is reached, his inspiration has all gone up in sounds pleasing to
his audience, ugly to him--sacrificed for the first acoustic--an
opaque clarity, a picture painted for its hanging. Easy unity,
like easy virtue, is easier to describe, when judged from its
lapses than from its constancy. When the infidel admits God is
great, he means only: "I am lazy--it is easier to talk than
live." Ruskin also says: "Suppose I like the finite curves best,
who shall say I'm right or wrong? No one. It is simply a question
of experience." You may not be able to experience a symphony,
even after twenty performances. Initial coherence today may be
dullness tomorrow probably because formal or outward unity
depends so much on repetition, sequences, antitheses, paragraphs
with inductions and summaries. Macaulay had that kind of unity.
Can you read him today? Emerson rather goes out and shouts: "I'm
thinking of the sun's glory today and I'll let his light shine
through me. I'll say any damn thing that this inspires me with."
Perhaps there are flashes of light, still in cipher, kept there
by unity, the code of which the world has not yet discovered. The
unity of one sentence inspires the unity of the whole--though its
physique is as ragged as the Dolomites.

Intense lights--vague shadows--great pillars in a horizon are
difficult things to nail signboards to. Emerson's outward-inward
qualities make him hard to classify, but easy for some. There are
many who like to say that he--even all the Concord men--are
intellectuals. Perhaps--but intellectuals who wear their brains
nearer the heart than some of their critics. It is as dangerous
to determine a characteristic by manner as by mood. Emerson is a
pure intellectual to those who prefer to take him as literally as
they can. There are reformers, and in "the form" lies their