[From Books and You, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940, pp. 88-91:]

Emerson, of course, is a figure of much greater substance [than Thoreau]. I was first led to read him many years ago by a fair-haired lady I met on the Lake of Como. On the excursions we took she always carried a volume of the Essays with her and she had heavily underlined in blue pencil (perhaps to bring out the colour of her eyes) the passages that particularly struck her. There were at least two or three on every page. She told me that she found Emerson a great solace. She said that in all the tribulations and difficulties of her life she went to him and found something to her purpose. I met her again many years later in Hawaii and she very kindly asked me to lunch with her at a house she had rented for the season. She had always been wealthy, but since our last meeting had come up in the world, for her husband had been raised to the peerage and she was now a woman of title. She received me in a Callot dress (the Sisters Callot being then the most fashionable dressmakers in Paris), wearing a pearl chain that must have cost a quarter of a million dollars, but with no shoes or stockings. “You see,” she said, pointing to her bare feet “here we lead the simple life.” I thought it a pity they had bunions on them. At that moment a Chinese butler, dressed very like one of the Ming emperors, brought in a tray of cocktails. I asked her if she still read Emerson. She seized a volume from the table and clasped it to her by this time withering bosom, and told me, indeed yes, she never went anywhere without a volume of the Essays; she waved a jewelled hand at the blue sea which you saw through the open windows and said that except for Emerson she would never really have grasped the spiritual significance of the Pacific Ocean. She died a little while ago at a ripe old age, but a disciple of Emerson to the last, and she left her yacht and her library to the gigolo who had been the other solace of her declining years. Since she did not leave him enough money to run the yacht he sold it; but secondhand books fetch little and it may be that he kept the library. In that case I can only hope he found the Emerson a solace in his bereavement.

I must admit that he has never been a solace to me. I do not wish to speak disrespectfully of a writer in whom his country-men take pride; I recognize the charm and benignity of his character; when you read his journals you cannot but be impressed by the thoughtfulness which possessed him even when he was no more than a young boy, and by the fluency with which he expressed himself; and since he was a lecturer, with the platform in view when he wrote, it may be that his voice and presence added a significance to his discourse which is lost in the printed page; but I can only confess that I cannot find much profit or entertainment in his celebrated Essays. Often he hardly escapes the commonplace by a hair’s breadth. He had a gift of the picturesque phrase, but too often it is empty of meaning. He is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man. But since in the case of so famous an author one’s natural curiosity impels one to ask what it is that has given him such a position in the world of letters, I should recommend you to read his English Traits. In this book he was bound down to the concrete and so there is less in it of the vague, loose and superficial thinking which in his Essays he was apt to indulge in; he thus managed to be more vivid, more actual and more entertaining than in any of his other works. I certainly read it with pleasure.