SECOND LOOK AT EMERSON.

EMERSON handles things without gloves, as everybody knows. He has climbed above the atmosphere of this world and kicked away the ladder-holding no deferential communication, that is to say, with any of the intermediate ladder-rounds or degrees of goodness. If he descends at all, it is quite to the ground, otherwise he is out of reach-up with the Saviour or down with Lazarus and his sores. We intended, in the present number of our paper, to have given a careful illustration of thisin some remarks upon Mr. Emerson's last lecture and his worksbut head and hand out of condition for a few days, has prevented this, as it will account, (to subscribers and correspondents,) for other short-comings of our bespoken time and pen. We only wish, just now, to record, before we lose hold of it, an instance of the boldness with which Mr. Emerson speaks, from his superatmospheric elevation-instructing our readers, at the same time, as to his view of the principle of Socialism, now so vigorously at work among us.

As among the "Signs of the Times" (which formed the subject of his Lecture) he spoke with reverential admiration of the Apostleships of Fourier and Owen-lauding those reformers so

highly, indeed, as to draw a murmur of satisfaction from the Listen-to-reason-dom which formed the greater part of his audience, and hisses from the few believers in things as they are, who had been brought thither by curiosity. Of the main Socialist aim, to distribute the means of human happiness more equally, he apparently could not speak admiringly enough—but he scouted, very emphatically, the possibility of any general community of existence, as a destruction of the poetry of individual and family separation, and as altogether "culinary and mean." Level all men, he said, and they would commence to unequalize to-morrow -those who had once got the upper hand in wealth and power being able and likely to get it again. The similitude with which he illustrated the impossibility of commonizing and equalizing great men, as well as the less gifted and ordinary, will be enough to complete the reader's idea of Emerson's extent of belief in Socialism, while at the same time it makes an easily remembered frame on which to embroider the stray threads of its argument and progress. "Spoons and skimmers," said he, "you can make lie undistinguishably together-but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself."

We went early, to get a seat where we could see Emerson, and were struck with the character of his audience, most of whom we knew by repute. We doubt whether any man, but this lecturer, could draw together so varied an assemblage, and yet probably none were there who had not a point of contact with the mind they came to enjoy. Mr. Charles King was there, with his combined likeness to Aristotle and Epicurus; Mrs. Kirkland, with her fine-chiselled aristocratic features and warm bright eye; Mr. Andrew Jackson Davis, the Revelations-man, looking as if thought had never left a foot-print on his apprentice face; Miss

Sedgwick, with thought and care stranded on the beach of her countenance by the ebb of youth; Mr. Greeley, with his face fenced in by regularity and culture, while the rest of him is left "in open common;" half a dozen of the men who live for Committees and influence; six or eight of the artists who are painting away the time till the millennium comes; several unappreciated poets; one or two strong-minded wealthy men who are laying up a reserve of intellect against what Capt. Cuttle calls a 66 rewarse"; and, as well as we could see, few or no ordinary people. If Emerson would come to New York, and invite just that audience to gather around him and form a congregation of Listeners-to-reason, with or without pulpit, we are very sure that he might become the centre of a very wellchosen society-form it into a club or gather it around a pulpit. Either way, New York is the place for him, we think.

That "critics," as Sir Henry Wotton said, "are brushers of noblemen's clothes," one feels very sensibly and reprovingly, in turning a pen to write any comment on Emerson. He says so many wonderful, and wonderfully true and good things, in one of his Delphic lectures, that, to find any fault with him, seems like measuring thunder by its echo down a back alley. Yet, with all his inspired intuition, he is not careful enough not to over-say things. To point an antithesis, he will put, into his unforgetable words, that which leaves mistrust in the ear when the music stops tingling. One feels vexed, not that he should have been careless enough to do what he likes, being Emerson, but that there should have been a miscellaneous audience there, to hear and remember it against him.

Yet we never saw a more intellectually picked audience than

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our Prophet of the Intuitive draws together. From the great miscellany of New York they come selectively out, like steel filings out of a handfull of sand to a magnet. It would be worth while to induce such nucleal men to lecture in large cities, if only to discover what particles belong to that shape of crystal-what beads fit together on one string-how the partakers of one level of intellect are scattered through the different levels of politics, religion and society. We should very much like a catalogue of Emerson's audiences, as minds which you could address, like the centurions of the Army of Opinion, with reasons, to be passed by them to the multitude in the shape of commands.

We made several memoranda of thoughts in Emerson's lecture with which to gem a paragraph for our readers, but we find that we should do injustice to them without giving the surroundings, and we will wait till they are published, (as we trust these lectures soon will be,) and give them in the safer shape of a column of "Spice Islands."

CALHOUN AND BENTON.

THOSE who take no part in politics, or who look on thẻ two opposing parties as upon two sides of a pyramid--correcting each other's leanings, and holding the strength of the country between. them are still interested sometimes to know the shape in which the corner-stones are hewn-the grain and mark from nature with which eminent men are visible to their fellows. The two great Southern Democrats, Calhoun and Benton, were figuring in strong relief recently in the Senate, and, in a memorandum book, wherein we record any chance approach of ours to the personal orbit of a star, we put ink on the impressions we received of these two, in a week's observation, and herewith we present them to our readers-adding only the conjunctions and prepositions, left out, so universally, in things written to be read when one is beyond responsibilities of grammar.

BENTON is a caricature likeness of Louis Philippe-the same rotundity, the same pear-shaped head, and about the same stature. The physical expression of his face predominates. His lower features are drilled into imperturbable suavity, while the eye, that undrillable tale-teller, twinkles of inward slyness as a burning lamp wick does of oil. He is a laborious builder-up of