In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[] As a young staffer on the Ohio State Journal, William Dean Howells made a literary tour of New York and New England in 1860. He visited Walt Whitman in New York and became acquainted with the bohemian crowd at Pfaff’s restaurant on Bleeker Street; in New England he visited Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, and Emerson in Concord. Following an appointment from 1861 to 1865 as the American consul in Venice, Howells returned to the United States, where for the next twenty-five years he held important editorial positions at the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and Cosmopolitan Magazine, and he settled into a distinguished career as a novelist and as a major critical spokesman for the realistic school of American fiction. Howells’s visits to Thoreau and Emerson in 1860 were the only real exceptions to a generally positive tour. In contrast to reports by other aspiring young people collected in this volume, Howells’s report of his visit to Emerson— written in 1894, more than thirty years after the fact—stands out as one of the very few instances in which a writer did not leave the meeting impressed by Emerson’s openness and encouragement of, in this case, his ambition to be a poet. Perhaps Howells was merely being a bit too sensitive, or perhaps he inadvertently provoked Emerson when, in response to his question about whether he knew Ellery Channing’s poems, Howells replied that he knew them only through Poe’s negative critiques. In any case, when he published his “Impressions of Emerson” as his contribution to the centenary celebration of Emerson’s birth, Howells borrowed liberally from the report that follows, but he also added to it several complimentary remarks about Emerson’s appearance as he remembered it and his enduring appeal as a lecturer. On the subject of Emerson’s image as it was typically reproduced in photographs during the centenary, he wrote: “I found the likenesses all very like; no photograph could well err as to the beautiful Greek serenity of Emerson’s looks; and yet they all seemed to me a shade, or several shades, severer than he seemed; they lacked that certain wise sweetness, remotely touched with humor, which was the first and last characteristic of his face.” But perhaps Howells’s warmest praise of Emerson occurs in his description of attending one of his lectures during his later years. Instead of criticizing Emerson for fumbling with his manuscript and William Dean Howells “My First Visit to New England” () emerson in his own time [ ] seeming to forget his place, Howells transforms these lapses into illustrations of Emerson’s charm on the platform: He was already beginning to forget, to achieve an identity independent of the memory which constitutes the unsevered consciousness of other men. This gift of purely spiritual continuity evinced itself publicly as well as privately, and it was the singular pleasure of hearing him lecture, to see him lose his place in his manuscript, turn the leaves over with inaudible sighs, and then go smiling on. Once I remember how, when some pages fell to the floor and were picked up for him and put before him, he patiently waited the result with an unconcern as great as that of any in his audience. He was, in fact, the least anxious of those present, for by that time it had come about that the old popular . . . doubt of him had turned into a love and reverence so deep and true that his listeners all cared more than he to have the distractions of the accident end in his triumph. (Harper’s Weekly Magazine, 47 [16 May 1903]: 784.) (continued) I rather wonder that I had the courage, after [my visit to Thoreau], to present the card Hawthorne had given me to Emerson. I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make out any interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to the master.I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me,for I have a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with the card in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity, while I waited a moment on the door-step below him. He would have been about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though I have called him an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely dark...

Share