Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to Margaret Fuller:
Send Thoreau’s poem since he promised to mend it . . . H. T. is full of noble madness lately, and I hope more highly of him than ever. I know that nearly all the fine souls have a flaw which defeats every expectation they excite but I must trust these large frames as of less fragility—than the others. Besides to have awakened a great hope in another, is already some fruit is it not?
(The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1939), 2:447)
Around this time, Emerson writes:
[ . . .] astonished one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work, he had gone rambling none knew whither, he had written hundreds of lines, but he could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told, he could tell nothing but that all was changed, man, beast, heaven, earth, & sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised.
(The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8:83)
