audience. She kindly lent the book to the present writer, and invited a correspondence regarding it. While in Liverpool she heard a discourse by the Rev. James Martineau, which called forth her warm admiration.

Every reader of Mr. Lowell knows his intensely humorous description of the characteristics of Emerson and Carlyle, in "A Fable for Critics." That keen and vigorous critic has said many admirable things in prose about Emerson, and any memoir of him would be incomplete and inadequate which did not include the following exquisitely expressed tribute to his genius and influence. "A lecturer now for something like a third of a century, one of the pioneers of the lecturing system, the charm of his voice, his manner, and his matter has never lost its power over his earlier hearers, and continually winds new ones in its enchanting meshes.

. I have heard some great. speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with a drift we can not and would not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long-studied artist in these things) does the deliberate utterance, that seems waiting for the first word, seem to admit us

partners in the labour of thought, and make us feel as if the glance of humour were a sudden suggestion; as if the perfect phrase lying written there on the desk were as unexpected to him as to us. There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses. We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has produced. Search for his eloquence in his books, and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith of language he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne-a diction at once so rich and so homely as his I know not where to match. It is like homespun cloth-of-gold. I know no one that can hold a promiscuous crowd in pleased attention so long as he. . . . 'Plain living and high thinking' speak to us in this altogether unique lay-preacher. We have shared in the beneficence of this varied culture, this fearless impartiality in criticism and speculation, this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature which rather stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If ever there was a standing testimonial to the cumulative power and value of Character-we have it in this gracious and dig

nified presence. What an antiseptic is a pure life! At sixty-five he has that privilege of soul which abolishes the calendar, and presents him to us always the unwasted contemporary of his own prime. Who that saw the audience will ever forget it, where every one still capable of fire, or longing to renew in them the half-forgotten sense of it, was gathered? Those faces, young and old, agleam with pale intellectual light, eager with pleased attention, flash upon me once more from the deep recesses of the years with an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, brimming with love and hope, wholly vanished now in that other world we call the Past, or peering doubtfully through the pensive gloaming of memory, your light impoverishes these cheaper days! I hear again that rustle of sensation, as they turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some keener flash of that humour which always played about the horizon of his mind like heat-lightning, and it seems now like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves that are whirling around me. His younger hearers could not know how much they owed to the benign impersonality, that quiet scorn of everything ignoble, the never-sated hunger of self-culture, that were personified in the man before them. But the older knew how much the country's

intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus of his teaching and example, how constantly he had kept burning the beacon of an ideal life above our lower region of turmoil. To him more than to all other causes did the young martyrs of our Civil War owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of their lives. Those who are grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of us are, for what they feel to be most valuable in their culture, or perhaps I should say their impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which only genius can give, and without which all doctrine is chaff." "I can never help applying to him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon-'There happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language was nobly censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke.'

Mr. Lowell gives a vivid description of the effect produced by Emerson's speech at the Burns Centenary dinner at Boston in 1859. "In that closelyfiled speech of his every word seemed to have just

He looked far away

dropped from the clouds. over the heads of his hearers with a vague kind of expectation, as into some private heaven of invention, and the winged period came at last obedient to his spell. Every sentence brought down the house, as I

before,—and it is

never saw one brought down

not so easy to heat Scotsmen with a sentiment that has no hint of native brogue in it. I watched, for it was an interesting study, how the quick sympathy ran flashing from face to face down the long tables, like an electric spark thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of plaudits. I watched till tables and faces vanished, for I, too, found myself caught up in the common enthusiasm." This celebrated speech is reprinted in the latter portion of this volume.

From an Essay on Emerson by John Burroughs, the author of several volumes of rare merit, published in New York, and which it is surprising no London publisher has yet introduced to British readers, a few sentences are here given,-full of pith and just appreciation. Mr. Burroughs wields a racy pen, and there is the ring of the true metal in his delightful sketches of outdoor nature, mingled with chapters of a more purely literary character.

I know of no other writing that yields the reader so many strongly stamped medallion-like sayings and distinctions. There