a
famous friendship. In the summer of 1834 he settled at Concord. He
married again, visited England again, wrote essays, delivered lectures,
made orations, published poems, carried on a long and most remarkable
correspondence with Carlyle, enjoyed after the most temperate and serene
of fashions many things and much happiness. And then he died.

'Can you emit sparks?' said the cat to the ugly duckling in the fairy
tale, and the poor abashed creature had to admit that it could not.
Emerson could emit sparks with the most electrical of cats. He is all
sparks and shocks. If one were required to name the most non-sequacious
author one had ever read, I do not see how one could help nominating
Emerson. But, say some of his warmest admirers, 'What then? It does not
matter!' It appears to me to matter a great deal.

A wise author never allows his reader's mind to be at large, but casts
about from the very first how to secure it all for himself. He takes you
(seemingly) into his confidence, perhaps pretends to consult you as to
the best route, but at all events points out to you the road, lying far
ahead, which you are to travel in his company. How carefully does a
really great writer, like Dr. Newman or M. Renan, explain to you what he
is going to do and how he is going to do it! His humour, wit, and fancy,
however abundant they may be, spring up like wayside flowers, and do but
adorn and render more attractive the path along which it is his object to
conduct you. The reader's mind, interested from the beginning, and
desirous of ascertaining whether the author keeps his word and adheres to
his plan, feels the glow of healthy exercise, and pays a real though
unconscious attention. But Emerson makes no terms with his readers--he
gives them neither thread nor clue, and thus robs them of one of the
keenest pleasures of reading--the being beforehand with your author, and
going shares with him in his own thoughts.

If it be said that it is manifestly unfair to compare a mystical writer
like Emerson with a polemical or historical one, I am not concerned to
answer the objection, for let the comparison be made with whom you will,
the unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as the
Correggiosity of Correggio. You never know what he will be at. His
sentences fall over you in glittering cascades, beautiful and bright, and
for the moment refreshing, but after a very brief while the mind, having
nothing to do