made up of left-overs
from their published works, and hence as literary material, when
compared with their other volumes, are of secondary importance. You
could not make another "Walden" out of Thoreau's Journals, nor build
up another chapter on "Self-Reliance," or on "Character," or on the
"Over-Soul," from Emerson's, though there are fragments here and there
in both that are on a level with their best work.

Emerson records in 1835 that his brother Charles wondered that he did
not become sick at the stomach over his poor Journal: "Yet is obdurate
habit callous even to contempt. I must scribble on...." Charles
evidently was not a born scribbler like his brother. He was clearly
more fond of real life and of the society of his fellows. He was an
orator and could not do himself justice with the pen. Men who write
Journals, as I have said, are usually men of solitary habits, and
their Journal largely takes the place of social converse. Amiel,
Emerson, and Thoreau were lonely souls, lacking in social gifts, and
seeking relief in the society of their own thoughts. Such men go to
their Journals as other men go to their clubs. They love to be alone
with themselves, and dread to be benumbed or drained of their mental
force by uncongenial persons. To such a man his Journal becomes his
duplicate self and he says to it what he could not say to his nearest
friend. It becomes both an altar and a confessional. Especially is
this true of deeply religious souls such as the men I have named. They
commune, through their Journals, with the demons that attend them.
Amiel begins his Journal with the sentence, "There is but one thing
needful--to possess God," and Emerson's Journal in its most
characteristic pages is always a search after God, or the highest
truth.

"After a day of humiliation and stripes," he writes, "if I can write
it down, I am straightway relieved and can sleep well. After a day of
joy, the beating heart is calmed again by the diary. If grace is given
me by all angels and I pray, if then I can catch one ejaculation of
humility or hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an end."
"I write my journal, I deliver my lecture with joy," but "at the name
of society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen."

He clearly had no genius for social intercourse. At the age of thirty
he said he had "no skill to live with men; that is, such men as the
world is made of; and such as I delight in I seldom find." A