e too saw them! Never has this city known such audiences as he
gathered; never was such an Olympian entertainment as that which he
gave them.

It is very hard to speak of Mr. Emerson's poetry; not to do it
injustice, still more to do it justice. It seems to me like the robe
of a monarch patched by a New England housewife. The royal tint and
stuff are unmistakable, but here and there the gray worsted from the
darning-needle crosses and ekes out the Tyrian purple. Few poets who
have written so little in verse have dropped so many of those "jewels
five words long" which fall from their setting only to be more
choicely treasured. _E pluribus unum_ is scarcely more familiar to our
ears than "He builded better than he knew," and Keats's "thing of
beauty" is little better known than Emerson's "beauty is its own
excuse for being." One may not like to read Emerson's poetry because
it is sometimes careless, almost as if carefully so, tho never
undignified even when slipshod; spotted with quaint archaisms and
strange expressions that sound like the affectation of negligence, or
with plain, homely phrases such as the self-made scholar is always
afraid of. But if one likes Emerson's poetry he will be sure to love
it; if he loves it, its phrases will cling to him as hardly any others
do. It may not be for the multitude, but it finds its place like
pollen-dust and penetrates to the consciousness it is to fertilize and
bring to flower and fruit.

I have known something of Emerson as a talker, not nearly so much as
many others who can speak and write of him. It is unsafe to tell how a
great thinker talks, for perhaps, like a city dealer with a village
customer, he has not shown his best goods to the innocent reporter of
his sayings. However that may be in this case, let me contrast in a
single glance the momentary effect in conversation of the two
neighbors, Hawthorne and Emerson. Speech seemed like a kind of travail
to Hawthorne. One must harpoon him like a cetacean with questions to
make him talk at all. Then the words came from him at last, with
bashful manifestations, like those of a young girl, almost--words that
gasped themselves forth, seeming to leave a great deal more behind
them than they told, and died out discontented with themselves, like
the monologue of thunder in the sky, which always goes off mumbling
and grumbling as if it had not said half it wanted to, and ought to
say....

To sum up briefly what would, as it see