What one comes at last to want is power, mastery; and, whether it be mastery over the subtleties of the intellect, as in Emerson himself, or over the passions and the springs of action, as in Shakespeare, or over our terrors and the awful hobgoblins of hell and Satan, as in Dante, or over vast masses and spaces of nature and the abysms of aboriginal man, as in Walt Whitman, what matters it?  Are we not refreshed by all?  There is one mastery in Burns, another in Byron, another in Rabelais, and in Victor Hugo, and in Tennyson; and though the critic has his preferences, though he affect one more than another, yet who shall say this one is a poet and that one is not?  “There may be any number of supremes,” says the master, and “one by no means contravenes another.”  Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas, says Emerson, quoting the scientist; and every great poet complements and leaves the world free to every other great poet.

Emerson’s limitation or fixity is seen also in the fact that he has taken no new step in his own direction, if indeed another step could be taken in that direction and not step off.  He is a prisoner on his peak.  He cannot get away from the old themes.  His later essays are upon essentially the same subjects as his first.  He began by writing on nature, greatness, manners, art, poetry, and he is still writing on them.  He is a husbandman who practices no rotation of crops, but submits to the exhaustive process of taking about the same things from his soil year after year.  Some readers think they detect a falling off.  It is evident there is not the same spontaneity, and that the soil has to be more and more stirred and encouraged, which is not at all to be wondered at.

But if Emerson has not advanced, he has not receded, at least in conviction and will, which is always the great danger with our bold prophets.  The world in which he lives, the themes upon which he writes, never become hackneyed to him.  They are always fresh and new.  He has hardened, but time has not abated one jot or tittle his courage and hope,—­no cynicism and no relaxing of his hold, no decay of his faith, while the nobleness of his tone, the chivalry of his utterance, is even more marked than at first.  Better a hundred-fold than his praise of fine manners is the delicacy and courtesy and the grace of generous breeding displayed on every page.  Why does one grow impatient and vicious when Emerson writes of fine manners and the punctilios of conventional life, and feel like kicking into the street every divinity enshrined in the drawing-room?  It is a kind of insult to a man to speak the word in his presence.  Purify the parlors indeed by keeping out the Choctaws, the laughers!  Let us go and hold high carnival for a week, and split the ears of the groundlings with our “contemptible squeals of joy.”  And when he makes a dead set at praising eloquence, I find myself instantly on the side of the old clergyman he tells of who prayed that he might never be eloquent;