son because he was not Carlyle. We are all poor
beggars in this respect; each of us is the victim of his own demon.
Beware of the predilection of the master! When his temperament impels
him he is no longer a free man.

We touch Emerson's limitations in his failure to see anything in
Hawthorne's work; they had "no inside to them"; "it would take him and
Alcott together to make a man"; and, again, in his rather
contemptuous disposal of Poe as "the jingle man" and his verdict upon
Shelley as "never a poet"! The intellectual content of Shelley's work
is not great; but that he was not a poet, in fact that he was anything
else but a poet, though not of the highest order, is contrary to the
truth, I think. Limitations like this are not infrequent in Emerson.
Yet Emerson was a great critic of men and of books. A highly
interesting volume showing him in this character could be compiled
from the Journals.

Emerson and Hawthorne were near neighbors for several years. Emerson
liked the man better than his books. They once had a good long walk
together; they walked to Harvard village and back, occupying a couple
of days and walking about twenty miles a day. They had much
conversation--talked of Scott and Landor and others. They found the
bar-rooms at the inns cold and dull places. The Temperance Society had
emptied them. Hawthorne tried to smoke a cigar in one of them, but
"was soon out on the piazza." Hawthorne, Emerson said, was more
inclined to play Jove than Mercury. It is a pleasing picture--these
two men, so unlike, but both typical of New England and both men of a
high order of genius, walking in friendly converse along the country
roads in the golden September days over seventy years ago. Emerson
always regretted that he never succeeded in "conquering a friendship"
with Hawthorne, mainly because they had so few traits in common. To
the satisfaction of silent intercourse with men Emerson was clearly a
stranger. There must be an interchange of ideas; the feeling of
comradeship, the communion of congenial souls was not enough.
Hawthorne, shy, silent, rather gloomy, yet there must have been a
charm about his mere presence that more than made up for his want of
conversation. His silence was golden. Emerson was a transcendental
Yankee and was always bent on driving sharp bargains in the
interchange of ideas with the persons he met. He did not propose to
swap horses or watches or jack-knives, but he would swap ideas with
you day