of grace, and of character to serve such a constituency?" But then
Emerson's definition of eloquence is simple, and foretells the practice
of to-day rather than describes the practice of Webster, Everett,
Choate, and Winthrop, his contemporaries: "Know your fact; hug your
fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity....
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly
intelligible to the person to whom you speak."

* * * * *

I turn next to some examples of Emerson's anticipation of social
conditions, visible to him as seer in his own day, and since become
plain to the sight of the ordinary millions. When he accumulated in his
journals the original materials of his essay on Worship, there were no
large cities in the United States in the present sense of that term. The
great experiment of democracy was not far advanced, and had not
developed many of its sins and dangers; yet how justly he presented them
in the following description: "In our large cities, the population is
godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These
are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is
it people manage to live on, so aimless as they are? ... There is faith
in chemistry, in meat and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the
steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine wheels, sewing-machines, and in
public opinion, but not in divine causes."

In Emerson's day, luxury in the present sense had hardly been developed
in our country; but he foresaw its coming, and its insidious
destructiveness. "We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a
hundred trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our
expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in