Copyright, 1887, BY JAMES ELLIOT CABOT. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge: My object in this book has been to offer to the readers and friends of Emerson some further illustrations, some details of his outward and inward history that may fill out and define more closely the image of him they already have, rather than to attempt a picture which should make him known to strangers, or set him forth in due relation to his surroundings or to the world at large. The position of literary executor to which he appointed me, and the desire of his family that I would write a memoir of him, have given me access to his unpublished writings (including many letters confided to me by some of his most valued correspondents, to whom I render hearty thanks), and to sources of information in the memories of persons who knew him in his early years and in his home. My aim has been to use these opportunities to furnish materials for an estimate of him, without undertaking any estimate or interposing any comments beyond what seemed necessary for the better understanding of the facts presented. Where I may seem to have transgressed this rule, I am in truth for the most part only summing up impressions gathered from his journals and correspondence, or from the recollections of his contemporaries. The letters I have found less directly available than I had hoped. Emerson says of himself that he "was not born under epistolary stars : " he did not readily communicate his feelings of the moment, before they were tried and sifted by reflection; letter-writing was an effort to him, and the effort prevented him from giving to his letters that direct impress of his personality — of the man, apart from the author which we look to find in them. And the same thing is true to a great extent even of his journals, of which there is a full series from his college-days onward almost to the end of his life: they do not often bring us closer to him than we are brought by his published writings. I have been obliged to dismember and rearrange them more than I wished, and often to give their general drift in my own words, instead of simply allowing him to tell his own story. But if I have not been able to draw from these interior sources, or from a minute examination of his life, much of first-rate importance to add to our |