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Introduction. I am indebted to Mr. E. W. Emerson for assistance in preparation of this book and for various illustrative note and comment. Without his approval and wish that it should be published I should not have ventured into print, and it is therefore fitting it should be dedicated to him. Ikis not a new valuation of Emerson but a narrative of his influence and its effects upon the thoughtful young men of his time. Neither does it concern itself much with personal recollections of Emerson, save one exception which may be pardoned to the adventurous spirit of youth. I call to remembrance simply the known annals of his life and work in their relation to my own generation. I make no claim to long or intimate personal acquaintance with Emerson. My elders and vii distinguished contemporaries were more fortunate than myself in this respect but nothing could prevent my sharing with them his lectures, his essays and poems and the general intellectual movement which acknowledged him as its leader. By a sort of instinct, or whatever it may be called, I did not fail to become possessed with the whole spirit and productions of that movement, and never supposed that because I did not often share in his hospitalities I was any the less qualified to understand his pages or to consult his oracles in the difficult passages of life. I have spent most of my life at lanes ends and country cross-roads where my opportunities for frequent association with those to whom my sympathies were drawn were much restricted. Yet there was an impalpable bond between us and an intelligence and communion conveyed by no tangible instruments, like the new telegraphy which sends a message by the invisible wires of space.Thus one comes to the belief that it is indiffer viii ent where he dwells or what his fortune if he have any center in himself there is for him also a circumference with unnumbered radiating lines from one to the other, on whose paths all that toward which his nature most inclines may freely and prosperously pass. It has seemed to me therefore that with no personal assumption I might call what I have written Remembrances of Emerson. Contents A Day with Emerson . I Emersons Influence on the Young Men of his Time . 39.0 Emerson as Essayist 95 Remembrances of Emerson A DAY WITH EMERSON It is natural to wish for personal communication with great men. We are drawn to them as to a finer climate. Young men seek them with an instinctive hope of receiving a direct gift which will brighten themselves with some beam of greatness older men divine that only so much as they take with them will they carry away. The confidence of youth is nobler if more inexperienced. In going to celebrated persons results of a singular sort are disclosed among them disappointment and mortification. Youth recognises enough of greatness to discover its own littleness. It finds that it cannot come very near the great man because as yet it has no orbit of its own. At a distance all is compensated by the imagination. At a distance we figure a magnificence in the presence and affairs of genius. What chagrin to find that possibly it has Remembrances of Emerson dirty hands and big feet, eats with a knife, with many uncomfortable manners to balk the predisposed admirer. When its genius is predominant it retires to its adytum, whither we cannot follow we cannot surprise it in the act of being a genius we remain on the outsidewith its follies, or flattering equalities. We feel a shadow of regret to see the man whose pages suggest only the fairest ideals living subject to most of the vulgar conditions which torment mankind. Prudence hints that it would be wise to keep away...

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