William Ellery Channing writes to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I see more of [Giles] Waldo, last Saturday. We walked down to Staten Island. Here, is a good disorganized condition, a sort of moderate Thoreau, Thoreau with the Stoic & Pompous element dried out, but it cant bear fruit, anymore than Thoreau. These young men who know nothing about home or family, who dont know that home or family means, what can they do? Their hearts are not as hard as the nether mill stone, but they are as useless as if they were as hard. I dont pity them, nor care anything about them. They are blind; they are unfused.
(Studies in the American Renaissance 1989, 214)