As a child I recall him among groups of children in his garden a little aloof but beaming with a happy smile.  At a later time, when I was in college, we used sometimes to walk the twenty miles from Cambridge to Concord and the student group always found in him a hospitable entertainer.  By that time he had reached the height of his fame.  Those of us who sought him had been readers of Nature or the poems, of Representative Men, and of English Traits.  For my own part while I did not always understand his thought, much of it was entering into my very fibre.  In particular the essays on self-reliance and idealism were moulding my life.  We approached him with some awe, “If he asks me where I live,” said one of our number, a boy who was slain in the Civil War, “I shall tell him I can be found at No.  So-and-so of such an alley, but if you mean to predicate concerning the spiritual entity, I dwell in the temple of the infinite and I breathe the breath of truth.”  But when Emerson met us at the gate, things were not at all on a high transcendental plane.  There was a hearty “Good-morning,” significant from him as he stood among the syringas, and there were sandwiches and strawberries in profusion, a plain bread-and-butter atmosphere very pleasant to us after a long and dusty tramp.  On one occasion Emerson withdrew into the background, we thought too much, while he gave the front place in the library, after he had superintended royally the satisfaction of our bodily needs, to his neighbour Bronson Alcott.  Mr. Alcott white-haired and oracular, talked to us about Shakespeare.  There was probably a secondary sense in every line of Shakespeare which would become apparent to all such as attained the necessary fineness of soul.  Perhaps we should find in this the gospel of a new Covenant in which Shakespeare would be the great teacher and leader.  Mysteries were gathering about him, who was he?  Who really wrote his plays and poems?  The adumbrations of a new supernatural figure were looming in the conception of the world.  Mr. Alcott mused through the afternoon in characteristic fashion and Emerson sat with us, silently absorbing the mystic speculation.

But Mr. Emerson was not always silent.  A good friend of his who was akin to me and over partial, invited him to her house with a little circle of neighbours and lo, I was to furnish the entertainment!  I had written a college poem and with some sinking of heart I learned that I was to read it to this company of which Emerson was to be a member.  I faced the music and for half an hour rolled off my stanzas.  At the close, my kinswoman arranged that I should talk with Emerson in a corner by ourselves and for another half-hour he talked to me.  I am bound to say that he said little about my poem, but devoted himself almost entirely to an enthusiastic outpouring over Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an advance copy of which had just been sent him.  A stronger commendation of a piece of literary work