But he claims no moral or human attributes or rights for his level; it
simply acts in obedience to the principle it embodies--the law of
gravitation.

The lecturer "gets away" with such things better than the writer. An
audience is not critical about such matters, but the reader takes note
of them. Mosaics will do on the platform, or in the pulpit, but will
not bear the nearer view of the study.

The incongruities of Emerson are seen in such passages as this: "Each
plant has its parasites, and each created thing its lover and poet,"
as if there were any relation between the two clauses of this
sentence--between parasites and lovers and poets! As if one should
say, "Woodchucks are often alive with fleas, and our fruit trees bloom
in May."

Emerson was so emboldened by what had been achieved through the
mastery of the earth's forces that he was led to say that "a wise
geology shall yet make the earthquake harmless, and the volcano an
agricultural resource." But this seems expecting too much. We have
harnessed the lightnings, but the earthquake is too deep and too
mighty for us. It is a steed upon which we cannot lay our hands. The
volcano we may draw upon for heat and steam, as we do upon the winds
and streams for power, but it is utterly beyond our control. The
bending of the earth's crust beneath the great atmospheric waves is
something we cannot bridle. The tides by sea as by land are beyond us.

Emerson had the mind of the prophet and the seer, and was given to
bold affirmations. The old Biblical distinction between the scribes
and the man who speaks with authority still holds. We may say of all
other New England essayists and poets--Lowell, Whipple, Tuckerman,
Holmes, Hillard, Whittier, Longfellow--that they are scribes only.
Emerson alone speaks as one having authority--the authority of the
spirit. "Thus saith the Lord"--it is this tone that gives him his
authority the world over.

I never tire of those heroic lines of his in which he sounds a
battle-cry to the spirit:

"Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,--
''T is man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.'"

The last time I saw Emerson was at the Holmes seventieth-birthday
breakfast in 1879. The serious break in his health had resulted in a
marked aphasia, so that he could not speak the name of his nearest
friend, nor answer the simplest question. Yet he was as serene as
eve