Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/260

230 answer to such a charge from Margaret Fuller, Emerson acknowledged such barriers to any intimacy between himself and others and called himself "an unrelated person." Henry James, Senior, openly declared that he could not probe the misty, calm reserve of Emerson, "who kept one at such arm's length, tasting him and sipping him and trying him."

It is not strange that Emerson truly believed that Thoreau's desire was to become a stoic. He did not know, until after Thoreau's death, many of the dormant, submerged evidences of tender heart-love. His funeral address, so widely read and quoted, revealed his deep admiration for his friend, but it also showed that, doubtless unwittingly, he had lost sight of some of the nobler and gentler qualities of Thoreau's nature. In a reminiscent sketch by Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, entitled "A Little Gossip," in Scribner's Magazine for November, 1900, she emphasizes Emerson's delight in the study of men and women, as a scientist would study specimens. This acute probing extended even to his friends and, as the years caused lapse of full memory, occasioned some comments of seeming disloyalty. To Mrs. Davis, a few years after Thoreau's death, he said;—"Henry often reminded me of an animal in human form. He had