144 INDOOR STUDIES 



history, and to his worth and significance, in this 

 connection, the speaker did very inadequate justice. 

 We know there is much in Emerson's works that 

 will not stand rigid literary tests; much that is too 

 fanciful and ethereal, too curious and paradoxi- 

 cal, — not real or true, but only seemingly so, or so 

 by a kind of violence and disruption. The weak 

 place in him as a literary artist is probably his want 

 of continuity and the tie of association, — a want 

 which, as he grew old, became a disease, and led to 

 a break in his mind like that of a bridge with one 

 of the piers gone, and his power of communication 

 was nearly or quite lost. Anything like architectural 

 completeness Emerson did not possess. There is no 

 artistic conception that runs the length and breadth 

 of any of his works ; no unity of scheme or plan like 

 that of an architect, or of a composer, that makes 

 an inevitable whole of any of his books or essays; 

 seldom a central and leading idea of which the rest 

 are but radiations and unfoldings. His essays are 

 fragmentary, — successions of brilliant and startling 

 affirmations or vaticinations, with little or no logi- 

 cal sequence. In other words, there are seldom any 

 currents of ideas in Emerson's essays, but sallies and 

 excu.rsions of the mind, as if to get beyond the re- 

 gion of rational thinking into the region of surmise 

 and prophecy, — jets and projectiles of thought 

 under great pressure, the pressure of the moral 

 genius. He says, speaking more for himself than 

 for others: "We learn to prefer imperfect theories 

 and sentences, which contain glimpses of the truth, 



