“Tapping the tempest for a little side wind.”—­

“The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment and bind them fast in one web.”—­

He is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases.  He likes the expression “mother-wit,” which he finds in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and other old writers.  He often uses the word “husband” in its earlier sense of economist.  His use of the word “haughty” is so fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it.  But his special, constitutional, word is “fine,” meaning something like dainty, as Shakespeare uses it,—­“my dainty Ariel,”—­“fine Ariel.”  It belongs to his habit of mind and body as “faint” and “swoon” belong to Keats.  This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson’s imitators are easily recognized.  “Melioration” is another favorite word of Emerson’s.  A clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word “haughty;” his exquisite delicacy by his fondness for the word “fine,” with a certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the word “melioration.”

We must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel with Solomon and criticise the Sermon on the Mount.  The “point and surprise” which he speaks of as characterizing the style of Plutarch belong eminently to his own.  His fertility of illustrative imagery is very great.  His images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects, ennobled by his handling.  He throws his royal robe over a milking-stool and it becomes a throne.  But chiefly he chooses objects of comparison grand in themselves.  He deals with the elements at first hand.  Such delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight.  It is as when the slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling the stained windows of a great cathedral.  We have seen him as an unpretending lecturer.  We follow him round as he “peddles out all the wit he can gather from Time or from Nature,” and we find that “he has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun,” and is carrying about the morning light as merchandise.

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