Scott lived in the thirteenth century, and had great fame on the Continent as well as in Scotland. He is mentioned by Dante.
Page 190, note 2. The following account of the effect of a sentence from one of Emerson's books on a Virginian youth is best given in his own language: "Fresh from college, now from every career planned by parent or friend I had recoiled: some indefinable impediment barred each usual path. … Utterly miserable, self-accused amid sorrowful faces, with no outlook but to be the fettered master of slaves, I was wont to shun the world, with a gun for an apology. … So came I on a day [to the banks of the Rappahannock] and reclined on the grass reading in a magazine [Blackwood's] casually brought. … The church-bells across the river smote upon a heart discordant with them, at discord with itself. Nature had no meaning, life no promise and no aim. Listlessly turning to the printed page, one sentence caught my eye and held it; one sentence quoted from Emerson, which changed my world and me. A sentence only! I do not repeat it: it might not bear to others what it bore to me: its searching, subtle revelation defies any analysis I can make of its words. All I know is that it was the touch of flame I needed. That day my gun was laid aside to resume no more."1 1.1
The author, who under the new influence sacrificed his inheritance of slaves, and even his father's blessing, and later, place and influence as a clergyman because of his advocacy of human liberty, said to the editor, "But for the reading of that extract from Emerson in a critique in Blackwood on 'Six American Books,' I should be lying in a rebel's grave to-day."
An Austrian writer on Reading and Culture2 1.2 in his preface
