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a half-proselyte among Quakers in
North Carolina; then a school-teacher in
Connecticut; always poor, but always thoughtful, ever gravitating towards refined society, and finally coming under the influence of that rare and high-minded man,
the Rev. Samuel J. May, and placing himself at last in the still more favored position of
Emerson's foot-note.
When that took place, it suddenly made itself clear to the whole
Concord circle that there was not one among them so serene, so equable, so dreamy, yet so constitutionally a leader, as this wandering child of the desert.
Of all the men known in
New England, he seemed the one least likely to have been a country peddler.
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.”
1 It is suggested by
