He goes to the Radical Club, or to
the literary gathering, and listens with the closest attention to
every word that is said, in hope that something will be said, some
word dropped, that has the ring of the true metal. Apparently he
does not permit himself a moment's indifference or inattention.
His own pride is always to have the ready change, to speak the
exact and proper word, to give to every occasion the dignity of
wise speech. You are bartered with for your best. There is no
profit in life but in the interchange of ideas, and the chief
success is to have a head well filled with them. Hard cash at that;
no paper promises satisfy him; he loves the clink and glint of the
real coin.
His earlier writings were more flowing and suggestive, and had
reference to larger problems; but now everything has got weighed
and stamped and converted into the medium of wise and scholarly
conversation. It is of great value; these later essays are so many
bags of genuine coin, which it has taken a lifetime to hoard; not
all gold, but all good, and the fruit of wise industry and economy.
I know of no other writing that yields the reader so many strongly
stamped medallion-like sayings and distinctions. There is a
perpetual refining and recoining of the current wisdom of life and
conversation. It is the old gold or silver or copper, but how
bright and new it looks in his pages! Emerson loves facts, things,
objects, as the workman his tools.
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