246 INDOOE STUDIES 



siasm than I had ever before looked upon any man. 

 I do not think I could have approached and spoken 

 to him on any consideration. I cannot at this date 

 divine why I should have stood in such worshipful 

 fear and awe of this obscure individual, but I sup- 

 pose it was the instinctive tribute of a timid and 

 imaginative youth to a power which he was just 

 beginning vaguely to see, — the power of letters. 



It was at about this time that I first saw my own 

 thoughts in print, — a communication of some kind 

 to a little country paper published in an adjoining 

 town. In my twenty-second or twenty-third year, 

 I began to send rude and crude essays to the maga- 

 zines and to certain New York weekly papers, but 

 they came back again pretty promptly. I wrote on 

 such subjects as " Eevolutions, " "A Man and his 

 Times," "Genius," "Individuality," etc. At this 

 period of my life I was much indebted to Whipple, 

 whose style, as it appears in his earlier essays and in 

 the thin volume of lectures published by Ticknor, 

 Eeed & Fields about 1853 is, in my judgment, 

 much better than in his later writings. It was 

 never a good style, not at all magnetic or penetrat- 

 ing, but it was clear and direct, and, to my mind 

 at that period, stimulating. Higginson had just 

 begun to publish his polished essays in the "Atlan- 

 tic," and I found much help in them also. They 

 were a little cold, but they had the quality which 

 belongs to the work of a man who looks upon litera- 

 ture as a fine art. My mind had already begun to 

 turn to outdoor themes, and Higginson gave me a 



