g but what now is, and is
becoming; your courage, your enterprise, your budding affection, your
opening thought, your prayer, I can love--but what else?"

Can you not love your friend for himself alone, for his kinship with
you, without taking an inventory of his moral and intellectual
qualities; for something in him that makes you happy in his presence?
The personal attraction which Whitman felt between himself and certain
types of men, and which is the basis of most manly friendships,
Emerson probably never felt. One cannot conceive of him as caring
deeply for any person who could not teach him something. He says, "I
speculate on virtue, not burn with love." Again, "A rush of thoughts
is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to me." Pure
intellectual values seem alone to have counted with Emerson and his
followers. With men his question was, "What can you teach me?" With
Nature, "What new image or suggestion have you got for me to-day?"
With science, "What ethical value do your facts hold?" With natural
history, "Can I translate your facts and laws into my supernatural
history?" With civil history, "Will your record help me to understand
my own day and land?" The quintessence of things was what he always
sought.

"We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves," Emerson wrote in
1842, and then added, "We lose time in trying to be like others." One
is reminded of passages in the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence, wherein
each tried to persuade the other to be like himself. Carlyle would
have Emerson "become concrete and write in prose the straightest
way," would have him come down from his "perilous altitude,"
"soliloquizing on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitude,
where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness
and only _the man_ and the stars and the earth are visible--come down
into your own poor Nineteenth Century, its follies, its maladies, its
blind, or half-blind but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its
tears, and try to evolve in some measure the hidden God-like that lies
in it." "I wish you would take an American hero, one whom you really
love, and give us a History of him--make an artistic bronze statue (in
good words) of his Life and him!" Emerson's reply in effect is,
Cremate your heroes and give me their ashes--give me "the culled
results, the quintessence of private conviction, a _liber veritatis_,
a few sentences, hints of the final moral you draw from so much