for
mystification, and a free delivery of hard words, perfectly and
unequivocally wonderful. We listened one long hour by the clock of
Rumford Hall, one night, to an outpouring of _argumentum ad hominem_ of
Mr. Emerson's--at what? A boy under an apple tree! If ten persons out of
the five hundred present were put upon their oaths, they could no more
have deciphered, or translated Mr. Ralph's argumentation, than they
could the hieroglyphics upon the walls of Thebes, or the sarcophagus of
old King Pharaoh! When Ralph Waldo opens, he may be as calm as a May
morn--he may talk for five minutes, like a book--we mean a
common-sensed, understandable book; but all of a sudden the fluid will
strike him--up he goes--down he fetches them. He throws a double
somerset backwards over Asia Minor--flip-flaps in Greece--wings
Turkey--and _skeets_ over Iceland; here he slips up with a flower
garden--a torrent of gilt-edged metaphors, that would last a country
parson's moderate demand a long lifetime, are whirled with the fury and
fleetness of Jove's thunderbolts. After exhausting his sweet-scented
receiver of this floral elocution, he pauses four seconds; pointing to
vacuum, over the heads of his audience, he asks, in an anxious tone, "Do
you see that?" Of course the audience are not expected to be so
unmannerly as to ask "What?" If they were, Ralph would not give them
time to "go in," for after asking them if they see _that_, he
continues--

"There! Mark! Note! It is a malaria prism! Now, then; here--there; see
it! Note it! Watch it!"

During this time, half of the audience, especially the old women and the
children, look around, fearful of the ceiling falling in, or big bugs
lighting on them. But the pause is for a moment, and anxiety ceases when
they learn it was only a false alarm, only--

"Egotism! The lame, the pestiferous exhalation or concrete malformation
of society!"

You breathe freer, and Ralph goes in, gloves on.

"Egotism! A metaphysical, calcareous, oleraceous amentum of--society!
The mental varioloid of this sublunary hemisphere! One of its worst
feelings or features is, the craving of sympathy. It even loves
sickness, because actual pain engenders signs of sympathy. All
cultivated men are infected more or less with this dropsy. But they are
still the leaders. The life of a few men is the life of every place. In
Boston you hear and see a few, so in New York; then you may as well die.
Life is very narrow. Bring a few