eau's "Week."
Moonlight and high noon! The great romancer gives a dreamy, poetic
version of the river landscape, musically phrased, pictorially composed,
dissolved in atmosphere--a lovely piece of literary art, with the soft
blur of a mezzotint engraving, say, from the designs by Turner in
Rogers's "Italy." Thoreau, equally imaginative in his way, writes like a
botanist, naturalist, surveyor, and local antiquary; and in a pungent,
practical, business-like style--a style, as was said of Dante, in which
words are things. Yet which of these was the true transcendentalist?

Matthew Arnold's discourse on Emerson was received with strong dissent
in Boston, where it was delivered, and in Concord, where it was read
with indignation. The critic seemed to be taking away, one after
another, our venerated master's claims as a poet, a man of letters, and
a philosopher. What! Gray a great poet, and Emerson not! Addison a
great writer, and Emerson not! Surely there are heights and depths in
Emerson, an inspiring power, an originality and force of thought which
are neither in Gray nor in Addison. And how can these denials be
consistent with the sentence near the end of the discourse, pronouncing
Emerson's essays the most important work done in English prose during
the nineteenth century--more important than Carlyle's? A truly enormous
concession this; how to reconcile it with those preceding blasphemies?

Let not the lightning strike me if I say that I think Arnold was
right--as he usually was right in a question of taste or critical
discernment. For Emerson was essentially a prophet and theosophist, and
not a man of letters, or creative artist. He could not have written a
song or a story or a play. Arnold complains of his want of concreteness.
The essay was his chosen medium, well-nigh the least concrete, the least
literary of forms. And it was not even the personal essay, like Elia's,
that he practised, but an abstract variety, a lyceum lecture, a
moralizing discourse or sermon. For the clerical virus was strong in
Emerson, and it was not for nothing that he was descended from eight
generations of preachers. His concern was primarily with religion and
ethics, not with the tragedy and comedy of personal lives, this motley
face of things, _das bunte Menschenleben_. Anecdotes and testimonies
abound to illustrate this. See him on his travels in Europe, least
picturesque of tourists, hastening with almost comic precipitation past
galleri