es, cathedrals, ancient ruins, Swiss alps, Como lakes, Rhine
castles, Venetian lagoons, costumed peasants, "the great sinful streets
of Naples"--and of Paris,--and all manner and description of local color
and historic associations; hastening to meet and talk with "a few
minds"--Landor, Wordsworth, Carlyle. Here he was in line, indeed, with
his great friend, impatiently waving aside the art patter, with which
Sterling filled his letters from Italy. "Among the windy gospels,"
complains Carlyle, "addressed to our poor Century there are few louder
than this of Art.... It is a subject on which earnest men ... had better
... 'perambulate their picture-gallery with little or no speech.'"
"Emerson has never in his life," affirms Mr. John Jay Chapman, "felt the
normal appeal of any painting, or any sculpture, or any architecture, or
any music. These things, of which he does not know the meaning in real
life, he yet uses, and uses constantly, as symbols to convey ethical
truths. The result is that his books are full of blind places, like the
notes which will not strike on a sick piano." The biographers tell us
that he had no ear for music and could not distinguish one tune from
another; did not care for pictures nor for garden flowers; could see
nothing in Dante's poetry nor in Shelley's, nor in Hawthorne's romances,
nor in the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen. Edgar Poe was to him "the
jingle man." Poe, of course, had no "message."

I read, a number of years ago, some impressions of Concord by Roger
Riordan, the poet and art critic. I cannot now put my hand, for purposes
of quotation, upon the title of the periodical in which these appeared;
but I remember that the writer was greatly amused, as well as somewhat
provoked, by his inability to get any of the philosophers with whom he
sought interviews to take an aesthetic view of any poem, or painting, or
other art product. They would talk of its "message" or its "ethical
content"; but as to questions of technique or beauty, they gently put
them one side as unworthy to engage the attention of earnest souls.

At the symposium which I have mentioned in Emerson's library, was
present a young philosopher who had had the advantage of
reading--perhaps in proof sheets--a book about Shakespeare by Mr. Denton
J. Snider. He was questioned by some of the guests as to the character
of the work, but modestly declined to essay a description of it in the
presence of such eminent persons; ventur