habit of betaking himself to Walden woods, which extended to
within a mile or so of his door; thence would he return with an exalted
look, saying, "The muses are in the woods to-day"; and no one who has
read his Woodnotes can doubt that he found them there. Occasionally
Channing, Thoreau, or my father would be his companion; Alcott preferred
to busy himself about his rustic fences and summer-houses, or to sit
the centre of a circle and converse, as he called it; meaning to
soliloquize, looking round from face to face with unalterable faith and
complacency.

My father read Emerson with enjoyment; though more and more, as he
advanced in life, he was disposed to question the expediency of stating
truth in a disembodied form; he preferred it incarnate, as it appears in
life and in story. But he could not talk to Emerson; his pleasure in his
society did not express itself in that form. Emerson, on the other hand,
assiduously cultivated my father's company, and, contrary to his general
habit, talked to him continuously; but he could not read his romances;
he admitted that he had never been able to finish one of them. He loved
to observe him; to watch his silence, which was full of a kind of speech
which he was able to appreciate; "Hawthorne rides well his horse of the
night!" My father was Gothic; Emerson was Roman and Greek. But each was
profoundly original and independent. My father was the shyer and more
solitary of the two, and yet persons in need of human sympathy were able
to reach a more interior region in him than they could in Emerson. For
the latter's thought was concerned with types and classes, while the
former had the individual touch. He distrusted rules, but had faith
in exceptions and idiosyncrasies. Emerson was nobly and magnanimously
public; my father, exquisitely and inevitably private; together they met
the needs of nearly all that is worthy in human nature.

Emerson rose upon us frequently during our early struggles with our
new abode, like a milder sun; the children of the two families became
acquainted, the surviving son, Edward, two years my elder, falling to
my share. But Emerson himself also became my companion, with a humanity
which to-day fills me with grateful wonder. I remember once being taken
by him on a long walk through the sacred pine woods, and on another
occasion he laid aside the poem or the essay he was writing to entertain
Una in his study, whither she had gone alone and of her own ini