young, wait there to offer each faithful man a budding branch, in their hands budding, in his to blossom and mature its fruit,- wherewith he sows the field of time, gladdening the millions yet to come.

66

II

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

When a hen lays an egg in the farmer's mow she cackles quite loud and long. "See," says the complacent bird, see what an egg I have laid!" all the other hens cackle in sympathy, and seem to say, "what a nice egg has got laid! was there ever such a family of hens as our family?" But the cackling is heard only a short distance in the neighboring barnyards; a few yards above the blue sky is silent. By and by the rest will drop their daily burden, and she will cackle with them in sympathy; but ere long the cackling is still, the egg has done its service, been addled, or eaten, or perhaps proved fertile of a chick, and it is forgotten, as well as the cackler who laid the ephemeral thing. But when an acorn in June first uncloses its shell, and the young oak puts out its earliest shoot, there is no noise; none attending its growth, yet it is destined to last some half a thousand years as a living tree, and serve as long after that for sound timber. Slowly and in silence, unseen in the dim recesses of the earth, the diamond gets formed by small accretions, age after age. There is no cackling in the caverns of the deep, as atom journeys to its fellow atom and the crystal is slowly getting made, to shine on the bosom of loveliness or glitter in the diadem of an emperor, a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

As with eggs, so is it with little books; when one of them is laid in some bookseller's mow the parent and the literary barnyard are often full of the foolishest

cackle, and seem as happy as the ambiguous offspring of frogs in some shallow pool in early summer. But by and by it is again with the books as with the eggs; the old noise is all hushed, and the little books all gone, while new authors are at the same work again.

Gentle reader, we will not find fault with such books, they are useful as eggs; yea, they are indispensible; the cackle of authors, and that of hens, why should they not be allowed? Is it not written that all things shall work after their kind, and so produce; and does not this rule extend from the hen-roost to the American Academy and all the Royal Societies of literature in the world? Most certainly. But when a great book gets written it is published with no fine flourish of trumpets, the world does not speedily congratulate itself on the accession made to its riches; the book must wait awhile for its readers. Literary gentlemen of the tribe of Bavius and Mævius are popular in their time, and get more praise than bards afterwards famous. What audience did Athens and Florence give to their Socrates and their Dante? What price did Milton get for the Paradise Lost? How soon did men appreciate Shakespeare? Not many years ago George Steevens,1 who "edited" the works of that bard, thought an "Act of Parliament was not strong enough" to make men read his sonnets, though they bore the author up to a great height of fame, and he sat where Steevens "durst not soar." In 1686, there had been four editions of Flatman's Poems, five of Waller's, eight of Cowley's; but in eleven years of the Paradise Lost only three thousand copies were sold, yet the edition was cheap, and Norris of Bemerton went through eight or nine editions in a quite short time. For forty-one years, from 1623 to 1664, England

was satisfied with two editions of Shakespeare, making, perhaps, one thousand copies in all. Says Mr. Wordsworth of these facts: "There were readers in multitudes; but their money went for other purposes, as their admiration was fixed elsewhere." Mr. Wordsworth himself furnishes another example. Which found the readiest welcome, the Excursion and the Lyrical Poems of that writer, or Mr. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome? How many a little philosophist in Germany went up in his rocket-like ascension, while the bookseller at Königsberg despaired over the unsaleable sheets of Immanuel Kant!

Says an Eastern proverb, "the sage is the instructor of a hundred ages," so he can afford to wait till one or two be past away, abiding with the few, waiting for the fit and the many. Says a writer:

“There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams; and lets pass, without a single valuable note, the founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,— the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias. A popular player,- nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the

two.

"If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's time should be capable of recognizing it. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the

time of Pericles, there was never any such society, yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now."

It is now almost fourteen years since Mr. Emerson published his first book, Nature. A beautiful work it was, and will be deemed for many a year to come. In this old world of literature, with more memory than wit, with much tradition and little invention, with more fear than love, and a great deal of criticism upon very little poetry, there came forward this young David, a shepherd, but to be a king, "with his garlands and singing robes about him;" one note upon his new and fresh-strung lyre was "worth a thousand men." Men were looking for something original, they always are; when it came some said it thundered, others that an angel had spoke. How men wondered at the little book! It took nearly twelve years to sell the five hundred copies of Nature. Since that time Mr. Emerson has said much, and if he has not printed many books, at least has printed much; some things far surpassing the first essay, in richness of material, in perfection of form, in continuity of thought; but nothing which has the same youthful freshness, and the same tender beauty as this early violet, blooming out of Unitarian and Calvinistic sand or snow. Poems and Essays of a later date are there, which show that he has had more time and woven it into life; works which present us with thought deeper, wider, richer, and more complete, but not surpassing the simplicity and loveliness of that maiden flower of his poetic spring.

We know how true it is that a man cannot criticise