than he gave it would be hard to conceive.  He had been moved by it to the depths and his forecast for its author was a fame of the brightest.  It was then I first heard of Walt Whitman.  Soon after the world heard much of him and it still hears much of him.  Emerson did not confine the expression of his admiration of Walt Whitman to me, as the world knows; he expressed it with an equal outspokenness to the poet, who curiously enough thought it proper to print it in gilt letters on the cover of his book, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”  To do that was certainly a violation of literary comity, but who shall give laws to rough-riding genius!  It is a penalty of eminence to be made sponsor unwittingly before the public for men and things when reticence would seem better.  At any rate it brought Whitman well into notice and I have never heard, rough diamond though he undoubtedly was, that Walt Whitman’s withers were wrung by this breach of confidence.

There is a little nook by Gore Hall in Cambridge with which I have a queer medley of associations.  One night I was tossed in a blanket there during my initiation into the Hasty Pudding Club.  Precisely there I met Emerson rather memorably on the Commemoration Day in 1865 when he said to me, glancing at my soldier’s uniform, in very simple words but with an intonation that betrayed deep feeling, “This day belongs to you.”  Immediately after, hard by I shook hands with Meade, the towering stately victor of Gettysburg in the full uniform of a corps commander, in contrast indeed to the slight, plainly-dressed philosopher.  And only the other day I helped my little granddaughter to feed the grey squirrels in the same green nook from which the rollicking boys, the sage, and the warrior have so long since vanished.

I have heard it remarked by a man of much literary discrimination that Emerson’s poetic gift was pre-eminent and that he should have made verse and not prose his principal medium for expression.  As it is his poems are few, his habitual medium being prose.  The critic attributed this to a distrust which Emerson felt of his power of dealing with poetic form, the harmonious arrangement of lines.  He felt that Emerson was right in his judgment of himself, that there was a defect here, and that it was well for him to choose as he did.  All this I hesitate to accept.  As regards form, while the verse of Emerson certainly is sometimes rough, few things in poetry are more exquisite than many verses which all will recall.  What stanzas ever flowed more sweetly than these written for the dedication of the Concord monument?  “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,” or the little poem on the snow-storm, “Announced by all the trumpets of the sky arrives the snow.” The Boston Hymn, too, though in parts informal to the point of carelessness, has passages of the finest music,

  “The rocky nook with hill-tops three,
  Looked eastward from the farms
  And twice each day the flowing sea
  Took Boston in its arms.”