but few have a fine musical ear. All of us understand justice, but few have a taste for theology. Theology is the rhetoric or the technical distribution of Conscience."
His faith, from his experience of life, that success can always be drawn out of failures, appears in the end of the paragraph in the text.
Page 96, note 1. Mr. Emerson, writing to his friend John Sterling, tells of the pleasure his letter gave as a whole, rather than in the things said: "These were opinions, but the tone was the man."
"The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over."—"Behavior," Conduct of Life.
Page 97, note 1. In this sentence Mr. Emerson refers to his friend Thoreau, but what follows only expresses the feeling of disappointment sometimes felt in their intercourse in later days, not always, and not in Thoreau's youth. Mr. Emerson hated argument, dialectic. Thoreau's Scotch ancestry on his mother's side (Dunbar) asserted itself in love of fence for itself, as a game when he met a foeman worthy of his steel. So they came to enjoy each other's writings more than society, yet they always honored and esteemed each other, in spite of this temperamental bar to full enjoyment of each other's company indoors. But Mr. Emerson delighted to be led, as if by Pan himself, to the groves and glades in their best days, and to have their secrets shown.
Page 98, note 1.
"Laugh not too much, the wittie man laughs least:For wit is newes only to ignorance."Herbert, "The Church Porch."
In the notes to the essay on The Comic will be found
