What place Emerson is to occupy in American literature is for America to determine. Some authoritative remarks on this subject are to be found in Mr. Lowell's essay on 'Thoreau,' in _My Study Windows_; but here at home, where we are sorely pressed for room, it is certain he must be content with a small allotment, where, however, he may for ever sit beneath his own vine and fig-tree, none daring to make him afraid. Emerson will always be the favourite author of somebody; and to be always read by somebody is better than to be read first by everybody and then by nobody. Indeed, it is hard to fancy a pleasanter destiny than to join the company of lesser authors. All their readers are sworn friends. They are spared the harsh discords of ill-judged praise and feigned rapture. Once or twice in a century some enthusiastic and expansive admirer insists upon dragging them from their shy retreats, and trumpeting their fame in the market-place, asserting, possibly with loud asseverations (after the fashion of Mr. Swinburne), that they are precisely as much above Otway and Collins and George Eliot as they are below Shakespeare and Hugo and Emily Bronte. The great world looks on good-humouredly for a moment or two, and then proceeds as before, and the disconcerted author is left free to scuttle back to his corner, where he is all the happier, sharing the raptures of the lonely student, for his brief experience of publicity. Let us bid farewell to Emerson, who has bidden farewell to the world in the words of his own _Good-bye_: 'Good-bye to flattery's fawning face, To grandeur with his wise grimace, To upstart wealth's averted eye, To supple office low and high, To crowded halls, to court and street, To frozen hearts and hasting feet, To those who go and those who come,-- Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home, I am going to my own hearth-stone Bosomed in yon green hills, alone, A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned; Where arches green the livelong day Echo the blackbird's roundelay, And vulgar feet have never trod, A spot that is sacred to thought and God.' THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. Dr. John Brown's pleasant story has become well known, of the countryman who, being asked to account for the gravity of his dog, replied, 'Oh, sir! life is full of sairiousness to him--he can just never get eneugh o' fechtin'.' Something of the spirit of this saddened dog seems lately to have entered into the very people who ought to be freest from it--our men of letters. They are all very serious and very quarrelsome. To some of them it is dangerous even to allude. Many are wedded to a theory or period, and are the most uxorious of husbands--ever ready to resent an affront to their lady. This devotion makes them very grave, and possibly very happy after a pedantic fashion. One remembers what Hazlitt, who was neither happy nor pedantic, has said about pedantry: