KEY TO STYLE.

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being very unlike the eight or ten outside folds that stop the eye in the beginning. But a heavy and vase-like blossom of a magnolia, with fragrance enough to perfume a whole wilderness, which should be lifted by a whirlwind and dropped into a branch of an aspen, would not seem more as if it never could have grown there, than Emerson's voice seems inspired and foreign to his visible and natural body. Indeed, (to use one of his own of his own similitudes,) his body seems never to have broken the umbilical cord" which held it to Boston, while his soul has sprung to the adult stature of a child of the universe, and his voice is the utterance of the soul only. It is one of his fine remarks, that " it makes a great difference to the force of any sentence whether a man is behind it or no❞ -but, without his voice to make the ear stand surety for his value, the eye would look for the first time on Emerson and protest his draft on admiration, as not "payable at sight.'

The first twenty sentences, which we heard, betrayed one of the smaller levers of Emerson's power of style, which we had not detected in reading him. He works with surprises. A man who should make a visit of charity, and, after expressing all proper sympathy, should bid adieu to the poor woman, leaving her very grateful for his kind feelings, but should suddenly return, after shutting the door, and give her a guinea, would produce just the effect of his most electric sentences. You do not observe it in reading, because you withhold the emphasis till you come to the key-word. But, in delivery, his cadences tell you that the meaning is given, and the interest of the sentence all over, when-flash!-comes a single word or phrase, like lightning after listened-out thunder, and illuminates, with astonishing vividness, the cloud you have striven to see into. We can give, perhaps, a partial exemplification of it, by a description rather than a quotation of a droll and graphic sketch, which he drew in his lecture, of his first impression of Englishmen on the road. The audience had already laughed in two or three places, and-with the intention to be longer attended to, on that point, quite gone out of his eyes-he was fumbling with his manuscript to look for the next head--when the closing word just audible, threw us all into a fit of laughter. "The Englishman," (if we may paraphrase rather than quote, for it is impossible to recall the subtle collocation of his words,) "dresses to please himself.

He puts on as many coats, trowsers and wrappers as he likes, and, while he respects others' rights, is unaffected by, and unconscious of the observation of those around him. He is an island, as England is. He is a bulky and sturdy mass, with his clothes built up about his body, and he lives in, thinks in. and speaks from, his-building." To the listener, this last word, which was dug out, smelted, coined and put away to be produced and used with cautious and artistic effectiveness, seems an accident of that moment's suggestion-as new a thing to the orator as to himself, and which he came very near not hearing, as it came very near not being said.

We are gossiping only-not trying to estimate or criticise. What our readers might not otherwise get at, is what we aim to give-in this as in most else that we describe editorially. Emerson is too great a man to be easily or triflingly appreciated. The more studied as well as more properly deferential views which we entertain, of his nature and power, we leave unexpressed, because others are likely to do it better (as is shown in another column) and because we write, stans in uno pede, and can let the ink dry on nothing. We can only say of this Lecture on England, that it was, as all is which he does, a compact mass of the exponents of far-reaching thoughtsstars which are the pole-points of universes beyond—and, at each close of a sentence, one wanted to stop and wonder at that thought, before being hurried to the next. He is a suggestive, direction-giving, soul-fathoming mind, and we are glad there are not more such. A few Emersons would make the every day work of one's mind intolerable.

Let us close by giving our readers an advance-taste of a grand similitude with which he closed his Lecture, and which we see is not given in the newspaper reports of it. It is one of those Titanic thoughts that would alone make a reputation, and a prophetic metaphor of England's power, for which Victoria should name one of her annual babies Emerson. After some very bold and fearless comment on the croaking that predicts the speedy downfall of England, he compared her to the banyan tree, which, it will be remembered, sends up shoots from its roots that become themselves huge trunks of parent vegetation. "She has planted herself on that little island," he said, "like the banyan tree, and her roots have spread under the sea, and come up on far away continents and in every quarter of the world, flowering with her language and laws, and for

ever perpetuating her, though the first trunk dismember and and perish." In his own words, this thought will have as banyan an eternity as England.

SECOND LOOK AT EMERSON.

EMERSON handles things without gloves, as everybody knows. He has climbed above the atmosphere of this world and kicked away the ladder-holding no deferential communication, that is to say, with any of the intermediate ladder-rounds or degrees of goodness. If he descends at all, it is quite to the ground, otherwise he is out of reach-up with the Saviour or down with Lazarus and his sores. We intended, in the present number of our paper, to have given a careful illustration of this-in some remarks upon Mr. Emerson's last lecture and his works-but head and hand out of condition for a few days, has prevented this, as it will account, (to subscribers and correspondents,) for other short-comings of our bespoken time and pen. We only wish, just now, to record, before we lose hold of it, an instance of the boldness with which Mr. Emerson speaks, from his super-atmospheric elevation-instructing our readers, at the same time, as to his view of the principle of Socialism, now so vigorously at work among us.

As among the "Signs of the Times" (which formed the subject of his Lecture) he spoke with reverential admiration. of the Apostleships of Fourier and Owen-lauding those reformers so highly, indeed, as to draw a murmur of satisfaction from the Listen-to-reason-dom which formed the greater part of his audience, and hisses from the few believers in things as they are, who had been brought thither by curiosity. Of the main Socialist aim, to distribute the means of human happiness more equally, he apparently could not speak admiringly enough—but he scouted, very emphatically, the possibility of any general community of existence, as a destruction of the poetry of individual and family separation, and as altogether culinary and mean." Level all men, he said, and they would commence to unequalize to-morrow-those who had once got the upper hand in wealth and power being able and likely to get it again. The similitude with which he illustrated the impossibility of commonizing and equalizing great men, as well as the less gifted and ordinary, will be enough to complete the reader's

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idea of Emerson's extent of belief in Socialism, while at the same time it makes an easily remembered frame on which to embroider the stray threads of its argument and progress. "Spoons and skimmers," said he, you can make lie undistinguishably together-but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself."

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We went early, to get a seat where we could see Emerson, and were struck with the character of his audience, most of whom we knew by repute. We doubt whether any man, but this lecturer, could draw together so varied an assemblage, and yet probably none were there who had not a point of contact with the mind they came to enjoy. Mr. Charles King was there, with his combined likeness to Aristotle and Epicurus; Mrs. Kirkland, with her fine-chiselled aristocratic features and warm bright eye; Mr. Andrew Jackson Davis, the Revelationsman, looking as if thought had never left a foot-print on his apprentice face; Miss Sedgwick, with thought and care stranded on the beach of her countenance by the ebb of youth; Mr. Greeley, with his face fenced in by regularity and culture, while the rest of him is left" in open common;" half a dozen of the men who live for Committees and influence; six or eight of the artists who are painting away the time till the millennium comes; several unappreciated poets; one or two strong-minded wealthy men who are laying up a reserve of intellect against what Captain Cuttle calls a rewarse;" and, as well as we could see, few or no ordinary people. If Emerson would come to New York, and invite just that audience to gather around him and form a congregation of Listeners-to-reason, with or without pulpit, we are very sure that he might become the centre of a very well-chosen society-form it into a club or gather it around a pulpit. Either way, New York is the place for him, we think.

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That " critics," as Sir Henry Wotton said, "are brushers of noblemen's clothes," one feels very sensibly and reprovingly, in turning a pen to write any comment on Emerson. He says so many wonderful, and wonderfully true and good things, in one of his Delphic lectures, that, to find any fault with him, seems like measuring thunder by its echo down a back alley. Yet, with all his inspired intuition, he is not careful enough not to over-say things. To point an antithesis, he will put, into his unforgetable words, that which leaves mistrust in the

MENTAL CENTURIONS.

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ear when the music stops tingling. One feels vexed, not that he should have been careless enough to do what he likes, being Emerson, but that there should have been a miscellaneous audience there, to hear and remember it against him.

Yet we never saw a more intellectually picked audience than our Prophet of the Intuitive draws together. From the great miscellany of New York they come selectively out, like steel filings out of a handful of sand to a magnet. It would be worth while to induce such nucleal men to lecture in large cities, if only to discover what particles belong to that shape of crystal-what beads fit together on one string-how the partakers of one level of intellect are 'scattered through the different levels of politics, religion, and society. We should very much like a catalogue of Emerson's audiences, as minds which you could address, like the centurions of the Army of Opinion, with reasons, to be passed by them to the multitude in the shape of commands.

We made several memoranda of thoughts in Emerson's lecture with which to gem a paragraph for our readers, but we find that we should do injustice to them without giving the surroundings, and we will wait till they are published, (as we trust these lectures soon will be,) and give them in the safer shape of a column of "Spice Islands."

CALHOUN AND BENTON.

THOSE who take no part in politics, or who look on the two opposing parties as upon two sides of a pyramid-correcting each other's leanings, and holding the strength of the country between them-are still interested sometimes to know the shape in which the corner stones are hewn-the grain and mark from nature with which eminent men are visible to their fellows. The two great Southern Democrats, Calhoun and Benton, were figuring in strong relief recently in the Senate, and, in a memorandum book, wherein we record any chance approach of ours to the personal orbit of a star, we put ink on the impressions we received of these two, in a week's observation, and herewith we present them to our readers—adding only the conjunctions and prepositions, left out, so universally,

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