He was conscious of his defect in this direction, and would fain have had it otherwise. Thus he writes in his journal in 1839: “We would all be public men if we could afford it. I am wholly private; such is the poverty of my constitution. ‘Heaven betrayed me to a book and wrapped me in a gown.’ I have no social talent, no will, and a steady appetite for insights in any or all directions, to balance my manifold imbecilities.” He even quotes approvingly the remark of some one that he “always seemed to be on stilts.” “It is even so. Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to me.” He lacked sympathy with men. He cared nothing for persons as such, but only for the genius of humanity which they embodied, and this genius of humanity he did not find in any sufficiency in ordinary mortals. He writes in his journal, “I like man, but not men!” He liked ideas, but not things. He dwelt in the abstract, not in the concrete. “In the highest friendship,” he says, “we form a league with the Idea of the man who stands to us in that relation--not with the actual person.” And his letters, fine and eloquent as most of them are, do not read like a message from one person to another person, but from one Idea to another Idea. Yet Emerson’s leading trait is eminently American; I mean his hospitality toward the new,--the eagerness with which he sought and welcomed the new idea and the new man. Perhaps we might call it his inborn radicalism. No writer ever made such rash, such extreme statements, in the hope that some new truth might be compassed. Anything new and daring instantly challenged his attention. His face was wholly set toward the future,--the new. The past was discredited the moment it became the past. “The coming only is sacred,” he said; “no truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.”