reader
easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a
thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence.
As he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm,
place them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson,
'very fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this
capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of
which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is
almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free
from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for
meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true
urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing
has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes
nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical
unction. That modest and lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm
to his companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us
from finding any page of it cold or hard or dry."

E.P. Whipple, the well-known American critic, wrote soon after Emerson's
death:

"But 'sweetness and light' are precious and inspiring only so far as
they express the essential sweetness of the disposition of the
thinker, and the essential illuminating power of his intelligence.
Emerson's greatness came from his character. Sweetness and light
streamed from him because they were _in_ him. In everything he
thought, wrote, and did, we feel the presence of a personality as
vigorous and brave as it was sweet, and the particular radical thought
he at any time expressed derived its power to animate and illuminate
other minds from the might of the manhood, which was felt to be within
and behind it. To 'sweetness and light' he therefore added the prime
quality of fearless manliness.

"If the force of Emerson's character was thus inextricably blended
with the force of all his faculties of intellect and imagination, and
the refinement of all his sentiments, we have still to account for the
peculiarities of his genius, and to answer the question, why do we
instinctively apply the epithet 'Emersonian' to every characteristic
passage in his writings? We are told that he was