And carry in my heart, for days,
Peace that hallows rudest ways.”
His Threnody, written after the early death of his first-born son, has always seemed to me one of the most moving elegies in the English tongue. His patriotic poems, especially the Concord Ode, are unsurpassed as brief, lyrical utterances of the spirit of America. In certain moods, when the mind is in vigour and the windows of far vision open at a touch, Emerson’s small volume of Poems is a most companionable book.
As his prose sometimes intrudes into his verse and checks its flow, so his poetry often runs over into his prose and illuminates it. What could be more poetic in conception than this sentence from his first book, Nature? “If the stars should appear but one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”
Emerson’s Essays are a distillation of his lectures. His way of making these was singular and all his own. It was his habit to keep note-books in which he jotted down bits of observation about nature, stray thoughts and comparisons, reflections on his reading, and striking phrases which came to him in meditation or talk. Choosing a subject he planted it in his mind and waited for ideas and illustrations to come to it, as birds or insects to a flower. When a thought appeared he followed it, “as a boy might hunt a butterfly,” and when it was captured he pinned it in his “thought-book.” No doubt there were mental laws at work all the time, giving guidance and direction to the process of composition which seemed so irregular and haphazard. There is no lack of vital unity in one of Emerson’s lectures or essays. It deals with a single subject and never gets really out of sight of the proposition with which it begins. Yet it seldom gives a complete, all-round view of it. It is more like a series of swift and vivid glimpses of the same object seen from different stand-points, a collection of snap-shot pictures taken in the course of a walk around some great mountain.
From the pages of his note-books he gathered the material for one of his lectures, selecting and arranging it under some such title as Fate, Genius, Beauty, Manners, Duty, The Anglo-Saxon, The Young American, and giving it such form and order as he thought would be most effective in delivery. If the lecture was often repeated, (as it usually was,) the material was frequently rearranged, the pages were shifted, the illustrations changed. Then, after it had served its purpose, the material was again rearranged and published in a volume of Essays.
It is easy to trace in the essays the effects of this method of writing. The material is drawn from a wide range of reading and observation. Emerson is especially fond of poetry, philosophy and books of anecdote and biography. He quotes from Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, George Herbert, Wordsworth, Plutarch, Grimm, St. Simon, Swedenborg, Behmen the mystic, Plato, and the religious books of the East. His illustrations come from far and near. Now they are strange and remote, now homely and familiar. The Zodiac of Denderah; the Savoyards who carved their pine-forests into toys; the lustrum of silence which Pythagoras made his disciples keep; Napoleon on the Bellerophon watching the drill of the English soldiers; the Egyptian legend that every man has two pair of eyes; Empedocles and his shoe; the flat strata of the earth; a soft mushroom pushing up through the hard ground;—all these allusions and a hundred more are found in the same volume. On his pages, close beside the Parthenon, St. Paul’s, the Sphinx, Ætna and Vesuvius, you will read of the White Mountains, Monadnock, Katahdin, the pickerel-weed in bloom, the wild geese honking across the sky, the chickadee singing in the face of winter, the Boston State-house, Wall Street, cotton-mills, railroads, Quincy granite, and so forth. Nothing is too far away to seem real to him, nothing too near to seem interesting and valuable. There is an abundance, sometimes a superabundance, of material in his essays, not always well-assorted, but all vivid and suggestive.
The structure of the essay, the way of putting the material together, does not follow any fixed rule or system. Yet in most cases it has a well-considered and suitable form; it stands up; it is architecturally built, though the art is concealed. I once amused myself trying to analyze some of the essays, and found that many of the best ones have a definite theme, like a text, and follow a regular plan of development, with introduction, discussion, and conclusion. In some cases Emerson does not disdain the “heads and horns” of the old-fashioned preacher, and numbers his points “first,” “second,” “third,”—perhaps even “fourth.” But this is rare. For the most part the essays do not seem to be constructed but to grow. They are like conversations with the stupid things left out. They turn aside from dull points, and omit connecting links, and follow an attractive idea wherever it may lead. They seldom exhaust a subject, but they usually illuminate it.
“The style is the man,” and in this case it is well suited to his material and his method. It is brilliant, sparkling, gem-like. He has great freedom in the choice of words, using them sometimes in odd ways and not always correctly. Generally his diction is made up of terse, pungent Anglo-Saxon phrases, but now and then he likes to bring in a stately word of Greek or Latin origin, with a telling effect of contrast. Most of his sentences are short and clear; it is only in the paragraph that he is sometimes cloudy. Every essay is rich in epigrams. If one reads too much of a style like this, the effect becomes fatiguing. You miss the long, full, steady flow of sentences with varied cadence and changing music.