The publishers have here presented a book about Emerson, written by the
one man who stood nearest to him of all men; one from whom he drew
inspiration in generous measure, and to whom, in return, he discovered
without reserve his inmost self. Such a book cannot fail to be an
original and vital contribution to EMERSONIANA. Not to read it, is to
miss a clear and searching exegesis of one whose name has been called
the greatest in American literature. It is like a portrait of one of the
old masters, painted by his own brush.
The introductory sonnet to Emerson is pitched in a lofty key, and
condenses into fourteen pithy lines a statement of the author’s
life-long debt of friendship—material and spiritual. The essay itself
was written twenty-odd years ago, while Mr. Alcott was still in the full
vigor of his intellect. It was privately printed, and presented to
Emerson on his birthday. A limited edition was published for the first
time in 1882, and readily sold. The revision and reading of the
proof-sheets of this edition was the last literary work which Mr. Alcott
did, previous to the stroke of paralysis which deprived him of the
perfect control of his faculties, and kept him a prisoner in his room
ever afterward. It was a work occupying several months, as the
octogenarian’s visits to Boston were somewhat infrequent, and often
including other business. Such moments as he could give were, of course,
valuable; and the publishers, at whose suggestion the work was
undertaken, would meet him, now in the topmost story of some lofty
building, and now in some dim-lighted basement, where together they
would go over the unfinished sheets,—time gliding by for the nonce, all
unheeded.
So anxious was Mr. Alcott that his work on Emerson should some day be
given to the world, that after his paralytic shock, when his memory had
lost its grasp of many things, and among others, of his recent labors on
his newly published book,—a copy of which he had not seen,—he still
remembered his former earnest wish that it should be made public. And to
one of his friends, who spent several hours with him each week, he
remarked with much excitement, on two or three occasions, that his essay
must be brought out at once; insisting that it should be published in
the philosophical magazine which his friend edited. Finally a copy of
the book was brought to him, greatly to his astonishment and delight.
This is all the more touching an incident of his friendship for the
great Emerson, when it is remembered that the latter more than once said
that “it would be a pity if Alcott survived him, since he alone
possessed the means of showing to the world what Alcott really
was.”—(Cabot’s Memoir of Emerson, vol. i. p. 281.)
The book also contains Alcott’s “Ion: a Monody,”—read by him at the
Concord School of Philosophy, and to which Mr. John Albee, in “The
New-York Tribune,” paid the following high praise: “It continues for us
that tender strain bequeathed by Moschus’s ‘Lament for Bion,’ Milton’s
‘Lycidas,’ and Shelley’s ‘Adonais;’ but it has a pathos and beauty all
its own, ... faultless in tone and in art.”
Mr. Sanborn’s ode to Emerson, “The Poet’s Countersign,” also read at the
Concord School, completes the volume, and makes a worthy addition to
that lofty form of verse that has enriched the literatures of all ages,
from Pindar to Tennyson.