EMERSON THE LECTURER. i?83 



grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of us are, foi what 

 they feel to be most valuable in their culture, or perhaps 

 I should say their impulse, are grateful not so much for 

 any direct teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which 

 only genius can give, and without which all doctrine is 

 chaff. 



This was something like the caret which some of us 

 older boys wished to fill up on the margin of the master's 

 lecture. Few men have been so much to so many, and 

 through so large a range of aptitudes and temperaments, 

 and this simply because all of us value manhood beyond 

 any or all other qualities of character. We may suspect 

 in him, here and there, a certain thinness and vagueness 

 of quality, but let the waters go over him as they list, 

 this masculine fibre of his will keep its lively color and its 

 toughness of texture. I have heard some great speakers 

 and some accomplished orators, but never any that so 

 moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of 

 undertow in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our 

 minds from their foothold into deeper waters with a 

 drift we cannot and would not resist. And how artfully 

 (for Emerson is a long-studied artist in these things) 

 does the deliberate utterance, that seems waiting for the 

 fit word, appear to admit us partners in the labor of 

 thought and make us feel as if the glance of humor were 

 a sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying writ- 

 ten there on the desk were as unexpected to him as to 

 us ! In that closely-filed speech of his at the Burns 

 centenary dinner every word seemed to have just dropped 

 iown to him from the clouds. He looked far away over 

 the heads of his hearers, with a vague kind of expecta- 

 tion, as into some private heaven of invention, and the 

 winged period came at last obedient to his spell. " My 

 dainty Ariel ! " he seemed murmuring to himself as he 

 cast down his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of 



