dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and
such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New
York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses
with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in
the lonely waste of the pinewoods' (ii. 328).

It was perhaps the same necessity of having to guide men away from the
danger of transcendental aberrations, while yet holding up lofty ideals
of conduct, that made Emerson say something about many traits of conduct
to which the ordinary high-flying moralist of the treatise or the pulpit
seldom deigns to stoop. The essays on Domestic Life, on Behaviour, on
Manners, are examples of the attention that Emerson paid to the right
handling of the outer conditions of a wise and brave life. With him
small circumstances are the occasions of great qualities. The parlour
and the counting-house are as fit scenes for fortitude, self-control,
considerateness, and vision, as the senate or the battlefield. He
re-classifies the virtues. No modern, for example, has given so
remarkable a place to Friendship among the sacred necessities of
well-endowed character. Neither Plato nor Cicero, least of all Bacon,
has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangely
commingled of all human affections. There is no modern thinker, again,
who makes Beauty--all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming--so
conspicuous and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to say
that Emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or of
prudence into one complex sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory
of excellence might be better described than any other of modern times
by the [Greek: kalokagathia], the virtue of the true gentleman, as set
down in Plato and Aristotle.

So untrue is it that in his quality of Sage Emerson always haunted the
perilous altitudes of Transcendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but
the everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and
the indigo Firmament sowing itself with daylight stars.' He never thinks
it beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor morals, or to say a
good word for what he somewhere calls subterranean prudence. Emerson
values mundane circumspection as highly as Franklin, and gives to
manners and rules of daily behaviour an importance that might have
satisfied Chesterfield. In fact, the worldly and the selfish are
mistaken when they assume