Page:Americans (1922).djvu/136

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or a hundred of his "images," selected here and there from his baskets of cut gems, for example:

I am a willow of the wilderness
Loving the wind that bent me.

Or possibly the reviver of Emerson should remind the Chicago School of these lines:

Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,
Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood.

Critics have sufficiently harped upon certain defects in the prose style of Emerson: the apparent lack of firm design and evolution in the larger divisions of his discourse; the difficult transitions, the imperfect coherence, within the paragraphs. It is perhaps worth observing that some of these faults are closely connected with his characteristic virtues, and are truly due to the excess of these virtues. Emerson is characteristically rich and economical. He is so rich that he can put into a sentence as much as another would put into a paragraph, and as much into a paragraph as another would put into his entire discourse. He is so economical of space, so bent on filling every inch with solid matter, that he deliberately prunes away what is merely explanatory and transitional. If one compares passages in the Journals with parallel passages in the essays, one remarks at first with surprise that the superiority