And in writing to Carlyle, he says:—­

“You are of the Anakirn and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution.”

Again, “I am the victim of miscellany—­miscellany of designs, vast debility and procrastination.”

He thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry.  His presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough to make him a rapid and enduring walker.

Emerson’s voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the lecture-room.  It was never loud, never shrill, but singularly penetrating.  He was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite sidewalk.  It was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him.

He never laughed loudly.  When he laughed it was under protest, as it were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the “ground swell,” as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed convulsion.  He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much.

Emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered the birthright of the New Englander.  He had not the mechanical turn of the whittling Yankee.  I once questioned him about his manual dexterity, and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail, —­which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it to the roof of a house or elsewhere, I took to be a confession of inaptitude for mechanical works.  He does not seem to have been very accomplished in the handling of agricultural implements either, for it is told in the family that his little son, Waldo, seeing him at work with a spade, cried out, “Take care, papa,—­you will dig your leg.”

He used to regret that he had no ear for music.  I have said enough about his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the words.

There are stories which show that Emerson had a retentive memory in the earlier part of his life.  It is hard to say from his books whether he had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen.

Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the academy, over which was the inscription [Greek:  maedeis hageometraetos eseito]—­Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here,—­would have been closed to him.  All the exact sciences found him an unwilling learner.  He says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with impunity.