mind the last step at the garden end. If the man who can do these things
be not an artist, then must we have a new vocabulary and rename the
professions.

There is, in all this effectiveness of Emerson, no pose, no literary
art; nothing that corresponds even remotely to the pretended modesty and
ignorance with which Socrates lays pitfalls for our admiration in
Plato's dialogues.

It was the platform which determined Emerson's style. He was not a
writer, but a speaker. On the platform his manner of speech was a living
part of his words. The pauses and hesitation, the abstraction, the
searching, the balancing, the turning forward and back of the leaves of
his lecture, and then the discovery, the illumination, the gleam of
lightning which you saw before your eyes descend into a man of
genius,--all this was Emerson. He invented this style of speaking, and
made it express the supersensuous, the incommunicable. Lowell wrote,
while still under the spell of the magician: "Emerson's oration was more
disjointed than usual, even with him. It began nowhere, and ended
everywhere, and yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling
that something beautiful had passed that way, something more beautiful
than anything else, like the rising and setting of stars. Every possible
criticism might have been made on it but one,--that it was not noble.
There was a tone in it that awakened all elevating associations. He
boggled, he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses; but it was as
if a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and
it was _our_ fault, not his. It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff
as stars are made of, and you couldn't help feeling that, if you waited
awhile, all that was nebulous would be whirled into planets, and would
assume the mathematical gravity of system. All through it I felt