None the less, if we will have but a little patience, and bid our occasional wonderment be still, and read Emerson at the right times and in small quantities, we shall not remain strangers to his charm. He bathes the universe in his thoughts. Nothing less than the Whole ever contented Emerson. His was no parochial spirit. He cries out: 'From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and altitudes.' How beautiful, too, are some of his sentences! Here is a bit from his essay on Shakspeare in _Representative Men_: 'It is the essence of poetry to spring like the rainbow daughter of Wonder from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier have wasted their life. The famed theatres have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to his genius--him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express--the genius knows them not. The recitation begins, _one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painful pedantry_, _and sweetly torments us with invitations to his own inaccessible homes_.' The words we have ventured to italicize seem to us to be of surpassing beauty, and to express what many a play-goer of late years must often have dimly felt. Patience should indeed be the motto for any Emerson reader who is not by nature 'author's kin.' For example, in the essay on _Character_, after reading, 'Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and negative pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative; will is the north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north'--how easy to lay the book down and read no more that day; but a moment's patience is amply rewarded, for but sixteen lines farther on we may read as follows: 'We boast our emancipation from many superstitions, but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment Day--if I quake at opinion, the public opinion as we call it, or the threat of assault or contumely, or bad neighbours, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumour of revolution or of wonder! If I quake, what matters it what I quake at?' Well and truly did Carlyle write to Emerson, 'You are a new era, my man, in your huge country.'