The same feeling comes out in the Poem “Blight,” where he says the “young scholars who invade our hills”

  “Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
  And all their botany is Latin names;”

and in “The Walk,” where the “learned men” with their glasses are contrasted with the sons of Nature,—­the poets are no doubt meant,—­much to the disadvantage of the microscopic observers.  Emerson’s mind was very far from being of the scientific pattern.  Science is quantitative,—­loves the foot-rule and the balance,—­methodical, exhaustive, indifferent to the beautiful as such.  The poet is curious, asks all manner of questions, and never thinks of waiting for the answer, still less of torturing Nature to get at it.  Emerson wonders, for instance,—­

  “Why Nature loves the number five,”

but leaves his note of interrogation without troubling himself any farther.  He must have picked up some wood-craft and a little botany from Thoreau, and a few chemical notions from his brother-in-law, Dr. Jackson, whose name is associated with the discovery of artificial anaesthesia.  It seems probable that the genial companionship of Agassiz, who united with his scientific genius, learning, and renown, most delightful social qualities, gave him a kinder feeling to men of science and their pursuits than he had entertained before that great master came among us.  At any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn.  But he loves the poet always better than the scientific student of nature.  In his Preface to the Poems of Mr. W.E.  Channing, he says:—­

“Here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud with a poet’s curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection they awake.”—­

This was Emerson’s own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of nature.

Emerson’s style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects.  His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony.  His imagery is frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the special to the general and universal, and vice versa, with a bound that is like a flight.  Here are a few specimens of his pleasing audacities:—­

“There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup.”—­

“He arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic.”—­

“If we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.”—­