his own in this generation.  He is terse, concentrated, and free from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation.  Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity.  The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical unction.  That modest and lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm to his companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us from finding any page of it cold or hard or dry.”

E.P.  Whipple, the well-known American critic, wrote soon after Emerson’s death: 

“But ‘sweetness and light’ are precious and inspiring only so far as they express the essential sweetness of the disposition of the thinker, and the essential illuminating power of his intelligence.  Emerson’s greatness came from his character.  Sweetness and light streamed from him because they were in him.  In everything he thought, wrote, and did, we feel the presence of a personality as vigorous and brave as it was sweet, and the particular radical thought he at any time expressed derived its power to animate and illuminate other minds from the might of the manhood, which was felt to be within and behind it.  To ‘sweetness and light’ he therefore added the prime quality of fearless manliness.

“If the force of Emerson’s character was thus inextricably blended with the force of all his faculties of intellect and imagination, and the refinement of all his sentiments, we have still to account for the peculiarities of his genius, and to answer the question, why do we instinctively apply the epithet ‘Emersonian’ to every characteristic passage in his writings?  We are told that he was the last in a long line of clergymen, his ancestors, and that the modern doctrine of heredity accounts for the impressive emphasis he laid on the moral sentiment; but that does not solve the puzzle why he unmistakably differed in his nature and genius from all other Emersons.  An imaginary genealogical chart of descent connecting him with Confucius or Gautama would be more satisfactory.

“What distinguishes the Emerson was his exceptional genius and character, that something in him which separated him from all other Emersons, as it separated him from all other eminent men of letters, and impressed every intelligent reader with the feeling that he was not only ‘original but aboriginal.’  Some traits of his mind and character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of heredity can give us the genesis of his genius?  Indeed, the safest course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess that it is the nature of genius ’to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.’”

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF EMERSON’S PRINCIPAL WORKS.