178 BIRDS AND POETS 



to hold his tongue. But one cheerfully forgives 

 Emerson the way he puts his thumb-nail on the 

 bores. He speaks feelingly, and no doubt from as 

 deep an experience as any man in America. 



I really hold Emerson in such high esteem that 

 I think I can safely indulge myself in a little more 

 fault-finding with him. 



I think it must be admitted that he is deficient 

 in sympathy. This accounts in a measure for his 

 coolness, his self-possession, and that kind of un- 

 compromising rectitude or inflexibleness that marks 

 his career, and that he so lauds in his essays. No 

 man is so little liable to be warped or compromised 

 in any way as the unsympathetic man. Emerson's 

 ideal is the man who stands firm, who is unmoved, 

 who never laughs, or apologizes, or deprecates, or 

 makes concessions, or assents through good-nature, 

 or goes abroad; who is not afraid of giving offense; 

 "who answers you without supplication in his eye," 

 — in fact, who stands like a granite pillar amid the 

 slough of life. You may wrestle with this man, he 

 says, or swim with him, or lodge in the same cham- 

 ber with him, or eat at the same table, and yet he 

 is a thousand miles off, and can at any moment fin- 

 ish with you. He is a sheer precipice, is this man, 

 and not to be trifled with. You shrinking, quiver- 

 ing, acquiescing natures, avaunt! You sensitive 

 plants, you hesitating, indefinite creatures, you un- 

 certain around the edges, you non-resisting, and you 

 heroes, whose courage is quick, but whose wit is 

 tardy, make way, and let the human crustacean pass. 



