,
Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to his genius--him they crown,
elucidate, obey, and express--the genius knows them not. The
recitation begins, _one golden word leaps out immortal from all this
painful pedantry_, _and sweetly torments us with invitations to his
own inaccessible homes_.'

The words we have ventured to italicize seem to us to be of surpassing
beauty, and to express what many a play-goer of late years must often
have dimly felt.

Patience should indeed be the motto for any Emerson reader who is not by
nature 'author's kin.' For example, in the essay on _Character_, after
reading, 'Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and negative
pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a
south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative; will is the
north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as having its
natural place in the north'--how easy to lay the book down and read no
more that day; but a moment's patience is amply rewarded, for but sixteen
lines farther on we may read as follows: 'We boast our emancipation from
many superstitions, but if we have broken any idols it is through a
transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained that I no longer immolate a
bull to Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble
before the Eumenides or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic
Judgment Day--if I quake at opinion, the public opinion as we call it, or
the threat of assault or contumely, or bad neighbours, or poverty, or
mutilation, or at the rumour of revolution or of wonder! If I quake,
what matters it what I quake at?' Well and truly did Carlyle write to
Emerson, 'You are a new era, my man, in your huge country.'

Emerson's poetry has at least one of the qualities of true poetry--it
always pleases and occasionally delights. Great poetry it may not be,
but it has the happy knack of slipping in between our fancies, and of
clinging like ivy to the masonry of the thought-structure beneath which
each one of us has his dwelling. I must be allowed room for two
quotations, one from the stanzas called _Give all to Love_, the other
from _Wood Notes_.

'Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Nor thou detain her vesture's hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer's