s
with their lunch under a tree--in all such incidents there are
pictorial elements because the least part of it all to the looker-on
is the act of eating.

In Da Vinci's "Last Supper" the mere animal act of taking food plays
no part; the mind is occupied with higher and more significant things.
A suggestion of wine or of fruit in a painting may be agreeable, but
from a suggestion of the kitchen and the cook we turn away. The
incident of some of Washington's officers during the Revolution
entertaining some British officers (an historical fact) on baked
potatoes and salt would appeal to the artistic imagination. All the
planting and reaping of the farmers is suggestive of our animal wants,
as is so much of our whole industrial activity; but art looks kindly
upon much of it, shows us more or less in partnership with primal
energies. People surrounding a table after all signs of the dinner
have been removed hold the elements of an agreeable picture, because
that suggests conversation and social intercourse--a feast of reason
and a flow of soul. We are no longer animals; we have moved up many
degrees higher in the scale of human values.

Emerson's deep love and admiration for Carlyle come out many times in
the Journals. No other literary man of his times moved and impressed
him so profoundly. Their correspondence, which lasted upwards of
forty years, is the most valuable correspondence known to me in
English literature. It is a history of the growth and development of
these two remarkable minds.

I lately reread the Correspondence, mainly to bring my mind again in
contact with these noble spirits, so much more exalted than any in our
own time, but partly to see what new light the letters threw upon the
lives of these two men.

There is little of the character of intimate and friendly letters in
these remarkable documents. It is not Dear Tom or Dear Waldo. It is
Dear Emerson or Dear Carlyle. They are not letters, they are epistles,
like Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, or to the Thessalonians, or to
the Romans. Each of them contains the fragments of a gospel that both
were preaching, each in his own way, but at bottom the same--the
beauty and majesty of the moral law. Let the heavens fall, the moral
law and our duty to God and man will stand. These two men, so
different in character and temperament, were instantly drawn together
by that magnet--the moral sentiment. Carlyle's works were occupied
almost entirely with men