Edmund Clarence Stedman on Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Emerson's prose is full of poetry, and his poems are light and air. ... His modes of expression, like his epithets, are imaginative.”

“We are told of his mode of preparing an essay,—of the slow-growing medley of thoughts on a topic, at last brought out and strung at random, like a child's variegated beads.”

“He began where many poets end, seeking at once the upper air, the region of pure thought and ideality. ... Emerson was the freest and most ideal of them all, and what came to him by inheritance or prophetic forecast he gave like a victor.”