done. His lofty anticipations have not been realized. No Teacher like the one for whom he looked, who should follow the shining laws of the universe beyond the point visible in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures-follow them until he should see them come full circle-has appeared to Emerson. For such a Teacher we look in vain to him. He has seen but a few points of that mighty circle whose infinite center is the will of the Eternal Mind, whose radii are the immensities, and whose circumference holds the universe; or, as one of old phrased it, "whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere." Of Emerson we must say, what he said of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures : "His utterances have no special integrity, and are not shown in their order to the intellect." Perhaps he himself came to a conclusion not unlike this; for, in one of his later works, he says: "Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit." This, indeed, Emerson has done; and his undigested theories may well, to use his own phrase," be preferred to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion."

VI.

CRITICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL.

EMERSON'S whole mature life has been that of a Thinker and a Teacher. For the utterance of his thoughts he has found two mediums: oral discourse and written books. It is with the latter that we shall have to do; for the mere spoken word dies almost as soon as it has been uttered, unless it has such vitality as to enter into the life of some auditor, or has so sunk into his memory that, perhaps, years after, he is enabled to write out at least the substance of it, and so the discourse becomes substantially permanent. Such is the case with some of the discourses of Socrates, as preserved by Plato. Such is the case with a few of the discourses of Jesus. Some of these as the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded by Matthew, the last discourse to the disciples on Passover-eve, as recorded by John, and many of the parables-seem to be full reports, giving the very words of our Saviour. Oral discourse has one advantage over that which is written: if a man speaks from the fullness of his heart, the interaction between speaker and auditors gives a new life to the words. The flashing eye, the impassioned utterance, the spontaneous action, impart a force to thoughts and words which, when read, move us but little.

The sermons of Whitefield or the orations of Edward Irving, when read, seem cold, and hardly worth printing; but when delivered they thrilled the hearts of thousands. Of Emerson's Lectures, we know that they took strong hold upon those who heard them; but, as a whole, he has never thought them adapted for publication. They were clearly designed to be heard, not to be read. Perhaps the best parts of them have been substantially embodied in his books. Sometimes he seems to have condensed a lecture, or a number of lectures, into an essay or a chapter; sometimes to have expanded a chapter into a lecture. But the written book possesses this great advantage over the spoken word: it preserves the very thought of the author, and in the very form in which he wished to express it. And if the book comes to be printed as most books worthy of preservation do, sooner or later-it remains a possession for evermore. A good book is the most imperishable of all man's works. Herodotus will live when the Pyramids shall have crumbled into dust. Thucydides has outlived the Parthenon. Shakespeare and Milton will be as fresh as they are to-day when London shall have come to be what Memphis is. Some of the Hebrew Scriptures have outlived more than three millenniums, and all the kingdoms and empires which have grown up and fallen into decay; and they and the New Testament Scriptures can never cease to sway man's

heart so long as man shall exist here or in the hereafter. Many good books have, indeed, been apparently lost to after-ages. Some of these have been from time to time recovered. The manuscripts had been stored away in closets, piled over with dusty archives, or scrawled over with worthless stuff in palimpsests, but have been unearthed, cleaned off, and deciphered; so that we now have them as perfect as they were when they came from the hands of their authors. The process of discovery is still going on; and it is by no means impossible, not even perhaps improbable, that the lost "Decades" of Livy and the missing dramas of Eschylus and Sophocles will yet be brought to light. What need is there to speak of the clayinscribed tablets and cylinders of Assyria, which, after lying utterly unknown beneath heaps of ruins of temple and palace for five-and-twenty long centuries, have, within our own generation, been exhumed and deciphered, shedding a flood of light upon the darkness which had gathered over and around the history and legends of preceding ages?

Still another advantage of the written book over oral discourse is that the reader can always recur to it. The spoken discourse impresses us mainly in the mass. Many of the most vital points may fail to strike us; or they may be misunderstood or not understood at all; and we have no means of correcting the errors into which

we shall have fallen. But we can go back to the printed volume, can study it over and over again until we are assured that we understand it, or that we cannot understand it. Let, then, the preacher or the orator commit his best thoughts to the press; not that all or a tithe of what he has said should be presented just as he spoke it, but that the cream and marrow of his thoughts should be set forth in their due order and in the best form at his command. This, we think, has been done by Emerson.

Of the leading characteristics of Emerson's course of thought and mode of expression, we can not better express our own estimate than by citing a portion of Mr. Whipple's thoughtful article in Appletons" "Cyclopædia":

WHIPPLE UPON EMERSON.

“As a writer, Emerson is distinguished for a singular union of poetical imagination with practical acuteness. His vision takes a wide sweep in the realms of the ideal, but is no less firm and penetrating in the sphere of facts. His observations on society, on manners, on character, on institutions, are stamped with sagacity, and indicate a familiar knowledge of the homely phases of life, which are seldom viewed in their poetical relations. One side of his wisdom is worldly wisdom. The brilliant Transcendentalist is evidently a man not to be easily deceived in matters pertaining to the ordinary course of human affairs. His common-sense shrewdness is vivified by a pervasive wit. With him, however, wit