lism on the other. Its cheerful and sunny light of
the common day enhances instead of obscures the light that falls from
the highest heaven of the spirit. Saadi or Hafiz or Omar might have
fathered him, but only a New England mother could have borne him.
Probably more than half his poetry escapes the average reader; his
longer poems, like "Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love," "Monadnoc,"
"Merlin," "The Sphinx," "The World-Soul," set the mind groping for the
invisible rays of the spectrum of human thought and knowledge, but
many of the shorter poems, such as "The Problem," "Each and All,"
"Sea-Shore," "The Snow-Storm," "Musketaquid," "Days," "Song of
Nature," "My Garden," "Boston Hymn," "Concord Hymn," and others, are
among the most precious things in our literature.

As Emerson was a bard among poets, a seer among philosophers, a
prophet among essayists, an oracle among ethical teachers, so, as I
have said, was he a solitary among men. He walked alone. He somewhere
refers to his "porcupine impossibility of contact with men." His very
thoughts are not social among themselves, they separate. Each stands
alone; often they hardly have a bowing acquaintance; over and over
their juxtaposition is mechanical and not vital. The redeeming feature
is that they can afford to stand alone, like shafts of marble or
granite.

The force and worth of his page is not in its logical texture, but in
the beauty and truth of its isolated sentences and paragraphs. There
is little inductive or deductive reasoning in his books, but a series
of affirmations whose premises and logical connection the reader does
not always see.

He records that his hearers found his lectures fine and poetical but a
little puzzling. "One thought them as good as a kaleidoscope." The
solid men of business said that they did not understand them but their
daughters did.

The lecture committee in Illinois in 1856 told him that the people
wanted a hearty laugh. "The stout Illinoian," not finding the laugh,
"after a short trial walks out of the hall." I think even his best
Eastern audiences were always a good deal puzzled. The lecturer never
tried to meet them halfway. He says himself of one of his lectures, "I
found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good
house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs." The
absence of the stairs in his house--of an easy entrance into the
heart of the subject, and of a few consecutive and leading