Savannah morning news. [volume] (Savannah) 1868-1887, 1882-06-02
Dr. Holmes ON Emerson

,
What could we do with this unex-
pected, unprovided for, unclassif1ed, half
unwelcome new conner, who has been
for awhile ported, as it were, in our Uni
tartan cold green house, but had taken to
growing so fast that he was lifting off its
glass roof and letting in the hailstones
Here was a protest that outfl6nked the
extreme left of liberalism, yet so calm
and serene that its radicalism had the &C.
cents of the gospel of peace. Here was
n iconOclast without a hammer, who
took down our idols from their pedestals
so tenderly that it seemed like an act of
worship.
The scribes and Pharasees made light
of his oracular sayings. The lawyers
could not find the witnesses to subpoena
aud the documents to refer to when his
case came before them, and turned him
over to their wives and daughters. The
ministers denounced his heresies, and
handled his writings as if they were
packages of dynamite, and the grand
mothers were as much afraid of his new
teachings as old Mrs. Piozzi was of
geology. We had had revolution.
airy orators, reformers, martyrs; it
was but few years since AbnCr Knee
land had been sent TO Jail for expressing
an opinion about the great First Cause
but We had had nothing like this man,
with his seraphic voice and countenance,
his choice vocabulary, his refined utter
ance, his gentle courage, which, with a
different manner, might have been called
audacity, his temperate statement of
opinions which threatened to shake the
existing order of thought like an earth
quake.
1t always seemed to me as if he looked
upon this earth very much as a visitor
from another planet would look on it.
He was interested, and to some extent
curious about it, but it was not the first
spheroid he had been acquainted with by
any means.
Few poets who have written so little
in yer. have dropped so many of those
Jewels five words long" which fall from
their setting only to be more chOicely
treasured. h pLuri6Us unun1 is hardly
more familiar to our ears than HE
builded better than he knew" and
Keats ching of beauty" is little better
known than Emerson's beauty is its
own excuse for being"
Speech seemed like kind of travail
10 hawthorne. O0e must narpOOn MIN
like a cetacean with questions to make
him talk at all. Then the words came
from him at last, with bashful mani
festations, like those of a young girl,
almOst-wOrds that gasped themselves
forth, seeming to leave great deal more
behind them than they told, and died
out Disconnected with themselves, like
the monologue of thunder in the sky,
which always goes off mumbling and
grumbling as if it had not said half it
wanted to, ard meant to, and ought to
say.
Emerson was sparing Of words, but
used them with great precision and
nicely. If he had been followed about
by short.hand-writing Boswell, every
sentence he ever uttered might have been
preserved. To hear him talk was like
watching one crossing a brook on step
Pig stones. His noun had to wait for
its verb or its adjective until he was
ready; then his speech would come
down upon the word he wanted; and
not Worcester nor Webster could better
it from all the wealth of their huge vo-
cabularies