erson 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 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 ra