“August 28. [1838.] “It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English church and hear the liturgy read. Yet nothing would induce me to be the English priest. I find an unpleasant dilemma in this nearer home.” This dilemma is “The Problem.” And here again is the original of “The Two Rivers,” “as it came to mind, sitting by the river, one April day” (April 5, 1856): “Thy Voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the music of the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee, as thou through Concord plain. “Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air, and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it. “I see thy brimming, eddying stream, and thy enchantment. For thou changest every rock in thy bed into a gem; all is real opal and agate, and at will thou pavest with diamonds. Take them away from thy stream, and they are poor shards and flints: So is it with me to-day.” These journals differ from common diaries in being a chronicle of thoughts, rather than of events, or even of impressions. Emerson is the most impersonal of writers, which accounts in part, and by virtue of the attraction of opposites, for the high regard in which he held that gossip, Montaigne. Still, there are jottings enough of foreign travel, lecture tours, domestic incidents, passing public events, club meetings, college reunions, walks and talks with Concord neighbors, and the like, to afford the material of a new biography,[2] which has been published uniformly with the ten volumes of journals. And the philosopher held himself so aloof from vulgar curiosity that the general reader, who breathes with difficulty in the rarefied air of high speculations, will perhaps turn most readily to such more intimate items as occur. As where his little son—the “deep-eyed boy” of the “Threnody”—being taken to the circus, said _à propos_ of the clown, “Papa, the funny man makes me want to go home.” Emerson adds that he and Waldo were of one mind on the subject; and one thereupon recalls a celebrated incident in the career of Mark Twain. The diarist is not above setting down jests—even profane jests—with occasional anecdotes, _bons mots_, and miscellaneous witticisms like “an ordinary man or a Christian.” I, for one, would like to know who was the “Miss —— of New Haven, who on reading Ruskin’s book [presumably “Modern Painters”], said ‘Nature was Mrs. Turner.’” Were there such witty fair in the New Haven of 1848?