Both writers had this in common:  they were poets and moralists.  They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen portraits of character.  The particular form in which they wrote makes little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an elevated sentiment.

It was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer in what direction they should turn their special gifts.  The actor had learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his apprenticeship in the pulpit.  Each had his bread to earn, and he must work, and work hard, in the way open before him.  For twenty years the playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good estate to his native town.  For forty years Emerson lectured and published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him.  He never became rich, as Shakespeare did.  He was never in easy circumstances until he was nearly seventy years old.  Lecturing was hard work, but he was under the “base necessity,” as he called it, of constant labor, writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and dangerous winter season.

He spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed plain people whose classics were the Bible and the “Farmer’s Almanac.”  Wherever he appeared in the lecture-room, he fascinated his listeners by his voice and manner; the music of his speech pleased those who found his thought too subtle for their dull wits to follow.

When the Lecture had served its purpose, it came before the public in the shape of an Essay.  But the Essay never lost the character it borrowed from the conditions under which it was delivered; it was a lay sermon,—­concio ad populum.  We must always remember what we are dealing with.  “Expect nothing more of my power of construction,—­no ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together.”—­“Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result:  paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.”  We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse.  He liked the freedom of the platform.  “I preach in the Lecture-room,” he says, “and there it tells, for there is no prescription.  You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius.”  In England, he says, “I find this lecturing a key which opens all doors.”  But he did not tend to overvalue the calling which from “base necessity” he followed so diligently.  “Incorrigible spouting Yankee,” he calls himself; and again,