In a little poem of Coleridge’s, “William Tell,” are these two lines: 

  “On wind and wave the boy would toss
  Was great, nor knew how great he was.”

The thought is fully worked out in the celebrated Essay of Carlyle called “Characteristics.”  It reappears in Emerson’s poem “Fate.”

  “Unknown to Cromwell as to me
  Was Cromwell’s measure and degree;
  Unknown to him as to his horse,
  If he than his groom is better or worse.”

It is unnecessary to illustrate this point any further in this connection.  In dealing with his poetry other resemblances will suggest themselves.  All the best poetry the world has known is full of such resemblances.  If we find Emerson’s wonderful picture, “Initial Love” prefigured in the “Symposium” of Plato, we have only to look in the “Phaedrus” and we we shall find an earlier sketch of Shakespeare’s famous group,—­

  “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet.”

Sometimes these resemblances are nothing more than accidental coincidences; sometimes the similar passages are unconsciously borrowed from another; sometimes they are paraphrases, variations, embellished copies, editions de luxe of sayings that all the world knows are old, but which it seems to the writer worth his while to say over again.  The more improved versions of the world’s great thoughts we have, the better, and we look to the great minds for them.  The larger the river the more streams flow into it.  The wide flood of Emerson’s discourse has a hundred rivers and thousands of streamlets for its tributaries.

It was not from books only that he gathered food for thought and for his lectures and essays.  He was always on the lookout in conversation for things to be remembered.  He picked up facts one would not have expected him to care for.  He once corrected me in giving Flora Temple’s time at Kalamazoo.  I made a mistake of a quarter of a second, and he set me right.  He was not always so exact in his memory, as I have already shown in several instances.  Another example is where he speaks of Quintus Curtius, the historian, when he is thinking of Mettus Curtius, the self-sacrificing equestrian.  Little inaccuracies of this kind did not concern him much; he was a wholesale dealer in illustrations, and could not trouble himself about a trifling defect in this or that particular article.

Emerson was a man who influenced others more than others influenced him.  Outside of his family connections, the personalities which can be most easily traced in his own are those of Carlyle, Mr. Alcott, and Thoreau.  Carlyle’s harsh virility could not be without its effect on his valid, but sensitive nature.  Alcott’s psychological and physiological speculations interested him as an idealist.  Thoreau lent him a new set of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy.  Emerson looked at nature as a poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as vague as that of Polonius.  But Thoreau