“....  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: 

“This is tonic indeed!  And let no one object that it is too general; that more practical, positive direction is what we want....  Yes, truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious.  Yet the secret of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper.  It is in the hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are indissolubly united; in which they work and have their being....  One can scarcely overrate the importance of holding fast to happiness and hope.  It gives to Emerson’s work an invaluable virtue.  As Wordsworth’s poetry is, in my judgment, the most important done in verse, in our language, during the present century, so Emerson’s Essays are, I think, the most important work done in prose....  But by his conviction that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood, and to prevail, and to work for happiness,—­by this conviction and hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have been right in them....  You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too diligently.”

Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in his own country, did much to obtain a hearing for Emerson’s works in Germany.  At first the Germans could not understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed turns of phrase which are so characteristic of Emerson’s style.

“Macaulay gives them no difficulty; even Carlyle is comprehended.  But in Emerson’s writings the broad turnpike is suddenly changed into a hazardous sandy foot-path.  His thoughts and his style are American.  He is not writing for Berlin, but for the people of Massachusetts....  It is an art to rise above what we have been taught....  All great men are seen to possess this freedom.  They derive their standard from their own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a scrap of common-sense would have made the same....  We become wiser with them, and know not how the difficult appears easy and the involved plain.

“Emerson possesses this noble manner of communicating himself.  He inspires me with courage and confidence.  He has read and seen but conceals the labor.  I meet in his works plenty of familiar facts, but he does not employ them to figure up anew the old worn-out problems:  each stands on a new spot and serves for new combinations.  From everything he sees the direct line issuing which connects it with the focus of life....