Mr. Emerson is bounteous and gracious, but thin, dry,
angular, in intercourse as in person. Garrison is the only solid moral
reality I have ever seen incarnate, the only man who would do to tie to, as
they say out West; and he is fresher and firmer every day, but wanting in
intellectual culture and variety. Wendell Phillips is always graceful
and gay, but inwardly sad, under that bright surface. Whittier is the
simplest and truest of men, beautiful at home, but without fluency of
expression, and with rather an excess of restraint. Thoreau is pure and
wonderfully learned in nature's things and deeply wise, and yet tedious in his
monologues and cross-questionings. Theodore Parker is as wonderfully
learned in books, and as much given to monologue, though very agreeable and
various it is, still egotistical, dogmatic, bitter often, and showing marked
intellectual limitations. Mr. Alcott is an innocent charlatan, full of inspired
absurdities and deep strokes, maunders about nature, and when outdoors has
neither eyes, ears, nor limbs. Lowell is infinitely entertaining, but
childishly egotistical and monopolizing.
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 93-4
