writers nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to my
modest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never was of
those Westerners who believed that the West was kept out of literature by
the jealousy of the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the men
to write that magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan as
one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say
that I had never heard of him.

I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did not
commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner,
and he asked me to come with him. After dinner we walked about in his
"pleached garden" a little, and then we came again into his library,
where I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away. He questioned
me about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had
met, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of
Mr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their
quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I
answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe's criticisms: cruel
and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.

"Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson.

"Poe's," I said again.

"Oh," he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far
search for my meaning, "you mean the jingle-man!"

I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had
written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more
abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a