superabundant imagination cover a 'simple air,' he complains, with a 'volley of variations.' You are, he says, dispensing 'that which is rarest, the simplest truths, truths which lie next to consciousness, which only the Platos and the Goethes perceive,' and he hopes for the hour 'when the word will be as simple and so as resistless as the thought'; for the hour, that is, when a Carlyle will be an Emerson. To find effective utterance for these 'simplest truths' is, in fact, Emerson's special function. The difficulty of the task is proverbial. A simple truth is a very charming thing; but it has an uncomfortable trick of sinking into a truism. If you try to make it something more it is apt to collide with other simple truths. The function of the system-maker is to persuade the various truths to keep the peace by assigning to each its proper limits and stating it with due reserves and qualifications. But that is precisely what Emerson altogether declines to do. The most obvious peculiarity of his style corresponds. His lectures are a 'mosaic' of separate sentences; each, as he put it himself, an 'infinitely repellent particle.' Carlyle, praising the beauty and simplicity of his sentences, complains that the paragraph is not 'a beaten ingot,' but 'a
