Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/447

Rh Chartist martyrs. Among the toiling classes, there is a large and thickening host of reeds shaken with the wind, too ready to bow before any Professor Windrush who may set up his unstable banners for tokens. Against the hybrid produce of mysticism and materialism, "Phaethon" comes with power. Mr. Emerson is not responsible for all the vagaries of his fellow-prophets, Not unfrequently, it may be supposed, there are laid to his charge things that he knows not. But his great authority over the minds of many thinking persons, suggests a keener jealousy of whatever may be directly or indirectly pernicious in his method. To many he bears the aspect of an inspired and oracular seer—and if surrounded by clouds and thick darkness, it is but from excessive bright, and the silver lining is patent to all faithful souls: and so they paint himHe has his band, too, of "splendid" writers, who illuminate the periodical press with their effulgent critiques on his greatness;—for example, weigh the golden sentences of the following delicious balderdash from the Boston Post (U.S.):—He [Mr. Emerson] comes and goes like a spirit of whom one just hears the rustle of his wings. He is a vitalised speculation—a talking essence—a bit of transpareney broken from the spheres—a spiritual prism through which we sec all beautiful rays of immaterial existence. His leaping fancy mounts upward like an india-rubber ball, and drifts and falls like a snow-flake or a feather. He moves in the regions of similitudes. He comes through the air like a cherubim with a golden trumpet in his mouth, out of which he blows tropes, and figures, and gossamer transparencies of suggestive fancies. Le takes high flights, and sustains himself without ruffling a feather. He inverts the rainbow and uses it for a swing—now sweeping the earth, and now clapping his hands among the stars." Would old Mr. Disraeli have inserted such a quotation among the "Curiosities” or among the "Amenities of Literature?" Probably in the chapter devoted to the "Calamities of Authors"—for that an author should be liable to critical inflictions of this kind, is surely a tragical fate, Remembering all the extravagances of Boston spiritualism, one might almost ask, Can anything good come out of that school of the prophets? But that were a stupid sceptical query—if only convicted as such by the well-known criticism on Emerson, in quite another style, as—who converts a select few to hearty faith in a nescio quid, and subjects life, and love, and nature, and God, and things of that sort, to a post mortem examination, and idealises the wide, universal Cosmos, with all its details,

Hawthorne's graphic sketch of the "Old Manse," to which we owe pleasanttells us how singular a giddiness Emerson, one of its denizens, wrought