•ltKllfT\
LIBRARY 1
UNIVERSITY Of I
CALIFORNIA/
THE CENTENARY
OF THE BIKTH OF
Emerson
AS OBSERVED IN CONCORD MAY 25 1903
UNDER THE DIRECTION OF
THE, SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD
Rhodora f if the napes auk thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
at C[jc Ktoetstte
FOR THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD
JUNE 1903
MAlfi L2B«
COPYRIGHT 1903 BY JOHN SHEPARD KEYES
PS
EMERSON
"WHEREVER the English language is spoken
throughout the world his fame is established and
secure. . . . But we, his neighbors and townsmen,
feel that he was ours. He was descended from the
founders of the town. He chose our village as the
place where his lifelong work was to be done. It
was to our fields and orchards that his presence
gave such value ; it was our streets in which the
children looked up to him with love, and the elders
with reverence. He was our ornament and pride."
EBENEZER ROCK WOOD HOAR,
April SO, 1882.
MAIfi LIB.
COPYRIGHT 1903 BY JOHN SHEPARD KEYKS
PS
EMERSON
"WHEREVER the English language is spoken
throughout the world his fame is established and
secure. . . . But we, his neighbors and townsmen,
feel that he was ours. He was descended from the
founders of the town. He chose our village as the
place where his lifelong work was to be done. It
was to our fields and orchards that his presence
gave such value ; it was our streets in which the
children looked up to him with love, and the elders
with reverence. He was our ornament and pride."
EBENEZER ROCK WOOD HOAR,
April SO, 1882.
INTRODUCTION
THE proceedings recorded in this volume resulted
from the following votes passed at a meeting of
THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD
on December 23, 1902 :
VOTED: That the Social Circle in Concord ar
range a celebration of the Centenary of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, May 25, 1903, their best beloved
and respected member for many years.
VOTED: That the members of the Circle be a
committee to make arrangements for the same.
CONTENTS
PAOE
THE MORNING . 1
MORNING INTRODUCTION ..... 3
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON . . 5
ADDRESS OF LEBARON RUSSELL BRIGGS . . 14
THE AFTERNOON 31
AFTERNOON INTRODUCTION .... 33
PRAYER BY LOREN BENJAMIN MACDONALD . 34
ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR .... 36
ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON . . .45
ADDRESS OF THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 58
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES . . . .67
ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR . . 78
THE EVENING . . . . . .95
EVENING INTRODUCTION 97
OPENING REMARKS, BY JOHN SHEPARD KEYES . 99
SPEECH OF CAROLINE HAZARD .... 99
SPEECH OF MOORFIELD STOREY .... 104
LETTER FROM JAMES BRYCE AND OTHERS . Ill
SPEECH OF HUGO MUNSTERBERG .... 113
SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON . • . 119
THE CONCORD HYMN 128
APPENDIX . . • • . . ^. . 129
THE SOCIAL CIRCLE AND COMMITTEES . . 137
THE MORNING
EMERSON CENTENARY
MEMORIAL EXERCISES in the Town
Hall in Concord, Massachusetts, on the morning
of Monday, May 25, 1903, one hundred years
after the birth of RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
Arranged by the Social Circle, a society of
which he was a member for forty-two years.
1. OPENING HYMN: "THEPiLGRiM FATHERS"
2. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
By William Lorenzo Eaton
Chairman of the Meeting
3. RECITATIONS
By Pupils of the High School
4. SONG: "ODE"
Sung in the Town Hall, Concord, July 4, i 857
By Pupils of the High School
f. ADDRESS
By LeBaron Russell Briggs
6. SONG: "CONCORD HYMN"
Sung at the completion of the Battle Mon
ument, April 19, 1836
By all the Schools
7. CLOSING SONG: "GLORIA"
From Mozart's Twelfth Mass
By Pupils of the High School
THE EMERSON CENTENARY
THE MORNING
ON the occasion of the celebration of the two hun
dredth anniversary of the settlement of Concord, Mr.
Emerson being the orator of the day, " the children of
the town, to the number of five hundred, moved in
procession to the Common in front of the old church
and Court House," and thence proceeded to the
church. "The North Gallery had been assigned for
them : but (it was a good omen) the children over
ran the space assigned for their accommodation and
were sprinkled throughout the house and ranged in
seats along the aisles." Following this precedent
the Social Circle as a part of its plan for the suitable
observance of the one hundredth anniversary of
Mr. Emerson's birth, determined to arrange a
morning meeting for the children of the town, in
which they should participate. The School Commit
tee was requested to make May 25th a school holi
day, and pupils of the Grammar and High School
grades of the public schools and their teachers were
invited to a morning meeting in the Town Hall on
that day. A similar invitation was extended to the
4 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
pupils and teachers of the Middlesex School, the
Concord School, and Miss White's Home School.
The pupils of these schools, to the number of six
hundred, came together at half past ten, filling the
hall, both floor and gallery. The children and grand
children of Mr. Emerson, the Social Circle, the
School Committee of Concord, and other invited
guests to the number of sixty or more, occupied the
platform in the rear of the speakers.
Thus in 1903 as in 1835 the young people of the
town were assembled to help celebrate the day. To
quote the special correspondent of the Springfield
Republican : —
"The Social Circle could have done nothing bet
ter than by bringing the children into the event of
the town, and making them perceive that it was also
an occasion of the world, and that they had a proper
and, indeed, a most important part in it."
The young people were seated punctually in the
seats previously assigned, and the exercises opened
with singing of "The Pilgrim Fathers" by the
schools, under the leadership of Fred W. Archi
bald.
An address was then given by William Lorenzo
Eaton, Superintendent of Public Schools in Con
cord, as follows : —
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 5
ADDRESS OF
WILLIAM LORENZO EATON
PUPILS OF THE CONCORD SCHOOLS : You have been
asked to come here to-day to participate in exercises
in honor of Concord's foremost citizen. But he
whom we to-day celebrate was much more than a
citizen of Concord, for his name and fame have gone
wherever men live and have regard for sincerity,
and truth, and duty, and honor. Yet the Social
Club, of which he was a member for more than forty
years, has arranged to-day's series of memorial exer
cises with the feeling that in a peculiar and limited
sense he who lived here a neighbor to your fathers and
grandfathers belonged to this town. The gentlemen
of this club also thought that it was fitting that the
children of the town should have a meeting arranged
especially for them. For you, young people, are the
hope of your native town. Your faces are toward
the future. To you they look to maintain the high
ideals, to carry forward the high purposes to which
this town has been committed for so many genera
tions. It is their expectation and belief that from this
meeting you will carry away impressions of this
great man that will help to make your lives nobler,
and purer, and sweeter ; that there will descend upon
you something of that spirit, of that radiant person
ality that set Emerson apart and made him a tran
scendent power for noble living wherever his word
has reached.
6 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
His personality was indeed a radiant one ! No one
came in contact with him during his life but felt it
strongly and was the better for it. Those who have
come under its influence through the printed volumes
which he has left as a legacy to the world, feel and
acknowledge its power. This spirit, this power, this in
tangible something, which fills this hall where his voice
was heard so many times ; which pervades these streets
in which he walked ; which rests upon these meadows
and forests which he traversed ; which clings to his
home where he wrought through a long and fruitful
lifetime, has entered into the lives of all of us with
an uplifting force that we feel, though we may not
define.
To you young people, as well as to your elders, must
often come the query, What constitutes greatness ?
Why do we accord greatness to this man and not to
that man ? What is its test ? What the touchstone
by which we recognize it? I suppose that you, as
you grow older and think more deeply upon these
matters, must come to the same conclusion that think
ing people always reach, that a great man is great
because he, more clearly than any one else, expresses
the ideals and aspirations of his age. Especially is
this true of great poets and great statesmen. We
all know that Abraham Lincoln was a great man.
Now, he was a great man because he had the power
to see, and the power to express, in clear and deci
sive action, what all men, at the North at least,
were thinking and were eager to express. He became
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 7
the God-given leader of the Northern conscience
that found expression in the political action which
has given a new and a nobler meaning to our great
Nation.
To Mr. Emerson, also, we must accord a leader
ship of the men of his age. But were he the spokes
man merely of his own age, and for his own age, he
would fall short of that superlative greatness that we
believe is now determined for him. The utterances
of such a man become proverbial. Once they fall
from his lips they are upon the lips of all men.
For they reveal to all men and, at the same time,
express for all men the truths which they have been
feeling, and trying in vain adequately to express.
They become the current coin of men's daily speech,
and are used without conscious thought of their
origin.
You are familiar, even at your age, with some of
this coinage. Lines which have been embodied in
the every-day language of the people readily recur
to your minds. I need hardly recall them to you.
They are such as these : —
" He builded better than he knew,
" The conscious stone to beauty grew."
" Beauty is its own excuse for being."
" Pure by impure is not seen."
" Obey thy heart."
" When half gods go,
The gods arrive."
" He serves all who dares to be true."
8 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
" The silent organ loudest chants
The Master's requiem."
" What is excellent,
As God lives is permanent."
" Right is might throughout the world."
" 'T is man's perdition to be safe
When for the truth he ought to die."
Then you remember the lines which ring as a
clarion call to every young soul who looks to live a
noble and useful life, —
" So nigh is Grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man ;
When Duty whispers low, * Thou must ! '
The youth replies, « I can.' "
I need hardly say that the man who makes the
proverbs, the current sayings, for the nation is the
man who exerts an undisputed moral leadership
which guides that nation onward and upward.
I have asked you to think of Emerson as a great
poet. Did time permit I would ask you to consider
him as a great lecturer and essayist. Above all
I would have you know him as a man who was
greater than his works. I would have you under
stand, too, that it was the young people of his day
who heard and heeded his message rather than their
elders. Believing as I do that he has the same mes
sage for you, I urge you, therefore, young people of
Concord, as you grow older to acquaint yourselves
with Emerson. Go with him into the pine woods
that he loved so well, and which whispered such
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 9
secrets into his ear. Perhaps you will hear those
secrets also. Walk over these plains with him and
with him spend a frequent holiday on his and your
dream-giving Indian River. Scale the hills and take
the distant view. See Wachusett and Monadnock
beckoning you to their heights, as they did him.
With him gaze at the sunset. Look into that deep,
overarching sky. Hitch your wagon to yonder star,
and with him travel into the unexplored and unex
plained depths beyond. Gaze upon the rhodora where
it blooms, and " leave it on its stalk." Watch the
birds in their flight and where they nest, and name
them " without a gun." Listen to the humble-bee's
" mellow, breezy bass," and think what Emerson
heard, and let it teach you the lesson it taught him.
In the long winter evenings, when mayhap the snow
is swirling around your house, and shuts you from
the outer world, take down your volume of Emerson
and, in "a tumultuous privacy of storm," read and
think, and think and read, until something coming
to you out of that great spirit shall have shaped and
moulded your lives to nobler thought and deeds.
I have spoken to you of some of the reasons why
Emerson's life and teachings should interest and
inspire you. In the main they are reasons that would
apply to young people of your age anywhere in this
broad land. But there are other reasons why the
pupils in the Concord schools should have a closer
and more personal interest in Emerson. As a boy,
years before he came to live in Concord, he visited
10 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
the town. It is said that he went to our schools.
There is a tradition that, standing on a box or barrel,
in the corner grocery, in the store now occupied by
Richardson's Pharmacy, he would recite poems to
the delight of those who frequented the store.
Later in life he did his duty on the School Com
mittee of the town. We have a recently found copy
of the records of the School Committee covering
the years from 1826 to 1842. Several pages of these
records were written and signed by Mr. Emerson,
as Secretary of the School Board.
He enjoyed visiting the schools and listening to
the children. He took a special delight in the school
that so long was kept nearly opposite his house. The
schoolhouse, as you know, was recently removed,
and is now occupied by the Sloyd School, over
whose entrance might well be placed the line from
one of Emerson's Essays, —
"Labor is God's education."
He visited that schoolhouse many times when it
was on its original site, long after his duties on the
School Committee required such visitation. Many
pupils of those days now recall with great delight
and pride his visits. He was specially pleased to
hear the boys and girls declaim, or recite poetry, for
he regarded such exercises as an important part of
the education of the young. A gentleman who is
now in active business in Boston, speaking to me of
his experiences as a boy in the school, said that Mr.
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 11
Emerson, after listening awhile to the regular exer
cises, would, with the consent of the teacher, turn to
him and say, " Has n't Henry something for us to
day?" And Henry, all charged for the expected
invitation, would rise and recite some choice bit of
poetry or of prose, and receive the commendation
of his auditor. That boy's name was Wheeler, and
since the founding of this town our schools have
never lacked a full supply of Wheelers. So, to-day,
in introducing to you the part of the programme
which is to follow, I will ask a boy, whose name is
Wheeler, if he has not something for us to-day.
Then the following recitations were given by
pupils of the High School : —
HAMATREYA Hennon Temple Wheeler
FABLE Agnes Louise Garvey
HUMBLE-BEE James Joseph Loughlin
MONADNOCK Kenneth Thompson Blood
BURNS Edward Bailey Caiger
THE TITMOUSE Mildred Browne
LET ME GO Lucy Tolman Hosmer
FORBEARANCE Warren Kendall Blodgett
WOOD-NOTES Roland Worthley Butters
WOOD-NOTES Richard Francis Powers
RHODORA Margaret Louise Eaton
After the singing of the " Ode" of July 4, 1857,
the chairman of the meeting, Mr. Eaton, introduced
Mr. Briggs as follows : —
12 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
Twenty-six years ago this very month I attended
a meeting here when this hall was filled, floor and
gallery, not as to-day with school-children, but with
their natural friends, their teachers. They had
come to this town from all parts of Middlesex
County to discuss questions pertaining to the inter
ests of their schools. In the course of the afternoon
Mr. Emerson read to them a portion of his lecture
Education. I well remember how he appeared on
this platform and I distinctly recall his marvellous
voice. There was a carrying power and strength in
it the like of which I never heard in any other man.
One passage in particular I recall, in which he
characterized boys. It seems as if now I heard his
voice, as he read : —
I like boys, the masters of the playground and
the street, — boys, who have the same liberal ticket
of admission to all shops, factories, armories, town-
meetings, caucuses, mobs, target-shootings, as flies
have ; quite unsuspected, coming in as naturally as
the janitor, — known to have no money in their
pockets, and themselves not suspecting the value of
this poverty ; putting nobody on his guard, but see
ing the inside of the show, — hearing all the asides.
There are no secrets from them, they know every
thing that befalls in the fire-company, the merits of
every engine and of every man at the brakes, how to
work it, and are swift to try their hands at every
part ; so too the merits of every locomotive on the
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 13
rails, and will coax the engineer to let them ride
with him and pull the handles when it goes to the
engine-house. They are there only for fun, and not
knowing that they are at school, in the court-house,
or at the cattle-show, quite as much and more than
they were, an hour ago, in the arithmetic class.
The committee in charge of to-day's exercises de
sired to find some one to address you who knew, and
understood, and sympathized with young people. It
was not unnatural that their thoughts at once turned
to a man who, as a professor and an officer of Har
vard College, had had wide and sympathetic deal
ings with thousands of young men. It was known
also that his comprehensive interest in young people
was not confined to the young men. The doors of
Radcliffe and Wellesley colleges were always open
to him, where the welcome accorded him was no less
cordial than that which he was accustomed to ex
tend to the Harvard boys summoned to the Dean's
office. I have the pleasure of introducing to you to
day, therefore, Professor Le Baron Russell Briggs,
for so many years the well-known and well-beloved
Dean of Harvard College.
14 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
ADDRESS OF
LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS
Now and then we meet a man who seems to live
high above the little things that vex our lives, and
who makes us forget them. He may speak or he
may be silent ; it is enough that he lives and that we
are with him. When we face him, we feel somewhat
as we feel when we first see the ocean, or Niagara,
or the Alps, or Athens, or when we first read the
greatest poetry. Nothing, indeed, is more like great
poetry than the soul of a great man ; and when the
great man is good, when he loves everything that is
beautiful and true and makes his life like what he
loves, his face becomes transfigured, or, as an old
poet used to say, " through-shine ; " for the soul
within him is the light of the world.
Such a great man was Emerson. He was much
beside : he was a philosopher. Sometimes a philoso
pher is a man who disbelieves everything worth
believing, and spends a great deal of strength in
making simple things hard ; but Emerson was a
philosopher in the best sense of the word — a lover
of wisdom and of truth. He was also a poet ; not
a poet like Homer who sang, but a poet like that
Greek philosopher, Plato, who thought deep and
high, and saw what no one else saw, and told what
he saw as no one else could tell it. This is another
way of saying that Emerson was a " seer."
ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 15
To many of you he may not seem a poet, for his
verse is often homely and rough. It has lines and
stanzas of noble music, —
" Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old."
" Still on the seeds of all he made
The rose of beauty burns.
Through times that wear and forms that fade
Immortal youth returns ; "
but seldom many of them in succession.
" Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply, —
' 'T is man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.' "
The first three of these lines are beyond the reach of
most poets ; the fourth line is prose.
" I am born a poet," he wrote to his betrothed ;
" of a low class without doubt, yet a poet. That is
my nature and vocation. My singing, be sure, is
very husky, and is, for the most part, in prose."
" He lamented his hard fate," says his biographer,
Mr. Cabot, " in being only half a bard ; or, as he
wrote to Carlyle, * not a poet, but a lover of poetry
and poets, and merely serving as writer, etc, in this
empty America before the arrival of the poets.' '
He questioned whether to print his poems, " uncer
tain always," he wrote, " whether I have one true
spark of that fire which burns in verse ; " and in a
16 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
little poem, called " The Test," lie says that in some
five hundred of his verses,
" Five lines lasted, sound and true."
When he wrote prose, he thought of a sentence by
itself, and not of its connection with other sentences ;
and when he wrote verse, he thought, it would seem,
of the form of each line, without much attention to
the form or the length of its neighbors, or even to
its own smoothness, — he whose ear for a prose sen
tence was trained so delicately.
Yet I, for one, would give up any other poetry of
America rather than Emerson's ; and I am certain
that one secret of his power over men and women
was his belief that every human soul is poetry and
a poet, and his waking of men and women to that
belief. He had beyond other men a poet's heart ;
and if, as Carlyle says, to see deeply is to see music
ally, and poetry is musical thought, he is a poet of
poets.
" God hid the whole world in thy heart,"
says Emerson. "The poet," he says elsewhere,
"knows why the plain or meadow of space was
strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons,
and stars ; why the great deep is adorned with ani
mals, with men and gods."
Nature he lived with ; and when he wrote of her,
he wrote as one who knew her as his closest friend.
" My book should smell of pines," he said.
ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 17
" To read the sense the woods impart
You must bring the throbbing heart."
" Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy,
And merry is only a mask of sad,
But, sober on a fund of joy,
The woods at heart are glad."
" Hast thou named all the birds without a gun ?,
Loved the wood-rose and left it on its stalk ?
O be my friend, and teach me to be thine."
" Thou " [the poet], he said, " shalt have the whole
land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath
and navigation, without tax and without envy ; the
woods and the rivers thou shalt own ; and thou shalt
possess that wherein others are only tenants and
boarders. Thou true land-lord ! sea-lord ! air-lord !
Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly,
wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever
the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with
stars, wherever are forms with transparent bound
aries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wher
ever is danger and awe and love, there is Beauty,
plenteous as rain, shed for thee ; and though thou
shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able
to find a condition inopportune or ignoble."
The poet is not only a seer, he is a hearer : —
" Let me go where'er I will
I hear a sky-born music still :
It sounds from all things old,
It sounds from all things young,
18 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
From all that 's fair, from all that 's foul,
Peals out a cheerful song.
It is not only in the rose,
It is not only in the bird,
Not only where the rainbow glows,
Nor in the song of woman heard,
But in the darkest, meanest things
There alway, alway something sings.
JT is not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cups of budding flowers,
Nor in the red-breast's mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings."
Yet it was not cheerfulness that made Emerson a
poet ; and certainly it was not music, in the common
understanding o£ the term : it was high thought,
joined with a wonderful gift — an almost inspired
sense — of the right word ; a gift not always his, but
his so often that he has said more memorable things
than any other American. You can find no higher
simplicity in the fitting of word to thought : —
" Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply."
While I speak of the poetry in him and the love
of nature, let me read what he wrote to a little girl of
thirteen who looked up to him then and always : —
MY DEAR LUCIA : — I am afraid you think me
very ungrateful for the good letters which I begged for
and which are so long in coming to me, or that I am
ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 19
malicious and mean to make you wait as long for an
answer ; but, to tell you the truth, I have had so many
" composition lessons " set me lately, that I am sure
that no scholar of Mr. Moore's has had less spare
time. Otherwise I should have written instantly ; for
I have an immense curiosity for Plymouth news, and
have a great regard for my young correspondent. I
would gladly know what books Lucia likes to read
when nobody advises her, and most of all what her
thoughts are when she walks alone or sits alone.
For, though I know that Lucia is the happiest of
girls in having in her sister so wise and kind a guide,
yet even her aid must stop when she has put the
book before you : neither sister nor brother nor mo
ther nor father can think for us : in the little private
chapel of your own mind none but God and you can
see the happy thoughts that follow each other, the
beautiful affections that spring there, the little silent
hymns that are sung there at morning and at even
ing. And I hope that every sun that shines, every
star that rises, every wind that blows upon you will
only bring you better thoughts and sweeter music.
Have you found out that Nature is always talking to
you, especially when you are alone, though she has
not the gift of articulate speech ? Have you found
out what that great gray old ocean that is always in
your sight says? Listen. And what the withered
leaves that shiver and chatter in the cold March
wind ? Only listen. The Wind is the poet of the
World, and sometimes he sings very pretty summer
20 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
ballads, and sometimes very terrible odes and dirges.
But if you will not tell me the little solitary thoughts
that I am asking for, what Nature says to you, and
what you say to Nature, at least you can tell me
about your books, — what you like the least and
what the best, — the new studies, — the drawing and
the music and the dancing, — and fail not to write
to your friend,
K. WALDO EMERSON.
His " immense curiosity for Plymouth news " is
not surprising ; for he wrote this letter shortly be
fore his marriage with Miss Jackson, of Plymouth.
The " wise and kind " sister of his little correspond
ent was Miss Jackson's closest friend, and stood up
with her at the wedding.
Emerson was also a patriot, a man who loved his
country, and longed for it to do right. " One thing,"
he says, " is plain for all men of common sense and
common conscience, that here, here in America, is
the home of man." " America is a poem in our eyes,"
" its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and
it will not wait long for metres."
" For He that flung the broad blue fold
O'ermantling land and sea,
One third part of the sky unrolled
For the banner of the free."
" For he that worketh high and wise
Nor pauses in his plan,
ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 21
AVill take the sun out of the skies
Ere freedom out of man."
Yet his greatest patriotic poem is not the Fourth
of July Ode, from which I have been quoting, —
("O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire,")
and not the Concord Hymn, never so familiar that
we can read without a thrill, —
" Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world."
His greatest patriotic poem is Voluntaries, which
treats of slavery and the conflict between North and
South. Freedom loves the North ; —
" The snowflake is her banner's star ;
Her stripes the boreal streamer are."
It is this poem that answers the terrible question ; —
" Who shall nerve heroic boys
To hazard all in Freedom's fight ? "
with that mighty quatrain, —
" So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, ' Thou must/
The youth replies, • I can.' "
Yet Emerson is greatest, not as philosopher, poet,
or patriot, but as helper of men. He made men
better by simply walking among them. I have
spoken of his face as " through-shine," as transfigured
22 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
with love and refinement and wisdom, with the
vision that shall not fade, —
" And never poor beseeching glance
Shamed that sculptured countenance."
It is much to remember him as I do, even in his old
age ; to have lived with those to whom he was " Mr.
Emerson," who had known him early, and who loved
him as they loved no other man. Some of you may
secretly wonder whether he was all that your elders
have called him, — just as I used to wonder whether
the Parthenon, the great temple at Athens, was
not Professor Norton's building rather than mine,
whether it would appeal to such as I. When I saw
the Parthenon, even in its ruin, I accepted it in
stantly and forever; and, if you could have seen
Emerson, even in his enfeebled old age, you would
have accepted him.
" No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face."
Emerson's face was the highest and the loveliest and
the most " through-shine," because his life was all
this. " Is it so bad ? " he wrote to a friend who had
said that " no one would dare to uncover the thoughts
of a single hour," — " Is it so bad ? I own that to a
witness worse than myself and less intelligent I
should not willingly put a window into my breast.
But to a witness more intelligent and virtuous than
I, or to one precisely as intelligent and well inten-
tioned, I have no objection to uncover my heart."
ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 23
" He was right," says Mr. Cabot, " lie could only
have gained by it." " It was good," says Hawthorne
in a passage that Mr. Cabot quotes, " to meet him in
the wood-paths or sometimes in our avenue with that
pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his presence
like the garment of a shining one ; and he, so quiet,
so simple, so without pretension, encountering each
man alive as if expecting to receive more than he
would impart. It was impossible to dwell in his
vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain
atmosphere of his lofty thought."
Emerson himself has told us that " Rectitude scat
ters favors on every side without knowing it, and
receives with wonder the thanks of all people." So
it was with him ; as it is written of one whom no
man was more like, " There went virtue out of
him and healed them all." He who knew sorrow
yet was glad, who knew self-distrust yet stood self-
reliant, who knew weakness yet remained strong,
who knew bitterness yet kept sweet, whose love of
man and of nature and of nature in man, shone
through his face, and through every page he wrote,
— he seemed to those near him the very prophet of
God, preaching hope, freedom, courage, the glory of
a high and simple life. " The sublime vision," he
says, " comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean
and chaste body." " If we live truly, we shall see
truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong
as it is for the weak to be weak."
24 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
" Teach me your mood, O patient stars !
Who climb each night the ancient sky,
Leaving on space no shade, no scars,
No trace of age, no fear to die."
In his presence weak men were ashamed that they
had ever wondered whether it was worth while to
live ; for in his presence, even in the presence of
what he had written, it was harder to be a coward
than to be brave.
Of young people — not children, but young men
and women — he was the supreme helper ; and we
must remember that it was not only neighbors and
friends who loved him, not only those that touched
the hem of his garment who were made whole. His
voice, his manner, his presence, charmed and refined
all who came near him ; but his written words put
courage into ten thousand hearts.
" Trust thyself ; every heart vibrates to that iron
string."
" We will walk on our own feet ; we will work
with our own hands ; we will speak our own minds."
" If the single man plant himself indomitably on
his instincts and there abide, the huge world will
come round to him."
" We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged
battle of fate where strength is born."
" But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the
Almighty saith, ' Up and onward forever more ! ' :
" Man is timid and apologetic ; he is no longer
upright ; he dares not say, ' I think,' 'I am,' but
ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 25
quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before
the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses
under my window make no reference to former roses
or to better ones ; they are for what they are ; they
exist with God to-day."
" I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart
and be the nobility of this land."
Here is the star to which many an awkward and
timid country lad has hitched his wagon ; the strong
and steady light to which the lights that flickered in
a thousand hearts have flashed their bravest answer.
This gentle scholar was a man, and a man who
inspired others with his own manliness. There was
in his philosophy no room for the weak and lazy.
With all his visions he had a keen sense of the
value of time, and expressed it (with more truth
than poetry) in " The Visit : " -
" Askest, « How long thoii shalt stay ? '
Devastator of the day 1 "
" Do your work," he says, " and I shall know
you. Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.
Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope
too much or dare too much."
" The distinction and end of a soundly constituted
man is his labor. Use is inscribed on all his facul
ties. Use is the end to which he exists. As the tree
exists for its fruit, so a man for his work. A fruitless
plant, an idle animal, does not stand in the uni-
26 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
He believed in work that left no time for worry
ing: —
" But blest is he who playing deep yet haply asks not why,
Too busied with the crowded hour to fear to live or die."
And he believed in work through everything, —
" On bravely through the sunshine and the showers !
Time hath his work to do and we have ours."
Such was the courage of his preaching and of his
life. We are to be ourselves in the present, not to
make ourselves like anybody else or like what we
ourselves have been. If we are inconsistent, no
matter ; if we are misunderstood, no matter. " With
consistency," he says, " a great soul has simply
nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with
his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now
in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict
everything you said to-day. 4 Ah, so you shall be
sure to be misunderstood ! ' Is it so bad, then, to be
misunderstood ? . . . Every pure and wise spirit that
ever took flesh " has been misunderstood.
" Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine
wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers,
texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past
and future into the present hour."
" Our helm is given up to a better guidance than
our own ; the course of events is quite too strong for
any helmsman, and our little wherry is taken in tow
by the ship of the great Admiral, which knows the
ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 27
way, and has the force to draw men and states and
planets to their good."
And there was no room in his philosophy for the
sickly and discontented. As one of " the first obvious
rules of life," he says, " Get health." " And the best
part of health," he adds, " is fine disposition. It is
more essential than talent, even in the works of tal
ent. Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to
peaches, and to make knowledge valuable, you must
have the cheerfulness of wisdom."
" I know how easy it is to men of the world to
look grave, and sneer at your sanguine youth and its
glittering dreams. But I find the gayest castles in
the air that were ever piled far better for comfort
and for use than the dungeons in the air that are
daily dug and caverned out by grumbling, discon
tented people."
Nor is cheerfulness for the young only : —
" Spring still makes spring in the mind
When sixty years are told ;
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart
And we are never old.
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow,
And through the wild-piled snow-drift
The warm rosebuds below."
Even though old age bring loss of power, it need
not bring loss of cheerfulness : —
" As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time
28 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime,
' Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.' "
If disaster come, there is good in it. " We learn
geology the morning after the earthquake."
George Eliot tells us of a woman who seemed
among other people like a fine quotation from the
Bible in a paragraph of a newspaper. Something
like this might be said of Emerson, who brought into
every-day life the help that cometh from the hills.
" I believe," says an old friend of his, " no man ever
had so deep an influence as he had on the life and
thought of the young people of his day. I think
there are many who would say . . . that it has
been one of the chief privileges of their life to have
lived at the same time with him."
I have tried to show you what Emerson has meant
to American youth ; how he has stood for pure life,
high thought, brave speech, patient and cheerful
work ; how he found in everything poetry and a man's
poetry, and revealed that poetry to the world : but
this is not all. It is as easy to " put a girdle round
about the earth in forty minutes " as to compass in
half an hour a great man. I might speak of him as a
forerunner of Darwin. " Man," he says, " is no up
start in the creation, but has been prophesied in nature
ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 29
for a thousand, thousand ages before he appeared . . .
His limbs are only a more exquisite organization —
say rather the finish — of the rudimental forms that
have been already sweeping the sea and creeping in
the mud ; the brother of his hand is even now cleav
ing the Arctic sea in the fin of the whale, and innum
erable ages since was pawing the marsh in the flipper
of the saurian." I might speak of his Yankee humor,
or of his tenderness and romance, —
" The little Shakspeare in the maiden's heart
Makes Romeo of a plough boy on his cart; "
but I purposely let them pass with this bare mention
(as I let pass "The Titmouse," "The Rhodora,"
" The Mountain and the Squirrel," " The Humble-
bee ") ; for I wish you this day to think of Emerson,
living and dead, as a high and helpful friend.
There is no better company, no better society, than
his. Read him and re-read him. Do not try to write
like him : he would have you write like none but
yourselves ; and besides, his style is his and his only.
Do not try to be like him, except so far as in being
your best selves you come into the likeness of all who
are good and true. When you read him, do not be
troubled if you lose the thread of his thought ; he
himself did that ; yet, as a young man once said of
him, "His sayings are like the stars, which are
scattered disorderly but together make a firmament
of light."
" Hundreds of people," says Ruskin, " can talk
30 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
for one who can think ; but thousands can think for
one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy,
and religion all in one."
This man who walked your streets, and loved them,
spoke with a voice that is rare in any race or time ;
he thought as it is given to few to think ; and he saw.
We have had no man like him. I will not say that
we have had none so great. Lincoln may have been
greater. They are so different that we cannot com
pare the two : and yet, as Lincoln's proclamation
brought life and hope to captive hearts, so did the
brave word that Emerson spoke flash on the souls of
men the truth that they were slaves no more ; that
each might and must stand to his work erect and
strong, since nature and God were his very own.
The eyes of the blind were opened, and the ears of
the deaf unstopped ; " for he came that they might
have life, and that they might have it more abun
dantly."
The morning exercises then closed with the " Concord
Hymn," sung by all the schools, and the " Gloria " from
Mozart's Twelfth Mass, sung by pupils of the High School.
THE AFTERNOON
<Bmer0on Centenarp
MEMORIAL EXERCISES
IN THE MEETING HOUSE
OF THE FIRST PARISH
IN
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS
ON
MONDAY AFTERNOON
MAY THE TWENTY-FIFTH
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND THREE
ONE HUNDRED YEARS
AFTER THE BIRTH OF
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
ARRANGED BY THE SOCIAL CIRCLE
A SOCIETY OF WHICH HE WAS A
MEMBER FOR FORTY-TWO YEARS
ORDER OF EXERCISES
1. MUSIC
Under the direction of THOMAS W. SURETTE
2. PRAYER
By REV. LOREN B. MACDONALD
3. INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS
By SAMUEL HOAR
Chairman of the Meeting
4. ADDRESS
By CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
5. ADDRESS
By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
6. A SONG OF DESTINY
By FRIEDRICH HOLDERLIN
English Translation by REV. J. TROUTBECK
Music by JOHANNES BRAHMS
" Far in yon regions of light, where pleasures fai/ not^
wander the Spirits blest,
Breathed on by airs of glory, bright and divine, like a harp
when a master hand wakes it from silence.
Free from care like a babe that is sleeping, are they that in
Heaven dwell.
Pure and lowly as half opened blossoms, in those fields of
light they ever bloom ;
And in bliss are their eyes still gazing on clearness calm
and eternal."
Sung by the CONCORD CHORAL ASSOCIATION
7. ADDRESS
By WILLIAM JAMES
8. ADDRESS
By GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR
9. SEVENTY-EIGHTH PSALM
Sung by the Congregation
to the tune of St. Martins
My tongue, by inspiration taught
Shall parables unfold;
Dark oracles, but understood,
And owned for truths of old.
Let children learn the mighty deeds
Which God performed of old,
Which, in our younger years, we saw,
And which our fathers told.
Our lips shall tell them to our sons,
And they again to theirs ;
That generations yet unborn
May teach them to their heirs.
THE AFTERNOON
THE afternoon exercises were held in the Meeting
House of the First Parish.
The music was under the direction of Professor
Thomas Whitney Surette, who was also the organist
of the occasion and liberally contributed his time
and talents to the success of the afternoon.
The singing was by forty members of the Concord
Choral Association, who also gave their services.
The Meeting House was opened at two o'clock
for the holders of tickets, and at three o'clock for the
general public, about eight hundred people being
present.
The following named sons of members of the So
cial Circle were ushers and assistants : —
William Bradford Bartlett, Samuel Hoar, Jr.,
Percy Whiting Brown, Francis DeHart Houston,
Henry Taft Eaton, Nathaniel Peabody How,
John Marshall Eaton, Richard Jefferson Eaton,
William Forbes Emerson, John Hoar,
Raymond Emerson, Francis Rodman Titcomb.
The exercises began at five minutes after three
by the singing of Luther's hymn, " A Mighty Fort
ress is our God," followed by a prayer by the Rev
erend Loren Benjamin Macdonald, the minister of
the First Parish.
34 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
PRAYER
BY LOREN BENJAMIN MACDONALD
O GOD, we thank Thee for that Divine Wisdom
which, from generation to generation, entering into
holy souls, has made them friends of God and pro
phets. We come before Thy face deeply grateful for
the gift of that illumined soul whose name to-day we
honor. We thank Thee for all the blessed way in
which Thou didst lead him. We bless Thee that,
entering into his mind and heart, Thou didst so
guide him in the way of truth and light and beauty,
that, shedding down upon us to-day the greatness of
his thought and the beauty of his spirit, we catch
something of that divine influence and inspiration,
and our lives are made sweeter and better because he
has lived.
We thank Thee, O God, that Thou didst so touch
his heart in early youth that he was led on in de
vout allegiance to the spirit of truth to which he
gave his life — that truth which brought him into
Thy sacred presence. We thank Thee that Thy
spirit of beauty so took possession of his soul that
he was evermore guided by it to Thee, the source of
all beauty. We thank Thee for that vision of right
eousness by which he was ever led on into the Holy
of Holies of Thy presence. And we thank Thee that
from that mount of vision, from that divine insight,
he comes to us to-day to quicken our better life, to
PRAYER BY LOREN B. MACDONALD 35
make the world more beautiful for us, to make the
way of life more sacred, to give us a deeper sense of
responsibility in living, so that our lives mean more
to us to-day because of his teaching.
We come at this hour yielding our minds and
hearts in gracious and loving admiration and alle
giance to his blessed influence. We feel the touch
of his spirit in these sacred surroundings. We feel
that, in these places hallowed by his presence, we
stand on holy ground. We pray Thee that more and
more we may feel that the beauty of the world is
increased to us, indeed, because he has lived. Grant
us, we pray, that, standing in the inspiration of his
memory, with the blessed influence of his spirit
pressing in upon our spirits, we may, indeed, follow
in that way to which he pointed. May his spirit be
an antidote for all our restlessness, a cure for all
that is shallow and unworthy in our lives. May we,
entering to-day into the silences of the spirit, feeling
ourselves in the presence of that great Over-Soul, in
whose presence he felt himself, be inspired, as he
was, to go forth to do Thy work for the right, and
to earnest labor for Thy blessed kingdom of truth
and beauty and goodness. Make us also illumined
souls, touched by that divine fire from above, so that
we, too, catching some vision from the mount, may
go forward to help bring something of the divine
kingdom of light and peace and joy here upon the
earth.
We ask it all as Thy children, Amen.
36 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR
NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS : — It is a rare event
in the life of a New England town when, by a com
mon impulse, men pause to celebrate the anniversary
of the birth of one of its citizens.
With patriotic pride, and deep and tender feeling,
we are accustomed to recur at frequent intervals to
the pathetic story of those settlements in the wilder
ness, of which this in Concord was the type, and we
note with high appreciation that what was then sown
here in weakness has been raised in power again and
yet again.
And we also esteem it a priceless heritage, worthy
of continued celebration, that when in the provi
dence of God it became necessary that the might of
England should be " fronted and driven back," to
secure the preservation of the liberty of which the
Fathers had sown the seed, there was then found
here the fertile field and the husbandmen ready for
the harvest. These strengthening memories are a
part of our local history.
It is not, however, the least of the claims of Con
cord to fame that out from her loins should have
sprung the great intellectual and spiritual leader and
emancipator of America.
It seems fitting that this people should commemo
rate Emerson on the one hundredth anniversary of
his birth, for their history and their quiet fields
ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR 37
furnished the alembic in which that clear and pure
spirit was distilled.
Of the seven men who had been ministers of this
town before his birth, whose names are borne on
yonder tablet, he claimed five as his kindred. It was
the blood of Peter Bulkeley, the founder, repeating
itself in his veins, that made him a non-conformist.
His grandfather, William Emerson, the preacher
of the Revolution, transmitted to him a lofty patri
otism. If there was found in his discourses a moving
eloquence, it was traceable to the unquenchable spirit
of Daniel Bliss, his great-grandfather, who came
down here from Springfield to discipline and divide
this people, of whom it was said that when the cele
brated Whitefield preached here in 1764 in the after
noon, and Mr. Bliss preached in the morning, " the
Concord people thought their minister gave them
the better sermon of the two."
The Social Circle, of which Mr. Emerson was an
active member for forty-two years, itself a society in
this town which traces its origin to the Committee of
Safety in the Revolution, acting in this behalf for
the people of Concord, has invited you to join with
it in this Commemoration. It has appointed me its
mouthpiece. The summons must be obeyed, for I
cannot disregard those voices, audible to myself alone,
which bid me to say what I can.
This Society, with the modesty generated by over
one hundred and twenty years of life in Concord, re
calls what Emerson himself recorded of it in 1844 :
38 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
" Much the best society I have ever known is a
club in Concord called the Social Circle, consisting
always of twenty-five of our citizens, doctor, lawyer,
farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, etc., solidest of
men who yield the solidest of gossip."
It should be added that no member of the Social
Circle now living was a member when these words
were written.
I suppose that a majority of this audience will
agree that the earliest misfortune in Mr. Emerson's
life, which, however, he did all he could to counter
act in after years, was that he was not born in Con
cord.
The record which fixes the time of his birth
speaks of three successive events, and is found in
his father's diary, as follows : —
" May 25, 1803. Mr. Puffer preached his Elec
tion Sermon to great acceptance. This day also,
whilst I was at dinner at Governor Strong's, my son
Ralph Waldo was born. Mrs. E. well. — Club at
Mr. Adams'."
So we, too, divide our ceremonies to-day into three
parts : an acceptable discourse in the morning ; a
symposium after noon ; and a meeting of the Club
in the evening.
His father, the Rev. William Emerson, who in
1803 was the minister of the First Church in Bos
ton, died in 1811 when Ralph Waldo was eight
years old. His mother, left a widow with six chil
dren and in narrow circumstances, was a woman of
ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR 39
high character, who under great difficulties reared
and educated her family. When they were without
food for a day she sustained them by stories of
heroic endurance. His grandfather, William Em
erson, minister of this town, builder of the Old
Manse, in which his children were born, addressed
and encouraged the minutemen on the Common in
the early morning of the nineteenth of April, 1775,
was witness and recorder of the fight at the bridge,
joined the army at Ticonderoga as chaplain, and
died of camp-fever in 1776.
The only grandfather Mr. Emerson ever knew
was Dr. Ezra Ripley, minister in this town for
nearly sixty-three years, who married the widow of
his predecessor and lived in the Old Manse, where
Mr. Emerson came as a boy on frequent visits, at
tending school, and forming the acquaintance of the
families of the town, and the fields, trees, and mead
ows which were his intimate friends during his long
life. His biographical sketch of Dr. Ripley, pub
lished among the memoirs of the Social Circle,
shows a deep appreciation of the life and character
and manners of a sturdy New England minister of
the old school, and does not fail to note the humor
ous side of its subject.
Mr. Emerson entered Harvard College in 1817,
was President's Freshman under President Kirkland,
which office entitled him to a room rent free, earned
needed money as a waiter in Commons, held several
scholarships, withdrew with his class from college
40 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
in his sophomore year because some of its members
were expelled for a fight with freshmen, returned
and graduated about midway in his class in 1821,
and was its class poet. He taught school, studied
for the ministry, was ordained in 1826 and preached,
was threatened by serious sickness, became asso
ciate pastor with the Kev. Henry Ware in the Sec
ond Church in Boston (the old church of Cotton
Mather), separated himself therefrom in 1832, re
fused offers of settlement from other societies, and
came to Concord with his mother to board at the
Old Manse in the fall of 1834, when he was thirty-
one years of age.
He came to be the seer and prophet and poet, the
teacher and the spokesman of this town. On its
great occasions he appeared for it, and not only illu
mined the events of which he spoke but made those
events vocal and perpetuated them in human mem
ory. His address on the two hundredth anniversary
of the settlement of the town is easily the first of
its kind. It should be read here to each successive
generation on the twelfth of September, even as the
Declaration of Independence is read in our towns on
the Fourth of July. It was delivered 011 Saturday,
September 12, 1835, when he was thirty-two years
old. He drove to Plymouth on the fourteenth, was
there married to Miss Lydia Jackson, and drove
back on the fifteenth with his wife, to the house
which he had bought on the Cambridge turnpike, to
live there the rest of his life.
ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR 41
Of the farm, as he called it, on which he lived, he
subsequently wrote thus : —
" When I bought my farm I did not know what
a bargain I had in the blue-birds, bobolinks, and
thrushes, which were not charged in the bill. As
little did I guess what sublime mornings and sunsets
I was buying, what reaches of landscape, and what
fields and lanes for a tramp. Neither did I fully con
sider what an indescribable luxury is our Indian
River, which runs parallel with the village street and
to which every house on that long street has a back
door which leads down through the garden to the
river bank ; where a skiff or dory gives you all
summer access to enchantments new every day, and
all winter to miles of ice for the skater. Still less did
I know what good and true neighbors I was buying :
men of thought and virtue, some of them known the
country through for their learning, or subtlety, or
action, or patriotic power, but whom I had the plea
sure of knowing long before the country did ; and
other men, not known widely, but known at home,
farmers, not doctors of laws, but doctors of land,
skilled in turning a swamp or a sandbank into a
fruitful field, and where witch-grass and nettles grew
causing a forest of apple-trees or miles of corn and
rye to thrive. I did not know what groups of interest
ing school-boys and fair school-girls were to greet
me in the highway, and to take hold of one's heart
at the school exhibitions."
In 1837 he wrote the famous hymn for the dedi-
42 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
cation of the Battle Monument, and compressed the
story of the fight into the lines which are now in
scribed on the base of the statue of the Minuteman.
And we take pride in the knowledge that the sub
lime record of his mighty thoughts has been heard
round the world, with a potency for good at least as
effective as the shot of the embattled farmers.
In his old age, upon the one hundredth anniversary
of the fight, he spoke at our great celebration, saying
at the close, " It is a proud and tender story. I chal
lenge any lover of Massachusetts to read the fifty-
ninth chapter of Bancroft's History without tears of
joy."
And what great benefactions he showered upon
this people all his life. He gratuitously gave one
hundred lectures before our Lyceum, or an average
of two a year. It was sometimes irreverently said that
he tried them on in Concord. If this were true, it is
comforting to us to admit that they proved a good
fit. They are themselves the record of a noble life.
They constitute the greatest service rendered to this
community by any single life in its history. They
were eagerly attended by old and young. They were
filled with lofty and inspiring thoughts, and every
now and then came flashes of unexpected humor.
I remember hearing as a boy a lecture of his ; the
subject I have forgotten, its doctrines probably I
did not appreciate ; I was no doubt charmed as always
by the music of his voice and the felicity of his dic
tion. Perhaps he was arguing for concentration of
ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR 43
effort. He turned from the pages of his manuscript,
which, like a lianclf ul of pearls, he would seem to take
one by one at random and discourse upon, and, hesi
tating a moment as he looked out upon his audience,
smiled, and said, " No man, says the Italian proverb,
can carry more than three watermelons under one
arm." The memory of this anecdote served a good
end thirty years afterward, and furnished an apt
illustration of the helpless condition of a witness who
had unsuccessfully ventured on a number of false
hoods in testifying to an important transaction.
He was for many years on our School Committee.
He regularly attended the town meetings and occa
sionally took active part in the discussions. We re
member his speaking words of high encouragement
and patriotic fervor to a company of young men of
this town who were starting for the front in the Civil
War. These words were spoken on the Common to
the descendants of the men for whom his grandfather
had done a similar service on the same spot nearly
ninety years before.
And when the town dedicated its monument to
those who went and did not return, we spontaneously
turned again to the kindness which never failed us.
He had long service on the Library Committee of
the town. He delivered also the address at the open
ing of our new Public Library in 1873.
He was a member of this Parish, had during all
his life here a pew, in which he sat with his family
whenever he went to church.
44 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
He acknowledged his own indebtedness to three
women of high character and rare attainments, not
of his own immediate family, — his aunt, Mary
Moody Emerson, of whom he wrote, " she gave high
counsels: it was the privilege of certain boys to
have this immeasurably high standard indicated to
their childhood, a blessing which nothing else in edu
cation could supply ; " Mrs. Samuel Bipley, of whom
he said, " The kindness and genius that blend their
light in the eyes of Mrs. Ripley inspire me with some
feeling of unworthiness ; at least with impatience of
doing so little to deserve so much confidence ; " and
Elizabeth Hoar, of whom he recorded in his journal,
" I have no other friend whom I more wish to be
immortal than she ; an influence I cannot spare, but
must always have at hand for recourse."
Mr. Emerson was an idealist, he was the idealist
of our time, he was " the Man thinking," but he was
more than that to us. Where his standard was
planted, to that height he had himself attained ; yet
he was singularly free from self-assertion ; he sought
for, and seemed eager to recognize, the superiority
of others, and lived among us here as other men
lived. It is our great felicity that he lived here. He
bound us to him by the completeness of his character
and the sweetness and simplicity of his life, and by
the message of good hope which he continually gave.
The supreme test of the neighbor proved his worth.
Did not our own Sam Staples say of him that he
was " a first-rate neighbor, and one who always kept
ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 45
his fences up " ? And he himself said, " Those of us
who do not believe in communities, believe in neigh
borhoods and that the Kingdom of Heaven may con
sist of such."
The Chairman then said : —
We have invited some eminent men to speak to us
to-day, and I take pleasure in presenting Professor
Charles Eliot Norton, of Cambridge.
ADDRESS OF
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
MR. CHAIRMAN, Members of the Social Circle,
Ladies and Gentlemen of Concord and from abroad :
It is well that this day should be celebrated through
out our land, for the memory of Emerson deserves
more than mere local honor. It is well, moreover,
because the celebration is a virtual protest against
the prevalent spirit of materialism and militarism.
But here, in this doubly consecrated town, the cele
bration, as you, Mr. Chairman, have justly said, has
special significance and appropriateness, and you
will not disapprove of my citing, as accordant with
your own words, those of your honored father, Mr.
Emerson's near friend, the " incomparable citizen,"
as he called him, the spokesman of the town at
Emerson's funeral, when he said, in his brief and
heartfelt address on that occasion : " We, his
46 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was ours. He
was descended from the founders of the town. He
chose our village as the place where his lifelong work
was to be done. It was to our fields and orchards that
his presence gave such value ; it was our streets in
which the children looked up to him with love, and
the elders with reverence. He was our ornament
and pride." It is becoming, then, that you, members
of the Social Circle to which Emerson belonged for
many years, should, above all, commemorate this an
niversary, and should ask others to celebrate it with
you. I thank you for inviting me to take part in it.
" There are always in the world," says Plato, " a
few inspired men whose acquaintance is beyond
price." " I am in the habit of thinking," said Mr.
Emerson, " that to every serious mind Providence
sends from time to time five or six or seven teachers
who are of the first importance to him in the lessons
they have to impart. The highest of these not so
much give particular knowledge, as they elevate by
sentiment, and by their habitual grandeur of view."
And of these highest inspired men whose ac
quaintance is beyond price, and who elevate those
who come into relations with them by sentiment and
habitual grandeur of view, was Emerson himself.
In modern times the influence of these men is dif
fused through their printed words, and they become
teachers of first importance to many remote and
unknown readers. Yet now, as in the days of Plato,
personal acquaintance with them is beyond price.
ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 47
But the printed word is diuturnal, and the personal
acquaintance transitory. For a little while the per
sonality of these divine men, cherished in the memo
ries of a few of their contemporaries, continues to
have a twilight existence ; but before long all who
knew them face to face have gone from the world,
and only hearsay and tradition concerning them
remain.
It is an interesting and precious element of this
commemorative occasion that so many are taking
part in it who remember Mr. Emerson in life, and
who bear in their hearts the image of his benignant
presence. We, the elders, who held acquaintance
with him to be priceless, and for whom he felt a
kindly regard or even a friendly affection, can hardly,
do a better service for the younger generation than
to give them, so far as may be possible, a faithful
impression of the man himself, who exhibited in his
daily walk and conversation a nature of ideal sim
plicity, dignity, and elevation.
Emerson was fortunate in the time and place of
his birth. I doubt if there has ever been a com
munity happier in its main conditions, moral and
material, than that of Massachusetts during the
early years of the last century. But it was essen
tially immature ; it had not yet secured intellectual
independence ; its thought, its literature, its manners,
its religion, were imported and derivative. Many
men of vigorous character and abundant natural
capacity were found in it ; but there were few who
48 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
possessed originality or depth of intellect ; no poets,
no philosophers, no thinkers in the highest sense
were here ; nor were there any deep founts of learn
ing.
Into this fortunate, immature, intelligent, reli
gious, hopeful community, Emerson was born ; born
of admirable parents, the children of a long line of
well-bred ancestors. He was born good, with an
inheritance of serious-mindedness, of an intellectual
disposition, and of religious sentiment. He was also
born a poet, and the advantages of place and time
of his birth gave form and direction to his poetic
genius. Its very originality, that which distinguishes
and individualizes it, exhibits its native source.
The originality of genius is often a strange and
perplexing phenomenon to the contemporaries of its
possessor, — nor is it always understood by the man
himself. Contemporaries fail to recognize at once
the poet as the seer who reveals to them their own
imperfectly developed tendencies, and expresses for
them their own mute sentiments ; while the poet,
familiar with the conditions in which he lives, and
unconsciously shaped by them, may fail, for a time
at least, to note the partial incompatibility between
the traditional and customary order of things and
the novel ideas revealed to his poetic vision.
So it was with Emerson. The mass of his contem
poraries for a long while looked askance on him, and
regarded his utterances with suspicion and disap
proval. And he himself made a long trial of the
ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 49
old ways before he arrived at the conviction that he
could not follow them, but must take the independ
ent course dictated to him by his genius. He was
already thirty years old when he came to full self-
reliance. Before he was forty years old he had de
livered his chief message. This was no systematic
philosophy, no dogmatic doctrine, but an individual
interpretation of the universe, and of the life of
man as a part of the universe.
The essence of his spiritual teaching seems to me
to be comprised in three fundamental articles, —
first, that of the Unity of Being in God and Man ;
second, that of the creation of the visible, material
world by Mind, and of its being the symbol of the
spiritual world ; and third, that of the identity and
universality of moral law in the spiritual and mate
rial universe. These truths are for him the basis
of life, the substance of religion, and the meaning of
the universe.
From the little circle of selfish interests in which
our lives are mainly spent, Emerson lifts us into the
great circles of the universe, from the meanness of
personal and individual considerations into the sense
of the large spiritual relations of even our common
daily affairs, and makes us conscious partakers of the
general life of the universe, part and parcel of its
divine order. It is this that Matthew Arnold meant
when he said so well that Emerson " is the friend
and aider of those who live in the spirit." Holding
nature, and man as a part of nature, to be but a
50 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
symbol and external manifestation of the Eternal
and Infinite Mind, omnipresent in the form of the
Universe, the source of its law by which it works
always toward perfection, he cannot but be the most
absolute of optimists. There is no pause in the flow
of Being through the world ; everything is in a state
of flux, and the main course of the stream is always
forward, from good to better.
" Through flood and sea and firmament,
Through light, through life it forward flows."
But truth that has been spiritually discerned must
be spiritually interpreted. When he insists on the
divinity in man, and bids him trust himself, it is
not to the selfish and arrogant that he speaks, but
to the man who is endeavoring after righteousness
and who keeps his soul open to the influences of
the divine essence which is its source. His optimism
is the same with that of Ecclesiasticus : " All the
works of the Lord are good, — so that a man cannot
say this is worse than that, for in him they shall all
be approved." And his teaching of self-confidence
is taught not less by the same wise man of old:
" In every good work trust thine own soul, for this
is the keeping of the commandments." " The soul
converses with truths," said Emerson, "that have
always been spoken in the world."
Emerson was of that class of men, individuals of
which, as he says, appear at long intervals, eminently
endowed with insight and virtue, and manifesting in
ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 51
every relation and expression a latent indefinable
power, which is of a different and higher order than
any talent and which compels attention and respect.
It is the power of character, that is, of the highest
form of the nature of the man. It is this which
determines ultimately the extent and the strength of
his influence. In a noble nature it exhibits itself in
every expression.
And if I were called on to describe Emerson in
a single phrase, I should say that of all the men I
have known he made the strongest impression of con
sistent loftiness of character. This character was no
less manifest in familiar social relations than in his
public discourses. His superiority was evident in the
natural simplicity of his manners and demeanor.
Affectation, self-consciousness, parade, were impos
sible to him. His habitual bearing was of sweet
gravity and reserve, in which was no aloofness, but
a ready responsiveness to every claim of thought or
word of another. He was not lavish of sympathy,
but in case of need no sympathy was more compre
hensive than his. He inspired affection and honor
in every one who knew him. His presence raised the
level of every company.
His essays on Character, Manners, and Beha
vior show how penetrating and clear had been his
observation of the ways of men, and how wise his
conclusions from it, — but though many of the finer
traits which he described found illustration in him
self, yet the secret of his superiority is hardly dis-
52 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
closed in them. It resided, I believe, in the fact that
he lived more in accord with the moral order of the
soul than other men, more as one whose soul was
always open to the influences of the divine spirit,
however that spirit be defined. In this was the source
of the serenity and elevation of his own spirit, and in
it was also the source of that clear insight into the
significance of common life and daily trivial affairs
which his reflections upon them and his aphorisms
concerning them display.
In 1870, after reading Emerson's volume entitled
Society and Solitude, Carlyle wrote to him in well-
chosen words : " It seems to me you are all your old
self here, and something more. A calm insight,
piercing to the very centre ; a beautiful sympathy, a
beautiful epic humor ; a soul peaceably irrefragable
in this loud-jangling world, of which it sees the ugli
ness, but notices only the huge new opulences (still so
anarchic) ; knows the electric telegraph, with all its
vulgar botherations and impertinences, accurately for
what it is, and ditto ditto the oldest eternal Theolo
gies of men. All this belongs to the Highest Class
of thought ; and again seemed to me as, in several re
spects, the one perfectly Human Voice I had heard
among my fellow-creatures for a long time. And
then the ' style,' the treatment and expression, — yes,
it is inimitable, best — Emersonian throughout. . . .
You have done very well ; and many will know it
ever better by degrees." The judgment of the friend
is confirmed by that of the new generation.
ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 53
My own relations with Emerson began after his
position as poet and seer was established, not with the
great public indeed, but with the best of his contem
poraries. Twenty-five years younger than he, I felt
at first a certain hesitancy and shyness in personal
relations with him, not only because of the disparity
of age, and the distinction of his place in the esteem
of worthy men, but also because my father had been
conspicuous in opposition to the drift of his teach
ings and had used language of severe condemnation
of them. It seemed to me possible that Mr. Emerson,
though too high-minded to feel resentment toward
an upright and high-minded opponent, might yet in
cline to hold back from more than merely formal
acquaintance with me. But I was mistaken. From
the beginning of our intercourse he treated me with
a simple graciousness and frank confidence that set
me at ease with him, and quickened in me that affec
tion and reverence which I have just spoken of his
inspiring in every one who had the happiness of
coming into close relation with him.
Thirty years ago this month I had the opportunity
of seeing more of him, and of being in more constant
relation with him than at any other time. He was
returning with his daughter from his last visit to
Europe, and I, with my family, was a fellow passenger
on the steamer. There was no crowd on board ; the
vessel was not one of the swift Leviathans of to-day.
We had long walks together on the deck ; and in the
evening, after the rest of the passengers had gone
54 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
to their berths, he and I used to sit talking together
for an hour or two, till eleven o'clock, when the lights
were extinguished in the deserted cabin. The visit
to Europe and to Egypt had been undertaken, as
some of you will remember, at the urgency of friends,
in the belief that a change of scene and interest
would be serviceable to him after the shock which
he had experienced from the burning of his house in
the summer, and the depressed condition of health
which had followed it. It had done him all the good
that had been hoped for, and he now seemed in
excellent health and spirits.
" It is rank blasphemy," said he one day, " to
doubt anything in the universe ; everything in life
makes for good. The moral element in man supreme,
is progressive. Man is always better than himself.
The world is all for happiness, and is meant for the
happy. It is always improving. Pain and sorrow are
of no account as compared with the joy of living ; if
a man be overcome by them he violates the moral
order."
" The universe is not a cheat ; the beauty and the
order of the external world are sufficient proof that
the spiritual world is in accord with the hopes and
instincts of man and nature for their own perfection."
" Order, goodness, God are the one everlasting,
self -existent fact."
" I measure a man's intellectual sanity by his faith
in immortality. A wise man's wish for life is in pro
portion to his wisdom."
ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 55
He would not entertain for a moment the evidence
of ruthlessness and disorder in nature, of perversion
of the moral nature in men. His faith was superior
to any apparent exceptions to his doctrine ; all of them
could be brought into accordance with it.
In our long evening talks he told me much of his
early life. He was often in a mood of reminiscence,
and in the retrospect all life lay fair behind him, like
a pleasant landscape illumined by the slowly sinking
sun. The sweetness and purity and elevation of his
nature were manifest in his recollections, and his
vision of the past was that not only of the poet, but
of the good man who had gained from life the best
it can afford. He returned over and over again to the
happiness of life and the joy of existence. He had
been very fortunate in his times.
The 25th of May, his seventieth birthday, was
the last day before the voyage ended. When I
greeted him in the morning, he replied with a plea
sant semi-humorous smile, and with a blush like a
youth, " You are too good with all these kind words,
but the day is a melancholy one for me, for I count
this seventieth birthday as the close of youth ! " He
had been reading with great interest on the voyage
the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, and one of them
may have been lingering in his mind : —
" Yet Oh ! that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close !
The nightingale that in the branches sang,
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows ? "
56 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
But my thoughts fell back to his own Terminus,
written ten years before ; not so much to its opening
words, " It is time to grow old," but rather to the
verses with which it ends : —
" As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime ;
Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed ;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed."
One day, a day of rough waves and lowering skies,
as we walked the deck, he spoke of the stout hearts
of the early mariners, sailing the untracked seas.
" How, in Heaven's name, did Columbus get over ? "
as Clough asks. " Not so much of a wonder after
all," said Emerson ; " Columbus had his compass, and
that was enough for such a soul as his ; there was
the miracle of the magnet, the witness of the divine
spirit in nature, type of the eternal control of matter
by spirit, of fidelity to the unseen and the ideal. I
always carry with me a little compass," and taking
it from his pocket, he added, " I like to hold the god
in my hand."
He lived for nine years after his return home.
Some of you remember his gently declining days.
The evening mists steadily gathered about him, but
while they gradually obscured the light of his mind,
they were still suffused by the unquenched glow of
his spirit. His sweetness, his faith never failed.
ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 67
On the last occasion that I saw him at his own
house his powers of recollection were imperfect, but
his gracious benignity was unchanged. His talk had
its old tone, though the intermittent thoughts some
times failed to find perfect expression. As I was
bidding him good-bye at his hospitable door, his
daughter, who proposed to go with me to the rail
road station, urged him to accompany us. " No," said
he, " no, my dear, my good friend whose name I can
not recall, has had quite enough of me to-day ; " and
then turning to me with a smile, as if to apologize
for the seeming lack of courtesy in his inability to
recall my name, he said in words and manner like
his old self, " Strange that the kind Heavens should
keep us upon earth after they have destroyed our
connection with things ! "
The last time I saw him was at the funeral of
Longfellow on the 26th of March, just a month be
fore his own death. He leaned on my arm as we
walked through the path at Mt. Auburn behind the
poet's coffin, and as we stood listening to the short
service at the grave. He hardly seemed to belong to
our actual life ; he was present but yet remote ; for
him, too, " The port well worth the cruise was near."
If there be pathos in the record of these last days,
there is no drop of bitterness in it. They were the
peaceful ending of a happy life. " Enoch walked
with God ; and he was not, for God took him."
Emerson's fame is secure. The years will sift his
work, but his true message and service were not for
58 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
his own generation alone. It is not the founders
of schools whose influence is the strongest and most-
lasting in the world, but rather that of teachers who
lift and invigorate the souls of men by sentiment and
habitual loftiness of view. Men draw strength and
high resolve to-day, after seventeen centuries, from
the desultory Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and
in long future time men seeking to elevate and lib
erate their souls will find help in the words and ex
ample in the character of Emerson.
The Chairman then introduced Colonel Thomas
Wentworth Higginson.
ADDRESS OF
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
WHEN one opens the morning's newspaper on a day
like this and finds it filled, like all its companion
journals, with eulogiums upon one man, it is diffi
cult not to recall that fine passage in Landor's
Imaginary Conversations, where Demosthenes says
of Athens, " I have seen the day when the most
august of cities had but one voice within her walls ;
and when the stranger, on entering them, stopped
at the silence of the gateway, and said, ' Demos
thenes is speaking in the assemblage of the people. ' '
One controlling voice speaks to us to-day and all
that we can do is in our humbler individual tones to
ADDRESS OF T. W. HIGGINSON 69
respond to it. The point upon which I am to speak,
as I understand, is the record of Ralph Waldo
Emerson as a reformer.
In viewing him thus, we may well recall Father
Taylor, the famous preacher to sailors in Boston,
who, when criticised by some fellow Methodists for
being a friend of Emerson, inasmuch as he was a
man who, they thought, must surely go to hell, re
plied, " It does look so ; but I am sure of one thing ;
if Emerson goes to hell it will change the climate
there and emigration will set that way." l The wide
spread commemorations of this month show that
Father Taylor, as usual, was right. They imply that
Emerson was not merely a technical reformer, but
stood to the world as a vital influence and repre
sented the general attitude of reform. Above all
thought rises the freedom to think ; above all utter
ance ranks the liberty to utter. The man who first
asserted that liberty at a given time, and, in assert
ing it, made it attractive and convincing, became
the leader of his period. It was Emerson who did
this for us. From the moment that his volume called
Nature was published in 1836, the thraldom of
Puritanism was broken and men were summoned to
follow the Inner Light. William Penn and the
early Friends had stretched out their hands for this
attitude, but had never quite reached it, because
still somewhat fettered by the tradition of Bible
worship, and by a persecuting clergy of whom Wil-
1 Conway : Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 66.
60 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
liam Penn complained that so far from being good
Christians, they had yet to learn to be good
Heathen.1 Yet Emerson described himself, speak
ing to his kinsman, Dr. Haskins, as "more of a
Quaker than anything else." Channing did not
reach this position, though he drew, as his son tes
tifies, nearer and nearer to it as he grew older.
Parker was not absolutely a leader, but rather fol
lowed Emerson and popularized him. Emerson,
and he only, is the more than Luther of these mod
ern days. We'see this through a glass darkly to-day,
but a hundred years hence, it will be held unques
tionable.
I was but a boy of twelve when Emerson's vol
ume, Nature^ was published. But I was not too
young to hear him lecture once at the Cambridge
Lyceum, and I recall most definitely the impression
he made on at least one of his youngest hearers.
The lectures were held in an old building, preceding
the present Lyceum Hall, and it was the custom of
the village boys, as is still the habit in small coun
try towns, to attend each lecture, take seats very
near the front, and within fifteen minutes retire,
one by one, without much mercy on the lecturer or
the audience. No doubt I took my full share of this
form of intellectual experiment — which in Cam
bridge has especial force from the fact that we re
tired not down the stairs, but by dropping through
a mysterious hole in the slanting floor among the
1 No Cross, No Crown, ii. 76.
ADDRESS OF T. W. HIGGINSON 61
upper seats; but I remember very well that on the
occasion of Mr. Emerson's lecture, I was gradually
deserted by my fellows and sat through the lecture
alone. Being reproached afterwards by my play
mates for this want of fidelity to their customs, I
could only plead that "I liked to hear that man;"
and when asked if I understood what he said, I
honestly replied "No." It now seems to me that
not one of his grown-up hearers could have paid
him a greater compliment. What had reached me
was the personality of the man. Long after this,
when I read in Lowell's words, "We do not go to
hear what Emerson says, so much as to hear Emer
son," I felt that this was just what I had done as a
child.
It was in college that I read his books and reread
them, but only came gradually to recognize him as
being what he was, the most resolute reformer, not
excepting Garrison, whom our nation had produced.
This conviction took definite form, perhaps, at the
first meeting of the Free Religious Association in
1868, when he came last among the speakers and
selected for praise the last but one, who had dis
tinctly objected to the word "Christian" as being
a limitation. Mr. Emerson following, said, "I have
listened with great pleasure to the lessons we have
heard. To many, to those last spoken, I have found
so much in common with my own thought that I
have little left to say." The form of the phrase is
evidently not given with precise accuracy, but I fol-
62 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
low the printed report. He said later in his speech,
"The child, the young student finds scope in his
mathematics and chemistry or natural history, be
cause he finds a truth larger than he is; finds him
self continually instructed. But in churches, every
healthy and thoughtful mind finds itself in some
thing less; it is checked, cribbed, confined." No
thing said was on the whole so trenchant as this.
The Rev. Richard Cecil said in England, about
1777, that "If o$e good upright man should deny
Christianity, he would do the faith of England more
harm than all the sneers of Voltaire or all the senti-
mentalism of Rousseau." In the sense in which Cecil
used the words, Emerson was that man. But these
words were spoken more than a century ago, at a
time of sectarian narrowness which it is now hard
to recall; and the very terms "faith" and "Chris
tianity" are now habitually used in a far wider
sense. To Mr. Cecil, Emerson would have seemed
anti-Christian ; but now a chorus of those who call
themselves Christians speaks his praise. We have
the striking testimony of the Rev. Dr. Haskins, his
near kinsman, that Mr. Emerson preferred even to
speak of the Deity as "It," and nothing more illus
trates the power of his essentially reverential tone
of mind than that this same kinsman, an Episcopal
clergyman of unimpeached standing, was so im
pressed by what Emerson said that he himself went
on to vindicate this pronoun "It" as being, in it
self, not meaningless or even irreverent, but rather
ADDRESS OF T. W. HIGGINSON 63
a good selection of words, as Mr. Emerson used it,
standing simply for God's omnipresence.1 We know
also that while Emerson found formal prayer at
stated intervals impossible to him, yet he said, "As
well may the child live without its mother's milk
as the soul without prayer;" while he also said,
44 Do not speak of God much. After a very little
conversation on the Highest Nature, thoughts de
sert us and we run into formalism ! ! " - He never
recognized the leadership of Jesus Christ as that
of an absolutely infallible guide ; yet to show that
he guarded against overstatement on this ground
also, we have the remarkable passage, preserved
by Miss E. P. Peabody from the original manu
script of his Divinity Hall address, — a passage
left out for want of time only, and warning his
hearers against making even truth a fanaticism:
"Too soon we shall have the puppyism of a preten
sion of looking down on the head of all human cul
ture; setting up against Jesus Christ every little
self magnified."3
Attempts have always been made to disparage
Emerson, on the ground that he was not, even in
reform, a system-maker, but was, fragmentary. This
trait seems to me more and more to have been one
of his highest titles to immortality. System-makers
are short-lived ; each makes his single contribution,
1 Haskins's Emerson, p. 130.
a E. W. Emerson in Prophets of Liberalism, p. 49.
8 Peabody, Reminiscences of Dr. Channing, p. 373.
64 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
and the world passes on. They are finger-posts in
history; but the man who dares to be himself is not
the finger-post, but the runner. Few now read Aris
totle ; but Seneca, Epictetue, Marcus Antoninus yield
us new translations and editions every year. We
have them for manuals and give them to our chil
dren. What the system of each may be is quite
secondary — each offers us a series of thoughts,
detached or otherwise; and each of these thoughts
may turn out great enough to mould a life. Such
are the thoughts we get from Emerson. We may
say of his works what Renan said so finely of Mar
cus Antoninus, "His works will never grow anti
quated, because they offer no dogma."
Let us all be Platos and Newtons, if you please;
or, if you prefer, Homers and Shakespeares ; let
our school committees hunt them up in abundance,
if possible, in every school district; yet let us not
lose faith in the greatness of the spontaneous or
fragmentary life ; that is, the life which becomes at
its highest moments a source of vital influence.
Open your Emerson anywhere and you are presently
touched by the vivid power of a phrase, a sentence;
or perhaps — in his earlier addresses especially —
by the cadence of some fine paragraph. Read, for
instance, that description of the boyish student to
be found in his address at Dartmouth College
(1838):-
" In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth
loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in his sleep-
ADDRESS OF T. W. HIGGINSON 65
ing wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor
Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home
to the surrounding woods the faint roar of cannon
ades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He
is curious concerning that man's day. What filled
it? the crowded orders, the stern decisions, the for
eign despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul
answers — Behold his day here ! In the sighing of
these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the
cool breeze that sings out of these northern mount
ains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you
meet, — in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of
noon, and sauntering of the afternoon ; in the dis
quieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of
vigor ; in the great idea and the puny execution ;
— behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the
same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's,
Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day, — day of all that
are born of women. The difference of circumstance
is merely costume. ... Be lord of a day, through
wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history
books."1
Fifty years ago there must have been more than
a thousand men and women in America and in Eng
land who could look back on that passage, as I did,
and say of it, "At any rate, it was the making of
me." A hundred thousand others since then may
have, perhaps, looked back and said of those first
thousand converts, "It was they who made us." You
1 Nature, Addresses and Lectures, pp. 157-159.
66 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
might as well question the creative power of pas
sages in the Book of Psalms.
I began with a picture of Emerson as he showed
himself to an essentially childish mind. Let me
close with a glimpse of the scene when he was
brought, for the first time, before a thousand half-
childish minds, gathered beneath the solemn moss-
hung forests of South Carolina, early in the Civil
War. It was the first regiment of freed slaves mus
tered into the service of the Union ; and they stood,
with that perfect stillness of which they were ca
pable, while their white surgeon, Dr. Seth Rogers,
of Worcester, a man who possessed their confidence
in all ways, read before them at their Sunday ser
vice, by his own wish, the whole of Emerson's
" Boston Hymn." When he came to the lines —
" Pay ransom to the owner
And fill his cup to the brim.
Who is the owner ? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him ! " —
I watched their faces as he read. There was no look
of wild excitement, no air of aroused and selfish
desire, but a serene religious expression, a look of
absolute security, as if the Almighty had at last
heard their prayers and this far-off poet was his
messenger.
The Chairman then introduced Professor William
James.
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 67
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES
THE pathos of death is this, that when the days of
one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded
with business and felt so heavy in their passing,
what remains of one in memory should usually be so
slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the
echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of
print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a
brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best
of us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance
had now shrunk into the phantom of an attitude,
into a mere musical note or phrase, suggestive of his
singularity — happy are those whose singularity
gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inev
itable pity of such a diminution and abridgment.
An ideal wraith like this, of Emerson's singular
ity, hovers over all Concord to-day, taking in the
minds of those of you who were his neighbors and
intimates a somewhat fuller shape, remaining more
abstract in the younger generation, but bringing
home to all of us the notion of a spirit indescribably
precious. The form that so lately moved upon these
streets and country roads, or awaited in these fields
and woods the beloved Muse's visits, is now dust ;
but the soul's note, the spiritual voice, rises strong
and clear above the uproar of the times, and seems
securely destined to exert an ennobling influence over
future generations.
68 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
What gave a flavor so matchless to Emerson's
individuality was, even more than his rich mental
gifts, their combination. Rarely has a man so known
the limits of his genius or so unfailingly kept within
them. " Stand by your order," he used to say to youth
ful students ; and perhaps the paramount impression
one gets of his life is of his loyalty to his own
type and mission. The type was that of what he
liked to call the scholar, the perceiver of pure truth,
and the mission was that of the reporter in worthy
form of each perception. The day is good, he said,
in which we have the most perceptions. There are
times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snow-
flake, or a farmer planting in his field, become sym
bols to the intellect of truths equal to those which
the most majestic phenomena can open. Let me
mind my own charge, then, walk alone, consult the
sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every
morning for the news concerning the structure of
the universe which the good Spirit will give me.
This was the first half of Emerson, but only half ,
for his genius was insatiate for expression, and his
truth had to be clad in the right verbal garment.
The form of the garment was so vital with Emer
son that it is impossible to separate it from the mat
ter. They form a chemical combination, — thoughts
which would be trivial expressed otherwise are
important through the nouns and verbs to which
he married them. The style is the man, it has been
said : the man Emerson's mission culminated in his
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 69
style, and if we must define him in one word, we
have to call him Artist. He was an artist whose
medium was verbal and who wrought in spiritual
material.
This duty of spiritual seeing and reporting deter
mined the whole tenor of his life. It was to shield
it from invasion and distraction that he dwelt in the
country, and that he consistently declined to entan
gle himself with associations or to encumber himself
with functions which, however he might believe in
them, he felt were duties for other men and not for
him. Even the care of his garden, " with its stoop-
ings and fingerings in a few yards of space," he
found " narrowing and poisoning," and took to long
free walks and saunterings instead, without apology.
" Causes " innumerable sought to enlist him as their
" worker " — all got his smile and word of sympa
thy, but none entrapped him into service. The strug
gle against slavery itself, deeply as it appealed to
him, found him firm : " God must govern his own
world, and knows his way out of this pit without
my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it
but me. I have quite other slaves to face than those
Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the
brain of man, and which have no watchman or lover
or defender but me." This in reply to the possible
questions of his conscience. To hot-blooded moral
ists with more objective ideas of duty, such a fidel
ity to the limits of his genius must often have made
him seem provokiugly remote and unavailable ; but
70 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
we who can see things in more liberal perspective
must unqualifiedly approve the results. The fault
less tact with which he kept his safe limits while he
so dauntlessly asserted himself within them is an
example fitted to give heart to other theorists and
artists the world over.
The insight and creed from which Emerson's life
followed can be best summed up in his own verse : —
" So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man ! "
Through the individual fact there ever shone for
him the effulgence of the Universal Reason. The
great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses itself
in mortal men and passing hours. Each of us is an
angle of its eternal vision, and the only way to be
true to our Maker is to be loyal to ourselves. " O
rich and various Man ! " he cries, " thou palace of
sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning
and the night and the unfathomable galaxy ; in thy
brain the geometry of the city of God ; in thy heart
the bower of love and the realms of right and
wrong."
If the individual open thus directly into the Ab
solute, it follows that there is something in each and
all of us, even the lowliest, that ought not to consent
to borrowing traditions and living at second hand.
" If John was perfect, why are you and I alive ? "
writes Emerson. " As long as any man exists there
is some need of him ; let him fight for his own."
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 71
This faith that in a life at first haud there is some
thing sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note
in Emerson's writings. The hottest side of him is
this non-conformist persuasion, and if his temper
could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be
by reason of the passionate character of his feelings
on this point. The world is still new and untried. In
seeing freshly, and not in hearing of what others
saw, shall a man find what truth is. " Each one of
us can bask in the great morning which rises out of
the Eastern Sea, and be himself one of the children
of the light." " Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to
that iron string. There is a time in each man's edu
cation when he must arrive at the conviction that
imitation is suicide ; when he must take himself for
better or worse as his portion ; and know that though
the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nour
ishing corn can come to him but through his toil be
stowed on that plot of ground which it was given
him to till."
The matchless eloquence with which Emerson pro
claimed the sovereignty of the living individual elec
trified and emancipated his generation, and this
bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics
as the soul of his message. The present man is the
aboriginal reality, the Institution is derivative, and
the past man is irrelevant and obliterate for present
issues. " If any one would lay an axe to your tree
with a text from 1 John, v. 7, or a sentence from
Saint Paul, say to him," Emerson wrote, " ' My tree
72 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
is Ygdrasil, the tree of life.' Let him know by your
security that your conviction is clear and sufficient,
and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here
and with your Creator." " Cleave ever to God," he
insisted, " against the name of God ; " — and so, in
spite of the intensely religious character of his total
thought, when he began his career it seemed to many
of his brethren in the clerical profession that he was
little more than an iconoclast and desecrator.
Emerson's belief that the individual must in rea
son be adequate to the vocation for which the Spirit
of the world has called him into being is the source
of those sublime pages, hearteners and sustainers of
our youth, in which he urges his hearers to be in-
corruptibly true to their own private conscience.
Nothing can harm the man who rests in his appointed
place and character. Such a man is invulnerable ; he
balances the universe, balances it as much by keep
ing small when he is small as by being great and
spreading when he is great. " I love and honor Epa-
minondas," said Emerson, " but I do not wish to be
Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world
of this hour than the world of his hour. Nor can you,
if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by say
ing, ' He acted and thou sittest still.' I see action to
be good when the need is, and sitting still to be also
good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him
for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his
lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space
for all modes of love and fortitude." " The fact that
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 73
I am here certainly shows me that the Soul has need
of an organ here, and shall I not assume the post ? "
The vanity of all super-serviceableness and pretense
was never more happily set forth than by Emerson
in the many passages in which he develops this as
pect of his philosophy. Character infallibly proclaims
itself. " Hide your thoughts ! — hide the sun and
moon. They publish themselves to the universe.
They will speak through you though you were dumb.
They will flow out of your actions, your manners and
your face. . . . Don't say things : What you are
stands over you the while and thunders so that I can
not say what you say to the contrary. . . . What a
man is engraves itself upon him in letters of light.
Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing.
There is confession in the glances of our eyes ; in
our smiles ; in salutations ; and the grasp of hands.
His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression.
Men know not why they do not trust him, but they
do not trust him. His vice glasses the eye, casts lines
of mean expression in the cheek, pinches the nose, sets
the mark of the beast upon the back of the head, and
writes, O fool ! fool ! on the forehead of a king. If
you would not be known to do a thing, never do it ;
a man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert,
but every grain of sand shall seem to see. — How
can a man be concealed ? How can he be concealed ? "
On the other hand, never was a sincere word or a
sincere thought utterly lost. " Never a magnanimity
fell to the ground but there is some heart to greet
74: THE EMERSON CENTENARY
and accept it unexpectedly. . . . The hero fears not
that if he withstood the avowal of a just and brave
act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows
it, — himself, — and is pledged by it to sweetness of
peace and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in
the end a better proclamation than the relating of
the incident."
The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one
is, provided one only be authentic, spreads itself, in
Emerson's way of thinking, from persons to things
and to times and places. No date, no position is
insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only
genuine : —
" In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth
loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this sleep
ing wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor
Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home
to the surrounding woods the faint roar of can
nonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany.
He is curious concerning that man's day. What filled
it? The crowded orders, the stern decisions, the
foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette ? The soul
answers — Behold his day here ! In the sighing of
these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the
cool breeze that sings out of these northern mount
ains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you
meet, — in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of
noon, and sauntering of the afternoon ; in the dis
quieting comparisons ; in the regrets at want of vigor ;
in the great idea and the puny execution : — behold
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 75
Charles the Fifth's day ; another, yet the same ;
behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's,
Scipio's, Pericles's day, — day of all that are born of
women. The difference of circumstance is merely
costume. I am tasting the self-same life, — its sweet
ness, its greatness, its pain, — which I so admire in
other men. Do not foolishly ask the inscrutable,
obliterated past what it cannot tell, — the details of
that nature, of that day, called Byron or Burke ; —
but ask it of the enveloping Now. . . . Be lord of a
day and you can put up your history books."
Thus does " the deep to-day which all men scorn"
receive from Emerson superb revindication. " Other
world ! there is no other world." All God's life opens
into the individual particular, and here and now,
or nowhere, is reality. " The present hour is the
decisive hour, and every day is doomsday."
Such a conviction that Divinity is everywhere may
easily make of one an optimist of the sentimental
type that refuses to speak ill of anything. Emerson's
drastic perception of differences kept him at the
opposite pole from this weakness. After you have
seen men a few times, he could say, you find most
of them as alike as their barns and pantries, and
soon as musty and as dreary. Never was such a fas
tidious lover of significance and distinction, and
never an eye so keen for their discovery. His opti
mism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate
hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whit
man has made us familiar. For Emerson, the indi-
76 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
vidual fact and moment were indeed suffused with
absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition that
saved the situation — they must be worthy specimens,
— sincere, authentic, archetypal; they must have
made connection with what he calls the Moral Sen
timent, they must in some way act as symbolic
mouthpieces of the Universe's meaning. To know
just which thing does act in this way, and which
thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret
(somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of
seership, and doubtless we must not expect of the
seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson himself was
a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of
the individual fact, but he could also see the trans
figuration. He might easily have found himself say
ing of some present-day agitator against our Philip
pine conquest what he said of this or that reformer
of his own time. He might have called him, as a
private person, a tedious bore and canter. But he
would infallibly have added what he then added:
" It is strange and horrible to say this, for I feel that
under him and his partiality and exclusiveness is
the earth and the sea, and all that in them is, and
the axis round which the Universe revolves passes
through his body where he stands."
Be it how it may, then, this is Emerson's revela
tion : — The point of any pen can be an epitome of
reality ; the commonest person's act, if genuinely
actuated, can lay hold on eternity. This vision is the
head-spring of all his outpourings ; and it is for this
ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 77
truth, given to no previous literary artist to express
in such penetratingly persuasive tones, that poster
ity will reckon him a prophet, and, perhaps neglect
ing other pages, piously turn to those that convey
this message. His life was one long conversation
with the invisible divine, expressing itself through
individuals and particulars : — "So nigh is grandeur
to our dust, so near is God to man ! "
I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the
echo, of men is after they are departed. Emerson's
wraith comes to me now as if it were but the very
voice of this victorious argument. His words to this
effect are certain to be quoted and extracted more
and more as time goes on, and to take their place
among the Scriptures of humanity. " 'Gainst death
and all oblivious enmity shall you pace forth," be
loved Master. As long as our English language
lasts, men's hearts will be cheered and their souls
strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical
pages with which you have enriched it.
The Chairman then said : —
May I say on your behalf, citizens of Concord,
that we greet with warm and peculiar affection our
elder brother, George Frisbie Hoar.
78 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
ADDRESS OF
GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR
I AM proud and happy that I am counted among the
children of Concord on this anniversary. There are
many things we are all thinking that we cannot find
time to say to-day. There are some things we are
all thinking that Mr. Emerson would not like to
have us say. His modest and discreet spirit would
have found something of exaggeration in it, even
coming from his neighbors and townsmen.
We are thinking, all of us, of that lovely and
delightful personal quality, pure and sweet as that
of an archangel. We are full of the love which every
one of us who knew him felt for him, from the time
he first took up his abode here in his sylvan home.
But the town has had other citizens of that quality.
That town is poor that has not had them. We are
tempted to compare our philosopher and poet with
other great men, with other thinkers, and writers,
and poets. Some of us think Emerson the first
American by the same title by which Shakespeare is
the first Englishman. Some of us think of him as
the only writer since Bacon, in whose essays a
thought quoted from Bacon's essays seems to be in
its natural place, — the setting quite as costly as the
jewel. But I do not think he would have liked such
comparisons. At any rate, if they are to be made,
let them be made by men without the bias of a per
sonal affection.
ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 79
Yet our celebration would be cold indeed, were we
to leave out of it the human feeling, — the feeling of
pride and love, — in which we have a right to indulge
as his townsmen and his countrymen.
When the young philosopher, in his first produc
tion which might be called public, — his Bowdoin
Prize Essay, in 1820, — disclosed his aspiration and
his ideal of excellence, he prefaced it with these
lines. He was then seventeen years old.
" Guide my way
Through fair Lyceum's walk, the green retreats
Of Academus, and the thymy vale
Where, oft enchanted with Socratic sounds,
Ilissus pure devolved his tuneful stream
In gentler murmurs. From the blooming store
Of these auspicious fields, may I unblamed
Transplant some living blossoms to adorn
My native clime."
Surely that aspiration was accomplished. Ah,
sweetest of Evangelists! Here in these fields of
ours stood your feet when you uttered your message
to mankind. You walked by our river and our ponds,
like Lycidas, the very genius of the shore. You
transplanted here, unblamed, the living blossoms of
the groves of Academe. You waked again the echoes
of the voice of Plato, mingled with Ilissus' tuneful
murmurs, in our woods and fields and by our Indian
stream.
I do not undertake to speak of Mr. Emerson's
service to the youth of his country, as a guide to
80 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
the best literature, or as a counsellor and inspirer to
that noble and brave behavior of which he was,
himself, so admirable an example. I will not speak
of him as a critic, to whose almost infallible touch
stone every man brought his metal to see if it were
gold. I will not undertake to speak of him as a
poet, or as an orator, rising, on fit occasion, to the
loftiest eloquence.
I have time to speak of him in but one aspect.
That is, the contribution he made to the knowledge
by mankind of spiritual laws.
I think he had the farthest and clearest spiritual
discernment of any man who has lived in modern
times. His vision was not only keen and far-sighted,
but he was singularly free from the things that dis
tort or disturb. There was no local attraction, or
temptation, or heat, or blur. So we may take him
as the best witness we know of to the spiritual facts
which are all around us and close to us, but yet so
many of which we cannot know, or know but imper
fectly, by any seeing or hearing of our own. What
we see, he saw more clearly. What we hear, he heard
more distinctly. And always he sees a face we can
not see, and hears a voice we cannot hear. Now, to
what does this witness, the best witness we can find
so far, certify ? Whether any human intelligence be
absolutely trustworthy, or any human judgment be
absolutely sure, in its report of such things, or in
determining their value and quality, we need not stop
to inquire. This is, in our opinion, the best we have
ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 81
at command. What are the things which this man
of farthest and profoundest vision has to report?
What is the estimate of them by the judgment the
most accurate in its poise ? What do they weigh by
these balances in which there is no dust ?
I do not mean only that he saw what no other man
can see. I mean, too, what other men see dimly and
doubtfully, but are the more certain of because he
saw it too. Persons on the deck see a dim object or
a cloud of smoke in the horizon. Some conjecture
one thing, and some another. Then comes the pilot
with his far sight and his trained eye, and tells you
that it is a steamer, or a ship. He knows the line to
which she belongs, and the name of the vessel. He
only, it may be, confirms what some of the rest have
said. But what other men guessed, he knew.
Every man who is seeking a spiritual life finds in
Emerson his own faith, if he have faith, as the
Christian sects find theirs in the Saviour. Now, what
are the things in which our confidence is strengthened
and deepened by the fact that he tells us they are
true ? Some of them — and we may thank God for
it — we may see also for ourselves. Some of them he
reveals to us and makes clear to us. But we can take
the courage that they give us from the fact that the
clearest eyes, and the best intelligence, and the most
dispassionate judgment that has appeared among men
for many a day adds to the imperfect evidence of our
intelligence, the more perfect evidence of his. I
cannot, of course, in a few minutes, enumerate all
82 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
the things he has reported to us. It would take a
long, and careful, and profound study to comprehend
them myself.
He has taught us the virtue of completeness, and
courage, and sincerity of utterance. In dealing with
the things that pertain to the soul he utters no half-
truths, no pious frauds. He gives us no milk for
babes. The purpose of Emerson, like that of Milton,
is to justify the ways of God to man, and they do
not need to be clothed in a veil. God is not to be
seen, as Moses saw him, from behind.
He affirms that inspiration, and the [process of
revelation, did not end with the Apostles and the
Scriptures. It is going on to-day, and all the time,
to him that hath ears to hear. The bush is burning
still.
The spiritual message comes to each man for him
self, which he can trust and which he must act upon.
" Trust thyself ! Every nerve vibrates to that iron
string." The universe is for the building up of indi
vidual character. Each soul is to be a star and dwell
apart. Men should greet each other every morning
as coming from far countries — like the Gods, who
sit apart, and talk from peak to peak all around
Olympus.
Mr. Emerson said of his own style that his works
were made up of infinitely repellent particles. This
is in a sense true of humanity — as he thought it
should be. But he has reaffirmed for us, and taught
us anew the value of the human affections, and
ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 83
to prize the great virtues to which our race has
attained thus far. He was a royal and noble lover.
He loved wife, and children, and home, and neigh
bor, and friend, and town, and country. He loved
liberty, and justice, and hope, and courage. His
picture of the New England Town, for which Con
cord sat ; his Boston Hymn ; his Fortune of the Re
public, are the high-water mark which the love of
country, and of birthplace, and of town had reached
at that time.
Has any man spoken to us like him of the virtue
of a good hope, since the Apostle placed it forever
in the centre of the mighty group ? He saw that
crime and sin led all souls to the good. The cosmic
results will be the same whatever the daily events
may be.
He was eminently a reconciler. His larger orbit
enclosed all lesser orbits, and even all divergent lines.
One thing he saw which mankind have not seen.
That is, that forever the slave is owner, and forever
the victim is victor.
So, when Freedom,Virtue, Religion, Justice, Love,
Patriotism, call their witnesses his name will be the
first of our time to be called. So far as mortal testi
mony can prove it, they can rest the case with him.
He has made the best statement in all secular
literature of the doctrine of immortality. He shows
us that the world and the human soul are not only
unreasonable, but inexplicable, without it. Yet he
makes no absolute affirmation, except that we shall
84 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
be immortal if that be best. Whether we shall know
each other again is a Sunday-school question. He
will not spend his time about it. Perhaps, as he says
of Carlyle, this nimble and active spirit does not care
to beat itself against walls. But he is not, like Carlyle,
a destroyer or a scorner. He worships no demon of
mere force. If he does not know what we long to
know of another world, he pays due homage to the
loving and wise Spirit that sitteth as Sovereign on
the throne of this. Kather he believes that the world
is but one world, and that the Sovereign who reigns
over it — never to be dethroned — knows very well
that every road leads to the gates of His Kingdom.
He sees no God of force or of disdain looking down
on mankind as on a race of grovelling swine or
chattering apes. For myself, I never read what
Emerson says about Immortality, or think of him
as thinking about it, without summing it all up in
Addison's noble line, —
" The Soul, secure in her existence, smiles."
When Emerson first uttered his grave and cheerful
voice, there still echoed in the ear of mankind the
cry of disdain inspired by the diseased brain of
Carlyle, when he imagined the serene and silent stars
looking down from their eternal solitudes on the
varied occupations of men. " What thinks Bootes of
them as he leads his hunting-dogs across the zenith
in their leash of sidereal fire ? " What thinks Bootes
of them ? Bootes is but a few specks of shining dust,
ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 85
glistening with putrescent light, save as he is clothed
with beauty and with glory in the conscious soul of
man. The only thing in the world, under Him who
made it, that can ever be truly an object of reverence
is a human soul subjecting itself, of its own volition,
to a law higher than its own desire. The answer to
the seer of the old world came from the seer of the
new ; —
" So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must/
The youth replies, « I can.' "
Nothing could be more unbecoming than to speak
irreverently of CarJyle while we are doing homage to
Emerson. Emerson stood loyally by his friends, by
that friend most loyally of all. Among Carlyle's
chief titles to remembrance by posterity will be
Emerson's certificate.
Still, Emerson, though his lover and admirer,
admits that Carlyle reminds him of a sick giant.
Carlyle is a hater of evil. He stands for honesty
and righteousness. He finds them hardly anywhere,
and finds them least of all in the men who are
most eager in trying to attain unto them. Until
honesty and righteousness come to the throne —
which Carlyle does not expect to happen in his time
— he proposes to maintain and to obey an ad inte
rim Sovereign, who is nothing but a poor and com
monplace tyrant.
Jowett well said of him that he was a man with-
86 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
out admiration of any active goodness ; he expressed
his own personal fancies in the likeness of intellec
tual truths, and that if he, himself, were engaged in
any work more than usually good, Carlyle would be
the first person to utter a powerful sneer, and if he
were seeking to know the truth, Carlyle would ridi
cule the notion of a homunculus discovering the
truth.
Wordsworth said truly of Carlyle that he defied
all sympathy. And he said truly of the Carlyle tem
per : —
" That pride,
How e'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness ; that he who feels contempt
For any living thing hath faculties
That he has never used, that thought with him,
Is in its infancy."
He seemed to despise every good man. He was
essentially a scorner, and the lash of his scorn fell
upon good men ; and his homage, which he rarely
gave, was given, in general, to bad men. However
we may be dazzled by Carlyle, our fixed star will be
shining in the sky when this meteor is gone. If we
may trust our seer when he tells us that evil is tem
porary and perishable, and that
" What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent,"
then the function of the destroyer of evil is perish
able and temporary also.
Mr. Emerson's philosophy had no Stoicism in it.
ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 87
If it brought him ampler compensations than were
vouchsafed to common men, grief also filled to its
depths a larger heart, and touched with its agony
nerves more finely sensitive than those of common
men. Who has uttered, like him, in that immortal
"Threnody," the voice of parental sorrow? What
more loving heart ever mourned the loss of a brother's
love than that which could not be unlocked because
the key had gone with Charles and Edward ? I re
member, as if it were yesterday, that winter morning
in my early youth, when the messenger came to my
father's door before sunrise, bearing his written mes
sage to one of the household, " Everything wakes
this morning, except my darling boy." The noblest
emotions of the soul are nobler to us that they have
moved him.
I have spoken very imperfectly of a part only of
the messages Emerson brought to us. Now, it is not
enough for our purpose that the intellect should see
these things. Men do not like skeletons or anatomies.
And they do not like cold. These things must come
to us, if they are to be living truths for us, clothed
and apparelled in regal splendor; adorned and
wreathed with flowers and branches ; made sweet and
tender by the graces of poetry ; made musical with
rhythm and verse. They must be spoken by eloquent
lips, and the soul must be opened to receive them by
the glance of the eye, and the tone of the voice, and
the flush of the cheek, of the prophet who utters them.
We who are the survivors of that generation, and
88 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
who dwelt in the town of his home, enjoyed that
privilege also. I do not know how others may feel.
But I would not be without that sweet and tender
memory of the voice whose words yet linger in my
ear, " nestling," as Lowell says, " in the ear, because
of their music, and in the heart, because of their
meaning," to have heard Demosthenes speak from
the Bema, or Plato in the Academy.
To cite the tributes of eminent authorities to the
great place of Mr. Emerson in literature, and his
trustworthiness as an intellectual and spiritual guide,
would occupy not only the day but the year. We
cannot undertake to do that. But we ought to be
certain that we are not induced by our love for our
delightful friend and townsman to confound our own
narrow field of vision with that of all mankind —
especially with that of posterity. Yet that must be
a fixed star of the first magnitude, of whom observ
ers, whose stations are apart by the distance of the
whole heavens, concur in so reporting. When the
Jew, and the Catholic, and the Unitarian, and the
Anglican, and the Calvinist, and the Sceptic ; when
the Russian, and the German, and the Scotsman,
concur with his own countrymen in their estimate
of a religious teacher, we may fairly believe that
we have got the verdict not of the year or of the
generation only, but of the centuries.
I received the other day a letter from an accom
plished Jew containing a paper he had written upon
Emerson. In it he says, "Emerson's hold on the
ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 89
minds and thoughts of men is truly remarkable. The
circle of his influence grows continually wider and
wider. He appeals to the most various and diverse
natures. The greatest and the humblest unite in
paying him homage. He fascinates and inspires the
hearts and souls of all. The men and women of two
continents come to his writings with the feeling that
a new world has been discovered, and a new era
opened in their lives. They peruse his works with a
delight and an avidity unaroused and unsatisfied by
any other author, ancient or modern. The sanest,
the soberest, the most 'practical' lawyers, doctors,
statesmen, philosophers, business men — those are
among the unnumbered hosts of those throughout
the world who confess themselves the eager, devoted
students and admirers of the inspiring Emerson.
His words are on every tongue. His sentences illu
mine the pages and adorn the speeches of the great
est writers and orators."
About the time I got his letter, I heard from
Bishop Spaulding, one of the most eminent Catholic
prelates in this country, who has lately earned public
gratitude by an important service to public order,
that Emerson was a favorite author of his also. This
is his letter. It is written with some reserve, as
would be expected from one to whom the Church is
the final authority on all such questions. I am told
that Bishop Spaulding is called by the men of his
own faith "the Catholic Emerson," and that they
deem it a title of high honor.
90 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
ST. MARY'S CATHEDRAL,
PEORIA, ILL., April 14, 1903.
MY DEAR SENATOR HOAR : — I send you this
brief word on Emerson.
Emerson is the keenest, the most receptive, the
most thoughtful mind we have had; and whatever
his limitations, his failures to get at the profoundest
and therefore the most interesting truth, he is, and
probably will continue to be for a long time, the
most vital force in American literature. His influ
ence will outlast that of Carlyle and Ruskin. His
sanity, his modesty, his kindliness are greater ; he is
more hopeful and consequently more helpful than
they. He himself says we judge of a man's wisdom
by his hopefulness ; and so we may give him a place
among the world's wise men.
Very sincerely yours,
(Signed) I. L. SPAULDING.
Constantine Pobedonostzeff, since the death of
Alexander II., has been the power behind the throne
in Russia. At the first meeting of Alexander III.
with his councillors, he told the Emperor that all
liberal measures and all constitutions were a de
lusion ; that no constitution was fitted to Russia
except the will of an autocrat, directed by his own
sense of responsibility to the Almighty. He holds
that not only the political conduct, but the religious
faith of the people must be ordered from the throne.
Six words — " Obey or die ; believe or die " — are
ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 91
all the constitution, statute, or bill of rights for
an empire that holds one sixth of the people of the
globe. I suppose his single will, influencing that of
the Emperor, and compelling submission from the
whole people, has been, for nearly a quarter of a
century, the most powerful single will on the face of
the earth. Yet his favorite author is Emerson. He
has enriched Russian literature by several transla
tions. The first book he translated was Thomas a
Kempis's Imitation of Christ, and the next was
Emerson's " Works and Days."
A little time ago, at my request, he sent for the
Concord Library a volume of his translation into
Russian, with an autograph letter and his own por
trait. I was told by our representative at St. Peters
burg that he was much delighted by my request
which led him to send them. This is the letter with
which he accompanied the book : —
SIR : — It is true that having been from my youth
a constant reader and admirer of Ralph Waldo Emer
son, I one day undertook the translation of one of
his essays, " Works and Days," taken from the book,
Society and Solitude. The work had for me a par
ticular interest, since it is not easy to express in a
foreign language the original style of the author.
The work, published in 1874, was reprinted in a col
lection of my essays which appeared in 1896, in Mos
cow.
The Hon. Andrew White, whose stay at St. Peters-
92 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
burg, unhappily too short, has left with me the most
agreeable memories, probably had this work in view
when he mentioned my fondness for Emerson in an
article in the Century Magazine.
If my book should answer the idea of Senator
Hoar, I desire to send it to you, Monsieur, with the
request that you transmit it to the Library at Con
cord with my most sincere compliments.
Accept, Monsieur, the expression of my most re
spectful regards,
(signed) CONST. POBEDONOSTZEFF.
The 17th of May, 1898, PETERSBURG.
To MONSIEUR HERBERT PIERCE.
In 1833, three years before he wrote Nature, Mrs.
Ripley said of him, " We regard him still, more than
ever, as the apostle of the Eternal Reason."
When Dean Stanley was in this country he took
special pains to inform himself of the history and
present condition of our religious denominations.
The result of his observation was, that whatever
might be the sect or creed of the clergymen, they
all preached Emerson.
It were a sorry story for humanity if these eternal
verities had been uttered by but one voice, or had
waited from the beginning for any one voice to utter
them. They were revealed to humanity in the morn
ing of creation. The revelation will continue until
time shall be no more. What is best in humanity
answered in the beginning, and will answer to the
ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 93
end. The lesson is that the common virtues, the com
mon hopes, the common loves, the common faiths of
mankind are the foundations on which the Universe
is builded and are the things that shall endure. There
is a diversity of gifts, but the same spirit. There
is a difference of language, but the same message.
Emerson says, "he is base — that is the one base thing
of the universe — to receive benefits, and render
none." " Noblesse oblige" says the chivalrous pro
verb of France. " To whom much is given, of him
much shall be required," say the Hebrew Scriptures.
Emerson tells us that beauty, love, and truth are
one. He is only another witness that faith, and
hope, and love are the pillars on which all things
rest, and that they abide. Their identity the Church
has striven for ages to express in the great doctrine
of the Trinity. Emerson also tells us that they are
one with duty and with joy. What is that but to
say with the Assembly's catechism that the chief end
of man is to '* glorify God and to enjoy him forever " ?
Thank God if it be true that these are the eternal
commonplaces, and that the humblest individual soul
as well as the greatest, by virtue of its birthright as
a child of the Infinite Soul, is able to comprehend
them and to trust them.
But above all these, comprehending them all, is
his perception of a presence that I hardly know how
to name, and that it sometimes seems he did not like
to name. I asked a famous preacher what it was
that he thought Emerson saw more clearly than other
94 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
men. He said, "It is the Immanent God." What
Emerson would have called it if he had given it
a name, I do not know — God, the Over-Soul, the
Unknown, the Unity manifesting itself in beauty, in
power, in love, in joy, in duty, existing everywhere,
speaking in every age through some prophet of its
own, — it spoke to our age its high commands
through the lips of Emerson.
The exercises closed at forty-five minutes after five
with the " Seventy-eighth Psalm," sung by the congrega
tion to the tune of " St. Martins."
THE EVENING
THE EVENING
THE Social Circle met in the evening of May 25,
1903, at seven o'clock, in the vestry of the First
Parish. It had been voted at a meeting February
3, 1903, " that Miss Ellen T. Emerson, Mrs. Wil
liam H. Forbes and her children, and the family of
Edward W. Emerson be invited ... as guests of
the Circle." Other guests were invited by the Com
mittee and by the members individually, and in all
one hundred and fifty-two were present.
At half -past seven the company took their seats,
the guests invited by the vote of the Circle and those
invited by the Committee sitting at tables upon the
raised platform at the end of the room, with the
Chairman of the Committee.
The tables were decorated with lady's-slipper and
rhodora. A large portrait of Mr. Emerson, framed
in branches of pink hawthorn, with a laurel wreath
at its base, rested against the head table in front of
the Chairman. Branches of wild cornel bush, wild
cherry, and pink hawthorn filled the spaces on either
side. On the walls hung extracts from Mr. Emerson's
writings framed in pine boughs.
On the dinner card was the " Concord Hymn," a
colored print of the rhodora blossom with four lines
98 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
from " The Rhodora," and the following tribute to
the Social Circle written by Mr. Emerson to a friend
December 17, 1844 : -
" Much the best society I have ever known is a
club in Concord called the Social Circle, consisting
always of twenty-five of our citizens, doctor, lawyer,
farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, etc., solidest of men,
who yield the solidest of gossip. Harvard University
is a wafer compared to the solid land which my friends
represent."
The menu was as follows : —
Little Necks
Radishes Olives
Cream of Lettuce
Toast Sticks
Turbans of Halibut Lobster Sauce
Sliced Cucumbers
FiUet of Beef
Potato Croquettes Green Peas
Asparagus, Hollandaise
Lettuce and Tomato Salad, Mayonnaise
Frozen Pudding Strawberries
Ice Cream and Water Ices
Assorted Cake
Toasted Crackers
Roquefort Cheese Cream Cheese
Coffee
During the dinner there was music by an orches
tra, and then the Chairman, the Hon. John Shep
ard Keyes, rose and said : —
SPEECH OF CAROLINE HAZARD 99
REMARKS OF JOHN SHEPARD KEYES
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, Friends and Fellow Mem
bers of the Social Circle : — To-night is Emerson's,
THE SEER.
" Alone on his dim heights of song and dreabi
He saw the dawn, and of its solace told.
We on his brow beheld the luminous gleam
And listened idly, for the night was cold.
" Then clouds shut out the view, and he was gone,
And though the way is dubious, dark the night,
And though our dim eyes still await the dawn,
We saw a face that once beheld the light."
This is the third time — and the third time never
fails — that the ladies have attended a meeting of
the Social Circle. The first occasion was at the Cen
tennial of the Circle, the second was on a summer
evening later, and to-night we have a majority of
the fair sex with us. I am very glad to be able to
present to you the President of the foremost women's
college, the daughter of an especial friend of Emer
son — Miss Hazard, of Wellesley College.
SPEECH OF CAROLINE HAZARD
MR. CHAIRMAN, and Members of the Social
Circle : — I am sure it is a great honor to be accounted
a member of this Social Circle for this one evening,
100 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
an honor which I prize very highly. I must say,
when your Chairman of the day asked me to come
here and say a word, I feared that I should be what
Mr. Emerson would call " an unauthorized talker."
But I have the authority, not only of the kind invi
tation of your Chairman, but what Mr. Emerson
would recognize as the true authority — the authority
of the affection and gratitude which I have — which
all women must have — for the work which Mr.
Emerson did for women as well as for men. It
seems to me that that splendid message of the dig
nity of the person and of the worth of personality
which he preached and was the preeminent example
of — that message which he spoke to all young men
and young women — comes with an especial force
to the young women of to-day. When we think
what New England was one hundred years ago, how
it was truly a provincial New England, — a New
England connected with the mother country by
the closest ties, but still connected only with the
mother country and not with the great world cur
rents, — we also think of what Mr. Emerson did
in widening that connection, in making the con
nection with the whole of German literature, with
the revival of the study of Dante, and with all of
those other currents of literature which have en
riched our lives, and flow from his preaching and
his awakening.
The dignity which he gave to the individual with
his call to awake and arise — this splendid call to per-
SPEECH OF CAROLINE HAZARD 101
sonality — sounded not only for men but for wo
men. " The whole realm of history and biography,"
he says, " is to increase my self-respect. Then I ven
ture ; then I will also essay to be." And it was to
what has been called the misrepresented and neglected
sex that this call came with perhaps especial em
phasis. It was a call to service. There were many
women who were content with their daily round of
duty, who found in it certainly all the room they
could ask for self-denial; but the call to awaken
to their own personality, to a conception of the
worth of their own souls and the right that they
had to live their own lives, — this call came with
an especial force, as it seems to me, to the women
of his day. We hope we have learned the lesson.
There were some who carried the lesson farther
than he ever intended, perhaps, but that call was
a call which has aroused all that is best in the
women of our land. Mr. Emerson himself, in his
own beautiful and gracious life, in his association
with women, recognized what the place of women
could be in society and in the world. They had
been too long merely pretty playthings. The young
girl who ruled with an arbitrary authority for
a brief hour, and then was consigned to house
hold cares, too often as a housekeeper rather than
as a companion of her husband — all that Mr.
Emerson saw, and in his own life showed how it
need not be. The value of his women friends, the
value of the women of his own household, he cher-
102 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
ished and in every way increased by his own gra
cious and loving deference and the dignity of his
own character. And so his splendid message of the
value of personality, is a gift for us women to be
especially grateful for.
And with that gift of the recognition of the value
of the person came his recognition of the day, — the
present moment, this hour, — whether the day came
" in bud-crowned spring " or whether the day was —
" Deformed and low,
Short and bent by cold and snow."
This day, this present moment, as he said, is the best
day that ever was. He said that every day was a
doomsday, a day to be filled with work, a day to be
filled with all high endeavor. Who of us does not
recall with a thrill of joy that wonderful poem of the
"Daughters of Time," and the herbs and the apples
which were taken, and the solemn scorn with which
he saw the day turn and depart silent ? That splendid
message comes to each one of us. And with the
worth of the person and the value of the day came
ever the sounding note of joy, — joy in the present,
joy in life, joy in the world! These are his flowers,
his rhodora, his pine-trees, his beauty in these Con
cord meadows that we love and rejoice in. As for
the deeper sources of that joy, how full and subtle
the intimations are as they gleam on his pages. " Of
that Ineffable Essence which we call Spirit," he says,
" he who thinks most will say least." He could say
SPEECH OF CAROLINE HAZARD 103
with Sir Thomas Browne, "whoso feels not the
warm gales and gentle ventilation of this Spirit,
though I feel his pulse, I dare not say he lives, for
truly without this there is to me no heat under the
tropic nor any light, though I dwelt in the body of
the sun."
It was here in these Concord meadows that he
taught us that man may have fellowship with God, —
" that man in the bush with God may meet." This
was the source of his joy ; this was the strength of
his personality ; this was the message which he
preached to the men and women of his day, that
over us
" Soars the eternal sky
Full of light and of Deity."
THE CHAIRMAN : Emerson had very little to do
with the law, but he once got sued. A couple of
scamps sold him a piece of land for his Walden
garden, and another scamp undertook to contest the
title, and the philosopher and poet had to become
defendant in a suit. That was a good many years
ago, and the lawyers were not perhaps then as bril
liant as they are now. If he had only had such a
lawyer as we have here to-night, — the foremost
member of the Suffolk Bar, — I think the result
would have been very different. I am very happy to
present to you Moorfield Storey, Esq.
104 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
SPEECH OF MOORFIELD STOREY
MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : — I
might well hesitate in this company of his old friends
and neighbors to speak of Emerson, for what can I
say that is not already known to you all ? Nor is it
easier to say the fitting word after all that you have
heard to-day and all that many of you heard last
night from lips that are far more eloquent than mine.
I am encouraged, however, by the reflection that the
better we love and honor a man, the more welcome
is appreciation, even from strangers. We like to
know that his quality was recognized by every one.
I feel, however, a sense of personal obligation to
your great teacher for the lesson that he taught me,
and your Chairman's invitation came as a challenge
to bear my testimony in recognition of my debt
which I could not well refuse. I speak to-night, not
as a contemporary and an equal, but simply as a
representative of the younger generation which his
words influenced profound^. And I am glad that I
have an opportunity, at this late hour of a long day
spent in celebration, to speak briefly. I am satisfied
that you will thank me for setting those who may
come after me that good example.
I well remember the evening, early in my college
course, when I first met Mr. Emerson. It was at his
own table, and I have never forgotten the grave and
gracious simplicity of his manner. He appeared
SPEECH OF MOORFIELD STOREY 105
anxious rather to draw from me my opinions on the
questions which he suggested than to express his
own. Then and always he seemed to ask of each
newcomer, " What have you to tell me ? " His atti
tude was that of a learner, and conveyed a subtle
suggestion that the ideas of his visitor might be
of interest to him, which was at once unexpected
and delightful. A friend of mine, now an eminent
philosopher, has confessed to me that he was so be
guiled by a similar appeal to himself at his first
interview with Mr. Emerson that he launched into
an exposition of his philosophic creed which, upon
reflection, he felt must have been more interesting
to himself than it was to his hearer. My memory
retains the look and the gracious manner of my
host, but, mercifully perhaps, does not recall my
response.
It was from the writings of Mr. Emerson, how
ever, that during our college life many of us learned
our most valuable lessons. The vital thought which
he thus expresses, — " Nature arms each man with
some faculty which enables him to do easily some
feat impossible to any other, and this makes him
necessary to society," with its corollary that each is
bound to discover what his faculty is, to develop it,
and to use it for the benefit of mankind, was in itself
a liberal education. It meant that every man, able
or dull, superior or inferior, white, brown, or black,
had his right to his chance of success, and it followed
that no other man had a right to take that chance
106 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
away or to insist that Iris fellow man should be remade
according to his ideas. He who has learned to be
himself and to act upon his own convictions, regard
less of personal consequences, " safe in himself as in
a fate," and who does this naturally and simply, not
claiming praise for being what he is, any more than
the plant asks praise for blooming, has grasped the
highest conception of duty.
Again, I learned from Mr. Emerson that the moral
laws of the universe are as inexorable as the physical
laws which govern the solar system, that they " ex
ecute themselves," that " in the soul of man there is
a justice whose retributions are instant and entire.
He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He
who does a mean deed is by the action itself con
tracted. Thefts never enrich ; alms never impover
ish."
He who really believes this has an abiding faith
which will enable him to view without impatience
the crooked workings of the world and to wait with
serenity for the inevitable punishment which waits
upon wrong and the certain triumph of right, con
tent to do his part while he may and indifferent to
the insignificant question whether he lives to see the
punishment and the triumph or not. Such seem to
me in part Emerson's faith and his conception of
duty, and happy he whose strength enables him to
make them his own.
Not merely, however, in the supreme moments of
life, and in the great crises of human affairs, does
SPEECH OF MOORFIELD STOREY 107
Emerson help us. We may find in him a practical
recognition of smaller troubles, and he teaches us,
if not to avoid them, at least how to see them in
their proper perspective. When, for example, we
realize a long cherished ideal, and after a life of
labor in the city, acquire a farm, we feel the truth
of such words as these : —
"If a man own land, the land owns him. . . .
With brow bent, with firm intent the pale scholar
leaves his desk to draw a freer breath, and get a
juster statement of his thought in the garden walk.
He stoops to pull up a purslain or a dock that is
choking the young corn, and finds there are two ;
close behind the last is a third ; he reaches out his
hand to a fourth ; behind that are four thousand and
one. He is heated and untuned, and by and by wakes
up from his hideous dream of chickweed and redroot
to remember his morning thought, and to find that
with his adamantine purposes he has been duped by
a dandelion. A garden is like those pernicious ma
chineries we read of every month in the newspapers,
which catch a man's coat, skirt, or his hand, and
draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irre
sistible destruction."
There is a profound truth in this statement which
every man who has tried farming recognizes. If I
were to criticise it at all, I should say that he under
estimates the number of weeds.
While we are considering the relation between
tariff and treaty, we may read with advantage such
108 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
passages as this : " Do not legislate. Meddle, and
you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give
no bounties ; make equal laws ; secure life and
property, and you need not give alms."
Against the panegyrics of war, which seem now to
be the fashion, it is well to weigh his calm sentences :
" It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind
that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want
excitement, as all boys kill cats." ... In certain
regions " of man, boy, or beast, the only trait that
much interests the speaker is the pugnacious. And
why? Because the speaker has as yet no other
image of manly activity and virtue, none of endur
ance, none of perseverance, none of character, none
of attainment of truth. Put him into a circle of
cultivated men where the conversation broaches the
great questions that besiege the human reason, and
he would be dumb and unhappy as an Indian in
church. ... If the search of the sublime laws of
morals and the sources of hope and trust in man
and not in books, in the present and not in the past,
proceed ; if the rising generation can be provoked to
think it unworthy to nestle into every abomination
of the past, and shall feel the generous darings of
austerity and virtue, then war has a short day, and
human blood will cease to flow."
Citizens of Concord, yours is a great inheritance.
You breathe an inspiring air. You celebrate at fit
ting times the first scenes in a great struggle for
human freedom. The Mmuteman marks the spot
SPEECH OF MOORFIELD STOREY 109
where the shot was fired which startled the world.
Are its echoes silent here ? Is your admiration spent
on the statue, or does it extend to the cause for
which the Minuteman died? Are the sons of your
fathers indifferent to the struggles of other men for
freedom ? Are they content to stand silently by
while their fellow citizens in this country are denied
their equal rights ? Are they willing to help deprive
another people of that liberty which is the birth
right of all human beings ?
You meet to-day to celebrate the birth of Emerson.
Why? Because he taught great truths, or uttered
vain aspirations for impossible ideals ? Do you cele
brate dates and names with empty forms, or do you
really believe in the truths which make those dates
and names significant? One proof of living faith in
those truths, of willingness to maintain them no
matter at what personal cost, whether found in vote
or speech or effective action, were worth a hundred
monuments and a thousand celebrations. Is it the
name or the reality which calls us together ? Are we
trying to win honor for ourselves by professing to
believe in the plain life and high thought which
Emerson taught, or do we really believe? This is
the question which this occasion asks us all, and
only the conduct of our lives can answer it.
THE CHAIRMAN : — Your committee thought, not
withstanding the smallness of this room and the
actual filling of it which you would make, that it
110 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
might be agreeable to invite — knowing they could
not come — some of the distinguished foreigners
who have so much admiration for Mr. Emerson and
who were so friendly to him on his visit abroad. I
have before me quite a package of the letters that
they have sent in answer, all of them fortunately —
inasmuch as we have but one vacant seat in the
room — declining to come, and quite a number of
them expressing a very high and exalted opinion
both of the senders who do them this honor of invit
ing them, and of Mr. Emerson whom we are trying
in this way to honor. However, I am not going to
read these letters at this time. They will all be care
fully preserved for the use and good reading of the
Social Circle at some future time.1 The vacant seat
at this table was to have been occupied by a profes
sor of Glasgow University, which, as you know, gave
Mr. Emerson a very large vote for the position —
the highest in the college — of Lord Provost ; and
although it did not elect him, fortunately for us, —
as it might have taken him away more than we would
have been willing, — he said of it that the voices of
those young men were his fairest laurels. This gen
tleman, Professor Smith, was sent over here by the
University to bear his tribute at this or some other
of the celebrations in honor of Mr. Emerson ; but he
is unfortunately in a hospital in Toledo, Ohio, instead
of being here. But he has sent to Mr. Hoar his
tribute, and Mr. Hoar will oblige me by reading it.
1 See Appendix, page 131.
LETTER READ BY SAMUEL HOAR 111
SAMUEL HOAR : — Mr. Chairman, I received this
to-day just before the afternoon celebration began.
The length of that celebration prevented my present
ing it to the audience then.
Mr. Hoar then read the following
MEMORIAL.1
We, a few of the Scottish and English admirers
of the late R. W. Emerson, and of his writings,
desire to associate ourselves with those who are cele
brating in the United States his Centenary. We re
joice in the knowledge that his ethical teaching has
so largely influenced to high and worthy aims the
great nation to which he belonged, and we desire to
testify how powerfully his teaching has affected
for good very many in our own country. Many
of his writings have been a life-long inspiration to
people of the Anglo-Saxon nation all over the world.
Rt. Hon. JAMES BRYCE, D. C. L., M. P.
Principal DONALDSON, of St. Andrews University.
Principal MARSHALL LANG, Aberdeen University.
Principal STORY, Glasgow University.
Rev. JOHN WATSON, D. D., of Liverpool (Ian Maclaren).
Rev. JOHN KELMAN, M. A., Edinburgh.
Rev. JAMES MOFFAT, Dundonald, Ayrshire.
Professor WALTER RALEIGH, Glasgow University.
Rev. HUGH BLACK, M. A., Edinburgh.
Mrs. MARY DREW (ne'e Gladstone).
1 See Appendix, page 131.
112 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
Miss AGNES C. MAITLAND, Somerville College, Oxford.
Professor HENRY GOUDY, D. C. L., Oxford.
Professor J. G. McKENDRiCK, Glasgow University.
Professor S. ALEXANDER, Owen's College, Manchester.
Professor GEORGE SAINTSBURY, Edinburgh University.
Professor GEORGE ADAM SMITH, Glasgow.
PATRICK W. CAMPBELL, W. S., Edinburgh.
Sir LESLIE STEPHEN.
Sir WILLIAM TURNER, Edinburgh University.
Professor MARCUS DODS, Edinburgh.
Professor LATTA, University, Glasgow.
Professor A. V. DICEY, All Souls, Oxford.
Professor ALEXANDER LAWSON, University, St. An
drews.
Professor C. H. HERFORD, Manchester.
Professor A. S. PRINGLE PATTISON.
EDMUND GOSSE, LL. D., London.
THE CHAIRMAN; — Kudyard Kipling declined his
invitation, but we have his " Recessional " here to
night and we hope to have the pleasure of hearing
Mr. Parker sing it.
Kipling's " Recessional " was sung by Mr. George
J. Parker, accompanied on the piano by Mrs.
Charles Edward Brown.
THE CHAIRMAN : — The gentleman who has per
haps honored the memory of Emerson by the grandest
and most lasting memorial, and who proposed the
plan for the Emerson Hall of Philosophy at Cam-
SPEECH OF HUGO MUNSTERBERG 113
bridge, at an expense of $150,000, which sum he has
already raised, is with us to-night, and we desire to
thank him in this manner for the great service he
has done for the memory of Emerson. I have plea
sure in introducing to you Professor Miinsterberg, of
Harvard University.
SPEECH OF HUGO MUNSTERBERG
MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : — The
overwhelming kindness of your generous words,
Mr. Chairman, adds much to the embarrassment with
which I stand before you. I am deeply embarrassed
indeed, — how can I, a foreigner, an outsider, rise at
this occasion to speak to a circle of women and men,
inspired from childhood by the atmosphere of Emer
son's New England ? I have been brought up near
the Baltic Sea, and in my childhood the waves of
the ocean seldom brought greetings from these New
England shores to the shores of Germany. And yet
my youth was not untouched by Emerson's genius.
I am glad to mention this Emersonian influence
abroad, because in the rich chord of the joyful enthu
siasm of this day I missed only one overtone : a tone
bringing out the grateful appreciation which Emer
son found in the not-English speaking foreign coun
tries. As far as I remember, I had only three Amer
ican books, in German translation, in my little
schoolday library. At ten I got a boys' edition of
Cooper's Leather stocking; at twelve I enjoyed
114 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
Longfellow's poems, but at fourteen I had Emerson's
Essays. And they accompanied me through my stu
dent days ; I read and reread them, and he became
thus the star to which I hitched my little wagon
when it was to carry me to the new world from the
fatherland. This was not without effect on my own
American experiences. Emerson's work had so often
represented to me the spirit of the new world which
I entered that my mental eye became so sensitive as
to recognize the Emersonian lines and curves and
forms everywhere in the background of American
life. Most Europeans, and especially Germans, who
come over, see everywhere the features of commer
cialism and practical utilitarianism. I was impressed
by the idealism of this young, healthful community,
and in the first essay which I published on America,
in a German paper, only a few months after my first
visit, I wrote with most sincere conviction : "If
you really want to understand the deepest energies
of this glorious country, do not consult the editorials
of the yellow press of New York, but read the
golden books of the wise man of Concord."
But, Mr. Chairman, I feel that I have no right to
speak here as a German, since you have assured us
that the foreign scholars have been invited for to
night, with the understanding that they are not
allowed to come — if a cover has been laid for me,
nevertheless, I take it that I was expected not to
forget that I am here as the representative of the
Harvard Philosophy Department. But, Mr. Chair-
SPEECH OF HUGO MUNSTERBERG 115
man, the Philosophy Department of Harvard has
not to report any new facts to-night. The Emerson
story is very simple, very short, and completely known
to you. "We saw a year ago that the time had come
to place an Emerson Hall for Philosophy on the
Harvard Yard, and that it was necessary for that
purpose to collect 1150,000 before the 25th of May,
1903 ; we began thus to collect, and when we counted
the contents of our purse, on the 23d of May, 1903,
we found there $ 150,250. That is the whole simple
story indeed, and yet some connotations to it may
be in order, and I am most happy to make them
in this company.
First, do not misunderstand the report of our
treasurer ; the sum I mentioned was meant from the
beginning merely as a fund sufficient to secure a
building, — not at all sufficient to secure the building
for which we were hoping from the start. We want
a spacious, noble, monumental hall — the architec
tural plans are drawn. To build it as the plans sug
gest it we need $100,000 more ; and while we
highly appreciate any small gifts toward this addi
tional sum we are firmly determined not to reject
even the largest contributions.
But all this refers to the externals, to the news
paper side of our memorial work ; let me speak in
this narrower circle of some more internal points.
Seen from such an exoteric point of view, it may
look as though we Harvard philosophers had said
through all the year : " Happy public, you are fortu-
116 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
nate in being allowed to build a fine building for our
splendid philosophy instruction, and now that the
checks are written, the public may kindly remove
itself and the students may fill their fountain pens
to write down in the new building our glorious effu
sion of wisdom." Well, over there in Cambridge,
we must impose on the freshmen and sophomores,
but here let me say at once, we know exactly that
the generous contributions of the community were
not given to us but to Emerson. And if we ever
forgot it, our benefactors reminded us of it. I asked,
for instance, the help of Andrew Carnegie, and he
gave generously, but when I replied that there would
be rejoicing in Harvard that at last he had given to
Harvard University, — I saw in the far background
the big Harvard Library building we need so badly, —
he left me not the slightest doubt that his pledge
was for the Emerson Memorial, but not for Harvard
as Harvard. Yes, it is thoroughly an Emerson build
ing, a late expression of Harvard's gratitude for her
greatest son.
But we know also that the value of this memorial
gift lies not in its walls and roof, but in the kind of
work which will develop within those walls. It will
be a true Emerson memorial only if the words and
work in that hall become help and guidance, wisdom
and inspiration for new and new generations of Har
vard men. There would be no hope of such influence
if we instructors really entered into it with an air
of self-satisfaction and self-complacency. Let me
SPEECH OF HUGO MUNSTERBERG 117
assure you that it is exactly the opposite feeling with
which we look into the future, and this conviction
that we must fulfil our duty better, much better,
than heretofore, is common to all of us in the whole
large Department of Philosophy. A lucky chance
brought to me this morning, when I left for Concord,
a letter from our colleague, Professor Royce, who is
spending his sabbatical year in the country of his
childhood, in California. He finds the fit word bet
ter than I could hope to do ; let me read from his
letter. I had written to him that the success seems
near, and he replies : —
" I feel very deeply how great are the responsi
bilities which the new gift places upon the shoulders
of each teacher of the department which is thus
endowed. I do not know how much I shall be able
to do to live up to these new responsibilities. I only
know that the news of the success of the Emerson
Hall endowment fills me with a desire not only to
improve here and there, but quite to make over
afresh, and to change throughout for the better, my
methods of work as a teacher of philosophy; and
with a determination to devote myself as never be
fore to the task of offering to philosophy and to
Harvard my best services. That the founding of this
new building may mean the beginning of a new life
for philosophical study in our country, and the dawn
ing of a new day for the interests of higher thought
in our national affairs, is the earnest wish of your
absent colleague."
118 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
This is the feeling of our common department's
soul. We shall not enter the new Philosophy Hall
with the feeling that we can sit there on our laurels,
but with the firm promise that we will live up to the
duties which the single word above its door demands
from us. We all are united by the ideal to make
our work in Emerson Hall worthy of the name that
honors it.
Mr. Chairman, I see from your pretty menu-card
that Emerson once said, " Harvard University is
thin like a wafer compared with the solid land of
our Social Circle in Concord.'* That was sixty years
ago, and there has not been much change since that
time, indeed. But now the change will come, believe
us. Emerson Hall in Harvard University will be
built on solid land, too, on the solid land of our best
will and effort, and we will work that it may prove
perhaps even not less solid than the Social Circle, —
solid land on which to stand to-night gave me the
greatest possible pleasure.
THE CHAIRMAN : — Dr. Emerson needs no intro
duction from me to you. He will occupy the few
remaining moments before the time to leave for
the train, and the exercises will then close with
singing the "Battle Hymn" to the tune of "Old
Hundred."
SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 119
SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON
MR. CHAIRMAN, My Honored Friend, — My
Friends and Neighbors: — The Social Circle, as
stated in its book of chronicles, was not merely
founded * 4 for the diffusion of useful communica
tions " by the twenty -five members who composed it,
— some of which might be shared by their wives and
some not, — but for the promotion of the social affec
tions, that they should not die. I am glad to see
how liberally the Circle has gone to work to promote
them by such a thoroughly social and affectionate
and catholic occasion as this.
Now, it makes me smile a little when, after the
exercises that I have had the privilege of attending
here and elsewhere, I think of a remark that I have
so often heard my father make. My mother was
constantly remembering that "Ten years ago to-day
such a thing occurred," and other members of the
family would remember other anniversaries. When
at table such remarks were made, my father would
often laugh and say, "Oh, it is always a hundred
years from something." But he was so good a towns
man and he had such an affectionate regard for his
neighbors — and he construed that term very largely
— that if we can conceive of him being present and
receiving such a tribute as has been given to him
to-day, it is very clear how it would have affected
him. Some of you are too young — or too young
120 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
Concordians — to remember the burning of his house
as far as the heroic mustering of his friends would
allow it to be burned, for they, some of whom I see
here to-night, at the risk of their lives, prevented the
entire destruction and saved all his effects. Well,
his friends had sent him abroad to restore his health,
and he was coming home, and word had gone out
that the steamer had come in, and the engineer was
instructed to toot the whistle as the train came down
the grade from Walden Woods if Mr. Emerson was
on board, and the bells were ringing and the people
gathered at the depot. Mr. Emerson was carried
homeward delighted, under a triumphal arch, sur
rounded by his neighbors, with the school-children
marching alongside, but he supposed in good faith
that all this was a tribute to my sister Ellen. He
did not realize that it was for him. But when after
passing beneath a triumphal arch, he came to his
own door, and found the house just as he had left
it, with hardly a trace of the injury, and his study
just as it was before, with all the books there, and
then saw the waiting throng of friends and neigh
bors around his gate, it suddenly came over him
what it meant. He sped down the marble walk to
the gate, — I cannot say all that he said; it was but
a few words, for the meaning of it all swept over
him. He began, "My friends and neighbors! lam
not wood nor stone." He articulated but a few
words, but he made his meaning clear. And so we,
his family, feel to-day.
SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 121
Now, what was the reason, though not born in
Concord, though a scholar living apart, though fol
lowing his own lines regardless of other people's
ideas, has caused him to be considered, first, as
crazy, and then as atheistic, and then the charge
resolved itself into pantheism, and then it became
merely mysticism, and finally he was accepted, —
what was the reason that he was accepted? It was
for two reasons. In the first place, he never fought.
He simply announced his message. He was a her
ald; he announced the word that was given to him,
and it was not his part to defend it. The truth, he
believed, would defend itself. There was no pugnac
ity in him. The truth needed no defence. He sim
ply left it to work its own way, and so he aroused
no opposition. In the second place, while finding
good in all things, he saw even in the fierce and
ferocious wars of the Middle Ages and the institu
tions of feudalism, this benefit, that it was a proof
of the gentleman that he carried his life in his hands
and was ready to answer for his word with his life,
— it was exactly that which Mr. Emerson did : he
answered for his words with his life. Many persons
were not reading his words in those days; only a
few were; but his life was before the people, and
those who had read his words also came to see his
life, and finding his life humble and serene and
sweet and expectant and hopeful, they became his
friends. He made friends everywhere as the sun in
heaven makes friends.
122 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
But while he was an idealist, this story is told of
him by a friend, that when the philosophers who
were visiting him were discoursing in his study, a
load of wood arrived for him and he said to them,
" Excuse me, for a moment ; we have to attend to
these things just as if they were real." And so
when his duty to his town and his country and his
globe came up, he attended to those duties as if
they were real. He went to town meeting, although
his neighbor on the hill advised him not to go be
cause " what you do with the ballot is no use — it
won't stay so; but what you do with the gun stays
done." But he went to town meeting, and I want
to recall one word that he said. It is a good politi
cal tract, and very short. He said, " What business
have you to stay away from the polls because you
are paired off with a man who means to vote
wrong? How shall you, who mean to vote right,
be excused from staying away? Suppose the three
hundred Spartans at Thermopylae had paired off
with an equal number of Persians. Would it have
been the same to history? Would it have been
the same to Greece? Would it have been the same
to the world? " This morning, in the singing of
the Ode at the town hall, I missed two verses.
The time was short and they were therefore left out,
but they were lasting truths that he announced — as
true from 1898 to 1903 and onward as in the dark
days of the Civil War. These were the omitted
verses : —
SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 123
" United States ! The ages plead, —
Present and past in umler-song, —
Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.
" For sea and land don't understand,
Nor skies without a frown
See rights for which the one hand fights
By the other cloven down."
Now, to turn to a more entertaining aspect of our
subject, perhaps, I wish to tell two stories which
were connected with the little book I wrote about
my father, but which came to me too late to go into
the book. I will try to make them brief, but they
seem to me very delightful. Our good neighbor,
Mr. Bowers, whom many of you remember, who
lived on Hey wood Street by the brook, — a patriot
who always spoke so well in the temperance meet
ings and the Anti-slavery and Kansas meetings that
my father, very humble about his own eloquence,
always came home saying, "Bowers spoke admir
ably; " — when the war came shouldered his gun as
a private in the three months' men, and afterwards
served as captain throughout the war with credit.
From various troubles, owing to the war, Mr.
Bowers's reason was affected, and he was confined
in Danvers Asylum willingly. But he did not for
get his principles, and instantly set himself to make
the life of the inmates as tolerable as he could. He
would write to my sister and myself, asking if we
would please send him some books, — "Why, the
124 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
people here haven't any books to read, and they
would be a great comfort to them." When my me
morial volume about my father came out, he wrote
me and said, "I have no money, but will you send
me your book?" and then wrote me such a letter
that I said, "No price that has as yet been paid for
that book has even approached the price you have
paid for it." Mr. Bowers was a nephew of George
Minott, who lived on the hill opposite my father's.
Mr. Bowers was one day talking with his uncle, —
an old agriculturalist and pot-hunter, who had only
been to Boston once, when he marched there in
1812 with his gun and then he got so homesick
for Concord that he promptly deserted ; — as they
stood there talking together, my father came out
from his study with his tall hat on and his satchel
in hand, going to Boston for the day. He paused
as he reached the middle of that dusty diagonal
leading to the upper sidewalk, as you know, and
was apparently lost in meditation. They supposed
he was meditating some profound problem. Un
doubtedly, the problem was whether or no he had
done with a certain book which should be carried
back to the Athenaeum. But Mr. Minott said to
Mr. Bowers, "Charley, that man ain't like other
men. He is like Enoch. He walks with God and
talks with his angels." I am sometimes tempted to
ask how many graduates of Harvard College would
know who Enoch was.1
1 Mr. Samuel Hoar, on behalf of the University, officially
SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 125
The other story was this. Mr. Bowers was tem
porarily curator of the Lyceum. The minister of a
neighboring town, who had a sonorous voice which
he, with others, enjoyed, and a florid style of rheto
ric, was to have lectured, but was unexpectedly de
tained. Mr. Bowers came down to ask Mr. Emerson
if he would read something. Mr. Emerson said:
"Yes; I could read you something; but will the
people who are assembled to hear the sound of the
trumpet be content with a penny whistle ? "
Mr. Emerson's love for his townsfolk, especially
for the boys and girls, was very great. How little
conscious was the boy, as he passed the gate, riding
a horse to be shod, or the girls walking to school, —
how little conscious of the admiration that they
excited in him and his pleasure in watching them
pass. He had a little book which he called Auto
among his manuscripts in which he noted a few
points especially characteristic of himself. One
thing he wrote was, " I have never seen a man that
could not teach me something. I always felt that
in some point he was my master." It was so with
women and with children. We had once a friend,
a charming young girl, visiting us at our house.
One morning, through some family exigency, she
was alone at breakfast with Mr. Emerson and
poured out his cup of coffee for him. She felt very
much abashed. She felt unable to discourse on
informs me that Harvard students are familiar with Enoch
because he was translated some time ago.
126 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
philosophy, but she said it suddenly came over her,
"Mr. Emerson could not fix over an old dress, he
could not do plain sewing the way I can do it, to
save his life." Then she felt better, and they got
on together beautifully after that. I wish she had
said it to him ; it would have delighted him. When
1 was in college many persons used to come to ask
Mr. Emerson questions, — young people often no
older than I. But you know how it is; boys are not
apt to ask their fathers questions. They ask some
other person's father. I was surprised to see how
the boys who came there did so. I seldom asked a
very serious question of him, but I recall one
answer with pleasure. It was about Immortality.
I ventured to ask what he thought. This was the
answer : — "I think we may be sure that, whatever
may come after death, no one will be disappointed."
That seemed to cover all our concern about the
future.
My father's delight in his farm and what he found
in it — except the weeds — has already been men
tioned. I like to close with this incident, because,
you know, in the pictures of the good men and
women who have been canonized, they are repre
sented with some emblem, — a book or a wheel or
a cross or a sword, as an attribute. David Scott,
the Edinburgh painter, has this one merit in that
wooden picture that he made of my father, in that
he recognized that my father stood for Hope, and he
put the rainbow in the background — the symbol of
SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 127
Lope. Mr. Emerson, finding everything good in
Concord, and near at hand in his home, wrote this: —
" The sun athwart the cloud thought it no sin
To use my land to put his rainbow in."
The evening closed with the "Concord Hymn"
sung to the tune of "Old Hundred," in which all
present were asked to join.
128 THE EMERSON CENTENARY
CONCORD HYMN :
SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLE MONUMENT,
APRIL 19, 1836.
BY the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept ;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps ;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone ;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
APPENDIX
APPENDIX
PROFESSOR GEORGE ADAM SMITH of Glasgow, who was
unexpectedly prevented from attending the dinner of the
Social Circle, writes, under date of May 23, 1903 : —
" I had hoped to get to Concord to represent my coun
try at the great memorial of one as highly honoured with
us as with you. ... I enclose the letter from Scottish
(and a few English) admirers of Mr. Emerson. The
number could easily have been quadrupled."
In sending his signature to the letter mentioned by Pro
fessor Smith, Sir Leslie Stephen wrote to Mr. Campbell :
" I should be proud to think that any value could be
attached to my expression of respect and admiration for
Emerson. No man of his time, I think, had a loftier or
purer character, or did more to raise the intellectual level
of his contemporaries. ... I can never read his writings
without being, for the time at least, a better man."
Among the letters referred to by the Chairman were
the following : —
REVUE DBS DEUX MONDES,
CABINET DU DIRECT-BOB 15, RUE DE L'UNIVERSITE,
LUNDI ET VENDREDI PARIS, le 2 Mai 1903.
DE 3 A 5 HEURE8.
M. F. Brunetiere serait heureux, tant en son nom per
sonnel que comme directeur de la Revue des Deux Mondes
132 APPENDIX
si les circonstances lui avaient permis de prendre part au
Banquet que le Social Circle de Concord va ce'le'brer en
1'honneur du grand penseur Americain : Ralph Waldo
Emerson.
Mais s'il est priv£ du plaisir d'y assister il tient a t£-
moigner de son admiration pour celui qui sera le he'ros de
cette fete et il prie M. le President Keyes de vouloir bien
etre 1'interprete de ses sentiments.
30 HYDE PARK GATE, LONDON.
April 30, 1903.
Dr. Stanton Coit begs to thank the Social Circle in Con
cord for their kind invitation to the banquet on May 25th.
He regrets that he cannot be present, but although so far
away he is doing what he can to celebrate the anniversary
of Emerson's birthday. A special service will be held on
Sunday, May 24, at the West London Ethical Society in
memory of Emerson when Dr. Coit will deliver a com
memoration address on Emerson.
JOHN S. KEYES, ESQ.
4 LAVEKOCKBANK ROAD, EDINBURGH.
May 8, 1903.
JOHN S. KEYES, ESQ.
DEAR SIB: — I beg to thank you, and through you
the " Social Circle of Concord," for the great honour done
me in inviting me to the banquet on the centenary of Mr.
Emerson's birthday. I am only sad that as an octogena
rian, I am now too old to undertake all that my attendance
in Concord would mean.
I know not that I ever met on earth a man of the no
bility of Emerson : it was a moral exaltation simply to
have seen him. That I did see him has been one of the
APPENDIX 133
calms of my life : reverence and love always accompany
my memory of the evening I spent with him.
It will always be a joy to know that I was associated
with those five hundred Glasgow University Student Voices
which Mr. Emerson himself spoke of as his *' Fairest
Laurel."
I do hope you and the Circle will readily sympathize
with me in my sorrow not to be present on such a memor
able occasion of the honouring of Emerson.
Wishing you and the Circle the full joy of success on
that auspicious May twenty-fifth, I am,
Most respectfully,
Yours and theirs,
JAMES HUTCHISON STIRLING.
30 NEWBATTLE TERRACE, EDINBURGH.
14 May, 1903.
DEAR SIR : — I have to thank you very heartily for
your kind invitation to the banquet which the " Social
Circle in Concord " are to give on the 25th inst., in honour
of Emerson's centenary.
It is a real pleasure to me to hear of this banquet in
memory of my Uncle's much loved and highly appreciated
friend ; and it is with deep regret that I have to decline
the invitation to be present, so kindly tendered me, on the
grounds of distance from Concord and my many engage
ments. But tho' absent in body, I shall be with you in
spirit on the memorable twenty-fifth of May, and heartily
wish success to the celebration.
With many thanks and kind wishes,
1 am, yours sincerely,
ALEX. CARLYLE.
JOHN S. KEYES, ESQ.,
CONCORD, U. S. A.
134 APPENDIX
BALLIOL COLLEGE,
May 3, 1903.
DEAR SIR : — Will you express to the members of the
Social Circle of Concord my great regret that I cannot ac
cept their kind invitation. Emerson teaches us not to lay
too much weight on the conditions of time and space, but
they sometimes come in one's way in the details of prac
tice. I heartily sympathize with you in doing honour to
one who has done so much to elevate the tone of literature
and to encourage ideal ways of thinking among all Eng
lish speaking people.
I am much obliged to the Social Circle for the kindness
of this invitation. I am,
Very respectfully,
E. CAIRD.
HOUSE OF COMMONS,
May 7, 1903.
DEAR SIR : — Permit me to thank the members of the
Social Circle in Concord for their very kind invitation to
be present at the banquet to be held on the hundredth
anniversary of the birth of the most illustrious citizen of
Concord, and to express my sincere regret that it is impos
sible for me to leave England at present, and have the
pleasure of attending this celebration. I had the honour
and pleasure of knowing Mr. Emerson, and retain the
most vivid recollection of the charm of his manner and
conversation. No life and no character better deserves
to be commemorated by the people of New England than
his does. Believe me,
Very faithfully yours,
JAMES BRTCE.
CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE.
APPENDIX 135
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH,
May 19, 1903.
DEAR SIR : — I must apologize for the delay in reply
ing to your most kind invitation to the banquet of the
" Social Circle in Concord " on May twenty-fifth, the an
niversary of the birthday of its most distinguished mem
ber, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The delay was caused by
my absence on the continent, my letters not being for
warded.
It would have given me the greatest pleasure, had it
been possible, to be present at your banquet in the flesh,
as I shall certainly be in the spirit, on Monday night.
The spell of Emerson's home does not lose its power as
the years go by, and I have myself had the great pleasure
of visiting the scenes round which his memory clings, and
others in your beautiful Concord.
May I ask you to be so kind as to convey to the other
members of your " Social Circle " my regrets that I can
not avail myself of the invitation with which you have
honoured me.
Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
JAMES SETH.
JOHN S. KEYES, ESQ.,
CONCORD, MASS.
PALERMO,
5 Maggio, 1903.
lLLmo. SiGr. PRESIDENTS : — Dolente di non potere assis-
tere al simposio che cotesto Circolo Sociale terra in onore
del grande idealista Ralph Waldo Emerson nel centesimo
anniversario della sua nascita, prego Lei Signer John S.
Keyes di volermi rappresentare in tale fausta ricorrenza
136 APPENDIX
e di voler porgere ai socii tutti di cotesto nobile Sodalizio
il mio affettuoso saluto nel nome dell' immortale pensatore,
le cui opere sono il mio vademecum e il porto nel quale is
raccoglie il mio spirito sconf ortato dallo scetticismo in-
vadente.
Le stringo fraternamente la mano
H suo devotissimo,
ANDREA Lo FORTE RANDI.
In addition to the foregoing letters, formal expressions
of regret for their inability to be present were received
from the following : —
Giosue Carducci, Bologna.
Professor A. V. Dicey, All Souls College, Oxford.
Shadworth H. Hodgson, London.
Rudyard Kipling, Sussex, England.
Sir Frederick Pollock, London.
Herbert Spencer, Brighton, England.
Bernard Bosanquet, Oxshott, Surrey, England.
THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD
MAY, 1903
JOHN SHEPARD KETES HENRY DINOLEY COOLIDGK
JULIUS MICHAEL SMITH WILLIAM LORENZO EATON
1 1 K s KV FRANCIS SMITH JOHN LEACH GILMORE
EDWARD WALDO EMERSON SAMUEL HOAR
WILLIAM HENRY HUNT GEORGE EUGENE TITCOMR
DAVID GOODWIN LANO WILLIAM WHEELER
ALFRED MUNROE LOREN BENJAMIN MACDONALD
PRKSCOTT KEYES STEDMAN BUTTRICK
WOODWARD HUDSON HARVEY WHEELER
RICHARD FAY BARRETT FRANCIS AUGUSTINE HOUSTON
EDWARD JARVIS BARTLETT THOMAS HOLLIS
CHARLES EDWARD BROWN RUSSELL ROBB
WILLIAM HENRY BROWN FREDERIC ALCOTT PRATT
ADAMS TOLMAN
CENTENARY COMMITTEES
Executive
SAMUEL HOAR
LOREN BENJAMIN MACDONALD THOMAS HOLLIS
WILLIAM LORENZO EATON EDWABD JARVIS BAHTLETT
On the Dinner
JOHN SHEPARD KEYES
JOHN LEACH GILMORE RICHARD FAY BARRETT
CHARLES EDWARD BROWN WOODWARD HUDSON
On Publication
FREDERIC ALCOTT PRATT
WILLIAM LORENZO EATON WOODWARD HUDSON
14 DAY USE
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