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3n flDemoriam. 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF HIS VISITS TO ENGLAND 
 
 IN 
 
 1833, 1847-8, , 1872.3, 
 
 AND 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM UNPUBLISHED LETTERS. 
 
 BY 
 
 ALEXANDER .IRELAND. 
 
 Plutarch says that when Cicero, as a young man, visited the oracle at Delphi, the 
 advice given him was to make his own genius, not the opinions of others, the guide 
 of his life. 
 
 One who of such a height hath built his mind, 
 And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, 
 As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame 
 Of his resolved powers, .... 
 
 nor pierce to wrong 
 
 His settled peace, nor to disturb the same ; 
 
 Which makes, that whatsoever here befalls, 
 He in the region of himself remains. 
 
 SAMUEL DANIEL (1562-1619). 
 
 LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO. 
 EDINBURGH: DAVID DOUGLAS. GLASGOW: DAVID M. MAIN. 
 
 MANCHESTER: J. E. CORNISH. 
 
 LIVERPOOL : J. CORNISH & SONS. BIRMINGHAM : CORNISH BROTHERS. 
 
 1882. 
 
3n fl&emorfant 
 
 y 
 
 [The substance of this Memoir appeared in the Manchester 
 Examiner and Times of 29th April, the day after the news 
 of Mr. Emerson s death reached England. It is now 
 reprinted, with additions, which extend it to more than 
 three times its original length.] 
 
 INGLEWOOD, 
 
 BOVVDON, CHESHIRE, 
 
 May zoth, 1882. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 THE grave has scarcely closed over the remains of the 
 great man whose renown all over the world is more 
 firmly established than that of any Englishman of his time, 
 when the new<s comes to us that the foremost thinker and 
 philosopher of America has joined the ranks of the majority. 
 America has produced great soldiers, distinguished men of 
 science, and poets of world-wide fame, but it is not too much 
 to say that since the Declaration of Independence no man 
 has so powerfully influenced the intellect of the nation as 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson. On Thursday night, April 2/th, at 
 nine o clock, at his house in Concord, Mass., surrounded by 
 those dearest to him, this great man peaceably departed. He 
 leaves a widow, a son Dr. Edward Emerson, of Concord, and 
 two daughters. The eldest, Ellen who was his tender and 
 faithful companion whenever he left home, his amanuensis in 
 his later years, and, as he sometimes lovingly called her, his 
 " memory " is unmarried. The youngest, Edith, is married 
 to Colonel W. H. Forbes, of Milton Hill, Mass., and has a 
 numerous family. When they visited England in 1872, bringing 
 their children with them, Mr. Carlyle sat for a likeness, with 
 Emerson s grandson, Ralph, then a fine boy of twelve or 
 thirteen, standing by his knee. 
 
 717 
 
4 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most original and independent 
 thinker and greatest moral teacher that America has produced, 
 was born at Boston in 1803. He was a legitimate product 
 of Puritanism. As far back as his family is traced it has been 
 represented by ministers of the old faith of New England, the 
 founder of it having journeyed thither with his congregation 
 from Gloucestershire, in England, in 1635, and each of these 
 ministers was associated with some phase of that faith, whether 
 Calvinism, Universalism, or Unitarianism. His ancestry on 
 both sides forms an indispensable explanation and background 
 of every page of his writings. The Emerson family were 
 intellectual, eloquent, with a strong individuality of character, 
 robust and vigorous in their thinking practical and philan 
 thropic. His father was the Rev. William Emerson, pastor of 
 the First (Unitarian) Church of Boston, and was noted for 
 his vigorous mind, earnestness of purpose, and gentleness of 
 manner. The boy lost his father when he was but eight 
 years old. His mother was a woman of great sensibility, 
 modest, serene, and very devout. "She was possessed of 
 a thoroughly sincere nature, devoid of all sentimentalism, 
 and of a temper the most even and placid (one of her sons 
 said that in his boyhood, when she came from her room in the 
 morning, it seemed to him as if she always came from com 
 munion with God) knew how to guide the affairs of her 
 house, had the sweetest authority, and manners of natural 
 grace and dignity. Her dark, liquid eyes, from which 
 old age did not take away the expression, were among 
 the remembrances of all on whom they ever rested." The 
 young Emerson was very carefully educated, and entered 
 Harvard University at an early age, where he graduated in 
 1821. Every graduating class in that institution elects a poet 
 and an orator for its celebration, which is called " class-day," 
 and Emerson was chosen as the poet of his class. In his 
 junior year he received a Bowdoin prize for an essay on 
 "The Character of Socrates," and in his senior year he again 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 5 
 
 gained a prize, his subject being " The Present State of 
 Ethical Philosophy." Among his companions he was 
 already distinguished for literary attainments, and more 
 especially for a certain charm in the delivery of his addresses. 
 After graduation he entered upon his studies in the Unitarian 
 Divinity College connected with the University. After he had 
 graduated from the Divinity College and been "approbated" 
 for the ministry, he was led to visit the far South South Caro 
 lina and Florida on account of impaired health. On his 
 return, he was settled as the junior pastor of a large congre 
 gation in Boston, and was afterwards appointed chaplain to 
 the State Legislature. His preaching attracted considerable 
 attention, though it brought no crowd. Many an old hearer 
 afterwards remembered these discourses in reading his essays. 
 A venerable lady of those days, a member of his congrega 
 tion, when asked what was his chief characteristic as a 
 minister, said : " On God s law doth he meditate day and 
 night." 
 
 Finding himself unable to continue to hold the creed and 
 perform the rites of the sect with which he was connected, he 
 decided to relinquish his pulpit. He gave his reasons for this 
 in a remarkable discourse. The Rev. Henry Ware, whose col 
 league Emerson was, addressed to him a friendly expostulation 
 against the doctrines of this discourse. In reply Emerson 
 said : " What you say about the discourse is just what I 
 might expect from your truth and charity, combined with 
 your known opinions. I am not a stick or a stone, as one 
 said in the old time, and could not feel but pain in saying 
 some things in that place and presence which I supposed 
 would meet with dissent, I may say, of dear friends and bene 
 factors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is perfect in the sub 
 stantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse, and is not 
 very new, you will see at once that it must appear very im 
 portant that it be spoken ; and I thought I could not pay the 
 nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress 
 
6 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 my opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. 
 I would rather say to them these things look thus to me, to 
 you otherwise. Let us say our uttermost word, and let the 
 all-pervading truth, as it surely will, judge between us. 
 Either of us would, I doubt not, be willingly apprised of his 
 error. Meanwhile, I shall be admonished by this experience 
 of your thought to revise with great care the address before 
 it is printed, and I heartily thank you for this expression of 
 your tried toleration and love." This was followed by a 
 sermon against Emerson s views, a copy of which was sent to 
 him, with a letter, to which he replied. A few sentences may 
 be given from the reply. " There is no scholar less willing or 
 less able than myself to be a polemic. I could not give an 
 account of myself, if challenged. I could not possibly give 
 you one of the arguments you cruelly hint at, on which any 
 doctrine of mine stands. For I do not know what arguments 
 are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in 
 telling what I think ; but if you ask me why I dare say so, 
 or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. When 
 I see myself suddenly raised to the importance of a heretic, 
 I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of 
 such a personage, who is to make good his thesis against all 
 comers. I certainly shall do no such thing. I shall read 
 what you and other good men write, as I have always done, 
 glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the page 
 that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before, seeing 
 whatever I can, and telling what I see." This was the date 
 of his emancipation from the trammels of creed. Shaking 
 off all traditions of creed and authority, he stepped, as he 
 said, into the free and open world to utter his private 
 thought to all who were willing to hear it. Thenceforth 
 he became "the chartered libertine" of thought, as he some 
 times humorously called himself. 
 
 Emerson s earliest appearance in print, we believe, was 
 in an address, "The Right Hand of Fellowship," delivered 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 7 
 
 at the ordination of H. B. Goodwin (1830), and his next, 
 "Sermon and Letter" to the Second Church, Boston (1832). 
 He finally bade farewell to his Boston parish in December, 
 1832, and early in 1833 embarked on his first voyage to Europe. 
 He sailed up the Mediterranean in a vessel bound for Sicily, 
 and went as far eastward as Malta. Returning through Italy, 
 where he dined with Walter Savage Landor in Florence 
 finding him " noble and courteous, living in a cloud of 
 pictures at his villa Gherardesca" he visited France, and 
 in July reached London. There he saw Wellington in 
 Westminster Abbey at the funeral of Wilberforce, and called 
 on Coleridge. In August of the same year (1833) ne made 
 a pilgrimage to Scotland. He remained some days in 
 Edinburgh, and delivered a discourse in the Unitarian Chapel 
 there, recollections of which happily still survive. Desirous of 
 personally acknowledging to Carlyle his indebtedness for the 
 spiritual benefit he had derived from certain of his writings 
 notably the concluding passage in the article on German 
 Literature, and the paper entitled "Characteristics" he found 
 his way, after many hindrances, to Craigenputtock, among 
 the desolate hills of the parish of Dunscore", in Dumfriesshire, 
 where Carlyle was then living with his bright and accom 
 plished wife in perfect solitude, without a person to speak to, 
 or a post office within seven miles. There he spent twenty- 
 four hours, and became acquainted with him at once. They 
 walked over miles of barren hills, and talked upon all the great 
 questions which interested them most. The meeting is 
 described in his " English Traits," published twenty-three years 
 afterwards, and the account of it there given is reprinted by 
 Mr. Froude in his "Life of Carlyle," &c., lately issued. Carlyle 
 and his wife ever afterwards spoke of that visit as if it had 
 been the coming of an angel. They regarded Emerson as a 
 "beautiful apparition" in their solitude. A letter exists, written 
 to a friend a few days after this visit, which gives an account 
 of it, as well as of one to Wordsworth. This letter, written 
 
8 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 on the spur of the moment, and not intended for publication, 
 contains some details not to be found in the published account 
 of these two visits. It is now printed for the first time in 
 the Appendix to this Memoir. Mr. Froude says of this visit : 
 " The fact itself of a young American having been so affected 
 by his writings as to have sought him out on the Dunscore 
 moors, was a homage of the kind which he (Carlyle) could 
 especially value and appreciate. The acquaintance then 
 begun to their mutual pleasure ripened into a deep friendship, 
 which has remained unclouded in spite of wide divergencies 
 of opinion throughout their working lives, and continues warm 
 as ever at the moment when I am writing these words (June 
 27, 1880), when the labours of both of them are over, and 
 they wait in age and infirmity to be called away from 
 a world to which they have given freely all that they had 
 to give." 
 
 Emerson has the distinction of having been the first 
 eminent literary man of either continent to appreciate and 
 welcome "Sartor Resartus." The book was written in 1831 
 at Craigenputtock, but could find no publisher for two years. 
 At last it appeared in " Fraser s Magazine " in. successive 
 chapters, in 1833-4 (Carlyle having to accept reduced re 
 muneration); and it was not till 1838 that it appeared as a 
 volume in England. While subscribers were complaining of 
 the " intolerable balderdash " appearing from month to month 
 in the magazine under the title of " Sartor Resartus," and 
 threatening to withdraw their subscriptions if that " nonsense" 
 did not speedily cease, Emerson was quietly collecting the 
 successive numbers with a view to its publication on comple 
 tion. In 1836 the American edition of the work appeared in 
 Boston, printed, we believe, at Emerson s risk. The publi 
 cation was sufficiently successful to yield a profit of .150, 
 which Emerson sent to Carlyle the most important sum 
 which he had, up to that time, received for any of his works. 
 In Emerson s modest preface to the book (on its first appear- 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 9 
 
 ance in the shape of a volume), occur these memorable 
 words the earliest cordial recognition of the originality and 
 power of this now famous work : 
 
 We believe, no book has been published for many years, written in a more 
 sincere style of idiomatic English, or which discovers an equal mastery over all 
 the riches of the language. The author makes ample amends for the occasional 
 eccentricity of his genius, not only by frequent bursts of pure splendour, but by 
 the wit and sense which never fail him. But what will chiefly commend the book 
 to the discerning reader is the manifest design of the work, which is a Criticism 
 upon the Spirit of the Age, we had almost said, of the hour, in which we live ; 
 exhibiting, in the most just and novel light, the present aspects of Religion, 
 Politics, Literature, Arts, and Social Life. Under all his gaiety, the writer has an 
 earnest meaning, and discovers an insight into the manifold wants and tendencies 
 of human nature, which is very rare among our popular authors. The philanthropy 
 and the purity of moral sentiment, which inspire the work, will find their way to 
 the heart of every lover of virtue. 
 
 A similar service was done by Emerson some years later in 
 a few prefatory remarks to the first American reprint of Car- 
 lyle s Miscellaneous Reviews and Essays. 
 
 His health, which had always been delicate, and which in 
 1832 had been greatly affected by domestic bereavement (the 
 death of his first wife) and the worry of controversy, was quite 
 restored by the voyage and his subsequent travels. After his 
 return to America he gave lectures before the Boston Lyceum, 
 his subjects being: "Water;" "Michael Angelo;" "Milton;" 
 "Luther;" "George Fox;" "Edmund Burke;" also two lectures 
 on " Italy," and three on " The Relation of Man to the Globe." 
 In August, 1835, in a lecture before the American Institute of 
 Instruction, his subject was the " Means of Inspiring a Taste 
 for English Literature." In September of the same year he gave 
 a historical address in Concord, it being the second centennial 
 anniversary of the incorporation of that town. In September, 
 1835, he married Miss Lydia Jackson, of Plymouth. Her family 
 was descended from one of the earliest Plymouth settlers. 
 In December, 183 5, he gave a course often lectures in Boston 
 on " English Literature." The first two were on the earlier 
 writers, and there were others on Chaucer, Bacon, Shakespeare, 
 and all the subsequent great writers. In the last lecture, he 
 
io IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 touched upon Byron, Scott, Dugald Stewart, Mackintosh, and 
 Coleridge. He placed Coleridge among the sages of the 
 world. In succeeding seasons he gave courses on " The 
 Philosophy of History ;" "Human Culture;" "Human Life;" 
 " The Present Age ; " " The Times ; " and other subjects. It 
 is to be hoped that all these lectures, hitherto unprinted, 
 will be given to the world. At a meeting held in Concord 
 in 1836, on the completion of a monument to commemorate 
 the Concord fight, a hymn was written for the occasion by 
 Emerson, and read by Dr. Ripley, and sung to the tune of 
 the " Old Hundred." It contained the immortal lines : 
 
 Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
 And fired the shot heard round the world. 
 
 In 1835 ne was reading Plato and Plutarch more diligently 
 than ever, and began to study Plotinus and other writers of 
 the same class. He also read the writings of the German 
 mystics, as well as of the English idealists, the poems of 
 George Herbert (which he keenly relished), and the prose 
 works of Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, Milton, Jeremy 
 Taylor, and Coleridge. In 1836 appeared "Nature," a little 
 volume of only ninety-five pages, the contents consisting of 
 an Introduction, and eight chapters, entitled, Nature, Com 
 modity, Beauty, Language, Discipline, Idealism, Spirit, and 
 Prospects. The spirit of its teachings is that nature exists 
 only for the unfolding of a spiritual being. His ideas are in 
 this little volume more systematically developed than else 
 where. They have been thus summarised : " Every natural 
 fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Nature becomes a 
 means of expression for these spiritual truths and experiences, 
 which could not otherwise be interpreted. Its laws, also, are 
 moral laws when applicable to man ; and so they become to 
 man the language of the Divine Will. Because the physical 
 laws become moral laws the moment they are related to 
 human conduct, Nature has a much higher purpose than that 
 of beauty or language in that it is a Discipline. It is in these 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 11 
 
 views that Emerson s resemblance to Swedenborg is apparent, 
 in his caring for Nature only as a symbol and revelation of 
 spiritual realities." This truly seminal book met with but 
 a small sale, only 500 copies being disposed of in twelve 
 years ! The first edition of it is now one of the rarest books in 
 America. An account of the work is given by George Willis 
 Cooke in his recent work, " Ralph Waldo Emerson : His 
 Life, Writings, and Philosophy," to which the reader is 
 referred. An oration, entitled " Man Thinking," delivered 
 before the Phi-Beta-Kappa Society, Cambridge, in 1837, and 
 an address to the Senior Divinity Class, Cambridge, 1838, 
 also won him wide notice for their originality, boldness, and 
 power. They exercised an immense influence on the youthful 
 mind of New England. It was of this address that a friend 
 of Emerson s said : " Henceforth the young men of New 
 England will have a fifth Gospel in their New Testaments." 
 He delivered "Literary Ethics," an oration, in 1838. 
 
 In 1840 he started "The Dial," a magazine devoted to 
 the discussion of mooted questions in philosophy, literature, 
 and history. At one period of its existence Margaret 
 Fuller and George Ripley were connected with its man 
 agement. Through this organ Emerson, Ripley, Theodore 
 Parker, Henry D. Thoreau (the most unique of American 
 literary personalities), J. S. Dwight, W. H. Channing, Miss 
 Fuller, C. P. Cranch, J. F. Clarke, T. H. Hedge, J. R. Lowell, 
 Miss Peabody, A. B. Alcott, Ellery Channing, Edward, and 
 Charles Chauncey Emerson, C. Lane, C. A. Dana, J. C. 
 Cabot, and others, all of them persons of high and varied 
 culture, gave utterance to their thoughts. The magazine 
 existed for four years 1841-4. A complete set of the 
 four volumes is now an almost unattainable rarity. Even 
 odd numbers of it fetch a high price. An originally sub 
 scribed -for and complete copy exists in the library of 
 one of Mr. Emerson s English friends, in which the 
 authorship of each article is indicated in his own hand- 
 
12 IN MEMO RI AM: 
 
 writing. In "The Dial" were published " Man the Reformer," 
 " English Reformers," " The Young American," " Lectures 
 on the Times " (including " The Conservative," and " The 
 Transcendentalist"), "The Senses and The Soul," "Thoughts 
 on Modern Literature," "Thoughts on Art," "The Tragic," 
 "The Comic," "Prayers," "Letter to the Readers of The 
 Dial " (on Railroads, Air- Roads, Communities, Culture, The 
 Position of Young Men, Bettina von Arnim, and Theodore 
 Mandt s Account of Holderlin s " Hyperion "). Under the 
 heading "Ethnical Scriptures" were given from time to time 
 extracts from the most notable Oriental books of religion and 
 morals. The first number of " The Dial " had a very charac 
 teristic address to its readers from his pen. The purpose of 
 the magazine was the most various expression of the best, the 
 most cultivated, and the freest thought of the time, and was 
 addressed to those only who were able to find " entertain 
 ment " in such literature. There were no facts for popularity. 
 Each number was a symposium of the most accomplished 
 minds in the country. It is the memorial of an intellectual 
 impulse which the national life of America has never lost 
 Emerson himself, in the preface to the first American edition 
 of Carlyle s collected essays, says : " Many readers will here 
 find pages which, in the scattered anonymous sheets of 
 The Dial, spoke to their youthful mind with an emphasis 
 that hindered them from sleep." Many of his finest 
 poems made their first appearance in this periodical. " The 
 Method of Nature" was published in 1841. The first series of 
 Emerson s "Essays," to which Mr.Carlyle contributed a preface, 
 was published in 1841. In this volume are contained some 
 of his most original and ablest papers " Self- Reliance," 
 "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Love," "Friendship," "The 
 Over-Soul," and "Intellect." In the same year he delivered an 
 address at Concord, on the anniversary of the emancipation of 
 the negroes in the West Indies. A second series of "Essays" 
 appeared in 1844, also with a few prefatory words by Carlyle. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 13 
 
 This series contained nine papers "The Poet," "Experience," 
 "Character," "Manners," "Gifts," "Nature," "Politics," "Nomi 
 nalist and Realist," and "New England Reformers" (a lecture). 
 In December, 1847, he wrote the "Editor s Address" in the 
 first number of the " Massachusetts Quarterly Review." 
 
 The publication of his two volumes of Essays, having 
 stamped Emerson as a thinker of indisputable originality and 
 power, his fame rapidly increased in this country, and many 
 of his admirers became desirous that he should visit England, 
 and deliver courses of lectures, as he had done in the great towns 
 of his own land. He had now gained the ear of England, and 
 many of the finest minds of both hemispheres had acknowledged 
 his genius and power. For some time he hesitated, doubting 
 whether his name would bring together any numerous company 
 of hearers. Several letters passed on the subject. At length his 
 hesitancy was overcome, and permission granted by him to 
 announce his visit and his intention to read lectures to institu 
 tions, or to any gathering of friendly individuals who sympa 
 thised with his studies. Applications immediately flowed in 
 from every part of the kingdom, and in many cases it was 
 found impossible to comply with the wishes of the requisition- 
 ists, from a fear of enforcing too much labour on the lecturer. 
 Had every offer that was made been accepted, his engagements 
 would have extended over a much longer period than he was 
 prepared to remain in England. At last he arrived at Liver 
 pool on 22nd October, 1847. Carlyle was greatly delighted 
 with the prospect of again seeing his friendly visitor "the 
 lonely, wayfaring man," as he described him of 1833. A letter 
 from Emerson, announcing the probable time of his sailing, 
 had, by negligence at a country post-office, failed to be 
 delivered to Carlyle in due course, and only turned up near 
 the time of Emerson s expected arrival, thus depriving the 
 former of the opportunity of responding with hospitable mes 
 sages and invitations. This led to great trouble of mind in 
 Carlyle, fearing, as he did, that it might subject him to the 
 
14 IN ME MORI AM : 
 
 appearance of a want of hospitality a possibility abhorrent 
 to his feelings. His trouble was ended, however, by an arrange 
 ment being made to have his reply delivered to Emerson the 
 instant he landed in England, which, it is needless to say, was 
 faithfully carried out. His minute instructions and almost 
 solemn injunctions in regard to this matter were delightfully 
 characteristic of his high regard for Emerson. The reader 
 will find them in a later page. 
 
 For some months he took up his residence in Manchester, 
 from which, as from a centre, he issued forth to lecture in 
 various towns in the midland and northern counties of England. 
 His first course was delivered to the members of the Man 
 chester Athenaeum, the subject being " Representative Men, 
 including Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and 
 Goethe." His next course was given in the Manchester 
 Mechanics Institution, the subjects being " Eloquence," 
 " Domestic Life," " Reading," " The Superlative in Manners 
 and Literature," and " The Humanity of Science." The titles 
 of these lectures are given to show the wide range of his 
 subjects. They excited great interest, and attracted crowded 
 audiences. While in Manchester he delivered a remarkable 
 speech at a soire e, held under the auspices of the Manchester 
 Athenaeum, Sir A. Alison being in the chair. Richard Cobden 
 and other notabilities were present. His text was the indo 
 mitable "pluck" and steadfastness and grandeur of England, 
 amid all her difficulties and trials. At that time English 
 commerce and industry were in a very depressed condition. 
 This speech, although comparatively brief, was carefully pre 
 pared for the occasion, and the importance he attached to it 
 may be gathered from the fact that he printed it, in extenso, 
 in his " English Traits," published nine years after. He also 
 visited Edinburgh in February, 1848, where he lectured, and 
 met many of its celebrities, including Robert Chambers, with 
 whose geniality and kindly humour, and charming family 
 circle, he was delighted. While there, he was the guest of Dr. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 15 
 
 Samuel Brown. He spent two days at Ambleside with Miss 
 Martineau and paid another visit to Wordsworth his first 
 having been paid fifteen years before. A few records of his stay 
 in London, and remarks on some of the people he met there, 
 will be found in his " English Traits," one of the most bril 
 liant and striking books ever written about England and its 
 characteristics. In perusing this volume the reader will be 
 charmed by its vigour, vivacity, and acuteness. It is remark 
 able for its subtle discrimination, and clear insight into 
 national character. In hanging over its pages, one expe 
 riences much the same feelings as if one were transplanted 
 from a dead-level country to hilly pastures and wooded 
 ridges, where the turf is elastic, and the air sharp, keen, and 
 bracing. 
 
 His lectures in London were attended by the Mite of the 
 social and literary world of the metropolis. Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, 
 the Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Byron and her daughter 
 Ada (Lady Lovelace), the Duke of Argyll, Dr. John Carlyle, 
 William and Mary Howitt, Douglas Jerrold, Mr. John Forster, 
 Thackeray, and many other distinguished persons were among 
 his hearers. The writer of this notice can speak for the breath 
 less attention of his audience, and the evident all-absorbing 
 interest with which his discourses were listened to. The course 
 consisted of six lectures, on " The Minds and Manners of 
 the Nineteenth Century," " Power and Laws of Thought," 
 " Relation of Intellect to Natural Science," " Tendencies and 
 Duties of Men of Thought," " Politics and Socialism," " Poetry 
 and Eloquence," and " Natural Aristocracy." It was a remark 
 able course. Only one or two of these lectures have been 
 printed. Not a few of his aristocratic audience must have 
 winced under some of his keen reproofs and reminders of 
 duty. He uttered his convictions with a daring independence, 
 and gave his judgments with a decisiveness of tone and 
 earnest solemnity of manner which might have put kings in 
 fear. He made his audience feel as if he had got them well in 
 
1 6 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 hand, and did not mean to let them go without giving them 
 his "mind." It was as if he had said (to use his own words, but 
 on another occasion) : " This you must accept as fated, and 
 final for your salvation. It is mankind s Bill of Rights, the 
 royal proclamation of Intellect, descending the throne, and 
 announcing its good pleasure, that, hereafter, as heretofore, and 
 now once for all, this world shall be governed by common sense 
 and law of morals, or shall go to ruin." During the delivery of 
 this course a letter appeared in the London Examiner, urging 
 a repetition of it at a price sufficiently low to admit of poor 
 literary men hearing Emerson. " This might be done by 
 fixing some small admission charge, commensurate with the 
 means of poets, critics, philosophers, historians, scholars, and 
 the other divine paupers of that class. I feel that it ought to 
 be done, because Emerson is a phenomenon whose like is not 
 in the world, and to miss him is to lose an important, informing 
 fact, out of the nineteenth century. If, therefore, you will 
 insert this, the favour will at all events have been asked, and 
 one conscience satisfied. It seems also probable that a very 
 large attendance of thoughtful men would be secured, and 
 that Emerson s stirrup-cup would be a cheering and full one, 
 sweet and ruddy with international charity." 
 
 Three lectures were also given at Exeter Hall : "Napoleon," 
 " Shakespeare," and " Domestic Life." At their conclusion 
 Mr. Monckton Milnes (now Lord Houghton) made a speech 
 complimentary to the lecturer, and to which the latter replied. 
 
 The first impression one had in listening to him in 
 public was that his manner was so singularly quiet and unim- 
 passioned that you began to fear the beauty and force of his 
 thoughts were about to be marred by what might almost be 
 described as monotony of expression. But very soon was 
 this apprehension dispelled. The mingled dignity, sweetness, 
 and strength of his features, the earnestness of his manner and 
 voice, and the evident depth and sincerity of his convictions 
 gradually extorted your deepest attention, and made you feel 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 17 
 
 that you were within the grip of no ordinary man, but of one 
 " sprung of earth s first blood," with " titles manifold ;" and as 
 he went on with serene self-possession and an air of conscious 
 power, reading sentence after sentence, charged with well- 
 weighed meaning, and set In words of faultless aptitude, you 
 could no longer withstand his "so potent spell," but were forth 
 with compelled to surrender yourself to the fascination of his 
 eloquence. He used little or no action, save occasionally a 
 slight vibration of the body, as though rocking beneath the 
 hand of some unseen power. The precious words dropped 
 from his mouth in quick succession, and noiselessly sank into 
 the hearts of his hearers, there to abide for ever, and, like the 
 famed carbuncle in Eastern cave, shed a mild radiance on all 
 things therein. Perhaps no orator ever succeeded with so 
 little exertion in entrancing his audience, stealing away each 
 faculty, and leading the listeners captive at his will. He 
 abjured all force and excitement dispensing his regal sen 
 tences in all mildness, goodness, and truth ; but stealthily and 
 surely he grew upon you, from diminutive proportions, as it 
 were ; steadily increasing, until he became a Titan, a com 
 manding power 
 
 To whom, as to the mountains and the stars, 
 The soul seems passive and submiss. 
 
 The moment he finished, he took up his MS. and quietly 
 glided away, disappearing before his audience could give 
 vent to their applause. 
 
 The French Revolution of 1848 happening while he was 
 in this country, he went over to Paris in the spring of that 
 year, and was present at several meetings of the political 
 clubs, which were then in a state of fullest activity. He was 
 accompanied by Mr. W. E. Forster (the late Chief Secre 
 tary for Ireland). In Paris he made the acquaintance of 
 the late James Oswald Murray, with whom he often went 
 about the city. Mr. Murray, then an artist, made a crayon 
 sketch of Emerson, which is in the possession of an English 
 B 
 
i8 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 friend. His observations made during that visit were em 
 bodied in a brilliant lecture on the French, which he delivered 
 at Concord, but which has not been published. Before 
 sailing for America, in the Summer of 1848, he spent a 
 night in Manchester, and had much to say of all he had 
 seen and met. He overflowed with pleasant recollections of 
 his visit, and spoke in the warmest terms of the kindness and 
 consideration which he had everywhere experienced. He 
 said he had not been aware there was so much kindness in 
 the world. Would that some unseen but swift pen could have 
 recorded all he said in these last rapidly-flying hours ! Speak 
 ing of Carlyle, he repeated the words used in a letter written 
 some months before : " The guiding genius of the man, and 
 what constitutes his superiority over almost every other man 
 of letters, is his commanding sense of justice, and incessant 
 demand for sincerity." He spoke of De Quincey and Leigh 
 Hunt as having the finest manners of any literary men he had 
 ever met. 
 
 On the Sunday before he sailed for America, a large 
 number of his friends and admirers from all parts of the 
 country were invited to meet him at the hospitable mansion 
 of Mr. and Mrs. Paulet (both since dead), near Liverpool, 
 whose guest he was. Among other notable persons gathered 
 together on that occasion to spend a few hours in his company, 
 and to listen to his rich experiences and recollections, was 
 Arthur Hugh Clough, for whom Emerson had a most tender 
 regard. In the following year the former met Margaret 
 Fuller in Rome. He had become known to a select circle 
 of scholars by his poem, "The Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich," 
 which Kingsley eulogised, and Oxford pronounced " indecent, 
 immoral, profane, and communistic." Mr. Emerson esteemed 
 the poem highly, and was the means of procuring its re- 
 publication in America. In a private letter, dated December 
 8th, 1862, he says: "I grieve that the good Clough, the 
 generous and susceptible scholar, should die. I have read 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 19 
 
 over his Bothie again, so full of the wine of youth." In 
 the autumn of 1852 Clough went to America, by Emerson s 
 invitation, voyaging thither in company with Thackeray and 
 Lowell. He settled at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he 
 was welcomed with remarkable cordiality, and formed many 
 friendships which lasted to the end of his life. While in Ame 
 rica he contributed several articles to the reviews and magazines, 
 and undertook a revision of the translation, known as Dry- 
 den s, of Plutarch s "Lives" for an American publisher, which 
 appeared in five volumes. In the following year he returned to 
 England. He died at Florence in 1861, in his 43rd year. 
 
 In 1846 Emerson published his first volume of Poems ; in 
 1850 the "Essay on War" in Miss Peabody s "Aesthetic 
 Papers;" and "Representative Men;" and in 1852, in conjunc 
 tion with W. H. Channing, the " Memoirs of Margaret Fuller." 
 His contribution to the work were the chapters in the first 
 volume on Concord and Boston. Four years later (1856), he 
 published "English Traits." Under the title of " Echoes of 
 Harper s Ferry " he published, in 1 860, three speeches con 
 cerning John Brown, which he had delivered at Boston in 1859, 
 at Concord later in the same year, and at Salem in 1860. This 
 was followed by "The Conduct of Life" (1860), containing 
 nine essays Fate, Power, Wealth, Culture, Behaviour, Worship, 
 Considerations by the Way, Beauty, Illusions. In 1864 
 appeared an "Introductory Essay on Persian Poetry," prefixed 
 to the "Gulistan" of Saadi; Biographical Sketch prefixed to 
 H. D. Thoreau s " Excursions " (1863), " Oration on the Death 
 of President Lincoln" (1865), "May-day and other Poems" 
 (1867), "Address at a Meeting to organize the Free Religious 
 Association" (1867); "The Rule of Life," a Lecture delivered to 
 the "Parker Fraternity" (1867) ; " Society and Solitude" (1870), 
 containing twelve essays Society and Solitude, Civilization, 
 Art, Eloquence, Domestic Life, Farming, Work and Days, 
 Books, Clubs, Courage, Success, Old Age. In 1871 he wrote 
 an introduction to Goodwin s translation of Plutarch s "Morals." 
 
20 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 In the same year appeared " Parnassus, a Selection of 
 English and American Poetry, with prefatory remarks," of 
 which it may be truly said that it is the best collection of 
 English Poetry ever made. The only thing marring the 
 completeness of the volume is the much -to -be -regretted 
 absence of a few specimens of his own poems. Any other 
 selector but Emerson would had he been a poet have 
 given some specimens of his own verses. In a recent 
 volume of " Selections of English Poetry," published in 
 London, the editor obligingly presents the reader with 
 eleven passages from Shakespeare, seven from Milton, and 
 thirteen from his own works ! Some of the selections in 
 " Parnassus " have been inserted for their " historical im 
 portance ; some for their weight of sense ; some for single 
 couplets or lines, perhaps even for a word ; some for magic 
 of style ; and others which although in their structure 
 betraying a defect of poetic ear have nevertheless a wealth 
 of truth which ought to have created melody." The arrange 
 ment is not chronological, but based upon the character 
 of the subject, under the following heads : Nature ; Human 
 Life ; Intellectual ; Contemplative, Moral and Religious ; 
 Heroic ; Portraits ; Narrative Poems and Ballads ; Songs ; 
 Dirges and Pathetic Poems ; Comic and Humorous ; Poetry 
 of Terror, and Oracles and Counsels. An index of authors, 
 prefixed, with dates of birth and death, is a useful guide in 
 many instances, especially as regards the period of the 
 writings. It does not appear that the merits of the author s 
 acknowledged or perhaps we should say recognised 
 position had had much to do with the copiousness of 
 the extracts. The next products of his pen were an 
 Address on " The Dedication of the Concord Free Library " 
 (1873); and in 1876 "Letters and Social Aims," containing 
 eleven essays Poetry and Imagination, Social Aims, Elo 
 quence, Resources, The Comic, Quotation and Originality, 
 Progress of Culture, Persian Poetry, Inspiration, Greatness, 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 21 
 
 Immortality; " Fortune of the Republic," an address delivered 
 in Boston in February, 1878; and "The Preacher," printed 
 in the " Unitarian Review" (1880). In the " North American 
 Review" will be found the following essays: Michael 
 Angelo, Milton, Character, Demonology, Perpetual Forces, 
 The Sovereignty of Ethics. To the " Atlantic Monthly " he 
 contributed, between 1858 and 1876, the following articles 
 and poems : The Rommany Girl, The Chartist s Complaint, 
 Days, Brahma, Illusions, Solitude and Society, Two Rivers, 
 Books, Persian Poetry, Eloquence, Waldeinsamkeit, Song of 
 Nature, Culture, The Test, Old Age, The Titmouse, American 
 Civilization, Compensation, Thoreau, The President s Pro 
 clamation, Boston Hymn, Voluntaries, Saadi, My Garden, 
 Boston, Terminus, Aspects of Culture (Phi -Beta -Kappa 
 Address, Harv. Univ., 1867). 
 
 In a later page the reader will find a list of the articles on 
 Emerson and his writings in the magazines and reviews of 
 Great Britain and the United States, as well as indications of 
 what has been written about him in France, Germany, and 
 Holland. 
 
 In 1872 he again visited Europe, accompanied by his 
 daughter, arriving in November. After a short stay in 
 London, they proceeded to Egypt, spending some time there, 
 returning in the Spring of 1873 to England, via Italy and 
 France. During this visit he did not deliver any lectures. 
 He resided for some weeks in London, and visited Professor 
 Max Muller at Oxford. He spent a single day (8th May) in 
 Edinburgh, his main object being to see Dr. J. Hutchison 
 Stirling, author of " The Secret of Hegel." His two last days 
 were spent under the roof of a friend in Cheshire, and many 
 of his old acquaintances and hearers of 1847-8 had thus an 
 opportunity of meeting him. 
 
 The friendship which existed between Emerson and that 
 remarkable woman, Margaret Fuller was altogether of a 
 noble and beautiful character, and was only terminated by her 
 
22 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 sad and untimely death. Returning from Europe with her 
 husband (Count D Ossoli) and child, the vessel in which they 
 sailed was wrecked on i6th June, 1850, within sight of her own 
 New England shores indeed, quite close to the beach. For 
 twelve agonising hours they were face to face with death. 
 She refused an attempt made by four of the crew to save her, 
 lest she might have been divided for ever from those dearest 
 to her. She bravely preferred certain death to the chances of 
 an eternal separation. The terrible story has been told with 
 intense power and sympathy by W. H. Channing. Of this 
 woman of true genius, whose conversation was of unrivalled 
 fluency and brilliancy, ample records remain. She was an 
 accomplished Greek, Latin, and Hebrew scholar. She had a 
 singular power of communicating her literary enthusiasm to 
 her companions. She has left behind her several volumes 
 containing the best of her literary work. It has been said of 
 her that " she was plain in appearance, and that she had a 
 faculty of unsheathing herself at the touch of a thought ; and 
 those who came into right relations with her remember her as 
 almost beautiful. Her natural place was at the centre of a 
 circle where thoughts and truths were being discovered, and 
 which had not yet found their channels in literature. With 
 the finest womanly sympathies she combined the strong mas 
 culine intellect, and an individuality which stimulated every 
 other individuality. Her influence was great in the intellectual 
 activities of her day." She has left a record of her impressions 
 of Emerson s Lectures, too long for quotation in full, but from 
 which it is worth while giving a few sentences : " Among his 
 audience some there were simple souls whose life had been, 
 perhaps, without clear light, yet still a search after truth for its 
 own sake, who were able to recognise beneath his veil of words 
 the still small voice of conscience, the vestal fires of lone reli 
 gious hours, and the mild teachings of the summer woods. 
 The charm of his elocution was great. His general manner 
 was that of the reader, occasionally rising into direct address 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 23 
 
 or invocation in passages where tenderness or majesty de 
 manded more energy. At such times both eye and voice 
 called on a remote future to give a worthy reply a future 
 which shall manifest more largely the universal soul as it was 
 then manifest to his soul. The tone of the voice was a grave 
 body tone, full and sweet rather than sonorous, yet flexible, and 
 haunted by many modulations, as even instruments of wood 
 and brass seem to become after they have been long played 
 on with skill and taste ; how much more so the human voice ! 
 In the most expressive passages it uttered notes of silvery 
 clearness, winning, yet still more commanding. The words 
 uttered in those tones floated awhile above us, then took root 
 in the memory like winged seed. In the union of an even 
 rustic plainness with lyric inspiration, religious dignity with 
 philosophic calmness, keen sagacity in details with boldness 
 of view, we saw what brought to mind the early poets and 
 legislators of Greece men who taught their fellows to plough 
 and avoid moral evil, sing hymns to the gods, and watch the 
 metamorphosis of nature. Here in civic Boston was such a 
 man one who could see man in his original grandeur and 
 his original childishness, rooted in simple nature, raising to 
 the heavens the brow and eye of a poet." An account of 
 Concord and Emerson is given at length by Frederika Bremer, 
 in her " Homes of the New World." She was a guest in 
 Emerson s house, and describes her host and his environments 
 in a most vivid manner. 
 
 Every reader of Mr. Lowell knows his intensely humorous 
 description of the characteristics of Emerson and Carlyle, 
 given in " A Fable for Critics." The keen and vigorous critic 
 has said many admirable things in prose about Emerson 
 which are well worth remembering. Here are a few of them : 
 " A lecturer now for something like a third of a century, one 
 of the pioneers of the lecturing system, the charm of his voice, 
 his manner, and his matter has never lost its power over his 
 earlier hearers, and continually winds new ones in its en- 
 
24 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 chanting meshes." " There is no man living to whom, as a 
 writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so 
 great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses. We look upon 
 him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has pro 
 duced. Search for his eloquence in his books, and you will 
 perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has 
 kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith of language 
 he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders 
 with Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne a diction at once so 
 rich and so homely as his I know not where to match. It is 
 like homespun cloth-of-gold. I know no one that can hold a 
 promiscuous crowd in pleased attention so long as he. ... 
 Plain living and high thinking speak to us in this altogether 
 unique lay-preacher. We have shared in the beneficence of 
 this varied culture, this fearless impartiality in criticism and 
 speculation, this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature 
 which rather stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If 
 ever there was a standing testimonial to the cumulative power 
 and value of Character we have it in this gracious and 
 dignified presence. What an antiseptic is a pure life ! At 
 sixty-five he has that privilege of soul which abolishes the 
 calendar, and presents him to us always the unwasted con 
 temporary of his own prime. . . . Who that saw the 
 audience will ever forget it, where every one still capable of 
 fire, or longing to renew in them the half-forgotten sense of it, 
 was gathered? Those faces, young and old, agleam with pale 
 intellectual light, eager with pleased attention, flash upon me 
 once more from the deep recesses of the years with an exqui 
 site pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, brimming with love 
 and hope, wholly vanished now in that other world we call 
 the Past, or peering doubtfully through the pensive gloaming 
 of memory, your light impoverishes these cheaper days ! I 
 hear again that rustle of sensation, as they turned to exchange 
 glances over some pithier thought, some keener flash of that 
 humour which always played about the horizon of his mind 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 25 
 
 like heat-lightning, and it seems now like the sad whisper of 
 \he autumn leaves that are whirling around me." " His 
 younger hearers could not know how much they owed to 
 the benign impersonality, that quiet scorn of everything 
 ignoble, the never-sated hunger of self-culture, that were 
 personified in the man before them. But the older knew how 
 much the country s intellectual emancipation was due to the 
 stimulus of his teaching and example, how constantly he had 
 kept burning the beacon of an ideal life above our lower 
 region of turmoil. To him more than to all other causes 
 did the young martyrs of our Civil War owe the sustaining 
 strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every 
 record of their lives. Those who are grateful to Mr. Emerson, 
 as many of us are, for what they feel to be most valuable in 
 their culture, or perhaps I should say their impulse, are grate 
 ful not so much for any direct teachings of his as for that 
 inspiring lift which only genius can give, and without which 
 all doctrine is chaff." " I can never help applying to him 
 what Ben Jonson said of Bacon There happened in my 
 time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his 
 speaking. His language was nobly censorious. No man 
 ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or 
 suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No 
 member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His 
 hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. 
 He commanded where he spoke. " 
 
 Mr. Lowell gives a vivid description of the effect produced 
 by Emerson s speech at the Burns Centenary dinner at 
 Boston in 1859. "In that closely-filed speech of his every 
 word seemed to have just dropped from the clouds. He 
 looked far away over the heads of his hearers with a vague 
 kind of expectation, as into some private heaven of invention, 
 and the winged period came at last obedient to his spell. . . 
 Every sentence brought down the house, as I never saw one 
 brought down before, and it is not so easy to heat Scotsmen 
 
26 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 with a sentiment that has no hint of native brogue in it. I 
 watched, for it was an interesting study, how the quick sym 
 pathy ran flashing from face to face down the long tables, 
 like an electric spark thrilling as it went, and then exploded 
 in a thunder of plaudits. I watched till tables and faces 
 vanished, for I, too, found myself caught up in the common 
 enthusiasm." Emerson s concluding sentences were these: 
 
 Yet how true a poet is he ! and the poet, too,of poor men, of grey hodden, 
 and the guernsey coat, and the blouse. He has given voice to all the experiences 
 of common life ; he has endeared the farm-house and cottage, patches and poverty, 
 beans and barley ; ale. the poor man s wine ; hardship, the fear of debt, the dear 
 society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so 
 few, and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. What a 
 love of nature, and, shall I say it ? of middle-class nature. Not great like Goethe 
 in the stars, or like Byron on the ocean, or Moore in the luxurious East, but in 
 the lonely landscape which the poor see around them, bleak leagues of pasture 
 and stubble, ice, and sleet, and rain, and snow-choked brooks; birds, hares, field- 
 mice, thistles and heather, which he daily knew. How many " Bonnie Boons," 
 and "John Anderson, my joes," and "Auld Langsynes," all round the earth have 
 his verses been applied to ! And his love songs still woo and melt the youths and 
 maids ; the farm- work, the country holiday, the fishing coble, are still his debtors 
 to-day. And as he was thus the poet of poor, anxious, cheerful, working 
 humanity, so he had the language of low life. He grew up in a rural district, 
 speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made that lowland 
 Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language 
 made classic by the genius of a single man. But more than this, he had that 
 secret of genius, to draw from the bottom of society the strength of its speech, 
 and astonish the ears of the polite with these artless words, better than art, and 
 filtered of all offence through his beauty. It seemed odious to Luther that the 
 devil should have all the best tunes ; he would bring them into the churches ; and 
 Burns knew how to take from fairs and gypsies, blacksmiths and drovers, the 
 speech of the market and street, and clothe it with melody. But I am detaining 
 you too long. The memory of Burns I am afraid heaven and earth have taken 
 too good care of it, to leave us anything to say. The west winds are murmuring 
 it. Open the windows behind you, and hearken for the incoming tide what the 
 waves say of it. The doves perching always on the eaves of the stone chapel 
 opposite may know something of it. Every name in broad Scotland keeps his 
 fame bright. The memory of Burns every man s and boy s, and girl s head 
 carries snatches of his songs, and can say them by heart, and, what is strangest of 
 all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth. The wind 
 whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley, and bulrushes hoarsely 
 rustle them ; nay, the music-boxes at Geneva are framed and toothed to play 
 them ; the hand organs of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes 
 of bells ring them in the spires. They are the property and the solace of man 
 kind. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 27 
 
 From an Essay on Emerson by John Burroughs, the 
 author of several volumes of rare merit, published in New 
 York, and which it is surprising no London publisher has yet 
 introduced to British readers, it is worth while giving a few 
 sentences, bearing upon some of the characteristics of Mr. 
 Emerson s writings. Mr. Burroughs wields a racy pen, and 
 there is the ring of the true metal in his delightful sketches of 
 outdoor nature, mingled with chapters of a more purely 
 literary character. 
 
 I know of no other writing that yields the reader so many strongly stamped 
 medallion-like sayings and distinctions. There is a perpetual refining and 
 recoining of the current wisdom of life and conversation. It is the old gold or 
 silver or copper; but how bright and new it looks in his pages ! Emerson loves 
 facts, things, objects, as the workman his tools. He makes everything serve. 
 The stress of expression is so great that he bends the most obdurate element to 
 his purpose ; as the bird, under her keen necessity, weaves the most contrary and 
 diverse materials into her nest. He seems to like best material that is a little 
 refractory ; it makes his page more piquant and stimulating. Within certain 
 limits he loves roughness, but not to the expense of harmony. He has a wonderful 
 hardiness and push . Where else in literature is there a mind, moving in so rare a 
 medium, that gives one such a sense of tangible resistance and force ? 
 
 But after we have made all possible deductions from Emerson there remains 
 the fact that he is a living force, and, tried by home standards, a master. Wherein 
 does the secret of his power lie ? He is the prophet and philosopher of young 
 men. The old man and the man of the world make little of him, but of the 
 youth who is ripe for him he takes almost an unfair advantage. One secret of his 
 charm I take to be the instant success with which he transfers our interest in the 
 romantic, the chivalrous, the heroic, to the sphere of morals and the intellect. 
 We are let into another realm unlooked for, where daring and imagination also 
 lead. The secret and suppressed heart finds a champion. To the young man fed 
 upon the penny precepts and staple Johnsonianism of English literature, and of 
 what is generally doled out in the schools and colleges, it is a surprise; it is a 
 revelation. A new world opens before him. The nebulae of his spirit are resolved 
 or shown to be irresolvable. The fixed stars of his inner firmament are brought 
 immeasurably near. He drops all other books. . . . Emerson is the 
 knight errant of the moral sentiment. He leads in our time and country, one 
 illustrious division, at least, in the holy crusade of the affections and the intuitions 
 against the usurpations of tradition and theological dogma. 
 
 Emerson often appeared on the Anti- Slavery platform, 
 and sympathised warmly with the Abolitionists. His views on 
 Free Trade were of the most far-reaching nature. "America," 
 
28 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 he said in one of his public addresses, "means opportunity, 
 freedom, power. The genius of this country has marked out 
 her true policy; opportunity doors wide open every port 
 open. If I could I would have Free Trade with all the world, 
 without toll or custom-house. Let us invite every nation, 
 every race, every skin ; white man, black man, red man, yellow 
 man. Let us offer hospitality, a fair field, and equal laws to 
 all. The land is wide enough, the soil has food enough for 
 all. We should cling to the common school, and enlarge and 
 extend the opportunities it offers. Let us educate every soul. 
 Every native child, and every foreign child that is cast on our 
 coast should be taught, at the public cost, first, the rudiments 
 of knowledge, and then, as far as may be, the ripest results 
 of art and science." An acute writer in the Spectator, of 
 May 6th, 1882, speaking of the interest Emerson took in all 
 public events, very justly remarks: "He sympathised ardently 
 with all the great practical movements of his own day, while 
 Carlyle held contemptuously aloof. He was one of the first to 
 strike a heavy blow at the institution of slavery. He came for 
 ward to encourage his country in the good cause } when slavery 
 raised the flag of rebellion. He had a genuine desire to see 
 all men free, while Carlyle only felt the desire to see all men 
 strongly governed which they might be, without being free 
 at all. Emerson s spirit, moreover, was much the saner, and 
 more reverent of the two, though less rich in power and 
 humour." 
 
 During the last three or four years his memory frequently 
 failed him, especially in reference to his recollection of more 
 recent events. But he was himself perfectly conscious of 
 this, and though it did not prevent his occasionally delivering 
 lectures and taking part in public gatherings, from the time 
 this defect became manifest he was always accompanied to 
 the platform by his daughter, whose devotion and considerate 
 tact invariably supplied the words and phrases which Mr. 
 Emerson could not recall. To the last he continued to take 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 29 
 
 great interest in the well-being of his neighbours and the 
 intellectual and material progress of his native village. He 
 had never lost his inherent love of dignified simplicity in 
 domestic life, and his home was a model of refinement and 
 unostentatious comfort. He was never more happy than in 
 the company of his grandchildren, and all children loved him. 
 His old age was serene, and the sweetness and gentleness of 
 his character were more and more apparent as the years rolled 
 on. To the last, even when the events of yesterday were 
 occasionally obscured, his memory of the remote past was 
 unclouded. He would talk about the friends of his early and 
 middle life with unbroken vigour ; and those who ever had 
 the good fortune to hear him, in the free intercourse of his 
 own study, will not soon forget the charm of his conversation 
 and the graciousness of his demeanour. He would drive with 
 his visitors to the numerous interesting spots in and about 
 Concord, he would point out the old home of his own family, 
 the house of his friend, Mr. Alcott, and the still more famous 
 "old manse" which Hawthorne has made immortal. One 
 who had the pleasure of visiting him within the last two years 
 has told of such a privilege ; how he saw the wise old man 
 whom he had first heard in Manchester more than thirty 
 years before, and again in the seclusion of a friend s house 
 during Mr. Emerson s last visit to England, and at last in 
 the home of his youth and age. " Assuredly," he said, " this 
 great and good man was seldom seen to rarer advantage. 
 He drove me to the haunts of the pilgrims who came to 
 Concord to see the place of so many noble and interesting 
 associations ; in the public library of the town which he 
 had helped to establish, he showed me not a few literary 
 treasures which the greatest libraries in the world might 
 envy he pointed out the famous tavern where the British 
 soldiers stopped on the day made memorable by the first 
 fight in the war of Independence. And on the battle field 
 itself, where the beautiful Concord river still flows silently 
 
30 IN MEMO KI AM: 
 
 between the low hills which almost entwine the little town, he 
 told the story of the famous struggle. It was a perfect spring 
 day ; light breezes stirred the pine trees under which lay the 
 remains of the nameless English soldiers ; and hard by was 
 the granite monument to the memory of the local militiamen 
 who fell in that famous skirmish. The scenes and the asso 
 ciations were in themselves eloquent, but they were rendered 
 immeasurably more so by the narrative of the sage whose 
 verses, cut in stone on the monument before us, will tell of 
 future generations how Concord s noblest son sang of the re 
 nown of his country s defenders. And a few weeks afterwards 
 I was present at one of the dinners of the famous Saturday 
 Club. As the wits of the Restoration and Queen Anne s 
 days met at Wills s Coffee House to listen to Dryden or to 
 the more select conclave of the October Club, so the poets 
 essayists, and humourists of Boston assembled at these 
 dinners, held sometimes at the houses of the members, and 
 sometimes, when the meetings were larger, in one of the 
 hotels. This was a notable gathering ; it was intended to do 
 special honour to the distinguished Massachusetts lawyer, who 
 had just returned from presiding at the Chicago Convention 
 which had nominated General Garfield, Republican candidate, 
 for the Presidency. Longfellow was in the chair ; James T. 
 Fields was near him. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was as 
 usual the life and soul of the party, and there were other 
 scarcely less famous men. Emerson had not recently been 
 able to attend many of the meetings, but the occasion 
 was no ordinary one. * Look at Emerson, said Fields ; 
 * how happy he looks ; was there ever such a sweet smile, 
 and yet how silent he is. In the early days of the club, 
 when Agassiz, its founder, was with us, he and Emerson 
 were the liveliest of us all. It was touching to see the 
 marks of reverence and regard which all displayed to him, 
 and to notice his appreciatory responses. He thoroughly 
 enjoyed the sparkling sallies of Wendell Holmes, and when 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 31 
 
 Longfellow, to whom speech-making was always a punishment, 
 in a few well-chosen words, referred to the presence of their 
 honoured fellow-member, Emerson was constrained to reply, 
 and he did not forget to tell us that if he could not make 
 them a speech he was only following the example of his 
 friend the chairman. It was altogether a delightful meeting, 
 but already there are melancholy associations with it. Fields, 
 whose Yesterdays with Authors has given us so many 
 delightful sketches of famous men, has followed his friends 
 Thackeray and Dickens. Longfellow, the sweetest, the most 
 genial, and gentle of poets and men, has also gone, and now 
 we mourn the departure of the greatest of them, Emerson 
 himself, a man in whom were combined the strength of the 
 New England Puritan and the grace and beauty of the 
 accomplished Greek." 
 
 Did space permit, much might be said of Emerson s first 
 visit to England in 1833, and his second in 1847-8; of the 
 tenor of his life at Concord ; of the literary contemporaries and 
 friends who sought his society and counsel ; of his connection 
 with the notable experiment of the Brook Farm community 
 (although he never joined it), idealised by the weird pen of 
 Hawthorne in the "Blithedale Romance;" of his literary 
 tours ; of his imperturbable good temper, and sweetness of 
 nature the rare union in him of humility and nobility 
 producing (to use the words of a living author) "the most 
 perfect gentleman he ever met ; " of the accidental destruction 
 of his house by fire, and his year s absence in Europe, while it 
 was being rebuilt at the expense of his fellow-townsmen, as a 
 mark of their regard ; and of the enthusiasm with which he 
 was received on his return the crowd accompanying him 
 in triumph from the railway station to the newly-built house, 
 which, with delicate and thoughtful consideration, had been 
 made an exact counterpart of the old home. A letter from one 
 of his own family, written at the time, records that the citizens 
 gathered at the railway terminus in crowds, and the school 
 
32 IN MEMOR1AM: 
 
 children were drawn up in two smiling rows, through which he 
 passed, greeted by enthusiastic cheers and songs of welcome. 
 All followed his carriage to the house, and sang " Home, 
 sweet Home " to the music of the band. A few days after 
 wards, he invited all his fellow-citizens to call and see him in 
 his new home, and most of the inhabitants availed themselves 
 of the opportunity. 
 
 With regard to his claims as a poet, a few words only can 
 be said. The essence of true poetry is manifest in many of 
 his sayings that take not the form of versification. It has 
 been truly said that the highest and best poetry is that which 
 is felt, and which is incapable of being expressed in language. 
 He is emphatically a poet in his prose. His poems contain 
 genuine inspiration of the very highest kind, but rhyme does 
 not aid his development. In a single page he gives more of 
 the spirit of poetry than would supply a dozen of ordinary 
 rhymesters for the whole of their lives ; and yet there are 
 poetasters who could at least equal him in the construction of 
 passable verses. When the world is wiser, Emerson will be 
 owned as a great poet. There are single poems of his which 
 for depth of feeling, tender regret, profound insight into the 
 human soul, and an inimitable quaintness and simplicity 
 (sometimes rivalling George Herbert himself) are not to be 
 matched in the works of the acknowledged masters of the 
 poetic art. His friend, Dr. Hedge, says: "In poetic art he 
 does not excel. The verses often halt, the conclusion sometimes 
 flags, and metrical propriety is recklessly violated. But this 
 defect is closely connected with the characteristic merit of the 
 poet, and springs from the same root his utter spontaneity. 
 And this spontaneity is but a mode of his sincerity. More 
 than those of any of his contemporaries, his poems, for the 
 most part, are inspirations. They are not made, but given ; 
 they come of themselves. They are not meditated, but burst 
 from the soul with an irrepressible necessity of utterance 
 sometimes with a rush which defies the shaping intellect. It 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 33 
 
 seems as if it were not the man himself that speaks, but a 
 power behind call it Daemon or Muse. Where the Muse 
 flags, it is her fault, not his ; he is not going to help her out 
 with wilful elaboration or emendation. There is no trace, as 
 in most poetry, of joiner-work, and no mark of the file." 
 The following remarks relating to his poems are from the 
 pen of an English friend one of his most appreciative 
 admirers in a letter written since the news of his death : 
 
 " I well recollect the wonder with which I first became 
 familiar with those crystal-clear perceptions of his, visions 
 as if from the very mountain top of the human intellect. To 
 me they were a distinct revelation of new intellectual possi 
 bilities, hitherto only dimly imagined. We talk, naturally 
 enough, of Emerson being one of the greatest of American 
 writers ; to me he has always stood alone in the great history 
 of literature the clearest seer, the most dauntless speaker, 
 the deftest and most subtle intellect ; uttering his convictions 
 in words of light tinted only from the azure of infinity. 
 I know nothing more exquisitely dainty than some of his 
 snatches of poetry. Those who see no poetry in them, simply 
 do not see them at all. I can only compare them to exquisite 
 snow-crystals, fresh gathered from some highest mountain 
 peak, where the clouds of human infirmity never reach. 
 Human passion, in the Edgar Poe sense, they have none ; but 
 for subtlety of insight and delicacy of utterance, I think they 
 stand alone in literature." 
 
 As regards Emerson s literary methods, one of his friends 
 thus speaks : " It was his habit to spend the forenoon in his 
 study, with constant regularity. He did not wait for moods, 
 but caught them as they came, and used their results in each 
 day s work. It was his wont to jot down his thoughts at all 
 hours and places. The suggestions resulting from his read 
 ings, conversations, and meditations, were immediately trans 
 ferred to the note-book he always carried with him. In his 
 walks, many a gem of thought was in this way preserved. 
 C 
 
34 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 Even during the night he would get up and jot down some 
 thought worth laying hold of. All the results of his thinking 
 were thus stored up, to be made use of when required. After 
 his note-books were filled, he transcribed their contents in a 
 large commonplace book. When a fresh subject possessed his 
 mind, he brought together the jottings he found he had 
 written down concerning it, forming them into a connected 
 whole, with additional material suggested at the time. His 
 essays were thus very slowly elaborated, wrought out through 
 days and months, and even years, of patient thought. 
 They were all carefully revised, again and again ; corrected, 
 wrought over, portions dropped, new matter added, or the 
 paragraphs arranged in a new order. He was unsparing 
 in his corrections, striking out sentence after sentence ; and 
 whole paragraphs disappear from time to time. His manu 
 script was everywhere filled with erasures and emendations ; 
 scarcely a page that was not covered with these evidences of 
 his diligent revision." 
 
 A friend says that few authors have published less than 
 Emerson in comparison with the great mass of papers which 
 remain unprinted. "Scarcely any of his numerous sermons have 
 ever been published ; most of his speeches on political and social 
 occasions remain uncollected and unedited ; many verses exist 
 only in manuscript, or have been withdrawn from publication ; 
 and even of his lectures, from which he has printed freely for 
 nearly forty years, a great many still remain in manuscript. 
 Even those published omit much that was spoken, the five 
 lectures on History, on Love, and others, displaying so many 
 omissions to those who heard them, that the author was at the 
 time sorely complained of by his faithful hearers for leaving 
 out so much that had delighted them. Few or none of the 
 philosophical lectures read at Harvard University eight or nine 
 years ago, and designed to make part of what he called ( The 
 Natural History of the Intellect/ have ever been printed. This 
 work, when completed, was to be the author s most systematic 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 35 
 
 and connected treatise. It was to contain, what could not fail 
 to be of interest to all readers, his observations on his own in 
 tellectual processes and methods, of which he has always been 
 studiously watchful, and which, from his habit of writing, he 
 has carefully noted down. From this work, which, even if 
 not finished, will at some time be printed, and from his corre 
 spondence of these many years, portions of which will finally 
 -be printed, it will be possible to reconstruct hereafter a rare 
 and remarkable episode in literary history." 
 
 An American writer, speaking of Emerson s unwillingness 
 to print anything but his best, says : " He has always been 
 extremely careful of what he put into print, regarding the 
 covers of a book as a sacred temple into which only the purest 
 and best of a writer should be permitted to enter. No 
 American or European has been so superlatively fastidious as 
 he respecting publication. He believed that a book should 
 have every reason for being ; that nothing trivial, passing, or 
 temporary should be introduced into it ; that the sole excuse 
 for a book should be the presentation of fresh thought ; that 
 its contents should be in some manner an addition to the 
 common stock of knowledge. Most authors would have put 
 all their lectures and essays between covers because they had 
 written them, and because they could gain something thereby. 
 Emerson was an illustrious example to his guild in this par 
 ticular. If he had less vanity than members of his craft 
 generally he had more pride, more regard for his reputation, 
 more confident expectation of enduring fame. It is said that 
 he had unwavering confidence in this, and that therefore he 
 published what was universal and abiding in interest and 
 influence, and compressed his utterances into the smallest 
 space. Had all writers followed his example how immeasur 
 ably libraries would have been reduced ! A hundred volumes 
 would shrink to one, and there might be some hope of a tireless 
 student in a long life gaining a slight smattering of the great 
 authors with whom everybody is presumed to be wholly 
 
36 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 familiar. Emerson is a pattern to all mere book-makers 
 present and to come. If he had done nothing else than to 
 inculcate by example the economy of print he would deserve 
 a separate niche in the temple of literary fame, and who shall 
 say that he has not secured it? All the writings he has 
 wished to be known by can be put into three small volumes, 
 and in these is there not as much weighty and important 
 matter as can be discovered in the same space in any lan 
 guage ? The matter is not (as in the great majority of books) 
 what can be found elsewhere generally far better said in 
 the illimitable wilderness of type. It is, barring quotations, 
 which always serve to illustrate his idea, actually Emerson s 
 own, the fruit of his observation, study, and reflection the 
 action of an original individual mind upon life, history, and 
 nature." 
 
 Professor Tyndall thus speaks of his reason for so often 
 quoting Emerson : " I do so mainly because in him we have 
 a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really and 
 entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science past, pre 
 sent, or prospective. In his case poetry, with the joy of a 
 bacchanal, takes her graver brother science by the hand and 
 cheers him with immortal laughter. By Emerson scientific 
 conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms 
 and warmer hues of an ideal world." " If anyone can be said 
 to have given the impulse to my mind, it is Emerson ; what 
 ever I have done, the world owes to him." It is said that 
 on the fly-leaf of an odd volume of Emerson s works, acci 
 dentally picked up by the Professor at an old-book stall, and 
 which first made him acquainted with his writings, are 
 inscribed these words : " Purchased by inspiration." Herman 
 Grimm, an accomplished German critic of Emerson, says that 
 he found in his works a sense of joy and beauty, such as is 
 given by the greatest books. He found himself made captive 
 by thoughts which it seemed as if he were hearing for the first 
 time. " When I again read his sentences," he continues, " the 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 37 
 
 enchanting breezes of hope and spiritual joy filled my soul 
 anew. The old worn-out machinery of the world was re 
 created, and I felt as if I had never breathed so heavenly an 
 atmosphere. I can indeed say that no author has had such 
 an influence upon me as Emerson. The manner of writing of 
 the man, whom I hold to be the greatest of all living authors, 
 has revealed to me a new way of expressing thought." The 
 late Dean Stanley concludes a letter about him in these 
 words : " Long may Ralph Waldo Emerson enjoy the in 
 fluence which superiority gives over mediocrity, and calm 
 reason over fleeting passion." 
 
 Whatever verdict may be pronounced upon Emerson s 
 opinions, he must be universally regarded as one who by his 
 teaching and practical example has done more to make the 
 life of the scholar beautiful, and the career of the man of 
 letters a reproof to all low aims, and an inspiration to all high 
 ones, than any other man in America one might almost say, 
 in either continent. His greatest service has been the inculca 
 tion of intellectual self-reliance, and absolute sincerity of 
 thought. In an oration delivered before the literary societies 
 of Dartmouth College in July, 1838, will be found the highest 
 expression of his opinion regarding the duty and aims of the 
 scholar : 
 
 If, with a high trust, he can thus submit himself to the supreme soul, he 
 will find that ample returns are poured into his bosom, out of what seemed hours 
 of obstruction and loss. Let him not grieve too much on account of unfit associates. 
 When he sees how much thought he owes to the disagreeable antagonism of various 
 persons who pass and cross him, he can easily think that in a society of perfect 
 sympathy, no word, no act, no record, would be. He will learn that it is not 
 much matter what he reads, what he does. Be a scholar, and he shall have the 
 scholar s part of everything. As, in the counting room, the merchant cares little 
 whether the cargo be hides or barilla ; the transaction, a letter of credit or a 
 transfer of stocks ; be it what it may, his commission comes gently out of it ; so 
 you shall get your lesson out of the hour, and the object, whether it be a concen 
 trated or a wasteful employment, even in reading a dull book, or working off a 
 stint of mechanical day labour, which your necessities or the necessities of others 
 impose. . . . 
 
 Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore, and 
 explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. 
 
38 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 Neither dogmatize yourself, nor accept another s dogmatism. Why should you 
 renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature com 
 forts of an acre, house, or barn ? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. 
 Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, 
 and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men s 
 possessions, in all men s affections, in art, in nature, and in hope. You will not 
 fear that I am enjoining too stern an asceticism. Ask not, Of what use is a 
 scholarship that systematically retreats ? or Who is the better for the philosopher 
 who conceals his accomplishments, and hides his thoughts from the waiting 
 world ? Hides his thoughts ! Hide the sun and moon. Thought is all light, arid 
 publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own 
 miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. 
 It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and ex 
 pectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one 
 and perfect, it will yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar 
 beloved of earth and heaven. 
 
 Emerson is also one of the consummate masters of the English 
 tongue. " His sentences are often like diamonds. There is 
 no thinker of our day who, for sentences that have the ring of 
 oracles, can quite compare with him." " No writer is so 
 quotable. Scarcely a page, especially of the earlier essays, 
 but supplies some terse and pregnant saying, worthy to be 
 inscribed in a golden treasury of portable wisdom." " His 
 sentences score themselves on the brain. Force of state 
 ment, the surprise of fitness, the hitting of the nail on the 
 head are the distinguishing characteristics of his writings." 
 " His pages are laden with aphorisms his style of compo 
 sition is eminently aphoristic and they are so felicitously 
 put, and on such a variety of themes, that the capturing 
 memory declines to surrender them, and speedily claims 
 them as its own. Let him the fit audience find, though 
 few, and he will illustrate what it is to speak golden words 
 in that natural style of perfect sincerity, tenderness, and 
 thoughtfulness, by which every syllable is conducted straight 
 home to the faculty it was meant for. For the enuncia 
 tion of his own sentences we call him simply a perfect 
 speaker. The manner fits the matter as if cut out for it from 
 eternity." 
 
 Theodore Parker, in one of the best critical papers on Emer- 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 39 
 
 son that has appeared, written in 1 849, says : " He is the most 
 republican of republicans, the most protestant of dissenters. 
 His culture is cosmopolitan. He trusts himself, trusts man, 
 and trusts God. He has confidence in all the attributes of 
 Infinity. Hence he is serene; nothing disturbs the even poise 
 of his character, and he walks erect. Nothing impedes him 
 in his search for the true, the lovely, and the good ; no private 
 hope, no private fear, no love of wife or child or gold or ease 
 or fame. He has not written a line which is not conceived in 
 the interest of mankind. He never writes in the interest of a 
 section, of a party, of a church, of a man, but always in the 
 interest of mankind. No faithful man is too low for his 
 approval and encouragement ; no faithless man too high and 
 popular for his rebuke. To no English writer, since Milton, 
 can be assigned so high a place ; even Milton himself, great 
 genius though he was, and great architect of beauty, has not 
 added so many thoughts to the treasury of the race ; no, nor 
 been the author of so much loveliness. Emerson is a man of 
 genius such as does not often appear ; such as has never 
 appeared before in America, and but seldom in the world. 
 He learns from all sorts of men ; but no English writer, we 
 think, is so original." 
 
 In a brief memoir like this, it would be out of place to 
 attempt to explain his philosophy. He has, in fact, pro 
 pounded no system. He is called a Transcendentalist ; but 
 he never adopted the name. He beholds and reports all, be 
 it secular or sacred. "He trustingly accepts what comes to 
 the open sense and the waiting mind." " Strictly, he is not 
 the founder of any school, but has furnished the foundation 
 stones of many schools." " If he has not discovered the 
 secret of the universe, he tells frankly what he finds as 
 a perceiver or observer, and constantly endeavours to place 
 himself in harmony with the Most High." He seeks to 
 solve the riddle of the universe for himself, and is content 
 with no traditionary answer. He insists on man s indi- 
 
40 IN MEMORIAM: 
 
 viduality, and protests against the merging of our separate 
 beings into indolent conformity with a majority. " Let a man 
 know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Beneath 
 opinions, habits, customs, is the spirit of a man. The one 
 thing in the world of value is the soul, free, sovereign, active. 
 He teaches that man shall be true to himself, let the world 
 say what it will. The truly religious mind will find beauty 
 and necessary facts, in the shop and the mill. Proceeding 
 from a religious heart, it will raise to a divine use the railroad, 
 the insurance office, the telegraph, the chemist s retort, in 
 which we now seek only an economic use. The end and aim 
 of life is not to assert ourselves, but by individual faithfulness 
 to become fit recipients of the Divine Mind, so as to live in 
 thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. The 
 greatest philosopher is but the listener of simple faithfulness ; 
 and the loftiest wisdom is gained when self is forgotten in 
 communion with God." To use his own words, " Let man 
 thus learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his 
 heart ; this, namely, that the Highest dwelleth with him ; 
 that the sources of Nature are in his own mind, if the senti 
 ment of duty be there." " Let it not be recorded, that in this 
 moment of the Eternity, when we who were named by our 
 names, flitted across the light, we were afraid of any fact, or 
 disgraced the fair day by a pusillanimous preference of our 
 bread to our freedom. What is the scholar, what is the man 
 for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time ? 
 Have you leisure, power, property, friends ? you shall be the 
 asylum and patron of every new thought, every unproven 
 opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good 
 will and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the tongues 
 of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble ; but 
 you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Ever 
 lasting, are to stand for it ; and the highest compliment Man 
 ever receives from Heaven, is the sending to him its disguised 
 and discredited angels." 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 41 
 
 Those who have felt throughout their lives the purifying 
 and elevating power of Emerson s writings, and who have 
 recognised in his inspiring career the perfect sanity of true 
 genius, can never think of him without affectionate reverence. 
 He now rests, in that deep repose which he has so well 
 earned, and on laurels that will never fade. 
 
FUNERAL. 
 
 THE FUNERAL OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 The last rites over the remains of Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 took place at Concord on the 3Oth of April. A special train 
 from Boston carried a large number of people. Many persons 
 were on the street, attracted by the services, but were unable 
 to -gain admission to the church where the public ceremonies 
 were held. Almost every building in town bore over its en 
 trance door a large black and white rosette with other sombre 
 draperies. The public buildings were heavily draped, and 
 even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief 
 at the loss of their friend and fellow-townsman. 
 
 The services at the house, which were strictly private, 
 occurred at 2-30, and were conducted by Rev. W. H. Furness, 
 of Philadelphia. They were simple in character, and only Mr. 
 Furness took part. The body lay in the front north-east 
 room, in which were gathered the family and close friends of 
 the deceased. The only flowers were contained in three 
 vases on the mantel, and were lilies of the valley, red and 
 white roses, and arbutus. The adjoining room and hall were 
 filled with friends and neighbours. 
 
 The poet s wife and daughter Ellen sat near the coffin. 
 Dr. Furness occupied a position in the passage-way, and made 
 a brief and touching address, saying that the peaceful face 
 lying before them only indicated a like quiet of soul within, 
 and reflected its peace and purity while it yet tenanted the 
 body. He then recited Tennyson s " Deserted Home," and 
 repeated from Longfellow words read at that poet s own 
 funeral, a few weeks ago. Appropriate quotations from 
 Scripture followed. 
 
FUNERAL. 43 
 
 The procession was then formed for the public services 
 at the Unitarian Church, which is but a short distance from 
 the house. The Concord Social Circle led the way, then 
 followed the hearse and pall-bearers : Charles Emerson and 
 Haven Emerson, nephews of the deceased ; Wm. H. Forbes, 
 Emerson s son-in-law; J. Elliott Cabot, Emerson s biographer; 
 Prof. James B. Thayer, of Harvard Law School; Dr. Edward 
 Emerson, Mr. Ralph Forbes, and Mr. W. Thayer, all relatives 
 of the deceased, and following them were a few carriages with 
 the family and intimate friends, among whom were Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes, G. W. Curtis, President Eliot, of Harvard 
 College; Professors Norton, Pierce, Horsford, and Hills, of 
 Cambridge; Mrs. J. T. Fields, representatives of the Boston 
 publishing houses, and many others. 
 
 At the church many hundreds of persons were awaiting 
 the arrival of the procession, and all the space, except the 
 reserved pews, were packed. In front of the pulpit were 
 simple decorations, boughs of pine covered the desk, and in 
 their centre was a harp of yellow jonquils, the gift of Miss 
 Louisa M. Alcott. Other floral tributes were an open 
 volume, upon one page on white ground the word " Finis " in 
 blue flowers. This was from the teachers and scholars in the 
 Emerson School. By the sides of the pulpit were white and 
 scarlet geraniums and pine boughs, and high upon the wall a 
 laurel wreath. 
 
 Before 3-30 the pall-bearers brought in the plain black 
 walnut coffin, which was placed before the pulpit. The lid 
 was turned back and upon it was put a cluster of richly 
 coloured pansies and a small bouquet of roses. While the 
 coffin was being carried in " Pleyel s Hymn " was rendered 
 on the organ by request of the family of the deceased. Dr. 
 James Freeman Clarke then entered the pulpit. Judge E. 
 Rockwood Hoar remained by the coffin below, and when the 
 congregation became quiet made a brief and pathetic address, 
 his voice many times trembling with emotion. 
 
44 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Mr. Hoar began his tribute with the words : " The beauty 
 of Israel is fallen in its high place." He then spoke of the 
 world-wide sorrow felt at the poet s death and of the special 
 veneration and grief of the townspeople, who considered him 
 their own. " There is nothing to mourn for. That brave and 
 manly life was rounded out to the full length of days ; that 
 dying pillow was softened by the sweetest domestic affection, 
 and as he lay down to the sleep which the Lord giveth His 
 beloved, his face was as the face of a child and seemed to give 
 a glimpse of the opening heavens. Wherever the English 
 language is spoken throughout the world his fame is estab 
 lished and secured ; from beyond the sea and throughout this 
 great land will come innumerable voices of sorrow for this 
 great public loss. But we, his neighbours and townsmen, feel 
 that he was ours ; he was descended from the founders of the 
 town ; he chose our village for the place in which his life-long 
 work was to be done ; it was to our fields and orchards that 
 his presence gave such value ; it was in our streets that 
 children looked up to him with love, and the elders with 
 reverence ; he was our ornament and pride. The lofty brow, 
 the home of all wise thoughts and aspirations ; those lips of 
 eloquent music ; that great soul, which, trusting in God, never 
 lost its hope of immortality ; that great heart, to which every 
 thing was welcome that belonged to man ; that impressible 
 nature, loving and tender and generous, having no repulsion 
 or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness ; our friend, 
 brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide, is gone. There 
 is no more that we can do now than to give this our hail 
 and farewell !" 
 
 Judge Hoar s remarks were followed by the congrega 
 tion singing the hymns " Thy will be done," " I will not fear 
 the fate provided by Thy love." The Rev. Mr. Furness then 
 read selections from the Scriptures. 
 
 The Rev. James Freeman Clarke delivered a long and very 
 interesting address upon the life and works of the deceased, after 
 
FUNERAL. 45 
 
 which a feeling prayer was offered by Rev. Howard M. Brown, 
 of Brookline, and the benediction closed the exercises in the 
 church. Immediately before the benediction, Mr. Alcott 
 recited a sonnet he had written for the occasion. 
 
 Over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neigh 
 bours, friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the 
 face of the dead poet. The body was robed completely in 
 white, and the face bore a natural and peaceful expression. 
 From the church the procession took its way to the cemetery. 
 The grave was made beneath a tall pine tree upon the hill 
 top to the east of Sleepy Hollow, the upturned sod being con 
 cealed by strewings of pine boughs. A border of hemlock 
 spray surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides. 
 The services here were very brief and the casket was soon 
 lowered to its final resting place. 
 
 The Rev. Dr. Haskins, a cousin of the family, an Episcopal 
 clergyman, read the Episcopal burial service, and closed with 
 the Lord s Prayer, ending at the words "and deliver us from 
 evil." In this all the people joined. Dr. Haskins then pro 
 nounced the benediction. After it was over the grand 
 children passed by the open grave and threw flowers into it. 
 
RECO LLECT IONS, 
 LETTE RS, 
 
 AND 
 
 M I SCE LLAN I ES 
 
 RELATING TO 
 
 EM ERSON. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. 
 
 MR. EMERSON S VISITS TO ENGLAND IN 1833, 1847-8, 
 AND 1872-3. 
 
 It was in the month of August, 1833 nearly fifty years 
 ago that I had the singular good fortune to make the 
 acquaintance of Mr. Emerson, and to enjoy the privilege of 
 several days intercourse with him. I was then residing in 
 Edinburgh, my native city, and he was on his way home, after 
 his first visit to Europe. He had with him a letter of introduc 
 tion to a friend of mine, who, luckily for me, was then so much 
 engaged in professional duties, that he was unable to spare even 
 a few hours to do the honours of the old Scottish metropolis ; 
 so the young American traveller was handed over to me, and 
 I thus became "an entertainer of angels unawares." In those 
 early days Mr. Emerson was about thirty years of age, and 
 his name was then utterly unknown in the world of letters ; 
 for the period to which I refer was anterior, by several years, 
 to his delivery of those remarkable addresses which took 
 by surprise the most thoughtful of his countrymen, as well 
 as of cultivated English readers. Neither had he published 
 any of those essays which afterwards stamped him as the 
 most original thinker America had produced. At that time 
 he was still connected with the Unitarian body in New 
 England, although not in full agreement with it on certain 
 D 
 
50 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 matters of doctrine. On Sunday, the i8th of August, 1833, 
 I heard him deliver a discourse in the Unitarian Chapel, 
 Young Street, Edinburgh, and I remember distinctly the 
 effect which he produced on his hearers. It is almost needless 
 to say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, 
 and many of them did not know what to make of it. The 
 originality of his thoughts, and the consummate beauty of 
 the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity 
 of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, the 
 singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from 
 the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep 
 impression on me. Not long before this I had listened to a 
 wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers, whose force, and energy, 
 and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence carried, for the 
 moment, all before them his audience becoming like clay 
 in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the 
 pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young 
 Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the 
 rhetorical splendours of Chalmers. His voice was the sweetest, 
 the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard ; nothing 
 like it have I listened to since. 
 
 That music in our hearts we bore, 
 Long after it was heard no more. 
 
 We visited together the courts of law and other places of 
 interest to a stranger, and ascended Blackford Hill, which 
 commands a fine view of the city from the south. There* were 
 thus good opportunities for conversation. He spoke on many 
 subjects connected with life, society, and literature, and with 
 an affluence of thought and fulness of knowledge which sur 
 prised and delighted me. I had never before met with any one 
 of so fine and varied culture and with such frank sincerity of 
 speech. There was a graciousness and kind encouragement, 
 too, in his manner, inexpressibly winning to one so much 
 younger than himself; and it was with a feeling almost akin 
 to reverence that I listened to and drank in his high thoughts 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. 51 
 
 and ripe wisdom. A refined and delicate courtesy, a kind of 
 spiritual hospitality, so to speak, the like of which, or any 
 thing approaching to which,! have-never encountered, seemed 
 to be a part of his very nature, and inseparable from his 
 " daily walk and conversation." It was not therefore extra 
 ordinary, rather quite a natural result, that the impression 
 produced on me was intense and powerful. 
 
 It is with a feeling of something like pride that I find 
 recorded, in a journal kept at the time, some memoranda of 
 that brief intercourse, written in a strain of youthful, enthu 
 siastic admiration, and of perfectly confident expectancy as to 
 his future a strain which might at that time have sounded 
 very inflated, but which his subsequent career may be said 
 to have rendered almost tame and inadequate. He spoke 
 much about Coleridge, whom he had just visited at High- 
 gate. I happened then to be reading the prose works of that 
 writer, and these formed a fruitful topic of conversation. He 
 spoke of his "Friend" and "Biographia Literaria" as containing 
 many admirable passages for young thinkers, many valuable 
 advices regarding the pursuit of truth and the right methods 
 to be adopted in its investigation, and the importance of 
 having precise and correct notions on moral and intellectual 
 subjects. He considered that there were single sentences in 
 these two works, which embodied clearer ideas of some of the 
 most subtle of human speculations than are to be met with in 
 the pages of any other thinker. " Let no one, however, expect 
 in these books of Coleridge s anything strictly symmetrical. 
 The works themselves are disjointed, inconsecutive, and totally 
 destitute of all regularity and plan. As Hazlitt, with his usual 
 acuteness, truly said of them They are vast prefaces and 
 projects preliminary to immense productions which he was 
 always contemplating, but could never bring himself to exe 
 cute. " He spoke of Dr. Channing, Sir James Mackintosh, 
 Goethe s " Wilhelm Meister," and Charles Cotton s translation 
 of Montaigne s " Essays," which he regarded as matchless 
 
52 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 among translations. " After reading Cotton s racy English/ 
 he said, " Montaigne seems to lose, if you look into him in the 
 original old French." 
 
 I find that in an essay on "Books," published in 1860, 
 he says that he prefers reading the ancients in transla 
 tion. It was a tenet of Goethe s that whatever is really 
 valuable in any work is translateable. " I should as soon 
 think," says he, " of swimming across Charles River when I 
 want to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, 
 when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue." 
 After Bohn s volumes of translations of the Classics made 
 their appearance, he held that they had done for literature 
 what railroads have done for international intercourse. 
 
 Some of Walter Savage Lander s " Imaginary Conversa 
 tions " he greatly admired particularly those between Bacon 
 and Richard Hooker, Sir Isaac Newton and Isaac Barrow, and 
 Diogenes and Plato. Although not an admirer of the Utili 
 tarian philosophy, he had some of Jeremy Bentham s hair and a 
 scrap of his handwriting. He asked me if I was in the habit of 
 writing down my thoughts. I said I was not; that reading was 
 my greatest pleasure and solace laborum dulce lenimen. " I ad 
 vise you," said he, " and other young men, to write down your 
 ideas. I have found my benefit in it. It fixes more firmly in 
 your mind what you know, and what you have acquired, and 
 reveals to you unerringly which of your ideas are vague, and 
 which solid." Of De Quincey, Wordsworth, and Carlyle he 
 spoke many times especially Carlyle, of whom he expressed 
 the warmest admiration. Some of his articles in the " Edin 
 burgh Review" and "Foreign Quarterly Review" had much 
 struck him one particularly, entitled "Characteristics" and 
 the concluding passages of another on German Literature, 
 regarding which he was desirous of speaking to the author. 
 He wished much to meet both Carlyle and Wordsworth : " Am 
 I, who have hung over their works in my chamber at home, 
 not to see these men in the flesh, and thank them, and inter- 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. 53 
 
 change some thoughts with them, when I am passing their 
 very doors ?" He spoke of their " rich thoughts, and rare, 
 noble glimpses of .great truths, their struggles to reveal their 
 .deepest inspirations, and glorious hopes of the future of 
 humanity not all at once very apparent, but to be digged 
 out, as it were, reverently and patiently from their works." 
 
 There was great and, I remember, almost insuperable 
 difficulty in ascertaining where Mr. Carlyle then lived, and I 
 well remember the pains Mr. Emerson took to get the in 
 formation ; at last, it was obtained from the secretary to the 
 University. " I will be sure to send you, before sailing, an 
 account of my visit to Carlyle and Wordsworth, if I should 
 be fortunate enough to see them." Accordingly, in faithful 
 fulfilment of his promise, he wrote me a letter on the 3Oth of 
 August, 1833, fr m Liverpool, giving an account of the inter 
 views he had with both of them. These interviews he has 
 described in his " English Traits," published twenty-three 
 years afterwards, and must be well known to the readers 
 of that best of all books on England. He found that Car 
 lyle had heard of his purpose to visit him from a friend, 
 and, on his arrival, he insisted on dismissing the gig which 
 had been hired to carry him from Dumfries to Craigen- 
 puttock a distance of sixteen or seventeen miles. It was 
 therefore sent back, to return the next day, in time for 
 him to secure his seat in the evening coach for the south. 
 So he spent nearly twenty-four hours with Carlyle and 
 his accomplished wife, who were living in perfect solitude 
 among some desolate hills in the parish of Dunscore not a 
 person to speak to within seven miles. " I found him one of 
 the most simple and frank of men, and became acquainted 
 with him at once. We walked over several miles of hills, 
 and talked upon all the great questions that interest us most. 
 The comfort of meeting a man of genius is that he speaks 
 sincerely ; that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is 
 above the meanness of pretending to knowledge which he 
 
54 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 has not, and Carlyle does not pretend to have solved the 
 great problems, but rather to be an observer of their solution 
 as it goes forward in the world. I asked him at what religious 
 development the concluding passage in his piece in the 
 Edinburgh Review upon German literature (say five years 
 ago), and some passages in the piece called Characteristics, 
 pointed ? He replied that he was not competent to state it 
 even to himself he waited rather to see. My own feeling 
 was that I had met with men of far less power who had got 
 greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might 
 guess from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers ; 
 he forgives and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle 
 on in his own place and arrive at his own ends. But 
 his respect for eminent men, or rather his scale of 
 eminence, is about the reverse of the popular scale. Scott, 
 Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon even Bacon are no heroes of 
 his ; stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates, the glory of 
 the Greek world but Burns, and Samuel Johnson, and 
 Mirabeau, he said interested him, and I suppose whoever else 
 has given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and 
 has not calculated too much. But I cannot think of sketching 
 even his opinions, or repeating his conversations here. I will 
 cheerfully do it when you visit me in America. He talks 
 finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very 
 much at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, 
 but I could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in 
 his wife, and I hope he will not leave the moors ; tis so much 
 better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than 
 to be filed down to the common level by the compliances 
 and imitations of city society. And you have found out the 
 virtues of solitude, I remember, with much pleasure." 
 
 The third day afterwards, Mr. Emerson called on Words 
 worth at Rydal Mount, and was cordially received, the poet 
 remembering up all his American acquaintance. Here is 
 his description of the interview : " He had very much to 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. . 55 
 
 say about the evils of superficial education, both in this 
 country and in mine. He thinks that the intellectual tuition 
 of society is going on, out of all proportion, faster than its 
 moral training, which last is essential to all education. He 
 does not wish to hear of schools of tuition ; it is the educa 
 tion of circumstances which he values, and much more to this 
 point. He says that he is not in haste to publish more 
 poetry, for many reasons, but that what he has written will 
 be at some time given to the world. He led me out into a 
 walk in his grounds, where he said many thousands of his 
 lines were composed, and repeated to me three beautiful 
 sonnets, which he had just finished, upon the occasion of his 
 recent visit to Fingal s Cave, at Staffa. I hope he will print 
 them speedily. The third is a gem. He was so benevolently 
 anxious to impress upon me my social duties as an American 
 citizen, that he accompanied me near a mile from his house, 
 talking vehemently, and ever and anon stopping short to 
 imprint his words. I noted down some of these when I got 
 to my inn, and you may see them in Boston, Massachusetts, 
 when you will. I enjoyed both my visits highly, and shall 
 always esteem your Britain very highly in love for its wise 
 and good men s sake. I remember with much pleasure my 
 visit to Edinburgh, and my short acquaintance with yourself 
 and your good parents. It will give me very great pleasure 
 to hear from you, to know your thoughts. Every man that 
 ever was born has some that are peculiar. Present my re 
 spects to your father and family. Your friend and servant, 
 R. WALDO EMERSON." 
 
 So much with regard to Mr. Emerson s first visit to 
 England. As every one knows, his name, in a very few 
 years, became celebrated in his own country, exercising a 
 remarkable influence in all- thoughtful circles. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle edited Emerson s first series of Essays pub 
 lished in this country in 1841. In his preface to them 
 he wrote : "The name of Ralph Emerson is not entirely 
 
5 6 * RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 new in England ; distinguished travellers bring us tidings of 
 such a man ; fractions of his writings have found their way 
 into the hands of the curious here; fitful hints that there is, 
 in New England, some spiritual notability called Emerson, 
 glide through reviews and magazines. Whether these hints 
 were true or not true, readers are now to judge for themselves 
 a little better. . . . Emerson s writings and speakings 
 amount to something ; and yet, hitherto, as seems to me, this 
 Emerson is perhaps far less notable for what he has spoken or 
 done, than for the many things he has not spoken and has 
 forborne to do. With uncommon interest I have learned that 
 this, and in such a never-resting, locomotive country, too, is 
 one of these rare men who have withal the invaluable talent 
 of sitting still ! That an educated man, of good gifts and 
 opportunities, after looking at the public arena, and even 
 trying, not with ill success, what its tasks and its prizes might 
 amount to, should retire for long years into rustic obscurity ; 
 and amid the all-pervading jingle of dollars and loud chaffer 
 ing of ambitions and promotions, should quietly, with cheerful 
 deliberateness, sit down to spend his life, not in Mammon 
 worship, or the hunt for reputation, influence, place, or any 
 outward advantage whatsoever : this, when we get a notice of 
 it, is a thing worth noting." 
 
 The publication, in England, of this and the second series 
 of essays, which took place a year or two later, made his name 
 widely known throughout Great Britain, and thinking persons 
 recognised in him an intellectual leader. Many of his friends 
 were desirous that he should come to England, and deliver 
 courses of lectures similar to those he had given with such signal 
 success in various cities of the United States. In this desire I 
 warmly shared. In the autumn of 1 846, a very favourable oppor 
 tunity presented itself of sending a message to him by a common 
 friend Mr. Lloyd Garrison who was then sailing from Liver 
 pool to Boston, and who promised to deliver it himself. I gladly 
 availed myself of the occasion, and on the spur of the moment, 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. 57 
 
 just before the ship steamed out of the Mersey, I wrote him a 
 hasty note in pencil, urging him to entertain the project of a 
 lengthened visit to England, and which should embrace the 
 delivery of lectures in some of the chief towns. Before long I 
 received a reply, which was more favourable than I expected. 
 It was full of kind words and reminiscences. " Your sugges 
 tion is new and unlocked for, yet opens to me at once so many 
 flattering possibilities, that I shall cheerfully entertain it, and 
 perhaps we may both see it ripen, one day to a fact Certainly 
 it would be much more practicable and pleasing to me to 
 answer an invitation than to come into your cities and 
 challenge an audience/ Some months later (28th February, 
 1847) ne wrote : " I owe you new thanks for your friendly 
 and earnest attention to the affair of Lectures which you have 
 put me on, but I had not anticipated so prompt an execution 
 of the project as you suggest. Certainly I cannot think of it for 
 April (1847). For September I will think of it, but cannot at 
 present fix anything. I really have not the means of forming 
 an opinion of the expediency of such an attempt. I feel no 
 call to make a visit of literary propagandism in England. All 
 my impulses to work of that kind would rather employ me at 
 home. It would be still more unpleasing to me to put upon a 
 few friends the office of collecting an audience for me, by much 
 advertisement and coaxing. At the same time it would be very 
 agreeable to me to accept any good invitation to read lectures 
 from institutions, or from a number of friendly individuals who 
 sympathised with my studies. But though I possess a good 
 many decisive tokens of interest in my pursuits and way of 
 thinking from sundry British men and women, they are widely 
 sundered persons, and my belief is that in no one city, except 
 perhaps in London, could I find any numerous company to 
 whom my name was favourably known. If I were younger, 
 it would give me great pleasure to come to England and 
 collect my own audience, as I have done at home here ; and I 
 have that confidence in my favourite topics and in my own 
 
5 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 habits, that I should undertake the affair without the least 
 distrust. But perhaps my ambition does not give to a success 
 of this kind that importance it has had for me. At all events, 
 in England I incline rather to take than to give the challenge. 
 So that you see my project requires great frankness on your 
 part. 1 You must not suffer your own friendly feelings to give 
 the smallest encouragement to the design. . . , You in 
 quire what are the rates of remuneration of lecturers here. 
 . . . I am glad to hear what you tell me of your employ 
 ments and position. I doubt not life has taught and is 
 teaching us both one lesson. It would be strange, but most 
 agreeable to me, to renew again our brief yet never-forgotten 
 acquaintance of thirteen or fourteen years ago in Edinburgh. 
 With ever kindest regards." 
 
 It was quite characteristic of Mr. Emerson to under-estimate 
 the extent to which his name was known and his writings appre 
 ciated in England. No sooner was it announced that he had 
 decided to revisit this country and to read lectures, than (as 
 has been stated in a previous page) applications from every 
 part of the kingdom began to flow in, and in many cases 
 it was found impossible to comply with the wishes of the 
 requisitionists, from a fear of committing him to engagements 
 which might have become burdensome to him. Speaking 
 of the occasion of his second visit to England in " English 
 Traits," he says : " I did not go very willingly. I am 
 not a good traveller, nor have I found that long journeys 
 yield a fair share of reasonable hours. But the invitation was 
 repeated and pressed at a moment of more leisure, and when 
 I was a little spent by some unusual studies. I wanted a 
 change and a tonic, and England was proposed to me. 
 Besides, there were, at least, the dread attraction and salutary 
 influences of the sea, so I took my berth in the packet ship, 
 Washington Irving/ and sailed from Boston on Tuesday, 
 5th October, 1847." 
 
 His friend Carlyle was greatly delighted with the prospect 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. 59 
 
 of again seeing Mr. Emerson. A letter from the latter, 
 announcing the probable time of his sailing, had, by accidental 
 negligence at a country post-office, failed to reach Carlyle in 
 due. course, and only turned up near the time of Mr. Emerson s 
 expected arrival, thus depriving his friend of the opportunity 
 of responding. The only thing left to be done was to get the 
 reply delivered to Mr. Emerson as soon as he should land. 
 Knowing that I was in communication with him, and certain 
 to be cognisant of the time of his arrival, Mr. Carlyle wrote 
 me on the subject, and his letter is so delightfully character 
 istic of his high regard for Mr. Emerson, and his earnest desire 
 to free himself from even the slightest appearance of a want 
 of hospitality, that I must give an extract from it. It is dated 
 Chelsea, i5th October, 1847, J ust ten days after Mr. Emerson 
 had sailed : " By a letter I had very lately from Emerson 
 which had lain, lost and never missed, for above a month in 
 the treacherous post-office of Buxton, where it was called for 
 and denied I learn that Emerson intended to sail for this 
 country about the 1st of October; and infer, therefore, that 
 probably even now he is near Liverpool or some other of our 
 ports. Treadmill, or other as emphatic admonition, to that 
 scandalous post-master of Buxton ! He has put me in extreme 
 risk of doing one of the most unfriendly and every way un 
 pardonable-looking things a man could do ! Not knowing in 
 the least to what port Emerson is tending, when he is expected, 
 or what his first engagements are, I find no way of making 
 my word audible to him in time, except that of entrusting it, 
 with solemn charges, to you, as here. Pray do me the favour 
 to contrive in some sure way that Emerson may get hold of 
 that note the instant he lands in England. I shall be perma 
 nently grieved otherwise ; shall have failed in a clear duty 
 (were it nothing more) which will never, probably, in my life 
 offer itself again. Do not neglect, I beg much of you ; and, 
 on the whole, if you can, get Emerson put safe into the 
 express train, and shot up hither, as the first road he goes ! 
 
60 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 That is the result we aim at. But the note itself, at all events, 
 I pray you get that delivered duly, and so do me a very great 
 favour, for which I depend on you." I need scarcely say that 
 these solemn injunctions, so characteristic of Carlyle, were 
 faithfully carried out to the very letter. 
 
 The ship reached Liverpool on the 22nd of October, 1847, 
 and Mr. Emerson at once proceeded to Manchester, where 
 I had the pleasure of receiving him at the Victoria Station. 
 After spending a few hours in friendly talk, he was " shot 
 up," as Carlyle had desired, to Chelsea, and at the end of a 
 week returned to Manchester to commence the first of a series 
 of lecturing engagements which had been arranged for him. 
 In a previous page (Memoir, p. 16) I have endeavoured to give 
 the reader some idea (I feel how inadequate it is) of Emerson s 
 manner of reading in public, and its influence on his hearers. 
 
 During his stay in Manchester, and just before going 
 to London to pay a round of visits and to lecture, he 
 invited a number of friends from various parts of the 
 country to dine and spend an evening with him at his 
 lodgings in Lower Broughton. His guests were principally 
 young men ardent, hopeful, enthusiastic moral and religious 
 reformers and visionaries, gathered together from Birmingham, 
 Sheffield, Nottingham, Liverpool, Huddersfield, Newcastle, 
 and other towns. One of them, a man of erratic genius, 
 and of very straitened means (but nevertheless an inveterate 
 smoker), who not many years ago died in a lunatic asylum 
 in New York, trudged on foot all the way from Hudders 
 field to be present, and next day performed the same feat 
 homeward. He has left behind him a detailed description 
 of this gathering, written in a rather sarcastic spirit, but curi 
 ous for its life-like sketches of his fellow-guests. One of the 
 finest spirits assembled on that occasion Henry Sutton, of 
 Nottingham, whose little volume of Poems, in Emerson s 
 opinion, contained pieces worthy of the genius of George 
 Herbert and who, happily, is still living in our midst, 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. 61 
 
 honoured and beloved by his friends says that the impression 
 left on his mind was that the affair went off admirably, 
 and that all seemed delighted to have had such an oppor 
 tunity of coming into closer contact with Emerson that 
 no one could but feel gratified by his kindliness and gentle 
 dignity, and that his conduct and manner were perfect. 
 " Any criticism to the contrary could only excite pity for the 
 writer, if it did not too strongly call forth disgust." It was a 
 memorable symposium. With his fine graciousness of man 
 ner and delicate courtesy, Emerson listened with serene 
 amiability, and an ineffably sweet smile to everything his young 
 guests had to say, and made them feel, as was his wont, that 
 he was the favoured one of the party, and that he specially was 
 imbibing much wisdom and benefit from their discourse. In 
 the course of the evening, being urgently requested to do so, 
 he read his lecture on Plato, then in MS., but now printed in 
 his " Representative Men." 
 
 Among the guests who were present at this motley gather 
 ing were two no longer living of whom I wish to say a few 
 words. One of them was Dr. W. B. Hodgson, late Professor 
 of Political Economy in the University of Edinburgh, who died 
 unexpectedly in Brussels in 1880, lamented by a very large 
 circle of friends. I had known him intimately almost from his 
 boyhood. At the time of Emerson s visit he was proprietor 
 and conductor of the Chorlton High School, Manchester. He 
 was a man of brilliant gifts, a classical scholar of no common 
 mark, and master of several European languages. His kindly 
 nature, extensive knowledge of literature, and conversational 
 powers can never be forgotten by those who knew him. As 
 an after-dinner talker he had few equals. His marvellous 
 memory (for he never forgot anything he had ever read, or 
 heard, or seen), supplied him with an inexhaustible store of 
 witty and humorous stories and anecdotes, sparkling bon mots, 
 and an unfailing affluence of apt quotation. No story, how 
 ever good, could be told by another person in his presence 
 
62 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 which he was not able to cap on the instant by a better one. 
 In this social field he was facile princeps. During his life he 
 rendered most valuable services to the cause of education 
 by his addresses, lectures, and other publications, and by his 
 vast (for no other word can in this case be used) correspondence 
 with Educational Reformers, Political Economists, and heads 
 of Schools and Colleges, in every part of the kingdom. I 
 may safely say that, during forty years, he spent, on an 
 average, two or three hours a day, at least, in correspondence. 
 The other guest to whom I wish to refer was Joseph 
 Neuberg, whom I knew for more than twenty years, and 
 whose memory I cherish for his many admirable qualities of 
 head and heart. He was a highly-cultivated and thoughtful 
 German, born at Wiirzburg. Mr. Emerson had made his 
 acquaintance at Nottingham, when lecturing there was, 
 indeed, his guest. Neuberg was a successful merchant, and 
 had recently sustained a severe domestic affliction in the 
 death of his wife. At the time I speak of, he was living 
 with a sister, as his companion, in a beautiful home, looking 
 down upon the Trent and its green meadows. He had ardent 
 literary tastes, was an enthusiastic admirer of Carlyle s 
 writings, and had long wished to become acquainted with 
 him. The gratification of this desire was brought about by 
 the friendly aid of Emerson, who spoke of him to Carlyle in 
 terms of high commendation. Neuberg afterwards proposed 
 to Carlyle to wind up his business and to reside in London, 
 and live on the modest fortune he had made ; devoting him 
 self, heart and soul, to his service. This proposal soon 
 became a reality. He finally left Nottingham, after winding 
 up his affairs, and settled in London. From that period up 
 to the time of his death, about fifteen years ago, he was in 
 almost daily communication with Carlyle. His industry was 
 untiring. He made researches for Carlyle in all quarters 
 often spending days and weeks in the library of the British 
 Museum, unearthing facts and dates from hundreds of obscure 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. 63 
 
 and neglected books, manuscripts, and maps, thus saving 
 his friend an endless amount of distasteful drudgery. He 
 would think nothing of spending a whole day in verifying 
 a single fact or date. During the composition of " The 
 Life of Friedrich," his services were of great value, and were 
 fully appreciated by Carlyle. They proceeded together to 
 Germany, and inspected all the battle-fields and places of 
 historical interest described in the Life. He also translated 
 into German the successive volumes of the work. By this 
 arrangement they appeared simultaneously in London and 
 Berlin. Neuberg did not live to translate the last two 
 volumes, which were done by another hand. Carlyle was 
 much grieved when death deprived him of this faithful friend 
 and assistant. In no account of his friend which has yet 
 appeared, has any notice been taken of Neuberg, nor any 
 tribute paid to his memory. In the " Reminiscences " his 
 name once occurs in a parenthesis, but there is no note 
 appended to tell the reader who he was Stat nominis umbra. 
 In " Shooting Niagara ; and after?" Carlyle quotes a piece of 
 information furnished to him by Neuberg. Without naming 
 him, he speaks of his informant as " one of the wisest and 
 faithfullest German friends I ever had, a correct observer, and 
 much a lover both of his own country and of mine." In a 
 letter from Carlyle to Mr. Neuberg s sister, written in April, 
 1867, he says: "If the bust give you any satisfaction, surely I 
 shall think it, all my days, to have been well worth while ! 
 No kinder friend had I in this world ; no man of my day, I 
 believe, had so faithful, loyal, and willing a helper as he gener 
 ously was to me for the last twenty or more years. To look for 
 his like again would be very vain indeed, were I even at the 
 beginning of my course, instead of at the end ! A man of fine 
 faculty, too ; decidedly the most intelligent, swift, and skilful, 
 at that kind of work, whom I have ever seen and known of. 
 The memory of him will remain dear and noble to me; the 
 sudden stroke that has cut away such a friend, in these my 
 
64 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 otherwise desolate days, may well be sad and heavy to me. But 
 if so to me, what then is it to you and your dear little ones ? 
 Alas on this head I must say nothing. I will bid you be of 
 courage, pious courage, and in all things try to do as you think 
 he would have ordered and wished ; which I believe will 
 daily be your best consolation in this sore trial." 
 
 During the fortnight in which Mr. Emerson delivered his 
 course of lectures in London, at the Portman Square Literary 
 and Scientific Institution, in the summer of 1848 (referred to 
 at page 1 5 of the Memoir), I had the honour of being his guest. 
 He had lodgings in the house of Mr. John Chapman, in the 
 Strand a well-known publisher of those days. As he had 
 been already many weeks in London, he had met a large num 
 ber of literary and social celebrities, including Rogers, Hallam, 
 Milman, Barry Cornwall, Helps, Clough, Matthew Arnold, 
 Faraday, Owen, Lyell, Carpenter, Mrs. Jameson, Henry 
 Crabb Robinson, Mrs. Somerville, Dickens, Thackeray, Tenny 
 son, and, I believe, Macaulay. He also received invitations 
 from and visited several members of the aristocracy, including 
 the Duchess of Sutherland. Notwithstanding his numerous 
 social engagements, he generally devoted many hours a day to 
 study, retiring to his room immediately after breakfast, and 
 extending the forenoon to three o clock. The lectures to 
 which I have referred were prepared with much care, as will 
 be seen by his correspondence with myself, prior to my 
 joining him in London. During this visit we went to some of 
 the theatres together on one evening hearing Jenny Lind, 
 who was then achieving her first triumphs in London. He 
 was very desirous of calling upon Leigh Hunt, and as I had 
 known the latter for many years, and was in the habit of 
 spending an evening with him when business carried me to Lon 
 don, it was proposed that I should take him to Hunt s house. 
 The interview lasted, I think, a couple of hours, and evidently 
 gave great pleasure to both. I have already mentioned that 
 he thought the two finest-mannered literary men he had met 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. 65 
 
 in England were Leigh Hunt and De Quincey. Hunt charmed 
 him by his sprightly, sparkling conversation, overflowing with 
 anecdote and quotation. His courteous and winning manner 
 was on this occasion tempered by a certain delicate rever 
 ence, indicating how deeply he felt the honour of being thus 
 sought out by his distinguished visitor. It is singular that 
 Hunt produced a similar impression upon Hawthorne. I 
 venture to give a portion of his description of him one of 
 the most touching sketches that Hawthorne has written : 
 " He was a beautiful old man. Jn truth, I never saw a finer 
 countenance, either as to the mould of features or the expres 
 sion, nor any that showed the play of feeling so perfectly. 
 It was like a child s face in this respect. At my first glimpse 
 of him, I discerned that he was old, his long hair being white, 
 and his wrinkles many. It was an aged visage, in short such 
 as I had not at all expected to see, in spite of dates, because 
 his books talk to the reader with the tender vivacity of youth. 
 But when he began to speak, and as he grew more earnest in 
 conversation, I ceased to be sensible of his age ; sometimes, 
 indeed, its dusky shadow darkened through the gleam which 
 his sprightly thoughts diffused about his face, but then another 
 flash of youth came out of his eyes, and made an illumination 
 again. I never witnessed such a wonderfully illusive transfor 
 mation, before or since ; and, to this day, trusting only to my 
 recollection, I should find it difficult to decide which was his 
 genuine and stable predicament youth or age. I have met 
 no Englishman whose manners seemed to me so agreeable 
 soft, rather than polished, wholly unconventional, the natural 
 growth of a kindly and sensitive disposition, without any 
 reference to rule, or else obedient to some rule so subtle 
 that the nicest observer could not detect the application 
 of it. I felt that no effect upon my mind of what he 
 uttered, no emotion, however transitory, in myself, escaped 
 his notice, -his faculty of observation was so penetrative 
 and delicate. On matters of feeling, and within a certain 
 E 
 
66 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 depth, you might spare yourself the trouble of utterance, 
 because he already knew what you wanted to say, and 
 perhaps a little more than you would have spoken. There 
 were abundant proofs throughout our interview of an un- 
 repining spirit, resignation, quiet relinquishment of the 
 worldly benefits that were denied him, thankful enjoyment 
 of whatever he had to enjoy, and piety, and hope shining 
 onward into the dark, all of which gave a reverential cast 
 to the feeling with which we parted from him. I wish that 
 he could have had one full draught of prosperity before he 
 died. At our leave-taking he grasped me warmly by both 
 hands, and seemed as much interested in our whole party as 
 if he had known us for years. All this was genuine feeling, a 
 quick, luxuriant growth out of his heart, which was a soil for 
 flower-seeds of rich and rare varieties, not acorns, but a true 
 heart, nevertheless." The effect produced upon Emerson by 
 his visit to Leigh Hunt was in most respects the same as in 
 the case of Hawthorne, and could not be expressed in more true 
 and touching words than those I have just quoted. He often 
 recurred to the interview, and spoke of it as one of the most 
 delightful he had ever had with a man of letters. 
 
 Many interesting places and persons we saw together 
 in London. An evening spent at the house of John Minter 
 Morgan, a wealthy social reformer and associationist, deserves 
 special mention. This gentleman was an amiable, gentle, 
 and sweet-mannered enthusiast, and had written several 
 works well-known in his peculiar field of literature : 
 " Hampden in the Nineteenth Century," " Colloquies on 
 Religion," " The Christian Commonwealth," " Extinction of 
 Pauperism," "The Revolt of the Bees," "The Phoenix Library," 
 a series of works, original and reprinted, on the Renovation 
 and Progress of Society, in Religion, Morality, and Science. 
 It is only necessary to read the titles of these works in order 
 to know the views and opinions of this worthy moral 
 reformer. He had met Emerson somewhere in London, and 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. 67 
 
 obtained the promise of an evening. Thereupon was gathered in 
 his large drawing-room an extraordinary assembly, consisting 
 of many of the leading socialists in London. The first part of the 
 evening was spent in the contemplation of a huge coloured 
 revolving view of a series of associated villages and homes, with 
 the most enchanting representations of churches for the cul 
 tivation of universal religion, elegant lecture and concert 
 rooms, and theatres, of ladies and gentlemen walking about 
 in the healthy costumes of the future, their children playing 
 about them, and over all, a sky of unclouded blue. Mr. 
 Morgan, with a long rod, explained to his audience the 
 meaning and significance of all these beautiful objects, and 
 answered many questions put to him by timid believers and 
 admirers, chiefly ladies. After this entertainment the company 
 adjourned to tea and coffee, and after a couple of hours spent 
 in introductions and the conversations naturally flowing there 
 from, the party broke up at eleven o clock. Emerson con 
 fessed that he had never before met such a gathering of 
 singular people, and often humorously alluded to it after 
 wards. 
 
 On the day which Mr. Emerson spent in Edinburgh, on 
 his last visit to Europe (May 8th, 1873), ne dined at the 
 house of a friend, Dr. William Smith, the translator of 
 many of Fichte s works, and President of the Edinburgh 
 Philosophical Association, who heard him preach in Edin 
 burgh in 1833, and who had listened to his lectures in 1848. 
 At the dinner party he met Lord Neaves,* Dr. W. B. 
 
 * Lord Neaves was a distinguished member of the Scottish bench, and a man of 
 fine culture, a recognised wit and humourist, and of the most genial disposition ; 
 he was a general favourite in Edinburgh social circles. He was the author of 
 many songs and verses, social and scientific, contributed to " Black wood s 
 Magazine." These have been collected, and have gone through several editions. 
 Some of these verses had quite a renown at the time of their publication. Among 
 them may be named "The Origin of Species," "The Permissive Bill," "I m 
 very fond of Water," "Hilli-onnee," "Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter," "Let 
 us all be unhappy on Sunday," and others. 
 
68 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Hodgson,* and the widow of Dr. Samuel Brown, who had 
 been his host in 1847-8, and a few other friends. He was 
 greatly delighted with the brilliant fire of repartee and wit 
 which was kept up between Lord Neaves and Dr. Hodgson, 
 as well as of the songs of the former, who sang not a few ; and 
 he frequently referred to this " wit combat " on his visit to 
 me a few days later. In a scrapbook of the son of his Edin 
 burgh host he inscribed this memorial of his visit. "After 
 a happy evening with excellent company." R. WALDO 
 EMERSON. 8th May, 1873. On the evening of his arrival 
 (7th May) he met a large party of notabilities in the house 
 of Professor Eraser. A characteristic incident relating to this 
 visit is worth recording. His host, Dr. Smith, thus relates it : 
 " On the 8th I drove him for some time about the city ; Miss 
 Emerson, being rather indisposed, remained at the hotel. In 
 the course of our drive we stopped at the shop of a worthy 
 tradesman in Nicholson-street, who is an enthusiastic admirer 
 of E. I had been informed that he had been making anxious 
 inquiries about E. s place of abode and the probable time of 
 his departure, so that he might have a chance of getting a 
 glimpse of his hero. I alighted, and entering the shop said, 
 
 Mr. , Mr. Emerson is at the door, and will be glad to 
 
 see you for a few minutes. You may imagine his delight at 
 this unexpected fulfilment of his wishes. The five minutes 
 were well spent, and I have no doubt are a cherished 
 memory." 
 
 He spent the last two days of this his final visit to England, 
 under my roof, along with his devoted daughter, Ellen. This 
 afforded an opportunity of bringing together many of his old 
 friends and hearers of 1847-8, whom he was well pleased to 
 meet. To every one he gave a few minutes, and the stream 
 of conversation flowed on for several hours. After all the 
 guests had departed, he indulged in a cigar, and expressed 
 
 * Late Professor of Political Economy in the University of Edinburgh, already 
 referred to. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS. . 69 
 
 his gratification at having met so many " good people," as he 
 called them. " Would that I could have held converse 
 with each for half-an-hour ! " A capital bon mot, related 
 by him on this occasion, must here be recorded. It would 
 have rejoiced the heart of dear Charles Lamb. Speaking 
 of a convivial club, of which he was a member, having 
 ceased and dispersed for many years, it was thought 
 desirable that the survivors should once more assemble, 
 and revive their old recollections. An interval of ten 
 years had meanwhile elapsed. While the wine was circu 
 lating, someone proposed that the society should have a 
 gathering every ten years. Mr. Appleton, one of the com 
 pany, instantly said, " Then it should have the title of a 
 Dutch picture, Boors Drinking after Teniers " (ten years). 
 His last hours in Liverpool, before sailing, were spent with 
 Mr. R. C. Hall, an old friend and admirer. 
 
 It has often struck me that the "marble self-possession" of 
 Emerson, his perfect reliance upon his own genius and 
 intuitions, his grand self-dependence, which no passing excite 
 ment could disturb or shake for a moment; and his steadfast 
 belief in the ultimate sovereignty of righteousness and truth, 
 are well indicated in the following remarkable lines, written 
 by an old English poet early in the seventeenth century 
 Samuel Daniel : 
 
 One who of such a height hath built his mind, 
 And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, 
 As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame 
 Of his resolved powers, . ... 
 
 . ..." . . nor pierce to wrong 
 
 His settled peace, nor to disturb the same. 
 
 And with how free an eye doth he look down 
 
 Upon these lower regions of turmoil, 
 
 Where all these storms of passion vainly beat 
 
 On flesh and blood ; where honour, power, renown, 
 
 Are only gay afflictions, golden toil ; 
 
 Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet 
 
 As frailty doth, and only great doth seem 
 
 To little minds, who do it so esteem. 
 
70 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 .- .- . . who hath prepared 
 
 A rest for his desires ; and sees all things 
 Beneath him ; and hath learned this book of man, 
 Full of the notes of frailty ; and compared 
 The best of glory with her sufferings : 
 . . . inured to any hue 
 
 The world can cast ; that cannot cast that mind 
 Out of its form of goodness ; that doth see 
 Both what the best and worst of earth can be ; 
 
 Which makes, that whatsoever here befals, 
 He in the region of himself remains." 
 
CORRESPONDENCE. 
 
 EMERSON TO CARLYLE ON " THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH " 
 AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR. 
 
 " Concord, ist May, 1859. 
 
 "The book [the first volume of The Life of Friedrich ] 
 came, with its irresistible inscription, so that I am all tender 
 ness and all but tears. The book, too, is sovereignly written. 
 I think you the true inventor of the stereoscope, as having 
 exhibited that art in style long before we had yet heard of 
 it in drawing. The letter came also. Every child of mine 
 knows from far that handwriting, and brings it home with 
 speed. . . . You hug yourself on missing the illusion of 
 children, and must be pitied as having one glittering toy 
 the less. I am a victim all my days to certain graces of 
 form and behaviour, and can never come into equilibrium. 
 Now I am fooled by my own young people, and grow old 
 contented. The heedless children suddenly take the keenest 
 hold on life, and foolish papas cling to the world on 
 their account, as never on their own. Out of sympathy, 
 we make believe to value the prizes of their ambition and 
 hope. My two girls, pupils once or now of Agassiz, are 
 good, healthy, apprehensive, decided young people, who 
 love life. My boy divides his time between Cicero and 
 cricket, knows his boat, the birds, and Walter Scott, verse 
 and prose, through and through, and will go to college next 
 year. Sam Ward and I tickled each other the other day, in 
 looking over a very good company of young people, by find 
 ing in the new comers a marked improvement on their 
 
72 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 parents. There, I flatter myself, I see some emerging of our 
 people from the prison of their politics. ... I am so glad 
 to find myself speaking once more to you, that I mean to 
 persist in the practice. Be as glad as you have been. You 
 and I shall not know each other, on this platform, as long as 
 we have known. A correspondent even of twenty-five years 
 should not be disused unless through some fatal event. Life 
 is too short, and with all our poetry and morals too indigent, 
 to allow such sacrifices. Eyes so old and weary, and which 
 have learned to look on so much, are gathering an hourly 
 harvest ; and I cannot spare what on noble terms is offered 
 me. . . ." 
 
 " Concord, 1861. 
 
 " Here has come into the country, three or four months ago, 
 another volume of your History of Friedrich, infinitely the wit 
 tiest book that ever was written ; a book that one would 
 think the English people would rise up in mass and thank the 
 author for by cordial acclamation, and signify, by crowning him 
 with oak leaves, their joy that such a head existed among 
 them, and sympathising and much-reading America would 
 make a new treaty, or send a Minister Extraordinary to offer 
 congratulation of honouring delight to England in acknow 
 ledgment of this donation ; a book holding so many memo 
 rable and heroic facts, working directly on practice, with new 
 heroes, things unnoticed before the German Plutarch (now 
 that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and the British 
 Plutarchs), with a range, too, of thought and wisdom, so 
 large and so elastic, not so much applying as inculcating 
 to every need and sensibility of man, that we do not read a 
 stereotype page, rather we see the eyes of the writer looking 
 into ours ; mark his behaviour, humming, chuckling, with 
 under tones and trumpet tones, and long commanding glances, 
 stereoscoping every figure that passes, and every hill, river, 
 road, hammock, and pebble in the long perspective with its 
 wonderful system of mnemonics, whereby great and insig- 
 
LETTERS. 73 
 
 nificant men are marked and modelled in memory by what 
 they were, had, and did. . . . And, withal, a book that is 
 a Judgment Day for its moral verdict on the men and nations 
 and manners of modern times. And this book makes no noise. 
 I have hardly seen a notice of it in any newspaper or journal, 
 and you would think there was no such book. I am not 
 aware that Mr. Buchanan has sent a special messenger to 
 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, or that Mr. Dallas had been instructed 
 to assure Mr. Carlyle of his distinguished consideration. But 
 the secret wits and hearts of men take note of it, not the less 
 surely. They have said nothing lately in praise of the air, 
 or of fire, or of the blooming of love ; and yet, I suppose, 
 they are sensible of these, and not less of this book, which is 
 like these." 
 
 "Concord, 8th December, 1862. 
 
 "Long ago, as soon as swift steamers could bring the new 
 book across the sea, I received the third volume of Friedrich 
 with your autograph inscription, and read it with joy. Not a 
 word went to the beloved author, for I do not write or think. 
 I would wait perhaps for happier days, as our President 
 Lincoln will not even emancipate slaves until on the heels of 
 a victory, or the semblance of such. But he waited in vain for 
 his triumph, nor dare I in my heavy months expect bright days. 
 
 " The book was heartily grateful, and square to the author s 
 imperial scale. You have lighted the glooms, and engineered 
 away the pits, whereof you poetically pleased yourself with 
 complaining, in your sometime letter to me, clean out of it, 
 and have let sunshine and pure air enfold the scene. 
 First, I read it honestly through for the history ; then 
 I pause and speculate on the muse that inspires, and the 
 friend that reports it. Tis sovereignly written, above all 
 literature. ... I find, as ever in your books, that one 
 man has deserved well of mankind for restoring the scholar s 
 profession to its highest use and dignity. I find also that you 
 are very wilful, and have made a covenant with your eyes that 
 
74 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 they shall not se anything you do not wish they should. 
 But I was heartily glad to read somewhere that your book 
 was nearly finished in the manuscript, for I would wish you to 
 sit and taste your fame, if that were not contrary to the law 
 of Olympus. My joints ache to think of your rugged labour. 
 Now that you have conquered to yourself such a huge king 
 dom among men, can you not give yourself breath, and chat 
 a little an Emeritus in the Eternal University and write a 
 gossiping letter to an old American friend or so ? Alas, I own 
 that I have no right to say this last, I who write never. 
 Here we read no books. The war is our sole and doleful 
 instructor. All our bright young men go into it, to be mis 
 used and sacrificed by incapable leaders. One lesson they all 
 learn ; to hate slavery, deterrima causa ! But the issue does 
 not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. No 
 body can help us. Tis of no account what England or France 
 may do. Unless backed by our profligate parties, their action 
 would be nugatory, and, if so backed, the worst. But even 
 the war is better than the degrading and descending politics 
 that preceded it for decades of years ; and our legislation has 
 made great strides, and if we can stave off that fury of trade 
 which rushes to peace, at the cost of replacing the South in 
 the status ante bellum, we can, with something more of courage, 
 leave the problem to another score of years free labour to 
 fight with the beast, and see if bales, barrels, and baskets 
 cannot find out that thus they pass more commotiiously and 
 surely to their ports, through free hands than through bar 
 barians." 
 
 " Concord, 26th Sept., 1864. 
 
 "I had received in July the fourth volume of Friedrich, 
 and it was my best reading in the summer, and for weeks 
 my only reading. One fact was paramount in all the 
 good I drew from it, that whomsoever many years had 
 used and worn, they had not yet broken any fibre of 
 your force ; a pure joy to me who abhor the inroads 
 
LETTERS. 75 
 
 which time makes on me and my friends. To live too long is 
 the capital misfortune, and I sometimes think if we shall not 
 parry it by better art of living, we shall learn to include in our 
 morals some balder control of the facts. I read once that 
 Jacobi declared that he had some thoughts which, if he 
 should entertain them, would put him to death ; and per 
 haps we have weapons in our intellectual armoury that are to 
 save us from disgrace and impertinent relation to the 
 world we live in. But this book will excuse you from any 
 unseemly haste to make up your accounts, nay, holds you 
 to fulfil your career with all amplitude and calmness. I 
 found joy and pride in it, and discovered a golden chain of 
 continuity not often seen in the works of men, apprising me 
 that one good head and great heart remained in England 
 immovable, superior to his own eccentricities and perver 
 sities, nay, wearing these, I can well believe, as a jaunty 
 coat or red cockade to defy or mislead idlers, for the better 
 securing his own peace and the very ends which the idlers 
 fancy he resists. England s lease of power rs good during 
 his days. I have in these last years lamented that you had 
 not made the visit to America, which in earlier years you 
 projected or favoured. It would have made it impossible that 
 your name should be cited for one moment on the side of the 
 enemies of mankind. Ten days residence in this country 
 would have made you the organ of the sanity of England and 
 Europe to us and to them, and have shown you the necessities 
 and aspirations which struggle up in our free states, which, as 
 yet, have no organ to others and are ill or unsteadily articu 
 lated here. In our to-day s division of Republican and Demo 
 crat it is certain that the American nationality lies in the 
 Republican party (mixed and multiform though that party 
 be), and I hold it not less certain that, viewing all the 
 nationalities of the world, the battle of Humanity is at this 
 hour in America. A few days here would show you the dis 
 gusting composition of the other party which within the Union 
 
76 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 resists the national action. Take from it the wild Irish element, 
 imported in the last twenty-five years into this country, and led 
 by Romish priests, who sympathise of course with despotism, 
 and you would bereave it of all its numerical strength. A man 
 intelligent and virtuous is not to be found on that side. 
 
 " Ah ! how gladly I would enlist you with your 
 thunderbolt on our part ! How gladly enlist the wise, 
 thoughtful, efficient pens and voices of England ! We want 
 England and Europe to hold our people staunch to their best 
 tendency. Are English of this day incapable of a great 
 sentiment ? Can they not leave cavilling at petty failures 
 and bad manners, and at the dunce part (always the largest 
 part in human affairs), and leap to the suggestions and finger- 
 pointing of the gods, which, above the understanding, feed the 
 hopes and guide the wills of men? This war has been con 
 ducted over the heads of all the actors in it, and the foolish 
 terrors, ( What shall we do with the negro ? * the entire 
 black population is coming North to be fed, &c., have strangely 
 ended in the fact that the black refuses to leave his climate ; 
 gets his living and the living of his employer there, as 
 he has always done ; is the natural ally and soldier of 
 the Republic in that climate ; now takes the place of 
 200,000 white soldiers ; and will be, as the conquest of the 
 country proceeds, its garrison, till Peace without Slavery 
 returns. Slaveholders in London have filled English ears 
 with their wishes and perhaps beliefs ; and our people, generals 
 and politicians, have carried the like, at first, to the war, until 
 corrected by irresistible experience. I shall always respect 
 War hereafter. The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort 
 and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of eternal life, 
 eternal law, reconstructing and uplifting Society, breaks up 
 the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider. The 
 dismal Malthus, the dismal De Bow, have had their night. 
 Our Census of 1860, and the war, are poems which will, in 
 the next age, inspire a genius like your own. 
 
LETTERS. 77 
 
 " I hate to write you a newspaper, but, in these times, tis 
 wonderful what sublime lessons I have once and again read 
 on the bulletin boards in the streets. Everybody has been 
 wrong in his guess, except good women, who never despair of 
 the ideal right." 
 
 LETTERS TO A. IRELAND. 
 
 "Liverpool, joth August > 1833" (before sailing for America). 
 Extracts from this letter, describing his first interviews with 
 Carlyle and Wordsworth, will be found at page 53, "Recol 
 lections." 
 
 " Concord^ 28tk Dec., 184.6. I was very glad to be 
 reminded by your concise note, written on shipboard and 
 conveyed to me by Mr. Garrison, of our brief intercourse 
 thirteen years ago, and which it seems has not yet quite 
 ended. Your affectionate expressions towards me and my 
 friends are very grateful to me; and, indeed, what better 
 thing do men or angels know of than an enduring kind 
 ness ? In regard to your inquiry whether I shall visit 
 England now or soon, the suggestion is new and unlooked 
 for, yet opens to me at once so many flattering possibilities 
 that I shall cheerfully entertain it, and, perhaps, we may both 
 see it ripen one day to a fact. Certainly it would be much 
 more practicable and pleasant to me to answer an invitation, 
 than to come into your cities and challenge an audience. 
 You have been slower to visit Mr. Wordsworth than I was, 
 but, according to all testimonies, he retains his vigour and his 
 social accomplishments. He could not now remember me in 
 my short and unconnected visit, or I might easily send him 
 assurances, from me and many others also unknown to him, 
 of a regard that could not fail to gratify him. With the best 
 wishes of these days, &c." 
 
78 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 The next letter from him (Concord, 28th February , 
 will be found at page 57 in " Recollections." 
 
 " Concord, ist April, 184.7. My townsman, E. Rockwood 
 Hoar, Esq., is ordered by his physicians to quit his profes 
 sional duties for a time, and to travel for his health. Mr. 
 Hoar is an eminent practitioner at the Massachusetts Bar, 
 and was lately a member of our State Senate. As he proposes 
 to visit Manchester in his route, I use the opportunity to 
 beg you to introduce him to the Athenaeum, and to give him 
 any local information that you may think may be useful to 
 him. Yours with great regard." 
 
 " Concord, jist July, 184.7. I owe you hearty thanks for 
 your effective attention to my affair, which was attractive 
 enough to me in the first proposition, and certainly assumes 
 in your hands a feasible shape. I have a good deal of 
 domestic immoveableness being fastened down by wife and 
 children, by books and studies, by pear trees and apple 
 trees but after much hesitation can find no sufficient re 
 sistance to this animating invitation, and I decide to go to 
 England in the autumn. I think to leave home about the 
 ist October, perhaps in the steamer, but more probably in 
 the sailing packet which leaves Boston for Liverpool on the 
 5th of each month; and, at any rate, shall expect to be in 
 England before the ist November. From the ist November, 
 I will take your advice as to the best order of fulfilling those 
 engagements you offer me at Manchester, Sheffield, and 
 Leeds. In regard to the subjects of my lectures, I hope to 
 send you by the next steamer some programme or sketch 
 of programme that may serve a general purpose. I could 
 more easily furnish myself for so numerous a course as 
 seems to offer itself if there were any means of preventing 
 your newspaper reporters from publishing such ample tran 
 scripts as I notice (in the Examiner you were so good as 
 to send me) of Mr. Marston s lectures. But I will see what I 
 
LETTERS. 79 
 
 have to say. Meantime, I beg you not to give yourself any 
 further pains in this matter, which I fear has already cost 
 you much. It will give me pleasure to speak to bodies of 
 your English people, but I am sure it will give me much more to 
 meet with yourself and other honoured individuals in private; 
 and I see well that, if there were no lecturing, I should not fail 
 to find a solid benefit in the visit. With great regard." 
 
 " Concord, jotk Sept., 184.7. I have decided, after a little 
 hesitation and advising with better sailors than myself, to 
 follow my inclination in taking passage in a ship, and not 
 in the steamer. I have engaged a berth in the * Washington 
 Irving/ which leaves Boston for Liverpool next Tuesday, 
 5th October. The owners are confident that, with ordi 
 nary fortune, we shall arrive in Liverpool in twenty days. 
 But I shall not complain if the voyage should be a little 
 longer. ... I shall probably think it best to go directly 
 to Manchester to meet yourself, and to settle with you the 
 plan of my little campaign. I suppose that I shall be ready 
 to read lectures at once as soon as the proper notices can 
 be given ; or, if more time is required by the institutes, I 
 can go to London, and make a short visit before I begin. I 
 know that I ought to have sent you some synopsis long ago, 
 but it has never been quite certain to me what I could promise, 
 as I have been endeavouring to complete some lectures not 
 even yet quite finished. I think I will now reserve my table 
 of contents until I see you. Yours, with great regard." 
 
 "Edinburgh, ijth February^ 184.8. Some friends here with 
 me to read my lecture on Plato to the Phil. Society, on Satur 
 day night, at half-past eight o clock. It lies in one of my 
 bureau drawers at Mrs. Massey s. Now will you proceed with 
 beneficent action at once to Fenny-street, demand a candle, 
 and open the various newspaper envelopes in my drawers 
 until you eliminate and extort Plato, and send it by post 
 immediately to me, care of Dr. Brown, I, Cuthbert s Glebe 
 
8o RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Edinbro ? The good Misses Massey will assist your search, 
 and yourself will reward your pains. I have seen your father 
 and mother, and Mr. Chambers, and others your friends, and 
 all your despatches and benefits have safely arrived. Ever 
 yours." 
 
 "Ambleside, 2$th Feby., 1848. Here am I for one day 
 more at Miss Martineau s house. I had fully intended to 
 set out for Manchester this morning ; but let myself be 
 over-persuaded by some hospitable friends yesterday, to 
 stay to-day and see the mountains. I had the best 
 visit at Edinburgh, where I parted with your kindest 
 mother last Sunday p.m.; and on Monday, with Dr. Brown 
 and De Quincey, at the station on my way northward. Yes 
 terday I spent a valuable hour, and perhaps a half more, with 
 Mr. Wordsworth, who is in sound health at seventy-seven 
 years, and was full of talk. He would even have walked on 
 my way with me towards Miss Martineau s, but it began to 
 rain, and I would not suffer it Ever, with best wishes." 
 
 "London, 142, Strand, Jth March, 184.8. I am well 
 enough domiciliated here, and am awaiting your visit. . . . 
 I am beginning to see London shows, but, as everywhere, 
 find the morning too precious to go abroad in, and am 
 prone to lengthen the morning till three o clock. I have 
 seen Carlyle one good day, and, as you ask it, I will send 
 you some good token of him, of this day or a better. But 
 now for another change. . . .Yours affectionately." 
 
 Strand, London, yth March, 184.8. I find him 
 (Carlyle) full of strong discourse. He is in the best humour 
 at the events in France. For the first time in his life 
 he takes in a daily paper the Times and yet I think he has 
 not much confidence in the ability of the French to carry such 
 great points as they have to carry. He interests himself a 
 
LETTERS. 8 1 
 
 good deal in the Chartists, and in politics generally, though 
 with abundant contempt for what is called political He talks 
 away on a variety of matters, on London, on the Universities, 
 on Church and State, on all notable persons, on the delusion 
 that is called Art, on the Sand novels, &c., &c. I think him a 
 most valuable companion, and speaking the best opinions one 
 is likely to hear in this nation. It is by no means easy to 
 talk with him, but there is little need of that, as he enjoys his 
 pictures and his indignations highly. The guiding genius of 
 the man, and what constitutes his superiority over other men 
 of letters, is his commanding sense of justice and incessant 
 demand for sincerity. And I cannot help thinking that he 
 has more books, or at least one more book to write, of more 
 efficiency than any he has written. I expect your promised 
 visit as soon as the hard work is over. Yours ever." 
 
 " London , 3rd April, 184.8. I had hoped to have seen 
 you here ere this. My London adventures already make 
 too long a story to write. I spend my time not quite 
 unprofitably, but in a way that must soon have an 
 end, or it would make an end of my comfort. Yet I 
 cannot decline these valued opportunities of seeing men and 
 things which are offered me here. Excepting Tennyson, I 
 believe, I have seen all the literary and many of the political 
 notabilities who interested me. On Thursday last, I went to 
 Oxford, and spent two days and more, very agreeably there, 
 and made the acquaintance of many good men. I have not 
 quite yet decided how long to stay, or whither next to go, but 
 soon must. I carried our good friend Neuberg, the other 
 night, to Carlyle, who was in better mood than usual. I 
 have a good chamber for you here, waiting your advent, and 
 am ever yours. I doubt about Paris a little, being very 
 impatient to be at home and at work." 
 
 " 14.2, Strand, ijtk April, 184.8. Some friends are taking 
 steps here to find me an audience in London, if only 
 F 
 
82 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 I were ready and if I do this thing, I must perhaps 
 be too late for you in M. and L. Never ask such a 
 tardy workman as I when his wares will be finished. 
 Meantime I am very industrious, eat a great many dinners, 
 hear a great many lectures, see many persons, many things, 
 go to clubs, theatres, and soirees, receive good letters, through 
 your hands, from home, and get on a line or two in my literary 
 tasks every day. I have never gone to Bristol, Cheltenham, 
 and Exeter, though reminded of my privilege. The London 
 day is not long enough for its manifold deed, and I leave 
 my letters long unanswered. I received with thanks the 
 good ( Examiners. The last is gone to Boston. I sent you 
 a new Mass. Quarterly Review, but it could not go by 
 post, I found too late, because I had written your name on 
 it. With kindest remembrances to your friends, I remain, 
 yours faithfully." 
 
 " London, 14.2, Strand, 3rd May, 184.8. I have stayed in 
 London a great while, yet have not quite finished my visit. I 
 am going to Paris, I think, on Saturday, and mean to stay there 
 but a short time, as it is decided, almost against me, that I shall 
 read lectures here three weeks hence. Ah, if I knew what to call 
 those lectures ! they have grown from day to day and have not 
 yet a name. But the indecision whilst I have been writing 
 here, whether to read or not, and which I had once decided 
 NO, has left me quite unable to send you any word to 
 Manchester. . . It will also be too late at Man 
 chester for any of those private classes which hovered in 
 your friendly imagination. Besides it is late in the year, and 
 it will be high time for me to set my slow sail for the Capes of 
 Massachusetts. In my short and crowded days here I have 
 given you no account of myself, yet I have found London 
 rich and great, quite equal to its old fame. I have seen a 
 large number of interesting persons, and I suppose the best 
 things the Parliament, Oxford, the British Museum, Kew 
 
LETTERS. 83 
 
 Gardens, the Scientific Societies, the Clubhouses, the Theatres, 
 and so forth. I attend Mr. Owen s lectures at the Royal 
 College of Surgeons ; Faraday, at the Royal Institution ; 
 Lyell, Sedgwick, Buckland, Forbes, I hear at the Geologic 
 Society ; and two nights ago I dined with the Antiquaries, 
 and discussed Shakspeare with Mr. Collier. Dr. Carpenter 
 has shown me his microscopes, Sir Henry Delabeche his 
 geologic museum, and I have really owed many valuable 
 hours to the scientific bodies. Now the Picture Galleries are 
 open, and I have begun to see pictures and artists. It is very 
 easy to see that London would last an inquisitive man a good 
 while, and find him in new studies, but the miscellany is 
 distracting, and quiet countrymen will soon have enough of 
 dining out and of shilling-shows. Yet I value all my new 
 experience, and doubtless shall not wish it less when I am 
 safe in my woods again. In Paris I shall remain three weeks 
 to see the revolution, and to air my nouns and verbs. Mr. 
 Bancroft, who has just returned, takes the most favourable 
 views of their politics, and says the workmen have quite 
 got through all scheme \sic\ of asking Government to find 
 them labour, repudiate the whole plan, &c. By the last 
 steamer I had no letters from home ; if the letters of the 
 due ship come to you, speed them to your ever obliged and 
 grateful." 
 
 " London, Tuesday , nth July, 184.8. It now appears cer 
 tain that I cannot reach Manchester [on his way to Liver 
 pool], do what I can, before 9-4 p.m. on Thursday. So 
 you must give me tea and toast and a bed that night, and 
 despatch me early next morning to Liverpool, where Mrs. 
 Paulet has always been promised the homage of a day. I 
 am very sorry that I am so late and crowded and speedy ; 
 tis the inevitable fate of my nation. But I could not go 
 without a call at Chatsworth, which I must report to some 
 friends at home, and I stop at Coventry one night first. I 
 
84 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 have just got home from Stonehenge, whither I went with 
 Carlyle, and Chapman has made out the plan of my new 
 journey to you the best he could. Yours ever." 
 
 " Concord, 5th July, 184.9. You will think I died and was 
 buried soon after I left Manchester. No, I escaped the sea 
 and survive until this day, but with no studies or fortunes 
 worth transmitting news of so far; yet not despairing, one 
 of these days, to send you something. But here is my friend, 
 Rev. James Freeman Clarke, an excellent and accomplished 
 man, who can tell you of every good thing in Boston and 
 America, and whom you must furnish with good tidings to 
 me of all your circle. Yours affectionately." 
 
 " Concord, I2th May, 1850. I received many weeks ago 
 a note from you for which I found no answer, I am sorry 
 for it, and so sent none. I am so disconnected from all 
 the common systems of lucrative work, that when I hear 
 of an applicant I inquire of other people if there is room. 
 Mr. Greeley (of N.Y.) said, None for literary work ; we 
 refuse such applications in great numbers. Rev. Dr. Fur- 
 ness, of Philadelphia, said, I always advise the Englishman 
 to come ; I know of so many instances of success. My 
 belief is that there is, for all men of energy, much more 
 room and opportunity here than with you ; but almost no 
 more promise here than with you for any infirmity. In 
 the case of your friend, I should think it not wise, from 
 my impressions of his tendencies and turn of mind, to make 
 the adventure. I saw him but little, and learned something 
 of him from his friends, the Fishers, I saw no writing, heard 
 no public speaking, and have no knowledge of what public 
 talent he possesses ; but he did not inspire me with any confi 
 dence in his good sense, or in his reasonable expectations 
 from society. So I only praise the more your and Mr. Fisher s 
 generous fidelity to him. I was very glad to see your hand 
 
LETTERS. 85 
 
 and name, and you must not fail to write me again when you 
 have the like application to make for another person. Tis 
 likely I may give you a much better answer. But mainly I 
 look and shall not cease to look for your own arrival, though 
 late, yet sure, it must be, on your tour of observation. Mr. 
 Lawrence, I see, tells you once a month, in London, that we 
 are a great nation, and my dear Carlyle tells you that we are 
 a very dull one ; but Nature never disappoints, and our square 
 miles and the amount of human labour here are incontestable, 
 and will interest all your taste, intelligence, and humanity. 
 Forgive me that I never write. My eyes are not good, and I 
 write no letter that is not imperative. I remember you at all 
 times with kindest thankfulness. ... I heard with joy 
 
 that E was well placed, to command his time and studies. 
 
 Of Mr. B , too, his paper brought me good news. And 
 
 Mr. Kell, of Huddersfield, gave me good tidings of others of 
 your friends. Yours affectionately." 
 
 " Concord, April 26, 1869. Unless I knew your generosity 
 . . . I should hesitate to write a line to you after such 
 unpardonable intervals, lest, if you have not forgotten my 
 handwriting, you should burn it unread. But now I have two 
 commanding motives which break down even my chronic and 
 constitutional reluctance to write a letter. In the first place, 
 a pretty good acquaintance with the brave book you sent 
 me,* I dare not count how many months ago, and whose 
 examination even I was long forced to postpone, mainly on 
 account of tasks which have closely succeeded each other 
 ever since October until now, and partly, also, because 
 you had forgotten how much twenty-one or two years 
 have damaged my eyes since I saw you, so that they now 
 refuse to read a type so fine and solid as that of this book, 
 unless in the most favourable circumstances. Polite friends 
 
 * Mr. Emerson here refers to a volume printed by me in 1868 a labour of 
 love a " Bibliographical List of the Writings of Charles Lamb, and of the 
 voluminous Works of William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt." 
 
86 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 assure me that it is only because I have darkened my house 
 with a grove of trees, which allow easy reading in my library 
 only in the brightest days. But, at last, I have read much in 
 this pleasant book of justice and love, and can willingly join 
 in the general thanks of scholars to you for this work of 
 loyalty and good taste, so thoroughly and accurately per 
 formed, that it will be the liber veritatis and liber studiorum 
 for all lovers of Lamb and Hazlitt and Hunt, now and 
 hereafter. . . . My second motive for the pen to-day 
 is that my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Fields, who know so many 
 of your English friends, but have never seen yourself, are 
 departing in a couple of days for England and France and 
 Switzerland, and I desire to make it certain that you and 
 they shall meet. You and they have many good qualities 
 in common, and among them the singular eccentricity of an 
 eminent goodwill and helpfulness to me. If it is possible, 
 I hope that Mrs. Ireland and Mrs. Fields may meet, that I 
 may have new information to add to all I drew from the 
 valued photograph you sent me. Miss Mabel Lowell, Mr. J. 
 R. Lowell s only daughter, is of the Fields party in their 
 tour. I should like well to see you and your Manchester again, 
 you and your household, and to know the history of many of 
 those who surrounded you in 1847-8. Mr. Bright has been 
 at last placed as you anticipated and wished, and the world 
 thinks of Mr. Cobden as you and your friends did. With Mr. 
 W. E. Forster and Mr. Rawlins I have had some com 
 munication. . . . All your political friends have been ours, 
 and I wish you will keep them so. But one duty you have 
 left undone, which is to make your own visit to these States, 
 and I shall expect you till you come. Be assured you 
 shall find a hearty welcome in this house. Yours ever 
 affectionately." 
 
 " Concord, iqth January, i8j2. I wish that my son-in- 
 law, Col. W. H. Forbes, and my daughter (Edith), his wife, 
 
LETTERS. 8? 
 
 should not fail to see you if they reach Manchester in their 
 passage through England to the continent. They know well 
 your steadfast goodwill and good action at one time, and at 
 all times to me and to my frierids, artd I have charged them 
 pot to fail at seeing you on their way, or else certainly on 
 their return through England. You must show them the 
 specialties of your great city, and you must make them 
 acquainted with Mrs. Ireland, whom I have never seen, 
 though I keep her photograph. Tell them, I pray you, all 
 that I should hear from you, and believe me, ever yours 
 affectionately." 
 
 " Oxford, ist May, 1872, House of Professor Max Milller. 
 It seems that I have been travelling too fast for your letters 
 to catch me. To-day I have received yours of 29th April, 
 and rush to say with thankfulness and regret that my day for 
 reaching Manchester should be the I2th May, and that I will 
 come to you then at Bowdon. Meantime, for Mr. Brown, of 
 Selkirk, I think with gratitude to him that it will be safer for 
 such swift travellers as my daughter and I must be, that it 
 will be best not to trouble him with our swiftness, but to sit 
 down at Kennedy s Hotel, in Edinburgh, and trust to the 
 ordinary resources for our visit to the important points, and I 
 will try to express our thanks to him for his kindest offices. 
 I arn sorry to be so tardy with my acknowledgments, and am 
 just now waited for by my hospitable Professor Miiller to go 
 to the colleges. In great haste, but greater love, I remain." 
 
 "Edinburgh, Kennedy s Hotel, 8th May, 1873. My best 
 thanks for your affectionate care for me and mine. Ellen 
 tells me that the result of her arithmetic and dates is that 
 we shall arrive at Manchester at 5-20 on Monday from the 
 Lakes, and that I will stay till Wednesday with you, and Ellen 
 will go to Liverpool on Tuesday noon, such are her necessities. 
 Continue, I pray you, your loving-kindness to me and mine. 
 With my greetings to Mrs. Ireland. Yours ever faithfully." 
 
88 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 MR. MONCURE D. CONWAY. 
 
 I consider it due to my friend, Mr. Moncure D. Conway, to 
 give here the letter of introduction which he brought to me from 
 Emerson in 1863. Through the study of his writings he had 
 been led to abandon the creed in which he was reared, and to 
 turn against the institution of slavery prevailing in Virginia. 
 His father was a planter and slave-owner in that State, and the 
 change which came over his son led to their alienation, and to 
 his departure from the paternal home. By Emerson s advice he 
 went to Cambridge University, and entered the Divinity 
 College, connected with Harvard University. His object was 
 to be near his master, and to know more of the man through 
 whom his life had been revolutionised. " Now and then he 
 came at the solicitation of the students to pass an evening in 
 conversation with them or to read an essay. On one occasion, 
 when it was announced that he was to read a lecture at 
 Concord, the Emersonians collected in some force and drove 
 in sleighs by night over the twenty miles to hear him. The 
 lecture had been postponed, but the philosopher took us to his 
 house, and we found in his conversation ample compensation 
 for our disappointment. He treated those present as the 
 guests of his thoughts, with an imperial hospitality, and the 
 questions and answers of the youthful inquirers must have 
 convinced him that if the old circle of Concord had broken up, 
 it was only into divers circles with other centres. Within the 
 next few years his influence in the Divinity College had so 
 increased that he might have been regarded as an ungowned 
 professor ; and it will not seem surprising to those who 
 remember those days that he should since have been brought 
 into official relations with the University. A great deal of my 
 time was passed at Concord ; Thoreau, Miss Peabody, Ellery 
 Channing, and one or two others of the old fraternity were 
 still there, and the society was very attractive. There were 
 courses of lectures given in the village by eminent gentlemen, 
 
MONCURE D. CONWAY. 89 
 
 and Mr. Emerson s open evenings preserved the literary 
 character of the society. The motley group described by 
 Hawthorne were no longer seen crowding in the streets of 
 Concord, but there were to be frequently met strange faces 
 which, as they passed, the villagers were apt to note with the 
 surmise that they might be famous men from far-off places." 
 Mr. Conway ultimately settled as a minister in Boston. 
 In 1863 he came to London, and afterwards succeeded to the 
 pastorate of Mr. W. J. Fox s congregation at South Place, 
 Finsbury, a position which he still holds. Mr. Conway has 
 contributed many valuable papers on Emerson and other 
 subjects to " Fraser s Magazine," between 1864 and 1874, and 
 he is a frequent writer in other periodicals. Several books 
 from his pen have made their mark, and are well known and 
 appreciated "Republican Superstitions;" "The Earthward 
 Pilgrimage;" Sacred Anthology, being Selections from Orien 
 tal Scriptures;" an elaborate "History of Demonology," in two 
 vols. ; " Legend of the Wandering Jew ; " " Thomas Carlyle : 
 Recollections of Seventeen Years Intercourse ; " " Address 
 on John Stuart Mill ; " &c., &c. Mr. Conway s abilities and 
 acquirements have gradually secured for him and his ad 
 mirable wife a very large circle of friends in London, which 
 includes many of the most distinguished men and women of 
 letters, and artists. 
 
 LETTER INTRODUCING MR. CONWAY. 
 
 " Concord, yth April, 1863. 
 
 " Mr. Moncure D. Conway, a valued neighbour of mine, 
 and a man full of public and private virtues, goes to 
 England just now, having, as I understand, both inward 
 and outward provocation to defend the cause of America 
 there. I can assure you, out of much knowledge, that 
 he is very competent to this duty, if it be one. He 
 is a Virginian by birth and breeding ; and now for many 
 years a Northerner in residence and in sentiment. He 
 
90 RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 
 
 is a man of excellent ability in speaking and writing, and I 
 grudge to spare his usefulness at home even to a contingency 
 so important as the correcting of opinion in England. In 
 making you acquainted with Mr. Conway, I charge him to 
 remind you that the first moment of American peace will be 
 the best time for you to come over and pay us and me a long 
 promised visit." 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 
 
 EMERSON S BOYHOOD. 
 
 Rufus Dawes, who knew Emerson as a boy, gives us in 
 his " Boyhood Memoirs " (1843) a si g nt f tne ^oy when he 
 was about ten years old : " It is eight o clock a.m. ; and the 
 thin gentleman in black, with a small jointed cane under his 
 arm, his eyes deeply sunken in his head, has asked that 
 spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be 
 about ten years old, to touch the bell ; it was a privilege 
 to do this ; and there he stands, that boy, whose image, 
 more than any others, is still deeply stamped upon my 
 mind, as I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why, 
 and thought him so angelic and remarkable feeling towards 
 him more than a boy s emotion, as if a new spring of 
 brotherly affection had suddenly broken loose in my heart. 
 There is no indication of turbulence and disquiet about 
 him ; but with a happy combination of energy and gentle 
 ness, how truly is he the father of the man ! He has touched 
 the bell, and while he takes his seat among his fellows, 
 he little dreams that in after times he will strike a different 
 
 note." 
 
 THE YOUNG PREACHER. 
 
 Mr. Charles T. Congdon, a veteran American journalist, in a 
 series of papers in the New York "Tribune" in 1879, entitled 
 " Reminiscences of a Journalist," gives some recollections 
 of Emerson before he had abandoned his ministerial con 
 nection with the Unitarian body : "It is curious that I should 
 first have heard the lovable voice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
 when he was the Rev. Waldo Emerson. One day there came 
 into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals, with a face all 
 
92 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the first 
 prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. Our choir 
 was a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant 
 after Emerson s voice. I remember of the sermon only that 
 it had an indefinite charm of simplicity, quaintness, and 
 wisdom, with occasional illustrations from nature, which were 
 about the most delicate and dainty things of the kind which 
 I had ever heard. I could understand them, if not the fresh 
 philosophical novelty of the discourse. Mr. Emerson preached 
 for us for a good many Sundays, lodging in the home of a 
 Quaker lady, just below ours. Seated at my own door, I 
 saw him often go by, and once in the exuberance of my 
 childish admiration I ventured to nod to him and to say 
 Good morning ! To my astonishment, he also nodded 
 and smilingly said Good morning ! and that is all the 
 conversation I ever had with the sage of Concord not 
 enough, decidedly, for a reminiscent volume about him after 
 he has left a world, which he has made wiser and happier. 
 He gave us afterward two lectures based upon his travels 
 abroad, and was at a great deal of trouble to hang up prints, 
 by way of illustration. There was a picture of the tribune in 
 the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, painted by one of our towns 
 men, and I recall Mr. Emerson s great anxiety that it should 
 have a good light, and his lamentation when a good light was 
 found to be impossible. The lectures themselves were so 
 fine enchanting we found them that I have hungered to 
 see them in print, and have thought of the evenings upon 
 which they were delivered as * true Arabian nights. " 
 
 ORATION BEFORE THE PHI-BETA-KAPPA SOCIETY, 
 CAMBRIDGE, IN 1837. 
 
 At page 1 1 of the " Memoir," allusion is made to the 
 immense influence on the youthful mind of New England, 
 produced by the oration before the Phi-Beta-Kappa Society, 
 at Cambridge, on August 31, 1837. Alcott, who was present, 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 93 
 
 says of it : " I believe that was the first adequate statement 
 of the new views that really attracted general attention. I 
 had the good fortune to hear that address ; and I shall not 
 forget the delight with which I heard it, nor the mixed 
 confusion, consternation, surprise, and wonder with which the 
 audience listened to it." Lowell, who also heard it, says the 
 delivery of this lecture "was an event without any former 
 parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured 
 in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. 
 What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering 
 with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what silence 
 of foregone dissent ! " 
 
 His HOME AND FRIENDS. 
 
 George William Curtis, an accomplished author and 
 orator, who at one time lived at Concord, thus spoke of 
 Emerson s home : " It is always morning within these doors. 
 If you have nothing to say, if you are really not an envoy 
 from some kingdom or colony of thought, and cannot cast a 
 gem upon the heaped pile, you had better pass by upon the 
 other side. For it is the peculiarity of Emerson s mind to be 
 ever on the alert. He eats no lotus, but for ever quaffs the 
 waters which engender immortal thirst. . . . The fame of 
 the philosopher attracts admiring friends and enthusiasts from 
 every quarter, and the scholarly grace and urbane hospitality 
 of the gentleman send them charmed away. . . . It is not 
 hazardous to say that the greatest questions of our day and of 
 all days have been nowhere more amply discussed, with 
 more poetic insight or more profound conviction, than in the 
 comely square white house upon the edge of the Lexington 
 turnpike. ... I chide society, I embrace solitude, he 
 says, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, 
 the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they 
 pass my gate. It is not difficult to understand his fondness 
 for the spot. He has always been familiar with it, always 
 
94 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 more or less a resident of the village. Born in Boston upon 
 the spot where Channery Place Church now stands, part of 
 his youth was passed in the Old Manse, which was built by 
 his grandfather, and in which his father was born ; and there he 
 wrote Nature. The imagination of the man who roams the 
 solitary pastures of Concord, or floats dreaming down its 
 river, will easily see its landscape upon Emerson s page. If 
 there be something oriental in his philosophy and tropical in 
 his imagination, they have yet a strong flavour of his mother 
 earth the underived sweetness of the open Concord sky, and 
 the spacious breadth of the Concord horizon." In 1845 there 
 was something like a club formed, whose members met in 
 Emerson s library on Monday evenings. This library is 
 described by Mr. Curtis. " It is a simple square room, not 
 walled with books like the den of a literary grub, nor merely 
 elegant like the ornamental retreat of a dilettante. The 
 books are arranged upon plain shelves, not in architectural 
 bookcases, and the room is hung with a few choice engra 
 vings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael 
 Angelo s Fates, which, properly enough, imparted that 
 grave serenity to the ornament of the room which is always 
 apparent in what is written there." Here the scholars met at 
 their symposium. " Plato " (Alcott) "was perpetually putting 
 apples of gold in pictures of silver ; for such was the rich ore 
 of his thoughts, coined by the deep melody of his voice. 
 Orson " ( Thoreau ) " charmed us with the secrets won 
 from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods while 
 Emerson, with the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild 
 waters, sought to bind the wide-flying embroidery of dis 
 course into a web of clear sweet sense. . . . Miles Cover- 
 dale " (Hawthorne), " a statue of night and silence, sat, a little 
 removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing imperturbably 
 upon the group ; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair 
 and eyes and suit of sable made him, in that society, the 
 black thread of mystery he weaves into his stories." 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 95 
 
 Mr. Alcott once wrote thus of Emerson : " Fortunate 
 the visitor who is admitted of a morning for the high 
 discourse, or permitted to join the poet in his afternoon 
 walks to Walden, the Cliffs, or elsewhere, hours to be 
 remembered as unlike any others in the calendar of ex 
 periences. Shall I describe them as sallies oftenest into the 
 cloudlands, into scenes and intimacies ever new, none the 
 less novel nor remote than when first experienced ? inter 
 views, however, bringing their own trail of perplexing 
 thoughts, costing some days duties, several nights sleep 
 oftentimes, to restore one to his place and poise. Certainly 
 safer not to venture without the sure credentials, unless one 
 will have his pretensions pricked, his conceits reduced in their 
 vague dimensions. But to the modest, the ingenuous, the 
 gifted welcome ! nor can any bearing be more poetic and 
 polite to all such, to youth and accomplished women 
 especially. His is a faith approaching to superstition con 
 cerning admirable persons, the rumour of excellence of any 
 sort being like the arrival of a new gift to mankind, and he 
 the first to proffer his recognition and hope." Concord was 
 for many years a kind of. Mecca to which many a devout and 
 faithful pilgrim resorted. " Young visionaries (in the words 
 of Hawthorne), to whom just so much of insight had been 
 imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to 
 seek the clew that should lead them out of their self-involved 
 bewilderment. Grey-headed theorists whose systems, at 
 first air, had imprisoned them in an iron frame-work travelled 
 painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the 
 free spirit into their own thraldom. People that had lighted 
 on a new thought, or a thought that they fancied new, came 
 to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a 
 lapidary to ascertain its value. For myself, there had been 
 epochs in my life when it, too, might have asked of this 
 prophet the master-word that should solve me the riddle of 
 the universe ; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were 
 
96 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 no question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as 
 a poet of deep beauty and austere tenderness, but sought 
 nothing from him as a philosopher." 
 
 A writer in the " Chicago Times," a few years ago, thus 
 wrote from his own knowledge of Emerson : " Although 
 one of the severest of students and most abstract of philo 
 sophers, he always emerges from his library to the family 
 circle with evident satisfaction. Notwithstanding a certain 
 gravity of manner, he is full of geniality and bonhomie, and 
 is never more eloquent and charming than when away from 
 his books and manuscripts. He is very fond of children 
 and young people; loves to talk and walk with them, and 
 listens to them as if they were revealing the oracles of the 
 gods. No man in Concord is more popular or accessible than 
 he. He is fully in sympathy with the old town ; he reveres 
 and honours it, and says he would not exchange it for New 
 York, Athens, Rome, or Paris. To get a clear and adequate 
 conception of Emerson, one must see him at home, in undress, 
 so to speak, if he may be considered as ever in uniform, who 
 is the soul of simplicity and sincerity. He is the kindest of 
 husbands, the most considerate of fathers. It is related of 
 him that when any thought strikes him, when any suggestion 
 occurs, or any pat quotation is recalled, he invariably stops 
 the thing he is doing and jots down the thought or suggestion 
 for future use or reference. Even in the middle of the night 
 he observes this habit, knowing that a good thing may be lost 
 forever unless recorded. Before his second wife got used to 
 his ways, she would ask him, when he arose to strike a light, 
 Are you ill, husband ? No, my dear, he would reply, T only 
 an idea. . . . Nobody has ever seen him out of temper, 
 or even ruffled. He is the embodiment of calm courtesy, of 
 placid refinement the very reverse of the supremely nervous, 
 irritable being an author is believed to be, and often is, in 
 truth." 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 97 
 
 Miss FREDERIKA BREMER S VISIT TO EMERSON. 
 
 In her " Homes of the New World," Miss Bremer gives the 
 following account of a visit she paid to Mr. Emerson at his 
 home in Concord, in 1849: "During the four days that I 
 remained in Emerson s house I had a real enjoyment in the 
 study of this strong, noble, eagle-like nature. Any near 
 approximation was, as it were, imperfect, because our charac 
 ters and views are fundamentally dissimilar, and that secret 
 antagonism which exists in me towards him, spite of my 
 admiration, would at times awake, and this easily called forth 
 his icy-alp nature, repulsive and chilly. But this is not the 
 original nature of the man he does not rightly thrive in it, 
 and he gladly throws it off if he can, and is much happier, as 
 one can see, in a mild and sunny atmosphere where the 
 natural beauty, of his being may breathe freely and expand 
 into blossom, touched by that of others as by a living breeze. 
 
 " I enjoyed the contemplation of him in his demeanour, 
 his expression, his mode of talking, and his every-day life, as 
 I enjoy contemplating the calm flow of a river bearing along 
 and between flowery shores large and small vessels, as I love 
 to see the eagle circling in the clouds, resting upon them and 
 its pinions. In this calm elevation Emerson allows nothing 
 to reach him, neither great nor small, neither prosperity nor 
 adversity. 
 
 " Pantheistic as Emerson is in his Philosophy, in the moral 
 view with which he regards the world and life, he is in a high 
 degree pure, noble, and severe, demanding as much from 
 himself as he demands from others. His words are severe, 
 his judgment often keen and merciless, but his demeanour is 
 alike noble and pleasing and his voice beautiful. 
 
 " One may quarrel with Emerson s thoughts, with his 
 judgment, but not with himself. That which struck me most, 
 as distinguishing him from most other human beings, is 
 nobility. He is a born nobleman. I have seen before two 
 other men born with this stamp upon them his excellency 
 G 
 
98 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 W r, in Sweden, and is the second, Emerson 
 
 the third which has it, and perhaps in a yet higher degree ; 
 and added thereto that deep intonation of voice, that expres 
 sion so mild yet so elevated at the same time. I could not 
 but think of Maria Lowell s words, If he merely mention my 
 name, I feel myself ennobled. 
 
 " I enjoyed Emerson s conversation, which flowed as 
 calmly and easily as a deep and placid river. It was anima 
 ting to me both when I agreed and when I dissented ; there 
 is always a something important in what he says, and he 
 listens well and comprehends and replies well also. But 
 whether it was the weariness of the spirit or whether a feeling 
 of esteem for his peace and freedom, I know not, but I did 
 not invite his conversation. When it came it was good, when 
 it did not come it was good also, especially if he were in the 
 room. His presence was agreeable to me. He was amiable 
 in his attention to me and in his mode of entertaining me as 
 a stranger and guest in his house. 
 
 "This is what I wished to say to Emerson, what I en 
 deavoured to say, but I know not how I did it. I cannot 
 usually express myself either easily or successfully until I 
 become warm and get beyond or through the first thoughts ; 
 and Emerson s cool, and as it were circumspect, manner 
 prevented me from getting into my own natural region. I 
 like to be with him, but when with him I am never fully 
 myself. I do not believe that I now expressed myself in 
 telligibly to him. He listened calmly, and said nothing 
 decidedly against it, nor yet seemed inclined to give his 
 views as definite. He seemed to me principally to be op 
 posed to blind or hypocritical faith. I do not wish, said 
 he, that people should pretend to know or to believe more 
 than they really do know and believe. The resurrection, the 
 continuance of our being, is granted, said he also ; we carry 
 the pledges of this in our own breast. I maintain merely 
 that we cannot say in what form or in what manner our 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 99 
 
 existence will be continued. If my conversation with 
 Emerson did not lead to anything very satisfactory, it led, 
 nevertheless, to my still more firm conviction of his nobility 
 and love of truth. He is faithful to the law in his own breast, 
 and speaks out the truth which he inwardly recognises. He 
 does right. By this means he will prepare the way for a 
 more true comprehension of religion and of life. For when 
 once this keen glance, seeing into the innermost of every 
 thing, once becomes aware of the concealed human form in 
 the tree of life like Napoleon s in the tree of St. Helena 
 then will he teach others to see it too, will point it out by 
 such strong, new, and glorious words that a fresh light will 
 spring up before many,and people will believe because theysee." 
 
 THE "BROOK FARM COMMUNITY" EXPERIMENT. 
 
 A friend of Emerson gives the following account of this 
 singular movement, which Hawthorne with his inimitable 
 and weird pencil has immortalized in that saddest of 
 romances, "The Blithedale Romance:" "It was indescribably 
 ludicrous to observe reverend doctors and other dons coming 
 out to gaze upon the extraordinary spectacle, and going 
 about as dainty ladies hold their skirts and daintily 
 step from stone to stone in a muddy street, lest they 
 be soiled. The dons seemed to doubt whether the mere 
 contact had not smirched them. But, droll in itself, it was a 
 thousandfold droller when Theodore Parker came through the 
 woods and described it. With his head set low upon his 
 gladiatorial shoulders, and his nasal voice in subtle and 
 exquisite mimicry reproducing what was truly laughable, yet 
 all with infinite bonhomie and with a genuine superiority to 
 small malice, he was as humorous as he was learned, and as 
 excellent a man as he was noble and fervent and humane a 
 preacher. On Sundays a party always went from the Farm 
 to Mr. Parker s little country church. He was there exactly 
 what he was afterwards when he preached to thousands of 
 
ioo RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 eager people in the Boston Music Hall ; the same plain, simple, 
 rustic, racy man. His congregation were his personal friends. 
 They loved him and admired him and were proud of him ; 
 and his geniality and tender sympathy, his ample knowledge 
 of things as well as of books, his jovial manliness and sturdy 
 independence, drew to him all ages and sexes and conditions. 
 The society at Brook Farm was composed of every kind of 
 person. There were the ripest scholars, men and women 
 of the most aesthetic culture and accomplishment, young 
 farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers the industrious, 
 the lazy, the conceited, the sentimental. But they were 
 associated in such a spirit and under such conditions that, 
 with some extravagance, the best of everybody appeared, and 
 there was a kind of esprit de corps, at least in the earlier or 
 golden age of the colony. There was plenty of steady, essen 
 tial hard work ; for the founding of an earthly Paradise upon a 
 rough New England farm is no pastime. But with the best 
 intention, and much practical knowledge and industry and 
 devotion, there was in the nature of the case an inevitable 
 lack of method, and the economical failure was almost a fore 
 gone conclusion. But there were never such witty potato 
 patches and such sparkling corn-fields before or since. The 
 weeds were scratched out of the ground to the music of 
 Tennyson or Browning, and the nooning was an hour as gay 
 and bright as any brilliant midnight at Ambrose s. But in 
 the midst of all was one figure, the practical farmer, an honest 
 neighbour who was not drawn to the enterprise by any 
 spiritual attraction, but was hired at good wages to super 
 intend the work, and who always seemed to be regarding the 
 whole affair with the most good-natured wonder as a pro 
 digious masquerade. Indeed, the description which Haw 
 thorne gives of him at a real masquerade of the farmers in 
 the woods depicts his attitude toward Brook Farm itself: 
 * And apart, with a shrewd Yankee observation of the scene, 
 stands our friend Orange, a thick-set, sturdy figure, enjoying 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. loi 
 
 the fun well enough, yet rather laughing with a perception of 
 its nonsensicalness than at all entering into the spirit of the 
 thing. That, indeed, was very much the attitude of Haw 
 thorne himself toward Brook Farm and many other aspects of 
 human life. But beneath all the glancing colours, the lights 
 and shadows of its surface, it was a simple, honest, practical 
 effort for wiser forms of life than those in which we find our 
 selves. The criticism of science, the sneer of literature, the 
 complaint of experience, is that man is a miserably half- 
 developed being, the proof of which is the condition of human 
 society, in which the few enjoy and the many toil. But the 
 enjoyment cloys and disappoints, and the very want of labour 
 poisons the enjoyment. Man is made body and soul. The 
 health of each requires reasonable exercise. If every man 
 did his share of the muscular work of the world, no other 
 man would be overwhelmed by it. The man who does not 
 work imposes harder toil upon him who does. Thereby the 
 first steals from the last the opportunity of mental culture, 
 and at last we reach a world of pariahs and patricians, with 
 all the inconceivable sorrow and suffering that surround us. 
 Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see that the way back 
 to the age of gold lies through justice, which will substitute 
 co-operation for competition. . . . The spirit that was 
 concentrated at Brook Farm is diffused, but it is not lost. As 
 an organised effort, after many downward changes, it failed ; 
 but those who remember the Hive, the Eyrie, the Cottage 
 when Margaret Fuller came and talked, radiant with bright 
 humour ; when Emerson and Parker and Hedge joined the 
 circle for a night or a day ; when those who may not be pub 
 licly named brought beauty and wit and social sympathy to 
 the feast ; when the practical possibilities of life seemed fairer, 
 and life and character were touched ineffaceably with good 
 influence cherish a pleasant vision which no fate can harm, 
 and remember with ceaseless gratitude the blithe days at 
 Brook Farm." 
 
102 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 MR. ALCOTT AND HIS DAUGHTERS. 
 
 The following account of the venerable Mr. Bronson Alcott, 
 Emerson s life-long friend, still living, in his eighty-third year, 
 will be read with interest. His name is inseparably associated 
 with that of his distinguished fellow-townsman. It is from a 
 paper in the New York "Home Journal," entitled "Literati at 
 Concord," November, 1 874 : 
 
 " Not far from Mr. Emerson s hemlock grove writes a 
 pilgrim of the Inter-Ocean is the picturesque home of the 
 Alcotts. It is the queerest little cottage in the world. It 
 stands at the foot of the hill which the British soldiers crossed 
 the morning, nearly a hundred years ago, when they marched 
 up from Lexington. The house is a dull brown colour, with 
 peaked roof and many a gable end, in one of which, hooded 
 by the jutting roof and festooned by some airy sprays of 
 woodbine, is the window whence * Aunt Joe looks out on the 
 sunny meadows. On each side of the front walk there is a 
 huge elm with rustic seat built around its roots, and among the 
 branches tame squirrels hold high revelry. Yonder a ham 
 mock swings under some apple trees, and around the whole 
 runs a rustic fence, built by Mr. Alcott himself. It is made 
 entirely of pine boughs, knotted, gnarled, and twisted into 
 every conceivable shape. No two pieces are alike ; the gates 
 are wonderful, and they alone would make credible the story 
 that he spent years collecting the branches. 
 
 " Mr. Alcott, the Orphic Alcott, as Curtis calls him, is 
 one of the Concord philosophers, and has his ism, of course. 
 Vegetables and conversation are his forte, and he reared his 
 family on a diet of both, apparently with great success, judg 
 ing from appearances. He ate weeds and talked and built 
 summer-houses, whose chief use was to be targets for George 
 William Curtis wit. Once he kept a young ladies school 
 in Boston, where books were discarded and teaching done 
 entirely by conversation. He was also a member of those 
 extraordinary assemblages, practicable in Boston alone, over 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 103 
 
 which Margaret Fuller presided, and it must have been a rare 
 sight to see how these two inexhaustible talkers managed to 
 tolerate each other. For it is said that Mr. Alcott s con 
 versations are very much like the Irishman s treaty the 
 reciprocity is all on one side ; or, as a Western host described 
 him once in his invitations to some friends, Come up this 
 evening. I have a philosopher on tap. 
 
 " It is all well enough to joke about Mr. Alcott till you 
 see him. Then to come face to face with this white-haired, 
 benign, gracious old man, makes levity seem irreverent. He 
 is over six feet tall, but a good deal stooped. His long, grey 
 hair falls scantily around a face beautified by the placidity and 
 dignity of old age ; he is a perfect counterpart of the pictures 
 of venerable cures one sees in French story books. His 
 manners are very simple and unaffected, and it is his great 
 delight to gather some of his daughters young friends in his 
 cosy, crimson-lined study and chat with them. Mr. Emerson 
 esteems him highly, but his books seem to be less appre 
 ciated by his own people than they are abroad, a fate common 
 to prophets if not philosophers. His most valuable work is 
 a journal faithfully kept for fifty years, carefully bound, 
 indexed, and with letters and other valuable papers ranged 
 on his library shelves. This taste for minute detail, his 
 orderly arrangement, his distinguished associates, and the 
 number of years covered by the record will make these 
 volumes priceless to historians or biographers. If in Emer 
 son s study perpetual twilight reigns, in Alcott s it is always 
 noon. The sun shines in it all day long, the great fireplace 
 roars, and the warm crimson hangings temper the sunlight 
 and reflect the firelight. Quaint mottoes and pictures hang 
 on the walls. The most noticeable picture is a photograph 
 of Carlyle. It is what is called a Cameron photograph. 
 An English woman of rank takes these photographs of dis 
 tinguished men just for her own amusement. The camera is 
 set out of focus, the heads nearly life-size, and the general 
 
104 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 effect is singular interesting, if nothing else. All you can 
 see against a black background is the indistinct outlines of a 
 shaggy white head and beard and sharp features. With all 
 deference to Mr. Carlyle, we must say that he looks like an 
 old beggar. 
 
 " Miss May Alcott, a fine-looking, stylish woman, is an 
 artist whom the critic of critics, Ruskin, has declared to be 
 the only successful copyist of Turner. She surely has one 
 attribute not usually allied to her profession the most gene 
 rous interest in other artists not only by word of mouth, but 
 with substantial endeavour. She brought home with her 
 several English water colours, for whose artists she is trying 
 to find American patrons. She herself paints in oil and 
 water colours, and sketches in crayons, charcoal,, sepia, ink, 
 and pencil, and is one of the most popular Boston teachers. 
 Her studio at home, a most cobwebby, disorderly, fascinating 
 little den, is frescoed with profiles of her acquaintances that 
 is the toll cheerfully paid by her visitors they must be drawn 
 on the wall. She is known to the general reading public 
 through her illustrations of Little Women/ in which she 
 fell far short of her usual ability. She and Louisa planned 
 subsequently a charming little book called * Concord 
 Sketches, which it is a great pity was never made public. 
 Beside painting, Miss May models in clay sometimes. A 
 head of Mercury and all sorts of pretty little sketches from 
 her hands adorn her home, which is made a still sunnier 
 remembrance to all visitors by her brightness and cordiality. 
 [This lady died some years ago.] 
 
 " Louisa Alcott, the elder of the two, the darling of all 
 American nurseries, is something of an invalid. She is 
 amiable and interesting, and, like her sister, sociable, unless 
 you unluckily approach her in her character of author, and 
 then the porcupine bristles. There is no favour to be curried 
 with her or Gail Hamilton by talking shop. Little Women 
 is drawn chiefly from Miss Alcott s own home life. Amy the 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 105 
 
 golden-haired, is May, Hemmie and Demmie are her two 
 little nephews, Mr. and Mrs. Marsh her father and mother ; 
 she herself is Jo, of course. When the book was first pub 
 lished, children used to come by the dozen from all parts of 
 the country to see Jo. To the calls of these little pilgrims 
 she always presented herself cheerfully, though she used to be 
 infinitely amused at the unmistakable disappointment of her 
 young admirers when they saw this delicate, practical-looking 
 lady, slightly stooped, for their rollicking, romping, nimble Jo. 
 Miss Alcott struck a rich vein of popularity and more sub 
 stantial reward in her juvenile books, though she herself con 
 siders Hospital Sketches the best of her writings. 
 
 " Some four or five years ago she went into a Boston book 
 store to leave an order, which the clerk told her could not be 
 attended to, * because, said he, not knowing to whom he 
 spoke, * we shall be busy all day packing books for a Western 
 firm. Two weeks ago we sent ten thousand copies of " Little 
 Women " out there, and to-day comes an order for twenty 
 thousand more. As soon as they got out of the store her 
 companion turned to her with some congratulatory expression. 
 
 " Ah! said Miss Alcott, drawing a long breath, I have 
 waited fifteen years for this day. 
 
 " Mrs. Alcott is a beautiful old lady, herself something of 
 a writer, or, as one of her daughters lovingly says, the 
 brightest one of the family. " 
 
 " MONDAY CONVERSATIONS " AT CONCORD. 
 
 A writer in the " Boston Journal" (April 27, 1872,) gives an 
 account of Emerson s "Monday Conversations" and "Literary 
 Meetings" at the Mechanics Hall, Concord: "A venerable 
 gentleman, well preserved, serene and elegant in manner, takes 
 his seat upon the platform of a cosy and comfortable hall, at 
 three o clock on a Monday afternoon, when the rush and roar 
 of business in practical Boston is at its height, and, gently 
 arranging his papers before him, looks calmly around him 
 
io6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON . 
 
 upon the large audience gathered to hear him. It is the can- 
 serie which he has undertaken the familiar and delicate 
 enunciation of his ideas in the form invented by our sprightly 
 yet thoughtful French friends and the ladies throng to hear 
 him in greater numbers even than when he appears in the 
 attitude of the lecturer. A red curtain hangs behind him, 
 setting off in sharp relief the keen and noble outline of his 
 features the head thrown forward with the poise of daring 
 assertion and the face now animated with all the warmth 
 and enthusiasm of a genuine poetic admiration, now saddened 
 and reserved with the diffidence of the habitual student and 
 the man of reverie. Side-lights from each wing of the stage 
 throw a sharp light upon the ample manuscript on the reading- 
 desk, for the philosopher and poet is now rapidly nearing 
 seventy years of age, and the fatigues of the lecture-room are 
 easier felt than thirty years ago. Yet the same consummate 
 magnetism lingers around and upon every word and phrase ; 
 there is the same thrilling earnestness of antithesis, the same 
 delight and gloating over poetry and excellence of expression, 
 as of old. There is no other man in America who can, by the 
 mere force of what he says, enthrall and dominate an audience. 
 Breathless attention is given, although now and then his voice 
 falls away so that those seated farthest off have to strain every 
 nerve to catch the words. The grand condensation, the un 
 faltering and almost cynical brevity of expression are at first 
 startling and vexatious ; but presently one yields to the charm, 
 and finds his mind in the proper assenting mood. The con 
 versations attract more women than men, but they are of the 
 more intellectual and reflective class of our New England 
 women, who find in the intensity and wonderful precision of 
 Mr. Emerson s mind something inexpressibly pleasing. Nor 
 are they blind worshippers merely at a shrine before which 
 they kneel in wonder ; but the large majority appreciate and 
 enjoy to the uttermost the continual, unresting surging of 
 thought thrust upon them. . . . Mr. Emerson is greeted 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 107 
 
 by a class of people who are rarely seen together on any other 
 public occasion in Boston. Aside from the large number of 
 professed admirers and disciples, and the literati, who are pre 
 sent each time that he speaks or reads in Boston or vicinity, 
 the men who go to hear him are mainly of the desire-to-be- 
 dazzled-and-shocked order, who seem disagreeably surprised 
 when they do comprehend what he says. Mr. Emerson s 
 terse and vivid sentences cling in the memory, and will not be 
 effaced. The causerie of yesterday afternoon gave an 
 hundred ideas upon poetry, and the relations of nature to man, 
 which will be henceforth grafted inseparably upon the common 
 mind. The emphatic New Englander listens, incredulously 
 at first, but finishes by saying, That s so ! Ideals and here 
 tofore far-remote abstractions are brought down to the sphere 
 of daily life admirably illustrated made plain, and tethered 
 where even the humblest can appreciate them as realities. 
 And in all cases it seems to the listener as if the phrases 
 uttered were sculptured in the thought of the speaker as if they 
 had been so from the beginning, and could never be otherwise." 
 
 EMERSON AND HIS DAUGHTER. 
 
 A correspondent of the " Cincinnati Commercial," giving 
 an account of a lecture delivered at Cincinnati in July, 1876, 
 thus speaks of the beautiful relation between Mr. Emerson 
 and his daughter: "Into the Congressional library walked 
 Emerson, one of the immortals, and smiled his celestial smile, 
 as if two such things as mercury and the thermometer were 
 not. His daughter Ellen by his side, and as she is the incar 
 nation of common sense, she also was sublimely indifferent to 
 the weather. When this rare spirit (far be the day) passes 
 forever from mortal sight we shall hear more from this 
 daughter Ellen. For she, in all likelihood, will be the 
 executor of his papers and the delineator of that deep, still, 
 inward life. It is memorable that the men who have achieved 
 the most in letters and in science have always had a woman 
 
io8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 standing close beside them within the veil, as Carl Schurz 
 says in homely phrase : Handing them the bricks while they 
 build/ and holding up their hands when they were weary. It 
 has just come to light how much Sir William Herschel owed 
 to the tender and tireless sister who, through a lifetime of 
 nights, stood by his side while others slept ; who polished till 
 her hands grew numb the mirrors which were to reflect back 
 for him immensity ; who had no ambition in life but to be his 
 servant ; who underrated her own achievements that she 
 might exalt his, and, as her clear vision swept the paths of 
 the spheres, shrank from her own discoveries of worlds, lest it 
 might prove a shadow on his fame. So the great American 
 seer has a woman walking close by his side, taking the very 
 thoughts from his mind and translating them for the world, 
 and this woman is his daughter." 
 
 LITERARY OPINIONS. 
 
 A few years ago, an English literary gentleman visited 
 Emerson at his home in Concord, and brought away many of 
 his opinions on literary and other subjects. A few of these 
 are here recorded : " Wordsworth s ode on Immortality 
 touches the high water mark of modern literature. 
 Walter Savage Landor will always be read by the select 
 few. Matthew Arnold is growing too diffusive. His sweet 
 ness and light have become as heavy as lead with too much 
 repetition. He liked Arnold s critical essays very much, but 
 was not partial to his poetry. Sainte-Beuve he considered 
 the great French writer. He said * I don t meddle with 
 Auguste Comte, in reply to the question whether he was 
 interested in the positive philosophy. . . . Thoreauwasa 
 true genius, and so great was his mastery of the phenomena 
 of nature that it would need another Linnaeus, as well as a 
 poet, properly to edit his writings. ... Of Buckle 
 he spoke with admiration, comparing his erudition with 
 Gibbon s fulness of learning, and cited his chapters on France 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 109 
 
 in particular as a splendid contribution to history. . . . 
 Carlyle being mentioned, Emerson defended him from 
 Margaret Fuller s criticism in her letters, and said that 
 Carlyle purposely made exaggerated statements, merely to 
 astonish his listeners. His attitude toward America during our 
 war was unfortunate, but no more than could be expected. " 
 Mr. Emerson s visitor records what Carlyle is reported to have 
 said regarding a distinguished English poet of the " fleshly 
 school," but the pronunciamento is so scathing and unprintable 
 that I dare not venture to give it currency. 
 
 THE "SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY" AT CONCORD, 1880. 
 
 The Concord Correspondent of the "Chicago Tribune" (Sep 
 tember, 1 880) gives the following sketch of Emerson at the age 
 of seventy-seven: "An old man with large eyes, prominent 
 nose, and awkward carriage, may often be seen shyly stealing 
 into the School of Philosophy, just after the beginning of the 
 lecture. Passing through the aisle on tiptoe, he seats himself 
 in a huge ear-lap chair at the left of the platform. The lips of 
 the Sphinx are sealed, and their peaceful expression and the 
 far-away look in the eyes would seem to indicate that the dis 
 cussion going on has not sufficient interest to draw him from 
 the calm joy of reverie. But the way in which he leans 
 forward now and then to catch the tones of an indistinct 
 speaker, and the promptitude with which certain little red 
 spots appear on his cheeks whenever a personal allusion or 
 quotation is made, show that, after all, he is listening with 
 respectful attention. Emerson has a noble propensity to 
 overrate the works of his contemporaries. He has such a 
 sublime faith that the coming man will eventually arrive, 
 that he is always on the look out for him, and finds his John 
 the Baptists in eccentric Thoreau and uncouth Whitman, in 
 whom so many see only insanity. And especially does his 
 unaffected humility place an exaggerated estimate upon the 
 works and words of his personal friends. Thoreau was an 
 
i io RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 original genius, and his mother used to say : Why, how 
 much Mr. Emerson talks like Henry ! Some people are 
 unkind enough to say that the boot was squarely on the other 
 foot, and that Thoreau was only a parody of his great friend. 
 While such statements are grossly unjust, it remains true that 
 the fame of the poet naturalist owes much to the friendship of 
 Emerson, who not only gave him warm encouragement and 
 unstinted praise, but made himself pecuniarily responsible 
 in order that Walden and The Week might be given 
 to the world by a hesitating publisher. Emerson s house was 
 thrown open last Sunday evening, and parlour and study and 
 hall were filled with friends from the town and the School of 
 Philosophy. Mr. and Mrs. Emerson (whose quaint, sweet face 
 and simple, old-fashioned attire suggested to one lady that 
 She might have just stepped off the Mayflower } bustled 
 around, shaking hands and arranging chairs for the guests. 
 Then Mr. Emerson rapped upon a door-jamb and said : 
 Some of our friends have something to say to us, and we 
 shall be glad to have them begin. Mr. Channing, Mr. Alcott, 
 Miss Peabody and Professor Harris did most of the talking. 
 Mrs. Emerson made a single remark, but the host took no 
 part whatever. The seventy-seventh birthday of Mr. Emer 
 son occurred recently. He feels the weight of years, and 
 though he walks about briskly, his memory is failing, and he 
 is often thrown into - pathetic confusion by his treacherous 
 faculty. It seems very difficult for him to grasp a new name. 
 Joseph Cook called upon him just after Moody and Sankey 
 had been in Boston, and he inquired of his visitor if he had 
 been attending the ( Mosely and Sukey meetings ! He 
 never appeared in public without his faithful maiden daughter 
 Ellen, who has the face of a saint and the garb of a Quakeress. 
 She has charge of his manuscripts, and when asked, a few 
 days ago, what lecture her father proposed to read before the 
 school, replied that * she had not decided. She intimated, 
 furthermore, that she might put a veto on his lecturing at all." 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. ill 
 
 A TOUCHING CONVERSATION WITH HIM IN 1881. 
 
 A visitor at Concord, in August, 1881, records the following 
 touching conversation with Emerson. " Just on the outskirts 
 of the village, a little way back from the street, stands the old- 
 fashioned country-seat which is sacred as being the home of 
 the Jove of the Concord Immortals, Emerson. Mr. Emerson 
 himself came to the door to greet me with a still active step, 
 and with his placid, inscrutable countenance unchanged in 
 the eight years since I had seen him last. A vein of sadness 
 ran through his striking words as we conversed, which now 
 and then deepened into indescribable pathos as he spoke of 
 himself: 
 
 " I am visiting the Summer School, and called to pay my 
 respects to you, I said. 
 
 " * I thank you, he replied, and a slight difficulty in articu 
 lation was noticeable as he spoke. I am glad to see you ; 
 yet I fear I can do little. I can only disappoint those who 
 come to see me. I find that I am losing myself, and .1 wander 
 away from the matter that I have in mind. There was little 
 to be said, but I made some remark, and he continued : 
 
 " I cannot say much. When I begin I lose myself. And 
 so when my friends come to see me I run away, instead of 
 going to meet them, that I may not make them suffer. 
 
 " I spoke of an examining committee on which he had 
 served at Cambridge, and his face lightened for an instant. 
 Yes, yes, he said, and made some personal enquiry of me. 
 ( But I see no one now, he added. 
 
 " Your general health is good, I trust ? I asked. 
 
 " Yes, my health is good enough, he replied indifferently. 
 Then he said slowly, with a wonderful pathos in his voice : 
 But when one s wits begin to fail, it is time for the heavens 
 to open and take him away. 
 
 " He turned sadly aside, and I left him. More keenly than 
 anyone else can do, the philosopher realises that age is casting 
 a shadow upon his memory and slowly chilling his faculties." 
 
112 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 MR. HOLYOAKE S VISIT. 
 
 Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, in the latest chapter of his 
 recent American tour in the " Co-operative News," describes 
 a visit he paid to Emerson : " Though tall, he is still erect, 
 and has the bright eye and calm grace of manner we knew 
 when he was in England long years ago. In European eyes, 
 his position among men of letters in America is as that of 
 Carlyle among English writers ; with the added quality, 
 as I think, of greater braveness of thought and clearness of 
 sympathy. . . . Friends had told me that age seemed 
 now a little to impair Mr. Emerson s memory, but I found his 
 recollection of England accurate and full of detail. English 
 men told me with pride that in the dark days of the war, when 
 American audiences were indignant at England, Emerson 
 would put in his lectures some generous passage concerning 
 this country, and raising himself erect, pronounce it in a 
 defiant tone, as though he threw the words at his audience. 
 More thap any other writer Emerson gives me the impression 
 of one who sees facts alive and knows their ways, and who 
 writes nothing that is mean or poor." 
 
 Two CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES. 
 Some twenty years ago Emerson addressed a literary 
 society, during Commencement, at Middlebury, Vermont, and 
 when he ended, the President called upon a clergyman to con 
 clude the service with prayer. Then arose a Massachusetts 
 minister, who stepped into the pulpit Mr. Emerson had just 
 left, and uttered a remarkable prayer, of which this was one 
 sentence : " We beseech Thee, O Lord, to deliver us from 
 ever hearing any more such transcendental nonsense as we 
 have just listened to from this sacred desk." After the bene 
 diction, Mr. Emerson asked his next neighbour the name of 
 the officiating clergyman, and when falteringly answered, 
 with gentle simplicity remarked: "He seemed a very con 
 scientious, plain-spoken man," and went on his peaceful way. 
 
MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS. 113 
 
 " Mr. Giles, the Irish essayist, told me a nice little story of 
 Emerson, with which this chapter may conclude. We had a 
 rich old merchant, who was a tireless talker, with whom our 
 lecturers sometimes lodged. The good-hearted gentleman 
 caught Mr. Giles one evening and kept him a complaisant 
 but dreadfully weary listener, morally button-holed, so to 
 speak, until nearly sunrise. Then, as they parted for the 
 night, or rather for the morning, the garrulous and gratified 
 monologist said: I like you, Mr. Giles ; you are willing to 
 hear what I have to say ; Mr. Emerson was here the other 
 night, after he had lectured, and he said he did not wish to 
 hear me talk that he had rather go to bed. Not that the 
 kindest of men meant to be uncivil he merely spoke with 
 the simplicity and directness of a Greek philosopher." 
 
 THE LATEST GLIMPSES OF EMERSON IN HIS HOME. 
 
 One of the latest glimpses we have of Emerson, in his home 
 surroundings, is from the journal of Walt Whitman, the Ame 
 rican poet, who paid a visit to Concord in the Autumn of last 
 year (iSSi). He dined with Emerson and his family, and 
 spent several hours on two successive days in their company. 
 The following sentences I cull from Whitman s journal now 
 before me : 
 
 " Camden, N. /"., Dec. i, 1881. During my last three or 
 four months jaunt to Boston and through New England, I 
 spent such good days at Concord, and with Emerson, seeing 
 him under such propitious circumstances, in the calm, peace 
 ful, but most radiant, twilight of his old age (nothing in the 
 height of his literary action and expression so becoming and 
 impressive), that I must give a few impromptu notes of it all. 
 So I devote this cluster entirely to the man, to the place, the 
 past, and all leading up to, and forming, that memorable and 
 peculiar Personality, now near his 8oth year as I have just 
 seen him there, in his home, silent, sunny, surrounded by a 
 beautiful family." 
 H 
 
114 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " Concord, Mass., Sept. ij. Never had I a better piece of 
 better luck befall me : a long and blessed evening with Emer 
 son, in a way I couldn t have wished better or different. For 
 nearly two hours he has been placidly sitting where I could 
 see his face in the best light near me. Mrs. S. s back parlour 
 well fill d with people, neighbours, many fresh and charming 
 faces, women, mostly young, but some old. My friend A. B. 
 Alcott and his daughter Louisa were there early. A good 
 deal of talk, the subject Henry Thoreau some new glints of 
 his life and fortunes, with letters to and from him one of the 
 best by Margaret Fuller, others by Horace Greeley, W. H. 
 Channing, etc. one from Thoreau himself, most quaint and 
 interesting. My seat and the relative arrangement were such 
 that, without being rude or anything of the kind, I could just 
 look squarely at E., which I did a good part of the two hours. 
 On entering he had spoken very briefly, easily and politely to 
 several of the company, then settled himself in his chair, a 
 trifle pushed back, and, though a listener and apparently an 
 alert one, remained silent through the whole talk and discus 
 sion. And so, there Emerson sat, and I looking at him. A 
 good colour in his face, eyes clear, with the well-known expres 
 sion of sweetness, and the old clear-peering aspect quite the 
 same." 
 
 " Next Day. Several hours at E. s house, and dinner there. 
 An old familiar house (he has been in it thirty-five years), 
 with the surrounding furnishment, roominess, and plain 
 elegance and fulness, signifying democratic ease, sufficient 
 opulence, and an admirable old-fashioned simplicity modern 
 luxury, with its mere sumptuousness and affectation, either 
 touched lightly upon, or ignored altogether, OPcourse the 
 best of the present occasion (Sunday, September i8th, 1881) 
 was the sight of E. himself. As just said, a healthy colour in 
 the cheeks, and good light in the eyes, cheery expression, and 
 just the amount of talking that best suited, namely, a word or 
 short phrase only where needed, and almost always with a 
 
MR. LOWELVS VERSE. 115 
 
 smile. Besides Emerson himself, Mrs. E., with their daughter 
 Ellen, the son Edward and his wife, with my friend F. S. and 
 Mrs. S., and others, relatives and intimates. Mrs. Emerson, 
 resuming the subject of the evening before (I sat next to her), 
 gave me further and fuller information about Thoreau, who 
 years ago, during Mr. E. s absence in Europe in 1848, had 
 lived for some time in the family, by invitation. 
 
 " Let me conclude by the thought, after all the rest is said, 
 that most impresses me about Emerson. Amid the utter 
 delirium-disease called book-making, its feverish cohorts fill 
 ing our world with every form of dislocation, morbidity, and 
 special type of anemia or exceptionalism (with the propelling 
 idea of getting the most possible money, first of all), how 
 comforting to know of an author who has, through a long 
 life, and in spirit, written as honestly, spontaneously, and 
 innocently, as the sun shines or the wheat grows the truest, 
 sanest, most moral, sweetest literary man on record unsoiled 
 by pecuniary or any other warp ever teaching the law 
 within ever loyally outcropping his own self only his own 
 poetic and devout soul ! If there be a Spirit above that looks 
 down and scans authors, here is one at least in whom it might 
 be well pleased." 
 
 EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 
 
 From "A Fable for Critics." 
 BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, 
 Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on. . . 
 A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range 
 Has Olympus for one pole, for t other the Exchange ; 
 lie seems, to my thinking (although I m afraid 
 The comparison must, long ere this, have been made), 
 A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian s gold mist 
 And the Gascon s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl co-exist ; 
 All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he s got 
 To I don t (nor they either) exactly know what; 
 For though he builds glorious temples, tis odd 
 He leaves never a doorway to get in a god. 
 
ii6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Tis refreshing to old-fashioned people like me 
 To meet such a primitive Pagan as he, 
 In whose mind all creation is duly respected 
 As parts of himself, just a little projected; 
 And who s willing to worship the stars and the sun, 
 A convert to nothing but Emerson. 
 So perfect a balance there is in his head, 
 That he talks of things sometimes as if they were dead ; 
 Life, nature, love, God, and affairs of that sort, 
 He looks at as merely ideas ; in short, 
 As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet, 
 Of such vast extent that our earth s a mere dab in it; 
 Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her 
 Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer ; 
 You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration, 
 Each figure, word, gesture just fits the occasion, 
 With the quiet precision of science he ll sort em, 
 But you can t help suspecting the whole & post mortem. 
 There are persons, mole-blind to the soul s make and style, 
 Who insist on a likeness twixt him and Carlyle ; 
 To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer, 
 Carlyle s the more burly, but E. is the rarer ; 
 He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier 
 If C. s an original, E. s more peculiar; 
 That he s more of a man you might say of the one, 
 Of the other he s more of an Emerson ; 
 C. s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb - 
 E., the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim; 
 The one s two-thirds Norseman, the other half Greek, 
 Where the one s most abounding, the other s to seek ; 
 C. s generals require to be seen in the mass, 
 E. s specialities gain if enlarged by the glass ; 
 C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues, 
 And rims common-sense things with mystical hues, 
 E. sits in a mystery calm and intense, 
 And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense; 
 C. shews you how every-day matters unite 
 With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night, 
 While E. in a plain, prseternatural way, 
 Makes mysteries matters of mere every day. 
 E. is rather like Flaxman, lines straight and severe, 
 And a colourless outline, but full, round, and clear ; 
 To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accords 
 The design of a white marble statue in words. 
 C. labours to get at the centre, and then 
 Take a reckoning from there of his actions and men ; 
 E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted, 
 And, given himself, has whatever is wanted. 
 
MANCHESTER SPEECH. 117 
 
 EMERSON S SPEECH IN MANCHESTER. 
 [This speech (referred to in "Memoir," p. 14) was delivered 
 at a soiree, held under the auspices of the Manchester 
 Athenaeum, at the Free Trade Hall, in November, 1847, 
 under the presidency of Sir A. Alison, the historian, and at 
 which Richard Cobden and other political leaders were 
 present. Of this meeting Mr. Emerson says in his " English 
 Traits:" "A few days after my arrival in Manchester, in 
 November, 1847, the Manchester Athenaeum gave its annual 
 banquet in the Free Trade Hall. With other guests, I was 
 invited to be present, and to address the company. In 
 looking over recently a newspaper report of my remarks, I 
 inclined to reprint it as fully expressing the feeling with which 
 I entered England, and which agrees well enough with the 
 more deliberate results of better acquaintance recorded in the 
 foregoing pages. Sir Archibald Alison, the historian, presided, 
 and opened the meeting with a speech. He was followed by 
 Mr. Cobden, Lord Brackley, and others, among whom was 
 Mr. Cruikshank, one of the contributors to Punch. Mr. 
 Dickens s letter of apology for his absence was read. Mr. 
 Jerrold, who had been announced, did not appear."] 
 
 Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, It is pleasant to me to meet this great and 
 brilliant company, and doubly pleasant to see the faces of so many distinguished 
 persons on this platform. But I have known all these persons already. When I 
 was at home they were as near to me as they are to you. The arguments of the 
 League and its leader are known to all the friends of trade. The gaieties and 
 genius, the political, the social, the parietal wit of "Punch" go duly every 
 fortnight to every boy and girl in Boston and New York. Sir, when I came to 
 sea I found the "History of Europe" on the ship s cabin table, the property of 
 the captain ; a sort of programme or playbill to tell the seafaring New Englander 
 what he shall find on his landing here. And as for Dombey, sir, there is no land 
 where paper exists to print on where it is not found ; no man who can read that 
 does not read it ; and if he cannot he finds some charitable pair of eyes that can, 
 and hears it. But these things are not for me to say; these compliments, though 
 true, would better come from one who felt and understand these merits more. I 
 am not here to exchange civilities with you, but rather to speak of that which 
 I am sure interests these gentlemen more than their own praises; of that 
 which is good in holidays and working days, the same in one century 
 and in another century. That which lures a solitary American in the woods 
 
n8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 with a wish to see England is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race, its 
 commanding sense of right and wrong, the love and devotion to that this is 
 the imperial trait which arms them with the sceptre of the globe. It is this 
 which lies at the foundation of that aristocratic character which certainly 
 wanders into strange vagaries, so that its origin is often lost sight of, but which, if 
 it should lose this, would find itself paralysed ; and in trade, and in the mechanic s 
 shop, gives that honesty in performance, that thoroughness and solidity of work, 
 which is a national characteristic. This conscience is one element, and the other 
 is that loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship, that homage of man to man, run 
 ning through all classes the electing of worthy persons to a certain fraternity, to 
 acts of kindness and warm and staunch support, from year to year, from youth to 
 age, which is alike lovely and honourable to those who render and those who 
 receive it; which stands in strong contrast with the superficial attachments of 
 other races, their excessive courtesy, and short-lived connection. You will think 
 me very pedantic, gentlemen, but, holiday though it be, I have not the smallest 
 interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys ; and I 
 think it just, in this time of gloom and commercial disaster, of affliction and beg 
 gary in these districts, that, on these very accounts I speak of, you should not 
 fail to keep your literary anniversary. I seem to hear you say that, for all that is 
 come and gone yet, we will not reduce by one chaplet or one oak leaf the braveries 
 of our annual feast. For I must tell you, I was given to understand in my child 
 hood, that the British island from which my forefathers came was no lotus garden, 
 no paradise of serene sky and roses, and music and merriment all the year round ; 
 no, but a cold, foggy, mournful country, where nothing grew well in the open air, 
 but robust men and virtuous women, and these of a wonderful fibre and endurance ; 
 that their best parts were slowly revealed ; their virtues did not come out until 
 they quarrelled they did not strike twelve the first time ; good lovers, good 
 haters, and you could know little about them till you had seen them long, and 
 little good of them till you had seen them in action ; that in prosperity they 
 were moody and dumpish, but in adversity they were grand. Is it not true, 
 sir, that the wise ancients did not praise the ship parting with flying colours 
 from the port, but only that brave sailer which came back with torn sheets 
 and battered sides, stripped of her banners, but having ridden out the storm? 
 And so, gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England, with her possessions, 
 honours, and trophies, and also with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering 
 around her, irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which can 
 not be suddenly changed ; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new and 
 all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing populations I see 
 her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days 
 before ; indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy 
 day, and that in storm of battle and calamity she has a secret vigour and a pulse 
 like a cannon. I see her in her old age, not decrepit, but young, and still daring 
 to believe in her power of endurance and expansion. Seeing this, I say, All hail ! 
 mother of nations, mother of heroes, with strength still equal to the time ; still 
 wise to entertain and swift to execute the policy which the mind and heart of man 
 kind requires in the present hour, and thus only hospitable to the foreigner, and 
 truly a home to the thoughtful and generous who are born in the soil. So be it ! 
 so let it be. If it be not so, if the courage of England goes with the chances of a 
 
ARTICLES IN PERIODICALS. 119 
 
 commercial crisis, I will go back to the capes of Massachusetts, and my own 
 Indian stream, and say to my own countrymen, the old race are all gone, and the 
 elasticity and hope of mankind must henceforth remain on the Alleghany ranges, 
 or nowhere. 
 
 ARTICLES ON EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS IN THE 
 ENGLISH AND AMERICAN PERIODICALS. 
 
 EMERSON, R. W. (R. Buchanan) Broadway, 2 : 223. (J. Burroughs) Galaxy, 
 21 : 254, 543. (Delia M. Colton) Continental Monthly, I : 49. (G. Gil- 
 fillan) Tait s Magazine, New Series, 15 : 17. (J. O Connor) Catholic World, 
 27 : 90. (G. Prentice) Methodist Quarterly, 24 : 357. Dublin Review, 
 26: 152. North British Review, 47: 319. Westminster Review, 33: 
 345. Same art., Living Age, 16 : 97. Blackwood, 62 : 643. (F. H. 
 Underwood) North American Review, 130 : 485. 
 
 Address, Jtily, 1838. Boston Quarterly, I : 500. 
 
 Address on Forefather s Day. (I. N. Tarbox) New Englander, 30 : 175. 
 
 and his Writings. (G. Barmby) Hewitt s Journal, 2 : 315. Christian 
 
 Review, 26 : 640. 
 
 and History. Southern Literary Messenger, 18 : 249. 
 
 and Landor. Living Age, 52: 371. 
 
 and the Pantheists. (H. Hemming) New Dominion Monthly, 8 : 65. 
 
 and Transcendentalism. American Whig Review, I : 233. 
 
 and Spencer and Martineati. (W. R. Alger) Christian Examiner, 84 : 257. 
 
 Conduct of Life. (N. Porter) New Englander, 19 : 496. Eclectic 
 
 Review, 46 : 365. 
 
 Ctdtureof. Eraser, 78 : I. Same art., Living Age, 98: 358. 
 
 Essays. Democratic Review, 16 : 589. Eclectic Magazine, 18 : 546. 
 
 Living Age, 4 : 139; 23 : 344. (C. C. Felton) Christian Examiner, 30 : 252. 
 Eclectic Review, 76 : 667. Boston Quarterly, 4 : 391. Biblical Review, I : 
 148. Eclectic Review, 76 : 667. Prospective Review, I : 232. Tait s 
 Magazine, new series, 8 : 666. 
 
 Facts about. Chambers Journal, 21 : 382. 
 
 Homes and Haunts of. (F. B. Sanborn) Scribner, 17: 496. 
 
 Lectttres at Manchester, England. Hewitt s Journal, 2 : 370. 
 
 Lechires and Writings of. Every Saturday, 3 : 680 ; 4 : 381. 
 
 Letters and Social Aims. International Review, 3 : 249. 
 
 New Lectures. New Englander, 8: 166. Christian Review, 15 : 249. 
 
 Poems of. (C. E. Norton) Nation, 4 : 430. American Whig Review, 
 
 6 : 197. (C. A. Bartol) Christian Examiner, 42 : 250. Southern Literary 
 Messenger, 13 : 292. Brownson, 4: 262. Democratic Review, I : 319. 
 Christian Remembrancer, 15 : 300. 
 
 Prose Works. Catholic World, II : 202. 
 
 Recent Lectures and Writings. Fraser, 75 : 586. Same art., Living 
 
 Age, 93: 581. 
 
120 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 EMERSON, R. W. Representative Men. (C. A. Bartol) Christian Examiner, 48 : 
 314. Eclectic Review, 95 : 568. British Quarterly, II : 281. 
 
 Society and Solitude. Fraser, 82 : I. 
 
 Writings. (F. H. Hedge) Christian Examiner, 38 : 87. (J. W. Alex 
 ander) Princeton Review, 13 : 539. 
 
 FOREIGN TRANSLATIONS OF, AND ARTICLES ON, EMERSON. 
 
 Edgar Quinet, in a volume of Lectures on " Christianity and the French Revolu 
 tion," 1845, devotes one to " America and the Reformation," in which he 
 thus expresses his opinion of Emerson : "In this North America, which is 
 pictured to us as so materialistic, I find the most ideal writer of our times. 
 Contrast the formulas of German Philosophy with the inspiration, the initia 
 tive, the moral elan of Emerson. The author I have just named is proof 
 enough that bold pioneers are at work in America pursuing the quest of truth 
 in the moral world. What we announce in Europe from the summit of a 
 revived past, he also announces from the germinating solitude of a world 
 absolutely new. On the virgin soil of the new world behold the footsteps of a 
 man, and a man who is moving toward the future by the same road that we 
 are going." 
 
 In the "Revue Independante," 1846, the Countess D Agoult, under her pseu 
 donym of "Daniel Stern," has an article on "The Literary Tendencies of 
 America," in which Emerson is highly appreciated. Philarete Chasles also 
 wrote about him. 
 
 Emile Montegut, in the " Revue des Deux Mondes," has written on Emerson in 
 an article entitled "An American Thinker and Poet," 1847. " Hero Worship : 
 Emerson and Carlyle," 1850. " English Character judged by an American," 
 1856. 
 
 Herman Grimm, in 1857, published a translation of Emerson s "Goethe" and 
 "Shakespeare" in "Representative Men," with a criticism on his writings. 
 Some sentences from this criticism, as well as from another work by the same 
 author, "New Essays," will be found at page 36, "Memoir. 
 
 H. Wolff gives a life of Emerson in a Dutch work, published at Bois le Due, 
 1871, entitled " Prophets of Modern Date." 
 
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