noticed anywhere as one evidently a scholarly thinker astray from the alcove or the study, which were his natural habitats.  His voice was very sweet, and penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort.  His enunciation was beautifully clear, but he often hesitated as if waiting for the right word to present itself.  His manner was very quiet, his smile was pleasant, but he did not like explosive laughter any better than Hawthorne did.  None who met him can fail to recall that serene and kindly presence, in which there was mingled a certain spiritual remoteness with the most benignant human welcome to all who were privileged to enjoy his companionship.”

Emerson died April 27, 1882, after a few days’ illness from pneumonia.  Dr. Garnett in his excellent biography says:  “Seldom had ’the reaper whose name is Death’ gathered such illustrious harvest as between December 1880 and April 1882.  In the first month of this period George Eliot passed away, in the ensuing February Carlyle followed; in April Lord Beaconsfield died, deplored by his party, nor unregretted by his country; in February of the following year Longfellow was carried to the tomb; in April Rossetti was laid to rest by the sea, and the pavement of Westminster Abbey was disturbed to receive the dust of Darwin.  And now Emerson lay down in death beside the painter of man and the searcher of nature, the English-Oriental statesman, the poet of the plain man and the poet of the artist, and the prophet whose name is indissolubly linked with his own.  All these men passed into eternity laden with the spoils of Time, but of none of them could it be said, as of Emerson, that the most shining intellectual glory and the most potent intellectual force of a continent had departed along with him.”

CRITICAL OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS.

Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great hierarchy of letters.  Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to agree with his judgment of our great American.

After a review of the poetical works of Emerson the English critic draws his conclusions as follows: 

“I do not then place Emerson among the great poets.  But I go farther, and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men of letters.  Who are the great men of letters?  They are men like Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire—­writers with, in the first place, a genius and instinct for style....  Brilliant and powerful passages in a man’s writings do not prove his possession of it.  Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature.  Yet he is not a great writer....  Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his friend’s poetic and literary productions when he says:  ’For me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.’ ...