. But he was never so foolish as to
imitate the heroic--he, simply admired it from afar. He advised others to
work their poetry up into life, but he did not do so himself. He never
cast the bantling on the rocks, nor caused him to be suckled with the
she-wolf's teat. He admired "abolition" from a distance. When he went away
from home it was always with a return ticket. He has summed up Friendship
in an essay as no other man ever has, and yet there was a self-protective
aloofness in his friendship that made icicles gather, as George William
Curtis has explained.

In no relation of his life was there a complete abandon. His "Essay on
Self-Reliance" is beef, iron and wine, and "Works and Days" is a tonic for
tired men; and yet I know that, in spite of all his pretty talk about
living near Nature's heart, he never ventured into the woods outside of
hallooing distance from the house. He could neither ride a horse, shoot,
nor sail a boat--and being well aware of it, never tried. All his farming
was done by proxy; and when he writes to Carlyle late in life, explaining
how he is worth forty thousand dollars, well secured by first mortgages,
he makes clear one-half of his ambition.

And yet, I call him master, and will match my admiration for him 'gainst
that of any other, six nights and days together. But I summon him here
only to contrast his character with that of another--another who, like
himself, was twice married.

In his "Essay on Love" Emerson reveals just an average sophomore insight;
and in his work I do not find a mention or a trace of influence exercised
by either of the two women he wedded, nor by any other woman. Shelley was
what he was through the influence of the two women he married.

Shelley wrecked the life of one of these women. She found surcease of
sorrow in death; and when her body was found in the Serpentine he had a
premonition that the hungry waves were waiting for him, too. But before
her death and through her death, she pressed home to him the bitterest
sorrow that man can ever know: the combined knowledge that he has mortally
injured a human soul and the sense of helplessness to minister to its
needs. Harriet Westbrook said to Shelley, drink ye all of it. And could he
speak now he would say that the bitterness of the potion was a formative
influence as potent as that of the gentle ministrations of Mary
Wollstonecraft, who broke over his head the precious vase of her heart's
love and wiped his fee