“I love Emerson’s book, not for its detached opinions, not even for the scheme of the general world he has framed for himself, or any eminence of talent he has expressed that with, but simply because it is his own book; because there is a tone of veracity, an unmistakable air of its being his, and a real utterance of a human soul, not a mere echo of such.  I consider it, in that sense, highly remarkable, rare, very rare, in these days of ours.  Ach Gott!  It is frightful to live among echoes.  The few that read the book, I imagine, will get benefit of it.  To America, I sometimes say that Emerson, such as he is, seems to me like a kind of New Era.”

John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an analytic study of Emerson’s style, which may reconcile the reader to some of its exasperating peculiarities.

“One of the traits that every critic notes in Emerson’s writing is that it is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous, so inconsecutive.  Dislike of a sentence that drags made him unconscious of the quality that French critics name coulant.  Everything is thrown in just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell is enough to persuade us that Pope did not exaggerate when he said that no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer as the power of rejecting his own thoughts....  Apart from his difficult staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary faults.  He uses words that are not only odd, but vicious in construction; he is sometimes oblique and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after epigrams that do not always come.  When people say that Emerson’s style must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget that though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still something to be said about its cut and fashion....  Yet, as happens to all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of expression deeply marked with character.  On every page there is set the strong stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated melody.  The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of the thought, and that, too, is a kind of eloquence.  An honest reader easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.  Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence.  As he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm, place them how or where you will.  He criticised Swedenborg for being superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the ignorance of men.  ‘Men take truths of this nature,’ said Emerson, ‘very fast;’ and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this capacity for granted in us.  In ‘choice and pith of diction,’ again, of which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost