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).
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