Mary W. Shelley

Shelley, beloved! the year has a new name from any thou knowest. When Spring arrives, leaves that you never saw will shadow the ground, and flowers you never beheld will star it, and the grass will be of another growth. Thy name is added to the list which makes the earth bold in her age, and proud of what has been. Time, with slow, but unwearied feet, guides her to the goal that thou hast reached; and I, her unhappy child, am advanced still nearer the hour when my earthly dress shall repose near thine, beneath the tomb of Cestius.--Journal of Mary Shelley

When Emerson borrowed from Wordsworth that fine phrase about plain living
and high thinking, no one was more astonished than he that Whitman and
Thoreau should take him at his word. He was decidedly curious about their
experiment. But he kept a safe distance between himself and the
shirt-sleeved Walt; and as for Henry Thoreau--bless me! Emerson regarded
him only as a fine savage, and told him so. Of course, Emerson loved
solitude, but it was the solitude of a library or an orchard, and not the
solitude of plain or wilderness. Emerson looked upon Beautiful Truth as an
honored guest. He adored her, but it was with the adoration of the
intellect. He never got her tag in jolly chase of comradery; nor did he
converse with her, soft and low, when only the moon peeked out from behind
the silvery clouds, and the nightingale listened. He never laid himself
open to damages. And when he threw a bit of a bomb into Harvard Divinity
School it was the shrewdest bid for fame that ever preacher made.

I said "shrewd"--that's the word.

Emerson had the instincts of Connecticut--that peculiar development of men
who have eked out existence on a rocky soil, banking their houses against
grim Winter or grimmer savage foes. With this Yankee shrewdness went a
subtle and sweeping imagination, and a fine appreciation of the excellent
things that men have said and done. But he was never so foolish as to
imitate the heroic--he, simply admired it from afar. He advised others to
work their poetry up into life, but he did not do so himself. He never
cast the bantling on the rocks, nor caused him to be suckled with the
she-wolf's teat. He admired "abolition" from a distance. When he went away
from home it was always with a return ticket. He has summed up Friendship
in an essay as no other man ever has, and yet there was a self-protective
aloofness in his friendship that made icicles gather, as George William
Curtis has explained.

In no relation of his life was there a complete abandon. His "Essay on
Self-Reliance" is beef, iron and wine, and "Works and Days" is a tonic for
tired men; and yet I know that, in spite of all his pretty talk about
living near Nature's heart, he never