rich as
conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics,
argument and confession." So writes Emerson to Carlyle in 1841.

It would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave
most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view
the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson
was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and a
play-actor.

The exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were,
accidental in the writings of Shakespeare. The demands of the
lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of
Emerson as an author. The play must be in five acts, each of a given
length. The lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it. Both play and
lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience
would tire before the allotted time was over.

Both writers had this in common: they were poets and moralists.
They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative
observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in
their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen
portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes
little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an
elevated sentiment.

It was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer
in what direction they should turn their special gifts. The actor had
learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his
apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must
work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the
playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good
estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and
published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in
the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never
became rich, as Shakespeare did. He was never in easy circumstances
until he was nearly seventy years old. Lecturing was hard work, but he
was under the "base necessity," as he called it, of constant labor,
writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and
dangerous winter season.

He spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man
could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed
plain people whose classics were the Bible and the "Farmer'