y" and
be elected to Congress? Certainly the essay just quoted from would not
make a very promising campaign document. Perhaps there was no great
necessity for Emerson's returning to the subject of "Beauty," to which
he had devoted a chapter of "Nature," and of which he had so often
discoursed incidentally. But he says so many things worth reading in the
Essay thus entitled in the "Conduct of Life" that we need not trouble
ourselves about repetitions. The Essay is satirical and poetical rather
than philosophical. Satirical when he speaks of science with something
of that old feeling betrayed by his brother Charles when he was writing
in 1828; poetical in the flight of imagination with which he enlivens,
entertains, stimulates, inspires,--or as some may prefer to say,--amuses
his listeners and readers.

The reader must decide which of these effects is produced by the
following passage:--

"The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of
everything into every other thing. Facts which had never before left
their stark common sense suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My
boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors,
and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the
intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word
has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my
stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box!
I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to
sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy
in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact,
which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days
so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the
imagination."

One is reminded of various things in reading this sentence. An ounce
of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day
memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if
often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A
coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a
Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification.
Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something
could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he
cannot lift the object he would fain idealize.

The habitual readers of Emerson do not