ing a long walk by Walden Pond, Margaret Fuller says of Mr. Emerson, “He is a much better companion than formerly, — for once he would talk obstinately through the walk, but now we can be silent and see things together.”[1]
In another place she gives this striking glimpse of his personal appearance: “It was raining hard and quite cold — he had on his blue cloak, falling in large straight folds ; in that he looks as if he had come to his immortality as a statue.”[2]
Elsewhere she describes him as reading to her passages of his poetry, and quotes some lines which I am unable to identify, while others appear in the appendix to the edition just published: —
“Waldo and I have good meetings, though we stop at all our old places. But my expectations are moderate now; it is his beautiful presence that I prize, far more than our intercourse. He has been reading me his new poems and the others. At the end he asked me how I liked the ‘little subjective twinkle all through.’ He has indeed set off the picture lively.
- ‘Lonely he sat, the men were strange,
The women all forbidden.’
- ‘Lonely he sat, the men were strange,
And,
- ‘Merge me in the brute universe
Or lift to some diviner dream.’
- ‘Merge me in the brute universe
And,
- ‘His loves were sharp, sharp pains.’
And,
- ‘Content with gods or fools to live.’
- ‘In the resolves of [fate?] I acquiesce.’
- ‘Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme.’
