inspiration was the gentle reformer, philosopher and writer, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, who was ever her father's loyal friend and helper.
Louisa's warm little heart enshrined the calm, great-minded man who
always understood things, and after she had read Goethe's
correspondence with Bettine, she, like Bettine, placed her idol on a
pedestal and worshipped him in a truly romantic fashion. At night,
after she had gone to her room, she wrote him long passionate letters,
expressing her devotion, but she never sent the letters--only told him
of them in later years, when they laughed together over her girlish
fancy. Once, she confessed to having sat in a tall cherry-tree at
midnight and sung to the moon until the owls scared her to bed; and of
having sung Mignon's song under his window in very bad German, and
strewed wild flowers over his door-step in the darkness. This sounds
very sentimental and silly, but Louisa was never that. She had a deep,
intense nature, which as yet had found no outlet or expression, and
she could have had no safer hero to worship than this gentle, serene,
wise man whose friendship for her family was so practical in its
expression. Also at that period, which Louisa herself in her diary
calls the "sentimental period," she was strongly influenced by the
poet and naturalist, Thoreau. From him she learned to know Nature in a
closer and more loving intimacy. Thoreau was called a hermit, and
known as a genius, and more often than not he could be found in his
hut in the woods, or on the river bank, where he learned to look for
the bright-eyed "Alcott girl," who would swing along his side in
twenty-mile tramps, eager and inquisitive about everything, learning
new facts about flowers and trees and birds and insects from the great
man at her side. Truly a fortunate girl was Louisa, with two such
friends and teachers as the great Emerson and Thoreau. Hawthorne, too,
fascinated her in his shy reserve, and the young girl in her teens
with a tremendous ability to do and to be something worth while in
life could have had no more valuable preface to her life as a writer
than that of the happy growing days at Concord, with that group of
remarkable men.

At that time she did not think seriously of having talent for writing,
as she had only written a half-dozen pieces of verse, among them one
called "My Kingdom," which has been preserved as a bit of girlish
yearning for the best in religion and in character, sweetly expresse