ine minds, there came to Emerson ways of
expression deeply marked with character. On every page there is set the
strong stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness;
the most awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and
simple note that touches us more than if it were the perfection of
elaborated melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the
travail of the thought, and that too is a kind of eloquence. An honest
reader easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start, when it shows
a thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence. As
he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm, place
them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson, 'very
fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this capacity
for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of which Mr.
Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own
in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free from the
important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation. Nor
in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent is
homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, a
courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes nearer to our hearts than
either literary decoration or rhetorical unction. That modest and
lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm to his companionship
breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us from finding any page
of it cold or hard or dry.

Though Emerson was always urgent for 'the soul of the world, clean from
all vestige of tradition,' yet his work is full of literature. He at
least lends no support to the comforting fallacy of the indolent, that
originating power does not go with assimilating power. Few thinkers on
his level display such breadth of literary reference. Unlike Wordsworth,
who was content with a few tattered volumes on a kitchen shelf, Emerson
worked among books. When he was a boy he found a volume of Montaigne,
and he never forgot the delight and wonder in which he lived with it.
His library is described as filled with well-selected authors, with
curious works from the eastern world, with many editions in both Greek
and English of