--with history, biography, political events,
and government; Emerson's with ideas, nature, and poetry; yet the bed
rock in each was the same. Both preached an evangel, but how
different!

Emerson makes a note of the days on which he received a letter from,
or wrote one to, his great Scottish friend. Both were important events
with him. It is evident that Emerson makes more of an effort to write
his best in these letters than does Carlyle. Carlyle tosses his off
with more ease and unconscious mastery. The exchange is always in
favor of the Scot. Carlyle was, of course, the more prodigious
personality, and had the advantage in the richness and venerableness
of the Old World setting. But Emerson did not hesitate to discount him
in his letters and in his Journals, very wisely sometimes, not so
wisely at others.

"O Carlyle, the merit of glass is not to be seen, but to be seen
through; but every crystal and lamina of the Carlyle glass is
visible." Of course Carlyle might reply that stained glass has other
merits than transparency, or he might ask: Why should an author's
style be compared to glass anyhow, since it is impossible to
dissociate it from the matter of his discourse? It is not merely to
reveal truth; it is also to enhance its beauty. There is the charm and
witchery of style, as in Emerson's own best pages, as well as the
worth of the subject-matter. Is it not true that in the description of
any natural object or scene or event we want something more than to
see it through a perfectly transparent medium? We want the added charm
or illusion of the writer's own way of seeing it, the hue of his own
spirit.

I think we may admit all this--doubtless Emerson would admit it--and
yet urge that Carlyle's style had many faults of the kind Emerson
indicated. It thrusts itself too much upon the reader's attention. His
prose is at the best, as in the "Life of Stirling," when it is most
transparent and freest from mannerisms. Carlyle's manner at its best
is very pleasing; at its worst it becomes a wearisome mannerism. When
a writer's style gets into a rut his reader is not happy. Ease,
flexibility, transparency, though it be colored transparency, are
among the merits we want.

The most just and penetrating thing Emerson ever said about Carlyle is
recorded in his Journal in 1847: "In Carlyle, as in Byron, one is much
more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly
superiority rather than intellectuality, and