te 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."

Emerson when he gave his mind to it could sing as harmoniously as the
best. Possibly we ought to regret that he did not write for the most
part in verse. It is verse which comes and clings most closely to our
souls and which memory holds most perma