id who says,
and is encouraged by his friends to say, brilliant things, but of whom it
would be cruel to expect prolonged mental exertion. A man, he himself
has said, 'should give us a sense of mass.' He perhaps does not do so.
This gloomy and possibly distorted view is fostered rather than
discouraged by Dr. Holmes's introductory pages about Boston life and
intellect. It does not seem to have been a very strong place. We lack
performance. It is of small avail to write, as Dr. Holmes does, about
'brilliant circles,' and 'literary luminaries,' and then to pass on, and
leave the circles circulating and the luminaries shining _in vacuo_. We
want to know how they were brilliant, and what they illuminated. If you
wish me to believe that you are witty I must really trouble you to make a
joke. Dr. Holmes's own wit, for example, is as certain as the law of
gravitation, but over all these pages of his hangs vagueness, and we scan
them in vain for reassuring details.

'Mild orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine,' does not sound very
appetising, though we are assured by Dr. Holmes that it is 'a very
agreeable aspect of Christianity.' Emerson himself does not seem to have
found it very lively, for in 1832, after three years' experience of the
ministry of the 'Second Church' of Boston, he retires from it, not
tumultuously or with any deep feeling, but with something very like a
yawn. He concludes his farewell sermon to his people as follows:

'Having said this I have said all. I have no hostility to this
institution. {221} I am only stating my want of sympathy with it.'

Dr. Holmes makes short work of Emerson's childhood. He was born in
Boston on the 25th May, 1803, and used to sit upon a wall and drive his
mother's cow to pasture. In fact, Dr. Holmes adds nothing to what we
already knew of the quiet and blameless life that came to its appointed
end on the 27th April, 1882. On the completion of his college education,
Emerson became a student of theology, and after a turn at teaching, was
ordained, in March, 1829, minister of the 'Second Church' in Boston. In
September of the same year he married; and the death of his young wife,
in February, 1832, perhaps quickened the doubts and disinclinations which
severed his connection with his 'Church' on the 9th September, 1832. The
following year he visited Europe for the first time, and made his
celebrated call upon Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and laid the keel of