The sermons of Whitefield or the orations of Edward Irving, when read, seem cold, and hardly worth printing; but when delivered they thrilled the hearts of thousands. Of Emerson's Lectures, we know that they took strong hold upon those who heard them; but, as a whole, he has never thought them adapted for publication. They were clearly designed to be heard, not to be read. Perhaps the best parts of them have been substantially embodied in his books. Sometimes he seems to have condensed a lecture, or a number of lectures, into an essay or a chapter; sometimes to have expanded a chapter into a lecture. But the written book possesses this great advantage over the spoken word it preserves the very thought of the author, and in the very form in which he wished to express it. And if the book comes to be printed as most books worthy of preservation do, sooner or later-it remains a possession for evermore. A good book is the most imperishable of all man's works. Herodotus will live when the Pyramids shall have crumbled into dust. Thucydides has outlived the Parthenon. Shakespeare and Milton will be as fresh as they are to-day when London shall have come to be what Memphis is. Some of the Hebrew Scriptures have outlived more than three millenniums, and all the kingdoms and empires which have grown up and fallen into decay; and they and the New Testament Scriptures can never cease to sway man's

heart so long as man shall exist here or in the hereafter. Many good books have, indeed, been apparently lost to after-ages. Some of these have been from time to time recovered. The manuscripts had been stored away in closets, piled over with dusty archives, or scrawled over with worthless stuff in palimpsests, but have been unearthed, cleaned off, and deciphered; so that we now have them as perfect as they were when they came from the hands of their authors. The process of discovery is still going on; and it is by no means impossible, not even perhaps improbable, that the lost "Decades" of Livy and the missing dramas of Eschylus and Sophocles will yet be brought to light. What need is there to speak of the clayinscribed tablets and cylinders of Assyria, which, after lying utterly unknown beneath heaps of ruins of temple and palace for five-and-twenty long centuries, have, within our own generation, been exhumed and deciphered, shedding a flood of light upon the darkness which had gathered over and around the history and legends of preceding ages?

Still another advantage of the written book over oral discourse is that the reader can always recur to it. The spoken discourse impresses us mainly in the mass. Many of the most vital points may fail to strike us; or they may be misunderstood or not understood at all; and we have no means of correcting the errors into which

we shall have fallen. But we can go back to the printed volume, can study it over and over again until we are assured that we understand it, or that we cannot understand it. Let, then, the preacher or the orator commit his best thoughts to the press; not that all or a tithe of what he has said should be presented just as he spoke it, but that the cream and marrow of his thoughts should be set forth in their due order and in the best form at his command. This, we think, has been done by Emerson.

Of the leading characteristics of Emerson's course of thought and mode of expression, we can not better express our own estimate than by citing a portion of Mr. Whipple's thoughtful article in Appletons" "Cyclopædia":

WHIPPLE UPON EMERSON.

"As a writer, Emerson is distinguished for a singular union of poetical imagination with practical acuteness. His vision takes a wide sweep in the realms of the ideal, but is no less firm and penetrating in the sphere of facts. His observations on society, on manners, on character, on institutions, are stamped with sagacity, and indicate a familiar knowledge of the homely phases of life, which are seldom viewed in their poetical relations. One side of his wisdom is worldly wisdom. The brilliant Transcendentalist is evidently a man not to be easily deceived in matters pertaining to the ordinary course of human affairs. His common-sense shrewdness is vivified by a pervasive wit. With him, however, wit

is not an end, but a means, and usually employed for the detection of pretense and imposture.

"His practical understanding is sometimes underrated from the fact that he never groups his thoughts by the methods of logic. He gives few reasons, even when he is most reasonable. He does not prove, but announces, aiming directly at the intelligence of his readers, without striving to extract a reluctant assent by force of argument. Insight, not reasoning, is his process. The bent of his mind is to ideal laws, which are beyond the province of dialectics. Equally conspicuous is his tendency to embody ideas in the forms of imagination. No spiritual abstraction is so evanescent but he thus transforms it into a concrete reality. He seldom indulges in the expression of sentiment, and in his nature emotion seems to be less the product of the heart than of the brain.

"His style is in the nicest harmony with the character of his thought. It is condensed almost to abruptness. Occasionally he purchases compression at the expense of clearness, and his merits as a writer consist rather in a choice of words than in the connection of sentences, though his diction is vitalized by the presence of a powerful creative element. The singular beauty and intense life and significance of his language demonstrate that he not only has something to say, but knows exactly how to say it. Fluency, however, is out of the question in a style which combines such austere economy of words with the determination to load every word with vital meaning.

"But the great characteristic of Emerson's intellect is the perception and sentiment of beauty. So strong is this, that he accepts nothing in life that is uncomely, haggard, or ghastly. The fact that an opinion depresses,

instead of invigorating, is with him a sufficient reason for its rejection. His observation, his wit, his reason, his imagination, his style, all obey the controlling sense of beauty which is at the heart of his nature, and instinctively avoid the ugly and the base.

"Those portions of Emerson's writings which relate to philosophy and religion may be considered as fragmentary contributions to the 'Philosophy of the Infinite.' He has no system; and, indeed, system in his mind is associated with charlatanism. His largest generalization is 'Existence.' On this inscrutable theme his conceptions vary with his moods and experience. Sometimes it seems to be man who parts with his personality in being united to God; sometimes it seems to be God who is impersonal, and who comes to personality only in man; and the real obscurity or vacillation of his metaphysical ideas is increased by the vivid and positive concrete forms in which they are successively clothed."

Mr. Frothingham, in his "New England Transcendentalism," while affirming that Emerson cannot be clearly designated as a Transcendentalist, in the technical sense of the term, styles him "the Seer," and under that title devotes to him an elaborate chapter, from which we make some excerpts, not always preserving the order in which they were written :

FROTHINGHAM UPON EMERSON.

"Emerson has been called 'the prince of Transcendentalists.' It is nearer the truth to call him the prince of Idealists. Certainly he can not be reckoned a disciple