sh, as Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In ordinary cases, a reporter well versed in his art, catches a sentence
of a speaker, and goes on to fill it out upon the most correct
impression of what was intended, or what is implied. But no such
license follows the outpourings of Mr. Emerson; no thought can fathom
his intentions, and quite as bottomless are even his finished sentences.
We have known "old stagers," in the newspaporial line, veteran
reporters, so dumbfounded and confounded by the first fire of Ralph, and
his grand and lofty acrobating in elocution, that they up, seized their
hat and paper, and sloped, horrified at the prospect of an attempt to
"take down" Mr. Emerson.

If Roaring Ralph touches a homely mullen weed, on a donkey heath,
straightway he makes it a full-blown rose, in the land of Ophir,
shedding an odor balmy as the gales of Arabia; while with a facility the
wonderful London auctioneer Robbins might envy, Ralph imparts to a
lime-box, or pig-sty, a negro hovel, or an Irish shanty, all the
romance, artistic elegance and finish of a first-class manor-house, or
Swiss cottage, inlaid with alabaster and fresco, surrounded by elfin
bowers, grand walks, bee hives, and honeysuckles.

Ralph don't group his metaphorical beauties, or dainties of Webster,
Walker, &c., but rushes them out in torrents--rattles them down in
cataracts and avalanches--bewildering, astounding, and incomprehensible.
He hits you upon the left lug of your knowledge box with a metaphor so
unwieldy and original, that your breath is soon gone--and before it is
recovered, he gives you another _rhapsody_ on t'other side, and as you
try to steady yourself, _bim_ comes another, heavier than the first two,
while a fourth batch of this sort of elocution fetches you a bang over
the eyes, giving you a vertigo in the ribs of your bewildered senses,
and before you can say "God bless us!" down he has you--_cobim!_ with a
deluge of high-heeled grammar and three-storied Anglo Saxon, settling
your hash, and brings you to the ground by the run, as though you were
struck by lightning, or in the way of a 36-pounder! Ralph Waldo is death
and an entire _stud_ of pale horses on flowery expressions and
japonica-domish flubdubs. He revels in all those knock-kneed, antique,
or crooked and twisted words we used all of us to puzzle our brains over
in the days of our youth, and grammar lessons and rhetoric exercises. He
has a penchant as strong as cheap boarding-house butter,