in and day out. If you had no ideas to swap, he lost interest
in you.

The wisdom of a great creative artist like Hawthorne does not
necessarily harden into bright epigrammatic sayings or rules for the
conduct of life, and the available intellectual content of his works
to the Emersonian type of mind may be small; but his interior, his
emotional and imaginative richness may much more than make it up. The
scholar, the sayer of things, must always rank below the creator, or
the maker of things.

Philosophers contradict themselves like other mortals. Here and there
in his Journals Emerson rails against good nature, and says "tomahawks
are better." "Why should they call me good-natured? I, too, like
puss, have a tractile claw." And he declares that he likes the sayers
of No better than the sayers of Yes, and that he preferred hard
clouds, hard expressions, and hard manners. In another mood, or from
another point of view, he says of a man, "Let him go into his closet
and pray the Divinity to make him so great as to be good-natured." And
again, "How great it is to do a little, as, for instance, to deserve
the praise of good nature, or of humility, or of punctuality."

Emerson's characterization of himself as always a painter is
interesting. People, he said, came to his lectures with expectation
that he was to realize the Republic he described, and they ceased to
come when they found this reality no nearer: "They mistook me. I am
and always was a painter. I paint still with might and main and choose
the best subject I can. Many have I seen come and go with false hopes
and fears, and dubiously affected by my pictures. But I paint on." "I
portray the ideal, not the real," he might have added. He was a
poet-seer and not a historian. He was a painter of ideas, as Carlyle
was a painter of men and events. Always is there an effort at vivid
and artistic expression. If his statement does not kindle the
imagination, it falls short of his aim. He visualizes his most subtle
and abstract conceptions--sees the idea wedded to its correlative in
the actual world. A new figure, a fresh simile gave him a thrill of
pleasure. He went hawking up and down the fields of science, of trade,
of agriculture, of nature, seeking them. He thinks in symbols, he
paints his visions of the ideal with pigments drawn from the world all
about him. To call such men as Emerson and Carlyle painters is only to
emphasize their artistic temperaments. Their serious