hem in his
picture? Beauty is likely to flee when we make a dead set at her.

Emerson's exaggerations are sometimes so excessive as to be simply
amusing, as, when speaking of the feats of the imagination, he says,
"My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors
and constellations." The baseball, revolving as it flies, may suggest
the orbs, or your girdle suggest the equator, or the wiping of your
face on a towel suggest the absorption of the rain by the soil; but
does the blacking of your shoes suggest anything celestial? Hinges and
levers and fulcrums are significant, but one's old hat, or old boots,
have not much poetic significance. An elm tree may suggest a
cathedral, or a shell suggest the rainbow, or the sparkling frost
suggest diamonds, or the thread that holds the beads symbolize the law
that strings the spheres, but a button is a button, a shoestring a
shoestring, and a spade a spade, and nothing more.

I cherish and revere the name of Emerson so profoundly, and owe him
such a debt, that it seems, after all, a pity to point out the flaws
in his precious amber.

Let us keep alive the Emersonian memories: that such a man has lived
and wrought among us. Let us teach our children his brave and heroic
words, and plant our lives upon as secure an ethical foundation as he
did. Let us make pilgrimages to Concord, and stand with uncovered
heads beneath the pine tree where his ashes rest. He left us an estate
in the fair land of the Ideal. He bequeathed us treasures that thieves
cannot break through and steal, nor time corrupt, nor rust nor moth
destroy.[2]

[Footnote 2: At the onset of the author's last illness he attempted to
rearrange and improve this essay, but was even then unequal to it,
and, after a little shifting and editing, gave it up. "Do what you can
with it," he said; and when I asked him if he could not add a few
words to close it, he sat up in bed, and wrote the closing sentences,
which proved to be the last he ever penned.--C. B.]

III

ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU

I

After Emerson, the name of no New England man of letters keeps greener
and fresher than that of Thoreau. A severe censor of his countrymen,
and with few elements of popularity, yet the quality of his thought,
the sincerity of his life, and the nearness and perennial interest of
his themes, as well as his rare powers of literary expression, win
recruits from each generation of readers. He does not grow sta