oral method thus predominates: a
series of oracular thoughts has been shaped for oratorical utterance,
not oratorical in the bombastic, popular American sense, but cunningly
designed, by a master of rhetoric, to capture the ear and then the mind
of the auditor.

Emerson's work as a lecturer coincided with the rise of that Lyceum
system which brought most of the American authors, for more than a
generation, into intimate contact with the public, and which proved an
important factor in the aesthetic and moral cultivation of our people.
No lecturer could have had a more auspicious influence than Emerson,
with his quiet dignity, his serene spiritual presence, his tonic and
often electrifying force. But if he gave his audiences precious gifts,
he also learned much from them. For thirty years his lecturing trips to
the West brought him, more widely than any New England man of letters,
into contact with the new, virile America of the great Mississippi
valley. Unlike many of his friends, he was not repelled by the
"Jacksonism of the West"; he rated it a wholesome, vivifying force
in our national thought and life. The "Journal" reveals the essential
soundness of his Americanism. Though surrounded all his life by
reformers, he was himself scarcely a reformer, save upon the single
issue of anti-slavery. Perhaps he was at bottom too much of a radical to
be swept off his feet by any reform.

To our generation, of course, Emerson presents himself as an author
of books, and primarily as an essayist, rather than as a winning,
entrancing speaker. His essays have a greater variety of tone than is
commonly recognized. Many of them, like "Manners," "Farming," "Books,"
"Eloquence," "Old Age," exhibit a shrewd prudential wisdom, a sort
of Yankee instinct for "the milk in the pan," that reminds one of Ben
Franklin. Like most of the greater New England writers, he could be,
on occasion, an admirable local historian. See his essays on "Life and
Letters in New England," "New England Reformers," "Politics," and the
successive entries in his "Journal" relating to Daniel Webster. He had
the happiest gift of portraiture, as is witnessed by his sketches of
Montaigne, of Napoleon, of Socrates (in the essay on Plato), of his aunt
Mary Moody Emerson, of Thoreau, and of various types of Englishmen in
his "English Traits." But the great essays, no doubt, are those like
"Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "The Over-Soul," "Fate," "Power,"
"Culture," "Worshi