Perhaps he was at bottom too much of a radical to be swept off
his feet by any reform.
To our generation, of course, Emerson presents himself as an
author of books, and primarily as an essayist, rather than as a
winning, entrancing speaker. His essays have a greater variety of
tone than is commonly recognized. Many of them, like "Manners,"
"Farming," "Books," "Eloquence," "Old Age," exhibit a shrewd
prudential wisdom, a sort of Yankee instinct for "the milk in the
pan," that reminds one of Ben Franklin. Like most of the greater
New England writers, he could be, on occasion, an admirable local
historian. See his essays on "Life and Letters in New England,"
"New England Reformers," "Politics," and the successive entries
in his "Journal" relating to Daniel Webster. He had the happiest
gift of portraiture, as is witnessed by his sketches of
Montaigne, of Napoleon, of Socrates (in the essay on Plato), of
his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, of Thoreau, and of various types of
Englishmen in his "English Traits." But the great essays, no
doubt, are those like "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "The
Over-Soul," "Fate," "Power," "Culture," "Worship," and
"Illusions.
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