“I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received.”  Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments.  But one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations enough.  I remember Emerson’s coming to my house to know if I could fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very advantageous invitation in another direction.  I told him that I was unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned.  He smiled serenely, saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that season.

No man would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas.  He crams his pages with the very marrow of his thought.  But in weighing out a lecture he was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh.  His utterance was deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays.  Exactly at the end of the hour the lecture stopped.  Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly, without peroration of any sort, always with “a gentle shock of mild surprise” to the unprepared listener.  He had weighed out the full measure to his audience with perfect fairness.

  [Greek:  oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes
  Aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei
  Ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,]

or, in Bryant’s version,

“as the scales Are held by some just woman, who maintains By spinning wool her household,—­carefully She poises both the wool and weights, to make The balance even, that she may provide A pittance for her babes.”—­

As to the charm of his lectures all are agreed.  It is needless to handle this subject, for Mr. Lowell has written upon it.  Of their effect on his younger listeners he says, “To some of us that long past experience remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had.  Emerson awakened us, saved us from the body of this death.  It is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless of what breath may fill it.  Sidney heard it in the ballad of ‘Chevy Chase,’ and we in Emerson.  Nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of victory.”

There was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in Emerson’s voice that was infinitely soothing.  So might “Peace, be still,” have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm.  I remember that in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror, I fell in with Governor Andrew, on his way to a lecture of Emerson’s, where he was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon his mind.  An hour passed in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the diamond drops that distil from a mountain rock, was a true nepenthe for a careworn soul.