r the word "fine," with a
certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the
word "melioration."

We must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel
with Solomon and criticise the Sermon on the Mount. The "point and
surprise" which he speaks of as characterizing the style of Plutarch
belong eminently to his own. His fertility of illustrative imagery is
very great. His images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects,
ennobled by his handling. He throws his royal robe over a milking-stool
and it becomes a throne. But chiefly he chooses objects of comparison
grand in themselves. He deals with the elements at first hand. Such
delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to
match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight. It is as when the
slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced
organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling
the stained windows of a great cathedral. We have seen him as an
unpretending lecturer. We follow him round as he "peddles out all the
wit he can gather from Time or from Nature," and we find that "he has
changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun," and is carrying
about the morning light as merchandise.

* * * * *

Emerson was as loyal an American, as thorough a New Englander, as
home-loving a citizen, as ever lived. He arraigned his countrymen
sharply for their faults. Mr. Arnold made one string of his epithets
familiar to all of us,--"This great, intelligent, sensual, and
avaricious America." This was from a private letter to Carlyle. In his
Essay, "Works and Days," he is quite as outspoken: "This mendicant
America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America." "I
see plainly," he says, "that our society is as bigoted to the
respectabilities of religion and education as yours." "The war," he
says, "gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation." All his
life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization.
All his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them.
To the dark prophecies of Carlyle, which came wailing to him across the
ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations. "Here,"
he said, in words I have already borrowed, "is the home of man--here is
the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has
recorded."

Such a man as Emerson belong