Emerson's style goes back and forth between intensely personal and highly abstract. He describes his grief over his young son's recent death in one sentence, and in the next he constructs an elaborate metaphor about human loneliness. He also strings together metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech, always finding new ways to re-describe an idea. For example, at one point he describes how temperament "shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see":
Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions, and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth, they are all creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them.
Emerson has already described experiences as colored glass beads we collect throughout our lives; he imagines that they are all strung onto a wire representing our temperament. Our temperament never changes and runs as a constant throughout all our life's experiences, informing the way we see and respond to our surroundings. In this passage, he describes temperament not as a wire, but as part of a "system of illusions." Our temperaments limit us without our knowing, "shut[ting] us in a prison of glass which we cannot see." This invisible glass cage also creates an "optical illusion about every person we meet." By this, he seems to mean that we can't see anyone's temperament, so it looks like they don't have any limitations on their impulses. But in fact, everyone has "boundaries they will never pass."
Readers who have a difficult time following what Emerson is trying to express in passages like this are not alone. Emerson is taking advantage of the essay form, which allows a writer to think through complex ideas on the page. Instead of stating a clear thesis and then developing an argument in support of it, Emerson uses shifting figures of speech in order to creep closer to what he is trying to say. To struggle through these passages is to look behind the curtain and see his thinking process.
