Calmly they show us mankind victorious O'er all that's aimless, blind and base; Their presence has made our nature glorious, Unveiling our night's illumined face."
ELOQUENCE
In February, 1847, Mr. Emerson gave a lecture on Eloquence before the Boston Mercantile Library Association. It seems to have been much the same as the present essay. Just three years earlier, after reading his lecture on The Young American before the same body, he wrote in his journal as follows:—
FEBRUARY, 1844.
When I address a large assembly, as last Wednesday, I am always apprised that an opportunity is there; not for reading to them, as I do, lively miscellanies, but for painting in fire my thought, and being agitated to agitate. One must dedicate himself to it and think with his audience in his mind, so as to keep the perspective and symmetry of the oration, and enter into all the easily forgotten secrets of a great nocturnal assembly and their relation to the speaker.
But it would be fine music and in the present well rewarded; that is, he should have his audience at his devotion, and all other fames would hush before his. Now, eloquence is merely fabulous. When we talk of it we draw on our fancy. It is one of many things which I should like to do, but it requires a seven years' wooing.
Eloquence, in boyhood and youth, had been his idol. He
