Is it an egotism in us to claim for New England and for a contemporary of ours parts and antecedents like these? or shall such endowments, admirable always, and awakening enthusiasm, be the less prized when represented in a countryman of ours, and when we have so frequently partaken of the pleasure which his books, his lectures especially, excite? I allude, of course, to Emerson. A rhapsodist by genius, and the chief of his class, his utterances are ever a surprise as they are a delight to his audiences; select though these are, and not all unworthy of him. Hear how Goethe describes him, where in his letters to Schiller, he calls the rhapsodist— “A wise man, who, in calm thoughtfulness, shows what has happened; his discourse aiming less to excite than to calm his auditors, in order that they shall listen to him with contentment and long. He apportions the interest equally, because it is not in his power to balance a too lively impression. He grasps backwards and forwards at pleasure. He is followed, because he has only to do with the imagination, which of itself produces images, and up to a certain degree, it is indifferent what kind he calls up. He does not appear to his auditors, but recites, as it were behind a curtain; so there is a total abstraction from himself, and it seems to them as though they heard only the voice of the Muses.” See our Ion standing there,—his audience, his manuscript, before him,—himself an auditor, as he reads, of the Genius sitting behind him, and to whom he defers, eagerly catching the words,—the words,—as if the accents were first reaching his ears too, and entrancing alike oracle and auditor. We admire the stately sense, the splendor of diction, and are surprised as we listen. Even his hesitancy between the delivery of his periods, his perilous passages from paragraph to paragraph of manuscript, we have almost learned to like, as if he were but sorting his keys meanwhile for opening his cabinets; the spring of locks following, himself seeming as eager as any of us to get sight of his specimens, as they come forth from their proper drawers; and we wait willingly till his gem is out glittering; admire the setting, too, scarcely less than the jewel itself. The magic minstrel and speaker! whose rhetoric, voiced as by organ-stops, delivers the sentiment from his breast in cadences peculiar to himself; now hurling it forth on the ear, echoing; then, as his mood and matter invite it, dying like “Music of mild lutes Or silver coated flutes, Or the concealing winds that can convey Never their tone to the rude ear of day.”