mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath.  His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road.  There is but one exception,—­in his love for Socrates.  In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion.”

The writer who draws this portrait must have many of the same characteristics.  Much as Emerson loved his dreams and his dreamers, he must have found a great relief in getting into “the middle of the road” with Montaigne, after wandering in difficult by-paths which too often led him round to the point from which he started.

As to his exposition of the true relations of skepticism to affirmative and negative belief, the philosophical reader must be referred to the Essay itself.

In writing of “Shakespeare; or, the Poet,” Emerson naturally gives expression to his leading ideas about the office of the poet and of poetry.

“Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.”  A poet has “a heart in unison with his time and country.”—­“There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.”

When Shakespeare was in his youth the drama was the popular means of amusement.  It was “ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and library, at the same time.  The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field.”  Shakespeare found a great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time to time on the stage.  He borrowed in all directions:  “A great poet who appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating.”  Homer, Chaucer, Saadi, felt that all wit was their wit.  “Chaucer is a huge borrower.”  Emerson gives a list of authors from whom he drew.  This list is in many particulars erroneous, as I have learned from a letter of Professor Lounsbury’s which I have had the privilege of reading, but this is a detail which need not delay us.

The reason why Emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing, especially when treating of Plato and of Shakespeare, is obvious enough.  He was arguing in his own cause,—­not defending himself, as if there were some charge of plagiarism to be met, but making the proud claim of eminent domain in behalf of the masters who knew how to use their acquisitions.

“Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us.”—­“Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the crowd.  A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato’s brain and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s.  We are still out of doors.”

After all the homage which Emerson pays to the intellect of Shakespeare, he weighs him with the rest of mankind, and finds that he shares “the halfness and imperfection of humanity.”