“Our arts are happy hits.  We are like the musician on the lake,
    whose melody is sweeter than he knows.”

The discourse on “Eloquence” is more systematic, more professorial, than many of the others.  A few brief extracts will give the key to its general purport:—­

“Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative.  Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.—­

    “He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion
    must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on
    character and insight.—­

    —­“The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.—­

—­“Its great masters ... were grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world and themselves also.”

“Domestic Life” begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of the goblet which holds some tonic draught:—­

“Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier’s, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not.  His unaffected lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child,—­the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his vexation,—­soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous compassion.  The small despot asks so little that all reason and all nature are on his side.  His ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue.  His flesh is angels’ flesh, all alive.—­All day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him.”

Emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about “Farming.”  Dr. Emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an address before the “Middlesex Agricultural Society,” and printed in the “Transactions” of that association.  He soon found out that the hoe and the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some general ideas about farming which he expressed very happily:—­