“It is to be remembered,” says Mr. Ruskin, “that all men who have sense and feeling are continually helped:  they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way.  The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided; and if the attainments of all human minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original powers, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it.”

The reader may like to see a few coincidences between Emerson’s words and thoughts and those of others.

Some sayings seem to be a kind of family property.  “Scorn trifles” comes from Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and reappears in her nephew, Ralph Waldo.—­“What right have you, Sir, to your virtue?  Is virtue piecemeal?  This is a jewel among the rags of a beggar.”  So writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Lecture “New England Reformers.”—­“Hiding the badges of royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem from under their rags.”  Thus wrote Charles Chauncy Emerson in the “Harvard Register” nearly twenty years before.

  “The hero is not fed on sweets,
  Daily his own heart he eats.”

The image comes from Pythagoras via Plutarch.

Now and then, but not with any questionable frequency, we find a sentence which recalls Carlyle.

“The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling.  The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all its borders in flame.  The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a long memory, and in hottest heat a register and rule.”

Compare this passage from “English Traits” with the following one from Carlyle’s “French Revolution":—­

“So long this Gallic fire, through its successive changes of color and character, will blaze over the face of Europe, and afflict and scorch all men:—­till it provoke all men, till it kindle another kind of fire, the Teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day!  For there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry jungle and grass; most sudden, high-blazing:  and another fire which we liken to the burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal, but which no known thing will put out.”

  “O what are heroes, prophets, men
  But pipes through which the breath of man doth blow
  A momentary music.”

The reader will find a similar image in one of Burns’s letters, again in one of Coleridge’s poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a letter of Leibnitz.

  “He builded better than he knew”

is the most frequently quoted line of Emerson.  The thought is constantly recurring in our literature.  It helps out the minister’s sermon; and a Fourth of July Oration which does not borrow it is like the “Address without a Phoenix” among the Drury Lane mock poems.  Can we find any trace of this idea elsewhere?