haps the twentieth reading, one may discover that the pattern in the page comes out, that the gaps are bridged by one's own experience, that each sentence is illustrated by one's own verification of it, and that somehow this swift "saltation" from epitome to epitome of moral wisdom makes all other moral writing seem thin and flat.
But Emerson has many other prose manners, to which the stock criticisms and the traditional jests are not at all applicable. Turn, for example, to his "Thoreau," a biographical portrait executed in the firm objective manner of Suetonious yet with the gusto of Plutarch—a superbly vital piece of characterization, unsurpassed if not unequalled by anything of like scope in American literature. Or consider the flow of his reminiscences of Brook Farm and his bland comment on Fourierism in Life and Letters in New England; it is beautiful writing, urbane, luminous, exquisitely ironical. Or for still another vein, turn to the pages in English Traits where he describes meeting Thomas Carlyle, with something of the Scotch master's graphic force:
