When the Chinese Embassy visited Boston in the summer of 1868 a banquet
was given them at the St. James Hotel, on August 21. The young Emerson,
sounding an early note of independence of the past, had written in 1824:—
I laugh at those who, while they gape and gaze,
The bald antiquity of China praise;—
but later he learned to revere the wisdom of Asia. About the time when
the _Dial_ appeared, many sentences of Chinese wisdom are found in his
journal, and also in the magazine among the “Ethnical Scriptures.”