ance would he stand, even in
university towns, as against the "movies" (a word so ugly I hesitate
to write it) in the next street?

I once defended Emerson against a criticism of Matthew Arnold's. It is
true, as Arnold says, that Emerson is not a great writer, except on
rare occasions. Now and then, especially in his earlier essays, there
is logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution,
growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph
follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a
kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the
incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read
as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon
became tired or blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned
argument. Pictures and parables and startling affirmations suited
better. Emerson did not stoop to his audience; there was no
condescension in him. The last time I heard him, which was in
Washington in the early seventies, his theme was "Manners," and much
of it passed over the heads of his audience.

Certain of Emerson's works must strike the average reader, when he
first looks into them, as a curious medley of sense and wild
extravagance, utterly lacking in the logical sequence of the best
prose, and often verging on the futile and the absurd. Yet if one does
not get discouraged, one will soon see running through them veins of
the purest gold of the spirit, and insight into Nature's ways, that
redeem and more than redeem them.

I recall that when, as a young man, I looked into them the first time,
I could make nothing of them. I was fresh from reading the standard
essayists and philosophers of English literature--Addison, Steele,
Cowley, Johnson, Locke--and the poems of Pope, Young, and Cowper, all
of ethical import and value, and sometimes didactic, but never
mystical and transcendental, and the plunge into Emerson was a leap
into a strange world. But a few years later, when I opened his essays
again, they were like spring-water to parched lips. Now, in my old
age, I go back to him with a half-sad pleasure, as one goes back to
the scenes of one's youth.

Emerson taught us a mingled poetic and prophetic way of looking at
things that stays with us. The talented English woman Anne Gilchrist
said we had outgrown Emerson; had absorbed all he had to give us; and
were leaving him behind. Of course he was always a teacher and
pr