From the days when Mr. Whipple attracted the attention of our intelligent, but unawakened reading community, by his discriminating and appreciative criticisms of Emerson’s Lectures, and Mr. Lowell drew the portrait of the New England “Plotinus-Montaigne” in his brilliant “Fable for Critics,” to the recent essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Henry Norman, and Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Emerson’s writings have furnished one of the most enduring pieces de resistance at the critical tables of the old and the new world.

He early won the admiration of distinguished European thinkers and writers:  Carlyle accepted his friendship and his disinterested services; Miss Martineau fully recognized his genius and sounded his praises; Miss Bremer fixed her sharp eyes on him and pronounced him “a noble man.”  Professor Tyndall found the inspiration of his life in Emerson’s fresh thought; and Mr. Arnold, who clipped his medals reverently but unsparingly, confessed them to be of pure gold, even while he questioned whether they would pass current with posterity.  He found discerning critics in France, Germany, and Holland.  Better than all is the testimony of those who knew him best.  They who repeat the saying that “a prophet is not without honor save in his own country,” will find an exception to its truth in the case of Emerson.  Read the impressive words spoken at his funeral by his fellow-townsman, Judge Hoar; read the glowing tributes of three of Concord’s poets,—­Mr. Alcott, Mr. Channing, and Mr. Sanborn,—­and it will appear plainly enough that he, whose fame had gone out into all the earth, was most of all believed in, honored, beloved, lamented, in the little village circle that centred about his own fireside.

It is a not uninteresting question whether Emerson has bequeathed to the language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like “the adamant of Shakespeare,” and remain a classic like the Essays of Addison or Gray’s Elegy.  It is a far more important question whether his thought entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. Corpora non agunt nisi soluta, and ideas must be dissolved and taken up as well as material substances before they can act.  “That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die,” or rather lose the form with which it was sown.  Eight stanzas of four lines each have made the author of “The Burial of Sir John Moore” an immortal, and endowed the language with a classic, perfect as the most finished cameo.  But what is the gift of a mourning ring to the bequest of a perpetual annuity?  How many lives have melted into the history of their time, as the gold was lost in Corinthian brass, leaving no separate monumental trace of their influence, but adding weight and color and worth to the age of which they formed a part and the generations that came after them!  We can dare to predict of Emerson, in the words of his old friend and disciple, Mr. Cranch:—­