Emerson | Page 5

glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket, all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures' (1845).
He loved to write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer or by readings of Plato, or whatsoever else is dearest to the Morning Muse.' Yet he could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He confesses that he sometimes craves 'that stimulation which every capricious, languid, and languescent study needs.' Carlyle's potent concentration stirs his envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he found very fascinating, eating up days and weeks; 'nay, a brave scholar should shun it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious enchantments.'
In the doings of his neighbourhood he bore his part; he took a manly interest in civil affairs, and was sensible, shrewd, and helpful in matters of practical judgment. Pilgrims, sane and insane, the beardless and the gray-headed, flocked to his door, far beyond the dozen persons good and wise whom he had mentioned to Carlyle. 'Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto' (Hawthorne). To the most intractable of Transcendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was never impatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where the case was not yet beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neighbour (1842-45). 'It was good,' says Hawthorne, 'to meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart.'
The most remarkable of all his neighbours was Thoreau, who for a couple of years lived in a hut which he had built for himself on the shore of Walden Pond. If he had not written some things with a considerable charm of style, Thoreau might have been wisely neglected as one of the crazy. But Emerson was struck by the originality of his life, and thought it well in time to edit the writings of one 'who was bred to no profession; never married; lived alone; never went to Church; never voted; refused to pay a tax to the State; ate no flesh, drank no wine, never knew the use of tobacco; had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no passions, refused all invitations, preferred a good Indian to highly cultivated people, and said he would rather go to Oregon than to London.' The world has room for every type, so that it be not actively noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his place in the catalogue. He was, after all, in his life only a compendium, on a scale large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. Yet we may agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with Socratic force to the heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be too purely material, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused.
Emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the hermit's trap of banishment to the rocks and echoes. 'Solitude,' he said, 'is impracticable, and society fatal.' He steered his way as best he could between these two irreconcilable necessities. He had, as we have seen, the good sense to make for himself a calling which brought him into healthy contact with bodies of men, and made it essential that he should have his listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they were not actually present to the eye. As a preacher Emerson has been described as making a deep impression on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by 'the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and the singular simplicity and directness of a manner free from the least trace of dogmatic assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, whose force and energy, and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, carried for the moment all before him--his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendours of Chalmers' (Ireland, 141).
At the lecturer's desk the same attraction made itself still more effectually felt. 'I have heard some great speakers and some accomplished orators,' Mr. Lowell says, 'but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he. There is