e built when the builder and the priest
and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid
every stone.--

"Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake,
whose melody is sweeter than he knows."

The discourse on "Eloquence" is more systematic, more professorial,
than many of the others. A few brief extracts will give the key to its
general purport:--

"Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards,
it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color,
speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it
must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.--

"He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion
must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on
character and insight.--

--"The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.--

--"Its great masters ... were grave men, who preferred their
integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they
toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a
reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or
morals, as above the whole world and themselves also."

"Domestic Life" begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it
sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of
the goblet which holds some tonic draught:--

"Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in
his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the
soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham
and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations
when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful,
the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to
swallow his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful
and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that
all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more
charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching
than any virtue. His flesh is angels' flesh, all alive.--All day,
between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house,
sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he
fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before
him."

Emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about
"