total and from moment
to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years
before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an
'Atlantic Breakfast' where it was part of my editorial function to
preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking
her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we
conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help
wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter,
was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens
here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his
character, his personality, his identity fully persisted.

I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his
memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not,
but I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which
could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with
a keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so
far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with
him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if
these form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very
gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many
of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have
elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and
once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of
Holmes's gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it
had borne its best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or
Lowell, or Whittier from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon
Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest
posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman's public use
of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. He
did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly)
that there had been an abuse of it.

IX.

The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room at the publishing
office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He
introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut,
with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was
just after his poem, 'Snow Bound', had made its great success, in the
mode