Companionableness comes by nature. We meet magically, and pass with sounding manners; else we encounter repulses, strokes of fate; temperament telling against temperament, precipitating us into vortices from which the nimblest finds no escape. We pity the person who shows himself unequal to such occasions; the scholar, for example, whose intellect is so exacting, so precise, that he cannot meet his company otherwise than critically; cannot descend through the senses or the sentiments to that common level where intercourse is possible with men; but we pity him the more, who, from caprice or confusion, can meet through these only. Still worse the case of him who can meet men neither as sentimentalist nor idealist, or, rather not at all in a human way. Intellect interblends with sentiment in the companionable mind, and wit with humor. We detain the flowing tide at the cost of lapsing out of perception into memory, into the limbo of fools. Excellent people wonder why they cannot meet and converse. They cannot,—no—their wits have ebbed away, and left them helpless. Why, but because of hostile temperaments, different states of animation? The personal magnetism finds no conductor, when one is individual, and the other individual no less. Individuals repel; persons meet; and only as one’s personality is sufficiently overpowering to dissolve the other’s individualism, can the parties flow together and become one. But individuals have no power of this sort. They are two, not one, perhaps many. Prisoned within themselves by reason of their egotism, like animals, they stand aloof; are separate even when they touch; are solitary in any company, having no company in themselves. But the free personal mind meets all, is apprehended by all; by the least cultivated, the most gifted; magnetizes all; is the spell-binder, the liberator of every one. We speak of sympathies, antipathies, fascinations, fates, for this reason. Here we have the key to literary composition, to eloquence, to fellowship. Let us apply it, for the moment, to Emerson’s genius. We forbear entering into the precincts of genesis, and complexions, wherein sleep the secrets of character and manners. Eloquent in trope and utterance when his vaulting intelligence frees itself for the instant, yet see his loaded eye, his volleyed period; jets of wit, sallies of sense, breaks, inconsequences, all betraying the pent personality from which his rare accomplishments have not yet liberated his gifts, nor given him unreservedly to the Muse and mankind. Take his own account of the matter.