In a piece originally written in the late 1860’s, but published in<\/em> The Atlantic<\/strong><\/a> many years later, Henry James Sr., the father of Henry James the novelist and William James the philosopher-psychologist, sought to explain just what it was about Emerson’s unassuming personality that carried such magnetism.<\/em><\/p>\n

It is now a full thirty years ago that I made Mr. Emerson’s acquaintance.\u00a0 He had come at the time to New York to read a course of lectures.\u00a0 These I diligently attended, and I saw much of him also in private.\u00a0 He at once captivated my imagination, and I have been ever since his loving bondman.\u00a0I tried assiduously during the early days of our intimacy to solve intellectually the mystery of his immense fascination; but I did not succeed.\u00a0 I could very well see what the charm was not.\u00a0 It did not the least consist, for example, in any intellectual mastery he exhibited; for what he mainly held to be true I could not help regarding as false, and what he mainly held to be false I regarded as true.<\/p>\n

Still less did any conventional graces or accomplishments account for the spell he wrought; for no man was more austere than he in manners, or less addicted to the arts of pleasing . . . But what the magic actually was<\/em>, I could not at all divine, save that it was intensely personal, attaching much more to what he was in himself, or by nature, than to what he was in aspiration, or by culture.\u00a0 I often found myself, in fact, thinking:\u00a0 if this man were only a woman, I should be sure to fall in love with him . . .<\/p>\n

It was utterly impossible to listen to Mr. Emerson’s lectures, without being perpetually haunted as to your intellect by the subtlest and most searching aroma of personality . . . His demeanor on the platform. . . was modesty itself:\u00a0 not the mere absence of display, but the presence of a positive personal grace.\u00a0 His deferential entrance upon the scene, his look of inquiry at the desk and the chair, his resolute rummaging among his embarrassed papers, the air of sudden recollection with which he would plunge into his pockets for what he must have known had never been put there, his uncertainty and irresolution as he rose to speak, his deep, relieved inspiration as he got well from under the burning-glass of his auditors’ eyes, and addressed himself at length to their docile ears instead:\u00a0 no maiden ever appealed more potently to your enamored and admiring sympathy.<\/p>\n

And then when he looked over the heads of his audience into the dim mysterious distance, and his weird monotone began to reverberate in your bosom’s depths, and his words flowed on, now with a river’ volume, grand, majestic, free, and anon diminished themselves to the fitful cadence of a brook, impeded in its course, and returning in melodious coquetry upon itself, and you saw the clear eye eloquent with nature’s purity, and beheld the musing countenance turned within, as it were, and hearkening to the rumour of a far-off but oncoming world:\u00a0 how intensely personal, how exquisitely characteristic, it all was! . . .<\/p>\n

I find in no man, especially no man equally famous, anything like the exquisite, unaffected, perfectly unconscious deference he pays to every other man’s freedom . . .\u00a0 He seems to me absolutely void of covetousness; entertains no clandestine designs upon any one; would not if he could impose his sway upon you; is destitute of all persuasive arts<\/a><\/strong>; has no resources either of flattery or command; is so ignorant, indeed, of all our accustomed devices in this sort, and so estranged from our ordinary corrupt manners in general, as to appear to most people utterly inexpansive; and yet he draws all men unto him, and is sure of their spontaneous homage.<\/p>\n

The Atlantic<\/strong><\/a>,Vol. 94, No. 566, pp. 740-745<\/em><\/p>\n