ienced, but because of certain shortcomings or deficiencies of
character and purpose, of which he is conscious--"some meanness," or
"unfounded pride" which may lower him in the opinion of others. Pride,
surely, but not ignoble pride.

Emerson's expectation of the great poet, the great man, is voiced in
his "Representative Men": "If the companions of our childhood should
turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not
surprise us." On the contrary, I think it would surprise most of us
very much. It is from the remote, the unfamiliar, that we expect great
things. We have no illusions about the near-at-hand. But with Emerson
the contrary seems to have been the case. He met the new person or
took up the new volume with a thrill of expectancy, a condition of
mind which often led him to exaggerate the fact, and to give an undue
bias in favor of the novel, the audacious, the revolutionary. His
optimism carried him to great lengths. Many of the new stars in his
literary firmament have quite faded out--all of them, I think, but
Walt Whitman. It was mainly because he was so full of faith in the
coming man that he gave, offhand, such a tremendous welcome to "Leaves
of Grass"--a welcome that cooled somewhat later, when he found he had
got so much more of the unconventional and the self-reliant than he
had bargained for. I remember that when I spoke of Walt Whitman to him
in Washington in 1871 or '72, he said he wished Whitman's friends
would "quarrel" with him more about his poems, as some years earlier
he himself had done, on the occasion when he and Whitman walked for
hours on Boston Common, he remonstrating with Whitman about certain
passages in "Leaves of Grass" which he tried in vain to persuade him
to omit in the next edition. Whitman would persist in being Whitman.
Now, counseling such a course to a man in an essay on "Self-Reliance"
is quite a different thing from entirely approving of it in a concrete
example.

In 1840 Emerson writes: "A notice of modern literature ought to
include (ought it not?) a notice of Carlyle, of Tennyson, of Landor,
of Bettina, of Sampson Reed." The first three names surely, but who
is Bettina, the girl correspondent of Goethe, that she should go in
such a list? Reed, we learn, was a Boston bank clerk, and a
Swedenborgian, who wrote a book on the growth of the mind, from which
Emerson quotes, and to which he often alludes, a book that has long
been forgotten; and is not Bettina fo