The magnificent dreamer, brooding as ever on the renewal or reedification of the social fabric after ideal law, heedless that he had been uniformly rejected by every class to whom he has addressed himself and just as sanguine and vast as ever;—the most cogent example of the drop too much which nature adds of each man’s peculiarity.
—Emerson on Amos Bronson Alcott

I was much taken with the image of the young Ralph Waldo Emerson, convalescing in Florida in the winter of 1827, playing “a kind of poor man’s golf by propelling green oranges with his stick along the beach at St. Augustine.” Equally surprising was the verbal snapshot of the elderly Emerson, in his seventies, wrapped in a shawl on a cool evening, enjoying conversation and remarking “the singular comfort” of a good cigar. Somehow such pastimes seem much too human, material, and commonplace for America’s greatest idealist thinker. America’s most peculiar thinker, too, by Carlos Baker’s lights. In any case, such colorful imagery and verbal precision—as well as sharp characterization and a fine gift for storytelling—are hallmarks of Baker’s new major biography, posthumously published, called Emerson Among the Eccentrics.[1] Baker was a longtime Professor of English at Princeton and author of Hemingway: A Life Story; Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision; and The Echoing Green: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Phenomena of Transference in Poetry.He was also the author of four volumes of fiction and two of poetry, which may