For myself, there bad been epochs of my life when I, too, might have
asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle
of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no
question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet, of deep
beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a
philosopher. It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the woodpaths,
or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam
diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and be,
so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man
alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart. And, in
truth, the heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions
which he could not read. But it was impossible to dwell in his
vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his
lofty thought, which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular
giddiness,--new truth being as heady as new wine. Never was a poor
little country village infested with such a variety of queer,
strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took upon
themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were
simply bores of a very intense water. Such, I imagine, is the
invariable character of persons who crowd so closely about an original
thinker as to draw in his unuttered breath and thus become imbued with
a false originality. This triteness of novelty is enough to make any
man of common-sense blaspheme at all ideas of less than a century's
standing, and pray that the world may be petrified and rendered
immovable in precisely the worst moral and physical state that it ever
yet arrived at, rather than be benefited by such schemes of such
philosophers.

And now I begin to feel--and perhaps should have sooner felt--that we