e
influence, and sternly test by quality alone,--judge each author by
his most golden sentence, and let all else go. The deeds make the man,
but it is the style which makes or dooms the writer. History, which
always sends great men in groups, gave us Emerson by whom to test the
intellectual qualities of Parker. They cooperated in their work from
the beginning, in much the same mutual relation as now; in looking
back over the rich volumes of the "Dial," the reader now passes by the
contributions of Parker to glean every sentence of Emerson's, but we
have the latter's authority for the fact that it was the former's
articles which originally sold the numbers. Intellectually, the two
men form the complement to each other; it is Parker who reaches the
mass of the people, but it is probable that all his writings put
together have not had so profound an influence on the intellectual
leaders of the nation as the single address of Emerson at Divinity
Hall.

And it is difficult not to notice, in that essay in which Theodore
Parker ventured on higher intellectual ground, perhaps, than anywhere
else in his writings,--his critique on Emerson in the "Massachusetts
Quarterly,"--the indications of this mental disparity. It is in many
respects a noble essay, full of fine moral appreciations, bravely
generous, admirable in the loyalty of spirit shown towards a superior
mind, and all warm with a personal friendship which could find no
superior. But so far as literary execution is concerned, the beautiful
sentences of Emerson stand out like fragments of carved marble from
the rough plaster in which they are imbedded. Nor this alone; but, on
drawing near the vestibule of the author's finest thoughts, the critic
almost always stops, unable quite to enter their sphere. Subtile
beauties puzzle him; the titles of the poems, for instance, giving by
delicate allusion the key-note of each,--as "Astraea," "Mithridates,"
"Hamatreya," and "Etienne de la Boece,"--seem to him the work of "mere
caprice"; he pronounces the poem of "Monadnoc" "poor and weak"; he
condemns and satirizes the "Wood-notes," and thinks that a pine-tree
which should talk like Mr. Emerson's ought to be cut down and cast
into the sea.

The same want of fine discrimination was usually visible in his
delineations of great men in public life. Immense in accumulation of
details, terrible in the justice which held the balance, they yet left
one with the feeling, that, after all, the