on its own account but to remain wide open, and see what
Emerson sends it, grows first restive and then torpid. Admiration gives
way to astonishment, astonishment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to
stupefaction.

'Napoleon is not a man, but a system,' once said, in her most impressive
tones, Madame de Stael to Sir James Mackintosh, across a dinner-table.
'Magnificent!' murmured Sir James. 'But what does she mean?' whispered
one of those helplessly commonplace creatures who, like the present
writer, go about spoiling everything. 'Mass! I cannot tell!' was the
frank acknowledgment and apt Shakspearian quotation of Mackintosh.
Emerson's meaning, owing to his non-sequacious style, is often very
difficult to apprehend. Hear him for a moment on 'Experience':

'I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politic. I have seen
many fair pictures, not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I
am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who
will ask, Where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This
is a fruit, that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations,
counsels, and the hiving of truths.'

This surely is an odd way of hiving truths. It follows from it that
Emerson is more striking than suggestive. He likes things on a large
scale--he is fond of ethnical remarks and typical persons.
Notwithstanding his habit of introducing the names of common things into
his discourses and poetry ('Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool,
and wood,' is a line from one of his poems), his familiarity therewith is
evidently not great. 'Take care, papa,' cried his little son, seeing him
at work with his spade, 'you will dig your leg.'

His essay on _Friendship_ will not be found satisfactory. Here is a
subject on which surely we are entitled to 'body.' The _Over Soul_ was
different; _there_ it was easy to agree with Carlyle, who, writing to
Emerson, says: 'Those voices of yours which I likened to unembodied souls
and censure sometimes for having no body--how _can_ they have a body?
They are light rays darting upwards in the east!' But friendship is a
word the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm. One
remembers Elia: 'Oh! it is pleasant as it is rare to find the same arm
linked in yours at forty which at thirteen helped it to turn over the
Cicero _De Amicitia_, or some other tale of antique friendship which the
young heart even then was burning to an