Mr. Alcott first visited Concord, as Mr. Cabot’s memoir of Emerson tells us, in 1835, and in 1840 came there to live. But it was as early as May 19, 1837, that Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller: “Mr. Alcott is the great man. His book [‘Conversations on the Gospels’] does him no justice, and I do not like to see it.... But he has more of the Godlike than any man I have ever seen and his presence rebukes and threatens and raises. He _is_ a teacher.... If he cannot make intelligent men feel the presence of a superior nature, the worse for them; I can never doubt him.”[12] It is suggested by Dr. W. T. Harris, one of the two joint biographers of Alcott, that the description in the last chapter of Emerson’s book styled “Nature,” finished in August, 1836, was derived from a study of Mr. Alcott, and it is certain that there was no man among Emerson’s contemporaries of whom thenceforward he spoke with such habitual deference. Courteous to all, it was to Alcott alone that he seemed to look up. Not merely Alcott’s abstract statements, but his personal judgments, made an absolutely unique impression upon his more famous fellow townsman. It is interesting to notice that Alcott, while staying first in Concord, “complained of lack of simplicity in A⸺, B⸺, C⸺, and D⸺ (late visitors from the city).” Emerson said approvingly to his son: “Alcott is right touchstone to test them, litmus to detect the acid.”[13] We cannot doubt that such a man’s own judgment was absolutely simple; and such was clearly the opinion held by Emerson, who, indeed, always felt somewhat easier when he could keep Alcott at his elbow in Concord. Their mutual confidence reminds one of what was said long since by Dr. Samuel Johnson, that poetry was like brown bread: those who made it in their own houses never quite liked the taste of what they got elsewhere. And from the very beginning, this attitude was reciprocated. At another time during that same early period (1837), Alcott, after criticising Emerson a little for “the picture of vulgar life that he draws with a Shakespearian boldness,” closes with this fine tribute to the intrinsic qualities of his newly won friend: “Observe his style; it is full of genuine phrases from the Saxon. He loves the simple, the natural; the thing is sharply presented, yet graced by beauty and elegance. Our language is a fit organ, as used by him; and we hear classic English once more from northern lips. Shakespeare, Sidney, Browne, speak again to us, and we recognize our affinity with the fathers of English diction. Emerson is the only instance of original style among Americans. Who writes like him? Who can? None of his imitators, surely. The day shall come when this man’s genius shall shine beyond the circle of his own city and nation. Emerson’s is destined to be the high literary name of this age.”[14]