Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/153

 ascent into this serene region, above all the noise of controversy, has its disadvantages. Carlyle complains gently that his friend is in danger of parting from fact and soaring into perilous altitudes. He is 'soliloquising on the mountain tops.' It is easy to 'screw oneself up into high and ever higher altitudes of transcendentalism,' to see nothing beneath one but 'the everlasting snows of the Himalaya, the earth shrinking to a planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with stars.' Come back to the earth, he exclaims; and readers of Emerson must occasionally echo the exhortation. And yet, in his own way, Emerson was closer to the everyday world than Carlyle himself; and it is the curious union of the two generally inconsistent qualities which gives a peculiar flavour to Emersonian teaching. Lowell puts it admirably in his comparison of Emerson and Carlyle:—

Emerson's curious position of equilibrium be-