_Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers_ is made up of lectures from the Harvard University course (1870–71) and earlier courses, and a sheaf of papers from ‘The Dial,’ mostly on ‘Modern Literature.’ He who deplores the curtness of the note on Tennyson in _English Traits_ will be glad to seek comfort in this earlier tribute. Yet the comfort may prove to be less than he would like. * * * * * Emerson’s audience is large and varied. Let us consider a few among the varieties of those who are attracted by his genius and the charm of his personality. To certain hardy investigators Emerson is not a mere man of letters whose thought, radiantly clothed, takes the philosophical form, he is a philosopher almost in the strict sense. They find a place for him in their classification. They know exactly what ideas, derived from what pundits, have come out with what new inflection in his writings. They have done for Emerson more than he could do, or perhaps cared to do, for himself; they have given him a system. All this is important and valuable. No little praise is due to results worked out with so much courage and critical acumen. Whether the conclusions are quite true is another question. Doubtless, too, there are readers who, taking their cue from the class just mentioned, find their self-love flattered as they turn the pages of the _Essays_ and the _Conduct of Life_. Not only, in spite of dark sayings here and there, does ‘philosophy’ prove easier and more delightful than they were wont to think, but their estimate of their own mental powers is immensely enlarged. There are the critics of letters whose function is interpretative, and whose influence is restraining. Solicitous to do their author justice, they are above all solicitous that injustice shall not be done him by overpraise. They bring proof that Emerson was not a precursor of Darwin, that he was inferior to Carlyle, that he was not a poet, that he was never a great and not always a good writer, that he was apt to impose on his reader as a new truth an old error in ‘a novel and fascinating dress,’ that he was even capable of writing words without ideas. But the motives which draw and bind to him the great majority of Emerson’s readers are connected with literature rather than philosophy or criticism. A prerogative of the man of letters is to be read both for what he says and for the way he says it. In the case of Emerson his thought may not be divided from the verbal setting. ‘He can never get beyond the English language.’ ‘No merely French, or German, or Italian reader will have the least notion of the magic of his diction.’[24]