perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the
words.

There are stories which show that Emerson had a retentive memory in the
earlier part of his life. It is hard to say from his books whether he
had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary
that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with
endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen.

Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the academy,
over which was the inscription [Greek: maedeis hageometraetos
eseito]--Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here,--would have
been closed to him. All the exact sciences found him an unwilling
learner. He says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with
impunity.

In an unpublished manuscript kindly submitted to me by Mr. Frothingham,
Emerson is reported as saying, "God has given me the seeing eye, but not
the working hand." His gift was insight: he saw the germ through its
envelop; the particular in the light of the universal; the fact in
connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all
this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden
and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. He had neither the
patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one
thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left
no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with
natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its
various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity
(_odoratio quaedam venatica_),--a good scent for truth and beauty,--it
appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity,
according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for
an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that
Franklin showed in the affairs of common life.

He was constitutionally fastidious, and had to school himself to become
able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships.
We must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. The clown of the first
edition of "Monadnoc" "with heart of cat and eyes of bug," disappears
in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that
recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were there still.
What must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-minded
worshippers who fastened upon h