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So pass my Days. But when Nocturnal Shades
This World invelop, and th’ inclement Air
Persuades Men to repel benumming Frosts,
With pleasant Wines, and crackling blaze of Wood;
Me Lonely sitting, nor the glimmering Light
Of Make-weight Candle, nor the joyous Talk
Of loving Friend delights; distress’d, forlorn,
Amidst the horrors of the tedious Night,
Darkling I sigh, and feed with dismal Thoughts
My anxious Mind; or sometimes mournful Verse
Indite, and sing of Groves and Myrtle Shades,
Or desperate Lady near a purling Stream,
Or Lover pendent on a Willow-Tree:
—John Phillips (1676–1709)

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Emerson was the greater artist. His essays contain some of the most beautiful language in our literature. How Henry James could have thought he had never developed a “style” is to me one of the mysteries of criticism. Thoreau in Walden comes close to the master, but he falls behind in the homeliness of his details and in the occasional smugness of his social satire. It almost seems as if he were reacting against the chiseled beauty of Emerson’s prose. The latter’s sentences were so fine that he needed nothing else. They became, like marble statues, part of the garden that was Concord. Their composer, serene, calm, detached, bland in speech and manner, the soft-spoken philosopher revered by all, did not often trouble himself on his strolls in the woods and along the river to pluck the flowers or feed squirrels or even identify the different species of flora and fauna. As Thoreau observed, he wouldn’t have been willing to trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets of Concord because it would have seemed out of character. Emerson communed with nature on a spiritual level, using his eyes to take in the landscape and his lungs the fresh air. He had no needs to brace himself with cold or rain or spend the night under the stars.
—Louis Auchincloss (b. 1917)