RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
"I have seen Emerson, the first man I have ever seen," wrote George Eliot in her diary many years ago. Carlyle uses similar expressions in his letters at least a score of times. Sentences like the following appear very often:—
"It remains true and will remain, what I have often told you, that properly there is no voice in this world which is completely human to me but your voice only."
Again:—
"In the whole world I hardly get to my spoken human word any other word of response that is authentically human. God help us, this is growing a very lonely place, this distracted dog-kennel of a world."
Indeed, the personality of Emerson seems to have produced a very marked effect upon all the great men and women with whom he came in contact. We find that he was often described as an angel in appearance in his younger days. Here are one or two instances: Of his appearance to them in their stony solitude at Craigenputtoch Carlyle afterwards wrote to Emerson:—
"Among the figures I can recollect as visiting us in our Nithsdale hermitage,—all like apparitions now, bringing with them airs from heaven, or else blasts from the other region,—there is perhaps not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself,—so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing, too, so soon into the azure inane, as an apparition should."