communicate with my _living_ kind--not my talking kind--by life
only; a word perhaps of _that_ communication, a fit word once a
year? Or shall I follow some commoner method--learn science and
bring myself first into man's respect, that I may thus the better
speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank with
earthliness--to belong to days forever past.
His appeal to Emerson at this hour was, as he elsewhere then puts it, to
the "invisible" man in the matter, who affected him as somewhere behind
the more or less immediately visible, the beautifully but mystifyingly
audible, the Emerson of honeyed lectures and addresses, suggestive and
inspiring as that one might be, and who might, as we say to-day, have
something, something more at least, for him. "I will tell him that I do
not value his substantive discoveries, whatever they may be, perhaps
half so largely as he values them, but that I chiefly cherish that erect
attitude of mind in him which in God's universe undauntedly seeks the
worthiest tidings of God, and calmly defies every mumbling phantom which
would challenge its freedom. Should his zeal for realities and contempt
of vulgar shows abide the ordeal I have thus contrived for them I shall
gladly await his visit to me. So much at least is what I have been
saying to myself. Now that I have told it to you also you have become a
sort of confidant between me and myself, and so bound to promote harmony
there." The correspondence expands, however, beyond my space for
reporting of it; I but pick out a few passages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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