, he asked me if I knew the poems of
Mr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their
quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I
answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe's criticisms: cruel
and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.

"Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson.

"Poe's," I said again.

"Oh," he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far
search for my meaning, "you mean the jingle-man!"

I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had
written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more
abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a
characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I
do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At any
rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already
absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the
Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he
looked at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got down,
with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely affixed
my initials to each. He followed me to the door, still speaking of
poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might
very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then.

A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and all
eternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasure
in it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in the
work; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure. But if
Emerson thought from the glance he gave my verses that I had better not
lavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more
of me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was
right. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that
it was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had somehow not
prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away
wondering in what sort I had gone wrong. I was not a forth-putting
youth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches that
merited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs
blame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused
retreat from Emerson's presence I had failed in a certain slight point o