_Oct. 10-13._--I spend a good deal of time on the Common, these
delicious days and nights--every mid-day from 11.30 to about 1--and
almost every sunset another hour. I know all the big trees, especially
the old elms along Tremont and Beacon streets, and have come to a
sociable silent understanding with most of them, in the sunlit air, (yet
crispy-cool enough,) as I saunter along the wide unpaved walks. Up
and down this breadth by Beacon street, between these same old elms,
I walk'd for two hours, of a bright sharp February mid-day twenty-one
years ago, with Emerson, then in his prime, keen, physically and
morally magnetic, arm'd at every point, and when he chose, wielding the
emotional just as well as the intellectual. During those two hours
he was the talker and I the listener. It was an argument-statement,
reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home, (like an army corps in
order, artillery, cavalry, infantry,) of all that could be said against
that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, "Children
of Adam." More precious than gold to me that dissertion--it afforded
me, ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson; each point of E.'s
statement was unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more complete or
convincing, I could never hear the points better put--and then I felt
down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all,
and pursue my own way. "What have you to say then to such things?" said
E., pausing in conclusion. "Only that while I can't answer them at all,
I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and exemplify
it," was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner
at the American House. And thenceforward I never waver'd or was touch'd
with qualms, (as I confess I had been two or three times before.)