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 PS 1638.W88 
 
 Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 
U3f 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tile Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014317105 
 
TALKS WITH 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
TALKS WITH 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES J. WOODBURY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO. 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY 
 CHARLES J. WOODBURY. 
 
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TO THE YOUTH OF THE LAND 
 WHO ASPIRE. 
 
 I BELIEVE you will find herein the person of 
 him whom you have never seen, but who 
 may have been to you already a good genius, 
 and iaken an unshared place. 
 
 Take his words to me as what he would 
 have said to you. 
 
 CHARLES J. WOODBURY. 
 
 Oakland, Califoknia 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 Meeting ... ••• ••• 
 
 Counsel ... .-• — — '9 
 
 Criticism ... ••• — •■• 37 
 
 Concord 
 
 Transcendentalism 
 
 Presence ... •.• •"• *" 
 
 Method 
 
 Manhood ... 
 
 69 
 
 105 
 119 
 
 >35 
 163 
 
MEETING. 
 
TALKS WITH 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 MEETING. 
 
 WiLLiAMSTOWN, Massachusetts, the home of 
 Williams College, is an ideal village. Here 
 one afternoon in the early autumn of 1865 
 arrived Ralph Waldo Emerson, unheralded 
 by even so much as a paragraph in the 
 county newspaper., 
 
 As Mr. Emerson was to lecture the same 
 evening, the situation was awkward. But he 
 soon was made aware that the group of 
 students, to whose importunity he had listened 
 in coming, possessed enthusiasm, even if they 
 lacked experience ; for at once there was a 
 stir. Within two hours, our most spacious 
 assembly-room, the Methodist meeting-house, 
 was procured. Placards overflowed the reg- 
 ular student bulletin boards, and blistered 
 every available place, even trespassing upon 
 
4 TALKS ^ WITH 
 
 such respected preserves as the chapel, 
 library doors and the fence about the resi- 
 dence of Dr. Hopkins, president. Num- 
 bers of us ran from house to house notify- 
 ing their inhabitants ; while others rang 
 the college and church bells, unconsciously 
 imitating Henry D. Thoreau on an occa- 
 sion somewhat similar, years before, in 
 Concord. That night all seats were filled. 
 
 The next morning we waited upon Mr. 
 Emerson with a proposition to give us some 
 more lectures. He consented; and so the 
 acquaintance of a day was lengthened into 
 a week. Afterward, lectures were under- 
 taken in North Adams, Pittsfield, and other 
 nigh places. When arranging for these, I 
 learned that, while our offence had been 
 venial, the manner of our atoning for it was 
 too declarative ; for the employment of either 
 a local agent or preliminary printer's ink was 
 not permitted. Nor did it appear that his 
 audiences at all suffered through these omis- 
 sions ; for rumour of his nearness was quick 
 to penetrate these neighbourhoods, and his 
 advent was like the avatar of a master to his 
 communion. 
 
 My association with these appearances 
 necessarily threw me with Mr. Emerson. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 5 
 
 From the first he had encouraged me, and his 
 instruction substituted for the time that of 
 the College. Nor did he abate his fatherly- 
 manner and interest after I had achieved 
 a beard, but was unalterably kind for the 
 five years after that I occasionally met him. 
 
 Thus much for these external matters that 
 are but of interest to show my right to speak. 
 From him, I have no right. Mr. Emerson 
 had never a thought of, and, a fortiori, gave 
 no permission for this publication. And yet 
 it is certain that I betray nothing and violate 
 no spirit of confidence. Every intercourse 
 carries experience and words that are not 
 renewable. A few of Mr. Emerson's by their 
 own weight and personality sought depths 
 whence they could not emerge. These would 
 only gratify the inquisition of the curious, and 
 belong to the domain of silence. It is the 
 broad and human tone which makes the 
 uncommon man interesting to us and desired 
 by us. Conspicuously was this the case with 
 Mr. Emerson, because it was the tone he 
 habitually employed. It is true he was aware, 
 especially during our earlier association, that 
 I was in the habit of preserving his speech ; 
 and once when I remarked that it ought to 
 
6 Talks with 
 
 have a larger public, he answered that there 
 should be among all who would " ascend, a 
 helpful companionship; and that which is 
 really a good for one will be so for more." 
 This is illustrative of his attitude which con- 
 stitutes my sanction. I have written for 
 love's sake, and that of gratitude; and I 
 believe he would have me give to others that 
 which was most generous and helpful to me. 
 
 The fact is, he had nothing to withhold, 
 and generally addressed me as if I were 
 wholly impersonal, a sort of invisible audience 
 (an absence from the spectrum wholly de- 
 sirable now) ; and it was not like him to be 
 exclusive, provided his reproduction pre- 
 served accuracy and faithfulness. 
 
 About this, happily, there is little doubt. 
 At one and twenty, the emotions are not 
 encysted : and so little was containment pos- 
 sible, that I found myself in the intervals of 
 our meetings reviving their transports. I 
 was delighted to discover that his language 
 came back to me without loss or change. It 
 seemed as if my pen was a reed, through 
 which breathed upon the paper his mono- 
 logue, with the physical impression of his 
 accent, dress, gait, and manner. And so the 
 boy's journals are themselves a curiosity to 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 
 the unreceptive man of forty-five. Mr. 
 Emerson always talked slowly, and his words 
 hamhe trick of impressing themsel^'es which 
 belongs to happy s^elej±ioiix,butit was mainly - 
 because his speech was so wise and sincere, 
 and came from the depths of his own heart, 
 that it has sunken so dqepinJxuiiijie;___From 
 some such cause, and from some such habit 
 of immediate revival, may it not have been 
 that the two contemporary gospel writers 
 were able to reproduce the words of Jesus ? 
 
 It has been impossible, of course, to print 
 these and the subsequent records as they 
 stand. To do so would create confusion, for 
 conversations are not methodical ; and, in so 
 long a period and to an uninformed youth, 
 many subjects would be discoursed upon 
 more than once. The reader, therefore, will 
 not expect to come upon the statements in 
 their succession. 
 
 Moreover, I have attempted a slight ar- 
 rangement of the subjects, which has neces- 
 sitated separations and associations. But 
 this is all ; and no transposition has been 
 permitted when to do so would affect the 
 primitive meaning and intention. Some- 
 times these are obscure, and once or twice 
 the speaker has anticipated or quoted 
 
8 Talks with 
 
 himself. But even here, the words being 
 invariably authentic, I have refrained from 
 the annotating pencil, preferring to let them 
 stand, bethinking myself that it would be his 
 way. The address is to an audience which 
 will come to just comparisons and conclu- 
 sions, and recognize that the object is less to 
 give a bundle of reminiscences than a new 
 view of the man himself. 
 
 I hope no reader will feel that the contents 
 transgress the title. Much that a man says 
 is unspoken, and yet is essentially his inter- 
 course, and not to be suppressed. Where- 
 fore, I bring, in the concluding chapters, 
 memories of. air and manner ; such sugges- 
 tions of personality as accompanied Mr. 
 Emerson's words ; and the effects of his fine 
 contagion on one who had neither theories 
 or prepossessions. These immediate and 
 inevitable impressions, made by his contact, 
 illustrated by his own words, are they not 
 still his breath in the lute, still his silent 
 talks ? 
 
 It remains, perhaps, to explain the man- 
 date for these loitering memories. Why are 
 they ushered so late or at all ? I hope they 
 will tell their own story and furnish adequate 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. g 
 
 reason. But some word of apology seems 
 appropriate, especially when so recently Mr. 
 Edward Emerson has delighted us with his 
 gift obtainable from no other, and what 
 must ever be regarded the official and 
 authentic life of Emerson (Cabot's) has been 
 published — a work beyond comparison, 
 genuine, copious, satisfying, and which 
 justifies the wise choice, of its subject. Con- 
 ceived in his own society, it has been 
 executed with marvellous fidelity to his wish 
 and spirit, and reproduces with exactness his 
 firm and sincere accent, impressive by con- 
 trast with the vague and extreme language 
 of too many of his followers and interpreters 
 when speaking of him. One feels that the 
 book would have his endorsement, and it 
 could have no higher. The portrait is gladly 
 and thankfully accepted as the most faithful 
 of all of those which have been painted by 
 so many loving hands. It is, perhaps, less a 
 portrait than a photograph. The high stature 
 is present, the figure and the lineaments, but 
 are there not absent a colour and warmth ? 
 Somehow it seems as if we miss the light that 
 drew us to him (but it is less for his sake 
 than ours that it is supplied) — as if the Emer 
 son we knew has been foreign to his bio- 
 
lo Talks with 
 
 grapher, and could not be gathered from 
 his posthumous papers. 
 
 Though he was inapt to distinguish between 
 his hearers (being concerned mainly with 
 his own thought), yet it was not possible for 
 him to be the same to his equals in age and 
 experience that he would be to a young man 
 of limited knowledge of life. His memoirists 
 have given what they got — stores, nurture, 
 education, example. But his gift to us, while 
 still embracing these, was something deeper. 
 He did not so much bring facts and ex- 
 periences as he became himself fact and 
 experience to us, entering into the source of 
 life, and penetrating at once the region of 
 motive. 
 
 From his neighbourhood, one always re- 
 turned reinvigorated, with choice moods, 
 and sometimes even ecstacies, which carried 
 those of extreme aesthetic sympathies and 
 deficient ratiocinative powers quite off their 
 feet. He knew well the wearying and 
 prostrating moments that assault and often 
 destroy intellectual life at its very birth, the 
 haunting longing and aspirations, the vague 
 unrest and insurrections which characterize 
 the passage forth from immaturity ; and he 
 condensed the vapour into rain. His pre- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. ii 
 
 sence broke the shards of the will and con- 
 centrated the man. Nothing came afterwards 
 precisely as it had come before ; and our 
 new eyes saw that things are not entitled to 
 respect simply because they are. It may be 
 that too often the old became obsolete, but 
 this could be corrected. With his coming, 
 adolescence ended and virility began. He 
 aroused the best elements of the soul, agitated 
 it to its depth, and precipitated all it had of 
 intellectual principle. He first taught us to 
 think, and_ who_can_.fQrget--th&- openeF of 
 that door ? The dawn- of life to the mind — is 
 there a greatgr„boon one human being can 
 receixfeJioift another? Is there one like 
 unto it, excepit the dawn,of love to thp hpart ? 
 Acquisitions, knowledge, training, even, can 
 only assume a place after it. Liberty radiated 
 from his presence. Then every interview 
 was'an' emancipation. Especially, can any 
 personality be imagined more irritating and 
 urging to the young and arable mind ? 
 
 So it is a youth's experience of Mr. Emer- 
 son that I would give to youth. It may be 
 that I am too much tethered by these strong 
 early associations ; that foreign and maturer 
 experiences may insist that he came par- 
 ticularly to them (as each of Vishnu's sixteen 
 
12 Talks with 
 
 thousand wives believed the god was pecu- 
 liarly hers alone) ; but to me it has grown 
 plainer all these years that there was a divine 
 appointment in the recording of these talks 
 to a youth, that he belonged to the,:SBung 
 men. They were the natural vehicle of his 
 spirit ; they always largely made up _Jiis 
 audiences, and replenished them when they^ 
 were. low; they were ever ready to second 
 him, soonest to greet and warinest to praise 
 his latest deliverance ; they opened the 
 Divinity Schools for him when elders would 
 have held them closed ; they supported 
 The Dial most eagerly, and gladly followed 
 further the brilliant heresiarch, his own hair 
 not yet gray. How many of his addresses 
 were delivered before colleges to which he 
 was constantly summoned from New England 
 and Virginia to the farther West, during the 
 years 1837 to 1879 ? 
 
 Amusing yet illustrative are the words of 
 the Worcester, Massachusetts, youth — 
 
 " We ought to go and hear such a man as 
 that, just to encourage him." 
 
 And I remember those winter night rides 
 of the Harvard students to his open evenings. 
 So all young men heard him greedily, insti- 
 gated and supported his Apprentices', Uni- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 13 
 
 versity, theological and literary lecturing both 
 at home and abroad, finally culminating in 
 the invitation of the Independents of Glasgow- 
 inviting him to accept the candidature for the 
 Lord Rectorship, and polling for him five 
 hundred votes. 
 
 His spirit of kinship to all young manhood 
 breathed from his person in public and 
 vitalized his page. And he recognized it. 
 His feelings were invariably clear and just 
 to his "brave young men," his "nigh starving 
 youth," and "heroic boys," as he called 
 them. " I cannot easily say no to them," he 
 said ; and so he wrote from England to Miss 
 Hoar — 
 
 " I have, however, some youthful corre- 
 spondents — you know my failing — friendly 
 young gentlemen, in different parts of 
 Britain." 
 
 And to Miss Peabody — 
 
 " My special parish is young men inquiring 
 their way of life." 
 
 And to Carlyle — 
 
 "As usual, at this season of the year, I, 
 incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an 
 oration to deliver to the boys in one of the 
 little country colleges, nine days hence. 
 ["The Method of Nature," before the Society 
 
14 Talks with 
 
 of the Adelphi, Waterville College, Maine, 
 August II, 1 84 1. J You will say I do not 
 deserve the help of any Muse. Oh, if you 
 knew how natural it is to me to run to these 
 places ! Besides, I always am lured on by 
 the hope of saying something which shall 
 stick by the good boys." 
 
 Even up to the confines of age, when he 
 receded into the shadow of its eclipse, and 
 when an increased desire to economize the 
 time as it grew short, and to mint some of 
 the metal so slowly hoarded, interrupted the 
 tranquillity with which he had been accus- 
 tomed to give himself to all comers, and he 
 was compelled to refuse admittance to 
 philosophers and savants, some of whom 
 had journeyed a long way to see him, he did 
 not deny himself to young men. Then, as 
 always, he was to them, it is admitted, 
 uniformly open and kindly. He may have 
 declined exhausting interviews with manhood 
 and age coming to compare, to judge, or to 
 criticize ; and with lotophagi whose dream 
 he had no longer the energy to awaken. 
 But to youth there was due this larger loyalty 
 of sympathy. He knew what he was tc 
 them. They held one another. So has he 
 not come to all who have Life to seek, spirits 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 15 
 
 of the morning sort everywhere, and carried 
 them whither they would not have found the 
 way? 
 
 Well do I remember his tender, shrewd, 
 wise face, as I first saw it in that summer 
 now so long ago that one might grow from 
 child to manhood, which was not like any 
 other, because it brought me to face my own 
 penury, and to translate my own enigmas. 
 Almost before we were alone he had made 
 me forget in whose presence I stood. He 
 was merely an old, quiet, modest gentleman, 
 pressing me to a seat near him, and all at 
 once talking about college matters, the new 
 gymnasium, the Quarterly ; and from these 
 about books and reading and writing ; and 
 all as if he continually expected as much as 
 he gave. I, wonted to the distance de- 
 manded by the College Faculty, found it 
 difficult to understand this. I regarded it as 
 a trait of first meeting, and was prepared for 
 it to disappear. But the next day, on our 
 walk to Greylock and the Berkshire hills, the 
 same heartiness and comradry inspired his 
 ways. And so it was ever after — no cir- 
 cumstances so varying, but, whether I saw 
 bim- alone or in the presence of others, 
 there was the ever ready welcome shining in 
 
1 6 Talks with 
 
 his eyes, the same manifest gentleness^and^ 
 persistent preference of others, s^xSQ. hired 
 strangers. 
 
 I remember one day, visiting the Natural 
 Bridge near North Adams, Massachusetts, we 
 employed an old man who lived in the vicinity 
 as a guide, and I could not but notice how 
 kind and gracious and ready to serve Mr. 
 Emerson was — the same flavour of look, 
 accent, and phrase which I noticed in his 
 conversation with the College Professors. It 
 came from the heart of the man. While we 
 were under the peculiar formation called 
 "The Causeway," I remarked, as indicative 
 of the radical nature of my companion, how 
 indefatigably he examined the quality and 
 strata of the rock to determine its comparative 
 age, and the thoroughness with which he 
 studied every fissure, even down to the beryl 
 and emerald pools at the base of the cliff; 
 as if, indeed, he were soon to be called upon 
 to make a report about it. He could not 
 take even a walk superficially. But while he 
 was mastering the bridge's simple secrets, he 
 listened to the old guide's garrulous talk about 
 his own needs, and was soon telling him of a 
 person living two miles away who probably 
 could furnish the desired occupation. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 17 
 
 "You must know him," Mr. Emerson 
 said ; and, taking a slip of paper, he wrote a 
 note to his friend, and gave it to our new 
 acquaintance, who then expressed a desire 
 to see his benefactor after the presentation 
 of the note, fearful that the call might not 
 prove successful. 
 
 " Very well," was the reply ; " my day is for 
 you after one o'clock any time next week." 
 
 And so from others whom I have met, who 
 knew him, I have learned how many lives he 
 thus piloted to gift-bringing natures ; how 
 constantly he_ followed this practice of ac- 
 quainting himself with the needs (not desires) 
 -_of -persons, and then bringing them together 
 for mutual advantage. 
 
 In my own case his kindly craft won the 
 heart first. The encouraging eyes must have 
 seen during our earlier days together so many 
 ill weeds ; but he seemed unconscious of 
 them. How long it was after our first greet- 
 ing, and after what personal effluence in 
 gradual talk and delightful reminiscence that 
 one day he fell to it ; and, beginning with a 
 lecture on composition, which was a clean 
 departure from the instructions which the 
 Professors o£Rhetoric haibeen giving us for 
 two years,-ended with -w«ds -which showed 
 me the hght of his life ! 
 
COUNSEL. 
 
COUNSEL. 
 
 [Although given here as one interview, the reader 
 will understand that it was not. The conversation 
 dealt with Counsel, but I have gathered here every- 
 thing \!s\3X Mr. Emerson said of that nature.] 
 
 It was in ray own room that, glancing up at 
 some "Laws of Writing" * on the wall, he 
 began abruptly — 
 
 " A sensibility to the beautiful and a pas- 
 sion for its forms cause such a stirring in 
 some men that they seek to reproduce what 
 they have seen. This is the attitude of art. 
 It has various modes of expression. Paint- 
 ing, statuary, music, translate readily. The 
 
 • It may not be amiss to reproduce here' such of 
 these " Laws " as received Mr. Emerson's approval : — 
 
 I. Write not at all unless you have something new. 
 
 II. Write it, and not before, behind, and about it. 
 
 III. Have nothing of plan visible — ^no firstly, or 
 secondly, or thirdly. Show the body, not the liga- 
 ments. 
 
 IV. Do no violence to words. Use them ety- 
 mologically. 
 
22 Talks with 
 
 song is the music and poem combined. 
 Composition is less natural. Its symbols are 
 arbitrary and artificial This makes it exact- 
 ing. Composition should stand at the apex 
 in a pyramid of mental gymnastics. 
 
 " The most interesting writing is that which 
 does not quite satisfy the reader. Try and 
 leave a little thinking for him ; that will be 
 better for both. The trouble with most 
 writers is, they spread too thin. The reader 
 is as quick as they ; has got there before, and 
 is ready and waiting. A little guessing does 
 him no harm, so I would assist him with 
 no connections. If you can see how the 
 harness fits, he can. But make sure that you 
 see it. 
 
 " Then you should start with no skeleton 
 or plan. The natural one will grow as you 
 work. Knock away all scaffolding. Neither 
 have exordium or peroration. What is it you 
 are vreiting for, any way ? Because you have 
 something new to say ? It is the test of the 
 universities, and I am glad you have made it 
 yours. We don't want pulse with no legumes. 
 To make anew and not from others is a 
 grand thing. You can always tell when the 
 thing is new ; it speaks for itself. And even 
 among the unlettered, it declares well enough 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 23 
 
 and strong enough. From this is the pro- 
 jection of idioms. But add true, and make 
 sure of this. Without such sanction, no one 
 should write. 
 
 " Then what is it ? Say it ! Out with it 1 
 Don't lead up to it ! Don't tiy to let your 
 hearer down from it. That is to be common- 
 place. &rjLitjwith all the grace and force 
 you can, and stop. Be familiar only with 
 gooJ expressions. Speak in your own natural 
 way. Then, and_Jhen only, can you be 
 Interesting. Let your treatise be yourself, so 
 your friends will say, ' wrote that.' 
 
 " Expression is the main fight. Search 
 unweariedly for that which is exact. Do not 
 be dissuaded. You say, know words etymo- 
 logically. Yes, pull them apart; see how 
 they are made; and use them only where 
 they fit. Avoid adjectives^ J^ettiie noun 
 da— iljework. The adj ectivemtroduces 
 sound, gives an unexpected turn, and so 
 often mars with an unintentional false note. 
 Most fallacies are fallacies of language. 
 Definitions save a deal of debate. 
 
 " Neit her concern yourself about con- 
 sistency. The moment you putty and plaster 
 y pur expresm cmaJQjnakethem hang together, 
 you have begun a weakening process. Takq 
 
24 Talks with 
 
 it for granted the truths will harmonize ; and 
 as for the falsities and mistakes, they will 
 speedily die of themselves. \i you must be 
 contradictory, let it be clean and sharp as 
 the two blades _of scissors meetT^ ' 
 
 " Are your theses given, oFSo you select ? 
 It is well enough rarely for practice to treat 
 on a suggested subject. But such writing is 
 at its origin derived and a peril. Ou^_of_ 
 your-owH-selfL.sheuld come your theme ; and 
 only thus can your genius be"yfflr friend. ~ 
 Eloquence, by which I mean a statement so 
 luminous as to render all others unnecessary, 
 is only possible on a self-originated subject. 
 
 "Don't run -aftei-ideas. Save and nourish 
 them, and you will have all you should enter- 
 tain. They will come fast enough, and keep 
 you busy. 
 
 " Reading is closely related tj) writing. 
 While the mind is plastic there shauld—be 
 care as to its impressions. The new facts 
 should come from nature, fresh, buoyant, 
 inspiring, exact. Later in lifiST-witeH-tiiere. is _ 
 less danger of imitating those traits_o£_ex- 
 pression through which information has been 
 received, facts may be gleaned from^a^wjHer 
 field. But now you shall not read these 
 books " — pointing — " Prescott~or Bancroft or 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson^. 25 
 
 Motley. Prescott is a thorough man. Ban- 
 croft reads enormously, always understands 
 his subject. Motley is painstaking, but too 
 mechanical. So are they all. Their style 
 slays. Neither of them lifts himself off his 
 feet. They have no lilt in them. You 
 noticed the marble we have just seen ? You 
 remember that marble is nothing but crystal- 
 lized limestone? Well, some writers never 
 get out of the limestone condition, ge airy. 
 Let your characters breathe from you. Walk 
 upon the ground,J)ut,aot_tQ sink. It is a 
 fine power, this. Some men have it, promi- 
 nently the French. How it manifests itself 
 in Montaigne, especially Cotton's translation, 
 and in Urquhart's ' Rabelais ' ! Grimm almost 
 alone of the Germans has it ; Borrow had it ; 
 Thoreau had it; and James Wilson — some- 
 times. 
 
 "Keep close torealitieSi^JDietiLyou accus- 
 tom yourself to getting facts at first hand. If 
 we could get all our facts so, there would, bs 
 no necessity ior books ; but they give us 
 facta, if we know how to use them; they 
 are the granaries of thought as well. 
 
 " Read those men who are not lazy ; who 
 putJhemselves into contact with the realities.. . 
 So you learn to look with your eyes too. ^^-i- 
 
26 Talks with 
 
 And do not forget the Persian, Parsee, and 
 Hindoo religious books — the Avesta, Vendi- 
 dad, and the rest ; books of travel, too. And 
 when you travel, describe what you see. 
 That will teach you what to see. Read those 
 who wrote about facts from a new point of 
 view. The atmosphere of such authors helps 
 you, even if the reasoning has been a mistake ; 
 such a book as 'Vestiges of Creation,' for 
 instance. 
 
 " For later philosophical studies, I would 
 recommend writers like Bacon and Berkeley. 
 They have been friends to me. I see you 
 have Sharon Turner. He is a thorough- 
 going man, and you may trust him, even 
 when he talks with no authority save his 
 own. Plutarch, of course, you know. And 
 there is Darwin ! I am glad to see him here. 
 And you must read George Borrow's book 
 about the gypsies. [I think he meant 
 " Lavengro."] He went among them, lived 
 among them, and was a gypsy himself. 
 There is nothing from second sources, nor 
 any empiricism in his book. You can rely 
 upon everything, and it is quaintly told. 
 From such as he you learn not to stop until 
 you encounter the fact with your own hand j 
 to search by all shows, and learn just how it 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 27 
 
 stands. Though the reward of the market is 
 in the thing done, the true reward is in the 
 doing. 
 
 " Avoid all second-hand borrowing books — 
 
 ' Collections of ,' ' Beauties of ,' etc. 
 
 I see you have some on your shelves. I 
 would burn them. No one can select the 
 beautiful passages of another for yoa It is 
 beautiful for him — well ! Another thought, 
 wedding your aspirations, will be the thing 
 of beauty to you. Do your own quarrying. 
 
 " Do not attempt to be a great reader, and 
 read for facts and not by the bookful. You 
 must know about ownership in facts. What 
 another sees and tells you is not yours, but 
 his. If you had seen it, you would not have 
 seen what he did, and, even less, what he 
 tells. Your only relief is to find out all you 
 can about it, and look at it in all possible 
 lights. Ke g p your eyss_open_jaiid-see-all you 
 ran ; pTiH whpn ynii get the right man, que^- 
 ti on him close. So learn to divine books, to 
 feel those that you want-wit-hottt-wasting-muah 
 time over them. Remember you must know 
 only the excellent of all that has been pre- 
 sented. But often a chapter is enough. The 
 glance reveals when the gaze obscures. Some- 
 where the author has hidden his message. 
 
28 Talks with 
 
 Find-Jtj-and-skiy-the-paragrag hs that do j iot 
 talk to you." 
 
 Upon my pressing him for directions more 
 particular and practical, a process which was 
 rarely successful — he hated details, and 
 avoided them — he, after a moment's hesita- 
 tion, continued as follows : — 
 
 "Well, learn how to tell from the begin- 
 nings of the chapters and from glimpses of 
 the sentences whether you need to read 
 them entirely through. So turn page a fter 
 page, keepi^ the writer !s-thniight befoie-you, 
 but not tarrying with him, untiL- he — ^ha^ 
 brought you to the thing you_axe_in_jear6h''' 
 of; then^weliwith him, if so be heha^jvliat;;;^-' 
 you want. BuTTfeCOltecrjoi-eftly-Tead^ ' 
 start your own "teamT^ 
 
 " Newspapers- have done much to ab- 
 breviate expression, and so to improve style. 
 They are to occupy during your generation a 
 large share of attention. [This was said 
 nearly a quarter of a century ago. It was as 
 if he saw ahead the blanket editions.] And 
 the most studious and engaged men can 
 only neglect them at his cost. But have 
 little to do with them. Learn how to get 
 their best too, without their getting yours. 
 Do not read them when the mind is creative. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 29 
 
 And do not read them thoroughly, column 
 by column. RememBer they are made for 
 everybodj;jjiid don't try to get what isn't 
 meant for you. The miscellany, for instance, 
 should not receive your attention. There is 
 a great secret in knowing what to keep out 
 of the mind as well as what to put in. And 
 even if you find yourself interested in the 
 selections, you cannot use them, because the 
 original source is not of reference. You 
 can't quote from a newspaper. Like some 
 insects, it died the day it was b'om. The 
 genuine news is what you want, and practice 
 quick searches for it. Give yourself only 
 so many minutes for the paper. Then you 
 will learn to avoid the premature reports and 
 anticipations, and the stuff put in for people 
 who have nothing to think. 
 
 " Readiiig_iong_at one time anything, no 
 matter how.it. fascinates, destroys thought 
 as completely as . the- inflections forced by 
 external causes. Do not permit this. Stop 
 if you find yourself^ becoming absorbed, at 
 even the first paragraph. ■ Keep yourselLout 
 and_watcil,^. your own impresaioJiS.. This 
 is one of the norms of thought. And you 
 will accumulate facts in proportion as you 
 become a fact. Otherwise you will accumu- 
 
30 Talks with 
 
 late dreams. Information is nothing, but the 
 man behind it. ~ " 
 
 "So you cannot make too much of yourself. 
 It is all there is of you. How many do you 
 know who are made up mainly of fragments 
 of others ? But follow your own star, and it 
 will lead you to that which nonc-athet-ean 
 attaS Imitation is suicide. . .You-««st4ake 
 yourself for better or for worse as ^^aur-por- 
 tion. A man can only get, an extemporized 
 half-possession of another's gift ; and what 
 came wholly natural from him has, in spite 
 of the best grace and skill, an impertinent 
 air from the borrower. The elder sentiment 
 will not thus keep the elder fire. 
 
 " I commiserate any one who is subject to 
 the misery of being overplaced. What he is 
 stands over him and thunders, and denies 
 what he says. Assist this tendency which 
 nothing can defeat. Yield not one inch to 
 all the forces which conspire to make you an 
 echo. That is the sin of dogmatism and 
 creeds. Avoid them ; they build a fence 
 about the intellect 
 
 "You are anxious about your career. I 
 know without your telling me. Every 
 college boy is. You think you can study out 
 yourself what you are best fitted for ? No. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 31 
 
 But you remember our stance with Professor 
 , over in the chemical laboratory yester- 
 day; how he took a substance and tried it 
 with others, one after another, until he dis- 
 covered the affinity? So a man finds by 
 trying what he can do best Each man and 
 woman is born with an aptitude to do some- 
 thing impossible to any other. Here on your 
 shelf is Fdnflon. Who can make his pale 
 Fenelonism but he ? 
 
 " By working, doing for others simul- 
 taneously with the doing of your own work, 
 you make the greatest gain. That is the 
 generous giving or losing of your life which 
 saves it. Don't put this^ aside until you are 
 more at liberty. That is slow death. ' Have 
 something practical on your hands, it makes 
 small matter what, at once. If your dis- 
 position is right you will sele t well. Turn 
 to the first thing that comes to hand and do 
 it. It is a great thing to get into the habit 
 of doing all things thoroughly__JBy=and^by 
 one discovers that_ he has_ done one thing 
 better tHan his mates ; and soon it is plain 
 that there is one thing which he alone can do. 
 And actfoii is the natural and noble expres- 
 sion of thought, its chef cTceuvre ; it is always 
 to be preferred. Make certain that you have 
 
32 Talks with 
 
 yours — not something, but your own. Do you 
 remember the story among the legends of 
 Arthur about the witch who was brewing 
 the liquid which should open the eyes of all 
 the people ? How some drops spattered into 
 the eyes of the serving-boy, who thereupon 
 incontinently fled, divining that he was to be 
 slain? Were all eyes anointed, how many 
 would be kept on one's own pot ? So live 
 in a clean and clear loyal ty to your own 
 affair. Do^ot let anqther'Sj,jiojnatter how 
 attractive, tempt you away. Then true and ~ 
 surprising revelations, _ come_ to..ygUj andr- 
 experiences resembling the manifestations.of 
 genius; the first- charaeteristie -of ~w-lMch-.is„„ 
 veracity; the. ..second, -S,urpris£.;_the. -third, 
 spontaneity i„the_faujd;h,— sensibility— to—the 
 laws of the universe.— Xjeniuscan .. see the 
 event as well in front as behind_;,_it Jells 
 where the city ought. to stand.aajKell_before 
 as after it is built. 
 
 "And to build the city is the great 
 accomplishment, not to possess it. There 
 are so many who are content to be without 
 being anything. Opportunities approach 
 only those who use them. Even" thougKls 
 cease "by^and-by to; visitrthe idle and "—after 
 a pause — " the perverse. But sudden and un- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 33 
 
 foreseen helps and continued encouragement 
 are vouchsafed to the devout worker. For 
 God is everywhere, having His will, and He 
 cannot be baffled. Make His business yours, 
 as did His son. The man who works with 
 Him is constantly assured of achievement 
 and the melioration of the race. Such 
 equipment the scholar needs. 
 
 "Be choice in your friendships. You can 
 have but few, and the number will dwindle 
 as^_yoS-^rQW older. Select minds who are 
 too strong and large to pretend to knowledge 
 and resources they do not really possess. 
 They address you sincerely." 
 
 As he rose to go, we saw from the little 
 door of the Hermitage* the spire of the 
 chapel in the gathering dark. 
 
 " How many faiths are there in this 
 village?" he asked, as he descended the 
 steps. 
 
 Before I could reply, trying to call to mind 
 the number of churches, I heard his quiet 
 voice again — 
 
 * There was near the rear of Professor Albert 
 Hopkins' garden an isolated, octagon-shaped, brick 
 structure formerly used as n. magnetic observatory, 
 but in my time known as the "Hermitage," and 
 rented by the college to any student who would 
 occupy it. 
 
 n 
 
34 Talks with 
 
 "Three thousand, five hundred people; 
 three thousand, five hundred faiths in the 
 village of Williamstown ! Let yours not 
 come from tradition. Life is awry at best. 
 The effort should be evermore to widen the 
 circle, so as to admit ventilation. Seek first 
 spirit, and second spirit, and third and ever- 
 more spirit ! " 
 
 About poetry he uttered the following sug- 
 gestions, occasioned by the criticism of some 
 Class-day rhymes : — 
 
 " I suppose you read your verses over after 
 they are written ? " 
 
 « Generally." 
 
 " I suppose, then, after a little they grow 
 old to you ? " 
 
 " Indeed, they do." 
 
 "And you continue to write. If after a 
 long time you look any of your lines over, 
 and you come to one, or a succession, and 
 say to yourself, ' That is good,' it is good ; 
 but destroy everything from which this 
 verdict must be withheld. The ' me ' is the 
 judge, after all; and if a thing seems good 
 to me, it shall to my fellows. I can sym- 
 pathize with the desire for outward confirma- 
 tion ; still, the poet is his own assurance ; 
 he shall be conscious of himself. If you 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 35 
 
 have a sensitive and poetic soul, thank God 
 for it -It -is- not yours,, save as. a gift. The 
 highest and truest utterances of the poet are 
 not his. Po gtryT ^TJihd here he lapsed into 
 that manner of reverie as if all hearers were 
 far away, "whether it comes in dreams or in 
 gleams, is noble. It must serve no sordid 
 uses ; it is of the above." 
 
 Then, after a pause — 
 
 " Did I not see Montaigne among your 
 books the other day? You shall not read 
 Montaigne and be a poet. 
 
 "You must keep some fact-books for poetry. 
 I think that they are much more nearly related 
 to poetry than rhyme or rhythm. Study 
 Greek for expression; but the poetic /a<r^ is 
 half the battle. Nature, gathered in by the 
 sensitive soul, forms the furniture of the poet. 
 Look out at this Indian summer. There is 
 something hygienic in the blue of it ; it is 
 the mountains' own colour. EySQLEIJcs has 
 its air. From the locality of Rome, for 
 instance, emanates such an air that the finest 
 men grow inspired by it, and want to live 
 there always. 
 
 " Did you ever think about the logic of 
 stimulus? Nature supplies her own. It is 
 astonishing what she will do, if you give her 
 
36 Talks with Emerson. 
 
 a chance. In how short a time will she 
 revive the over-tired brain ! A breath under 
 the apple-tree, a siesta on the grass, a whiff 
 of wind, an interval of retirement, and the 
 balance and serenity are restored. A clean 
 creature needs so little and responds so 
 readily ! There is something as miraculous as 
 the gospels in it Later in life, society be- 
 comes a stimulus. Occasionally, the gentle 
 excitation of a cup of tea is needed. A mind 
 invents its own tonics, by which, without per- 
 manent injury, it makes rapid rallies and 
 enjoys good moods. Conversation is an 
 excitant, and the series of intoxications it 
 creates is healthful. But tobacco, tobacco — 
 what rude crowbar is that with which to pry 
 into the delicate tissues of the brain ! " 
 
 Years after, I met Mr. Emerson in the 
 West, and mentioned in the conversation a 
 bit of exciting experience among the Ten- 
 nessee mountains, which drew from him the 
 following — 
 
 " What tonic can be more inspiriting and 
 healthful than an adventure ? It gives back 
 to the blood all its youth." 
 
CRITICISM 
 
CRITICISM. 
 
 A GROUP of Students were in the habit of 
 assembling in one of the larger college-rooms 
 for purposes of practice in debate ; and one 
 afternoon Mr. Emerson came quietly in (but 
 not without having been solicited time and 
 again). He refused to permit the discussion 
 to stop, but, seating himself on a sofa, he 
 gave straight attention to the speakers. It 
 was our custom to appoint at the beginning 
 of each session a critic to perform at its close 
 the duties indicated by the name. After the 
 abbreviated exercises were ended, at our 
 intercession, Mr. Emerson, from his seat, 
 offered some comment, ending in the an- 
 nouncement of certain laws of criticism which 
 undoubtedly prescribed his own attitude and 
 method. 
 
 I well remember the shrewd listening that 
 his opening words disclosed. How surprised 
 we were to hear him even repeat the names 
 of two or three (of previous acquaintance 
 
40 Talks with 
 
 with him, however) who had spoken after 
 his arrival ! 
 
 " Why should not," he asked, "advantages 
 be bartered like commodities? You have 
 sufficient for all your speeches if they are 
 
 rightly distributed. Let A purchase a 
 
 little fluency from B , and C some 
 
 earnestness from X , who might make a 
 
 good investment by securing a bit of A 's 
 
 spare accuracy. If this could be accom- 
 plished, and B and C exchange, 
 
 the one a little logic for the other's abundant 
 energy, you would have a most excellent 
 debate." 
 
 After a few words more in the same 
 humorous and good-natured strain, he con- 
 tinued more gravely — 
 
 "I was interested in your critic's report. 
 But there are nine of you here ; then there 
 should be nine critics. It is possible that 
 you associate a wrong meaning with this 
 word. I observed that your critic noted such 
 minutiae as that a certain word was pro- 
 nounced wrong ; that a plural verb followed 
 a single nominative ; that a gesture was 
 made with the index finger instead of the 
 open hand; that a speaker stood with his 
 feet six inches apart instead of two. So you 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 41 
 
 regard the speeches as so many targets, and 
 listen to pick flaws, to find faults and little 
 inaccuracies. You gain something in mark- 
 ing these things alone, but you lose im- 
 mensely more. Criticism should not imply 
 to you such a watching out, for that begets 
 hostility of thought, a closing of the mind to 
 the natural impulsions of the speech, lest it 
 be influenced by them; and indulgence in 
 the silent rehearsing of premature rejoinders. 
 You are chiefly here, I take it, for the study 
 of method, manner, style ; then you should 
 project yourselves into sympathy with the 
 speaker ; make certain that you receive his 
 effort ; receive it all, and receive it well ; put 
 yourself in his place ; try and see why he 
 sees as he does ; and then proceed outward to 
 investigate his sentiments and their expres- 
 sion. Remember, all criticism dealing with 
 isolated points is superficial. The prevailing 
 thought and disposition are your main care. 
 
 " Then seek what is characteristicaL Get 
 the method of the man ; the way in which he 
 tries to develop and impress his idea. Attend 
 closely to the quality of the matter presented. 
 It is an index of the speaker's originality and 
 culture, and therefore of his ability to impress 
 others. 
 
42 Talks with 
 
 "When your attention is held without 
 effort from yourself; when you are conscious 
 of thoughtfulness, achange of opinion working 
 within — then attend, attend. Your speaker 
 has power. Overlook all fault, intonation, 
 emphasis, pronunciation. Lay hold of his 
 secret. The genuine impressions of a speech 
 are the thoughts it immediately arouses, and 
 these are the sources of true critical activity ! " 
 
 I do not think of Mr. Emerson as primarily 
 a critic. His was not generally the posture 
 indicated by the word. He was familiar with 
 the laws that determine excellence of form, 
 but sincerity and the satisfaction of the moral 
 sense constituted his criterion. '~ — - 
 
 "The first and main attention of men to 
 one another is to listen and be taught," he 
 said ; " and we are continually surprised at 
 the riches of our fellows." 
 
 For this satisfaction, and not as a condition 
 of criticism, he accorded full reception, and 
 gave himself without reservation; and so, 
 when he chose to exercise it — and perhaps 
 there were few varieties of intellectual play 
 he enjoyed better— he had a large advantage 
 in the feat of mere criticism ; for he contained 
 his subjects ; he felt their limit and atmos- 
 phere, and all that he said showed with a 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 43 
 
 fine clarity that he fully interpreted and de- 
 fined them. He had the habit of justice ; 
 was never the least equivocal, self-interested, 
 or dictated to. His high moral intelligence 
 enabled him to point out the real signifi- 
 cance of prominent events. Of conse- 
 quence, his criticism was of that rarest 
 order, creative rather than judicial ; and 
 his historical and biographical judgments 
 have only been affected by the discovery 
 of facts and perspective unknown to him. 
 He always saw the good — a rare trait ; it 
 is easy to point out defects. 
 
 He was not capable of cynicism, nor was 
 he acerb. Even when provocation was great, 
 his satire was so gentle and genial that it 
 warmed even its object. He did not correct 
 slips made in his presence. When he was 
 less abstinent, the occasion plainly demanded 
 it, as when, with pleasant emphasis, he re- 
 minded a student who spoke of his reference 
 to the /««seum that he accented the second 
 syllable instead of the first. 
 
 Mr. Emerson talked apparently without 
 reservation to me about his contemporaries 
 and historical personages. In this and the 
 succeeding chapter I select such of his 
 delightful comment as seems distinguished 
 
44 Talks with 
 
 for the consideration of "his noble young 
 men." 
 
 I remember one afternoon we were 
 walking among the hills of Williamstown in 
 the locality known as Bryant's Glen. At 
 every little space, some new aspect of scenery 
 invited pause. The landscape was one apt 
 to suggest to such a youth as Bryant was at 
 eighteen the " Thanatopsis." We saw at a 
 little distance across the sward the ravine 
 creeping out of the swath of sunshine between 
 the ragged hills into its own dark and tangled 
 fragment of forest. In the immediate nook 
 where he wrote his poem the scattered trees 
 are of shrunken shaft, like a life which ends 
 without accomplishment. 
 
 "Yonder is a serious -jnaimta*ft^ said Mr. 
 Emerson, pointing to Greylock. " I should 
 think this would be just the place to read 
 'The Excursion.' The hills are very like 
 those of Westmoreland. Here one can see 
 the poet, standing on the shore and looking 
 off on the wide sea-light, and backward on the 
 glows of the mountains, and then recognizing 
 the inner supernal light, the subjective, as he 
 framed that most_celebrated combination — 
 
 " ' The light which never was on sea or land, 
 The inspiration and the poet's dream.' 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 45 
 
 "Wordsworth," he continued, pronouncing 
 the name as if it were spelled Waurdsworth, 
 "is the poet of England. I see the Reader 
 lately acknowledges it He is the only one 
 who comes up to high-water mark. No 
 mannerism in him ! Other poets start out 
 with a theory which dwarfs or distorts them ; 
 he was careful to have none. Other writers 
 have to affect what to him, thus, is natural. 
 So they have what Arnold called simplism, 
 he, simplicity. His attorney wished him to 
 
 go to law with Lord , to recover his estate 
 
 of which that peer had defrauded him. 
 Wordsworth refused, saying, ' No ; I must not 
 forget it is my profession to write poetry.' 
 And so he went into the forest, and lived on 
 bread, and — wrote poetry. He lived very 
 plainly. When Scott came to see him he had 
 no ale to offer him or wine, and so the 
 novelist was wont to go to the village inn 
 for his daily glass of ale. And one day as, in 
 company with his host, he was walking by the 
 inn, the landlord appeared and asked Sir 
 Walter if he had come for his cracker and 
 mug of ale ! Afterwards, I believe, the son 
 of the peer who had his estate, who was a 
 gentleman, compounded with the Words- 
 worths, and restored to them their property. 
 
4-6 Talks wii'h 
 
 " The first three books of ' The Excursion' 
 are the best. The discussions are unin- 
 teresting, but the adventures of the wonder- 
 ful Pedlar always charm me. There is 
 sometimes an extreme even in Wordsworth. 
 What is that ' horrible ' line in ' Peter 
 Beir? 
 
 " ' The long dry see-saw of this horrible bray.' 
 
 " The ass is unpoetical ; and perhaps Alice 
 Fell is too childish, a little. His sonnets are 
 good. They are, indeed, as pure, chaste, 
 transparent as Milton's, They are the 
 witchery of language. He is the greatest 
 poet since Milton," 
 
 What is it Bulwer says of Wordsworth ? 
 
 " Wordsworth's poetry is of all existing in 
 the world the most calculated to refine, 
 etherealize, to exalt j — to offer most corre- 
 spondent counterpoise to the scale that 
 inclines to earth." 
 
 Emerson could quote almost entirely the 
 " Prelude '' and " Excursion," so much had 
 he pondered them. I remember he was 
 abundant in reminiscences of Wordsworth 
 and Scott, and told me many anecdotes of 
 them, one or two of which are identical with 
 those narrated in " English Traits," only some 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 47 
 
 way they seemed to be much better told than 
 they are there. 
 
 " There are no books," he concluded, " foi 
 boys, like the poems of Sir Walter Scott. 
 Every boy loves them if they are not put into 
 his hands too late. 'Marmion,' 'The Lay 
 of the Last Minstrel,' 'The Lady of the 
 Lake;' they surpass everything for boy- 
 reading we have." 
 
 As an amusing instance of literary repeti- 
 tion, he referred in this connection to the 
 musical lines in some elder verses of a 
 countryman of Scott's : — 
 
 " Make me thy wrack 
 When I come back. 
 But spare me when I go," 
 
 by comparison with lines in Martial's twenty- 
 fifth epigram : — 
 
 " Parcete dum propero^ 
 Mergite dum redeo." 
 
 ^t was uncommon to hear Mr. Emerson 
 speak with such emphasis of any one as he 
 did of Plato. At our first railroad restaurant, 
 where, although there was plenty of time, 
 everybody was eating as they do generally 
 at travel-tables, Mr. Emerson leaned over 
 toward me, and said humorously, with a 
 smile — 
 
48 Talks with 
 
 " Wasn't it Plato who said of the citizens 
 of Agrigentum — they, you know, were colossal 
 architects and eaters — 'These people build 
 as if they were immortal, and eat as if they 
 were to die instantly ' ? " 
 
 " Read Plato's ' Republic ! ' Read_ Plato'a 
 ' RepublieJj;_Read Plato's J..R£.pubiic ! '" he 
 repeated, on anoffiS' occasion. ".He_ lifts, 
 man toward .the divine, and- 1 ]ike.it.,w]ieii I 
 hear that a man reads Plato. I want to 
 meet thatjoan^ For_no man-xif -aeff-conceit 
 can go through Plato." 
 
 Carl yle, I believe^ c onfesses that he cannot 
 read Plato. 
 
 " I am glad you have so many of the 
 Greek Tragedies," continued Mr. Emerson. 
 " Read them largely and swiftly in translation, 
 to get their movement and flow; and then 
 a little in the original every day. FoLJhe 
 Greek^_is_Jlie--ibuntain~Qf,JL£Uiguage. The 
 Latin__h^__a-— definite_shQre-line, but _lhe 
 Greek is without., bqutjds." Then, after a 
 pause7~he~ added, half to himself, " Dead 
 languages, called dead because they can 
 never die." 
 
 Of Gibbon he spoke strikingly, as follows — 
 
 " He is one of the best readers that ever 
 lived in England. You know his custom of 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 49 
 
 examining himself both before and after his 
 reading a book, to see what had been added 
 to his mental experience? All previous and 
 contemporary British historians are bare- 
 footed friars in comparison with Gibbon. 
 He was an admirable student, a tremendous 
 worker. He banished himself to a lonely 
 chAteau, just to work harder; but he thought 
 uncleanly. He had — as also did Aristo- 
 phanes, whom I never could read on that 
 account — an imagination degraded and never 
 assoiled, a low wit like that which defaces out- 
 buildings. He was a disordered and coarse 
 spirit, a mind without a shrine, but a great 
 example of diligence and antidote to laziness. 
 
 "Locke was a stalwart thinker. He 
 erected a school of philosophy which limited 
 everything to utility. But the soul, has its 
 own .£yespiv4ii€h. are made illuminating bylhe 
 Spirit of God." 
 
 "With the same lofty accent he spoke of 
 Harriet Martineau, and compared her attitude 
 with that of her brother : — 
 
 " It was a grief to me when I learned that 
 she had become materialist." After a long 
 pause he added, lifting his head, " God ? It 
 is all God." 
 
 " Read Chaucer," he said ; " in a day you 
 
 £ 
 
50 Talks with 
 
 will get into his language, and then you will 
 like him. Humour the lines a little, and 
 they are full of music. 
 
 " I think I will recite a strain from his 
 'Good Counsel,' and, were I you, I would 
 copy it and have it always with me. It is a 
 scripture." 
 
 He then delivered, without hesitation, but 
 very slowly and thoughtfully, sinking his 
 voice at the end of every line — 
 
 " Flee from the press and dwell with soothfastness ; 
 Suffice thee thy good, though it be small ; 
 For hoard hath hate and climbing tickelness. 
 Press hath envy and weal is blent over all, 
 Savour no more than thee behove shall ; 
 Rule well thyself that other folk canst rede, 
 And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread. 
 
 " Pain thee not each crooked to redress 
 In trust of her that turneth as a ball. 
 Great rest stands in little business ; 
 Beware also to spurn against an awl, 
 Strive not as doth a croke with a wall ; 
 Daunte thyself that dauntest others deed. 
 And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread. 
 
 " That thee is sent receive in buxomness. 
 The wrestling of this world asketh a fall ; 
 Here is no home, here is but wilderness. 
 
 Forth, pilgrim ! forth, beast, out of thy stall ! 
 Look up on high and thanke God of all ; 
 Waive thy lust and let thy ghost thee lead. 
 And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread I " 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 51 
 
 He repeated the last two lines, pronouncing 
 the last word so as to rhyme with the last of 
 the penultimate line, and then — 
 
 "I have seen an expurgated edition of 
 Chaucer ; shun it ! Shun expurgated editions 
 of any one, even Aphra Bene or Fran5ois 
 Villon. They will be expurgating the Bible 
 and Shakspeare next." 
 
 Of Shakspeare he talked much, and always 
 without a word of subtraction. Of no one 
 else did he speak in a similar strain of 
 encomium, excepting that imperial man, 
 Walter Savage Landor ; and of him Mr. 
 Emerson had this abatement, referring to his 
 conversation — 
 
 " He does not aspirate ; drops his h's like 
 a cockney. I cannot understand it." 
 
 He did not think that Shakspeare wrote 
 Wolsey's soliloquy and the scene that 
 follows it, on the ground that Shakspeare 
 always wrote so that the thought should 
 publish its own rhythm, a characteristic not 
 observable, he contended, in these passages. 
 
 "So far as we know," he said, "'The 
 Essays flL JV£oHtaigng_' is the only book 
 Shakspeare owned. Like Aristophanes, Shaks- 
 peare had the care of the presentation of his 
 plays, so they were kept practical. It has 
 
52 Talks with 
 
 had much to do with their surviving. When- 
 ever either got into ' the clouds,' he got down 
 out of them as fast as he could. 
 
 " But Shakspeare was a wonder. He 
 struck twelve every time ; " and then, after a 
 pause, "We have not such creatures in 
 America." Somehow the words and his half 
 sad manner in uttering them, brought back 
 to me old Nestor's lament, " For not at any 
 time have I seen such men, nor shall I, as 
 Perithous and Gyas, etc." 
 
 He spoke of the songs of Ben Jonson as 
 " the finest in the English language. They 
 are rich and succulent and metery. Few 
 men have that ^7onderful power of rhyming, 
 especially double-rhyming, that he has ;" and 
 he instanced " The Mask of Daedalus," and 
 recited four stanzas of Jonson's ode to him- 
 self in illustration. 
 
 I was much interested in his words on 
 Shelley and Blake. While he seemed hesi- 
 tatingly to recognize and allow the wide 
 gleams of truth the disciples of these mystics 
 claim for them, he yet insisted that their 
 visions were rather a curiosity than a dis- 
 covery, and rebuked them strongly for their 
 trait of " obliteration of the imagination " 
 by natural objects. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 53 
 
 " I cannot read Shelley with comfort," he 
 said. " His visions are not in accord with 
 the facts ; they are not accurate. He soars 
 to sink." From Blake he quoted """ The 
 Tiget"^ 
 
 "Tiger, tiger, burning bright," 
 
 over and over, almost the only thing I ever 
 heard him quote that he put into the " Par- 
 nassus." 
 
 He , criticized Tennyson as "factitious'' 
 and a "posture-master,"'said that his inspira- 
 tion is "scanty, and does not arrive at ex- 
 tremities." When I reminded him that in 
 "English Traits" he says of Tennyson, 
 " The colour of the dawn flows over the 
 horizon from his pencil," he answered after a 
 moment — 
 
 " And that is true, too." 
 
 He many times referred to Leigh Hunt, 
 and advised me to read him, "a true and 
 gentle friend to all men." 
 
 Of Matthew Arnold he said, " He is 
 stored with all critical faculties except humour, 
 but so far he shows little of that." And of 
 Brownijig, " He is always a teacher.'' 
 
 " Have you read any of Goethe?" he asked. 
 
 On my replying affirmatively as to " Wil- 
 helm Meister," he said — 
 
54 Talks with 
 
 "Ah yes, that is good. It wants to be 
 read well ; it contains the analysis of life. 
 Wasson, in the Atlantic, some time ago had 
 some excellent words upon it, more a pane- 
 gyric than a criticism. But Wasson must 
 have just come to it. We have loved Meister 
 a long time." He could not read nor endure 
 Faust, but of Fichte he said, " He would use 
 any weapon to convert a hearer. I think he 
 would trepan a person, if so he could pass 
 his own edacious conceptions into the bared 
 brain." In this connection he commended 
 the example of the German professor who 
 stood on his head when his audience thinned. 
 
 I once asked his opinion of the novels of 
 George Sand, and he answered as follows : — 
 
 " It is wonderful the amount she has 
 written — everything ; she seems to know the 
 world. But her stories — I do not know about 
 them ; I do not read stories. I jieyer could 
 turn a dozen pages _in 'Don Quixote.' or 
 Dickens -withQUta yawn. He takes too long 
 to tell a little ; too much of a reporter who 
 must fill a column. Why read novels ? We 
 meet stranger creatures than their heroes. 
 What writer of stories would not be derided 
 if he gave us creatures as impossible as Nero 
 or Alva or Joan of Arc ? " 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 55 
 
 He frequently drew comparisons between 
 the authors who ought to write for the good 
 of the world and those who ought to write 
 merely for their own good. As an instance 
 of the latter, he mentioned a poet then rather 
 the fashion, who had recently appeared in 
 England. 
 
 " I was surprised," he said, " at the praise 
 
 of the Review. The man had no sun— 
 
 a derived light like a star's. He had read 
 ' Festus,' and the ' Life Drama ' leaked out. 
 It must have been inspired by a headache, 
 the delirium of the tripod without its vati- 
 cination ; the verses are not of the kind that 
 the people like — nothing hearty or happy in 
 them." 
 
 This last trait he expected in all good 
 writing. I remember in one of our earliest 
 interviews how he spoke of a manuscript 
 volume of poetical studies that had then 
 just been sent him by my friend Edward 
 King, " They are wonderful for a boy of 
 seventeen, but they are too melancholy 
 He seems to see nothing but the horrible. 
 Now, the world is joyous. He paints every- 
 thing in black, and yet he is a rosy-cheeked 
 boy. I wonder at it. We cannot have the 
 Rembrandt colour. Melancholy is unen- 
 
56 Talks with 
 
 durable; grief is abnormal. Victor Hugo 
 has written such a book. I have not read 
 it ; I do not read the sad in literature." 
 
 These w6r3s~wereTlie first seismic tremors 
 in my new heavens and new earth. They 
 set my wits a-swimming, troubled me with 
 apprehension of possible limitation in him, 
 and finally coerced me into a collision which 
 I regard as ridiculous enough now, but which 
 my conscience will not permit me to con- 
 ceal, because the experience is a valuable 
 object-lesson to the young men, to whom this 
 narrative primarily speaks ; and because it 
 illustrates Mr._ Emerson's peculiar and 
 wholesome ways with his_ lo,vers, emanci- 
 pating them byjaying theni even from him- 
 self. ^Uthefreaders will not be interested in 
 "these juvenile hysterics. After setting down 
 in my journal his conversation for the day, 
 I could not restrain the expression of my 
 doubts. As they are necessary to a full un- 
 derstanding of the situation, I will venture 
 to transcribe the passage as follows : — 
 
 " Mr. Emerson said to-day that no one 
 ought to write as Hawthorne has. I did 
 not ask him what he meant. This is of no 
 use with him. He talks in riddles, or, I 
 should say, rebuses, so perspicuous and pic- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 57 
 
 turesque are words, and one has to guess 
 his meaning. This is not difficult often ; 
 and to-day I am pretty sure he was referring 
 to the nether side of human experience com- 
 memorated by Hawthorne, for he spoke in 
 connection of King's meLmcholy verse, and 
 said he would not read ' Les Miserables ' 
 because the subjects and treatment are not 
 cheerful. It-£annat_be thathe, a guide in 
 morals, persistently shuts his eyes to -the- only 
 class of_facts which makes morals neces- 
 sary? 
 
 "He tells me to read the Eastern theo- 
 logical books — bibles, he calls thera — and a 
 long and starving Ramadan have I had with 
 them ; but how can he have read and endorse 
 them? Their inspiration is of the pall, their 
 language of the grave ; their message, what 
 there is of it, is covered with vapours of the 
 tomb. In Saadi, Hafiz, and the rest, whom 
 he so warmly approves, what else is there 
 but the same tragic story, lightened, per- 
 haps, with sentiment and fancy ? The whole 
 oriental literature, so far as I know it, is an 
 elegy. 
 
 " In our Bible, ' darkness broods ' from 
 Genesis to Revelation. A bleak wind 
 blows through all the History, the Kings, 
 
$8 Talks with 
 
 the Judges, the dithyramb of Solomon and 
 lyrics of David, Job's story of doubt and 
 despair. Then there are the prophets. 
 Their very word is a ' burden ; ' their thun- 
 derbolts echo from skies heavy and black, 
 and the lofty Ideal their lightnings mo- 
 mentarily disclose is a ' Man of sorrows, 
 and acquainted with grief.' When he 
 
 comes Oh, the breath of Calvary ! 
 
 How can a morality one ' shall ' — to use 
 Mr. Emerson's own word — trust be built 
 up and blink these facts of the dawn of 
 religion ? 
 
 " Martyrs have given the Church its 
 manliest life ; so only did it become brave 
 and saintly. 
 
 "If ever a literature respired 'the sad,' 
 surely the Greek does and the Latin. 
 There Destiny is omnipresent. Its misty 
 fane is the only one in the countless tem- 
 ples whose crowd of unsacred divinities 
 and gods makes a godless materialism that 
 presents no obscure glimmer of hope, and 
 is the mantle of their followers' philosophy. 
 Lucretius, and even Plato, trace their 
 thought as if on sable shrouds. Where is 
 the classic tragedy that does not labour 
 under the stress and dirge of the unlifted 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 59 
 
 cloud of Fate ? It makes even the com- 
 edies shudder. Anacreon knows well of 
 
 "Death, with his head wrapped in gloom ; " 
 Lesbia's and Sulpicia's kisses are ' mingled 
 with sad tears,' their foreheads are bowed 
 earthward with chaplets of cypress, and 
 even their laughter is ephemeral, like that 
 of Virgil's Lalage and Daphne, caught 
 again after all the years by the lips of 
 Keats. From Tibullus to Tom Moore, the 
 jocund chansons are twined with the blos- 
 soms of the tomb. The worm of the grave 
 trails over the page of Horace. He spoke 
 approvingly of my portrait of Dante yonder 
 on the wall. But what is the story of those 
 features ? They are born of night and filled 
 with it. He has brought me to Chaucer. 
 (Why did I not find him earlier?) But all 
 the pictures of this the father and mother 
 spirit are shaded with dark colours. Then 
 there is Shakspeare. Master, what has been 
 thy coined gold of speech, so chary with its 
 largess, of him ! But too faithful is he to hu- 
 manity to conceal its myriad miseries, and 
 how transparent is his own sorrow in the 
 sonnets ? 
 
 " I wonder if he would forbid the sights 
 blind Milton saw ? But what poems are 
 
6o Talks with 
 
 these — ' Paradise Lost,' ' Samson Ago- 
 nistes/ and ' II Penseroso ! ' 
 
 "Ah no, Brother Moschus, you may not 
 escape this cadence of the minor chord. Its 
 vibration is felt in all our literature. 
 
 " There must be something deeper in all 
 this than the effort of the mind of man in in- 
 vestigating the problems of his being and tlie 
 unintelligible universe. May it not be that the 
 mystery of expression, itself impenetrable and 
 elusive, haunts with its tantalizing irony the 
 pursuit of the unutterable secret, and results 
 necessarily in wounded endeavour ? Allans'' 
 
 The next day, full of these trist thoughts, 
 at the cost of a struggle, but with a youth's 
 temerity, I told Mr. Emerson of my inability 
 to accept his statements on this matter as I 
 understood them. He heard me patiently, 
 watched my quivering lips a moment, and 
 then said briefly, but with beaming glance — 
 
 'Ufery__weU;__JL_dQ_jiot^wish_disciples.'' 
 And now I see that the occurrence coricealed 
 a crisis in our affairs. For from this time 
 disappeared in his pupil the boyish and 
 servile acquiescence, and I doubt not in 
 the master the feeling of nausea it could not 
 but cause. The release saved me my friend, 
 and made of his friendship a greater blessing ; 
 
* Ralph Waldo Emerson. 6i 
 
 even as the vision came again and tarried 
 with the monk after he had shown himself to 
 be worthy of it. 
 
 This was a long step toward manhood ; but 
 the remarkable reply held for me a still deeper 
 teaching, and one yet more psychologically 
 formative, in that it exhibited to me the 
 foolish habit I had fallen into of concerning 
 myself with my friend's wares rather than 
 himself. And afterwards I found myself less 
 and less drawn by Mr. Emerson's opinions, 
 advice, literary judgments, etc. Not that they 
 did not interest me. One would have to be 
 less or more than human not to respond to 
 these unique and wise overflowings of insight 
 and experience. But now I saw there was a 
 far richer gift aloof from these and in reserve, 
 namely, the personality of the man himself. 
 And to all youth I would say, recognize this 
 in every great soul with whom you come in 
 contact — the power that is his that made him 
 wh^t he is. It is more to you than all his 
 esoteric facts and ideas. He conveys it to 
 you ill what he sayS,'and in what he omits 
 to say ; in his laches and lapses ; and it is 
 his greatest gift that he has such life adequate 
 to survive the deadening and mechanical 
 processes through which he has been com- 
 
62 Talks with 
 
 pelled to come to you in his books and give 
 you himself. 
 
 Of American contemporaries Mr. Emerson 
 spoke as follows : — 
 
 "The connecting link between England and 
 America is Oliver Wendell Holmes. If that 
 acute-minded man had been born in England, 
 they would never have tired of making much 
 of him. He has the finest sensibility, and 
 that catholicity of taste without which no 
 large and generous nature can be developed. 
 Everything interests him. He has phases 
 which make him welcome as well to Bacchus 
 as Minerva. Open to Euphrosyne? Yes, 
 and to Eresicthon ! 
 
 "Jaijies Russell Lowell is a man M sot..; a 
 genial man, of good inspirations, who can 
 write^oems of wit and something better. It 
 does one good to read him. He ,ias a good 
 deal of self-consciousness, and never forgave 
 Margaret Fuller and Thoreau for wounding it. 
 „ " ' Leaves of Grass,' by Walt Whitman, is a 
 ''book you must certainly read. It is won- 
 ^Srful. I had great hopes of Whitman until 
 he became Bohemian. He contrasts with 
 Foe, who had an uncommon facility for 
 rhyme, a happy jingle. Poe might have 
 become much had he been capable of self- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 63 
 
 direction. Thoreau was attracted to New 
 York to see Whitman." 
 
 Mr. Emerson said this as if it were at once 
 a compHment and endorsement, and re- 
 marked upon the attraction as being " psycho- 
 logical." 
 
 He spoke of Daniel Webster as " deformed. 
 Every drop of his blood had eyes that looked 
 downward. He knew the heroes of '76 well 
 enough ; he did not know the heroes of his 
 own day when he met them on the streets. 
 He became to me the type of decay. To 
 gain his ambition, he gave ease, pleasure, 
 happiness, wealth; and then added honour 
 and truth. He had a wonderful intellect; 
 but of what importance is that when the rest 
 of the man is gone? He was oblivious of 
 consequences, and " — after a pause — " con- 
 sequently oblivion." 
 
 Of Forceythe Willson he spoke with great 
 regret : — 
 
 " There we were,'' he said, " Lorigfellow, 
 Whittier, Channing, all of us, writing letters 
 to our friends in Michigan, Indiana, every- 
 where, to find who and where was the poet 
 that was delighting us so ; and all the time he 
 lived in his own hermit-hut, not a stone's 
 throw from Mr. Lowell's house in Cambridge. 
 
64 Talks with 
 
 You remember his parting song ? It far sur- 
 passes Poe in his most peculiar vein ; " and 
 he quoted slowly : — 
 
 " This is the burden of the heart, 
 The burden that it always bore ; 
 
 We live to love, we meet to part. 
 And part to meet on earth no more ; 
 
 We clasp each other to the heart, 
 And part to meet on earth no more. 
 
 Of Hawthorne, Mr. Emerson spoke hesi- 
 tatingly, as if not fully aware of the quality 
 of that tenebrous mind. He characterized 
 the account of Brook Farm in the " Blithes- 
 dale Romance " as "untrue." " Hawthorne," 
 he said, " lived afar from us. He was always 
 haunted by his ancestry, who spelt the name 
 Hathorne. His gait and moods were of the 
 sea. He had kinship to pirates and sailors. 
 What was it Channing wrote by inspiration 
 from him ? 
 
 " ' Unceasing roll the deep green waves, 
 And crash their cannon down the sand.' 
 
 But his writings are of the terrible, the 
 grotesque, and sombre. There is nothing 
 joyous in them. He resisted the light. 
 His genius was for the unhappy and nether 
 side. It is the same way with Hugo. No 
 man ought to write so. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 65 
 
 " Abbott wrote a pitiful book about Napo- 
 leon ; but he was a wonderful man enough — 
 always fell on his feet. The best memoirs of 
 hira are those of Leuzier. Scott is too 
 British ; O'Meara, the Irish surgeon, writes 
 well of him — a little low, untutored, rough ; 
 but he had personal access, and Napoleon 
 breathed through all the men about him. 
 What was that he said about making his 
 generals out of mud ? His meanness, which 
 could speak no chivalric word, spoke there, 
 but it spoke fact" 
 
 Of Agassiz he quoted : — 
 
 "Nature selects some man, who is im- 
 pressionable, thoughtful, simple-hearted, and 
 conducts him softly to some one of her little 
 closets, and bids him enter; and when he 
 comes back, the world stands still to know 
 what he learned there. When a created 
 thing gets an interpreter, it crowns him.'' 
 
 And of Everett and Ticknor : — 
 
 "Edward Everett and George Ticknor 
 were men especially excellent in the modern 
 languages. The golden time of Everett's 
 life was when he was Professor of Greek at 
 Cambridge. He did more real good there 
 than as senator or governor. He had a fine 
 conception of Greece, and a genius for the 
 
66 Talks with Emerson. 
 
 Greek language. He returned from Europe, 
 and was professor to the class above me 
 when I was a student. As a college president 
 he was not successful. He noticed little 
 things too much, as whether an undergraduate 
 touched his hat to him or not, and the 
 students hated him. Therefore he resigned." 
 
CONCORD. 
 
CONCORD. 
 
 Sacred village,, whose every bush burns with 
 the fire its iminortak have Jeft! Whither 
 shall the devout pilgrim who would breathe 
 the noblest inspirations with which the New 
 World has yet been blessed turn, if not 
 thither? And for the youth who would 
 nourish his soul with high ambitions and 
 electrify it with rare associations, is there any 
 atmosphere like that of the revolutionary 
 battlefield with Emerson's historic inscrip- 
 tion, — the classic river that lisps as it flows ; 
 the hermit lake Walden; the eloquent cairn; 
 the " wood-lots," domestic but shadowy, 
 where the minute life celebrated by Haw- 
 thorne toils through Sisyphean days, — and 
 all the scenes made precious by the victories 
 they have witnessed ? 
 
 Thoreau's faith was in Concord. His 
 motto was : " Ne quid quasiveris extra te 
 Concordiamgue.'' But Concord in a spiritual 
 sense is in William EUery Channing's " Wan- 
 
72 Talks with 
 
 derer,'' and those who cannot know directly 
 its inspirations will find them as nearly as 
 such gracious influences can survive the book- 
 making ordeal in that little volume. Mr. 
 Channing erwandert Concord. The " old 
 Virginia road " was familiar with his person. 
 He knew even better than Thoreautheuplands' 
 every precinct and meadows, penetrated in 
 all directions the woods and groves and 
 marshes, rowed the ponds, and swam the 
 rivers. With bright humour he alludes to his 
 experiences : "Fatigue, blazing sun, face par- 
 boiled, the pint cup never scoured, shaving 
 unutterable, stockings dreary having taken to 
 peat." His descriptions were made realistic 
 by these daily exposures year after year, 
 saturated, so to say, with the sunshine and 
 the humidity of the Middlesex woods. As 
 a friend said, " We saw his dripping hair and 
 exhausted body, but he had found the labo- 
 ratory of the gods, the earthly Alhambra." 
 Mr. Emerson quoted to me from the " Sea 
 Scene " (not a portion of " The Wanderer") : 
 
 " The purple kelp waves to and fro. 
 
 The white gulls, curving, scream along ; 
 They fear not thy funereal song. 
 Nor the long surf that combs to snow." 
 
 Of Margaret Fuller he spoke much at one 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 73 
 
 time and another, but nothing that teaches, 
 unless it is the following : — 
 
 " I was amused with what she said of 
 Bettine Brentano— something like this : ' She 
 has not pride enough. Only when I am 
 sure of myself would I pour out my soul at 
 the feet of another. In the assured soul it 
 is kingly prodigality; in one which cannot 
 forbear, it is babyhood.' " 
 
 He repeated the word "kingly" with a 
 musing circumflex, as if another woman would 
 have used a different gender, and added — 
 
 " But she would need be certain of her 
 lover as well as herself — which Bettine could 
 not be. There is something, too, in the lover. 
 Margaret never met Goethe. 
 
 " We all had to regret a single trait in 
 Margaret. Dr. Channing characteristically 
 referred to it once when she was a guest in 
 his own house, somewhat in this wise — 
 
 " ' Miss Fuller, when I consider that you 
 
 are and have all that Miss has so long 
 
 wished for, and that you scorn her, and that 
 she still admires you, I think her place in 
 heaven will be very high.' 
 
 " Margaret," Mr. Emerson concluded, 
 " was a strange woman. Her eyes in some 
 moods were visible at night, and her hair 
 
74 Talks with 
 
 apparently lightened and darkened. She had 
 
 /unconscious clairvoyant instincts, and could 
 
 Vead the fortune in the human face. She 
 
 Tyas most inspired when in pain. What she 
 
 w^ote me is expressive of her deepest nature — 
 
 '* ' With the intellect I always have, always 
 shall, overcome; but that is not the half 
 of the work. The life, the life ! Oh, my 
 God ! shall the life never be sweet ? ' " 
 
 The flame was in the heart of this dazzling 
 woman. If Emerson was the brain of the 
 Concord circle, Margaret Fuller was its blood. 
 
 Of this group — the most conspicuous in 
 its domain that has ever existed in America 
 — Mr. Emerson was easily chief. And 
 during his strongest years, perhaps he was 
 more. There was something "catching" 
 about him. No one could exactly explain 
 or even understand it, but every one was 
 sensible of it; so that his friends in Eng- 
 land and America felt called upon to warn 
 admirers that they must be on their guard, 
 and if they sought a familiarity closer than 
 his pocket edition, not be carried too far, 
 for he could not encourage an imitator. 
 Amusing stories have been told of charac- 
 teristic exaggerations resulting from too 
 much Emerson in the neighbourhood. In- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 75 
 
 deed, one had to be more than human 
 to remain in the presence of a nature so 
 orgasmic and not betray the fact. He w^s 
 not a man to be approached closely, nor 
 was it well to be loved by him too dearly. 
 ThoTeau felt the perilous singling until his 
 mode of speaking and tones caught the trick 
 of Emerson's so nearly that the two men 
 could hardly be separated in conversation. 
 What wonder that Channing, Bartol, Alcott, 
 and the rest, strong and stately men — more 
 than that, among the heavenliest bodies our 
 material New World has seen — felt to some 
 slight deflection of their orbit the uninten- 
 tional, if not unconscious attraction of the 
 mild Jupiter so near them! Margaret Ful- 
 ler fled and saved herself. Hawthorne's rare 
 and solitary genius sought and held its 
 own, and he tarried in his own twilight. 
 The fact is, no one, meeting^ JEmerson was 
 ever the-sam'e again;-- His-.natural force was 
 so resistless, and so imperceptible that it 
 commanded -men before they were aware. 
 Leaders, scholars of high cultivation, theorists, 
 and men of thought de vieille roche, who visited 
 the lonely eminence where he dwelt apart, 
 noticed the contagion. Then there were 
 others, a curious throng, themselves often 
 
76 Talks with 
 
 curiosities, who came. Concord contained 
 during Emerson's solstitial years a great 
 light-house, shining far and wide, and show- 
 ing many ships their goal, but covered with 
 the shreds of wrecked barks and birds of all 
 imaginable shapes — and some unimaginable 
 — which had been attracted by its clear, 
 cold, solitary flame. How many, just saved 
 from the fire, but the wax of their wings for 
 ever melted, went hopping about the country 
 with a bit of Emerson in their mouths, dis- 
 seminating ordinariness and indistinctness, 
 offering the mime for the Miracle Play ! 
 
 Bo-tof ThflEeau, that hypethral and sepa- 
 rated "man,- I cannot say enough. Of no. one 
 did Mr. Emerson talk so often and tenderly. 
 The relation between the two needs a clearer 
 understarrdifig. Emerson made Thoreau ; 
 I he was'the-ehild of Emerson, as if of his own 
 ■j flesh. The elder took- the^ounger fresh 
 from cpUege (rgther drowsy ; and he dozed 
 after his return, but the woods and rivers of 
 Concord were his college). Emerson woke 
 him, gave him his start, and immediately 
 and astonishingly nourished him. He lived 
 much at Emerson's house, kept the gar- 
 den * and the home while their master 
 
 * Mr, Emenson was a man of meditation for whom 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. jj 
 
 was absent in Europe, and instructed him in 
 the mysteries of grafting and parsley. 
 
 Emerson called him "My Spartan-Buddhist, 
 Henry," "My Henry Thoreau." With no 
 one was he so intimate, until the disciple 
 became as his master, adopting his accent 
 and form, realizing his attractions and 
 antipathies, and knowing his good and eviL 
 The development of this sturdy bud into its 
 sturdier flower was a perpetual delight to the 
 philosopher. In Thoreau, he lived himself 
 over again. ,_ He said he liked Thoreau 
 because " he had the courage of his convic- 
 tions," but I think he meant his own convic- 
 tions.* In both we mark the same features : 
 as a severe and outre way of looking at events, 
 and a searching for lessons in them ; avoid- 
 ance of association; determination toward 
 the expression of their ideals in their life; 
 choice of straitened ways over broad ones, 
 
 action was too severe ; and his success at garden 
 tending is suggested by the expostulation of his son, 
 who, alarmed at certain gestures with the spade, 
 cautioned as follows: "Look out, papal you'll dig 
 your leg." 
 
 * " I told H. T. that his freedom was in the form, 
 but he does not disclose new matter. I am familiar 
 with all his thoughts ; they are mine, quite originally 
 dressed " (Cabotl. 
 
78 Talks with 
 
 and refusal to turn aside for livings, rewards, 
 and comforts ; jealousy of domestic and local 
 intellectual restraints, even to discontent 
 with the pressure of the average public senti- 
 ment; intolerance of make-shifts; keeping 
 away from court rooms, newspapers, and 
 presidents' messages ; " reading, not the Times, 
 but the Eternities," as one said ; " Standing 
 every man alone on his own peak," as the 
 other said But the similarity does not go 
 much beyond these limitations. Though 
 Emerson was larger, Thoreau was the more 
 concentrated and sinewy of the two ; and, 
 once beginning to carry out the parent's 
 discipline and thought into his own life, he 
 was uncompromising ; and the end was not 
 seen, nor to be anticipated. He ceased to 
 be illustrator and personifier, or in any sense 
 derived. His movements, which had been 
 projectile, a recognition of the elder's 
 thorough and wholesome methods, now went 
 far beyond them ; and, thenceforward, this 
 resolute man advanced his own kinetic 
 principles, and went his own way to his own 
 life. As of himself he said — 
 
 " But after manned him for his own stronghold." 
 And, thereafter, though dwelling in Con- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. ^g 
 
 cord, he lived in a far country, and was 
 differentiated to almost a distinct species. 
 
 The variations began soon, and his loyalty 
 plunged him occasionally into dramatic 
 situations. I shall never forget with what 
 gusto Mr. Emerson related to me the story 
 of Thoreau's constancy to his political reso- 
 lutions created by John Brown's execution, 
 and his amusing week of incarceration : — 
 
 " He was served with the writ of arrest on 
 his way to the shoe-shop; but he kept on, 
 his shoe in his pail, to have them both 
 mended." 
 
 " Henry was," continued Mr. Emerson, 
 "homelyTn appearance, a rugged stone hewn 
 from the cliff. I believe it is accorded to 
 all men to be moderately homely; but he 
 surpassed sex. He had a beautiful- smile 
 and an earnest look. His character reminds 
 me -of~Massillon. One could jeopard any- 
 thing~offhim. A limpid man, a realist with 
 caustic eyes that looked through all words 
 and shows and bearing with terrible percep- 
 tion ! He.was a greater Stoic jthan Zenq or 
 Scsevola or Xenophanes — greater, because 
 nothing of ijnpiirity clungJo_him, a man 
 whosfe core and- whose breath was conscience ; 
 and not one of those giants, not one of 
 
8o Talks with 
 
 Europe's best, not Pitt or Burke or Grattan, 
 but could come to him and say, Peccavi. 
 His fault was that he brought nothing near 
 to his heart ; he kept all influences toward 
 his extremities. Exaggerated moods we all 
 have to suppress ; for some amiability, or 
 at least reciprocity, are necessary to make 
 society possible. But he thought and said 
 that society is always diseased, and the best 
 mosj, so. Men of note would come to talk 
 with him. 
 
 " ' I don't know,' he would say ; * perhaps 
 a minute would be enough for both of us.' 
 
 " ' But I come to walk with you when you 
 take your exercise.' 
 
 " ' Ah, walking — that is my holy .tiineJ- 
 
 " And yet he was not a grave or austere 
 man. I remember he made us all laugh 
 with his accounts of what he sometimes saw 
 in his walks. What was that he told me of 
 the young Irishman whom he found kneeling 
 before his mother in the attitude of prayer ? 
 But, drawing nearer, he discovered that the 
 posture of the worshipper was merely in 
 order that his mother might remove a dust 
 particle from his eye with her tongue ! 
 
 " His energy was exhausted in projecting a 
 new path. He could not follow an old one, 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 8i 
 
 even when it was better for him. He 
 believed "things are lies because words are. 
 
 " He was an out of doors man. He 
 would stand in the snow for hours measuring 
 the increments in the growth of trees. These 
 and other similar excesses brought on an 
 affection of the throat which caused his end. 
 He suffered with a stoicism beyond the race, 
 and died in great pain, nobly, refusing opiates, 
 yielding himself to death during sleepless 
 nights and days. 
 
 " His ideas of living have been condemned, 
 but let us remember he lived them out. A 
 Mr. Cholmondeley,* an English gentleman 
 and graduate of Oxford, boarded while here 
 with his mother ; and, becoming much 
 attached to him, wished him to accompany 
 himself to the mountains of the Yellowstone, 
 and afterwards to South America, engaging 
 to defray all expenses. But not only to 
 
 • Some indication as to the antecedents of this 
 gentleman may be gleaned from the following ex- 
 tracts from Horace Walpole's correspondence : — 
 
 "My nephew, Lord Cholmondeley, the banker h 
 la mode, has been demolished " (Horace Walpole to 
 the Earl of Stafford, August 5, 1771). 
 
 " I am very sensible of your lordship's kindness to 
 my nephew, Mr. Cholmondeley " (The same to the 
 same, October 3, 1788). 
 
 G 
 
82 Talks with 
 
 those invitations, but also to another of a 
 trip across the States, Thoreau returned the 
 unvarying response — 
 
 " ' I think I had better stay in Concord.' 
 " On one of these occasions, Cholmondeley 
 enlarged fancifully upon the Hamadryads 
 that would be found lurking among the 
 Druidical forests about New Orleans, and 
 the gorgeousness of the flora they would find 
 on the Amazon River, mentioning particularly 
 the Victoria Regia. 
 
 " 'And I am expecting to find some day 
 the Victoria Regia on Concord River,' he 
 
 said." 
 
 The Victoria Regia for every man, he 
 may have meant, is to be found in the duty 
 at his own doorway — a habit of thought 
 characteristically Emerson's.* 
 
 "He refused on graduating from Harvard 
 to take his degree ; ' It isn't worth five 
 dollars, he said. 
 
 * When in Naples (the first time) he wrote in his 
 diary longing for 
 
 " the fogs 
 Of close, low pine-woods in a river town ; " 
 
 and he informed his brother from Paris that his own 
 study was the place for him ; and there was always 
 more of fine society in his own little town than he 
 could command. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 83 
 
 " I have always tliought that he did not do 
 justice to the influence of his college in 
 forming him. 
 
 " Though living in_ci3dlizaiionj- he was the 
 keenest observer of external .nature. I hare 
 evgi^^een. He had the trained sense of the 
 Indian, eyes that saw in the night, his own 
 way of threading the woods and fields, so 
 that he felt his path through them in the 
 densest night, without delay or interruption. 
 He would hear a partridge fly into a bush 
 in the dark of dawn, and guide you to the 
 spot after tiay unerringly. The tread and 
 trail of wild creatures were apparent to him 
 by sight, hearing, and, I believe, smell ; for 
 he said that the mud-turtle obtained its 
 peculiar odour after spring has come, like 
 other flowers'' 
 
 Turtles were an object of contemplation 
 to Thoreau. Of them he wrote : — 
 
 " I am affected by the thought that the 
 earth nurses their eggs. They are planted 
 in the earth, and the earth takes care of 
 them ; she is genial to them, and does not 
 kill thera. This mother is not merely in- 
 animate and inorganic. Though the imme- 
 diate mother turtle abandons her offspring, 
 the earth and sun are kind to them. The 
 
84 Talks with 
 
 old turtle on which the earth rests takes 
 care of them, while the other waddles off." 
 
 " He was wont to assert that even in the 
 oldest woods one could see foreign pheno- 
 mena, if always on the watch with direct 
 eyes and the right perception. And so he 
 insisted that he found revolutionary army cans 
 and the red Polar snow near the ponds of 
 Fair Haven ; and the Labrador Lediiim, 
 Kalmia Glauca, Canadian Lynx, a stormy 
 petrel, and the little auk with the tanager, 
 in the meadow of Sudbury. Perhaps he 
 idealized his vision, for he confessed : — 
 
 " ' There is no power to see in the eye 
 Itself, any more than in any other jelly ; we 
 cannot see anything till we are possessed 
 with the idea of it. First, the idea or the 
 image of the plant occupies my thoughts, and 
 at length I surely see it, though it may seem 
 as foreign to this locality as Hudson's Bay 
 is.' " 
 
 As confirming Mr. Emerson's impression, 
 I might quote from Thoreau himself: — 
 
 " Fair Haven pond, seen from the cliffs in 
 the moonlight, is a sheeny lake, apparently a 
 boundless primitive forest, untrodden by 
 man ; the windy surf sounding freshly and 
 wildly in the single pine behind you, the 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 85 
 
 silence of hushed wolves in the wilderness, 
 and, as you fancy, moose looking off from 
 the shores of the lake ; the stars of poetry 
 and history and unexplored nature looking 
 down on the scene. This light and this 
 hour take the civilization all out of the land- 
 scape." He was especially happy in fore- 
 casting spring. He noted earliest of all 
 the disappearance of that lover of winter, 
 the prince's pine, and recognized first her 
 young grasses and vetches ; the coming of 
 the utricularia ; the spirit-like houstonia, 
 and the mayflower epigsea. He knew 
 as well the autumn ensigns, the yellow 
 broom and golden-rod ; the red berries 
 of the trailing arbutus; the purplish-white 
 flowers of the Mikania scandens and poly- 
 gonum, biding by stream-sides. He heard 
 first the hyla in the marsh, the swamp-frog 
 and veery. Some years he was fortunate 
 enough to detect in the morning twilights a 
 peculiar roseate tongue or halo, the snood 
 of Spring herself, and even her outline 
 in the peculiar light of the moon as re- 
 flected from the higher hills and mountains. 
 He always felt (insensible to us) the coming 
 heat fluent between the earth-crust ai»d 
 branches. 
 
86 Talks with 
 
 " The fibre of nature was all through his 
 joints and marrow, and through life he wore 
 her livery. I don't know how long ago, far 
 away in his ancestry (he said he was descended 
 from the Northman, Thorer the dog-footed), 
 she planned him, measured him for his suit. 
 
 " He will be blamed for his shortcomings in 
 natural science, of which he made a profession; 
 but his early death should be remembered. 
 
 " He understood the flora and the birds, but 
 not the rocks. Out of doors he used instead 
 of a gun a spy-glass. 'A gun,' he said, 
 ' gives you the body, not the bird.' He 
 would trace a fish-hawk to her nest; and 
 then, examining the debris at the bottom, he 
 would find out more about the nature of the 
 fish-hawk than the veriest sportsman of them 
 all. He was a naturalist, but also a poet, 
 and would have penetrated from all external 
 aspects of nature to the secrets of her heart. 
 She always gave him a quick home and 
 shelter — always just the tree at hand, with its 
 low sloping branches ready for the poles and 
 roof, and the boughs and foliage of spruce 
 for a bed on which to cast his blanket. No 
 sweeter sleeps than those ! He saturated 
 himself with the growing wheat until he came 
 himself to be a bearded blade. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 87 
 
 " His out of doors life made him sensitive 
 within doors, so that he could endure the 
 atmosphere of few houses. He used to say, 
 by night every dweUing gives out bad air like 
 a slaughter-house. 
 
 " Things happened to him, came to him as 
 they will to lovers of the woods and fields. 
 
 "I remember once a friend accosted him 
 while they were walking with a request for 
 an arrow-head, if he should ever find one, 
 lamenting how fruitlessly he had searched 
 for one. 
 
 " ' They are rare,' said Thoreau, stooping 
 and picking up a fragment of earth-covered 
 substance he saw in the sod ; ' and now that 
 you have an opportunity, you had better 
 examine this ! ' And he presented a fine 
 specimen from which he finished disengaging 
 the earth-rust. An accident ? I do not 
 know. Sometimes I have thought the entire 
 woods were a cache for him ; he had such 
 secrets of hiding things and finding them 
 again. His invention of a new^ lead pencil 
 was quite characteristical. He could buy 
 none that would suit him, so he determined 
 to make some. After close study and ex- 
 periment, he produced the most excellent 
 pencil I have ever seen, and manuYactured 
 
88 Talks with 
 
 some hundreds of them, which he distributed 
 among his friends. A few found their way 
 to a neighbouring city, and he was approached 
 by capitalists with hberal offers to manufacture 
 them in quantities for commercial purposes. 
 But he refused, with the remark that he 
 merely wished to make a good pencil for his 
 own use; and the secret died with him. 
 He overflowed with ridicule for household 
 utensils, etc., such as the store-keepers offer, 
 and the few such things he used he provided 
 for himself, and they were much superior 
 and more convenient. Did he want a port- 
 manteau or box? Forthwith he produced 
 it, stripping the bark off a tree, joining by 
 dovetail without tack or nail, and chamfering 
 the edges and bottom. 
 
 " He was a close student of a few books. 
 He liked the ethnic scriptures. Cholmon- 
 deley had given him some rare and costly 
 copies of the Bhagavad-Gita and other bibles. 
 His style has been sometimes criticized as 
 opaque, but that is a quality frequently found 
 in the reader. It was a style that refused 
 compromise as did the man. ' If the spirit 
 of poetry,' he said, ' chooses to descend upon 
 me as I stand still, it is well ; if not, I will 
 not go in search of her. Here, on this rugged 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 89 
 
 soil of Massachusetts, I take my stand, 
 baring my brow to the breeze of my own 
 country and invoking the genius of my own 
 words.' 
 
 " It is better to translate him than Epictetus 
 or Marcus Antoninus. He looked inward, 
 inward at the soul of things. Conscientious, 
 earnest, he talked in plain words to the 
 superstitious, and commanded his publishers 
 not to change a line. Thus his pages seem 
 profane and sometimes blasphemous. He 
 did not hesitate at shocking any weather- 
 worn creed or belief. Men called him 
 sceptic ; but he was too conscientious to go 
 to church. It was curious how much his 
 opinion was sought, considering how much 
 it was derided. No sooner did any extra- 
 ordinary news arrive than every one must 
 know what Thoreau thought about the last 
 happening. His poetry is of a new order. 
 The poem on Smoke is instinct with the 
 spirit of Simonides : — 
 
 ' Light-winged Smoke ! Icarian bird, 
 Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight ; 
 Lark without song, and messenger of dawn. 
 Circling above the hamlets as thy nest ; 
 Or else, departing dream and shadowy form 
 Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts ; 
 
90 Talks with 
 
 By night star- veiling, and by day 
 Darkening the light, and blotting out the sun. 
 Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth. 
 And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.' 
 
 " He was penetrated with the elder classical 
 influence ; he breathed the antique. Yet it 
 was impossible for him to copy words or 
 anything. 
 
 " There was during his literary life between 
 himself and Mr. Ticknor an inequality of 
 temperament and taste, by which the publish- 
 mg house of that gentleman was always pre- 
 vented from doing Thoreau justice. Con- 
 sequently, the Atlantic has published for 
 Thoreau, but not his best work. Mr. Greeley 
 was his most influential publishing friend. 
 Thoreau has an always increasing number 
 of readers, and the selectest class of any 
 American in all Christendom. The 'Week 
 on the Concord River ' is his noblest work, 
 pervaded with dehghtful ideas. And you 
 must have the ' Letters and Select Poems ' 
 of his I have lately edited. I will give them 
 to you. 
 
 " He had a great contempt for those who 
 made no effort to gauge accurately their own 
 powers and weaknesses, and by no means 
 spared himself, of whom he said that a man 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 91 
 
 gathers materials to erect a palace, and finally 
 concludes to build a shantee with them. 
 
 '"You have heard from a great many,' he 
 wrote to a friend in Springfield. ' How 
 long since you had a letter from yourself?' 
 
 " ' You pay yourself for your riches,' he 
 wrote again ; ' what becomes oA you 1 ' " 
 
 Others of Thoreau's ion mots, approved by 
 Mr. Emerson, I treasured : — 
 
 " Occasion wears front hair.'' 
 
 "A poor man's cow, a rich man's child 
 dies.'' 
 
 "Sleep is half a dinner." 
 
 " Good heart, weak head." 
 
 " What men do, not what they promise. 
 
 •' People are less careful to avoid evil than 
 its appearance." 
 
 "No animal is so patient as the fretful 
 porcupine." 
 
 "Let the muse lead the muse. If the 
 muse accompany, she is no muse, but an 
 amusement." 
 
 " It is the art of mankind to polish the 
 world, and every one who works is scrubbing 
 in some part." 
 
 " Could there be an accident so sad as to 
 be respected for something better than we 
 are?" 
 
92 Talks with 
 
 " If we made the true distinction, we should 
 almost all of us be seen to be in the alms- 
 house for souls." 
 
 " Who is most dead — a hero by whose 
 monument you stand, or his descendants of 
 whom you never heard ? " 
 
 " The farmer is an enchanted labourer.'' 
 
 " Never, except in the case of women and 
 children, act on the supposition that people's 
 regard for you can be higher than yours for 
 them." 
 
 " Sometimes we are inclined to class those 
 who are once-and-a-half witted with the half- 
 witted, because we appreciate only a third of 
 their wit." 
 
 And from Saadi : — 
 
 " Ketp the door to your mouth shut, and 
 I cannot tell whether you deal in jewels or 
 small ware." 
 
 " The cat is a tiger to the mouse, but is 
 herself a mouse to the tiger." 
 
 "When you determine to fight, be sure 
 that you are stronger than your adversary, or 
 that you have a swifter pair of heels." 
 
 " Of a truth every one is born with a 
 tendency to Islamism, and it is owing to his 
 parents his becoming a Jew, a Christian, or a 
 Majoosie." 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 93 
 
 "To the nymphs of paradise purgatory 
 would be hell, and ask the inhabitants of 
 hell whether purgatory is not paradise." 
 
 " O Lord of the World ! Those who are 
 Zihids will not accept of money ; and they 
 who have money are not Zahids." 
 
 Emerson quoted not seldom as from 
 
 Thoreau the figure — - 
 
 " When Autumn bleeds 
 In all the maples ; " 
 
 and said the following from Ennius was often 
 on Thoreau's lips — 
 
 ' ' Ego deum genus did et dicam ccelitum, 
 Sed eos non curare^ opinor^ quid agat humanum 
 
 genus ; 
 Nam, si curenf^ bene bonis sit, male malis quod nunc 
 abesl." 
 
 And this from Shelley — 
 
 " The day that dawns in fire will die in storms, 
 Even though the noon be calm." 
 
 It was Thoreau's theory that the universe 
 grows by destruction of itself. The process 
 of development from the nebulous completes 
 its decay. 
 
 " And thefts from satellites and rings 
 And broken stars I drew ; 
 And out of spent and aged things 
 I framed the world anew. " 
 
94 Talks wirtr 
 
 His belief is epitomized in Pindar's eighth 
 Olympic — 
 
 " A man doing fit things 
 Forgets Hades." 
 
 Nec quid hymen quid amor quid sint connubia 
 curat. 
 
 The bark foundered too early, but surely 
 it sails another sea ? 
 
 It was not easy for human nature to 
 honour one who honoured not it, and so he 
 lived in antagonism outward or inward with 
 most of those he met He was a forsaken 
 traveller on a solitary roadway through the 
 land of Noman, and few there be that find it. 
 Emerson referred to him the words — 
 
 " I can see no one who is able to fill the 
 place he has left here, no causes at work to 
 produce one who even has a tendency to fill 
 it." 
 
 To Parker Pillsbury, who approached him 
 on the subject of religion the winter before 
 his death, he replied gently, " One world at 
 a time," 
 
 It was a grim day that he was borne from 
 the village meeting-house to his grave near 
 Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow. Only a little 
 company of friends were present Mr. 
 
Ralfh Waldo Emerson. 95 
 
 Emerson spoke a few words after the coffin 
 was lowered. 
 
 As Thoreau exhibited Emerson the recluse, 
 so Amos Bronson Alcott, a most benign, 
 saintly, and unworldly man when I knew him, 
 was a joyous and buoyant embodiment of 
 Mr. Emerson socially. For Emerson was not 
 what one would, term " talkative ; " indeed, 
 it is seldom one, meets a man more held in 
 duress by his own thought. When he was 
 surprised into utterance it was mostly a 
 monologue of oral reflections which seemed 
 to be addressed to a widely read and thought- 
 ful audience, and which always exacted much 
 of the listener. It is somewhat remarkable 
 that a man who has given more movement 
 to thought than almost any other since Plato, 
 should have shown in habit so little sympathy 
 with this law by which men most naturally 
 receive ideas ! But I think he secretly found 
 the simplest conditions under which people 
 meef irksome. 
 
 " Parties of pleasure, yes, parties 01 entiut, 
 he once remarked. And again, " When one 
 meets his mate, society begins ; " expressions 
 of a man who, although among us, is not of 
 us. 
 
 And yet I recall no words about conversa- 
 
g6 Talks with 
 
 tion better than his. He apprehended it 
 rightly ; he called it, " A series of intoxica- 
 tions ; " " The right metaphysical professor ; " 
 " The true school of philosophy ; " and said, 
 " We must be warmed by the fire of sympathy, 
 and be brought into the right conditions and 
 angles of vision." 
 
 "When you answer," it was his maxim, 
 " address the meaning, not the words.'' And 
 his tenth beatitude was, " Blessed is he who 
 giveth the answer that cannot be answered." 
 
 But he did not commonly exemplify this. 
 The conspicuous illustration of it was Mr. 
 Alcott, who had a much more extended 
 adaptiveness. To him the meeting of human 
 beings in converse was what the communion- 
 table is to Christians. He founded the 
 drawing-room conversation as a means of 
 culture, a more valuable gift than Emerson's 
 of the Lyceum. Its method, by which a 
 leader discourses upon some theme at leisure, 
 answering questions which are farther dis- 
 cussed in the freedom of informal exchange, 
 is more natural and probably more rewarding 
 than either lecturing or preaching, especially 
 among people where similar conditions of 
 receptivity prevail. Mr. Alcott's field was 
 limited, because his philosophy was not often 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 97 
 
 vascular, so that, as Fichte said of himself, 
 he could only succeed with " brave good 
 people." But who that met him in the con- 
 versazioni which he made so popular can for- 
 get the experience — the master's " solar face,'' 
 framed in that wealth of hair in which the 
 white breath of his soul had been caught and 
 kept ; his pleasant fervours ; his irresistible 
 hyperboles ; his colours, dilatations, magni- 
 loquence, glorious soarings to the great might 
 have been ; sublime and ideal chimeras ; the 
 winning wilfulness with which he presented 
 a sometimes erroneous philosophy ; his 
 pictures, delicate rather than distinct, and 
 somewhat bleached, as if conceived amid 
 etiolated conditions ; his fugitive answerings, 
 orphic, subtle, like quicksilver, and, even when 
 merely amoebsean, the participants having 
 dropped out, and the ground beneath sound- 
 ing hollow to every ear but his, so surpassingly 
 complete and master-like, always satisfying 
 the questioner, who enjoyed if he could not 
 acquiesce. 
 
 Though often philodoxical rather than 
 philosophical, he was always in sympathy 
 with the highest motives that can elevate the 
 human soul, and received from God the gift 
 of lofty inspirationSj singularly incommensur- 
 
 H 
 
98 Talks with 
 
 able, from which Emerson with others grate- 
 fully drank. His sacred enthusiasms, which 
 penetrated his hearers as if they had drunken 
 sunbeams, buoyed his step to the last, sounded 
 in his voice like an angelus, and dwelt in his 
 eyes long after they had lost their speech and 
 feeling, and became otherwise rayless like a 
 vault. He had a soul of candour ; whatever 
 other expression his face wore, that never left 
 it, and his smile had such faith that it made 
 melancholy a sin. He cherished a sweet 
 sense of the loyalty of friendship, and be- 
 lieved devoutly in the Concord saviours. No 
 one circulated with more enthusiastic per- 
 versity west and east, with now and then a 
 conscientious obolus from Emerson, the coin 
 of mutual gratulation, acceptable possibly to 
 numismatists, but hardly current on Olympus. 
 He possessed before groups a manner 
 never for a moment fatiguing. He knew the 
 secret of teaching by talk, and his demeanour 
 at gatherings was always illuminated by a 
 gentle politeness and interpretation of others. 
 He understood how to open the eyes of 
 people without contradicting them. Children 
 especially were susceptible to the charm. 
 What Landor makes the Greek child, Ternissa, 
 say of Epicurus, reminds me closely of what 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 99 
 
 the child of an acquaintance said of Mr. 
 Alcott : — 
 
 " I love to hear him talk. He is so pla in. 
 and tel ls me so much I didn't know, fastening 
 it on to^ yrat-t-dtd-Ehow ; and~he-Jw,s-so 
 much patience^ and-loQks-.aoJdBdlyrasTfTie' 
 were waiting forTnore-questieas."— — '"^ 
 
 Of Mr. Alcott Emerson said — 
 
 " Bronson Alcott is a man supremely self- 
 conscious. Socrates thought Athens ought 
 to support him ; and Alcott thinks Boston 
 Commonwealth ought to support ht7n — and 
 it ought ! His life is full of beatitudes. 
 Wordsworth should have come to him for the 
 origin of the Pedlar. He has no regard for 
 wealth. Once an admirer sent him a twenty- 
 dollar gold piece from Boston. About a 
 week after, a mendicant, passing his door, 
 asked alms. 
 
 " ' I have nothing,' said Alcott, answering 
 from habit — ' or yes, stay ; I have, too ; wait 
 a minute ! ' 
 
 " And, running into his house, he returned 
 with the gold coin, which he handed to the 
 beggar. He took it and vanished. I be- 
 lieve a week or so afterwards he returned it 
 to Mr. Alcott, with the remark that he found 
 he was not able to either keep or spend it. 
 
100 Talks with 
 
 " Alcott is the best reader of Plato living. 
 He talks exquisitely. A reporter offered, good- 
 naturedly, to report his conversations, but he 
 failed to reproduce the delicate inflections 
 and tints of thought which form their charm. 
 He has a passion for writing, but he cannot 
 write, he has no gift that way. His pages are 
 anchylozed. I always feel sad when he brings 
 anything to read to me. He used to say 
 that Jesus was intensely feminine; always 
 spiritually apprehensive and respondent to 
 the thought rather than its expression. 
 
 " His ways of teaching were new and un- 
 popular. He was exposed to persecution on 
 account of them. But they are sure to be 
 adopted, because they are based on human 
 nature. 
 
 " He came to Concord from Germantown, 
 Pa., about forty years ago. The name of the 
 family was Alcox. He changed it to Alcott. 
 His wife was from one of the most excellent 
 families in Boston. There will never be 
 enough credit given to that woman for what 
 he and his daughters have done. 
 
 " Louisa was born about thirty-four years 
 after her father, and on the same day. She 
 is a natural source of stories. When she was 
 seven years old she was the delight of the com- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ioi 
 
 munity, writing dramas and buildin^ theatres 
 at her father's and the neighbours' houses. 
 She composed a hymn while yet a girl ; wrote 
 a book (which has been printed under the 
 name of ' Moods ') when she was sixteen ; 
 another, a book of fables, before she was 
 twenty. At nineteen the papers began buy- 
 ing her stories. She did not want to grow to 
 womanhood. She went out as a governess, 
 and wrote a story of her experiences for the 
 Atlantic ; but they could not understand it, 
 and told her she had better continue as a 
 teacher. 
 
 " She never was sick until she went into the 
 army as nurse, and has never been well since. 
 She took a trip to Europe, which was an un- 
 doubted benefit. She produced her hospital 
 sketches in 1865, and is now (1868), I be- 
 lieve, bringing out what will be her best yet, 
 ' Little Women.' We all think this is due to 
 her publishing friend, who told her she must 
 write a girl's book, while she insisted she 
 could not. It is often the case that publishers 
 understand authors better than they do them- 
 selves. She is, and is to be, the poet uf 
 children. She knows their angels. 
 
 " May won Ruskin's praise for her wonder- 
 ful copies of Turner, which were sold at great 
 
102 Talks with 
 
 profit. But Mr. Alcott respected Louisa's 
 genius because it was original. May's 
 pleasant room at home was much admired 
 by our Concord folk. She had Thoreau's 
 genius with materials. The cover of the 
 walls and floor, the finish and adornment 
 of the furniture, were the work of her own 
 hands. The mirror formed the farthest, inner 
 centre of successive frames of different woods, 
 so that in it one's face was like a picture 
 in perspective, ' reached by courteous ap- 
 proaches,' as her father said." 
 
 Of Transcendentalism, Mr. Alcott re- 
 marked, "It means that there is more in 
 the mind than enters it through the senses." 
 
 He was a great believer in heredity. When 
 the children did wrong, he said — 
 
 " It is the fault of the old folks. What we 
 are is the result of our ancestors. Choice," 
 he insisted, "implies apostacy. The pure, 
 unsuUied soul is above choice." 
 
 And again, " Those who learn by heart 
 are taught from the heart, a spontaneous 
 teacher." 
 
 His conscientiousness, like Thoreau's, 
 brought him once to the inside of a jail, 
 from which he was released by Mr. Hoar. 
 
 He was a living rebuke to gross animal 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 103 
 
 feeding. Like all Pythagoreans, he was not 
 an eater of flesh. 
 
 Is it he or Mr. Emerson Charles Kingsley 
 called "Cousin Cramchild"? It would have 
 been neither if Mr. Kingsley had known of 
 whom he was speaking. Mr. Alcott's "St. 
 John the Evangelist " is an utterance wholly 
 after the heart of the great Englishman. 
 
TRANSCENDENTALISM. 
 
TRANSCENDENTALISM. 
 
 " The Puritans came here," said Mr. Emerson 
 one day, "in a revolt against forms. Why 
 should they have kept any, then ? Why 
 accept baptism and the bread and wine of 
 the Supper, and refuse the foot-washing, 
 which was at least as strongly emphasized? 
 They were right, nobly; but they stopped 
 short. Is any form necessary ? Do we need 
 any gift or foreign force ? Can we not be 
 self-sustaining ? See this divinity of daisies 
 around us. Can we not be level to them ? 
 What need is there of miracles ? That Jesus 
 lived purely was his strong argument 
 " Virgil said to Dante — 
 
 " ' Let us not talk of these things ; 
 Let us look and pass on. ' 
 
 "But there must be an effort to merge 
 religion into literature, and realize theology ; 
 for man's highest good is concerned. The 
 elimination of scholasticism and subtleties 
 
io8 Talks with 
 
 would be healthful ; and divine lives would 
 the more hasten to become common." 
 
 He paused a moment, and I felt en- 
 couraged to ask — 
 
 "What is Transcendentalism, Mr. Emer- 
 son?" 
 
 He was silent, and then said, with a 
 humorous emphasis — 
 
 " Well, why do you ask me 1 It isn't, I 
 suppose, a commodity or 'Plan of Salva- 
 tion,' or anything concrete; not, surely, an 
 ' established church ; ' rather, unestablished ; 
 not even bread, perhaps, but a leaven 
 hidden.'' 
 
 He continued more seriously-^ 
 
 " If we will only see that which is about 
 us, we shall see also above. Is God far from 
 any of us ? There is an equality of the 
 human spirit to the world's phenomena. We 
 look neither up to the universe nor down to 
 it, but confront it. And the soul should 
 always bear itself thus in the presence of the 
 natural objects which suggest and express 
 God, are His revelations. 
 y-y The Transcendentalist sees everything 
 as Idealist. That is, all events, objects, etc., 
 seen, are images to the consciousness. It 
 is the thought of them only one sees. You 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 109 
 
 shall find God in the unchanged essence of 
 the universe, the air, the river, the leaf; 
 and in the subjective unfolding of your 
 nature, the determination of the private 
 spirit, everything of rehgion. As for the 
 name, no one knows who first applied the 
 name." 
 
 Once he mentioned Kant ; and the Critik 
 of Pure Reason was, perhaps, a remote an- 
 cestor of Transcendentalism. I could not 
 receive then the full content of Mr. Emer- 
 son's words on Idealism. Now, with the 
 commentaries of the years, they are plain; 
 but it is not necessary to present the subject 
 here, it having become familiar. The impres- 
 sion of Transcendantalisra which his speech 
 conveyed was that he esteemed it less as a 
 gospel or even revelation than as a rebuke of 
 the temper which accepts mediators, incarna- 
 tions, and go-betweens ; a protest, appeal, 
 aspiration for direct relations between God 
 and man, unencroached upon by any " word." 
 The Bible is a sacred book of all nations, of 
 value as the record of a religion. The book 
 of nature (by which is intended all objects 
 that have retained simplicity) is the " word 
 of God." The Kingdom of Heaven certainly 
 comes with observation. As all material 
 
no Talks with 
 
 forms necessarily lived before in Him, so we 
 find Him in them now. 
 
 Literally, a passing beyond all media in 
 the approach to the Deity, Transcendentalism 
 contained an effort to establish, mainly by a 
 discipline of the intuitive faculty, direct inter- 
 course between the soul and God. " I am 
 the door," said Jesus ; " no one cometh unto 
 the Father but by me." " Yet," pleaded the 
 new Evangel, " are we not brothers ? Let 
 us come as thou earnest, to thy Father and 
 to our Father." 
 
 It is often the fate of a new doctrine to be 
 carried farther than its founder intended. 
 That the conservatives hastened to demand 
 the establishment of a chair of Apologetics in 
 the viewless Theological Seminary of Con- 
 cord was natural enough ; but the surprise of 
 the philosopher and his friends was awakened 
 by the eccentricities of sundry fanatics whose 
 heads had been hurt by Apollo's quoits 
 thrown wild. They announced theories, as 
 they said, beyond Emerson, and yet called 
 them his ; they even deified him as a being 
 of mist and fire far in advance, and leading 
 in the path. Though he did not deny that 
 he could not make it straight, how straight 
 were those of the accepted faith-bringers i* 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, hi 
 
 And so they clambered their Emersonian trail 
 up the mountain until it disappeared among 
 atmospheres that would not support spiritual 
 life. There was much heroic even in these 
 eccentrics. What though their inspiration 
 of rarified air did create some excesses, before 
 which it is an effort to keep the countenance ; 
 and the sacred fire of their fane proved to be 
 a spurious phlogiston, causing inflammation 
 rather than flame, — it is to be remembered 
 that these were brave men who stood for 
 something; men not "to be killed among 
 the bats as a bird, an.ong the birds as a 
 bat ; " and a heart unstirred by their de- 
 votion is cold indeed. But the glory of 
 the sunrise was in the eyes of those already 
 in the immediate religious and intellectual 
 neighbourhood ; and the number included 
 some of the purest men and women and 
 profoundest thinkers in the country. They 
 cared less for the name than for the ideas 
 clustered around it. To them it was 
 enough that the faith vindicated the freedom 
 of the soul against all forms of fatalism, and 
 pronounced man a being of eternity instead 
 of a worm of the dust. From such a faith 
 they would drink as from a stream of cold 
 refreshment, and be satisfied without inquiry 
 
112 Talks with 
 
 as to whether it flowed from or toward the 
 mountain of Omniscience. What other 
 doctrine said so many true words by the 
 way? and so no matter whither the way 
 led. 
 
 Their first concrete expression was the 
 Dial. To turn the pages within its faded 
 old lilac covers now is to bring again the 
 atmosphere of those creative days, their 
 nobility and their heroisms. Margaret Fuller 
 was the first editor, and although her 
 catholicity, too large to permit a waste- 
 basket, admitted uninspired witnesses to the 
 uselessness of Saviours and discussions of 
 the universality of the Holy Spirit in a 
 soprano key, yet so high was the motive and 
 so strenuous the impulse of its founders, that 
 every number contained expressions in- 
 valuable and quite equivalent to the propaga- 
 tion of themselves, despite stupidities and 
 delusions. Mr. Emerson did manfully his 
 share, assuming the editorship, but finally 
 relinquishing a work so unnatural to him. 
 William Ellery Channing was perhaps its 
 most delightful writer, with such opulent com- 
 panions as Theodore Parker, J. Freeman 
 Clarke, C. A. Dana, James Russell Lowell, 
 Frederic Hedge, C. A. Bariol, J. C. Cabot, 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 113 
 
 C. P. Cranch, and others. The Dial was 
 a horologe of the dawn, and should have 
 marked the hours longer. 
 
 All this was fifty years ago ; and the Dial's 
 shadow now is only seen in Alcott's garden. 
 One can hardly wander of an afternoon after 
 summer is flown, here where the Concord 
 School of Philosophy holds its intellectual 
 festivals, in the presence of statuettes of 
 Plato, Emerson, Harris, Howison, Thoreau, 
 Voltaire, Pestalozzi, Mulford, Dr. Jones, and 
 others which haunt the arbours and grace 
 the walks of the parterres and grove of apple- 
 trees, even to Hillside Chapel, where Web- 
 ster's Dictionary is the only book in sight, 
 without feeling that he is in a hygienic atmo- 
 sphere, friendly to a larger and sane liberty of 
 religious meditation. 
 
 There are those who believe that the ghost 
 of Transcendentalism will rise again, and are 
 even waiting to see the stone rolled away 
 from its sepulchre ; but may we not accept 
 this emancipation as inheritance, as all that 
 will come out from it for the healing of the 
 nations? 
 
 Did he from whose loins it was drawn ex- 
 pect more, a present faith ? 
 
 I think not. As he desired to construct 
 
 I 
 
114 Talks with 
 
 no system of theology or moral science, 
 never giving us a system nor completing his 
 " Natural History of the Spirit or Intellect" 
 (sometimes called one and sometimes the 
 other), so his Transcendentalism is to be 
 regarded as a fragment, existing less as a 
 religious idiosyncracy, much less a passing 
 fashion, than as a lifting and permanent 
 force in general religious culture. As a 
 modifying influence in thought, as an im- 
 pulse toward a finer life, it became a power. 
 Its subtle suggestions, its aspirations; that 
 which it stood for and symbolized ; its 
 exultant, soaring spirit — these gave it mean- 
 ing to every elevated soul drawn into it. 
 Where it touched the practical duties of life, 
 its touch was recognized as honest. The 
 promises it made to the believer never insult 
 the purity of religious motive, and resemble, 
 so far as literal fulfilment is concerned, those 
 made by Jehovah to the fathers. As-tailieJifc_ 
 fiiiti nn - n n. rnndllil; fff tli r " ipiritf ii n ii i i mil) 
 Mtt&nereogJiad-jieKerj, -flfmllt.. He trusted 
 
 Vii s rnmp le^f^l y , and p. ven . gajia— thtaw - a 
 
 feminine _credence in his relations with"f)er- 
 sons. I f he had -aar iiU'Ueisti1ae»-ifr was Ais. 
 In"Siuaker-talk. he^said — 
 " I do not pretend to any commandment 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 115 
 
 or Jarge_revelation. But if at^n}r_time I 
 conduct, I fin d, perhaps, a silentobstad«-in- 
 
 my-TTiTTn4-<4wht— l^.<?a.n.nnt- ^rrnnnt- fnr. Very 
 
 well ; I let it lie, think it may pass away ; if it 
 does not pass away, I yield to it, obey it You 
 ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. 
 It is not an oracle, not an angel, not a 
 dream, not a law ; it is too simple to be 
 described ; it is but a grain of mustard-seed.^ 
 But such as it is, it is— sometbing which 
 the contradiction of all mankind could not 
 shakew'-' He was a pilgrim of the invisible, 
 and, both by heritage and growth, without 
 the capacity of sin. Doubt by his philoso- 
 phy was not a positive exertion of the will, 
 but a suspense of the judgment, a negative 
 fact merely. Transcendentalism t o him 
 was, to be faithful to the revelations that _ 
 comgTS' the joul^_and^ are xecQgnizeii,by it 
 asjrue. Ohcein later years, and in his own 
 study, I ventured to ask him : " Mr. Emer- 
 son, what of personal immortality ? " He 
 turned gently some pages, and handed me 
 one which read somewhat as follows : — 
 
 "The youth puts off the illusions of the 
 child. The man puts off the ignorance and 
 tumultuous fancies of youth; proceeding 
 thence, puts off the egotism of manhood, and 
 
Lt& 
 
 Talks with 
 
 becomes at last a public and universal soul, 
 hence rising to great heights, but also rising 
 to realities, until the last garment of egotism 
 falls and he is with God, shares the will and 
 immensity of the first cause." 
 '' I received this immediately as a declara- 
 tion of belief in the final absorption of all 
 individualities into an original and active 
 entity which is continually creative. And 
 perhaps this is a form of immortality familiar 
 to his meditation. ' But afterwards I thought 
 I saw in the statement not necessarily a pro- 
 jection of his own faith, but (such was his 
 habit of answering habits and moods of 
 thought rather than forms of expression) a 
 mild censure of the question itself, as if, in- 
 deed, he had replied : Do not question ; for 
 character and destiny are the same, and ex- 
 cessive canvassing about being prolonged be- 
 trays a weakness of self-conceit which de- 
 stroys the possibility. To such an attitude 
 the answer must be that the teleology of life, 
 so far as we can follow it, is that of the type, 
 not the individual. 
 
 For at another time he wrote, and the 
 passage was inspired — 
 
 " I have a house, a closet which holds my 
 books, a stable, a garden, a field ; are these, 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 117 
 
 any or all, a reason for refusing the angel 
 who beckons me away, as if there were no 
 room or skylight elsewhere that could repro- 
 duce for me as my wants require ? " 
 
 He spoke of Ciq^ varyingly; sometimes 
 almost personally as if synonymous with 
 perfect manliness, again as an immanent 
 spirit, ofte n a s a pervasive f orce, (^^ He 
 held faith rigidly to fact, so ?a'r "as we can 
 see fact. " It is. not permitted-,-" he said- ta 
 me, " to believe in opposition to the guide- 
 post. We can only remember that it does 
 not travel the road it points out. We can 
 travel. it, -but that road, no other ! " * In order 
 to appreciate Mr. Emerson's newness and 
 revolution, it is necessary to read the literature 
 of his day, for his doctrines are common 
 property now. His evangel was faith in 
 man and man's final victory, the incarnation 
 of God. The_futiire-was serene. Almost 
 thfiJastJ^ords-I was^ver -to hear him utter 
 were with- a , snulft and-, cheer regarding .a~ 
 4oubt (not his) he could not dispel. 
 
 ' So Carlyle : " A course wherein clear faith can- 
 not go with you may be worse than none ; if clear 
 faith go never so slightly against it, then it is certainly 
 worse than none" (Carlyle, letter to Emerson, 
 February 3, 1835). 
 
ii8 Talks with Emerson. 
 
 " For that," he said, " we must wait until 
 to-morrow morning." By 
 
 " That great and grave transition 
 Which may not king or priest or conqueror spare, 
 And yet a babe can bear." 
 
 The morrow's morning has come to him. 
 
PRESENCE. 
 
PRESENCE. 
 
 When I recall Mr. Emerson personally, J. 
 recognize that a man more impersonal one 
 seldom meets. There was nothing pro- 
 nounced about him. Presence (in one mean- 
 ing)r-he 4mdr"B®»e, because he was without 
 the consciousness, self-esteem, and self-asser- 
 tion which go so far to constitute it But 
 there was that behind the withdrawn manner 
 which took possession with an exclusiveness 
 no personal fascinations or magnetism could 
 equal or explain. To every comer he was 
 a fact and experience, undissuadable, pene- 
 trating to the region of motive and source of 
 volition ; and from the first moment, his was 
 the " morning light which shines more and 
 more unto the perfect day.'' 
 
 At the time of our first meeting, Mr. 
 Emerson was sixty-two. His tall, slender 
 figure had made slight obeisance to age ; but 
 the earlier portraits of him I had been 
 familiar with ill-prepared me for his changed 
 
122 Talks with 
 
 expression. The aggressive physiognomy was 
 still there; the^ delicate^severe^_Jips^_jrid 
 p iercing ey es. But they rarely flashed now, 
 wearing instead an introspective grey ; and 
 the lips were rather those of a seer than a 
 poet. The hair alone had kept its native 
 colour, like dark wine. Both Rowse's and 
 Wyatt Eaton's rather than Griswold's portraits 
 revive him faithfully as he was at this time, 
 and during the few later years that I saw 
 him. Rowse especially has reproduced the 
 large featuring of his face, with that wise, 
 determined nose (called straight, like the 
 Damascus road) which other Emersons have, 
 and the tender, shrewd eyes, that until the 
 very end kept so much sunshine in them. 
 And what eyes they were ! Whatever they 
 lookea at, they looked into, and that effort- 
 ^lessly. Such^arenot^ ordinary eyes ; they are 
 divining rods. I have noticed that most men 
 successful in values, business men of the first 
 order, have the same inquisitive peer. Under 
 excitement his look was illuminated, and be- 
 trayed by turns the sagacity of the man of 
 affairs and the " vision " of the clairvoyant. 
 His more tranquil regard continually revealed 
 yourself to yourself like the limpidity of a 
 clear pool 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 123 
 
 But the regnant feature of Mr. Emerson's 
 personal contact was his voice : in converse 
 agreeable, kindly, incisive, it was only to be 
 heard when everything was congruous and 
 still. But who that ever listened to it in 
 public has forgotten the healthful experience ? 
 Not resonant like PhilUps', and presenting 
 fewer contrasts with itself than Beecher's, it 
 seemed as neither of these to carry, as some 
 rivers carry gold, the speaker's soul in it. 
 Ajs^ the voice, like the soul, knew no falling 
 
 inflections. Palm anrt ffUlflblfii thg J*"""-, 
 
 logist went on, the voice always .jaised, sus— 
 pense aft er_gyspense, still inconclusive wiiea 
 the ^ij^itfltiflOkeilfor rest,.tbe.ib>£aie ^SKJng 
 clear until .thfi. postponed empJiasiS-joLj^lg^ 
 final jgause, and that still ail-.ppward pitch ;Jj 
 the lesson of which made me puzzle and 
 ponder, and finally appeared to be ethical 
 rather than rhetorical — that on all subjects we 
 discourse inadequately, and can never come 
 to a period. As if he should say : It is time 
 to stop, but not to finish. There is more to 
 be added to complete the presentation, but it 
 cannot be spoken now on account of some- 
 thing else which must follow. 
 
 So he always stood on the rostrum, having 
 cast away all the tricks that orators hold 
 
124 Talks with 
 
 dear, gestureless, save now and then a slight 
 movement of the hand, repelling as from the 
 cold pole of a magnet; his eyes searching 
 his manuscript, or raised over all of us and 
 gazing forward into space, sometimes in the 
 presence of a luminous expression, glowing 
 like the lenses of some great light-gatherer ; 
 uttering sentence after sentence, with the 
 accent of a man who insists on this present 
 statement, but who believes that we cannot 
 here come to the whole truth of the thing, 
 and shall never quite find the end of it. 
 
 For the rest, so lifted and extraordinary 
 was the elevation from which he approached 
 the subjects he discussed ; so clear his 
 medium, and removed from lower currents 
 and "occasions"; such was his insight, 
 mastery, and moderation, — that he soon 
 created in his audience a fine surprise, and, 
 without delay, his own nerve and spirit. Then, 
 such was his fairness and solicitation, so 
 liberated was the manner of his address from 
 dogmatism and self-assertiveness, that his 
 audience was fain to project him free of the 
 local circumstance, and to identify his pre- 
 sence as representative in this busy and 
 material age of that solitary and timeless 
 group of natures, the choice of all ages. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 125 
 
 But the completed benediction was after 
 he descended from the enforced dignity of 
 the platform, and apart from the exacting 
 restraints of the study. His bearing and 
 contact had the exquisite power of a moral 
 nature which has never been impaired by a 
 wilful transgression. Nobility character- 
 ized his deportment. 
 
 Elevating is a weak word with which 
 to describe the influence of his gentle 
 serenity upon men ; for even quite above 
 themselves were they lifted by his pres- 
 ence, and found their highest moments his 
 common ones. 
 
 The cause of this was that all his thoughts 
 and life were abreast of the Holy Spirit and 
 tried by it, so that every phenomenon 
 assumed its natural place, demanding atten- 
 tion, but at no moment throwing the soul 
 out of its relation with the Unseen. Even 
 in those days when he was disturbing the 
 movement of all the intelligent forces around 
 him, and the entire atmosphere was in 
 commotion because of him, there was one 
 point of absolute calm, the centre of the 
 cyclone. 
 
 As has been with less truth said of another, 
 and yet not entirely appropriately of him, "He 
 
126 Talks with 
 
 was beautifully unfit to walk in the ways of 
 other men ; " not entirely appropriately, for, 
 although solitary, he was a welcoming man, 
 tendered a noble regard, meeting, every one 
 with.8Ut.sli3:n«ss;.or.stiiaess, interesting himself 
 to make the most of the occasion, so that his 
 presence was a continual sohcitation and 
 reward. Al though qu iet almost to reserve. (I 
 neverh£a£d_Jum l.^ugE)7"h'i's social bearing 
 wasjlistinguished. by^^anold-scHooTpoliteness, 
 with just enough polish to divert the suspicion 
 that his retirement had made him rustic ; 
 and his slight, ha^^ J'oreign e tiquette was so 
 uphfted. by jthe_pres£nceu)Q£e moral sense, 
 thayus.Hjanners jatfitfi f^elestiaL. 
 
 His conversation was always in the low 
 tone of one accustomed to being listened to, 
 and presupposed a philologist's knowledge of 
 words, so that the language was followed 
 doubtingly at first, but soon companionably, 
 and, anon, it was plain that he opened hori- 
 zons and left on almost everything he 
 touched a remnant of originality. Moreover, 
 one had with him the perpetual delight of 
 hearing a thing said in its best way. You 
 listened now to a quaint anecdote or satire, 
 and now to an epithet, comparison, or excerpt, 
 touched gently or sharply with his own 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 127 
 
 criticism, until you breathed the high atmo- 
 sphere where your companion dwelt, not as a 
 spectator but as familiar ; and, after parting, 
 you remembered, more even than his vivid 
 talk, his simple ways, the home-like feeling he 
 diffused, and the forgetfulness that you were 
 in the presence of our foremost American. 
 
 He was an intent listener. One was 
 quite sure of his""appreciation if deserved. 
 Bu| there was always in his personality a 
 certain resistance, "a familiar reropteness ; " 
 and even when his companionship was most 
 gentle and encouraging, it was searching and 
 pungent like the odour and flavour of certain 
 flowers and herbs. His books are aromal 
 with the same quality. 
 
 He disliked odd people, and during his 
 most useful yearFTie was compelled to meet 
 a great many. Sometimes it seemed as if 
 they would overrun him, even drawing from 
 him, apropos of introductions, the droll demur, 
 "WJiom God hagi^ puj^asuftder, why should 
 
 man join together ? " But he was always 
 
 patient, and tried to free each one from his 
 peccant humours and triteness, and discover 
 what was his advantage. How often did the 
 peripatetic philosopher without honour in his 
 own land find here the right royal arch for 
 
128 Talks with 
 
 his Spanish castle, the unappreciated poet 
 wings and a farriery for his limping palfrey, 
 and the reformer, too often one-sided, a lar- 
 ger horizon with a yet stronger enthusiasm. 
 
 Anything that excited remark in dress 
 and ■de«a«aBourrE£2^2[e21^iiistinct. I 
 remember he returned fromTTew Yoit, and 
 told me that Mr. Walt Whitman, by invita- 
 tion dining with him at the Astor House, 
 had come without his coat ! The extremes 
 met then, though undoubtedly he enjoyed 
 the unrestrained man and democratic poet, 
 despite the odour his verses perspire. Long 
 enough after the occurrence to divert any 
 suspicion of a connection, JtIr._jEmerson 
 said — 
 
 " Dress should reveal the spirit. There 
 are men™sa JjruiaUy •yyuIuTahd indilerentto 
 ci.Yilization that they remind one of the veldt, 
 the .dhow., and ,the kraal. They ought. -to go 
 about, their faces smeared with woad, in skins 
 of vwild- animals, - with, a , booeiclub.. pjuiheK 
 shoulders and a sword of siaik tooth, beating 
 drums offish skin." 
 
 And again — 
 
 " Manners should hespeaL-liie. man, inde- 
 peudfiat-Qf-firrc-'dothiflg. The general does 
 not need a brilliant coatv" 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 129 
 
 He was a most salutary companion. His 
 rery nearness was an abstersion. To him, 
 there was but one foundation of genuine 
 courtesy as of genuine character, and that 
 was the moral sense, so that though he never 
 preached against bad physical habits and 
 morals, his presence did not permit them. 
 The sobriety, directness, honesty, and con- 
 scientiousness which he infused into a man 
 were antiseptic, and eliminated slovenly and 
 unfortunate habits of mind and body.* 
 
 It was taken for granted as a basis of com- 
 panionship with him that one was living in con- 
 stant obedience to the demands of his highest 
 nature. He believed that the intellect and 
 the moral sentiment should not be separated. 
 Crass instincts he could forgive, and he had 
 an almost divine patience with weakness and 
 
 * Mr. Emerson said he smoked very (and we all 
 know how he spared that overworn word) rarely, 
 and never until he was fifty. He was a punctual 
 man. I remember one afternoon we were going to 
 drive. As I came into his room, prompt to the 
 moment, I saw that he was already waiting. Every 
 book and manuscript were put out of reach, not even 
 the newspaper before him ; but there he sat on the 
 edge of the lounge, his coat on his arm, his hat in his 
 hand. I never knew him a minute late at any 
 appointment. The example of course caught me — at 
 a cost, I suppose, of years. 
 
 K 
 
I30 Talks with 
 
 even indolenge* but none.witkdislMjaesqr- He 
 anticipated the disclosures of Remusat as he 
 did the discoveries of Darwin, and despised 
 the first Bonaparte because he cheated at 
 cards. " It is one of those acts," he said 
 to me, " which only men of a certain kind 
 can commit. _rf cannot Tie extenuated-."' 
 "^ So his bearing had a certain translucency, 
 and begat it. 
 
 "When two persons," he remarked once 
 in my hearing, " are not happy with one an- 
 other, fence and parry with one another, in- 
 stead of meeting, are not all of their expres- 
 sions a little impertinent ? " (out of place). 
 
 " We drop everything and arrive at sim- 
 plicity, which is the perfection of manners." 
 
 Incompetence^jwfiakcessof will, yacilla t- 
 ing motives, nay, even stupidity-, -m-igh4;..be, 
 OYfixlaok£ii.;^-bii--tKi*t9-of-hypuis*isy, nuvL'l. 
 Less endurable to him than even the flip- 
 pant and fungoid folk who thought to enter- 
 tain him with their theological cavilling, 
 was the approach of these persons of super- 
 ficial etiquette and attired manners who 
 were too polite for good breeding, don- 
 ning courtesies for the sake of experi- 
 ment or occasion. But even the genu- 
 flections of these toy-shop gentry, and the 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 131 
 
 deeper disease of dissimulating natures pre- 
 tending to the possession of tastes and 
 sympathies they did not own and did not 
 care to own, he would strive to antidote, 
 often by pointed questions which would dis- 
 close to these confecting people the real 
 state of things, or by a severe simplicity of 
 demeanour which aiforded uneasy contrast. 
 
 " He was a friend, a more than friend, austere 
 To make one Icnow one's self and make him fear. 
 He gave that touch too noble to be kind, 
 To wake to life the mind within the mind." 
 
 But when the affectations were too pro- 
 nounced, his phrases grew quiet and brief; 
 be became reticent or disappeared. A 
 passage of Wordsworth reminds me of 
 
 him : — 
 
 • 
 
 " Plain his garb, 
 Such as might suit a rustic sire, prepared 
 For Sabbath duties ; yet he was a man 
 Whom no one could have passed without remark. 
 Active and nervous was his gait ; his limbs 
 And his whole figure breathed intelligence. 
 Time had compressed the freshness of his cheek 
 Into a narrower circle of deep red. 
 But had not tamed his eye that, under brows 
 Shaggy and gray, had meanings which he brought 
 From years of growth — like a being made 
 O' many beings." 
 
 Excursion, " The Wanderer." 
 
132 Talks with 
 
 But words do not touch nerves ; I would 
 that they could, that you might find herein 
 himself as well as his utterances, so that this 
 record might be, as Mr. Walt Whitman hoped 
 of his " Leaves of Grass," a man and not 
 a book. But I forbear, failing to recall him 
 as I knew him — genial, mild-mannered, 
 anticipating, breathing an enchanted youth, 
 though already beyond the years when men 
 begin to think about dying or are half dead. 
 
 A word about the nest and its good lares 1 
 !M r. Emersfln.._rare ly spoke of himself, but 
 he Jjadthe passion for home which is 
 characteristic of all manly natures, and tpld 
 • me that he beUeved in large famihes. His 
 mother had twelve brothers and sisters — five 
 sisters and one brother older than herself, 
 three sisters and three brothers younger — and 
 his father and mother had eight children. 
 
 I asked him once about his boyhood, but 
 the brief answer gave small glimpse of boyish 
 spirits and joys ; and reading in the meeting- 
 house was probably his nearest to a boy's 
 sins. Perhaps he was a man who never had 
 a boyhood ; I think it must have been always 
 aged. And so not least among the marvels 
 he awakened, was the pleasant query how one 
 who never was a boy himself could cherish 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 133 
 
 so subtle a sympathy with a boy's weakness 
 and work and gladness and troubles. 
 
 But, notably from the mother, there was 
 an atmosphere of charm and peace in the 
 home that no jollity could substitute. All 
 through the child life, the sweetness of living 
 for one another was exemplified. Through 
 youth into manhood, it was still the gentle 
 order of the family. William taught school 
 to help Waldo through college ; Waldo taught 
 school to help Edward ; and Edward taught 
 school to help Charles — all graduating from 
 Cambridge between 1818 and 1828. Sim- 
 plicity and mutual deference and love were 
 the law of the household 
 
METHOD. 
 
METHOD. 
 
 How exacting is aroused youth ! It claims 
 without shame every sacrifice ; and, if it 
 could, would lay its head by the face of God. 
 Out of its twilight some path it must find or 
 force. What grace, then, in the inimitable 
 man to shorten for a time to half-length the 
 arm by which his neophyte has been held, 
 and vouchsafe as to the what, the when, and 
 the how wise disclosures, not by didactic 
 precept, but simply by showing his own ways ; 
 not, of course, that they could become 
 another's, but that so best could another get 
 his own. This last rare gift I seek in 
 these two concluding chapters to pass on 
 to the new generation, trying thereby to 
 render such return as the great giver would 
 direct. This is solely my purpose, and to 
 abstain from all judgment and the like. 
 Such an attitude is foreign to me when I 
 think of him. Incompaiable^aQd- beyond 
 speech, incomniensurable ^_hg.;._ and .the 
 
138 Talks with 
 
 greatest have been, his interpreters,. They 
 have- spread the" profound and conspicuous 
 elements -©£. his character, and taken up arid 
 carri_edj)n hiaJoity.message. Their decisions 
 are of record familiar wherever his name is 
 known, and history has given him his own 
 place. Of so exalted a man my opinions and 
 encomium are of no worth ; but, especially 
 to those young hearts to whom is this address, 
 my experiences have value in proportion to 
 their nearness — provided always that they 
 are given with faithfulness and frankness; 
 traits which should always belong to narrators. 
 To omit a characteristic incident or mode is 
 an unfortunate prejudgment. The subtract- 
 ing fact only injures when suppressed. It 
 would seem that a biographer literally takes 
 a life when he takes from it that which alone 
 unites it with other lives. A perfect hero 
 with either his virtues or his vices " writ in 
 water," is transhuman ; and so valueless to 
 the world as an example, because it can find 
 no point d'appui in so much symmetry. I 
 noticed Mr. Emerson invariably made these 
 distinctions and expected them. No man 
 ever lived who has less to lose by their 
 observance. Strangers_who_ sought Jiim for 
 the first time, and found his contact toi) 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 139 
 
 arueiaicr-enflp.d b.y:-pmi-sing its spirituality. . 
 And in his presence, the most conscientious 
 may give way to the natural and honourable 
 impulse which compels us to praise without 
 discrimination the great servers of mankind. 
 
 He -hdiexsd persistently in thg,„practise of 
 expressing the thought with the pen. "Writer" 
 write," be-w-as wont to. say tp.me ; "jhfiieisjB 
 no way to learn to write eaceftLbjimitJng/; ' 
 His admiration was often too sanguine for 
 the event. There was a young Rousseau — I 
 knew him well — who devoted years to the 
 preparation of a psychological novel, which 
 our Antinous had counselled writing out at 
 length, though the result could not well be 
 otherwise than it was — a mass of worthless 
 manuscript. Although he knew well how 
 vast is the number of books brought to be 
 printed in comparison with the few that are, 
 yet he never disgusted the would-be author 
 with such statistics or discouraged effort, 
 but jj\yaj5„.jefliisiiiei£.4jthe_satisf action of 
 .. expression a ""ffiiCAPTiJ; finaJ. rpgiilt. 
 
 It is given to all men of letters to love the 
 Chermit vhabitj but Mr. Emerson's extreme 
 - solitariness was dictated from afar. 
 
 " I hope you like walks alone and in by- 
 paths. You find your best muse there," said 
 
I40 Talks with 
 
 he to me ; and the powers that conspired to 
 build him, the manes of seven generations 
 spoke in the expre ssion . 
 
 He avoide d (^ies7 even when abroad, 
 seeking always, "WKen he could, some quiet 
 thorp wherein to disappear; liked not his 
 wife's (Mrs. Lidian's) home, because it was a 
 larger village than Concord, and — the state- 
 ment is veracious, not authentic — was thankful 
 when the inclemency of the weather assisted 
 his own retirement Even thence he frequently 
 dwelt apart He did some work on Monad- 
 nock, and in the Old Manse. " Nature " 
 came from one of these remote, hidden 
 studies. 
 
 " Bu t I find_ _m^, best workiiig;„§plijude." he 
 said to me, "in some New York hotel or 
 country inn, where no one knows or can find 
 me. There one finds one's self" 
 
 In his walks he was inquisitive, would 
 interrupt the subject to remark upon anything 
 uncommon; especially objects meretricious 
 or false rarely escaped his surveiUant eye. 
 It was a marvel that an attention so inward 
 could also be so outward. A wooden build- 
 ing made to imitate brick or stone, painted 
 blinds where were no real ones, ashlar work, 
 false facades, fences of wood made to re- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 141 
 
 semble iron, any object suggestively untrue 
 annoyed him. 
 
 One d ay I called upo n him . \ q fa;^ jiim 
 
 was still co2;^ingj_^ It was necessary for some 
 purpose, he explained, that he should possess 
 some sixty pages of manuscript in duplicate. 
 I offetg^JcjsUeKeJlJBi ; J3Juyj£.saidhejnust 
 do, this, as be jy-as-fbtced tp dfl.|a;gry thing, for 
 himself. 7~f>*— ' 
 
 I like to recall such facts as these, because 
 continental critics have stated that he bor- 
 rowed Montaigne, imitated the Orientalists 
 and Germans; and these are not the traits 
 of a borrowing man. To me, Emerson's 
 swift convictions, his sunniness and fidelity 
 to the homely sincerities, are not even of like- 
 ness to Montaigne's pedantic and desultory 
 earthliness, and his unforsaken whims. I have 
 not seen any direct citations to substantiate 
 these charges. They have never appeared in 
 domestic latitudes, and I do not think they 
 could have been made by persons acquainted 
 with Mr. Emerson, or familiar with his work ; 
 for he shrank from appropriating anything 
 not originally his, or that had not been 
 assimilated by his own mental character. He 
 would rather be a kitten and cry " mew," and 
 
142 Talks with 
 
 that mew would be Emerson's. It is true he 
 sought the Oriental literature, as did Carlyle 
 the German. Emerson imported it for 
 Americans. Who among us knew of the Vedas 
 or Ramdyana until he scattered the desire for 
 them here and there as a household treasure ? 
 And who has sought Saadi or Hafiz but has 
 encountered a disappointment of hopes based 
 on Emerson's richer page, to whom the im- 
 possibility of even a moment's masquerade or 
 carrying foreign colours for the most transient 
 purposes was ancestral ? The same virility and 
 rarity of organization which has made him so 
 eminent, has forced others of the same un- 
 receptive blood into successes, as marked in 
 commercial and professional pursuits. His 
 life and revealings were his own and explicit. 
 Openness to conversion is, perhaps, as 
 admirable as firmness of conviction, but less 
 suggestive of a severe individuality. M^tr^ 
 Em£iSfln!§_methods were posi tive. He did not _ 
 den^z— That he never disclosed impatience 
 when his positions were traversed led some to 
 believe that he held his doctrines with a light 
 hand. But once I heard him defend assailed 
 statements ; and that occasion aiforded a re- 
 markable instance of the tenacity with which 
 lie held his views, and the cogency with which 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 143 
 
 he could advocate them. He listened so well, 
 extended such appreciative consideration, and 
 then there was such an apparent yielding in 
 the fairness of his returns, that no one was pre- 
 pared for the discovery, until it was inevitable 
 from the larger view he presented, that confu- 
 sion must follow those who. withstood him. He 
 did not compromise, nor did he proclaim ; but 
 his quiet rejoinders concealed the dark fires of 
 volcanic regions which catch where they ace 
 not^ seen. It was from his example a brief 
 and gentle discussion — a heated magnet loses 
 its power — and not abandoned until all saw 
 that there was positively no hope of eliminat- 
 ing from such pertinacity any position once 
 assumed. But the charm consisted in the 
 quiet reappearance of the arraigned proposi- 
 tions ; they came clad always in new 
 language, with illustrations that gave them 
 a new force, but the same indestructible 
 identity. I can never remember the incident 
 without applying to it quite as much as to the 
 divinity of existence the old Brahma lines : — 
 
 " If the red slayer thinks he slays, 
 Or if the slain think he is slain, 
 / They know not well the subtle ways 
 / I keep and pass and turn again," * 
 
 • A good instance is this quatrain of Mr. Emer- 
 
144 Talks with 
 
 But, marchom, I touch a single subor 
 dinate feature too long for faithfulness. 
 Eoleniicism was foreign _to^ Mr. ..Emsrson. 
 His opponents wove his sisal fibres into 
 ropes, but when they were drawn tight he 
 had escaped. All of him the attitude of 
 hostility could detain was the linen cloth 
 about the body. He woulinot-de-battle for 
 hia_pi£cepts ; he did-'Horwish-follQffiers, nor 
 was he an iconoclast. The images are re- 
 moved or burned after, not by him. He 
 was solicitous about the clay, but not about 
 the shape ; and womM^ conger v e individ u - 
 ahsm rather even than the ]inowl«4ge"«)f— 
 tiutbr Moreover, he was deeply sensitive 
 to the many-sidedness of truth, and the 
 impossibility of uttering in regard to it the 
 complete word. 
 
 How this contrasts with the bold and 
 stormy Carlyle ! With what tempests of hu- 
 mour that, as Emerson said, " floated every- 
 thing," the great Scotchman would sweep 
 
 son's resurrecting power. Compare Krishna's song 
 in the Bhagavad-Gita, Edwin Arnold's translation : — 
 
 " He who shall say, 'Lo ! I have slain a man,' 
 He who shall think, ' Lo ! I am slain ! ' those both 
 Know naught 1 Life cannot slay. Life is not 
 slain 1 " 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. HS 
 
 pposition away ; or, quite as likely, with 
 'hat electrical violence he would destroy it ! 
 
 The y wer e always at war, their methods 
 ansversej,and-thdx_s£.paia]iaaa$i5iSeS«ced. 
 'arlyle!sL_adEantage. was jn force, Emerson|s 
 1 insight. His^ feet were always on the 
 arth. And so he believed in the grandeur 
 f the masses and their self-originated ad- 
 ancement, while Carlyle's sympathies were 
 ever democratic. "A great deep cliff," 
 e said, " divides us, in our ways of prac- 
 cally looking at this world." Emerson 
 aid me that Carlyle was impatient for him 
 5 know Goethe — =z. knowledge which did 
 mch less for the American than for the 
 cotchman. Both_ enccairaged— geftuine 
 omers, but neither could tolerate insincerity, 
 ■hich they destroyedi~one™winr'lighJ.£ni^ 
 nd the other with Jigbt. 
 
 But I hasten to my vicissitudes with Mr. 
 Emerson's literature ; for they traversed mis- 
 nderstandings with his methods to which 
 very young and new reader is exposed, 
 'or^many years before I saw him his pages 
 semed to me immortal. They-stirred me 
 5 a Bible ; so completely (according to my 
 apacity) did I receive their revelation, so 
 eenly did I feel their bracing and severe 
 
146 Talks with 
 
 climate ; the fine exhilaration they create ; 
 iheir insight ; their sententious wisdom ; the 
 nobility of their character. So the highest 
 aspirations of my mind were met and satis- 
 fied. Then I was disturbed by bruit of 
 under-meanings and tones that I had not 
 caught. I learned that I ought to find a 
 series of sub-conscious, logical links, subtly 
 binding these inspirations into an integral 
 whole; and that they were inhabited by a 
 double interior sense, like that attributed to 
 Swedenborg by his disciples. I had been for 
 months passionately and patiently absorbed 
 in the search when Mr. Emerson himself 
 came upon the scene. "Now," I exclaimed, 
 " that I can see the master, I shall be taught." 
 Well do I remember the charmed after- 
 noon that he put into my hands one of his 
 personal collections, — I do not know their 
 name; Emeisoniana, I _called..iljem,-^-ather- 
 ings which _ had grovtn from -year to year 
 until they would raake-a.,.v£iluH»e-;r brrgmal 
 reflestians," extracts with pen and pencil, 
 scraps, personal draughts, and even a gallery 
 of words and brilliant and studious expres- 
 sions; like Bacon's "Promus," anything and 
 everything that had formed a mental experi- 
 ence for him. Here and there were isolated 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 147 
 
 quantities of manuscript, evidently denoting 
 what he had meditated, and studies of par- 
 ticular subjects with his own commentaries. 
 He obviously had sipped from books rather 
 than read; and these repertories witnessed 
 that he had obeyed his own maxim-to " shut 
 t he book when your own thought comeg." 
 It seemed as if he had preserved everything, 
 whether in good form or not ; but this was a 
 mistake; for he destroyed much that should 
 have been spared. Many of the passages I 
 at once recognized as friends of the rostrum. 
 In a moment it flashed upon me that I was 
 in the presence of one of the manuscript 
 sources of the addresses, essays, treatises, 
 yea, the books themselves. So soon as I 
 could realize this, I sought to pursue through 
 a few of the pages the theme on which they 
 advertised to discourse. But I very soon 
 became unable to trace connections. Here 
 was the subject, looked at, looked about, 
 looked into; but here, as well, were others 
 remotely relevant or not relevant at all, and 
 paragraphed bits of print, pen-illustrations, 
 adages, criticisms, ingenious and delicate 
 reflections obviously just as they came, and 
 on anything — and then the subject again 
 appearing, like the uncalculated return of a 
 
148 Talks with 
 
 comet. The orbit was long, and an ellipse, 
 I went back and over the ground again and 
 again with scrutinizing eyes, but I could 
 not be mistaken, and finally gave it up, 
 convinced that the wigwam was lost, not the 
 Indian. 
 
 Studying still closer into the construction 
 of the propositions themselves, it became 
 plain that Mr. Emerson considered the 
 paragraph for him the limit of logical ex- 
 pression. He tried to crowd everything into 
 it ; an attempt which the following one 
 exposed. These fragmentary and unrelated 
 statements produced upon me an impression 
 of isolation, and gave an air of incomplete- 
 ness. With their drastic quality and weight, 
 they overpowered the narrative. So since 
 have our gigantic Californian sequoias made 
 me indifferent as to the trend or extent of 
 the forest they constitute. The thoughts 
 seemed islanded, as he said, "paragraphs 
 incompressible, each sentence an infinitely 
 repellent particle.'' And Carlyle's descrip- 
 tion : " By-the-by, I ought to say the sen- 
 tences are very brief, and did not, in my 
 sheet reading, always entirely cohere for me. 
 Pure genuine Saxon; strong and simple; of 
 a clearness, of a beauty, — but they did not 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 149 
 
 sometimes rightly stick to their foregoers and 
 their followers ; the paragraphs not as a 
 beaten ingot, but as a beautiful bag of duck 
 shot held together by canvas " (Carlyle : Letter 
 to Emerson, November 3, 1844). And one 
 remembers Theodore Parker's comparison of 
 Mr. Emerson's sentences to an army all 
 officers — but they are advancing on a long 
 march. 
 
 And now I thought I understood better 
 about the frequent lapse and hiatus in the 
 Lyceum appearances and the lectures as 
 published, which frequently bewilder the 
 young student. Mr. Emerson sought not 
 occasions, and determined not to write for 
 them ; but in his position he could not avoid 
 them, nor could he lift bodily into them the 
 original fabric of his work without some con- 
 cession to time and place; and Bronson 
 Alcott has drawn a picture of Mr. Emerson 
 on his knees in his study, trying to piece 
 together for such exigency sheets of written 
 matter with which the floor was carpeted. 
 But art is inflexible, and there were audacious 
 chasms which even his carpentry could not 
 join, and which had been abandoned in 
 despair. This physiological connection, I 
 fear, must be accepted rather than the 
 
I50 Talks with 
 
 psychological ; but^anjii Jogical-eomRtlction 
 wniild sever those-tea dong whieh - God nev er 
 j oined together . So I no longer wondered 
 at the hesitant turning of leaves which had 
 characterized the lecturing. What trying 
 moments some of those pages must have 
 occasioned ; what temporary embarrassment, 
 incident upon extracting anything consecu- 
 tive from them ! Well, I knew now why no 
 lecture was twice alike; for, lo, the theme 
 occupied many hours, and we got only one. 
 Here before me was the original body, with- 
 out form, though I could almost see the 
 creator's hand moving on the manuscript's 
 face ! As for a hidden sense, I said (and 
 this conclusion remains unchanged), the 
 readers who find one in Faust may in 
 Emerson; but they will find it as the cup 
 was found in Benjamin's sack, and by a 
 similar process. 
 
 The next step toward possession of my 
 author was a most important one, namely, 
 my introduction to Plato and Coleridge. I 
 found myself returned by them to the same 
 posture of attention Emerson had originally 
 excited. The Socratic dialogues, especially, 
 while apparently lawless, exhibited that 
 nothing important was omitted in the ground 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 151 
 
 gone over ; and I discovered that there was 
 really the same progress as if the manikin 
 process had been pursued, and the argument 
 anatomized. These imaginary conversations, 
 and Coleridge's discursive discussions, became 
 to me object-lessons disclosing Emerson's 
 secret of advancing by a natural instead oi 
 the artificial order I had been trained in. 
 Then I recalled what he _ba.d. , J;a ught me 
 (" Counsel "), to permit fiototiocmative steps 
 to appear^Mnd I saw how foolisli it had been 
 -iirme to suppose that he would permit them 
 to apjjear himself 
 
 " Why could it not be," I asked myself, 
 " that he dispenses with the syllogism, 
 which is rather a form of stating proof 
 than proving, and performs his reasoning 
 in quiet, acquainting the reader only with 
 the epigrammatic results ; and that these 
 limited diversions, given with such excess oi 
 candor that they cause me to be over-solicited 
 by them, really exhibit the author's truth by 
 the exhaustion of exits from it ? " Applying 
 this dialectic to the " Essays," I was delighted 
 to find that they were responsive to it, and 
 displayed under it the same intelligent plan 
 as that unquestioningly acknowledged in his 
 more concrete work, like "Nature," " English 
 
153 Talks with 
 
 Traits," his orations, and his campaign 
 addresses, which march like a phalanx. 
 From this point of view, there is one axis 
 through the main portion of his writings ; 
 and I regard them also as an exhibition of 
 what, in the best sense, natural methods of 
 composition can accomplish in the way of 
 style, to the construction of which he never 
 gave a thought, and so produced one entirely 
 new and fascinating, characterized by insight 
 rather than argument; seizing truths and 
 presenting them without the effort, hitherto 
 common, of showing relations and connec- 
 tions. 
 
 That Mr. Emerson's friends have gener- 
 ally not been content with this accomplish- 
 ment, and have sought to conform him to the 
 old rules and ways, I regard as unfortunate. 
 No new vogue gains permanent admiration 
 unless it is congenial to an unrecognized 
 necessity and the natural vehicle of its 
 creator. That adopted by Mr. Emerson 
 appears to me to be a vindication alike of 
 his sagacity and his conscientiousness. It ~ 
 was peculiarly adapted to the time of its 
 appearance, and to the man whose first work 
 was to break the heavy equilibrium amid 
 which he found himself; to agitate into life 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. i53 
 
 the settled New England torpor, and with 
 the intellectual activity to attain higher moral 
 processes. There remained one step farther 
 in this determination of method. The 
 reader of Mr. Emerson encounters (often 
 introduced by the formula, " I have heard," 
 or, " as a certain poet sang ") utterances that 
 are fragments of a sjiritual p julosnphy or 
 vision of which we have not the entire sub- 
 stance. The altitude from which these 
 verities come is beyond that sought by the 
 thinker or poet ; it is in the region of that of 
 the seer. The genesis of these thoughts of 
 God is quite as much the experiences of his 
 sinless life as the intuitions of his highest 
 and tpiyatif and prophetic moments, when 
 the univeraeJa gcame self -revelatory. The 
 spiritual character of these themes forbids 
 their approach by the methods of empirical 
 logic ; but in their presence there is a pro- 
 found and central self-containment. A 
 large unity and integrity resembling that of 
 Nature (within whose content are surprises 
 and contrasts) is in all expressions of the 
 Over-Soul or Supreme Reality, and they are 
 in it " as the ocean is in the bucket and the 
 bucket in the ocean." 
 
 I submit this elementary record to the 
 
154 Talks with 
 
 young and new reader of Emerson, in the 
 hope that it may be of some help in deter- 
 mining the question whether his presentation 
 is wiihin scientific form. 
 
 An organic philosophy he did not offer. 
 His claunj»»&-that-there is nQthing_coinp1 Ptp. 
 The clement Parcae in his study, who were 
 ever spinning a fairer thread, presided over 
 his mental attitude, which always said. All 
 objects are unknowable on account of their 
 relativity. Nothing is concluded here or can 
 be. I utter the final word on no subject. 
 How different this from Beecher's study, for 
 instance, where the great circular work-wheel 
 and chair in the centre somehow always pre- 
 sented positive and final declaration. But 
 Emerson would weave no completed fabric. 
 Far be it from him to dogmatize or insist 
 upon any pronouncement as complete or 
 final. He said what he saw, and as far as 
 he saw, without reasoning and without logical 
 unfolding. Fgf^ts, yes_ ^ hut I p t-th fi yeoAex ^n 
 
 h is o wn ^ dreafping, and~.make-Jiia^\vii, com- 
 pletions. His reward does not depend on 
 solidarity which is often artificial. 
 
 " Do not put hinges to your work to make 
 it cohere," he once said in substance to me. 
 And we must remember that through such 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 155 
 
 joints much sophistry has crept into the 
 world. Sincerity was Mr. Emerson's soul ; 
 and he unhesitatingly preferred laclT ofTron- 
 tinuity to the least ambiguity regarding inten- 
 tion. Classification for the sake of external 
 order and system was unnatural to him. Nor 
 was he sensitive to their absence in Carlyle, 
 whose writings are a congeries of magnificent 
 contradictions. It may be that this tempera- 
 ment in Mr. Emerson asserted itself at times 
 too strongly for his wish or his work, as cer- 
 tainly did his reluctance from severe thought. 
 After his proposition had once attained form 
 and been passed upon, it must remain. If 
 the next could be made to harmonize with it, 
 well ; if not, the next must look out for itself; 
 it, too, must be true, or it would not be here. 
 
 These omissions and silences in Emerson's 
 literature reward, and it is well to master its 
 cipher. It is the way a poet writes. Emerson 
 was essentially a poet, and the essays are 
 lyric and a solvent force. When even they 
 discuss society it is with a poet's insight. 
 No one reads them, any more than he would 
 poetry, by quantity. 
 
 " A poet does not say to mankind. This, 
 and this only, is true, and you will find it 
 consistent with every other truth I proclaim. 
 He says, I feel this, at this moment, to be 
 
iS6 Talks with 
 
 true ; so much of the Kving world I can 
 portray you. You ask sincerity of utterance 
 from the poet, not systematic thinking. 
 Here and there flash across the mind unmis- 
 takable truths or generous sentiments, which, 
 surely, it is well to utter, though in a partial 
 and disjointed manner. There is a certain 
 freedom of utterance allowed to the poet 
 which is denied to the prose writer, for this 
 very reason— that he is not expected to follow 
 out to its last logical result every opinion 
 and sentiment he expresses." 
 
 As regards the poetic form, what fetter 
 Mr. Emerson's genius felt from the rules of 
 art, or within what limits his temperament 
 confined his inspirations, we cannot know ; 
 but we have from a most conscientious critic, 
 himself a poet, in regard of Mr. Emerson the 
 judgment: "If he had been frequently sus- 
 tained at heights he was capable of reaching, 
 he would unquestionably have been one of 
 the sovereign poets of the world." But what 
 poet has inhabited such heights long ? 
 
 To me the graces that transcend in Mr. 
 Emerson's poetry are, with this spiritual 
 elevation, its allusiveness and infectious in- 
 dividualism — that quality which constrained 
 Carlyle to write him that his anonymous 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 157 
 
 work was at once distinguishable in a mis- 
 cellaneous gathering of writings. But in the 
 poetry, as in the prose, the laissez faire 
 atmosphere, necessa.'ily noticeable, was found 
 exasperating; and his critics crowded the 
 columns of the Boston and New England press 
 at times with attack, but found in them no 
 word of answer. Even the Archons of 
 literary opinion raised their deep and seldom 
 voices in vain. He was out and away from 
 the cry of the hounds. 
 
 One other of the deep lessons that con- 
 fronted me from those precious manuscript 
 pages of the master belongs here ; and that 
 was the evidences of painstaking and labour, 
 of careful reconsideration and retouching of 
 the form which were everywhere. Countless 
 of these memoranda were pasted or pinned 
 together, the language changed and rechanged 
 until the paper resembled palimpsist, and the 
 thoughts like sheet metal rolled and ham- 
 mered to the smallest possible compass. A 
 severer judge of himself never wrote. What 
 a rebuke to those writers who "throw off" 
 on the spur of the moment ! Nothing that he 
 did was " thrown off." Immense was the 
 tributary study, deep and long the meditation, 
 well brooded were all statements; but, more 
 
158 Talks with 
 
 than all, how firmly, with what infinite 
 patience, was the expression manipulated, 
 especially in his fine use of the common 
 everyday words which find on his page 
 their apotheosis, and approve him a great 
 master of English ! Here and there on inter- 
 jected leaves I could even trace the history 
 of a sentence from the first free and mordant 
 enunciation through modifications, abate- 
 ments, and restrictions to narrower outline, 
 then tempered to the exact fact, and the clean 
 and clear distinctions, the 
 
 "River to streamlet reducing, and mountain to slope 
 subduing." 
 
 Drop by drop the enchantment was distilled 
 which changed the water into wine. It is 
 this fine and full control of his instrument 
 which confers such a subtle charm on his 
 books, gives them their lucidity and surprise, 
 and makes of them English classics. Truly 
 a sayer was Emerson. 'Sometimes the pem- 
 mican process has been too rigid, and one 
 regrets the parsimony of words. But always, 
 if you repeat what he says, it must be in his 
 own language, even when he uses "reliable,"' 
 "loan," as a verb, "isolate" as an adjective, 
 " party " for individual," the three first," etc. 
 Indeed, such preferences as these — the 
 
KAl.r^i WALDO JiMERSON. 1 59 
 
 purposed adoption of abbreviations even in 
 his poetry, frequent disregard of precision 
 in the use of words, a certain intentional 
 raggedness of expression, the employment 
 of colloquialisms, exclamatory sentences, 
 and the like — distinguish Emerson from 
 the strictly literary writer ; and in so far 
 subtract from the permanency of his liter- 
 ary accomplishment. He gives impetus 
 to thought by saying things in new and 
 startling ways, and was not always, per- 
 haps, patient to trust his unsurpassed 
 knowledge of words and form. He was sub- 
 ject to flow and departure of tide. There 
 are passages in Emerson, many, many of 
 them, where he is a veritable Adonais, beau- 
 tiful and strong and luminous, where the 
 thought has been apparelled in a way not to 
 be surpassed for translucence and delicacy, 
 and these are literature. There are other 
 passages where, as obviously, there has 
 been an intelligent and unhesitating sacri- 
 fice to the dynamic. Here, it seems to me, 
 Emerson contrasts with Plato, who is never 
 for a moment other than purely literary. Mr. 
 Emerson claimed that the best statement 
 scanned and cited, " L et there be lia htrand^- 
 therej^as light." And we know of the lines — ' 
 
i&o Talks with 
 
 " I heard, or seemed to hear, the chiding sea 
 Say, ' Pilgrim, why so late and slow to come ? ' " 
 
 that they were substantially originally written 
 
 as prose. Expression to him was a sensuous 
 
 delight, and so his sentences are keen of 
 
 flavour, delicious, and refreshing. He tasted 
 
 his words. Who has said as perfectly those 
 
 things which are difficult to say at all ? He 
 
 told me that he^^as notjgelL-ghen Jip rwiJd 
 
 f not write] and— rrr the^ study ' ha lud THImite 
 ^palierrce; He even suspected his fervours, 
 and it took him a long time to secure in his 
 spirited paragraphs their wide, and at the 
 same time their carefully distinctive meaning. 
 This needful elaboration perhaps explains 
 his epistolary defect Any necessitated spon- 
 taneity embarrassed him, and he was forced 
 to copy his letters and search apparent ease 
 of/t^iposition. Once in my room he said — 
 (jyi see you have many gathered volumes 
 of correspondence of distinguished men and 
 women. It. is,A.fortiH>e-to write ■goad-leltejs^ 
 I do not havejl„. I do not love— l€.tteii — 
 ^nling, ^d jdojjfit JKiitfiuJetters readily.!!.-. 
 
 So his few apparently offhand public 
 addresses did not come pat, but on two 
 occasions at least within my knowledge 
 there was manuscript foundation. He was 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. i6i 
 
 not ^ equal to the exigent jistwaird, the im- 
 
 And the~~genesrs~of thought in the presence 
 of an audience, revealing to them that they 
 were in some wise the parent of it, which 
 made Beecher and Phillips, for instances, so 
 
 popular, was a perpetual surprise to him. ._! 
 
 cannot think of Emerson as envying any- 
 thing; but this extempore -i-naek— tempted 
 him. So a friend relates of him that one 
 day, coming out of a crowded audience which 
 he had disappointed in the middle of his 
 address by mislaying some pages of his 
 manuscript (so distressing him that he took 
 his seat), and which Phillips had immediately 
 delighted with his oration, Mr. Emerson said — 
 
 " I would give a thousand shekels for that 
 man's secret." 
 
 So he said of Beecher, apropos of his 
 oratory in England during the war — 
 
 "What will you do with an eloquent man? 
 He makes you laugh, and you cannot throw 
 your egg." These statements disclose an 
 estimate of eloquence coincident with the 
 ordinary one, rather than with his definition 
 given in " Counsel." Accepting that defi- 
 nition which was perhaps temperamental, 
 he was almost incomparably eloquent. 
 
1 62 Talks with Emerson. 
 
 His conveyance in regard to the fine arts 
 is so excellent but slight that perhaps 
 they did not fully address him. Neither 
 are the exact sciences represented as hav- 
 ing received attention. Indeed, of mathe- 
 matics, Mr. EmerSSftk said to me in my 
 home — ,' ji 
 
 "Some riiathematjcal works here, too. 
 What hours of anelancholy mine cost ! It 
 was long before I learned that there is some- 
 thing"^ wrcjig with X man's brai u \yli o 1o yi^~' 
 thein." ""■■- """ 
 
 Such remarks as these emphasize that Mr. 
 Emerson hoped to help less by demonstra- 
 tion and reasoning than by breaking up 
 apathy and imparting impulse ; and who that 
 has brooded over Emerson's writings and felt 
 their fascination, spontaneous as if from an 
 improvisatore, salient with all the qualities of 
 suggestiveness and motive-power, with imagi- 
 nation and intuition instead of syllogisms, 
 and words of a fine vitality coercing into new, 
 strange, and eruptive moods, — but has felt 
 that he has before him an illustration of what 
 the English language, unaided by action, can 
 achieve in moving the souls of men ? 
 
 M 
 
MANHOOD. 
 
MANHOOD. 
 
 This is the story of an enthusiasm. One 
 who comes to the long leisure of youth in its 
 arid but most auspicious days, concentrates 
 its vague and restless aspirations and nourishes 
 its heart, takes possession with an exclusive- 
 ness proportioned to the service. Not learn- 
 ing or wisdom or personal appearance and 
 fascinations create these profound and per- 
 manent impressions. When they are asked 
 for, the inquisition is deeper. What i« the 
 difi£ientiating_ substance, the__inner quality, 
 the central and essential character of the 
 man himself7^fox that we conjure the invisible 
 angel who has conquered us by his audacious 
 touch. No observations and calculations of 
 shadows to determine altitude will avail. 
 We can only know the man by the affections, 
 which, as Wordsworth says in a noble passage, 
 are their own justification. 
 
1 66 Talks with 
 
 So I knew him, and yet knew him not 
 For that is the nobility of every great man, 
 that he cannot be divined, but sends the 
 seeker farther and farther into his own un- 
 surveyed heavens. So he was incom- 
 mensurable, and might have been taken for 
 the pneuma Plato celebrated, who can see 
 two sides of a thing ; only, so far from being 
 simple, he was many-sided. His resemblances 
 were of Socrates, Buddha, and Ben Franklin; 
 but he continually surprised and eluded. 
 
 How often as young men, before we had 
 ever seen him, we used to gather about the 
 study table in those earlier days before his 
 coming, and create him mechanically from 
 his books ! How little were our verbatim 
 imaginations prepared for the propensities 
 we encountered! We went out to see one 
 who had forsworn all luxuries, a man of 
 abstemious and austere habit and severest 
 standard. We never found him. 
 
 Well I remember now the anxious con- 
 sultation and miserable misgivings over our 
 little banquet to him ! Long we hesitated 
 over the items of the simple order to the 
 village caterer 1 His country resources 
 afforded ice-cream and comfits ! But had 
 not our guest in his published writings for- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 167 
 
 bidden them, except for those who dare not 
 trust the entertainment of their own minds ? 
 And I venture the guess that neither of us 
 have since experienced that pecuHar creep of 
 surprise and rehef that gradually stole over 
 us as we saw (though, ignorantly, our repast 
 was offered at an hour when the stomach 
 should be sacred of intrusion, three p.m.) 
 our dainties disappear with an appetite we 
 had supposed characteristic only of under- 
 graduates. 
 
 So, again, on the road, when he would 
 stop wayfarers and inquire about the pro- 
 prietors of certain estates, and praise their 
 thrift and enterprise, remembering how I had 
 kindled reading his eloquent advocacy of a 
 renunciation " of the premature comforts of 
 an acre, house, and barn to traverse the star- 
 lit deserts of truth ! " I felt that I did not 
 understand him — that, in boy's parlance, his 
 words meant one thing and he another. 
 
 Of course this was the boy's stupidity. 
 Our eyes, myopic and level only to the 
 plinth, could not take in what it upheld or 
 represented. But, after all, has not the 
 blunder been shared by older and harder 
 heads? When the master's presence was 
 missed from the company of Pythagoreans 
 
1 68 Talks with 
 
 and herb-eaters at Brook Farm and Fruit- 
 lands, and when advocates of special reform, 
 attracted by the encouraging hospitality of 
 his writings, sought his espousal of their 
 schemes in vain, was it not apparent that 
 they, too, must take his words as parole, 
 and for themselves discover at the last that 
 he was not a reformer, but a creator of re- 
 formers ? 
 
 Then there are in his literature intuitions 
 which logic seems to continually overcome, 
 positions which are easily shown to be ap- 
 parently unreconcilable. 
 
 And one is reminded of what he says of 
 Plato. " One man thinks he meant this, 
 and another that. He said one thing in one 
 place and the reverse of it in another place. 
 He argues on this side and on that." (Em- 
 erson on Plato, but on himself as well.) 
 
 Farthermore, he advertises of himself: 
 " But lest I would mislead any, when I have 
 my own head and obey my own whims, let 
 me remind the reader that I am only an 
 experimenter. Do not set the least value on 
 what I do, or the least discredit on what I 
 do not do, as if I pretended to settle anything 
 as true or false. I unsettle all things. No 
 facts are to me sacred, none are profane. I ' 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 169 
 
 simply experiment, an endless seeker, with 
 no past at my back " (" Circles "). 
 
 Now such words as these, and such ex- 
 periences as those just narrated, have served 
 to puzzle and deter new seekers. But to the 
 true Emersonian, the facts indicated by these 
 words occasion no unrest. So far from having 
 this effect, they are recognized as being from 
 the master's inner self. He would unsettle 
 all things, why ? That we should pursue 
 them. He will have no sacred facts. Why ? 
 That we should look all facts in the face. 
 And this is the open secret of his power to- 
 day. Others give us themselves. He gives 
 and maintains to us ourselves, our best selves. 
 We do not seek him for knowledge, but for 
 wisdom, and the best wisdom — a new life. 
 And it is this universal search that indicates 
 that seminal, germinal, developing quality 
 which is the central essence of the man him- 
 self. He comes immediately into the mind, 
 a revolutionary force, questioning, suggesting, 
 destroying composure, provoking doubt of 
 the order that is, destroying gods whether 
 Penates or Empyrean, not with blows, but 
 with frost and fire, emancipating thought, 
 sowing a sane discontent and elation ; then 
 stimulator, inspirer, liberator of power. And 
 
170 Talks with 
 
 with what other service is such serv'ce com- 
 parable ? To this temper he was ever con- 
 stant. Even in his old age, which is not 
 seldom the obscuration of genius, when h s 
 days became almost merely loitering and 
 literary, he still kept this native bravery, 
 and I believe refers to it when he says he 
 obeyed 
 
 " The voice at eve obeyed at prime." 
 
 And so to the heart of youth I would say : 
 He comes especially to you. You will find 
 these days everybody quoting him, and not a 
 few praising. While he was too wise to seek 
 the inculcation of an harmonized system of 
 all truth, yet no one has given us so many 
 and such rare truths. No one in these con- 
 gested days will yet guide you so well to 
 those heights where are the jodel and the 
 edelweiss. But not for this does he come to 
 you. It is the invigorating, elevating soul of 
 him that you must meet. You, too, will go 
 in search of it ; you, too, will be impelled by 
 his words ; and you, too, are called upon to 
 forepoint at your peril when they are born 
 of his imagination, his mood, his uplifting 
 genius, his intuition, as well as when their 
 source is his valid commonsense. He ex- 
 pects of you that you will obey the placard, 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 171 
 
 "Private way, no thoroughfare," hung by 
 this verger over the turns of the quadrangle. 
 He, himself, the 
 
 " Musketaquit, goblin strong, 
 
 Of shard and flint makes jewels gay. 
 
 They lose their grief who hear his song, 
 
 And where he winds is day of day." 
 
 His are the loftiest conceptions, those which 
 do the most to make us discontented with the 
 ordinary and commonplace, and by that token 
 are essentially incapable of being literally 
 translated into speech or personified in action. 
 So you will find his words always wise, always 
 true. ^ Follow Emerson's utterances chrono- 
 logically from the first obscure but stimulative 
 manifestation of his spirit, when he had not 
 yet come to the full knowledge of his pur- 
 gosCj^ but was conscious mainly of the neces- 
 sity of-thawtng out the climate, through to 
 his later lifetime, when his philosophy forms 
 an unbroken fringe falling in separate threads 
 of beauty and use that touch at all points 
 wisely and sanely our humanity. I read a 
 portion of the essays to an old farmer. He 
 clapped his hands, and exclaimed that 
 whoever wrote that book knew how to 
 "farm it" Yet the characteristic admired 
 was merely that of practically a holding to 
 
172 Talks with 
 
 the fact by prehensility of tail — a valuable 
 trait even if simial, but one so common 
 that it would not distinguish. The soar of 
 the first gospel is necessary to lift the last. 
 Those primal pages are to be reverently 
 treasured by the Emersonian because they 
 first drew us to him. Indeed, the earlier 
 idealism, the era of the doctrine of Trans- 
 cendentalism and its accompanying intima- 
 tions, finds its interpretation in the later, 
 warmer, and riper work; as, in the Arctic 
 traveller's mythus, the speech congealed to 
 the hearers of his own time became audible 
 in after-days. How much to us has been 
 and will be ever the high sentences of that 
 earlier manhood, and his inability to con- 
 form, which was to the Jews a stumbling- 
 block and to the Greeks foolishness ! We 
 would not miss the records of him in the 
 matter of the Lord's Supper, Public Prayer, 
 Christening, etc., even though later in life it 
 may be that he would not have called these 
 forms sensualizing, nor have failed to find 
 some hands other than Channing's pure 
 enough to touch the f^r^head of t hft "hya- 
 cinthin,e.,bo4£«I!., 
 
 The moral quality of his genius was not 
 less its unfailing characteristic. The man 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 173 
 
 stood behind or abreast of his every state- 
 ment, and it came clothed with dignity from 
 his sincerity. Great events moved him deeply. 
 At their approach, his other worldliness and 
 pure speculations were put one side; and 
 all low motives, considerations of mere ex- 
 pediency that had been mixed with the 
 question, vanished in his strong presence 
 as if themselves purely speculative. Witness 
 his earliest advocacy of political reform ; his 
 expostulations with President van Burenj 
 and in the Bell-Everett matter his voice, 
 which was the conscience of New England ; 
 his foremo^f^ abolition pulpit ; his and 
 William Lloyd Garrison's anti-slavery apostle- 
 ship ; his noble address at Concord on the 
 death of Lincoln ; his emancipation speeches, 
 with t1i£Jj )f)va-fij.g^ In these was the voice 
 of the over-soul, his God through him. We 
 have no more mgnientous_ manifestation of 
 the national spirit more free from the ferocity 
 of his colleague's, more timely and weighty. 
 As befitted an epoch-originating man, he 
 was above the atmospheric envelope, and 
 not affected by its disturbances, but spoke 
 from the calm heights where gathered and 
 for ever will gather with him the noble and 
 victorious of all eras. The tone of loyalty to 
 
174 Talks with 
 
 the commonwealth always commanded his 
 respect and forbade his criticism. Once, 
 when an audience at which a friend was 
 present, was compelled to listen to an in- 
 dividual who persisted in reading some screed 
 on national politics, Mr. Emerson broke the 
 silence that followed the infliction with the 
 one word of praise — " Patriotic ! " 
 
 But this recognizing the best possible was 
 a quality always transparent in him. His 
 preference was persistent for only the good 
 in the human life around him, and he would 
 have nothing to do with its lemurs. Melan- 
 choly- was a, chimpanzee traij^toJu^. He 
 rejoiced in Fuller's- maxisr,"" An ounce of 
 cheerfulness is worth a pound of sadness to 
 serve God with." He had not the capacity 
 to form even a recognizing acquaintance with 
 the darker facts in human character. Un- 
 doubtedly, his faith in its reactions was 
 extreme. He perhaps gifted it with some 
 qualities it did not possess ; and it may be 
 there were some chasms he walked over with 
 buoyant step because with bandaged eyes; 
 or was it that they were too intently fixed 
 on the zenith to see the nadir? 
 
 He fought with the bright battalions. And 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 175 
 
 their allies of the graver faiths have proclaimed 
 that his serenityof_ogtiimsm invalidated his 
 authority aS-ajjjagtiQaUnQr4£xp.on ; while 
 even many of his friends have feared that 
 the natural enamel was too protective which 
 kept him so stainless. His Greek absorption 
 of the beautiful and the delicacy of his 
 spiritual organization may go some way 
 toward a sanction which with difficulty is 
 sought in his own instructor, Nature, whose 
 processes and penalties are darkly luminous 
 with the presence of a principle very like that 
 of evil. Whether here the linden leaf fell 
 on Siegfried is a question which time will 
 answer. I believe that his changeless dis- 
 regard of the vast power of the will to destroy 
 the ideal nature in man has its source in the 
 great hope which inspired that noble question, 
 "Who can set limits to the remedial force 
 of the Spirit ? " What voice, even to an age 
 so facilely incurious of its own dark problems 
 and so unconscious of sin as this, has a 
 stronger moral imperative and from a higher 
 plane of religious motive than that of him 
 who beyond question was the greatest vindi- 
 cator and exalter of the soul the new world 
 has seen ? 
 
 There are those who believe that he saw 
 
176 Talks with 
 
 clearly because he did not feel keenly that 
 within he was emotion]ess,_his_sympathies 
 bei ng rather wij ix-abstr-act-humanity. But all 
 that is noble in the human heart is accosted 
 by, and greets him. His love was for the man 
 in the man ; an44hatlave,jsdtkjiis.instinetive-- 
 knpjs4eage^rEhe-eentraJ.,aecrets of being, was 
 the source of his power. From it his in- 
 fi :ence~"exhared as perfume from a flower. 
 But the inner tenderness is disclosed in such 
 expression as the following to Carlyle : — 
 
 "I write to implore you to be careful of 
 your health. You are the property of all 
 whom you rejoice in heart and soul, and you 
 must not deal with your body as your own. 
 O my friend, if you would come here, and let 
 me nurse you and pasture you in my nook 
 of this long continent, I will thank God and 
 you therefor morning and evening, and doubt 
 ^ not to give you, in a quarter of a year, sound 
 eyes, round cheeks, and joyful spirits." 
 
 And how Mrs. Carlyle wrote him : " Friend, 
 who years ago, in the Desert, descended on 
 us, out of the clouds as it were, and made 
 one day there look like enchantment for us, 
 and left me weeping that it was only one 
 day." 
 
 It is because these memories and such 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 177 
 
 unpermitted memories as these are so near 
 the heart, because his volitions were so pure 
 and his demeanour so lowly, that we return 
 to these things ; and, remembering him less 
 as a man of unmatched originality, an un- 
 failing fountain of delightful ideas, a moral 
 genius of extraordinary insight and mastery, 
 an architect of new horizons, a generative 
 and elemental power even, than as anjj in- 
 heritance of the divine presence, think of him 
 lastingly and lovingly with the Scripture, 
 "Soine,shall-not«leep,_but be changed." 
 
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