and his style has
been largely modeled according to the demand of those sharp, heady New
England audiences for ceaseless intellectual friction and chafing. Hence
every sentence is braided hard, and more or less knotted, and, though
of silk, makes the mind tingle. He startles by overstatement, by
understatement, by paradox, by antithesis, and by synthesis. Into
every sentence enters the unexpected,--the congruous leaping from the
incongruous, the high coming down, the low springing up, likeness or
relation suddenly coming into view where before was only difference or
antagonism. How he delights to bring the reader up with a short turn,
to impale him on a knotty point, to explode one of his verbal bombshells
under his very nose! Yet there is no trickery or rhetorical legerdemain.
His heroic fibre always saves him.

The language in which Taine describes Bacon applies with even more force
to Emerson:--

"Bacon," he says, "is a producer of conceptions and of sentences. The
matter being explored, he says to us: 'Such it is; touch it not on that
side; it must be approached from the other.' Nothing more; no proof, no
effort to convince; he affirms, and nothing more; he has thought in the
manner of artists and poets, and he speaks after the manner of prophets
and seers. 'Cogita et visa,'--this title of one of his books might be
the title of all. His process is that of the creators; it is intuition,
not reasoning.... There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy,
than this mode of thought when it is not checked by natural and good
strong common sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural
divination, the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating
to the true, like the needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the
highest degree. He has a preeminently practical, even an utilitarian
mind."

It is significant, and is indeed the hidden seed or root out of which
comes the explanation of much, if not the main part, of his life and
writings, that Emerson comes of a long line of clergymen; that the blood
in his veins has been teaching, and preaching, and thinking, and
growing austere, these many generations. One wonders that it is still so
bounding and strong, so red with iron and quick with oxygen. But in
him seems to be illustrated one of those rare cases in the genealogy
of families where the best is carried forward each time, and steadily
recruited and intensified. It does not seem possible for any man t