[Boston—Monday, 10 July 1865]
Monday 1 Vol. of Epictetus. Sea exquisite, went to see two poor women.
Jamie saw Forceythe Willson. He told him that he was a pupil of Horace Mann at Antioch, that Mr Mann was a character that loomed up larger the nearer you approached him which was unlike most men who appear to dwindle.
Willson had previously told Mr Fields that he did not smoke and was happy to find him sympathetic with himself on this point but this afternoon he took out cigars as a matter of course and smoked during the interview. He went also to see James Gillmore whose wife is insane through spiritualism. He saw a lovely old lady in the garden whom Mr G. accosted as mother but when he entered the house he told J. privately that his mother did not know him and had not for years. The taint of insanity must be in both husband & wife.
What misery is this!!
Forceythe Willson came to tea. It was an event indeed. A man of sensitive humanities through which the immortal shines and struggles & burns. He affects me like a wild Tennyson, being like him in fundamentals, as to appearance, constitution; and all except what may be most properly termed education. He is an indigenous growth of our middle states. He was a pupil of Horace Mann & appreciated him.
He has the singular power of reading character from manuscript. He discovered Thoreau’s chivalric worship for women and read Elizabeth Sheppard’s tenderness and Emotional nature and saw her forehead and eyes. He knew the tragedy of her life but could not quite discern the peculiar expression of her nature, asked, if it were in music?
“One of the tenderest of natures far tenderer than I,” he said “and aspiring rather than ambitious” “the figure beckons me to come up to it.”
He talked of Wilhelm Meister wondering if one who could see so far into wisdom could be utterly cold and bad.
I ventured to say I thought the tenderness in Mignon’s songs could not come from an utterly bad man—after this he went away.
I was deeply moved after his departure. It awakens the energy of one’s spiritual life to talk with a man who fixes his gaze steadily upon the immortals and strives for them and not for the world or its bounties or its praise.
