Emerson had withheld his proof so long
that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as
nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem
over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same
number with Doctor Holmes's; the subjects were cognate, and I had my
misgivings. He wrote me back to "return the proofs and break up the
forms." I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the
electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs. I did so,
feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there
could be such ire in heavenly minds.

X.

Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; and I
have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her
reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would
not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon
in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have
appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a
world too vast to be the test that her own

"One entire and perfect crysolite"

would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear
splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still
from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for
the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that
it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the
assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written
into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in
transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of
her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often
absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say
whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading
of the 'Atlantic Monthly' was something almost fearfully scrupulous and
perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the
printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean
as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on
the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and
verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and
biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical
and scientific term. Wh