ch persons to exist."

"When Alcott wrote from England that he was bringing home Wright and
Lane, I wrote him a letter which I required him to show them, saying
that they might safely trust his theories, but that they should put no
trust whatever in his statement of facts. When they all arrived
here--he and his victims--I asked them if he showed them the letter;
they answered that he did; so I was clear."

Another neighbor who greatly impressed Emerson, and of whom he has
much to say, was Father Taylor, the sailor preacher of Boston. There
is nothing better in the Journals than the pages devoted to
description and analysis of this remarkable man. To Emerson he
suggested the wealth of Nature. He calls him a "godly poet, the
Shakespear of the sailor and the poor." "I delight in his great
personality, the way and sweep of the man which, like a frigate's way,
takes up for the time the centre of the ocean, paves it with a white
street, and all the lesser craft 'do curtsey to him, do him
reverence.'" A man all emotion, all love, all inspiration, but, like
Alcott, impossible to justify your high estimate of by any quotation.
His power was all personal living power, and could not be transferred
to print. The livid embers of his discourse became dead charcoal when
reported by another, or, as Emerson more happily puts it, "A creature
of instinct, his colors are all opaline and dove's-neck-lustre and can
only be seen at a distance. Examine them, and they disappear." More
exactly they are visible only at a certain angle. Of course this is in
a measure true of all great oratory--it is not so much the words as
the man.

Speaking of Father Taylor in connection with Alcott, Emerson says that
one was the fool of his ideas, and the other of his fancy.

An intellectual child of Emerson's was Ellery Channing, but he seems
to have inherited in an exaggerated form only the faults of his
father. Channing appears to have been a crotchety, disgruntled person,
always aiming at walking on his head instead of on his heels. Emerson
quotes many of his sayings, not one of them worth preserving, all
marked by a kind of violence and disjointedness. They had many walks
together.

Emerson was so fond of paradoxes and extreme statements that both
Channing and Thoreau seem to have vied with each other in uttering
hard or capricious sayings when in his presence. Emerson catches at a
vivid and picturesque statement, if it has even a fraction of truth i