Page:Americans (1922).djvu/139

 lyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self possessed and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor, which floated everything he looked upon.

If Emerson writes comparatively little in the descriptive and narrative veins, it is neither from impotence nor by chance but on consideration. "Do you see," he asks himself, "what we preserve of history? a few anecdotes of a moral quality of some momentary act or word." The word of Canute on the, he observes, is all the world remembers of the Danish conquest. Under the influence of this thought, he seems, for a time, to have meditated composing "a modern Plutarch," British and American—in which his "Thoreau" would well have taken the place of Cato, and his "Lincoln" a place of its own. His Representative Men was a partial fulfilment of the design. But quite early in life Emerson was much occupied by a rival thought, thus recorded in the fourth volume of the Journals: "I said to Bryant and to these young people, that the high poetry of the world from the beginning has been ethical, and it is the tendency of the ripe modern mind to produce it. . . . As, I think, no man could be better occupied than in making up his