his lecture tours in the West, among his neighbors, wherever
and whenever he goes as alert and watchful as a sportsman. He was a
sportsman of a new kind; his game was ideas. He was always looking for
hints and images to aid him in his writings. He was like a bird
perpetually building a nest; every moment he wanted new material, and
everything that diverted him from his quest was an unwelcome
interruption. He had no great argument to build, no system of
philosophy to organize and formulate, no plot, like a novelist, to
work out, no controversy on hand--he wanted pertinent, concrete, and
striking facts and incidents to weave in his essay on Fate, or
Circles, or Character, or Farming, or Worship, or Wealth--something
that his intuitive and disjointed habit of thought could seize upon
and make instant use of.

We see him walking in free converse with his friends and neighbors,
receiving them in his own house, friendly and expectant, but always
standing aloof, never giving himself heartily to them, exchanging
ideas with them across a gulf, prizing their wit and their wisdom, but
cold and reserved toward them personally, destitute of all feeling of
comradeship, an eye, an ear, a voice, an intellect, but rarely, or in
a minor degree, a heart, or a feeling of fellowship--a giving and a
taking quite above and beyond the reach of articulate speech. When
they had had their say, he was done with them. When you have found a
man's limitations, he says, it is all up with him. After your friend
has fired his shot, good-by. The pearl in the oyster is what is
wanted, and not the oyster. "If I love you, what is that to you?" is a
saying that could have been coined only in Concord. It seems to me
that the basis of all wholesome human attachment is character, not
intellect. Admiration and love are quite different things.
Transcendental friendships seem to be cold, bloodless affairs.

One feels as if he wanted to squeeze or shake Emerson to see if he
cannot get some normal human love out of him, a love that looks for
nothing beyond love, a love which is its own excuse for being, a love
that is not a bargain--simple, common, disinterested human love. But
Emerson said, "I like man but not men."

"You would have me love you," he writes in his Journal. "What shall I
love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you. What you have thought
and said? Well, whilst you were thinking and saying them, but not now.
I see no possibility of loving anythin