or when he makes the test of a man an intellectual one, as his skill at repartee, and praises the literary crack shot, and defines manliness to be readiness, as he does in this last volume and in the preceding one, I am filled with a perverse envy of all the confused and stammering heroes of history.  Is Washington faltering out a few broken and ungrammatical sentences, in reply to the vote of thanks of the Virginia legislature, less manly than the glib tongue in the court-room or in the club that can hit the mark every time?  The test of a wit or of a scholar is one thing; the test of a man, I take it, is quite another.  In this and some other respects Emerson is well antidoted by Carlyle, who lays the stress on the opposite qualities, and charges his hero to hold his tongue.  But one cheerfully forgives Emerson the way he puts his thumb-nail on the bores.  He speaks feelingly, and no doubt from as deep an experience as any man in America.

I really hold Emerson in such high esteem that I think I can safely indulge myself in a little more fault-finding with him.

I think it must be admitted that he is deficient in sympathy.  This accounts in a measure for his coolness, his self-possession, and that kind of uncompromising rectitude or inflexibleness that marks his career, and that he so lauds in his essays.  No man is so little liable to be warped or compromised in any way as the unsympathetic man.  Emerson’s ideal is the man who stands firm, who is unmoved, who never laughs, or apologizes, or deprecates, or makes concessions, or assents through good-nature, or goes abroad; who is not afraid of giving offense; “who answers you without supplication in his eye,”—­in fact, who stands like a granite pillar amid the slough of life.  You may wrestle with this man, he says, or swim with him, or lodge in the same chamber with him, or eat at the same table, and yet he is a thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish with you.  He is a sheer precipice, is this man, and not to be trifled with.  You shrinking, quivering, acquiescing natures, avaunt!  You sensitive plants, you hesitating, indefinite creatures, you uncertain around the edges, you non-resisting, and you heroes, whose courage is quick, but whose wit is tardy, make way, and let the human crustacean pass.  Emerson is moulded upon this pattern.  It is no mush and milk that you get at this table.  “A great man is coming to dine with me; I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me.”  On the lecture stand he might be of wood, so far as he is responsive to the moods and feelings of his auditors.  They must come to him; he will not go to them:  but they do not always come.  Latterly the people have felt insulted, the lecturer showed them so little respect.  Then, before a promiscuous gathering, and in stirring and eventful times like ours, what anachronisms most of his lectures are, even if we take the high ground that they are pearls before swine!  The swine may safely demand some apology of him who offers them pearls instead of corn.