and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the
feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection
they awake."--

This was Emerson's own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of
nature.

Emerson's style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes
quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects.
His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are
independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is
frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the
special to the general and universal, and _vice versa_, with a bound
that is like a flight. Here are a few specimens of his pleasing
_audacities_:--

"There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is
naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup."--

"He arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and
carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic."--

"If we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long
hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy
which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature."--

"Tapping the tempest for a little side wind."--

"The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot
every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and
employment and bind them fast in one web."--

He is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases. He likes
the expression "mother-wit," which he finds in Spenser, Marlowe,
Shakespeare, and other old writers. He often uses the word "husband"
in its earlier sense of economist. His use of the word "haughty" is so
fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its
employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it. But
his special, constitutional, word is "fine," meaning something like
dainty, as Shakespeare uses it,--"my dainty Ariel,"--"fine Ariel." It
belongs to his habit of mind and body as "faint" and "swoon" belong to
Keats. This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson's imitators
are easily recognized. "Melioration" is another favorite word of
Emerson's. A clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic
traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn
fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and
his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word "haughty;"
his exquisite delicacy by his fondness fo