essays in their present form. The oral method thus predominates:
a series of oracular thoughts has been shaped for oratorical
utterance, not oratorical in the bombastic, popular American
sense, but cunningly designed, by a master of rhetoric, to
capture the ear and then the mind of the auditor.

Emerson's work as a lecturer coincided with the rise of that
Lyceum system which brought most of the American authors, for
more than a generation, into intimate contact with the public,
and which proved an important factor in the aesthetic and moral
cultivation of our people. No lecturer could have had a more
auspicious influence than Emerson, with his quiet dignity, his
serene spiritual presence, his tonic and often electrifying
force. But if he gave his audiences precious gifts, he also
learned much from them. For thirty years his lecturing trips to
the West brought him, more widely than any New England man of
letters, into contact with the new, virile America of the great
Mississippi valley. Unlike many of his friends, he was not
repelled by the "Jacksonism of the West"; he rated it a
wholesome, vivifying force in our national thought and life. The
"Journal" reveals the essential soundness of his Americanism.
Though surrounded all his life by reformers, he was himself
scarcely a reformer, save upon the single issue of anti-slavery.
Perhaps he was at bottom too much of a radical to be swept off
his feet by any reform.

To our generation, of course, Emerson presents himself as an
author of books, and primarily as an essayist, rather than as a
winning, entrancing speaker. His essays have a greater variety of
tone than is commonly recognized. Many of them, like "Manners,"