acter to serve such a constituency?" But then
Emerson's definition of eloquence is simple, and foretells the practice
of to-day rather than describes the practice of Webster, Everett,
Choate, and Winthrop, his contemporaries: "Know your fact; hug your
fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity....
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly
intelligible to the person to whom you speak."

* * * * *

I turn next to some examples of Emerson's anticipation of social
conditions, visible to him as seer in his own day, and since become
plain to the sight of the ordinary millions. When he accumulated in his
journals the original materials of his essay on Worship, there were no
large cities in the United States in the present sense of that term. The
great experiment of democracy was not far advanced, and had not
developed many of its sins and dangers; yet how justly he presented them
in the following description: "In our large cities, the population is
godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These
are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is
it people manage to live on, so aimless as they are? ... There is faith
in chemistry, in meat and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the
steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine wheels, sewing-machines, and in
public opinion, but not in divine causes."

In Emerson's day, luxury in the present sense had hardly been developed
in our country; but he foresaw its coming, and its insidious
destructiveness. "We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a
hundred trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our
expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in
debt; it is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship,
that costs us so much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have
horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and
places of amusement? Only for want of thought.... We are first
thoughtless, and then find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual
and then must be rich." He foresaw the young man's state of mind to-day
about marriage--I must have money before I can marry; and deals with it
thus: "Give us wealth and the home shall exist. But that is a very
imperfect and inglorious solution of the problem, and therefore no
solution. Give us wealth! You ask too much. Few have wealth; but a