EMERSON 167 



down, is identical with that of the great wits, namely, 

 surprise. The point of his remark or idea is always 

 sprung upon the reader, never quietly laid before 

 him. He has a mortal dread of tameness and flat- 

 ness, and would make the very water we drink bite 

 the tongue. 



He has been from the first a speaker and lecturer, 

 and his style has been largely modeled according 

 to the demand of those sharp, heady New England 

 audiences for ceaseless intellectual friction and cha- 

 fing. Hence every sentence is braided hard, and 

 more or less knotted, and, though of silk, makes the 

 mind tingle. He startles by overstatement, by un- 

 derstatement, by paradox, by antithesis, and by syn- 

 thesis. Into every sentence enters the unexpected, 

 — the congruous leaping from the incongruous, the 

 high coming down, the low springing up, likeness, 

 relation suddenly coming into view where before was 

 only difference or antagonism. How he delights to 

 bring the reader up with a short turn, to impale him 

 on a knotty point, to explode one of his verbal 

 bombshells under his very nose! Yet there is no 

 trickery or rhetorical legerdemain. His heroic fibre 

 always saves him. 



The language in which Taine describes Bacon ap- 

 plies with even more force to Emerson : — 



"Bacon," he says, "is a producer of conceptions 

 and of sentences. The matter being explored, he 

 says to us : ' Such it is ; touch it not on that side ; 

 it must be approached from the other. ' Nothing 

 more; no proof, no effort to convince; he aifirms, 



