I know of no other writing that yields the reader so many strongly stamped medallion-like sayings and distinctions.  There is a perpetual refining and recoining of the current wisdom of life and conversation.  It is the old gold or silver or copper, but how bright and new it looks in his pages!  Emerson loves facts, things, objects, as the workman his tools.  He makes everything serve.  The stress of expression is so great that he bends the most obdurate element to his purpose; as the bird, under her keen necessity, weaves the most contrary and diverse materials into her nest.  He seems to like best material that is a little refractory; it makes his page more piquant and stimulating.  Within certain limits he loves roughness, but not at the expense of harmony.  He has wonderful hardiness and push.  Where else in literature is there a mind, moving in so rare a medium, that gives one such a sense of tangible resistance and force?  It is a principle in mechanics that velocity is twice as great as mass:  double your speed and you double your heat, though you halve your weight.  In like manner this body we are considering is not the largest, but its speed is great, and the intensity of its impact with objects and experience is almost without parallel.  Everything about a man like Emerson is important.  I find his phrenology and physiognomy more than ordinarily typical and suggestive.  Look at his picture there,—­ large, strong features on a small face and head,—­no blank spaces; all given up to expression; a high predaceous nose, a sinewy brow, a massive, benevolent chin.  In most men there is more face than feature, but here is a vast deal more feature than face, and a corresponding alertness and emphasis of character.  Indeed, the man is made after this fashion.  He is all type; his expression is transcendent.  His mind has the hand’s pronounced anatomy,—­its cords and sinews and multiform articulations and processes, its opposing and coordinating power.  If his brain is small, its texture is fine and its convolutions are deep.  There have been broader and more catholic natures, but few so towering and audacious in expression and so rich in characteristic traits.  Every scrap and shred of him is important and related.  Like the strongly aromatic herbs and simples,—­sage, mint, wintergreen, sassafras,—­the least part carries the flavor of the whole.  Is there one indifferent or equivocal or unsympathizing drop of blood in him?  Where he is at all, he is entirely,—­nothing extemporaneous; his most casual word seems to have lain in pickle a long time, and is saturated through and through with the Emersonian brine.  Indeed, so pungent and penetrating is his quality that even his quotations seem more than half his own.