aid is against me I feel a certain austere assurance of success,
but as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one
that lies unprotected before his enemies."

Next to Thoreau, Emerson devotes to Alcott more space in his Journals
than to any other man. It is all telling interpretation, description,
and criticism. Truly, Alcott must have had some extraordinary power to
have made such a lasting impression upon Emerson. When my friend Myron
Benton and I first met Emerson in 1863 at West Point, Emerson spoke of
Alcott very pointedly, and said we should never miss a chance to hear
his conversation, but that when he put pen to paper all his
inspiration left him. His thoughts faded as soon as he tried to set
them down. There must have been some curious illusion about it all on
the part of Emerson, as no fragment of Alcott's wonderful talk worth
preserving has come down to us. The waters of the sea are blue, but
not in the pailful. There must have been something analogous in
Alcott's conversations, some total effect which the details do not
justify, or something in the atmosphere which he created, that gave
certain of his hearers the conviction that they were voyaging with him
through the celestial depths.

It was a curious fact that Alcott "could not recall one word or part
of his own conversation, or of any one's, let the expression be never
so happy." And he seems to have hypnotized Emerson in the same way.
"He made here some majestic utterances, but so inspired me that even I
forgot the words often." "Olympian dreams," Emerson calls his
talk--moonshine, it appears at this distance.

"His discourse soars to a wonderful height," says Emerson, "so
regular, so lucid, so playful, so new and disdainful of all boundaries
of tradition and experience, that the hearers seem no longer to have
bodies or material gravity, but almost they can mount into the air at
pleasure, or leap at one bound out of this poor solar system. I say
this of his speech exclusively, for when he attempts to write, he
loses, in my judgment, all his power, and I derive more pain than
pleasure from the perusal." Some illusion surely that made the effort
to report him like an attempt to capture the rainbow, only to find it
common water.

In 1842 Emerson devotes eight pages in his Journal to an analysis of
Alcott, and very masterly they are. He ends with these sentences:
"This noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not want any more
su