Fourth of July. He taxes language to its limits in order to express his
revolt. He says that no man should write except what he has discovered
in the process of satisfying his own curiosity, and that every man will
write well in proportion as he has contempt for the public.

Emerson seems really to have believed that if any man would only
resolutely be himself, he would turn out to be as great as Shakespeare.
He will not have it that anything of value can be monopolized. His
review of the world, whether under the title of Manners, Self-Reliance,
Fate, Experience, or what-not, leads him to the same thought. His
conclusion is always the finding of eloquence, courage, art, intellect,
in the breast of the humblest reader. He knows that we are full of
genius and surrounded by genius, and that we have only to throw
something off, not to acquire any new thing, in order to be bards,
prophets, Napoleons, and Goethes. This belief is the secret of his
stimulating power. It is this which gives his writings a radiance like
that which shone from his personality.

The deep truth shadowed forth by Emerson when he said that "all the
American geniuses lacked nerve and dagger" was illustrated by our best
scholar. Lowell had the soul of the Yankee, but in his habits of writing
he continued English tradition. His literary essays are full of charm.
The Commemoration Ode is the high-water mark of the attempt to do the
impossible. It is a fine thing, but it is imitative and secondary. It
has paid the inheritance tax. Twice, however, at a crisis of pressure,
Lowell assumed his real self under the guise of a pseudonym; and with
his own hand he rescued a language, a type, a whole era of civilization
from oblivion. Here gleams the dagger and here is Lowell revealed. His
limitations as a poet, his too much wit, his too much morality, his
mixture of shrewdness and religion, are seen to be the very elements of