we have seen,
the good sense to make for himself a calling which brought him into
healthy contact with bodies of men, and made it essential that he should
have his listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they were not
actually present to the eye. As a preacher Emerson has been described as
making a deep impression on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by 'the
calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and
the singular simplicity and directness of a manner free from the least
trace of dogmatic assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I
had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, whose force and energy,
and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, carried for the moment all
before him--his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter.
But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession
of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the
rhetorical splendours of Chalmers' (_Ireland_, 141).

At the lecturer's desk the same attraction made itself still more
effectually felt. 'I have heard some great speakers and some
accomplished orators,' Mr. Lowell says, 'but never any that so moved and
persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich barytone
of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with a
drift that we cannot and would not resist. Search for his eloquence in
his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find
that it has kindled all your thoughts.' The same effect was felt in its
degree wherever he went, and he took pains not to miss it. He had made a
study of his art, and was so skilful in his mastery of it that it seemed
as if anybody might do all that he did and do it as well--if only a
hundred failures had not proved the mistake.

In 1838 Emerson delivered an address in the Divinity School of Harvard,
which produced a gusty shower of articles, sermons, and pamphlets, and
raised him without will or further act of his to the high place of the
heresiarch. With admirable singleness of mind, he held modestly aloof.
'There is no scholar,' he wrote to a friend, 'less willing or less able
to be a polemic. I could not give account of myself if challenged. I
delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or
why it is so, I am the most helpless of men,' The year before, his
oration on the American Scholar had filled Carlyle with delight. It was
the first