ns
good and wise whom he had mentioned to Carlyle. 'Uncertain, troubled,
earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his
intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the
difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more
hopefully than hitherto' (_Hawthorne_). To the most intractable of
Transcendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was never
impatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where the
case was not yet beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neighbour
(1842-45). 'It was good,' says Hawthorne, 'to meet him in the
wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual
gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and
he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man
alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart.'

The most remarkable of all his neighbours was Thoreau, who for a couple
of years lived in a hut which he had built for himself on the shore of
Walden Pond. If he had not written some things with a considerable charm
of style, Thoreau might have been wisely neglected as one of the crazy.
But Emerson was struck by the originality of his life, and thought it
well in time to edit the writings of one 'who was bred to no profession;
never married; lived alone; never went to Church; never voted; refused
to pay a tax to the State; ate no flesh, drank no wine, never knew the
use of tobacco; had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no
passions, refused all invitations, preferred a good Indian to highly
cultivated people, and said he would rather go to Oregon than to
London.' The world has room for every type, so that it be not actively
noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his place in the
catalogue. He was, after all, in his life only a compendium, on a scale
large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions
which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. Yet we
may agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with Socratic force to
the heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be too purely
material, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused.

Emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the hermit's trap of
banishment to the rocks and echoes. 'Solitude,' he said, 'is
impracticable, and society fatal.' He steered his way as best he could
between these two irreconcilable necessities. He had, as