Ralph don't group his metaphorical beauties, or dainties of Webster, Walker, &c., but rushes them out in torrents--rattles them down in cataracts and avalanches--bewildering, astounding, and incomprehensible. He hits you upon the left lug of your knowledge box with a metaphor so unwieldy and original, that your breath is soon gone--and before it is recovered, he gives you another _rhapsody_ on t'other side, and as you try to steady yourself, _bim_ comes another, heavier than the first two, while a fourth batch of this sort of elocution fetches you a bang over the eyes, giving you a vertigo in the ribs of your bewildered senses, and before you can say "God bless us!" down he has you--_cobim!_ with a deluge of high-heeled grammar and three-storied Anglo Saxon, settling your hash, and brings you to the ground by the run, as though you were struck by lightning, or in the way of a 36-pounder! Ralph Waldo is death and an entire _stud_ of pale horses on flowery expressions and japonica-domish flubdubs. He revels in all those knock-kneed, antique, or crooked and twisted words we used all of us to puzzle our brains over in the days of our youth, and grammar lessons and rhetoric exercises. He has a penchant as strong as cheap boarding-house butter, for mystification, and a free delivery of hard words, perfectly and unequivocally wonderful. We listened one long hour by the clock of Rumford Hall, one night, to an outpouring of _argumentum ad hominem_ of Mr. Emerson's--at what? A boy under an apple tree! If ten persons out of the five hundred present were put upon their oaths, they could no more have deciphered, or translated Mr. Ralph's argumentation, than they could the hieroglyphics upon the walls of Thebes, or the sarcophagus of old King Pharaoh! When Ralph Waldo opens, he may be as calm as a May morn--he may talk for five minutes, like a book--we mean a common-sensed, understandable book; but all of a sudden the fluid will strike him--up he goes--down he fetches them. He throws a double somerset backwards over Asia Minor--flip-flaps in Greece--wings Turkey--and _skeets_ over Iceland; here he slips up with a flower garden--a torrent of gilt-edged metaphors, that would last a country parson's moderate demand a long lifetime, are whirled with the fury and fleetness of Jove's thunderbolts. After exhausting his sweet-scented receiver of this floral elocution, he pauses four seconds; pointing to vacuum, over the heads of his audience, he asks, in an anxious tone, "Do you see that?" Of course the audience are not expected to be so unmannerly as to ask "What?" If they were, Ralph would not give them time to "go in," for after asking them if they see _that_, he continues-- "There! Mark! Note! It is a malaria prism! Now, then; here--there; see it! Note it! Watch it!"