Emerson had the instincts of Connecticut—­that peculiar development of men who have eked out existence on a rocky soil, banking their houses against grim Winter or grimmer savage foes.  With this Yankee shrewdness went a subtle and sweeping imagination, and a fine appreciation of the excellent things that men have said and done.  But he was never so foolish as to imitate the heroic—­he, simply admired it from afar.  He advised others to work their poetry up into life, but he did not do so himself.  He never cast the bantling on the rocks, nor caused him to be suckled with the she-wolf’s teat.  He admired “abolition” from a distance.  When he went away from home it was always with a return ticket.  He has summed up Friendship in an essay as no other man ever has, and yet there was a self-protective aloofness in his friendship that made icicles gather, as George William Curtis has explained.

In no relation of his life was there a complete abandon.  His “Essay on Self-Reliance” is beef, iron and wine, and “Works and Days” is a tonic for tired men; and yet I know that, in spite of all his pretty talk about living near Nature’s heart, he never ventured into the woods outside of hallooing distance from the house.  He could neither ride a horse, shoot, nor sail a boat—­and being well aware of it, never tried.  All his farming was done by proxy; and when he writes to Carlyle late in life, explaining how he is worth forty thousand dollars, well secured by first mortgages, he makes clear one-half of his ambition.

And yet, I call him master, and will match my admiration for him ’gainst that of any other, six nights and days together.  But I summon him here only to contrast his character with that of another—­another who, like himself, was twice married.

In his “Essay on Love” Emerson reveals just an average sophomore insight; and in his work I do not find a mention or a trace of influence exercised by either of the two women he wedded, nor by any other woman.  Shelley was what he was through the influence of the two women he married.

Shelley wrecked the life of one of these women.  She found surcease of sorrow in death; and when her body was found in the Serpentine he had a premonition that the hungry waves were waiting for him, too.  But before her death and through her death, she pressed home to him the bitterest sorrow that man can ever know:  the combined knowledge that he has mortally injured a human soul and the sense of helplessness to minister to its needs.  Harriet Westbrook said to Shelley, drink ye all of it.  And could he speak now he would say that the bitterness of the potion was a formative influence as potent as that of the gentle ministrations of Mary Wollstonecraft, who broke over his head the precious vase of her heart’s love and wiped his feet with the hairs of her head.

In the poetic sweetness, gentleness, lovableness and beauty of their natures, Emerson and Shelley were very similar.  In a like environment they would have done the same things.  A pioneer ancestry with its struggle for material existence would have given Shelley caution; and a noble patronymic, fostered by the State, lax in its discipline, would have made Emerson toss discretion to the winds.