race,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of gospel books."

We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are thought to be fond of
the spread-eagle style, and nothing can be more remote from that than
his. We are reckoned a practical folk, who would rather hear about a
new air-tight stove than about Plato; yet our favorite teacher's
practicality is not in the least of the Poor Richard variety. If he
have any Buncombe constituency, it is that unrealized commonwealth of
philosophers which Plotinus proposed to establish; and if he were to
make an almanac, his directions to farmers would be something like
this:--"OCTOBER: _Indian Summer_; now is the time to get in your early
Vedas." What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us all?
that his range includes us all? that he is equally at home with the
potato-disease and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-soul?
that, as we try all trades, so has he tried all cultures? and above all,
that his mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality?

There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel
and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling
impulses,--none whom so many cannot abide. What does he mean? ask these
last. Where is his system? What is the use of it all? What the deuse
have we to do with Brahma? Well, we do not propose to write an essay on
Emerson at the fag-end of a February "Atlantic," with Secession longing
for somebody to hold it, and Chaos come again in the South Carolina
teapot. We will only say that we have found grandeur and consolation in
a starlit night without caring to ask what it meant, save grandeur and
consolation; we have liked Montaigne, as some ten generations before us
have done, without thinking him so systematic as some more eminently
tedious (or shall we say tediously eminent?) authors; we have thought
roses as good in their way as cabbages, though the latter would have
made a better show in the witness-box, if cross-examined as to their
usefulness; and as for Brahma, why, he can take care of himself, and
won't bite us at any rate.

The bother with Mr. Emerson is, that, though he writes in prose, he is
essentially a poet. If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, and to
reduce it to words of one syllable for infant minds, you will make
as sad work of it as the good monk with his analysis of Homer in the
"Epistolae Obscurorum