, and on them catch and hang your own experiences,
till what was once his thought has become your character.

"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
which you please; you can never have both." "Discontent is want of
self-reliance; it is infirmity of will." "It is impossible for a man
to be cheated by any one but himself."

The orchestration with which Emerson introduces and sustains these
notes from the spheres is as remarkable as the winged things themselves.
Open his works at a hazard. You hear a man talking.

"A garden is like those pernicious machineries we read of every
month in the newspapers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand,
and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible
destruction. In an evil hour he pulled down his wall and added a
field to his homestead. No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man
own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home if he dare.
Every tree and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset
hedge, all he has done and all he means to do, stand in his way like
duns, when he would go out of his gate."

Your attention is arrested by the reality of this gentleman in his
garden, by the first-hand quality of his mind. It matters not on what
subject he talks. While you are musing, still pleased and patronizing,
he has picked up the bow of Ulysses, bent it with the ease of Ulysses,
and sent a shaft clear through the twelve axes, nor missed one of them.
But this, it seems, was mere byplay and marksmanship; for before you
have done wondering, Ulysses rises to his feet in anger, and pours
flight after flight, arrow after arrow, from the great bow. The shafts
sing and strike, the suitors fall in heaps. The brow of Ulysses shines
with unearthly splendor. The air is filled with lightning. After a
little, without shock or transition, without apparent change of tone,
Mr. Emerson is offering you a biscuit before you leave, and bidding you
mind the last step at the garden end. If the man who can do these things
be not an artist, then must we have a new vocabulary and rename the
professions.

There is, in all this effectiveness of Emerson, no pose, no literary
art; nothing that corresponds even remotely to the pretended modesty and
ignorance with which Socrates lays pitfalls for our admiration in
Plato's dialogues.

It was the platform which determined Emerson's style. He was not a
writer, but a speake