re of my power of construction,--no
ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs
tied together."--"Here I sit and read and write, with very little
system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent
particle." We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer
and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse. He liked the freedom
of the platform. "I preach in the Lecture-room," he says, "and there it
tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing,
sneer, or pray, according to your genius." In England, he says, "I find
this lecturing a key which opens all doors." But he did not tend to
overvalue the calling which from "base necessity" he followed so
diligently. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee," he calls himself; and again,
"I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and
am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received."
Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the
earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares
about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest
itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments.
But one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations
enough. I remember Emerson's coming to my house to know if I could
fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very
advantageous invitation in another direction. I told him that I was
unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned. He smiled serenely,
saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that
season.

No man would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas. He crams his pages
with the very marrow of his thought. But in weighing out a lecture he
was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh. His utterance was
deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. Exactly at the
end of the hour the lecture stopped. Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly,
without peroration of any sort, always with "a gentle shock of mild
surprise" to the unprepared listener. He had weighed out the full
measure to his audience with perfect fairness.

[Greek: oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes
Aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei
Ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,]

or, in Bryant's version,

"as the scales
A