on the side of fluency and texture is frequently with the Journals. The superiority of the essays is in condensation and intensity.
It should be observed, furthermore, that in the prose which Emerson himself published the degree of fluency and stylistic coherence varies greatly with the subject. The moral essays, such as "Self-Reliance" and "Compensation," are written more or less in the manner of the Book of Proverbs or the Essays of Bacon. They are built of distinct injunctions, maxims, and fragments of wisdom, twenty or thirty of them to a paragraph. "Solid bags of duckshot," Carlyle called these paragraphs, and urged Emerson to fuse them into a solid luminous bar. They are close packed enough, in all conscience, without fusion. There is stuff enough for a morning's meditation in any half-dozen of the hundreds of maxims which make up the essay on Self-Reliance. But no ordinary mind can read easily page after page of epitomized moral experience: "Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this." Before such matter can be made to flow, it must be diluted. Read in youth and for the first time, a page of such writing seems pebbly and difficult. But at each re-reading one discovers more pebbles that are interestingly translucent, opalescent, with a fire at the heart of them. Returning later in life, after per-
