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[175] neither Greek precision nor Roman vigor could produce a phrase that Emerson could not match. Who stands in all literature as the master of condensation if not Tacitus? Yet Emerson, in his speech at the antiKansas meeting in Cambridge, quoted that celebrated remark by Tacitus as to the ominousness of the fact that the effigies of Brutus and Cassius were not carried at a certain state funeral; and in translating it Emerson bettered the original. The indignant phrase of Tacitus is, “Praefulgebant . . eo ipso quod . . non visebantur,” “They shone conspicuous from the very fact that they were not seen,” thus enforcing a moral lesson in fourteen Latin syllables; but Emerson gives it in seven English syllables and translates it, even more powerfully: “They glared through their absences.” After all it is such tests as this which give literary immortality,--the perfection of a phrase,--and if you say that nevertheless there is nothing accomplished unless an author has given us a system of the universe, it can only be said that Emerson never desired to do this; and, indeed, left on record the opinion that the world is “too young by some ages yet to form a creed.” The
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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