a babbling Simonetta of echoes, and not
unnaturally was now and then himself a mark for the small-shot of
criticism. He had soon reached that height in the "cold thin
atmosphere" of thought where

"Vainly the fowler's eye
Might mark his distant flight to do him wrong."

I shall add a few words, of necessity almost epigrammatic, upon his
work and character. He dealt with life, and life with him was not
merely this particular air-breathing phase of being, but the spiritual
existence which included it like a parenthesis between the two
infinities. He wanted his daily drafts of oxygen like his neighbors,
and was as thoroughly human as the plain people he mentions who had
successively owned or thought they owned the house-lot on which he
planted his hearthstone. But he was at home no less in the
interstellar spaces outside of all the atmospheres. The
semi-materialistic idealism of Milton was a gross and clumsy medium
compared to the imponderable ether of "The Over-soul" and the
unimaginable vacuum of "Brahma." He followed in the shining and daring
track of the _Graius homo_ of Lucretius:

_"Vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi."_

It always seemed to me as if he looked at this earth very much as a
visitor from another planet would look upon it. He was interested, and
to some extent curious about it, but it was not the first spheroid he
had been acquainted with, by any means. I have amused myself with
comparing his descriptions of natural objects with those of the Angel
Raphael in the seventh book of Paradise Lost. Emerson talks of his
titmouse as Raphael talks of his emmet. Angels and poets never deal
with nature after the manner of those whom we call naturalists.

To judge of him as a thinker, Emerson should have been heard as a
lecturer, for his manner was an illustration of his way of thinking.
He would lose his place just as his mind would drop its thought and
pick up another, twentieth cousin or no relation at all to it. This
went so far at times that one could hardly tell whether he was putting
together a mosaic of colored fragments, or only turning a kaleidoscope
where the pieces tumbled about as they best might. It was as if he had
been looking in at a cosmic peep-show, and turning from it at brief
intervals to tell us what he saw. But what fragments these colored
sentences were, and what pictures they often placed before us, as if
w