The bother with Mr. Emerson is, that, though he writes in prose, he is essentially a poet.  If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, and to reduce it to words of one syllable for infant minds, you will make as sad work of it as the good monk with his analysis of Homer in the “Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum.”  We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds.  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 Browne,—­though he does use that abominable word, reliable.  His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the ooze of Cotton Mather himself.  A diction at once so rich and so homely as his we know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold.  The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the few can find it.  It is the open secret of all true genius.  What does he mean, quotha?  He means inspiring hints, a divining-rod to your deeper nature, “plain living and high thinking.”  We meant only to welcome this book, and not to review it.  Doubtless we might pick our quarrel with it here and there; but all that our readers care to know is, that it contains essays on Fate, Power, Wealth, Culture, Behavior, Worship, Considerations by the Way, Beauty, and Illusions.  They need no invitation to Emerson.  “Would you know,” says Goethe, “the ripest cherries?  Ask the boys and the blackbirds.”  He does not advise you to inquire of the crows.

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