All that intelligence could do toward solving problems for his friends
Emerson did. But there are situations in life in which the intelligence
is helpless, and in which something else, something perhaps possessed by
a ploughboy, is more divine than Plato.
If it were not pathetic, there would be something cruel--indeed there is
something cruel--in Emerson's incapacity to deal with Margaret Fuller.
He wrote to her on October 24, 1840: "My dear Margaret, I have your
frank and noble and affecting letter, and yet I think I could wish it
unwritten. I ought never to have suffered you to lead me into any
conversation or writing on our relation, a topic from which with all
persons my Genius warns me away."
The letter proceeds with unimpeachable emptiness and integrity in the
same strain. In 1841 he writes in his diary: "Strange, cold-warm,
attractive-repelling conversation with Margaret, whom I always admire,
most revere when I nearest see, and sometimes love; yet whom I freeze
and who freezes me to silence when we promise to come nearest.
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