In the privacy of his journals, every man allows himself a license of criticism which he would hardly practise in public. The limitations or eccentricities of Emerson’s literary tastes are familiar to most; such as his dislike of Shelley and contempt for Poe, “the jingle man.” But here is a judgment, calmly penned, which rather takes one’s breath away: “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.” This, to be sure, was in 1842, eight years before the appearance of “The Scarlet Letter.” Yet, to the last, the romancer’s obsession with the problem of evil affected the resolved optimist as unwholesome. Indeed he speaks impatiently of all novels, and prophesies that they will give way by and by to autobiographies and diaries. The only exception to his general distaste for fiction is “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which he mentions repeatedly and with high praise, comparing it with Aeschylus. The entry concerning Moore’s “Life of Sheridan” is surprisingly savage—less like the gentle Emerson than like his truculent friend Carlyle: “He details the life of a mean, fraudulent, vain, quarrelsome play-actor, whose wit lay in cheating tradesmen, whose genius was used in studying jokes and _bons mots_ at home for a dinner or a club, who laid traps for the admiration of coxcombs, who never did anything good and never said anything wise.” Emerson’s biographers make a large claim for him. One calls him “the first of American thinkers”: another, “the only great mind in American literature.” This is a generous challenge, but I believe that, with proper definition, it may be granted. When it is remembered that among American thinkers are Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, William James, and Willard Gibbs, one hesitates to subscribe to so absolute a verdict. Let it stand true, however, with the saving clause, “after the intuitional order of thought.” Emerson dwelt with the insights of the Reason and not with the logically derived judgments of the Understanding. (He capitalizes the names of these faculties, which translate the Kantian _Vernunft_ and _Verstand_.) Dialectics he eschewed, professing himself helpless to conduct an argument. He announced truths, but would not undertake to say by what process of reasoning he reached them. They were not the conclusions of a syllogism: they were borne in upon him—revelations. At New Bedford he visited the meetings of the Quakers, and took great interest in their doctrine of the inner light.