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moment
Alcott and
Emerson became united, however inadequate their twinship might have seemed to others.
Literature sometimes, doubtless, makes strange friendships.
There is a tradition that when
Browning was once introduced to a new
Chinese ambassador in
London, the interpreter called attention to the fact that they were both poets.
Upon
Browning's courteously asking how much poetry His
Excellency had thus far written, he replied, “Four volumes,” and when asked what style of poetic art he cultivated, the answer was, “Chiefly the enigmatical.”
It is reported that
Browning afterwards charitably or modestly added, “We felt doubly brothers after that.”
It may have been in a similar spirit that
Emerson and his foot-note might seem at first to have united their destinies.
Emerson at that early period saw many defects in Alcott's style, even so far as to say that it often reminded him of that vulgar saying, “All stir and no go” ; but twenty years later, in 1855, he magnificently vindicated the same style, then grown more cultivated and powerful, and, indeed, wrote thus of it:
I have been struck with the late superiority Alcott showed.
His interlocutors were all better than he: he seemed childish and helpless, not apprehending or answering their remarks aright, and they masters of their
