draws his conclusions as follows:

"I do not then place Emerson among the great poets. But I go farther,
and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like
Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire--writers with, in the
first place, a genius and instinct for style.... Brilliant and
powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his possession of
it. Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has
passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has
passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a
great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his
friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is
too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' ...

".... Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas,
not with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and
Addisons, can we rank Emerson. No man could see this clearer than
Emerson himself. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such
gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated
his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault' he calls it; praise
'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that
I am.'"

After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to praise. Quoting
passages from the Essays, he adds: