Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, F

Charles J. Woodbury, From Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890)

[ ] Charles Johnson Woodbury, later a manufacturer and lecturer, met Emerson at Williams College in 1865. Emerson arrived to deliver one lecture, but the response from the students was so positive that he remained for a week (7–15 November) and delivered six lectures: “Social Aims in America,” “Resources,” “Table Talk,” “Success,” “Culture,” and “American Life.” The twenty-one-yearold Woodbury took advantage of Emerson’s stay by walking and talking with him for most of the visit, and he eventually collected his notes on the experience as Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is the longest such work about Emerson. Charles J. Woodbury From Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson () When I recall Mr. Emerson personally, I recognize that a man more impersonal one seldom meets. There was nothing pronounced about him. Presence (in one meaning) he had none, because he was without the consciousness ,self-esteem,and self-assertion which go so far to constitute it.But there was that behind the withdrawn manner which took possession with an exclusiveness no personal fascinations or magnetism could equal or explain. To every comer he was a fact and experience, undissuadable, penetrating to the region of motive and source of volition; and from the first moment, his was the “morning light which shines more and more unto the perfect day.” At the time of our first meeting, Mr. Emerson was sixty-two. His tall, slender figure had made slight obeisance to age; but the earlier portraits of him I had been familiar with ill-prepared me for his changed expression.The aggressive physiognomy was still there; the delicate, severe lips and piercing eyes. But they rarely flashed now, wearing instead an introspective grey; and the lips were rather those of a seer than a poet.The hair alone had kept its native colour,like dark wine.Both Rowse’s and Wyatt Eaton’s rather than Griswold ’s portraits revive him faithfully as he was at this time, and during the few later years that I saw him.Rowse especially has reproduced the large featuring of his face, with that wise, determined nose (called straight, like the Damascus road) which other Emersons have, and the tender, shrewd eyes, emerson in his own time that until the very end kept so much sunshine in them. And what eyes they were! Whatever they looked at, they looked into, and that effortlessly. Such are not ordinary eyes; they are divining rods. I have noticed that most men successful in values,business men of the first order,have the same inquisitive peer. Under excitement his look was illuminated, and betrayed by turns the sagacity of the man of affairs and the “vision” of the clairvoyant. His more tranquil regard continually revealed yourself to yourself like the limpidity of a clear pool. But the regnant feature of Mr. Emerson’s personal contact was his voice: in converse agreeable, kindly, incisive, it was only to be heard when everything was congruous and still. But who that ever listened to it in public has forgotten the healthful experience? Not resonant like Phillips’, and presenting fewer contrasts with itself than Beecher’s,it seemed as neither of these to carry, as some rivers carry gold, the speaker’s soul in it. And the voice, like the soul,knew no falling inflections.Calm and equable,the monologist went on, the voice always raised, suspense after suspense, still inconclusive when the auditor looked for rest, the theme growing clear until the postponed emphasis of the final pause, and that still an upward pitch; the lesson of which made me puzzle and ponder, and finally appeared to be ethical rather than rhetorical—that on all subjects we discourse inadequately, and can never come to a period. As if he should say: It is time to stop, but not to finish. There is more to be added to complete the presentation, but it cannot be spoken now on account of something else which must follow. So he always stood on the rostrum, having cast away all the tricks that orators hold dear, gestureless, save now and then a slight movement of the hand, repelling as from the cold pole of a magnet; his eyes searching his manuscript, or raised over all of us and gazing forward into space, sometimes in the presence of a luminous expression, glowing like the lenses of some great light-gatherer; uttering sentence after sentence, with the accent of a man who insists on this present statement,but who believes...