gain he
says, aged thirty-two, "I study the art of solitude; I yield me as
gracefully as I can to destiny," and adds that it is "from eternity a
settled thing" that he and society shall be "nothing to each other."
He takes to his Journal instead. It is his house of refuge.

Yet he constantly laments how isolated he is, mainly by reason of the
poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and
of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal
spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for
many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run
for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." But he does
not run away; he often takes it out in hoeing in his garden: "My good
hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to
bite my enemies." "In smoothing the rough hillocks I smooth my temper.
In a short time I can hear the bobolinks sing and see the blessed
deluge of light and color that rolls around me." Somewhere he has said
that the writer should not dig, and yet again and again we find him
resorting to hoe or spade to help him sleep, as well as to smooth his
temper: "Yesterday afternoon, I stirred the earth about my shrubs and
trees and quarrelled with the pipergrass, and now I have slept, and no
longer am morose nor feel twitchings in the muscles of my face when a
visitor is by." We welcome these and many another bit of
self-analysis: "I was born with a seeing eye and not a helping hand. I
can only comfort my friends by thought, and not by love or aid." "I
was made a hermit and am content with my lot. I pluck golden fruit
from rare meetings with wise men." Margaret Fuller told him he seemed
always on stilts: "It is even so. Most of the persons whom I see in my
own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to
me. Nothing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my speech with
such. You might turn a yoke of oxen between every pair of words; and
the behavior is as awkward and proud."

* * * * *

"I would have my book read as I have read my favorite books, not with
explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and
agreeable influence stealing like a scent of a flower, or the sight of
a new landscape on a traveller. I neither wish to be hated and defied
by such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young whose
thoughts I stimulate."

Here E