Hence every sentence is braided hard, and more or less
knotted, and, though of silk, makes the mind tingle. He startles by
overstatement, by understatement, by paradox, by antithesis, and by
synthesis. Into every sentence enters the unexpected,--the
congruous leaping from the incongruous, the high coming down, the
low springing up, likeness or relation suddenly coming into view
where before was only difference or antagonism. How he delights to
bring the reader up with a short turn, to impale him on a knotty
point, to explode one of his verbal bombshells under his very nose!
Yet there is no trickery or rhetorical legerdemain. His heroic
fibre always saves him.
The language in which Taine describes Bacon applies with even more
force to Emerson:--
"Bacon," he says, "is a producer of conceptions and of sentences.
The matter being explored, he says to us: 'Such it is; touch it not
on that side; it must be approached from the other.' Nothing more;
no proof, no effort to convince; he affirms, and nothing more; he
has thought in the manner of artists and poets, and he speaks after
the manner of prophets and seers. 'Cogita et visa,'--this title of
one of his books might be the title of all. His process is that of
the creators; it is intuition, not reasoning. . . . There is
nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy, than this mode of
thought when it is not checked by natural and good strong common
sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural divination,
the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the
true, like the needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the
highest degree.
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