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[] The daughter of Emerson’s lifelong friend, the impractical reformer Bronson Alcott, and one of the most enduring American women writers of the late nineteenth century, Louisa May Alcott knew Emerson all of her life and, as her biographers and editors have frequently remarked, she considered herself a second Bettina von Arnim to Emerson’s Goethe. Never a practicing Transcendentalist, Alcott fully understood the practical limitations of Transcendentalism as she was literally forced to lived through them at the hands of her father and Charles Lane when the Alcotts settled at Fruitlands in 1843, and when she found herself , especially during and after the 1860s, having to provide for her family’s financial security through the sale of her writings. In her “Reminiscences of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Alcott directly addresses her debt to Emerson as her intellectual and literary mentor. At the same time, her account of their friendship over so many years does much to humanize Emerson at a time when many writers are transforming his life into a form of secular sainthood. For Alcott, the real measure of Emerson’s character is to be found in his devastation at little Waldo’s death in 1842, his playfulness in the company of his own and the Alcott children, his ironic understatement at seeing his house burn in 1872, and his humanitarianism in supporting reform movements such as Women’s Suffrage. By opening her account in the Youth’s Companion with the statement, “I count it the greatest honor and happiness of my life to have known Mr. Emerson,” Alcott, whose Little Women (1868–1869) and Little Men (1871) already served America’s rising generation as classics of family and community life, virtually legislated a new generation’s attention to Emerson’s literary and intellectual legacy. Louisa May Alcott As I count it the greatest honor and happiness of my life to have known Mr. Emerson, I gladly accede to a request for such recollections as may be of interest for the young readers for whom I write [in the Youth’s Companion]. My first remembrance is of the morning when I was sent to inquire for little Waldo, then lying very ill. “Reminiscences of Ralph Waldo Emerson” () emerson in his own time His father came to me so worn with watching and changed by sorrow that I was startled, and could only stammer out my message. “Child, he is dead,” was his answer. Then the door closed and I ran home to tell the sad tidings. I was only eight years old,and that was my first glimpse of a great grief,but I never have forgotten the anguish that made a familiar face so tragical,and gave those few words more pathos than the sweet lamentation of the Threnody. Later, when we went to school with the little Emersons in their father’s barn,I remember many happy times when the illustrious papa was our good playfellow. Often piling us into a bedecked hay-cart,he took us to berry,bathe,or picnic at Walden, making our day charming and memorable by showing us the places he loved; the wood-people Thoreau had introduced to him; or the wild flowers whose hidden homes he had discovered. So that when years afterward we read of “the sweet Rhodora in the wood,” and “the burly, dozy humblebee,” or laughed over “The Mountain and the Squirrel,” we recognized old friends, and thanked him for the delicate truth and beauty which made them immortal for us and others. When the book-mania fell upon me at fifteen, I used to venture into Mr. Emerson’s library and ask what I should read, never conscious of the audacity of my demand, so genial was my welcome. His kind hand opened to me the riches of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and Carlyle, and I gratefully recall the sweet patience with which he led me round the book-lined room, till “the new and very interesting book” was found; or the indulgent smile he wore when I proposed something far above my comprehension. “Wait a little for that,” he said. “Meantime try this, and if you like it, come again.” For many of these wise books I am waiting still, very patiently, because in his own I have found the truest delight, the best inspiration of my life. When these same precious volumes were tumbled out of the window while his house was burning some years ago, as I stood guarding the scorched, wet pile, Mr...

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