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THE LIFE OF
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

AT THE AGE OF ABOUT KIl'TY-ONK

The Life of
Ralph Waldo Emerson

RALPH L. RUSK

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1949

Printed in th« United States of America

All riffhts reserved, No fart of this boo
may be reproduced in a«v /orw wf/tt
the Permission of Charles St'nbncr's ,V<

MARGARET ANN, W. T.
MARIAN and ELLEN

MAK 1-1955

CONTENTS

Preface vii

1. Prologue: William and Ruth Emerson I

2. Boston, 1803 14

3. Looking Out from His Corner 19

4. .4 JB0/J Troubled World 30

5. Concord Ghosts and Others 43

6. Banishing Dullness from His Mind 54

7. Under the Tree of Knowledge 63

8. 77i£ Unwilling Schoolmaster 89

9. T/i£ Prized Gown and Band no

10. Ellen 131

11. Theses Nailed to the Church Door 151

12. A Fool's Paradise 168

13. A Thinker Let Loose 198

14. Lidian 210

15. Pan and Other Gods 227
1 6, This Age, This Country, Oneself 249
17. The Dial and the Essays 275
1 8. Leaping and Piercing Melodies 305

19. Not a World to Hide Virtues In 330

20. Down from His Ivory Tower 360

21. Things in the Saddle 388

22. The Fierce Storm of War 408

23. The Firmament Shrinks to a Tent 429

24. Voyage to the Island of Philae 459

25. Terminus 481
Notes 509
Index and Bibliography 553

THE LIFE OF
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

PREFACE

EVER since I became acquainted with the numerous and rich manu-
script sources that had been closely guarded for many years but
were at last accessible, it has seemed to me that it ought to be pos-
sible to write, not merely a book about Emerson, but one fit to be
called his life. The very plenitude of authentic records promised to make
realizable, this time, the biographer's dream of re-creating an entire man,
much as a novelist or dramatist of insight and imagination creates a char-
acter from a less restricted range of experience. The man that so good a
critic as Matthew Arnold called the writer of the most important English
prose of the nineteenth century, that man would turn out to be, not very
surprisingly, no pale, emotionless specter. What he needed to be allowed
to do was to reveal his private life and private thought, and now he could
be allowed to do that.

In this book I therefore try to let him and his contemporaries speak
for themselves and act as they did in real life, without much regard to
our preconceived notions of them. Since Emerson was a child and acted
as a child during a significant period of his growth, he relives here those
years, though plainly he was not then a poet or an essayist. As he was much
more affected by his early love affair than has been supposed, he betrays here
his emotion and his sentiment, though they may seem out of character in
a future philosopher— even a philosopher of so unorthodox a kind as he was
to become. As his ideas grew slowly from slight beginnings, I let him show
how they grew.

I am not wholly unaware of my lapses from the role of disinterested
observer. A biographer does not shut his eyes to what he himself has experi-
enced, but always reports another man's life in the light of his own. He
cannot keep his own feelings completely masked as he witnesses the comic
or tragic predicaments of his hero. He cannot quite conceal his admiration
for some particular characteristic or his dislike for another. For my part,
I am conscious of putting a high value on Emerson as an individualist
struggling, though never with entire success, to keep his little area of per-
sonal freedom safe from encroachment. Yet, it seems to me, when I recall
my conviction that his mind is no such simple thing as to be finally classified

viii PREFACE

and filed away, but is conspicuously valuable for its flexibility and variety
and even its contradictions, I slip quickly back into my unpartisan role.

Doubtless I have absorbed more from scholarly commentaries than my
notes show, and yet I try to state my indebtedness whenever I am aware
of it— except my frequent indebtedness to James Elliot Cabot and Edward
Waldo Emerson. As executors and as editors they prepared the way. They
were among the earliest biographers, and, though they wrote over sixty
years ago, have hitherto been the only ones to draw to any extent upon
original manuscripts. Their scope was limited, and it has now been possible
to add greatly to the sources they preserved and put into some semblance
of order but used only sparingly; yet their work was of greater worth to
me than I am able to make clear in a few words.

I am conscious of many other obligations that deserve fuller acknowl-
edgment than I can make. To the members of the Ralph Waldo Emerson
Memorial Association, and particularly to Emerson's grandsons W. Cam-
eron Forbes, Edward Waldo Forbes, and Raymond Emerson, I am thankful
for the freedom I have had of a great collection and for help of many
kinds. Over a long period of years, and often at the cost of much time and
trouble, Mr. Edward Forbes has courteously responded to my almost con-
tinual requests for records difficult to find or perhaps nonexistent. I owe him
a very special debt. Doctor Haven Emerson allowed me the use of the im-
portant family papers which he owns. Mr. Lewis S. Gannett, Mr. H. W. L.
Dana, Mr. A. Le Baron Russell, and many others made it possible for me
to quote from unpublished writings,

Grateful acknowledgment is due to the Harvard College Library, and
especially to its Houghton Library, where most of the Memorial Associa-
tion's manuscripts, together with other essential papers, are preserved. Dur-
ing the many months I spent in the Houghton Library I profited much by
the expert aid of Mr. William A. Jackson and Miss Carolyn Jakcman. I
have also had the friendly and effective co-operation of the Columbia Uni-
versity Libraries, the New York Public Library, the Union Theological
Seminary Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Concord Free
Public Library, the Concord Antiquarian Society, the Emerson House in
Concord, the Harvard Historical Society (of Harvard, Massachusetts), the
Andover-Harvard Theological Library, the Abcrnethy Library of Middle-
bury College, and other libraries— more than can be named here,

I owe particular thanks to Miss Sarah R. Bartlett, Mrs. Howard W.
Kent, Miss Anna M. Scorgie, Miss Jannette E. Newhall, Mrs. H. M, Foster,
Miss Viola C. White, Miss Helen Stearns, Mrs. Marshall B. Fanning, Mr.
William S. Parker, Mr. Bliss Perry, Miss Marjorie Nicolson, Miss Eleanor
Tilton, Miss Mary E. Burtis, Mr. Frederick T. McGill, Mrs. William Elder,
M. Louis Cazamian, and Miss Nora Scott.

The Columbia University Press, as well as the Memorial Association,
granted me permission to draw freely upon The Letters of Ralph Waldo
Emerson. The Houghton Mifflin Company made the Journals of Ralph

PREFACE ix

Waldo Emerson fully available to me. Mr. Odell Shepard gave me leave
to quote from The Journals of Bronson Alcott.

The progress of the book was greatly helped by the John Simon Guggen-
heim Memorial Foundation's award of a fellowship in biography and by
generous financial aid from the American Philosophical Society. Margaret
Ann and W. T. White, my daughter and son-in-law, read my manuscript,
greatly to its benefit. Mr. John L. Cooley, besides bringing me his Emer-
soniana, lent a practiced hand to the work of correcting both galleys and
page proofs of my chapters; and Mrs. Walter R. Bowie read the page proofs
of them. Mr. John Hall Wheelock of Charles Scribner's Sons was a wise
and sympathetic adviser. My wife, Clara Gibbs Rusk, gave indispensable
and much-valued aid from the time when the first preliminary note was
made till the day when the last proof sheet was corrected.

Mr. Edward Forbes has supplied the picture of his grandfather which
is reproduced in the frontispiece. The original was presumably a daguerreo-
type by Southworth & Hawes of Boston, but its early history is not now
clear. That daguerreotype, or an enlargement of it, was very probably, I
think, the same "large photograph, taken fifteen years ago," mentioned in
Ellen Emerson's draft of a letter to Gisela von Arnim Grimm apparently
begun in March of 1868. According to Ellen, the "large photograph" had
been "contemptuously discarded" by the family in spite of the photog-
rapher's warning that "This may not be the Father, but it is the orator,
the man as he stands before the world, and this will be the one picture
valued by posterity, when all the others are forgotten." And it was only,
she said, "within three months" that it had been rediscovered "in South-
worth & Hawes's shop" and "dragged . . . from obscurity" and "admired
and eagerly sought for." The same picture I have used, and, as I con-
jecture, the same Ellen described, was published by Alexander Ireland in
the longer of his two biographies of 1882. In his prefatory note Ireland
could give only an indefinite account of it. It was "reduced from a large
one" sent to him "in 1867," but "taken probably a few years before." Yet,
for some unexplained reason, he printed "J5/r. 55" under his reproduction,
thus affirming that the original was not earlier than 1857. When, however,
the picture was republished in the first volume of the Centenary Edition
it was dated 1854; and as that year was doubtless assigned by Emerson's
son, the editor, it seems most probable. The evidence in favor of 1853,
including some recently discovered, does not much weaken that probability,
though it is a reminder of the very real uncertainty that still exists.

R. L. R.

New York
February

PROLOGUE:
WILLIAM AND RUTH EMERSON

For shame! O Emerson! Arise to industry 1 To glory!
—William Emerson's diary, October 13, 1795

WHEN William Emerson came home from the governor's
house on Election Day he found a new son. Ralph Waldo
had been born at a quarter past three that afternoon. There
is good reason to believe that William Emerson felt the
elation a father would naturally experience on such an occasion and the
great relief a husband would naturally feel when his wife had passed safely
through the ordeal of childbirth. But his diary, though it had some highly
emotional passages, seldom seemed to him a fit place for the outpouring
of sentiment. He made a laconic note of the favorable condition of Ruth,
his wife. Whatever his parental feelings were, he concealed them perfectly
as he jotted down the entry briefly recording the events of that busy day.
He betrayed no more surprise than if he had known in advance the exact
moment of the birth of his fourth child. And it seems probable that even
with such foreknowledge he could not easily have canceled any of his
engagements,, for he was now a rather important man in Boston, the capital
of Massachusetts.

In the same diary where he recorded the events of Election Day,
May 25, 1803, he had already written the story of most of his mature
years. He sometimes reviewed his career, partly to admonish himself
against repeating old errors, but surely not without a mild feeling of
satisfaction because of his successes. If his achievements seemed modest,
they were mainly due to his own exertions. He had hardly known his
father and had not found it easy to rise from the condition of a rather
impecunious, if well instructed, country boy. Diary and family corre-
spondence together vividly evoked not less than thirteen years of his past,
carrying him back to the time when he was a young college graduate
pleased with the prospect of eking out a slender salary from the Roxbury
grammar school by keeping an evening school in winter and a girls' school
in summer.

2 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

His pleasure in teaching dwindled rapidly. The inescapable double
responsibility of discipline and instruction weighed heavily upon him
and his spirits were, as he said, "depressed with perpetual fatigue. He
experienced no undue delay in getting his licence to preach or m receiv-
ing his call to the little church at the village of Harvard, only a lew miles
across the hills from his native Concord. But even in the ministry his
peace of mind proved to be short-lived. Indeed it may have had no Me
at all, for in his letter of acceptance, in March of 179* his thoughts
already seemed to dwell unhappily on the meager salary he was to
receive When he told his future flock that "it is God who asagneth us
our station in life," he perhaps half consciously implied that for his own
part he would not have chosen so small a place as Harvard. At his ordina-
tion past generations of New England preachers whose name he bore and
other reverend ancestors of different names, were so many firm cords bind-
ing him to the church. Living members of the family were present to
encourage him, and his stepfather, Ezra Ripley, preached the ordination
sermon But whatever reason William Emerson had for singleness of heart,
he was soon deeply discontented, for he found his parish torn by religious
dissension and too poor to relieve him of his poverty.

He could not remember being free of debt since his twelfth year, but
poverty now proved harder to endure than when he had been less con-
spicuous, and he formed a new resolve to acquire the virtue of frugality.
He reminded himself in his journal: "Paid for a gold ring and buttons.
Things, which I could very ill afford! Be careful in future." His proposal
that his salary be pegged to commodity prices had some practical results
and showed him no mean theoretical economist, but he involved himself
more deeply by purchasing a farm. His increasing financial difficulties made
him fear that a separation from his church would be necessary. Though
such an act, in the face of the old New England custom of permanent
pastorates, would, he felt, "be like suffering my hair and my eyes to be
plucked out," it would be better than starvation.

It was pleasant enough to figure in the upper social set of the parish ;
and being a friend of the comparatively opulent Squire Kimball and of
Henry Bromfield, the Roger de Goverley of the place, made up partly
for one's own lack of the good things of life. Yet the young pastor could
not be content with favors from great friends. He was weary of bachelor-
hood, "the life of a monk," as it seemed to him, but was without money
to marry on.

He tired of parish dissension. Though the conservatives in his church
yielded far enough to accept a new and less trinitarian hymnal, they
finally rose in rebellion against instrumental accompaniment for religious

PROLOGUE: WILLIAM AND RUTH EMERSON 3

songs. Both the liberal hymns and their instrumental accompaniment were
innovations the music-loving pastor was responsible for. The visible symbol
of his approval of these things was the bass viol he lent to the musicians.
But whatever he did, he might offend somebody; and unfriendly critics,
eager to stir up the too placid pool of village life, were sleepless in their
vigilance.

It was true that he could turn to a variety of literary interests for con-
solation. He had, it seems, founded the first social library in the town, and
he acted as its custodian. Besides, he had collected a little library of his
own. He was enthusiastic about the fine things he discovered in Zimmer-
mann on solitude, and he read Priestley's letters to a philosophical un-
believer. But, since he felt no wholehearted devotion to his Harvard church,
his life seemed to lack a steady purpose.

Between readings he gave out books from the social library or played
on his viol. He was, uneasy because he saw that he read without method,
and he caught himself spending too much time playing checkers and singing
in the parlor. He resolved to be prudent but was soon at his checkers and
singing again. On his twenty-sixth birthday he was compelled to reflect
how much of his life had been carelessly spent. "Count the hours," he
admonished himself, "which I have consumed in sleep, dress, amusements,
and in mere saunterings, and what have I left? O let shame and compunc-
tion fill my soul . . . May God almighty take me into his holy keeping!"
But, immediately descending again into the actual world where holy and
profane things were inextricably jumbled, he added: "Planted my water-
melons & musk melons. Wrote two prayers. Attended and prayed in town-
meeting. Came home and read Tho. Reid's intellectual powers, which is
now my author on hand. Meditate. Review my last year's journal."

No doubt new resolves were not wholly in vain, but he pleasantly
discovered that "It is almost certain, that I can do as much in a day by
spending one third of it in company, as by confining myself entirely." He
not only sermonized and planted melons but arranged to have a new pair
of breeches made and played games. He sermonized again, read "the april
magazine," visited and drank wine, returned and played checkers. He was
off to Boston for a round of visits, music, and other pleasures, with special
attention to a family named Haskins. On the quarter day he could do little
but look over accounts and pay debts. "May God help me," he ejaculated,
uto be more pious and prudent."

His resolutions to study suffered many rude interferences. He blamed
himself for spending a good part of the day foolishly, "trooping and train-
ing in town, and what not." "Would to God," he prayed, "my mind could
so ... embrace a subject, as to be diverted by nothing trifling or incidental!

4 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Am lowspirited, poor wifeless, houseless, landless, and I am afraid almost
friendless." Pained cries continued to punctuate the more complacent pages
of his journals: "Began to sermonize. Failed. Retreated like a coward . . .
For shame! O Emerson! Arise to industry! To glory! , . . Shake off
sloth. Banish lustful thought and foolish, childish imaginations. . . . When
shall I produce works, that in the opinion of my enemies, as well as friends,
shall be deemed the joint effort of genius & habit?55

He finished Reid on the intellectual powers and was no doubt pleased
with his perseverance to the end of such a weighty and edifying treatise.
He wrote prayers and committed them to memory, and he contemplated. He
got through Beattie on truth, read some political pieces, began "Wesley's
testament," and finished "a Sicilian romance," presumably Mrs. Radcliffe's
novel and certainly not the only one of hers that he became acquainted
with. He resigned his office as librarian, apparently after getting into an
argument at the library meeting and then once more regretting his lack
of prudence. The library left his house the same day that he gave up his
vial, and he felt vacant and listless. But the next day he sermonized, kept
retired, and felt virtuous and happy. Once when he had tried in vain to
write sermons, he sat in the hall of the tavern for an hour, watching the
boys and girls dance. The last days of his twenty-seventh year found him
reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, a story in which beauty and goodness
tardily triumphed over villany, while Pyrenees or Apennines created an
atmosphere of wild romantic loveliness or loneliness, and supernatural
horrors got explained away. People in the village thought that his courtly
manners sometimes bordered on pomposity, that he was too proud, that he
asked grace too poetically when there was little on the table; but when he
looked at himself he saw a very human, uncertain, distressed person.

Though Boston meant over thirty miles of not very easy roads, he
managed to cover them now and then, keeping in touch with Doctor
Belknap, a preacher, compiler of hymns, writer of fiction, biographer, and
historian. Such a connection was a badge of culture, but William Emerson,
in making the long journey, also had in mind other attractions than those
of the versatile Doctor. By the summer of 1795 he was a not infrequent
visitor at the house of the Haskins family in Rainsford's Lane. A cautious
and deliberate lover, he did not wholly trust his own instincts. He was
making his advances with the approval, if not on the advice., of his erratic
but sometimes clever and even brilliant sister Mary. She let him know that
she had considered the eligibility of the young women of her acquaintance
and had made up her mind. It was she who urged him to think seriously
of Ruth, tenth of the sixteen children of John Haskins, the well-to-do
distiller.

PROLOGUE: WILLIAM AND RUTH EMERSON 5

The Haskins family was an interesting bit of humanity to examine.
John Haskins had been of a bold, adventurous nature from his youth, when
he had run away from home to follow the sea. Plying his cooper's trade
as a member of the crew of a privateer, he had been taken captive by the
Spaniards and afterwards by the French. Success as a business man in
later years inevitably added to his willfulness and personal force, and he
must have inspired admiration and pride as he strode up the aisle of Trinity
Church on a Sunday, wearing his long red cloak and carrying his cocked
hat in his hand. Ruth's mother, Hannah, also displayed a will of her own.
She used stubbornly to refuse to follow her husband to Episcopalian Trin-
ity, and, instead, would carry off a contingent of the Haskins children to
Congregational Park Street Church. In Ruth herself, the Haskins will was
subdued, perhaps not only by Haskins discipline but by her own gentler
nature, yet it showed in her remarkable power of endurance and in her
unwavering loyalty to principles and to friends. Now, in 1795, it was
probably a decisive circumstance that she possessed a loyal friend of her
own in Mary Moody Emerson.

"Be it as it may," Mary Moody informed her brother, "of the amiable
Ruth I must write. ... I have already told you that she is virtues self.
And I repeat it, that in her look and manners is combined every thing
which gives an idea of the whole assemblage of mild and amiable virtues.
Added to this a natural good understanding and a uniform sense of pro-
priety which characterises her every action and enables her to make a
proper estimate of every occurance. Yet true it is, my dear Ruth, thou
dost not possess those energies,— those keen vibrations of soul which seizes
pleasure— which immortalizes moments and which give to life all the zest
of enjoyment! But why should I regret this incapasity? If thou wert thus
formed, thou wouldst be a very different being from what thou now art.
... A thousand unborn sensations would impede the gentle accents of
benevolence, which now dwell on those lips that seem open but in the
cause of virtue!"

This was an honest, unadorned character analysis, calculated, not to
stir the imagination of a young man, but to impress his judgment, and
in William Emerson judgment ruled the imagination. There was no fateful
result for a year or so. But on a June day in 1796, William rode out with
Ruth u&," as he put it with his customary restraint, "talked with her on
the subject of matrimony," Before the week was over he had bought a
horse, and his trips to Boston multiplied until, on the 25th of October,
in the long, many-windowed Rainsford's Lane house, he was married to
the woman he somewhat meagerly described as "the pious and amiable
Ruth Haskins." Their short wedding journey covered all the significant

6 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

geography of William Emerson's life. They went from Boston to Concord,
where they dined, and then on to the upland village of Harvard, where
they found their neighbors and friends waiting to receive them.

The little village clung to the flanks of a ridge in a region of much
natural beauty. Not far away was the long crest of Prospect Hill. From
it one got a memorable view of Wachusett to the west and of Monadnock
and other mountains to the northward. But it is not clear whether the
pastor and his bride cared for these things. Winter was coming on, and
they bought a cow and settled down on the farm. Toward the end of
November the unrepentant bridegroom recorded: "Beautiful day. ... we
are poor and cold, and have little meal, and little wood, and little meat;
but, thanks to a kind Providence, courage enough!" Soon he agreed to
take a school in order to add $25 a month to the family income.

Early in the following year, thinking it proper to make a formal report
on his matrimonial venture to his father-in-law, he assured him that "my
expectations in regard to conjugal life, which never were notoriously modern,
are happily answered." The bride wrote with perfect decorum to her sister
Elizabeth, "Surely it cannot be reprehensible to love so good a sister; but
it would be if I were to repine at our separation, while I am under the
most endearing obligations to a friend nearer, than parents, or brethren;
one, who is altogether worthy of my affections. Thus blessed, feign would
I hush every rising murmur about distance from that little spot I once
delighted in, as my home; and complain only of those imperfections in
myself, that render me undeserving such a companion. I daily regret that,
so little of that benign and heavenly disposition recommended in the gospel
is discernible in my conduct."

Ruth's piety was habitual. A serious, religious tone appeared in many
of her resolutions, letters, prayers, and journal entries and was by no means
inspired simply by her sense of duty as the wife of a minister. An early
prayer of hers commemorating a festival day in her religious life read like
a liturgy. Once she copied a precept of self-reliant tone, "In things of
moment, on thyself depend" ; but in her recorded, thoughts she was usually
concerned with religious introspection. Generally she acted much and wrote
little.

Late in the winter of 1798, the first child, Phebe Ripley, was born.
"Joy and gratitude," William recorded, "swell our bosoms." Acts of kind-
ness from the neighbors made life easier at the farmhouse-parsonage. But
the mere business of getting a living for a growing family continued to
absorb the energies of the pastor, though he was quite as deeply religious
as his wife. "This world/3 he confessed, "which ought to have a very small
share of my thoughts engrosses many of them." He feared that he was in

PROLOGUE: WILLIAM AND RUTH EMERSON 7

danger of carrying his devotion to the family's temporal welfare "to an
excess which my religion and profession will by no means justify.'3

He regarded his small salary and his strained personal relations with
his parish as warnings that it was time for a change; and he seems to have
decided that if help did not come soon from some other quarter he would
set out for Washington, the paper city already agreed upon as the future
federal capital, and make a new start in the world. He had a fine dream
of founding there a more liberal church than the one he was tied to. But
a timely opportunity for a less precarious change determined his future.
The Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company of Boston asked him to
preach their Election Day sermon in 1799; and his discourse, published
as Piety and Arms, was doubtless decisive in getting him the invitation to,
the pastorate of the First Church in that town.

The First Church persuasively argued that Boston's need was greater
than little Harvard's because of the "Alarming attacks that are made on
our holy religion, by the Learned, the Witty & the Wicked, especially in
populous & Sea Port Towns," and was obviously ready to offer him a better
salary. It was a foregone conclusion that he would accept. Frankly remind-
ing his village parishioners of their failure to ease his financial burden and
of their chronic dissension, he begged them to let him go in charity and
peace. Suddenly appreciative of his value and aware of the special expense
that might be involved in settling his successor, they sent in a demand for
$1300 as compensation for the loss of their pastor, but, when the Boston
church, offered $1000 as an ultimatum, accepted that sum. On Sunday, Sep-
tember 22, 1799, in spite of alarming signs of ill health, William Emerson
preached both sermons at the Old Brick, the home of his new congregation.

He was undoubtedly pleased with the First Church's promise of a salary
of $14 a week, a dwelling house, and an annual supply of twenty cords
of wood; but, being prudent after seven years of unhappy experience, he
qualified his gratitude with the observation that he was ignorant of the
expenses of town life and could only express his confidence that his em-
ployers would deal justly with him. They were expected to see that he got
a reputable maintenance if he performed his duties faithfully. And, as it
turned out, both church and pastor kept their parts of this understanding.

The house occupied by the Emersons stood in Summer Street; near
what is now the corner of Chauncy. In contrast to the noise and bustle in
the vicinity of the Old Brick, half a mile away, here was almost bucolic
pcacefulncss. The tinkling of cowbells could still be heard in a neighboring
pasture, and the old parsonage, a gambrel-roofed wooden building, painted
yellow and standing far back from the gate, had nearly an acre of land to
itself, with orchard and garden and a row of elms and Lombardy poplars.

8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Other orchards and gardens, belonging to the estates of prosperous neigh-
bors, made the region slightly reminiscent of the country villages William
Emerson had known. The common, only a short distance away, was itself
still a public cow pasture.

William Emerson had good reason to be hopeful. But Ruth, on the eve
of her second confinement, seemed to have a premonition of ill fortune in
Boston. She dreaded the prospect of uthe useless ceremony, parade, and
pomp, that almost necessarily are attached to a town life.33 She declared
that she did not feel qualified to move in this new sphere, and in spite of
the difficult winters at Harvard she kept her great preference for retirement
and rural scenes. But she was a dutiful wife, and she remembered that in
following her husband she was returning to her girlhood home uto dwell,"
as she said in her somewhat Biblical manner, "among my kindred and
friends."

Though John Clarke, named after the late minister of the First Church,
came safely into the world a few weeks after his parents had settled down
in Summer Street, a major disaster was not far in the future. Within a
year illness swept the transplanted household, and it is certain that William
Emerson was dramatizing no imaginary grief when he made the brief entries
in his diary on the final day of the ordeal: "Phcbe is worse. Dies. Oh! my
God, support me under this heavy loss!" Ruth Haskins Emerson wrote
more calmly but with no less feeling: "Sepi 28, 1800. Sabbath day, Died
Phebe Ripley Emerson, the eldest child and only daughter of William and
Ruth Emerson Her disorder was the discntcry and canker. She was a lovely
and charming flower . . . O gracious God, let us ever be more solicitous,
that the ends thou didst design may be fully answered! Since thou has
deprived us of one of the purest streams of our earthly happiness, do thou
draw us to thee the fountain of inexhaustible felicity!31 A third child,
William, destined to outlive all his brothers and .sisters but one, was born
on the last day of July, 1801— "His perfect birth, and the good state of his
mother fill our hearts with gratitude to God,33 wrote his father.

The minister of the First Church seemed to regard all of the cultured
part of Boston as belonging to his parish. His calendar presented a jumble
of engagements. He gave much time to the founding and encouragement
of clubs, societies, and institutions intended to aid science, literature, and
the arts. The school committee required his attention. The singing society
met at his house. Across the Charles, in Cambridge, he attended the exhibi-
tion at Harvard as a member of the visiting committee; and he was soon
due at a meeting of the overseers. He did not neglect the Humane Society
or the Agricultural Society. He attended the club at Popkin's. He was
driving himself hard and had little privacy for either thought or relaxation.

PROLOGUE: WILLIAM AND RUTH EMERSON 9

Even his outings were apt to have an air of official gravity. He sailed in
the revenue cutter, a government vessel, when he got away for a few days
to visit Cape Cod and to pitch quoits and to fish at an island on the return
voyage. At another time he went "down on the water with the Select Men."
He became a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He met with
Kirkland and Popkin, fellow ministers of Boston churches, to arrange for
the founding of the Physiological Society, or wrote his 304^1 sermon, or
took his turn at lecturing before the Boston Philosophical Society, or had
to prepare a Fourth of July oration, and, on the day of his oration, dine
with the governor and attend an association meeting at Popkin's. He found
he had to write something for the Palladium,, a local newspaper. He studied
chemistry. In January of 1803 he received a new honor, being appointed
chaplain to the senate of the commonwealth; and before the year was out
he was to receive a like honor from the council.

Though he was much in the public eye, he had the good sense not to
overestimate his own value. "Good God!" he wrote in his journal, "What
a slow being I am! I scarcely vegetate. I am sometimes noticed; but I am
as stupid as an ass." Once after a meeting of the Philosophical Society, he
recorded that that organization was flourishing and remarked, with some
degree of self-satisfaction, "I thank a good Providence that this child of
my brain is fostered, and promises to grow to mature age." But he was
not boastful. Such prominence as he had already won was, after all, mainly
to be credited, as he doubtless knew, to the pulpit he occupied.

His reputation as a preacher at the First Church in his early years there
was enough to warrant the publication, by the summer of 1803, of half
a dozen or more sermons; but these were by no means works of genius.
They were not even very remarkable for any precocious Unitarianism or
rationalism. With many other Congregational ministers of his time, he
was drifting only half-consciously into the current of Unitarian thought,
and in America this still lacked definite direction. Though he may well
have been in a questioning mood— the least that could have been expected
of a budding Unitarian— when he prayed for help "to frame just concep-
tions of Jesus Christ, and of the design and extent of his mission to man-
kind," he was orthodox enough to praise God for "the clear and glorious
light of divine revelation" and for "sending from the realms of happiness
thy blessed son, who was the brightness of thy glory and the express image
of thy person, into this our sinful world." Yet he stressed very little the
notion of eternal punishment; and, though it might seem to him that an
"awful dispensation of providence" could cover his own purposes with
darkness, no belief in the predestination of the soul seems to have troubled
him. At times he held firmly to the doctrine of human depravity as well

io THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

as to that of Christ's mediation. But he was more an Arminian denying an
arbitrary and tyrannically administered scheme of salvation than a Gal-
vinist holding to a belief in the absolute government of God. Wearying
somewhat of the unqualified dogma of a threefold God, he was almost a
Unitarian. If he hated to let go of the old hereditary doctrines, he also
liked to be a cultured man and a catholic-minded gentleman.

Though he was not brilliant in his sermons, he could at least appeal
to good sense. "His eloquence;3 according to one contemporary, "was of
that bold and manly kind, that, when used in argumentative discourses,
generally produces conviction without appealing to the passions; and in
those of a didactick nature, enforces moral and religious truth, by its
suavity and mildness." Obviously he thought one of the chief duties of
the minister was to make religion a foundation for a just and temperate
life, the life of reason and of religion combined.

Even though for him the happy pulpit warrior was one who did not
confound the morality of the pagan Stoics with the religion of Christ, he
was confident that truth would be safe without being locked up in the
prison of a creed. What had seemed to some of his predecessors in the
pulpit of the First Church the abomination of abominations of all Chris-
tendom he could tolerate. He could remark without acrimony that "The
roman catholick church is going forward with spirit in Boston.35 It would
not be unreasonable to imagine him as an unperturbed onlooker when the
Church of the Holy Cross was dedicated in Boston and Bishop Carroll and
the priests, mutely testifying to the fact that Catholicism was still foreign
to New England, moved in procession from the residence of the Spanish
consul.

His orthodoxy had not gone unquestioned at the time of his ordination,
He read the radical Priestley and he seems to have owned a copy of The
Age of Reason, deist Tom Paine's book that stripped religion of revelation.
Perhaps he had summed up well his whole career as a preacher before he
had commenced it. The functions of an enlightened divine, he had said,
struck him with amazing beauty, and he was charmed with the idea of
reforming mankind.

But if William Emerson was a liberal in religion he was a conservative
in politics. Though in his clerical sphere he tried to keep clear of open
political controversy and more than once declared his dislike of politics,
those who heard his sermons and addresses could easily guess where his
party allegiance lay. The chief danger he saw to the social structure was
radical reform. He held to the opinion that society was a cake in which
the richest and most refined ingredients enjoyed a natural right to be on
the top layer. As he said in his sermon on the death of Governor Bowdoin's

PROLOGUE: WILLIAM AND RUTH EMERSON u

widow, he believed that "Talents, honours, and wealth hold a sort of natural
sway over the opinions of mankind.55 He commended the founders of the
Boston Female Asylum for their charity but at the same time felt it nec-
essary to reassure his hearers, for these comprised, as a local newspaper
reported, "most of the female merit and elegance of the town." If, he
admitted, those in charge of the asylum entertained "the romantick notion
of instituting an order of females in the community with new privileges, or
of even conferring gentility on these children who are destined to service,53
they might with reason be accused of "disturbing the wholesome arrange-
ments of society. But we/' he declared, "are infected with no rage for
modern innovation."

When he praised the early settlers in a Fourth of July oration, he
remembered their unconquerable love of liberty, but he defined that liberty
in much the same terms as those once used by the First Church's hero John
Winthrop on a famous occasion. He correctly understood the doctrine taught
by the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Concerning the liberty
of the common people they had no illusions. They did not seek or wish "the
freedom of an irrational, but that of a rational being," Their doctrine of
equality was a very sober one. It was not an equality of wisdom that they
believed in. And they did not teach "a parity of power, but of obligation."

He saw clearly that the liberty for which Americans had later been
willing to fight against the mother country was the liberty to control their
own wealth, and he held that it was not the Americans but the British who
had resisted law and order. And while he drew an example for the world
to admire from the American Revolution, he pointed a steady finger of
warning toward the French one. "See there, ye vaunting innovators,5' he
exclaimed, "your wild and dreadful desolations!55 Even in the year 1802
he could see that the French, "after murdering the mildest of despots," had
got a republic that was mere military despotism and slavery. And he re-
minded his fellow countrymen that "along with the political innovation,
which was ravaging Europe, there came abroad an infidel philosophy,
equally subversive of freedom, as of morals.5' If America should drink
deeper of this foreign draught, she would be ruined.

In the parlor, in the pulpit, or on the public platform William Emerson
made a more than respectable figure. The nearly contemporary engraving
of him published in The Polyanthos showed his face long and narrow with
deep lines that seemed to express courtesy, dignity, urbanity. The full head
of hair, only slightly wavy, and combed straight back from the forehead,
added to his air of elegance. The engraving, however, according to the
editor of the little magazine that printed it, was only "sufficient to awaken
a recollection of Mr. Emerson's features53 and could not be called a like-

is THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

ness. It was certainly "not so alive as he"; and it was too somber to conjure
up the image of "a very ready talker, with his friends" or a man who,
though he was formal in manner and speech, had ua passionate love for
the strains of eloquence."

On several of his friends and acquaintance he made a vivid impression.
According to a fellow preacher practiced in observing and judging the
characteristics of public speakers, William Emerson was "much more than
ordinarily attractive33 and had a "melodious voice," a clear enunciation,
and an agreeable pulpit manner. James Russell Lowell's father saw in him
"a handsome man, rather tall, with a fair complexion, his checks slightly
tinted, his motions easy, graceful and gentlemanlike, his manners bland and
pleasant." A Miss Eliza Quincy described him as a naturally good-looking
man who dressed with great care and carried a gold-headed cane. "I think,"
she said, "he was proud of his well-shaped leg. He wore knee-breeches and
black silk stockings, and when he sat down he placed one ankle on the
other knee, for that showed his leg to the best advantage." Whether or not
it was correctly reported that the tavern keeper knew him by his boots,
the minister was undoubtedly an elegant, formal man.

In the spring of 1803, when his third son was born, William Emerson
must have resembled very little the somewhat lifeless wood engraving in
The Polyanthos. Probably well-informed Bostonians would have agreed that
this liberal minister of the town's oldest church and chaplain of the Fed-
eralist senate was in his proper place when he sat at the governor's table
on Election Day, a chief anniversary of the commonwealth. May 25 was
only one of his many busy days. He kept a steady hand as he recorded the
birth of Ralph Waldo. In the rest of his entry he betrayed only the slightest
impatience. He included there the fact that two days earlier he had received
a Mr. Puffer as his guest, "and," he grumbled with disciplined decorum,
"here he has tarried." A complimentary remark on the Election Day sermon
just preached by Puffer masked the host's desire for his guest to be gone.
The diarist rounded out the story of the 25th by mentioning a club. He
presumably found time to attend the club that evening. On the following
day he was present to hear the "convention" sermon, part of the ceremonies
of Election Week, and had the governor and others home to dinner with
him, where they may have viewed his new son. On the syth he was at
a meeting of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society, He also dined on
that day with Lady Temple, perhaps to bring her religious consolation, for
he had only recently preached her mother's funeral sermon.

At times, no doubt, his hurrying from one appointment to another gave
him a pleasant sense of importance and helped him to forget a fundamental
conflict in character which he shared with a large part of humanity. But

PROLOGUE: WILLIAM AND RUTH EMERSON 13

he was by no means a stupid person, and there it still was, plainly to be
seen by his own eyes, the conflict between his love of mere gentility, of social
pleasure, and of ease and his resurgent ambition to rise to industry and
fame. Whatever qualities might be necessary for the successful pursuit of
fame, it became clear to him that the achievement of even industry made
demands that were discouragingly exacting. He was used to being frank
with himself. Had his parishioners been fortunate enough to look into
William Emerson's diary they might have read in it a sermon on human
nature more eloquent than any the pastor ever preached from his pulpit.

Unfortunately he did not record in his diary his secret thoughts at the
climactic moment of the week when he climbed into his pulpit and sat
Baiting to begin his sermon. The congregation may have misjudged him
but doubtless thought him a calm, collected, confident, satisfied man. His
wife, unwilling to trust anybody else to iron his lawn bands, had seen that
all was in order before he left home. And now he was "very handsome"
with the lawn at his throat and his black silk gown held correctly in place
by the broad plaited band of black silk around the waist.

Ruth Emerson, calm and deliberate, served as the balance wheel in the
daily routine performance of the Emerson domestic machinery and made
little stir in public. Having unobtrusively put the final touches to the im-
pressive dignity that would clothe her husband in his pulpit, she was willing
to share with other members of his congregation the status of admirer and
disciple. Perhaps her most conspicuous public appearances were before the
altar of the First Church, where she is said to have carried her babies, each
in turn, for baptism by her husband.

It seems unlikely that she was strong enough to play this part in the
ceremony of May 29, 1803, when the four-days-old Ralph Waldo was
duly entered in his father's bold hand in the baptismal record of the parish.
But probably it was she who had chosen the boy's first name in honor of
her brother Ralph Haskins, then "far absent in the Pacific Ocean35 as
supercargo on the ship of a Boston merchant. The second name came from
the Emersons. It had repeatedly appeared among them since the seven-
teenth century, when Edward, grandson of the Thomas Emerson who had
founded the American branch of the family, had married Rebecca, daugh-
ter of Cornelius Waldo. As William had recently noted in some genealogical
jottings, it had recurred well into the eighteenth century, when his paternal
grandparents, Joseph and Mary, had given it to two sons in succession,
not content to allow it to go unused after the death of the first.

2.
BOSTON, 1803

•

This mart of commerce; this rich mine of wealth;
This field of plenty; residence of health . . .
Shall all things else but genius flourish here?

— Winthrop Sargent, Boston. A Poem, 1803

THE year 1 803 was a good year for an American to be born in. On
the day of Ralph Waldo's birth, Reuben Puffer, the guest of the
Emersons, uttered some truths that turned out to be not wholly
unrelated to that event. For nations, as well as for individuals,
he said in his election sermon, there were times when heaven was propitious.
Now the United States came forward to enjoy their day. The future hung
upon the fate of America, and she was a spectacle watched by the whole
world. Had the preacher of the election sermon been only slightly more
prescient and had he not been addressing an audience predominantly Fed-
eralist, he might have pointed for proof to the territorial expansion then
actually in progress. Thomas Jefferson, the man in the White House who
seemed to cast a long, sinister shadow over State Street and Cornhill in
Boston, was already negotiating with France for more suitable boundaries.
News traveled slowly and any treaty had to be ratified by the Senate, but
some weeks had now passed since the President's emissaries, though in-
structed only to buy French land about the mouth of the Mississippi, had
suddenly agreed to purchase the whole of Louisiana, sprawling across the
Western prairies and plains from the Mississippi to the Rockies. The Fed-
eralists, unable to discover any good in Jefferson, were soon filled with
alarm and warned that

Extended empire like expanded gold,
Exchanges solid strength for feeble splendor.

But such fears were unfounded in the opinion of most Americans; and the
republic really was, as Puffer said, coming forward now to enjoy its day.
Boston herself was just stepping forward to enjoy a new day of great-
ness among American cities. Since the century and more of her rule as the
queen of English colonial towns, she had been eclipsed and surpassed both
commercially and intellectually. But her future was again bright. Though

BOSTON, 1803 15

she had fewer than thirty thousand people on her three hills and along the
borders of her small peninsula, still literally almost an island, her wharves
and warehouses already gave her the air of a metropolis. The Boston com-
mercial world of 1803 was fast becoming an economic powerhouse that
could, if properly harnessed, make the wheels of culture turn with exciting
momentum. That commercial world was a solid fact not only in the experi-
ence of the aged business-minded distiller John Haskins but in the life of
his son-in-law, the minister, for without the sustenance provided by it the
thin spiritual flame of the First Church might have flickered and smoked.
If William Emerson could have found time during the overcrowded
hours of May 25 to make the rounds of the waterfront and the chief
business streets, he would unquestionably have been impressed by the rich
stores of goods for sale. He might have got the key to the whole intricate
pattern of commerce by stopping at Central Wharf, where his brother-
in-law John Haskins Junior not only transacted auction, brokerage, and
commission business but sold West Indian rum, claret, Burgundy and mus-
cat wines, and a variety of French goods. Somewhere along the waterfront
the brig Eliza was just in from Alicante with a cargo of brandy; the
schooner Sally had arrived after a passage of twenty-nine days from Guade-
loupe with various stores, including molasses that was no doubt intended
to be made into rum; the ship Mary was in with salt from Lisbon; and
there was newly arrived coastwise shipping. Shops and warehouses were
crowded with a bewildering variety of desirable things : silk ribbons, men's
silk hats, Italian artificial flowers, Roman violin strings, marble chimney
pieces with hearths to match, thousands of excellent Havana segars, fine
flour, first and second quality ship bread, haddock, pollock, herring, mack-
erel, hundreds of quintals of codfish and barrels of alewives and hogsheads
of molasses, boxes of white and brown Havana sugar, Canton sugar, Cal-
cutta sugar, Welsh's fresh chocolate, numerous chests of fragrant hyson and
hyson skin and bohea and Souchong tea, tons of the best green coffee,
bottled cider, pipes of country gin and Rotterdam gin, St. Vincent's rum,
cherry rum, New England rum, St. Kitt's and Grenada rum, London porter,
cognac, sherry, Madeira, Lisbon and Vidonia and Malaga wines, Bordeaux
claret, table beer and strong beer by the barrel, kegs of tobacco, boxes of
Turkey figs, prunes, muscatel raisins, fresh oranges, lemons, apricots, Balti-
more flour, Richmond flour, pork, casks of rice, nuts, seeds, tons of whale
oil, Georgia upland cotton and cotton from the Carolinas, hemp, bales of
Madras handkerchiefs, plushes, umbrellas, fans, gloves, hose, ear jewels,
ear hoops and knots, English and Genevan watches, finger rings, knee
buckles, swords and hangers, gold and silver and tinsel epaulettes, satins,
laces, broadcloths, calicoes, ginghams, cassimeres, chintzes, Marseille quilt-

1 6 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

ings, sprigged and tamboured muslin, long lawns, Irish linens, sheeting,
diapers, shawls, black and colored hats for men, razors, straw hats and
bonnets as high as $15 each, fancy rosettes, veils, cloaks, mantles, silk gloves,
superfine fancy colored kid gloves and shoes of the same material, sewing-
silks of all kinds, nankeens, dimities, elegant morocco and cabinet work
shaving and dressing cases, satteen wood tea caddies with cut glass sugar
basins, elegant family medicine chests, paints and water colors in scores

of varieties.

But it would doubtless have been perfectly obvious to the calmly ap-
praising mind of William Emerson that not only the fertilizer of mercantile
wealth but a good deal of patient cultivation would be necessary to make
the sandy soil of Massachusetts bear a rank harvest of marketable ideas,
and that the Bostonians would have years of laborious waiting before their
local renaissance could reach its height. Their town seemed to cry aloud
for reform, even to its very streets and houses. Civic pride, shamed by what
seemed a monstrous collection of shapeless structures, where the few sym-
metrical buildings were like rough-hewn diamonds in a mean setting,
demanded domes, turrets, and spires to "parley with the setting sun.'1 Win-
throp Sargent, the current satirist and self-appointed spokesman for civic
pride, was satisfied with the evidences of commercial prosperity. But he
lamented in his poem Boston the depraved public taste that was offended
by Shakespeare and patronized triumphant German dullness on a stupid
stage. Literature was in disgrace, with ballads, foolish odes, and acrostics
the order of the day. One reason why genius alone failed to flourish here,
Sargent argued, was that poverty restrained it even in the midst of wealth.
Writers needed encouragement if they were to survive. Sargent, a sort of
New England Johnson, lashed with his scorn the social excesses and follies
of the times and advised, with perhaps little more conviction than the
author of London had done, that it would be better to fly from such scenes
to rural joys, far surpassing the pleasures of the town. But his sincerity
was unmistakable when he announced his ardent hope that in some more
glorious day these envious spots would all be wiped away, leaving the name
of Boston "unrivall'd on the chart of fame."

William Emerson, in spite of his unflattering estimate of himself as
"Destitute of one particle of genius," was really significant as one of the
leaders in the scheme for a future city notable for letters, arts, and sciences.
The desire for cultural amelioration was a part of his religion. He had
been used to praying, not only for a divine blessing upon the commerce,
fishery, and manufactures which he now saw flourishing about him, but
for a prospering of the "means of literature." He was just now witnessing,
with littlr. realization of the importance of the event, the arrival

BOSTON, 1803 ll

of a new worker who would prove to be far more effective than he in
advancing the good cause. A week after the birth of his son Ralph Waldo
he attended at the Park Street Church the ordination of William Ellery
Channing, later famed both as the national Unitarian leader and as the
harbinger of a new literary era in New England. There were a number
of intellectual or political notables who also seemed to strengthen the town's
claims to a place in the cultural sun. John Quincy Adams, future Presi-
dent, was a member of the First Church. Old John Adams, ex-President,
emanated distinction when he came in from his suburban residence to
receive honors on public occasions. Samuel Adams, a memorable figure
of the Revolutionary era, had a few more months to live before being
carried to the Granary Burying Ground with such pomp as the clergy,
local officialdom, and the representatives of foreign countries could supply.
Jeremy Belknap was dead by this time, but the older Robert Treat Paine,
later a friend and adviser to William Emerson, much as Belknap had been,
was still a justice of the state's supreme court.

Not farther away than Cambridge was a little group of professional
scholars, and miscellaneous untitled ones were also leavening the dough
of the whole community. Bostonians, if they wished to study Spanish or
French, might find their way to William Emerson's own street, where
Francis Sales held evening classes at home and stood ready to furnish trans-
lations, even from Italian or Portuguese, upon request. On the fringes of
Boston, Susanna Haswell Rowson, an English-born teacher and ex-actress,
removed her young ladies' academy from Medford to Newton and kept
up the stream of fiction that had already made her one of the most widely
read authors in America.

In the fine arts the renaissance, if European art was to have one in
Massachusetts, still seemed to be in the distant future. Though Copley,
one of the clever portrait painters of his time, was a native of Boston, he
had now been an Englishman for a quarter of a century or more. Neither
Gilbert Stuart, a Rhode Islander, nor Washington Allston, a South Caro-
linian, had yet arrived with brush and pigments to be a citizen of the
town. Well-to-do families owned a few portraits, but, so far as the less
fortunate were concerned, art hardly existed outside such hopeful institu-
tions as the Columbian Museum. The Columbian still had to be taken into
account, for though it had recently burned to the ground, it was rising
again phoenix-like from its ashes, as the owner had promised, and would
flourish at a new home in Milk Street. There it would soon display, for a
moderate admission fee, a new selection of "elegant paintings," together
with wax figures of historical personages, a perfect model of a mammoth's
skeleton, and a surprising variety of both natural and artificial curiosities.

1 8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Its rooms would resound with "excellent Music on the organized and grand
Piano-Fortes." Before the year was ended, the Columbian, emulated by
the rival Washington Museum at the foot of the Mall, would combine
literature and art in an exhibition of figures of Shakespearean characters.
The Boston stage meanwhile offered entertainments ranging from tragedy
to farce. In Federal Street Hamlet was played for the "first time these
four years."

The pastor of the First Church could have given any of his culture-
hungry fellow townsmen full information about the local scientific and
learned societies. Once he had boldly joined John Quincy Adams, Josiah
Quincy, John Lowell, Benjamin Bussey, and John Kirkland, later president
of the college, in pledging contributions toward the purchase of apparatus
and a library needed by the Society for the Study of Natural Philosophy.
In spite of his too slender financial means, he was still a devoted organizer
and promoter. Of all the Boston societies founded during his lifetime the
Massachusetts Historical Society appealed most to this lover of method.
It had realized Belknap's dream of a repository where historic objects and
historical manuscripts could be preserved in order and in safety for the use
of the learned and the curious. But it was only one of the rather numerous
scholarly or scientific institutions watched over by William Emerson and
his friends.

Boston's literary event of the year 1803 was the launching of The
Monthly Anthology, with schoolmaster Phineas Adams at the helm. After
six months, William Emerson was to take Adams's place, enlisting new
recruits and giving the feeble but ambitious little Anthology a more sig-
nificant direction. The society he would soon help form for the support of
the magazine would be in some respects conservative, being made up of
gentlemen conscious of their class. Yet nothing else in Boston would point
more steadily toward the town's literary future than this society and the
Anthology. The latter was the forerunner of The North American Review^
and the society eventually instigated the founding of the Boston Athenauim.

Ralph Waldo, now still in his first year, would live to look back upon
this era with some justifiable disdain, pricking and deflating its pretension
with an epithet, "that early ignorant & transitional Month-of-March, in
our New England culture." In their soberest moments the minister of the
First Church and his fellow pioneers would doubtless have acknowledged
the accuracy of every term of this verdict. They knew it was only early
spring, but they were preparing for a summer which they themselves could
hardly hope to enjoy.

LOOKING OUT FROM HIS CORNER

Thus, little by little, I became conscious where I was; and
to have a wish to express my wishes to those who could
content them . . . And, lo! my infancy died long since,
and I live.

—St. Augustine, The Confessions, translated by
E. B. Pusey, Book I

URING his early infancy Ralph Emerson was not much dis-
tinguished from his brothers in extant family papers, and in-
cidents in which he was concerned seemed mostly trivial to his
elders, though they could not actually have been so in the life
of any child. As early as his second year he was probably ordered to
Concord, along with his brothers, to "inhale a large portion of rural and
balsam air," When he was two years old his father sent him from Haverhill
a promise to "bring home cake for little boys who behave well at the
dinner table." In his third year he showed some imagination when he
joined his brother William in pretending to carry the family news to their
father, then in Maine, and to drink his health. He was overjoyed at the
traveler's return but doubtless listened with more wonder than compre-
hension to tales of the voyage to Portland in a vessel described as hardly
bigger than a punch bowl. By December of 1805 he was regarded as
"rather a dull scholar"; and it is possible that he was already at school
by that time. In the following March he was going to his teacher, a Mrs.
Whitwcll, "again." He got through a serious illness blamed on worms, and
before his third birthday he was once more back in the dame school and
naturally still unable to read well.

Presumably he had by this time discarded the yellow flannel that the
pastor's children are said to have worn "when quite young," and had got
into his dark blue nankeen jacket and trousers. He sometimes said his
prayers to Mary Winslow, his father's ward, and repeated for her enter-
tainment such profane pieces as "You'd scarce expect one of my age,"
"Franklin one night stopped at a public inn," and a part of the dialogue
between Brutus and Cassius. But there is no proof that he was an infant
prodigy, and some of the accomplishments Mary Winslow remembered

2o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

may have belonged to a period several years later. The three-year-old
scholar was certainly admonished because of his slow progress at school.
Once, when it was a question of whether he or his brother William needed
help more, Ralph was selected as the one to be drilled in his studies.

Yet he may have been acquiring quite as much informal as formal
acquaintance with subjects worth knowing. Even at his age he may have
caught some enthusiasm for the mysteries of science from his father, an
amateur scientist and member of a scientific club. Once his father, after
spending hours in preparation, viewed the total eclipse of the sun from
neighbor Bussey's garden in company with "a congregation of astron-
omers.3' The boy could hardly have been ignorant of such doings as these,
and he may have got an exaggerated notion of the dignity of men of letters
when the genteel members of the Anthology Society came frequently to
dine and to select articles for publication in the next number of their
magazine. In Boston he had, fortunately, opportunities to see specimens
of humanity ranging from refined to savage. Sometimes he may have found
his best teachers on the streets. This would surely have been possible when,
for several days, the town was host to ten Indian warriors, true and original
Americans, as they themselves declared.

Boston's love of pageantry stimulated civic and national pride in
juvenile minds. On the Fourth of July discharges of artillery and the ringing
of bells saluted sunrise and sunset, and there were processions and noisy
celebrations. At night crowds assembled on the common to witness the
display of fireworks. The Emerson boys, with family history strengthening
their patriotism, could hardly have escaped the general enthusiasm. Grand-
father Emerson's death during the Revolution would have been a familiar
story to them; and they must have heard their mother tell how, when she
was seven years old, General Washington had taken her on his knee. But
the Election Day that came on the last Wednesday in May was their
favorite holiday. Weeks before the event, as the boys lay in bed at night,
they counted in anticipation their Election Day pleasures. The chief adven-
ture was the spending, on the common, of the nincpence allotted to each
of them. The first time Ralph was old enough to have his money, so goes
the family tradition, he injudiciously parted with all of it for a sheet of
gingerbread but was immediately so filled with remorse that the compas-
sionate keeper of the stall allowed him to return half of the purchase and
gave him back half of the price.

Before he was four years old he had seen the beginning of one family
disaster and the end of another. The birth of his fourth brother, Robert
Bulkeley, seemed at first a propitious event. But Bulkeley was destined to
live past middle age without developing mentally beyond the ability to pen

LOOKING OUT FROM HIS CORNER 21

a few childish, ink-blotted lines. John Clarke, the oldest brother, had
found no New England climate that would heal his lungs. At home he
continued to fail "notwithstanding the best advice that Boston affords, and
the best attention we can give him.'5 On the day of his death his father
was overwhelmed with grief as he assured the questioning boy that he
had been a good child and would go to heaven, and Ruth Emerson seems
to have been crushed by the catastrophe. Ralph must at least have been
sobered by a sense of insecurity, though he was so young that he could
remember nothing in after years but sitting with the family in the parlor
at the funeral.

Doubtless he was not oblivious of the changing moods of his father.
William Emerson frequently felt disgust for worldly ambition but was apt
soon to fall a victim to it again. He reproved his sister Mary Moody for
false humility, a mask too flimsy to hide the pride which demanded that
her relatives "have a name in the world." For himself, he told her, he
began to see life in a different way and prized most highly the honors of
the honest, quiet man. Yet by January of the following year he had felt
a new upsurge of ambition and was experimenting with a private time
table too exacting for a man of his uncertain health:

6 to 7 Dress

7 to 8 Read the scriptures Original

8 to 9 Read Practical authors

9 to n Sermonize. Write 4 pages.

11 to 12 Greek authors. Write a letter.

12 to i. Latin authors. Write pro bono publico

1 to 2. Write for periodical publications.

2 to 3. Newspapers. Sermonize.

3 to 4 Read new publications & polemicks.

4 to 5 Read Philosophy. Mathematicks

5 to 6. Bookmaking

6 to 7. Read History. Sermonize.

7 to 9. Visit.

9 to 10. Write prayers.

10. to 11. Journalize. Devotions. Read.

His whole family must have been oppressed with anxiety when, that
spring, he suffered "a profuse hemorrhage from the lungs, from the effects
of which he never completely recovered." His doctors suggested Concord
as a refuge from the east wind. He knew Concord weather better than
they did and may not have followed their suggestion, but the very name
of his native town must have been music in his ears in the tense days of

22 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

strife between France and England when his own country stood pre-
cariously on the brink of war. He sometimes wished he had been born and
bred among Quakers and was vexed beyond measure that the whole world
should be kept in a constant tumult merely for the sport of a dozen or
so madmen, as he said. As for local politics, the fate of the Federalism
which was no doubt close to his heart seemed to be prophesied that sum-
mer in the magnificent spectacle of the funeral of Fisher Ames, its great

leader.

At some earlier and happier period of his life the minister and his
family might have gloried in the inauguration of a new church to take the
place of the one now engulfed in the swirling commerce of the town. But
he preached the last sermon in the Old Brick only in spite of what had
appeared to him to- be the restraining hand of God. An unforeseen "dis-
pensation of providence . . . suspending the exercise of my ministry,
seemed," he admitted, "to cover this purpose, and all my other purposes,
with a veil of darkness." And, to add to his gloomy mood, there was the
fact, quite plain to him, that he was leading a divided congregation to
the new place of worship. Many resented the trading of the Old Brick
for a new church barren of traditions. Even the parcel of dwelling houses
built for the church as part of the bargain was not enough to salve their
pride. The ill feeling remained tense, and one rude wit, not loath to remind
the world of the bargaining that had been necessary in order to get William
Emerson from the Harvard church, quipped:

Alas! Old Brick, you're left in the lurch,
You bought the Pastor and sold the Church,

William Emerson had the satisfaction of finishing and publishing A
Selection of Psalms and Hymns, with its preface dated in August of 1808.
His old theories of church music were now broadcast. Presumably there
was a new interest in hymnology in his own household, where it became,
sooner or later, a regular duty of the boys to learn hymns by heart. But
the moods of the pastor were inconstant, and he was soon discontented
with himself again. "The time was," he wrote that autumn, "when I hoped
to be a light in the church; but now, gracious God, the very light that is
in me seems to be darkness." A week later he had recovered his spirits
somewhat and resolved once more, "God willing, strictly to adhere to
method in pursuing my studies."

There were some reasons for a happier view of his fortunes. He was
given $700 for the purchase of furniture, and on a fine day in November
he moved into a new parsonage, the best of the four large dwelling houses
that the purchasers of the Old Brick had built for the church. He had

LOOKING OUT FROM HIS CORNER 23

hardly settled his family there before his sixth son, Charles Chauncy,
arrived safely. But the management of his household must by this time
have demanded more and more of his strength, and as a new year ap-
proached, the minister sensibly resolved upon a less exacting but still orderly
scheme for his own life:

New Plan

Before Breakfast. Prayers. Shave <& dress. Biblical criticism.

Before Dinner Sermonize. Write a prayer. Walk.

Before Tea Newspaper. New publications. History. Billets,

Letters, Business.

Before Supper Write pro bono publico.
Before bedtime Read.

In 1809, the year for which William Emerson devised his simplified
diurnal schedule, his son Ralph was six years old. It may have been about
this time that Ralph was taken for the sake of his health from Boston for
a brief stay in Concord. There he tried dock tea and bathing as cures for
some eruptive disease, perhaps what he afterwards remembered under the
vague label of salt rheum. Even in Boston, he could not escape the sup-
posedly curative baths. He rebelled till dislike of them, strengthened by
fear of deep water, became a phobia. William Emerson's insistence on
carrying out the doctor's advice stirred up long-lived resentment in the boy.
Some forty years later Ralph could not forget the severity of a father "who
twice or thrice put me in mortal terror by forcing me into the salt water
off some wharf or bathing house, and ... the fright with which, after
some of this salt experience, I heard his voice one day, (as Adam that of
the Lord God in the garden,) summoning us to a new bath, and I vainly
endeavouring to hide myself."

Two other symbols of authority, Mrs. Whitwell and the Miss Nancy
Dickson who succeeded her and who seems to have taught in the same
dame school, left little more than their names in his memory. In old age
William Furness could recall going with him to the ABC school kept in
Summer Street opposite the wooden Trinity Church. Ralph himself was
far more impressed by William Furness, with his red and white handker-
chief adorned with illustrations of the Mother Goose tale of "The House
that Jack Built," than by the rest of the school.

The third of Ralph's regular teachers, Lawson Lyon, made an un-
forgettable impression on some of his charges. Lyon was "a severe teacher,
high-tempered, and flogged the boys unmercifully." He would make a big
apple, the gift of some diplomatic pupil, illustrate the use of the terrestrial
globe; and, after the apple had served this educational purpose, he would

24 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

proceed to eat it with great satisfaction. He was a practical-minded man
and was probably at his best in training boys for the counting room. But
he seems to have meant little more to Ralph than Mrs. Whitwell or Nancy

Dickson did.

Outside school the life of the very small boy must have been less gray
than tradition paints it. In his declining years William Furncss, recollect-
ing how his friend once played with him and Sarn Bradford on the floor
of the Furness home, declared that it was the only occasion, so far as he
knew, when Ralph ever played as a normal child would have done. Prob-
ably Furness's memory was at fault, but even when the boy had no com-
panions he must have had frequent opportunities to escape the boredom
of unimaginative trivialities. There were ways of doing that without toys,
and it is hard to believe that the only toy in the minister's household was
the pictured box, originally filled with little story books, that may have
inspired a passage in "Domestic Life." At any rate, the few incidents remem-
bered by Ralph or by others from his early days did not add up to a
realistic childhood for any boy.

Ralph showed some imagination when he offered to aid the wood-
sawer at work in the Emerson yard by doing the grunting for him. The
yard was for a long time his chief playground, and "his mother used to
warn him not to play in the streets for fear of meeting 'rude boys.' " He
would "stand at the gate in a state of pleasing excitement half fear half
hope that the crudc boys' would come near enough for him to see them!"
As "a little chubby boy" he trundled a hoop in Chauncy Place. He had
never had a sled "and would not have dared to use one, for fear of the
'Round-Pointers/— rough boys from Windmill Point and the South End,
who Vere always coming;' taking Summer Street on their way to the
Common, where they had pitched battles with the West-Endcrs," But some
of these incidents reported so candidly by him were the reminiscences of
an old man whose memory was failing, and, at best, they certainly clid not
tell the whole story.

It is true, however, that his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson loomed larger
in Ralph's early life than did either his schoolteachers or his playmates.
She was an extremely valuable, if only occasional, instructor, for she cared
about ideas. Though she generally managed to disagree with her brother
William, she was always welcome in his house. In October of 1809,, he
wrote her: "If it is a compliment to say that I love you, and that your
residence in my family until death or matrimony separates us is necessary
to my happiness, I confess I have been complimentary, and shall be so
continually. . . . Again gladden with your voice & healing attentions our
charming boys, who have lame legs, wounded hands, and other calamities,

LOOKING OUT FROM HIS CORNER 25

and whose minds and hearts afford a fine field for the display of talents
such as their aunt possesses."

As she would one day jest to La Fayette, she had been "in arms" at
the Concord Fight. She was in her thirties before Ralph, eventually to be
her biographer, was old enough to recognize her peculiar virtues. In her
early years she was a recluse with access to only a few books, one of
which was a copy of Paradise Lost so mutilated that she could not then
know the title or that Milton was the author. Once she was out of seclu-
sion she learned rapidly, and she became a dangerous adversary in an
argument. She even tried authorship, though her few articles in The
Monthly Anthology were undistinguished and were possibly printed be-
cause of her brother's influence and after he had revised them. It was an
exaggeration to claim that all her language was happy; but it was little
more than the sober truth to call the diction of her letters and journals
"inimitable, unattainable by talent, as if caught from some dream." If,
as she said, the love of virtue was her particular gift from God, she was
also gifted with a genius for doing the unexpected and unconventional
thing, sometimes with supreme abruptness and awkwardness. She really
delighted in success, in youth, in beauty, in genius, in manners; but her
praise was often accompanied with the sting of reproof. "She surprised,
attracted, chided and denounced her companion by turns, and pretty rapid
turns." She prodded ambition into action. "Scorn trifles," she admonished,
"lift your aims: do what you are afraid to do . . ."

She escaped wealth and was glad, for she believed it would have
spoiled her. After due consideration she refused an offer of marriage from
"a man of talents, education and good social position., whom she respected."
She liked solitude and long found a kind of mystical delight in nature.
Nature had taught her to say, "Alive with God is enough,— 5t is rapture."
But she was a bundle of contradictions. Whatever her mysticism amounted
to, she continued to be both a fiery Calvinist and a liberal daughter of the
Enlightenment. For many years she longed for death and was prepared
for it, even to her shroud. But in spite of her secession from the world, she
managed to keep open the one outlet to it through which she was able
to exert the whole force of her character. Few had patience with her bad
taste, her clownish defiance of proprieties, her cryptic style of speech and
writing, and her cruel self -torment. But Ralph and one or two of her other
nephews were among the exceptions to the rule and were richly repaid
for their trouble.

William Emerson, though busy with his literary and scientific societies
and prematurely broken in health, took his parental responsibilities seri-
ously. When he was away from home in April of 1810 he wanted to hear

26 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

that Ralph "regards his words, does not eat his dinner too fast, and is
gradually resigning his impetuosity to younger boys." He admonished the
three girls who seem to have been his wife's helpers and the children's
nurses, and filled up his letter with remarks intended for the edification
of the boys. "I offer this tribute," he told his wife, "on the altar of domestick
affection and aid, which we together build, and the fire of which we suffer
never to be extinct; and if you think ... any portion of it ... will
assist you in fulfilling in my absence your domestick cares, you may cause
it to be read or read it when the family may be assembled at the rnorn-
ing sacrifice."

For him the parental and priestly offices as well as vocabularies were
closely related. At the First Church, Ralph stood in a dass with Sam
Bradford and other boys to repeat the catechism to the minister on the
afternoons of communion Sundays. The catechizer bore a striking resem-
blance to the son who was helping to recite the answers. But William
Emerson was not narrow in his insistence on religious and moral training.
He lived up to the spirit of his own father's exhortation to him to "learn
to read your Book and love your School." He had once warned his oldest
son that "It will grieve me excessively to have you a blockhead; but it will
excessively delight me to have you a bright scholar." He would soon round
out more than ten years of service on the school committee in Boston.
Recently he had concluded that the family tradition was not intellectual
enough and had advised his mother not to overstress in her grandchildren
the culture of the heart at the expense of the culture of the head.

By this time Ralph was old enough to get much of his education from
casual contacts with persons. On convention morning of Election Week he
might observe the behavior of the visiting ministers who came to the par-
sonage for breakfast, sometimes as many as a dozen of them. Some customs
and manners of his later life grew from roots deep in his childhood, and
memories of trivial happenings and of momentary delight in sense impres-
sions remained as links to his past. Over fifty years later he would be
served duck turnover on Thanksgiving Day "because he used to have one
when he was a little boy." Christmas was generally little noticed in a com-
munity that still kept some of its Puritan characteristics, but Ruth Emerson
had Episcopalian relatives. On Christmas Day the family circle was formed
at the Haskins house in Rainsford's Lane. On New Year's Day Ralph
doubtless accompanied his parents to the home of his Uncle Thomas Has-
kins, and on Twelfth-night they all went to Uncle Kast's house in Hanover
Street. On Monday afternoons Grandfather and Grandmother Haskins were
ready to serve tea to the assembled family. In winter they had a silver
tankard of sangaree inside the fender, and at the proper time it went round

LOOKING OUT FROM HIS CORNER 27

for each person to drink from. Haskins's unmarried daughters, Aunts Nancy,
Fanny, and Betsey, were in the background here, as they were in the back-
ground of Ralph's whole youth. Nancy and Fanny did little more than
make tatting and bobbin, but Betsey could rise to the occasion when sister
Emerson needed help in her household.

In the Emerson family an ordinary day began with a simple breakfast.
There were family prayers in the morning, and everyone read his own
verse of Scripture, the children taking part as soon as they could read. After
breakfast Ruth Emerson retired to her own room for reading and medita-
tion and was not to be interrupted. Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday were
marked by special rituals. On Thursday, following the "lecture" in Chauncy
Place, where clergymen from neighboring towns took turns preaching, Wil-
liam Emerson was apt to bring home some fellow ministers to dine. His
dining room, decorated with portraits of Charles Chauncy and John Clarke,
the earlier ministers of First Church for whom he had named two of his
own sons, was a fitting place for such a gathering. Saturday had its salt-fish
dinner, with vegetables, melted butter, and pork scraps; but in the evening
the Sabbath began. No visits were received or made. The work basket was
put aside, the parlor fireplace put in order, and the boys' clothes got ready
for use on the following day. On Sunday Ruth Emerson, a good discipli-
narian, was no doubt in complete control of her children as they set out
for church. Even on so important an occasion she was ruled by good sense
and was apt to forgo such vanity as a silk dress and wear one of plain
cotton cloth. On Sunday evening, at the end of a full twenty-four hours of
religious observance or quiet, the family was ready once more for simple
social pleasures. If, as often, the deacons of the church and other friends
came in, Ruth Emerson had a waiter prepared in the sideboard with de-
canters of wine and spirits.

For some years, presumably, this had been the typical social routine of
the family of which Ralph was a part. But Ralph and his mother and
brothers must have heard much, and with pride, of the life of his father
outside the home. Even outside his church and his societies, William Emer-
son was a public figure, though not a great one. In his modest role of man
of letters he had made himself known, at least to his fellow townsmen, as
an editor, journalist, and historian. He had helped to found The Christian
Monitor, but he was credited with no contributions to that journal except
four discourses "with the prayers annexed to each." Escaping from the
shadow of the pulpit, he wrote some "original compositions" and made
"judicious selections" for The Polyanthos, another local publication. After
a year and a half as editor of The Monthly Anthology, he had made way
for a succession of editors and editorial committees. As a contributor he was

28 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

counted on mainly for selections from British authors, brief notices of ser-
mons, brief "Thursday lectures'5 of his own on religious or moral topics,
and brief moral essays. Once he seems to have thrown off his habitual
restraint and engaged in a sharp skirmish with some authors he accused of
plagiarism. The Anthology, by mere coincidence, was to come to an end
within a few weeks of his death, but not until long after he had resigned
his seat "as an actual member35 of the society, partly because, in the pre-
carious state of his health, he had found it hard to keep up the pace of
conviviality set by some of his more robust friends.

Except for the Anthology his editorial labor had been chiefly on his
book of psalms and hymns. His historical writing was mainly comprised
in his incomplete, posthumously published book on the First Church, a
partial fruition of his desire to study "the great & learned men of this
country," including his own predecessors in the Boston pulpit. The book,
simple and orderly, showed a good deal of knowledge of New England
history. The dramatic episode of Anne Hutchinson and the bitter battle
between Chauncy and the enthusiasts who had Jonathan Edwards as their
strong but not entirely loyal champion warmed the blood of the historian
and made his style alive, but he often sank into a dull formality. A more
serious fault was his strong bia^ on the side of the correct, intellectually well-
groomed and predictable conservatives. He was a partisan of the elder
John Winthrop and of Charles Chauncy, both shining knights wearing the
favors of the First Church, He betrayed little comprehension of such com-
plex minds as those of Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards.

But his preaching, his attendance on learned societies, and his literary
labors-persuasive examples for Ralph, however lacking they were in any
extraordinary distinction— were fast drawing to a close. In February, i8u?
he was too ill to give a wholehearted welcome to the "healthy, fat, black-
eyed" daughter who was born before he could finish a letter begging Mary
Moody to come by the earliest stagecoach. He now looked gloomily into
the future of the family. "To my wife and children indeed,'5 he reflected,
"my continuance upon earth is a matter of moment, as, in the event of
my decease, God only knows how they would subsist. And then the edu-
cation of the latter!" A couple of weeks earlier he had recorded the last
of more than two hundred marriages performed for his parishioners. On
April 7 he added the infant Mary Caroline Emerson's name to his long
list of baptisms. Meantime he had preached his last sermon,

He tried a voyage to Portland but in vain. He assumed as much gaiety
as he could and jested about the conflicting advice of the doctors. They
would eventually agree that the hemorrhage of the lungs he had suffered
several years earlier probably had nothing to do with his final collapse.

LOOKING OUT FROM HIS CORNER 29

Their post-mortem examination would show that "the lower orifice of the
stomach was almost entirely closed by a schirrhous tumour, or hard swell-
ing, which on the inside was ulcerated." But meanwhile the patient apol-
ogized for his mirth at the confusion of the learned men. "Threads of this
levity," he confessed, "have been interwoven with the entire web of my
life."

Next day it seemed as if he heard a voice from heaven ordering him
to hand in his final accounts, but he was unshaken. "Whilst it is necessarily
the knell of terrour and sadness to my terrestrial hopes," he explained as
bravely as if he were still speaking from his pulpit, "it brings no dismay
to my celestial expectations." When he died, on May 12, 1811, his sister
Mary Moody Emerson, remembering his "state of long invalidity" and his
"defective" theology, could not grieve for him.

The First Church voted to furnish mourning to the widow and family
and directed that the male members of the society should wear black crape
around the arm for six weeks "and that the females assume appropriate
badges of mourning for the same time." The church and several other
organizations arranged jointly to show proper honor to the dead. As the
funeral procession moved from the First Church toward King's Chapel
burying ground, the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company marched
before the hearse, while William and Ralph, the oldest surviving sons,
walked behind it as mourners. Various delegations marched in line, and at
the rear between fifty and sixty coaches lumbered along. Ralph, then eight
years old, was more struck by the pomp and circumstance of the occasion
than by grief; and as he marched up School Street and saw the procession
sweep round the corner into Tremont Street, it seemed to him a grand sight.

A BOY'S TROUBLED WORLD

How strange that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within rny mind, should e'er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine . . .

—Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book I

-(HE First Church granted Ruth Emerson a temporary stipend
of $25 a week, the full amount of her late husband's salary, and
soon decided on a long-term plan that would give her $500
annually for a period of seven years. She was also to have, on
certain conditions, the use of the parish house for one year, and this period
was destined to be lengthened. She made the best disposition of her family
she could manage. She sent Bulkeley to the relatives in Maine. She accepted
Grandfather Ripley's offer to keep Edward that summer in Concord, where
Ralph would also be by August, improving in general health but c 'afflicted
by the humour." At the end of July she composed a prayer commemorat-
ing her husband's death, such a prayer as she had made long before at
the death of her first child.

It was arranged that William Emerson's library should be sold at auc-
tion in August. Among the more than two hundred works to be offered
to the public were some bearing the names of Ovid, Cicero, Livy, Longinus,
Shakespeare, Swift, Pope, Ossian, Shenstonc, and Goldsmith. There were
also The Spectator and The Rambler and almost all the other famous series
of eighteenth-century essays in English, besides EnficlcTs history of philos-
ophy and certain writings of Descartes, Locke, and Paley. There were few
American books, but one of them was Jonathan Edwards on the will.
Fortunately a number of volumes not advertised, as well as some that were,
remained in the possession of the family or were returned later. Though
the proceeds from the auction may not have justified the sacrifice of the
larger part of the library, the need for funds was great. And the historical
sketch of the First Church, got into printable shape and copyrighted by
the widow before the end of December, could hardly have earned enough
to make a serious difference to her.

A BOPS TROUBLED WORLD 3*

Mary Moody Emerson had yielded to her sister-in-law's plea for help,
but had to be persuaded again to stay on and to resist the urgent invitations
of other relatives who were competing for her services. Early in 1812 Ruth
Emerson assured a relative in Maine that "could you but look into this
house of distress, you would be convinced of the importance of her con-
tinuance here. Providence seems to have bestowed on her talents exactly
suited to the exigences of this bereaved family. In short I do not think her
place could be supplied to these fatherless children by any one on earth.
I pray God to preserve her valuable life & enable me justly to appreciate
so great a blessing. She possesses some traits of character that bear so strong
a resemblance to my dear deceased husband as render her peculiarly dear
to me, & I hope she will not ever, leave me except for a visit or a good
Husband, while she lives." Aunt Mary was thus growing more important
in the eyes of the family. No ordinary housekeeper or governess, she even
wrote the prayers which first Ralph's brother William and then Ralph
himself uread aloud morning and evening,35 prayers that contained "pro-
phetic and apocalyptic ejaculations" and "treasuries of piety" fit to inspire
sermons.

On his ninth birthday Ralph was of the statutory age to enter the
Boston Public Latin School; and then, or, almost certainly, a little earlier,
he joined the group of boys described by a contemporary as "the most
intractable and turbulent fellows, sixty or seventy in number, that ever met
together to have Latin and Greek hammered into them.3' The school was,
in 1812, at an unfortunate stage of its long history. It was, for one thing,
unsettled and badly housed. The old brick building in School Street, close
to the Emerson home, was being torn down to make way for a bigger one.
The architect had designed a formidable three-story structure, partly of
granite and, on the whole, better fitted to serve as a blockhouse on a
frontier infested with Indians than as a place where boys might hope to
study without sacrificing their eyesight. Ralph seems actually to have arrived
before the old building was torn down and to have followed the school in
its migration to an old wooden block on the Mill Dam, thence to a loft
on Pemberton Hill, and finally back to School Street when the new build-
ing was ready. Even in the new quarters the boys had to be content with
desks and seats of long, thick plank, too hard for jackknives.

The management was equally primitive. The headmaster, famed among
schoolboys of the time, was William Biglow, nicknamed Sawney. His
dramatic method of teaching could not have been altogether ineffective,
for it made abstractions as concrete as the somewhat different pedagogical
system of Charles Dickens's Dotheboys Hall would do. Biglow would flourish
his cane as he demanded of a backward pupil what an active verb ex-

32 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

pressed. " I'll tell you what it expresses,' he resumes, bringing the stick
down upon the boy's haunches with decided emphasis, 'it expresses an
action and necessarily supposes an agent, (flourishing the cane, which de-
scends again as before) and an object acted upon, As castigo te, I chastise
thee; do you understand now, hey?5" Biglow's liking for liquor was no
more controllable than his temper and already threatened to prove his

undoing.

Ralph Emerson found the day under Biglow broken conveniently into
two quite separate sessions, and the intermission was sometimes more
pleasant for him than the authorities intended it to be. With other mem-
bers of the lower classes he was sent off to spend a couple of hours in a
special school for private instruction in writing and cyphering; but, as the
South Writing School, kept by Master Rufus Webb, was on West Street,
or close to it, temptingly near Boston's public playground and parade field,
he "deliberately and continuously played truant, and enjoyed the stolen
hours on the Common." Apparently he had the courage to do these things
with the full knowledge that "bread-and-water confinement" would follow.
On the more sober days when he arrived at his writing desk, however, he
applied himself earnestly enough to make good progress, William Furncss,
his seat-mate in Webb's large, sparsely occupied room, never forgot how
Ralph labored over his copybook, his tongue, half out of his mouth, work-
ing up and down in cadence with the strokes of his pen.

Playing truant on the common was only one of many extracurricular
activities, ranging from mildly interesting to alluring, which were known
to the small schoolboy. Getting away to the wharves, only a short distance
from Summer Street, he could pick up shells out of the sand that vessels
had brought as ballast. There were plenty of attractive stones. There was
also gypsum; and its luminescence was a great marvel, never fully under-
stood, but easily demonstrated by rubbing two pieces together in a dark
closet. The boy would magnetize his penknife till it would hold a needle.
He doubtless felt that he was voyaging through strange seas of thought
when he meditated upon the fact, proved by actual experience, that blue
and gamboge combined would make green in the pictures of mountains
that he improvised. He got pleasure from "drawing vases by scrawling with
ink heavy random lines, and then doubling the paper, so as to make another
side symmetrical." He halloed at the pond, getting wonderful replies.

Certainly by this time he was practicing the art of poetry, and it could
not have been beyond his powers "at the age of nine years" to compose
"The Sabbath," now extant in a copy made by another hand many years
later. "The Sabbath" advised, in general, observance of the Lord's day

A BOPS TROUBLED WORLD 33

with attendance at church, with prayer, and with reading of holy books,
and added some specific recommendations for certain contingencies and,
undoubtedly, actual predicaments. If war prevailed, peace was to be prayed
for; if famine, plenty. If a man sinned, he was to repent and make good
resolves. The chief inspiration of both form and matter was perhaps the
family hymnal. The impeccable orthodoxy of all seven stanzas was ade-
quately illustrated in one of them:

Remember your Redeemer's love,
And meditate on things above,
Forsake while you are here below,
The path which leads to realms of woe.

But such piety did not always engross the thoughts of the youthful poet
even on Sunday. At church he had a good opportunity to drift from poetic
to philosophical moods until he was startled by the terrific snort some old
parishioner made in a pocket handkerchief. Sitting in his pew he would
amuse himself by "saying over common words as 'black/ 'white,' 'board,'
etc., twenty or thirty times, until the words lost all meaning and fixedness,
and/5 as he afterwards put it, "I began to doubt which was the right name
for the thing, when I saw that neither had any natural relation, but were
all arbitrary. It was a child's first lesson in Idealism."

There were the ventures into the water in Charles Street after school
hours and the striking spectacle of the rope walks, primitive factories which,
in those days, stretched their great length along many outlying Boston
streets or along the water front. There was the ever present danger of raids
by the tough North-Enders, South-Enders, and Round-Pointers. Once,
when Ralph was ten or eleven years old and Edward was eight or nine,
the two brothers were coming back into town over Charlestown bridge when
they met a little ruffian who asked their names and where they lived. Find-
ing that they did not belong to his quarter, he attacked Ralph and gave
him a bloody nose; and soon both the Summer Street boys were in tears.
Ralph later regretted that he had not got more of so invaluable a part
of a boy's education.

He heard the old Boston street cries. John Wilson, the town crier, rang
his bell at each street corner as he described a lost child or advertised an
auction such as had done away with most of the Emerson family library.
Wilson shouted "so loud that you could not hear what he said if you stood
near." Ralph eventually learned his lesson that whatever the inhibiting
influences of religious and moral training in the home, "a cultivated person
has several social languages to use as occasion requires," and from boys

34 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

in the street he doubtless picked up English that could be used "like a

sharp stick among the rabble."

In common with other boys he loved the display of power, speed, and
color in a large town. He was proud that he knew the fire engines as out-
siders could not do-the Extinguisher, the Despatch, and the Cataract.
There were the armories to pour out gay soldiery. There was the impressive
procession of boys in unifonn when the Washington Benevolent Association
took to the streets. The procession might be nearly a mile long and would
be escorted by elite companies of light infantry. Once there were fourteen
grand divisions of marchers, each headed by a marshal with the national
standard. The onlookers saw a forest of banners inscribed in honor of
Washington, Independence, Peace, Commerce, Agriculture, Mechanic Arts,
Fisheries, the Union, the Navy, and National Glory. The division of the
Rising Generation alone contained upwards of four hundred youths, all
dressed in beautiful uniforms, their hats and coats decorated with garlands
of flowers. In war time, even more than in peace, the soldiery and the
sea-fencibles were in evidence in the port.

In the autumn of 1812 war with Britain was about to begin seriously
at last after dragging along for months. The catastrophic blockade would
be delayed by the enemy until after the re-election of Madison, to be sure;
but the election once over, "then, my countrymen," warned a Federalist
paper, "prepare for war in earnest, taxes, annihilation of prosperity,, and
the whole phial of wrath, invited by a foolish, incompetent, and Frenchified
set of rulers." But already there were some naval victories to temper the
anger of the opposition, and Boston was an important naval base. The
frigates President, United States, and Congress and the brig Argus left
the harbor while the Constitution, Chesapeake., and Hornet were still being
fitted out. The Constitution, designed by Joshua Humphreys with an eye
to decisive superiority over British and French frigates nominally of the
same class, had won her victory over the Guerriere within some two months
after the declaration of war. The victorious ship already had a poet to
celebrate her, and, though family tradition preserved only an uninspired
line of his ballad on that subject, Ralph, as self-appointed laureate, now
began to compose similar warlike pieces and recite them for his friends.

Aunt Mary hinted that he should commemorate the tragic day when
Bostonians crowded the high ground and housetops near the harbor as
Captain Broke's Shannon tauntingly showed her British colors and luckless
Lawrence's Chesapeake followed her out to sea. But presumably Ralph did
not find his muse propitious. As an extant copy of his verses on the Battle
of Lake Erie was dated as late as 1814, he may have got part of his in-
spiration for them from what the Columbian Museum called its grand

A BOTS TROUBLED WORLD 35

naval panorama of the fight. It is probable that others of his verses, now
apparently lost, did not differ greatly in quality from these from "Perry's
Victory" :

When late Columbia's patriot brave
Sail'd forth on Eries tranquil wave
No hero yet had found a grave-
Within her watery cemetery.
But soon that wave was stained with gore
And soon on every concave shore
Reechoed with the dreadful roar
Of thundering artillery.

Though he preferred naval subjects, he was stirred by the Russian vic-
tories over Napoleon's retreating army, victories quite as important to
America as the war against the British. Doubtless he envied his mother and
his brother William when they went to King's Chapel, with the tickets
given to the family, to hear homage sung to the Muscovites by a great
chorus. Everybody knew of the doings at the Exchange Coffee House,
where toasts were drunk to the Emperor Alexander, "The deliverer of
Europe," and to General Kutuzoff, Prince of Smolensk. One of the in-
evitable transparencies showed Moscow wrapped in flames from which a
Russian eagle was ascending with a scroll in his beak bearing the words
cc Moscow is not Russia." Within a year or two Ralph appropriately honored
the Russians in one of the poetic panoramas in which he liked to show
how history was molded by divine providence.

By June of 1813 Ruth Emerson was sending out another plea for aid
from Mary Moody Emerson. Her affairs seemed to be coming to a crisis.
She expected to have to give up the parish house before the end of the
summer, "& then," she said, "the last visible connexion will be dissolved
between this family & the society once so dear to my departed husband."
By this time the church had chosen the Reverend Mr. Abbot, a bachelor,
as the new pastor, and she was asked to accommodate him in her home.
Again she urged Aunt Mary to hasten to her help. "What could I do?"
she pleaded with her stubborn sister-in-law. "I could not refuse the wish
of the society; but you know enough of my peculiarities to have some idea
of the greatness of this trial The belief that it might in some respects be
beneficial to the children led me to consent—" Thus, just as she was count-
ing on "retireing to some obscure retreat" she was, she regretted, "con-
strained to remain in the midst of this trying scene."

Other boarders meanwhile were coming and going, and it was not
until some days after his ordination that John Abbot brought his things

36 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to the parsonage, whereupon Ruth Emerson appealed once more to Aunt
Mary, astonished at the latter's calm persistence in keeping to her retreat
at Waterford. "Why my dear sister/3 she tried to reason with Aunt Mary,
ccit was on the presumption of your aid I ventured to ingage to take a
boarder that will occasion us so much care & time— Nor do I think it would
be consistent with your or my views of propriety & respectability that I
should take a person of this discription without a female friend or com-
panion in the house besides I cannot find time in your absence to do even
the necessary sewing of the family with my other cares & have now 4 or
5 shirts for the children which they need, waiting to be made when you
return—" That autumn, with, as she supposed, less than three months of
grace before she would have to leave the parish house, she was still trying
in vain to persuade Aunt Mary, but at last her entreaties seem to have
won a promise of help. In December she was hopefully listening till mid-
night to the stages as they rolled past, and before the end of January she
had the pleasure of seeing the recalcitrant aunt arrive. It is reasonable to
conjecture that Aunt Mary at once became the chief mentor of Ralph,
supervising his home studies and inspiring him to efforts that the Latin
School would never have got from him.

At any rate she was already a guide of whom he was fully conscious.
She had long been his correspondent, perhaps since he was six or seven
years old. By the spring of 1813 he had conquered enough of his awk-
wardness with the pen to write her in what is possibly the earliest letter
of his to be preserved, a few scraps of news and something of his daily
routine at the end of his tenth year:

"Boston April i6th 1813
"Dear Aunt

"I lately heard of our cousin Gaspers death you do'nt know how affected
cousin Rebecca was. I am much obliged to you for your kind letter. I
mean now to give you an account of what I do commonly in one day
if that is what you meant by giving an account of one single day in my
life Friday gth I choose for the day of telling what I did. In the Morning
I rose as I do commonly about 5 minutes before 6 I then help W™ in
making the fire after which I set the table for Prayers. I then call mamma
about quater after 6. We spell as we did before you went away I confess
I often feel an angry passion start in one corner of my heart when one
of my Brothers get above me which I think sometimes they do by unfair
means after which we eat our breakfast then I have from about quater
after 7 till 8 to play or read I think I am rather inclined to the former.
I then go to school where I hope I can say I study more than I did a

A BOTS TROUBLED WORLD 37

little while ago. I am in another book called Virgil & our class are even
with another which came to the Latin School one year before us. After
attending this school I go to Mr Webbs private school where I write &
cipher I go to this place at 1 1 and stay till one oclock. After this, when
I come home I eat my dinner & at 2 oclock I resume my studies at the
Latin School where I do the same except in studying grammar after I
come home I do mamma her little errands if she has any then I bring in
my wood to supply the break-fast room. I then have some time to play
& eat my supper after that we say our hymns or chapters & then take our
turns in reading Rollin as we did before you went. We retire to bed at
different times I go at a little after 8 & retire to my private devotions &
then close my eyes in sleep & there ends the toils of the day. May 1 1 Samuel
Bradford went yesterday to Hingham to go to Mr. Colman's School. Your
little pensioner Eliza Twist if you remember her is now established in a
Charity School and doing pretty well. Cousin John sends his love to you
& is well. I have sent a letter to you in a Packet bound to Portland which
I suppose you have not received as you made no mention of it in your
letter to mamma. Give my love to Aunt Haskins & Aunt Ripley with Robert
& Charles & all my cousins & I hope you will send me an answer to this
the first opportunity & beleive me I remain your most dutiful Nephew

"R. Waldo Emerson
"M M Emerson5'

But he had become a more sophisticated letter writer, and by the fol-
lowing year he had added to his circle of correspondents a brilliant Miss
Sarah Alden Bradford, a friend of Aunt Mary's who became a little later
the wife of his half uncle Samuel Ripley. For her benefit he discussed in
serious verses the virtues of Rollin's ancient history, an admirable intro-
duction to hero-worship. Rollin's story of Athens delighted him, though
he regretted that the Frenchman had omitted the Trojan War,

The burning city, and JEneas3 flight
With great Anchises on that fatal night.

Sarah Bradford was a skillful teacher, cleverly inciting him to scholarly
exercises that were to be personal favors to her. "Only think," she wrote
him, "of how much importance I shall feel in the literary world." Still
following hints she had given him, he turned to Vergil, praising

Nisus and Euryalus too
Those youthful heroes and those friends so true,

38 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

and he went on to furnish her with his own rhyming translation of a
passage from the fifth eclogue.

He continued to compose letters in verse. He wrote elegies on departed
relatives and friends and nonsense verses of pure doggerel. He was already
the author of several pages of octosyllabic couplets laboriously labeled The
History of Fortus A Poem in One Volume Eigtk Edition with Emenda-
tions By R W Emerson 1813. Embellished with Elegant Engravings by
W. H. Furness. The somewhat crude drawings made for him by his fellow
bencher at Webb's school were well suited to the unpolished metrical
romance. Fortus, singlehanded, slaughtered all but six score of the six score
and twenty thousand warriors who opposed him in his most notable en-
counter, killed two dragons, and got possession of a magically guarded
ring and, consequently, of an anonymous damsel, the only begetter of his
valor, who by this time felt sufficiently sure of his constancy.

By 1814 the Latin School had reached a crisis. The school committee
had first investigated, then warned, the tippling Biglow. It was decided
that it would be wise to hire an instructor who would "unite to the learn-
ing of a scholar the manners of a gentleman," even if he required a higher
salary. Biglow's eventual dismissal was the result of a gradual rise of senti-
ment against him followed by a slow response from the authorities. But
the uproarious scenes of the sudden rebellion remembered by Ralph Emer-
son in later years could not have been entirely imaginary. The day after
the storm the usher shortened his morning prayer to ten words, "Father
forgive them for they know not what they do.35 Biglow was out. The school
committee were soon arriving to introduce Benjamin Apthorpe Gould as
the new master, and Gould ruled securely from that moment.

About this time a new blow fell upon the Emerson family in the death
of three-year-old Mary Caroline, the only sister Ralph had known. Within
a couple of years after her death he remembered her in lines addressed to
a playmate who had suffered a similar loss:

Ne'er since my own loved sister met her doom,
Has such a pang assailed my bleeding heart
As when your sister felt the fatal dart.

But the time was to come when he could recall little more of Mary Caro-
line than that he "used to drag her to school in her wagon'5 and that she
was fair and had beautiful eyelashes.

The war, impatiently endured by Bostonians from the first, was causing
them new hardships. The press set up warning signposts along "The Road
to Ruin" and boldly called for an end to this foolishness at the earliest
possible moment. Plain citizens were alarmed by the high cost of living.

A BOPS TROUBLED WORLD 39

Few of them were so confident of getting an answer to the puzzle as was
the youthful Lydia Jackson, a girl destined to be important in Ralph Emer-
son's later life; but even Lydia, set apart and protected from the turmoil
of the time as she was, betrayed some anxiety when she wrote home to
Plymouth from the academy she was attending at Dorchester:

"Tell me dear Father the reason of the excessive high price of provi-
sions, when the earth has produced so bountifully? Every thing is extrava-
gantly dear, yet every thing abounds, you are my Oracle dear parent, so
you must expect me to question you on every, to me, inexplicable subject."

Even the "LAUS DEO!" that greeted Napoleon's abdication could not
make people forget the financial, and perhaps military, disaster staring them
in the face. Boston looked for a time as if it might become as lifeless as
the miniature ihodel of the town, showing wharves, stores, etc., which
Joseph Duchesne exhibited in Summer Street and promised to illuminate
brilliantly on the evening of July 4. At Washington, in August, the British
blew up the Capitol and the President's house and destroyed the navy yard,
and they were thought likely to be in Boston soon if drastic action was
not taken.

But drastic action was taken. Boston quickly assumed the appearance
of a garrison. Amid cheers of the citizenry the West Cambridge Light
Infantry, the Concord Artillery, the Framingham Artillery, the Marlbor-
ough Light Infantry, the Worcester Artillery, the Milford Artillery, and
the Hingham Riflemen began to arrive, together with contingents of light
infantry from Westborough, Waltham, Haverhill, Quincy, and neighboring
towns. Massachusetts and the other New England states were at last in the
war, though their people were mostly prepared to fight as New Englanders,
and not for the national government, and were eager to bring hostilities
to an end at the earliest possible moment. Anyhow, as "A Peace Advocate"
declared in the press, all the objects of the war had now been attained,
for these were simply to renew and rekindle the spirit of hostility against
Great Britain which was fast expiring in the East, to break down the Fed-
eralist party altogether, and to complete the ruin of the commercial states.
The Hartford Convention, drawing New England into a regional federa-
tion and straining the cords that bound her to the Union, was soon to
begin its sessions.

Ralph Emerson was old enough to share in the general excitement. The
rejoicing over the American victory on Lake Champlain was allayed by
the report that Baltimore was menaced by the British. In Boston Harbor
the ferries to Noddle's Island, later known as East Boston, were kept busy
carrying volunteers, mostly unfit no doubt, to work on the hastily planned
defenses. One day the dry-goods dealers abandoned yardsticks and scissors

40 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

for picks and shovels; another day the merchants of Long Wharf patri-
otically toiled on earthworks or at least had good intentions. Members of
the board of health, printers and binders and booksellers, the bricklayers
and stonelayers, and the housewrights were ready to take their turns on
various fortifications about the town. In later years the "one military recol-
lection53 from Ralph's own experience as a participant would, according
to his mood, fit, pleasantly exciting, into the pattern of unforgettable mem-
ories of things past, or would seem only mock-heroic or mildly comic.
Probably, at the time, there was nothing very heroic about the trip to
Noddle's Island with the boys from the Latin School. Ralph "went with
the rest in the ferryboat, and spent a summer day," but he would not
remember that he did any kind of work. What impressed him most was
the trouble he and the other boys took to get water in their tin pails in
order to relieve their intolerable thirst.

So long as the Emerson family had the parish house on Summer Street
and the pension of $125 a quarter they could keep from destitution. For
a long time they were little disturbed in their possession of the place, and
it is difficult to understand why they left it as soon as they apparently
did. Pastor John Abbot, though he married without much delay, seems
never to have lived in the parsonage except as a boarder. He preached
only a few sermons at the First Church before he voyaged to Portugal for
health; and he did not return till near the middle of the next year and
then only to go into seclusion at Brighton. In the following October he
died, and his successor was not ordained till months afterwards. But there
is reason to believe that the Emersons gave up all claim to the parish house
sometime before the end of 1814 and lived for a while in Bcnnet Street,
It is possible that for a brief time they were with the Haskinses in Rains-
ford's Lane. Meantime the most disturbing fact was that every day the
rising prices and the prospect of a British attack from the sea made any
residence in Boston less desirable. The family began to turn their eyes
toward the country. On September 20, 1814, Aunt Mary wrote the rela-
tives in Maine an account of the troubles and uncertainties that the Emer-
sons faced in the capital.

"You will like to hear by a pen from this place, on which for some
time so dark a cloud has rested. The publick mind . . . became in the
most anxious and alarmed state, you know. Many of the inhabitants
hastened to hide themselves & property in the Country. For the two last
sabbaths the petitions of the Clergy denote 'fearfull uncertainty' . . . But
you know the unhappy division in opinion renders it difficult for an in-
dividual to judge of the preponderance of immediate danger. People of
good judgement, at the head of socity, think an invasion of this Town

A BOTS TROUBLED WORLD 41

propable. At any rate, we know that a most afflictive and humiliating war
is depopolating and wasting the property lives of the Inhabitants! But so
dark and misterious is the condition of man, ever since the apostacy, that
one war raging, and one Country distroyed, is but an epitome of the whole
earth. ... As to our unprotected selves we are very calm as to< immediate
difficulty— But had we any thing to lose we s- feel very different probably.
We did not think of moving till last week many friends tho't it best And
when we consider the price of wood & provisions which will be the con-
sequence of the troops quarted already here it seems the best thing to go
into the Country. But where? Father R has invited us there in case of
being obliged to fly. And Ruthy has concluded, and has indeed sent to
propose taking some part of their house & living by ourselves as it is
impossible for her to board out with the children. . . . Either of Rev
Brothers w^ take one of the boys were it in their power, and were they
situated so that she could on the whole think it best. And as business is
wholly checked there is not a single place to which either Ed. or Ralph
can go. We are contemplating Andover as a good place for Boarders and
Mrs T. Haskins has written to her friends today. You would think from
this we are cast down but we are not. A low and humble state is generally
without much change. We have some hope that this house may be given
up, in that case Ruthy will not be in danger of immediate difficulty from
debts. This letter will increase your comfort in having Bullkley. Blessed be
God who put it into your heart. I have been desirous to try some new
plan of life; but Ruthy will not consent to our seperation at this time.
. . . I s2 like to describe the garrison like appearance of this Town, the
incessant echo of martial musick, no day nor night excepted, but I have
not time on this paper, nor inclination. . . ."

In spite of the uncertainties of war time, William, the oldest of the
Emerson boys and the first ready for college, went to Cambridge that
September, and within the week the family had a detailed account of
what adventures a newly arrived freshman might experience there. Ralph
doubtless pondered his own future in the light of his brother's report. Their
mother, in her reply, showed the Spartan sternness that could temper her
maternal affection. She wasted no tears over the dangers her son encoun-
tered among the young barbarians who had matriculated a year or two
ahead of him. "You I trust will ever rise superior to these little things,"
she admonished William, "for though small indeed consume much time
that might be appropriated to better purpose & far nobler pursuits. What
most excites my solicitude is your moral improvement & progress in virtue
... It is impossible for you to know any thing of the anxiety I feel for
you ... I fear I think almost too much about you; for should you not

42 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

be all you ought & all I wish I should be very unhappy—Let your whole
life reflect honour on the name you bear— You have it now in your power
to lay the foundation of future eminence in every thing praiseworthy &
excellent— I am happy I can say I feel a confidence in you that you will
be disposed to avail yourself of your advantages by making the best use
you can of them—"

Though William took such admonitions seriously and translated them
into action, Ralph continued to follow his bent toward a less strenuous
discipline that did not encroach too much on his favorite amusements.
Of these, verse-making served him most effectively as a protection against
overexertion at study. Yet his compositions were generally sober in tone
and were frequently pious. The death of his eighty-six-year-old grand-
father Haskins in October, shortly before the Emersons left Boston for the
country, inspired the eleven-year-old boy to a characteristic effort. The
elegy he wrote was perfectly regular in both meter and theology. He be-
trayed no sense of incongruity as he transformed the man who had sailed
the seas on a privateer and had more than once been taken captive by
foreign ships into a merely conventional angel, singing and soaring, his
head "covered with a crown of gold" and his hands holding a harp.
Nothing was recognizable of the vigorous and proud old John Haskins
who would have been more at home in a red cloak and cocked hat.

CONCORD GHOSTS AND OTHERS

In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts . .
-"Dirge," Concord, 1838

TOHN HASKINS was buried in the family tomb under old Trinity
I Church on the last day of October. A little more than a week later
I Ruth Emerson wrote from Concord to her sister Fanny of her un-
J happiness on quitting "the town & the dear Mansion . . . immedi-
ately after the decease of our hond Father." But events continued to testify
to the timeliness of her move to the country. If one of her late husband's
seventeenth-century predecessors in the pulpit of the First Church could
have come back to Boston in the last days of that autumn, he would doubt-
less have been convinced that the blockaded town had incurred divine
displeasure. He might have pointed, with impressive logic, to the terrible
warning of the recent earthquake. The shock, it was said, had been "pre-
ceded by a noise like that of a coach driven over the pavement" and was
felt as far away as Concord. Concord, a town the British had never been
able to occupy for more than a few hours, seemed, however, a compara-
tively safe retreat; and here Ralph's paternal grandmother and Ezra
Ripley, his stern but generous stepgrandfather, welcomed the Emersons
into the parsonage later known as the Old Manse.

The quiet village, more than any other place their ancestral home, had
long had a peculiar attraction for Emersons. To Ralph's father, a native,
it had seemed, in most respects, as good as a health resort, but much more
than that. "The streams of Concord" were proudly paired with "the hills
of Charlestown" in American tradition as he had expounded it. Once he
had confessed, in a fit of nostalgia, that the little river town became dearer
to him every day of his life: "Frequently in imagination I am bathing
my limbs in its waters. The fine foliage of its trees, its pleasant hills and
their beauteous prospects, and its extensive and verdant meads, often pass
in review before my minds eye. Nowhere, sooner than in that lovely village
would I pass the remnant of a life no longer useful . . ." His faith in its
virtues had never afterwards been severely tried. His widow and Ralph,

44 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

hitherto only occasional visitors in the town, were now beginning their
first residence there.

On Sundays Ralph must have listened with some awe to Grandfather
Ripley as the dignified man presided over his congregation in "the old,
cold, unpainted, uncarpeted, square-pewed meeting-house, with its four
iron-gray deacons in their little box under the pulpit." The country min-
ister belonged to the rear guard of the Puritans, still believed in special
providences, and had strong confidence in his prayers for rain. Though
nominally a Unitarian in his later years, he was by no means a radical;
and he could never be charged with sowing seeds of thought that could
by any chance sprout into transcendental heresies.

He had written many sermons by this time, but probably not one of
them was distinguished. A pen seemed fatal to the vigor of his expression.
But when he spoke without script he was direct and forceful. "He had a
foresight, when he opened his mouth, of all that he would say, and he
marched straight to the conclusion." His prayers were far more interesting
than his sermons, and as the boy listened for some affecting touch of nature,
he must have contrasted him with the more formal and cool William
Emerson of Boston. It was true that, because of u their remoteness from
artificial society & their inevitable daily comparing man with beast, their
inevitable acquaintance with the outward nature of man & with his strict
dependence on sun, rain, wind, & frost; wood, worm, cow, & bird," these
"old semi savages" in country parishes got "an education to the Homeric
simplicity which all the libraries of the Reviews & the commentators in
Boston do not countervail."

Ripley was stubbornly individual, but he loved people, had no studies
and no occupations which company could interrupt, and was always ready
to talk. Concord history was one of his specialties. He had an astonishing
knowledge of the town's past, family by family, and he took very seriously
his duty as patriarch. Riding about Concord with the old man, Ralph
got vivid impressions of his own ancestors. One tale that stuck in his mind
related how Grandfather William Emerson had defended his church against
nine of its members that had stirred up a quarrel and "how every one of
the nine had come to bad fortune or to a bad end." Ripley himself had
been Grandfather Emerson's successor in his pastorate, had married his
widow and acquired his land.

Grandfather Emerson became the Concord minister on the first day
of the year 1766. By that time he had graduated from college, had finished
the customary probationary period of schoolteaching, and was ready to
settle down. Not long after he entered the house of the late pastor Bliss
as a lodger he was wooing widow Bliss's daughter Phebe, and before the

CONCORD GHOSTS AND OTHERS 45

end of the year he married her. Even if his salary was only £100 a year
he and Phebe could make a pleasant home on their small farm border-
ing on the Concord River. Their numerous tables and beds, their two
pictures on canvas and three under glass, their books, their twenty-one
cream-colored plates, their four large silver spoons, and their pair of silver
tea tongs were, with their less pretentious possessions, enough for comfort.
When the pastor set out for his church on a Sunday he may have made
a more than decent appearance in his beaver hat, white wig, and black
coat. The silver buckles at his knees and on his shoes would have given
an added touch of distinction.

If his church was troubled with dissension and if some of its members,
disliking his doctrine and regarding his discipline as high-handed and
harsh, haled him before more than one council of sister churches, he knew
how to suffer a severe rebuke and still come off victorious. His doctrine was
apparently little more than the orthodox Congregationalism of his time.
With the lay members of his church, he signed a brief declaration of faith
in "y- Covenant of Grace" and in "y- Word of GOD as the only Rule of
our Faith & Practice"; but both pastor and flock tied themselves more
firmly to old Puritan theology by adding the opinion that "y- shorter
Cachesim of y? Assembly of divines" was an "excellent Compendium" of
the word of God. It is said that, with all his firmness, he showed much
kindness to the parishioners. When he first came, says a Concord tradi-
tion, the children, remembering the harshness of his predecessor, were
afraid; but Grandfather Emerson's judicious praise was to them "like the
sun coming from behind a cloud."

Grandfather Emerson was quite as much concerned with the stormy
politics of the time as with his religious duties. He witnessed the funeral
of the four victims of the "Boston Massacre," and he watched the temper
of the capital with intense interest when some citizens became discouraged
and began "to blame y? Destroyers of y? Tea & to lay y? Severity of y?
present Measures, & ye Sufferings consequent upon it at their Door!" In
the following autumn he was chaplain to the provincial congress, the rebel-
lious provisional government of Massachusetts, then meeting at Concord.
Early in 1775 he was busy recruiting minutemen; and at the general
review in March he boldly exhorted the soldiers against submission to
authority.

The redcoats soon arrived. A local tradition had it that at the first
alarm of the British approach to Concord Grandfather Emerson appeared
"with the others, his firelock in his hand" and that he raised the spirits
of one frightened colonial by laying his hand on his shoulder and saying,
"Don't be afraid, Harry; God is on our side." According to one historian,

46 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOM

he was rash enough to advise fighting in the center of the village, saying,
"Let us stand our ground ... if we die, let us die here!" But it is prob-
able that his main business during the subsequent encounter between min~
utemen and the king's men at the North Bridge was to stay close by his
house in order to guard his family and to feed the frightened women and
children who took refuge in his yard.

A month after Bunker Hill he wrote to his wife from the camp at
Charlestown "that as y? Sword is drawn we Americans will never sheath
it till all our Grievances are fully redressed to our utmost Wishes!" On the
anniversary of the Concord Fight he was ready with a prophecy of Amer-
ica's future greatness. A few months later, at the close of divine service,
he asked and received leave of his church to go as chaplain to the army
of the north, then at Ticonderoga. According to a family tradition, as he
was setting out on his fatal journey he turned his horse at the bend of the
road to look back once more at his home "as few men look—for he was
taking a leave,"

At Ticonderoga the enemy was 130 miles away, and there was no
prospect of battle, but death could come in other ways. Toward the middle
of September, while the American army lay rotting in a camp unprotected
by the most elementary precautions against disease, the chaplain himself
began to suffer from "a Sort of a mongrell Fcaver & Ague," Without wait-
ing for his pay, he started southward in a race with death. He got no
farther than Rutland, where strange but friendly hands cared for him
during his "long illness with the billious fever, attended with a tedious
Diarrhea," and decently interred his body.

From his grandmother Phebe Bliss Riplcy as well as from Ezra Ripley,
Ralph must have heard the story of Great-grandfather Daniel Bliss, a pred-
ecessor of Grandfather Emerson in the same village church. Bliss had been
pastor some twenty-five years when he died in 1764. Ripley doubtless knew
the story well from the church records and from the extant family papers.

Bliss stood trial on fifteen articles of complaint brought against him by
a few militant parishioners. His doctrine, discipline, and conduct were all
attacked at once. The council which tried him was especially concerned
over the charge that he had been wandering about from town to town,
to the disturbance of other ministers and their parishes. He was, in the
end, advised to acknowledge his faults publicly, to study the Scriptures and
orthodox divines diligently, to take time to prepare his public appearances,
and to avoid delivering any unsound and perplexing doctrines; but his
accusers were reprimanded quite as sharply. He promptly made his sub-
mission, and when the quarrel broke out again a few years later, he had
his church firmly at his back, and the crisis was soon past.

CONCORD GHOSTS AND OTHERS 47

Great-grandfather Bliss was simply caught in the revivalist excitement
stirred up by Whitefield. He was swept from his moorings, as other en-
thusiasts were, and fished for souls in strange waters. Ralph's father once
unceremoniously dismissed three of his own ancestors, including Daniel
Bliss, as followers of Whitefield "who were incapable of raising the tempest,"
as the English itinerant had done, but "were able, by means of dust and
rubbish, to continue the troubled state of the atmosphere." Many besides
Ezra Ripley must have known that when Whitefield preached to a great
throng at Concord he was pleased because his hearers were "melted down,"
and took a special liking to- Pastor Bliss, staying over night at his house
"that we might rejoice together." Bliss "broke into tears" that night, but
it was no unusual thing for strong minds to yield to the eloquence of
Whitefield.

During all but about forty-three of Concord's one hundred and seventy-
nine years of existence, the preachers in the town's pulpit had been Ralph's
ancestors with the one exception of Ezra Ripley, but Ripley was the boy's
stepgrandfather and almost an Emerson.

The pastorate of Edward Bulkeley, Ralph's ancestor in the sixth gen-
eration before his own, reached back some thirty-seven years from 1696,
the date of his death. According to tradition Edward Bulkeley "once saved
Concord from an attack of the Indian" because the red man feared the
minister's prayers.

Peter Bulkeley, Edward's father, was remarkable for the ill temper he
sometimes yielded to when he was tormented by bodily pains and for his
severe dress, his extremely close-cropped hair, his too refined conscience,
and his constant catechizing. But he was respected for solid virtues. His
name must have become familiar to Ralph, for Peter Bulkeley was esteemed
by all well-informed persons as one of the founders of the town. Driven
out of England by Archbishop Laud's persecution of the nonconformists,
he voyaged to the New World; and before the end of 1635 he and his
flock, coming to* a friendly understanding with the Indians of the Mus-
ketaquid country, dug rude shelters out of the hillside and gave the name
of Concord to their new home.

Peter Bulkeley commanded some respect, not only in his own town
and among the savages, but among the Puritan theologians who long kept
the Bay Colony in a turmoil of controversy. He once served as co-moderator,
with the great Thomas Hooker, of an important synod. He struggled with
the treacherous subtleties of Puritan theology and succeeded so well in
explaining them to his parishioners that he was persuaded to publish a
series of sermons in a volume called The Gospel-covenant; or the Covenant
of Grace Opened. He showed that though grace was free, a prerequisite

48 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to its operation was man's faith, and that good works, though not pre-
requisite, were an inevitable result; but he also quietly assumed that the
first act in the drama of salvation was God's arbitrary choice of those who
should enjoy its benefits. The book would be for Bulkeley's Concord repre-
sentative in the seventh generation after him not merely a symbol of a
false and poisonous creed but a reminder of family and of Concord history.
It was not quite in vain that Bulkeley, like Hunt, Willard, Hosmer,
Meriam, and Flint, once possessed the land, though there was reason for
the earth's laughter when

Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm,x
Saying, * 'T is mine, my children's and my name's.5

No living person in Concord bore the surname Bulkeley and none of the
first minister's land was in the possession of the Emerson family.

Concord was nevertheless the key to Emerson family history; and as
late as 1814 nearly all of the American geography of Ralph's family could
have been included in a circle a hundred miles in diameter with either
Concord or Boston as the center. A radius of about thirty-five miles would
have reached all but one or two outlying villages that mattered.

Ralph's great-grandfather Joseph Emerson, father of the Revolutionary
William Emerson, was born in the town of Chdmsford, some ten miles
to the north of Concord, but was known in later life as the minister of
Maiden. He graduated at Harvard, kept school at York in the District of
Maine, settled at Maiden in 1721, and, in the same year, married Mary
Moody. She was the daughter of Father Moody, minister of York, a hearty,
eloquent, magnetic man who would forbid an offended parishioner to
leave the meetinghouse, crying out, "Come back you graceless sinner, Come
back!" or, when members of his flock turned into the alehouse on a
Saturday night, would follow them in, collar them, drag them out, and
send them home. Both Joseph Emerson and Samuel Moody were, with
Daniel Bliss, among the enthusiasts who labored in the fields that White-
field had plowed.

Joseph and Mary lived largely for their children. Births dotted their
calendar from 1722 to 1745 with remarkable regularity till the Christian
names traditional in the family were nearly exhausted. "Conclude for ye
future," Joseph wrote in his diary for 1738, "to write some of my Sermons
at length, hoping they may be of some Service to my children & Relations
when I am gone." Both parents had their hearts set on keeping up the
family connection with the ministry. In 1763 the father sent William one
of the choicest books in his library, with the admonition: "Dear Child!

CONCORD GHOSTS AND OTHERS 49

your Mother & I are not a little concern'd for you— It was with a special
view to the Ministry, that we have been at so great an Expense for your
Education : If therefore your Genius & Disposition leads to it, & you should
be qualify' d for it, both as to Gifts & Graces, it would be an inexpressible
Addition to our Comfort & Joy-" Joseph himself "read the Iliad, & said,
he should be sorry to think that the men & cities he read of never existed5';
and, according to a family story, he endangered William's health by in-
sisting that the boy keep out of the hayfield and stay at his studies. Ralph
would one day search the diaries left by the Maiden pastor and copy out
homely passages showing the old religionist's private thoughts.

Earlier direct ancestors than Joseph on the Emerson side were shadowy
figures. Edward Emerson of Newbury, father of Joseph of Maiden, re-
mained for many years completely unknown, or more likely forgotten, by
Ralph. Once a "Merchant in Charlestown" and, according to his grave-
.stone, "sometime Deacon of the church in Newbury," he contributed Ralph's
middle name to the family by marrying into a New England Waldo family
of extremely dubious "French" origin, one of whose forebears in the direct
male line was supposed to have migrated from the Netherlands to Eng-
land during the reign of Elizabeth, to escape religious persecution. Edward
Emerson's father was the first American Joseph, conveniently called Joseph
of Mendon, from the little Massachusetts town of which he was the min-
ister. He "barely escaped with his life when the village was destroyed by
the Indians." Joseph of Mendon's second wife was Elizabeth Bulkeley,
granddaughter of the first minister of Concord, and his father was Thomas,
the first American Emerson.

This Thomas Emerson probably settled in Ipswich, the little frontier
town of drumlins, meadows, sand dunes, and tidal marshes, in time to have
Nathaniel Ward, the satirical Simple Cobbler, and Anne Bradstreet, the
Tenth Muse, as his neighbors. The earlier history of Thomas always re-
mained in doubt. One theory was that he came with his wife and family
from Bishop Stortford, Hertfordshire, about thirty miles from London.
He was known as a baker, and presumably was one, in spite of some slight
reason that could be offered to the contrary. But he may have had both
property and pride of ancestry. The rude heraldic device on the tombstone
of his son Nathaniel, now renovated and still to be seen in the Old Bury-
ing Ground at Ipswich, is one bit of the uncertain evidence linking Thomas
the baker with the prolific Emersons of the County of Durham who
had similar arms. Whether or not Ralph had yet heard of the baker or
the English Emersons he very likely knew and admired his own father's
bookplate with its three lions passant on a bend and, atop the shield, a
fourth lion grasping a battle-axe in the dexter forepaw; and what the book-

5o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

plate displayed was only a more conventional version of the same device

that marked Nathaniel Emerson's grave.

But whatever his antecedents and associations, Thomas Emerson was
only one of Ralph's sixty-four ancestors of that generation, and nearly all
the rest remained quite obscure. At best the boy's known ancestry was
hardly more than a picture gallery from which he could eventually select
a few prized canvasses to hang in his own house. These few chosen an-
cestors, though the physical and mental characteristics that had come down
to him in the bewildering shuffle of genes and chromosomes were impossible
to trace to any individuals among them, would always be important to
him as makers of his private myth and legend. But, for the most part,
he soon came to despise pedigree: "I was educated to prize it," he con-
fessed. "The kind Aunt whose cares instructed my youth (and whom may
God reward), told me oft the virtues of her and mine ancestors. ... the
piety of all and the eloquence of many is yet praised in the Churches^
But the dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living."

The Concord of his boyhood, known best to Ralph Emerson in the
winter of 1814 and the spring of the following year, contained the living
as well as the dead. And folkways, in this rural community, linked past and
present. Such social occasions as husking bees, apple bees, quiltings, and
raisings were already old-fashioned and dying out. Frolics of the coarser
sort that had troubled preachers like Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth
century were now generally things of the past. Ralph had arrived in town
in good time for a country Thanksgiving Day, with its apple, pumpkin,
and minced pies for breakfast and turkey, plum pudding, and more pies
for dinner. Through the winter the carrying in of the wood to the open
fireplaces was a job fit for a boy. If the boy was skillful, he could also be
trusted to see that the large, tough backlog and forelog were in place to
contain the more combustible wood piled between them. At night the coals
had to be raked up on the backlog and the whole covered with ashes. A
heavy snowstorm was the signal for the turning out of citizens with ox
teams drawing sleds upside down to force a passage along the streets and
roads. The fanners drove their teams toward the center of the town, and
the congregated oxen in the village square were a fine sight. Thanksgiving
and Sundays and some half dozen special holidays were likely to be the
only times when a boy could completely escape from the monotonous round
of slates and books. But the approaching end of the war and the making
of peace caused unusual excitement in Concord this winter. Once, when
news came that peace was about to be concluded, the bell rang a great
part of the night, and the citizens got up a subscription to pay for the
powder that was fired off by the artillery.

CONCORD GHOSTS AND OTHERS 51

It was not necessary to go far from the Ripley home, once Grandfather
Emerson's, to find a landscape that could enrich the memory of a sensitive
boy. Back of the house was the sluggish Concord River, flowing, if flowing
it could be called, toward the Merrimac and the sea. Upstream a little it
split into Sudbury and Assabet, and was a constant challenge to juvenile
explorers, to boatmen, or to skaters—

The same blue wonder that my infant eye
Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,—
Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed
The fragrant flag-roots in my father's fields,
And where thereafter in the world he went.

The whole landscape, made more vivid by visits in other years no doubt,
was later sublimated and sentimentalized in Ralph's dirge for his brothers
Edward and Charles:

The winding Concord gleamed below,

Pouring as wide a flood
As when my brothers, long ago,

Came with me to the wood. . . .

They took this valley for their toy,

They played with it in every mood;
A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,—

They treated Nature as they would.

They colored the horizon round;

Stars flamed and faded as they bade,
All echoes hearkened for their sound,—

They made the woodlands glad or mad.

On November 10, shortly after the family had arrived in Concord,
Ralph wrote that he was attending school there and liking it better every
day. He called for a copy of an anthology of Greek writers, and in his
correspondence he demonstrated his progress both in writing and in draw-
ing. The Concord grammar school, also attended by Edward and Charles,
was then kept by an Oliver Patten, a master who seems to have remained
there only the one school year. It was perhaps at Patten's school that Ralph
had his quarrel with Elisha Jones and Frank Barrett. Ezra Ripley, as grand-
father of one culprit and as moral magistrate of the whole village, called
all three boys before him and made them shake hands. Ralph accepted
mediation, but was tongue-tied; and Aunt Mary, when she heard of this,

52 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

reproved him sharply. "Fie on you! You should have talked about your
thumbs or your toes only to say something," she told him.

In the school, no doubt, he found encouragement for the love of poetry
he is said to have displayed more publicly by reciting verses from the top
of the sugar barrel in Deacon White's store. On Christmas Eve he made
a poem on Washington that showed he could now compose heroic coup-
lets mechanically correct enough but exceedingly stiff and conventional in
rhythm and diction. When the hated war with Britain was at last ended, he
wrote with enthusiasm of "Fair Peace triumphant." Perhaps his last poetic
effort during his country school days was an address to his teacher and his
fellow pupils which he called "Valedictory Poem Spoken at Concord":

This morning I have come to bid adieu

To you my schoolmates, and, Kind Sir to you;

For six short months my lot has here been cast,

And oft I think how pleasantly they've past,

In conversation with companions gay,

The time has past like one long summer's day,

But as I now go hence to other skies,

Where Boston's spires in goodly order rise,

A few short lines permit me here to say,

Whilst Sol prolongs the cheering light of day. . . .

To you, Respected Sir, alone I owe
More than I now, or ever can bestow,
Such tribute only as I have, I give,
That is my thanks, that tribute, Sir, receive;
A Brother too by sickness long detain'd
From study; at his loss is pain'd.
Another Brother small and younger too,
New to the school, and to its studies new,
Has here imbib'd impressions of that kind,
To banish all its dullness from his mind.

And now f arewel my schoolmates, happy days,
And Peace attend you in all virtuous ways,
Farewel ye walls where Science ever shines,
And smiling virtue opes her golden mines.

The "six short months" may have been a slight miscalculation, admis-
sible in the arithmetic of poetry. If it was sober fact, it possibly meant that
Ralph had begun school in Concord before his mother arrived in early
November, 1814. More probably it meant that he continued there for a

CONCORD GHOSTS AND OTHERS 53

few weeks after her return to Boston about the twenty-fifth of March in
the following year. She would naturally have gone alone to reconnoiter
the post-war town, and there was certainly at least a brief period of in-
decision. But it was not long before both Ruth Emerson and her family
had left the protection of the Ripley manse.

BANISHING DULLNESS FROM HIS MIND

If you have opportunity it may be well to impress the minds
of your grandchildren with the importance of becoming
intelligent as well as moral beings.

—William Emerson of Boston to his mother, January 1 1, 1810

THOUGH the danger of war was past, there was no escape from
the reality of poverty. Probably Ruth Emerson accepted the offer
of the Haskinses to provide shelter, but in spite of its vestiges of
modest grandeur the old homestead in Rainsford's Lane could
be no place of rest for her. Doubling up with the Haskinses meant, so their
offer had specified, that she must take them as her boarders. The distressed
widow, with her dependents, may have remained in Rainsford's Lane as
late as the middle of the summer, when she received at least one paying
guest from outside the Haskins family, and may still have been there in the
early autumn, when the merchant Daniel P. Parker and his family became
her boarders.

But by late October, when Parker sailed alone for London, both his
family and hers were probably installed in his Beacon Street home, with
Ruth Emerson in charge and free to invite paying guests. Her boarders
there apparently included Lemuel Shaw, future chief justice of Massachu-
setts, but no amount of respectability in them could reconcile her to being
housekeeper to the public. In a letter to her Maine relatives she explained
that she looked upon her undertaking "with fear & trembling" and added
that "sister Mary cheers & consoles me with the idea that our toils & sorrows
will soon be ended in the peaceful grave." Aunt Mary seemed pleased with
the place in Beacon Street because the windows afforded "a full view of the
granary burying Yard." The dooryard would serve as a pen for the cow,
fetched from Concord when she was fresh. Grandfather Ripley warned
that she must be fed under the eyes of the Emersons lest the children and
pig belonging to the poor man who tended her should devour her Indian
meal. Ralph had to drive her along Boston Common to pasture.

The neighborhood could not have been entirely ugly. Near by was the
State House as Bulfinch had designed it, and not far away stood the
colonial mansion John Hancock had lived in and the much newer house

BANISHING DULLNESS FROM HIS MIND 55

built by the John Phillips who was destined to be the first mayor of Boston.
But poverty was an uncomfortable slough from which to view prosperity,
and the family, however grateful, could not have been entirely happy over
gifts sent by well-to-do friends— silk for a gown and muslin for a cap, five
dollars in cash, a cheese, twenty dollars in cash, or cheese and sugar and
tea worth ten dollars.

Aid toward the education of the boys could be accepted with the least
compunction. Young William, already in college, now received the annual
grant of the First Church's income from the Penn legacy. This had for-
merly amounted to as much as £10 and was presumably still important.
Yet Ruth Emerson had to bear the brunt of the fight against poverty, while
every boy in the family felt its effects. His anxious search in the fallen
poplar leaves for a dollar bill he had lost when he was sent out to buy
himself a pair of shoes was for Ralph one of the most memorable experi-
ences of his childhood. According to family tradition he and Edward shared
a coat and were greeted by schoolmates with the taunt "Whose turn is
it to wear the coat today?" Once, it is said, when Aunt Ripley arrived she
found the boys in a state of exaltation because they had given their last
loaf to some other poor person and Aunt Mary was telling them stories of
heroism to keep them from feeling hungry.

Ralph felt the cumulative effect of stern religious training quite as much
as he felt the discipline of poverty. At church he was expected to digest
the sermon in order that he might give text and outline when he returned
home. At home on Sunday afternoons he and his brothers had hymns
to learn, though he might manage to substitute original composition for
memorizing. In Beacon Street he had experiences of religious terror that
paralleled those of young Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, as he learned in
later years. Edward Young, the graveyard poet, tinged Lydia's day and
night thoughts, the doubts of the too sensitive religious poet Cowper were
her own, and every flash of lightning "seemed the beginning of conflagra-
tion, and every noise in the street the crack of doom." Usually Ralph's
saving sense of the ridiculous must have weakened such terrors for him.
But they were commonplace in that age, when spiritual crises were "periods
of as certain occurrence in some form of agitation to every mind as denti-
tion or puberty." And the harrowing of the emotions in youth was sure
to have important repercussions in later life.

If Ruth Emerson was seriously religious, her sister Fanny, frequently
her counselor in family affairs, was excessively so. She gravely suspected
such heresies as were hatched by the college across the Charles River and
anxiously scanned the conduct of the Emersons for signs of moral and spir-
itual disintegration. "Wm's disposition & application," she had once written,

56 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

"is encouraging ... He has my best wishes for progress in learning &
an honorable discharge from the Seminary of which he is a member-
CD that it were a Nursery of piety as well as human literature. It is a sub-
ject of many prayers." She had been interested in Ralph because of his
"diffidence33 and his "poetic effusions," and she anticipated "his future
usefulness from noticing his present activity & desire to serve & please a
beloved Mother." Edward seemed reasonably safe at conservative Andover,
where he was soon sent. The pupils there attended preaching on Sunday
and on Monday reported the sermon; and., after the evening family prayers,
they joined in social prayer, the "young gentlemen" taking turns in leading
it. But to make doubly sure, Aunt Fanny warned Edward that life was
uncertain and that he should devote himself, soul and body alike, to reli-
gious ends. The Haskins sisters came honestly by their religious formalism.
Once, it is said, when his distillery adjoining the Haskins home was afire,
their father kept the children from leaving the house till he got them round
the table and returned thanks according to custom. "The Lord be praised
for this and all his mercies," he announced. "Now," he concluded, "you
may go."

Ralph's literary activities reflected his progress in bookish learning and
showed his humor as well as the family religiosity. He could discourse on
Doctor Johnson's opinions of Cowley and Donne, though he conveniently
fell into the Doctor's way of thinking. French phrases had begun to appear
in his letters as a result of his going every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
to take lessons of a Miss Sales. In English, Ralph practiced satire and irony.
He pestered his brother William with nonsense verses and took off his
eleven-year-old brother Edward's humble entry into Andover, "the seat of
so much learning, of the Muses, the Arts, and Sciences" with these lines:

And now arrives the chariot of state

That bears with regal pomp Ned, Bliss the great

See from afar arise a dusty cloud

And see approaching fast the gathering crowd

See yonder rank of learned sages come

Like reverend fathers of majestic Rome

Down from their aged heads their hats they bend

On either hand the bowing lines extend

While thro' the midst with elevated mein

Stalks "Edward Emerson the great" between

Hark the loud clangor of the sounding bell

To Andoveria's college hails thee well

BANISHING DULLNESS FROM HIS MIND 57

At the Latin School, Benjamin Apthorp Gould, the new headmaster,
won the respect of the boys and of the public. He was being driven hard
and was perhaps driving his pupils hard, though he found it "necessary
for the preservation of health and elasticity of mind," as he put it, that
a reasonable portion of time be allowed for relaxation. The town's sub-
committeemen who supervised the Latin School could soon boast, and not
without some justification, that "from the course of instruction and dis-
cipline in the same, it is now one of the best seminaries in New England
for preparing children for College."

Gould had, besides energy and good sense, literary taste and cared for
the liberal arts. Ralph, who used to be excessively fond of declaiming such
passages as that on Warsaw's last champion in Campbell's The Pleasures
of Hope, was fortunate to have a headmaster who valued good speaking
and devoted Saturday morning to practicing the boys in it. Gould even
provided at his own expense some medals inscribed "Palma Eloquentiae,"
though Ralph had to see these go to other aspirants. There were lines of
verse to be memorized, and even a dead language was not allowed to remain
a mere graveyard for grammarians to pilfer. After some sixty years Ralph
testified in honor of the Latin School that "the only . . . Greek lines I
ever learned to repeat & can still repeat I learned there." Doubtless the
new bookish interest Gould's efforts inspired acted as a stimulus in Eng-
lish composition.

The instruction in essay-writing was effective according to the taste of
the time. It seems to have been in September of 1815 that Ralph Emerson
handed in what was pretty obviously the best prose he could write on the
subject "Love of Praise." Struggling not quite successfully for mechanical
correctness but balancing conflicting views with admirable fairness, he told
his readers that the desire for praise was powerful and sometimes resulted
in good deeds, sometimes in bad. He learnedly cited an instance from
Xenophon and both strengthened and adorned his thesis with a Latin
sentence from Cicero.

By the master's favor he several times got a coveted chance to read his
rhymes on exhibition programs. "An English Poem, "Independence/ " on
the program in August of 1815, was his. On such an occasion he may
well have been picked as one of the boys thought most likely to shine,
whether or not they were the top scholars. Once, in the following year,
shortly before the annual visitation, he had the satisfaction of a poetical
tribute from an usher at the school. "Aug 16," he noted down on a sheet
of paper still preserved, "Mr G. Bradford today paid a very handsome
compliment by writing at the bottom of my Solitude—

58 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOJV

Musae— Welcome to Apollo's hill

Bend freely to our hallowed rill

And claim the right the God to Genius gave,

To sip divine Castalia's consecrated wave.

They were original but the subject did not deserve them/' the youthful
poet modestly commented. But whether or not he deserved the praise of
Bradford's muses, it was the kind of encouragement that would confirm
his literary ambition.

For some reason he switched from solitude to eloquence, but when the
great occasion of the annual exhibition actually arrived, he was on the
program and could hardly have felt that his audience was either unfit or
few, for the school committeemen and selectmen were accompanied on
their rounds by the governor of the state, the council, the sheriff, the secre-
tary and treasurer of the commonwealth., the judges of federal and state
and county and town courts, the clergy, the president and several professors
of Harvard, members of the state senate from Suffolk County, the town's
representatives in the legislature, and most of the municipal officers of the
various departments. Besides, there were strangers, including the consuls
of foreign countries, a major general named Ripley, with his staff, and
Colonel Croghan, the defender of Fort Meigs. But, as there were a number
of boys on the program at the Latin School and the newspaper reports
were not very specific, it is uncertain whether Ralph's English verses, more
learned than inspired, drew any of the applause that frequently burst from
the visitors.

A few months later, when the school was visited by a popular elocu-
tionist, Ralph, still remembered as the author of a poem on eloquence
suitable for the new occasion, was selected as one of the dozen or so boys
to perform for him. What could be found of his exhibition poem was brought
out again and fitted with a new ending. Ruth Emerson was among the
parents who turned out for the entertainment.

Ralph was serious about his school exercises and, many years afterwards,
regarded the themes and poems required by Gould as his "first essays in
writing." And the Latin School incited him to a variety of intellectual
adventures suited to his powers. He learned there to good purpose stories
of the behavior of heroes in the ancient classics. He liked his study of
literature. Having reviewed Cicero and some Greek writers, he sent to his
brother William for a Sallust. He began geography with Cummings's
introductory text and the Latin School equipment of "2 beautiful Globes,
An Orrery, and a large Atlas." Gould made places come to life by showing

BANISHING DULLNESS FROM HIS MIND 59

what each was famous for. He would answer a question about the possi-
bility of passing over the deserts of Africa by relating incidents of Napoleon's
Egyptian campaign. Ralph Emerson admired such intelligent teaching and
was avid of learning while he still kept his appetite for fun. In his less
serious moods he could gloat over such trivia as oddities of grammar or
spelling or vocabulary. That honorificabilitudinibusque was the longest word
was perhaps not a notable discovery but seemed so to him. The one subject
from which he could extract little pleasure was mathematics.

Naturally most of his friends were likely to be at the Latin School.
When, at the age of thirteen, he was asked by his Uncle Samuel Ripley
why "all the boys dislike you and quarrel with you, whilst the grown people
are fond of you/5 he was really not without intimates among his youthful
contemporaries. At his school, besides William Furness, there was John
Gardner, his neighbor on Summer Street in early childhood. In his last
year at the Latin School Ralph wrote to Edward of "the affection existing
between Curtis (the best schollar in Class) and myself and the great
affection between Leverett and the rest of the school. The whole body of
pupils were a loosely knit clan, the aristocracy of the public schools, with
their seventeenth-century tradition and their special studies looking toward
entrance into college. In the world of copybooks and textbooks they were
as much distinguished as were the members of the Ancient and Honourable
Artillery Company in the Boston world of uniforms and drums. When
President Monroe came to town on his national tour in 1817, the place of
honor by the gunhouse on the common was assigned to the Latin School
boys. There, arranged in the order of their height, all uniformed in blue
coats and white trousers, and every boy wearing in his buttonhole an arti-
ficial red and white rose, they waited two or three dreary hours but were
rewarded when, at length, the expected cavalcade appeared, the military
fired their salute, and the President "made his first bow to our school who
all took off their hats and cheered." It was the last fine gesture of the Latin
School so far as Ralph Emerson, then at the age of fourteen, was concerned.

If he paused to take stock of his career since he had entered the school
in 1812, he probably discovered scant grounds for personal vanity. He seems
to have won none of Boston's Franklin medals for scholarship. It was
already evident that, as a scholar, he was no match for his brother Edward,
for Edward concealed somewhere back of his "cat's eyes" and rosy cheeks
and under his thick, stiff hair an extraordinary talent for leadership in
a recitation room or on a public platform and had been, Gould said, the
best in his class.

But in spite of his own lack of such talent, Ralph could get from books

6o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

and elsewhere much that was not taught in classes or asked for on exam-
inations. In later life, partly, no doubt, in subconscious self -justification,
he put a special value on facts and ideas that came without having to be
hunted down systematically. "The regular course of studies, the years of
academical and professional education have not yielded me better facts
than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School," he argued.
"What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call
so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its com-
parative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to
thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what be-
longs to it."

Other institutions than the Latin School had contributed to the boy's
intellectual life. The family had kept his father's share in the Boston Library
Society. Though the list of books charged against this share proves no
actual reading by anybody, the borrowings of 1815-1817 were often such
as might have appealed especially to Ralph— Tacitus, Goldsmith, Maria
Edgeworth, Cicero, Shakespeare, Chateaubriand, Klopstock, Walter Scott,
and Doctor Johnson. The Arabian Nights, various volumes of British drama,
Godwin's life of Chaucer, Robertson's histories, and The Pleasures of Hope
were all in the list, not to mention an abridged version of The Light
of Nature Pursued, the philosophic Abraham Tucker's book with whose
ethical teachings Ralph soon became well acquainted. It is not clear whether
he went with the sensation-hungry public to Merchants' Hall, where the
grand panorama of Gloucester Harbor showed the famed sea serpent sport-
ing in waters only a few miles from Boston, and where one's faith in such
wonders could be confirmed by a view of a young sea serpent preserved
in alcohol. But he was steadily cultivating his life-long enthusiasm for
science of a more sober sort. He had his private museum and foraged for
curiosities; and he may have got new inspiration from visits to such places
as the museum of the Linnaean Society, a collection he certainly saw by
1817.

In the meantime Ruth Emerson struggled hard to earn the necessary
means for putting her boys through school and college. Her boarding house,
which at best attracted too small a portion of the swelling income of com-
mercial Boston, seldom remained long at the same address. In the autumn
of 1816 she had given up her place in Beacon Street, and by late Sep-
tember she was in Hancock Street. This was in the same neighborhood,
then the best, or nearly so, for boarding houses. But however attractive the
new location may have been to boarders, it afforded only dismal quarters
for the widow Emerson's children. From the basement, where he was con-
fined during an illness, Ralph looked out upon what he described as

BANISHING DULLNESS FROM HIS MlJ\L> 61

a dirty yard

By boards and dirt and rubbish marr'd
Pil'd up aloft a mountain steep
Of broken Chairs and beams a heap

and farther on he could see five tall chimneys, doubtless those of the an-
tiquated County Jail in Court Street, some distance away. The grim humor
of his lines on this dreary scene and on his job of scouring knives, pre-
sumably for use at the boardinghouse table, was evidence that he did not
easily slump into self-pity; but it was his mother whose courage was put
to the severest test.

Though she was still "kindly assisted by the Society" of the First Church,
she must have looked anxiously into the not very distant future when
she could expect to receive nothing more than the Penn legacy, for aid
in paying college bills, and some random gifts from individual members.
With Aunt Mary absent in Concord, she took stock of her affairs in a
gloomy mood. She got on as well as she had expected with a family of
boarders, but it was at best a melancholy life. "I pity," she said, "all who
are compelled to adopt this mode of getting a living, or rather an existance,
for it can hardly be called living— I try to be resigned to it because I see
no other way in which I can do so well altogether for our dear boys—
They can never know the pain it costs me to live this kind of life. . . .
We have no plan yet for the future, & indeed I seem to have no time to

form any plan while sister M y is absent— but go round the same little

circle again & again of petty cares—" Bulkeley was back after some years
mostly spent in Maine and added his weight to her load. Though he
learned his lessons in geography and grammar, he could not remember
them long. William, though he was thought too young and too small to
keep school yet, had lost no time during vacation, having worked in a
probate office. He had held on to his job of waiter at college most of the
last year and was reputed industrious and steady at his books. Ralph,
according to his mother, was her "man of the house & companion in the
evening" and was diligent in his studies and well spoken of by his teacher.

By May, Ruth Emerson was looking for a more convenient house,
where, of course, she would get more boarders. In July the First Church
assigned Ralph the Penn legacy formerly enjoyed by William and must
have taken it for granted that the younger brother was about to enter col-
lege. But there were doubts and there was conflicting advice from friends,
for the financial outlook was bleak. In July, it seems, Ruth Emerson made
a trip to Maine, perhaps to advise with relatives.

Toward the end of August, she wrote another of her frequent appeals

62 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to the mercurial Aunt Mary. She declared she was as convinced after trial
as before Aunt Mary went away that "I cannot do without you" Her
agitation of mind was caused partly by Aunt Mary's continued absence
and partly by the difficulty of managing three boys at home on vacation,
"the two small ones a fortnight instead of a week as usual." Having "dis-
missed Hannah, & turned Cook baker & washwoman together, with prep-
aration for W.s exhibition & Waldo's examination53 to look out for, she
was at her wit's end.

On the first of September she made a fresh start on her long tale of
woe and hope, with news of Ralph's changing prospects: "On the day of
Exhibition Mr Gould called in W. room & said he had seen the President
& he' & himself rather advised to R. W.s going in to College this year—
The Pred.t. observed he should be his freshman, & he would try to grant
him some other priviledges— Thus the path of duty seemed to be plain to
let him go forward— tho' a few days before all said let him wait till next
year & Ralphs mind had been brought to acquiesce in that plan & his
uncle Ripley was thinking of his aiding him in his school—

"Last Thursday he walked to Cambridge & with some tremour he sat
off— to be on the spot at 6 in the morning since which I have heard thro'
others he passed a very good examination— He came home on Saturday
pleased to find he was admitted— without being admonished to study, (as
was the case with many) . . ,"

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

r I ^HE Sacred Tree midst the fair Orchard grew,
I The Phoenix Truth did on it rest,

And built his perfum'd Nest.

That right Porphyrian Tree which did true Logick shew,
Each Leaf did learned Notions give,
And th' Apples were Demonstrative. . . .

— Cowley, "The Tree of Knowledge"

There I turn over now one Book, and then another, of
various Subjects, without method or design: one while I
meditate, another I record . . .

—Montaigne, "Of Three Commerces,53
translated by Charles Cotton

IT ONLY remained for Ruth Emerson to raise the funds for such of
Ralph's expenses as were not covered either by the arrangements made
with the college or by the Perm legacy. She was certain somehow to
keep the rest of her family going as usual. By about this time she had
found a new home, at No. 60 Essex Street, next door to the Boston Female
Asylum, and, though she worried about "all these expences & so small
means," she promptly engaged to take a family of four to board at sev-
enteen dollars a week. Financial difficulties, however trying, were not
insuperable. Ralph could now safely put his mind on Harvard, where
several generations of his ancestors, most of them perhaps hardly less im-
pecunious than he, had studied before him. He hoped to "begin with deter-
mined and ardent pursuit of real knowledge that will raise me high in the
Class while in Coll. and qualify me well for stations of future usefulness."
He would have been as much shocked as anybody could he have fore-
seen, by some sudden access of prophetic power, that George Ticknor, the
professor and, later, literary historian, would come back from his European
travels and studies to reveal to its governors that in the institution at Cam-
bridge they had neither a university, as they called it, nor a respectable
high school such as they ought to have. Had Ralph Emerson understood
the real situation, he might have chosen to wait for the era of reform to
begin. But as matters stood, he was willing to accept, without delay, the

64 TH£ LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

kind of higher education the New England fathers had left at his doorstep.

He had probably got his copy of the college laws bearing his own name
and the President's in attestation of the validity of the formally printed
Admittatur. He could now skip the section on entrance requirements, hav-
ing already passed "a very good examination.55 But there were some forty
pages of laws that every student promised to obey. They pictured college
life as seen from the vantage point of an experienced government. Though
the academic legislators did "earnestly desire" that all their youthful charges
might be incited to diligence in study and to right behavior by other mo-
tives than fear of punishment, they obviously did not really expect any
such millennial state of undergraduate morality.

Misdemeanors and criminal offenses were carefully placarded. A fes-
tive entertainment in the college or its vicinity, except at commencement
or at an exhibition, might result in the imposition of fines. Undergraduates
were not permitted to have anything to do with theatrical entertainments
in Cambridge. Religious and irreligious alike must "constantly and season-
ably attend prayers, each morning and evening, and publick worship ^on
the Lord's day, on publick fasts and thanksgivings, and the annual Dudleian
lecture.33 The Sabbath, beginning at sunset on Saturday evening, had to
be kept with Puritan strictness. The dress of the boys had to conform to
rule. Library privileges were severely restricted. The "books, most suitable
for the use of the undergraduates, being distinguished from the rest," the
students were not allowed to borrow any others "but by special license."
A sudden impulse to read a radical author might easily be quite forgotten
before a boy could even ask for his special license, for the library was
operated only on a very limited schedule.

Ralph Emerson was compelled not only to obey the laws but to help
enforce them, for he was the president's freshman, or orderly, as he had
been promised he should be. But his first thoughts as a petty officer of the
college could hardly have been so much for the smooth functioning of
academic government as for the scant financial relief he was earning. The
earnings fell far short of covering his expenses. His official position exempted
him from the charge for a study, but he received bills for various equip-
ment, supplies, and services. One bill was for the wood used in his fireplace.
He was dunned quarterly for "Steward and commons,33 and this meant
that he was eating, not in the president's house, but with his class in the
freshman dining room. He was charged the usual quarterly rate for instruc-
tion. Where he could, he saved. He had no serious expenses for repairs, as
many others had; no assessments for delinquencies, no fines. He avoided
natural history with its special fees and spent little for books. He was not
careless about returning from out of town too late for commons and so

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 65

having to size a meal. By practicing frugality he could satisfy all the
steward's claims by paying some fifty dollars, or at times even less, each
quarter.

The room assigned to him was in the rear of Wadsworth House under
the bachelor President Kirkland's study. Besides young Lothrop, a nephew
of the president's who was still preparing to enter college, four upperclass-
men lived under the same roof; but, though Ralph had some acquaintance
with them, his subordinate status placed him outside the social circle in the
president's dining room, to which they belonged.

President Kirkland, doubtless remembered by his freshman as a visitor
to Summer Street in the days of the Anthology Society, seemed a friendly
figure in spite of the countenance he gave to a degree of academic segre-
gation. A person of exceptional social talent and a "really superior" man,
he was, as his fellow Anthologist the late William Emerson had been, a
Unitarian minister and a Federalist. Kirkland had climbed to respectability
and power in defiance of poverty and the meager opportunities of the
frontier region from which he had come, and in conquering himself and
his private difficulties he had learned a way of putting other people at ease.
Ralph took lessons in human nature as he watched him in the routine
administration of academic law or saw him quelling a riot between town
and gown till "a great deal of noise swearing &c" died down into the mere
"muttering" of the retiring combatants.

Harvard College, or University, as it was now sometimes officially called,
had been founded shortly after the Boston Public Latin School and was
the oldest university on the continent north of Mexico. The yard still in-
cluded the earliest grounds of 1636, though the last of its seventeenth-
century relics had vanished. Along its western margin several eighteenth-
century structures still stood. Flanking these to the south was Wadsworth
House, the presidential residence. Three recently erected buildings sketchily
completed the quadrangle formed by the bricks and stones which, in 1817,
the casual passer-by called the college. The whole institution had a new
air of respectability. It was Kirkland, with his strong reforming broom,
who cleansed the yard of its ancient brewery and improved, at least to
outward appearance, its crude sanitary facilities. Yet the president's house
itself still had not only its garden but its stable, where "the man" looked
after the horse and cow.

This was the little self-contained world, center of the oldest part of
New England's Cambridge, upon which Ralph Emerson looked out from
his room as he listened for a tap on the floor overhead. Upon such a signal
he was ready to set forth, an unhurried Hermes, to carry the messages of
his good-natured, celibate Zeus. For neither Kirkland nor Ralph would

66 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

have found his likeness in the lines in which the poet of the boisterous
Engine Club dramatized the doings of the same president but another
freshman :

Then Bibo kick'd his carpet thrice;

Which brought his Freshman in a trice.

'You little rascal! go and call

The persons mention' d in this scroll.3

The fellow hearing scarcely feels

The ground, so quickly fly his heels.

Though Ralph was only fourteen, below the average age of his class,
his height and his gravity made him look older, and he seemed to bear
his delegated authority without much effort. He was "nearly as tall as
when he had reached maturity" and was "a Saxon blonde," with "pale
face, light hair, blue eyes." He was, it was observed, "calm and quiet in
his manners; and no matter how much he felt, externally he was never
moved or excited," And yet he was by no means jauntily self-confident.
Already he was remarkable for a "mingling of shyness, awkwardness, and
dignity." These were his visible characteristics. But years later he furnished
what was probably a better psychological likeness of himself about the age
of fourteen. Looking back then, no doubt mainly upon his own early self,
he described puberty as "a crisis in the life of the man worth studying,"
being "the passage from the Unconscious to the Conscious; from the sleep
of the Passions to their rage; from careless receiving to cunning providing;
from beauty to use; from omnivorous curiosity to anxious stewardship;
from faith to doubt."

Though the president's messenger boy knew many persons, he knew
few intimately. He afterwards remembered or fancied that he had been
in disfavor with the other boys at the Latin School during the latter part
of his period there and that this disfavor lasted into college. Sometimes he
spent a day or two in Boston with his mother, and his absences from the
college must have made him seem more unsocial than he was. His poetizing
may have aroused dislike. At any rate some of his later hastily drafted
verses alluded to the chilling atmosphere his muse found in college:

I went to Cambridge when a boy

To hear the gownsmen

And found more sense

In the way than in the hall

To poet vowed to solitude

Best societv is rude

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 67

John Gardner, an old neighbor in Summer Street and a mate at the
Latin School who leaned heavily on Ralph for aid during their first days
in Cambridge, did not afterwards remember that the other students had
"any feeling about him, but of regard & affection/5 though "he was not
prominent in the class." Gardner added to his childhood familiarity with
Ralph by taking long strolls with him about Cambridge, then a village that
allowed the country to creep up close to the busy market house in Harvard
Square; and his assertion that Ralph "was not talkative . . . never spoke
for effect , . . had no gush . . . but there was a certain flash when he
uttered any thing more than usually worthy to be remembered . . ." was
at least based on no mere fleeting impression. But Gardner also had some
less flattering opinions of him. He was obviously a little overpowered by
Ralph's "equanimity" and thought him in need of "a few harsher traits
& perhaps more Masculine vigor," Another classmate, Josiah Quincy,
destined to follow in his father's footsteps and become mayor of Boston,
was very little impressed. John Hill, eagerly crediting Ralph with his own
first introduction to Shakespeare, Montaigne, Swift, Addison, and Sterne,
went far toward building up a legend of a white-haired boy. But that Ralph
actually "pored over Montaigne, and knew Shakespeare almost by heart"
during his freshman year or any other year at college is at least doubtful,
though he certainly did not remain ignorant of either the Frenchman or
the Englishman. It may be true that some others of "the more studious
members of his class began to seek him out," and, if they did, they undoubt-
edly "found him to be unusually thoughtful and well-read; knowing, per-
haps, less than they about text-books, but far more about literature." But
there were limits to his reputation and influence. Significantly there seems
to be no evidence that Robert Barnwell, the brilliant South Carolinian who
was the acknowledged leader of the class, repaid Ralph's admiration further
than to condescend to "put his hand on the back of my head to feel for
the bump of ambition" and to pronounce "that it was very, very small."

Ralph Emerson generally kept aloof from the more uproarious doings
of his fellow freshmen, but he had loyalty for his class and "he keenly
enjoyed scenes of merriment." In a song of his that was sung at a freshman
supper following an examination, he demanded a union of friendship,
reason, and pleasure to bless the close of the glad year but filled his stanzas
mainly with mild witticisms about the faculty, the textbooks, and certain
breaches of college discipline by the members of his class.

Study at college was much the same as at the Latin School. Memoriz-
ing and reciting were the students' two serious occupations. But here there
was less liberty, it seemed. The tutors and even the professors, especially
in the freshman year, were apt to be simply drillmasters and academic

68 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

policemen. Ralph, who had got much of his pleasure from "idle books
under the bench" at the Latin School, did not thrive on such a system.
Headmaster Gould came once or twice to advise with his former pupil
about difficulties with mathematics, a subject in which the boy made an
"almost total failure." But before his first college year was over Ralph had
hit upon the comfortable theory that it was not "necessary to understand
Mathematicks & Greek thoroughly, to be a good, useful, or even great
man." "Aunt Mary," he told his brother William, "would certainly tell
you so, and I think you yourself believe it, if you did not think it a dan-
gerous doctrine to tell a Freshman."

Well 'grounded in Latin by his preparatory school, Ralph continued to
look for rhetorical flowers in the classics and could appreciate Professor
Brazer's neat handling of such a picturesque phrase as "fatigabat alieni
jam imperii deos" from Tacitus. He presumably did not take too seriously
the ponderous Latin of the Dutchman Grotius on the truth of the Christian
religion. Roman satire, doubtless expurgated but still racy, stood high in
the esteem of the young poet, who rashly advised his too willing classmates:

Then drink to the sprite of satirical Flaccus,

The first we heard hymning the praises of Bacchus;

He left us the precepts we practise tonight

And his "Nunc est bibendum" we never should slight!

Ralph's standing in both Latin and Greek "was fair," it is said, "and
his renderings in the recitations were frequently happy." With Edward
Everett away in Europe, the only Greek teacher on active duty was the
"taciturn, reserved, timid., gentle Dr. Popkin," a tall, square, straight figure
clothed in an unvarying black suit. His sole function in life, it was believed,
was to hear recitations, and he stirred from his deep mental repose only
long enough to correct the mistakes of his class as they translated from the
Greek. Ralph was probably less struck by the beauties of Greek than by
the "immense vis inertiae" of Old Pop, forever "restlessly stroking his leg
and assuring himself 'he should retire from the University and read the
authors.' "

Ralph had an insatiable curiosity about history, and especially its bio-
graphical parts. He may have got something worth while from the rules
of rhetoric and grammar, for these subjects were also studied in the first
year; and he must have become acquainted with a few good books under
the guidance of the grammarians Walker and Lowth. But such gains were
more likely to be incidental to his general reading. According to one class-
mate, he was especially happy in the weekly exercises in declamation. Some
of the fragments of florid college oratory long remained in his memory,

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 69

and he lived to confess "what fools a few sounding sentences made of me
and my mates at Cambridge."

The circumstance of his residence in Kirkland's house, no doubt, to-
gether with Kirkland's desire to help the Emerson family finances, brought
Ralph employment as a tutor a few days after the beginning of his fresh-
man year. Samuel Lothrop, the president's nephew, then preparing for
entrance into college, went to his uncle's study to meet the young fresh-
man. The president put things in motion. "When I presented myself,"
Lothrop remembered, "he gave two little taps of his foot upon the floor,
and immediately I heard a movement in the room below, footsteps on the
stairs, and a knock at the door." The freshman had arrived to take charge
of his pupil. "As soon as we got into his room he said, with a slight diminu-
tion of the dignity and authority manifested in presence of the President,
'Lothrop— your Christian name; what is it?' I told him my name, and then
made the same inquiry in regard to his; to which he replied, 'My name
is Ralph,-Ralph Waldo.' "

With little delay, they got down to work on "Latin Grammar., Liber
Primus, and Lacroix's Arithmetic." The pupil "enjoyed highly the ten or
twelve weeks" under Ralph's instruction but made little progress in the
studies assigned. The tutor was, so the pupil thought, too much a boy him-
self to> be severe and was more inclined to talk on general topics and to
read pieces of his own poetry and prose than to prod his youthful charge
along the- hard path of learning. Sometimes his humor got the better of
him, and he would give "comic views of persons." Yet he was careful about
good translations from the classics, and apparently knew reasonably well
the subjects he tried to teach. Lothrop thought him a peculiar person-
kind, easy, familiar, but self-sufficient, with a wall of reserve about him
that no one could penetrate.

The Emerson boys habitually seized upon vacations and leaves of ab-
sence from college as opportunities to earn money by teaching while their
mother kept on with her Boston boarding house, feeding relatives and
strangers and staying up "till about midnight every night." William, still
a mere boy though a senior in college, now spent most of the winter teach-
ing at Kennebunk, Maine. At Waltham, where William had earlier helped
his half uncle Samuel Ripley in his school, Ralph, fourteen years old, took
charge of his first class during the winter vacation of his freshman year.

Knowing well enough the straitness of the Emerson economy, he was
disgusted to find that his wages had to be spent for his own clothes.
Following his older brother's example, he rejoiced in abnegation, catching
up one corner of the family burden when he could, and was sympathet-
ically aware of the slightest changes in his mother's financial fortunes. "I

7o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

envied you/5 he wrote to William, "bringing your 5 Doll. Bills to mother;
but Mr R said I needed a coat & sent me to the tailor's . . ." He was,
however, quick to see the more hopeful aspects of affairs. "Just before I
came from Boston/' he reassured William, "Mr Frothingham sent Mother
a note containing 20 Dolls, given him by a ' 'common friend' for her with
a promise of continuing to her 10$ Quarterly for the use of her sons in
College; not stipulating the time of continuance At this time this assist-
ance was peculiarly acceptable, you know. It is in this manner, from the
charity of others. Mother never has,—& from our future exertions I hope
never will be in want.— It appears to me the happiest earthly moment my
most sanguine hopes can picture, if it should ever arrive, to have a home,
comfortable & pleasant, to offer to mother, in some feeble degree to repay
her the cares & woes & inconveniences she has so often been subject to
on our account alone."

As "petty school-master" at Waltham, Ralph found himself "sur-
rounded/' as he put it, "by my 14 disciples." He was a good enough
disciplinarian to be "safe & sound as yet unmuzzled & unsnowballed" a
month after his arrival, and, finding some moments free for recreation, he
had by that time "learned to skate, rhymed, written & read." Though
Edward seems to have come from Andover to take his turn as assistant at
Waltham, Ralph was back teaching again during the spring vacation. And
at the end of a third tour of duty there he returned home with a purse
of $12.

In spite of an already overloaded program, he set himself for a try at
the Bowdoin prize, fortunately making up his mind in advance to be
philosophical about failure. He also wanted to keep his hand in as a poet.
He had read unsentimental, rather sarcastic and funny verses to Lothrop.
One poem, it is said, "related to his minister and his father's successor
. . . whose marriage had occurred about this time." One related "to scenes
and incidents at the Latin school, which he had recently left; and others
to college and college life, upon which he had just entered. . . . very droll
in humor, and quaint in expression." Soon after he had informed his
brother Edward that "I don't write poetry when at Cambridge" and that
"in this country where every one is obliged to study his profession for assist-
ance in living & where so little encouragement is given to Poets &c it is
a pretty poor trade," he gave his classmates his song taking off the persons
and events of the freshman year.

He wrote his verses in spite of an ear deaf to the charms of music. It
may have been in his freshman year that he had the courage to offer
himself as a member of a college singing class and was advised, after at-
tempting one note for the master, or so the story went, not to come again.

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 71

But his sensibilities were keen in other directions. The fondness he already
had for what the Romantics called Nature was reflected without any
exaggeration in his later verses

How drearily in College hall

The Doctor stretched the hours,
But in each pause we heard the call

Of robins out of doors.

It may have been partly for health's sake and partly from literary fashion
that he acted on the theory that the air was wise and the winds thought
well. But though he seems never to have had much awareness of color, he
soon had a relish, if not love, for natural forms and sounds. Accord-
ing to a family tradition, "Sweet Auburn," as Mount Auburn, still a wild
tract, was then rather sentimentally called in honor of Goldsmith's village,
was "his walking-ground almost every day when he was in Cambridge."

At the beginning of their sophomore year, he and his chum Dorr found
themselves in possession of No. 5 Hollis Hall, "a corner room, up one flight
of stairs," and, at least as it appeared much later, "broad and low, with
a huge fireplace, little closets, and wide window-seats from which one looks
out upon the Cambridge Common, the old burying-ground, and, nearer
by, the 'class tree/ where the seniors meet for their farewell song." In
general this description was true for Emerson's time. But actually No. 5
was in those days not one but three. The principal room was shared as
sleeping quarters. Its paper and paint were not more than a year old, its
wainscot good, its plaster a little broken, its fireplace good, and its chimney
piece perfect, said the official in charge of such matters. The two little
studies adjoining were in not quite such satisfactory condition, but each
of them had its quota of three book shelves, suggestive of the real business
of college. The boys supplied the rest of their furniture. The atmosphere
of the place was not too studious. Dorr is said to have been "a waggish
fellow, who cared little for books, but was a favorite with the class on
account of his wit, his genial disposition, and his undoubted talent." He
promptly gained some costly notoriety by his misbehavior at public worship.

Ralph, naturally thrown more with other members of his class than he
had been at the president's, saw college government in a new light. The
sophomores, feeling their importance as second-year men, grew unruly. In
the commons they caused a scene of such disorder that the faculty sus-
pended a few of the ringleaders for three months. The class protested, but
the government, far from yielding, made further reprisals. Within a week
after the beginning of the teapot tempest many of the sophomores had left

72 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Cambridge, and, as those who remained kept their mutual agreement not
to attend chapel, they toa were soon ordered home.

The Rebelliad, a contemporary undergraduate's mock epic account of
the disturbances, recorded the doings of the principal actors but made no
mention of Ralph Emerson. He himself wrote what was described sar-
castically by his brother William as "a history of your very praiseworthy
resistance to lawful authority," but this is lost. The sophomore who had not
long since been the president's freshman most likely agreed with his mother
that the disorders were "sad business3' and yet stuck by his class out of
loyalty. He is said to have "remained at home until his class came to terms
with the authorities"; but probably he was among the twenty-seven, not
quite half of the second-year men, who applied for reinstatement after
about a week of absence from college. He must have been in good stand-
ing when, a few weeks later, he was appointed to a temporary waitership,
for the faculty would have hesitated to grant even so minor an office to
an unreconstructed rebel.

The rump class failed to settle down, and, though Ralph suffered no
punishment as a consequence, he must have been present on more than
one convivial occasion. His self-control, remarkable even at this time, helped
explain his ability to keep clear of college discipline, and he was also helped
by a good stomach. Then, as later, it seems, he could drink "a great deal
of wine (for me)," which probably was not much by other standards, and
still grow "graver with every glass." Indignation and eloquence, he said,
would excite him, but wine would not. Besides, he was not ambitious to
take a leading part in class carousals or conspiracies against authority. Ac-
cording to his own report, he was generally "a spectator rather than a
fellow." His dreamy nature, his age, and in some cases his good sense,
partly accounted for his lack of conspicuous leadership.

He was not the jolly, roistering undergraduate the popular clubs were
looking for. He did not join the Porcellian, known as the "Pig Club," a
society of robust eaters and drinkers that took Barnwell and eighteen other
members of the class, or Hasty Pudding, a somewhat more intellectual
fraternity that admitted eighteen of the boys of 1821, or the Order of
Knights of the Square Table, a festive brotherhood that got nine of them.
He would have been miserable at the musical meetings of the Pierian
Sodality and would hardly have dreamed of belonging to the Engine Club,
a band of reckless youths, it seems, who ran about town more often for
the purpose of quenching inner fires than for the protection of the property
of citizens or college, their ostensible purpose. Though he may have felt
a twinge of envy when he saw many of his classmates marching in the
Harvard Washington Corps, such pomp was not for him. Barnwell, Motte,

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 73

Upham, Withington, Cheney, Manigault, and Wood were elected as juniors
to Phi Beta Kappa, but presumably Ralph Emerson was not seriously con-
sidered for such an honor then or in his senior year. He seems to have had
no connection with the religious Wednesday Evening Society or with the
Saturday Evening Religious Society, or even with Kappa Delta, though
it was designed to encourage students intending to enter the ministry.

But he was a very active member of one religious circle, the old Adelphoi
Theologia, and belonged to several ephemeral clubs ranging from convivial
to studious. According to one story, he became in his sophomore year "the
leading spirit in a little book club, of which Edward Kent, afterwards
governor of Maine, Charles W. Upham, of Salem, and Dr. D. W. Gorham,
of Exeter, N. H., were also members. The club purchased the English
reviews, the North Americans—then just struggling into life,— and, in gen-
eral, the literature of the day which they could not find in the college
library." Another club, the Conventicle, was an outgrowth of the sopho-
more rebellion of 1818. Alden, the wag of the class, was founder and
"Kingsbury Was archbishop, Alden, bishop, and John B. Hill, parson."
It was made up of "a set of intimate friends, and Emerson was one of the
number. Although his quiet nature kept him out of most of the convivial
societies, he was always genial, fond of hearing or telling a good story, and
ready to do his share towards an evening's entertainment."

He regarded his election to the Pythologian Club before the end of his
sophomore year as a high honor, because, in his opinion, the Pythologian
could boast "the fifteen smartest fellows in each of the two classes Junior
& Soph." Its purpose was described as extemporaneous discussion; but much
of his effort in its behalf went into a long poem called "Improvement."
He, with seven other sophomores, instigated a nameless club for writing
and extemporaneous speaking, and he was one of the faithful members
who kept it alive almost to the end of their senior year. Few high-ranking
students ever belonged to it, but the compositions and discussions ranged
from trivialities to such serious questions as "Whether promiscuous immigra-
tion be advantageous to the United States," "Whether deep researches into
abstruse metaphysical subjects be advantageous to the Student," "Whether
the conduct of the United States towards the Indians can be reconciled to
the principles of justice and humanity," and "Whether equality of ranks
in society be best adapted to its happiness." Though some of the other
members were half a dozen years his senior at a time when such a dif-
ference in age counted heavily, Ralph had a prominent part throughout.
And it was evidence of his desire to be accepted as a good fellow that at
the last recorded meeting he won the thanks of the club by contributing
a couple of bottles of wine to encourage the spirit of the occasion.

74 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Presumably the more social clubs he belonged to made practical use
of several of the drinking songs he composed. One such piece, a parody
on Tom Moore, was to be sung until "our eyes grow drunkly dim" and,
in defiance of college discipline, exhorted,

Drink brothers drink the wine flows fast
The tutors are near and the daylight's past

but probably had no more substantial meaning for the youthful, imitative
author than did the neo-medievalism, eighteenth-century sensibility, and
"Inexplicable daemon" of melancholy that inspired his muse by turns.
Meantime, if the faculty knew anything about either his scandalous rhymes
or his innocent poetizing during his early college years, they were appar-
ently unimpressed. His prose as well as his verse went without official
recognition. He was not, it seems, assigned any exhibition part as yet and
only dreamed of capturing a Bowdoin prize,

Ruth Emerson urged her children to be independent but worked stren-
uously to provide for them. The death of Sheriff Bradford., the Emersons'
"greatest earthly benefactor," was a blow to her. But she continued to
receive gifts, it seems, from the daughters of the Robert Treat Paine who
signed the Declaration of Independence, as well as from an anonymous
donor and from the deacons of the First Church. Her son William, now
giving his whole time to teaching, was her main reliance. Once, during
Ralph's sophomore year, she seems to have been unable to pay the whole
rent of her house, but within a few weeks William sent $200, and she ac-
cepted it as providential. Some months later a friend of the family made
it possible to pay a new instalment of the rent, and William, after having
been warned that he would be expected to come to the rescue once more,
was granted a respite. The death of Ralph's Grandmother Haskins in
September of that year would pretty obviously mean the inheritance of a
small share of the estate eventually but must have meant nothing of the
sort to Ruth Emerson at the time.

Ralph was successful in cutting down a little his mother's expenses on
his account. Though he faced quarterly duns from the college, he had got
the Penn legacy; and in the spring of 1819 President Kirkiand had been
kind to his old freshman—"told me," Ralph reported, "I had grown &
said he hoped intellectually as well as physically & told me (better than
all) when my next bill comes out to bring it to him as I have never recieved
the Saltonstall benefit promised me before I entered College." T6 the sub-
stantial funds he got from the Saltonstall legacy Ralph added some earn-

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 75

ings as waiter in the junior commons, feeling mixed delight and dismay
at his appointment. While he was a waiter, he was also a policeman. Ac-
cording to an old rule, presumably still in force, he had to make a detailed
report after each meal, "of all damage done to the utensils in the hall,
at said meal, and of the person or persons who did the same, or any part
of it, if known." Otherwise he himself would have to pay.

During vacations he kept up his teaching for the Ripleys at Waltham,
where he doubtless lived through much the same round of duties that
Edward described when he took his turn in the same school. "The whole
care of 1 7 boys devolves on me from morning to night," Edward said. "We
rise as soon as we can possibly see. Then I have to hear all the morning
lessons before prayers. Aunt, and I read at prayers in a Greek Testament,
George Bradford in a Latin. From prayers we go to breakfast. From
breakfast half -an hour for play to the boys (not to me though) Then till
between one and two steadily in school. Then to dinner and then to school
again till supper time, from that time to eight take care of the boys while
they get their morning lessons." But there were recompenses other than
the scanty pay. Being with Sarah Alden Ripley was as good for a young
scholar as attending classes under his professors. "When no one is reading
to her/3 Ralph noticed., "at leisure moments you will find her reading a
German critic or something of the kind sometimes Reid on Light or Optics.
As to her knowledge talk on what you will she can always give you a new
idea— ask her any philosophical question, she will always enlighten you
by her answer."

Ralph's mediocre record as a freshman affected his three remaining
years as an undergraduate, but it was not quite true that he "gave up
college studies & took to general reading" or that, as he also afterwards
said, "In college, I had unpreparedness for all my tasks."

As a sophomore he was assigned the usual Greek and Latin authors,
together with such texts as Blair's lectures on rhetoric, Professor Levi
Hedge's Elements of Logick, and Locke's essays, or at least the essay on
the understanding. He had exercises in declamation and composition once
every two weeks. He studied algebra and worked with Legendre's geom-
etry under the guidance of his second cousin George Emerson, the new
tutor in that subject. "Mathematics I hate" was his concise comment on
such subjects. He apparently passed on to physical science under his cousin's
instruction. If the class got as far as astronomy he may have had a double
introduction to that subject, for another Emerson, Joseph of Byfield, had
recently boarded at Ruth Emerson's in Boston for some weeks while he
delivered public lectures on stars and planets.

76 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

It was doubtless Levi Hedge who led the class over the stony ground
of logic into the more pleasing landscape of Lockean philosophy. Logic
Ralph called "notorious & important" and recklessly resolved to get his
lessons verbatim. He also uttered a prayer to the "Spirit of Metaphysicks,"
a spirit with whom he had little acquaintance, afor preeminence among thy
sons!" In rhetoric he had Willard, regularly a teacher of Hebrew. One
critical theme he wrote ranked among the half dozen best, but he was soon
dissatisfied with "these trite simple subjects" that were being assigned. The
sophomores, perhaps by a special dispensation, studied no history.

Going on into their junior year, the boys worked at ancient classics,
Greek Testament, mathematics. They finished Locke, expounder of the un-
forgettable doctrine that the only fountains of knowledge are sensation and
reflection, passed on to the less formidable Paley and Dugald Stewart,
and continued with public declamations and forensic disputes once a month
and themes once a fortnight.

With his brother William's School for Young Ladies successfully estab-
lished in Boston, Ralph Emerson must now have been untroubled by any
doubts about financial support while he remained at college. In Hollis 15
he and his roommate, John Gourdin, a South Carolinian who was his
fellow junior and fellow member of the nameless club of debaters and
essayists, could settle down comfortably to textbooks and miscellaneous
literary experiments. It was presumably because of William's success that
Ralph could spend his winter vacation at home getting on with his dis-
sertation for the Bowdoin prize, and Edward, a victim of chronic colds,
could for the first time escape from the severe northern climate for a winter
with relatives in Virginia.

Before the winter was over William's school was so full that his mother
laid plans for removal to a house with a room suitable for pupils. In April
she accordingly took up new quarters at 24 Franklin Place, only a short
distance from Essex Street, Opposite her house was the Catholic Church
of the Holy Cross, the seat of Bishop Cheverus, the same prelate, beloved
of American Protestants and Catholics alike, who was later to return to
France and become an archbishop and finally a cardinal. Over the Arch
in Franklin Street still rested the collection of the Boston Library Society.
The Rev. William Emerson had once been a trustee of the society, and
his family still owned a share and drew out books.

At the college a new day was dawning. An impressive sign of it was
Professor Edward Everett's return from abroad. From the start Ralph was
one of the willing worshippers of the handsome idol of the undergraduates.
The new professor was really superior, but he had his weaknesses and his
students imitated them. If he took to heart Goethe's caution that eloquence

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 77

did not teach and was out of place in the lecture room, he still had no
qualms about embellishing his sermons and public addresses with flowers
of rhetoric. Ralph, with a keener appetite for sermons and orations than
for lectures, liked to hear such swelling phrases as "we shall stand upon the
confines of another world & see creation on creation sweeping by to their
doom" and "if they will not repent then let the passing bell wail from
steeple to steeple & when you weep you will not weep alone; the angels will
weep with you." He memorized these things. He could say half the sermon
from which he got them on the night after he had heard it, and he knew
that he was not alone in his enthusiasm for it. The Boston audience was
"almost ravished" by it, and when Everett repeated it in the Capitol at
Washington it was listened to in "breathless silence" and Senator Otis of
Massachusetts wept bitterly.

If Ralph Emerson was dreaming of becoming a preacher and orator
patterned on Everett, he also had some thought of emulating him as a
professor. When he had the good fortune to hear Everett's introductory
lecture on Greece, he jotted down the main points in his new journal, "The
Wide World," and solemnly resolved to make himself "acquainted with
the Greek language & antiquities & history with long & serious attention
& study," though "always," he cautiously emended his resolution, "with
the assistance of circumstances." He reminded himself that he must read
Herodotus and Aristophanes and all the Greek tragedians sooner or later,
and if only some relics of Egyptian literature remained he would peruse
them with ardor and strange interest.

He could not soon forget the "radiant beauty of person" of a classic
style that Everett possessed, the rich tones and precise utterance spoiled
only by a slightly nasal quality, the talent for collecting facts and for bring-
ing them to bear on the topic of the moment, the learned discourses on
learned subjects before the green boys from Connecticut and New Hamp-
shire and Massachusetts with their unripe Latin and Greek reading, the
abstention from all ornament in the lecture room, the mixture of infantine
simplicity with florid and quaint fancy used in the pulpit, the sweetly mod-
ulated manner of quoting Milton. Years after he had left college, when
his enthusiasm had burned itself out, Ralph still rated Everett a culture
hero, "a Manco Capac" sent to Massachusetts instead of Peru, but by that
time he credited him with only "popular profoundness"

Ralph, though not yet fully aware of the increased strength of the
faculty, promptly began to benefit from the instruction of the new Boylston
Professor of Rhetorick and Oratory, Edward Tyrrel Channing, a young
lawyer and journalist, fresh from the editorial table of The North American
Review. Never a scholar or a notable writer, Channing proved to be, never-

78 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

theless, an excellent teacher of his subject. The students little guessed how
fortunate his coming was. When he appeared for his inaugural, in De-
cember of 1819, they refused to form a procession in his honor. But an
assembly that "embraced most of the Literati and Friends of Literature
in the State35 crowded the chapel in University Hall to hear his ''ingen-
ious and eloquent7' attack on the old-fashioned bombastic oratory still com-
monly heard. He praised the oratory of ancient Greece as an "art of most
finished beauty and practical application55 but showed that less passion and
more deliberation and reflection were needed to appeal to the modern
world. Feeling and imagination were by no means to be excluded even
in 1819, but they must work with the judgment. The power of an orator
perfectly fitted for the age would be truly great, Channing concluded.

Whether or not Ralph Emerson heard this inaugural, he soon read it,
and he must have learned much similar good sense before he graduated
if the rhetorical doctrine Channing taught his classes during those first years
of his professorship at all resembled that of his lectures published nearly
forty years later. Channing came proclaiming the reign of law. It is not
clear whether he tried, in the senior year, to impose on Ralph's composi-
tions the kind of architectural planning he later devised for Thoreau, but
undoubtedly he helped to rid them of the worst effects of Everett's intoxi-
cating pulpit eloquence.

Meantime Channing5 $ most gifted student continued to write on his
own initiative. As early as January of 1820 he was reading about, if not
in, the Greek philosophers, with an eye to a Bowdoin prize. He already
knew Xenophon and Plato as the biographers of Socrates, the philosopher
with whom he was mainly concerned, and he got something from Diogenes
Laertius. The whole picture of Greek history and Greek thought became
clearer to him. He saw Socrates as a moralist, reviewed the conflicting
notions of the Socratic daemon, made what he could of the impressive
drama of the philosopher's death. "A Dissertation on the Character of
Socrates," presented to the faculty in July, was far from being a mature
essay; but it put him on the right road and won him the second prize, $20.
He was also trying for honors in public speaking, and at the end of the
term he was one of some fifteen Boylston contestants whose orations were
"distinguished for much correct and energetic eloquence, and appropriate
action." He got what seems to have been fourth place and was awarded
one of the three second prizes.

Thus he began his senior year with at least a faint halo and might count
on some respect from his ambitious freshman brother, Edward. Edward
roomed with him and must have inspired him to new efforts. In spite of
health. Edward had his eve on the prizes. The moment he was

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 79

up in the morning his mind turned to oratory and he began trying his
voice, which was often affected by hoarseness. The boys were in Hollis 9.
With its inevitable pair of miniature studies, the little apartment seemed
a presentable place once one got past the battle-scarred outer door. Ralph,
already greedy for solitude, found his own lone chamber the best thing in
college. But for him it was important for general reading and writing rather
than for study. He read desultorily but with excited interest. Sometimes his
enthusiasm was contagious. His classmate Warren Burton used to come to
his room, saying that he did not like to read and did not remember what
he read for himself but never forgot what Ralph read or quoted to him.

Textbooks and professors were, in spite of the printed "Course of In-
struction," much the same in the senior as in the junior year. Edward
Everett and his Greek literature were once more powerful attractions. A
printed synopsis of Everett's whole course on Greek literature still among
the Emerson books contains copious marginal notes whose history, how-
ever, is doubtful. But an important discovery of the senior year was George
Ticknor. Ticknor, a better scholar than Everett, had arrived laden with the
spoils of Europe, at the same time as the more popular Greek professor.
It had taken Ralph longer to learn Ticknor's merits. But now, at the begin-
ning of the new academic year, he listened to "an eloquent lecture" by the
"elegant" Smith Professor and observed that "every soul present warmly
acknowledged the force of delineation when the great deluge of the French
language, sweeping down all the feeble barriers of ephemeral dialects, car-
ried captive the languages and literature of all Europe." In his notebook
he wrote a simple outline of Ticknor's lectures on what he labeled the
second and third epochs of French literature, from 1515 to 1778. The
orderliness of his outline suggests that he may have used a syllabus or a
preliminary set of notes. Regularly, on the left-hand page he would outline
the basic facts, and on the right-hand he would amplify these and add
critical judgments, presumably not his own.

Two or three of his later enthusiasms were faintly foreshadowed in this
notebook. Already he knew something of the proverbial friendship of Mon-
taigne and La Boetie and he remarked upon the vast learning, the brilliant
thought, and the numberless quotations in what he set down as the "most
extraordinary book ever written," Montaigne's essays. His comments on
Racine, a dramatist whom he later saw performed on the Paris stage, re-
vealed his discovery that "Andromaque . . . rests on tenderness" and that
"Phedre . . . contains the Greek notion of Destiny." Moliere's Misanthrope
he labeled as too didactic but conceded that it contained "a spirit of
unrivalled satire." In his notes on Pascal's Pensees he admired the "great
force of character necessary to give a classical value to works like these."

8o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Even if, as is possible, he was merely copying a synopsis he had not made,
such things could be important to him. All these ideas were probably faint
echoes of Ticknor's learning, but they may have remained in the memory
of such a boy.

He jotted down in his diary, from time to time, a few choice bits from
Ticknor, and, finally, on May 2, 1821, he reported that the course of lec-
tures was finished. He added a summary of the professor's remarks that
might explain his own persistent obsession in later years with the idea that
the French intellect was sick: French literature, a unique phenomenon
according to Ticknor, was not national and the result of "the feelings,
situation, circumstances, & character of the whole people which produced
it'5 but conformed and must continue to conform to the rules and spirit
of the court of Louis XIV; and its six characteristics were conventional
regularity, little religious enthusiasm and feeling, a false character in the
expression of love, little deep sensibility, ambition to produce a brilliant
effect, and "restriction of success to those departments which will give some
kind of entertainment."

Ralph put into his journals a few hints of what he was writing for
Ghanning, In February of 1821 he made a pertinent memorandum: "I
must give Mr Channing a theme on the influence of weather & skies on
mind; I have tried poetry but do not succeed as well as might be wished."
He proceeded to lay out a plan, presumably a revision of an old one, for
such an essay, and the concrete conclusion his thinking on the general sub-
ject led him to was that a flaming sky explained why the Hindus were
"distressed & degraded by the horrors of a flimsy & cruel Superstition.'5
Another thing he apparently intended for Channing was a set of verses
headed "Castles in the air— built, in the near prospect of leaving College."
But on the manuscript he wrote, "This theme is dispensed with . . „ I
have now closed my college list of themes . . . May 8th 1821."

Essays and themes were to him the most exciting academic exercises.
But the study of philosophy, though Dugald Stewart's elementary philos-
ophy and William Paley's moral philosophy were required texts in both
junior and senior years, could stir him. He was even enthusiastic about
Stewart's success in making a textbook glamorous and was struck by what
he regarded as the Scot's brilliant promise of effects that were to follow
from the new analysis of the human mind. It was true that President Kirk-
land could not understand why Ralph, the author of the Bowdoin essay
on Socrates, was not a better Locke, Stewart, and Paley scholar. Yet, whether
Kirkland knew it or not, the boy was learning from other advisers to feel
something of the spell of philosophy.

Aunt Mary carried on a correspondence with him, inciting him to

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 81

speculation with hardly more than the mere mention of such theories as
the Swedenborgian one that the physical world was the basso-relievo of the
moral. As some of his correspondence has been lost, it is impossible to
say to what extent she was the prime mover in such speculations. As for
Swedenborgianism, it was already taking hold among the students at the
college. But Aunt Mary was at all events an inspiration to her nephew. She
got bits of information for him about Dugald Stewart from Sarah Alden
Ripley of the Waltham school. She offered him Price on morals, told him
she valued his correspondence with her. In one or two letters she may
have done as much for her nephew as Professor Levi Frisbie could do in
weeks of teaching.

Frisbie was, however, a memorable figure as he sat at his professorial
desk, his aching eyes shaded by his handkerchief; and he made his ideas
felt, notwithstanding the foibles he frankly revealed in his self -portrait:

Nice points in the schools he would settle at once;
Who his reasons saw not, was put down for a dunce.
Yet, ofttimes, the veriest trifle about,
He would doubt and consider, consider and doubt;
And at last, having acted, would fret for an hour.
That to change but once more, was now out of his power.

Some of his doctrines were in print. In his inaugural address, delivered
and published in Ralph's freshman year, he took for granted a moral sense
given by nature, but insisted that it needed as much cultivation as the
intellect. To him it seemed clear that imaginative literature had a great
share for good or evil in that cultivation. He delightedly agreed with the
indignant Edinburgh critics who had exposed the evil influence of "Moore,
Swift, Goethe, and in general the German sentimentalists" ; and he espoused
the Edinburgh view that we must have our Cudworths and Butlers and
Stewarts to take care of an inevitable Hobbes, Rousseau, or Godwin. His
bad eyes doubtless hindered his writing, but he had more recently published
his article about Adam Smith's observations on the moral sentiments. In
it he concluded, after balancing Smith's credits and debits, that the moral
sense, or rectitude as he now called it, "regulates and guides the whole
system of our affections and powers . . . and conducts man to the proper
end of his being.55

The same theory of the innate moral control recurred in the sketchy
lecture notes that remained unpublished till after his death. And in them
he once more pointed out how much the simple idea of right, or sense of
duty, or moral taste, needed proper development.

82 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

According to George Ripley, a sophomore during Ralph's senior year,
both Frisbie and his contemporary and successor, Levi Hedge, followed
Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown in protesting against Locke and Paley,
and thus opposed Andrews Norton, a Harvard professor who had to be
reckoned with by his colleagues. So far as Frisbie and Hedge represented
the college, its teaching was an endorsement of the Edinburgh brand of
Scottish philosophy and pointed slightly in the direction of Transcenden-
talism. The refurbishing of what was essentially the outmoded Shaftesbury-
Hutcheson theory of the moral sense was a feature that Ralph Emerson
would certainly not soon forget. It was also important for him that Frisbie,
earlier a professor of Latin, was a devotee of both ancient and English
literature and a formidable critic of composition. After college the pupil
affectionately remembered his old teacher as one of our "minds of repub-
lican strength and elegant accomplishments" and as an eloquent apostle
of the beauty of virtue.

For some time at least, Ralph continued to respect Bishop Butler, one
of the sober thinkers whose works were prescribed by the college catalogue
for all seniors. He doubtless got the required political economy in the same
year, and he read assigned essays in The Federalist. He seems to have
studied Professor Gorham's text in chemistry, a regular part of the cur-
riculum; but apparently he did not yet feel enough enthusiasm for exact
knowledge of the physical world to wish, as he afterwards did, for leisure
to go "to the college or the scientific school which offered best lectures on
Geology, Chemistry, Minerals, Botany, and seek to make the alphabets of
those sciences clear to me." As a boy, though he was probably seldom guilty
of mere reverie, he preferred his own thoughts, and in his diary he wrote:
"These soliloquies are certainly sweeter than Chemistry!53 It was only
toward the end of his senior year that he put his best efforts into several
projects in a final and somewhat belated attempt to build up a reputation
as a leading undergraduate writer and speaker, and these projects were all
extracurricular.

From miscellaneous sources with which his textbooks had little to do
he drew inspiration for the poem he read at what seems to have been his
only appearance on a college exhibition program. He was now unwittingly
rehearsing the method he was to use in much of his mature writing. What
he had kept or remembered of his theme on climate and culture could
have served as a useful foundation. In it he had used India and her super-
stitions as his chief example of the evil effects of a hot climate. He bor-
rowed some of the verses he had written for the Pythologian Club. Possibly
he recalled first-hand observations that his relative William Farnham had
reDorted to the Emersons a few years before, upon returning from Calcutta.

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 83

He may even have had some recollection of the books relating to India
that had been in his father's library.

He had once included The Asiatic Miscellany, by Sir William Jones
and others, in a list of books he had read, and something may have come
from it. Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama, a mine of information on
Hindu mysteries, had been referred to by Professor Edward Everett's
brother John in an oration that Ralph had long since rhapsodized over.
Ralph had once been enthusiastic about a passage from the Hindu classic
of Menu that he had found in one of Southey's notes. And in later years,
at least, both the story of The Curse of Kehama and its author's glosses
haunted him with paralyzing terror. He was thus getting an early intro-
duction to Hindu lore that warranted him in picturing in his own poem
a "stern Bramin armed with plagues divine," a sinister figure quite unlike
the religious aristocrat destined to capture his imagination.

But the slightly more than one hundred and fifty lines which he sum-
marized in his title as "Indian Superstition" were only the green fruit of
his private method of rambling literary exploration and were not appetiz-
ing fare to offer to his public. Though the poem was not a thing to be
proud of, it was his one serious bid for fame as a college poet, and he urged
recalcitrant Aunt Mary to be on hand for the senior exhibition, modestly
assuring her that "not twenty present will know that your proud ladyship
is related to the despised & ragged poet" and warning her that she "must
not ask for Waldo the Poet" as he was "better known by the name of
Emerson the Senior." On April 24 a throng of persons who, if they lived
up to the description he had given his aunt in advance, were "the leaders
of the fashion" and a "spectacle of this world's splendour" heard the poem.
After the announced exercises there were probably doings of a less decorous
sort with which the poet could hardly have been much concerned. Even
if this exhibition night was as wild as that of the preceding October had
been,, "with merriment and wine, evincing or eliciting gay, fraternal feeling
enough, but brutalized and defiled with excess of physical enjoyment," he
doubtless came through it unscathed and outwardly unperturbed.

Some three months later he was back in the public eye on two suc-
ceeding days. His "Dissertation on the Present State of Ethical Philosophy"
earned him one of the two second Bowdoin prizes. The thirty-four-page
treatise seemed to one of the contestants "long and dry," but Ralph pos-
sibly impressed the faculty members by his fidelity to their own general
view of philosophy. He was, at any rate, like them in having little or no
traffic with the new German thinkers and was as convinced as they were
that the true advance must go on under the guidance of the Scottish
philosophers whose great leaders had been Reid and Stewart.

84 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

On the following morning he made a sober class poet, announcing that
it was time to put away childish things.

Gambol and song and jubilee are done,
Life's motley pilgrimage must be begun . . .

he warned. He bewailed Europe's unhappy destiny, congratulated America
on her noble future, and paid a parting tribute to the college. But he
probably remembered his own halting lines with less pleasure than the
valedictory oration that his classmate Robert Barnwell delivered at that
same meeting in the chapel. Barnwell, also concerned about the perennial
problem of Europe and America, declared that "The childhood of our
country has past . . . We have broken from the mental thraldom, under
which a foreign literature had too long confined us. ... We will live
for ourselves. . . . We will turn to our own history . , . let us unite all
our powers to promote the establishment of a national literature." This
was only a boy's echo of voices speaking out everywhere in America, but
to an admiring classmate it might be important.

Ralph Emerson probably felt little pride in his part of these exercises,
for not fewer than six other boys, it is said, had refused the honor of being
class poet before he accepted it. He presumably kept his wits when his
classmates got tipsy and marched through the streets of Cambridge, shout-
ing insults as they passed faculty homes. He was probably not one of the
noisiest of the crowd who showed their contempt for authority by dancing
around the Rebellion Tree. With the rest of the boys he came near doing
without the final honor of formal graduation exercises. Only the vote of
President Kirkland prevented the faculty from canceling the whole com-
mencement program. The faculty had had enough of the incorrigible Class
of 1821.

With the aid of a final examination bearing heavily upon the allied
subjects of moral philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, the seniors were
able to take stock of their scholarly achievements. Ralph Emerson was
"number thirty in a class of fifty-nine" and presumably would have been
lower except for his record of good conduct. Yet in the practice of his own
private elective system he was doing much better. He would not have served
as an illustration of the educational theory expounded to the class by their
tutor Caleb Gushing in his farewell speech. Gushing was sure that "The
advantage of pursuing our studies in a public seminary consists not in
reading certain books, but in reading them methodically, with instructers
to give unity and plan to the whole course of studies, together with the
stimulus of public distinction to produce competition." Ralph was doubt-

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 85

less reading few books methodically, but he was looking into many. Relics
of them were scattered through his journals— "Wide Worlds/3 "Universes,"
and others. In a document he labeled "Catalogue— of Books read from the
date December 1819— in the order of time" he seems to have tried to
measure his progress by a method his professors neglected. The part of the
list he apparently covered before graduation contained perhaps eighty or
ninety titles and a beadroll of literary names extending from Plato to Wash-
ington Irving.

As a writer, he had won a few prizes but had done nothing worth
remembering. His saving graces were his tender age and his unflagging,
though, from the point of view of the faculty, misapplied, ambition and
perseverance. He had got some commendation from Aunt Mary, who was
usually severely critical. In the spring of his senior year she thought she
had discovered a happy revolution in his style, but her discovery would
have been much more firmly supported by the extant examples of his writ-
ing if it had come a few months later. He must have learned something
of the art of writing from his professors, especially Channing, and was
learning much more from the great books whose acquaintance he was
rapidly making.

Socially, his achievement disappointed him. He had made a few close
friends and a few others who were enough interested in him to be his
correspondents for some months. His infatuation, in his junior and senior
years, for Martin Gay, a student of his own age but two classes behind
him, had no social results. Cool Gay, as he was called by his classmates,
was a friend only in his admirer's journals. Ralph was struck by Gay's
features and thought they showed character. He somehow became fas-
cinated, but his fascination was not enough to prevent him from delib-
erately proceeding to dissection. A "dozen times a day, and as often by
night" his mind reverted to the magnetic boy and he wrapped himself up
in "conjectures of his character and inclinations." After months he and
Gay had had only "two or three long profound stares at each other," but
Ralph persisted in his silent admiration through most of his last college
year, when, having heard an unfavorable tale about Gay, he decided that
he would have to throw him off after all "as a cheat of fancy." The whole
experience struck him chiefly as an interesting psychological problem. The
problem, however, was doubtless mainly his own. He was delving slightly
into his unconscious self.

He had none of the social graces that grew out of easy living. Of the
less than $700 spent on his four years of college, he cyphered it out that
he earned $50 by keeping school and $55 in prizes and that all but about
$150 of the remainder came from the church or from charitable friends.

86 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

He was at a disadvantage with many of his mates because of the poverty
of his Boston background. His mother, looking out for the best opportunities
to save money, did not often remain settled for many months. In April
of his senior year she had moved her family from Franklin Place to the
neighboring Federal Street. As the new home was at No. 26, the Federal
Street Church, built by Charles Bulfinch and now presided over by the
distinguished Doctor Channing, must have been an attractive feature of the
noisy neighborhood for the Emersons. Ralph's second cousin George Bar-
rell Emerson, having quitted his Harvard tutorship., soon came to live with
them, bringing his brother. In general the boarders, since the move from
Franklin Place, were less troublesome, and Ralph's sick brother Bulkeley
could be more conveniently cared for here. But the Emerson family home
was still a boarding place; and, if Harvard friends came there, they were
likely to find it filled with uncongenial people.

Whatever the total reckoning, college life came to a close in no blaze
of glory for Ralph. He was just high enough in his rating to get one of
the commencement parts into which the lowest students admitted to the
program were unceremoniously crammed in twos and threes. He did not
feel like taking part in the customary conviviality marking the end of
student days. To his Aunt Ripley, the schoolmaster's sister, he wrote
gloomily: "I shall not have a dinner and have not asked any body— for
a conference is a stupid thing ... if you think of coming we shall be
very happy to see you; Mother and Aunt and a host of brothers will be
there." As the official program for August 29 announced, he was to confer
with Arnos Goodwin and William Pope "On the Character of John Knox,
William Penn, and John Wesley." Pope absented himself. Ralph, accord-
ing to his boyhood friend Sam Bradford., had looked forward to a poem
as his assignment and was so mortified at having nothing but some insig-
nificant prosing on John Knox that even after the audience began arriving
he still had to memorize his part, and when he finally spoke it he leaned
heavily on the prompter.

Some of his classmates were more fortunate. George Washington Adams
discoursed at length upon the influence of natural scenery on poetry, using
some phrases which, though not fresh, might remain in the memory of
one hearer- In the calm, lovely landscape, said young Adams, one felt a
quietness, a sense of tranquillity which was itself a temporary happiness;
but nature did not always smile, for she sympathized with other emotions
than those of kindness and sympathy. John Hill, one of Ralph's fellow
members of the nameless society of debaters and orators, tried to decide
"Whether there be an ultimate standard of Taste?" and arrived at the
conclusion that "It is vain to talk of taste without models." Samuel Hatch

UNDER THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 87

praised conservatives and warned against perpetual change. Josiah Quincy
thought that the literary history of France, Britain, and all nations went
to prove that "elegant literature has no other basis than that of the ancient
classics" and "That to any great elevation or extension of literature a large
& liberal public patronage is essential; & that ... a republick is the only
soil in which it naturally flourishes.'3

John Pierce, the tireless attendant upon commencement exercises, praised
Upham and Barnwell for their parts. A pessimistic newspaper reporter
agreed but lamented "an inferiority so obvious in the present class . . .
as to induce a general expression of disappointment.53 Though it used to
be an honor to go to college, times had changed, he grumbled. "At the
present day the merest blockhead in the world is sent thither to render him
wise, but it is seldom he closes his career without coming forth a greater
dunce than when he began it." Ralph Emerson thought the best thing on
the commencement program was an oration on genius by Sampson Reed,
a graduate who had returned to Cambridge, after the prescribed three
years of good behavior, to take his Master's degree. Reed's theme was the
divinity of genius. The young Swedenborgian was vigorously announcing
a new spiritual dawn. It is not surprising that, though his bold proclama-
tion struck most listeners as dull and tiresome, it caught the fancy of the
senior from Federal Street and he borrowed the manuscript and copied
it. The somber stanzas that William Cullen Bryant, a guest poet from the
Berkshires, recited at a meeting of Phi Beta Kappa on the following day
rounded out the commencement season but seem to have left no lasting
impression on Ralph. Perhaps, since Ralph had failed of election to the
honorary fraternity, he did not attend, though the public was invited.

He wrote little, it seems, for months to come, and so left only a very
incomplete record of feelings inspired by the end of his academic life. He
would naturally overlook for many years some of the benefits he had got,
or might have got, from academic discipline. But he had reason to remem-
ber his personal hurt when he thought of his alma mater. He "was not
often highly flattered by success," he confessed, "and was every day morti-
fied by my own ill fate or ill conduct." After a few months he went back
and sentimentalized in the old haunts; but there was doubtless real bitter-
ness as well as gay humor in his comment to a classmate: "I have dark-
ened upon Cambridge but once since Commencement, my love for it was
so wonderful, passing the love of women."

He was undoubtedly afraid that he had been on the wrong track, and
he suffered some pangs of conscience. But he never fully repented of his
"ill conduct" in failing to concentrate on the assigned lessons and join in
the general contest for the honors awarded largely for thoroughness of

88 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

preparation and accuracy of memory. Instead, within a dozen years or so,
he concluded that he had been right in trusting his own instincts. "I was
the true philosopher in college/5 he decided, "and Mr. Farrar and Mr,
Hedge and Dr. Ware the fake, yet what seemed then to me less probable?"
By that time he was gradually transmuting his unhappy emotional experi-
ences into a satisfying theory of the proper conduct of one's life.

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER

Of studie took he moost cure and moost heede,
Noght o word spak he moore than was neede,
And that was seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quyk, and ful of hy sentence.
Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne . . .

—Chaucer, prologue to The Canterbury Tales

EFORE the end of his senior year Ralph Waldo Emerson had
dropped his first name, and he soon insisted on being called Waldo.
His mother liked the name Waldo, perhaps because it helped to
distinguish him from her brother Ralph. Another reason for the
change may have been that when the boy's second cousin and former
tutor, George Emerson, joined Ruth Emerson's household in May of 1821
to begin some two years of residence there, he brought a brother with him.
George's brother was presumably the same Ralph Emerson whom Waldo
long afterwards recommended as a person "I knew . . . well in his youth."
Waldo, being inevitably doomed to the family purgatory of school-
teaching, had some hope that the Latin School would give him an usher-
ship. On a visit to Providence he may have looked for an opening there.
He did not relish the prospect of serving under his brother William. He
complained to Aunt Mary about a fatal Gehenna and a doleful day in
prospect and described himself as a dull and condemned mortal. He feared
that teaching girls and writing poetry might not mix. But he was soon
convinced that there was no escape for him, and before the end of the
year he had settled down as assistant in William's school for what the
prospectus called young ladies.

William, his supervisor, was a good teacher and disciplinarian. Two
years before, at eighteen, he had "offered himself as a grave & experienced
professor, who had seen much of life, & was ready to give the overflow-
ings of his wisdom & ripe maturity to the youth of his native city." He
was quiet and amiable, but his mind was method and order and "the tap
of his pencil" was sufficient to "enforce a silence & attention which spas-
modic activity of other teachers cannot often command." However much

9o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

the younger boy might dislike dependence on a brother, such a colleague
was a godsend for the shy and unmethodical Waldo. George Emerson, now
living in their home, must have been a fountain of advice for both his
younger cousins. Concluding that the competitive system was wrong, he
had refused an offer to stay on at Harvard as a professor, preferring to be
principal of the new English Classical School in Boston, where he was
promised a free hand in putting his own theories to the proof. There it
soon came out that he did not believe in corporal punishment, a form of
discipline still commonly used; and he told his seventy-five pupils that he
would never strike a blow unless they compelled him to and would believe
every word they said until they had been proved guilty of lying. He begged
the boys not to try to surpass each other but only themselves and promised
that the dull boy and the bright boy would get the same mark if each did

his best.

In comparison with these experienced teachers, Waldo Emerson was
a mere novice, and his weaknesses seemed extraordinary to him. He was
terrified at entering a girls5 school and was troubled by what he later called
"the infirmities of my cheek," "occasional admirations of some of my
pupils," and "vexation of spirit when the will of the pupils was a little too
strong for the will of the teacher/3 Sometimes he evaded severe tests of his
disciplinary powers by sending refractory pupils to his mother's room, thus
compelling them to undergo a minor sort of rustication. The girls were
naturally unable to resist the temptation to tease so young a teacher. At
election time they made a point of asking him whether he was going to
vote; and, though he was now officially "Mr Waldo," they called him
Ralph among themselves. But their refraining from laughter when he tipped
his chair too far and fell over backward showed their liking for him.

For compositions, he assigned such subjects as "Say not that the Former
Days were Better than these" and "Has Climate Any Influence on Char-
acter?" These were topics that he had already worked over in college. He
read the papers carefully and was struck by the singularly sonorous style
of one and the good sense of another. He labeled "Eloquent" a theme on
slavery, written by a girl whose nursery bedspread had depicted the evils
of the slave trade. A manuscript of his headed "Story for September loth
1823 Ginevra" and another marked "Stories to be written by learners"
were presumably used to inspire written or oral composition and to make
historical or geographical lessons palatable. When he assigned Fenelon,
together with Racine, Corneille, and Bossuet, he may have been braced
by his notes on Ticknor's lectures; but these would not have helped his
pronunciation, and he suffered from "timidities at French."

He taught Hume's history of England and was amazed and distressed

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 91

to find that one of the girls had memorized the whole of a forty-page
assignment. In his classroom, it seems, the Scottish trio of Thomas Reid,
Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Brown supplied most of the philosophical
reading. According to one pupil, "If any one was interested in Stewarts
philosophy it made him happy." The thinkers he had liked best in his col-
lege days seemed to dominate the young master still. The girls read poems
to him as one of their lessons, but he was too shy to- show them his own
favorites. He was at the time writing down his thoughts on morals, but,
as he said later, "no hint of this ever came into the school, where we clung
to the safe & cold details of languages, geography, arithmetic, & chemistry.33

Besides teaching in his brother's school, he seems to have given some
private instruction. According to Elizabeth Peabody, he and she sat shyly
together while he instructed her in Greek without charge. This seems,
according to her story, to have been in 1821. But any such tutoring by
Waldo could hardly have lasted long. Elizabeth Hoar remembered how
she was left one day in his charge. She thought him an unusual sort of
schoolmaster as uhe came out to th garden where she was & holding out
his hand said "Come now, my young friend3— as if an angel spoke." But
if Elizabeth Hoar was eleven at the time as she said, this must have been
near the end of his schoolteaching days.

However much the shy youth may have seemed an angel in the eyes
of young girls, he was a schoolmaster much against his will and looked
for the quickest way out of his treadmill. In one of his verse books he
jotted down the saying that

It takes philosopher or fool
To build a fire or keep a school.

To his classmate John Hill, then teaching in Maryland, he confessed, "I
am (I wish I was otherwise) keeping a school & assisting my venerable
brother lift the truncheon against the fair-haired daughters of this raw
city. It is but fair that those condemned to the 'delightful task,' should
have free leave to waste their wits, if they will, in decrying & abominating
the same." To his journal his tone was almost as rebellious and more
despondent. "But now I am," he wrote, "a hopeless Schoolmaster, just
entering upon years of trade to which no distinct limit is placed; toiling
through this miserable employment even without the poor satisfaction of
discharging it well, for the good suspect me, and the geese dislike me."

He was not quite hopeless and had times of pleasant freedom. In the
late spring, toward the end of the first year of his teaching, he was off
with William on a walking tour. Northboro, some thirty miles west of
Boston, was their terminal point, and there they settled down for a week

92 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

in a farmhouse and were joined by their brother Edward. To the boys from
the large town this region seemed idyllic. They lodged near a pond called
Little Chauncey, and often crossed it and "then," Waldo said, "tied our
bark to a tree on the opposite shore and plunged into the pathless woods,
into forests silent since the birth of time, and lounged on the grass, with
Bacon's Essays, or Milton, for hours.'5

Waldo was brooding over the problem of society and solitude and de-
bating it with Aunt Mary. "I cannot tell," he wrote her, "but it seemed
to me that Cambridge would be a better place to study than the woodlands.
I thought I understood a little of the intoxication, which you have spoken
of; but its tendency was directly opposed to the slightest effort of mind or
body; it was a soft animal luxury, the combined result of the beauty which
fed the eye; the exhilarating Paradise air, which fanned & dilated the
sense; the novel melody, which warbled from the trees. Its first charm
passed away rapidly with a longer acquaintance, but not once, during our
stay, was I in any fit mood to take my pen, cand rattle out the battles
of my thoughts,3 as Ben Jonson saith well. . . . Perhaps in the Autumn,
which I hold to be the finest season in the year, and in a longer abode
the mind might, as you term it, return upon itself; but for a year, without
books it would become intolerable."

He made some progress in literary explorations even when teaching
drained most of his energy. In spite of a remark that he abhorred leaving
a volume half read, probably his cardinal vice was already "intellectual
dissipation-sinful strolling from book to book, from care to idleness."
According to his own special list of books "read," he somehow got through,
or through with, at least three volumes of Sfcrnondi on the literature of
southern Europe, Hallam on the Middle Ages, a volume of Samuel Clarke's
theology, Byron's tragedies, five volumes of Gibbon's Roman Empire, Erskine
on revealed religion, Alexander Everett's Europe, Morc's Utopia, four vol-
umes of Sully's memoirs, three of Lemaire's volumes on the French Revo-
lution, the second part of Dugald Stewart's dissertation. Parts I and II of
Playfair's dissertation on the progress of mathematical and physical science,
Cook's voyages, a life of Burns, a volume of Milton's prcse, Jeremy Taylor's
Holy Dying, apparently some new volumes of Gibbon, Mackintosh's intro-
ductory lecture, a volume of Burke, the posthumous writings of his old
teacher Professor Frisbie, two volumes of Franklin's works, two volumes
of Hume's essays, Boileau's poetical works, Voltaire's Charles XII, and
Moliere's Le Misanthrope.

Presumably before the end of 1824 he had got what he cared most
to get out of the whole of this list., including some books by the inevitable
Walter Scott. He continued his reading of Scott much in the order of the

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 93

novels as they came from the press-— The Pirate, The Fortunes of Nigel,
Quentin Durward, St. Ronan's Well, and Redgauntlet. He was engaged
in his most extensive excursion into fiction. With The Pirate his enthusiasm
began to cool. As for American fiction, he would not admit any com-
parison between The Spy and Scott's novels, and he was disappointed when,
as he judged from some extracts he saw, the Irving of Bracebridge Hall
"left his fine Sketchbook style, for the deplorable Dutch wit of Knicker-
bocker." But when The Pioneers was published he quickly joined in Cooper's
praise.

He criticized Shakespeare because, though their greatness was clear to
him, the plays seemed to fall short of the ideal on the moral side. The fact
that you could cull from Shakespeare's works "a volume of poetry nearly
approaching to sacred inspiration" was the very reason they had wrought
"incalculable mischief," he believed. But he continued to read them and
soon he was quoting them frequently. He weakened in his severely moral-
istic attitude, discovering a noble masterpiece in Hamlet. Still, as in early
college days, he "thirsted to abuse the poetical character" of Wordsworth,
a contemporary poet to be read with caution because "the eye always is
afraid lest it should meet with something offensive at every turn." The
"something offensive" was most probably to be met with in Lyrical Ballads,
then thought by many critics to be a tasteless exhibition of contempt for
the great tradition. Meantime Aunt Mary's letters suggested new views of
the Hindu lore that Waldo, not long since, had stigmatized as "Indian
Superstition." She quoted for him what she called "a sweet morsel of Hindu
poetry." It made little difference that it was actually an imitation by the
skillful Orientalist Sir William Jones. It sounded the purest mystical and
pantheistical notes in the authentic religious verse of India. All was show
and delusion but the divine:

My soul absorbed one only being knows
Of all perceptions one abundant source ...

Though the schoolmaster had probably seen these lines in The Asiatic
Miscellany, he was as yet hardly more than conscious of the Oriental
treasures. "I am curious to read your Hindu mythologies," he wrote. Hith-
erto he had known only what was in the Christian Register about Ram-
mohun Roy, the Hindu friend of Unitarianism who was turning the minds
of many Americans toward India.

He informed his aunt, in return for her novelties, of his impression of
Italian history. His admiration for Venice, the Queen of the Isles, was
gone because of her disgraceful conduct. But he felt growing respect for
Florence, for her councils "were uniformly marked by a high minded wise

94 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

& patriotic policy far above the spirit displayed by any other state." His
reading in history made him readier to share the interest in European art
that was stirring in Boston, where the plaster casts given to the Athenaeum
attracted the eye, he said, "from the tedious joys of writing & reading."
Pale ghosts of Greece and Rome though they were, they were a revelation
to him. "The beholder," he discovered, "instantly feels the spirit of the
connoisseur stealing over him, &, ere he can exorcise it, rubs up his Latin
& Italian lore . . ."

In January of 1822, he resumed the keeping of his neglected journals,
using them mainly for discussion of religious, philosophical and literary
matters, for self-examination, for a commonplace book, and for a practice
book for his own literary experiments. He did not reveal the extent of his
literary experiments when he wrote to his classmate John Hill early in
1823: "I keep school.— I study neither law, medicine, or divinity, and write
neither poetry nor prose; nor, as you curiously imagined, have I the most
vague intention of inditing Romances. I admire to hear, and aim to tell
good stories . . . but that is all."

Whether seriously or not, he had long been trying to write bits of fic-
tion, mostly moralistic or fantastically imaginative, A few months before
his graduation he had, as he confessed, got deeply interested in "my
Magician," was "as anxious to know the end as any other reader could
be," and thought "this tale of mine might be told with powerful effect by
a man of good voice and natural eloquence"— so deeply had the idea of the
power of the orator taken hold of him. A fragment headed "Richards
Confession" and described as a "Continuation of Magician" was so brief
that it barely got an aged friar posted, in an expectant attitude, beside the
death bed of King Richard. A story of Uilsa, a queen "descended from
an hundred weird women fatal and feared daughters of Odin," ran through
several instalments in the same blotting book and ended with Uilsa in the
suffocating grip of a monstrous serpent.

There was a fragment about Omar, once the favorite of an Oriental
king but now fallen from his high estate. The young romancer was inspired
by Arthurian legend; or he wrote of strange happenings in the Pacific
islands; or, as he sat on the margin of the River of Golden Sands in Africa,
he had a vision of a slave hunt. But his obsession with a dreamlike, exotic
world was already weakening as he realized that the art of fiction, after
passing through an age of magicians, griffins, and metamorphoses, had
come to be more effective, at least for a modern audience, by placing
imaginary persons in real life.

Verse was now playing a minor part in his literary exercises, The in-

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 95

complete prose tale about Richard was matched by a dozen stanzas called
"King Richard's Death. A Ballad." Another ballad on an English king,
a piece destined, after careful grooming and much delay, to be printed
anonymously as "William Rufus and the Jew," followed, but at a distance
of two years. Soon the poet was adventurous enough to experiment with
irregular verse forms, even trying what he called "Prose run mad."

Meanwhile he continued his series of commentaries on the drama,
curious little essays, stiffly moral. Though they might have been intended
as contributions to a periodical, they had an atmosphere of unreality. Their
author, though continually crying for reform, knew little of the contem-
porary theater that he was criticizing; and the playgoers he conjured up
were ancients who had formed their taste on Aeschylus and Sophocles. He
very honestly summed up the series to date for Aunt Mary by saying that
"The drama crawls on but clamours for inspiration." Not content with
theorizing, he tried his hand at a dramatic blank verse fragment in which
an Indian chief eloquently defied the white men before they could cross
the sea. He seemed to be trying to prove that a modern theme could be
made into a play as heroic, and therefore as moral, as an early Greek
tragedy.

His thoughts were also on essay-writing and he was considering proper
models. He had already made up his mind that Montesquieu's Persian
letters were early examples of that literary form and had tried to place
them in relation to The Spectator papers and to The Rambler. Frequently
his journal entries were hardly less than brief attempts at moral and philo-
sophical essays. He tried in one of them to reason out the arguments for
slavery but concluded that "No ingenious sophistry can ever reconcile the
unperverted mind to the pardon of slavery; nothing but tremendous famil-
iarity, and the bias of private interest."

Though there was already a strong undertone of optimism in his specu-
lations, he was still finding the problem of evil tough. He thought no
elaborate argument could remove the stubborn fact of the existence of evil,
and evil was the foremost difficulty in the way of belief in an omnipotent
good Principle. Perhaps history would supply the answer to the question
whether the place of evil in the whole scheme of things could be justified.
Meantime there were the "enslaved, the sick, the disappointed, the poor,
the unfortunate, the dying." Certainly "war is waged in the Universe,
without truce or end, between Virtue and Vice," the nineteen-year-old
philosopher conceded. There was indeed "a huge and disproportionate
abundance of evil on earth," and the good was "but a little island of light
amidst the unbounded ocean." Yet the recompense of virtue was still out

96 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of all proportion to the attractions of vice, and true philosophy saw "amid
the vast disproportions of human condition a great equalization of happi-
ness."

The death of Professor Frisbie, Waldo's former teacher, may have had
something to do with a strong upsurge of interest in the problem of the
moral sense. The moral sense was of divine origin and was persistent in
its activity, the young schoolmaster felt sure. "It sometimes seems to sanc-
tion/' he declared, "that Platonic dream, that the soul of the individual
was but an emanation from the Abyss of Deity, and about to return whence
it flowed." He was ready now to base even his faith in immortality on the
moral sense. He composed a long treatise on "Moral Obligation." And as
if he were planning a formidable essay for publication, he lengthily dis-
cussed the attributes of God.

There was good reason why his interest in religion could hardly exceed
his enthusiasm for history. He was determined to search for an empirical
basis of his theories, and since he himself had not the requisite experience
he immersed himself in history. His historical and religious researches
jointly inspired an essay. Long readings in Mosheim, Gibbon, Hallam, and
Sismondi meant that he was seriously confronting the problem of the
medieval church and its relation to modern Christianity. He began bring-
ing his thoughts to a focus in the summer of 1822.

In its final form "Thoughts on the Religion of the Middle Ages" spec-
ulated on the cause of the "fact of awful interest" that nations passed
through periods of decline into "semi-barbarous repose." The power of the
medieval church had rested on its assumption of an authority over human
conduct that annihilated the independence of society; on adherence to
sanctimonious forms that affected only the surface of society, leaving the
social order fundamentally unregenerate; on accumulated wealth that cor-
rupted the clergy and the popes; and on an exercise of temporal authority
that finally roused the laity against the church and spelled its ruin. The
relapse of the Dark Ages was a lesson to after generations, showing the
need of a pure religion, plain in doctrine and rigid in practice.

This was the gist of the young Unitarian schoolmaster's article in the
opening pages of The Christian Disciple for November and December,
1822. If this was his first publication, he doubtless felt some satisfaction,
though he could hardly have got much applause, for the signature "H. O.
N." gave no clue to his identity. Aunt Mary had hinted in advance that
she had little patience for reading what he and his master Hallam thought
of the religion of the Middle Ages; and after publication, when Charles
Emerson asked her opinion of the piece, she had not seen it. Outside the
family Waldo relaxed his reticence enough to mention the new number

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 97

of the Disciple to his classmate Withington and to suggest, "Please to read
the first article and I will tell you who the writer is." He may have had
hopes of receiving an unbiased judgment, but it is doubtful whether he
got any reply, as his correspondence with Withington seems to have halted
just then for many months and, indeed, all but ended. In one way the
essay might have been important for him, as later events suggested. The
person who gave it its place of prominence in the magazine was doubtless
the editor, the younger Henry Ware. As pastor of the Second Church in
Boston, Ware would naturally look over his contributors with an eye for
promise of future distinction in the pulpit.

Whatever pride Waldo Emerson took in being a published if still ob-
scure author must have been salutary. He had been little enough contented
with himself. A few months earlier he had rated his social ability low and
bewailed what he judged to be his coldness of nature, confessing, with some
exaggeration, that the history of his heart was a blank. He had not been
able to refrain from mentioning his "diseases and aches and qualms/' and
his pessimistic self-appraisal may have been quite as much inspired by these
as by what he called his "desolate soul" His fear that his stop-gap occupa-
tion would hold him back from the ministry, surely his chosen profession,
had added to his discouragement. On the near approach of his nineteenth
birthday, a signal for general invoice-taking, he had discovered "a goading
sense of emptiness and wasted capacity" and had soliloquized bitterly, "Well,
and I am he who nourished brilliant visions of future grandeur which may
well appear presumptuous and foolish now." But ambition still stirred him
deeply, and he was far from giving up hope. Some ten months later, when
he described himself as "hastening to put on the manly robe," the youth-
ful author of "Thoughts on the Religion of the Middle Ages" recalled that
from childhood the names of the great had always resounded in his ear
and admitted frankly, if somewhat grandly, to his journal that "it is im-
possible that I should be indifferent to the rank which I must take in the
innumerable assembly of men." For the present, however, he could only
plod on with his school for young ladies.

It could hardly have been any lack of financial prosperity in the school
'that determined the family to leave Federal Street and Boston on May 24,
1823, one day before Waldo's twentieth birthday. They had no intention
of giving up the valuable income they got from the school. Presumably
the main reason why they turned their faces toward the fringe of hills
visible on the southern horizon was their hope of finding better health. But
they cared also for the charm of the hill country. There they had the
advantage of living in an unspoiled region not too far from the large town
where the two young schoolmasters did their teaching. Stones and trees

q8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EA1ERSON

became humanized and acquired such friendly and familiar names as the
Study, the Cliff, and the Pine-grove. Waldo discovered that there was "an
excellence in Nature which familiarity never blunts the sense of— a serene
superiority to man & his art."

Aunt Mary, long used to frequent retreats into the deep solitude of
Maine, commented that the family were now pleasantly translated "into
what you call the Country." The part of Roxbury to which Ruth Emerson
and her sons had moved was actually a temperately rough and wooded
countryside later included in Franklin Park. To reach the little farmhouse in
"Light Lane, Lower Canterbury," from their schoolroom it was necessary
for Waldo and William to travel some two miles over the Dedham Turn-
pike, "a continuation of the Main St. in Boston," and then a little farther
over a country lane. Their landlord was Stedman Williams, "a farmer of
30 yrs standing," who lived near by.

The neighborhood was then sometimes called Canterbury. Light Lane
seems to have been only one of a number of names, some facetious, that
were locally used. The Emersons3 house, standing in a gravelly lawn that
stretched "to an immeasureable extent on every side," was old and appar-
ently was an attractive home only because of the surrounding landscape.
But there was soon some society. Before the year was out Uncle Ralph
Haskins had bought a place within a mile and a half. There was much
going back and forth, and the Haskins house was particularly convenient
for the residents of Light Lane because it was on the way to Boston. Some-
times the Haskinses could hear the Emerson boys making the woods resound
with declamations and dialogues.

Even before the powerful Mill Corporation had built its new link to
the mainland Boston had had a firm hold on little suburban Roxbury, and
a stream of traffic between the two flowed over the marshy neck of the
peninsula. But all was peaceful a little off the main highway. Before a
year of this new life had passed, Waldo believed he had realized his "infant
aspirations" to be perfectly content among rocks and woods. Roxbury
seemed to him an old and pleasant home. Boston, where he earned money
in order to be respectable, was the House of Pride, with no comfortable
room for him. In his journal he wrote:

Good bye, proud world, I'm going home
Thou'rt not my friend & Im not thine
Long I've been tossed like the salt sea foam
All day mid weary crowds I roam

Good bye to Flattery's fawning face,

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 99

To Grandeur with his wise grimace.

To upstart Wealth's averted eye,

To supple office low & high

To frozen hearts & hasting feet

To noisy Toil, to Court & Street.

To those who go & those who come

Good bye, proud world ! I'm going home.

I'm going to my own hearth stone
Bosomed in yon green hills alone
Sweet summer birds are warbling there
forever mair

In spite of the somewhat exaggerated antisocial mood of these verses, the
passion for nature which they expressed was sincere. Even a more secluded
retreat would have pleased Waldo Emerson, at least for a time. Already, in
the late summer of 1823, after but a few months of Roxbury, he had gone
off, with Bacon's essays for company, on a tour, mostly pedestrian, to the
Connecticut Valley, through Worcester and as far as Amherst, Northamp-
ton, and Greenfield. Such a tour gave him at once the pleasure of new
landscapes and the sense of complete escape from his schoolroom.

Still heartily disliking the schoolroom and nursing his ambition to be
a minister, Waldo considered the vague possibility of studying theology at
Andover, presumably because of the learning of the faculty and in spite of
the conservative theology taught in the Calvinist stronghold. A move in that
direction would doubtless have been supported by his sometimes extremely
orthodox Aunt Mary, and though his serious intention was to return to
Harvard for his theology, he himself was not quite sure how far liberalism
should go. "An exemplary Christian of today, and even a Minister," he
told one of his old college mates, "is content to be just such a man as was
a good Roman in the days of Cicero or of the imperial Antonines. . . .
Presbyterianism & Calvinism at the South, at least make Christianity a
more real & tangible system . . ." But this was, he thought, "the most
which can be said of orthodoxy." So his doubts remained unsettled. "When
I have been to Cambridge & studied Divinity," he promised, "I will tell
you whether I can make out for myself any better system than Luther or
Calvin, or the liberal besoms of modern days. I have spoken thus because
I am tired & disgusted with preaching which I have been accustomed to
hear."

He kept track of his young contemporaries who were outdistancing him
in the race for the gown and band. He went over to Cambridge and heard

ioo THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

his classmate Charles Upham preach his first sermon before the divinity
students and listened to Professor Andrews Norton's eulogy and critique
of it. He may also have attended some of the public examinations, or
exhibitions, which the divinity faculty had begun to hold in the college
chapel. Meantime, though he felt a strong urge toward extreme liberalism
in religious creed, he was trying to hold fast to something that would
justify his going on into the ministry.

In reality Calvinism, in spite of Aunt Mary's gibe that he knew only
a few bugbear words of it, had no chance with him. His admiration for a
passage from one of Frothingham's sermons describing Calvinism as a doc-
trine which "represents man as 'coming into the world girt in the poison
robes of hereditary depravity & with the curses of his Maker on his head3 "
indicated the direction in which he was going. That he was still willing
to confess publicly his faith in something less vague than pagan doctrine
in the age of the Antonines was, however, made clear on the last day of
May, 1823, not quite a week after his twentieth birthday, when he and
his brother William signed the "Declaration of Faith subscribed by the
members of the First Church of Christ in Boston," Frothingham's own
church :

I. We, whose names are underwritten, declare our Faith in the only

living and true God.

II. We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that he was sanctified of the
Father, and sent into the world, that he might "redeem us from
all iniquity; and purify to himself a peculiar people zealous of
good works."

III. We believe in that gospel, which was ratified by the death and
resurrection of its author; and solemnly promise to make it the
only rule of our faith and practice.

United by the ties of one Lord, one common Faith, and one
Baptism, we promise to live in Christian love; to watch over each
other as members of the same body; to counsel and assist, when-
ever there shall be occasion; to be faithful to our master, and
faithful to each other, waiting in joyful hope of an eternal happy
intercourse in the heavenly world.

The same declaration had been signed by the members of the First Church
for many years past. One signature was that of Ruth Emerson. But if read
in the most liberal way this creed was not too narrow for a Unitarian in
1823. Undoubtedly Waldo read it the liberal way, and, so read, it marked
a point from which one dimension of his future growth as a thinker might
be measured.

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 101

Within a few months he had fallen into the long procession of dis-
ciples of William Ellery Channing. He walked into Boston almost every
Sunday to hear the preacher who, in spite of his frail body, his dislike of
controversy, and his horror of any kind of orthodoxy, even the Unitarian
kind, was now taking the lead among Unitarians. Channing seemed to
prove that one could be nominally a minister and yet be almost free of
creeds. Still, even he held to a belief in the unique importance of Jesus,
in the historicity of the gospel story, and therefore in miracles, with some
exceptions. For him the Bible, if not inspired, was at least a record of
inspiration.

But whatever horizons Waldo Emerson looked toward, the school for
young ladies seemed to stand in the way, circumscribing his freedom of
thought and action. After some two years as assistant to his brother William
he was about to take over the whole responsibility. Edward, now begin-
ning to take an important place in the family councils, had "ciphered it
all out" that it would be best for both William and the family if William
prepared for the ministry in Germany while Waldo and Edward himself
kept the pot boiling at home. Edward would teach and study law, and
when William returned from abroad the two of them would be ready to
take over the family finances while Waldo took his turn at professional
studies. Channing, being consulted, vainly protested, advising William to
study divinity at home rather than at Gottingen. Germany, he said, was
better for literature; but one who intended to preach in New England had
better study his divinity there. Yet Edward Everett, an old Gottingen stu-
dent, sent letters of introduction, unasked. Ticknor supplied more introduc-
tions. On December 5, 1823, William set sail for Europe.

Edward, keeping his part of the agreement, got a school of about one
hundred boys and was ready to turn ten weeks of his winter college vaca-
tion into cash. He was a highly efficient intellectual engine. At college he
was the great orator and quickened Waldo's love of oratory. His past record
was impressive. He had ended his junior year on the exhibition program
with his English oration on the encouragement of a sound literature as the
duty of the patriot. The love of literature, joined with a proper regard for
morals, would make America the chosen theater of God's mighty drama,
the orator had declared, and he had closed with the conventional burst of
patriotic prophecy. From this time he was perfectly at home on the platform.

His great hour came in 1824, on his commencement day, the day of
La Fayette's suddenly arranged visit to Harvard. For Waldo the occasion
had special significance, not only because it was Edward's day, but because
it was his own third academic anniversary. Though he was not a candidate,
some twenty-five of his classmates, having behaved acceptably during their

102 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

three years since graduation and having paid the required fee, were to
receive their Master's degrees. But the prime attraction was La Fayette
himself, seated conspicuously on the platform. "Never was homage so un-
bounded, so heartfelt, so spontaneous/' said one observer. "It was as if one
of the great heroes of history had been permitted to return to earth." The
speakers generally made it a point to allude to the old French warrior and
statesman, Washington's friend, "and so permitted the repressed rapture
to burst forth." Edward Emerson's oration, "The Advancement of the Age,"
marked the climax of the exercises. The brilliant senior with the "beau-
tiful countenance full of force & fire, yet of an almost feminine refinement,"
was unot merely the first scholar in his class but first by a long interval";
and now he had reason to do his best. According to the family tradition,
when he finally began to speal the huskiness of voice that had long been
his curse troubled him at first; but it cleared, and he addressed La Fayette
in well-modulated tones. Waldo, sitting in the audience, felt a glow of
pride and triumph strong enough to last until many years later when, with
incredulous eyes, he examined Edward's manuscript and saw how juvenile
the college oratory had been.

Yet even while Edward was winning his laurels in college and Charles
was getting a first prize at the Latin School, Waldo tempered his elation
with some second thoughts on the family's achievements. He confided to
one of the Concord relatives his opinion that "Proud & poor spirits are
not very far divided in this world . . . Men cheat each other & them-
selves with ostentatious distinctions . . . they are all the disciples & slaves,
& your only true Masters & Emperors are Time & Chance." He himself
was living through a daily round of commonplaces. He pursued "the labours
of the school, & the cares & studies at home" with "unrelaxing industry,
& perseverance," his mother remarked with more satisfaction than he felt.
He re-established the School for Young Ladies in a "good new room back
of Trinity church," within a stone's throw of the place in Summer Street
where he had once attended the A B C class. He had to pay a rental of
$150 a year and faced severe competition, but still he could count profits
from his "23 or 4" pupils.

Edward, not much spoiled by his college distinctions, was prepared now
to chain himself to an oar in the family galley. He had, indeed, already
taken a private school for boys in Roxbury with an estimated income of
$600 or $700. Within a few months there were new financial rainbows,
for the Haskins brothers were going ahead, on behalf of Ruth Emerson
and numerous other Haskins heirs, with the building of a hotel and stable
on the family estate in Rainsford's Lane. Mortgages had to be negotiated,
but there was hope of sizeable returns. The old Haskins Mansion House

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 103

itself had now been repaired so as to bring a higher rental the following
year, and Ruth Emerson was looking forward to receiving her small part.
Waldo betrayed an unfeigned interest in the family finances, as the time
of harvest in the school would be short. The girls would desert him, "for,"
he said, "they wax old," and not enough replacements were coming in.

If he was to study theology at Cambridge, the sooner the better. And
in order to shorten what might otherwise be three years of poverty there,
he was planning to enter the middle instead of the junior class. He was
already taking "a hebdomadal walk,35 sometimes to a Mr. Cunningham,
sometimes to Doctor Channing, "for the sake of saying I am studying di-
vinity.5* Though Channing, already famous as a preacher, was not an
unconstrained, friendly person who could easily communicate himself to
individuals, he doubtless made a deep impression on the mind of his young
disciple.

For the moment his doctrinal influence must have been conservative.
Only a few months before, he had preached a discourse on revelation that
Waldo thought unrivaled since its author's Dudleian lecture. Channing, in
his discourse, had "considered God's word to be the only expounder of his
works," and asserted "that Nature had always been found insufficient to
teach men the great doctrines which Revelation inculcated." Revelation
was "as much a part of the order of things as any other event."

Waldo got a reading list from Channing and borrowed some volumes
from him. But the list of "books for a theological student" that he preserved
was not striking for its originality, and its eleven titles, ranging from Taylor
on holy living and dying to Miss More on practical piety, did not seem
very formidable. Possibly Channing saw that this self-styled theological
student lacked health for hard study, or the list may have been merely an
instalment of a longer one. At any rate it was no such intellectual bill of
fare as the Doctor did, on occasion, give out.

Yet if Waldo Emerson was not accomplishing much hard work, he was
not drifting blindly, and in his attempt to get oriented and to chart his
further course intelligently he was getting more guidance from Channing
than a shelf of selected readings would have been likely to give. A few
weeks before his twenty-first birthday, at the beginning of what he called
his professional studies, he had followed up his deliberate dedication of
himself to the church with a sober inventory of his abilities and character-
istics, the basis of any hope he might have of success. It was in his diary
for ready reference if he needed to think it through again: "My reasoning
faculty is proportionably weak, nor can I ever hope to write a Butler's
Analogy or an Essay of Hume. Nor is it strange that with this confession
I should choose theology, which is from everlasting to everlasting 'debate-

104 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

able ground.' For, the highest species of reasoning upon divine subjects is
rather the fruit of a sort of moral imagination, than of the 'Reasoning
Machines/ such as Locke and Clarke and David Hume. Dr. Channing's
Dudleian Lecture is the model of what I mean, and the faculty which
produced this is akin to the higher flights of the fancy. I may add that the
preaching most in vogue at the present day depends chiefly on imagination
for its success, and asks those accomplishments which I believe are most
within my grasp." He had come at the profound fact of his mental com-
position in this attempt at self-analysis. The "sort of moral imagination"
making up for a lack of hard logic was it, as he already saw. And Chan-
ning's most important service, now or ever, was doubtless in helping him
to become aware of himself.

But he also had to reckon with some "signal defect of character which,"
as he said, "neutralizes in great part the just influence my talents ought to
have." He had been convinced of this by every comparison of himself with
his mates in years past. "Whether that defect," so it was reasoned out in
the diary, "be in the address ... or deeper seated in an absence of com-
mon sympathies, or even in a levity of the understanding, I cannot tell.
But its bitter fruits are a sore uneasiness in the company of most men and
women, a frigid fear of offending and jealousy of disrespect, an inability
to lead and an unwillingness to follow the current conversation, which con-
trive to make me second with all those among whom chiefly I wish to be
first." He thought he lacked "that good-humoured independence and self-
esteem which should mark the gentleman." He was "ill at ease, therefore,
among men. I criticize," he accused himself, "with hardness; I lavishly
applaud; I weakly argue; and I wonder with a 'foolish face of praise.'"

Yet, unless it also meant eloquence, his moral imagination was not, it
seemed to him, the only basis of his hope to thrive in divinity. He believed
he inherited his father's, or, possibly, paternal grandfather's, love of elo-
quence. He burned "after the caliquid irnmensum infinitumque' which
Cicero desired," and one would learn to imitate when one ardently loved.
In his better hours he was the believer, or dupe, of brilliant promises and
could regard himself as the possessor of powers that would "command the
reason and passions of the multitude." As for the kind of success he ought
to win, he thought it would be chiefly in public preaching but that private
influence would be a necessary objective.

He had long since made similar attempts at frank self-appraisal, but
his eyes were growing sharper and his results were now more concrete. There
was no sentimentalism about his merciless introspection, as he was pre-
paring for action. Along with his belief in compensation, and his optimism,
his doctrine of self-reliance was growing partly out of his personal neces-

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 105

sity. If he lacked self-reliance, he had to have it for success. He was already
a pragmatist. "Every wise man," he believed, "aims at an entire conquest
of himself.53 He knew that he had a long way to go before he could boast
of so complete a victory, but he had at least got far in the direction of a
private philosophy which would serve as a guide and, insisting on self-
reliance for himself, he was at the same time discovering in it a universal
validity.

In view of the profession to which he was dedicated, he was also con-
cerned with the problem of religious faith. But here he found no satisfactory
solution. Even metaphysics and ethics were superficial sciences and gave no
true insight into the nature and design of being. Every system of religion
might be wholly false. Pre-Darwinian ideas of evolution were in the air?
and the young student of theology seemed already to have a presentiment
of the shocks religion would suffer from that direction. "To glowing hope,
moreover, 3t is alarming," he confessed, "to see the full and regular series
of animals from mites and worms up to man; yet he who has the same
organization and a little more mind pretends to an insulated and extraor-
dinary destiny to which his fellows of the stall and field are in no part
admitted, nay are disdainfully excluded,33

Probably few aspirants to the ministry ever showed more conscience
or more imagination than he. He wanted to see his problems in their
broadest meaning. He wrote a lengthy letter to Plato on "the moral and
religious condition of man" for Aunt Mary to answer with a sharp reproof
on Plato's behalf. Though men still commended the wisdom of Plato, he
said, Christ and his apostles had won the day. Yet he saw that the Christian
priesthood were hard put to it to understand their own vocation. Was it
really necessary, he wanted to know, that men should have before them
"the strong excitement of religion and its thrilling motives33? He himself
was still a friend of Christian revelation. "But,33 he said, "I confess it has
not for me the same exclusive and extraordinary claims it has for many.
I hold Reason to be a prior Revelation, and that they do not contradict
each other." No wonder that he watched with keen interest the experiment
his brother -William was making in Germany, where American students,
traveling in the wake of Edward Everett and George Ticknor, were begin-
ning to examine curiously the new historical criticism of religion.

William had arrived at Gottingen in March of 1824. His first reports
were not alluring. After weeks of struggle with the "really appalling33 diffi-
culties of the German language, he could understand something of Eich-
horn3s spoken commentaries on the first three Evangelists and of another
professor's translations, with commentary, of Demosthenes; but by that
time he was critical of the German lecture system— "for you are aware/3

io6 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he wrote to Waldo, "that this recitation of the professor is the leading
feature, perhaps it might be just to add the grand error of the German
system of University instruction." He was also displeased with the social
life of Gottingen and lived in a solitude which, he said, Aunt Mary herself
might envy. He saw his fellow American Calvert frequently and now and
then called on a professor. "With the students/3 he wrote, "I have no inter-
course, and from what I see of them, am not desirous of any." Used to
the paternal system of college government, he was scandalized by their lack
of interest in lectures, their incredible consumption of wine and beer, their
endless feuds and duels, and their frequent rebellions. Soon, however, he
discovered that there was another side to the picture and his mounting
enthusiasm was hard to keep within bounds. "Learn German as fast as you
can/' he advised Waldo, "for you must come here, even if I take to school-
keeping again." He suggested some preparatory exercises. He listed helpful
German books including "all of Herder you can get/5 hoped his brother
cared for Hebrew, and advised his taking a quarter's lessons in speaking
French, "the language of every educated man in Europe."

In letter after letter Waldo disowned any expectation of arriving in
Gottingen. "I shall come to fairy-land as soon/5 he wrote. "Unless I c'd
take the wings of the morning for a packet & feed on wishes instead of
dollars & be clothed with imagination for raiment I must not expect to go."
There were moments when he was less sure of himself. He retreated far
enough to admit that he would be glad to try the new scene. He at least
wanted to hear in exactly what particulars the superior advantages of
Gottingen consisted. But, having listened to other arguments than Wil-
liam's, he wrote that it had been deemed wisest for him "to give up teach-
ing & make haste to be taught and in the very poverty of this course to
forswear Germany & go to the cheapest stall where education can be
bought." "Therefore," he said, "in a few months I shall probably be at
Cambridge & attempt to enter the middle Class, which if practicable will
be an economy of time not to be despised by a hard handed American
who reckons acquisitions by dollars & cents not by learning & skill. I tell
you your German towns are Castles in the air to me."

The awkward timing of transatlantic mails confused the long-range
debate, and it was apt to break out anew when it seemed to be all but
settled. Once more Waldo weakened in his resistance to his brother's re-
iterated advice. He even promised that if William thought it "in every way
advisable, indisputably, absolutely important" for him to go to Gottingen
and would say so distinctly, he would after all "make the sacrifice of time
& take the risk of expense, immediately ." He was therefore ready to yield
on the question of studying German, and Hebrew. "Say particularly if

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 107

German & Hebrew be worth reading for tho3 I hate to study them cordially
I yet will the moment I can count my gains," he finally found courage to
say. "Had I not better put on my hat & take ship for the Elbe . . .?" By
this time he himself was suggesting a new reason why he should take his
turn at Gottingen. This was the danger that otherwise he and William
might finish together at the theological school in Cambridge, where William,
it was understood, .was still planning to go on with his studies. If they fin-
ished together they might be rival candidates for a pulpit.

To Waldo, the effect of German learning on his brother's religious
ideas was inevitably a matter of great interest if hardly one to inquire about
point-blank. In his letters home William gave little ground for suspicion
that his private articles of faith were much affected by Eichhorn's higher
criticism of the Bible, but he was really adhering to his plan to be a minister
in the face of growing religious doubts. Having heard the last of Eichhorn's
lectures, he went on a walking tour to Dresden and back, visiting Weimar
on the way. This meant an opportunity to discuss his personal problem
with one of Germany's wisest men, for travelers were still few and were
prized as much as foreign newspapers.

Goethe, in his journal for September 19, 1824, briefly mentioned
William Emerson from Boston, North America, student at Gottingen, Prot-
estant theologian, and, apparently with some feeling of satisfaction, ap-
pended the information that the visitor waited for him. Though his own
impressions of the occasion were naturally more enthusiastic, William wrote
home only a vague account of their conversation "about America, and then
of other subjects of the highest interest." Only less cryptic in his journal
of the tour, he noted that Goethe soon got to "the state of religion in the
U. S." and "thought we had nothing to do with the different systems of
philosophy, but that the highest aim of life should be for each one to
accommodate himself as perfectly as possible to the station in which he
was placed."

So far as his letters home or his journal revealed, William made no
immediate sign of revolt against such a philosophy of expediency as seemed
to be implied in Goethe's remarks. Yet in a new letter to his brother he
was clearly debating his own relation to such doctrine, and he was pretty
obviously far from confident that an American church would receive the
radical teachings he had now come to accept from his professors. The re-
sults of Eichhorn's investigations of the origins of the gospels were of great
importance for an understanding of Christianity. But there was a disturb-
ing doubt as to these results. "Are we prepared to embrace these in their
fullest extent?" the youthful theologian put it. Eichhorn's findings had an
effect upon the picture of the character of Jesus. "And/5 William told

io8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Waldo, "in this connexion the remark occurs, that every candid theologian
after careful study will find himself wide from the traditionary opinions
of the bulk of his parishioners. Have you yet settled the question, whether
he shall sacrifice his influence or his conscience?"

The exchange of letters across the Atlantic continued with painful slow-
ness, and Waldo gradually got a formidable list of reasons why he should
study German and come to Gottingen for a substantial part of his theology.
William, making a final effort, patiently summed up all the arguments:
"But what advantage shall I reap? say you. At an university-a familiarity
with the German language, which you will probably not otherwise obtain
-then you have in the daily lectures the results of so many centuries of
struggles against superstition and ignorance; you see theology in its every
branch completely developed in the state to which the learned have brought
it, up to yesterday— aye, today. Out of the last arises one of no little con-
sequence, a very great familiarity with Latin and Greek, in the former of
which these literati seem almost to think.— I can get their books, perhaps
you answer, and do all this at home.-You can, but you never will" Waldo,
however, stayed at home.

During the last six months of William's residence in Germany things
moved rapidly at home. By about the first of November the Haskins heirs
had completed their thirty-five-room hotel on the home estate and had
named it in honor of the French hero who had recently visited Boston.
Shortly thereafter it was let. A sign was hung out that would appeal equally
to the military and to civilians. The figure of La Fayette was newly painted
on one side in the uniform of a general and on the other in citizen's clothes.
In the expectation of increased income for the family and with the de-
termination to go back to Cambridge with little delay, Waldo allowed the
girls' school to come to an end almost with the year.

"I have closed my school I have begun a new year,'9 he wrote on the
4th of January, 1825. Within the next month or so he had roughly com-
puted his earnings since he left the college as "two or three thousand dollars
which have paid my debts and obligated my neighbors, so that I thank
Heaven I can say none of my house is the worse for me." Presumably
every dollar of his indefinite but impressive total had come from the school
for young ladies. In his own opinion little but the money came of his more
than three years of teaching, He had "never expected success." ctMy
scholars," he had once put it, "are carefully instructed, my money is faith-
fully earned, but the instructor is little wiser, and the duties were never
congenial with my disposition.3' He was seldom patient with factual detail,
he was too shy to be a firm disciplinarian, and as he had bent over the
schoolmaster's desk he had had his eye on the pulpit.

THE UNWILLING SCHOOLMASTER 109

About the middle of January he sent word to William that, though he
had locked up school and now affected the scholar at home, the grand
schemes in process of realization were to keep the family finances on an
even keel. As he explained the outlook, their mother, one of the Haskins
heirs, should soon receive $200 a year from the new hotel, with reasonable
prospect of more. "In hour of need," he went on, "this can be easily
mortgaged for $1000. Moreover if I go to Cambridge at the end of the
present vacation, as I shall, the learned & reverend have consented to admit
me to the Middle Class of which measure whatever may be the moral &
general expediency, the pecuniary is apparent. Next I possess in fee simple
$518 at interest. Lastly Edward retains his private school of 7, or $800,
though the uneasy child whispers pretty loudly of slipping his neck from
the ancient noose in August. When I have added that in April we shall
probably migrate in a flock to Cambridge & occupy Mr Mellen's old house
for $100 or 200, you will have all the data whereon our calculations
proceed."

He had expected February 8, 1825, to ke his ^ast day at t^ie pleasant
rural retreat in the Canterbury quarter of Roxbury, but he seems to have
returned there before his formal admission into the theological school. On
February 10 he wrote to William, "Tomorrow morng I enter my name
Student in divinity at Cambridge, and shall expect mother there in April."
He had doubtless already written his affectionate farewell to what he called
"my woodland life." Being no hermit, he remembered not only the "twi-
light walks and midnight solitude" but also

the glad hey-day of my household hours,
The innocent mirth which sweetens daily bread,
Railing in love at those who rail again,
By mind's industry sharpening the love of life . . .

THE PRIZED GOWN AND BAND

But thou art fire, sacred and hallow'd fire;
And I but earth and clay: should I presume
To wear thy habit, the severe attire
My slender compositions might consume. . . .

—George Herbert, "The Priesthood"

THE records of the theological faculty said nothing of the new
student from Roxbury till the i6th of February. By a vote of
that day he was formally admitted to the middle class. Probably
nobody was quite certain what this action meant. Postgraduate
training was still a new and dubious experiment. Though the theological
faculty had recently become distinguishable from the general teaching staff
of Harvard College, even now it could lay claim to but three professors,
and only one of these devoted himself exclusively to the school The infant
institution, tentatively named the Theological School, hardly had a mind
of its own as yet, for it remained much under the control of its sponsor,
the Society for the Promotion of Theological Education in Harvard Uni-
versity.

Educational policy was naturally in the formative stage, but the main
objectives in February of 1825 could not have differed greatly from those
announced two years later. Theoretically, a student who remained for the
more or less regular period of three years was expected to study Hebrew,
Biblical history and criticism, natural and revealed religion, Christian the-
ology, Christian institutions, ecclesiastical powers, and the rights, duties,
and relations of the pastoral office. He was also told that he must learn
to speak extempore., to write and deliver sermons, and to conduct public
worship. But these requirements were only gradually becoming practicable
when Waldo Emerson entered, and he himself said little about such matters.
Even his movements outside the school during most of the spring and
summer of 1825 were only vaguely recorded.

On April 13, some two weeks after a new academic quarter had opened,
Ruth Emerson began her residence in the old Mellen house, on North
Avenue, near Jarvis Field; but Waldo may not have joined her at that
time. The fact that the steward of Harvard College, the official who looked

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND in

out for the bills due to the Theological School, had for some time surpris-
ingly little business with him seems understandable in the light of a laconic
autobiographical note that Waldo dated March, 1825, but certainly wrote
much later: "lost the use of my eye for study." It may have been about
this time that he went to Andrews Norton, the professor of sacred literature,
and, having explained that his eyes would not allow him to take an active
part, got leave to attend the lectures without reciting.

Perhaps his eyes did not prevent his taking some notes on lectures and
reading a limited amount of Biblical text. In that case, it was most likely
during this spring that he wrote many of the brief comments in his inter-
leaved copy of Wakefield's translation of the New Testament. St. Matthew
and St. John received by far the greater part of his attention. Now and
then he would remark on the meaning of some word in the Greek original,
but usually he was concerned with a less meticulous kind of interpretation.
On the forty-second verse of the tenth chapter of Matthew he observed:
"What is the reward of virtue? Virtue. This is the sum of Christianity."

This, with much else, sounded as if it were his own. On the parables in
the thirteenth chapter of the same gospel he remarked: "The parables
generally apply with equal truth to the whole Christian Church and to
the individual soul. The oak is but an expanded acorn. The Church but
a magnified man." Reflecting on another passage in the same gospel, he
decided that "Faith is the perception of spiritual truth. . . . And the prayer
is answered in its utterance." Luke, XV: 17, seemed to carry him back to
his own journal entries on self -reverence: "v. 17. having come to himself;
an instructive expression! Self, then, is reason, the knowledge of the true
& good. Children say in the street— 'Give it me, you knew me.3 and familiar
forms of speech are found among men, intimating every man's conviction
that if he were fully shown to his fellowmen, he would be approved. We
all draw our inmost life from the Divine Reason."

The young expositor, however original or unoriginal he may have been
at other times, betrayed a debt to the Theological School when he wrote
of a verse in the twelfth chapter of John: "Prof. Norton approves this
rendering = for this cause I came; for this hour." A note on John, XX: 28,
anxiously discounting any trinitarianism that might be read into the pas-
sage, was also suggestive of the school. But quite separate from any text
Waldo wrote two comments that again resembled his journal meditations:
"The kingdom of heaven, i.e. the true or right state of the soul," and
"I esteem it more to the purpose of a true exposition, more in unison with
the spirit of Christ, to draw a moral, than to prove a miracle."

Aunt Mary, that summer, listed his schoolteaching "& Roxbury fasts"
as the definite causes of his ailment, as if there could be no doubt. But

12 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

little later she not only confessed her ignorance of "the history rise &
rogress & prospects of W — eyes" but rated his defective sight a calamitous
s well as unexpected blow. Though she seems to have imagined at one
[me that he might turn out to be a laureate of religion and a sort of
econd Milton, with poetry a sufficient compensation for blindness, she
tever allowed her vision of him as a great pulpit orator to be long ob-
cured. Her ambition for him must have closed her own eyes to one possible
iey to his predicament, but family records of the time are too scanty to
»how whether an unconscious but positive distaste for formal theology
:ould have had anything to do with it.

Both his journals and letters all but halted. Sometimes he wrote with
e^reat difficulty, apparently without looking at the page. He had time for
recreational jaunts into the country. On the 5th of April he left a memento
of a visit to the Ripleys in Concord. On a wooden panel beside the fireplace
of an upper room in what came to be called the Old Manse were two
inscriptions,, the first written in 1 780 by his father, then a youthful student,
and the second, as recently as 1824 by Edward. Below these family records
Waldo wrote and initialed an inscription honoring the authors of both of
them: "Peace to the Soul of the blessed dead, honor to the ambition of the
living," Perhaps as he honored his ambitious brother he thought of him-
self as a mere spectator, incapacitated for action.

It was a dark year for the ambitions of living Emersons. Late that
summer Edward was forced to give up his school at Roxbury, having pre-
sumably overtaxed himself by combining legal studies with teaching. His
plight was especially disheartening because of his great promise as a lawyer.
Daniel Webster, an admired lawyer, had been willing to help Edward, he
had explained to him, "as well on account of your own merits, & Mr
Everett's wishes, as from a sincere regard for the memory of your excellent
father, whom I had the pleasure, in some little degree to know, & from
whom I rec") when quite a young man, tokens of kindness." But Edward
was now in no condition to stick to law or to anything. And he was not
the only distressed Emerson.

While Edward was making up his mind to cross the Atlantic in search
of health, his brother Charles, trying to get in trim for another brilliant
year in college, was spending some vacation weeks at Concord or in travel
and was taking gloomy account of his own chances of realizing soaring
ambitions in the unacademic world. 'There are moments of enthusiasm,"
he wrote, "when I feel a nascent greatness within me, & then anon comes
the hour of dejection & melancholy, when I mourn over my humble
capacity; at college among my classmates, I see none whom my vanity
acknowledges as more intelligent than myself—but at home where they

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND 113

surely ought to know best, why they think but little of me. Balancing these
contradictory results, I have come to the sad conclusion that I shall never
blind the world with excess of light . . ."

For the moment Charles's case was the least serious. Bulkeley bore the
deepest wounds, though he had the good fortune not to know how deep
they were. This fall and winter he was "perfectly deranged" for months,
and Waldo, trying to recover from eye strain while he taught a school for
boys at Chelrnsford, some ten miles north of Concord, had to take him in
charge.

At Chelmsford, where he had begun his school toward the middle of
September, Waldo Emerson soon received a new shock. This time it was
his brother William's personal crisis that he had to share. Arriving home
from Gottingen and his European travels, William, according to family
tradition, went quickly to Waldo and retold his Weimar experience, mak-
ing it all perfectly clear at last. Now he revealed how Goethe, encouraging
him in his inclination not to disappoint his family by giving up the ministry,
had "unhesitatingly told him" to "preach to the people what they wanted"
since "his personal belief was no business of theirs"; William, in the opinion
of the great German poet, "could be a good preacher and a good pastor
and no one need ever know what he himself had for his own private views."

Waldo, undoubtedly perturbed, listened with admiration to the sequel
of that episode. During a terrific storm on the homeward Atlantic passage
when he was more than once "compelled," as he said, "to sit down in the
cabin, and tranquilly to make up what I deemed my last accounts with
this world/' William had realized that he "could not go to the bottom in
peace with the intention in his heart of following the advice Goethe had
given him" and so had "renounced the ministry; and had come home to
begin the study of law.55 There is no reason to suppose that Waldo himself
did not fully resolve to act on the advice that Aunt Mary promptly and
emphatically gave out. Though she betrayed some curiosity about his
thoughts on William's change of profession, she explicitly laid it down that
the younger brother was immediately to prepare to preach, with or without
sight. Yet William's ordeal was hardly a thing that his brother could ever
dismiss as irrelevant to himself.

At Chelmsford, Waldo found his eyes partly healed. He is said, on
doubtful authority, to have worked on the farm as well as taught. Farmer
or not, he lived close to the soil in such a rural community, spending a
pleasant "autumn and winter among these hills and plains" and learning
"where the chestnut first spread its brown harvest on a frosty morning for
the boys; where the apples covered the ground with white fruit." He "saw
the last fires that burned in the old limekiln" and "knew the ripples of the

ii4 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Baptist Pond" and the woods that were waiting to be transformed into
corn fields.

But the poetic moods encouraged by his environment were no doubt
kept in check by the Chelmsford people. The farmers "were all orthodox,
Calvinists, mighty in the Scriptures, had learned that life was a preparation,
and 'probation/ to use their word." If they read no romances, they had
sterner teachers— the pulpit, poverty and labor, the town meeting. They
were themselves valuable instructors for a youth recently escaped from his
theological studies.

To his Chelmsford pupils the master of the Classical School was apt
to seem "very grave, quiet, and very impressive," "almost fascinating."
Though he was never harsh and never punished except with words, he had
complete command of the boys. He used to send them home with an
assignment in some such book as Plutarch's Lives and would question them
on it next day. The peculiar look in his eyes, fixed on something that
seemed to be beyond the field of vision, may have been chargeable to his
affliction. But bad eyes did not keep him from earning the fees he was paid.

It was during a vacation from his Chelmsford school that he reached
a fortunate turning point in his struggle against blindness. An earlier opera-
tion on one eye seemed to give him no relief; but now he let Reynolds, his
doctor, experiment with the other eye, and from this time he began grad-
ually to regain his sight in spite of his having to continue teaching. Ap-
parently on William's advice, he decided to close his school at Chelmsford
on the last day of December, but only in order to accept the offer of
another school. He needed the money, and neither a lameness attributed
to rheumatism nor his weak eyes could daunt his resolution, "God willing,"
"to drive & clinch the nails of instruction into at least 30 brains" at Roxbury.

At Roxbury, a day or two after the beginning of the new year, 1826,
Waldo gathered his pupils "in the second story of Octagon Hall, then
known as the Norfolk Bank Building." With its Gothic windows and its
tower adorned by "two white colossal figures emblematic of 'Charity and
her babes,5 which had formerly stood upon the Boston Almshouse," the
building was quite too monumental to be suitable for the ephemeral kind
of academy the new teacher had in mind. He and several scholars he had
brought with him from Chelmsford boarded at the home of his Uncle
Ralph Haskins's brother-in-law, a Mr. Greene. David Greene Haskins and
his older brother, together with Henry Harrington and "most if not all of
the other pupils" whom Edward Emerson had taught a few months earlier
resumed their studies under Waldo's guidance. To the younger Haskins
boy, his cousin Waldo naturally seemed friendly enough. In Harrington's
opinion he was not especially successful, as his mind was really on his

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND 115

divinity studies, but "the intellectual portion of his duties was faithfully
and adequately performed."

Certainly his mind was not confined within the limits of his school-
room. A few days after the return to Roxbury he used his "mended eyes"
for writing again in his journals. He speculated with his usual honesty
about the fundamentals of religion he proposed to preach. Perhaps at the
prompting of his own recent experience with sickness, he wrote another
of his informal and tentative essays on compensation. He liked to give his
sentences a universal application. "The whole of what we know is a system
of compensations/' he asserted. "Every defect in one manner is made up
in another. Every suffering is rewarded; every sacrifice is made up; every
debt is paid.53 His thoughts ran over other favorite topics. He tried Aunt
Mary with his "old faith" in self-reverence. In a less confident mood he
mocked his own ambition, seeing clearly that it was too big for its slender
foundation of physical health. When he had finished with his self-castiga-
tion he restored the scales of justice to their perfect state of equilibrium by
observing that, after all, fate would not permit the seed of the gods to
die and, whatever our pleasure, we should not hide the world's light. In
general, religion, philosophy, health, desire for achievement, and love of
fame were the themes he returned to most often.

By this time he seems to have taken to heart what he had heard from
William of the higher criticism of the Bible. He experienced moods of
ardent loyalty as well as of skepticism. He saw, as he told Aunt Mary, that
the German scholars were really shaking the foundations of Christianity! '*
He had no notion for the present of deserting because of this theological
earthquake but felt heroic in his resolve to defend "the august Founder"
and "the twelve self-denying heroes of a pious renown." He was anxious
to have sight enough to study theology and to get into the fray. He would
not see Christianity and all its good works "pass away and become
ridiculous."

After he had been at the Roxbury school for a month, he could read
several hours in the twenty-four besides teaching, but he soon suffered a
relapse. The rheumatic pain in his hip continued and spoiled his pleasure
in walking. He thought that "few men ever suffered more genuine misery
than I have suffered." Part of his misery was caused by unrealized ambi-
tion. Little was yet done, he reminded himself, "to establish my considera-
tion among my contemporaries, and less to get a memory when I am
gone. I confess the foolish ambition to be valued, with qualification. I
do not want to be known by them that know me not, but where my name
is mentioned I would have it respected." A chief goad of his anxiety for
achievement seemed to be his feeling of defeat in early life and a fear that

ii6 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he might not live long. "My recollections of early life/3 he confessed, "are
not very pleasant,"

He owed some of his ambition to his brothers, never long out of his
thoughts. William had taught the family by example how to conquer
poverty and at the same time get university training, even abroad. Charles
zealously kept up his pursuit of learning and fame. When he read the life
of Milton and learned that the poet, even as a boy, used to pore over his
books till midnight, the young student at once wanted to emulate him.
Edward, having crossed the Atlantic, had arrived at Gibraltar in Novem-
ber, and his letters were now beginning to reach Cambridge. He had gone
on to Marseille and was in Rome by the middle of March, giving himself
up "to the admiration of Roman glory & art," visiting the sculptor Thor-
waldsen, hearing the gossip of the studios, scribbling in Italian, going on
to see Florence, copying both Latin and Greek inscriptions, reveling like
a true scholar in these paradises of a scholar. But his most serious business
was simply to keep alive.

Waldo saw no way of escape from teaching, though he was getting
ready to leave his Roxbury pupils and migrate to Cambridge, where his
mother, "in order to get a schoolroom5' for him, now moved from the
Mellen house to one owned by Professor Levi Hedge. Less than three
months after he had opened his Roxbury school, Waldo closed it, and,
about the first of April, began his Cambridge school. Some of the boys who
attended it remembered the experience but differed in their opinions of it.
Young Richard Henry Dana, used to the barbarous treatment that school-
masters still frequently accorded to their pupils, was astonished at the
gentleness of Waldo and complained that "he had not system or discipline
enough to insure regular and vigorous study." Oliver Wendell Holmes's
brother John thought Waldo completely self-possessed and in control of
the boys: "Rather stern in his very infrequent rebukes. Not inclined to win
boys by a surface amiability, but kindly in explanation or advice. Every
inch a king in his dominion."

Again the schoolmaster's mind strayed from schoolbooks. His eyes now
comparatively well but his limbs diseased with rheumatism, the young
teacher continued to debate lofty subjects with himself. The idea of friend-
ship seemed to stir him suddenly. "In God's name," he asked, "what is
in this topic? It encourages, exhilarates, inspires me." This set him off on
the subject of affections. Feeling was a high form of reality and could
take the place of intellectual certainty. "I feel immortal. And the evidence
of immortality comes better from consciousness than from reason."

Meantime Aunt Mary, after some prodding from her nephew, had
made a sweeping attack on the "atheism" of the German higher critics.

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND 117

She was soon warning against his too unorthodox speculations. How could
he so divest himself of faith? she wanted to know. She decided to let his
current heresy pass as being merely an intellectual exercise, but she was
glad he had been held back from his ministerial career till his anchor should
be stronger than she suspected it now was. In another letter she would
to God he were not at Cambridge, though presumably his connection with
the Theological School was at this time extremely tenuous. He kept light-
heartedly on with his thoughts, not worrying because he could see no finality
in them. "There is no thought," he was confident, "which is not seed as
well as fruit. It spawns like fish."

Whether it was in this or in the preceding summer that he spent some
time on his Uncle Ladd's farm at Newton and heard from the Methodist
Tarbox, as they worked together in the hayfield, that men were always
praying and that their prayers were answered, the most important reper-
cussions of that experience came in 1826. On Sunday, June 11, he wrote
in his journal: t

" Tray without ceasing'

"It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties
furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive; the character, the
secret self. . . ."

He had found his text and was writing out the first paragraph of his
first sermon. Presenting this sermon to the Middlesex Association he won,
on October 10, 1826, his approbation, or license, to preach.

As he had had little theological training and was used to harboring
unorthodox opinions, it is probable that if the members of the association
of ministers had examined him carefully they would not have allowed him
to preach; but they had not rejected his sermon and, though unordained,
he was now a preacher. Five days after his approbation he repeated the
sermon on prayer for the congregation of Uncle Samuel Ripley at Wal-
tham. He did not realize the rosy dream he had once had of "a pulpit
Orator to whom the path of his profession is yet untried" ascending the
pulpit for the first time in the solemnity and strength proper to his high
mission, armed with "the tremendous eloquence which stirs men's souls,"
while below him are "the faces of men bent forward in the earnestness of
expectation," men in such a desirable frame of mind that "the preacher
may lead them whithersoever he will." But at least a few of his hearers
listened with rapt attention. Aunt Mary, overjoyed that he was at last
entering upon his ministry, seems to have made a special trip from Maine
for the occasion. She was highly gratified with her nephew's serious, simple,
dignified manner. His Aunt Sarah Alden Ripley, the preacher's corre-

n8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

spondent and guide to learning in his early boyhood, was delighted and
so were some others.

With his sense of humor, the unorthodox taster of ideas had been
unable to help smiling as he had pictured himself in advance in the gown
and band he had prized so highly. It was a queer life and the only mood
proper to it was, he thought, quiet astonishment. It was ironical that just
as he assumed his office as "the meek ambassador of the Highest" he should
be tossed once more into a whirlpool of religious doubts. He was ponder-
ing the theory "that it is wrong to regard ourselves so much in a historical
light as we do, putting Time between God & us; and that it were fitter to
account every moment of the existence of the Universe as a new Creation,
and all as a revelation proceeding each moment from the Divinity to the
mind of the observer." According to this theory Christianity ought to speak
merely as an expounder of the moral law known by intuition. Conscious
of the changes his mind had already undergone, he decided that he would
not be surprised at new revolutionary developments in his thought. Aunt
Mary's oracles were needed to keep him steady if he was to remain long
in the ministry he was just entering.

The situation was not helped by his excitement over a Boston Sweden-
borgian druggist's essay called Observations on the Growth of the Mind,
just published. Probably he had already recognized in Sampson Reed, its
author, an exposer of the "historical" fallacy. Aunt Mary, when he con-
fided such notions to her, made an immediate attack on the druggist, ridi-
culing his triteness, obscurity, and "swedenishness" and crediting his rare
ideas to Wordsworth. But so far as her nephew was concerned her efforts
were vain. For the moment he even imagined Reed as sitting in the late
Professor Frisbie's chair of natural religion, moral philosophy, and civil
polity at the college. It took nearly a dozen years to make him see his new
idol as a slave of dogma entrenched in another man's mind, the victim of
"this immense arrogancy & subtle bigotry of his church," Eventually he
wrote an epitaph to this youthful but long-lived enthusiasm when he sharply
reprimanded the

Demure apothecary

Whose early reverend genius my young eye
With wonder followed, & undoubting joy,

but who had at last become the "Sleek deacon of the New Jerusalem."

Charles went on at college with his successive Penn legacy subventions
to help his finances and kept up nearly to Edward's record as a student.
By the middle of September, William was getting settled in New York as
an apprentice lawyer. Edward had passed the climax of his foreign tour

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND 119

when he had made a visit of a few days at La Grange with La Fayette.
La Fayette, at table or surrounded by guests and family in a drawing room
adorned with an American flag and portraits of Washington and Franklin,
was an unforgettable figure. Edward went on to Waterloo, carried Dante
and an Italian dictionary with him as companions on Dutch canals, was
in England before the end of August, and arrived home again in October.
He had suffered so many hardships that he thought his travels a great
mistake so far as health was concerned. But he was well enough to go into
Webster's office; and once the great man came in to look for some books
and stopped to talk to him for ten minutes, informing him that it was
important to understand, not to remember, Blackstone. Edward soon had
other jobs, including one at the Boston Athenaeum, thus making sure that
he would have little chance to recover fully.

Waldo Emerson himself was now alarmed by new symptoms of disease,
this time in his lungs. Toward the end of October he confessed that he had
resigned his understanding into the hands of Aunt Mary, Edward, and
the doctor. "I give up my school this week. I journey next I know not
where. I am not sick nor very well." He closed his Cambridge school, the
last he ever taught; but before traveling he preached for the third time since
his approbation, using the same sermon he had started out with. This time
he spoke from the pulpit of Boston's First Church, where his father's career
had ended fifteen years earlier. Among his auditors were seventeen of his
former pupils.

For a time his plans remained uncertain. He must still have hoped that
a turn for the better in his health would let him stay on in the neighbor-
hood of the Theological School, Divinity Hall, recently dedicated by Chan-
ning's sermon, was a new attraction for him. But his uncertainty seemed
at an end when Uncle Samuel Ripley lent him $70 for a southern voyage
and supplied him with letters of credit good for additional cash. Thus
assured of adequate funds, Waldo set out on November 25 for Charleston.
He was a passenger in the Clematis, a ship fit to brave the Atlantic with
her 105 feet of length and one hundred of height and with her twenty-five
sails. It was his first trial of the sea. "After a day or two/' he wrote, "I
found I could live as comfortably in this tent, tossed on the ocean, as if
it were pitched on the mountains ashore."

On December 7 he was in Charleston. There, for the first time, he was
on American soil outside New England. He was struck by sectional dif-
ferences, particularly in manners. Manners, he was still convinced, were
closely under the influence of climate. He observed that the most lowly
laborers showed a surprising perfection of courtesy. He had not seen an
awkward Carolinian. Foraging from his boarding house on East Bay Street,

120 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he began to find old acquaintances. Samuel Oilman, a tutor at Harvard
when Waldo had entered the college, offered to accompany him to the
anniversary meeting of the local New England Society, and presumably
they were there on December 22. Oilman was the pastor of the Unitarian
Church, and Waldo again preached his sermon on ceaseless prayer. Motte,
an old college friend who had now turned Unitarian and resigned his
parish, introduced him to the Charleston Library Society.

But Charleston was proving too cold for an invalid whose lungs suf-
fered "oppressions & pangs, chiefly by night"; and Waldo Emerson even
considered a voyage to the West Indies. He was "not sick ... not well;
but luke-sick," having "no symptom that any physician extant can recog-
nize or understand." The best diagnosis he himself could put into words
was "a certain stricture on the right side of the chest, which always makes
itself felt when the air is cold or damp, & the attempt to preach or the like
exertion of the lungs is followed by an aching." About the tenth of Jan-
uary he departed on the sloop William, bound for St. Augustine.

He turned his back, as he said,

Upon the Northern lights, and burning Bear,
And the cold orbs that hang by them in heaven,
Till, star by star, they sank into the sea.

And at last he saw St. Augustine appear " 'mid orange-groves and citron
blooms." As the vessel slid slowly to the fragrant shore, he saw "Saint
Mark's grim bastions"

Planting their deep foundations in the sea,

and reminding him that here had once been an outpost of Spain.

Though this was the oldest American town, the Americans had been
in control for only half a dozen years. One saw here, in this ultima Thule
of civilized America, the enfeebled red men, "forest families., timid and
tame.35 In the streets were dark Minorcans as well as invalids who despaired
of seeing "New England's wood-crowned hills again," the rueful poet noted.
Nothing was stranger to New England eyes than the two iron cages in
which the Spanish governor was said to have suspended criminals and
allowed them to starve to death.

Waldo Emerson, comfortable but solitary, turned to his journal and
continued his old speculations or wrote sketches of the strange, torpid town.
He drove an orange along the beach, sailed in a boat, or sat in a chair.
He tried to shape sermons "for an hour which may never arrive." He
preached once to the St. Augustinians, not from any new manuscript, but
from the now well-worn inaugural on prayer,

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND 121

He made copious notes on the inhabitants and observed the low estate
of the church in this poverty-stricken region. He attended a special meet-
ing of a Bible society whose treasurer, being the marshal of the district, had
awkwardly enough appointed a meeting of the society and a slave auction
at the same time and place, "one being in the Government house, and the
other in the adjoining yard. One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of
great joy," Waldo noticed, "whilst the other was regaled with 'Going,
gentlemen, going!5 And almost without changing our position we might
aid in sending the Scriptures into Africa, or bid for 'four children without
the mother' who had been kidnapped therefrom." His eyes were not blind
to evil. For the present he looked at it philosophically, considering his own
private ills too. "He has seen but half the Universe," he told Aunt Mary,
"who never has been shown the house of Pain. Pleasure and Peace are but
indifferent teachers of what it is life to know." His intimate view of slavery
aroused the reformer effectively hidden beneath the philosopher. At the
moment he thought of St. Augustine as good for his bodily health. He
now weighed 141^ pounds, and he talked of teaching school again on
his return home.

But the most memorable result of his residence of some two and a
half months in Florida was his friendship with Achille Murat, nephew of
Napoleon and son of the colorful cavalry leader who became Marshal of
France and King of Naples. Never before in his life had he confronted
a person resembling this one. Young Murat, with his wife, a distant rela-
tive of George Washington, had come from his plantation home near Talla-
hassee and was on the point of setting out to visit an uncle in New Jersey
when he found Waldo Emerson ready to return northward. The extremely
limited shipping schedule of the port of St. Augustine made it a foregone
conclusion that the two men would sail together on the old, dependable
sloop William; and on March 28 they put to sea for Charleston, by way
of St. Mary's, Georgia, as fate and bad weather determined.

"We boarded together in St Augustine," Waldo wrote, "but I did not
become much acquainted with him till we went to sea. He is a philosopher,
a scholar, a man of the world very sceptical but very candid & an ardent
lover of truth. I blessed my stars for my fine companion & we talked
incessantly." According to tradition, their conversation did not halt even
during the storm, when they stayed in their berths, Waldo in the lower and
Murat in the upper, invisible to each other. Waldo undoubtedly defended
Christianity as interpreted by the most liberal Unitarians and won the
respect of the brilliant young Frenchman. Luckily the voyage was pro-
longed from the usual two days to nine by weather varying from dead calm
to roaring tempest.

122 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Upon arrival at Charleston Waldo Emerson made a memorandum that
would have served as rebuttal to his own complaints regarding his coldness
of nature: "I have connected myself by friendship to a man who with
as ardent a love of truth as that which animates me, with a mind surpass-
ing mine in the variety of its research,, and sharpened and strengthened to
an energy for action to which I have no pretension, by advantages of birth
and practical connexion with mankind beyond almost all men in the world,
—is, yet;- that which I had ever supposed only a creature of the imagina-
tion—a consistent Atheist,~and a disbeliever in the existence, and, of course,
in the immortality of the soul. My faith in these points is strong and I
trust, as I live, indestructible. Meantime I love and honour this intrepid
doubter. His soul is noble, and his virtue, as the virtue of a Sadducee must
always be, is sublime."

In Charleston, on the iyth of April, Murat wrote Waldo Emerson an
introduction to Joseph Hopkinson in Philadelphia; and the same day the
young minister was defiant in his diary, as if he had tilted unsuccessfully
in a further argument with the Frenchman and had tried vainly to com-
pete with him at some social gathering. He warned himself sharply to be
content with majestic thoughts and to "forego the ambition to shine in the
frivolous assemblies of men." "Yet my friend," he confessed with admira-
tion, ccis at home in both these jarring empires, and whilst he taxes my
powers in his philosophic speculations, can excel the coxcombs, and that,
con amore, in the fluency of nonsense." In a later exchange of letters
Murat, perhaps affected in spirits by a recent and severe illness, admitted
that the truth of atheism and that of Unitarianism now seemed to him
about equally probable. But on the grounds of expediency he considered
his own view preferable "in a refined state of society, although in barbarous
time of obscurity and ignorance," he not too generously conceded, "your
theory may be more useful" Murat3 still unsatisfied, thought a first step
to a solution of the problem should be an attempt to ascertain "how far
we can have an absolute notion of truth/5 and he intended to write a
monograph on that subject. In the meantime, however, he wanted his friend
to set up as a preacher in Tallahassee and substitute reason, learning, and
morality for the nonsense, ignorance, and fanaticism currently taught there;
and, for the future as it turned out, he unequivocally exempted Unitari-
anism from his general disgust for the religious character of the Americans.
On his side, Waldo Emerson continued to keep the far more radical French-
man in his esteem, and in time of religious crisis he would hardly be un-
conscious of him.

At Charleston, in 1827, Waldo was less troubled by his encounter with

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND 123

a magnetic atheist because at the very moment he himself was resting
securely in the theory of ^ell-reliance that he had long been building up
into an article of faith. "I lead a new life," he assured himself. "I occupy
new ground in the world of spirits, untenanted before. ... I doubt not
I tread on the highway that leads to the Divinity ." His physical tread was
also more determined now, and he had at last got his weight up to 152
pounds. As late as his return to Charleston, he had not finished a new
sermon since he left home; but being once more in the parish of Samuel
Oilman, he managed to preach again for him.

From Charleston he went on to Baltimore, where the Unitarian Church
had, he discovered, already engaged enough visiting preachers to last for
weeks to come. Before the end of April he was at Alexandria, with the
Ladds, his relatives. Dogged by ill luck, he again encountered unusual cold.
Toward the middle of May he preached in Washington "without any pain
or inconvenience," but he wrote Aunt Mary that he was "still saddled with
the villain stricture & perhaps he will ride me to death." He had day
dreams of other things he might do rather than preach. He would be a
novelist, a poet, a painter, a scientist. But he postponed any withdrawal
from his newly acquired profession. In Philadelphia he visited his school-
boy friend William Furness, now established as a Unitarian minister, and
aided him by preaching a couple of sermons, his whole stock. At New York
he found his brother William somewhat known for his lectures on German
literature but settling into the law office of Ketchum & Fessenden as an
apprentice on a salary of $3 a week and escaping immediate starvation by
giving private instruction to a family of girls. Waldo presumably preached
himself out, for he once more used both the Waltham sermons.

Meantime the First Church in Boston had sent him word that he was
wanted there for a while. Going on to Concord, where his mother was
living with the Ripleys again, he made, it seems, his first experiment with
a third sermon, quite uninspired. He preached it and a fourth at the
Boston First Church in mid June. He began the fourth with the Biblical
saying that a man shall reap what he sows, proceeded to reason out the
natural tendency to property owning and to the amassing of wealth, and
then swung round to his favorite theory "that a system of Compensations
prevails by God's will amid all the dealings of men in common life and
that in virtue of this law, no man can enrich himself by doing wrong, or
impoverish himself by doing right." Next Sunday he was back with another
new sermon. It was on the Crucifixion and was full of the sense of the
tragic; yet it too implied compensation, for he insisted, not unmindful of
a hint from Aristotle, on the purification that pity and terror could cause.

124 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO' EMERSON

And so he kept on, at an easy pace, writing and preaching sermons, pick-
ing up old threads of thought from his journals, weaving them into more
formal and usually less unorthodox patterns.

Within a few weeks after returning from the South he had taken a
room in Divinity Hall, a good anchorage for an expectant candidate.
Charles was at the college, winning honors as usual— too easily, Waldo
thought. Edward, going on with his law, kept several irons in the fire. Not
many months before, he had been reading, sometimes three hours a day,
to the almost blind historian Prescott. He spent much time studying in
Webster's office or taking care of the new senator's business affairs or even
of his family. Refusing the offer of a tutorship in Latin at Harvard, Edward,
"the uncomfortable victim of a splendid ambition," made his farewell ap-
pearance there as the orator at commencement. Waldo also attended the
exercises, tardily taking his Master's degree, out of course and without a
speaking part.

For Waldo residence at Divinity Hall had little to do with theology. He
no longer had health or much desire for an intensive study of that subject.
"My eyes are not so strong as to let me be learned," he put it. "I am
curious to know what the Scriptures do in very deed say about that exalted
person who died on Calvary, but I do think it at this distance of time &
in the confusion of languages] to be a work of weighing of phrases &
hunting in dictiona[ries]." He had seven of Everett's early manuscripts by
him as he tried to write sermons, but he got no inspiration. He could set
out for the Connecticut Valley on a short tour of duty as a Unitarian mis-
sionary preacher, or he could spend weeks as a substitute pastor in the
towns of the eastern part of his state, without breaking any ties to Cam-
bridge.

He walked much of the way to Northampton. Arriving at the hotel
and bring shown to a room, he complained that it was dirty. Not dirtier
than he himself was, he was told. But when Judge Lyman's wife came in
her carriage for him, the travel-worn minister received profuse apologies
from the innkeeper. Returning from his too strenuous mission to North-
ampton, Greenfield, and Deerfield, and as far west as Lenox, he had only
a short visit with his mother in the sitting room of the home at Concord
before he was off to keep a new engagement. At New Bedford, where he
went to preach for his kinsman Orville Dewey, he made good use of Dewey's
fine library, closeting himself in it the best part of each day but getting
exercise by sawing wood and by walking fast over the muddy, stony town.
After finishing his stipulated three weeks there, he preached in his father's
first parish, at the town of Harvard, then for Uncle Samuel Ripley at
Waltham, next at Watertown, then back in Boston.

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND 125

He enjoyed a brief interval of quiet in Divinity Hall, where he seems
to have resettled himself, some time in December, 1827, taking firm pos-
session of No. 14, a spacious room, with two windows and a fireplace, at
the northeast corner on the first floor. But he missed his old pleasure in
walking and grew impatient with the sad infirmities which he bore in youth
but which belonged, he protested, to "the limb & sense of age." He tried
to -conjure1 them away by writing verses and resolved,

Please God, I'll wrap me in mine innocence

And bid each awful Muse drive the damned harpies hence.

Late in December he left hi& armchair to answer a call to Concord, New
Hampshire, where he preached three Sundays and Christmas Day. On
Christmas Day he saw Ellen Tucker for the first time.

Her stepfather, Colonel William Austin Kent, was a benefactor of the
nascent Unitarian society in the town, and Kent's son Edward had been
a college classmate of Waldo's. It was a matter of course that Waldo should
meet the young and attractive Ellen. He was in the mood for friendship
if not for love, but he at first made some show of resisting at least the
latter. He wrote on the last day of the year that he was finding his fort-
night a pretty long one. His mind seemed to be on Cambridge, where he
once more hoped to attend some classes at the Theological School, and
on the old Concord, his home. He complained at length because he could
not find the kind of friend he wanted "either in the shape of man or
woman." He talked humorously about his intention of joining a sleighing
party to the Shaker community at Canterbury, where he thought he might
"put on the drab cowl." "Among the earliest institutions to be invented,"
he added, "if I read the stars-right, is a protestant monastery, a place of
elegant seclusion where melancholy gentlemen & ladies may go to spend
the advanced season of single life in drinking milk, walking the woods &
reading the Bible & the poets."

For some^weeks after his return southward he was presumably much
at Cambridge, and if he still had little part in the exercises of the Theo-
logical School, it was* perhaps more than usual. Even if his name was
omitted from the published list of candidates, he was known as a candidate
as much as he wished to be in his uncertain state of health. And he must
have been favorably known, in spite of his failure to go through the regular
routine of the school. For there is no reason to doubt the estimate given
by the well informed Uncle Samuel Ripley to Aunt Mary in February,
1828, that "Waldo is the most popular preacher among the candidates, and
all he wants is health to be fixed at once in Boston." Soon, in fact, Waldo

126 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

had had several pulpits offered to him with a view to settlement, but he

refused them all.

Outside the pulpit his life had to be pared down to suit his energy. In
the senior class of the Theological School were the Samuel Lothrop that
Waldo had tutored at President Kirkland's; George Bradford, brother of
Aunt Sarah Alden Ripley; and Frederic Henry Hedge, Professor Levi
Hedge's son. At least two of the three were living in Divinity Hall. Another
theological student, Warren Burton, once a member of the nameless literary
club in college, had lived in No. 14 Divinity Hall before Waldo moved
there and perhaps still had some rights in it. But Waldo, though he knew
all the seniors and probably aU the rest of his neighbors, got less social life
than he wanted. "I am living cautiously," he told his brother William, "yea
treading on eggs to strengthen my constitution. ... So I never wnte
When I can walk or especially when I can laugh. But my companions are
few; so, sometimes I must read . . ." He was also writing some sermons;
but whatever theological "exercises" he may now have started to do with
Norton were doubtless completely halted or were done under somebody
else's care, for the professor was seriously ill by March and was soon away
for a six months' European journey.

Some unpleasant incidents occurred as the young minister, determined
to postpone the responsibilities that a regular charge would entail, went
from pulpit to pulpit. It must have been his enthusiasm for Sampson Reed's
writings that got him involved with the local Swedenborgians, then, it
seems, on the lookout for at least a temporary pastor. There was some sort
of "gregarious invitation to the New Church" which he "was agreeably
disappointed" to find himself saved from. Yet he watched the Sweden-
borgians with no little interest; and in his copy of the first volume of The
New Jerusalem Magazine, for 1827-1828, he wrote the names of most of
the anonymous contributors.

At Concord or at Divinity Hall he could afford to risk being thought
feather-brained and lazy. At the first discovery of "a silly uneasiness" he
escaped, he said, "from the writing desk as from a snake" and went straight
to quarter himself on the first person he could think of in Divinity Hall
who could spare the time to entertain him. He preferred the jesters, for, as
he explained it, "after a merry or only a gossipping hour where the talk
has been mere soap bubbles I have lost all sense of the mouse in my chest,
am at ease, & can take my pen or book." He thought it might be good
sense to wait years, "for sound head & wind & limb & seraionbarrelful,"
before settling in a parish of his own.

He seemed doomed to a slow start in his profession, and delay was hard
for so ambitious a young man to endure. But his optimism was put to an

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND 127

even more severe test. Suddenly he was struck a stunning blow that no
one had foreseen. Edward, with all his brilliant intellectual powers, was
suffering from some obscure emotional tangle and at last reached the limit
of his strength and collapsed. As early as March of this year his journal
had begun to show what might in retrospect look like danger signals. The
twenty-two-year-old aspirant to the practice of law had become moodily
introspective. Some weeks later, as he pondered his ill health, he was op-
pressed by a sense of guilt because of his worldly ambitions and began to
cultivate a religious humility foreign to his nature. "Words words fail me/3
he confessed, "but I think I see GOD— distantly, dimly, now more, now
less manifestly revealing himself ... I tho't to find him in the hurricane
of ambition— but he was not there . . . Faint & weary— I have fallen pros-
trate. I have made the great Sacrifice— I have sacrificed my pride— my
pride" His condition changed rapidly. He believed that he was almost
miraculously better. But soon he began to be "affected strangely in his
mind."

One morning, in the old Concord home, he came down to breakfast
and, instead of treating Doctor Ripley with the customary veneration, began
to make fun of him. Then he went upstairs and made a beautiful prayer,
saying that his mother and grandfather had lost their reason and asking
for their restoration. He had fainting fits and delirium; but Waldo, having
hurried home after hardly more than beginning a new series of Sundays
at Concord, New Hampshire, saw the patient quickly "restored to his
former habits of thinking which," he put it, "I cannot help saying were
always perverse enough."

Doctor Jackson advised that Edward should not touch a book for a
year; but Waldo knew his brother well enough to predict that "the doctor's
dominion will shrink back into an advisory council, & come in, I doubt not,
for a due share of contempt." It looked as if Edward would soon be in
Boston and attending to business with his usual precision. Waldo returned
to New Hampshire, preached a second and third week there, and came
back to his headquarters in Divinity Hall, but on the last day of June word
came to him that Edward was ill again and this time in a state of violent
derangement. Waldo went to Concord and, with Doctor Bartlett's help,
took Edward in a closed carriage to the asylum at Charlestown.

Doctor Wyman objected to having the patient placed there, seeing that
this was not an ordinary case of insanity and that what Edward needed was
private care. Wyman was right, for Edward soon recovered his mind. But
his bodily health, undermined no doubt by tuberculosis, was broken past
any complete mending.

Waldo saw Edward's calamity objectively. Not frightened, he explained

i28 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to himself frankly why he had no fear that he would suffer a fate like
Edward's. "I have/' he reasoned it out, "so much mixture of silliness in
my intellectual frame that I think Providence has tempered me against
this. My brother lived and acted and spoke with preternatural energy. My
own manner is sluggish; my speech sometimes flippant, sometimes embar-
rassed and ragged; my actions (if I may say so) are of a passive kind.
Edward had always great power of face. I have none. I laugh; I blush;
I look ill-tempered; against my will and against my interest. But all this
imperfection, as it appears to me, is a caput mortuum, is a ballast-as
things go, is a defence."

Aunt Mary, looking back over the family record, saw nothing there to
blame for Edward's brief mental eclipse. "The dreadfull event," she wrote,
"gives no forboding of insanity to others-tis not hereditary ... No it is
disease & over exertion that has bro't this on E. His ancestors on my nor
his Mothers side were never tainted in the least. Some of my Cousins have
been so— and an Aunt— but it was an imbecillity rather in those . . ."

As if in mockery, fate exalted Charles, though at the same time it gave
him a mild jolt. After having contributed some essays to the college maga-
zine, he had helped to bring it to a "happy termination," as he said. He
received a first prize for a Bowdoin dissertation, he delivered the valedictory
oration to his class, and he had another oration to give at commencement.
But as this commencement part was only the second oration, he and his
friends raised a cry of injustice that brought some severe criticism from
Waldo. On the day following Charles's graduation Waldo had his own
little triumph. Perhaps because he was now known as a popular pulpit
candidate, he was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, seven
years after he had graduated.

He was beginning to give much of his time, at $15 a Sunday, to the
Second Church, where he took the place of the younger Henry Ware. He
was gradually getting to be more widely known, and the peculiar quality
of his sennons was becoming recognizable. Frederic Hedge, a shrewd person
who must have been kept well posted by Divinity Hall gossip if not by
actually hearing his friend preach, got the impression that Waldo was using
"great simplicity & an unconventional, untheological style" that shocked
the orthodox because it was "unsanctified" but charmed "unprejudiced
& appreciative minds."

At last, in the Harvard catalogue for 1828-1829, Waldo Emerson
publicly acknowledged himself a candidate for the regular ministry. The
account book he was now keeping gave his irregular connection with the
Theological School an air of reality that it had long lacked. From August
of 1828 to April of 1829 he made three payments, totaling $82.53, to that

THE PRICED GOWN AND BAND 129

institution. The last was marked "in full" and so presumably closed forever
his account for his sketchy tutoring, if indeed it was tutoring at this time,
in divinity. It seems that he at least went now and then to hear the stu-;
dents preach their practice sermons. He told Lothrop that he did not think
he would ever try to preach such sermons as those but would attempt to
strike out on some new line.

Lothrop, Hedge, and Bradford all graduated in the summer of 1828
but were still at Divinity Hall in the following year. Waldo was now re-
served toward Lothrop, his former pupil, making "no effort to resume our
old familiar intercourse." Hedge saw, in spite of the charming sermons,
no sign of future greatness in the Divinity Hall roomer who, "though not
a member of the Divinity School was understood to be a candidate for the
ministry preparing himself in his own way." Waldo developed slowly,
according to Hedge, and was slow in his movements and speech but already
exhibited, at twenty-five, "a refinement of thought & a selectness in the
use of language." He was devoted to his diary and used to go to some trouble
to get an accurate record of things he thought worth preserving in it. One
evening he came to Hedge's room to get the particulars of an anecdote of
Professor Norton's and could not sleep till he had made a note of them
all. Hedge "tried to interest him in German literature but he laughingly
said that as he was entirely ignorant of the subject he would assume that
it was not worth knowing." George Bradford, already a "day & night com-
panion," was to continue his affection for Waldo through many years of
friendship.

With William at work in a New York law office and teaching, lec-
turing, reporting, writing editorials, and translating from French and Spanish
journals to make a living, and Charles studying law in Boston while he
helped the family finances by teaching school, Waldo, whose opinions
Charles valued "more than the best of Physicians," had to look after Ed-
ward's welfare. By early November, Edward, greatly improved in health,
needed to be got out of Charlestown. Waldo wanted an engagement to
preach in the country, where he could take him for convalescence.

Probably he had Concord, New Hampshire, already in mind as most
desirable for his own reasons. At any rate he knew he would be welcome
there. Some months earlier one of the Kents had written to the American
Unitarian Association to urge that, because of the critical state of the Uni-
tarian society in the northern Concord, the young preacher who had pleased
them so well should be returned. A man "of force & popular address" was
needed, and "Such a man was M£ Emerson." Kent explained that "the
society was constantly increasing while he was here, & our meetings fully
attended," and that if he would be content to return, the society would be

130 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

content to have but one original sermon each Sunday, letting him read
a second one "from some author, making the duties as light as possible."

It was a good time for Waldo to break off from the Second Church till
its members could definitely make up their minds about inviting him to
settle. Its junior pastorate would, it seemed likely, be an important office,
becoming in the near future the senior, or only, pastorate, as Ware, long
hampered by illness, was expected to resign and join the faculty of the
Theological School. There was some polite maneuvering on both sides. But
Waldo quickly took Grandfather Ripley's expert advice and made a tem-
porary strategic withdrawal.

Arming himself for cultural purposes with a German volume probably
containing some of the writings of Goethe, he set out for Concord, New
Hampshire, on December 6, in company with Edward as he had planned.
Whether or not Frederic Hedge's urging had had any effect on him, he
had by this time doubtless read enough of Carlyle's journalistic evangeliz-
ing for German literature to make him feel that he must, after all, tackle
a new foreign language and try to make his own first-hand estimate of at
least one provocative writer whose native tongue it was. He traveled north-
ward in the best of spirits, for his body was well and he had an interesting
personal reason for the trip that he had not revealed in any of his letters
to his family. In his account book he entered not only his own and Edward's
stagecoach fare but the price he had paid for a copy of one of the popular
gift books of that season, a compilation called Forget me not, obviously
intended by its publishers for a lady's boudoir. For once he was confessedly
the victim of sentiment. He described the book as "for ELT."

/o.

ELLEN

Ne m'arrete pas., fantome odieuxl

Je vais epouser ma belle aux doux yeux.

— Leconte de Lisle, "Les Elfes"

(Let me pass, pale phantom I despise!
I must wed my love with the tender eyes.)

ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER was only seventeen years old but had
surprising dignity in spite of her youthfulness and her delicate, very
feminine figure. A fine forehead and eyes gave her firmly molded
oval face the appearance of intelligence as well as eagerness. She
had the air of a girl that knew her own mind, and she probably knew
better than Waldo Emerson what was going on in his when he arrived in
the town of Concord, New Hampshire. He reasoned it out that he had
arranged to preach to the local Unitarian congregation for a few Sundays
in order to give his brother Edward a chance to rest in the country; but
Ellen doubtless knew she was the magnet that brought him there. This was
not his only visit to the northern Concord since he had met her on the last
Christmas Day. What came of the sleighing party to the neighboring Shaker
village of Canterbury soon after their first meeting is not clear, but they
were probably together then. In the spring, when green foliage softened the
severe New Hampshire landscape, he made new visits to her town, and
by then any well-informed gossip in the neighborhood would probably have
concluded that they were in love.

The first entry he wrote in an old album of hers made a confession
that was thinly disguised under his own French and the French title of
a juvenile poem of Byron's. He was not explicit, but he at least acknowl-
edged a feeling more intense than ordinary friendship— friendship with all
the fire of love though without wings. " 'L'Amitie est 1'Amour sans ailes,' "
he wrote, "et mon affection, ma belle reine, est une Amitie amoureuse,
puisqu'elle a tout le feu de P amour, mais elle n'a point d'ailes; pas une
plume. Oh Ellen, elle ne peut pas mouvoir; c'est un rocher.— "

If this meant love that lacked only poetical expression, he supplied the
needful meter in another entry. This time, though he still wrote no year,

1 32 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he gave the rest of the date very exactly— eight o'clock in the morning of
June 10— and he ended with the salutation "Good morning to thee, Ellen."
He called the poem "Dreamings," and the dream he told was pretty ob-
viously one he had had during the past night:

It was full pleasant— fraught with happiness.
The dream that hath been over me! I would
To thee, dear Ellen, it were not all dross,
The gold that makes my treasurings— the glows
Of fancied bliss, that are to me rich jewels,—
Rich as the lights that pave the courts of heaven,
Burning eternal,— would they were to thee
Stars !— but the dream ! and may I tell it to thee?
To thee, who shap'd and who endued it
With all its magical splendour and deep peace?

In the dream they were alone while the world slept. They passed silently
along the margin of a large river that was noiseless, gloomy, and beautiful;
and they were content.

Then the blush of dawn
Grew in the east, and all the jewelry
That night had thrown upon the maidenly elms
And princely chesnuts, caught the glance of day.
The breeze woke up, and shook the forest heads
With its strong power, as manhood's thought mature
Shaketh the pearls of fancy from the mind,
Till it shall rise refreshed and unencumbered.
Morn wax'd: the birds their happy carrolings
Pour'd out upon the air, the solitude
Was full of utterable good and life
Was holiness. The sun rode high in heaven
And the day pass'd above us: The cool shade
Of evening came; still we were there, alone,
Wrapt in a conscious happiness that knew
Nor blight nor change.

I may not speak of all

The calm delights; the truth, not said, but felt.
The quiet joy that companied our steps
Thence,— and to pass forever, nor go forth
From all our ways—- The morning thus, so full
Of rich deliciousness, sweet day and eventide

ELLEN 133

Went by as moments— O my soul hath liv'd,
Dream as it was,— an age of happiness
In those few vision5 d moments! . . .

Now, in December, when, at least in Ellen's view of the matter, their
love affair was of long standing, Waldo Emerson may actually have be-
lieved that he had got over his "blushes & wishes/' as he said, before
returning to "that dangerous neighborhood." But if so he was quickly
disillusioned. The twenty-five-year-old philosopher made only an inglorious
attempt to be philosophical about Ellen. He was clearheaded enough to
see that the odds were against philosophy this time. He saw that it was
hard to yoke love and wisdom. "In her magic presence," he confessed,
"reason becomes ashamed of himself and wears the aspect of Pedantry or
Calculation.3' What "if the Daemon of the man," he wisely speculated,
"should throw him into circumstances favourable to the sentiment"? Then
"reason would stand on a perilous, unsteady footing." Obviously, as far
as Waldo Emerson was concerned, the circumstances already favored the
sentiment. And though he went through his philosophical gestures, remind-
ing himself how hard it was for a young man to determine the inner qual-
ities of a beautiful woman and that the chances were she did not possess
the virtues the lover valued in her, he seems to have come soon to the
pleasing conclusion that, in this case at least, beauty was sufficient proof of
goodness. The question of Ellen Tucker was, for him, as good as decided.
He could detect "Nothing but light & oxygen" in New Hampshire.

Ellen herself, though she expected to have some financial means once
she came into her share of the Tucker estate, was unrestrained by any
calculating selfishness and, as Waldo later said, "shamed my ambition and
prudence by her generous love in our first interview." Whether she went
so far at their meetings in earlier months remains uncertain. It is certain
that she did now. Some conversation of the sort remained fixed in the
memory of her lover. "I described my prospects," he summarized it. "She
said, I do not wish to hear of your prospects." He wrote more love poems
in her album. In his own journal he was soon addressing Ellen in verses
which gave the lie to the legend of emotional poverty he had been trying
to attach to himself. "I am enamoured of thy loveliness," he wrote, "Love-
sick with thy sweet beauty."

As Waldo lived one life and not two, he was doubtless unabashed when
he preached to Ellen's church a sermon he had recently written on the
affections. It sounded as if it were intended for Ellen and himself. For him
it served to restore the dignity of his philosophy, which had proved so
unreliable in her presence. Love, he said, was a necessity; but it was not

i34 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

the body but the spiritual properties that we loved. The affections, he
showed, with Plato's Symposium in mind no doubt, tended to expect per-
fection in the loved person, and from seeking perfection in the human
friend were led to seek it in God.

By Christmas Eve he had returned to Cambridge and was announcing
the successful conclusion of his private mission. To his brother William
he wrote that, having been "for one week engaged to Ellen Louisa Tucker
a young lady who if you will trust my account is the fairest & best of her
kind," he was "now as happy as it is safe in life to be." Ellen was, he
explained, "the youngest daughter of the late Beza Tucker a merchant
of Boston." During the residence of the Emersons in Roxbury they had
known of the family whose home they passed as they followed the Dedham
Turnpike into Boston. Ellen's mother had now been "three or four years
the wife of Col W. A. Kent of Concord, N. H."

Waldo did not go farther into the family history of the Tuckers, which
was heavy with misfortune and boded no good for Ellen. Her father, the
prosperous merchant who had once been a pew-holder in the Reverend
William Emerson's First Church in Boston and was later one of the founders
of the Baptist Church in Roxbury, died at the age of forty-eight. Five years
later her brother, George, a young medical student with leanings toward
both literature and science, traveled abroad for his health and died at
Paris, doubtless of what he called "a horrid cold which has turn'd my
blood to melted lead." Her sister Mary died- young. Now only her sisters
Margaret and Paulina and her mother, Mrs. Kent, survived. Margaret was
a victim of tuberculosis. It seems unlikely that either of the lovers under-
stood until after their engagement how seriously Ellen's life was threatened
by the same disease.

Back in Massachusetts, the minister resumed his supply preaching but
kept in close touch with Ellen. He had hardly returned home before he
bought her a copy of a second gift book, The Offering, edited, it seems,
by Professor Andrews Norton as a means of raising money for charity.
Waldo himself had written three of the anonymous contributions, two in
verse and one in prose. They were mere trifles he had salvaged from his
journals and notebooks. But a book with verse of his own was a fit gift
for Ellen, herself a poet.

His letters to Ellen were destroyed or are lost, but those of hers which
are still preserved prove that he was a faithful correspondent. She feared
she would annoy him with "the metaphorical droppings of a girl in her
teens," and apparently she had the humor to laugh at her own rhetorical
sentimentalizing. It became obvious that his old schoolmaster's instincts
were still alive when he put her to work reading a history of the Emperor

ELLEN 135

Charles V, doubtless Robertson's, and proposed writing to her in French.
She liked Charles V but had some difficulty in keeping her mind on it. The
proposed French letters would have caused both the lovers some trouble.
"I have been reviving some old French words in my head/' she wrote; "I
find want of practice has put them asleep but they walk drowsily forth
and I doubt not I can catch the idea of any thing you chuse to write. If
it takes more of your precious time to write in this way I would not." She
loved to read his "tinkling ryhmes" but could not keep up with him in
versifying. "My muse/5 she said, "is a disobedient lady and loves not the
cold . . . But you must weary of my feebly expressed thoughts—which
I am afraid are losing too much of their timidity— . . ."

The correspondence eventually ran to at least nearly forty letters on
her side. She humorously acknowledged his eight years' advantage in age
and wisdom by calling him Grandpa and apologizing for her own "half
grown ideas." She admired his letters because they were "not unmeaning
love letters— written only for courtship." After a few months she was doing
French exercises for him and even asking his help with her English com-
positions. Her illnesses sometimes made her letters pathetic., but she gen-
erally kept up her jaunty mood. She feared she was fading away and passing
him by in the journey of life in spite of his earlier start. At times she was
forced to put off his visits till she had better health, or she was able to send
him only brief notes. She wrote him love poetry and wanted more from him.

The Emersons nearly all welcomed her. Her dislike of Andrew Jackson
showed that she was politically eligible as a member of the family, but
that was the least of her qualifications. When she came to old Concord for
a visit, Ruth Emerson thought her "a blessing sent from heaven for Waldo"
and she pleased Grandfather Ripley, "the 'Apostle of half a century.' "
There were a few grumblings from Aunt Mary, who had not yet seen her
but whose eyes seldom saw unmixed good.

For Waldo there was enough good fortune to make unfavorable omens
look unimportant. He was about to enter upon a regular pastorate in spite
of some suspicions on the part of the senior minister who still nominally
held it. Henry Ware had foreseen, no doubt, that Waldo would be his
colleague and successor at the Second Church in Boston and had cautioned
him against unorthodox tendencies. The young preacher made no humble
apology. "I have affected generally/* he explained, "a mode of illustration
rather bolder than the usage of our preaching warrants, on the principle
that our religion is nothing limited or partial, but of universal application,
& is interested in all that interests man." But Ware, whose large head gave
an impression of stature belied by his puny frame, was not a serious ob-
stacle. Though he had frigid manners and no deep enthusiasm, he was

i36 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

benevolent. "In calm hours and friendly company," said Waldo, "his face
expanded into broad simple sunshine; and I thought le bon Henri a
pumpkin-sweeting."

Certainly the exchange of opinions between the two men did not much
affect opinion in the Second Church, which, in January, invited Waldo
to become junior pastor. Out of 79 persons voting, 74 were for him. He
was to receive $1200 a year, but it was agreed that after the end of Ware's
connection, which would be soon, he would be advanced to the rank of
pastor, with Ware's salary of $1800. Waldo hesitated only because he feared
that Ellen, whom he was already nursing through a severe attack of her
dangerous malady, might need to travel for her health. Having got encour-
agement from her doctor, he decided to accept the offer.

Ignorant of the crisis in Ellen's health, Aunt Mary exploded with dis-
gust at what she thought her nephew's vulgar success. She saw "no
romance,— all common, fat prosperity; not the poet, reckless of scholarship,
glad to get his bread anyhow." She prophesied that he would "be as busy
as a bee, yet as cautious as if he were a tailor making patterns." Aunt Mary
gloried in her own vagabondage and poverty, and she very honestly took
alarm at her nephew's prospect of marrying money. But within a few days
she was contentedly setting herself up as schoolmistress to Ellen, whom
she tutored by mail. She tried to prepare her to be, as she said, a lasting
blessing to the man to whom it was her favored lot to be attached. She
instructed her what religious books and what novels to read and ventured
to hope that she did not paint or talk French.

To Waldo Emerson, now at Boston in the house of a Haskins cousin
in order to be near Ellen, prosperity did not seem real. At the end of
January, in "these times of tribulation," which he was spending partly in
Ellen's sick room as one of her nurses, he sent his unenthusiastic acceptance
to the Second Church. Ellen's ill health must have been in his thoughts
as he wrote: "I come to you in weakness, and not in strength. In a short
life, I have yet had abundant experience of the uncertainty of human
hopes." He "cast many a lingering look around the walls" of 14 Divinity
Hall, a pleasant place to live. Two members of the Second Church were
ready to open their homes to him in Boston. He agreed to spend the first
month of his pastorate with George Sampson on North Allen Street and
afterwards to board with Abel Adams on Chardon Street, not too long a
walk from the church.

On Wednesday, the nth of March, 1829, the ordination was like a
family party. Edward and Charles and their mother and Ellen's mother
were witnesses. The family took pride in the new pastor's "elegant & dig-
nified" appearance and were moved to tears by the honorable allusions

ELLEN 137

made to his late father. Grandfather Ripley appeared "yet nobler in old
age, like an oak that gathers in venerableness what it loses in luxuriance."
No eminent preachers were present. Uncle Samuel Ripley preached the
sermon; Grandfather Ripley gave the charge; Frothingham, pastor of the
Rev. William Emerson's old church, gave the right hand of fellowship.
Another of the ministers was Upham, Waldo's college classmate. Gannett,
a graduate of the year before Waldo's, seemed endowed with prophetic
vision as he addressed the members of the society, urging them to spare
their pastor's strength, to respect the independence of his ministry, and,
even if he proved too heterodox to suit them, to give him credit for courage
at least. They were not to hinder the preacher in his duty so long as they
could endure him at all; if they could not endure him, manner or doctrine,
they were to tell him so frankly and let him go. "If," said Gannett, "I
must choose between the condition of a slave in Algiers, & the servitude of
a clergyman, who dares not speak lest he sh_- startle a prejudice, give me
the former."

Doubtless the ceremony was not too simple to suit Waldo. He heeded
John Milton's warning that ordination had no mysterious virtue in it but
was merely "the laying on of hands, an outward sign or symbol of admis-
sion," creating nothing and conferring nothing. After the ordination, the
family joined the guests at the four long tables in the hall of the Hancock
School, in the same street with the church. The ceremonies would hardly
have been complete without some observance at the manse in Concord,
and four pertinent lines on the wooden panel that had long served as a
sort of Emerson album may well have been written there by Edward on
this occasion:

Holy & happy stand
In consecrated gown
Toil, till some angel hand
Bring sleep & shroud & crown

To be pastor of the Second Church was an honor, and the salary sub-
stantial for a beginner. But the church, even if it was the second oldest in
Boston, was no longer fashionable or wealthy. Its place of worship did not
add to its attractiveness. The new junior pastor, unless he was completely
preoccupied with his unaccustomed responsibilities as he walked along
Hanover Street, must have marveled at the old but recently renovated
edifice. It was so tall, with its three tiers of windows accenting its height,
that it dwarfed the spire resting firmly but not very gracefully atop its large
rectangular tower. The tower itself resembled a campanile built by mistake
too close to the church. There were some unpleasant memories preserved

138 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

in the stories told about the place. It had been called the Revenge Church
because of its origin in a quarrel, and the Cockerel Church because the
figure of a cock had been perched upon its first weather vane, in derision,
it is said, of the Rev. Peter Thacher, over whose ordination there had been
fierce dissension. Tradition had it "that when the cock was placed upon
the spindle, a merry fellow straddled over it and crowed three times to
complete the ceremony.53

Whether or not the new junior pastor was troubled by such old wives'
tales, he could hardly have been unmindful of some somber figures in the
past 'or present of his society. More than a century earlier the learned
Puritan preachers Increase Mather and his son Cotton had both served the
Second Church for many years. When Waldo climbed into the semicircular
mahogany pulpit, he must "have been painfully conscious of Henry Ware,
Jr., still nominally his senior colleague. But when he faced the persons actu-
ally present, the pulpit's firm wings, extending laterally to make the semi-
circle into something resembling the Greek letter omega, and its dominating
height, emphasized by the fluted columns that buttressed its curved front,
doubtless gave him a sense of security. He had a psychological advantage
that seemed to nullify the numerical superiority enjoyed by his congrega-
tion, which was broken up into little platoons sheltered only by the less
formidable barriers of the pew walls and doors. Yet he needed courage,
for he was a young man announcing new doctrines where the much re-
spected senior pastor had recently repeated the articles of faith commonly
accepted by Unitarians.

He seemed to be defiantly answering Ware's earlier admonitions when,
in the first sermon he preached after being ordained, he charted his course,
declaring that he intended henceforth to use a freedom befitting the great-
ness of the Gospel and its application to all human concerns. His own
limitations were naturally strict enough, and it would be silly, he explained,
to shut himself up within still narrower bounds. He would simply appeal
to Biblical example if anybody complained about the want of sanctity in
his style. He was willing to admit that the Scriptures were the direct voice
of God. But he declared that the business of the church was to teach right
living rather than religious dogma. In a second sermon he made it clear
that he did not care to be an ecclesiastical policeman. He was still willing
to keep up the ordinances of the church, but in the two sermons he gave
notice that time-honored precedents were in danger.

He was soon averaging five introductory pastoral visits a day, and he
felt them in every bone of his body. On his second Sunday he "preached
at home all day & married a couple & baptized a child & assisted in the
administration of the supper." He got hard-earned confidence. "I fear

ELLEN 139

nothing now/5 he declared, "except the preparation of sermons. The pros-
pect of one each week, for an indefinite time to come is almost terrifick."
Exchanges with other pastors helped him, but there was no shirking the
job of writing fresh sermons. Ellen was in Boston, at least much of the time,
but he had to spend two or three hours a morning in writing and generally
the whole afternoon in visiting. Charles, then living in the city, was struck
by the increasingly eloquent preaching and by the amusing spectacle of the
inexperienced pastor visiting his people "without any other guide or intro-
duction, than his own knowledge of the street wherein they live." Some-
times Waldo "made long calls, kindly & affectionate on families v/ho had
no other claim to his attentions, than that of bearing the same name with
his parishioners."

Even before the ordination at the Second Church, the radical school-
master Amos Bronson Alcott had listed Waldo Emerson as eleventh among
the lesser preachers whose acquaintance he desired to make. A more en-
thusiastic hearer hazarded the opinion that "That young man will make
another Channing." Undoubtedly many would have agreed with the New
Bedford man who admired the young preacher's voice, "indefinite charm
of simplicity and wisdom," and "occasional illustrations from nature" but
found "the fresh philosophical novelties" of the sermon hard to understand.

Ware more than once declared his satisfaction with what was going on
in his old pulpit, but actually he was first doubtful, then deeply troubled.
In answer to one of Ware's privately administered admonitions, Waldo
said he was distressed "that the idea sh'd be given to my audience that I
did not look to the Scriptures with the same respect as others." He had
only meant to say, he explained, "that my views of a preacher's duties were
very high." But the new preacher had reasoned out his course for years
past and was not blundering into strange heresies. Ware was broken-hearted.
The parish dwindled, he said tearfully, for the church was afflicted with
skepticism.

Doubtless it was the sermon that most appealed to the young pastor,
but it was only one of the nine parts of the order of exercises for both
morning and afternoon as he once jotted them down: prayer, Scriptures,
hymn, prayer, hymn, sermon, prayer, hymn, benediction. He halted in his
prayers, ill at ease. He was fastidious in his choice of words and hated
stereotyped phrases. He complained that "the necessity of saying something
& not stopping abruptly led him to say what he would not have said— a
kind of insincerity." The ceaseless prayer, an aspiring and an actual living
toward ideals, which he had long since advised his hearers to practice was
something quite different from these public exercises.

As he himself had little music in him, most of the songs sung by the

1 40 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

choir or congregation must have given him as much pain as the worst of
them would have given to an expert. But he was delighted by the singing
of the peripatetic choir girl Charlotte Cushman, afterwards known in opera
for her fine contralto voice and later famous as an actress. Sometimes he
was emotionally uplifted when the church was filled with voices as it was
when Charles Wesley's New Year's hymn was sung. That piece had some
resounding lines that his ear was not deaf to:

COME, let us anew our journey pursue.
Roll round with the year,

And never stand still till the Master appear!

What he cared for most in the hymns was the occasional bit of poetry he
could detect and any evidences of liberal theology. In the old collection
used in his church he was troubled by false theological views. There were,
he considered, loose notions about immortality and gross conceptions of
spiritual things. He put these opinions into a sermon and had a new hymnal
adopted.

He found it awkward to visit sick people and mourners. Tales of his
unhappy adventures among his parishioners got into circulation. Called to
the deathbed of Captain Green, a rough-and-ready old Revolutionary
officer who lived next door to the church, Waldo was diffident and em-
barrassed, fumbled among the clutter of things on the sick man's table,
and began to talk about glassmaking. The captain was angry and told him
that if he knew nothing to do at a deathbed but to lecture about glass
bottles, he had better go. Another story told how Waldo, getting stuck in
the middle of a prayer he was making at a funeral, took his hat and left
without further ado. The young pastor himself might have jotted down
many similar incidents of his professional life, no doubt, if he had been
quick enough to realize the value of such trivia. But people shunned to
record the circumstance which they best knew, he afterwards put it, "for
example, the clergyman ... his pecuniary and social and amiable or
odious relations to his parish." It was only when you got far enough away
from "these employments & meannesses" that their significance loomed
larger and they appeared to be "the fit fable of which you are the moral."
I In common with other preachers, Waldo Emerson was naturally dis-
fcouraged when he thought of the mixed motives that brought his congre-
gation to church. He already knew well enough, without putting it into
so many words, that "Scarcely ten came to hear his sermon. But singing,
or a new pelisse, or Cousin William, or the Sunday School, or a proprietors'
meeting after church, or the merest anility in Hanover Street, were the
beadles that brought and the bolts that hold his silent assembly -in the

ELLEN 141

church." Yet he wanted the opportunity of confronting even such a con-,
gregation. They were "fools/' he admitted, but "potentially divine." Hef
hoped to stick to his pulpit till it appeared that a better platform was avail-
able to him.

A few close friends meantime made his professional worries seem un-
important. Abel Adams, to whose house in Chardon Street Waldo moved
his scanty belongings from George Sampson's home, was one of the most
dependable and useful friends he ever had. Adams cared little for books
but knew human nature and was a trusted adviser in financial matters.
He exchanged Bibles with the young minister and they called themselves
brothers. But Waldo had his mind mainly on Ellen. By the first of May she
had left Boston and was hopefully traveling in the Connecticut Valley.
Within a few weeks she had "fled like the Phenix bird" back to new Con-
cord, and Waldo spent nearly all the latter half of June there, a part of
the time in her sick room. She was "taken sick in the old way,— very sud-
denly," and he concluded that "human happiness is very unstable." Back
in Boston again that summer, he still hoped for her recovery and was think-
ing, it seems, of the possibility of settling with her in the peaceful corner
of Roxbury where he had once lived.

Having returned to New Hampshire at the earliest possible moment,
he set out with her on a long journey to improve her health. "Ellen & I
came hither in a chaise this morng. an easy ride of 12 miles from Con-
cord," he wrote to his brother Charles from the Shaker village of Canter-
bury. "Her mother followed us an hour or two later in coach with our
fair & reverend baggage. Ellen bore the ride beautifully & if tomorrow shd.
prove fair & she continues as well we mean to go on to Meredith bridge
... or even possibly to Centre Harbor . . . Mother Winkley or Sister
Winkley hath given Ellen & I a long & earnest sermon on the 'beauty of
virginity* & striven to dissuade us from our sinful purpose of 'living after
the way of manhood & of womanhood in the earth' but I parried her
persuasion & her denunciation as best I might & insisted we were yoked
together by Heaven to provoke each other to good works so long as we
lived . . ."

Waldo, untouched by Mother Winkley's Shaker doctrines, entertained
his pretty companion with a humorous rhyming journal of their progress.
Her fortitude was tested by the journey. As they went on toward the White
Mountains, they passed "thro much wind & some shower" and wished for
a fire in August. But the open air seemed better for Ellen than her nurse
and hot room at home. Waldo canceled his next Sunday's engagement
with his church in Boston, and they turned westward to the Connecticut
Valley before starting back to new Concord.

THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOtt

A few weeks later, in September, the lovers were off on another tour,
this time from her home to the Merrimac River, on to Worcester, Spring-
field, and Hartford, and back through Worcester into New Hampshire.
They carried half a dozen volumes of new novels besides some heavier
reading. By day they rode in the chaise, while Mrs. Kent and her daughter
Margaret came along in the carriage. At the taverns they read and scribbled.
He preached a sermon or two in spite of a lame knee. They hurried north-
ward on their return, as he wanted to get back to his own pulpit and Ellen
doubtless needed to reach home a week or two before their wedding.

On the last day of the month, in her stepfather Colonel Kent's old man-
sion in the New Hampshire Concord, they were married. Charles, the only
one of the groom's family at the wedding, had a great fondness for Waldo
and did not live through "3 whole days in that big house full of women"
without suffering a twinge of jealousy. Time was heavy on his hands "while
W. & the fair Ellen were whispering honied words above stairs,53 as he
said, "& I was turned over to the compulsory attentions of the stranger
folk." But he managed to arouse himself to an effort at generosity. "These
lovers," he explained, "are blind-purblind these lovers be-I forgive them
freely/3 Early in October the married pair were moving into the house of
a Mrs. Hannah Keating, on, or slightly off, Chardon Street, Boston, and
close to the home of Abel Adams. Waldo was soon laid up in his chair,
unable to walk without a cane. His sprained knee was now made worse by
chronic inflammation. On Sundays he preached sitting. He rode out with
Ellen every day when the weather was good.

His marriage had made him a man of some substance, or rather had
given him the promise of being so. "Men call me richer," he put it, "I hope
it will prove so-but shall be glad if the equipage of the king & the queen
for each hath their own doth not eat up master Mammon on his quarter
day." He settled down to his new way of life. He bought a pair of dumb-
bells, doubtless in an attempt to get exercise in spite of his lameness; de-
posited money in the Globe Bank; paid Chickering $300 for a piano;
subscribed to the Boston Athenaeum; and bought books. As his knee got
no better, he quit his reputable doctors and hired a quack, who had the
good luck to cure him. He offered to pay $3 a week so that Edward, now
admitted to the bar and at work in New York with William, could be kept
from overwork; but he did not find his own immediate financial prospects
rosy. "I have a fancy," he declared, "that if you shd examine my income
& outlay since my marriage you wd say I was poorer not richer, therefor.
But richer I surely am by all Ellen, if she bro't no penny."

In spite of his pastorate and his absorbing connection with Ellen he
was prepared, at least, to do a good deal of reading, perhaps partly for his

ELLEN 143

wife's benefit. In the year of his marriage he bought copies of Montaigne,
Rousseau, a Cooper novel, Scott's Marmion, and Combe on the constitu-
tion of man. He borrowed Herder on the philosophy of history, Marcus
Aurelius, Plato, and a few other authors from the Harvard College Library.
He paid some small sums to the Boston Library Society and got good re-
turns, borrowing such books as Xenophon on Socrates, Aristotle on ethics
and politics, Plutarch's Morals, Lucretius, Epictetus, Beaumont and Fletcher,
Massinger, Bishop Berkeley, Sir William Temple, Swift's Gulliver's Travels,
Clarissa Harlowe and another novel of Richardson's, Erasmus Darwin's
^oonomia, Lamb's essays, Southey's Thalaba, Schiller's history of the Thirty
Years' War, and Goethe's memoirs. He soon began to make heavy drafts
upon the library of the Boston Athenaeum.

He was beginning a new and rewarding period of acquaintance with
books. A few deftly turned phrases and philosophical distinctions such as
he might borrow from a subtle mind like Coleridge's— talent and genius,
fancy and imagination, reason and understanding— might help shape his
old thoughts into a semblance of order. After years of nibbling at Coleridge,
he suddenly became deeply interested in him that autumn and winter. In
December he wrote Aunt Mary that he was reading The Friend. He was
aware that she did not "speak of it with respect" but went on to inform
her that "there are few or no books of pure literature so self-imprinting,
that is so often remembered as Coleridge's." And a few days later he added
a determined defense of his author. Early in the new year he sent William
and Edward a list of books he was reading: "Coleridge's Friend— with
great interest; Coleridges 'Aids to reflection' with yet deeper; Degerando
Hist. Comparee des Systemes de Philosophic, I am beginning on the best
recommendation. & one more book— the best Sermon I have read for some
time, to wit, Combe's Constitution of Man. You see the present is too
mighty for me, I cannot get away to do homage to the mighty past."

He debated books with his brothers and with Aunt Mary, an instigator
or a severe critic of his thinking. Charles, by his own admission, was now
"quite taken with Coleridge." Aunt Mary sometimes professed to believe
that Waldo did not value her and would soon put her aside. She char-
acteristically attacked him obliquely by addressing Charles or some other
member of the family. "As to Waldo's letter," she once wrote, "say nothing
to him. It is time he should leave me. His sublime negations, his non-
informations, I have no right in the world to complain of." Another letter
showed that she was trying to keep up with the philosophical Aunt Sarah
Alden Ripley as well as with him, but not very willingly. "Coleridge— &
a few relations of his idealism," she grumbled, "I pick up & sit late & rise
early to question of a truth which can be of no consequence to me in the

i44 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

grave. Instead of truth I might say illusion— sophistry ..." She was be-
wildered. Her curiosity carried her along into new speculations, but she
looked with suspicion upon "the Kantian mania w'h has revived within
two or three years" and thought Kant and his followers as destructive of
theism as was Spinoza. She was sure she would never part with her reason-
ably orthodox and reliable favorite Doctor Samuel Clarke, but she saw
that the newly popular philosophical doctrines left "the good old Clarke
out of all reckoning."

Waldo bought a magnet, a frame for a view of Paestum, Boswell's life
of Johnson, a history of enthusiasm, the Boston Athenaeum catalogue, a
subscription to the Boston Daily Advertiser, a bird, a subscription to The
New Jerusalem Magazine, another to The Christian Examiner, another to
The North American Review, and another to The Edinburgh Review.
Such things could probably come out of his own salary, but he undoubtedly
could not meet all his expenses from that restricted source. He sometimes
paid Mrs. Keating over $100 a month for the house, with board it seems.
In March, April, and May he had heavy expenses for travel southward
with Ellen, her sister Margaret going along with them.

By the middle of March the three of them were in the Connecticut
Valley again. At Hartford he preached three times in one Sunday. There
he managed to bring Aunt Mary, who was apt to be boarding about in
odd places, for her first sight of Ellen. Ellen, in the rhymed travel journal
which it was her turn to keep on this trip, recorded Aunt Mary's dis-
appointment. As usual, however, Aunt Mary was not wholehearted in her
verdict. "I like her better better than I dreamt," she managed to bring
out; and she even discovered genius in the girl. But though she eventually
declared that the young wife was "the lovliest Maddona of my imajanation,"
she refused for the present to accept the usual estimate of Ellen's beauty.

On the whole the journey proved to be one more trial of endurance
for Ellen. Sailing from New Haven, she and her sister and Waldo encoun-
tered a gale that drove them into Norwalk Roads for shelter. There they
lay "pouting & snuffing the insufferable mephitis of the cabin, & hearing
the rain patter & looking at each other grimly." There were "forty stout
passengers . . . sleeping or trying to sleep in an air that wd doubtless have
put out a lamp on the floor. But morning came, the wind abated, & the
steam chimney began once more to puff." After "a noble passage up the
Sound," during which they enjoyed the "fine sun mild air, swift vessels,
beautiful shores, noble seats," they got to "this long London town" of New
York.

There Waldo took over the doggerel journal from Ellen to insert some
satirical lines on the parades of splendid "paint, lace, plumes, flowers, &

ELLEN . 145

brocades" on Broadway; but at the hotel she found fit subjects for more
of her own social satire. Amazed at the brazenness of the city belles, she
was, as she pictured herself the overmodest country lass, a

wondering, eager, newcome clown
And blushing like a country Miss
To see the utter nakedness
And how they cheat the legs of clothes
While the long arms in state repose . . .

But at last, safely on board the Thistle, she and Waldo were skirting Staten
Island, then entering the muddy Raritan, the waterway to Philadelphia.

In that city, they left the U. S. Hotel for Sarah M'Elroy's boarding
house, on the corner of Chestnut and Eleventh Streets. There Ellen dis-
covered more grist for her metrical mill, but her habitual mood was far
from satirical. William Furness, Waldo's boyhood friend and now a large
part of Philadelphia for the young couple, "found them on one occasion
walking with arms around each other, up & down their parlor." He was
impressed by Ellen's youthfulness and delicacy. The young husband, he
remembered, "borrowed my Hume's Hist of England." But as Waldo was
"Reluctant to inflict dry reading upon his child-wife, he said he would have
her begin with the reign of Queen Eliz^h" He stayed over two Sundays,
preached three sermons, and went with Ellen to see art treasures; but he
soon became "sadly impatient" of the "petty engagements which tear time
into slivers." By the first of April he was on his way home, leaving his wife
with her sister Margaret in Philadelphia till, as he planned, he should return
for them a few weeks later.

Before the end of May he and Ellen and Ruth Emerson were in Brook-
line, beginning their residence of several months in the ugly and old-
fashioned but pleasant, comfortable Aspinwall house. To Charles, a frequent
visitor there that summer, his mother seemed to have found a peaceful
hermitage that agreed with her own serene soul. The unfortunate fact for
Ellen was the cruel, inexorable chafing of the Massachusetts coast's east
wind, which, she said, "blows blue & shrill." For her husband, a week of
daily travel between Brookline and Boston was almost enough, but he was
willing to sacrifice himself, or others, to her good. Except for a "universal
benevolence," Charles observed, the young husband was "all called in &
centred in Ellen." Charles, finding himself neglected, was hurt and won-
dered "whether t'is the invariable effect of business & marriage, to make
one independent of, & therefore indifferent to old relationships & intimacies."

On Election Day in Boston, Waldo Emerson, chaplain of the state
senate, sat comfortably in the pulpit and listened to Doctor Channirig's

146 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

"noble discourse." Waldo's selection as chaplain, in the summer of 1829,
apparently had had no political significance, for the administration was
Democratic Republican while he, with many other former Federalists, was
presumably by that time at least nominally a National Republican. But
probably he had had to acknowledge a definite affiliation with the National
Republicans when, in the local election of the following December, he had
been chosen to represent the fourth ward on the Boston school committee
during the year 1830.

The committee meant a serious responsibility with little honor. Its
twelve members were elected annually, one from each ward ; and the mayor
and aldermen belonged ex officio. The committee elected all the public-
school teachers, determined salaries, and removed any teacher at discretion.
Each of its regular subcommittees visited and watched over one of the city
schools. Visitations, reports, quarterly meetings, special meetings, and in-
formal conferences added up to a staggering total of hours for a conscien-
tious member.

The young minister had been promptly assigned to the subcommittees
on the Latin School and the Mayhew School. He was a graduate of the
Latin School, and the Mayhew School was near his home. Except when he
was out of town he seldom failed to do his part. During the year he served
on a special committee to make the annual return of the Boston schools to
the state, vainly tried to block changes in school regulations, wrote two
quarterly reports for the subcommittee on the Mayhew School. It was dis-
couraging business for him to generalize on hasty impressions of the work
being done by the scholars. Once he reported that the subcommittee "spent
the forenoon in the Reading Department . . . There was not an appear-
ance of much diligence in the reading or spelling of this class. The first class
read pretty well, had advanced a little way in grammar; & were very well
acquainted with the map of the United States." Some divisions of the fourth
class, he faithfully recorded, were superior to the rest. One class recited
arithmetic extremely well, and there was good order in the school. Such
reports were tangible but not inspiring results of many meetings and visita-
tions. The Mayhew School was an especially troublesome assignment be-
cause of an altercation over disciplinary practices in vogue there.

In the manner of his father before him, Waldo Emerson resolved to
be methodical. He wished that God would grant him "persistency enough,
so soon as I leave Brookline, and come to my books, to do as I intend/'
He was trying to define his old theory of self-reliance more sharply with
the help of the Coleridgean concept of reason, reason that was not reason
but the faculty by which one intuitively turned on, in one's inner self, the

ELLEN 147

current of divine will and idea. He thought he saw clearer light on the
seeming contradiction between self-reliance and God-reliance, He para-
doxically insisted "that the more exclusively idiosyncratic a man is, the
more general and infinite he is." God, truth, shone directly into the soul,
and "it is/9 he put its "when a man does not listen to himself, but to others,
that he is depraved and misledo"

In the autumn he was back in Chardon Street among his books, but his
meditations on such ideas were interrupted by some speculations on a sub-
ject unhappily pressed upon his attention by the ill health of his family.
Was it "possible for religious principle to overcome the fear of death"?
Bacon had listed what he thought were passions and humors which could
triumph over that fear. Instances of defiance of death were familiar to
everybody^ but were these instances of a conquest of the fear or merely
of success in setting it aside, mere want of thought? Even "spiritual men"
like Doctor Johnson frequently showed great apprehension and gloom at
the thought of dissolution, Waldo recalled. Later he quoted Sir Thomas
Browne's Hydriotapkia in his journal.

News came from New York that Edward seemed as much threatened
by tuberculosis as Ellen and must travel. If he would not come to Boston
and let his mother and Ellen nurse hirn, he ought to go to Magnolia in
Florida, Waldo thought, rather than to the West Indian island of Santa
Cruz, a more expensive and more restricted place. Florida still had the
special attraction, Waldo supposed, of being Achille Murat's residence.
"For myself/3 he argued, "I would pay a hundred dollars to live a little
while with Murat." When word came that Edward was about to sail south-
ward alone, Ruth Emerson, having decided to make the voyage with him
if he wanted her, hastily set out for New York but was delayed by head
winds and arrived half an hour after he had sailed for Santa Cruz.

Ellen, taking her doctor's advice not to migrate to Cuba or elsewhere
unless she was prepared to stay for ten years, decided to risk another winter
in New England. If Edward's case was pathetic, Ellen's was more so and
was a test of her husband's fortitude as well as of her own. The pathos came
not only from her youth, her beauty, and her helplessness but also from
what she and doubtless Waldo believed to be her unfulfilled promise as a
poet. On blank leaves in a diary which had once been her brother George's
she had written some of her most revealing prose and verse. God, she said,
had given her a harp, and she thought the strings were sound, though the
bridge and frets were weak and wasting. She felt that every day she "ought
to get one drop ... of clear distilled essence" from her brain, but the
drop did not come, Her moods fell or soared up suddenly. "To day," she

148 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

once wrote, "my heart has been riding again on the south wind . . ." Her
fragile verses expressed her resignation or her constancy in a touching
feminine manner:

I sheild my bosoms inmate this sweet love

As I would mine own babe or a wee flower . . .

I will not stay on earth Waldo

Unless thy love is mine
When all that gave it birth my love

And beauty must decline . . .
Sweeter the green sod for my bones

The black earth for my head
The wind than thy cold altered tones

Whence all of love had fled—

At the other extreme, she had written satire, and she could forget the
solemnity expected of her as the wife of the minister and banter him with
verses on the independence she intended to assert in the next world:

I sha'nt keep a carriage
My wings will be strong . . .
I therefore shall use them
As I may see fit
And tea out & dine out—
Nor mind you a bit.

But her dominant tone appeared in the painfully intense sentiment of her
many serious pieces on love and religion. "Lines/' beginning "Love scatters
oil," and "The Violet" were among her most careful compositions and
were not greatly altered for printing in The Dial years later. Except for
a few happy moments, her wish to be a poet was frustrated. Her life was
too constricted. What poetry was left in her must have been congealed by
the cold storms at Boston in that final December of 1830. Two lines she
had probably written long before would have served best as a farewell to
her dream of poetic inspiration, lines which Waldo copied at the end of
his own book of selections from her poems and which his brother Charles
remembered :

I chided the moon,—she was icy cold—

The stars were coquettes too splendidly drest

She kept on riding out day after day, believing that the open air gave
her her chance for life. Before the end of January that chance had dwindled
perceptibly, though Waldo was still hopeful. "As soon as the snows melt

ELLEN 149

so as to give us passage," he said, "and as soon as she recovers her dimin-
ished strength so as to ride & walk we shall set out for Philad. or Baltimore,
God helping us.'3 She lived through another week of dying. But it seemed
to those who were with her that they were witnessing a religious act in
which there was not much room for pathos. When she was not torpid under
the influence of opiates, she was serene. On the sixth of February Charles
wrote that "her spirit seems winged for its flight. . . . Waldo is bowed
down under the affliction, yet he says t'is like seeing an angel go to heaven."
For Waldo's mother, full of piety and of affection for Ellen, "the closing
scene of her short life" had "solemn & delightful interest." The girl was,
she said, "calm & undismayed at the approach of death— & in a prayerful
& resigned state of mind commited herself & all her dear friends unto God
—biding each of us around her Farewell." On February 8, two hours after
Ellen's death, Waldo wrote to Aunt Mary:

"My angel is gone to heaven this morning & I am alone in the world
& strangely happy. Her lungs shall no more be torn nor her head scalded
by her blood nor her whole life suffer from the warfare between the force
& delicacy of her soul & the weakness of her frame. I said this morn & I
do not know but it is 'true that I have never known a person in the world
in whose separate existence as a soul I could so readily & fully believe . . .
I see it plainly that things & duties will look coarse & vulgar enough to
me when I find the romance of her presence (& romance is a beggarly
word) withdrawn from them all. . . ."

Henry Ware preached the funeral sermon, and the nineteen-year-old
Ellen, it seems, was buried according to her own request in her father's
tomb in Roxbury. She had been the wife of Waldo Emerson less than a
year and a half, yet she had stirred him more than anybody else ever had
done or could do. Others of the family vied with him in praising her.
Charles, who had known her exceptionally well, could not be eloquent
enough about her. The image of Ellen that remained in his mind was, he
said, "an Ideal that, if I were a Platonist, I should believe to have been one
of the Forms of Beauty in the Universal Mind. She moved ever in an
atmosphere of her own, a crystal sphere, & nothing vulgar in neighboring
persons & circumstances touched her." Waldo himself wrote and rewrote
her elegy in verse and prose.

For long after her death he had the habit of walking every morning,
it is said, from Boston to her tomb, near the Roxbury Latin School. His
cousin David Greene Haskins often passed him on the road to the ceme-
tery. Never was Waldo Emerson so settled in his belief in immortality. Therel
were moments when he could hardly conceive of the reality of either
physical or spiritual death.

150 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Does thy heart beat with mine? does thy blue eye
Ever look northward with desire,

he asked of Ellen. In other verses he seemed half serious in his disappoint-
ment that she did not by sheer will power, as if she were some Ligeia,
return to keep their secret pact to remain inseparable. An obscure unreason-
ing and uncontrollable impulse caused him on one of his visits to her
tomb, more than a year after her death, to open her coffin.

He continued to complain of his lack of emotion, and when he went
back "to the first smile of Ellen on the door-stone at Concord" and reviewed
the whole history of his love affair with her, it was his own coolness, as
he imagined it, that he regretted. But whatever his superficial coolness, he
was aware of the passion underneath. It was chiefly the lack of harmony
between the outer and the inner man that annoyed and puzzled him.

In time, however, he was able to look back upon his loss with what
seemed to him to be complete acceptance of the fact. "I loved Ellen," he
said, "and love her with an affection that would ask nothing but its in-
dulgence to make me blessed. Yet when she was taken from me, the air
was still sweet, the sun was not taken down from my firmament, and how-
ever sore was that particular loss, I still felt that it was particular, that
the universe remained to us both . . ."

THESES NAILED TO THE CHURCH DOOR

It is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience.
Here stand I, I cannot otherwise.

—Martin Luther, quoted in MS journal "Q,"
October 27, 1832

THOUGH his mother was there, the house in Chardon Street
seemed empty to Waldo Emerson. He quickly returned to his
pulpit, but the real text of his first sermon was his own sorrow.
He reasoned out consolation from his belief in immortality. The
Second Church kept him busy. A new vestry was finished, and he had to
make an address at its dedication. He had to follow up the dedicatory ad-
dress with a course of lectures explaining the Scriptures for the benefit of
the young people of his congregation. He went about this business with
a heavy heart.

In his opening lecture he summarized supposed facts about each of the
authors of the first three Gospels. He concluded with the characteristic
observation that in the three simple, poverty-stricken Jews one found an
example of the power of moral truth over the human soul. In a later lec-
ture he piled up the available evidence that the Bible was authentic, and
he went back over the history of English and other versions. By the end of
March he was giving his theory of the origins of the Gospels, and so he
went on from one subject to another. He by no means denied the his-
toricity of Jesus but held with Gieseler that probably, after their master's
death, the disciples repeatedly went over their facts together and so made
their accounts essentially agree. He showed how the Messianic tradition
was wrong in certain details; how, in spite of the general authenticity of
the gospels, some of the recorded miracles might need special interpretations
to make them palatable; how the Sermon on the Mount -was a sublime
declaration promising all spiritual gain and all worldly loss.

In his sermons he still found it hard to forget Ellen. A few weeks after
her death he completed and preached one on suffering. He undoubtedly
had his own private loss in mind as well as his law of compensation when
he told his congregation that it was only reasonable to look forward to a
life compounded of good and evil fortune. "Indeed it seems to me," he

i5* THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

said, "that in reading the lives of illustrious men the mind feels a sort of
incongruity when, as sometimes though rarely happens, they chance to live
in uninterrupted prosperity." He had now written over a hundred sermons.
But he kept on writing new ones and showed himself orthodox and un-
orthodox by turns. He was struggling to stay within the limits of liberal
Christian doctrine but was determined to be honest. Once he had asked
his brother William to make a synopsis of the leading arguments against
Christianity, for William's Gottingen training gave him some authority in
such matters. He had also wanted him to mark, in the works of Eichhorn
or others, the passages that would tend to destroy a candid inquirer's belief
in the divine authority of the New Testament.

In his second year on the school committee he was loaded with new
responsibilities. He had three schools to visit regularly. Some militant parents
of the Mayhew School, of whose subcommittee he was chairman, demanded
a reform of what they considered unreasonably harsh discipline. He labori-
ously compiled the results of his committee's investigations. The committee
was extremely skeptical about a complaint "That the masters had refused
permission to the boys to leave the school & go into the yard, on their
necessary occasions" and found no validity in the charge "That the boys
are employed to clean the inkstands & sweep the schoolrooms by way of
punishment.5' As for the sweeping of floors, the committee was of the
opinion "that the familiar usage of the other schools had better be retained
in this, of giving this work to all the boys of the school in alphabetical
rotation." It was true, the report said, that "each boy is required, when his
inkstand is foul, to carry it out & wash it," but this rule also was upheld.

Waldo Emerson was placed on a special committee that gave half-
hearted support to a proposed method of classifying the city's schools in
an attempt to bring order out of a somewhat chaotic state of affairs. But
troubles at the Mayhew School continued to give him his worst headaches.
A former teacher himself, he must have taken some pleasure in defending
the accused teachers of that school against what his brother Charles called
"the deep voiced mob.35 Contradictory petitions were filed within a few
weeks of the city election. Fifty-two persons, including some of weight in
the community, blamed the subcommittee for repeatedly refusing to act and
appealed directly to the whole school committee. One extremely bitter
parent drafted a petition of his own, charging the headmaster with "more
than savage barbarity . . . and a vindicative cruelty generally to my son
for more than three months ... so much so— that his mind & spirits
seem to be, bowed down to the ground." But the strong resistance of a
majority of the full committee, including Waldo Emerson and Ezra Gan-
nett, his old college mate, defeated the malcontents. A motion for the dis-

THESES NAILED TO THE CHURCH DOOR 153

missal of the master was so drastically amended that it was left a mere
warning that he had "exceeded the bounds of the judicious exercise of
authority." The excitement continued, but the defenders of authority stood
firm. When there were threats of violence, Emerson asked the mayor for
a peace officer. A motion to abolish all corporal punishment in the public
schools was defeated by the votes of Waldo Emerson, Ezra Gannett, and
others.

Memories of his own experiences as a teacher doubtless kept up the
interest of the minister in some of the visitations he had to report. He must
have cared especially about what went on in the Latin and Greek classes
at the Latin School which he had once attended as a pupil. He was not
indifferent to the way the boys read Viri Romce or Caesar, and he was
pleased with some correct translations from Horace that he was fortunate
enough to hear. But he had had enough and was not gratified when he
read in the newspaper in December, 1831, that he had again been nomi-
nated for a seat on the school committee. Fortunately he escaped a third
term. Perhaps the still smoldering embers of the fierce quarrel over the
Mayhew School flared up on election day. At any rate Waldo Emerson
was one of the few National Republican candidates to be defeated.

He kept from serious involvement in partisan politics but was still de-
cisively against Andrew Jackson and his followers. He described Jackson's
as "the bad party in the country," and he dined with John Quincy Adams.
He wrote to Edward in the late summer of 1831 : "Sad political disclosures
every day brings. Wo is me my dishonored country that such poor wretches
should sit in the chairs of Washington Franklin & Adams." It seemed
to him, he said, that "we shall all feel dirty if Jackson is reflected." But
if he was conservative in his choice of leaders, as a man of Federalist
background would naturally have been, he was liberal in some of his social
and political beliefs. He doubtless agreed with his brother Charles on the
duties of American citizens toward the oppressed races. Charles was already
prophesying a crisis over Negro slavery and denouncing the government
for its behavior toward the Indians. Waldo had long since used slavery in
his sermons when he needed examples of man's inhumanity to man. He
admitted the reform agitator Samuel May, "God's choreboy" to the
Second Church pulpit in the spring of 1831. May's address on "Slavery
in the United States" was fully reported in the press. The pastor was thus
linked with the reformer.

Waldo Emerson was growing restless in his shell of a home and thought
of quitting Boston for good. With Charles he revisited their old haunts in
Roxbury. He remembered the rough country of western Massachusetts
and formed fanciful plans for a secluded life of literature and science there.

154 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

He dreamed of establishing himself on an open hillside in one of "the
mountain counties." "There/3 he put it in language more literary than
scientific,

will I bring my books,— my household gods,
The reliquaries of my dead saint, and dwell
In the sweet odor of her memory.
Then in the uncouth solitude unlock
My stock of art, plant dials in the grass,
Hang in the air a bright thermometer
And aim a telescope at the inviolate sun.

At the end of May, 1831, he set out with Charles on a northern tour
of "a fortnight & a couple of days beyond.35 At Burlington, Vermont,
where Waldo preached on Sunday, they found President Marsh of the
University of Vermont, an editor and expounder of Coleridge. Approaching
Lake George and Ticonderoga, the travelers entered a region honored in
their family history. Grandfather Emerson had been with the American
army here. Charles "picked up a bullet in the old Fort at Ti. which," he
said, "I would fain believe to be of true Revolutionary memory." On the
return journey the brothers spent a day at Rutland in a vain attempt
to find their grandfather's grave.

Waldo was oppressed with the sense of mortality. The shocking experi-
ence of a few months earlier had left him numb. In his verses he reburied
Ellen,

who outshone all beauty, yet knew not
That she was beautiful . . .

and, falling into Aunt Mary's chronic mood, he professed a desire to die.
But he had no stomach for Aunt Mary's uncompromising realism. "I
should like," he wrote,

to lie in sweets,

A hill's leaves for winding-sheets,
And the searching sun to see
That I'm laid with decency
And the commissioned wind to sing
His mighty psalm from fall to spring
And annual tunes commemorate
Of nature's child the common fate.

He had another reason than Ellen's loss to think of death. His brothers
Charles and Edward were both threatened. Both had once seemed destined

THESES NAILED TO THE CHURCH DOOR 155

to make a mark in public affairs. Edward was so much in love with learn-
ing that he used to wash his mind's face each morning, as he said, with
a little Euripides or a scrap of Epictetus. Now he was an exile and hardly
dared to return to the New England climate. He kept alive in the West
Indies, where he first tried the little Danish-owned island of Santa Cruz,
or St. Croix. The beauties of St. Croix, long since praised in American
verse, inspired many prose passages in his notebooks and letters. He read
Robinson Crusoe's adventures, sympathetically no doubt, though his own
lot was not quite so desolate as Crusoe's. For some time he had the ad-
rnired Boston preacher Channing close at hand and saw other compatriots
coming and going. He was blistered, dieted, exercised with "friction53 twice
a day. He had daily periods of horseback riding, lounging, walking, bath-
ing, reading, chatting. He was a good observer and carefully watched the
process of removing the sugar from the coolers at Concordia. One or two
Negroes shoveled it from the cooler into tubs as if it were so much wet
gravel The tubs were then hoisted onto the heads of laborers and carried
away to the curing house.

Moving to San Juan, on the neighboring island of Porto Rico, Edward
became a clerk in the counting house of the American consul, Sidney
Mason, a man well informed about this island, where he had passed a third
of his life. Edward lived in the house of a Negro* who spoke English and
whose major dorno spoke French. He made the most of the exotic aspects
of Porto Rican life. He watched the friars passing along the streets., began
work on the Spanish language and wrote letters home in it, walked on the
ramparts and admired the climate. On St. John's day, San Juan's chief
anniversary, vespers were celebrated by horsemen racing through the streets.
At night there were hundreds of such riders. St. Peter's fiesta was next.
Edward turned to the adventures of Don Quixote in Spanish or be listened
while Colonel Flinter, an Irishman in the Spanish service, read from his
manuscripts on local history. He found life in San Juan bearable, and when
he heard that Charles was again threatened with a breakdown he was sure
this was the place for him.

In Boston, Waldo Emerson once more settled down to his philosophical
speculations. Aunt Mary, always in need of a companion in her mental
adventures, sometimes capriciously passed Waldo by hi favor of Charles.,
known as her boy. As she picked up what she called "ends & orts of
Kantism," she found her German philosopher pleased with certain a priori
proofs of a supreme rnind but nevertheless turning out, she thought, to be
an atheist. To her it seemed idiotic for a real or pretended idealist to deny
objective proofs of God. The philosopher Berkeley, admitting reality in the
cause, and the ancient Hindus, admitting nothing but divine agency, did

156 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

incomparably better, Kant was insane, though amiable. Charles, lacking
the speculative boldness that Aunt Mary prized in Waldo, seemed to despair
of keeping up a flight with her in so thin an atmosphere and was soon
trying to steer her in the direction of his philosophical brother.

Waldo was reading seven or eight lectures of Cousin in the first vol-
ume of the Frenchman's course, a sane and plain guide to the history of
philosophy. Still suffering from Ellen's loss, he refused the invitation of
Phi Beta Kappa to be its poet. "A few months since," he explained, "I
should have received it with sincere pleasure, but I have not at present any
spirit for a work of that kind, which must not be a dirge." He was not
the shallow optimist he was sometimes taken for, even by one so close to
him as Ms brother Charles. "Waldo is very well— speculates on— on— happy
he!5' So wrote Charles to Aunt Mary, "I said to you once, 'no anxiety, no
clouds, all inquiry & good hope & quiet live & easy die'— You rebuked
me, but I speak it of him more in marvel than in reproach— And perhaps
I am clean wrong— perhaps all minds are racked as mine is with doubt &
self accusation, but all do not pour their confessions unblushingly as I do
into the ear of their friends—" Actually, Waldo was trying to use his very
real doubts and suffering as materials for a philosophy of life. While Charles
was making his complaint to Aunt Mary, Waldo was writing to Edward:
"I am trying to learn the ethical truths that always allure me from my
cradle till now & yet how slowly disclosed! That word Compensations is
one of the watchwords of my spiritual world— & time & chance & sorrow
& hope do not by their revelations abate my curiosity."

Waldo Emerson had now got hold of a theory of writing that could
be a valuable discipline. No one could write well, he found, who thought
there was any choice of words for him, "There is always one line that ought
to be drawn, or one proportion that should be kept, and every other line
or proportion is wrong, and so far wrong as it deviates from this. ... In
good writing, words become one with things/' The thought of George
Herbert, one of his favorite poets, had "that heat as actually to fuse the
words," Elevation of soul, Emerson reasoned, would determine this power
over language. If the thing was in one's mind the words were bound to
come; and he put such diverse witnesses as Montaigne, Horace, Seneca,
Cicero, and Bums into the box to testify to this truth.

Two of these witnesses undoubtedly helped stir up in the literary ap-
prentice a disgust for the kind of sterile gentility that threatened to restrict
him. "That's why I like Montaigne," he acknowledged. "No effeminate
parlour workman is he, on an idea got at an evening lecture or a young
men's debate, but roundly tells what he saw, or what he thought of when
he was riding horse-back or entertaining a troup at his chateau. A gross,

THESES NAILED TO THE CHURCH DOOR 157

semisavage indecency debases his book, and ought doubtless to turn it out
of doors; but the robustness of his sentiments, the generosity of his judg-
ments, the downright truth without fear or favour, I do embrace with both
arms."

Emerson was dreaming of literature as a profession but was not yet
certain of financial means for even an experimental period of writing. In
June of 1831 Ellen's estate remained "wholly unsettled," but he had just
got "a long legal opinion3' favorable to his own claims. Six months later
letters of administration were about to be taken out. Cutler, the executor
of Beza Tucker's estate, hazarded the guess that the settlement would not
be made during Waldo's lifetime. John Ashmun, a Harvard law professor,
prepared on Waldo's behalf an appeal "To the Hon the Justices of the
Supreme Judicial Court— in Chancery." He recited the history of the Tucker
estate, argued for the claims of plaintiff Emerson to the share Ellen would
have been entitled to if she had lived to the age of twenty-one, and petitioned
for a writ of subpoena directing Cutler, together with Ellen's mother and
the other surviving heirs, to appear before the court "to abide such order
and decree as to your Honors shall seem agreeable to equity and good
conscience." A rumor got abroad that the pastor of the Second Church
"had refused all compromise with his wifes friends & was gone to law
with them." His comment to William was: "For ye first time I saw to my
sorrow yt ye thing admitted of y* face. The facts are yi by a mutual advised
consent we get ye Supreme Court to distribute ye estate, & I take no step
without advising with Mr & Mrs Kent & Margaret Tucker; and if ever
such a story shd. be quoted to you refer to those persons or to Mr Cutler."
Captain Nash, Paulina Tucker's husband, might probably, Waldo ex-
plained, take a different view of the matter but had opportunity to know
better.

In spite of some hope of prompt judicial action, it was actually nearly
two years before any decisive progress could be made toward a settlement
of the Tucker estate, and in the meantime Waldo Emerson remained un-
certain of his financial status. Presumably it was helped slightly by the
several persons who had rooms in the Chardon Street house he still kept.
One of those who apparently stayed longest with him was Warren Burton,
a college classmate who may have been worth more to him than the rental
of the space he occupied, for, though his writings proved ineffectual, he
seems to have been developing somewhat the same views of religion and
the church as Waldo's. Another inmate was Joseph Lyman, son of the
Northampton Lymans. But whatever pecuniary contributions Burton and
Lyman made did not make Waldo financially easy. Late in the spring of
1832 word was sent to Edward that the Chardon Street treasury was more

i58 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

than exhausted and that if he wanted to purchase any goods for the Porto

Rican trade he would have to supply his own funds.

Waldo managed to preach a fairly full schedule. With his usual frank-
ness, he revealed his current thought to his congregation. If some alert
deacon of the Second Church could have leafed through the little volumes
of his pastor's journals covering a period of eight or ten years he would,
with reasonable luck, have come upon nearly all the peculiar ideas deliv-
ered from the pulpit since Waldo Emerson became pastor. The sermons
presented in a somewhat more religious garb the diarist's favorite doctrines
of compensation, self-reverence, and the rest. A sermon against foolish,
counterfeit pride said that "The good man reveres himself, reveres his
Conscience, & would rather suffer any calamity than lower himself in his
i>wn esteem." Another sermon declared that physical things were chiefly
significant as symbols; another, that heaven was here and now; another,
that the moral sentiment, perceiver of right and wrong and therefore the
sovereign part of man's nature, existed in the mind independently of
experience; another, that there was a "law of progress, that on-look of
human nature, which is its distinguishing & beautiful characteristic." Others
asserted freedom of the will in spite of all determination from outside, or
the Quaker doctrine of the inward light with its implication that "the
bible has no force but what it derives from within us." Jesus, the preacher
explained, had no authority as a person. The delivery of the same truths
Jesus uttered would have invested the humblest created spirit with the same
authority, no more and no less.

In some of the later sermons the pastor defined more precisely ideas he
had often used before. "A trust in yourself/' he said in his one-hundred-
and-twenty-third sermon, "is the height not of pride but of piety, an un-
willingness to learn of any but God himself." If self was to be trusted
"the origin of selj must be perceived" Half a dozen sermons more and he
was experimenting with new phrases to underscore self-reliance in its more
obvious sense. He asserted that "what you can get of moral or intellectual
excellence out of this little plot of ground you call yourself, by the sweat
of your brow— is your portion/' For his one-hundred-and-fortieth sermon
he sharpened some of the old saws on friendship he had gathered from
Montaigne, Goethe, and Aristotle, His experience with his own brothers
may have helped him understand the difficulty of finding a real friend.
"Few men communicate their highest thoughts to any person . . . because
they do not find persons proper to receive them," he told his congregation.

His hearers must have been struck by his habit of regarding man as
divine. His calling in witnesses to truth wherever he could find them and
without caring whether they had ever been associated with the Christian

THESES MAILED TO THE CHURCH DOOR 159

tradition had its justification in the common divinity of men. "Moses &
Socrates & Confucius & Fenelon," he said from his pulpit, "think the same
thing. Justice love purity truth are intelligible to all men, & have a friend
in the bottom of the heart of every man." If he took such liberties in the
pulpit, it was natural that in the privacy of his study he now turned more
frequently to the great writers. He became more familiar with literary con-
temporaries or near contemporaries, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.
After long, intermittent stirrings of curiosity, he was awakening to Goethe.
He was getting an introduction to German literature through the anony-
mous articles Thomas Carlyle had long been publishing in British period-
icals. He thus saw a more attractive side of German genius than the
theological scholars of Gottingen could ever have shown him. But before
he could get very seriously at either Thomas Carlyle or the Germans he
had drifted into a life-shaking crisis.

From the start he had had his doubts about the ministry, but his family
connections were mostly like anchors holding him to it— Ruth Emerson,
Aunt Mary, Doctor Ripley, Samuel Ripley were certainly so. Probably
Ellen, while she lived, was a persuasive argument for his keeping a regular
profession. But by October of 1831, some eight months after her death,
his religious doubts were beginning to be strengthened by a positive dislike
of the church. He noted in his journals "how little love is at the bottom of
these great religious shows; congregations and temples and sermons,— how
much sham!'3 He feared that "Calvinism stands ... by pride and igno-
rance; and Unitarianism, as a sect, stands by the opposition of Calvinism.
It is cold and cheerless, the mere creature of the understanding, until con-
troversy makes it warm with fire got from below.35

Soon he was bored with the week-day Biblical lectures. He had now
finished the twenty-second since the opening of the new vestry and had
got over twenty-five chapters of Matthew by dint of skipping several of
them. Plans for the series called for thirty-six lectures. He had to help with
the course of Sunday evening lectures that Unitarian ministers of Boston
combined to give during the winter months. He and his college classmate
Mqtte commonly alternated from week to week as hosts. He did not see
how the world could get on without such institutions as the church, but
he was weary of being imprisoned in it. It was "the best part of the man,"
he sometimes thought, "that revolts most against his being a minister. His
good revolts from official goodness," he confessed with bitterness. "If he
never spoke or acted but with the full consent of his understanding, if the
whole man acted always, how powerful would be every act and every
word. . . . The difficulty is that we do not make a world of our own,
but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves

i6o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to them to be useful at all, and this accommodation is, I say, a loss of so

much integrity and, of course, of so much power.'5

He began to consider seriously whether he could not really cut and
run without too much loss of dignity. This was in February, nearly a year
after his wife's death. Within a few weeks, Aunt Mary, alarmed, was
pleading with him to remain in the ministry as his ancestors had done and
so leave a name to be "enrolled with the Mathers & Sewalls of that ven-
erable City" of Boston. Some three months later he struck Charles, back
from his first voyage to the West Indies in pursuit of health, as stagnating
and needing to be jolted. Charles said, "He suffers like most ministers
from being too much sheltered & treading too uniform a track-there is
danger of growing exclusive & fastidious & losing some faculties of action."
Waldo himself would have mostly agreed with this diagnosis, though it
did not go deep into his real malady. It seemed to him that a thinker des-
perately needed to be unfettered in order to keep up with truth. Truth,
said the apothegm he copied into his journal, never is but is always be-
coming. By June he was more outspoken. At times it seemed to him "that,
in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry."
|lt could all be reasoned out convincingly in the light of his belief that
'truth was a living, changing thing. "The profession," he put it, "is anti-
quated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.
Were not a Socratic paganism better than an effete, superannuated Chris-
tianity?" He was ripe for revolt.

It was probably about this time that he wrote the Second Church a
letter, now apparently lost, "stating," as the church's committee reported,
"a change in his opinions concerning the ordinance of the Lord's Supper,
and recommending some change in the mode of administering it." Exactly
what change he asked for is not clear, but presumably he wanted to be
relieved of his own responsibility as administrant of the rite. There were
far more fundamental objections to the ministry on his mind; but the
Lord's Supper was a public ceremony, not an abstract idea, and therefore
an issue that would easily be grasped by his parishioners. Perhaps he also
thought the Lord's Supper a good point at which to begin reforming be-
cause it was an old subject of controversy. Though Unitarians generally
wanted to keep the sacrament as a sacred feast, they were apt to feel that
in other hands than theirs it easily became a superstitious practice, and
they had long been uneasy about it. Waldo Emerson's father had worried
over it in his day and had once had some indefinite plan to liberalize its
observance. Waldo's brother William had within the last few years had
some debate with Doctor Ripley on the same subject.

A seven-man committee, which included the minister's second cousin

THESES MAILED TO THE CHURCH DOOR 161

George Emerson and his close friend George Sampson, took his proposal
under consideration, but, though extremely conciliatory, could not "regard
it as the duty of the Church to consent to any change in the mode of
administering the ordinance." On June 20 or the following day a meeting
of the church, held at the pastor's home, unanimously voted acceptance of
the report of the seven. The letter which formally notified Waldo Emerson
of this action was undoubtedly sincere in expressing the hope that the report
might "meet with your acquiescence, if not with your entire approbation."
The door was by no means shut in his face.

His brother William's question of seven years earlier whether the pastor
should sacrifice his influence rather than his conscience now loomed large.
There is no reason to doubt that Waldo at once made his decision to stick
by his conscience; but he presumably wanted time to make sure what con-
science had to say, and he must have nursed a hope that the church would
after all come round to his own view and give him leave to be as liberal
as he wished. At any rate no decisive action on his part was necessary at
the moment., for the church building had to be closed for six weeks while
repairs were being made. In company with Charles he promptly set out
for Maine. After a week with Aunt Mary at Waterford he went with her
and Charles to the neighboring town of Fryeburg. There, on the shores
of LovewdTs Pond, as an old ballad related, a bloody battle had been
fought with the Indians in colonial times. But now there should have been
deep peace among the mountain and river intervals of this secluded part
of the world. Aunt Mary remained at Fryeburg while her nephews went
on into the New Hampshire wilds as far as Conway. There Charles turned
back, leaving Waldo "under the brow & shaggy lid of the White Mts.
boarding at a comfortable little house of a private family— His health . . .
improved— -His spirits pretty good—"

Charles returned home with the impression that his brother might yield
a little. Underestimating Waldo's stubbornness, he said that "enough has
now been done, (perhaps too much) for the expression of individual opinion,
& I hope his own mind will be brought to the persuasion that it is his duty
to stay where he is & preach & pray as he has done & administer the
ordinance as nearly as he conscientiously can, in accordance with the faith
& wishes of his pious parishioners—" Doubtless this was the argument that
Aunt Mary had dinned into Waldo's ears at Waterford and at Fryeburg.

In the seclusion of Conway the rebellious minister thought that among
the mountains one should see the errors of men more calmly and wisely.
He was going back for a second Sunday at Fryeburg and was jotting down
things he might decide to say from the pulpit there: "Religion in the mind
is not credulity, and in the practice is not form. It is a life. It is the order'

i62 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOJV

and soundness of a man. It is not something else to be got, to be added,
but is a new life of those faculties you have. It is to do right. It is to love,
it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble." He was simply grinding
religion down to morals, as he now habitually did.

Some days later he was at Ethan Allen Crawford's house in the Notch
of the White Mountains. Aunt Mary was apparently with him there for
a time but soon wrote him a farewell letter. She seemed to be ceremoniously
casting him off; but her sentences were so incoherent that even he, used
as he was to her cryptic style, must have been puzzled. His mood changed,
and in his preoccupation with his personal concerns he wearied of these
mountains whose summits were always covered with clouds. He was left
with "a circle of woods to the horizon, a peacock on the fence or in the
yard, and two travellers no better contented than myself in the plain parlour
of this house."

Fate managed to take the heroics out of his crises. He realized that it
was at last the hour of decision. But he saw both sides too clearly to feel
any exaltation. "It seems not worth while," he reflected, "for them who
charge others with exalting forms above the moon to fear forms themselves
with extravagant dislike." The most desperate scoundrels had been the
overrefiners. Society could not exist without some accommodation. Yet
Waldo Emerson had really made up his mind long ago, and there was no
changing it. Through with cogitation, he was ready for a climb up Mt.
Washington. He timed himself as if he were testing his strength, and his
record was good. The climb he made from Crawford's to the summit
usually took from four to six hours. It took him four hours and fifteen
minutes.

Before the end of July he was back in Boston, doubtless with the manu-
script of his sermon on the Lord's Supper all but ready to preach from.
It was promptly put to use as family reading while he tried to recover from
a sudden and annoying disorder. Charles explained to William that Waldo
"is for this last day or two troubled with a diarrhoea which he is nursing
lest a worse thing come upon him." Though the trouble was perhaps merely
the result of nervous tension, there was reason to be careful. What worse
disease the minister feared Charles did not say, but within a few weeks
many Bostonians were seized with panic at the prospect of a cholera epi-
demic and an association was formed to see that the sick were not forsaken.

When the church was open again, at the beginning of August, the
pastor, still sick, had to call in substitutes for three Sundays. Looking ahead,
he saw that the final Sunday of the month would be the regular time
for communion, and he was determined to escape that. He arranged to
exchange pulpits on that day and postponed his sermon on the Lord's

THESES NAILED TO THE CHURCH DOOR 163

Supper to September. His health might have made him unfit for the ordeal
at the Second Church anyhow. On August 19 he told Aunt Mary that
though he "came home stronger & fatter than for years53 his complaint had
"stripped" him "to bones."

His mind was already on plans for the future in case separation from
the church should be final. His faith in his philosophy of life was not dis-
turbed. "I can only do my work well/' he warned Aunt Mary, "by abjur-
ing the opinions & customs of all others & adhering strictly to the divine
plan a few dim inches of whose outline I faintly discern in my breast."
The prospect looked "gay & glorious" to him. "So," he said, "I will sing
the hymn of hope in light or gloom for a time or forever as pleases Heaven."
He was content that Ellen was "beyond misfortune" and resolved that he
would "not invite any others to penury & disappointment if I am doomed."
He also revealed to Aunt Mary his vague notions of how he might begin
a new life devoted to literature and philosophy: "I am entering into
acquaintance with Goethe who has just died. The Germans think there
have been but three men of genius— Homer, Shakspear, & Goethe. If I
go into the country to books, I shall know him well, & you will come &
board with Mother & me, & we will try him whether he deserves his niche.
S. A. R. grieved he shd. die because he & Mme de Stael were suited to
this world. The Germans regard him as the restorer of Faith & Love after
the desolations of Hume & the French."

In early September, Edward, home for a short time to visit and to
buy merchandise to take back to Porto Rico, found Waldo gradually recov-
ering his strength and preaching again. On the gth the embattled pastor
read the long-expected explanatory sermon to a crowded house. It was
a simple, restrained statement. Upon examination of the Evangelists, it
appeared that Jesus, in beginning the rite of the Lord's Supper, was merely
celebrating the Passover with his disciples. His remarks at the time were
nothing but the figurative language he was constantly using. St. Paul, the
person really responsible for perpetuating the rite, probably labored under
the mistaken notion that Jesus would shortly come a second time. Thus
the modern observance of the Lord's Supper was without valid authority.
It was also positively harmful. It clothed Jesus with authority he never
claimed. It was unsuited to modes of Western thought. It ought not to
be observed even if Jesus had enjoined it. Forms in general were essential,
but to exalt particular forms and to adhere to one form a moment after
it was outgrown was unreasonable. Jesus himself had sought to redeem
religion from formalism.

The minister, having given these reasons against the rite, said that he
would be content to let others observe it till the end of the world but that

1 64 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he himself was simply not interested and would therefore not go on with
it. As the prevailing feeling in the church favored the rite, he would soon
resign his office as minister. This was substantially all he had to say. It
seemed to have some effect. Charles believed that if the parish were polled
three-fourths of the votes would favor keeping the minister on his own
terms, but he was sure no such poll would be taken because some of the
most 'influential men, the authoritative core of the church, adhered to
the ordinance.

By this time Waldo Emerson had written an uncontroversial letter of
resignation. While he waited for an answer to this, he seems to have had
some reason to think arrangements might still be made to keep him. But
there was no solid ground for such speculations, and any possible arrange-
ment could hardly have given him the freedom he found necessary. Late
in September he and his mother rested for three or four days at Hopkinton
Springs, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and he doubtless tried the effect of
the three local varieties of mineral water on his ailment. While Waldo still
waited for news from the authorities of the church, Edward began, on
October 6, his return voyage from Boston to Porto Rico. As Edward sailed
past Nantasket and on toward the cape, he wrote two farewells, a note
brought back by the pilot and a poem, "The Last Farewell."

Too soon those spires are lost,
Too fast we leave the bay,

he wrote in what sounded like his own epitaph.

On October 21 Waldo preached once more in his old pulpit. Any of
his hearers who imagined that he was going to retreat a little and so
perhaps prepare the way for a refusal of the church to accept his resig-
nation must have been completely disillusioned by the tone of this sermon.
The whole discourse was simply another encomium of self-reliance. Waldo
Emerson was attacking formalism and the authority of institutions and
traditions.

He already knew something of Fenelon and may have been braced by
the Frenchman's teaching that the soul, in the climactic experiences of
the religious life, does not need the aid of form and method. He had had
his mind much of late upon the Quaker George Fox and managed to
quote him in this sermon without suggesting a parallel with his own case.
He probably found it difficult to forgo some mention of Martin Luther,
for he was also thinking of him in this crisis. Not quite a week after he
preached the sermon, he wrote, with an old copy of Frasefs Magazine
open before him, this pertinent reminder : " 'Luthers words were half
battles.3 At Worms to the Diet he said Till such time as either by proofs

THESES NAILED TO THE CHURCH DOOR 165

from Holy Scripture or by fair reason & argument I have been confuted
& convicted I cannot & will not recant. It is neither safe nor prudent to
do aught against conscience. Here stand I, I cannot otherwise. God assist
me Amen-!5 " The unsigned article from which he copied these sentences
had been written by Thomas Carlyle. The harassed pastor had been ad-
miring other anonymous work of Carlyle, on whom he commented, "He
gives us confidence in our principles. He assures the truth-lover everywhere
of sympathy."

Kindred minds of Europe's past and present seemed to conspire to
encourage the rebellious American. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle
suddenly became more substantial persons in his eyes, persons he might
think of meeting in their homes. On the afternoon following the preaching
of his last sermon he gave his pulpit to a clergyman named Brown, an
English Unitarian planning to settle in America. The Englishman came
to dinner in Chardon Street the same day, a fortunate circumstance, for
he was full of British literary gossip. According to Charles, "He told about
Coleridge (who is an opium eater) & about Carlisle the author of the
Characteristics article— a German bred scholar— he had been in Words-
worth's library, a fine room ... in its prospect of hill & lake scenery . . ."
Charles, no more ignorant of the world of Goethe and Schiller than were
most cultured Americans at the time, looked on with curiosity while his
brother studied the Germans through Carlyle's eyes and waited for the
church to take final action.

"Waldo," he commented, "has been of late very much a reader of
translations from the German— Schiller & Goethe— & the articles on German
literature written by Carlisle in the English magazines— some of the trans-
lations are very noble— a story from Goethe & a character of the true
scholar, the man of genius, by Schiller. Goethe seems to have been a sort
of Homer— a Child a Favorite of Nature— to have accomplished a vast
orbit in his own intellectual & moral history, to have past through the
greatest changes & come in the end to a cheerful & Christian Faith. A poor
scholar whom he had been kind to said of him that 'his heart which few
knew, was as noble as his genius which all knew'—"

On October 28 a meeting of the Second Church's proprietors which
Abel Adams and some other good friends of the pastor refused to attend
voted thirty to twenty to grant the pastor's dismission but temporarily
continued his salary. It turned out that the ex-pastor got the salary for
the rest of the year but had to supply the pulpit at his own expense.

A few weeks after the final act of the church, his mental crisis seemed
past. He told his brother William that the severing of the strained cord
was a relief and that he saw peace and freedom some distance ahead of

i66 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

him. His head was by this time full of projects "of action, literature, phi-
losophy." He dreamed of establishing a successful magazine. With the
help of his lawyers William and Edward, and of Charles, just now sworn
in as an attorney of the Court of Common Pleas, he thought he ought to
make such a scheme work. It would take a few months to get it started,
he thought. Yet for the moment his obstinate diarrhoea made it impossible
for him to accomplish anything. The malady became so threatening that
he was advised to voyage. At first he thought of going to the West Indies
to spend the winter with Edward, "but in a, few hours," as he told Wil-
liam, "the dream changed into a purpureal vision of Naples & Italy."

After the acceptance of his resignation he ceased to preach at the Second
Church. He wanted to go back to say his formal farewell, but he had
frequent relapses and was "as white & thin as a ghost." He was compelled
to send his last message to the members of his parish in the form of a
printed letter, dated December 22, 1832. In the letter he showed no
resentment yet did not fail to include a reminder of the firmness of his
purpose. When his former parishioners read his declaration that he did
not care to live anywhere longer than he had liberty to seek and utter
truth, they must have taken it to mean that he would never be a regular
minister again. He had done all that he could well do in the narrow
mahogany pulpit. He needed more elbowroom.

Others could perform the routine duties of parish priest better than
he, and for the present he had finished with the extraordinary religious
pronouncements he had wished to make. Some of his theses would have
been quite too radical for the rebellious monk and university professor
fMartin Luther to post on Wittenberg's church door— that what was worth
'while in religion was simply moral truth, that any man who could see
truth was as divine as Jesus ever was, that self-reverence was God-reverence.
But the most courageous doings of the pastor of the Second Church had
not required any physical daring and had not been cleverly dramatized.
As he had nailed up his theses one by one there had been no great com-
motion in Hanover Street, Boston; and he had had the bad luck to attract
a crowd only when he was posting his objection to the Lord's Supper, one
of his weakest efforts and one that he later remembered with disgust.

He had to be content with little more credit than his conscience could
give him. In the Evening Gazette Miss Eliza Townsend asserted that he
had been a beloved and admired pastor and bade him farewell on behalf
of "all who were privileged with knowing such a signal example of devoted
integrity, eloquence and disinterestedness." Probably most of the parish-
ioners who stuck by him to the end did so more from personal liking than
from any enthusiasm for his reforming notions. The comment of the town

THESES NAILED TO THE CHURCH DOOR 167

ranged from heartfelt professions of loyalty to him, there can be no doubt,
to the hints of his insanity that came to the ears of his friend Frederic
Hedge. Some of the citizens just then much excited over the phrenological
lectures Spurzheim had recently given in Boston were presumably confident
that an examination of the ex-minister's bumps of self-esteem and destruc-
tiveness would confirm their more charitable suspicions.

Of his family, to him his most important critics, William could not
have failed to understand him, and toward the end Charles must have
abetted what seemed to others an ill-timed exhibition of obstinacy. Grand-
father Ripley seems to have been persuaded that he was really insane.
Aunt Mary, with all her insistence on her own private right to perfect
siberty of thought and action, had fought tooth and nail against her nephew's
apostasy. She kept, underneath her frowning exterior, a strong faith that
she would one day see him "rising from defeat into new ground" and
that, as she said, his mazy path would end well. But she was both sad and
scornful as she thought the whole crisis over. After Waldo had got well
out into the Atlantic and was safe from her sharp tongue and her keen eye
"that went through and through you like a needle," she relieved her feel-
ings in a letter to Charles:

"Still I am sad while I write. It is like-it is far sader than the trans-
lation of a soul by death of the body to lose Waldo as I have lost him.
And now that he is far far away I can complain. I do believe he has no
fixed faith in a personal God! His letters have been confused & dark— a
mixture of heathen greatness— of worse than antient good heathenism—
pantheism— Swedenborgianism— hypotheisis of nature & german rationalism.
And yet yet you talk of his being a 'reformer & needing good health.5 A
reformer! and beginn at the wrong end? annuling a simple rite w'h has
bound the followers of Jesus together for ages & announced his resurrec-
tion! A reformer— who on earth with his genius is less able to cope with
opposition? Who with his good sense less force of rnind— and while it in-
vents new universes is lost in the surrounding halo . . . No, he never
loved his holy offices— and it is well he has left them. . . ."

A FOOL'S PARADISE

Travelling is a fool's paradise. ... I pack my trunk,
embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up
in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad
self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. . . .

-"Self-reliance"

EMERSON sailed on Christmas Day. He did not choose the day but
merely went when the ship was finally ready after several false
alarms. Some disgruntled parishioners who had heard his recent
sermons may have wondered whether his departure on that par-
ticular anniversary was not ill-omened. To the sharp eye of the realistic
and experienced Captain Cornelius Ellis of the brig Jasper ill omens of
another sort were plain enough. In the captain's opinion, the ex-minister
of the Second Church was too sick to survive a winter crossing of the
Atlantic. The Jasper, on which he had purchased passage with the help of
his mother and of his staunch friend Abel Adams, did not have comfortable
quarters for even a man in robust health. She was doubtless the same
Jasper that had earlier been used to transport mules on the West Indian
run out of Boston, and no one would have expected luxury in such a vessel.
On the present voyage she carried, besides her own scanty 236 tons, a
cargo of logwood, mahogany, tobacco., sugar, coffee, beeswax, cheese, and
other freight. Her passenger list contained the names of five persons all told.
After the second morning out, every one of the five passengers was
confined to his dreary cabin, suffering from nausea and the anticipation
of going to the bottom. In this predicament, with the pleasures of memory
as his sole remaining resource, Emerson fell back on his old favorite Milton's
"Lycidas." But when the tempest showed signs of subsiding he and some
of the other passengers came from their holes till a new blow sent them
scurrying back again. The other passengers turned out to be Silas P. Hoi-
brook, Mrs. Holbrook, Miss Holbrook, and their friend Samuel Kettell. As
Mrs. Holbrook "never went on deck" and Miss Holbrook seems to have
been inconspicuous, the two men of their party, together with Captain
Ellis, must have supplied almost all the society Emerson enjoyed during the
long voyage.

1 68

A FOOL'S PARADISE 169

Despite such meager opportunities, Emerson may have engaged in some
literary conversation, for both Holbrook and Kettell were, about this time,
among the hackwriters who worked the literary treadmill of the Samuel
Griswold Goodrich known to youthful readers as Peter Parley. During the
voyage Kettell, a clever linguist, was amusing himself principally by turning
a Parley book into modern Greek. One did not easily get beyond%the limits
of the great Parley empire. In little Malta, where the ship was now bound,
one could expect to come upon a Maltese printing of what at least pur-
ported to be a foreign language version of Parley's geography. But Kettell
had other claim to distinction than that of being a translator and writer
for children. Only a few years earlier he had supplied Goodrich's older
readers with a three-volume anthology of verses written in America from
the earliest colonial times to the date of publication. As his countrymen
were now showing a national spirit in their literature, it was time, he had
argued, to "look seriously into the grounds of the insinuation thrown out
some years ago by our neighbors across the ocean, that there was no such
thing as an American book worthy of being read." To the ex-minister think-
ing of turning author but still quite without literary reputation, KettelPs
ideas would have been threadbare but would have promised some con-
versation.

By the 5th of January the brig was in warmer waters. Emerson was
the only person on board who was pleased when she sauntered through a
calm day at a knot or two an hour. But he read little and did nothing.
When he tried one of Goldoni's numerous plays he was bored. He had
brought along some of his brother William's guidebooks, and probably he
had in his cabin the Italian dictionaries, as well as the mattress, that he
had begged of William. If the storms recurred he cared little. In spite of
Captain Ellis's gloomy prediction, the invalid of a few weeks before thanked
the sea and rough weather "for a truckman's health and stomach." But he
was still poet enough to feel imaginatively both the arrogant power of the
tempest and the insinuating charm of the ocean's quiet moods. He could
recreate vividly the times when the little ship was driving, as he said,

with naked spars
Before the roaring gale,
Hemmed round with ragged clouds . . .

or the reeking cabin was cold and wet, the masts strained, the sail torn,
the gale blowing fiercer as the night set in, the seaman aloft scarcely able
to master his struggling reef. When a calm sea relieved the monotony of
the storms, he rode as a cloud over the purple floor with mists for company,

1 70 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

felt the warmth of the water, and far below saw the motes of light by day

and the streams of fire by night.

On the night of the sixteenth day of the voyage a black hummock of
land, Santa Maria, the southernmost of the Azores, loomed up through the
thick weather. Ten or eleven days later the little vessel passed into the
Mediterranean and had on her port side the cold summits of Spain's Sierra
Nevada and, nearer, white villages rooted halfway up the slopes of snow-
covered hills. For the first time the traveler stood face to face with the

Old World.

Physically Emerson was a new man. According to one story, chicken
pox that had been suppressed in his early childhood broke out in the form
of numerous boils during the voyage and so was finally disposed of, leav-
ing him perfectly well. The boils may have been more real than the chicken
pox, but, whatever the explanation, the benefit of the voyage to the sick
traveler was indubitable. A few years later he could authoritatively advise
his public from the lecture platform that there was such a thing as necessity
of change for the sake of health and that this was the chief use of the sea
voyage, "so sanative to exhausted bodies."

Though The Malta Government Gazette duly announced the Jaspefs
arrival on February 2, 1833, the passengers had two more weeks5 board
to pay to Captain Ellis before they could leave the quarantined brig. Half
a month of their precious time was thus idled away in Valetta's Marsamus-
cetto Harbor. But the quarantine was merely a routine matter, having
nothing to do with the actual state of health of the Americans; and on
the 1 5th they took lodgings on shore and began their exploration of the
island of Malta, finding it a box of curiosities. Pleased with this first glimpse
of the Old World and glad to enter at its little end, as he put it, Emerson
forgot his scruples against travel and opened his eyes and ears.

Past centuries spoke from the crowded buildings clinging to the gnarled
finger of stone which separated the two harbors of Valctta. The sharp con-
tours of the city offered views of the precipitous sides of basins deep down
in which floated the vessels of various nationalities. A mass of swarthy
people, many of whose ancestors had lived in Malta when it was an ancient
Phoenician colony, seemed about to burst the incredibly tight urban bound-
aries. The warm-colored interior of the Cathedral of San Giovanni seemed
full of memories of the great order of the Knights of Malta, once Christen-
dom's defenders against the Mohammedans. In the dim vault Emerson
saw the tomb of the Grand Master de ITsle Adam, the gallant warrior who
had received the island from the Emperor Charles V after the knights had
been driven from Rhodes by the Turks. There, too, was the tomb of Grand
Master de la Valette. He had fought the Turks often and had even served

A FOOL'S PARADISE i?1

as their galley slave before he turned them back from Malta and built the
fortress city that bore his name. Flanking the cathedral aisles were the
chapels containing monuments of both masters and knights. There the unity
that had made all formidable against the enemies of the cross had finally
been renounced. Each nationality now jealously kept its dead in its own
particular chapel.

The American traveler, struck by the rich decoration of Maltese churches,
hoped that before the end of the century New Englanders would "carve
and paint and inscribe the walls" of their somber places of worship. He
yielded himself easily to "the religious impression of holy texts and fine
paintings." In spite of his having no ear for music, he was also pleased by
the swelling cathedral organ and the chanting of the friars. But his mood
changed. He had already detected over a convent gate an inscription prom-
ising full indulgence, daily and perpetual, for both the living and the dead.
He comforted himself by attending services in an obscure chapel where he
heard the English Bible read, Watts's dependable psalms sung, and a Prot-
estant sermon preached.

At the governor's fancy dress ball in the old palace where the grand
masters had once lived and where his admired Coleridge had served the
British government of Malta, Emerson had his first glimpse of European
society on parade. It seemed to him that the few beautiful women were
worth going far to see. He had got his invitation to the ball from the
American consul, and the ball may have resulted in his call on Mrs. Davy.
Whether he went to her house merely for sociability or in the hope of
getting inspiration for his study of science is not clear. At her home, at
any rate, he seems also to have met her husband, a brother of Sir Humphry
and himself a chemist. But meantime, for the most part, Emerson had kept
close to Kettell and the Holbrooks, staying with them at Vicary's, just across
the Piazza San Giorgio from the palace, during the week or so he spent
in the island after being released from quarantine.

Having seen Malta, the five former passengers of the brig Jasper hired
the little brigantine // Santissimo Ecce Homo and had a swift passage to
Syracuse in the island of Sicily. In that ancient city Waldo Emerson found
lodgings in the tiny Via Amalfitania. The house was possibly the same
where Count August von Platen, the Bavarian poet who loved Italy and
Sicily better than Germany, came to die a few years later. "VENNE IN
SIRACUSA E IL 5 DICEMBRE 1835 MORI IN QUESTA CASA,"
said the stone tablet placed there long afterwards. Emerson could see Mt.
Etna from a window "& the tomb of Archimedes & the Ear of Dionysius
from the house top."

Syracuse proved to be "a poor grey shabby place, the ruin of ruins,"

I72 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDQ EMERSON

neither the capital of the Mediterranean world it once was nor the pleasant
half ancient, half modern large provincial town it later became. Wars and
earthquakes had changed the face of things, yet Emerson liked to be here
where great men had lived. In Syracuse, if history not always separable
from legend told the truth, even tyrants had had the good sense to invite
such guests as the dramatist Aeschylus, the poet Pindar, and the philoso-
pher Plato to their courts. Dion, though he had finally earned his violent
death, had once been a disciple of Plato and worthy of such a master.
Timoieon, coming from the mother city of Corinth to deliver Syracuse
anew from a Greek tyrant and later from the Carthaginians, had lived out
his life as one of the cleanest and most fortunate leaders of the ancient
Greek world. The fame of such men was kept green in the writings of
Plutarch and Cicero; and at length Wordsworth, a poet Emerson had much
on his mind, had conferred new distinction on Dion as a lost leader. For
a scholar, Syracuse, though now in its fallen state shrunken into the little
island of Ortygia, was worth a long voyage.

Well outside the narrow boundaries of the city of 1833 lay the ruins
of the theater and of the amphitheater. Near these were the quarries; and,
far to the west, along the plateau, extended the walls of Dionysius, con-
verging into a massive fortress. Many centuries ago the power of Athens
in the ancient world ebbed away as thousands of her young men were
slaughtered on the slopes of the Epipolae or were consigned as prisoners
to a worse fate in the quarries. For the quarries, though later masked in
shrubbery and flowers, were a living death to the Athenians herded into
them without protection from sun or weather. The whole extent of ancient
Syracuse was a monument to the stupidity of man quite as much as to
his heroism.

Gods, too, once played here their little parts, hardly worse than tragi-
comic, and were worshiped in the temples. The remains of one such
pagan place of worship still stood, imbedded in the walls of the Christian
cathedral, to symbolize the triumph of the new religion over the old. Across
the main harbor, on a hill bordering the marshes that were the bane of
more than one besieging army, one saw the ruins of the temple of Olympian
Zeus; and not far away the creek of Cyane was flowing from the same
fountain of Cyane into which Persephone's friendly nymph was transformed
as a not too harsh punishment for her interference in the love affairs of
her betters. On the shore in Ortygia was the fountain of Arethusa, a nymph
saved by Artemis from the long pursuit of a river god and allowed to
bubble up here in peace. Her fountain was crystal-clear like Cyane's but
was now gathered in a basin polluted by the washerwomen of the city.

Emerson felt the strong pull of the mythical and historical past and

A FOOL'S PARADISE i?3

would have liked to be scholarly. Undoubtedly he knew the sense of unity
one could get from things that had been a part of the experience of the
race but had dropped out of its conscious memory. He wrote home: "I
want my Virgil & Ovid. I want my history & my Plutarch. I want maps
& gazetteers.35 He and his friends rode with the American consul into the
country and explored the relics of the greater ancient city. He remembered
Cicero's description when he visited the quarries. One of these had been
taken over by the Capuchins and turned into a garden. The traveler grew
mellow under the smiles of the friendly monks and was so struck by the
peaceful air of the convent that he all but accepted the "little neat room
with a few books5' which the padre offered to give up to him as a home.
"How good and pleasant to stop and recollect myself in this worn-out nook
of the human race, to turn over its history and my own/3 Emerson mused.
But he kept an eye open to the actual. He took a boat across the harbor and
up the Anapo River, but not far enough to enter the Cyane and feel the
charm of the strong, narrow current with its rank papyrus thickening and
threatening to put an end to the hard upstream rowing. Having seen noth-
ing more notable in the Anapo than "canes and bulrushes and snails, and
a very little, narrow, mean puddle to be famed in song," he crossed the
fields to the temple of Zeus that was "enriched with the spoils of the Car-
thaginians 2500 years ago'5 but could now boast only a few broken columns.

On the last day of February, Emerson, Kettell, and the Holbrooks started
by mule and on foot a thirteen-hour journey over the forty-odd miles to
Catania. In the north rose Etna. Into Etna's crater, according to one story,
Empedocles of Girgenti, reputed both a democrat and a divinity, threw
himself in the hope that his disappearance would be interpreted as a trans-
lation to the world of spirits. In verses of unknown date the philosophic
Emerson honored Empedocles as being indeed partly divine. Round the
shore of a magnificent bay the travelers straggled and stumbled with their
tinkling mules and shouting drivers. One weary mule slipped into the mud
and was got out with difficulty. Another fell with the litter in which the
ladies were riding.

Catania, a city whose pavements, with a large part of her buildings,
had come out of neighboring Etna, was, in contrast to Syracuse, thronged
with people, a city of the living; yet the landmarks of antiquity could still
be traced there. In such a city there were several sharply contrasting worlds,
and Emerson passed abruptly from one to another. He took a letter of
introduction to the rich Benedictine monastery, where he arrived in time
to witness the semiweekly dole to the poor. He saw "hundreds of women
and children in the yard, each receiving her loaf and passing on into a
court, that none should come twice to the basket." If he visited the medieval

1 74 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

cathedral, he also saw the ancient baths and the ancient theater. When he
attended the opera he commented, "It is doubtless a vice to turn one's
eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy."

After three days of Catania he took the road to Messina, traveling by
coach with several Sicilians, Itellario, priest of the church of St. lago in
Messina, Itellario's two nephews Lorenzo and Gaetano, and the tailor
Francesco Nicolozi. The great kindness of his companions could not keep
his conversation with them from being a comedy. He had much overesti-
mated his knowledge of the Italian language, and as for conversing with
Sicilians in their own peculiar dialect, he concluded that he might as well
be with Arabs.

In the morning, from Giardini, he saw Taormina above him, a balcony
overlooking this end of Sicily. Arriving at that impressive height, the traveler
was amply rewarded for his pains. There, from the Graeco-Roman theater,
roofed only by the sky as its ancient architects had intended, one looked
out upon the unforgettable panorama of mountain and sea dominated by
Mt. Etna. The little town had a fresh surprise ready whenever the visitor
passed round a corner into a piazza or climbed up a circuitous strada to
a higher level, and it added to the wild landscape human warmth and
color that were appealing. Emerson had half a mind to be a fisherman
and draw his nets at the base of Taormina's cliffs the rest of his days.

Between Taormina and Messina, through "the most picturesque coun-
try, I judge, that for the same extent is anywhere to be found," he had his
Sicilian companions again and must have heard their "O che bella veduta!"
repeated many times. At Messina the earthquakes had left few antiquities
for him. He drank tea with the American consul and his wife, and philos-
ophized as he noted the bustle and noise of the populace on the Sicilian
shore of the strait. Humanity was much the same everywhere to "the poor
hermit who with saucer eyes" had "strayed from his study." He saw Kettell
and the Holbrooks once more, it seems, and settled financial accounts with
them.

Setting sail on March 6, he passed between Scylla and Charybdis. In
the afternoon he saw the smoke of the volcano Stromboli and, as night fell,
its faint tongue of fire. In the morning he felt the unique spell of Palermo,
lying in the long voluptuous curve of shore and mountains. In the mood
of a docile traveler, he saw the notable places in the city and viewed the
panorama of sea and land from Monreale. He studied what this foreign
culture had to offer. "Art was born in Europe," he wrote, "and will not
cross the ocean, I fear." He seems to have troubled little about the political
condition of Sicily. American superiority was upheld by the consul and his

A FOOL'S PARADISE 175

wife. They lived socially quite apart from the Sicilians. But in the Palermo
press there had recently been news reports not calculated to increase Emer-
son's patriotic pride. There was trouble between South Carolina and the
federal government, and there were more ominous disagreements between
North and South.

The manners of the Palermitans kept the transatlantic visitor wide-eyed.
A lady invited him to go with her for a ride, though the day was stormy
and the coach was therefore covered. On their return the bewildered
traveler accompanied her into her house but was not invited to dine, where-
upon he made his obeisance, paid his half dollar to her coachman, who
waylaid him on the stairs, and walked home through a drenching rain. He
liked the Capuchins, the most esteemed of the Catholic clergy, but even in
their convent his pleasure was less than perfect. One of the monks conducted
him through the long aisles lined with hundreds of grinning skeletons of
Capuchins, here an abbot, there a general of the convent, every one with
his name tag hanging at his breast. The monk explained that he himself
would one day take his place there among his dead brothers. Emerson,
through some misunderstanding, was next conducted to an insane asylum.
No wonder that the world he saw in the Palermo opera seemed unreal until
what struck him as a touch of natural passion transformed the whole scene
and turned his pity for "the performers in their fillets and shields and
togas" into admiration. As the steamer Re Ferdinando sped toward Naples
he lay in his berth and tried to recall the manners of the prima donna and
the other singers.

During his two weeks in Naples the city was crowded with foreigners,
and he was forced to live in unpleasant quarters. In vain he changed from
what was doubtless some obscure garret of the magnificent Chiaia to a new
room. It apparently required much reading of Goethe and perhaps of other
books borrowed from a circulating library at a carlin a day, and many
tours up and down the Villa Reale, to keep his mind off his "black lodging
in the Croce di Malta." He was lonely and cold. Guides and thieves, he
learned, were sometimes the same persons. One day he had his pockets
picked twice and thereafter began to behave, he thought, with tolerable
composure.

By now he had become bellicose in his resistance to the claims of places
and objects that took for granted an easy triumph over every traveler. "I
won't be imposed upon by a name," he resolved. But in spite of all annoy-
ances he was teachable. Naples gave him his first opportunity "of seeing
any original of the great statues of antiquity," he confessed. For him it was
"more than meat & drink to see so many princely old Greek heads." There

176 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

was "The picture gallery too. Five genuine Raffaelles & Guide & Titian
& Spagnoletto each of which you may safely admire without risk of its
being a copy." The former Unitarian pastor was, as in Malta, delighted
by the beauty of the churches. And if San Carlo's opera was closed on
account of Lent, if the temple of Venus at Baiae was a cooper's shop and
asses brayed in it, and if the Lucrine Lake was "not above three times the
size of Frog Pond, nor quite three times as pretty," he found other things
to make up for them.

His experience qn Vesuvius and in its neighborhood made a story he
thought good enough to save up for a lecture audience. At Resina his party,
once more including the Holbrooks and Kettell, left the coach and pro-
ceeded on donkeys but had to climb the final stretch with staves straight
up through loose lava ajid cinders. The region of the crater was warm,
and the wind blew the smoke in their faces almost to suffocation as they
looked down into the red and yellow pits which were the navel of the
volcano. At Herculaneum little progress had been made with the digging,
but a fourth of Pompeii was already open and Emerson walked into the
ancient houses and shops. Anticipating the partial reforms of later excava-
tors, he saw how the show was spoiled by the carting away of statues and
utensils to the museums and thought it "a pity they could not be left here
in their place at least in a single house it would make so impressive a
spectacle.55

Incidents of the visit to Naples, such as his seeing the corpse of an
officer "dressed out in his regimentals, powdered & pomatumed, & sitting
up in the bier, going to his own funeral," fixed themselves in his memory,
but he was most impressed with the slightness of the change travel caused
in the traveler. In the pause before the service in the English ambassador's
chapel he realized that nothing was altered with him except the place. He
summed up his objections to travel, the "thousand petty annoyances/' the
unrealized plans for study and disappointed hopes of good society. "Still,"
he admitted, "though travelling is a poor profession— bad food, it may be
Igood medicine. It is good, like seasickness, to break up a morbid habit,
?& I sometimes fancy it is a very wholesome shaking for me."

On March 25 he paid his fare from Naples to Rome. Riding day and
night in company with, two Bostonians, Warren and Grant, and a couple
of English people, he crossed the Pontine Marshes without being attacked
either by malaria or by robbers. As he passed the Coliseum he had his
introduction to the grandeur of ancient Rome. He may have settled im-
mediately in the Hotel di Gran Bretagna, on the Piazza di Spagna. Holy
Week was at hand and people were crowding into the city to witness the

A FOOL'S PARADISE

pomp of the church. Emerson purchased an old copy of Officium Heb-
domadcz Sanctce juxta Formam MissaLis, et Breviarii Romani sub Urbano
VIII and was ready for the ceremonies of the eight days beginning with
Palm Sunday and ending with Easter.

On Palm Sunday at the Sistine Chapel he counted twenty-one purple-
robed cardinals as they filed in with their attendant priests; saw the pope
enter in his scarlet robes and with his bishop's miter and the cardinals
presently coming one by one to kneel before the throne and kiss the pontiff's
hand; and watched the attendants replacing the robes of the cardinals with
gorgeous copes of cloth of gold. The blessing of the palms and the chanting
of the passion, the distribution of palms and olives, and the spectacle of
the pope riding aloft in his chair of state at the end of the ceremonies were
strange to the eyes and ears of a New England Unitarian in 1833.

On Wednesday afternoon he was in the Sistine Chapel again. As the
plaintive and melodious strain "Miserere mei, Deus" came out of the silence
and darkness he found it touching. Everything was in good taste, he thought,
and the setting was Michelangelo's chapel. He was more struck by mere
liturgical forms than he had expected to be. On Thursday he watched the
learned and able Gregory XVI wash the feet of thirteen pilgrims, one from
each Christian nation, the American pilgrim being from Kentucky. At
night, as he heard the Miserere sung once more in vast St. Peter's, he was
probably unaware of the presence of a young Englishman, John Henry
Newman, still a member of the Church of England. Presumably at the
same moment with Emerson, this future cardinal was listening with sur-
prise to the beauty of the voices but disapproving in his heart what he
called the degrading religion of Rome.

On Good Friday, Emerson witnessed religious processions in which
the marchers, muffled in black, carried staves surmounted with death's-
heads. On Easter Sunday, when the whole festival season came to an end,
he heard the pope say mass in St. Peter's and was pleased to see the pic-
tures and statues divested of the curtains. At noon he saw the pope in the
great window over the principal door of the cathedral, giving his bene-
diction. The bell tolled, the drums beat, the trumpets sounded. Then, as
the pope rose and spread out his hands and blessed the people, "All knelt
as one man. He repeated his action (for no words could be heard) , stretch-
ing his arms gracefully to the north and south and east and west, pro-
nouncing a benediction on the whole world. It was a sublime spectacle."

So thought the American, keeping his extreme Protestantism quite un-
harmed while he watched and listened for the unforgettably beautiful or
pathetic parts of such ceremonies. To him the most pathetic sight in Rome

178 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

was probably a ceremony at the church of Trinita de3 Monti, wherein
some nuns were taking the veil— "youth, beauty, rank, thus self-devoted to
mistaken duty," he commented.

By the middle of April the reluctant traveler, though still willing to
trade the most imposing: city "for one man such as were fit to walk here/'
was obviously under the spell of the place as he listed its historical and
artistic riches. "Here is the town of centuries, the capital of the ancient
& of the modern world. All is large, magnificent, secular, & the treasury of
the arts is evidently the contribution of the whole civilized world. I have
been here three weeks & my eyes are now familiar with the objects whose
forms in pictures & models & casts are familiar to all Christendom. I
see almost daily the Coliseum., the Forum, the Pantheon, the Apollo, the
Laocoon, the Gladiator, besides St. Peters, & the Transfiguration & the
last Judgment. By degrees the topography of the old City arranges itself
in ray head & I learn to find not only a Church or a picture^ but even a
shop or a trattoria, by referring it to the Column of Trajan or the Arch
of Constantine. It is a grand town, & works mightily upon the senses &
upon the soul. It fashions my dreams even, & all night I visit Vaticans."

The Vatican was for him "an endless collection of all precious remains
of ancient art; a quarter of a mile of statues, with branching galleries.
And here too are Canova's works,55 he went on with his inventory of the
pope's and Rome's treasures. "Upstairs one story are the chambers of
Raffaelle containing his world renowned frescoes; go up another story, &
you. enter the picture gallery where is the Transfiguration & its rainbow
companions. All this unrivalled show is thrown open twice in every week,
& our due feet never fail. At the other end of the town is the Capitoline
Museum & Gallery also open twice in the week. Then on common days,
we may go to Thorwalsdetfs Studio, or to Gibson's or to Wyatt's (Eng-
lish sculptors) or to the Quirinal Hill, & see the reputed statues of Phidias
& Praxiteles, or to any of a dozen palaces, each a picture gallery, or to
some church ... & so on & so forth, to the end of the Guide book, &
the end of the year. Ah great great Rome! it is a majestic city, & sat-
isfies this craving imagination."

He began to cultivate opinions of his own about masterpieces of art,
He fell in love with Raphael and stuck to his preference for "The Trans-
figuration," a more triumphant discovery of man in the very act of dem-
onstrating his divinity than the stories of Dion and Empedocles had
afforded. It was the world's foremost picture, if he was to be judge, and not
because of any astonishing blaze of beauty resulting from some fortunate
bright combination of colors and forms, but because of "this familiar,
simple, home-speaking countenance." In the Vatican he admired Raphael's

A FOOL'S PARADISE 179

rooms enough but, with a gesture in the direction of functionalist!!, de-
clared that "It was a poor way of using so great a genius to set him to
paint the walls of rooms that have no beauty and, as far as I see, no
purpose.55 He would not allow even the claims of originals over copies
when he thought the claims exaggerated. When he came to the "Apollo" and
the "Lao coon" he remarked, " 'T is false to say that the casts give no idea
of the originals. I found I knew these fine statues already by heart and had
admired the casts long since much more than I ever can the originals."
Starting out with little more than complete frankness to build up a theory
of art, he wanted some facts to go on. He wanted to know "the place of
all these works in the history of art; how this vase and that statue were
designed, what the sculptor and what his patron thought of them, and
the marks of the eras of progress and decline. But now," he said, "they
amaze me and beget a vague curiosity which they cannot satisfy, nor can
any living man."

He saw that the cafes were filled with English, French, and German
sculptors and painters, but he naturally wanted to observe artists in the
act of creating art, and not simply eating and drinking. He was struck by
the pathos of the young beginner's lonely lodgings littered "with sketches
and canvas and colour-bags." Doubtless he discussed art with the com-
panions he found in Rome. He knew an Englishman named Kingston.,
Lewis Stackpole from home, Anna Bridgen and her sister from Albany,
some young Livingstons of New York. The Bostonians Warren and Grant
went with him to visit the Danish Thorwaldsen's studio. He may have had
something to do with his countryman Nathaniel P. Willis, a facile writer
of travel sketches, then in Rome. He got great pleasure from his excursions
with a young John Cranch, an American art student resident in the city.
He liked William Wall, of New Bedford, and perhaps had some discussions
with Francis Alexander, another American. Both Wall and Alexander
were painters.

For Emerson literary Rome turned out to be mainly Renaissance and
modern and as much English as Italian. He ascended Monte Gianicolo to
visit Tasso's tomb in the out-of-the-way church of Sant3 Onofrio and saw
the poet's death mask, with its "air of independence & genius," in the
neighboring convent. Remembering Shakespeare, he looked for Pompey's
statue at whose base Caesar fell. When he visited the church of Aracoeli
he remembered, with only a little confusion of localities, the English Gibbon
and his history of the Roman decline and fall. At night, as he wandered
in his dreams among statues and fountains, he was introduced to the late
Lord Byron, a great benefactor of Italy. Possibly he knew that in the
Piazza di Spagna John Keats had died not many years before, but he

i So THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

doubtless knew little of Keats's verse. It was by mere accident that he
found In Rome one other link with English literature. At an evening party
given by a college mate he met Gustave d'Eichthal, member of a family
of Jewish bankers at Paris, and next day received from him a letter to
John Stuart Mill in London, The letter asked Mill to introduce Emerson
to Thomas Garlyle, Meantime Emerson kept in mind Goethe's enthusiastic
commentary on Rome and rated it as truth.

Ending his visit in the capital of the ancient world, where he had been,
as he said, <cin better health than ever since I was a boy," he set out on
April 23 for Florence. With him, it seems, rode Wall, Robert M. Walsh
of Philadelphia, Brantz Mayer of Baltimore, an Irish priest named O' Flan-
agan, and Dracopoli, a Greek student returning home after ten years of
study. The carriage required five and a half days, for the 150 miles sepa-
rating Rome and Florence grew into a much greater distance along the
circuitous route through Civita Castellana, Terni, Foligno, Assisi, Perugia?
Cortona, and Arezzo. At Foligno, long since stripped of Raphael's madonna
to which the town gave its name, Emerson saw the devastation of the
earthquake of the preceding year. Apparently he had no time for the
memorials of St. Francis at Assisi. During a cold evening at Passignano,
on the shore of Trasimeno, he had leisure to remember the ancient duel
between Hannibal and Rome. He did not forget that Arezzo was the birth-
place of Petrarch.

But Florence was his chief objective, and within a few days after his
arrival there he was settled in the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, ready
for a long stay. He had brought with him a letter to Henry Miles, an
American merchant resident in the city. Miles took some trouble to act as
his adviser and companion. Emerson also had Wall for society, and it
seems that Anna Bridgen and her sister turned up again.

The weather was growing hot, but the city of art and letters could
still be attractive. There were retreats from the heat in the Cascine in the
evenings and in the Boboli Gardens; and good streets, industrious citizens,
spacious and well-furnished lodgings, and elegant and cheap cafes made
life more comfortable here than elsewhere in Italy. Erminia, the flower girl,
came to your cafe every morning. If you did not buy flowers of her she
would give them to you. Flowers by day, and at night there was singing
along the streets. When it was time to light the lamp in his room, Emerson
could expect Giga to come and repeat with him the same courteous formula,
which made only a slight draft on his small Italian vocabulary. Then she
would leave him to his reading of Goethe and Sismondi and to sleep. In
order to get information for use in daylight he had to study at night. "Then
so inveterate," he wrote home, "is my habit of depending upon my books

A FOOL'S PARADISE 181

that I do not feel as if my day had substance in it, if I have read nothing.
So I labor at German & Italian a little." He finished Manzoni's pious but
charming / Promessi sposi. Even though at least partly fictitious, people
like Fra Cristoforo went a long way to balance the "hideous anecdotes of
the depravity of manners" one continually heard. Emerson, only a beginner
even in the conventional bookish Italian, must have struggled through the
recent novel in its original northern dialect, as the Tuscan recension was
not yet published.

His daily excursions took him well over Florence and her suburbs during
his month there. His patriotism and his inherited Puritanism sometimes
rose in revolt. His Protestantism waxed strong as he surveyed the whole
ecclesiastical world of Italy and what he called its idolatry, "producing as
it does of course the other extreme of unbelief & loosest morals." He even
ventured to lump politics with religion and customs in general. He wrote
to a former parishioner that the way to learn to value American churches,
government, and manners was to come to Italy. But the physical charm
of Florence mastered all his scruples. "And wherever I go,55 he said in his
diary, "I am surrounded by beautiful objects: the fine old towers of the
city; the elegant curve of the Ponte Trinita; the rich purple line of the
Apennines, broken by the bolder summit of the marble mountains of Car-
rara. And all, all is Italian; not a house, not a shed, not a field, that the
eye can for a moment imagine to be American."

As at Rome, he delighted in both museums and churches. The old
churches of Florence at first struck him as too plain to compare with those
of Rome, but familiarity made them grand in his eyes. His appreciation
was undoubtedly helped by the long tradition of the Tuscan city's own
pride in its treasures. Santa Groce seemed to him "not a Florentine, no,
nor an European church, but a church built by and for the human race,"
and the Duomo was "like an archangel's tent." When he tried to test the
best-known works of art without respect to their fame, he decided that
the judgment of the world was well founded. The Medici "Venus" was
his prime favorite.

As in Rome, he wanted to see art in progress as well as of the past.
American artists in Italy were old hands at welcoming travelers who might
prove to be buyers. But whether or not Emerson was mistakenly regarded
as a potential customer, he justified his visit to one studio when he began
a long-lived friendship with the sculptor Horatio Greenough. He continued
his new habit of studying the opera. Yet when he witnessed Bellini's La
Straniera, he was more curious about who and what the prima donna was
in real life than about what became of her according to the libretto, as this
Greek beauty strongly resembled a lady he knew in America. He doubtless

182 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

saw more than he heard. His eyes, at any rate, were so much dazzled by
the light and colors that he was obliged to look at his shoes for half an
hour. Remembering Goethe's plea for an impersonal evaluation of art, he
tried, though in vain, to be tolerant to a ballet between acts.

He called on the astronomer and microscopist Giovanni Amici and saw
the famed optical instruments. He had had a recurring ambition to be a
scientist. Now, it seems, he watched while Amici performed experiments
on polarized light. But in this region the living celebrity he cared most to
see was the author of Imaginary Conversations. It was doubtless through
Horatio Greenough that he got his invitation to the villa near suburban
San Domenico di Fiesole. At the dinner table there he heard Landor do
justice to Montaigne but, shockingly enough, refuse to praise Thomas
Carlyle. At breakfast in the same villa a couple of days later Landor was
again erratic. Emerson had the uncomfortable feeling that the Englishman
was trying hard to escape from his proper character of intellectual in order
to behave like a man of the world. "Sincerity, in the highest sense," the
disillusioned Emerson concluded, "is very rare. Men of talents want sim-
plicity & sincerity as much as others." Even Walter Savage Landor could
not be allowed to say with impunity that "Socrates was a vulgar sophist."

On May 28, after writing a hasty leave-taking note to Landor, Emer-
son said farewell to Florence. The Holbrooks had caught up with him
again, and they, together with William Wall and a Philadelphian named
Thomas Stewardson, were his traveling companions on the road north-
ward. Stewardson seems to have pumped the ex-minister's mind vigorously.
He was shocked by the pantheistic notions he brought up. But presumably
the conversation turned more often to Italian art than to unorthodox philo-
sophical ideas. On the five-day journey to Venice the party passed through
Bologna, Ferrara., and Padua, towns whose rich art could be a common-
place only in Italy. From Monselice, on the rim of the Euganean Hills,
Emerson looked out with untroubled delight over the great plain. It was
like a sea with cities for islands. Venice, with its islands that were not
imaginary, was dimly recognizable on the horizon. Some years earlier the
reforming poet Shelley, seeing almost the same magnificent spectacle from
the hills not far from neighboring Este, had been stirred to anger at the
complacently tolerated Austrian tyranny. Near Battaglia, Emerson, with his
companions, left the carriage and walked to Arqua to see the house and
the tomb of Petrarch. At Padua he visited the university and, in a room
like a hollow inverted cone, he watched as Professor Caldani lectured on
anatomy from a subject. At Mestre the travelers boarded a boat for Venice.
From a certain distance Venice looked like nothing but New York, and at

A FOOL'S PARADISE 183

first the Grand Canal was simply the highway leading to a hotel, the Gran
Bretagna, close to the Piazza of Saint Mark.

Emerson thought that in the full moon the piazza was a world's wonder,
but he pitied the people who, though not beavers, were compelled to live
here. He was in a gloomy mood. Probably he was brooding over some
awkward moment he had had with Stewardson or with one of his other
fellow travelers. He reflected bitterly that he had no skill to live with the
generality of men and seldom found the exceptional man he was looking
for. "It seems to me/' he repented, "no boy makes so many blunders or
says such awkward, contrary, disagreeable speeches as I do." But he duti-
fully accompanied his party, making the rounds of Venice during these
mild, cloudy days. He saw that the paintings were glorious, that the churches
surpassed all those of Florence in splendor, that the city had had its great
moments. But musing over the disgraceful historical record on the walls of
the Ducal Palace, he made up his mind that the rule of the Austrians was
"merciful to that whose story is written here in stone and iron and mire."
Gary, the translator of Dante, was just ending a visit of some two weeks
with his love for the city of canals still "on the increase," and Richard
Monckton Milnes was regretfully taking leave after many months in "this
bright and congenial atmosphere"; but Emerson, apparently not having
the good fortune to meet the Englishmen and certainly without their knowl-
edge of Venice, was soon ready to go. The government, keeping a watchful
eye on strangers, had thought it worth while to record in the Ga&etta
privilegiata his arrival with his party on June 2 and likewise made a note
of his departure with them for Milan just two days later.

Setting out from Mestre with the same trusty driver who had brought
them from Florence, the Americans passed through Vicenza and Verona.
The travelers were very companionable now and in a holiday mood. On
the third day they had their three hours of nooning at Desenzano. Across
the narrow corner of Lago di Garda, at no great distance from them, lay
the little peninsula of Sermione, where the ancient Roman poet Catullus
had once lived. But they gave their chief attention to the modern Desenzano
villagers, who were celebrating Corpus Christi. Every house had "hung out
its quilts and damask and brocade"; and at the altar of the church were
the little girls made up as angels in white dresses with wings. The Italian
towns were all different and all picturesque. Everywhere the people were
lovers of the beautiful. The peasant wore a scarlet cloak or tied a red
garter or knee-band to his leg or wore flowers in his hat or buttonhole.

By good luck the travelers saw Milan from the coach of a friendly
count who was not afraid to talk and took no pains to conceal his hatred

1 84 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of the Austrian government, "so jealous, so rapacious, which holds Italy
down by the pointed cannon." Emerson seems to have hunted up many
of Milan's masterpieces of art, including "The Last Supper" of Leonardo.
He praised the cathedral and; remembering Manzoni's novel, did honor to
the ashes of Carlo Borromeo beneath the great Gothic building. But he
was beginning to tire of architecture, concluding that it was all imitation
and that none came up to his idea of real greatness. He seemed to be
groping toward the theory, not unrelated to Plato's idealism, that the
supreme artistic act was in the mind of the artist. It was, he said, in the
soul that architecture existed, and Santa Croce and the Duomo were only
poor imitations. As he had earlier demanded a philosophy of painting and
sculpture, he now wanted one of architecture.

After a few days of Milan he and Wall and Stewardson, together with
Anna Bridgen and her sister, with whom they had once more caught up,
posted along the shore of Lago Maggiore and crossed over Napoleon's
Simplon into Switzerland. The wheel of the diligence was "chained and
shod with a heavy log of green wood" as they went down the northern
slope to the valley of the Rhone. Emerson, having taken his place on the
outside by day, was compelled to ride there through the cold night with
the scant comfort of a shawl lent by one of the women inside. The road
followed the shore of the Lake of Geneva, through Clarens and past the
Castle of Chillon to Lausanne. There Emerson inquired his way to Gibbon's
house, where the history had been finished. The steamboat brought him and
his friends to Geneva; and Calvin, Rousseau, Voltaire came to mind. He
went to see the chateau at Ferney, in spite of his dislike of "the king of
the scorners." On the I7th of June the Americans left Geneva by dili-
gence. Three days later they arrived in Paris and took lodgings in a hotel
on the boulevard Montmartre. Apparently Emerson soon moved to a cheaper
place close by, where he was at pension with a number of Americans. This
place may have been what he described as the "pension ... at the corner
of Rue Neuve Vivienne" There, "directly over the entrance" of the Pas-
sage des Panoramas, he was certainly established a little later, and there
he was sufficiently near the geographical and institutional center.

He was hardly in the mood to go Parisian. His old prejudice against
the French was not lessened by his weariness of travel. What he had liked
most about Italian cities was their totally un-American, old-world character,
a new experience for him. The French metropolis was becoming modern.
It was taking thought for the comfort of its some 800,000 inhabitants. In
the summer of 1833 there was even talk about lighting the streets with gas;
and the public prints discussed "Improvements and Embellishments," in-
:luding not only better monuments but better pavements and sidewalks.

A FOOL'S PARADISE 185

The spirit of progress was in the air, but this was not what Emerson had
come to Europe for.

The determination of his traveling companions to make him admire
the city did not help matters. He was impatient at not discovering men
and ideas. A true memoir of his travels so far would, he decided, read thus:
"A man who was no courtier, but loved men, went to Rome,— and there
lived with boys. He came to France, and in Paris lives alone, and in Paris
seldom speaks. If he do not see Carlyle in Edinburgh, he may go to
America without saying anything in earnest, except to Cranch and to
Landor." He wanted to learn to speak French but generally had to con-
verse with English-speaking people. He unfortunately met a good many
acquaintances from Boston. He found his cousin Ralph Emerson. He made
a call on Oliver Wendell Holmes, a medical student. He attended a Fourth
of July dinner with ninety-eight of his countrymen and saw "the grand
Lafayette, but not much else."

Yet this was only a small part of the story, and in the end Paris, except
for antiquities and art, gave him more to ponder than any other Euro-
pean city had done. He need not have regretted that he had taken his
lodgings for a month. Parisian books and journals, art, drama, opera,
politics, religion, scholarship, and science were ready to be examined by
the intellectually curious.

If "the poorest Frenchman" could "walk in the kings garden every
day" or "read if he chuse, in the kings library— wide open-the largest in
the world, or in the Mazarine library, or in several more," Emerson soon
found that, though a foreigner, he had the same privileges. In the libraries
and in the numerous cheap, well-stocked reading rooms he could get an
advantageous view of the state of civilized man, perhaps even a better
perspective of America than at home. If he looked into the reviews in the
Journal des debats, he could see through French eyes the distressing pic-
ture of his country drawn by the harsh but just Mrs. Trollope or he might
learn Continental sentiments regarding his friend Murat's astonishing de-
fense of American slavery. He might also read the new instalment of a
review of Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville's study of the
American penitentiary system and its applicability to France, a harbinger
of de Tocqueville's great book on democracy in America.

Though it was not Rome or Florence, Paris also had a variety of
museums, such as the Louvre and the Luxembourg, open on certain days
of every week. The Louvre had all Italy to compete with and so was at
a hopeless disadvantage; but even the Italian Leonardo was best represented
here, and here Emerson saw Murillo "almost for the first time."

Emerson turned zestfully to the drama and opera. "More than twenty

1 86 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

theatres/' he counted, "are blazing with light and echoing with fine music
every night, from the Academic Royde de la Musique, which is the French
Opera, down to the Children's Drama; not to mention concerts, gardens
and shows innumerable." On the day of his arrival Delavigne's somewhat
Shakespearean play Les Enfants d'fidouard, new that year, was receiving
its twentieth performance at the Theatre-Frangais, and the public was
still eagerly crowding to see it. On the same evening, at the Porte Saint-
Martin, La Tour de Nesle, the sensational melodrama by Dumas phe,
first produced in the preceding year, was to be given for the last time.
During the American visitor's four weeks in Paris theatergoers could witness
such good things as I phi genie en Aulide and Marie Stuart and such a
brilliant old comedy as Le Manage de Figaro. Operas were plenty, among
them being Guillaume Tell, Robert le Diable, and Fra Diavolo. Auber's
very new Gustave III, too elaborate to be performed frequently, was
repeated during this July with "all the chief personages of song and dance"
participating. Emerson, witnessing a performance of it, was struck by the
good taste and imposing effect of the dancing and by the brilliant scenic
decoration. In Les Enfants, he thought Mile Mars, though she spoke
French beautifully and had the manners of a princess, hardly excelled her
supporting cast.

French politics was in the air as well as in the newspapers. The citizen
king Louis-Philippe had arrived at the Tuileries the day after the American
traveler had reached Paris. The Chamber of Deputies had barely ended
its sessions. Thiers, Arago, and M. de Broglie had taken part in the de-
bates. But the Three Glorious Days, now three years in the past, had not
been, so far as Emerson could see, the beginning of a millennium. Politics
now "spoiled conversation & men in France," he complained. "Cousin has
quit Plato & M. Arago his magnet & galvanic battery since those unlucky
3 days. And to such paltry purpose. The press to be sure is free & says the
sauciest things every day but otherwise the government has very much the
character of the old government & exiles shoots or imprisons whom it
pleases."

Emerson sampled the unorthodox religious notions of the Parisians. If
he was just now revolving in his mind the dim idea of an independent
church with himself as pastor, he got little comfort from hearing Chatel,
founder of the Eglise Catholique Frangaise. This was a curious institution
whose priests wore newly invented dresses and at whose services martial
music was performed by a large orchestra, relieved by interludes of vocal
music with piano accompaniment. Chatel, sometimes eloquent, might rate
as a Unitarian but was more radical than anybody who wore that label
in America. Emerson, coming to this conclusion, felt sympathy for him but

A FOODS PARADISE 187

already had well in mind a liberalism of his own outside any church. "I
feel myself pledged/5 he made up his mind in Paris, "if health and oppcnM
tunity be granted me, to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own;
evidence; that no doctrine of God need appeal to a book; that Christianity '
is wrongly received by all such as take it for a system of doctrines,— its |
stress being upon moral truth; it is a rule of life, not a rule of faith."

In the long, low-winged and domed stone palace of the Institut de
France, Emerson had the good fortune to be introduced into a seance of
the class of science, and the conspicuous men were pointed out to him
— Biot, Arago, Gay-Lussac, Jussieu, Thenard. One piece of business at this
meeting of July 8 was the official reception of Pradier's bust of Cuvier,
a timely honor to the great comparative anatomist, dead little more than
a year. Emerson had only to present his passport in order to open the doors
of any public institution in this hospitable city, and he seems to have made
good use of his privilege at both the Sorbonne and the College Royal.
He had hardly arrived in Paris, it seems, before he had bought their minia-
ture semester announcements, at two sous apiece, of Papinot, the book-
seller in the rue de Sorbonne. Reading "these splendid news" in the
Cafe Procope, as he afterwards remembered, he had felt a young intel-
lectual's delight at such invitations to knowledge and "straightway joined
the troop of students of all nations, kindreds, and tongues" drawn together
"to listen to the first savans of the world without fee." Among the lecturers
listed in his printed program of the Sorbonne were Guizot on modern
history and Cousin on the history of ancient philosophy; but these, and the
other notables, had alternates. No less a person than the philosophic de
Gerando was announced as lecturing on law at the Place du Pantheon
near by. The College Royal offered a remarkable group of professors and
courses, including Jouffroy on the Greek language and philosophy and
Thenard on chemistry. Emerson certainly listened to both Jouffroy and
Thenard.

At the neighboring Jardin des Plantes he found the specimens arranged
as nearly as possible according to Jussieu's system. Here Gay-Lussac taught
general chemistry, and there were other courses. But it was the botanical
garden itself, and especially its cabinet of natural history, that gave Emer-
son one of the memorable experiences of his life. His mind seemed to leap
forward with a new vision. The significance of the whole display seemed
suddenly to gain clarity for him as if it were a hard problem that had
solved itself while he slept. The "beautiful collection" made him "as calm
and genial as a bridegroom." This experience was one thing he had got
from his travels that the natural history society at home might care to
hear about. If he looked at his subject too poetically, he could at least

1 88 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

appeal to his fellow enthusiasts for sympathy on the ground that "we have
all a presentiment of relations to external nature, which outruns the limits
of actual science," and with the confidential admission that ^'except to
Naturalists I might hesitate to speak of the feelings it excited in me." ^

What he said a few months later to his lecture audience, after making
these preliminary apologies, simply put into prose poetry his experience at
the Jardin des Plantes: "The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever,
as you look along this bewildering series of animated forms, the hazy but-
terflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, insects, snakes, fish,-& the up-
heaving principle of life every where incipient, in the very rock aping
organized forms. Whilst I stand there I am impressed with a singular Con-
viction that not a form so grotesque, so savage, or so beautiful, but is an
expression of something in man the observer. We feel that there is an
occult relation between the very worm the crawling scorpions & man. I am
moved by strange sympathies. I say I will listen to this invitation. I will
be a naturalist."

One would like to know whether, as Emerson examined the memorable
fifteen rooms, he had any realization of the irony of fate in giving him
through Cuvier's painstaking classification of skeletons an imperfect glimpse
of the theory that Cuvier had so consistently opposed. Guvier seemed to
make his presence felt here. His house still stood in this garden, and he
was being praised on every hand now that he was dead. In this same year
a biography of him that Emerson soon knew plainly stated the great scien-
tist's answer "to those who believe in the indefinite alteration of forms in
organized beings, and who think that, with time and habits, each species
might have made an exchange with another, and thus have resulted from
one single species." Guvier had defied the theorists to point out the miss-
ing links between extinct and surviving species.

And one would also like to know how much, if any, first-hand knowl-
edge Emerson then had of "those who believe in the indefinite alteration
of farms." Years earlier he had had a premonition of the havoc which
"the full and regular series of animals from mites and worms up to man"
might work among religious dogmas. If he had not got hold of Lamarck
by 1833, he had either got from some other source an idea resembling
LamarcFs or pieced together something vaguely suggestive of a Lamarckian
theory out of his own observations. He may have discovered helpful hints
in an English translation of Herder's outlines of the philosophy of his-
tory, a book he had once borrowed. He probably knew something of
Lamarck. At any rate he was now so far advanced that he was sure to get
such knowledge without undue delay. Some three years later he was to
tell a lecture audience in unmistakable terms that the "system of La Marck

A FOOL'S PARADISE 189

aims to find a monad of organic life which shall be common to every
animal, & which becomes an animalcule, a poplar-worm, a ... mastiff
or a man, according to circumstances. It says to the caterpillar cHow dost
thou, Brother! Please God, you shall yet be a philosopher.' "

These, Emerson commented, were "extreme examples of the impatience
of the human mind in the presence of a multitude of (separate) facts, &
the energy with which it aims to find some mark on them according to
which they can all be set in some order.'3 But such examples did not really
seem extreme to so poetical a scientist as he. The normal state of his own
mind in the presence of the provoking mysteries of nature was impatience
and a bold desire to solve the problem of the one and the many. That state
of mind was the essential condition of his experience in the Jardin des
Plantes. That he saw in the show before him something besides a hazy
vision of evolution is also plainly deducible. He may have got a new sense
of the old doctrine of the correspondences between physical and intellectual
or spiritual. But that at least a vague acceptance of the much debated
theory of evolution was also a part of the experience seems more certain.

After all, Paris had paid him good returns on his investment of four
weeks of his time, and he was ready to leave the city with mental baggage
noticeably weightier than he had brought out of Italy. On July 1 8 he and
Francis Alexander, one of the American painters he had found in Rome,
climbed into the diligence, a conveyance that mercilessly sacrificed its
drowsing passengers to the demon of speed. After riding all night through
St. Denis and Beauvais, they had breakfast at Abbeville, and reached
Boulogne about sunset. At Boulogne they boarded the steamer for England.
In the early light of Sunday, July 21, Emerson saw without surprise the
highly cultivated fields along the Thames, then passed Greenwich, docks,
arsenals, and fleets of shipping, to land at the Tower Stairs in London. As
it was only about seven in the morning he and Alexander met few persons
till they reached St. Paul's. With a porter to carry their things they walked
through Cheapside, Newgate Street, and High Holborn, and found the
lodgings at a Mrs. Fowler's, in Russell Square, to which Emerson had been
directed by an American traveler of his acquaintance.

Emerson came provided with a number of introductions he had got
from William Pratt, his brother Edward's college chum, and from d'Eich-
thal. Within a couple of days, it seems, after his arrival on English soil
he carried d'Eichthal's letter to John Stuart Mill, at the India House, and
Mill accordingly wrote a formal introductory note for him to present to
Carlyle. Btit, as Emerson of course did not know, Mill also sent a separate
letter directly to Carlyle, putting the responsibility for the recent intro-
ductory note squarely on d'Eichthal's shoulders. Emerson, he said, appeared

i go THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to be a reader and admirer of Carlyle's writings and so might get some
good from the meeting he asked for, but, after one or two conversations
with him, Mill did not think his presentee a very hopeful subject. And this
was just the opinion that might have been expected from Mill For what-
ever the conversations were ostensibly about, his logical mind, crammed
with utilitarian philosophy and a variety of economic and political theories,
would naturally have provided an extremely unfortunate half hour for one
who had little skill in logic, knew little of economics or politics, and had
already described Utilitarianism as a "stinking philosophy."

For Emerson, the visit to Carlyle and a meeting with Coleridge were
the chief unfinished business. He seems to have had little appetite for
London. "Immense city, very dull city," he commented, thus establishing
his own uncomfortable status as a young traveler on the mere surface of
London. But there was some life in London even for so casual a visitor.

Though the theaters were at a low ebb, the American traveler might
have cared to see his compatriot John Howard Payne's Clari; or, the Maid
of Milan at the Royal Victoria. There were music and dancing. Vincenzo
Bellini's operatic version of the Romeo and Juliet story, his La Sonnarnbula,
and his Norma were all to be heard, as well as Otella and another piece
of Rossini's. Madame Malibran was singing. Through late July and early
August, Paganini, the man who, as Emerson later remarked, could "extract
rapture from a catgut," kept giving additional performances on his violin.
Young Fanny Elssler and her sister were still dancing at the Theatre Royal,
Covent Garden, when Emerson arrived in London.

Whatever attention Emerson paid to such theatrical events, the drama
that most impressed him was the funeral of Wilberforce, the popular hero
of many a battle for abolition of the slave trade and the friend of parlia-
mentary reform and Catholic emancipation. In the streets the immense
crowds testified to the significance of the occasion. At Westminster Abbey
there were the Lord Chancellor, the Speaker of the House of Commons,
and the Duke of Gloucester, all receiving the coffin at the door; the king's
boys, the Westminster School boys, and the various groups of choristers
enjoying their moment of importance; the temporal peers, led by Sussex
and Wellington; the clergy, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury; and Sir
Robert Peel among the commoners.

Perhaps at Mill's suggestion, Emerson visited Doctor Bowring and was
taken by him to Jeremy Bentham's house and shown, with veneration, the
garden walk and the rooms of the Utilitarian philosopher. Emerson, though
far from subscribing to Bentham's doctrine that morality consisted in
being useful, was given a lock of the great man's hair and an autograph.
Bentham had died hardly more than a year before. Bowring, his literary

A FOOL'S PARADISE 191

executor and editor, wanted him to be uadmired & loved in America."
Emerson, with an unfeigned interest in literary landmarks, "walked in the
garden, on one side of which is the house in which Milton lived when he
was Cromwell's Secretary." Hazlitt once "occupied it a little while, & placed
a stone upon it, with the inscription John Milton— the Prince of Poets."
The American traveler, still caring more for Unitarianism than for Utili-
tarianism, promised to dine with Bowring to meet the Unitarian Lant
Carpenter. He also had an introduction to a man he might have caught
a glimpse of in Rome or Venice— Gary, the British Museum's assistant
librarian and Dante's translator.

Lant Carpenter was not the only preacher Emerson cared about. He
went to hear both the extremely liberal Unitarian W. J. Fox and the bril-
liant free lance Edward Irving, then near his untimely end. If Emerson
was ignorant of how Irving had once been entangled in the destinies of
the Carlyles, he undoubtedly knew that the Scottish preacher had pro-
pounded such heresies as the humanity of Jesus and so had been put out
of the Church of Scotland. He was only one of the many strangers at-
tracted to the private church in Newman Street, London, where Irving
now entertained all comers. With "a play-book in one hand, and a Bible
in the other," as William Hazlitt once aptly described him, Irving boldly
walked the tightrope of popular favor. The diminutive Fox, in spite of his
equally fluent speech, his more pleasing voice, and his more animated and
beneficent face, could not compete with such showmanship, and doubtless
only such a serious-minded traveler as Emerson would discover him. Emer-
son's ecclesiastical curiosity, however, took him little farther, than the dis-
senting chapels. He admired Westminster Abbey and visited and revisited
it. At St. Paul's he saw a service in progress. "Poor church," he wrote in
his journal.

Yet to him the most interesting person in London or its suburbs was
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Coleridge, though once a Unitarian, as he
confessed with shame, had turned out to be a tireless advocate of the
Church of England. On the morning of August 5 Emerson set out to see
his hero. Arriving at Highgate, he at length found somebody who could
show the way to Coleridge's retreat, the Gillman home. A note requesting
permission to make a call brought the reply that the poet was still in bed
but would see his visitor after twelve o'clock. Returning at one, Emerson
was confronted by a short, thick old man with bright blue eyes, fine com-
plexion, and a torrent of talk.

Coleridge began with the Americans he knew, praising the painter
Washington Allston, then passing to Doctor Charming, whose Unitarian-
ism he regretted as an "unspeakable misfortune." Picking up a book which

iga THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

his visitor suspected had been laid on the table for the occasion, he read
with great vehemence two or three pages of manuscript notes written by
himself in the flyleaves, passages that struck Emerson as being out of Aids
to Reflection. As soon as he stopped for a second to take breath, Emerson
"remarked to him that it would be cowardly in me, after this, not to inform
him that I was an Unitarian, though much interested in his explanations.
Yes, he said, I supposed so & continued as before," The indefatigable
talker went on for nearly an hour. Much of the conversation., almost com-
pletely monopolized by the old poet, "was like so many printed paragraphs
in his book, perhaps the same, not to be easily followed."

Emerson had seen his man but had found him "old and preoccupied"
and unable to "bend to a new companion and think with him.'3 If the
exploration of Landor's rnind at close quarters had been disappointing,
the discovery of the great Coleridge's limitations must have been far more
so. Lack of health had driven Emerson to travel, but, having decided to
travel, he came to Europe, at least so he afterwards reasoned it out, mainly
because of the attraction of "Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey,
and the latest and strongest contributor to the critical journals, Carlyle."
"If," he added, "Goethe had been still living I might have wandered into
Germany also." But Goethe was dead, and now there remained only De
Quincey, Carlyle, and Wordsworth to be seen. Within a few days after his
return from Highgate to London, Emerson was on his way to Scotland
and the Lake Country.

He traveled rapidly. He visited Kenilworth and Warwick Castles with
his relative Orville Dewey, the New Bedford pastor. It may have been next
day as he passed northward that he saw "Tamworth tower and town" and
remembered almost accurately some of the lines of Marrnion that he had
learned as a schoolboy. He visited Matlock, "close by the Derwent, and
under the eaves of the caverns of the Peak of Derbyshire." From Shef-
field he went on to York, where he must have made a hurried visit to the
cathedral

He arrived in Edinburgh on the i6th of August with a letter of intro-
duction to some person who "was then so much engaged in professional
duties5 that he was unable to spare even a few hours to do the honours
of the old Scottish metropolis.'3 The too busy professional man managed,
however, to persuade a friend, Alexander Ireland, as good luck would have
it, to take the young American in tow.

On Sunday, Emerson was in the pulpit of the Unitarian Chapel in
Young Street, Edinburgh. Ireland3 pleased by the visitor's sermon, was sure
"that nothing like it had ever been heard35 in that chapel before. Many
hearers did not know what to make of the unconventional visitor. But it

A FOOL'S PARADISE 193

was not only Emerson's original thoughts but "the consummate beauty of
the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing,
the absence of all oratorical effort, and the singular directness and sim-
plicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption"
that made a lasting impression on Alexander Ireland.

The enthusiastic guide showed his guest "the courts of law and other
places of interest to a stranger," and together they ascended Blackford Hill,
where, in his boyhood, Walter Scott used to lie and listen to the "murmur
of the city crowd" and "Saint Giles's mingling din." The old and new towns
spread out on either side of Princes Street and the gardens under the pro-
tection of the castle, with Calton Hill and Arthur's Seat as formidable
outposts, were rich in interest for any visitor that cared for literature or
history. Not only well-versed in Walter Scott but acquainted since college
days with Dugald Stewart and the Scottish philosophical school, Emerson
must have understood his Edinburgh as few other American travelers could
have done.

But Scott and Stewart were of the past. Emerson had his mind on
certain living British writers. In spite of the revealing encounter at High-
gate, he had kept his respect for Coleridge. For Alexander Ireland's benefit
he discoursed on The Friend and the Biographia Literaria. "He considered
that there were single sentences in these two works, which embodied clearer
ideas of some of the most subtle of human speculations than are to be met
with in the pages of any other thinker." He spoke of De Quincey, but
apparently did not see him. He had a strong determination to visit Garlyle
and Wordsworth. "Am I,53 he asked, "who have hung over their works in
my chamber at home, not to see these men in the flesh, and thank them,
and interchange some thoughts with them, when I am passing their very
doors?" In 1833 Carlyle had returned from retirement to live for a time
in Edinburgh, but he had soon disappeared again from the city, and it
was only after persistent inquiries made in the wrong quarters that his
whereabouts were learned from the secretary of the university. The infor-
mation the secretary gave made it certain that the American traveler's
itinerary would next point toward Dumfriesshire, in southwestern Scotland,
as its chief objective.

On August 2 1 Emerson sailed up the Forth from Edinburgh's port of
Leith to the historic castle town of Stirling in weather so bad that he kept
in the cabin and read his book. Along the rainy road from Stirling to
Doune and Callander that night he saw little more than his horse's head.
Early next morning he was traveling, through country made classic by
Walter Scott, past Loch Vennachar and Loch Achray; but "the scenery
of a shower-bath," he remarked, "must be always much the same." Before

i94 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he was out of the Trossachs the skies cleared and revealed the great
stretches of heather that colored the country to the hue of a rose. In boats
on Loch Katrine he and his party fought against wind and wave only as
far as Ellen's Isle and then took to the shore again. He and four others
of the company walked fourteen miles along a winding sheep track up the
shore toward the west end of the lake. Ready to leave Loch Katrine, they
dried their shoes, drank whiskey, and ate oatcake. It was still five miles
to Inversnaid, where they were to catch the steamboat on Loch Lomond,
and there was nothing for it but to use their legs again. At Inversnaid the
hut, close to the roaring cataract, was full of Gaelic-talking Highlandmen
and women and peat smoke.

The voyage southward by steamer was so rough that Emerson lost
overboard the black cap he had bought in Malta and was left shivering
with a handkerchief on his head. He finally reached Glasgow in such con-
dition that he was unable to object when the innkeeper assigned him a
little room at the top of the house. At the university he saw the Hunterian
Museum. He visited the old cathedral remembered from Rob Roy, and
the Saltmarket. On the 24th he was at Dumfries. There, as the coach
halted at the King's Arms, the guard pointed out to him a son of Robert
Burns standing on the doorstep. Emerson passed the small tenement of
the poet's eighty-year-old widow as he followed his guide to Burns' s tomb.

Next day, having learned that Craigenputtock, the farm where Carlyle
lived, was fifteen or sixteen miles distant and that no public coach passed
near it, Emerson hired a gig and driver. As he penetrated into the parish
of Dunscore he was struck by its desolate aspect. Doubtless the region was
quite as wild then as now, with coarse grass and bracken and purple and
red heather thick on the rough soil in late August. Rock cropped out near
the summits of the long hills stretching row upon row to the horizon. Doubt-
less then as now the wildness but not the desolateness of the landscape was
broken by a geometric pattern of ponderous gray stone fences, and the
loneliness of the scene was only emphasized when a rabbit or a few half
wild sheep would start out from clumps of bracken.

Arriving at the two-story stone house on Craigenputtock farm, Emer-
son found that Carlyle had already been warned of the intended visit and
was insistent that he stay the night. The gig was therefore sent back to
Dumfries with instructions to return for the traveler next day in time for
him to catch the evening coach to the south. The intervening twenty-four
hours were enough— and perhaps more would have been too much— for the
beginning of a lifelong friendship. The tall, gaunt Carlyle let loose his
extraordinary flood of conversation. He clung "to his northern accent with
evident relish" as he told lively anecdotes "with a streaming humor which

A FOOL'S PARADISE 195

floated every thing he looked upon." Jane Welsh Carlyle, his wife, imme-
diately recognizable as an accomplished woman, told how the trip they
had proposed to make to Weimar had fallen through for lack of funds and
described the gifts that Goethe had sent them.

As they sat in the secluded farmhouse or walked together over miles
of hills, Emerson and Carlyle revealed themselves to each other as fully
and as frankly as they could. "The comfort of meeting a man of genius/'
Emerson happily recalled his old rule, "is that he speaks sincerely . . ."
Already a reader of Carlyle, he did not need much further proof of the
man's genius. If Landor had failed to pass the severe test of sincerity, Carlyle
did not fail. And yet inevitably something was lacking here too. "Socrates,
the glory of the Greek world," was again used as a touchstone with dis-
appointing results. Emerson, checked by this experience, felt that he had
met with "men of far less power who had yet greater insight into religious
truth" than his new Scottish friend. Naturally the thirty-seven-year-old
Garlyle, having doubtless never so much as heard the name of his thirty-
year-old visitor until this meeting was arranged, could not fully recognize
his genius on such short notice. Fortunately, though, being hungry for con-
versation with the outside world, he was in the right mood, and another
favorable circumstance was that his wife at once liked the stranger. Jane
Carlyle later summarized her impressions somewhat poetically by saying
that this man descended as if out of the clouds, made one day look like
enchantment, and left her weeping that it was only one day. Carlyle agreed
with her that their guest was "a beautiful transparent soul." In simpler
English this doubtless meant one who had emotional health and balance
as well as intellectual qualities.

Though it turned out that each of the two men thus brought together
was, for the other, one of the few existing minds who could serve him
usefully as a friend, they were, in thought and in character, plainly sepa-
rated by a gap that could never be bridged. From the first meeting Emer-
son understood that Carlyle, with all his enthusiasm for the service of God,
was a vigorous animal, somewhat resembling Montaigne, and kept close
to the earth. Carlyle, on his part, was impressed, and soon distressed, by
a certain visionary, impractical quality in Emerson. It seemed fitting to
the burly Scot not to accompany his visitor over the hill on the way back
to Dumfries but to catch the last glimpse of him as he appeared to be
vanishing into thin air at the summit.

By evening Emerson had crossed the English border. He was still con-
gratulating himself on "A white day in my years," but was ready for a
try at his next literary man, this time a celebrity, William Wordsworth,
the greatest living poet. On the morning of the 2 8th he went out from

ig6 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Ambleside to Wordsworth's Rydal Mount home. It was a place to write
poetry in. From nearby Nab Scar one could see Rydal Water, Grasmere,
and other lakes spread out as if on a great map. The poet was called in,
"a plain, elderly, white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by
green goggles.'5 He enumerated his transatlantic acquaintances and "had
much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his favorite
topic,~that society is being enlightened by a superficial tuition, out of all
proportion to its being restrained by moral culture." He duly recited his
literary prejudices, heaping special abuse on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. He
had read only the first part of the book. Having found it full of all manner
of fornication, he said, he had thrown it across the room in disgust; but
he promised to try again since he had heard Emerson's defense of it. He
thought Carlyle clever and deep but disliked his obscurity and sometimes
thought him insane. In his opinion Coleridge's writings were clearer than
Carlyle's but ought to be less obscure. He led the way to a walk on his
grounds where many thousands of his lines were composed and offered to
repeat some of his latest sonnets. There he was, "the old Wordsworth,
standing apart, and reciting ... in a garden-walk, like a school-boy de-
claiming." Emerson at first wanted to laugh but listened respectfully when
he remembered that he had come here to see a poet and that a poet was
now chanting his poems.

On the following day the traveler covered the whole distance from
Kendal to Liverpool. From Manchester on he rode in a railway train,
presumably for the first time, and was alive to every detail of the trip.
"Strange proof," he thought, "how men become accustomed to oddest
things! the laborers did not lift their umbrellas to look as we flew by
them . . ." Later, in Liverpool, he saw George Stephenson's prize-winning
Rocket and some of the other locomotives and got informal lectures on
steam power from Jacob Perkins.

While he waited for his ship to sail he heard a few sermons. One was
by James Martineau. Emerson, presenting an introduction from Henry
Ware, told Martineau the story of his resignation of the ministry of the
Second Church. "He was then," the English Unitarian leader put it, "in
a very indeterminate state of mind about questions on religion, and I was
struck with the mixture of clear decision on the subject which had led to
action, and of modest suspense on topics which he had not yet fully thought
out. But I made up my mind that he would not be likely to return to
the ministry."

On August 30 the traveler paid Captain Hoxie of the New- York for his
passage and purchased a Mackintosh overcoat for protection against the
Atlantic. At his Liverpool hotel, the Star and Garter in Paradise Street,

A FOOL'S PARADISE 197

not far from the docks, Emerson waited wearily till September 4, when his
ship finally sailed with fourteen passengers in the cabin and sixteen in the
steerage,

On September 5 he "saw the last lump of England receding without
the least regret/' but he was not very happy over the prospect before him.
As he sailed homeward he considered his future career. He liked his "book
about Nature55 and must already have planned it or even begun to write
it out; but he was not swept away by any enthusiasm or ambition, literary
or otherwise. He wished he knew where and how to live. He was glad to
be on his way home, "yet not so glad as others, and my way to the bottom/'
he assured himself, "I could find perchance with less regret, for I think it
would not hurt me,— that is, the ducking or drowning.53 He reviewed some
of his favorite philosophical theories and decided they were still valid in
the light of his European experience.

He had already begun to appraise the results of his seven months in
foreign countries. First-hand acquaintance with Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle,
and Wordsworth was worth thanking God for. It warranted his resolve that
hereafter he would "judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men.55 He was
also prepared to judge foreign countries more confidently and more intelli-
gently. He could understand well enough the feeling of the uninhibited
Yankee with lip curled in scorn as he passed among Europe5s ducal and
royal palaces. Yet he felt doubtful as well as proud when he remembered
the young, self-assertive America to which he was returning. Though he
had pretty definitely made up his mind to speak for himself and for his
own country, he was now traveled and experienced, not ignorant of the
Old World, and so not single-hearted in his patriotism. Having also read
much, he was steeped in the thought and feeling of other lands and of
other ages. He inevitably cared for what he judged the best that was thought
and known anywhere in the world. It was therefore impossible for him to
be a narrow-minded nationalist. He had gone only that far toward a solu-
tion of the much discussed problem of American cultural independence
when he arrived at New York on October 7, 1833.

A THINKER LET LOOSE

I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left
a slavish print upon our necks; the ghost of a linnen decency
yet haunts us. -Milton, Areopagitica

The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is,
not to know their own task, or to take their ideas from others.
—"The Fugitive Slave Law" read at New York

FOR more than a year after his return from Europe, Emerson moved
from one temporary home to another. Presumably he carried out
his plan to spend a few days with his friend George Sampson in
Boston and then go on to suburban Newton, where his mother had
been living, "for a pro tempore study." Toward the middle of December
he took a room in the home of James Pelletier, a French teacher, at 276
Washington Street, Boston. His brother Charles, then struggling for a foot-
hold in Court Street, the lawyers' swarming place, was already living at Pel-
letier' s, and he and Waldo had "pleasant Fraternal evenings." Next spring
Waldo boarded for a time with a Mrs. Palmer in Franklin Place. Late in
April he was back in Newton, to remain for several months. The parlor
and three bedrooms that he and his mother rented in the house of a Mrs.
Allen made them a comfortable resting place in a retreat as retired as the
Roxbury home had been. In this woodcock's nest, two miles or more from
the station of the new railroad, they counted seven Sundays in a week.

The gossip over Emerson's resignation from the Second Church had
not entirely died down but had passed its peak during his absence abroad.
Once or twice at least it had got into the press. Once a writer in The New-
England Magazine had misrepresented and exaggerated Emerson's real
objections to the Lord's Supper and hinted broadly that Emersonian doc-
trine was the evil fruit of William Ellery Channing's liberal preaching. The
former "Unitarian minister, in the north part of Boston," thus attacked
along with Channing found a prompt defender in Ezra Gannett, his old
college mate and fellow member of the school committee. Though Gannett
differed "widely" from Emerson on the rite, he could not consent, he said,

198

A THINKER LET LOOSE 199

"that the opinions of one, whom I hold in admiration for his unimpeachable
purity and integrity, should be misrepresented to the prejudice of his char-
acter in the estimation of the community, while he is absent from his native
land."

The dust of the old controversy did not keep Emerson from going ahead
with as much irregular supply preaching as he cared to do. Within a few
weeks after his return from abroad he went back to the Second Church,
greeted his former parishioners as a returned traveler would do, and preached
a new sermon reaffirming some of his well-known unorthodox views with-
out apology. Outside of Boston, he preached most at New Bedford, where
he had several tours of duty of from three to half a dozen weeks in suc-
cession. His kinsman Orville Dewey, quitting his pastorate there, doubtless
wanted him to take his place permanently. Probably some of the leading
members had given their informal assent to this plan; but there is no reason
to believe that the church ever issued any formal invitation to Emerson.
According to Frederic Hedge, a person apt to be well informed on such
matters, when Emerson wrote to a committee of the church that he would
not agree to celebrate the communion service or to pray except when he
was in the mood, the committee suppressed the letter and the negotiations
fell through. Whatever any such negotiations amounted to, the episode of
his irregular pastorate at New Bedford was important only because it
brought Emerson into closer contact with the Quakers or ex-Quakers there.
He was impressed by the Quaker widow Deborah Brayton, the keeper of
the fashionable boarding house where he lived, and was undoubtedly much
more influenced by Mary Rotch, another Quakeress, a sort of local Aunt
Mary Moody Emerson. Sometimes he traveled farther from home than
New Bedford. He preached at Bangor, Maine, during July, 1834, and at
New York for a month in the autumn of the same year. He wrote a hymn
for the ordination of Chandler Robbins, his successor at the Second Church
in Boston, and was soon afterwards a guest in Robbins's pulpit. Very prob-
ably he did not want to be considered a candidate for any regular pastorate.

His new freedom was now made more secure by his new financial
status. Though his European voyage seems to have cost more than a year's
salary at the Second Church at a time when he was no longer drawing
a salary, his affairs had taken a decisive turn for the better during his
absence. His furniture, except an organ, had been sold, yielding over $900
to his credit. But far more important, the settlement of the Tucker estate
had at last become a thing that could be counted on. After new complica-
tions caused by the deaths of Emerson's sister-in-law Margaret Tucker and
his mother-in-law, Mrs. Kent, had been cleared up, things had moved
rapidly, Within a few days of his own death, Professor Ashmun, Emer-

200 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

son's counsel, had briefly argued the case before the Supreme Judicial
Court in Boston; and toward the end of the following June, when the
plaintiff was still on the continent of Europe, the case of Emerson vs.
Cutler, the executor of the Tucker estate, had been decided. Emerson was
eventually to receive the whole of Ellen's share of the two-thirds of the
estate willed to the Tucker children.

In the early months of 1834 his financial expectations began to be real-
ized in cash and negotiable paper and he had a basis for future plans.
Before the end of January he had been granted permission by the executor,
in view of troublesome debts, to draw at least one small sum in advance
of final settlement. A decree issued by the court in the March term specified
the money and stocks that he was to have as the first of two main instal-
ments, and before the middle of May he accordingly received 67 shares
in the City Bank, 19 in the Atlantic Bank, and 31 in the Boston and Rox-
bury Mill Dam, together with a cash balance of between three and four
thousand dollars. The estimated total value of these assets was $11,600.
When he had got the whole of the inheritance in hand, Emerson would,
he thought, be sure of an annual income of about $1200, an amount equal
to two-thirds of his recent salary as pastor. But he would have, as it turned
out, slightly over three years to wait for the payment of the second half
of the funds he was counting on, On the other side of the ledger he must
estimate some special expenses. It would be necessary for him to pay not
only his own living expenses but at least a share of those of his mother,
for her income from the Lafayette Hotel now amounted to only $80 or
$90 a year, about $225 short of her actual expenses. He would also be
responsible for a share of the cost of keeping his brother Bulkeley. Though
his outlay on Bulkeley's account was not great, it might continue for many
years. The inheritance from Ellen was, however, enough to justify the
resolve he must have made to put an end to his irregular ministry as soon
as he could get a modest reputation as a lecturer and a writer. He was
prudent, though it is quite improbable that in any circumstance he would
have kept at his preaching many years longer.

The lecture platform was a logical first step to take from the pulpit.
A few weeks after his return from abroad, Waldo Emerson had begun
with his lecture on "The Uses of Natural History/' He was humanizing
and Transcendentalizing science. The world and the mind, he told his
audience, were inseparably paired. Our speech was packed with metaphors
"because the whole of Nature is a metaphor or image of the human Mind,"
he explained. "The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as
face to face in a glass." A future botanist named Moses Curtis observed
that the several hundred hearers seemed highly gratified with the lecture;

A THINKER LET LOOSE 201

but when he himself thought it over he found it mostly intangible. He
was quite unable to catch the meaning of the passage, inspired by Emer-
son's visit to the Jardin des Plantes, on the occult sympathy between man
and the material world. There was so much dreaminess in it. But no such
doubts troubled Emerson's brother Charles. In his opinion, "Waldo lec-
tured ... to a charm." Charles "was glad to have some of the stump
lecturers see what was what & bow to the rising sun."

It was probably late in December, 1833, ti13* t'ie new lecturer read
"On the Relation of Man to the Globe." This likewise contained echoes of
his foreign travel and approximated a theory of evolution in its assertions
that man was no upstart but was prophesied in nature long before he
appeared and that animals were created gradually from age to age, the
new varieties being suited to the contemporary condition of the earth.
Narrowly interpreted, this could have meant merely the orthodox belief
in special creations; but to a man of Emerson's imaginative temperament
it probably meant more. As in the earlier lecture, there was also insistence
upon the correspondences between the world of the senses and the world
of thought. Again, in spite of lip service to the old argument from design,
there was a start along a path so far little trod.

Emerson was fortunate in hitting upon science as his first inspiration
for lectures. Natural history was indeed, as his brother Charles said, "the
study now." Everybody was "making catalogues of birds, reading memoirs
of Cuvier, hearing lectures about Crustacea, Volcanoes, entomology & the
like." Emerson was busy, as usual, with provocative ideas. Even though
his lecture on "Water," before the Boston Mechanic's Institution on Jan-
uary 17, 1834, proved to be the weakest of his series on natural history,
he managed to make it underscore, faintly at least, his recognition of the
ceaseless revolution going forward in nature. In his "Address" read at the
annual meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History in the following
May, he defended those amateur scientists who labored enthusiastically,
as he did, to acquire knowledge that could only be superficial. The spell
of the Jardin des Plantes was again upon him. He showed that recent
discoveries pointed more and more steadily at method, at a theory; and
he asserted that a visit to a natural history cabinet excited reveries about
relations which one could feel without being able to comprehend or define
thtm. Scientific studies had many virtues, and they looked to him like
medicine for America's disease of European imitation. Not hopeful of
achieving literary independence without a great sacrifice, he proposed the
somewhat short-sighted theory that scientific progress might be made in-
dependently of other nations. The otherwise evil Jacksonian party was help-
lag us, with its ignorance of all literature and its selfish, gross pursuits, to

202 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

get free of England's cultural hegemony. "But/5 he suggested, "a better
cure would be in the study of Natural History."

His two lectures on Italy were the most frank and detailed reports of
his experience abroad that he gave a lecture audience until, long after-
ward, he began his book on England. He read the Italian lectures not very
frequently over a period of years. At New Bedford he was at a great deal
of trouble to hang up prints by way of illustration. One picture he used
there, a painting of the most magnificent room in the Uffizi Gallery, was
by the New Bedford artist William Wall3 his companion during a part of
his foreign travels. He began with a disclaimer of any ulterior purpose or
any special knowledge. He simply wanted to give "a brief account of the
most interesting objects of Italy as they present themselves to the notice
of an American traveller." He would not venture upon an analysis of
Italian politics. He modestly remarked that "A learned criticism upon works
of art is a very pertinent study for an Italian traveller, but I have no learn-
ing on the subject." He made an effort at restraint on the subject of the
church and admitted that perhaps "the best form of worship would adopt
something of this Catholic ceremony." He was trying, in spite of the in-
evitable glorification of travel which the lecture implied, to preserve both
his Americanism and his self-respect. He ended with a gesture of defiance
even toward immortal Rome, warning his hearers against any surrender of
self-reliance: "The Genius of the place seems to say in the ear of every
wanderer, Why are you dazzled with the name of Caesar? A part as im-
portant, a soul as great, a name as dear to God as his— is your own/' Into
his second lecture on Italy, relating his impressions of the country from
Rome northward, he put something of the same spirit of independence,
though he took pains to do justice to the accumulated treasures of many
centuries of culture.

But it was in the course on his first group of representative men-
Michelangelo, Martin Luther, John Milton, George Fox, and Edmund
Burke— that he unmistakably rehearsed for his future platform successes and,
to the discerning, pretty fully revealed the main direction of his think-
ing. In these lectures and in those that soon followed, his travels, studies,
and miscellaneous experiences were kneaded together. It was a symbolical
act for him to write his lecture on Michelangelo in a coat he had had made
in Florence. He got into the spirit of Michelangelo partly by translating
from the great artist's verses. Having swung sharply round from science
to biography, he became more than ever a collector of notable men., and
particularly heroic men, though he did not go as far in dramatizing heroism
as he thought of doing when he proposed, in January of 1835, to lecture
on the deaths of Phocion, Socrates, and Sir Thomas More. When he dis-

A THINKER LET LOOSE 203

cussed literature, he made much of its biographical implications. For him
every subject naturally took on an ethical coloring, but he contented him-
self with basic principles, habitually avoiding limited applications of hih
theories. He commonly slighted material values in favor of intellectual and
spiritual. Idea, spirit had for him a much more vivid existence than things.

Presumably, from the start, he read his lectures and seldom attempted
any extempore speaking, though when he took part in a debate before the
Concord Lyceum, contending that the French Revolution caused more
good than evil, he won the decision. But even if he .stuck to his manuscript
he quickly learned to communicate to his audiences a sense of his eloquence
and daring. For some time his lectures did not carry him farther from
Boston than Concord and, in the opposite direction, Plymouth. But it was
obvious that he would soon command a far larger audience.

In his more strictly literary ventures he had less success. Though he
had kept up a thin stream of verse since boyhood, he could as yet seldom
be at ease in metrical expression. In the Newton woods he wrote "The
Rhodora," a piece appropriate to that setting. In "The Rhodora," with
its defense of unutilitarian beauty, and almost of art for art's sake., he
created a fragile beauty. But when he sat down to write for a Phi Beta
Kappa anniversary he was disconcerted. If he manufactured, as he said,
the "amusing verses'5 in demand on such occasions he would have to "out-
rage" his own "solemn nature/3 but if he tried poetry he would not please
his audience. He elected poetry, had a hard time to keep from falling
into "a sort of fata morgana reflecting the images of Byron, Shakspear,
and the newspapers,35 and, in his own opinion, failed to make a successful
declamation of it. His brother Charles called the poem "both good sense
£ good verses"; but, at best, it was hardly more than good sense.

Making slow progress toward the profession of letters, Emerson had
at least a vague purpose to write an article for The North American Review
on the Concord Fight. As late as December of 1 833 he had vainly nursed
along his dream of establishing a magazine or paper of his own. Yet chap-
ters of Nature, his first book, were growing toward completion in his
journals ; and his intellectual current was gathering force, though it carried
along what seemed, on the surface, to be mainly the ideas he had repeated
for years, as self-reliance, compensation. He found that the distinction'
between reason and understanding, a distinction he credited jointly to*
Milton, Coleridge, and the Germans, was "a philosophy itself. 9f "Reason,"/
he explained in a letter to Edward, "is the highest faculty of the soul—
what we mean often by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it
simply perceives; it is vision. The Understanding toils all the time, com-
pares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighted but strong-sighted, dwelling in;

204 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

the present the expedient the customary. Beasts have some understanding
but no Reason. Reason is potentially perfect in every man— Understand-
ing in very different degrees of strength. . . . Religion Poetry Honor be-
long to the Reason; to the real the absolute. . . ."

The direction of his religious thought at this transitional period of his
life was becoming more sharply defined. Both Quakers and Swedenborgians
were looming larger in his estimate of values. He thought both spiritually
alive, as churches in general were not. Quakers he described as ua sublime
class of speculators" and "perhaps the most explicit teachers of the highest
article to which human faith soars the strict union of the willing soul to
God & so the souls access at all times to a verdict upon every question
which the opinion of all mankind cannot shake & which the opinion of all
mankind cannot confirm." In theory he insisted on the genuineness of the
mystical relationship, but his own mystical flights were always apt to be
kept close to earth by common sense, perhaps more accurately describable
in his case as the theoretical or intellectual area in his nature which could
never be quite submerged in his aesthetic or unconscious self.

With the Swedenborgians he never could go more than half way, but
his sympathy with their doctrine of the primacy of the spiritual had its effect
on his thought. A Swedenborgian friend esteemed himself "measureably
excused for not preaching" while Emerson was in New Bedford and was
"giving as much New Jerusalem doctrine as the people will bear." On the
first Sunday of 1835 Emerson went so far as to visit the Swedenborgian
chapel in Boston. What he heard did not excite him, but he saw signs of
life there. On the same Sunday he listened to the Methodist Father Taylor,
the seamen's preacher, and set Taylor's church down in the same category
of the living. He was simply a seeker, ready to accept whatever ideas seemed
worth while, but by no means willing to lock himself up in anybody's
intellectual prison. Within a few weeks a rumor got abroad that he was
a Swedenborgian, and this reverberated as far away as New York but was
false.

He still kept out of the storm center of the political debates of the time
but had political prejudices and did some serious political thinking, which
,was certain to come to the surface in his later writing. He was already able
}to see that his favorite doctrine of self-reverence, or self-reliance, was at
tthe root of democracy; but, with his habit of looking critically on all sides
of a truth without much worry over contradictory findings, he was also
quick to see the abuses of democracy. He felt humiliated when he attended
a caucus and disillusioned when obviously unfit persons were elected to
office. He was frankly contemptuous of "this rank rabble party, the Jack-
sonism of the country/' in spite of his belief that there was latent virtue

A THINKER LET LOOSE 205

there; and he wanted God to avert the failure of the Whigs. He generally
kept clear of all kinds of extremists. Being a philosophical man, he had
little faith in even good-intentioned enthusiasts captained by fanatics and
so did not think it his business to march with the legions now ready for
a frontal assault on slavery. But he nevertheless had his unfaltering opinion
and would live up to it in his individualistic manner. Whatever havoc
opposition to slavery might work with other American institutions, he did
"not wish to live in a nation where slavery exists."

If3 in this crucial period, Emerson had few friends who could guide him
toward a literary career, he had already proved his capacity for friendship.
He could attract such excellent, though unliterary, men as Abel Adams and
George Sampson. George Sampson, a Boston merchant, was a friend whom
he received with democratic understanding. Sampson, a former parishioner,
would not let the action of his church sever him from his pastor and still
"loved him like a brother." At the time of his premature death, in July
of 1834, he was on the way to join Emerson in Maine.

It was to preach Sampson's funeral sermon that Emerson mounted the
pulpit of the Second Church for the last time. He was not apologetic be-
cause the events of Sampson's life "were few & nowise remarkable" or
because his friend had, as he confessed to the audience, "neither literature
nor wealth nor power." Instead, he praised the greatness Sampson had
expended on commonplace duties. "I should be ashamed," he said, "to
express a respect for Cato & Aristides & Washington & see virtues which
all ages had unanimously pointed out to me, & have no eye to discover the
very same virtues when they appeared among my own acquaintance & in
the performance of ordinary duties. I should then feel no security that
if Cato & Aristides should reappear in the world I should have penetration
enough to discover them."

At least two persons were impressed by the speaker's perfect loyalty to
such a friend, for Amos Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Peabody had come
together to hear the funeral sermon. Elizabeth Peabody told her sister Mary
that ecwords would vainly essay to do justice" to Emerson's "apotheosis of
Sampson," and that "His expression— his tones— his prayers—his readings
of Scripture— his sermon . . . will live in my soul forever & ever— And
7 know that man as well as I could have known him had I been his
acquaintance on earth."

Waldo Emerson and William, Edward, and Charles had been friends
as well as brothers and had often remarked on their close association. Edward
had written from Porto Rico that he never read the treatises on friendship
by ancient and modem writers without thinking of their family brother-
hood. But now ill fortune began to overtake it. Edward, the much admired

206 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOM

scholar and lawyer who had had "from youth the leader's look" and whose
"sculptured countenance" had never been shamed by "poor beseeching
glance/' was the first to break the circle. He had kept as long as he could
to his quiet routine as merchant's clerk and American consul's assistant at
San Juan. But an accidental wetting in August, 1834, had worsened his
chronic cough, and before the end of the following month pains in the
chest, and then pulmonary suppuration, showed that his case was hopeless.
On the first day of October he died. For some two years after Edward's
death the brotherhood consisted of William, Waldo, and Charles.

Among all his friends Emerson rated Carlyle, since the European tour,
as his chief symbol of the profession of letters. Carlyle's words were a gospel
that the literary neophyte, no matter how self-reliant, must respect. It was
important to Emerson that that gospel was less British than German. Car-
lyle's articles on German literature which Emerson had been reading before
he crossed the Atlantic probably included the old but still exciting one on the
state of German literature in 1827. That article illustrated the whole Teu-
tonic orientation of the Scot's mind. Carlyle was as bold in praising German
taste, literature, and philosophy as Mme de Stael had been. He approved
Fichte and Schelling as fit for importation into Britain but gave Kant the
lion's share of the praise. Significantly for a transatlantic admirer who was
not apt to read far in Kant's own writings, he set down the "grand char-
acteristic" of Kant's philosophy as the distinction between reason and under-
standing and was as negligent as Coleridge about giving adequate warning
of the limitations of intuition upon which Kant himself had actually in-
sisted so sternly. Carlyle exaggerated and oversimplified, but his faults could
not equal his virtues in the eyes of Emerson. When Emerson spoke of Milton,
Coleridge, and the Germans he was probably thinking mainly of Coleridge
and of the Germans as expounded by Carlyle.

By 1 834 the whole Emerson circle was stirred up by the Scottish strong
man of letters. In July, before an answer had come from him to his Amer-
ican admirer's first letter, but pretty obviously after some instalments of
"Sartor Resartus" in Fraser's had been read by the Emersons, Charles was
explaining to Aunt Mary how Carlyle's "living words, fire-baptized," showed
the iconoclastic Scot "working himself clear of disbelief & coming forth
into the light of hope & God's Truth. He has," Charles added, "with what-
soever strangeness & extravagance of utterance, spoken Delphic yea higher
than Delphic oracles— since they touch the great mysteries of Revelation,
say rather the infinite mystery of Being. You may be revolted from him at
first— we all are— but his soul is so lordly, free & pure you will love him."

In the following August, Carlyle, "now of Craigenputtock no more, but
of London," wrote Waldo Emerson "a noble letter." A seal of approval

A THINKER LET LOOSE 207

on the friendship begun a year earlier, it was all the more welcome because
it came just after its author had finished the most spiritual of his gospels
and so had recommended himself most effectively to the budding Tranr
scendentalist. Emerson, long since a subscriber to Fraser's, was doubtless
familiar with the whole of "Sartor" before Carlyle's gift of the four stitched
copies ^of the excerpted articles could reach him. In spite of its extravagant
rhetoric, "Sartor55 must have reminded him of his own journals. Professor
Teufelsdrockh resembled his American reader in his "humour of looking
at all Matter and Material things as Spirit." His method was not that of
common logic but of "practical Reason, proceeding by large Intuition "
He thought that nature was "what the Earth-Spirit in Faust names it, the
living visible Garment of God," and that "Matter, were it never so des-
picable, is Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit." He was firmly convinced
that here or nowhere was the ideal, in the self. For him great men were the
inspired texts of a divine book of revelations making up history. He had
forsaken Byron and had banished the everlasting No, accepting in its stead
the everlasting Yea. He had discovered in Goethe, as Emerson was at last
doing, a prophet in whom man's life "again begins, were it but afar off,
to be divine."

By January of 1835 Emerson was directing the attention of his former
pupil Benjamin Hunt to the "author of the pieces 'Burns' 'Characteristics'
'Corn Law Rhymes— Review/ &c. in the Edinburgh, & of many singular
papers in the Foreign Review, & Frasers Magazine,-all alive-& all true,"
and of "Sartor." "My friends," he added, "think I exaggerate his merit
but he seems to me one of the best, & since Coleridge is dead, I think, the
best thinker of the age.55 Inspired by Carlyle's example, Emerson was taking
to the private study of German with surprising zest. It seemed time lost,
he admitted, "for a grown man to be turning the leaves of a dictionary,
like a boy, to learn German"; but he was convinced that he was on the
right trail. Goethe became almost a refrain in his journals.

Another promising source of help, a man he had known since they were
together in theological school, was Frederic Hedge, the author of some
vigorous criticism of Swedenborg and Coleridge. Emerson called one of
Hedge's articles "a living leaping Logos" and naturally thought of its author
as a desirable helper in case his own hazily projected magazine should
become a reality. Hedge tried to rescue mysticism from the low and re-
proachful sense in which it was generally understood. He took Swedenborg,
the mystic— for so he regarded him— as his text; but he denied him any
special authority, cited Kant against him, and concluded with a declaration
of friendliness toward the New Church somewhat overbalanced by a frank
avowal that he had no sympathy with that idolatry which could embrace

2o8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

a human tradition as if it were a revelation from God. All this may have
been serviceable to Emerson as he developed his own ideas on Swedenborg
and mysticism, though it did not comprehend those ideas. The most sig-
nificant part of the lengthy review of Coleridge that Hedge printed while
Emerson was on his way to visit the subject himself was a discussion of
the "transcendental" philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schilling. Only less
culpable than Garlyle in his earlier essay on the state of German literature,
Hedge failed to repeat Kant's emphatic warning against too great depend-
ence on the use of the transcendental method.

Other tutors, likewise sensitive to the new winds of doctrine blowing
from over the Atlantic, were ready to begin their work for the emancipated
teacher and preacher now turning lecturer and man of letters. Before sail-
ing for Europe, Emerson had had a conversation with James Freeman
Clarke on "Goethe, German Literature, Carlyle, etc/3 Some months after
his return from abroad he and Clarke began to exchange letters at long
intervals, with Goethe and the Germans still the center of interest. Emerson
urged Clarke to publish an article, then in manuscript, on Goethe and
Carlyle; and Clarke in turn urged Emerson to do something of the sort
himself and at the same time pointed to Margaret Fuller as another dis-
coverer of Goethe. For some months she had been seeking an opportunity
of meeting Emerson; and now he seemed willing. Learning of this propi-
tious turn of events, she masked her enthusiasm as well as she could and
wrote to Frederic Hedge: "I am flattered that Mr Emerson should wish
to know me. I fear it will never be but tis pleasant to know that he wished
it. I cannot think I should be disappointed in him as I have been in others
to whom I had hoped to look up. The sensation one experiences in the
atmosphere of his thought is too decided and peculiar." At almost the same
time Alcott was writing in his diary, "I wish to know Mr. R. Emerson
and Mr, Hedge."

Free at last from any routine of school or church, Emerson looked about
for the place where he could live with a near balance of society and soli-
tude but with the beam down slightly on the side of solitude. He had not
forgotten Coacord, his ancestral town, where he had once lived for some
months and lad often visited. It had frequently been his mother's retreat,
and Elizabeth. Hoar, Charles's fiancee, was likely to draw Charles there
to take a desk in her father's law office till he could find room in Boston.
In late September of 1834, Emerson began preparations for the move from
Newton to Concord. He asked Grandfather Ripley to arrange for a wagon
and reckoned up his and his mother's baggage as a bureau, a small table,
two bookcases of two shelves each, two armchairs, a trunk, two beds, and
some small articles, altogether making a load not too great for a large

A THINKER LET LOOSE 209

horse cart to carry. Some three weeks later his mother wrote in her note-
book, "Came to Concord Tuesday 14 to board with Dr. Ripley the winter."
After several intervening Sundays or Mondays of preaching in New York,
Waldo Emerson himself settled down contentedly into this rural scene.

He knew that after the loss of his place as a titular leader of Boston
Unitarianism his retreat into the country would look to the world like a
confession of defeat. People would speak of him with pity or disdain. But
he easily mustered up enough courage and pride to endure any such obloquy.
It was a fitting time for the rhymed advice he wrote for himself in an
undated passage of a verse book. He would accept both "talent & disgrace,55
leave "The marble town unwept," and nourish his virtue "in a private
place." In his diary he wrote, "Hail to the quiet fields of my fathers!" As
he set up his inkstand and prepared to begin a new life he made an am-
bitious resolve. "Henceforth," he announced to himself, "I design not to
utter any speech, poem or book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work.
I will say at public lectures, and the like, those things which I have medi-
tated for their own sake, and not for the first time with a view to that
occasion." Such an ideal was impossible to realize but was a mark to shoot
at. This was not the first time he had placed it on his target; but now, in
1834, it had greater practical significance.

Pleased with his prospects, he began to feel at home in Concord, though
he was still only a boarder in the manse. In his room there— apparently the
northwest second-story room, looking out toward the battlefield and the
river— he got down to work on Nature, the book he had pondered on his
return voyage across the Atlantic. The ocean seemed to sound in his ears
again. The great willow tree over his roof, he wrote, "is the trumpet and
accompaniment of the storm and gives due importance to every caprice of
the gale, and the trees in the avenue announce the same facts with equal
din to the front tenants. Hoarse concert: they roar like the rigging of a
ship in a tempest"

LIDIAN

This lady is a person of noble character whom to see
is to respect. I find in her a quite unexpected community
of sentiment & speculation . . .

—Letter to William Emerson, February 5, 1835

And I should think she had the rare characteristic of
genius—inexhaustible originality.

—Elizabeth Peabody to her sister Mary,
February 25, 1835

ONE Sunday afternoon a few years earlier, the guest preacher at
the Twelfth Congregational Church, in Chambers Street, Bos-
ton, looked down into the upturned face of a young woman
seated beside the pulpit in an attitude of rapt attention. The
young woman was Lydia Jackson, a visitor in the city, and she had pre-
sumably dropped into the Twelfth Church by chance. According to family
tradition, when Lydia first looked up at the man in the pulpit she was
simply astonished at the length of his neck. But what he was presently say-
ing must have taken equal hold on her imagination, for when the service
was over she found herself leaning eagerly forward and so tired that she
believed she must have kept the same position throughout the sermon. Upon
inquiry she learned that the preacher was Emerson. On another Sunday
she saw him walking in front of her on the way to church, his gown flut-
tering in the wind. Then, in 1834, she heard him lecture in her home town
of Plymouth.

It was early in that year that he appeared on the lecture platform in
Plymouth. His old friend George Bradford seems to have arranged for the
lecture. Lydia heard it and was charmed, though she did not go with the
others to meet Emerson at Captain Russell's, where he was spending the
night. He soon returned to preach a sermon in the town, and it may have
been on that occasion that Lydia was asked by a friend how she liked
hearing her own ideas preached. If the family tradition is true in detail,
as it undoubtedly is in general, Lydia soon had a premonition of what was
to happen. One day as she was going up the stairs in the Winslow House,

210

LILIAN 211

her home, she saw a clear image of herself dressed as a bride and walk-
ing down those stairs with Emerson. She was shocked, and yet did not feel
guilty, for she was not conscious that any such thought had ever entered
her mind. She promptly pushed it back into the realm of the unconscious.
Early in October, some seven months after his first Plymouth lecture, she
was writing from Boston that she "came near having a call from Mr
Emerson that very morng— but somehow lost it."

He had stayed in the house of Captain Russell at Plymouth, and as
the captain's children were by this time good friends of both Emerson and
Lydia Jackson, they may have had some part, along with George Bradford,
in preparing the way for the courtship that was soon to follow if it had
not already begun. Le Baron Russell doubtless reported in Plymouth his
visit with Emerson in the Concord manse, a visit he long remembered as
"a week of pure enjoyment such excitement as a young man would natu-
rally have from the daily society and friendship of a man whom he de-
lighted in above all others." It was presumably during this visit of his that
young Russell and his host had a Sunday morning drive to Waltham. On
such a drive, at any rate, Emerson repeated poetry to the appreciative
youth, giving him his first knowledge of George Herbert. Le Baron's sister
Lucia, then a schoolgirl, had found Emerson a sympathetic critic of her
compositions. An older sister, Mary Howland Russell, had been Lydia Jack-
son's friend from babyhood.

After preaching a midweek sermon at Plymouth in the following Jan-
uary, Emerson returned home with "most agreeable recollections." A few
days later Lydia had, it is said, a momentary vision of her lover's face,
gazing at her and then suddenly vanishing; and on the next day she re-
ceived his letter containing a proposal of marriage. In spite of her vision,
she was utterly amazed. But she wrote him to come and talk with her on
the subject, and he came at once. She closed her eyes and catechized him
on the seriousness of his love. They were old enough to know their own
minds. He was well over thirty-one. She was eight months his senior. Their
engagement was quickly agreed on and was announced in Plymouth the
following day. He gave her the diamond that had been Ellen Tucker's and
had it set, as she requested, in a pin; but the jeweler, misunderstanding
his instructions, made this useless to her. In his diary, however, Emerson
seems to have recorded no word of his engagement except that January 30,
presumably the day it occurred, was "spent at Plymouth with Lydia Jack-
son."

He felt no unrestrained enthusiasm and had, as he confessed to his
brother William, a very different feeling from that which his first engage-
ment had inspired. "This is a very sober joy," he admitted; and he ex-

2i2 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

plained his attachment by pointing to Lydia Jackson's nobility of character,
to their "unexpected community of sentiment & speculation/' and to the
fact that in Plymouth she was "dearly prized for her love & good works."
Besides, his involvement in affairs of his own left him little time for Lydia.
He was beginning to deliver his new course in Boston, and, as he was
writing his lectures on Michelangelo, Luther, Milton, George Fox, and
Burke as he went along, he was in no position to play the role of devoted
lover at Plymouth. The result was that a number of letters, some hurried
and brief, and not more than a few hasty visits were the best means he
had of piecing out the short courtship. He now revealed himself as rapidly
as he could through the letters which, at least for the probity and good
sense they showed, were not unworthy of the canonization they received
at the hands of Lydia Jackson. A few days after his decisive visit in
Plymouth, he wrote to her:

"Concord, i February—

"One of my wise masters, Edmund Burke, said, CA wise man will speak
the truth with temperance that he may speak it the longer.' In this new
sentiment that you awaken in me, my Lydian Queen, what might scare
others pleases me, its quietness, which I accept as a pledge of permanence.
I delighted myself on Friday with my quite domesticated position & the
good understanding that grew all the time, yet I went & came without
one vehement word—or one passionate sign. In this was nothing of design,
I merely surrendered myself to the hour & to the facts. I find a sort of
grandeur in the modulated expressions of a love in which the individuals,
& what might seem even reasonable personal expectations, are steadily post-
poned to a regard for truth & the universal love. Do not think me a meta-
physical lover. I am a man & hate & suspect the over refiners, & do sym-
pathize with the homeliest pleasures & attractions by which our good foster
mother Nature draws her children together. Yet am I well pleased that
between us the most permanent ties should be the first formed & thereon
should grow whatever others human nature will.

"My Mother rejoices very much & asks me all manner of questions
about you, many of which I cannot answer. I dont know whether you
sing, or read French, or Latin, or where you have lived, & much more. So
you see there is nothing for it but that you should come here & on the
Battle-Ground stand the fire of her catechism.

"Under this morning's severe but beautiful light I thought dear friend
that hardly should I get away from Concord. I must win you to love it.
I am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. That is my
nature & vocation. My singing be sure is very 'husky,3 & is for the most
part in prose. Still am I a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of

LID I AN 213

the harmonies that are in the soul & in matter, & specially of the corre-
spondences between these & those. A sunset, a forest, a snow storm, a cer-
tain river-view, are more to me than many friends & do ordinarily divide
my day with my books. Wherever I go therefore I guard & study my
rambling propensities with a care that is ridiculous to people, but to me is
the care of my high calling. Now Concord is only one of a hundred towns
in which I could find these necessary objects but Plymouth I fear is not
one. Plymouth is streets; I live in the wide champaign.

"Time enough for this however. If I succeed in preparing my lecture
on Michel Angelo Buonaroti this week for Thursday, I will come to
Plymouth on Friday. If I do not succeed— do not attain unto the Idea of
that man— I shall read of Luther, Thursday & then I know not when I
shall steal a visit —

"Dearest forgive the egotism of all this letter Say they not 'The more
love the more egotism.3 Repay it by as much & more. Write, write to me.
And please dear Lidian take that same low counsel & leave thinking for
the present & let the winds of heaven blow away your dyspepsia.

"Waldo E."

Two days later, in answer to a letter of hers, he managed to write
little but a promise of more self -revelation :

"I say to thee my noble Lidian that you little know to whom you are
saying these fine things I have just read. . . . For loving you, if we are
true to our principles I expect to love you & that you will love me better
& better every hour whilst the world stands. Of these things I hope to
make you surer next Friday . . . And so with this short message almost
too late for the stage I must flee back to Michel Angelo only beseeching you
to take care of your health & to love dearly

"Waldo Emerson for whom I hope you will be able to find a more
affectionate name than Mr E."

In her eyes he wore the prestige of pulpit and platform as a saint wore
a halo, and, as she insisted on keeping his dignity intact, she refused, in
spite of his plea, to call him by a more familiar name. But he had no such
inhibitions about her. At the outset he had determined, presumably for
reasons of euphony, to reform her name. If she remained Lydia after her
marriage, most New Englanders, with their unconscious antipathy to a
hiatus between vowels, would call her Lydiar Emerson. Probably he reasoned
it out that way, but at any rate he was troubled by no doubts. According
to his cousin Sarah Ripley, he simply declared that those who had baptized
the child Lydia had been ill-advised, for her name was Lidian.

By February 12, not quite two weeks after their engagement, he was
demanding letters, as he had neither seen her nor heard from her for half

THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

a dozen days. But he found too little time for writing himself. If his letter
was short., he apologized that it was this or none. Next day he was writing
her again. He explained his sticking to his lectures instead of coming to
Plymouth. Having spoken frankly of Ellen Tucker, he felt obliged to show
Lydia that she had taken him too seriously. In order to make this matter
clear3 he offered to let her read his journals. He continued the debate over
the location of their future home, quoting the sentiments of his inkstand
in support of Concord's claims: "In fine Inkstand concludes that unless
Lidian can trundle Plymouth rock a score of miles northward, she must
even quit it & come & sit down by Concord Battle-Bridge. In reward of
that grace, Inkstand is full of promises of verses & histories writ in & by
her love," The debate was going in favor of Concord but, though Lydia
had for years known that that place was, as she had once put it, "a pleasant
town" with "society refined & intelligent" and that it was even "at a very
convenient distance . . . from Boston, and not an unreasonable one from
•Plymouth/3 it was hard for her to shift her loyalty.

Emerson kept up his efforts, against odds, to be lover and lecturer at
the same time. He was impatient of his own delay in writing to Plymouth,
but he explained that "a visit time & strength-consuming to Waltham a
heavy cold riding like the night mare my head & throat; & two biographies
of Burke with 8 volumes of his works to read mark & inwardly digest,—
quite eat up my hours & minutes." At a time when he was apparently
sketching out his poem "Musketaquid," he wrote Lydia a fresh apology for
Concord and its "innocent river." In the same letter he added a warning
that he did not want to be addressed any longer "with that prefix Rev.39
By March 5 the troublesome lecture on Burke was finally read in Boston.
Lydia Jackson was there to hear it and thought it delightful. "In describ-
ing Burke as the noblest and kindest of human beings/' she told her sister,
"the lecturer seemed describing himself— so much are they alike— only I
would say— 'nay better than Burke' . . " After the lecture there was a
party at the home of Mrs. Sturgis. Two Sturgis girls, Ellen and Caroline,
were precocious enough to figure as youthful bluestockings.

By means of her own share of the correspondence and a visit she got
up courage to make in Concord, Lydia Jackson revealed much of her char-
acter to the Emerson family and circle. Her lover's friends and acquaintance
were already doing their best to fill in the picture. It was generally agreed
that she was not a beauty. Charles Emerson put the matter the shortest
way when he told William that "The lady is a sort of Sybil for wisdom-
She is not beautiful anywise that I know, so you look at the outside alone/3
but added that "Mother is pleased, & everybody."

Several feminine observers got more detailed impressions, which they

LIDIAN 215

promptly shared with their friends. Arriving at Mrs, Bliss's home in Boston
for a first meeting with the prospective bride, Elizabeth Peabody learned
that she was upstairs tardily finishing a letter to her lover. Elizabeth pleas-
antly busied herself by reading a letter which Emerson had received from
Carlyle, and in due time Lydia descended, looking, as her visitor put it,
"very refined but neither beautiful or elegant— and very frail— & as if her
mind wore out her body-she was unaffected but peculiar." The two women
sat down together and "had a beautiful talk about a variety of most
intellectual & spiritual things- And I should think," Elizabeth rounded
out her report, "she had the rare characteristic of genius— inexhaustible
originality.35 A few days later Sarah Freeman Clarke, another intelligent
inspector, announced that Lydia was almost equal to Emerson and as
remarkable among women as he among men, was singular-looking yet
beautiful, had an expression of face that showed a "beaming soul," seemed
to be "a searing transcendentalist" and perhaps as independent in her think-
ing as was Margaret Fuller, and respected Unitarianism because without
it there could be no Transcendentalism.

Widely circulated rumors about the engaged couple proved at least that
Emerson already had some local celebrity. Lydia Maria Child heard the
gossips affirm "that Mr. Emerson was about to marry a Swedenborgian
lady, who, the first time she heard him lecture, received a very strong im-
pression that they were spiritual partners; insomuch that, on her return
home, she said to a friend, That man is certainly my pre-destined hus-
band.' " Margaret Fuller, her interest in Emerson already keen, "heard
much of Miss Jackson and should think her every-way calculated to make
Mr Emerson happy even on his own principle that it is not the quantity
but the quality of happiness that is to be taken into consideration.55 Emer-
son illustrated what struck Margaret as the rule that a man marrying a
second time usually selected a wife of character and manners entirely
unlike those of his first.

If she had chosen to do so, Mrs. Bliss, Lydia's girlhood friend in Plym-
outh and now her hostess and social mentor in Boston, could have added
to these various appraisals a reasonably complete and enlightening history
of the past of Lydia Jackson and her family, as Plymouth was a family-
conscious town.

Lucy Cotton, Lydia's mother, was, it seems, the direct descendant of
the redoubtable John Cotton who had migrated to Massachusetts Bay to
be a beacon light, at first flickering but soon steady and reliable, of the
Puritan church during the contentious time when not only John Winthrop,
but Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson as well, were members of that
colony. Lucy, according to the family tradition, had many books and spent

2i6 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

her days with them, as befitted one who came of so learned an ancestry.
Charles Jackson, who married this Lucy Cotton in 1794, came of almost
the earliest Plymouth Colony stock, it is said. He was a merchant and owner
of several ships enough prized to bear picturesque figureheads, and so was
naturally a Federalist and hated a Democrat. Ill health kept down his
spirits, and he was apt to have an air of disapproval that made his wife
sad, so their sixth child, Lydia, thought. Of the seven Jackson children only
three lived beyond infancy— Lucy, born 1798; Lydia, September 20, 1802;
and Charles Thomas, in 1805. These three kept much of their childhood
intimacy, even after Lucy's disastrous marriage and Charles's rise to prom-
inence as a scientist. The two sisters were destined to spend much of their
lives together or as neighbors.

As a child, Lydia learned her alphabet from the somber pages of The
New-England Primer and used to repeat its familiar assurance of all men's
partnership with Adam in the original sin:

In Adam's Fall
We Sinned alL

By the time she was six she was receiving a more vivid lesson in human
sorrow, for her mother then began her ten years of suffering from the
tuberculosis that was to cause her death.

Before Lydia was eleven years old she and her sister were sent off to
Dorchester to listen to the instructions of Mrs. Saunders and Miss Beach.
At the Saunders and Beach academy young ladies were taught the substan-
tial subjects of reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar, the French
language, composition, geography, the use of the globes and maps, and
history, together with the fancy ones of drawing, painting in oils and chalks
and water colors, drawing and coloring maps, embroidery, plain and orna-
mental needlework, tambour, painting on velvet, music, and dancing.
Lydia could not master all these things during her year or so at the board-
ing school, but both she and her sister at least liberally sampled the cur-
riculum. One of the several books charged against the account of the sisters
was a volume that taught French according to an "infallible method."
Dancing was thought important, and Lydia enjoyed it, though her Calvin-
ist aunts gave her to understand that she was pirouetting over hell-fire. A
French dancing master was thorough and encouraged her to stand in the
stocks an hour or more each day. She was faithful and, in later years,
believed that she owed her graceful walk to her dancing lessons.

Through a summer and autumn she wrote her stiff, meager letters home
from the academy on Clifton Hill, Dorchester: "I was homesick at first,
but am not much so now. Lucy is not homesick at all. M^! Saunders and

LID I AN 217

Miss Beach are very kind to me, as are the young Ladies. , . . The sum-
mer dear mamma passes very rapidly, but I hope by me, not without
improvement. I am too well aware of the present advantages offered me,
and that I came here expressly to avail myself of them, to be idle, or care-
less. I have begun to paint and dance, also to take lessons on the globes.
. . . Are all our acquaintance well? do any inquire for us? or are we
forgotten by our young friends, if we are, I shall be sorry, but I can soon,
I flatter myself be consoled, for there are a number of young Ladies here
to whom we begin to be attached, and who politely return our partiality.
We must be disobliging and unamiable indeed if we did not secure a por-
tion of the esteem of our Preceptresses . . ."

She wanted to know why her father was silent and why he had not
visited her. She and her sister were in good health, "but," she told him,
"I begin to be fearful that the same blessing is not continued to you, as
we have had no assurance of your welfare," Though she was anxious about
the high cost of living, she relied on him for an answer to her questions
on every subject that was inexplicable to her. To her mother she wrote
again in November: "The return of composition day presents me with no
task I assure you; for it gives me the happiness of writing to you dear
Mother . . ." She would remain in Dorchester at Thanksgiving time, but,
being, in spite of that irregularity, a loyal daughter of Plymouth, she
looked forward to getting home "on the Anniversary of the landing of our
Forefathers.55 The homecoming to her sober parents must have been a
notable event in her life. According to family tradition she then received
from her invalid mother the only kiss she could remember getting from
her, though presumably her memory was not perfect.

Lydia kept her liking for composition for several years at least, writing
solemn verses of her own and copying others into her commonplace books.
Among poems she signed and dated as her own was one called "Trust in
Providence Recommended." It warned of unexpected dangers and con-
cluded, without much optimism, that Providence alone could give security.
The things fixed in the memory of Lydia during childhood fitted, in gen-
eral, into a similar emotional pattern. At church she pored over the hymn-
book. The awful pictures of God's wrath she found there seemed unfor-
gettable. Terror "was bred in her bones." Though she could delight in such
a book as Don Quixote, she took with great seriousness the moralistic juvenile
rhymes of Jane Taylor. Later she dreamed that she met this favorite author
and was so overwhelmed with gratitude, affection, and joy that she fell at
her feet and wept. Lydia and Lucy, however, were not baptized till Lydia
was sixteen, when her mother, having been perhaps too shy to make a
public confession, was allowed to join the church on her deathbed.

2i8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

When the deaths of her father and mother occurred within hardly
more than two months of each other, Lydia could feel no grief, though she
tried to. She soon knew she did not face poverty. Her father had owned
a block of buildings on Court Street, in the heart of Boston; and the guard-
ians estimated that each of the children should have fourteen thousand
dollars, though there was some suspicion that the heirs were being cheated
by the son of Jackson's partner. Lydia was to have, a little later, an income
of about six hundred dollars a year. She and Lucy were sent off to school
again,, this time to Mrs. M'Keige's Seminary for Young Ladies in Jamaica
Plain, another Boston suburb. There the Jackson girls were offered much
the same things to be had in Dorchester but with Italian added. Some of
these subjects were indispensable to a cultured person's mental baggage.
Others were merely decorative. To Lydia and Lucy, Mrs. M'Keige seemed
admirable for her personal virtues, and, if her own account was to be
believed, she was an able teacher, with her excellent English education,
whatever additional culture she had acquired during a residence of several
years in France, and her fluent speaking of Italian as well as French.
Among her pupils the girls from Plymouth found at least one worth know-
ing. It was at Mrs. M'Keige's school that Lydia recruited a devoted friend
in Margaret Forbes.

Next year, it seems, both Lydia and Lucy went back to Plymouth and
settled down to a not very delightful routine of boarding with their aunts
and uncles. Lucy's marriage, a year or so later, did not entirely interrupt
the intimacy of the sisters; but when Lucy was too far away for satis-
factory intercourse Lydia had her close Plymouth friends, especially Betsey
Davis, Sarah Kendall, and Mary Rowland Russell, to console her. The
four friends, with a few other girls, formed a reading society, met from
house to house, and had their own newspaper, The Wisdom of the Nine.
It seems that young gentlemen also belonged to the reading society, and
there were other cultural activities than reading. The town was rich in
friendly, not unintellectual society.

At nineteen Lydia made a bad recovery from scarlet fever, and during
the rest of her life she believed herself a sufferer from the aftereffects
of the disease. She made herself a martyr, even as a girl, by undertaking
private experiments on her health or by setting herself tests of endurance.
She read of Napoleon and attempted to emulate him by getting along with
four hours of sleep a night. Once, having started on a new quest for per-
fection, she resolved to read only religious things till eleven o'clock every
morning. She tried special exercises such as skipping rope and jumping
over a cricket. After the fires were taken apart by her uncle in the evening
she would sit, wrapped in a shawl, reading. She read her uncle's medical

LID I AM 219

books and got from them a theory of health that no doubt did much to
keep her an invalid in later life. Having read about hydropathy and the
importance of fresh air and loose clothing, she took cold baths, slept with
open windows, and buttoned her skirts to a waist.

But she also had more pleasant methods of self-improvement. Once she
took riding lessons in Boston in the same class with Ellen and Margaret
Tucker, though she never knew which was which. She loved society and
was no recluse. She always liked old-fashioned dancing, and as late as her
twenty-second year she had instruction from a dancing master and was
"daily acquiring 'Politeness & the graces,5 " as she assured her sister.

She was not socially irresponsible even though she lacked regular occu-
pation, and her religious seriousness hardly slackened. She decided that her
income ought to be entirely spent every year and in such a manner as to
do good to others as well as to herself. She set her poor cousins to work
on sewing and embroidery with herself as paymaster. There was a sudden
increase in her concern about religion. Sometime during three weeks at
Woods Hole when she was twenty-three, she had a half-mystical experi-
ence. She felt that all her future was dimly shown to her, and she was
prepared for what was to come. Once she refused to go on a visit because
she thought a process of change was going on in her that must not be
interrupted, and the climax of this episode was another semi-mystical ex-
perience.

But she was by no means done with the world and was not narrow-
minded. She was quick and keen, was learning skill in repartee, and was
becoming generally competent in conversation. She cared for intellectual
things. She was apparently keeping up with the latest developments in her
own country's literature. She thought she saw James Fenimore Cooper's
virtues but was glad when a review was published that would put down
his indiscriminate admirers. The general cry of approbation seemed to her
a disgrace to American letters. She also shared the new urge to explore
other modern literatures than English and American. When, in the winter
of 1831-1832, George Bradford taught German in Plymouth, she and a
few other young women made up what they called a class, meeting every
Wednesday evening to recite to him. She was "exceedingly interested,"
seldom finding anything more pleasing than the hours she was able to spare
for her reading of the hitherto strange language. Thus, after some years,
her literary discoveries had grown to modest international proportions. She
learned German poetry and never ceased to enjoy repeating it. The class
read Wilhelm Meister, and she was carried away by it.

When Emerson proposed to marry her, the enthusiasms of her girlhood
had mostly passed, though some had left their mark. Her liking for books,

220 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

for their ideas rather than for any peculiar literary excellence., was stronger
than ever. In religion she was still nominally a Unitarian but had in reality
become a seeker, as Emerson himself was. She was like him in wanting
a religion that insisted on a continuing revelation of truth without respect
to tradition and history. She was accused, as he was, of being a Sweden-
borgian. Her brother denied the accusation on her behalf but warned her,
a few months after her engagement. "Do you know," he asked, "that the
disciples of Swedenbourg consider you & Mr Emerson among their num-
ber? Young Dr Shurtluff had a long discourse with me the other day about
it & said that there was a large party in Boston who were very desirous of
establishing a new New Church & of making Mr Emerson their pastor."
But Charles Jackson "told the Dr. that although much of your ideal phi-
losophy corresponded with their doctrines . . . you were very far from
being a convert to the New Church"— and he wanted to know from her
whether that was not true.

Whatever she may have replied to her brother, Lydia painstakingly, if
not very clearly, explained her status to Elizabeth Peabody, evidently after
Elizabeth had questioned her point-blank. She had recently thought and
read much on Swedish doctrine. It seemed to her, she said, that "in all
kindred speculations, I catch one ray of light,— find one little rill of truth
here & there— in the works of the general race of writers— but in the writ-
ings of Swedenborg and his followers— and yet more, in the sayings of
Christ and his apostles I seem to have traced the light to its source, the rill
to its fountain.—Not that I am a Swedenborgian— or expect to become one
—yet repeated experience of this kind, affords, to me at least, a strong
presumption in favour of what the N. J. Church Christians assert of their
faith." And this was probably the chief substance if not the entire sum of
her Swedenborgianism. Its meaning was that she was not a strait-laced
orthodox religionist and was ready to go at least a little way with her future
husband into such a cloudland as Transcendentalism. They were both ex-
perimenters.

Matters of grosser nature seemed to Lydia momentarily to bar the way
to their union. Her sister's husband, Charles Brown, recently a member of
a firm of commission merchants at Long Wharf in Boston, had lost money
and reputation together and suddenly abandoned his family and fled the
country. The as yet undivided Jackson estate was involved, and the plight
of Lucy and her two children was so serious that Lydia would have to
assume a good deal of responsibility for them. Brown, as it turned out, was
to be a thorn in the family flesh, even though he stayed on the other side
of the Atlantic. For many years, from as far east as Constantinople and
as far west as Ireland, he wrote his wife tales of repeated but always unsuc-

LID1AN 221

cessful efforts to rehabilitate himself with a view to returning home. Some-
times he even sent small sums of money; but his spectacular successes were
always in the future and he added to his offenses by letters preaching
patience and warning against unorthodox religious views such as he could
easily discover in the Emersons. Emerson, however, was not frightened by
the possibility, in 1835, of any such annoyances. He promptly quieted
Lydia's fears by assuring her that she might devote all her own income to
Lucy and her children and, moreover, bring them to Concord to live if
she wished.

On her visit to Concord to meet the Emerson family, Lydia was pleased
with the mother and was much taken with Elizabeth Hoar, then engaged
to Charles. But there nevertheless seems to have been some coolness in her
reception. Probably the unpredictable Aunt Mary at first frowned, then
smiled, and no lasting harm was done. The family tradition has it that she
invited herself to Plymouth to visit her prospective niece and caused much
distress by her erratic behavior, and that when Emerson came and carried
her back to Concord she spent the whole time on the road in trying to
persuade him to give Lydia up. However this may have been, Lydia was
soon declaring to her sister her delight in the whole Emerson family, Aunt
Mary included. "And,53 she asserted, "in Aunt Mary— I have found a
congenial soul— one who understands and says she likes with all her heart
every thing I tell her. We have had high and sweet communion."

The wedding had to wait till Emerson had delivered what amounted
to his inaugural address as a Concordian. The town of Concord had re-
membered the approach of its second centennial. The town meeting duly
appointed committees. September 12, it was decided, was to be celebrated
by a procession and an oration. By the end of June, Emerson was engaged
to prepare the oration. He spent some weeks in serious work. He borrowed
the proof sheets of the local history Lemuel Shattuck was about to pub-
lish, hunted up the survivors of the Concord Fight, and took quantities of
notes. He got reminiscences from Jonas Buttrick and Abel Davis, as both
of them had been present at the famous fight with the British. He felt pity
for Thaddeus Blood when he taxed the old man's memory for details of
that event, now sixty years in the past. It was "hard to bring them up,"
Blood apologized; the truth, he said, would never be known.

It was probably the greatest effort Emerson ever made at gathering
and checking facts in the manner of a scholar, with the possible exception
of his more deliberate preparation for the writing of his book on England
many years later. When Shattuck became nervous over the danger that
things he contributed would be published in the address before his history
could appear, Emerson tried to impress this benefactor with the extent

222 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of his own original investigations: "I have now on my table/' Emerson
explained, "the seven first volumes of the Town Records, and the Volume
of Church Records; all which books I have examined with great atten-
tion; I have Johnson's Wonder Working Providence in the Historical Col-
lections. I have here also Hubbard's Indian Wars, Mathers Magnalia,
Winthrops Journal Hutchinsons History & his Collection; Minot; & Brad-
ford; Bancroft's U. S. Peter Bulkeleys Gospel Covenant. Aliens Biog. Dic-
tionary. Dr Ripley's Half Century Sermon & History of ye Fight; Phinney;
& the Lexington Sermons; Brigham's Discourse at Graf ton; &c— These
books are & have been before me. At Cambridge in August I made written
extracts from Neal's New Eng^; Shepards Clear Sunshine &c; Mourt;
Higginson; Josselyn; Underhill; Shepards Lamentation, &c. And I believe
I have several extracts which might interest you." This meant that Emer-
son had made a serious attack on the available sources of early New Eng-
land history.

In spite of some grumbling by those who charged that the celebration
was in the hands of the aristocrats, all was in smooth running order. Plans
had been carefully made for the unusual pageant of groups ranging from
the school children to the surviving soldiers of the Concord Fight. The
town was ready for its great day. Grandfather Ripley's "old meeting house
showed such a mass of heads" as had "hardly been crowded under its roof
since roof it had" when the psalm was sung from the old Bay psalm book
of 1 640 and was " 'deaconed' out, a line at a time, after the fashion of our
grandfathers, & sung by the whole congregation."

Emerson's address, lasting an hour and forty-five minutes, was what
Charles Emerson called it, "a faithful historical sketch of this Town,"
giving due honor to "the brave company of First Settlers," to "the red men
the original lords of the soil," and to the citizens of Revolutionary days,
when "the quiet river" of the town's fortunes, "swollen by tributary waters,
rushed over the rocky barriers that would have choked its course." It was
an admirable address for the occasion. In spite of some complaint of injury
to ancestral pride, few Concordians past or present could have been dis-
pleased with the orator's account of local history; and probably no other
subject would have served Emerson better as a passport to the good graces
of the town.

He was by this time a property owner in Concord. The house he had
first selected for his intended bride turned out to be unavailable, and the
wedding seemed to recede into the distance. Lydia, grieved, opened her
Bible and got the comfort she wanted, for her eye fell on the text, "Fur-
thermore I tell thee that the Lord will build thee an house." At least so
goes the family tradition, and at all events the engaged couple did not

LIDIAN 223

have too long to wait. About the beginning of July, Emerson agreed to
pay $3,500 to John Goolidge for the house built not many years earlier for
Charles Coolidge. At last, with the Coolidge House ready and the historical
address over, the wedding could take place.

On the 1 3th of September, undeterred by his mother's notion that his
match was "a Petruchio sort of affair," Emerson set out in a chaise on
his way to Plymouth; but he kept his joy well within the limits of dignity,
and on his way out of Concord he stopped at the stable to have the new
bright yellow reins that had been furnished him changed for green ones.
He explained that he discarded the yellow reins "lest people should think
he had been weaving them of golden-rod.'3 Next day he rode on from
Boston, where he had stopped for the night. The weather was rainy, but to
the great relief of Lydia Jackson, a person who habitually noticed portents,
the Plymouth skies cleared in the evening. Emerson did not arrive at the
Winslow House, the old Jackson family home, till about four o'clock; and
afterwards he sat talking with the bride so long that there was hardly time
for her to dress. Then she was so slow hi dressing that he started upstairs
to inquire for her. They met on the landing, and, as she had foreseen in
her vision months before, they walked downstairs together to be married.
In the morning Emerson and Lydia, henceforth Lidian so far as he was
concerned, set out in the chaise for Concord; and late that afternoon she
saw for the first time the house that was to be her home from that moment
till the day of her death, over fifty-seven years later.

The house, not quite half a mile from the center of the village of
Concord, stood near the point where the Cambridge Turnpike branched
off from Lexington Road, the stagecoach route to Boston. Long, undulat-
ing Revolutionary Ridge, rising a little distance to the north beyond but
closely bordering Lexington Road, seemed like a protecting wall against
the winter winds but was too distant to be completely effective in that
capacity. The whole of the slightly more than two Coolidge acres was
low-lying land, extending down to the Mill Brook, and so was at some
disadvantage in a town where rivers and marshes were as prominent topo-
graphical features as ridges and hills. In 1835 the main part of the two-
story house was L-shaped. The kitchen and servants' quarters, stretching
out to the south toward the garden and the brook, made the L more em-
phatic. The building was unsatisfactory as it stood, but it was said to be
firmly constructed. Emerson started with the conviction that the outside of
it could not be fine until trees and flowers gave it a character of its own,
but he had already resolved to "crowd so many books & papers, &, if pos-
sible, wise friends, into it that it shall have as much wit as it can carry."

As Ruth Emerson was going for a long visit in New York, Lidian set

1224 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

about getting the Coolidge House, or Coolidge Castle, as the Emersons
sometimes called it, into proper running order according to her own ideas.
Keeping the Emersons5 maid and adding one of her own, she quickly
established a domestic regime that her husband, a lover of quiet and simple
life, doubtless thought unnecessarily elaborate.

Her letters to her sister showed her in a happy and determined mood.
She had made a day's work of the parlor carpet, "though Nancy as well
as Mr E. helped me where they could." The house and grounds were even
better than she had at first thought. All was bright and peaceful, and she
did not expect any event or trial that would be beyond her power to bear
easily with the strength which, she said, had so wonderfully sustained her:
"I look at all through which I have been conducted at the mercies which
have been granted to me so unworthy— in deep gratitude—in calm amaze-
ment." She was soon speaking of her happiness with an almost religious
exaltation and wanted her sister to come and see for herself. Lidian was
delighted with the "calm holy prayers of the morning and evening the
beautiful portion of scripture." She marveled at the devotion her husband
showed her and thought that he and she would "surely make each others
happiness. Little did they know Waldo Emerson who believed he could be
content to pass through life without domestic happiness/' she explained
to her sister. "He was formed for it as perhaps few are. And not only to
enjoy but to impart, all the warmer charities of social and domestic life."

Economy, it soon appeared, was necessary, though the financial diffi-
culties were by no means insuperable. Expenses were piling up, and though
Emerson now had $11,500 at interest, the single item of taxes, town and
county and ministerial, was over seventy dollars. William Sohier, the law-
yer, was doing what he could to make the second half of the Tucker
inheritance available but had to overcome the inertia of others concerned
in the settlement. Some of the heirs seemed, as Charles put it, to have
adopted Emerson's own philosophy that one had eternity to do one's busi-
ness in. Waldo Emerson himself gave an impressive example of economy
by persisting in wearing a couple of old coats, "rags and all," much to his
wife's astonishment. Finances became a subject of family conferences.
"Mr E & myself," Lidian told her sister after some two weeks of marriage,
"had the other day another sober 'Darby and Joan' calculation of both his
income & mine— and find that we have plenty with careful management
and renouncing of superfluities of all kinds, but without it— must go behind
hand." She announced her acceptance of the new economic theory. "But,"
she added her reservation, "we do not intend to retrench so far as to be
any less hospitable to the transcendentals & other friends than we have
all along planned I promise Mr E. that I will be contented if he will be

LILIAN 225

—to give our many visitors only things comfortable dispensing wholly with
luxury & show Company will be but small additional expense if we keep
but the same decent table that we hope to afford at all times."

The routine of the household was getting established. For her sister's
benefit Lidian described a typical day: "We have prayers in the morn-
ing a little before 7 breakfast at 7— then I hold a consultation with

Nancy about dinner and can go to my work reading or writing without
further care. \Ve dine exactly at one— Mr E & myself then set about writ-
ing letters if there are any to write or finish— for the mail at 3— then I take
my nap— and then my walk with Mr E. or to see Aunt Mary— or she
comes here— or I sit down alone to my occupations. Tomorrow I mean to
undertake the most hopeful of the old coats to keep me busy. We drink
tea at six— half an hour before which Mr E. issues forth from his sanctum
to sit the blind-man's-holiday with me. In the evening he brings down his
work and I take mine and after talking a bit we 'make a mum' and keep
it till 9 o'clock when we call the girls and have prayers— Then we talk
a while, or I read to my blind man.— Charles E did sleep here but he
found it less convennt than to remain at his room; he eats with us and
talks, too, which is better still. Sometimes it comes over me as so strange
that I should be housed with these two wonderful beings— turning out
coffee for them and helping them to pie! Consulting also about the keep-
ing of pigs & hens— and telling Waldo to be sure to stop at the grocers
in his morning expedition, and tell him to send home some eggs & ginger;
—and to inquire the price of molasses & rinsing-tubs. All which he duti-
fully promises to do."

Lidian and her husband soon succeeded in accustoming themselves to
a domesticity that proved a lasting bond between them, and it seemed
probable that their common interest in ideas was destined to contribute
quite as much to their mutual happiness. One anonymous resident of
Plymouth had looked upon their approaching marriage as "the conjunc-
tion of the two planets" and as a kind of festival of the Transcendentalists.
Lidian, fixed in her ways, had, it is true, struck this same observer as
having, on the eve of her wedding day, rather the appearance of "one of
the vestals . . . who in a fit of forgetfulness had let her lamp go out and
was preparing herself for the living burial, than that of a maiden about
to be united to Waldo Emerson." Nevertheless, her union with such a man
as Emerson had still seemed sure to be "a tale of spirituality & idealism."

The marriage was always successful in most ways; but, as time went
on, Lidian's strong ties to more conventional religious teachings restrained
her, and she found his progress into untrammeled freedom of thought too
rapid for her to keep pace with. The nickname of Asia that he sometimes

226 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

gave her seemed suitable not only because no other New Englander he
knew possessed such a depth of feeling continually called out on trivial
occasions but also because it symbolized Christianity and even religious
conservatism. Palestine, another of his names for her, expressed the latter
meaning even more emphatically. In their Concord home the prayers and
domestic devotions were soon omitted, to her deep regret. At first she was
saddened. Later she turned upon Transcendental doctrine a stream of
clever satire, good-natured but penetrating.

The family tradition that for five years Lidian felt herself more and
more married but that this growth in felicity was checked noticeably when
what she called the "Transcendental Times" gave her a different view of
her husband, is undoubtedly correct. But Lidian herself was at first reckoned
one of the new lights and worked loyally with her husband in ushering in
those "Times" that later proved so distressing to her. In the autumn of
1835 she and he waited together in an attitude of pleased expectation,
for their fellow Transcendentalists were already knocking at the gate of
Coolidge Castle.

PAN AND OTHER GODS

Socrates. Should we not offer up a prayer first of at!
to the local deities?

Phaedrus. By all means.

Socrates. Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt
this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the
outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise
to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold
as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry.— Any-
thing more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.

—Plato's Phaedrus, translated by Benjamin Jowett

CONCORD was from two to three hours from the city of Boston
if one measured the distance by the lumbering stages that traveled
the Lexington Road past Emerson's house. The whole town con-
tained only some two thousand inhabitants, and, if the near future
could be predicted from the recent past, its annual increase was not likely
to be more than five or ten persons. The village itself, with only a part of
the town's population, promised to be, as its name originally suggested, the
abode of peace, or of as much peace as one could reasonably expect to
find in an America stirred with bitter political strife.

Even in Concord one noticed signs of that strife. The antimasonic fac-
tion had made an impressive showing in the last congressional election
against even so honored a man as Samuel Hoar, Charles Emerson's pros-
pective father-in-law; and less than a year later one of the local papers had
claimed that all Middlesex County was redeemed from Whiggism, the
curse of all curses. The reformers were stirring on all sides. Josiah Bartlett,
destined to be the Emersons' family doctor, had accepted the presidency of
the Concord Temperance Society. The recently founded Middlesex Anti-
Slavery Society had already held its first quarterly meeting at Grandfather
Ripley's church in Concord. George Thompson, the English abolitionist,
had spoken with extemporaneous eloquence to a spellbound audience. The
rising tide of antislavery propaganda threatened to engulf Coolidge Castle,
though its master had hitherto kept clear of organized reform. At the dining
table there sat his brother Charles, the clever talker who had not long since
declared himself an abolitionist and announced that he was going to make

227

228 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

a public address on the dangerous subject of slavery. Shortly after his
marriage Waldo Emerson, much to his surprise, had been brought face to
face at his own breakfast table with the redoubtable Thompson. Aunt Mary
had happened to be boarding in the town at the time and had engineered
this meeting with the abolitionist without asking her nephew's advice. A
few days later a Boston mob stripped William Lloyd Garrison of "a large
portion" of his clothing, and Thompson was soon forced to take ship secretly
for England in order to save his life.

Concord was caught in the grip of America's destiny, yet here one could
at least retreat into the woods on pleasant days and calm one's soul. After
some months of his trial of rural life Emerson was delighted with it. "I
love the mighty PAN/5 he assured himself.

He had set himself apart from the outside world as effectively as he
could afford to do, and now doubtless most of the villagers and farmers
felt that he was a person apart from them too. From the first his rare visits
to the grocery store, where the country wits clustered about the stove, must
have chilled the genial current of mind that flowed there. He was a scholar
among plain but clever people. Though he firmly believed in the democratic
scheme of government, he was hardly at home in the town meetings, where
others with less knowledge of books than he had knew far better how to
make the machinery of politics move. In the spring of 1836 he suffered the
usual fate of the newly married man by being elected a hog-reeve, but his
duty of assessing fines against the owners of marauding swine was pre-
sumably only nominal. A month later the town, this time taking his special
fitness into consideration, elected him to the school committee after he had
served by appointment to fill a vacancy on it. Citizens had been dissatisfied
with the board, and he was its onty former member whom they allowed
to remain active. He was quickly made its chairman, and its secretary as
well. But long before he came to Concord, he had learned from experience
what burdensome detail such honors might load him with. He demonstrated
how briefly the secretarial records might be kept; and when he was dele-
gated to draw up the official return of the town schools, he paid the full
fee to a deputy and had him do the actual work. By this time, some half
year after his election, he had resigned his office.

In spite of his need for more uninterrupted quiet in his own study, he
did not entirely shut himself up from the rest of the community. His wife
and his brother Charles were links to life outside the home. His mother,
returning some eight months after his marriage to make her permanent
residence with him, must have done what she could to keep him connected
with the local Unitarian society. In his early Concord years he seems to
have been not only a pew-holder but a loyal attendant at Grandfather

PAN AND OTHER GODS 229

Ripley's church. He joined the Concord Social Library and was at once
chosen a member of its three-man standing committee, and later he was
elected president. For half a dozen years he served the library, and after
a period of freedom he was back in harness again just before the institution
was taken over by the town. To the sermons he sometimes preached for
his grandfather's church he added occasional lectures for the local lyceum.
He was still doing more than his part as a citizen of the town; but natu-
rally, though Aunt Mary was now becoming estranged, his close associates
were his relatives and a few writers who either came to live near him or
were his visitors.

Aunt Mary's defection and her half-hearted attempt at reconciliation
could have been predicted on both temperamental and intellectual grounds.
Though she at first took delight in Lidian, Mary Moody Emerson soon
found it impossible to keep up her unwonted sweetness of temper. The
demon of her satirical wit possessed her in an evil hour at her nephew's
dinner table. With Charles present as a witness, she set off an explosion of
tempers. Angry and ashamed, she vowed she would never again spend an
hour in Waldo Emerson's house unless she were brought there on a litter.
On second thought she also ruled out the litter. She regretted "two or three
jokes" she had made but was otherwise determined, for a time, to be un-
repentant. Yet she did not renounce, as she explained to Waldo, "my early
admiration of your genius— which I love to hover over as like to some
admirable sculptor— like to some vision of nature w'h haunted me in youth."
And in a fit of generosity she shouldered much of the blame for their
estrangement, professing her own unworthiness'to be his friend. It looked
for the moment as if their quarrel might be patched up.

But Aunt Mary knew that the real conflict between them was over ideas
and was fundamental. She had been the most determined foe of Waldo
Emerson's incipient Transcendentalism, and she was sticking to her guns
After inciting him in his childhood to think daringly, she had finally lost
him in what she called "the chaos of modern speculation," where she could
not feel at home. Now she looked back over their wordy battles with a
sense of bewilderment. "I knew not," she admitted, "on what ground you
did any thing— nor where to find your principles— they were an enigma."
With a sigh of relief she explained, "I do not regret the tedious history.
. . . But . . . 'tis truth to say our usual intercourse is ended." And, as it
turned out, she was right about the end of their old intercourse.

Aunt Mary, with all her bewilderment over the behavior of her nephew,
had seen with remarkable clarity the outlines of the chief development of
New England thought in that generation. She had warned against the
"humanitarians," deniers of Christ's divinity, among whom she placed him

23o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

and, with some hesitation, William Ellery Chaaning. She thought she
saw through Charming's "deep poetic sentiment, and pious enthusiasm."
What had his high-strained thought accomplished in the last twenty years?
What had humanitarianism done to abolish slavery? Nothing. Instead, it
had chilled faith. With its supernatural character taken away, Christianity
was a straw before the tempest. No matter how high man was raised by
high-flown language like Channing's, after a few efforts his waxen wings
would fall. Thus she had warned, adding that though Calvinism had dug
a dark ravine, it was Unitarianism that had filled it with victims. In her
eyes the vindictive creed of the Calvinist had at least the virtue of making
sin appear in its odious reality. But she had leveled her scorn at the half-
baked humanitarians because they had left out the Judgment Day and the
"consummation of this passing world" from their careless reckonings. Soon
she had begun to identify Transcendentalism with the worst in humani-
tarianism. By the time of her nephew's second marriage she had become
a sworn enemy of Transcendentalism and it was too late to hope to con-
vert her. Whatever influence she had was henceforth a check upon extreme
development of the new doctrines.

But, for Emerson3 Aunt Mary's estrangement was far less distressing
than another misfortune which his family circle was about to suffer. In
1835, Charles had taken over Samuel Hoar's law office in Concord, and
he now looked forward to settling down with Elizabeth Hoar, the lawyer's
daughter, in the two new rooms that Waldo planned to build into the L
of his house. Charles had good reason, if the high opinions of his friends
were just, to expect a great career in both law and politics. But though his
life had been all promise, twenty-seven years of zero accomplishment was
his own summary of it when he saw his end close at hand. The end came
more quickly than any of the family could have believed. There were
unmistakable symptoms of the advanced stages of tuberculosis. Alarmed,
Waldo Emerson took Charles to New York by easy stages in the last weeks
of April and left him in William's care. For a few days, the stricken young
man seemed to improve, but by the gth of May he was dead. Ernerson
returned, bringing Elizabeth Hoar, but they were too late to see him alive.
The strain of this loss, after so many losses, was heavy for Waldo Emerson.
With his nerves tense to the breaking point as he stood at his brother's grave,
he let "compressed nature," according to one observer, break through his
restraint "in a laugh— and an ejaculation 'dear boy.3 " He gloomily com-
mented, " 'When one has never had but little society— and all that society
is taken away— what is there worth living for?' "

Emerson had, as he said, lost a soul "so costly & so rare that few persons
were capable of knowing its price.33 Concord seemed colorless without

PAN AND OTHER GODS 231

Charles's "immense promise" and Emerson felt "not only unfastened there
and adrift but a sort of shame at living at all." Others could not have
known how Charles had kept critically aloof from his brother's thinking
and might have proved a salutary influence on it had he lived longer. But
praises came from all sides for him. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a college class-
mate of his, pictured the "calm, chaste scholar" in a poem read at the Phi
Beta Kappa anniversary that year. Harriet Martineau remembered her
indebtedness. "At the time of the hubbub against me in Boston," she later
explained it, "Charles Emerson stood alone in a large company in defence
of the right of free thought and speech, and declared that he had rather
see Boston in ashes than that I, or anybody, should be debarred in any
way from perfectly free speech."

Demands came from several of Charles's friends that a selection of
posthumous writings, introduced by a memoir, should be published. Waldo
Emerson had begun almost immediately after his brother's death to look
over the papers left to his care, but he found much narrower limitations
than he had expected. It was hard enough for him to understand why his
brother's journal should have so bitter a strain of penitence and deprecia-
tion. Then came his more depressing discovery that, after all, Charles had
not had notable literary talent. "I mourn that in losing him," he regret-
fully concluded, "I have lost his all, for he was born an orator, not a
writer." Though he kept the question of publication open for a long time,
he finally printed only a few brief selections from Charles's manuscripts in
The Did.

Yet Charles had really been an extraordinary person. Waldo Emerson
did not exaggerate his own estimate when he declared, "In Charles, I found
society that indemnified me for almost total seclusion from all other. He
was my philosopher, my poet, my hero, my Christian. Of so creative a mind
that (tho' he wrote no verse) yet his conversation made Shakspear more
conceivable to me; such an adorer of truth that he awed us, and a spirit
of so much hilarity & elegancy that he actualized the heroic life to our
eyes . . ." So severe was the loss that Emerson found the whole structure
of his own philosophy momentarily shaken. Trying to fit his loss into it, he
could "gather no hint from this terrible experience," and only groped "in
greater darkness." The best exegesis he could make of this obscure text was
that "Night rests on all sides upon the facts of our being, tho', we must
own, our upper nature lies always in Day."

Lucy Brown, Lidian's sister, helped to enliven the household for weeks
at a time but could not make up for the great loss it had suffered. It was
the fortunate birth of Emerson's first child, Waldo, in October, 1836, a
few months after Charles's death, that restored the foundations of optimism.

232 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO. EMERSON

Emerson fell an easy convert to the cult of childhood after a mere pretense
of keeping a philosophical aloofness. "The stimulated curiosity of the
father/' he tried to explain, "sees the graces and instincts which exist indeed
in every babe, but unnoticed in others; the right to see all, know all, to
examine nearly, distinguishes the relation, and endears this sweet child."
At first he saw nothing of his own in the child and was "no conscious party
to any feature, any function, any perfection I behold in it." "I seem," he
confessed, "to be merely a brute occasion of its being, and nowise attaining
to the dignity even of a second cause, no more than I taught it to suck
the breast.35 But after giving the matter another thought, he observed,
"Now am I Pygmalion."

Outside his home he gradually formed other social ties. After less than
a year in his rural retreat he dreamed of a choice social circle there. "I
will tell you," he wrote to Frederic Hedge, "what society would please me;
that you should be the minister of Concord & George P. B its school master
& Carlyle a resident whilst he lectured in Boston and Mrs Ripley & Mr
Alcott should be visiters." Hedge was never minister of Emerson's town.
Carlyle, though he frequently hinted at a transatlantic venture, never saw
America. But George Bradford was later a schoolmaster in Concord, Amos
Bronson Alcott was by turns a visitor and a resident, and Sarah Alden
Ripley eventually settled down in the Old Manse. Alcott, however, was
the only one of them to become a frequent companion of Emerson's over
a long period of years.

Emerson had heard of Alcott through George Bradford as early as the
summer of 1835, an^ within a few days thereafter he had met the clock-
maker, farmer, and pedlar who was by this time a radical schoolmaster
in Boston. A few more days and he was acquainted with Elizabeth Pea-
body's "beautiful book." This Record of a School revealed to an amazed
public what philosophical discussions Alcott had been carrying on with his
pupils at the temple. In the following October, George Bradford brought
Alcott to Concord. Alcott and Emerson were already known to each other
as "spiritualists," or idealists, and now, during a week-end visit, they be-
came aware of their agreement on a broad area of speculation. Alcott
assured himself that he had found no man in whose whole mind he felt
more sympathy. Emerson briefly limned Alcott: "A wise man, simple,
superior to display . . ." And he jotted down the heads of Alcott's con-
versation. At the end of November Alcott was back again for two or three
more days of talk. His words were so hypnotizing that one hardly saw the
person who uttered them. "The wise man who talks with you," Emerson
observed, "seems of no particular size, but, like the sun and moon, quite
vague and indeterminate." Alcott, for his part, was deeply stirred by what

PAN AND OTHER GODS 233

Emerson managed to say; and he resolved to seek this new friend's "face
and favor as a precious delight of life."

That winter Emerson undertook, with many misgivings, the delicate
task of suggesting revisions in the manuscript of Alcott's "Breath of Child-
hood," as it seems first to have been called, or "Psyche," as it was soon rechris-
tened. Alcott had got the stuff of his book by patiently observing the mental
and moral growth of his infant daughters and trying to fathom the rela-
tion of childhood to spirit. "Psyche" chanted as its refrain the superiority and
priority of spirit even in a world of matter, a doctrine long dear to Emer-
son; and it confided the guidance of the head to the heart. Emerson, already
a lover of Wordsworth's ode in praise of childhood, admired and detested
Alcott's manuscript. He saw its sincerity; but he also saw that as a piece
of writing it was shapeless, lacked variety of thought and illustration, and
was too dogmatic. He listed a number of passages that he believed ought
to be rescued from the dross and made into a book; and he gave Alcott
a sheaf of suggested corrections. Alcott, never having received any such aid
before, was grateful. He tried to follow directions and within a few months
brought the manuscript back for fresh criticism. Some two years later
Emerson twice reread it. "If the book were mine," he advised the distressed
author, "I would on no account print it; and the book being yours, I do
not know but it behoves you to print it hi defiance of all the critics." Though
Emerson offered, against his own judgment, to try to find a publisher,
Alcott took the unfavorable verdict to heart.

But the sharp critic of "Psyche" sat and listened with admiration as its
author, presiding at his desk, exercised the minds of his young pupils upon
questions of "taste and truth." When Conversations with Children on the
Gospels was published, Emerson tried to defend Alcott from the vicious
attacks of prudish enemies. He paid for the tuition of his late friend George
Sampson's son at the ill-starred Temple School. There were visits back
and forth between Concord and Boston, where Alcott lived, but Concord
was the preferred meeting place. Emerson was not slow to discover Alcott's
weaknesses. He must have approved every line of the younger William
Ellery Channing's verses addressing the impractical idealist as

thou Don Quixote of the soul;
Thou bee without a sting,
Thou ball that will not roll,
Thou rose without a thorn,
Thou stalk without its corn,
Thou everlasting talker,
Thou essential sleep-walker,
Alcott my gossip fine . . .

234 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Yet he stubbornly held to his own high estimate of the rare intellectual

qualities of his friend.

Emerson would doubtless have included Margaret Fuller when he listed
his select spirits had he known her then as he began to do on the following
day. She was quite as important an entrant into the widening Concord
circle as Alcott. At the age of twenty-six, she was slight, tense; clever,
uncommonly intelligent, and ambitious. Though she was by no means
beautiful, once she got well into a conversation, she could set up an intel-
lectual current of surprising power. She was a talker, a feminine and more
scholarly Alcott come to rescue the quiet, self-contained Emerson from his
too great mental isolation. She was also a lover of action, as Alcott was
not. Just now she was reaching out, pleased to find masters who could give
her a sense of direction, and she had long had her eye on Emerson as one
such master.

Doubtless Harriet Martineau had, as she claimed, encouraged some
preliminary steps toward the new friendship. But Margaret could scarcely
have made any real progress till the summer of 1836, and it was probably
Elizabeth Peabody who got the somewhat grimly determined young woman
an invitation to Concord at that time. According to her own story, Eliza-
beth told Emerson she wished him to "know Margaret better" and explained
how she herself had felt at first, as he now felt, a strong but unjustifiable
prejudice against her. This testimony, it seems, together with Lidian's
urging, overcame his objections.

Margaret's first visit lengthened out to three weeks, and her host's praise
of his guest did not grow fainter the longer she stayed. She was "quite an
extraordinary person," Emerson made up his mind after more than two
weeks of her. "It is always a great refreshment to see a very intelligent
person/' he said. "It is like being set in a large place. You stretch your
limbs & dilate to your utmost size." He had at once discovered exactly what
Margaret could do for him. As she herself knew, she always carried her
magic with her, and it had little to do with her femininity or with her
wardrobe. Her "faded calico frock," she honestly told her sister Ellen, did
not prevent her from "exciting respect and interest" at Concord. Her magic
lay in her quick, sympathetic mentality and in her ability to get the best
ideas out of her companions.

Before the visit was ended she had completed her conquest of both the
Emersons. "We like her— she likes us," Lidian confided the family opinion
to Elizabeth Peabody. "I speak in this way— because you know we came
together almost strangers— all to one another and the result of the experi-
ment—as Miss F. herself said in her letter to you on the subject of a nearer
acquaintance with us— was doubtful— the tendencies of all three being strong

PAN AND OTHER GODS 235

& decided— and possibly not such as could harmonize." It had turned out
as Lidian had expected from the first in spite of some unfavorable rumors
she had heard about Margaret. "I ought not to speak," she said, "as if
I had myself had much doubt that I should enjoy Miss Fs society-I had
heard from the best authority that she was sound at heart— and I could
imagine no peculiarities of intellect or character, that cou[ld] revolt me
or repel my regard— if that [w]as true of her."

The advent of two such highly individual intellectuals as Alcott and
Margaret Fuller in the Emerson circle within less than a year of each other
was significant. However much Emerson wished detachment from any-
thing resembling a concerted movement, his own influence as a leader thus
greatly increased at the critical moment when the Transcendentalists were
beginning to distinguish one another from the heterogeneous mass of New
England liberals. The inevitable founding of a brotherhood of Transcen-
dentalists for mutual encouragement and enlightenment was, whether he
liked it or not, already under way. His friend Frederic Hedge, the scholarly
young minister who had learned the idiom of German speech and thought
in his school days, partly at the famous Schulpforta, seems to have been
the prime instigator of an association. As early as 1835 a scheme had been
proposed for the founding of a journal to serve as a rallying point. Hedge
was at first slated to be editor of what was to be called the The Tran-
scendentalist, or The Spiritual Inquirer, or the like. But when he was about
to remove from the neighborhood of Boston to the backwoods of Maine,
he suggested that Garlyle be persuaded to assume the editorial direction.
Carlyle actually considered coming to America about this time, but not
very seriously. Emerson planned that if the Scot would come, the journal
should be his main dependence for a living. The whole project for a mag-
azine, it turned out, had to be postponed for years. But some sort of asso-
ciation of the like-minded could be formed without much delay, and Hedge
was still the chief mover. He would be able to attend it when he came
down from Maine from time to time.

When, in June of 1836, Emerson received a proposal that he join such
an association, he was dubious. For him a debating club, though the sub-
ject to be discussed was nothing less expansive than the general state of the
world, might not be profitable. Suspecting that not all of even so select
a company would prove to be intuitionalists, he waited a month before
announcing his "hearty good will to the project." He knew his mind ac-
curately. It was his mental habit to see a kind of vision of truth that he
could only report as he saw it and would not attempt to argue. "The men
of strong understanding,55 he said, "are a menacing rapid trenchant race
—they cut me short— they drive me into a corner--! must not suggest, I

236 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

must define— & they hold me responsible for a demonstration of every senti-
ment I endorse. Whilst therefore I cannot sufficiently give thanks for the
existence of this class, without whom there could not be either porridge or
politics I do, for my particular, thoroughly avoid & defy them.3'

He had "never found that uplifting & enlargement from the conversa-
tion of many'5 which he found "in the society of one faithful person." But
he conceded that the experiment proposed by Hedge had never been fairly
tried, he hoped pure pleasure from it, he suggested a time for the first
meeting which proved to be too early, and he recommended Alcott as a
prospective member. Hedge's plan called for an assembly of ministers.
Emerson could hardly say enough for Alcott, though conceding that there
were some serious faults in him. "You must admit Mr Alcott over the pro-
fessional limits, for he is a God-made priest," he insisted. The projected
club, however, needed a couple of months more of gestation before it
could be born.

Meantime, Emerson, though he continued to preach irregularly for a
few years longer, had written what was probably his last sermon. Yet he
still spent his eyes in reading religious literature. He had his Swedenborgian
magazine, and he had his notes on the obscure Swedenborgian Oegger.
Oegger's doctrine of the dependence of language upon natural objects and
of the special service nature did man by illustrating concretely man's moral
conceptions which would otherwise remain pale abstractions was nothing
new to Emerson, but in Oegger it was both emphatic and plain. Oegger,
however, offended by insisting on the special divinity of Jesus and on the
indisputable authority of the Bible. Swedenborgian Sampson Reed's pres-
tige was not quite ended. Emerson had for some time been curious about
Bohme, the mystic; but it is by no means certain that any work of Bohme's
ever became his "favourite book," as Elizabeth Peabody believed. He had
extended his explorations of Oriental philosophy to the writings of Confucius.

But his serious studies generally took a more literary turn. Doubtless
for a time he and Lidian spurred each other to the study of German. One
of his prenuptial gifts to her had been an anthology of Richter. Already
Emerson had laboriously covered many pages of his journals with his own
translations of Goethe. He was struck by Goethe's theories of beauty and
by his espousal of the old idea that all existing things are to be found in
some measure in every existing thing, that each bears some resemblance
to all others. He quickly conquered his distrust of the German Olympian
on the score of morals and set out to explore the many small volumes of
the Stuttgart and Tiibingen edition. In the summer of 1836 he discovered
that a Boston bookstore would sell him fifteen, the only copies available,
of the posthumous volumes then in course of publication. It was bliss to be

PAN AND OTHER GODS 237

alive in this new intellectual dawn. Emerson found it easy to turn a deaf
ear to Aunt Mary's admonition, ostensibly aimed at Lidian, to "Abandon
Goethe— cleave to his antipode the Saviour of men." A few weeks after his
purchase of the fifteen posthumous volumes he was sure that Goethe was
"the high priest of the age" and "the truest of all writers."

Goethe's chief British admirer, Thomas Carlyle, was stirring up numer-
ous American admirers, not only of Goethe but of himself. Among the
latter, Emerson, having visited Carlyle and being his correspondent, was
conspicuous. The rumor had got abroad that he had received as many as
fifty copies of "Sartor Resartus," still only an improvised pamphlet. Though
other persons already planning an American edition preferred to wait until
there were better prospects of success, Le Baron Russell, Emerson's Plym-
outh friend, vigorously seized upon the project and persuaded Emerson
himself to write the preface. Encouraged by a modest number of subscribers,
Russell published five hundred copies. By April of 1836 Emerson had
proudly sent one of these to the author but was not hopeful of a good
sale, as he often heard well founded objections to the extraordinary style.

While he was borrowing and spreading the ideas of others Emerson was
putting his own into order for the lecture platform or the press. His peculiar
habits of thought made special difficulties for the prospective hearer or
reader. The stability and unity of his philosophy was undermined by his
conviction that truth grew and changed. In his opinion, the truest state
of mind became false if one rested in it. He liked the flash of truth that
showed intuition at work. Yet he also practiced a kind of inductive method.
He affirmed the value of observation and observed commonplace facts. He
not only drew much upon experiences recorded in history, in confessions,
in biographies, in poetry, and in the bibles of various peoples, but he relied
upon his own firsthand studies of the behavior of men. He did not expect
his Transcendental theories to be valid despite all human experience. Still,
when driven into a corner, he was apt to be stubbornly confident that a
little later on, if not now, they would be justified by a wise interpretation
of experience.

Charles Emerson had suspected him of caressing ideas and hoarding
them because of their appeal to the aesthetic sense rather than valuing them
as aids in shaping conduct. Though Charles had carried his complaints to
Aunt Mary in vain, he had continued to take the matter to heart. Only
a few months before his death he had tried to decide in his fragmentary
journal why Waldo's thoughts seemed unsubstantial. "I think," he had
answered the question, "because he sits among them as the epicure at his
long table who would send away no dish untasted. Not that Thoughts are
with him things of manufacture of mere merchantable value, no, but works

238 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of art, in the finish & perfection of which he is interested as the painter in
his landscape or the sculptor in his statue— But I want my thoughts rather
as bread of life— & God who gives me daily bread, supplies to me reason
whereby I apprehend those which are necessary to me." Charles must have
given this comment almost immediately to Waldo, and Waldo's prompt
record of it in his own journal may have confirmed Charles's judgment.
According to Charles, so Waldo had summed up the criticism, perhaps all
truth was merely occasional, not designed to be stored for contemplation,
but alive only in action. This was a bit of pragmatism that he remem-
bered. He had, however, undoubtedly accepted Charles's dictum, not as
a complete and final statement, but as mirroring one of the conflicting
aspects of truth.

He held a far more favorable opinion than Charles's of the substan-
tiality of his thoughts. He had already found that the audiences in lecture
halls did not demand that the idealist dismount from his winged horse. He
had already learned how to hold his audience, whether in the country
lyceum or in the city. In spite of what must have seemed to some a certain
rusticity of appearance, the tall, lanky Concordian could display more
urbanity of mind than almost any other American lecturer. He knew the
English language better than most. He had the advantage of an excellent
voice, said to have been at its best when he entered his thirties.

Even before his historical address at Concord he had been in some
demand for occasional lectures. In August of 1835 ^e had addressed the
American Institute of Instruction, in Boston, on "The Best Mode of In-
spiring a Correct Taste in English Literature." In November of that year,
he had begun his course of ten lectures on English literature for the Society
for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, at the Masonic Temple in the same
city; and after the first evening he had believed he would never again
distrust men's appetites for the abstractest speculation. Charles's comment
to William, "But you & I know how the pill is gilt & sugared," had testified
to the practical rhetorical skill of the lecturer as well as to the simplicity
of his manner.

The ten manuscripts of the course of 1835-1836 were carefully pre-
served, though for Emerson their only value must have been as a record
of progress. They showed how he had viewed the pageant of English authors,
his chief models; they summarized his thinking at the moment when he
was about to finish his own first book; and in later years they proved that
the drift of his thinking had already found its permanent direction before
he was known as an author.

In these lectures Chaucer was a text for comment on sources and orig-

PAN AND OTHER GODS 239

inality and illustrated the national mind, but writers from Shakespeare to
Byron were tested mainly by ethical and philosophical standards. George
Herbert, a great favorite, was defended for his temperate use of a "style
chiefly marked by the elaborate decomposition to which every object is
subjected" and by a delight in discovering abstruse relationships. But the
most significant thing in Herbert was his power to excite the feeling of
the moral sublime. The whole course might have been very frankly entitled
"A Transcendentalist Looks at British Literature." Such writers as could
not be made to march in review under some fold of the Transcendental
banner suffered serious deductions from their fame.

Locke and Coleridge were the most unmistakable representatives of two
irreconcilable groups of thinkers much discussed in the lectures. John Locke
would "be always respectable/3 but his epoch, said Emerson, marked "the
decline & not the rise of a just philosophy. With him disappeared the class
of laborious philosophers who had studied Man with Plato in the belief
that Man existed in connexion with the Divine Mind . . ." Locke's repu-
tation and example "gave leave to a crowd of Essayists who referred the
unfathomable mysteries of human knowledge thought & action, the im-
pression of heaven & continual creation upon our plastic clay to the low
sources of sensation." But Coleridge seemed to surpass all other modern
British writers. His genius was rich exactly where Locke's had been poor.
"He was of that class of philosophers called Platonists, that is, of the most
Universal school; of that class that take the most enlarged & reverent views
of man's nature. His eye was fixed upon Man's Reason as the faculty in
which the very Godhead manifested itself or the Word was anew made
flesh. His reverence for the Divine Reason was truly philosophical & made
him regard every man as the most sacred object in the Universe, the Temple
of Deity." Naturally, Biographia Literaria was ranked as "undoubtedly
the best body of criticism in the English language." Now that Coleridge
was dead, his true character and greatness had begun to appear. "Already,"
Emerson declared, "he quits the throng of his contemporaries & takes his
lofty station in that circle of sages whom he loved."

Emerson had received a fee of $200 for the ten lectures, delivered in
as many weeks; and even while he had read the lectures in Boston he had
repeated some of them elsewhere and so, by a little travel, greatly increased
their market value. The not very distant town of Lowell had paid him
$96 at almost the same time he had got his $200 from Boston. He had also
been earning a modest sum by the sermons he had preached, usually twice
a week, during his Boston lecture course. A little later he received not quite
$150 from Salem for some half dozen lectures. Thus, though his financial

240 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

returns were not impressive, there was no longer any reason why he should
doubt his ability to command a hearing. He was now prepared to issue his
challenge more boldly, in the shape of a book.

Nature, his first book, had grown slowly out of his journals, letters,
sermons, and lectures. It had seemed nearly ready for the printer by the
end of June, 1836; but it was not till the gth of September that the little
volume of ninety-five pages was advertised for sale in Boston. If its title
page bore no name, a name was hardly needed, so characteristic of Emer-
son were the bold thought, checked now and then by admirable restraint,
and the poetic but quite functional style of this extraordinary essay.

In it a thinker with none of the conventional timidities of his time and
place pleaded for "an original relation to the universe." It was true that
at present we saw God and nature only through the eyes of foregoing gen-
erations, who had beheld them face to face. But we too might see for
ourselves. Surprising vistas were to be opened up. Nature, not the poor
material thing she had been supposed to be, held the key. Though separate
from spirit, she consistently pointed to spirit as her source and justification.
It was because of her relation to spirit that she could always, even in her
humblest manifestations, fill the susceptible mind with a wild delight. In
a fortunate moment she could lead her devotee into what amounted to a
mystical religious experience and hinted at pantheism: "In the woods we
return to reason and faith. . . . Standing on the bare ground,— my head
bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,— all mean egotism
vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the
currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel
of God." Plotinus, an avowed mystic, had said somewhat the same thing.

But Emerson, having finished this daring flight, quickly made sure that
his feet were on the ground again. There was, after all, he warned, a degree
of illusion in such experiences. It was "necessary to use these pleasures with
great temperance." After his customary manner, Emerson was showing
both sides experimentally and was looking for the middle way. In a com-
pletely sober chapter he even listed the commonplace practical uses of
nature. But, well aware that material values were in no danger of being
underestimated, he returned to his immaterial realm. Even beauty in nature,
he reiterated Plato's doctrine, was at best only preliminary, "the herald
of inward and eternal beauty." And so he repeatedly alternated other-
worldliness with matter-of-factness.

The real purpose of the book was to find a scheme of unity into which
God, the soul, and nature—the solid world of trees and stones and human
bone and flesh— could be fitted. Emerson did not go about this business in

PAN AND OTHER GODS 241

a logical way but obviously had somehow to deal with several time-honored
theories of unity. The theory of materialism, in Transcendental eyes, solved
the problem of unity only by destroying God and the soul and was there-
fore unthinkable. The religious mystic believed that the soul could enjoy
brief moments of perfect union with God and was sure that his experience,
however incommunicable it was, proved him right. Emerson, even if he
could not claim to speak from a very high order of experience, seems to
have accepted at once this theory of unity as a partial answer to his quest.
But mystical union, however exalted and real it might be, could not endure
beyond brief moments, and nature, though she might be a helpful guide,
had no essential part in it. The pantheist whose spiritual God made the;
soul and the world out of his own divine stuff achieved a far more pleasing
unity. Emerson accepted this unity; and yet he was not long content to
accept it, because it submerged too completely both nature and the soul.
The extreme idealist's exciting theory that nature existed only in the mind,
or the soul, pointed in the right direction but did not seem entirely satisfy-
ing or convincing to one who loved nature. In this first book Emerson
approved mysticism, pantheism, idealism, in varying degrees, by turns. He
was not satisfied with any of them, but he leaned most toward idealism.
Mainly, though, his idealism was moderate. He was, it seemed, looking
for a compromise.

Obviously there was now no complete unity. But in the future there
might be. In a chapter on prospects, ending the book, Emerson insisted on
looking into the future through intuition rather than through empirical
science. He ended, therefore, not with the testimony of a scientist but with
"some traditions of man and nature" sung to him by "a certain poet" who
was plainly a convinced idealist. Not matter but spirit, sang this Orphic
poet, was the foundation of man. Man was now a god in ruins, fallen be-
cause he had lost his innocence. But a happy revolution in both man and
nature would attend a new influx of spirit.

The Orphic poet, whoever he was, was sponsored by Emerson; but the
interesting doubt remained whether he was merely a figure of speech. If
Emerson needed a Diotima or an Er, he had as much right to invent one
as Plato had had. But it may have pleased his fancy to metamorphose the
Transcendental schoolmaster Alcott into "my poet." If so, there was doubt-
less some significance in the fact that Alcott, his admired friend, his tireless
instructor in extreme idealism through many long conversations, and the
author of a manuscript book glorifying childhood as a revelation of the
spiritual nature of man, gave him "some majestic discourse" just before
the latter part of Nature was written.

242 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

What was important, however, was that Emerson chose to give his
poet's song the most commanding place in Nature. The whole book was
a prose poem with interpolated passages of stark realism. But the Orphic
poet's song was a kind of final defiance to untranscendental critics and gave
the whole composition an air of exaggerated idealism.

Both Transcendental and untranscendental critics were soon vocal.
Alcott, already familiar with parts of the book, read it within a day or two
of publication and thought it "a gem." Carlyle rightly saw in Nature "the
Foundation and Ground-plan5' of his friend's future writing, though actually
the future writing proved to be somewhat less extreme than the blueprint
demanded. Within a month five hundred copies "were gone." The book
had a few hundred readers at least. Reviews added to its modest fame or
to its notoriety. The Unitarian Christian Register called it a work of genius
and justly characterized it as poetical, philosophical, moral, and religious
without the forms of poetry, philosophy, ethics, or theology. In The West-
ern Messenger, a Unitarian and Transcendental magazine published in the
Ohio Valley, Samuel Osgood, still in his Unitarian phase, complained of
the obscurity of the Orphic poet's chants but warned the many who would
call the book dreamy that its dreams were at least visions of eternal realities.

In January of 1837, Francis Bowen, a young instructor in philosophy
at Harvard, gave the little volume what was perhaps its most unfriendly
reception. In The Christian Examiner, another Unitarian magazine, he
mercilessly exposed the weaknesses of the Transcendental mind as they
would appear to any unimaginative disciple of John Locke. He did not
pretend to understand the chapters on "Spirit" and "Prospects"; but he
thought he saw well enough that he and other orthodox expounders of
philosophy were cavalierly dismissed as vulgar minds. He saw that the
Transcendentalists were really reviving, in their essential doctrines, "the
Old Platonic school"; but he nevertheless credited the main inspiration of
their philosophy to the Germans, whose language, he remarked, had a
genius for novelty and vagueness. In his eagerness to discredit intuition he
betrayed a narrow and unscientific conception of the experimental method.
Before he finished, he lost his temper and revealed that he had discovered
in Emerson and the Transcendentalists "arrogance and self-sufficiency"
that were "no less absurd in philosophy, than criminal in morals." But, in
spite of some blundering, Bowen may have done a service to the author
of Nature. For, though in later writings Emerson was frequently carried
away by an excess of faith in intuition, he paid, in general, increasing
respect to the observation of actual life.

Other reviews of Nature were mostly either enthusiastic or sharply an-
tagonistic. A critic in The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review,

PAX AND OTHER GODS 243

a little more than a year after Bowen had delivered his indictment, was
delighted with the book and wanted to "call all those together who have
feared that the spirit of poetry was dead, to rejoice that such a poem as
'Nature3 is written." Various sects made ammunition of the little volume
for their own private wars. An English Swedenborgian believed he had dis-
covered an admirable bit of sectarian propaganda by some unknown mem-
ber of the New Church in America or at least someone who had "read the
writings of Swedenborg" and whose mind was "imbued with their truths."
Not until another unwary Briton had gone so far as to reprint Nature for
the use of young Swedenborgians did the distressing revelation come from
a keen-eyed American New Church editor and one of his contributors that
their fellow religionists had been hoaxed. Nature, it had to be explained,
had much in it that was familiar to a reader of Swedenborg yet was,, in
its general meaning, not only an un-Swedenborgian and unchristian book
but "infidel and insidious poison."

Whatever the reviewers thought of it, Nature was fortunately timed.
Not two weeks after its publication, there was held in Boston the prelim-
inary meeting of "Hedge's club," or the Symposium, as its originators some-
times called it in honor of Plato, though outsiders soon dubbed it the
Transcendental Club and that name stuck. Emerson, the author of the
book that would have served better than any other as the manifesto of
the Transcendentalists, was one of the first of the not entirely like-minded
to arrive at the home of George Ripley, in Bedford Place, on September
19. The other persons present during the course of the afternoon were
Ripley, Hedge, Alcott, Convers Francis, James Freeman Clarke, and Orestes
Brownson. The conversation, Emerson thought after some hours of it, was
"earnest and hopeful."

The conversers were a group of young and hopeful men. Francis, the
oldest, was not quite forty-one; Clarke, the youngest, was twenty-six. The
rest were in their thirties. Everyone was a scholar in his own way, but Hedge
was remarkable for his grasp of German philosophy, and Ripley was The
Christian Examiner's writer on foreign thinkers. Brownson was the most
formidable controversialist and was quick to catch at new religious and
social ideas. He had left the Presbyterian Church to become a Universalist
minister and then gone on into the Unitarian ministry but had not yet
taken his final plunge into Catholicism.

It was suggested that the rule of admission into the group be that no
man should be received whose presence would exclude any topic, but this
was doubtless an ideal that could hardly be lived up to. Ripley and his
guests, planning their next meeting, agreed on inviting Channing, the
veteran leader of American Unitarianism in its long advance :into liberalism.

244 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

It was also decided that invitations should be sent to James Walker, Uni-
tarian minister at Charlestown; Nathaniel Frothingham, the Unitarian
pastor of the old First Church, where Emerson's father had once served for
many years; John Sullivan Dwight, fresh from the divinity school at Cam-
bridge and on the lookout for a Unitarian pulpit; Cyrus Bartol, out of the
same school a year earlier and likewise waiting for a pulpit; Doctor Chan-
ning's nephew William Henry Channing, another recent theological grad-
uate from Cambridge; and the public-spirited Jonathan Phillips, once one
of Doctor Channing's atheistical college mates but afterwards one of his
deacons, and "one of the intuitive men,33 as the great preacher said, "whom
I take delight in much more than in the merely logical."

Almost the first remark Emerson had made at the preliminary meeting
was "that 't was pity that in this Titanic continent, where nature is so
grand, genius should be so tame." He had pointed out that there was "Not
one unchallengeable reputation" and had cited Allston, Bryant, Greenough,
and Doctor Channing by way of illustration. When the second meeting
was held, early in October, at Alcott's house, in Boston, this provocative
indictment of Emerson's was the topic of conversation. All who attended
the preliminary gathering were there, but the only new member present
was Bartol. Channing, who cared for few friends and had to conserve his
strength, kept aloof. Some recruits came later. One of these, Theodore
Parker, must have strengthened the logical fiber of the group's discussions.
Meetings continued to be held at irregular times and places. Emerson seems
frequently to have found himself not too much oppressed by better logicians
and more ready talkers.

If the Symposium was an amorphous club with no dues to collect and
no regular members, the persons taking part in its discussions were never-
theless easily identified and their intellectual orientation gradually came to
be understood. If these persons were, as was commonly reported, the Tran-
scendentalists, then the Transcendentalists appeared to be mostly extremely
liberal Unitarian ministers who were quite as much interested in literature,
philosophy, or even social reform as in the church. Most of them were
seekers after new truth and were impatient of restraint by any creed. Some
were on their way out of the church, or even out of Christianity itself.
Though they would not let God be human, they tended to make man divine;
and their incipiently divine man had it as one of his duties to get his own
most important revelations without depending on a middleman between
himself and God. Yet they were not too insistent on original intuitions to
realize their deep indebtedness to many minds and doctrines. They had the
fervor and conscience of the seventeenth-century Puritan, and they were
still getting some nourishment from the dry stalks of Unitarianism. Their

PAN AND OTHER GODS 245

intellectual horizons were broadened by the rationalism of the eighteenth
century and by the new theories of the natural scientists. They felt the
liberalizing pull of political democracy and the expansiveness of the Ro-
mantic movement in literature. But they also drew much from the potent
essences of various idealisms, mysticisms, pantheisms, and Platonisms. They
levied at will upon ancient and modern philosophies and religions. They
had the conviction that the world was their province, and they foraged
through it for spiritual and mental food. They were not, however, in so
much danger 'of overindulgence as one might have supposed. Even if Tran-
scendentalism sometimes seemed to be the saturnalia of faith, the members
of the Transcendental Club were, after all, mostly intellectuals who exer-
cised a good deal of judgment and self-restraint.

Early in December, 1836, Emerson, strengthened, no doubt, by his new
ties with fellow Transcendentalists as well as by his newly-won repute as
an author, was back on the lyceum platform with a course of no fewer
than twelve lectures announced as "Philosophy of History." He saw that
the number of lecturers advertising in the newspapers "bore a pretty large
proportion to the number of ears in Boston." But, having drawn good
audiences the preceding winter, he had made up his mind to be his own
manager and was taking the whole financial risk. He went sensibly about
his business as manager. Though he had to accept undesirable days in order
to get the Masonic Temple again, he was determined to have it. Facing
the common on Tremont Street, it was known and accessible to everybody.
Its two Gothic towers, rising nearly a hundred feet from the ground and
overshadowing the chaste Ionic-columned portico of neighboring St. Paul's,
seemed admirable symbols of the aspiration for culture and for the good
life that stirred many a lyceum audience in the mid-nineteenth century.
It was in this building that Alcott's ultra-liberal Temple School fittingly had
its home. On the second floor was the large, oddly-shaped lecture room,
"with circular seats upon a spherical floor." Theoretically, a thousand
persons, arriving by way of the winding stairways in the towers, were accom-
modated at a lecture. During this winter Emerson usually found about 350
in his audience.

Though lecturing was for him a necessary means of money-getting, he
managed to take it light-heartedly. He did not mean to let his subject cramp
him, as he explained to his brother William. "But so much lecturing & now
a little printing," he said, "has bronzed me & I am become very dogmatic;
and I mean to insist that whatsoever elements of humanity have been the
subjects of my studies, constitute the indisputable core of Modern History !
To such lengths of madness trot we when we have not the fear of criticism
before our eyes: and the literary man in this country has no critic." He

246 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

needed room to draw his big circles. His announcements seemed to vie, he
admitted, with Puck's brag that the earth would be girdled in forty minutes.
Each of his lectures took only about ten minutes longer than that.

His dozen lectures brought no carefully elaborated inductive reasoning
or logical process of any kind to bear upon the problem of the one and
the many. They were twelve cantos on the beauty of that same unity which
he had sought to discover in his recent book. Now he tried other exploratory
paths. History was defined as the unfolding of the universal mind. The
individual, unable to read the lesson of unity in his own life because he
was too close to it, had to turn to history. The idea of a spiritual, or intel-
kctual3 unity was dominant everywhere. An important aid to the under-
standing of the unity of history was science, for science, as in Lamarck's
evolutionary theory, moved toward central truths. Art, literature, politics-,
religion, society^ trades and professions, manners, ethics were different aspects
of history j but as each was singled out and examined it seemed only to
add to one's sense of universal unity. "We learn/* the lecturer summarized
when he faced his audience for the last time, "that there is one Soul . . ."
But he seems immediately to have substituted mind for soul. The two things
seemed to be the same, and he was in a lecture hall, where the greater
realistic force of an unpretentious expression counted.

Exciting passages abounded in the lectures. Doubtless the audience
listened anxiously for the sharp comments upon current questions of public
interest. A discussion of politics brought the radical thinker momentarily
into the conservative camp., where, however, he was ill at ease. In this last
winter of Andrew Jackson's administration, Emerson was in no mood to
applaud the retiring President. Both political parties, though, had serious
faults, he saw; the radicals were not often wisely led, and the conservatives
^opposed both good and bad measures of their opponents. Yet no matter
;what tie strife, he concluded philosophically, humanity was always the
gainer. Amid the harsh discords of politics citizens tended to improve and
to become independent of the mutations of parties and states, If Emerson
was a conservative, he was one of a new stripe. He was plainly already
turning over in his mind his theory that the true function of government
was to prepare the way for the self-reliant individual.

The lectures repeated Emerson^s habitual glorification of the individual.
The individual, sharing in the light and power generated by the universal
mind, had a share in divinity. "The walls," Emerson said, "are taken away;
we lie open on one side to all the deeps of spiritual nature; to all the
attributes of God." He quoted from Oriental philosophy and scripture
"examples of the class of sentences, which mate us feel the exceeding great-
ness of our moral sentiment," and he saw moral sentiment as the sure

PAN AND OTHER GODS 247

guide of the individual mind. He decried organized reform movements as
destructive of individualism. He praised heroic individualism as the heart
of good manners. Problems of original sin, the origin of evil, predestination,
and the like were merely the childish diseases of the soul. The central arch
of ethics was the self-reliance of the single man. Yet there was no narrow
egotism in such self-reliance. "The sincere man/' the lecturer declared,
"who does without second thought that which he is prompted to do ...
is not an individual so much as he is the hands & the tongue of Nature
itself." In his manuscript he added a sentence but put it in brackets which
may have indicated some doubt as to the wisdom of reading it in public.
The gist of it was that if a man could be completely obedient to the inner
promptings he would be omnipotent, for his will would be one with the
divine will.

At times, in this series on "Philosophy of History/' Emerson seemed
to be bringing his characteristic ideas into a new harmony. But he stopped
far short of suggesting anything resembling a complete philosophical system.
His ideas were too poetical to submit to logic. He was content to remain
a poet who, whatever shaping power of imagination he lacked, was really
inspired by a vision of the unity of things.

Many hearers were pleased with the bold lecturer. Alcott, though he
credited a remarkable voice and an effective trick of transition from vulgar
to sublime subjects with part of the magic of Emerson, was convinced that
his friend was destined to be the great literary man of his age. If Convers
Francis was troubled by the abrupt transitions and by his own difficulty
in remembering the best things that were said, he nevertheless came away
with the conviction that there were passages of unequaled precision and
beauty. He believed that the Emersonian charm resulted from hearty truth-
fulness, simplicity, purity, and vision. William Ellery Channing, deaf in
one ear and delicate in health, avoided the lyceum; but he seems to have
followed Emerson's lectures with the aid of his daughter Mary. She, with
other former pupils of Elizabeth Peabody, delightedly listened, and she
"often borrowed the manuscripts to read to him." Elizabeth Peabody "never
heard him express anything but pleasure and essential agreement."

Horace Mann, likewise barely outside Emerson's circle of friends and
disciples, was enthralled by the orator's magnificent generalizations. The
opening lecture of the course, he thought, "was to human life what New-
ton's Trincipia' was to mathematics." Emerson seemed to him to succeed
in his attempts to impose unity on all things: "As a man stationed in the
sun would see all the planets moving round it in one direction and in
perfect harmony, while to an eye on the earth their motions are full of
crossings and retrogradations; so he, from his central position in the spir-

248 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

itual world, discovers harmony and order when others can discern only
confusion and irregularity." It was one of the most splendid manifestations
of the truth-seeking and truth-developing mind that Mann had ever heard.
He was aware, however, that the person sitting next to him was less well
pleased— Walter Channing, dean of the Harvard Medical School, com-
plained of a headache. In spite of Emerson's transparent language, "it was
almost impossible/' Horace Mann explained, "to catch the great beauty
and proportions of one truth before another was presented."

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF

I stand in my place, with my own day, here.

—Walt Whitman, "Starting from Paumanok"

ONCE through with his lecture season, Emerson sank back into
the rural life he had chosen and was still contented with. Be-
tween spells of work hi his study he schemed improvements in
his house and grounds. The shadow of ill health fell suddenly,
threatening him with exile. Late in the spring of 1837 he was suffering
from "a slight but somewhat increased inflammation on the lungs." He
told his brother William, "I am in feeble health at this moment & shall
perhaps need to make a long journey or a voyage," and he had Doctor
Ripley write him a letter of introduction stating that the "late pastor of the
second church in Boston" was "travelling in hope of regaining his health."
But the danger was soon past, and he did not travel.

At home, both architecture and landscaping challenged him with dis-
couraging problems. It did not seem easy to make his house and its not
very expansive grounds into the kind of home he had wanted. Gardening,
as he later decided, could never be expected to give grandeur to a house
in a fen. He would never be able to make over almost the entire south side
of his house into one great window for the advantage of the winter sun.
As yet he could not dream of building a marbled bath, or a turret such
as Montaigne had for a library, or a cave for summer study such as de-
lighted William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. The
improvements he had so far made were modest ones. He had carried out
his plan to square the L of his house by adding two new rooms. Within
a few months after his marriage he had begun planting trees. In the spring
of 1836 he had hired Cyrus Warren to set out 15 apple trees, 3 pears, i
plum, and i peach. Before June was over he had paid his subscription to
the Tree Society. He got the first of two notebooks that he devoted to
records of his plantings and to miscellaneous horticultural lore. Pines, hem-
locks, maples, elms, chestnuts, oaks were to be set out from year to year,
for he was a lover of trees.

* By the summer of 1837 he was pleased with his garden and liked to
work in it. It seemed to be the road to health. "Yesterday afternoon," he

249

250 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

congratulated himself, "I stirred the earth about my shrubs and trees and
quarrelled with the piper grass, and now I have slept, and no longer am
morose nor feel twitchings in the muscles of my face when a visitor is by."
When he had the good luck of two excellent days, he weeded corn and
strawberries. He was intent on becoming fat and gave up his studies. The
birds entertained him as he gardened. The Maryland yellowthroat seemed
to chant to him all day long, "Extacy! Extacy!" He pitied city dwellers.
"The striped fly that eats our squash and melon vines, the rosebug, the
corn worm, the red old leaf of the vines that entices the eye to new search
for the lurking strawberry, the thicket and little bowers of the pea-vine, the
signs of ripeneso and all ihf hints of the garden, these grave city writers
never knew/5 he boasted. He managed his garden with the help of a
neighbor. Early next year he proudly told Carlyle that he had recently set
out, on the west side of the house, "forty young pine trees to protect me
or my son from the wind of January.33 Soon he was lamenting the dearth
of gardens in America. He saw that his fellow countrymen had no experi-
ence of such as were common in Europe. Here, without the musky English
gardens, the verses of Tennyson could not have been written, he declared;
and from the days of his Italian travels he recalled the Villa d'Este as
"a memorable poem in my life."

He added a little fanning to his gardening. Doubtless few of his Amer-
ican ancestors during two centuries had failed to dabble in farming, what-
ever their chief occupations were. He soon fell into the thrifty habit of
buying a pig and, in due time, sending for one of his townsmen to kill the
fatted hog. In 1838 he began the expansion of his miniature domain by
purchasing from Peter Howe the "heater piece," a triangle of slightly more
than 127 rods that lay like a wedge driven into the crotch of the Lexington
Road and the Cambridge Turnpike. His new land got its name because its
shape suggested the piece of cast iron that was heated and placed inside
a hollow flatiron.

He was now fairly well braced against the financial crisis of President
Van Buren's administration. Even before he received the final instalment
of his share of the Tucker estate, he was enjoying, not only the dividends
from the half he had long since got, but $500 a year from that still in the
hands of Pliny Cutler. At the end of July, 1837, he learned from his lawyer
that it was only necessary to sign a receipt in order to bring to a close the
long negotiations over the estate and to receive his second instalment. This
instalment, consisting of shares in the City, Atlantic, and Massachusetts
Banks of Boston, made him richer by $11,674.50. He was also to have a
reversionary interest in one-third of $3,750 held back for the purpose of
making annuities. He was able to keep most of his stock intact, while some

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 251

thousands of dollars that he soon lent to his brother William would be an
equally dependable source of income. Within a year or so the improved
state of his finances was making itself apparent in the Concord assessors'
books, where the true value of his stocks and money at interest was recorded
as $19,400 and that of his house, barn, and land as $3,450. Besides, Lidian
had her own smaller inheritance; and though for some time devoted to
the aid of her sister, it at least made the future of the Emersons look
brighter. Unfortunately Lidian's property was already confided to the hands
of her dishonest cousin Abraham Jackson, who was eventually detected
and punished but only after a long career as an embezzler.

Emerson soon found that his accounts with publishers added little to
his financial prospects. His earned income, almost entirely from his lectures,
was still dwarfed by his receipts from securities. But when he pondered the
question of whether his "accidental freedom by means of a permanent
income" was really the decisive thing that was shaping his career, his answer
was No. And in the light of the history of his thought and character he
was justified in his conclusion. He saw the moral implications of the ques-
tion, but he believed that, as he put it, "my direction of thought is so strong
that I should do the same things,— should contrive to spend the best part
of my time in the same way as now,, rich or poor. If I did not think so/'
he reflected, "I should never dare to urge the doctrines of human culture
on young men."

His income from all sources was hardly more than enough to turn the
wheels of the domestic machinery that Lidian quickly built up. Before she
had been three years in the house she required "2 middle aged women
besides Hepsy" as household aids. Her husband congratulated himself be-
cause he had a wife with "an angel's heart," delighted in his child Waldo,
and liked being entangled even in commonplace domestic affairs. Within
a year or two he had to reform his schedule in order to save time for
writing. He tried rising at six o'clock, taking his coffee in his study, and
keeping aloof from the family till twelve o'clock or one. Yet he almost
rivaled Alcott in his nursery studies. In spite of his dislike of religious cere-
monial he carefully recorded in his diary the fact that his boy, dressed "in
the self-same robe in which, twenty-seven years ago, my brother Charles
was baptized," was taken to the village church for the conventional christen-
ing at the hands of Doctor Ripley. "I feel," Lidian told her sister, "as if a
volume might be filled before one could duly set forth all that this child
is to him, both as possession and hope . . ." His growing affection made
him consider whether, in case of disaster to his family, his philosophy would
hold together. But he assured himself that it would. In February of 1839
the domestic pattern was further complicated by the birth of a daughter.

252 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Lidian Emerson insisted that the child should be called Ellen, after the
first wife.

From his edge of the village it was so short a way to the woods and
Walden Pond that Emerson could quickly pass from society to solitude.
It was true that he sometimes found the woods too full of mosquitoes; and
he picked the crude blackberries at the risk of splintering his hand. But,
as there was an endless variety of landscape and sky, he seldom came home
unrewarded! '"As he strode through the woods one September day he heard
a pattering like rain, and, looking up, "beheld the air over and about the
trees full of insects (the winged ant) in violent motion and gyrations, and
some of them continually dropping out of the flying or fighting swarm,
and causing the rain-like sound as they fell upon the oak leaves." On a
June night he left his journal and walked in moonlight that made amber
of the world. "The meadows/5 he noticed, "sent up the rank smells of all
their ferns and grasses and folded flowers into a nocturnal fragrance. The
little harlot flies of the lowlands sparkled in the grass and in the air.35 His
capacity for enjoyment of the summer was immense. At noon, when the
mercury stood at ninety in the shade, he reveled in the "circumambient
sea" of heat. » i

He incessantly reverted from outdoor nature to human nature. People
stirred his curiosity. He wanted society and did not want it. He refused
invitations to evening parties "chiefly because," he said, "besides the time
spent, commonly ill, in the party, the hours preceding and succeeding the
visit are lost for any solid use, as I am put out of tune for writing or read-
ing." It was a triumph for him to become a valued member of a club.
Within five years after settling in Concord he was elected to the town's
Social Circle. The circle had twenty-odd farmers and villagers, men of
character and of some reading, capable of teaching him the hard reality
of life close to the soil. When he turned to more ambitious excursions
into friendship, he was apt to be disappointed. "We are armed all over,"
he told Margaret Fuller, "with these subtle antagonisms which as soon as
we meet begin to play, & translate all poetry into such stale prose!" Yet
he got along well enough with the philosophical Alcott and loyally cham-
pioned him throughout the crisis that ended in the closing of the Temple
School in Boston. And Margaret Fuller herself was invaluable to him.

Margaret Fuller was a gadfly who stung people to action. When she
was a visitor in his home in the spring of 1837 s'ie managed to give Emer-
son five or six lessons in German pronunciation. Though his attempts to
learn to speak the language proved abortive, she at least made him read
it with more determination. As she had earlier assisted Alcott in his Temple
School and had now begun as a teacher at Providence, she had an interest

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 253

in educational theory and, doubtless, persuaded Emerson to shape his ideas
on that subject into an address. She also helped him toward a critical theory
of art. Thus she always paid her way and was a welcome guest. Unable
to find a house in Concord to take as her own, she made frequent use of
Emerson's, "this mansion of peace," as she called it. Elizabeth Hoar saw
how she succeeded in making Emerson talk his best. "He is a ray of white
light/3 the admiring Elizabeth told Aunt Mary, "& she a prism— If not
so pure & calm, yet she has all the elements of the ray in her varied being."
Margaret Fuller was in a state of contentment. "I know not/' she confided
to Charles Newcomb, "when I was most happy in the many hours of
meditation I passed in the tangled wood-walks, or those of conversation
with my friend whose serene and elevated nature I never came so near
appreciating as now." But though the house was full of company, with
the lawyer William Emerson and his wife there from New York to add an
element of practical common sense to the discussions, the host would not
be diverted too much from his regular hours of work. He shut himself in
his study during the morning, postponing the pleasures of conversation and
of reading aloud until the afternoon.

Margaret, not content to stretch Emerson's intellectual horizons with
such ambitious projects as her ill-starred life of Goethe and her five annual
series of conversations in Boston, also looked after his social improvement.
She not only insisted on threshing out the theory of friendship but vigor-
ously practiced the art at the same time. Quiet persons like Elizabeth Hoar
marveled that Margaret knew "so many beautiful people"; and certainly
Margaret was not content to wear them "like a diamond chain about her
neck." She kept her beautiful people circulating and took care that the
best of them got to Concord, One of the most prized was the very youthful
and vivacious Caroline Sturgis, already known to the Emersons but really
introduced into the Concord circle by Margaret. By June of 1838 Caroline
was visiting at Coolidge Castle, borrowing manuscripts, and starting a long-
lived correspondence with Emerson. A year later Emerson was asking Mar-
garet Fuller for an introduction to Anna Barker, "your Recamier." Anna's
right to the appellation was proved by social triumphs on both sides of the
Atlantic. Margaret, the intellectual prodigy, saw in Anna, a New Orleans
beauty, the unrealized half of what she herself wished to be. On first
acquaintance with Anna, Emerson objected that she had less intellect than
feeling, "and of course," he complained, "she is not of my class, does not
resemble the women whom I have most admired and loved." But after
a few months he shared an untroubled admiration of her with a number
of his friends. Within a year Anna became the wife of one of these, Samuel
Gray Ward, a Bostonian of much charm.

254 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Ward came to Emerson in 1838, also by way of Margaret Fuller. He
could not escape the broker's career he was born to, but during his student
days he had had the good fortune to meet not only Anna Barker but Mar-
garet Fuller. From Margaret, seven years his senior in years and far more in
culture, he got his mental awakening. Having traveled abroad,, part of the
time with so scholarly a person as George Ticknor in Italy and in Germany,
he had acquired some literary7 and artistic theories that Emerson respected.
Emerson added him to his list of hopeful young men and was his corre-
spondent for many years. Ward and, later, Margaret were sponsors of the
poetical nephew and namesake of the famous preacher William Ellery
Channing. Emerson and Ward both toiled over Ellery's manuscripts in the
hope of getting the somewhat clumsy poet on his literary feet. Ellery, way-
ward and willful, went beyond the bounds of poetic license and was the
victim of whimsical spells of inaction. He caused fresh anxiety among his
friends when his furtive wooing of Margaret Fuller's sister Ellen came to
light; and Margaret soon found herself his surprised and, at first, unwilling
sister-in-law. Ellery, though never fully subdued, became in a short time
a resident of Concord and was Emerson's companion on many walks.

Emerson had a habit of discovering promising young men, and a few
of them lived up to expectations. It may have been Lucy Brown, his sister-
in-law, who first brought him and Henry Thoreau together, and the time
may have been as early as 1836. At any rate, she had probably begun her
brief residence in the Thoreau home by then. The following year Emerson
tried to get a suitable subvention for the stubborn senior who had offended
the college authorities by his revolt against the competitive system of study.
It seems to have been his inquiry "Do you keep a journal?" that inspired
Thoreau to write the first of his thousands of diary entries in October,
1837. By the following winter he and Thoreau were exploring the Concord
countryside together, and Emerson was speaking of his independent and
unprepossessing companion as of a favorite. "Montaigne,53 he observed,
"is spiced throughout with rebellion, as much as ... my young Henry
Thoreau."

However rebellious, Thoreau must have owed more to their friendship
than Emerson did, but he had repaid much of the debt within a few years.
When he stated eloquently the objections of the poor youth of genius against
what looked like a foreclosure of his rights in nature by the proprietors of
the land, Emerson jotted down some notes in his journal for future use.
Emerson was pleased when the "protester" suddenly "broke out into good
poetry & better prose." Word eventually got around among the bright young
men of the Boston area that Thoreau, though rated by James Russell Lowell
as "the most inimitable of all imitators5* had become in the eyes of Emer-

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 255

son "one of the wonders of the age9' and was' being indirectly quoted by
the same "Great Original53 in lectures. Thoreau's verses on "Sympathy"
struck Emerson at once as "The purest strain, and the loftiest, I think, that
has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest." Foreseeing that the
new journal the Transcendentalism were planning would offer an oppor-
tunity for Henry, Emerson was for that reason more favorable to its found-
ing. "My Henry Thoreau," he announced, "will be a great poet for such
a company, & one of these days for all companies."

When James Russell Lowell joined with boyish enthusiasm in the con-
servatives' hue and cry against the rising Concord literary group he had
not only heard Emerson lecture but had known him as a friend. Suspended
in his senior year and sent to Concord by the Harvard College authorities,
he had carried letters of introduction and had been in time to be invited
to a Fourth of July party at the Emersons', and to make the sixth under-
graduate guest at dinner and tea. The memory of such hospitality did not
dull his satirical thrusts at Emerson in a juvenile class poem, but he was
soon remorseful, wrote an apology, and received in reply one of his former
host's masterpieces of courtesy. For Emerson, the whole episode was simply
the exploratory beginning of another long-lasting friendship.

Visitors now came to Concord in increasing numbers, and according
to Lidian everyone was welcomed. She enjoyed the delight her husband
took in his guests, and she turned away regretfully, as she said, "from high
discourse to Martha-like care of wine & custards/' Edward Taylor, the
pastor of Seamen's Bethel in Boston whom Emerson had long admired,
came to spend a night with him after treating an audience in the old village
church to a sample of his appealing oratory. Channing, a more polished
preacher, was another guest. But after one of his visits Emerson commented:
"Once Dr. Channing filled our sky. Now we become so conscious of his
limits and of the difficulty attending any effort to show him our point of
view that we doubt if it be worth while." The doctor's nephew William
H. Channing, a radical young minister, also came.

A youthful Cambridge tutor named Jones Very, a practicing mystic
recently discovered by Elizabeth Peabody, was welcomed but found Emer-
son too selfish and too earthy to breathe in the highest spiritual altitudes.
Jones Very might be in the borderland between sanity and insanity, but,
being admirable for his selflessness and unworldliness, could be forgiven
much eccentricity. Professor Felton came the same day with him; and
Thoreau, Rockwood Hoar, and Barzillai Frost, the local minister, were
invited in to meet the guests. Though Jones Very could not be happy in
so large a company, he impressed Emerson.

Within a few months it was noised abroad that Emerson was puffing

256 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

him up into a saint and philosopher; and at the same time rumors were
rife that Very had become quite insane, imagining himself another Christ,
divinely commissioned. Very came back to Concord for a visit of several
days, and Emerson, unperturbed by the disapproval of the gossips, studied
this pathological case in the hope of learning a little wisdom as well as
psychology. He saw that the gentle mystic distrusted him as being too
intellectual. "He thinks me covetous in my hold of truth, of seeing truth
separate, and of receiving or taking it, instead of merely obeying,35 Emer-
son observed but nevertheless turned hopefully to a couple of essays the
young man had written and to some sonnets he had printed in a Salem
paper.

Next year, 1839, after Emerson had circulated "a roll" of the extraor-
dinary sonnets in manuscript and a number of them had been printed in
a Western magazine, he had Jones Very at Concord again for a few days.
Before the end of that summer he had selected "Out of two hundred poems
. . . sixty six that really possess rare merit.'5 Sixty-five of these he pub-
lished, with Very's essays on Shakespeare and epic poetry, in a neat, slender
volume.

A register of visitors to Coolidge Castle during these early Concord
years of Emerson's would have served as a directory of New England's
Transcendentalists, social reformers, and liberal-minded or radical-minded
scholars, with a few other miscellaneous persons.' Hedge came, a man
notable for his philosophical and linguistic talent. So did Sarah Alden Ripley,
a human mill, grinding German, Italian, Greek, chemistry, metaphysics,
or theology, utterly indifferent as to which was thrown into her hopper.
Guests were as various as Horace Mann3 bent on forming a county educa-
tional association; John D wight, full of knowledge of music; Cyrus Bartol,
starting out on his career as minister and author; and Aunt Fanny Haskins,
"a remarkable specimen of still life." There were visitors of many ideas and
visitors of one idea. Emerson found it necessary to "treat the men and
women of one idea, the Abolitionist, the Phrenologist, the Swedenborgian,
as insane persons with a continual tenderness and special reference in every
remark and action to their known state."

Among his fellow Concordians Emerson soon came to be respected, if
not marveled at, but was hardly esteemed an equal. Years later the popular
opinion was expressed by Sam Staples, a fellow townsman who had in his
time been bar-tender, clerk, constable and jailer, deputy sheriff, repre-
sentative in the General Court, auctioneer, real-estate agent, and gentleman
farmer. "Well," Staples summed it up, "I suppose there's a great many
things that Mr. Emerson knows that I could n't understand; but I know

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 257

that there's a damn sight of things that I know that he don't know any-
thing about."

As there was no effective international copyright, Emerson shielded
Garlyle as well as he could from American pirating. Acting as Carlyle's
agent meant petty business details and annoyances. Emerson got his first
serious experience of the sort when he looked after the American edition
of The French Revolution. He prepared a prospectus, collected the names
of subscribers, and was responsible for some of the press notices. Without
much hope of acceptance, he wrote a review and sent it to editor James
Walker. Walker printed only a mutilated version of it in The Christian
Examiner. The reviewer, resolved to salvage his rejected paragraphs, re-
membered that Orestes Brownson had asked for a "notice" to put into his
new journal, The Boston Quarterly; but the extensive criticism of the
Revolution that tardily appeared there seemed not to have any Emersonian
flavor. In spite of all his anxiety about his now famous British friend's
success, however, Emerson was independent in his judgment. Rereading the
book, or at least most of it, he felt "astonishment and unabated curiosity
and pleasure" but condemned its "perpetual levity." A few months later
he published the first two of the four volumes of Carlyle's Critical and Mis-
cellaneous Essays.

Emerson, though he was being gibed at by superficial critics as a fol-
lower and imitator of Carlyle, did not labor without some return. Carlyle
was stirring up a few new friends for him in England. The young intel-
lectual John Sterling had found Nature, it seems, on Carlyle's table and
had "fallen overhead in love" with its author. Emerson sent some things
he had printed, and so began the correspondence that covered the few
remaining years of Sterling's life, though the two men never met. By the
spring of 1839, Richard Monckton Milnes, a member of Parliament and,
according to his friend Carlyle, "a beautiful little Tory dilettante poet and
politician," had begun collecting Emerson's writings in order to review
them in a British journal.

Though Emerson had none of Carlyle's fierce determination to save,
the political and economic world from its stupidity, he was by no means
oblivious to the need of such salvation. He wanted to deal with men as
individuals, not in masses, but he felt contradictory emotions. In one of its
aspects, the age seemed to him the age of trade, when everything gave way
to avarice. In another aspect, he saw it as a social era, the age of associa-
tions and the age in which people believed that such economic fundamentals
as trade and production could be altered by law. He did not clearly foresee
the social upheaval that industrialism would cause. In the spring of 1837

258 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he was "gay as a canary bird" because he had learned that the destiny of
New England was to be the manufacturing country of America and he
would therefore have to worry no longer out of morbid sympathy for the
farmer.

He was pleased that his line of duty kept him clear of the debate over
the serious financial distress of the late 18303. A visit from his brother
William, a lawyer in Wall Street, must have made him sufficiently aware,
if he had not already been so, of the panicky condition of the country as
banks in New York and Boston began to suspend specie payments. His own
modest wealth must have been endangered. But he refused to believe that
the universe was tumbling to ruin. "The humble-bee/5 he philosophized,
"and the pine-warbler seem to me the proper objects of attention in these
disastrous times." At the moment he was very probably composing a pre-
liminary version of his lines to the bumblebee. He wrote them mainly in
a mood suggestive of anything but the fear sweeping over financial America.
As he defied bodily disease and was resolved not to "sail for Porto Rique"
to escape it as his ill-fated brothers had done, so he defied the threatening
economic storm. He defied it by ignoring it. Following the flight of the
bee, he had a vision of

sunny hours,

Long days, and solid banks of flowers;

Of gulfs of sweetness without bound

In Indian wildernesses found;

Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,

Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.

Yet in the end he made his poem only less poignant in its recognition of
human sorrow than was Keats's much more somber ode to the nightingale.
Emerson's bee was a philosopher wiser than human seer because he man-
aged to make ridiculous, so far as he was concerned, the

Want and woe, which torture us,

But obviously want and woe remained very real to us.

Discussing the financial crisis in plain prose, Emerson observed that
the black times had great scientific value and were an epoch that a critical
philosopher would not miss. "What was, ever since my memory, solid con-
tinent, now yawns apart and discloses its composition and genesis," he
commented. The crisis he thought interesting to watch, not fatal. He saw
the resources of the vast continent, and the blight of trade and manufac-
tures seemed to him only a momentary mischance.

He must have imbibed, perhaps unconsciously, some more or less radical

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 259

views from George Bancroft, the Democrat. He read the second volume
of Bancroft's history of the United States that year. He had long since
discovered for himself that his own favorite doctrine of self-reverence was
"root and seed of democracy." To a lecture audience in 1838 he announced
that the encroachment of the democratic element on the monarchial was
one of the first fruits of reflection in our modern age. It may have been
the same year that his wife told a correspondent that Emerson never used
the term lower classes and that it was wholly objectionable to him. For
days at a time he would receive Edward Palmer as a guest. Palmer, "a
gentle, faithful, sensible, well-balanced man for an enthusiast," had solved
the current specie problem by renouncing the use of money entirely and
accordingly did not pay for his lodging. Instead he was apt to leave behind
him a free copy of the Herald of Holiness, the little paper he printed on
the Bowery in New York. Palmer seems to have been not so much an
extreme democrat as the mildest and most inoffensive of communists. Aunt
Mary thought him crazy, but Emerson was willing, as usual, to hear both
sides. And even when he failed to see how it would help matters to take
money out of circulation, he was glad to have his guest demonstrate how
the invincible me could still exist in contentment after everything had been
stripped from it.

In 1839 Emerson was probably near the peak of his sympathy with the
Democrats as a party. Not long before, it was true, he had felt bitter as
he passed by the shop where "the dictator of our rural Jacobins" was
instructing his political pupils and counting the votes they would cast in
the next election. Emerson detested the radical politician who valued chiefly
"persons who are nothing but persons." But he would doubtless have felt
much the same way about a Whig politician of the same order. Now, at
any rate, he seemed to be about to announce himself publicly as a Demo-
crat, or, more radical than the general run of Democrats, a Locofoco. The
political-minded in his audience had taut nerves as he read his first lec-
ture in the course of 1839-1840. In that lecture he seemed to them to be
talking plainly when he classed all men as either of the party of the past
or of that of the future, found the colleges and all monied foundations
of learning or religion on the side of tradition, but saw the party of move-
ment daily and steadily gaining and himself welcomed the future.

Theodore Parker was delighted and wrote to Convers Francis : "It was
democratic-loco-foco throughout; and very much in the spirit of Brown-
son's article on 'Democracy and Reform3 in the last Quarterly. . . . Ban-
croft was in extasies,— he was rapt beyond vision at the loco-jocoism of the
lecture, and said to me the next evening,— It is a great thing to say such
things before any audience, however small . . . but let him come with

s6o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

us before the 'Bay State' and we will give him 3000 listeners.' " A "grave,
whig-looking gentleman" who heard the lecture said he could account for
it only on the supposition that Emerson "wished to get a place in the Custom
House under George Bancroft." Bancroft, an admirer of intellectuals and
himself one of the most cultured of the Democratic officeholders, shortly
afterwards invited Emerson to dinner. Though the dinner looked unpolitical,
it may be that Bancroft had some hope of bringing him onto the political
platform.

Meantime, Emerson, in spite of his distrust of fanatical reformers, was
becoming more dissatisfied with the uneasy truce over slavery. Lidian, one
of the delighted hostesses of the Southern Grimke sisters when they came
to plead the antislavery cause in Concord, must have encouraged him in
the direction of action. Some two months after the Grimkes had left, he
read an address on slavery in a Concord church; and when Lovejoy, the
antislavery editor, was killed by an Illinois mob, Emerson felt outraged.
He saw clearly that the history of the Negro race to date had been a tragedy
that did not easily fit into even a Transcendentalist's great circles. Negroes,
he wrote in his journal, in 1838, were more pitiable when rich than when
poor. "Of what use are riches to them? They never go out without being
insulted. Yesterday I saw a family of negroes riding in a coach. How
pathetic!" But he was in no shouting mood. He had his unswerving belief
that if Transcendental doctrine, demanding that all men be treated as gods,
won acceptance by individuals it would spell the end of such evils as
slavery. And though the subject of abolition even became poetic in Whit-
tier's hands, he did not think that it was his own calling to deal with it.

He turned back to his books. He read Oriental lore again and sampled
Ripley's specimens of foreign literature. He was pleased with new readings
in Tennyson. He no longer cared much for novels. It took public opinion
to drive him to read Oliver Twist. He thought Dickens remarkable for his
sharp eye for exteriors but not for insight into character. In some of George
Sand's books, discovered with Margaret Fuller's help, he found, however,
"authentic revelations of what passes in man & in woman." Before the
end of 1838 he had bought a copy of Kant's Critick of Pure Reason, an
unsatisfactory translation published by Pickering at London. Possibly it
was his hand that marked a passage on pages 431 and 432; but if it was,
he failed to take its caution to heart. His own highly intuitive philosophy
was not strictly "transcendental" but was dangerously "transcendent" ac-
cording to Kant's definition.

Emerson himself saw, however, that the idea of spirit was evanescent
and really out of reason as well as out of sensuous experience. He saw both
sides, weak and strong, of his philosophy. He had sharply contradictory

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRV, ONESELF 261

moods^ He could write a prose poem on the divinity of man: ". . . if
grow in God. I am only a form of him. He is the soul of me. I can even
with a mountainous aspiring say, / am God . . ." Then, before he laid
down his pen, he could confess: "A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I
yet behold two.55 What he was writing might have served as an epilogue '
to his first book, a confession of his failure in it to discover real unity.*
"Whilst I feel myself in sympathy with nature, and rejoice with greatly
beating heart in the course of Justice and Benevolence overpowering me,"
he went on, "I yet find little access to this me of me. I fear what shall
bef al : I am not enough a party to the great order to be tranquil. I hope
and I fear. I do not see. At one time, I am a Doer. . . . but presently
I return to the habitual attitude of suffering." Thus, at times, he became
conscious that at the end of his whole quest for truth there could be only
the tragedy of futility so far as any final static results were concerned. But
to him this did not mean that it was futile to observe diligently the chang-
ing aspects of truth that would perhaps, after all, have to be accepted as
the ultimate realities. Meantime he was, as always, simply a seeker, looking
for any semblance of unity wherever he could find it. It sometimes occurred
to him that the unity for which he longed was discoverable in his relations
with minds in past centuries. He was amazed when he considered how near
the seventeenth-century minds of MarveH and the "metaphysical poets"
Donne and Cowley were to his own. —

In his home there was agreement as yet on the grand law of compensa-
tion, though experience often seemed to count heavily against it. Lidian,
sick and sometimes despondent, still made her "weak & most fearful nature"
hold to this faith and so "endure the thought of the evil that is in the
world." As late as 1839 she told Elizabeth Peabody, "My Understanding
fails to show me how things can be so— yet my Reason when I will listen
—steadfastly affirms— All must be for the Best ... All despondency is
founded on delusion;— with me, and I think with most, it originates in
bodily disease— or fatigue at least— It is in the nerves,— the soul disowns
it." Emerson, according to Lidian, had no easier time than she in keeping
up faith. He was at the very moment, she said, preparing to lecture on
human misery. In theory, he made light of it. "But in fact— I scarce ever
saw the person upon whom the suffering of others made so real impres-
sion," she added.

In the series of lectures he continued to read in Boston, Emerson stub-
bornly stood his Transcendental ground. Though he skillfully varied his
ideological rhythms, the real contents of the lectures changed little more
than did the general titles which he gave to the courses. Instead of the ten
lectures on "Human Culture" delivered at the Masonic Temple in the

262 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

winter of 1837-1838, he offered ten lectures on "Human Life" at the
Masonic Temple in 1838-1839. In 1839-1840 his ten lectures, once more
at the Masonic Temple, were announced as on "The Present Age."

He held the attention of the liberals and radicals, and for a long time
there was little diminution in his audiences. At the opening lecture in
December of 1838 Alcott found the audience "choice/3 including every hope-
ful and devout person of his acquaintance. According to Samuel Ripley, the
house was fuller each night as that season advanced, the audience being
"composed mostly of young men and women of the higher and more intelli-
gent classes.5' Undoubtedly many came because of the recent attacks on
Emerson as a dangerous radical, attacks which he had at first mistakenly
feared might end his usefulness as a lecturer. His own excitement was great,
so great for a time that he could not sleep at night and had to postpone
one lecture till he got back on his feet. At home Lidi'an was delighted with
the lecture on "Love"— "to me the most glorious poem I ever heard—
celestial—holy."

The Boston course still yielded the main part of what Emerson earned
by his lectures. In the winter of 1837-1838 the average attendance was
439, the total receipts were $796, the cost of the lecture hall was $130.,
and other expenses, including those for advertising, tickets, and travel, were
$95. Emerson therefore found that he had earned a net profit of $571 on
ten weekly lectures. In spite of the financial depression, his profits were
more than one-third greater than in the preceding winter. It was true that
in the critical season of 1838-1839 at the temple the gross receipts from
ticket sales seemed to drop a little, but they still amounted to over $700.
Next winter the average attendance was estimated at about 400, and prob-
ably the ticket sales were about the same.

But if, during the years 1837-1839., the Boston lectures brought the
largest cash returns, a couple of addresses delivered in Cambridge, across
the Charles River, were destined to reverberate longest in the ears of the
world.

The first of these, a Phi Beta Kappa oration, was a stopgap, for Emer-
son was asked to prepare it on short notice after the Rev. Dr. Wainwright
had finally made up his mind to decline the honor. Yet the address had
actually been in preparation for many years. From his own college days,
when the faculty had rated him as only average, Emerson had had some-
thing ready to say on the subject of scholarship and its relation to the cul-
ture of the individual. As early as 1835 he had half resolved to put together
a paper on the duty and discipline of the scholar. It was perhaps in the
same year that he pondered the foreign sneer at the dearth of literary
production in America but warned himself against cultural nationalism. He

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 263

cautioned himself not to "read American/3 for, he reflected, "Thought is
of no country." By May of 1836 he was definitely planning to make a
"sermon to Literary Men.35

Now, more than a year later, he was asked to be the orator of the
Harvard chapter of the national scholarly literary society that had been
founded at the College of William and Mary, in Virginia^ during the
American Revolution. Its regular members were the winners, from year
to year, of an educational marathon that Emerson wished to reform. But
he himself had long been an honorary member, the conservative-minded
society was a conspicuous symbol of scholarship, and the occasion of its
anniversary gave him the hearing he wanted for his own liberal ideas.

Precisely at noon on August 31, 1837, two hundred and fifteen mem-v
bers of Phi Beta Kappa marched into the meetinghouse near Harvard Yard
and joined the guests already gathered there. The Rev. William Parsons
Lunt was there with a "finished" poem. A band played, and a minister
offered a prayer. It took Emerson one hour and fifteen minutes to read his
oration to an audience that was partly hostile, partly friendly. John Pierce
timed him and listened impatiently. He was struck by Emerson's "misty,
dreamy, unintelligible style" and credited it to "Swedenborg, Coleridge,
and Carlyle." Alcott was delighted but would never forget "the mixed
confusion, consternation, surprise, and wonder" of some who were present.
Frederic Hedge, Caleb Stetson, George Bradford, and others of the orator's
"most devoted literary friends5* drank it all in, fully satisfied. "What crowded
and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what en-
thusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" So Lowell
long afterwards summarized the conflicting moods of the listeners. To him
the address seemed a classic, "our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard."
Oliver Wendell Holmes., though he probably cared little for its esoteric
passages at the time, would one day think it worthy to be called "our
intellectual Declaration of Independence."

Friends must have realized that the address was mostly what they had
often heard Emerson say before but never express so well. This time he
had polished his manuscript to the last phrase, and he was confident. He
felt, as he put it, that he was playing on his listeners "as on an organ."
But his manner was as much the trained athlete's as the musician's. His
sentences were quick, powerful jabs, and almost every stroke opened the
way for another.

In the past Phi Beta Kappa's anniversary had been little more than
"a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too
busy to give to letters, any more." But the time had come for a change.
"Our day of dependence/' the orator announced, "our long apprenticeship

264 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.55 This was more a hope
than a boast, and he went on to show what would have to happen if it
were to be realized. The scholar would have to transform himself from
a narrow specialist, "the delegated intellect/' into a man of broad culture
participating in the world of ideas and action, "Man Thinking" He had
nature, books, and his own action as tutors to give him efficient aid in
bringing about his desired transformation and to be his working partners
afterwards. Once this narrow specialist had turned into man thinking, he
would find that his duties were all comprised in self-trust. Trusting himself,
this thinker who had allied himself with broad humanity would find his
own age and his own country fit to work in and himself fit to do the work.
If he was an American he was especially fortunate. The spirit of the age
became every day more democratic, more individualistic, magnifying the
importance of the single man. Let the American no longer be timid, imita-
tive, too deferential to European precedent. Instead let him be self-reliant
and individual. Let "the single man plant himself indomitably on his in-
stincts, and there abide.5' Then "the huge world,55 Emerson assured his
audience in his peroration, "will come round to him.55 This was the sum
of what the Phi Beta Kappa orator said.

As he had already published his essay on nature, little was needed on
that subject. But books, representing the mind of the past, were a challenge
he had never fully met before. No one knew better than he that books
could be precious lamps at which the flame of thought was rekindled in
hours of darkness. But everybody else knew that too. What most needed
to be taught now was the necessity of liberating imitative minds from
slavery to authority. The true scholar-thinker must not be subdued by his
instruments. Books were for idle times. "Meek young men,55 Emerson
warned, "grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views
which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero,
Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote
these books."

Bent on providing his timid scholar with intellectual muscles as well
as backbone, Emerson insisted, more vigorously than ever before, on the
importance of action. The Concord villager who lived in quiet retirement
may well have been answering the gibes of "practical5' men whose target
he had been. He challenged the practical value of the doer who was no
thinker as well as of the thinker who was no doer. "The so-called 'prac-
tical men,5 55 he said, "sneer at speculative men, as if, because they specu-
late or see, they could do nothing." Then, for the benefit of the scholar,
he read what might have served as a prospectus of William James and
John Dewey: "Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential.

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 265

Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into
truth. . . . Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know
whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.3' Only action could
complete thought. William James, many years later, marked this passage
in his copy of Emerson.

Self -trust, self-realization, was the core of the address. Mainly the appeal
was completely understandable to the most untranscendental minds. Its
broad basis in common sense made this one of Emerson's most powerful
writings. It was alive with rhetoric that went home to the hearer. The
scholar's duty not to defer to the popular cry even if respectable leaders
of society joined it came out as "Let him not quit his belief that a popgun
is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be
the crack of doom." But Emerson the Transcendentalist was not completely
hidden. He was determined to keep this discourse intelligible to both his
immediate audience and a much larger one beyond the walls of the meet-
inghouse and would not run any serious risks. Yet he ventured for a moment
or two to reveal, back of the single, self-reliant man, the "one ^oul which
animates all-men." This was a sufficient hint to the imaginative.

As for the literal-minded, they vastly exaggerated Emerson's doctrine
of American cultural independence. The nationalistic note in the address,
though often taken as the dominant one, was not dominant. Self-trust for
the individual, no matter of what nationality, was the dominant note. The
problem of self-trust merely happened to have a special meaning for
America, an adolescent country that feared to grow up intellectually. Emer-
son announced the special American aspect of the problem in his opening
paragraph and then pushed it aside. Only as he neared the end of his
address did he halt his long commentary upon "this abstraction of the
Scholar'5— the timeless scholar, unlimited by nationality— and turn to matters
"of nearer reference to the time and to this country." Even then he was
mainly concerned with the characteristics of the age, and, in spite of his
renunciation of what he called "the romantic/' he saw them for the most
part in terms of European Romanticism. Only in his final paragraph did1
he get round to what he had to say of his own country. He was no narrow-
minded nationalist.

At dinner in commons, after the program in the meetinghouse, Oliver
Wendell Holmes enlivened the occasion with a song, and there were
"witty toasts and speeches from all parts of the Hall.55 A certain Warren
from Plymouth, having evidently understood the importance of the orator's
brief allusion to the jme soul back of every individual, gave a toast that
pleased Emerson. "Mr. "President," he said, "I suppose all know where the
orator comes from; and I suppose all know what he has said; I give you

266 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Spirit of Concord; it makes us all of One Mind" Governor Edward
Everett, after replying to a toast In his own honor, heaped flattery upon
the Phi Beta Kappa orator and delivered a little eulogy of the late Edward
and Charles Emerson, both high honor students during their years at the
college.

Waldo Emerson and Lidian returned to Concord with Margaret Fuller
and, presumably, other company. A festive spirit must already have per-
vaded Coolidge Castle, where, on the following day, fourteen members of
the Transcendental Club gathered for an all-day party, with Margaret
Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar, Sarah Alden Ripley, and doubtless Lidian Emerson
admitted into the inner circle pro tempore. The Transcendentalists, it ap-
peared, required as much space and as great a variety of substantial foods
as even devotees of Locke's sensual philosophy could have reasonably de-
manded. "They filled every seat at a table the whole length of the dining-
room" ; and Lidian fed them, as she put it, "beef ... a noble great piece
for the Spiritualists— (with which mine husband was especially pleased) —a
boild leg of mutton with caper sauce and for side dishes ham and tongue
. . . corn—beans tomatoes macaroni cucumbers lettuce & applesauce and
. . . puddings . . ." An "array of soft custards graced the board," and
there were "pears raisins & nuts for dessert." What the fourteen had to
say about the Phi Beta Kappa oration Lidian did not record, but she left
no doubt about her own views. Though she disagreed with the opinion that
the audience had looked "particularly edified," she was so certain that the
orator's words had been "God's truth— fitly spoken" that she would "have
cared little— but for their own sakes— if the hearers generally had hissed
the speech."

Within a month a first printing of five hundred copies of An Oration,
later to be known as The American Scholar, was sold out, and Emerson
was more in the public eye than he had ever been before. It was doubtless
partly for rest that he deserted his study. He rested by doing some farm-
ing and gardening. But visitors, as Lidian explained to her sister, also
"prevented Mr. E from resuming his old studious ways." When at last he
was "full of zeal to begin writing either a book or a course of lectures"
—he had "not yet decided which"— Lidian' s preference for lectures may
have affected his decision in their favor. It would, however, have been
difficult for him to remain in retirement now that he had got a reputation
as an orator. By April of 1838, when the ten lectures of his Boston course
were over. Concord needed his help in championing the cause of the Chero-
kee Indians, then being pushed out of Georgia and across the Mississippi
in accordance with what the government called a treaty. At the town's
meeting of protest he spoke, "very unwillingly," as his wife said, "preferring

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 267

individual action." This propagandizing by mass demonstration was, as
he put it, "like dead cats around one's neck," but it was one of the "holy
hurrahs" that he could not escape. In spite of his strong feeling about the
mistreatment of the Indians, it was hardly less distasteful for him to write
his individual protest to President Van Buren in an indignant letter dated
the day after the meeting and soon broadcast to the nation by the news-
papers. This too was an act done for an occasion and therefore not quite
his own. "I hate myself when I go out of my sphere," he told John Pier-
pont, "but a man must have bowels sometimes . . ." He could play the
role of the happy warrior only when his act grew naturally out of his own
past experience and thought, as did the divinity school address of the fol-
lowing summer.

He had unwittingly begun to write the divinity school address years
before he was invited to deliver it. Three years before he delivered it he
had gone back to Divinity Hall at Harvard and had witnessed "the best
performance" with a heavy heart. A little later he had tried to list the
defects of Jesus— no cheerfulness, no love of natural science, no kindness
for art, nothing of Socrates, of Laplace, of Shakespeare. A perfect man
ought to recognize the intellectual nature as well as the moral. "Do you
ask me," Emerson had written in his journal, "if I would rather resemble
Jesus than any other man? If I should say Yes, I should suspect myself of
superstition." He had nevertheless continued to preach irregularly through
most of 1837. Then his pace had slackened and he had nearly stopped
early the following year. Meantime he had been visibly wearying of church-
going and other conventional religious acts. After attending church one
Sunday in March of 1838, he had been all but ready to say that he would
go no more. "I ought to sit and think," he had said to himself, "and then
write a discourse to the American Clergy, showing them the ugliness and
unprofitableness of theology and churches at this day, and the glory and
sweetness of the moral nature out of whose pale they are almost wholly
shut." But he could hardly have suspected how near he was to carrying
out this half -formed purpose.

Three days later he received a letter from several persons who spoke
for what they somewhat pompously called the "Senior Class of Divinity
College Cambridge." They asked him to deliver "the customary discourse,
on occasion of their entering upon the active Christian ministry." The
graduating class numbered only about half a dozen young men; but the
occasion offered him a platform from which he could speak to Unitarian
ministers, if not laymen, everywhere. At the Phi Beta Kappa anniversary
he had bearded the scholars in their own stronghold. Now he could come
to grips with the preachers in theirs.

268 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

His formal acceptance written on the syth of March revealed nothing
about his intentions. But as he was called to Cambridge soon afterwards
for a discussion of theism with "The Divinity School youths" and may
have seen more of them before July 15, there is room for doubt as to how
ignorant they were of the nature of his discourse when he began to read
it to them on that day. Anyhow students of theological schools of the more
liberal sort seem to have been able to take a generous dose of radicalism
without flinching, though the ministry, having to beware of offending lay-
men of more conservative opinion, could easily be alarmed.

The little chapel on the second floor of Divinity Hall had been altered
some seven years earlier so that the pulpit no longer stood awkwardly
against the windowed wall and faced an auditorium about twice as wide
as it was deep. Instead, the pulpit was now at the north end and the
speaker might easily command the attention of the hundred or so listeners
who could find seats. The room "was very much crowded" and the audience
paid "profound attention'5 as Emerson spoke.

! He began with a soothing description of the charm of nature in "this
refulgent summer." The world was indeed a marvel of perfection. But
when the mind revealed the universal laws, then the great world shrank
at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. The perfection of
these laws suggested that only one will, one mind, was everywhere active.
This was the supreme law, and the perception of it awakened in the in-
dividual the religious sentiment, divine and deifying. This sentiment, though
it created all forms of worship, was an intuition only and could not be
received at second hand. Jesus understood the intuitive faculty of man and
the divine and deifying religious sentiment in which it resulted. In the
jubilee of sublime emotion he said, "I am divine. Through me, God acts;
through rne, speaks.53 But his doctrine was distorted by the understanding
of men, it being only to be taught by the reason. The understanding, man's
lesser faculty, caught the high chant from the lips of the poet Jesus and
said after a lapse of time, "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven.
I will kill you, if you say he was a man." Christianity became a myth.

Thus historical Christianity, Emerson went on to explain, became not
the doctrine of the soul but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive,
the ritual. "It has dwelt, it dwells," he said, "with noxious exaggeration
about the person of Jesus." The soul knew no personal preference and
invited every man to expand to full circle. But Christianity had built up
an absolute monarchy, and Jesus had become a demigod like Osiris or
Apollo. This was intolerable. It would be vain, however, Emerson cau-
tioned, to attempt to establish a new cult, with rites and forms. Better
breathe new life into the old. Yet the only real remedy was to dare to love

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTR1> ONESELF 269

God without mediator and to cleave to the spiritual, rejecting the formal
religion.

Elizabeth Peabody long afterward believed she remembered seeing in
the manuscript a passage that "would have saved many a weak brother
and sister Transcendentalist from going into the extreme of ego-theism"
had Emerson not omitted it in reading for lack of time and had he not
later refused to print it because he had not read it and did not want to
be unfair to the critics who were talking about the spoken address. "It was
a warning/' she said, "against making the new truth a fanaticism." But as
her memory often deceived her in old age the omitted passage may have
been imaginary.

In July of 1838 she and the rest of the elect were, it was said, enrap-
tured. Theodore Parker, having found this address a warrant for a liberal
reform of theology, immediately noted in his diary that Emerson had
"surpassed himself as much as he surpasses others in the general way. . . .
So beautiful, & just, so true ... & this week I shall write the long-medi-
tated sermns. on the state of the church, & the duties of these times." But
in general the most liberal wing of the New England ministry, the Uni-
tarian preachers, were shocked. Dean Palfrey of the theological school was
said to be much hurt.

Some of the more intellectual college boys, such as James Russell Lowell
and his circle, began by ridiculing the address but gradually swung round
to a favorable view of it. Nathan Hale, Jr., was glad he had not heard it,
but he had heard enough about it and wanted to kick every one of the
divinities he saw, as he thought it insulting in them to choose Emerson for
their orator. Lowell, watching from his Concord retreat, pitied persons who
pinned themselves to Emerson's coat tails and were so blinded by the dust
that they thought they had got above this poor little earth; and in his
verses intended for the commencement week festivities he prophesied woe
to religion when a man who had the title of Reverend preached what an
atheist like Abner Kneeland would have been proud to emulate and what,
by Judge Thacher's standards, would doom the offender to the county jail.
But when his friend George Loring cautioned him against prejudice and
a too hasty judgment, Lowell himself began to feel uncertain. Loring pres-
ently reported that for his own part he had begun to read Emerson and
liked him.

The members of the class in divinity that had stirred up this storm of
controversy hesitated but finally decided to print, not publish, three hun-
dred copies of the address. Emerson probably made some insignificant
changes in the manuscript or proof sheets. To an admonition from Henry
Ware, Jr., now of the divinity faculty but once his colleague at the Second

270 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Church, he replied that as his conviction of the substantial truth of the
doctrine he had expressed was perfect he felt it very important that it be
spoken out; yet he would "revise with greater care" before he published.

For the most part Emerson's family stood on his side at this crisis.
Even one of the two preachers among them was more friendly than crit-
ical. Uncle Samuel Ripley, fearing that his nephew would be "classed with
Kneeland, Paine &c, bespattered & belied/' pleaded with him not to allow
the offending discourse to go to press, but, once it was printed, urged him
to come to Waltham and speak from Ripley's own pulpit. Though Grand-
father Ripley, the venerable Concord pastor, was "a good deal disturbed
at Waldo's sentiments" and considered his example ua hindrance to the
progress of professed religion in Concord/5 Uncle Samuel? even if he did
not pretend to understand everything in the address, declared his entire
sympathy with Emerson and was obviously delighted to see him stand "firm
and unmoved/' no more minding what was said of him "than he does the
whistling of the wind." And though Aunt Mary was long afterwards to
recall the "lecture to the diy school" as a thing ccw'h should be oblivion's,
as under the influence of some malign demon/5 William Emerson, in New
York, was "no way shocked at your heresies/' so he told his brother, Lidian
was as loyal to her husband's views as she had been at the time of the
Phi Beta Kappa address, "But you want to know/' she wrote to her sister,
"how much of a cloud these mists of prejudice have formed over his light-
Why, none at all. I do not know that he has felt a moment's uneasiness
on his own account . . . For my own part I sympathize with his calmness
entirely. If I am moved at all it is only with joy at his having had the
moral courage to encounter so much obloquy. . . . Were I but worthy
of him— neither sickness or care would prevent my being one of the hap-
piest of women."

Emerson himself felt that his aloofness, his position as "merely an ob-
server, a dispassionate reporter," not a partisan, would guarantee him the
scholar's perfect freedom. "The young people/3 he observed, "and the
mature hint at odium, and aversion of faces to be presently encountered
in society. I say, No: I fear it not. No scholar need fear it."

The controversy raged for some time in the press., and the name of
Abner Kneeland, the "blasphemer/5 was again linked with Emerson's,
Perhaps Emerson, no atheist, was known as a signer, with Doctor Chan-
ning and other tolerant persons, of the petition asking pardon for Knee-
land. He acknowledged the polemical skill of his former teacher Andrews
Norton, "the old tyrant of the Cambridge Parnassus/" but thought him an
illustration of the low state of religion. Henry Ware, Jr., went far toward
exonerating the divinity teachers and students from any blame for Tran-

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 271

scendental heresy by preaching a sermon, The Personality of the Deity,
and publishing it "at the Request of the Members of the Divinity School"
Ware sent a copy of this to Emereon with a letter, hopeful of prodding him
into an argument. Emerson labored over a private reply, carefully groom-
ing and canceling phrases. But the gist of it all was that he simply refused,
as usual, to argue. Instead he merely reaffirmed his long-time loyalty to
his own highly individualistic and intuitional method of truth-hunting.

Of the religious reviews, the most friendly were only lukewarm in his
support. The Western Messenger, a Unitarian and, in the main, Tran-
scendental magazine published in the Ohio Valley, was a wavering ally
but did not want to desert him till it became clearer just what the war was
about. The Boston Quarterly Review, Orestes Brownson's new and vigorous
journal, thought the address "somewhat arrogant" and reproved its spirit
as "quite too censorious and desponding, its philosophy as indigested, and
its reasoning as inconclusive," but contended that the large amount of
error in it could be dismissed, while the good it did would live after it.
The influence of Emerson's "free spirit, and free utterance" would, said
Brownson's review, have a lasting effect on American literature.

There were powerful enemies who were ready with decisive condemna-
tion. In November The Christian Examiner, the chief Unitarian periodical,
assured the public that the notions advanced in the address, "so far as they
are intelligible, are utterly distasteful to the instructers of the School, and
to Unitarian ministers generally, by whom they are esteemed to be neither
good divinity nor good sense" and passed on disdainfully to praise Ware's
rejoinder in The Personality of the Deity. An extremely conservative Pres-
byterian journal, The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, discoursed
long and by no means unlearnedly upon the German philosophy, its evil
works and its Oriental connections; dismissed Cousin, the French adapter
of that philosophy, as superficial and conceited to the last degree; and
finally passed on to a brief denunciation of the "nonsense and impiety"
of Emerson's address. The address was "obviously in imitation of Thomas
Carlyle" though based on principles like those of Cousin. Nothing of it
was from the Bible. The author was clearly "an infidel and an atheist."

A pamphlet war followed before the excitement died down. Andrews
Norton, "the hard-headed Unitarian Pope" whose St. Peter's was once little
Divinity Hall, had announced at his inaugural, twenty years earlier that
"our religious faith rests for its main support on what we believe the dec-
larations of God, communicated by Jesus Christ"; and he had not changed
his mind. Now he printed an address delivered "at the Request of the
'Association of the Alumni of the Cambridge Theological School* J3 under
the suggestive title of A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity. If this

272 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

was not a frontal attack on the Transcendentalism, it was at least a de-
termined attempt to cut the German ground out from under their feet.
Answers naturally came thick and fast on behalf of the New School. George
Ripley wrote a long one that betrayed surprising bitterness but came near
achieving his purpose of crushing Norton under the weight of German
learning. He was in high spirits about the business.

Aunt Mary, who sided with Norton, reported that her nephew said
nothing about the controversy. He knew that the usour faces55 of which he
wrote in his journal were not merely imaginary. "The whole band of clergy-
men/3 so Samuel Ripley commented on the plight of his nephew, "have
raised their voice against him, with a very few exceptions; and the common
people, even women, look solemn and sad, and roll up their eyes . . . 'Oh,
he is a dangerous man; the church is in danger; Unitarianism is disgraced;
the party is broken up3 . . ." Doubtless many strictly conservative Boston
families, like one Convers Francis knew, were taught "to abhor & abominate
R. W. Emerson as a sort of mad dog." But neither the sourness of Boston
conservatives nor the dislike of the divinity faculty or of the clergy in
general caused Emerson great distress. "The taunts and cries of hatred and
anger, the very epithets you bestow on me/5 he could imagine himself say-
ing, "axe so familiar long ago in my reading that they sound to me
ridiculously old and stale. . . . I3 whilst I see this, that you must have
been shocked and must cry out at what I have said, I see too that we
cannot easily be reconciled, for I have a great deal more to say that will
shock you out of all patience." He seems to have turned the matter over
calmly in his mind, warning himself against acquiring a persecution complex.

If, as seems probable, his poem "Uriel," apparently not written till
some years after the event, was a sublimation of the crisis caused by the
divinity address, it exaggerated the reality as poetic license entitled it to
do. Perhaps Emerson, not without a sense of humor, was touching up
Horace Mann's portrait of him as "a man stationed in the sun/3 for he
quite possibly knew that portrait.

He seemed, in his poem, to become Milton's sharp-sighted archangel
Uriel, looking out over the universe from his vantage point in the sun,
seeing the true motions of the planets, and understanding the laws that
remained obscure to observers standing on the earth. The young deities
overheard discussing witat subsisted and what only seemed might have been
the audacious young members of the Transcendental Club, and Uriel's
speech that caused a shudder round the sky was perhaps a poetic version
of the divinity school address. Well informed readers may have guessed the
identity of the actors who shook their heads behind the masks of the. old
war gods, and of those who played the parts of the friendlier seraphs frown-

THIS AGE, THIS COUNTRY, ONESELF 273

ing from myrtle beds. Uriel's depressing eclipse may have resembled what
the author of the divinity address had at first mistakenly expected to
experience.

A sad self-knowledge,, withering, fell

On the beauty of Uriel;

In heaven once eminent, the god

Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud;

Whether doomed to long gyration

In the sea of generation,

Or by knowledge grown too bright

To hit the nerve of feebler sight. . . .

And Emerson felt something of the archangel's defiant mood, though he
was not bellicose and though his severest indictments of the orthodox were
not uttered in a "voice of cherub scorn."

As Hedge remembered in his declining years, he heard Emerson read
the poem aloud long before its publication and got the idea that it was to
be interpreted ironically, the archangel typifying the radical vagaries of the
day. It seems more likely that Emerson was really dramatizing himself in
that character, but with some subtle irony.

The only Emerson who suffered serious eclipse after the divinity address
was Emerson the preacher. He preached twice on Wednesday, August 15,
at Watertown, and on two Sundays in the following January at Concord.
According to his own carefully kept record, his sermon at Concord on
January 20, 1839, was his last. He had narrowed down his profession to
that of author and lecturer; but for some time he published nothing more
that reached, then or later, so many readers as the Phi Beta Kappa oration
and the divinity address had. His oration at Dartmouth College, read some
days after he had stirred up the hornet's nest at Cambridge, was published
in September. It was on the subject of literary ethics, was a poor relation
of the Phi Beta Kappa oration of the year before, caused hardly a ripple
of excitement, and was promptly forgotten by all but a few. In February,
April, and July of 1839 The Western Messenger, edited by Emerson's friend
James Freeman Clarke, published new and old verses called "Each in All/5
"To the Humble-bee,53 "Good-bye, Proud World!5' and "The Rhodora."

Meantime, however, a few weeks before the resounding Phi Beta Kappa
oration had been spoken, Emerson had done his part for a local patriotic
celebration by contributing a few stanzas that could be set to familiar
music. The famous fight with the redcoats had taken place almost under
the shadow of Concord's manse, an Emerson family home. Grandfather
Ripley, now the master of house and land, had given the town a slice of

274 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

his little field on condition that the grant should be fenced with heavy stone
and that a monument commemorating April 19, 1775, should be erected
on the ground by July 4, 1837. The cornerstone was laid late in 1836, but
the monument, though it bore that date, was not dedicated till the follow-
ing Fourth of July. On the afternoon of that day a "great concourse of
people" assembled beside the shaft to hear prayers from their pastors and
an address by their congressman, Samuel Hoar. But when the original
hymn by a "citizen of Concord" was read by Ripley and "beautifully sung"
by a choir to the tune of Old Hundred, the author was not there to hear,
being absent on a visit to Plymouth.

The "assembled multitude" was "highly gratified and deeply impressed"
by the day's exercises and may have approved the local paper's judgment
that the hymn spoke for itself and that it at once excited ideas of originality,
poetic genius, and judicious adaptation; but probably few persons clearly
perceived at the moment the fitness and the assured vitality of the simple
phrases packed into the first stanza:

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 "Concord Hymn," as it was later called, was at once taken up by the
newspapers, though it was some thirty-eight years before its opening lines
were cut in stone on the farther side of the river.

But though it was to become a part of the American tradition and
deserved immortality, the "Concord Hymn" offered Emerson no pattern
for his future verse. The not very new pieces he published in The Western
Messenger of 1839 showed, however, more subtlety of perception and a
more indirect and a freer style than he had used in early years. There were
also other signs that he was escaping completely from the conventional
themes and rhythms that he had practiced during his youthful apprentice-
ship. By 1839 he was insisting on a theory of poetic liberty. He wanted
"not tinkling rhyme, but grand Pindaric strokes" and "such rhymes as shall
not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom."

Yet in spite of his belief that a single stanza of poetry could outweigh
a book of prose, his progress as a poet was necessarily impeded by his too
great occupation with prose. He continued to write poetic prose and, as
it turned out, was often called upon to act as critic and editor of mis-
cellaneous amateur writers.

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS

Was unterscheidet (What distinguishes

Gotter von Menschenr . . . Gods from us men? . . •

Ein kleiner Ring A narrow circle

Begranzt unser Leben, • Contains our life,

Und viele Geschlechter And our generations

Reihen sich dauernd Are helplessly fastened,

An ihres Daseyns As so many links,

Unendliche Kette. In the great chain of being.)

—Goethe, "Granzen der Menschheit"

Edel sey der Mensch . . . (Man should aim high . . .

Nur allein der Mensch It is only man

Vermag das Unmogliche . . . Can do the impossible . - .)

-Goethe, "Das Gottliche"

IN March of 1835 William Ellery Channing lost a night's sleep over
the rumor that some young men proposed to found a Transcendental
journal. A little more than four years later the same young men, now
members of the Transcendental Club, were talking the journal out of
dream into reality. At a meeting of the club in September, 1839, Theodore
Parker was convinced that the three persons competent to take charge were
Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Frederic Hedge. Presently he narrowed
down his choice to Emerson as editor. Margaret, Hedge, and humbler
spirits, he thought, should be assistants. But Emerson had no intention of
trading his freedom for an editorial chair, and by early November the
election had lighted on Margaret, "George Ripley having promised to
undertake all the business part of it for her."

Margaret meditated a number for the following April, though she pre-
ferred to wait till autumn, "which," said Emerson, 'looks like a century
in such affairs." When she began her appeal for contributors, she discovered
that the solidarity of the Transcendentalists was far from perfect She
leaned heavily on Emerson. He wrote to her in December, "I believe we
all feel much alike in regard to this Journal; we all wish it to be, but do
not wish to be in any way personally responsible for it." Hedge, in what
seemed a perverse mood, reminded her that he himself could once have
been the editor and warned her that though he was as much interested in

275

276 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

the journal as ever, she was not to count on him for any help. He blew
hot and cold. Within a few weeks he frankly confessed that he was afraid
to identify himself publicly with the Transcendentalists lest he be taken for
an atheist in disguise. And he explicitly announced that he did not agree
with the ideas of Emerson and Alcott.

Emerson thought Hedge's view "quite worthless53 but cautioned Mar-
garet that her ill health was a real danger and that she ought not to go
ahead with the journal unless she felt confident of quick improvement.
As she wanted to go ahead, he suggested contributors. Besides more obvious
persons, he named Samuel Gray Ward, Henry Thoreau, Caroline Sturgis,
Sarah Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, and young Ellery Chan-
ning; and, as it turned out, all of them sent in acceptable manuscripts.
He helped George Ripley negotiate with publishers. Confident that the
journal would succeed, he backed up Ripley's demand "that they shd take
all the risk & should give us half the profits/3

He got the promise of a paper from Alcott. He asked Ellery Charming
for verses. He collaborated so extensively with Margaret Fuller on the
introductory address, "The Editors to the Reader," that he wrote only
his own name at its head in his copy of the first volume of the magazine.
The not very dependable firm of Weeks, Jordan, and Company published
The Did, No. i, on the first of July, 1840.

Running through the pages of a copy that Alcott had brought him
from Boston on the day of publication must have seemed to Emerson like
leafing through the family album and the guest book. Besides his intro-
ductory address, modestly commending the infant quarterly to those con-
scious of a new "strong current of thought and feeling," there were two
of his own poems, "To Eva" and "The Problem." "A Short Essay on
Critics," with its classification of members of the literary bench and bar
as subjective, apprehensive, and comprehensive, was signed F. and was
Margaret's. "Notes from the Journal of a Scholar" consisted of scraps that
Emerson had intelligently selected from the notebooks of his brother Charles.
In one of these scraps, perhaps the most poetical thing he ever wrote,
Charles, tentatively exploring the boundaries of the unconscious, identified
himself with others in a manner suggestive of later passages in Melville
and Whitman: "The reason, why Homer is to me like dewy morning, is
because I too lived while Troy was, and sailed in the hollow ships of the
Grecians . . . And Shakspeare in King John does but recall to me myself
in the dress of another age, the sport of new accidents. I, who am Charles,
was sometime Romeo. In Hamlet, I pondered and doubted." "The Last
Farewell" was Emerson's brother Edward's poetical valedictory to life. The
verses called "Sympathy" were by Emerson's young townsman and protege

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 277

Henry Thoreau. So was the not very remarkable prose on Persius. The
"Lines" beginning "Love scatters oil" were by Ellen Tucker and made a
slender column in her memory. The youthful Samuel Gray Ward's love
of art found expression in some verses.

Alcott was here with fifty rather abstruse and not very poetic apothegms,
a first instalment of the "Orphic Sayings" that delighted satirists of The
Dial. Some ideas resembling Emerson's echoed rather hollowly among
abstractions labeled with Roman numerals. "Your first duty is self-culture,
self-exaltation : you may not violate this high trust. . . . Men shall become
Gods. . . . The voice of the private, not popular heart, is alone authentic.
. . . All things are instinct with spirit." Alcott, lacking the power to make
poetry of such ideas, had, as Emerson said, left them "cold vague general-
ities." Yet Emerson himself insisted that they be printed, and soon after
their publication he decided that they were "of great importance to the
Journal inasmuch as otherwise, as far as I have read, there is little that
might not appear in any other journal."

Wearying of the first number, he dreamed of making The Died less
literary in order that economic, political, and other questions of the time
might get some attention. He could not have been surprised when Carlyle
promptly reported that The Dial was too ethereal for him. In the opening
article of the second number Emerson drew heavily upon his recent lecture
on literature. He also printed a first instalment of his own poem "Wood-
notes"; and in a lengthy article called "New Poetry" he introduced the
public to the verses of the dreamy, gentle Ellery Channing. Carlyle, though
he saw improvement over the first Dial, warned that there was still too
much soul. But the Transcendental quality of the magazine remained
strong. Its reputation for intelligibility was not helped by the printing of
"The Sphinx" in the third number. The popular opinion regarding writers
for the periodical was a little later expressed without great exaggeration in
some unfortunately dull satirical verses that the usually vivacious and clever
Oliver Wendell Holmes recited at a Phi Beta Kappa anniversary. Accord-
ing to Holmes, the deluded infants who talked in Dialese addressed the
world as if they had resolved all its mysteries and doubts.

In April of 1841 the fourth number seemed to promise something more
substantial. Robust Theodore Parker dealt with the problem of labor and
not without a glance now and then at reality as understood by the work-
ingman. In his lecture "Man the Reformer," contributed to the same num-
ber, Emerson tried characteristicallv to trace social and economic conflict
to its root in private character, discovering that the greatest of all reforms
would be effected by substituting love for selfishness. To Volume II of
The Did he was a laggard contributor. Aside from a second instalment

278 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of "Woodnotes," there were some minor verses of his and not much prose.
He seems to have helped Ripley transfer The Did from Jordan of the
bankrupt Weeks, Jordan, and Company to Elizabeth Peabody, bookseller
and publisher to the Transcendentalists.

Meantime his boyhood dream of writing a volume of essays had been
realized. On New Year's Day of 1841, it seems, he had sent the manu-
script to the printer. Wishing to acknowledge the debt the book owed to
the Concord woods he thought he might call it Forest Essays but dropped
the first half of that title. Essays was published a little past the middle of
March.

Both literal-minded and too hasty readers might have been saved much
distress if Emerson had explained in a prefatory note that he habitually
looked sympathetically at both sides of his subject though not always in
the same essay. For the benefit of these classes of readers he might also
have said to begin with what he chose to reserve for the tenth essay: "But
lest I should mislead any ... let me remind the reader that I am only
an experimenter. ... I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred;
none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at
my back.33 But the title he had given his book was itself a warning.

A book written by an essayist highly conscious of Plutarch, Montaigne,
and Bacon was apt to be one of almost unlimited freedom. Emerson's
essays, it is true, were not so miscellaneous as theirs. All of his were tied
somehow to the main threads of his philosophy. But their arrangement in
the volume did not often suggest their particular interrelationships. As the
essay on nature was not finished in time to be included, there could be no
trilogy of Over-soul, self, and nature if Emerson considered such a group-
ing. He did not attempt to emulate even the modest degree of orderliness
he had achieved some five years earlier in his "Philosophy of History,"
though a few of the essays were closely related to that course of lectures.

But it may have been his satisfaction with the lectures which caused
him to give the essay on history first place in his new book. History, rather
than nature, now appeared to be the best expositor of the divine mind;
and the essay showed how the divine mind was the chief actor in the
annals of mankind and worked its will through individual selves. This idea
was, in its simplest form, as old as religion. Recently it had got new dignity
from Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history and from Cousin's intro-
duction to the history of philosophy. Emerson knew Cousin's book, and
Cousin had known Hegel himself as well as his published writings. But
Emerson worked out his theory in what was unmistakably his own way
and made it a fit, if very incomplete, introduction to Essays.

Within each essay unity was only partial. Perhaps most passages could

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 279

have been transferred from one paragraph to another or from one essay
to another without harm. Only the sentences were indisputably units, but
they were admirable. Many of them were arrows which Emerson had so
often practiced with that he could drive them into the bull's-eye with con-
summate skill. One such sentence often seemed worth an essay by any
contemporary writer. The ideas were explosive, the diction bold and pic-
turesque. Sometimes there were new words of the author's own coinage,
sometimes obsolete or obsolescent ones that emanated an aura of quaint-
ness. As if to afford still more variety, Emerson would occasionally include
a poetic or Scriptural archaism. But generally his words were undated and
much alive; and on the whole his English was as clear and as strictly cor-
rect as almost any written in England or America.

For a reader who knew Nature and the published addresses and had
a fair acquaintance with the lectures, the leading ideas of the essays already
had a degree of familiarity. But such familiarity only gave the essays the
advantage of being more easily understood and of seeming more credible.
Freshness of phrase, generous illustrations of the meaning, and added polish
of form made them superior to the lectures. They were a new imaginative
creation; and this was true in spite of the fact that every idea of Emerson's,
as of any other poet, had close relations with what had been said by some
earlier thinker.

Emerson was able to compress his thoughts best on subjects about which
he had thought most. "Self-reliance/5 the essay that had been longest in
his mind, bristled with challenging epigrams: "To believe your own thought,
to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,
—that is genius. ... In every work of genius we recognize our own re-
jected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
. . . Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. . . . Society
everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its mem-
bers. . . . Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. . . .Nothing
is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. ... I do not wish
to expiate, but to live. ... A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds . . . An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man . . ,
Travelling is a fool's paradise. . . . Insist on yourself; never imitate. . . .
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the
other. . . . Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. . . . The
civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. ... A
political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of
your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and
you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can
bring you peace but yourself."

s8o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

In some respects "Self-reliance," expounding the key doctrine of Tran-
scendentalism, was one of the most untranscendental of the essays. Its theme
was very old. "All that depends on another gives pain; all that depends on
himself gives pleasure . . ." said the ancient Hindu law. In ancient Europe
the same doctrine had been taught by others than the Stoics. In sixteenth-
century France, Montaigne had been sure that "though we could become
learned by other Mens Reading," yet "a Man can never be wise but by
his own Wisdom/5 In England the poetic glorification of the individual
had risen to a climax at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Ger-
many one found it in Goethe's "Prometheus" and in his much more sober
doctrine of self-culture. Pioneer life in the New World had insistently taught
self-reliance of the practical sort of which Franklin, with his own notable
stock of epigrams, was a favorite apostle. The author of Essays himself had
collected numerous scraps of folk wisdom on the subject. Doubtless many
a practical-minded reader got happily through "Self-reliance" without being
much perturbed by more than a few surprising paradoxes and bold plunges
beneath the surface of common sense. That was pretty obviously what
Emerson wanted to happen. Some weeks before publication he betrayed
his impatient desire to avoid overrefinement in this essay when he com-
mented, "My page about 'Consistency' would be better written thus: Damn
Consistency!35 As in his address on the American scholar, he was determined
to speak to a large audience and was loath to explain a mystery because
"all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition."

But characteristic intuitive, idealistic, mystical doctrine, though he had
almost hidden it, was really an indispensable part of "Self-reliance." For
the initiated, he made it clear that the foundation of the self -trust he was
teaching was an aboriginal Self. The "ultimate fact" was "the resolution
of all into the ever-blessed ONE." It was as if the essayist had suddenly
left the world of the Boston Daily Advertiser and the New York Journal
of Commerce and got lost in conversation with a friendly circle of Neo-
platonists on the left bank of the ancient Tiber or were seated beside the
Ganges with some swarthy yogi who had fortunately escaped from the
deadly formalism and superstition of the Brahmans.

"Compensation" was harder than "Self-reliance" to fit into a practical-
minded man's reading. But it was understandable to the most unimaginative
as an attempt to refute the doctrine, then, as Emerson believed, commonly
taught in churches, "that judgment is not executed in this world; that the
wicked are successful; that the good are miserable." After all, what think-
ing man could really make sense of the theory that God remained all but
dead to the present world but came alive, both omnipotent and just, the
moment the curtain was rung down on it? To Emerson himself "Com-

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 281

pensation" had important personal significance. As his struggle in early life
for self -trust was finally rounded out by his essay "Self-reliance/3 so his
incessant endeavor to adjust himself to the tragedy of his own losses came
to a fitting climax in " Compensation."

His long record of bufferings by death and disease seemed to make him
immune to the taunt that he was a mere dreamer filled with the easy elo-
quence of ignorance. Certainly he was not deceived about the magnitude
of the problem he was attacking in the essay and did not expect complete
success. He only hoped "to record some facts that indicate the path of the
law of Compensation; happy beyond my expectation if I shall truly draw
the smallest arc of this circle." Probably many of his readers condemned
him too hastily because they failed to understand how limited his objectives
were. He was not attempting to deny evil. He was attempting., at the most}
only to balance good and evil and expected the result of any such balance
to be not perfection but justice.

He did not succeed any -better than he had expected. It was good sense
but not convincing argument to cite polarity in every part of nature—dark-
ness and light, heat and cold, the ebb and flow of waters, male and female.
One might agree that for every grain of wit there was a grain of folly and
yet be skeptical when the proposition was reversed. It was easy to show
that the haves were going to lose something but not so easy to prove that
the havenots were going to get their share. In the end the mystery of
suffering and of evil remained about as Job had left it when he confessed
that there were "things too wonderful for me, which I knew not." Probably
the final appeal that Emerson addressed to his practical-minded reader was
the one he himself felt most keenly: "We cannot stay amid the ruins."
And in that he was right. No man kept on living without faith and hope
however much he might profess himself a complete pessimist. The pro-
fessed pessimist, Emerson might have defended himself, was a sentimentalist,
luxuriating in a feeling which he had no intention of matching with action.
But as the author of "Compensation" Emerson obviously had his chief
success in fighting a rear-guard engagement. He could do little more than
beat an orderly retreat in the face of overwhelming odds. In "Spiritual
Laws/' the following essay, he soon got onto more tenable ground with his
theory of evil: "All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the
heart unhurt."

"Love" was one of the most pleasing and was the most Platonic of all
the writings of Emerson, lover of Plato. The Phaedrus and the Symposium,
whose exotic homosexual elements were conveniently ignored, together
accounted for essential parts of this essay. But it owed much to the sharp
observations Emerson had made on life. The glorification of the passion of

282 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

love, undertaken with sudden access of fervor such as Socrates himself
experienced when he had fully made up his mind to do justice to this fit
subject for a philosopher-poet, was followed by a sublimation of physical
passion into spirituaD Emerson climbed, with Plato's Socrates, the ladder
of love, asserting that by physical love we are "put in training for a love
which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue
and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom."

"Friendship" also had some relation to Emerson's reading but had
firmer roots in his experience and in the favorite ideas nurtured through
many years in his journals. If Emerson looked again into Bacon and Mon-
taigne3 he made no effort to match either the worldly wisdom or the
orderly style of Bacon and laid claim to no such success in the art of friend-
ship as Montaigne had had, but must have seen that he could surpass both
writers in the depth and philosophical acumen of his thought. One so
widely acquainted with authors must have heard faint echoes of many
familiar voices as he wrote, voices at least as distant in antiquity as Aris-
totle's, but he had his private resources.' On this subject of friendship he
was a conscious experimenter and observer, as his letters to such friends
as Margaret Fuller, Sam Ward, and Caroline Sturgis showed. Henry
Thoreau was another of the many persons who helped prepare him. But
in spite of any aid he got from either friends or books the essay was very
much his pwn. "Friendship31 proved to be a new chapter on his old theme
of self-reliance.

The glow of enthusiasm with which he began the essay soon faded.
He seemed to think of only the kind of friendship in which, according to
Montaigne's caution, one should walk with bridle in hand and with pru-
dence and circumspection. He came near to agreeing with the classical
admonition Montaigne had quoted, fcO my Friends, there is no Friend."
If Emerson's genuine friend existed, he was an epitome of the virtue of
self-reliance. "Let me be alone to the end of the world/3 Emerson put it,
"rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real
sympathy. . , . Let him not cease an instant to be himself.53 He had to
admit in the end that he had seemed to do a kind of treachery to his
subject, for "The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity
and trust.55 Yet when he warned his friend, "Unhand me: I will be de-
pendent no more,33 he was trying to prepare the way for a reunion on a
higher platform. He was like the Stoics in limiting friendship to the wise
and good. Whether those he admitted into his select company were friends
or merely a select company remained, on his own showing in "Friendship/*
doubtful.

"Prudence," "Heroism/3 and "The Over-soul55 made a disparate trio.

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS

In "Prudence," an essay on "the virtue of the senses" or "the art of
securing a present well-being," Emerson came nearest to by-passing his
high doctrines but discovered in the end that all the other virtues were
friendly to prudence. In "Heroism" he expounded self-reliance only thinly
disguised. In "The Over-soul" the self-reliant mood of the most highly
individualized self appeared once more in its true light. So far as the
individual's relation to the divine mind was concerned, self-reliance was
shown to be something akin to wise passiveness. The soul rested in the arms
of Unity, or the Over-soul, as the earth rested in the arms of the soft
atmosphere. From this surrounding presence the soul received light, truth;
and of these it somehow became, in turn, the revealer. But Emerson, the
theorizer of mysticism, found the actual revelations of the Over-soul as
incommunicable and indescribable as the practicing mystic usually found
his experiences to be. The windmill of mysticism was a noble one, no mere
grinder of corn, but Emerson broke his lances against it in vain.

"Circles," "Intellect," and "Art" rounded out his book. He pictured
truth under what was for him the absolutely perfect figure of concentric
circles. No_Jaj^&Q~4ruth^ A bigger circle would include the one

just drawn. There would always be a later and broader generalization that
could be made, and it was foolish to hate expanding truth. Closed minds
needed to stand clear of it. They needed to "Beware when the great God
lets loose a thinker on this planet." Once, when he was preparing the
Essays for the press, Emerson dreamed that as he was floating at will in
the ether he saw the world not far "off, "diminished to the size of an
apple"; and that, in obedience to an angel, he ate it. But it is doubtful
whether he ever, in any moment of consciousness, thought of truth as a
thing so definitely limited or so completely attainable. "Intellect" recom-
mended a saving mixture of will and intuition, as well as freedom of thought
and self-reliance. But intuition and passivity were again triumphant. In
the last essay Emerson denied that art was imitation. It was rather inspira-
tion. The Over-soul was at work once more, this time guiding the hand
of the artist. And if there was one universal artist back of all artists, then
all art was akin. The distinction between the fine and the useful arts ought
to be forgotten, Emerson assured his reader as he had assured his audience
in the lecture hall long before.

The first series of Essays completed its author's ruin in some eyes but
made his reputation in others. After reading "Self-reliance," Aunt Mary,
with her fiery temperament only slightly cooled by her sixty-six years, had
a bad night. She wanted to know whether "this strange medly of atheism
and false independence" was "the real sane work of that man whom I
idolised as a boy, so mild, candid modest obliging." If her brother William

284 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOJV

had only lived, she was sure, his son would never have committed these
offenses against Christian decency. She regretted that Waldo Emerson uhad
not gone to the tomb amidst his early honors" instead of living on to be
disgraced by his Essays. She blamed his wife and Sarah Ripley far not
interfering before it was too late to save him. Sarah Ripley appeared to
be the guiltier one, for she had been "one means of early infecting him
with infidelity." Aunt Mary now tried an appeal to Elizabeth Hoar but
feared that Elizabeth's faith had also been shaken. Aunt Mary's world
seemed to be falling away from beneath her feet. But she was still deter-
mined to cling to her old-fashioned faith. "If," she pleaded, "my joys and
hopes are delusive oh wake me not . . ."

The leonine Orestes Brownson, laying his hand on a copy of the Essays,
proclaimed to the patrons of a Boston bookstore that anyone who wished
to know what sound Transcendentalism was should read that book. Brown-
son regarded himself as one of the three profoundest men in America and
was at least capable of recognizing Transcendentalism. Felton, the jolly
Greek professor, belied his reputation for good humor when he reviewed
Essays. "It is idle to argue against these old, but ever-recurring errors/'
he groaned. With his knowledge of literature, he could not fail to see that
this book was written by a master of English and contained "many single
thoughts of dazzling brilliancy; much exquisite writing, and a copious vein
of poetical illustration." But he was certain that the Emersonian doctrine
of self-reliance and intuition, "if acted upon, would overturn society, and
resolve the world into chaos." Edward Everett wrote home from England
that he hoped his nephew and namesake, Edward Everett Hale, would
keep away from Transcendentalism if Emerson's Essays was a sample of
it He found it hard to believe that such a clear thinker and beautiful
writer as he had known Emerson to be a few years earlier could have
printed such conceited and laborious nonsense as this book now introduced
to the British public by Carlyle.

The little London edition of the essays sponsored by Carlyle was not
a complete surprise to the British public. A year before its appearance,
Richard Monckton Milnes had formally introduced Emerson's earlier pub-
lications to its prospective readers. Milnes, a Tory writer described by his
friend Carlyle as a bland-smiling, high-bred, Italianized little man with
long olive-blond hair, had defdy sketched for The London and Westminster
Review the normal well-informed conservative opinion of the American
Transcendentalism Emerson, according to the Westminster article, was a
sort of lesser, transatlantic Carlyle, He wrote in a vigorous and eloquent
style, faithfully represented the idealism that could be detected below the
surface of American life, and announced doctrines that were naturally

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 285

attractive to assertors of democratic principles but failed to pause and con-
sider what a bedlam of egoists would be turned loose on the world "if this
indiscriminate self-reliance was generally adopted as the sole regulating
principle of life.33 Presumably this Emerson of Milnes's was approximately
what many Britons expected to find when they picked up the Essays in
the bookshops.

Carlyle did much in his lengthy but restrained preface to the English
edition to attract intellectuals and frighten others away. This first English
edition quickly made what he called an appropriate sensation, and there
were many reviews, striking all notes, he reported. He himself felt that
Emerson had strained not quite successfully to catch the universe in his
net. Harriet Martineau wrote to America to prophesy a thousand years of
life for the book. Britons wanted enough copies of it to make it profitable
for a piratical British publisher to reprint the volume within two or three
years. Milnes was so well pleased with it that he was anxious to get back
into critical harness for the sake of the American author. John Sterling
wrote Emerson that in Britain, where the social prestige of church orthodoxy
was powerful, there were probably not a hundred persons outside London
who could appreciate the essays; but for his own part he was delighted.
"You are/5 he said, "the only man in the world with whom, though unseen,
I feel any sort of nearness . . ." Recommending the essays to Caroline
Fox, he advised her "to devote three months entirely to the study of this
one little volume."

Emerson resolved that "I shall one day write something better than
those poor cramp arid 'Essays5 which I almost hate the sight of." And if
he got little pleasure from -the volume, he got quite as little financial return
from it. In order to bolster up his finances he would have to get a high
interest on his money investments or continue the lecturing from which
he had got brief respite.

His lyceum itineraries had burst their tightly circumscribed bounds in
1840 when he had carried his lectures out of New England for the first
time to read three of them at the Mercantile Library in New York. But
he had made the long journey unwillingly. Lonesome, even at the home
of his brother on Staten Island, he had comforted himself with the marine
spectacle at the Narrows more than with the table talk of such persons as
his kinsman Orville Dewey, a minister, and the poet and editor Bryant,
doubtless full of politics in that year of a Presidential election. On his way
home he had managed, with his half dozen lectures at Providence, to stir
up local curiosity about Transcendentalism. The deeply religious Charles
King Newcomb, "a slight, dark young man, with a hesitant manner and
a nervous laugh35 and "a heavy mass of tangled dark hair which was always

286 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

slipping over his eyes and being flipped back with an impatient gesture/'
had seemed to be almost ready to declare himself a discipk. But the lec-
turer had disappointed "all the young persons" by failing to devote an
evening to a forthright exposition of the new doctrines. Each day it had
been expected that he would break out with the New Light in the next dis-
couise. He had been glad to retreat toward Concord, congratulating him-
self on the $300 he had earned during his travels, but had learned on
passing through Boston that he would lose over $200 because of the failure
of the Atlantic Bank to pay its dividend.

In the summer of 1841, with his new book well out of the way, he tried
halfheartedly to prepare an oration for a college commencement while he
contemplated the sea at Nantasket Beach. He had earned his vacation, and
Nantasket, then unspoiled, was the right place for it. He loved "this vast-
ness & roar-the rubbing of the sea on the land so ancient & pleasant a
sound " and "the color & the curve" of the ocean. He had pleasant mem-
ories of Malta and Sicily and his other Mediterranean experiences. But the
oration, "The Method of Nature/' did not prosper. The dreamy mood of
Nantasket that had got into -it could hardly appeal to the students and
their friends who celebrated their academic festival that August at the little
backwoods town of Waterville in Maine. According to the local newspaper,
an honest farmer probably expressed the opinion of the generality when
he remarked, "It is quite likely that the oration contained a great deal of
science; but even if it did not, no one could know the fact."

The City Bank failing to pay a dividend in the autumn of 1841, Emer-
son was forced to prepare manuscripts for another series of winter evenings
at the Masonic Temple. Of his eight lectures "On the Times," it was
doubtless "The Transcendentalist," the manifesto his Providence audience
had expected in vain, that aroused the greatest interest in Boston. Though
he denied that there was a Transcendental party or even a single pure
<Transcendentalistj he found Transcendentalism real enough. It was, as he
Described it, a slightly more than moderate idealism and strong intuition-
ialism running, in its extreme form, into mystical ecstasy. Though it might
be a saturnalia of faith, it was really excessive only because its devotees
failed, through imperfect obedience, to live up to it. Even the strong among
them were dissatisfied with their experience, but they kept on their way
unperturbed by ridicule. If they were rank individualists and too solitary
to be good members of society, it might still appear that society owed much
to them. So Emerson explained the newness and its apostles to the Bos-
tonians, as objectively as he could. Afterwards he warned Aunt Mary not
to make more of his role in the lecture than that of mere observer. He had
been only a biographer, he told her., "describing a class of young persons

THE DIAL AND THE ESS ATS 287

whom I have seen— I hope it is not confession and that, past all hope, I
am confounded with my compassionated heroes & heroines/9 And yet, in
spite of his characteristic effort to keep his individuality intact, his account
of the composite Transcendentalist was a picture in which his own features
were not missing.

The financial results of his course were not encouraging in this year
when he was compelled, as often, to look narrowly at his finances. Though
he had once received an average of $57, he now had but $40 a lecture.
His Boston market was slipping. He repeated five of the eight lectures at
Providence but "found a small company & a trivial reward." He was forced
to look again in the direction of New York, where he spent the first weeks
of March, 1842, repeating a selected half dozen of the Boston lectures. He
had a friendly enough reception there. Though The Evening Post, William
Cullen Bryant's paper, complained of some incoherence in his thought, it
declared that "More than almost any other public speaker, he makes an
intelligent hearer think for himself." William Emerson saw that his brother
had "produced a marked sensation in the best part of our community"
and had won "many lovers & admirers." Yet the lecturer was earning only
some $200 above expenses.

But, fortunately, at New York he was receiving other pay than money.
As an observer of the full tide of life in the crowded metropolis he was
learning timely lessons. Here the reformers daunted him with their precise
and determined plans for saving the world. One could not escape the tire-
less enthusiasms of men like the tall, pale-haired Horace Greeley, the New
Hampshire and Vermont farm boy who had arrived in the city some ten
years before as a youthful journeyman printer dressed in comical garb but
was now the editor of his own papei, the successful New-York Daily
Tribune. Greeley loved the tingling life of the great town and knew the
poverty and distress of its unclean masses. He was a born reformer, and
at the moment he was full of the doctrine of Fourier. Fourier's principle
of attractive industry was declared to be comparable in the social realm to
the law of gravitation in the physical world. Men could be brought together
in communities where they could forget their old inhibitions and find their
proper emotional and cultural development and their proper destiny. Fourier
was a pre-Freudian psychoanalyst of parts. Albert Brisbane, the chief Amer-
ican expounder of this new gospel that he had brought back from Europe,
later struck Henry Thoreau as looking like a man who had lived in a cellar,
far gone in consumption. But he was really a person of great force. He
had digested the contents of his master Fourier's works and offered them
to the public in a book called Social Destiny of Man. And now he had
captured Greeley and his Tribune. Emerson had been in town only a few

288 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

days when Brisbane's daily articles on Fourierism began to appear on the
Tribune's front page.

The lecture platform, as well as the press, was a strategic hilltop the
propagandists wanted to seize. But from the moment when Emerson con-
fronted Brisbane and Greeley together at their Graham boarding house he
knew that he could not satisfy them. "They are bent on popular action:
I am in all my theory, ethics, & politics a poet and of no more use in their
New York than a rainbow or a firefly," he wrote home. Greeley compli-
cated matters by declaring himself a fellow Transcendentalism Emerson had
hardly got lodged in the Globe Hotel before Brisbane was there with the
first full instalment of his plea for the new system. "He wishes me," Emer-
son reported to Lidian, " 'with all my party,5 to come in directly & join
him. What palaces! What concerts! What pictures lectures poetry & flow-
ers. Constantinople it seems Fourier showed was the natural capital of
the World., & when the Earth is planted & gardened & templed all over
with 'Groups' & 'Communities' each of 2000 men & 6000 acres, Con-
stantinople is to be the metropolis & we poets & Miscellaneous transcendental
persons who are too great for your Concords & New Yorks will gravitate
to that point for music & architecture & society such as wit cannot paint
nowadays."

Emerson also found in Manhattan a few acquaintances very different
from Greeley and Brisbane. He discovered one "William Greene a devout
man who seems to read nothing but Boehmen & Madame Guion," and
Greene took him to see "a devout woman, Mrs Black, of the same stamp."
Both mystics were simple, unpretentious souls. Rebecca Black made her
living by slopwork for the tailors. Henry James, "a very manlike thorough
seeing person," then a rebel against Calvinism drifting toward Sweden-
borgianism, came to Emerson's hotel for a visit, and so began a friendship
that lasted many years. Emerson thought him "the best apple on the tree
thus far." In James's home he saw The Did lying on the table, and in
the nursery he may have seen the two-months-old son, William. Possibly,
as tradition has it, Emerson climbed the stairs to give his blessing to the
infant philosopher. But whether or not William James received the bless-
ing, his Pragmatism doubtless owed something to the incipient Pragmatism
which he found, many years later, in the writings of the Transcendentalism

Lidian's guess that one result of the New York trip would be the addi-
tion of some "very respectable lions" to "the transcendental menagerie"
was, however, not quite accurate. A chief virtue of this experience for
Emerson was that it tested his individualism and love of solitude. The city
itself left him first hot, then cold. The endless crowds made him feel more
keenly the value of his own particular class, but he had his moments of

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 289

enthusiasm. "For a national, for an imperial prosperity, everything here
seems irrevocably destined,55 he told Margaret Fuller. "What a Bay! what
a River! what climate! what men! What ample ample interior domain,
lake mountain & forest! What manners, what histories & poetry shall
rapidly arise & for how long, and, it seems, endless date ! Me my cabin fits
better, yet very likely from a certain poorness of spirit; but in my next
transmigration, I think I should choose New York.55

Events conspired to make the individualist face the sorry problems with
which society was concerned. The Fourierism that confronted him in New-
York was much like the associationisin he had seen at George Ripley's
Brook Farm. In the summer of 1840 there had been some half serious talk
between Emerson and Alcott of founding a sort of informal Transcendental
university, possibly at Concord. George Ripley and Margaret Fuller had
joined the discussion later, it seems. But in the following October, George
and Sophia Ripley, Margaret, and Alcott had met at Emerson's home
to consider plans for the founding of Brook Farm in the Boston suburb
of West Roxbury. The blueprint of Brook Farm had called for not only
an educational establishment but an ideal community where intellectuals
could work a little with their hands and learn a way to escape any share
in the evils of industrialism. But the bare suggestion of anything resembling
a communal scheme had chilled Emerson the individualist. "And," he had
written in his diary, "not once could I be inflamed, but sat aloof and
thoughtless; my voice faltered and fell. ... I do not wish to remove from
my present prison to a prison a little larger.55 After the meeting he had
wanted to keep an open mind and had explained in detail his sympathy
and his objections; but the upshot of the matter was that he decided against
Brook Farm.

Yet by now the general excitement over economic and social reform
had stirred him deeply. He desired at least to experiment with some limited
reform completely under his own control. Nothing came of a plan of his
to receive into his home the needy Alcotts that they might join him and
Lidian in a one-year program of "labor & plain living.55 And the scheme
to have the maid and the cook eat at the Emerson family table quickly-
proved impractical. Louisa, the maid, though she at first accepted it for
the sake of the general social betterment of the household, rejected it when
Lydia, the cook, firmly refused to budge from the kitchen. Thus the plans
for "Mr Alcott, Liberty, Equality, & a common table55 all went by the
board.

A somewhat similar plan of Emerson's was more fortunate. It was
arranged that, since the Alcotts would not come, Henry Thoreau should.
For one year he was "to have his board &c for what labor he chooses to

29o THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

do." At the age of twenty-four Thoreau was "an indefatigable & a very
skilful laborer/5 and Emerson, having been a skeleton ail that spring of
1841 until he was ashamed, worked with him and at his direction. Emer-
son now had hopes of robust health; and, at the same time, he felt virtuous
because he was aiding genius and was taking at least a minor part in the
social experimentation that the reformers were continually dinning into
his ears. In the summer the social experiment in Ms home was made more
complex by the presence there of young Mary Russell as teacher in the
nursery. Marston Watson, who afterwards became her husband, "always
heard33 and believed that she was Thoreau's "Maiden in the East.55

Thoreau demonstrated remarkable versatility. He rowed Emerson on
the Concord at night, introducing him to the "shadowy, starlit, moonlit
stream, a lovely new world/5 Emerson said. "Through one field only we
went to the boat and then left all time, all science, all history, behind us,
and entered into Nature with one stroke of a paddle." A realist in the
garden and a poet on the river, Henry was ready anywhere to play the
philosopher and indulge in a discussion of Transcendental doctrines. "I
said to him what I often feel/' Emerson commented, "I only know three
persons who seem to me fully to see this law of reciprocity or compensa-
tion,— himself, Alcott, and myself: and 't is odd that we should all be
neighbors . . .**

Though Emerson could tire of Transcendental theory and once testily
commented that he was familiar with all Henry's thoughts, "my own quite
originally drest/3 he usually rated Henry as one of the most original of
men, an incarnation of self-reliance. If Henry Thoreau appeared to Haw-
thorne quite unsophisticated except in his own way and ugly as sin, with
his long nose and queer mouth, he was nevertheless a healthy and whole-
some person to know, and his ugliness was of an honest kind that became
him better than beauty. Thoreau could show the tenderness of a woman
as he sat beside his dying brother but could often be crabbed enough.
Hawthorne's impression that Emerson had suffered inconvenience from
such an inmate was undoubtedly correct. But as Thoreau's stay at his
friend's house extended far beyond the original estimate of a year, amicable
relations must have prevailed. Henry himself afterwards told Emerson of
his appreciation of the complete freedom lie had been allowed to enjoy
as tf'y°ur pensioner." Lidian found the young man admirable, and in
several letters he later wrote her from Staten Island, where he lived in
William Emerson's family as a tutor, he showed a warm affection for this
motherly woman who was nearly fifteen years his senior and, at times,
idealized her till his admiration became a kind of Transcendental Man-
olatry. Emerson remembered with some amusement one incident that

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 291

resulted from those "two or diree letters to my wife" from Thoreau: "She
spoke of them to his family, who eagerly wished to see them, She con-
sented, but said, 'She was almost ashamed to show them, because Henry
had exalted her by very undeserved praise.5— CO yes,5 said his Mother,
'Henry is very tolerant.5 "

Meantime Emerson watched the progress of Brook Farm. After all, if
what he heard was true, the numerous experimental communities that were
now being established might really transform American society. At the end
of Brook Farm's first year a shrewd merchant named Clapp told him that
it must happen soon that these communities would change and control the
price of bread as the manufacturing and commercial associations had done
the price of cotton and farmers would be driven into associations in self-
defense. Emerson visited West Roxbury and observed the experiment there
at first hand. He could even take his part in one of the farm's charming
sylvan fetes. Once, on a September day in 1841, when a birthday picnic
party was in progress in the woods and the festive farmers were sporting
in colorful costumes, Hawthorne, lying under the trees in his favorite role
of observer, saw Emerson and Margaret Fuller emerge into the little glade
which was the center of the gay throng. But Emerson's later description
of Brook Farm as "a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an
Age of Reason in a patty-pan" both simplified and exaggerated what he
actually saw there. George William Curtis, a resident for some two years
beginning in 1842, remembered that Emerson used to come as an inter-
ested spectator, enamored of the spirit of the enterprise but not of the
actual community, "in which he saw very plainly all the unconscious
drolleries."

Emerson may have been drawn to West Roxbury as much by his
friends as by the novel social scheme of the place. On some visit he might
see George Bradford, still plying his old profession of teaching, and Charles
King Newcornb, vaguely drifting somewhere between Transcendentalism
and Catholicism. Before Newcomb left the community, he loved it so well
that he dreamed of erecting a shrine, to be called, perhaps, Our Lady of
Brook Farm or the Holy Cross of West Roxbury. Lidian's nephew Frank
Brown was there for a time. Various friends of Emerson's appeared on
occasion.

But in spite of the good things he was later to say of the experiment,
Emerson himself was persuaded that it was a mistake. Such an association
would hardly invite intuitions, he must have been sure. After its first two
years, he was of the opinion that it would show a few noble victims and
that the rest of the members would shirk their duty. Hawthorne boasted
that he had lived in the community during its heroic age. According to

292 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Emerson's observation the virtue of Brook Farm was simply that it showed
the possibility and convenience of good neighborhood, but that virtue could
be borrowed and the rest left.

Yet the need of much mending of the social structure seemed patent.
The evils of the cutthroat labor market could not be concealed even behind
Walden Woods. In the winter of 1842 the projected railroad through
Concord began to look real. But before there was any railroad to build,
the region was flooded with poor Irish laborers. Edmund Hosmer, the
farmer who used to work out Emerson's road tax for him, threatened to
sell out and go to the West because the Irish undersold him in the labor
market. Hosrner, a person who always looked "respectable and excellent
to you in his old shabby cap and blue frock bedaubed with the slime of the
marsh," represented an invaluable stratum of Concord society. He was not
a mere Napoleon with sixty battles to his credit but had won six thousand,
on as many hard-fought summer or winter days. Society could hardly
afford to let such a man go down to defeat in this miserable economic
confusion. Soon their employers were driving the poor Irish themselves as
if they were Negroes.

Emerson saw these things happening. Across the Mill Brook he had the
perpetual reminder of the red charity house on the poor farm. For many
years Nancy Barren, the mad woman who was one of its inmates, had
screamed herself hoarse, as if she were quite unaware that Concord was
an idyllic retreat where poverty and other ills of the bustling world had
no business to come. Emerson could hear her when he had a window open.
He was not a snob. He objected to class distinctions, saw the human values
in the poor, liked the unrestrained attitudes and manners of men and
women in Prince Street, Charter Street, Ann Street, and the other haunts
of poverty in Boston's North End, and discovered more picturesqueness in
people at work than in persons consciously posed. But in the face of any
organized reform heralded as for the benefit of the workers he was apt to
be the convinced individualist. He wanted a more fundamental reform.

The temperance movement was gaining great momentum. In June of
1841 the Middlesex County Temperance Society held its annual meeting
at Ripley's church. There were 226 delegates present as against only 30
at the annual meeting of the preceding year— "another evidence/5 said
The Republican, a Concord newspaper, "of the wonderful interest that
is now taken in the progress of temperance principles." On the day of the
meeting Emerson paid $3 to the Cold Water Army. But within a few
months he paid more for several bottles of Madeira without any exercise
of his prized right of scorning consistency. When he yielded, a year or
two later, to a challenge to deliver a temperance speech at the village of

THE DIAL AMD THE ESSAYS 293

Harvard, it was temperate living, not merely temperate drinking, that he
praised. Temperance pledges, he warned, would not win the victory. Souls
were not saved in bundles, he was sure. If he bowed for the moment to
organized reform, it was only to reissue his declaration of self-reliance.

Wars of liberation were, according to him, for individuals to fight
against their own weaker natures. His part, outside his private war, was to
teach that fact. As late as 1841 he thought of the Negroes, in their misery,
as, in the most profound sense, slaves of themselves. A movement to reform
religion nearly stirred him into action. At the first convention of the Friends
of Universal Reform, it is true, he finally made up his mind to speak, but
by then the meeting was at an end. He attended, but only as a much
interested spectator, the succeeding conventions in Chardon Street and
their sequel, the Bible Convention of 1842. He was fascinated by the spec-
tacle of fanaticism in all its colors and shades. "As a historian of the
Times," he remarked, "one would certainly wish to be there."

The one religious organization to which he continued steadily to give
financial aid was the Unitarian church in his village. Though he otherwise
had little or no connection with it, he did not wish to offend his neighbors
and he had his family's interests to consider. Hawthorne was amused when
Emerson kept him and Hillard under cover until the good Concordians
had safely got to church. Only then could the three set out on a Sunday
walk to Walden. In private Emerson would sometimes express himself
without any inhibition on the subject of religious dogma. He marveled that
"these physicians, metaphysicians, mathematicians, critics, and merchants,
believed this Jewish apologue of the poor Jewish boy," and he wondered
"how they contrived to attach that accidental history to the religious idea,
and this famous dogma of the Triune God, etc., etc." Preaching was cursed,
and the better it was, the worse, he said. "A preacher is a bully: I who
have preached so much,— by the help of God will never preach more."
He had presumably not preached since January of 1839. But he kept on
paying pew rent as well as taxes for the support of the church. He would
also pay an odd dollar to the impecunious Methodists, and he could even
go back to the pulpit of the Second Church when the old building was
about to be torn down and very honestly tell his former parishioners how
little his ideas had really changed since youth. He seemed to be confessing
in the pulpit that he ought never to have been in the Christian ministry.

His study and books, his garden, the fields, his family, his friends made
a rich tapestry against which life could be placed and admired ; but nothing
remained the same. Doctor Ripley had only remarked, after a spdl of
apoplexy and palsy, that he believed he had had a bad turn. Next year,
May 2, 1841, the day after he was ninety, he preached the last of his

294 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

farewell sermons. This extemporaneous effort was esteemed, said the church
scribe, "the most impressive and eloquent sermon he ever delivered." But
in September he died, and for Emerson the Puritan world receded farther
into the past. On November 22 of the same year the family gained a new
and firm hold on life by the birth of Edith, Emerson's second daughter.
But toward the end of the following January, Waldo, his five-year-old son,
was suddenly stricken with scarlatina. When Louisa May Alcott, only some
three years the boy's senior, went to inquire how he was, she knew the
answer at once from the tragic face of his father. Elizabeth Hoar's brother
Rockwood was never more impressed with a human expression of agony
than by that of Emerson leading the way into the room where little Waldo
lay dead.

Emerson gradually attained a mood of acceptance and, in his letters
and journals, wrote down hints that slowly grew into "Threnody," an ode
which was almost a pastoral, in honor both of the boy and of nature. But
at first he thought he could comprehend nothing of his loss but its bitter-
ness. His philosophy was put to a severe test. To Samuel Ripley it seemed
obvious enough that, since young Waldo's death, Emerson could never be
the same again. Lidian, having suffered an incurable wound, brooded over
unanswerable questions, and, apparently, turned for comfort to more or-
thodox doctrines than Transcendentalism.

Yet there were some compensations for Emerson. Concord began to
look more like his dream of a center of intellectuals when Hawthorne,
in July of 1842, brought Sophia Peabody, as his bride, to the manse,
the house to whose name he soon gave literary eminence. But Sophia's
enthusiasm for Emerson and Transcendentalism and Hawthorne's cool
habit of analysis were not quite reconciled in the pair's later relations with
the Concord sage. Hawthorne confessed that there had been times in his
life when he might have asked this "prophet" for the key to the riddle of
the universe; but now, as he explained it, "being happy, I felt as if there
were no question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of
deep beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a
philosopher." Emerson himself found it as hard to capture Hawthorne the
man as to make anything of Hawthorne the storyteller.

Margaret Fuller never realized her vague idea of starting a school in
Concord, but with her class in mythology at Boston she was often Lidian's
schoolmistress and sometimes Emerson's. She by no means gave Emerson
his first introduction to the ballet, but she helped revive his interest in it
when she went with him to see Fanny Elssler in Nathalie. The two spec-
tators may well have debated whether this was poetry or religion. Yet
Emerson was not quite at ease as he pondered the philosophy of the ballet.

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 295

He admired as much as anyone the extreme grace of Fanny Elssler, "the
winning fun and spirit of all her little coquetries, the beautiful erectness
of her body, and the freedom and determination which she can so easily
assume" ; but he felt some doubts when he thought of the college boys who
'left metaphysics, conic sections, or Tacitus" to watch her tripping satin
slippers. Characteristically, he decided that "the morals, as it is called/' lay
"wholly with the spectator.53

In the spring of 1842 he paid a new instalment of his debt to Margaret
by aiding her escape from the foundering Transcendental magazine, The
Did. By about the middle of March her mind was made up that the April
number would be her last. She could no longer afford to sacrifice health
and labor, "with such a bankrupt's return," and she was ready to put
either Theodore Parker or Emerson into the editorial chair. On first learn-
ing the fact, Emerson thought that he might promise to take responsibility
only for the July number. But he soon decided to accept the editorship
without reservation, in order to keep it out of strange hands. There was
little hope of financial success. It was estimated that not more than three
hundred subscribers could be relied on and that these might pay about
$750 above commissions to the agents. Some $700 of this would be eaten
up by the cost of publishing.

Emerson was already ominously admitting "that I rely on one expedient
to make it valuable namely a liberal selection of good matter from old
or from foreign books when dull papers are offered & rejected"; but he
also urged his friends to contribute. He persuaded Hedge to supply a trans-
lation of Schelling's introductory lecture at Berlin but got little else from
him. He asked help of Parker, though he did not wish to see him in the
editor's chair, and the result was some profound scholarly articles on cur-
rent religious controversy. Margaret Fuller gave weight to both his volumes
of The Dial with her essay on Romaic and Rhine ballads and her crusade
for women's rights. Alcott collected manuscripts and news in England.

After a severe struggle with the oddities of Charles Newcomb's style,
Emerson managed to get the first of "The Two Dolons" into print, un-
doubtedly to the discouragement of subscribers. Jones Very was allotted
a few pages but was unhappy when he saw them. "I found rny Poem the
'Evening Choir' altered considerably from what I had written,93 he com-
plained, and he said firmly that he preferred his own lines. Emerson's poet
Ellery Channing had his day in the sun. Thoreau, serving sometimes as
an assistant to the editor, suddenly became a leading contributor. The
youthful Charles Stearns Wheeler sent letters of literary gossip from Ger-
many. A few articles about current social problems fortunately came in.
Benjamin Peter Hunt's travel sketches also served to give an air of reality

296 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to the too spectral magazine. Young James Elliot Cabot tackled Kant
boldly. Emerson himself supplied many notices of books. His poetry during
his editorship fell below the level of what Margaret Fuller had got from
him. For substantial filler for his two volumes he had to fall back on several
of his lectures.

By March of 1843 The Dial no longer so much as paid expenses; but
Emerson3 hating on his own account to end it and remembering Margaret
Fuller's sacrifice for it, made up his mind to prolong the agony another
year. It now had only 220 subscribers and was nearly hopeless. In the
following October, Emerson, though he was already running into debt
because of it, considered the desperate expedient of turning the editorial
responsibility over to his impecunious and unsteady townsman Ellery Chan-
ning. But the number for April, 1 844, was the last. George Curtis did not
exaggerate more than most writers of epitaphs when he described The Died
as going out like a star from its unique place in American literature and
its contributors as clothed in white garments. And yet many of The Dial's
contributors, changing their white robes for darker and more practical garb,
continued to bear an important part in the country's intellectual life.

During the last years of The Dial, Emerson, as usual, found no escape
from lecturing. Before the City Bank resumed payment of even meager
dividends in October, 1842, it had been unfruitful for eighteen months,
causing him a deficit of $900, an important sum in his tight economy.
Thus he was persuaded "to go peddling again." Seeing that lyceum goers
were now becoming conscious of the New England cultural revolution of
which he was a part, he gathered his commentaries on the characteristics
of his region into a series of lectures. With these lectures he set out for
Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Brooklyn, and Newark early in the
new year, 1843.

At Baltimore, the mother city of the church of Rome in English-speaking
America, the cathedral's pictured walls and chanting priests reminded him
of the Old World. At both Baltimore and Philadelphia he saw what he
could of the fine arts, also reminiscent of the Old World. At Philadelphia
he praised the Quakers, revealing his sympathy with some of their ''spir-
itual views." He visited Lucretia Mott, the Quaker reformer just back from
her antislavery address before a Washington audience whom no man would
have dared to speak to as she did. She warned Emerson that he was living
too much out of the world and may thus have helped to inspire his speech
on West Indian emancipation a year later.

He visited Washington. He heard Calhoun and Benton speak in the
Senate. One night, in the rotunda of the Capitol, he watched,, with Calhoun
and others, while Horatio Greenough unsuccessfully experimented with the

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 297

lighting of his statue of George Washington. He found the room in the
Capitol which contained the newly invented electric telegraph, and at the
Patent Office he saw the treasures Wilkes's expedition had brought back
after years of exploration that had carried the American fleet into strange
seas and put its commander's name on the map of the Antarctic Continent.
It was also at Washington that he made a new friend in Giles Waldo, a
young man whose ardent discipleship and copious stream of letters soon
grew to be somewhat overpowering. In New York, where Emerson made
a false start with his lectures on New England under the management of
a feeble committee and had to make a new beginning at the Society Library,
he saw Henry James again and discovered the inevitable new friend and
disciple in William Tappan, "a lonely beautiful brooding youth who sits
at a desk six hours of the day in some brokerage or other." But after two
months of travel Emerson wanted to be at home again with his children,
"sprawling on the floor as victim & playmate of the noisy pair"; and he
was back in Concord with Ellen and Edith on the ninth of March.

At home, some weeks later, he observed the beginnings of Fruitlands,
another Utopian community. Alcott, one of its founders, had for several
years tenanted a cottage and an acre of ground in Concord. Though dis-
trustful of his spade as a means of getting a living, he had settled down,
well pleased with himself. His long-suffering wife had been pleased too and,
for the first time in years, had gone singing about the house. Then, one
day, he had felt an irresistible urge to go to England. Emerson, once more
summoned to the aid of his perennially impecunious friend, had had
to raise the necessary funds for the voyage. As Alcott would not willingly
shake hands with a merchant, being above all trade and tradesmen, raising
subscriptions had been difficult. But Emerson had succeeded in begging $50
for him and had supplied $325 more, it seems, from his own pocket. The
thankful Alcott had wanted to include a miniature of Emerson in his bag-
gage and had loyally read his copy of the Essays, conjuring up memories
of home, while approaching the English shore in the last days of May,
1842. In July, after having charmed many hearers, though not Carlyle,
he had presided triumphantly over a meeting of the friends of human
progress at Alcott House School, Ham, Surrey.

When Emerson had learned that Alcott intended to bring back Charles
Lane and Henry Wright, two of his English followers, he had sent him a
letter to read to them, warning them that though their new American friend
was trustworthy as to theory he was not so as to facts. But Lane and Wright
had paid no heed to the warning, and the three enthusiasts had embarked
themselves, with a remarkable library of mystical, occult, and miscellaneous
books, and crossed the Atlantic to found Fruitlands. Emerson watched with

298 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

some sympathy but no faith as the impractical men prepared to cultivate
their scenic, unproductive acres on a hillside near the village of Harvard.
It was in June of 1843, the year in which the Millerites were preparing
for the end of the world, that the Alcotts and their reforming friends began
their new world hopefully in spite of austere economies. Labor on their
farm was almost entirely manual, for they respected the rights of their
fellow animals. The table presented a barren aspect, as not even the hens
or the bees could be robbed of the fruits of their toil. Emerson, visiting the
farm in July, found all well but commented, "We will see them in De-
cember." The winter of 1843-1844 was unfortunately marked by terrible
cold, and by the middle of January the Fruitlands community, perhaps
never strong enough to have survived even a mild winter, was broken up.
Alcott lost no money of his own, but the blow was nevertheless overwhelm-
ing to him and he wanted to die, though he did not. Emerson continued
in later years to raise small funds for Alcott's support and even looked after
Charles Lane's business affairs while Fruitlands was being slowly liquidated.

However cool and restrained his theory of friendship was, Emerson
actually spent a good deal of time and money on his friends. He helped
Margaret Fuller by negotiating on her behalf for the publication of her
Summer on the Lakes. He still tried hard to establish closer relations with
Hawthorne, though Hawthorne gave him little encouragement. Once they
got off together for a two days' excursion on foot to the town of Harvard,
where they visited the Shakers. Once at least, with Henry Thoreau dancing
and leaping ahead of them, they skated on the Concord River. Sophia
Hawthorne observed that while her husband glided over the ice as stately
and grave as a Greek statue, Emerson pitched along, head foremost, half
lying on the air. In financial matters it was another story. Emerson helped
out the impecunious storyteller by buying barrels of his apples. Though
he could hardly read most of Hawthorne's somber fiction, he was pleased
with "The Celestial Railroad," a satirical parody of The Pilgrim3 s Progress
in which the German-born Giant Transcendentalist was described as resem-
bling "a heap of fog and duskiness/5

He gave many hours to the poet Ellery Charming, now settled in a
little red house as his nearest neighbor on the Cambridge Turnpike. He
had long walks and conversations with him, found publishers for his poems,
and reviewed his volume of 1843 in The United States Magazine, and
Democratic Review. Somewhat blinded by his loyalty to the man, he greatly
overestimated the value of Ellery's verses. He wrote to Sterling, in Eng-
land, that Channing was, "though young, the best poet we have." He paid
his poet for chopping wood and, against all precedent it seems, for papers
contributed to The Dial. When, toward the end of 1844, Channing went

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 299

to New York for an ill-fated experiment as a writer on Horace Greeley's
Tribune, Emerson once more anxiously sponsored him.

For a time, it seems, Emerson was almost persuaded that he himself
ought to quit Concord. Margaret Fuller once warned him that the town
was too peaceful to be a fit home for a lyric poet or orator, and Caroline
Sturgis thought it a great marsh where he ought not to spend all his life.
The question of leaving its "tame landscape" and moving to "a more pic-
turesque country, perhaps to Berkshire perhaps to the sea" was "often
agitated/9 as Emerson afterwards recalled; but he concluded that changing
his home would not change him enough to repay him for the trouble.
Gradually he settled himself more comfortably where he was. He did what
he could to make Concord winters more endurable. By about the middle
18405, it seems, he had installed airtight stoves and given up the regular
use of his drafty fireplaces. In summer Hugh Whelan, now his hired man,
took responsibility for the garden. The birth of Emerson's second son,
Edward Waldo, on July 10, 1844, was a new and persuasive reason for
contentment. Life was expanding again and getting a firmer root.

Emerson did his part to increase the cultural facilities of his village and
was hopeful about its future. He was one of the original directors of the
Concord Atheneum, founded in 18452, and contributed to its slender col-
lection. If the "city facility and polish" he wanted his children to have
along with "rural strength and religion3' were not easily procurable in a
place so secluded as Concord, he saw that Concord would not always be
so secluded, He had already paid the first of his many assessments on the
local railroad stock. The trains began running between the village and the
city in June, 1844. The locomotives dashed past Walden Pond, crying at
the top of their iron lungs, "Ho for Boston!" In September of the same
year Emerson bought a little more Concord land, the Wyman field, on the
north shore of Walden Pond.

Though he still held fundamentally to his old philosophical ideas, he
was gradually becoming somewhat less otherworldly. He speculated, when
he read "The Borderers/5 whether Wordsworth had not some time seri-
ously asked himself if a crave sin might not stimulate his intellect and
pay its way. He could not have known that Wordsworth had had a
French daughter, but he was probing realistically into psychology. He read
in the pagan mystic Proclus, he said, "as I would take opium." He found
much pleasure in Chinese lore, notoriously more realistic than Western
philosophy. But his interests were wide. He had an opinion of Browning's
Paracelsus and he watched sympathetically the rising star of Tennyson and
was enough known as an admirer to be asked to furnish an introduction
to an American edition of that poet. Months after he had written his poem

300 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

on Saadi in The Dial, it seam, he began his reading of The Gulistan.

Spurred on by Margaret Fuller's skepticism as to his knowledge of
Dante's Vita nuova, he translated the whole of the little Bible of love and
got EUery Channing to try his han'd at putting at least some of the metrical
passages into verse. The thirty-six sheets of Emerson's holograph manu-
script that have now come to light testify to the correctness, in general, of
his description of his work as {Cthe ruggedest grammar English that can be,
keeping lock step with the original.55 Naturally in such a tour de force his
lock steps were sometimes missteps, but he managed to keep much of the
fragile beauty of the book. His success in this latter respect was perhaps
greatest in his rendering of the final lines, where Dante,, as if he had not
already idealized Beatrice beyond credibility, promised that if God would
give hirn some years of life he would attempt "to say of her that which
was never said of any one." It may possibly have been another and an
improved version of this translation that Emerson suggested some four
years later as printable "in two parts" in The Massachusetts Quarterly
Review, or it may be that he had by that time forgotten the actual state
of his manuscript. As late as a year' after he had finished his first version
he reprimanded Caroline Sturgis for copying out what he called his precious
blot to send about for others to see. He asked her only to imagine berself
turning Milton into French as a school exercise and then having this exercise
printed as the new translation of that poet. If he was hardly just to The
Divine Comedy, he knew the value of the lesser book in spite of its far
remove from modernity.

In the winter of 1843—1844 he gave no lecture course but devoted
himself to the preparation of a new volume of essays. On October 9 of
the following year he signed his final agreement with James Munroe &
Company. They were to sell the two thousand copies to the trade at a
ten percent discount from the retail price of one dollar and were them-
selves allowed a commission of thirty percent, the author, as usual, keeping
the control of his book in his own hands. Before the end of the month the
second series of Essays was published. Emerson had already sent off sheets
of the book to the English publisher Chapman, and by the end of the year
he received a copy with London imprint and Carlyle's prefatory notice
warning off prospective pirates.

In both form and ideas the book had strong Emersonian characteristics.
The nine essays were arranged in hardly more than haphazard order.
"Nature," chiefly notable, in comparison with the book of that name, for
its plainer hints at the theory of evolution, was there because it had needed
much altering and so had failed to get into the first series. "Gifts" was
a revision of the essay of that title already printed in The Dial. "The
Poet," destined to bring occasional sharp cries of dissent from Herman

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 301

Melville, along \vith approval for the nobility of certain passages, was a
fresh proclamation of its author's old theory of the artist, master of lib-
crating symbols., as spokesman for universal nature and universal mind.
It was also an admirable example of the myth-making of which Emerson
had become enamored in his reading from Plato. The passage on the winged
soul of the poet with his immortal progeny was a charming prose poem.
But the demand for a poet who "knew the value of our incomparable
materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another
carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer55
showed Emerson on the road to an untranscendental sort of realism.

These essays of 1844 were mostly less militantly Transcendental than"
the first series and leaned less on theory and more on experience. "Man-
ners" showed more knowledge of the actual world and made more con-
cessions to it than "Love" or "Friendship" had done. Its gentleman could
not only outpray saints in chapel but give the law wherever he was and
be good company for pirates as well as for academicians. Emerson was
in this volume even more willing than ever before to see all sides. In
"Nominalist and Realist" he spoke with a sincerity seldom surpassed by any
author when he confessed, "I am always insincere, as always knowing
there are other moods."

The frankest confessions might therefore be expected in the essay which
afforded the severest test of his willingness to confront theory with fact,
the essay "Experience/5 first tentatively called "Lords of Life.35 He was in
the same predicament with most philosophers and religionists and theorists
of various stripes— he had tried out his theories long enough to know that
they were far from matching experience at every point.

But, though he was much more honest than most, he was loath to make
any fundamental concession. Even now when he came to grips with the
problem of experience as never before, it was a foregone conclusion that
no foundation stone of his Transcendental theories was going to be rejected.
He had not given up his belief that in deep moments of faith the appeal
to experience was really invalid and vain. He had long since had the con-
viction that experience, even of suffering, could be an inferior order of
reality. When put to a cruel test by the death of his son, he had confessed,
"I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve; that this fact takes no more deep
hold than other facts, is as dreamlike as they; a lambent flame that will
not burn playing on the surface of my river." It was true that the tragic
experience did not fade out so soon or so harmlessly as he then thought
it would, but he had nevertheless only exaggerated a fact of his nature
and of his philosophy which he stated again, with like exaggeration, in the
essay "Experience/5 It looked, as he got into his essay, as if he would
produce simply another poetic exaltation of the spiritual over the physical,

302 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

a sort of hymn to Maya, illusion* Experience hardly seemed to be a sub-
ject for one who had declared that his life was "optical^ not practical/'

Dream delivered us to dream, he complained. Change of moods and
objects was a necessity of our nature. Life itself was a bubble and a
skepticism, a sleep within a sleep. Though Emerson could not renounce his
belief that there was "that in us which changes not and which ranks all
sensations and states of mind/' he was willing to admit that "the new
philosophy" must absorb skepticisms. Somehow all this unreality of experi-
ence must be made part of a triumphant experience of the self. Illusion,
temperament, succession, surface, surprise, reality, subjectiveness were all
lords of life, and none could be by-passed. Perhaps even this was not the
complete picture. Emerson admitted that he was still too young by some
ages to compile a universal code and that he was only gossiping about
the politics of eternity.

And yet if he could not know all, he knew how to accept good-
humoredly what he had got. Life had been a wonderful experience, though
nothing more than receiving, without having anything in the end. One
played, it seemed, an exciting game with experience, but not for keeps. All
the hankering after practical effect really seemed to Emerson to come from
a mistaken conception of life. Learning a little truth was enough reward.
In his ears he always seemed to hear the law of destiny "that every soul
which had acquired any truth, should be safe from harm until another
period."

In his essay "Politics/' an excellent test of his ability to confront the
kind of reality so confidently expounded by the keeper of the village
grocery store, Emerson spoke partly from theory, partly from experience.
He knew something of ancient and modern works on politics and much
more of history and biography. He saw that his own favorite theory of self-
reliance was the taproot of democracy, but his sympathies were broad. He
had had some experience of the American political scene. As a Federalist
by inheritance, he had naturally become a National Republican, or at
least he had been more than once a National Republican candidate for an
unwanted office. Later he had presumably voted with the Whigs, but only
because he had thought their candidates the best, and with increasing dis-
satisfaction.

He undoubtedly had the feeling that property was safer with the Whigs
than with the Democrats, yet his own modest possessions did not blind him
to the rights of the unpropertied. Sometimes, at least, he keenly felt the
evils of industrialism. His sharpest arrow aimed at the camp of the indus-
trialists may have been one that he left unshot, a set of verses, not earlier
than the 18405, which he called "New England Capitalist." The capital-

THE DIAL AND THE ESSAYS 303

ist's machines, he said, were only manikins modeled on the capitalist him-
self and served as weapons for his conquering will. The squirming victim
of Emerson's wrath behaved shamefully enough:

He built his mills, &, by his politics, made

The arms of millions turn them.

Stalwart New Hampshire, mother of men,
Sea-dented Maine, reluctant Carolina,
Must drag his coach, & by arts of peace
He, in the plenitude of love & honor,
Eats up the poor,— poor citizen poor state.

Emerson, as he said, understood poverty much better than riches. Coming
to know more well-to-do merchants, he found virtues in them; but he could
think of a rich friend as only accidentally so and suited by character for
poverty.

As for slavery, his sudden leap into the political arena in aid of the
abolitionists had occurred only a few weeks before the publication of the
second Essays. Then, in his address on emancipation in the West Indies
he had seemed to at least one observer to be a new man— not cold, clear,
and intellectual but genial and benevolent, smiling as if to defy world,
flesh, and devil. What his essay "Politics" might have been had it come
late enough to reflect this outburst of assured enthusiasm for reform can
only be guessed at, but it could easily have been less philosophical and
academic than it was. Almost at the moment the second Essays came from
the press, it seems, he was visiting the extremist William Lloyd Garrison in
his dingy office and, at last, respecting him without reservation. But if his
surprising fraternization with the radical abolitionists came too late to
affect "Politics," the earlier history of his political theory and practice was
the significant background of that essay.

"Politics" was inevitably a delicately balanced essay. To a partisan
filled with a sense of the necessity of immediate decision it could only be a
disappointment. Emerson took the detached view that the form of govern-
ment, rapidly changing, was only a memorandum of national standards
of culture, also rapidly changing. Property would always have its share of
power, legally or illegally; but there was an instinctive feeling, still in-
articulate, that the whole constitution of property at present was injurious
and degrading to persons and that truly the only interest for the considera-
tion of the state was persons and their culture. As for basic political pat-
terns, democracy was best for Americans because the religious sentiment
of the present time accorded best with it. There was no decisive superiority
in either of the great political parties of the hour. "The philosopher, the

304 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

poet, or the religious man," Emerson said, "will of course wish to cast his
vote with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition
of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner
the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power.
But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party
propose to him as representatives of these liberalities. , . . On the, other
side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able and
cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of prop-
erty." The basic trouble was that all public ends looked vague and quixotic
beside private ones; and, accordingly, the antidote to the abuse of power
by the government was the influence of private character, the growth of
the individual. The state existed to educate the wise man, and once he
appeared the state would expire. No perfection of organized authority, it
was clear., but the perfection of individuals was the supreme end in view.
Government, politics could at best be only incidental aids.

Essays, second series, aroused the usual dissonant voices of praise and
blame. Lydia Maria Child, an ardent abolitionist who used both her hands
to "row the boat of practical endeavor/5 complained that these essays took
away her strength, as they harped too much an the unreal, elusive quality
of things. Margaret Fuller found the new series far more adequate than
the first, with more glow and more fusion. She promised to make it her
companion through life. Frederic Hedge made amends for the earlier hos-
tility of The Christian Examiner by printing there an admiring review
which, however, betrayed his anxiety to reform Emerson and make at least
half a Christian of him. In The United States Magazine, and Democratic
Review an anonymous critic of both series of essays delighted in the bold
reduction of the "apparent contradictions5' of the universe to unity. The
essays, he found, were the purest and most poetic expression of that phi-
losophy of identity, Transcendentalism, from which the mind derived at
the same time inspiration and repose. As for the historical background of
Emerson, it looked German enough; but, said this by no means blind
disciple, "Plotinus and Proclus, Plutarch and Marcus Antoninus are evi-
dently greater favorites with him than Schelling and Hegel/' and it was
only by superficial observers that he was classed with Carlyle, a thinker
manifestly lacking "this all harmonizing sense of the unity of being."
Carlyle himself admired the "real word33 the new Essays spoke and, as
usual, hinted broadly at the too much theory and too little practicality.
Instead of looking for the philosophy of unity, he studied the book's rhetoric
with a practiced eye, looking for rhetorical unity. He found the new Essays
genuine Saxon, strong and simple but somewhat incoherent, a bag of duck-
shot, he said.

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES

The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent,
are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm
in far greater numbers and threaten to devour them; but
these last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap
they fall plump down and rot, having received from the
souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the
melodies of the poet ascend and leap and pierce into the
deeps of infinite time, _eeThe porf,

SINGE boyhood Emerson had wanted to be a poet, but he had lived
more than half his life before he made up his mind to publish a
volume of his verses. Rufus Griswold had collected a few of them
in an anthology, but Griswold habitually welcomed the worst poets
as well as the best. Edgar Allan Poe, a highly gifted but erratic critic, had
once conceded that Emerson's "love of the obscure does not prevent him
. . . from the composition of occasional poems in which beauty is ap-
parent by flashes." But after having bestowed that more restrained than
discriminating praise, Poe resumed, from time to time, his somewhat mo-
notonous ridicule of The Dial and the Transcendentalists. Emerson was
still reluctant to make serious claims for his own poems because he saw
the discrepancy between them and his idea of poetry. He might not have
decided to publish them if his friends had not already put them into cir-
culation. Even when he had come to a decision he moved slowly. For more
than two years after the appearance of his second series of essays his main
business was to prepare his poems for the press, yet he concerned himself
mostly with quite different things, thus living up to William James's much
later dictum that poetry "ought to be the overflowing of a life rich in other
ways."

For Emerson life was rich in variety but usually quiet. The numerous
works and days he found enumerated in the old copy of John Evelyn's
Kalendarium Hortense: or, the Gard'nefs Almanac given him by Alcott
suggested very inadequately the variety of events and responsibilities that
demanded his time. The garden was merely the most pleasant of his avoca-
tions, and his study, only his principal workshop.

305

306 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

While he continued to look after his friends who could npt take care
of themselves, he became more deeply involved in the struggle over slav-
ery. Early in January of 1845 Samuel May, brother of Alcott's wife,
and Samuel Sewall, her cousin, bought Hillside, on the Lexington Road,
for the Alcott home, keeping the land in their own names for safety's sake.
Emerson, presumably acting as agent for May and Sewall, paid the money
to the grantor. But at the same time he himself took title to eight acres
just across the road to the south, and these were also for Alcott's use. He
paid $500 for these additional acres. Before January was over he had had
some part in the Concord meeting to protest the expulsion of Elizabeth
Hoar's father, an agent of Massachusetts, from South Carolina. The Hoar
incident increased the growing tension over slavery. About the same time
Emerson was urging the Concord Lyceum to admit Wendell Phillips, the
antislavery agitator, to its forum. He went to Boston to hear the debates
in the Texas Convention and was disappointed at the Whig speeches favor-
ing moderation; but his philosophy calmed him within a few weeks and
he concluded that the world spirit would not be defeated even by the
annexation of Texas.

His curiosity about revolutionary social schemes still unjaded, he turned
back to Fourier with a determination to read him. He would be willing,
he said, to enlist under Fourier's banner for five years if experiments were
permitted, but there was an immense presumption against every experiment
in morals. He thought Fourier would not go far outside France. Soon he
was attacking Fourier as a charter to libertines; and, perhaps about the
same time, he was listening to his friend Sam Ward's conservative talk
and becoming, as he said, "much warped from my own perpendicular &
grown avaricious overnight of money & lands & buildings." He let each
mood have its way momentarily for the sake of the experience and to
avoid getting into a mental rut.

Diving into a very different world of ideas he found new reason to
admire Proclus. He read with eagerness of "arrested development" in that
nine-days wonder, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book he
liked except for its timid theological ideas, though many thought it dan-
gerous. He took a new interest in the Bhagavadgita, a charming confusion
of Hindu speculations in which an indescribable blend of pantheism and
mysticism with practical teachings regarding acceptance of commonplace
duties principally impressed the reader. Emerson had hitherto known only
fragments of this song, itself merely a small fragment of a massive poem.
Now, with a copy of the English version, presumably placed in his hands
by his new friend James Elliot Cabot, he became an enthusiastic reader
of the book and took pains to find more readers for it.

LEAPING AMD PIERCING MELODIES 307

Ellery Channing, shy but quick-witted and full of the same tang of
New England soil that one found in people around Concord, was back
from his New York misadventure and was looking for a farm. Henry
Thoreau was building his hut on Emerson's land at Walden Pond, where
he began to live on July 4, 1845. Sam Ward finally published his edition
of Goethe's essays on art. Caroline Sturgis talked frankly about the poems
Emerson was accumulating. They pleased her better the more she read
them. Sometimes she saw that the words full of meaning but not images
made a melody. Now and then, she found, a line darted forth like a tongue
of flame and others moved harmoniously about it; but sometimes these
little flames seemed to hiss and sputter as if cold water had been thrown
upon the coals. She wanted the poems put into a book, but she warned me
poet against abstractions. She advised hirn to make saw-dust pies with his
little daughter Edith rather than continue to question the invisible; and
she offered to take him into the mountains to hunt rattlesnakes^ an occupa-
tion likely to school him in concrete realities. Hawthorne, Caroline Sturgis's
host during at least part of her visit in Concord, was having trouble in
keeping up his rent, not having paid a cent to Samuel Ripley for the use
of the Old Manse through more than half of the year 1845. Emerson, as
well as Ellery Channing, was anxious to keep this rarity in Concord, and
he urged Caroline Sturgis to come back to the manse as a boarder and so
help clear up the financial tangle there. In October of that year Hawthorne
gave up the Old Manse and left Concord for some years.

Having already poured a good deal of money into Alcott, the bottom-
less pail, Emerson remembered him in a will he made out in September.
One section of the will directed that Emerson's eight acres of the Hillside
land should be administered by Lidian for the benefit of Alcott during
the latter's lifetime and should thereafter become the property of Alcott's
heirs. The property was thus to benefit Alcott and his family but "be free
from all claims of his creditors." The same will also named Henry Thoreau
as heir to the Walden Pond land on which he had built his hut, a pro-
vision naturally canceled after Thoreau had finally left Walden.

Away from home, Emerson the radical and friend of radicals had minor
adventures among the conservative-minded and saw the country. At Mid-
dlebury College, in Vermont, the "prejudices entertained . . . with regard
to the peculiar views of the Transcendentalists" were at the time impressive
enough to be noticed in the public prints; and it was probably the address
he made there this summer of r 845 that brought down on him the prompt
rebuke of a ministerial prayer asking one special favor: "We beseech Thee,
O Lord, to deliver us from ever hearing any more such transcendental
nonsense as we have just listened to from this sacred desk/' Yet he was

3o8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

"listened to with an intensity of interest and pleasure, rarely observed on
such an occasion.5' At Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, some
heresy was detected in him, and afterwards he was warned that unless
some passages of his address were altered publication of it might give of-
fense to the patrons of the college, mostly religious people unaccustomed
to speculation. He did not publish it, probably because he had read much
the same thing at Middlebury and it was already reported in the news-
papers. Coming home by New York, he revisited William Tappan, for
whose benefit he praised Caroline Sturgis; and he ended the southern part
of his tour by voyaging up the Hudson in a rainstorm,

In Concord the new house he was building for Lucy Brown, Lidian's
sister, on a lot he had recently purchased near his own home, was being
completed, Thoreau, author of verses for Lucy, came in from his Walden
hermitage to do some of the work. Emerson put over a thousand dollars
into the house. It would help keep a good entertainer near Lidian. Mean-
time, when Emerson could shut himself up in his study, he went on with
his reading under the guidance of Elliot Cabot, but he vainly tried to catch
Cabot's enthusiasm for Schelling and Spinoza. He was naturally repelled
by what seemed to him harsh mathematical logic. He was more interested
in the success of his friend than in propagating the doctrines of Schelling
when he later made an unsuccessful effort to find a publisher for Cabot's
translation of the essay on freedom. Out of his study again, he directed
some clear-eyed glances at the national political scene. He was growing
disgusted with the "boyish" policy of the Whig Party, an opportunist party
that was, he saw, trying to "disembarrass itself of the abolitionists" while
he was beginning to respect them. Whiggism, he made up his mind, was
"a feast of shells." Even the Whigs' admirable Daniel Webster, "the great
cannon loaded to the lips," was now hardly audible to Emerson's ears.
Emerson was present and possibly spoke at the September convention of
anti-Texas agitators at Concord. He arrived belatedly in Cambridge to
join some twenty persons at the adjourned meeting of a few weeks later.
That autumn he hated the narrowness of the Native American Party, and
further showed his liberality by paying for the use of the vestry when
Robert Owen appeared in Concord. At the home of Alcott, a proper place
of entertainment for the founder of the long since defunct community at
New Harmony, Indiana, he seems to have heard the latest social theories
of the old reformer. In the same month he refused to lecture at New Bed-
ford because the lyceum there had excluded Negroes from regular mem-
bership.

While he emulated other villagers by adding to his few scattered plots
of land, acquiring a little from the Town of Concord and putting over

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 309

twelve hundred dollars into a new purchase of more than forty acres of
woodland near Walden Pond, he became more and more a literary man.
Urgent requests kept coming to him to help fill up projected or real literary
journals, or to provide publishers with new books. In the spring of 1845
he had refused to make any serious promise of aid when the "transcen-
dental bookseller33 John Chapman, London publisher of his essays, wanted
to found ua new Dial.33 But he had informed the Englishman that "I am
really bent now on collecting a volume of poems from the pieces I have
scattered hi the Dial & elsewhere with some MSS of that kind which may
seem fit to print, and of this book I mean to send you a timely transcript."
When the New York literary adviser Evert Duyckinck made a vigorous
attempt to get prose from him for Wiley and Putnam's Library of Choice
Reading, Emerson once more turned the discussion to his poems. These,
Duyckinck thought, would fit nicely into Wiley and Putnam's Library of
American Books as a companion "volume35 to "a small collection by Mr
Poe including some remarkable juvenile poems.33 But, though Wiley &
Putnam published The Raven and Other Poems before the end of the
year, Emerson rejected their proposal to put his own pieces into such a
flimsy pamphlet, priced at thirty-one cents and yielding a royalty of six
cents a copy. He had to push his verses aside on account of lectures, and
a misunderstanding with the same New York firm over their handling of
one of Carlyle's books soon left his plans for publication in this country
as vague as ever.

He returned to the lyceum platform unwillingly. It seemed too bad to
grind down Transcendental ideas for popular consumption. His lectures,
it occurred to him, were "a kind of Peter Parley's story of Uncle Plato35
and "a puppet show of Eleusinian Mysteries.33 But by December, 1845,
he was reading a course of seven for the Boston Lyceum. The subjects were
reminiscent of his early lectures on biography but caused him much more
labor in his own and other libraries. After his introductory lecture on the
uses of great men, he got onto dangerous ground. In Plato, Swedenborg,
Montaigne, Napoleon, Shakespeare, and Goethe he had formidable minds
to cope with. He prepared for a serious study of Plato by buying Charles
Lane's copy of Sydenham and Taylor's very imperfect translation. The
poet Longfellow's fine library yielded some books on Shakespeare. Further
help came from the Boston Athenaeum. While Emerson worked hard to
finish the manuscripts of the course, Caroline Sturgis, a guest at his house,
found the days long and quiet but the evenings social, Caroline alternated
between exaltation and a feeling of frustration in this thin intellectual
atmosphere. The prospect of seeing some Transcendental guests eat plum
pudding amused and relieved her. She wanted to dance the tarantella and

3io THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

dance herself to death. But the seven lectures, whatever Caroline may have
thought of their lack of reality, brought Emerson $350 from the Boston
Lyceum, and this meant only a few dollars less for each lecture than he
had made above all expenses in his most successful privately managed
course, eight years earlier. He got only half as much for repeating the course
on representative men in neighboring Lowell, though Lowell paid better
than other towns where he read some of the same lectures.

In the following February, after the Boston course was ended, he was
raising funds for Ellery Channing, for Ellery was now obsessed with the
notion that, being a poet, he must go to Europe, the homeland of poetry
and art, and go quickly. Ellery had calculated that he could make his
voyage and spend a year in Italy for not more than $300. Emerson agreed
to pay $75 himself, and he probably got $50 more from Sam Ward. Caro-
line Sturgis was to give $75, and another well-wisher was to add $100.
Early in March, Ellery sailed for Marseille. He went on as far as Rome
but was back in New York Harbor almost exactly four months after he
had left it A few weeks after Ellery's return Emerson was writing a letter
for Margaret Fuller to carry to Carlyle. Margaret, having broken away
from New England, had already run through her New York period and
was now hopeful of absorbing the essence of Europe.

During much of the spring and summer of 1846 Emerson worked at
his book of poems. He was sensitive to literary patterns that he was dis-
covering in an un-English and un-European past. For several years he had
known something, perhaps not much, of the Persian poet Hafiz. By October
of 1843 he had "had the Gulistan of Saadi," on whom he had earlier
written verses in The Dial. Now, one fortunate April day, he bought at
Elizabeth Peabody's bookstore the two volumes of Joseph von Hammer's
German translation of the Diwan of Hafiz. He soon felt, it seems, the moral
ambivalence of the poems hi this collection. It was easy for him to see that
they were not mere sensuality. Sooner or later he made numerous nota-
tions in the German volumes, and his many manuscript and printed trans-
lations testified to his delight. Even in 1846 the somewhat extravagant
figures and not very coherent ideas of the brief, clever, exotic pieces were
not too late to leave their mark on the verse he was still getting ready for
the press. At the end of July he told Elizabeth Hoar that he had lately
written "Mithridates," "Merlin," and "Alphonso of Castile."

While he wrote or collected poems he was not oblivious of political
and military doings. Once he burst out with the angry declaration that
democracy became "a government of bullies tempered by editors." As the
Mexican War began he prophesied that the Americans would conquer but
that Mexico would be the poison that would bring them down at last.

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 311

Both he and Thoreau found 1846 a bitter year. Henry Thoreau, the pro-
tester who did not want to be a partner in the business his government was
carrying on, had long refused to pay his poll tax; and now, when he came
into the village from his Walden hut to get a mended shoe, he was seized
and spent a night in jail.

Emerson, used to doing his own protesting on the lecture platform or
on the printed page, felt no enthusiasm over Thoreau's behavior. The
prison was, he thought, one step to suicide and did not reach the evil so
nearly as other possible methods would do. The scholar knew very well
that no government would ever please him. "Why should he poorly pound
on some one string of discord, when all is jangle?" Emerson told Alcott
that Thoreau's conduct was mean and skulking. Almost at the same mo-
ment, however, he was full of admiration for the manuscript of A Week
on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Under an oak tree on the bank
of the Concord River he listened one afternoon as Thoreau read his "seven
days' voyage in as many chapters." Emerson called it "pastoral as Isaak
Walton, spicy as flagroot, broad & deep as Menu" and was ready to help
find a publisher for it.

The domestic economy of the Emersons underwent a revolution during
that summer, when they tried the novel experiment of living in their own
house as the boarders of a Mrs. Marston Goodwin, who was allowed to
bring in other boarders, as well as her four children. Lidian was in feeble
health and had to be relieved of the care of housekeeping, but the sixteen
months of Mrs. Goodwin's stay, when there were sixteen or eighteen persons
in the house much of the time, could not have been easy for her or for
Emerson. Yet the experiment, lasting apparently from May, 1 846, to Sep-
tember, 1847, left Lidian with the conviction that Mrs. Goodwin was "born
for the blessing of others" and was "thoroughly tender & self sacrificing."

About the same time, whether through Mrs. Goodwin's beneficent in-
fluence or not, the family seems to have got more into the spirit of play.
Thereafter family picnics and other outings in the Concord woods were
occasions memorable to the children. Blueberrying parties would start out
immediately after dinner. Emerson, says family tradition, would drive the
carryall with Grandmother Emerson and perhaps Aunt Lucy and others
aboard, while Thoreau drove the hayrack loaded with the children and
their mothers and the servants. Emerson himself seldom picked berries but
strolled about or sat in the shade with his mother and with Aunt Lucy.
Henry Thoreau explored the terrain, finding the best places for the pickers
to work. At home, outdoor life received a new impetus early in 1 847, when
Emerson loosened the tight boundaries of his farm, hardly more than
garden and orchard, by purchasing Warren's little field just to the east.

312 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Meanwhile, never free from his literary occupation for long at a time,
he had lectured as far away from home as Bangor, Maine, and, what was
more important, had struck a bargain with his old publishers, James Munroe
& Company of Boston, for the printing of his poems. Keeping control of
the book in his own hands, he bore all the expense of manufacture and
had the publishers account to him at thirty percent discount for the copies
they sold. The first edition presumably consisted of fifteen hundred copies,
stereotyped; and he was charged $373.37 for the printing. At the same
time he got a similar agreement for publication of a smaller number of
copies of the second series of Ellery Charming' s poems. Aware of the danger
of losing his foreign market to pirates, he had already sent the manuscript
for the London edition of his own book to John Chapman. Publication in
Boston occurred on Christmas Day, or, at latest, December 26, 1846,
though the date of the imprint was 1847.

The little volume, called simply Poems, began defiantly with "The
Sphinx.35 Many prospective purchasers at the bookstores must have been
too dismayed to read farther. "Each and All," "The Problem/5 "To Rhea,"
"The Visit," and "Uriel," the poems immediately following "The Sphinx/3
did not suggest easy holiday reading. Simpler pieces, such as "The Rhodora,"
"The Humble-bee," and "The Snow-storm," were well concealed; and the
"Concord Hymn" was held back to the end of the book. The common
man, with his common emotions, so much celebrated in the popular poetry
of the day, had given place in this volume to the introspective thinker
whose idiom was highly intellectualized and sometimes marked by meta-
phors as violently wrenched out of nature as were those of Donne and
Cowley in the seventeenth century. The lines were often firmly spun but
were not apt to fall into broadly woven rhythmic patterns. Frequently the
thought had to stand alone and make its way without much metrical aid.
The lines were usually short and sharp, stinging the mind to action and not
pleasing the senses. Perfection of rhyme was patently undervalued. The
dome of many-colored glass was missing. The light that shone through the
poems was generally the white light of intellect if not of eternity. The
reader was like a traveler suddenly set down in an arctic landscape, im-
mensely impressed if he could properly adjust his vision, but perhaps chilled.
If the senses were chilled, the mind got vigorous exercise in interpreting the
frequently cryptic style. But the by now rather familiar Transcendental
ideas kept emerging as the meaning cleared up.

If "The Sphinx," reprinted from The Dialj was not already famous for
its obscurity, it was soon to be so. Even Henry Thoreau, after filling thir-
teen pages in an attempt to explain it stanza by stanza, confessed that he
now saw "the great advantage of verse over prose— and how all com-

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 313

mentaries must be finite, but a text is infinite." He suspected that his
commentary might prove "as enigmatical as the Sphinx's riddle. Indeed/5
he exonerated himself, "I doubt if she could solve it herself." So far as
an extant rough draft shows, the struggle Emerson had with the poem
before he printed it had nothing to do with clarification of its meaning.
It was only artistically a gain to get rid of such lines as

Bring Sphinx a pair of spectacles
Her muddy eyes to clear
and to substitute

She melted into purple cloud.

She silvered in the moon;
for

She hopped into the baby's eyes
She hopped into the moon . . .

and it was not until many years later that he tried to put the meaning of
the whole poem into two prose sentences: "The perception of identity/' ,
he summarized, "unites all things and explains one by another, and the
most rare and strange is equally facile as the most common. But if the
mind live only in particulars, and see only differences (wanting the power
to see the whole— all in each), then the world addresses to this mind a
question it cannot answer, and each new fact tears it in pieces, and it is
vanquished by the distracting variety."

But this was oversimplified, and did not fully recognize the contra-
dictory elements in the thought of the poem. These were left for the reader
to put into proper logical relation. The diagnosis of man's ills which the
Sphinx, or man's inquiring spirit, made in the first half of the poem was
almost exactly balanced by the reply of "a poet" in which one might
reasonably have expected to find a proposed cure. The inquiring spirit had
a clear vision of the unity of nature but discovered man standing strangely
aloof, the sole discord in the otherwise universal harmony. Even the child
was bathed in the general joy of identity with the world soul. But man
was not. Something had poisoned him, and he himself was poisoning the
ground he walked on. What was the reason for man's evil fate? But instead
of dealing with cause and cure, "a poet," as confident in his optimism as
the Orphic poet of Emerson's first book, simply accused the Sphinx of
blindness and denied the existence of any real disease.

It was one of Emerson's most Emersonian ideas that only the "per-
ception of identity" was lacking. His poet, answering the dull Sphinx, sup-
plied that perception. The answer she got in several charming stanzas was

314 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

really a defense of man, and of the justice of his lot, on the ground that
what troubled him was only his inquiring spirit and his insatiable thirst
for perfection. However black his condition had looked when the Sphinx,
with mother Nature chiming in, had ended the superficial diagnosis, it now
took on a rosy hue. The bard, rejoicing in sharper vision than the phi-
losopher could boast, easily discovered love, the unifying force, operating,
plain enough to all good eyes, just below the surface. Fortunately there
was no need of any drastic change, it seemed. The moral of the first part
of the poem now appeared to be pointless, for the evil of the world had
dissolved before the penetrating glance of the poet seer.

With her mission obviously at an end, the inquiring spirit, now revert-
ing to genuine Sphinxhood, wrapped herself up in the altered garment of
the ancient myth and faded away, becoming indistinguishable from the
most pleasing aspects of nature:

Uprose the merry Sphinx,

And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud.

She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;

She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave:

She stood Monadnoc's head*

Harmony not only continued to reign throughout the universe, but at last
it was harmony visible and perceived, and man had sufficient reason to
be happy, being freed by truth from the very real curse of illusion.

Probably few readers of the book saw that the next poem, "Each and
All," was simply an earlier and less involved poetic experiment on the same
theme. The third piece, "The Problem,3* was perhaps Emerson's most mag-
nificent glorification of the religious spirit but was weakened by his too
equivocal dislike, in the opening lines and at the end, of religious formalism.
Yet the somewhat feeble beginning on church and churchman may have
caught the attention of the reader taught to look for shocking unorthodoxy
in the author, and there was little delay in getting at the surprisingly rich
array of epigrammatic couplets. The epigrammatic couplets enumerated
evidences of the genuineness and power of the religious impulse. This im-
pulse, being the flow of the Over-soul through men's minds, was also
equivalent to inspiration and genius, and might result in art:

Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 315

Never from lips of cunning fell

The thrilling Delphic oracle;

Out from the heart of nature rolled

The burdens of the Bible old;

The litanies of nations came.

Like the volcano's tongue of flame,

Up from the burning core below,—

The canticles of love and woe:

The hand that rounded Peter's dome

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome

Wrought in a sad sincerity;

Himself from God he could not free;

He builded better than he knew;—

The conscious stone to beauty grew, . . .

Such and so grew these holy piles,

Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,

As the best gem upon her zone,

And Morning opes with haste her lids

To gaze upon the Pyramids;

O'er England's abbeys bends the sky.

As on its friends, with kindred eye . . .

These temples grew as grows the grass;

Art might obey, but not surpass.

The passive Master lent his hand

To the vast soul that o'er him planned . . .

"To Rhea" and "The Visit," other reprints from The Did, were poetic
companion pieces to the essays on love and friendship. In "Alphonso of
Castile" Emerson succeeded in dramatic monologue with something of the
same irony of tone and vigor of expression that Browning had frequently
used. Emerson's Alphonso advised the "celestial fellows" mostly in lan-
guage that even a peasant would have understood. The ruthless king, seeing
all things on earth deteriorating, called upon the gods for drastic reforms,
including the doing away with nine-tenths of the miserable inhabitants:

Earth, crowded, cries, 'Too many men!3

My counsel is, kill nine in ten,

And bestow the shares of all

On the remnant decimal.

Add their nine lives to this cat;

Stuff their nine brains in one hat . .

316 THE LIFE OP RALPH WALDO EMERSON

So shall ye have a man of the sphere
Fit to grace the solar year.

"Mithridates" had the same assertive, masculine, untranscendental tone.
The vigorous hater of the Romans, somewhat transformed from his his-
torical character, might have been an American Transcendentalist, weary
of his restraints and off for a vacation in the unspiritual world of money-
getters, eaters, drinkers, sinners:

Too long shut in strait and few,
Thinly dieted on dew,
I will use the world, and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.

With a Faustian zest for the long-delayed feast of life he cried,

Hither! take me, use me, fill me,
Vein and artery, though ye kill me!

Perhaps Emerson wished only to honor the daring intellect curious to know
and experience the world. If so, he succeeded in making the mental drama
concrete.

If he seldom got any poetic inspiration from the potent wine of sexual
love, he now and then struck off passages that betrayed acquaintance with
passion, as in "Fate,3' or "Destiny" as it was later called:

Thy beauty, if it lack the fire

Which drives me mad with sweet desire,

What boots it?

There was no lack of dramatic quality in "Hamatreya," an adaptation of
a passage in The Vishnu Purana. Though the Concord names and the
simple vernacular speech must have disappointed a reader expecting the
traditional poetic manner, there were not only passages of simple farmer's
talk about clay, lime, gravel, a granite-ledge, and a misty lowland to go
to for peat, but also the consciously rhetorical

Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;

and the stark, cool comments of the poet before the beginning and after
the close of the Earth-song:

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 317

Ah, the hot owner sees not Death, who adds
Him to his land, a lump of mould the more.
Hear what the Earth says . . .

When I heard the Earth-song

I was no longer brave;

My avarice cooled

Like lust in the chill of the grave.

"The Rhodora" was pure simplicity and charm. In it and in "The
Humble-bee" Emerson, rejecting the economist's philosophy, surrendered
himself as fully as he could to a childlike enjoyment of nature. "Wood-
notes" was a more elaborate hymn to nature. Much of it was slightly
Wordsworthian but was also from as close observation as Wordsworth him-
self used; and the forest seer, perhaps mainly created in the image of
Thoreau, was at least as real as the boy of Winander.

And such I knew, a forest seer,

A minstrel of the natural year . . .

He saw the partridge drum in the woods;

He heard the woodcock's evening hymn;

He found the tawny thrushes3 broods;

And the shy hawk did wait for him;

What others did at distance hear,

And guessed within the thicket's gloom,

Was shown to this philosopher,

And at his bidding seemed to come.

In the second part of "Woodnotes" the pine tree diagnosed man's ills
much as the Sphinx had done:

The wood and wave each other know

Not unrelated, unaffied,

But to each thought and thing allied,

Is perfect Nature's every part,

Rooted in the mighty Heart.

But thou, poor child! unbound, unrhymed,

Whence earnest thou, misplaced, mistimed,

Whence, O thou orphan and defrauded?

And before it finished it was murmuring pantheistic praise of "the eternal
Pan" and the unity of all things with an accent reminiscent of India:

Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;

3i8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Thou askest in fountains and in fires,

He is the essence that inquires.

He is the axis of the star;

He is the sparkle of the spar;

He is the heart of every creature;

He is the meaning of each feature;

And his mind is the sky.

Than all it holds more deep, more high,

I "Monadnoc" showed Emerson faltering in his faith that nature really
had the transforming power which had made the forest seer admirable. He
was momentarily as much disillusioned with the dwellers about Monadnock
as Coleridge had been skeptical of Wordsworth's noble hill people with
diction peculiarly fit for poetry. But, loath to believe that "the brave old
mould" was broken, he did what he could to discover minor virtues in
his mountaineers. With their ploughs and carts and household arts they
were praiseworthy or even heroic. They were admirable masters of lan-
guage for their own purposes. They wielded masterfully their fourscore or
a hundred words, displaying power that a cultured man like the poet might
envy in them as much as in Montaigne.

Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
Squandering your unquoted mirth,
Which keeps the ground and never soars,
While Jake retorts and Reuben roars;
Scoff of yeoman strong and stark,
Goes like bullet to its mark;
While the solid curse and jeer
Never balk the waiting ear.

It was one of Emerson's triumphs to escape the ignorance of the educated,
or at least their biased judgment, and revel in the display of vigor on no
matter what intellectual plane. But a moment later he would be worlds
away from his rude mountain dwellers, singing the superior reality of
mind and spirit.

As if to prove his versatility beyond any doubt, Emerson wrote, in his
"Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing," a stinging rebuke to the sordid politics
of the era when "the famous States" were "Harrying Mexico" but at the
same time attached an apology for his own isolation from political squab-
bles. Things were in the saddle and rode mankind, and something would
have to be done; but for himself he fell back on his own doctrine of in-

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 319

dividualism. Let one live one's own life. The state would follow the best
it could. "Astnea," in spite of its title, was another of Emerson's many
tributes to Emersonian self-reliance; "Etienne de la Boece" honored self-
reliance in friendship.

The "Ode to Beauty/3 the first of a group of love poems or poems
about love, was justly excepted by Thoreau from his general admiration
of Emerson's verse because, among other reasons, its lines sloped too quickly
to the rhyme and because it sounded like parody. It was, said Thoreau, as
if the poet had used a hatchet on his verses as they came out, chopping
some short and some long. But the same criticism might have been made
of many other poems of Emerson's. "Give all to Love" had somewhat the
same faults but more vigor. It opened with one of Emerson's most un-
inhibited recommendations of love but ended with the cool advice that
stoical self-reliance be kept alive underneath the passion, ready to play its
part in case of need, and with the equally assured declaration of faith in
compensation should the beloved be lost:

Leave all for love;
Yet, hear me, yet . .
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, forever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.

Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young,
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free . . .
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

The volume also contained a few of the poems that had been written
for Ellen Tucker and the not very graceful "Initial, Daemonic and Celestial
Love." The latter recalled the essay "Love" with its modern Platonism.
Its three parts were no more satisfying than Spenser's four hymns on love
and beauty and heavenly love and heavenly beauty, but the last of the
three struck fire more than once in the course of its long, irregular progress.
Emerson was at home in his mystical vision

320 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOX

where all form
In one only form dissolves;
In a region where the wheel
On which all beings ride
Visibly revolves;

and for short periods he was as capable as Dante of religious exaltation.
He knew what the Italian poet meant by an "increate perpetual thirst"
that could draw one toward "the realm of God's own form." But the
concreteness and the intensely personal quality of Dante's visions were im-
possible to him, and his emotion quickly took on an intellectual paleness.
This intellectual pallor and the brevity and irregularity of lines and
meter were the faults that impressed one most in this book. Yet there was
hardly a poem that did not have some rare excellence. The poems on love
were followed by poems on the art of poetry. In "Merlin" Emerson was
really defending his own irregular meter. "The kingly bard," according
to the poetic of "Merlin/9

Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace;

Emerson boldly asserted that it was not the bard's business to encumber
his brain with the coil of rhythm and number but to climb for his rhyme,
passing into the upper chamber without taking the trouble to count the
"compartments of the floors/5— mounting to paradise by the stairway of
surprise, he called it. "Bacchus," praising the wine of poetic inspiration,

wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,

was not wanting in what it extolled and had many vigorous lines. "The
House," with its more coherent imagery and simpler structure, was a satis-
fying poem in spite of the excessive substitution of irregular feet that turned
the virtue of variety into a minor vice. For once the muse showed herself
an architect with a plan, and the result was a house built to music and
yet firm on its foundation.

She lays her beams in music,

In music every one,
To the cadence of the whirling world

Which dances round the sun—

"Musketaquid," fortunately moving in an almost sluggish blank verse,
keeping pace with the river's current and suiting the contentment and rest-

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 321

fulness of the Concord landscape, was followed by three elegies at the
end of the book. The Concord landscape appeared again in the "Dirge"
Emerson had written chiefly to commemorate his brothers Edward and
Charles. Another Concord poem was the long but charming "Threnody,"
inspired by the death of his son Waldo,

The hyacinthine boy, for whom
Morn well might break and April bloom,
The gracious boy, who did adorn
The world whereinto he was born,
And by his countenance repay
The favor of the loving Day . . .

Emerson, too firmly and contentedly fixed in the universal laws, and so
grieving that he could not grieve, collected rich epithets and scattered them
through a poem which, if it was not grief, was a nearly perfect philoso-
pher's substitute, A book which owed so much to Concord woods, fields,
and river ended, naturally enough, with what later came to be known as
the "Concord Hymn," turning back in memory to the town's embattled
farmers of 1775.

With all the virtues and faults that helped to unfit it for popularity
among the general reading public, the volume seemed to some of its
author's friends to be his passport to the poetic hall of fame. To others
it was hardly poetry at all but philosophy. Longfellow had it read to him
all evening and late into the night of December 26. To him many of the
pieces were Sphinx-like, many exquisite. He saw that the poems were
more intellectual than emotional; and, not without insight into the art
of a poet so extremely different from himself, he called Emerson a singer
of ideas. Alcott, though he said "many fine things" about the volume,
repaid Emerson for some of his own criticism by asserting that "the senti-
ment was moral and the expression seemed the reverse." Oliver Wendell
Holmes, confessing that he had read Emerson's poems in The Died more
for their faults than for their virtues, was now willing to look for virtues.
He still complained of unreasonable obscurity, a tendency to old-fashioned
conceits, and disdain of old-fashioned artistic proprieties. He frankly dis-
liked the vague and mystical things even though they might be the most
excellent in the volume. But in the poems he liked best he found more
of the wild strawberry flavor than in anything else that American soil had
produced. Horace Greeley, no qualified judge of such matters himself but
well informed, asserted that the poems had pleased everybody but the
most stubbornly bull-headed.

Aunt Mary, at last in a relenting mood, tardily announced that if only

THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Waldo were fixed in the Christian faith he would be capable of writing
a Paradise Lost without the tiresome parts. Caroline Sturgis, an unconven-
tional young woman who was weary of statuesque human beings and
wished she had red hair and eyes like a comet, told him, much as she had
done long before, what she believed was the simple truth about his poems.
Their thoughts pleased her, but she expected more emotion in poetry.
Philosophy was philosophy still, though delivered in rhymes by Alphonso
the Wise. Carlyle, with his habitual dislike of poetry, wished, when he
read Poems, that Emerson would be concrete and would stick to prose. In
spite of difficulties, he imagined he gained a real satisfaction from the
book; but he preferred floods of sunlight to what he described as these
thin, piercing radiances, like starlight.

Probably Margaret Fuller's criticism., based on a fairly up-to-date knowl-
edge of the poems but published a little before they were put into book
form, expressed nearly the average opinion of Emerson's friends who were
qualified to judge. Some would not have agreed with her in admiring the
melody of the poems, but most must have approved her praise of "subtle
beauty of thought and expression55 as well as her chief strictures. "But his
poems," she had said, "are mostly philosophical, which is not the truest
kind of poetry. They want the simple force of nature and passion, and
, . . fail to wake far-off echoes in the heart. The imagery wears a sym-
bolical air, and serves rather as illustration, than to delight us by fresh and
glowing forms of life.35 What her critical comments on Emerson the poet
amounted to but did not say was that while he harked back to Johnson's
"metaphysical poets" of the seventeenth century, he was moving, as was
Edgar Allan Poe, in the direction of what later came to be called the
symbolists. And this was true.

Before Poems had been out of the press long enough to justify the date
on the title page, the reviewers were at work. On December 29 the Boston
Courier justly called it "one of the most peculiar and original volumes of
poetry ever published in the United States/3 and discovered in it not only
harshness of diction and obscurity of thought but "exceeding refinement"
of sentiment and "piercing subtlety" of imagination. Cyrus Bartol, in The
Christian Examiner of some weeks later, conceded that no modern writings
were superior to those of Emerson in original merit, and that no one had
a finer eye than he for detecting the lines of correspondence that united
all things. But Emerson, if Bartol .was to be judge, had more height than
breadth, was the poet of a class rather than the poet of a race. And then
Bartol ventured to stir up the old ashes of religious controversy, blaming
Emerson for recognizing nowhere the Christian faith and for appearing
to acknowledge no distinction between man and the deity. The Protestant

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 323

critic, though gentler, was, on that point, not far from agreement with
Orestes Brownson, now a Catholic. Brownson, in his quarterly, declared
that Emerson's poems were "not sacred chants" but "hymns to the devil"
and could be relished "only by devil-worshipers.35

Cornelius Mathews, reviewer for The Literary World of New York,
agreed with the Examiner at many points and seemed to echo several of
BartoPs judgments. But he was unworried by the religious issue, reported
that he had observed what looked like an increasing friendliness toward
Emerson, and pointed a finger of scorn at the die-hard critics. Mathews
had some sharp comments for Emerson too. He was wide awake, even if
too unsympathetic with the seventeenth-century men, when he quoted
Johnson's reproof for their violent yoking of heterogeneous ideas. But the
upshot of his whole commentary was that Americans had in Emerson "one
of the finest, as he is certainly one of the most singular, poetical spirits of
the time." In "the torpid and respectable North American Review," recog-
nized by Mathews as one of Emerson's implacable foes, Francis Bowen,
still contemptuous, condemned Emerson along with eight other poets, in-
cluding Ellery Channing. He remembered Emerson's earlier "offensive
opinions" but asserted that this volume of poems contained "the most
prosaic and unintelligible stuff that it has ever been our fortune to en-
counter." "Is the man sane," he asked, "who can deliberately commit to
print this fantastic nonsense?" James Russell Lowell's censures, published
more than a year later in A Fable -for Critics, had wings, as Bowen's did
not, though they were the fledgling witticisms of a youthful critic. And if
Lowell looked only in Emerson's prose for the "grand verse," he found
something deep in the poems; if he was struck by their incoherence, he
nevertheless judged that the worst of them were "mines of rich matter."

Meantime the poet's life continued to be full of other things. On
Christmas Eve, 1846, as Poems was about to issue from the press, the
Emersons sleighed to the Alcotts5 and saw presents distributed. At home
they had an extraordinary Christmas dinner. Pies were a staple diet there
throughout the year, but on this occasion each piece inclosed a note ad-
dressed to a member of the family. Gifts were reserved for New Year's
Day, still regarded by the Emersons as a more proper time for festivities
than Christmas. Ellen, then not quite eight years old, recorded in her
journal that on the first of January, 1847, her father gave her The Diadem,
a parlor annual, for 1846 and for 1847. Both volumes contained poems of
his. Next day he entered in his account book an item of $3 paid for music
at the children's party. A few days later he entered a one-dollar subscrip-
tion for a runaway slave. Within a couple of months he was busily carry-
ing on correspondence in an attempt to help the poor Danish, or Prussian,

324 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

novelist Harro Hairing, for Hairing thought himself abused by his pub-
lishers.

About the time his poems came from the press Emerson had received
word that he was wanted in England to read lectures. Lyceums flourished
there and in Scotland as in America. The English edition of Poems, though
the difficulties of its style were not helped by the numerous printer's errors,
doubtless strengthened the demand for Emerson; but the essays and ad-
dresses had been enough. For several years he had received invitations to
cross the Atlantic. Now a concrete and persuasive one came from his friend
Alexander Ireland, his Edinburgh guide of 1833. but by this time manager
and editor of two Manchester newspapers. On December 28 Emerson
wrote him a favorable, though not decisive,, reply. Ireland sent more detailed
information on the prospects. Confident that he could successfully publicize
a lengthy British lecture tour, he offered to attend to all necessary business
arrangements. Liverpool, Manchester, London would certainly listen; a
circle of "Literary Institutions55 in Yorkshire and Lancashire needed quan-
tities of lectures. Lectures sometimes commanded fees of from £5 to £10,
and summer was the only off season.

Emerson, still dubious whether he could collect an audience in any
British city but London, listened next to Carlyle's profession of confidence
in the success of the proposed tour. Carlyle praised the solidity, practicality,
and sagacity of the dark, energetic Alexander Ireland, and he held out the
unique bait of a London audience of British aristocrats. According to
Carlyle, Emerson was an aristocrat himself and would like to speak to
Britishers of his own class.

Before any decision could be made about British offers a new and
very different proposition needed an answer. The Englishman Heraud had
now decided to postpone his projected magazine, but a somewhat similar
American scheme was making progress. A meeting at Emerson's home one
day in April decided to publish "a successor of the Dial59; and Emerson,
Theodore Parker, and Charles Sumner were instructed to choose an editor
and a publisher. Emerson, experienced in Transcendental journalism and
bent on his British tour, flatly refused to be a principal this time. When,
in spite of his protests, he was announced as "in the Direction" of The
Massachusetts Quarterly Review, he was provoked. But he could not escape
entirely. With good grace he supplied an address to the public for the
initial number.

Neither the prospect of transatlantic lectures nor the business of found-
ing a new magazine seriously interfered with the calendar of his fields and
orchards. Fruit trees were purchased in quantity at Plymouth. The varieties

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 325

of pears that were to grow to formidable numbers began arriving. Napoleon,
Beurre Diel, and Urbaniste were only a few of those to be set out at once
along with young apple trees. Henry Thoreau surveyed the two acres and
sixty-six rods of the newly acquired Warren lot. John Hosmer, John Gar-
rison, and Anthony Colombe put out seventy trees there and in the heater
piece. On the first of June, Emerson made an inventory of his trees, naming
nearly all of the 128, tree by tree. The distinct sections of his orchard now
made an impressive showing— west of the arbor and south of the path,
west of the arbor and north of the path, old orchard strip in the east garden,
west garden, heater piece east fence.

Soon after the great tree planting, Thoreau relocated two firs, perhaps
ten years old, to make them fit better into the new scheme; and next day,
with the help of Anthony Colombe, he laid tribute on the Wyman lot and
Walden Woods, bringing back forty-two white pines from one to five feet
high, one pitch pine, and eleven hemlocks for the adornment of the arbor.
On the following day he brought seventeen savins from Flint's Pond and
set them out by the arbor. Some five weeks later Emerson, Alcott, and
Thoreau took the road to Walden to cut hemlocks for columns to the
curious summer house now planned for the further ornament of Emer-
son's grounds. Alcott, sometimes with Thoreau's help, kept at his pleasing
labors as architect and builder by day, while at night he had happy dreams
in which he continued his day-time occupation. As for the gibes of the
townspeople at what he described as the sylvan and serpentine style, he
considered that Michelangelo's finest work might well have provoked similar
remarks. At the end of August, Emerson was surprised that the little house
he expected to call Tumbledown Hall had not yet fallen.

By late July the English visit had been decided upon, with the first of
October set as the approximate date of sailing. Alexander Ireland had
stirred up enthusiasm in the proper quarters. James Hudson of the Central
Committee of the Yorkshire Union of Mechanics' Institutes had put in his
oar, "I can engage for the north and south of England that we should
hail with delight the great transatlantic Essayist and our Lecture Halls
would be crowded with men who have already learned to love and now
only wait to see the American poet." He offered seventy-five guineas for
fifteen nights at institutes in his neighborhood and thought he could promise
other engagements once he was sure Emerson would come. Ireland and
Hudson together seemed to make the scheme foolproof. Before time to
sail Emerson got word from Mary Howitt. She wanted to advertise him
by publishing a memoir of him about the time he arrived in England. But
he begged off. With a view to revisiting France, he hired a Doctor Arnoult

326 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to give him twenty-four lessons in French conversation, and went to Boston
for them every Tuesday and Friday. He discovered another French in-
structor in the Courtier des Etats-Unis and subscribed for it.

Emerson, now about to face the Old World as the representative of
American culture, was in his forty-fifth year and had conquered the serious
physical ills that had beset him in early life. The thinness of his body,
accentuated by his nearly six feet of height, would make him look fragile
in comparison with the solidly built Britons, and their vitality would awaken
his envy. But in spite of the narrow and sharply sloping shoulders on which
it was set, his head gave the impression of firmness. His shock of brown
hair, now darker than in his youth, and his short, unobtrusive side whiskers
partly framed a face with rugged features and penetrating blue eyes. Some-
times, perhaps commonly, his face had a luminous, friendly expression
revealing an unusual combination of sensitiveness and self-control.

Probably his expression never approximated that of the obviously ideal-
ized crayon portrait of "about 1846." His more serious mood may have
been caught with some fidelity by the 1846 daguerreotype made for Garlyle's
benefit, and by David Scott's somber painting of 1 848, liked by both Alcott
and Sanborn. The Scott portrait showed Emerson the lecturer, mildly stem,
watching his audience intently. The worried, tense face of the Pirsson
daguerreotype of 1848 was not convincing. Though the English artists were
doubtless prejudiced by their notions of what a native American should
look like, they were -right in discovering the Indian type in Emerson's fea-
tures. If Alcott was in an attitude of worship not conducive to the clearest
vision when he saw ideal and classic beauty and Olympian contour of
figure in Emerson, he was not deceived as to the dignity and force with
which the lecturer could impress his audiences.

Through his books and through a few friends and acquaintances Emer-
son was already known to a number of Europeans. Carlyle was the most
powerful of his British friends. But there were lesser ones. The perhaps
two thousand or more copies of an English reprint of his lecture "Man the
Reformer" had helped make him attractive to readers who cared more for
the problems of their own day than for the timeless ideas of his essays and
poems. His religious liberalism frightened many readers. A brilliant woman,
a friend of Carlyle' s, dared to confess only in a whisper that she had spent
a day on the essays and found them full of truth. She did not dare to
recommend them to anybody else. Yet a few of the religious but un-
orthodox might even have endorsed Elizabeth Hoar's opinion that the
teachers of the nations at this time were Jesus, Goethe, Carlyle, and Emer-
son. John Heraud believed that The Monthly Magazine, under his own

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 327

brief term of editorship, had helped secure a wide acceptance of Tran-
scendentalism, or an English version of it. In the English universities there
were a few young men of great promise who were ready to receive the
Emersonian doctrine. Such were the Oxonians Arthur Hugh Clough and
his young friend Matthew Arnold, though it is hard to believe that there
was not some cool skepticism mixed with their enthusiasm from the start.
It was only a few years later that Arnold put his unsteady faith into his
sonnet "Written in Emerson's Essays." As he challenged the dead, unprof-
itable world to listen to this new, oracular voice, he saw with sorrow that
man after man, full of bitter knowledge, smiled incredulously and passed
by unmoved. He himself repeated his mentor's golden text and waited for
an answer:

Yet the will is free:

Strong is the Soul, and wise, and beautiful:
The seeds of godlike power are in us still:
Gods are we, Bards, Saints, Heroes, if we will.—
Dumb judges, answer, truth or mockery?

Emerson was not unaware that he had enthusiastic readers in France,
where he planned to visit before returning from his British tour. Margaret
Fuller had written him soon after her visit in Paris that the Polish poet
Adam Mickiewicz had first made the Essays known there. Margaret, bait-
ing the elusive, mystical Pole with a copy of Emerson's poems, had "found
in him," as she reported, "the man I had long wished to see, with the
intellect and passions in due proportion for a full and healthy human being,
with a soul constantly inspiring." This much of the story, at least, Emerson
knew; but there was much more of it.

Is seems that Mickiewicz, discovering Emerson in 1838, had promptly
communicated his enthusiasm to his friend Edgar Quinet. By 1842 the
College de France was the center of the new excitement over the American
Transcendentalism During his last two years as professor of Slavonic lan-
guages and literature there, Mickiewicz managed to introduce Emerson to
his students. By 1844, when Mickiewicz gave up his professorial chair,
Quinet, a professor of Southern European literature, was parading Emerson
before his students in company with Vico, Condorcet, Herder, and Hegel
and was praising him without much restraint. In a lecture of 1845 he
declared that in the same North America which was pictured as so ma-
terialistic he had found the most idealistic writer of the age. The historian
Jules Michelet, a member, with Mickiewicz and Quinet, of a remarkable
triumvirate at the college, is reputed to have shared their admiration for

328 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Emerson* Politics was playing no small part in the teaching of the trium-
virate, and Emerson and America were expendable ammunition for the
liberal movement soon to result in the Revolution of 1848.

It was Philarete Chasles, also of the College de France, who, in August
of 184,4, brought Emerson out into the full light of publicity. In the Revue
des deux mondes his notable article on literary tendencies in England and
America was sure of reaching the intellectuals of more countries than
France. Ghasles imagined, as any other specialist in Germanic languages
and literatures would have been apt to do, that Carlyle was the master of
Emerson. But he placed both high. In America, he discovered, Emerson
was the one puissant original just as Carlyle was in England. He saw the
fundamental democratic tendency of Emerson and the broad streak of
conservatism in Carlyle. But the significant thing was that he had made
Emerson a literary figure in French eyes. From the professors the Emer-
sonian contagion spread to the Comtesse d'Agoult, another political radical.,
and to Emile Montegut, a youthful but scholarly writer not unlike Emerson
in freedom of thought and mystical leanings. Meantime somebody had
made French of the critical chapter on Emerson and other American writers
in Margaret Fuller's recent Papers on Literature and An.

Comtesse d'Agoult's article in La Revue independante, July 25, 1846,
was presumably the first to be devoted to Emerson alone by any critical
journal in France, and it was intelligent as well as weighty. The countess
remembered hearing Mickiewicz mention Emerson in a lecture. "But/3 she
said, "mentioned thus casually and without any precise significance attached
to it, the name of Emerson did not awaken the curiosity of an audience
with more pressing matters to worry about, and surely no one except me
in that assembly tense with political passions dreamed of remembering it.55
At all events she remembered. Finding no copy of Emerson's writings in
Paris., she sent to London for Carlyle's English edition of the first Essays.
Reading that book, she made up her mind that its author was no literary
man, no political theorist, no philosopher, hardly even a moralist, but some-
thing better than all these— a wise man acting in conformity with his own
nature. She quickly got a firm hold on his key ideas and cast his horoscope.
She was persuaded that the union in his superior mind of the spirit of
Protestant individualism with the spirit of pantheism provided a new
medium out of which a native, original American art might grow. She
looked upon him as the personification of the American genius, a genius
impatient of all authority and disdainful of tradition.

In August of the fallowing year, when Emerson was preparing to cross
the Atlantic in person, he unwittingly received a second formal and im-
pressive introduction to the French, this time through £mile Montegut,

LEAPING AND PIERCING MELODIES 329

soon to be influential as Frenchmen's handy guide to American, English,
and German literature. With the Revue des deux mondes for his platform,
Montegut spoke with much assurance and no doubt made some converts,
It was true, he found, that in Emerson the philosopher tended to become
a moralist, and that was a bad augury, for the moralist flourished only in
an age of doubt and indecision. And yet, at home in the company of
Montaigne, Charron, and Shakespeare, Emerson was a sage, having orig-
inality, spontaneity, wisdom as an observer, a nice analytical sense, critical
ability, and freedom from dogmatism. The self-reliance which, Montegut
recognized, was the key to Emerson's thought made life no immolation,
as Puritanism had done, but perpetual heroism. In the new American
philosophy the individual attracted the universe to himself, as in other phi-
losophies he was absorbed by it. Montegut, in common with other French
admirers, saw in Emerson a thinker whose ideas could be used for bullets
in the political war then raging in France; but he was looking for argu-
ments against extreme leveling democracy. He saw how it could be argued
that Emerson declared for the individual in order to protect character and
genius against the intolerant mob. But he showed his sense of values when
he abruptly turned his back on the political turmoil of the moment and
ended with an eloquent plea for Emerson's thought as timeless truth.

On the whole, to a well-informed transatlantic observer, it might have
seemed that Emerson could hardly have chosen a more appropriate time
for his voyage to Europe. England was probably then in a more receptive
mood for such doctrine as his than ever before. In France the growing
political crisis seemed to offer the largest scope to the French democrats
who had felt the inspiration of his writings. However vaguely conscious he
himself was of the fitness of the time, he was going. On October 5, 1847,
having paid up his debts and written Alexander Ireland the latest version
of his plans, he boarded the packet ship Washington Irving in Boston
Harbor.

ig.

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN

But England is anchored at the side of Europe, and right
in the heart of the modern world. . . .

—English Traits

T IDIAN, Henry Thoreau, and the Alcotts saw Emerson off for England.
I Probably Ruth Emerson, though now in her seventy-ninth year,
I was also at the wharf to bid her son farewell. Mrs. Alcott wept.

-*— H Thoreau, chosen to be the protector and man of all work for Lidian
and her children, looked with a critical eye on the packet ship Washington
Irving, a sailing vessel in an age when steamers were already the efficient
passenger-carriers of the Atlantic, and discovered reasons why a voyage in
her would not be desirable. The stateroom Emerson was assigned "was
like a carpeted dark closet, about six feet square, with a large keyhole for
a window." The skylight over his head was "the size of an oblong dough-
nut, and about as opaque." And instead of walking in Walden Woods he
would have to promenade on deck, "where the few trees, you know, are
stripped of their bark." The ship, already shorn of romance in Thoreau' s
eyes, was towed ingloriously out to sea by a steam tug "without a rag of
sail being raised."

Three days later the little ship, weighing some 1500 tons freight and
all, had made only 134 miles and was creeping through a forest of logs,
boards, and chips spewed into the sea by the rivers of Maine and of New
Brunswick. Seven men, three women, and ten children had the run of the
quarter-deck and made, with the voluble Captain Caldwell, the society
of the ship. The sick were selfish and those not sick too lacking in energy to
inquire about the sixty-five persons in the steerage or to help amuse the
children. Dickens, Dumas, and Captain Marryat were in the library for
the comfort of the literary. Emerson had the diary of his great-grandfather
Joseph of Maiden in his cabin for his private reading. A whale passed,
deliberately showing his whole length. There were schools of mackerel and
blackfish. Schools of porpoises swam by the bowsprit, throwing themselves
out of the water. The land birds failed to turn back soon enough, and
Emerson saw one of them drowning in the sea. Astern, the waves broke

330

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 331

into the most delicious green. Eleven days out, the ship came one night
into an area of phosphorescence so bright that one could read the dial of
a watch by the weird light. This was the passage Emerson long remem-
bered for gales that made the overjoyed Malay cook cry, "Blow! me do
tell you, blow!" But the gales of October, 1847, whatever they amounted
to, were presumably blowing in the right direction, for on the sist the
coast of Cork was visible and next day the mountains loomed on the oppo-
site side of St. George's Channel.

There, on the starboard, lay Britain, a great ship anchored at the side
of Europe, in the heart of the mid-nineteenth-century world. Never a ship
of fools, she sometimes had the aspect of a man-of-war; sometimes, of a
merchantman. Emerson knew Britain's great achievements in the past and
her great names. It is doubtful whether, even after some hints from Garlyle,
now rapidly entering into a period of profound pessimism, he had an
adequate understanding of the unrest and bitterness rife among her score
or so millions of people at the moment of his arrival. The Reform Bill
of fifteen years earlier had been only a palliative. Recriminations over
the wealth and political power of the few and the poverty and political
impotence of the many were shrill and insistent. The peace of Britain was
made less secure by neighboring Continental countries which were powder
kegs ready to be touched off by the flame of revolution. A few more
months and, as the ultra-conservative political thinker Thomas Carlyle put
it, awe had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing,
and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. . . .
Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, in-
articulate as the voice of Chaos." Emerson was certainly aiding the growth
of democratic thought, but the extreme European reformers, eager to
remake the world by violence, were hardly capable of understanding this
unbellicose philosopher.

The Washington Irving moved up past the coast of Wales and into
the Mersey on October 22. It was after dark when she arrived; but Emer-
son, with three other passengers and the captain, climbed into a dangerous-
looking little boat and, first by oars and then by sail, got to the Liverpool
water front. Emerson experienced some confusion and delay because Alex-
ander Ireland, kept back by his duties in the newspaper office, failed to
meet him, and because Carlyle's letter marked for delivery to him "on
the instant when he lands in England" was not delivered till after he had
been ashore for a couple of days. But on the 25th he went from Liverpool
to Manchester; and there Ireland promptly began to prove himself "the
king of all friends & helpful agents, the most active unweariable & imper-
turbable." And on the same day Emerson, finding that his lectures would

332 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

not begin for a week, decided to accept Garlyle's pressing invitation and
was quickly on his way to London.

At ten o'clock that night Jane Carlyle opened the door to him and
he saw the redoubtable Scot himself behind her with a lamp in the entry.
He was their guest for several days, but it took only a moment to loosen
the floodgates of Carlyle's talk. It was long past midnight when the con-
versation recessed till breakfast next morning. "At noon or later/' Emerson
wrote home, "we went together, G. & I— to Hyde Park and the palaces
(about two miles from here) to the National Gallery and into the 'Strand'
to Chapman's shop Carlyle melting all Westminster & London down into
his tall & laughter as he walked." If Carlyle had not changed much during
the fourteen years since Emerson had visited him at Craigenputtock, Emer-
son saw him now in a new light, felt that he had not come to know him
very well before, and was surprised at his rude vigor and range.

Emerson now saw the chasm between himself and this man who was
**not mainly a scholar, like the most of my acquaintances/' he wrote to
Lidian; "but a very practical Scotchman, such as you would find in any
Sadler's or iron dealer's shop, and then only accidentally and by a sur-
prising addition the admirable scholar & writer he is." Emerson was re-
minded of the Irish gardener at home. c£If you wish to know precisely
how lie talks, just suppose that Hugh Whelan had had leisure enough, in
addition to all his daily work, to read Plato, & Shakspeare, & Calvin, and,
remaining Hugh Whelan all the time, should talk scornfully of all this
nonsense of books that he had been bothered with,— and you shall have
just the tone & talk & laughter of Carlyle." Carlyle's uninhibited conversa-
tion revealed "a very unhappy man, profoundly solitary, displeased &
hindered by all men & things about him, & plainly biding his time."

An accidental meeting at the National Gallery with Mrs. Bancroft,
Lidian's girlhood friend and now the wife of the American minister, soon
resulted for Emerson in an introduction to Samuel Rogers. In the house
that till recently stood on an extension of St. James's Place, with its trios
of curving windows looking out on Green Park in the rear, the eighty-
four-year-old poet received Emerson, Mrs. Bancroft, and a few others with
indiscriminate politeness and went through his routine of showing pictures
and manuscripts and telling anecdotes of the great. After a few more
preliminary glimpses of London society Emerson returned to Liverpool on
the 2gth.

As his lecture season was to begin with concurrent courses in Man-
chester and Liverpool, he engaged lodgings in both cities. He had in each
place "a handsome furnished parlor & bedroom," with fire, lighting, and
service. At Liverpool he lodged at a Mrs. Hill's. At Manchester, his chief

JVOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES 7JV 333

headquarters during the autumn and winter, he lived in a simple house
in suburban Fenny Street, Higher Broughton. His landlady there, Mrs.
Massey, bought his provisions for him and made them go as far as she
could, carried his letters to the post office and his boots to the cobbler. He
usually took his meals at home, and in solitude except when he had invited
guests. But he was soon being asked to friendly houses. At Liverpool the
British Unitarian leader, James Martineau, an acquaintance of 1833, now
got "an indelible impression of the depth and greatness of his nature." It
appeared that The Dial was "absurdly well known" in these parts and
served as an introduction to its former editor.

His lectures for both the Manchester Athenaeum and the Liverpool
Mechanics Institution were drawn from his old course called "Representa-
tive Men." But after a few days he started to give concurrently a mis-
cellaneous course consisting of "Eloquence/' "Domestic Life," "Reading,"
"The Superlative in Manners and Literature," and, it seems, "The Human-
ity of Science.55 At the end of November he revisited Liverpool to lecture
for a new branch of the Roscoe Club.

The success of his British tour now seemed endangered only by a
number of resentful religionists who were trying to shut him up. He was
preached against even by some in the Church of England, but they were
not his most violent enemies. Though his lecture on Swedenborg in the
course on "Representative Men" was objected to by the general public
only as "a misty subject, mistily treated," the Swedenborgians were deeply
offended. The Rev. J. H. Smithson, a New Jerusalem pastor apparently
influential in the Manchester Athenaeum, sent a letter of protest to the
American and promptly carried his quarrel into his pulpit. A "crowded
congregation" heard his assertions that Emerson was wrong in calling
Swedenborg a mystic at all, wrong in considering Swedenborg's theologic
interpretation of everything a vice, and wrong in saying that evil should
be shunned as evil rather than as a sin against God, Smithson vigorously
defended his own belief in demons and evil spirits and lashed out against
Emerson's somewhat startling claim that man, even in brothels, in jails,
or on gibbets, was on his way upward toward God. To Emerson's advice
that "Every ardent and contemplative young man at eighteen or twenty
ought once to read the theological books of Swedenborg and then throw
them aside for ever," Smithson replied confidently that if the ardent and
contemplative young man obeyed the first half of this admonition he would
be in no danger of carrying out the rest of it. Emerson, cautious about
overoptimism, wrote home that "my reception here is rather dubious &
by no means so favorable as Henry pleases to fancy."

Generally he was thought a good platform speaker. If there was at first

334 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

some complaint that his voice was nasal, it was conceded that at times he
spoke with musical richness and depth. Some disliked the evenness of his
rhythm and the sameness of expression in his face. Doubtless many were
struck by a certain stiffness in his manner, his ubolt upright" posture, his
behavior on the platform "as if he were a great overgrown school-boy,
saying his task/5 and his c 'downright plain" way of reading his manuscript.
"Now and then/' said George Phillips, "his face lighted up, and his strange
mystic eyes flashed as with the Delphic fire, but it was a momentary ebulli-
tion, and the statue was itself again.35 Yet praise soon outweighed blarne.
"His voice, his delivery, his very carelessness of his audience, his indiffer-
ence as to whether they understand him or no, seem/3 another observer put
it, "to become endeared to one as forming part of the individual Emerson,
whose thoughtful pathway lies alone through the mental world."

Many would have lionized the transatlantic visitor had he been willing
to be the lion. But if he had to refuse to dine with the mayor of Man-
chester, he skillfully played his part in Free Trade Hall at the soiree of
the Manchester Athenaeum, chief sponsor of his lectures. The throng must
have been dominated by John Bright., though he only sat silent at the high
table, and by Richard Cobden, his great ally who had returned a few
weeks earlier from a triumphal Continental tour. But Emerson, when it
came his turn to speak, was immediately in his own proper element. He
remarked that he had known the British cultural and political leaders before
he came over. "When I was at home," he said, "they were as near to
me as they are to you." The arguments of the Anti-Gorn-Law League and
its leaders were, he said, known to all friends of free trade. He also remem-
bered what was expected of him as a specialist in ethics. He spoke of "the
moral peculiarity of the Saxon race,— its commanding sense of right and
wrong, the love and devotion to that."

Once his Manchester and Liverpool courses were over, Emerson was
ready to make diligent use of Bradshaw's monthly railway guide. He was
impressed by the superior mechanical might of the English in the swift
trains^ for he rode everywhere "as on a cannonball." In December he began
the lecturing his agents had arranged for him in widely scattered towns.
He first went north to Preston. But he at once doubled back to Manchester
and soon got as far south as Nottingham. Then, after a week of consoli-
dated effort with travel only between Nottingham and its near neighbor
Derby, he went north to Preston again, but only to turn around and
hurry to Birmingham, a new farthest south for the tour. With almost equal
perversity his schedule sent him, once more, north of Manchester to
Huddersfield, and thereupon, instead of sending him to Chesterfield and
Leicester, reversed that desirable order. With little regard to any feeling

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 335

of futility he may well have had by this time, it next hustled him off to
Birmingham again. He was like a tennis ball batted back and forth among
these northern towns. He went from Birmingham to his old lodgings in
Manchester to spend Christmas Day.

On Christmas Day he had Alexander Ireland and John Cameron as
guests at his Manchester lodgings. But before the end of December he was
in Worcester, from whose cathedral tower he saw the Severn and the
Malvern Hills. He lectured several times at Leeds, where he dined with
the mayor but was warned by the president of the mechanics institution
to reconsider some passages in his lectures that were likely to be construed
as attacks on Christianity. Between Leeds lectures he appeared at Halifax
and Ripon. He was several times at Sheffield and once at York, where the
minster was "beautiful beyond belief." He continued his Yorkshire cam-
paign till the 2 ist of January, lea.ni.ng heavily on "Napoleon," "Domestic
Life," and "Shakespeare/9

He had soon fallen into the habit, new to him, of accepting invitations
to private homes instead of going to the hotels. His correspondence had
grown inconveniently large, especially with young men, in England and
Scotland, and even in Ireland, where the poet William Allingham volun-
teered his friendship. He was asked if he would not remove to England.
In Manchester late in January for two weeks of comparative quiet, Emer-
son had insistent calls from organizations whose desire to use him testi-
fied to his popularity. "Peace; Thomas Paine anniversaries; Roscoe Club
Soirees; Infant Athenaeums that hold bazaars, all beckon & solicit the
attention of the new come lecturer," he wrote home. "My Societies are to
the full as droll as Pickwick's." He paid for his own ticket to the great
Free Trade banquet, where he was delighted to hear Cobden again. Long
a student of the art of public speaking, he watched his man carefully.
Cobden spoke calmly, surely, and factually. His dogma of free trade had
given him an effective education. But for Emerson the memorable event
of his fortnight of freedom from timetables was his own private banquet,
a farewell symposium of the friends and disciples he had won by his books
and lectures in Lancashire and its neighboring counties.

Some notable persons he had met in this region were not present at
his Manchester lodgings on January 29. Perhaps Philip Bailey, author of
the then popular Festus, was not invited. The admired George Stephenson,
builder of the first effective locomotive, could hardly have been expected
in this last year of his life. Though Herbert Spencer later tried vainly to
kindle Emerson's interest in synthetic philosophy, he did not come from
Derby in January, 1848.

But those who actually arrived for the festivities showed to what a

336 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

variety of minds Emerson could appeal. Two came from Nottingham.
Joseph Neuberg, the German merchant., had been Emerson's host there.
Later he became an extremely useful friend of Carlyle's. Henry Sutton,
"the pride of Nottingham/' was a marked man in even this gathering. He
was a timorous, spiritual young man and had nearly got rid of his body.
According to report, he contemptuously fed it on roots and water. In his
recent book. The Evangel of Love, he had impatiently announced his
devotion by displaying on the title page a quotation from Emerson, but
he had found the courage to tell his new master privately that he liked
Alcott "much better than I do you.33 George Dawson was a lecturer and
at times announced the same subjects Emerson did. Thomas Ballantyne
was a Manchester editor. William Maccall, an ex-Unitarian minister "full
of metaphysics and poetry," seems also to have been among the guests.

Doctor W. B. Hodgson, later professor of political economy at the
University of Edinburgh but at this time a schoolmaster in the Manchester
area, not only attended at Emerson's lodgings but opened his own house
to the guests. Alexander Ireland was naturally present, and his associate
Francis Espinasse,, a clever journalist. Espinasse was known as a follower
of Carlyle but was sharply reproved by Jane Carlyle for showing signs
of deserting to the Emersonian camp. He was an obviously fit guest. John
Cameron, from Wakefield, was, according to Emerson, a "most erect &
superior mind" but, like many others, too greatly in debt to Carlyle. Thomas
Hornblower Gill, a "wonderful six feet of brain and nerves" but thin
and -ungainly with his "small Puritan head, which was more than half
forehead," was the hymn-writer and poet Emerson had first seen and
admired at Birmingham. George Phillips, an "erratic genks," had "marched
from the far moors of Yorkshire^ and crossed the steep and rocky summit
of Stanedge" on a "boisterous winter's day5* to be present on this occasion.

The somewhat malicious Phillips told the story of the symposium with
most detail and made Emerson's guests look like a menagerie. "A more
motley, dissimilar, heterogeneous mass of persons never before, perhaps,
met together at the table of a philosopher," he said. Espinasse classified
them as "mystics, poets, prose-rhapsodists, editors, schoolmasters, ex-Uni-
tarian ministers, and cultivated manufacturers" and asserted that their only
bond of union was "a common regard and respect for Emerson." There
were some unconventional happenings. Gill insisted on reading "a fine
passage in Plato" and, having read it, commenced a long dissertation upon
it. But Emerson, pleased, like the rest, "sat silent and listening, with that
calm pale face of his." Gill had his triumph in spite of his spectacular
accidents with food and wine at table, but Henry Sutton sat at the right
hand of Emerson, being, it seemed, the master's apostle St John. After

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 337

dinner, the company listened to "a reading by Emerson— at urgent request
—of his paper on Plato." A few remained for breakfast next morning. Alex-
ander Ireland was little troubled by the amusing incidents of the occasion,
and Emerson himself looked upon his guests with a sympathetic and friendly
eye and wrote home to Lidian, "These are all men of merit, & of various
virtues & ingenuities.3' He was no snob.

After his two weeks' respite from lecturing, he left Manchester for Edin-
burgh. On his way north he stopped a few times for sightseeing or for
lectures. Near Barnard Castle he explored the region of Scott's Rokeby.
From Barnard Castle to Darlington he passed, during the whole of an
afternoon, through the great domain of the Duke of Cleveland and met
the duke himself in the highway, returning with his dogs from the hunt.
Emerson thus got his democratic eyes accustomed to one aspect of British
aristocracy. Presently, in a counting room at the Gateshead Iron Works,
he was studying a very different symbol of British society in a George
Crawshay who had, Emerson understood, "refused the tests at Cambridge,
after reading my Essays." Through Crawshay's misinformation Emerson
lost the proper train to Edinburgh but, after some telegraphic explana-
tions, arrived to find his audience still waiting for him, "really a brilliant
assembly," fit to listen to his new lecture, "Natural Aristocracy."

Yet Scotland, still a stronghold of orthodox Presbyterianism in spite
of the ominous "Disruption" of some five years earlier, looked like dan-
gerous ground for Transcendental lecturing. The country had already been
alerted. In Taif s Edinburgh Magazine, George Gilfillan, a wobbler in his
later estimates of Emerson, welcomed him as the "Coming Man" but
warned him against repeating offenses of which he had been guilty in
England. There, Emerson had "mesmerized" or "mystified" his audiences
and had uttered "imprudent, and even outrageous" things. Such "escapades"
were "certain to be misunderstood," and, Gilfillan sternly announced, "in
Scotland they will not be endured." The judgment of Blackwood's Edin-
burgh Magazine that, though the lecturer was pre-eminent among Amer-
icans for original genius, he was guilty of obscurity and incoherence was
a much less serious matter; but in an article in MacphaiVs Edinburgh
Ecclesiastical Journal and Literary Review, nicely timed for his arrival in
Scotland, some generous praise of his innocuous qualities masked a defense
of orthodoxy against any attacks he might make on it. And the rumblings
of the Edinburgh journals were only a prelude.

At Edinburgh and Glasgow Emerson had somewhat the same inter-
locking lecture schedules that he had had at Manchester and Liverpool,
but the courses were shorter, and Glasgow got only half as many nights
as Edinburgh. At Edinburgh, after his initial lecture, he read the appar-

338 THE LIFE OP RALPH WALDO EMERSON

ently very old "Genius of the Age," "Shakespeare/' and "Eloquence."
Meantime Glasgow citizens, presumably judged less literary than those of
the old capital, were hearing the much worn but reliable "Napoleon" and
"Domestic Life.5'

The criticism Emerson now got was not entirely one-sided. According
to a self-styled student, though the visitor indeed horrified the orthodox, he
stirred the hearts of the liberal. But the common opinion was unfavorable.
A pamphlet called Emerson's Orations to the Modem Athenians; or,
Pantheism summed up this "Chimera of the Oracle of the Woods" as a
brilliant and dangerous though visionary propagandist of the skepticism of
which France had afforded an appalling example, The urbane Edinburgh
Philosophical Institution could take four lectures and survive public opinion,
but several of the directors of the Glasgow Athenaeum were panic-stricken.

In Edinburgh, Emerson was pleasantly settled in the bachelor apart-
ments of a correspondent and admirer, Doctor Samuel Brown. In recent
years Brown had entertained Margaret Fuller and had learned what he could
of Emerson from her and other traveling Americans. He was a friend of
Carlyle and also knew Edinburgh and the Scottish pantheon. An imagina-
tive scientist, he was unsubdued by the discipline of his laboratory; and
Carlyle aptly described him as "that kind of a man, that if God Almighty
wished to hang a new constellation in the sky, he would give him an
estimate for the same." At Brown's, Emerson found David Scott, "a sort
of Bronson Alcott with easel & brushes/5 and Craig, -Brown's Siamese twin,
"sharer of all his chemistry or alchemy/3 It was from this retreat among
the unorthodox that the American guest sallied forth to explore and to
read lectures.

What Emerson wrote home at the time showed that his Scottish tour
was really a memorable experience. The day after his arrival he saw JoKn
Wilson ("Christopher North"), Mrs. Jeffrey, Mrs. Crowe, "and looked
all round this most picturesque of cities . . , and in the evening met Mr
Robert Chambers (author of the Vestiges of Creation) by appointment
at Mr Ireland's (father of Alexander L) at supper. The next day at is,'5
he went on, "I visited by appointment Lord Jeffrey . , . then went to
church, & heard John Bruce preach, and then to Mrs Crowes at 5.30, to
dine with De Ouincey, and David Scott, & Dr Brown. De Quincey is a
small old man of 70 years, with a very handsome face, and a face too
expressing the highest refinement, a very gentle old man, speaking with
the greatest deliberation & softness, and so refined in speech & manners as
to make quite indifferent his extremely plain & poor dress. For the old
man summoned by message on Saturday by Mrs Crowe to this dinner had

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 339

walked on this stormy muddy Sunday ten miles from Lass Wade, where
his cottage is, and was not yet dry ... He has a childish facility, and
has also relation to Ellery Channing, & to George Bradford, say George's
amiableness raised to the tenth power. . . . He invited me to dine with
him ... & I accepted."

There was no respite. "The next day/' Emerson wrote, "I breakfasted
with David Scott, who insists on sittings for a portrait & sat to him for
an hour or two. ... At I o'clock, I went to Glasgow, and read my story
there to an assembly of 2 or 3000 people in a vast lighted cavern called
the City Hall, that will hold 5000 people. . . . Next day, I dined at
Edinburgh with Robert Chambers . . . This day I went to the University
to see Professor Wilson & to hear him lecture (on moral philosophy) to
his class. . . . His lecture . . . was on the association of ideas, & was a
very dull sermon without a text, but pronounced with great bodily energy,
sometimes his mouth all foam, he reading, the class writing, and I at last
waiting a little impatiently for it to be over. No trait was there of Chris-
topher North; not a ray."

Emerson stretched out his letter to extraordinary length, for he was
full of his Scotch news. "Afterwards," he said, "we went to Sir Wm
Hamilton's Lecture on Logic— He is the great man of the college . . .
but now suffering lately from palsy. We went over the Old Parliament
House, saw all the judges, & heard a little of the pleadings of the barristers,
under the guidance of Francis Russell, Esq. who, you may remember,
visited us from Dr Brown. ... I saw George Combe, who had called
on me & had invited me to breakfast . . . Combe talked well & sensibly
about America. But, for the most part, there is no elasticity about Scotch
sense it is calculating & precise, but has no future. Then to Glasgow &
spent the night at Professor Nichol's observatory ... I saw next day the
Saut Market and O plenty of women (fishwives & others) & children,
bare-footed, barelegged, on this cold i8th of February in the streets. ... At
Edinburgh again . . . visited Lord Jeffrey . . . Jeffrey as always very-
talkative, very disputatious, very French ... I should like to see him put
on his merits . . . but here he is the chief man, has it all his own way,
and is a mere Polonius. . . . The next day, I dined with De Quincey
& his pleasing daughters . . . We carried our host back with us to Edinb.
in the carriage to Mrs Crowe's, & to my lecture!"

Thus Emerson in his own words put an end to any suspicion that he
suffered from a lack of hospitality in Scotland. There were many, includ-
ing a few notable persons, willing to give the lecturer a clean bill of health.
David Scott at first found him "severe, and dry, and hard" in appearance

34<> THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

but gradually discovered that he was "elevated, simple, kind, and truthful5'
in character. Scott managed to suggest all of these qualities in the portrait
he painted in oils. De Quincey, saved at length from bailiffs and opium
but not from his shyness and his fear of old Edinburgh specters, must,
however habitual his amiability, have been warmed a little by the Amer-
ican visitor. At any rate he recommended him in a letter to Derwent
Coleridge as a distinguished author of fascinating books and as one who
"knew your illustrious father personally, and honored him33 ; and then he
actually came, with Doctor Samuel Brown, to the railroad station to see
the "foreigner" off to Dundee. In the provincial town Emerson learned
that even defenders of Scottish religion had friendly moments. "On Mon-
day," he continued his long letter, "I left Edinb. & came to Dundee &
lodged last night with Mr Gilfillan, who wrote Gallery of Portraits, & who
is minister of the Free Church there. This day I have come to Perth and
tomorrow I return to Dundee & Gilfillan. On Friday to Paisley, & on
Saturday I leave Scotland . . ."

Having finished his Scotch lectures at Dundee, Perth, and Paisley,
Emerson returned to England in the last days of February, On his way
southward he took advantage of Harriet Martineau's invitation in order
to be near Wordsworth. It was his first opportunity since 1833 and would
be his last.

An hour and a half with Wordsworth, now within some two years of
his death, was time well spent in spite of the old man's tiresome prejudices.
These he poured out volubly, once he was completely awakened from his
afternoon nap. Emerson found him "full of talk on French news, bitter
old Englishman he is, on Scotchmen whom he contemns; on Gibbon, who
cannot write English; on Carlyle, who is a pest to the English tongue, on
Tennyson, whom he thinks a right poetic genius tho with some affecta-
tion." Emerson commented that "though he often says something I think
I could easily undertake to write Table Talk for him to any extent for
the newspapers, & it should cost me nothing & be quite as good ... as
any one is likely to hear from his own lips. But he is a fine healthy old
man with weatherbeaten face, and I think it is a high compliment we
pay to the cultivation of the English generally, when we find him not
distinguished." And if Emerson turned his eyes from the man to the poet,
certainly the case was altered for the better; and his astonishing dictum,
apparently never retracted, that "The Ode on Immortality is the high-
water mark which the intellect has reached in this age" was only one of
many evidences of his great regard for Wordsworth.

During his two days as guest of Harriet Martineau, Emerson went on

JVOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES /A 341

horseback with her and William Greg to get the best views and dined with
the Arnolds at Greg's. Then, "through all these wondrous French news
which all tongues & telegraphs discuss,'' he set out for Manchester and
from there went on almost immediately to London.

In London, Emerson settled himself in the Strand, a vantage point
from which Doctor Johnson's "full tide of human existence" could be
conveniently observed. He had "a good sittingroom & chamber" to himself
in John Chapman's house at No. 142. That house was no dull place, with
literary and other people coming and going; and Emerson, within some
two weeks after his arrival, was to get a notion of what curious encounters
might occur there. To his great surprise, and certainly to hers as well, Jane
Garlyle, looking for one of the several bookish Chapmans in the Strand,
was conducted by mistake to Emerson—deposited in his arms, as she put
it. Proffered hospitality so urgently that she had no opportunity to ex-
plain her mistake, she settled down for half an hour's visit before she went
on her way.

Once Emerson got outside Chapman's house, only a minute's walk
would bring him to London landmarks. Within a few rods was the little
island of St. Mary-le-Strand, dividing the noisy traffic into two streams;
and near at hand was the great quadrangle of Somerset House, marking
historic ground. Almost directly back of Somerset House one could, by
paying toll, cross the Thames on John Rennie's beautiful Waterloo Bridge.
In this part of London one saw more evidences of Britain's wealth and
power than of her distress. London, the wealthy and powerful city, was
remarkable, not only for omnibuses, steam ferries, penny post, and the
rapidly growing West End, but as the city where one heard Grisi sing,
Macaulay talk, and Faraday lecture; where one ate Soyer's cooking and
had Rothschild for one's banker. London had the best, and so it was an
economy to come here. The new Houses of Parliament, now in course of
construction, symbolized the might of the kingdom and of the empire as
well as the advance of British freedom. London, it was true, was a different
city to different people. Hugh Whelan, the gardener, wrote to Emerson,
admonishing him not to fail to see Oxford Street lighted with gas and beg-
ging him to look up the place where Hugh's uncle used to keep the sign
of the Dog and Duck. Emerson himself had found only a "very dull city"
here some fifteen years before. Now he went out to Chelsea and talked
with Carlyle.

In March of 1848, Carlyle was full of a new enthusiasm. He was
taking The Times, the first daily paper he had ever had, and was de-
lighted to see the new French revolution "teaching this great swindle,

342 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOM

Louis Philippe, that there is a God's justice in the Universe after all." It
was at Carlyle's suggestion that Emerson had a look at the Chartists.
They were just then reviving after some years of quiescence and were
about to work themselves up for the grand climax, or grand fiasco as it
proved to be, of April 10. At the National Hall in Holborn, Emerson
watched their ceremonies in honor of the deputation that had returned from
carrying congratulations to the new French Republic. The "Marseillaise"
was sung, but the great throng preferred the slogan "Every man a ballot
and every man a musket/3 In the streets the unrest got out of control. Day
after day a mob caused anxiety among shopkeepers by wandering about
and breaking windows and stealing. Emerson pondered the place of the
scholar in politics. "When we would pronounce anything truly of man/5
he noted, "we retreat instantly on the individual." And yet when he heard
there was to be a Chartist revolution on Monday and an Irish revolution
the following week, it occurred to him that the right scholar would feel
these things a challenge and a test of his genius.

But in London the titled aristocracy and the intellectuals soon began
to demand what time Emerson could spare from his reading and writing
hours. His notebook was well filled with appointments with interesting
people of these more fortunate classes. Within a week after his return to
London he had a long visit from the entertaining Milnes, and he was to
see much more of him. Milnes, having once reviewed Emerson in a London
journal, felt a kind of proprietary interest in him. This future Lord Hough-
ton was now the symbol of aristocratic sympathy with democratic reform.
Thackeray, making merry in Punch over an imaginary English revolution
inspired by events in France, headed his cabinet list with "Minister of
Foreign Affairs, President of the Council, and Poet Laureate, Citizen
Monckton Milnes." But Emerson noticed that, though people jestingly
addressed his friend as Citoyen Milnes, they spoke of him "between jest
& earnest" as "really one who might play one day a part of Larnartine in
England."

By the end of March, Emerson was writing to Lidian: "At Mr Ban-
croft's I dined with Macaulay, Bunsen, Lord Morpeth, Milman, Milnes,
& others. Carlyle, Mr & Mrs Lyell, Mrs Butler, & others came in the
evening. At Mr Milmair's I breakfasted with Macaulay Hallam, Lord
Morpeth ... At Mr Procter's (Barry Cornwall,) I dined with Forster
of the Examiner, Kinglake (Eothen) & others. At Mrs Drumrnond's I
found Mr Cobden & Lord Monteagle , . . Carlyle carried me to Lady Har-
riet Baring . . . Macaulay is the king of diners-out. I do not know when
I have seen such wonderful vivacity. . . ." And he went on to tell how

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 343

he found Lord and Lady Ashburton, Lord Auckland, Carlyle, Milnes,
Thackeray, Lord and Lady Castlereagh, the Bishop of Oxford, and others
at Baring's.

He heard incessant talk of the French revolution. "Besides the intrinsic
interest of the spectacle and the intimate acquaintance which all these
people have with all the eminent persons in France, there is evidently a
certain anxiety/5 he put it, "to know whether our days also are not num-
bered, and whether the splendid privileges of these English palaces, to
which, they plainly see, that the world never had any thing that could
compare, are not in too dreadful contrast to famine & ignorance at the
door, to last.35 He had a good opportunity to hear Carlyle dispensing
jeremiads to aristocratic company, but he observed that these prophecies
of woe were not taken as gospel in even this company where many were
the Scot's friends. "The aristocrats say," he informed Lidian, " Tut that
man in the House of Commons & you will hear no more of him.3 "

Some of his new friends marveled that an American could look so
human and be so inoffensive. The Bishop of Oxford observed after Bing-
ham Baring's dinner that "Emerson is very little Yankee, tall, thin., with no
atrabilious look" . . . Grabb Robinson, the experienced tuft-hunter, was
astonished at his civilized condition. "It was,95 he confessed, "with a feel-
ing of predetermined dislike that I had the curiosity to look at Emerson
at Northampton's, a fortnight ago; when, in an instant, all my dislike
vanished. He has one of the most interesting countenances I ever beheld
—a combination of intelligence and sweetness that quite disarmed me."
The stranger looked as if he might be a worthy addition to one's collection,
and Crabb Robinson did not run away. "I was introduced to him," he
commented with evident satisfaction.

Emerson's election for the term of his English visit to honorary mem-
bership in the Athenaeum was a sign that he had been accepted by intel-
lectuals and aristocrats. Scientists, artists, and literary men, together with
"liberal Patrons," made up the regular membership of the club, or so the
book of rules and regulations boasted; and the honorary members were
"Foreign Ambassadors and Ministers Plenipotentiary, Foreign Members of
the Royal Society, and such other Foreigners of distinction for Science,
Literature, or the Arts, (not exceeding Ten of the latter at one time,) as
the Committee may deem it advisable to name." His unanimous election
to the Reform Club was evidence that Emerson was acceptable to liberal
political leaders. In general he easily disarmed the prejudiced in all ranks
of society. Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, skeptic, and poet, after attending
Garth Wilkinson's party in honor of "the illustrious American" at Hamp-

344 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

stead, walked back with him into London and found his talk "gentle and
good55 but managed to keep his own national prejudice nearly intact by
declaring, "He was the only American in whose company I ever felt real
enjoyment." Quickest of all to accept Emerson were the literary aspirants,
usually young men, but sometimes women. The enthusiasm that Eliza
Maria Gillies showed for him seemed to belie her protestation that she had
no notion of playing Bettina to a new Goethe. Matthew Arnold, an aspirant
with a better claim to attention, did not forget him during London's spasm
of political excitement that spring. In what the much younger man de-
scribed as "a very pleasant interview," they discussed Carlyle, Wordsworth,
and Harriet Martineau, neighbor of Arnold's family in the Wordsworth
country.

In London, Emerson nearly always accepted the invitations he got,
no matter from what quarter. He went to the home of Lord Palmerston,
the experienced minister of foreign affairs and future prime minister, and
saw "a quite illustrious collection," or to the home of Lady Morgan, "a
sort of fashionable or London edition of Aunt Mary, the vivacity the wit,
the admirable preservation of social powers, being retained,— but the high
moral genius being left out.'3 He wanted to "know how that 'other half
of the world lives, though," he said, "I cannot & would not live with
them." He impartially appraised virtues and vices. If he liked the aris-
tocrats for their simplicity of speech and manners he noticed that they
suffered from want of thought just as fashionable circles at home did.

He went to Oxford on invitation of Arthur Clough, a fellow of Oriel
College, and Charles Daubeny, a professor of botany. "I was housed,"
he wrote home, "close upon Oriel, though not within it, but I lived alto-
gether on college hospitalities, dining one day with Mr Stanley, of Uni-
versity College, & his Fellows; the next day, breakfasting with Jacobson,
& some Deans & Doctors; dining at Exeter College, with Palgrave, Froude,
& other Fellows, & breakfasting, next morning, at Oriel, with Clough,
Dr Daubeny; &c They all showed me the kindest attentions; showed me
their college buildings, the Bodleian Library, &c, not forgetting the Ran-
dolph Gallery; but, much more, they showed me themselves, who are many
of them very earnest, faithful, affectionate; some of them highly gifted
men; some of them, too, prepared & decided to make great sacrifices for
conscience sake. . . . They seemed to think I had come to stay a good
while, & marvelled much at my rapid departure at the end of 48 hours."

Oxford, though an aristocratic symbol of the past, was, Emerson knew,
a battleground where new ideas were fighting the old. In this somber
dark-timbered hall of Oriel, where Gothic windows, bearing colorful coats
of arms, blurred the feeble daylight, Arthur Clough was more troubled by

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 345

the new ideas than one might have guessed who saw him step forward
to the upper table at commons to repeat the Latin grace,

Benedictus benedicat,
Benedicitur benedicatur.

Yet it seemed clear to Emerson that the boldest minds here were painfully
restrained. He was soon truly "fond of these monks of Oxford." But he
got no new illumination when Froude, a young scholar he much admired,
pointed out Pusey's window to him and declared reverently, "From that
window came all our light"; and he realized how impossible it would be
for him to breathe this atmosphere year after year as the fellows were
doing. His large reservation from total praise of Oxford was that here "you
may hold what opinion you please so that you hold your tongue." Appar-
ently he took his own counsel and held his tongue during his visit, stirring
up no public debate. "Everybody liked him," Clough testified, "and as the
orthodox mostly had never heard of him, they did not suspect him . . ."

Emerson saw other British institutions, often with the help of the best-
qualified guides or when the best performers were on. At the British
Museum Sir Charles Fellows instructed him on Greek remains and Coven-
try Patmore showed him prints. At the theater he saw Mrs. Butler as
Cordelia and Macready as Lear. At Covent Garden he heard Grisi and
Alboni sing. Richard Owen provided a ticket to his own lectures at the
Royal College of Surgeons, and Emerson took care to hear as many of
them as possible. Fortunately Owen also showed the Hunterian Museum,
a thing he could very well do, as he had prepared the catalogue of its col-
lections. Emerson, in the lecture room, watched intently; saw that Owen's
vinous face was a powerful weapon and that his surgical smile and air of
virility penetrated the audience; admired the scientist's perfect self-com-
mand.

With Robert Hutton, Emerson attended a meeting of the Geological
Society of London, presumably at Somerset House, and had the good for-
tune to hear what he called "the best debate I have heard in England,
the House of Commons & the Manchester Banquet not excepted." The
Scottish geologist Andrew Crombie Ramsay, one of the members present,
also thought it a good night and "was glad of this," he said, "for Emerson,
the American, was there." Among the speakers was Charles Lyell, a geol-
ogist whose discoveries had helped pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories.
Frequent subsequent meetings with him may have added something to
Emerson's enthusiasm for science. Early in April, Emerson was back with
the Geological Society after dining with the Geological Club, its inner circle.

He saw Kew Gardens under the guidance of Sir William Hooker, the

346 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

director. Crabb Robinson, now assured of his harmlessness, took him to
what was considered a highly successful anniversary meeting of the Society
of Antiquaries in the Freemasons' Tavern. All the members enthusiastically
drank the health of Emerson and got a response from him. At table he
discussed Shakespeare's sonnets with John Payne Collier. Collier's Shake-
spearean forgeries had not yet been exposed.

Just at the moment when Emerson was getting comfortably acquainted
with Dickens and more comfortably with Tennyson, a Hawthorne minus
Hawthorne's bashfulness, he decided to cross the English Channel without
further delay. Tennyson warned him against going yet and refused to go
along. Instead, he offered to go with him to Italy. But the boulevards
seemed to have grown calm enough since the flight of Louis-Philippe, and
Emerson, with an effort, stuck to his own plan. Presumably he had by
now carried out his intention to file his French tongue further in London
and had got some preparation by attending the French theater there. On
May 6 he crossed to Boulogne and next day took temporary lodgings at
a hotel, the Montmorency, No. 20, boulevard des Italiens, in Paris.

After a couple of days there, he moved to the left bank. The radical
Goodwyn Barmby, once a listener to Alcott's teachings in Surrey and later
an enthusiastic Emersonian, said that Emerson "took up his abode in the
lovely little apartment which I had not long before occupied, in a hotel
in the Rue des Beaux Arts, which I think I recommended to him." Accord-
ing to Emerson's own account, his comfortable rooms were at 15, rue des
Petits Augustins (a street later renamed Bonaparte). But the arrangement
of streets in that quarter was such that the two addresses might conceivably
have been the same. It seems, at any rate, that when Emerson arrived he
was not surprised to find his English friends already at his hotel—the Rawdon
Quaker W. E. Forster, Carlyle's friend and Emerson's host a few months
earlier; the Paulets, Emerson's Liverpool friends; and the Manchester nov-
elist Geraldine Jewsbury, Jane Carlyle's intimate, known less formally at
Cheyne Row as Miss Gooseberry. Emerson engaged his apartment for a
month. He was thus settled in the heart of the capital, close to the lie de
la Cite.

He took to dining at a table d'hote on the right bank where there were
usually five hundred Frenchmen, he estimated, demonstrating how the
language should be spoken. But as Clough, his Oxford friend, had reached
France before him and remained there longer than he did, the two dined
together "daily" during Emerson's whole stay. Though there were a good
many Americans in Paris at the moment and very few English, Emerson
kept mainly with his British friends, presumably because his business abroad
was chiefly with Britain. Clough was, to a slight extent, a compromise. He

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 347

had spent several years of his childhood in America but had proudly flour-
ished his British flag there and always remained, in spite of a later resi-
dence in America, as English as his very English face. Besides Clough,
Emerson often had the Paulets as dinner companions until they left Paris;
and he saw something of Forster and Miss Jewsbury. One morning he
brought Hugh Doherty to breakfast. Doherty was an Irish socialist who
had found England too hot

What Emerson most wanted was acquaintance with Frenchmen of
information. But Clough was doubtless the next best thing. Clough was
full of "interest in life and realities, in the state of woman, and the ques-
tions so rife in Paris through Communism, and through the old loose and
easy conventions of that city for travellers5* and talked "so considerately
of the grisette estate/' that Emerson found him "the best piece de resistance,
and tough adherence, that one could desire." Presumably the two men had
some uninhibited conversation on the subject of the grisettes. Possibly, too,
Clough carried some jesting on the subject too far to please Emerson. On
May 13, at any rate, Emerson wrote in his Paris diary what could most
readily be interpreted as a reply to something of that kind. "What,5* he
asked, "can the brave and strong genius of C. himself avail? What can
his praise, what can his blame avail me, when I know that if I fall or
if I rise, there still awaits me the inevitable joke? . . . But when I balance
the attractions of good and evil, when I consider what facilities, what
talents a little vice would furnish, then rise before me not these laughers,
but the dear and comely forms of honour and genius and piety in my
distant home, and they touch me with chaste palms moist and cold, and
say to me, You are ours." In London Emerson had had some conversation
with Carlyle and Dickens on chastity; but whether the C. of the Paris
entry meant Carlyle or Clough, Emerson was obviously not marked for
conquest by the grisettes.

He nevertheless saw as much of Parisian life as he could. If he was
not at the French Academy on May 19 for the reception to the literary
historian Ampere which Philarete Chasles, Emerson's own critic of some
years earlier, reported in the Journal des debats, he found enough less
dignified Parisian experiences open to him. He seems to have attended the
theater at least half a dozen times. The plays he saw included the classic
Phedre and Mithridate. He saw Rachel in both the Racine plays and heard
her sing the "Marseillaise." The slight woman seemed to him to grow paler
with passion as she chanted the words of the song and shook the tricolor
banner in her hand. It was probably for her acting that he saw Francois
Ponsard's Lucr'ece, though that play had some significance of its own,
having marked, a few years earlier, the reaction against romantic Dumas

348 THE LIFE OP RALPH WALDO EMERSON

and Hugo on the Paris stage. He bought a ticket to a ball, presumably for
the opportunity of observing another side of Parisian life. He also bought
a ticket to the Winter Garden. He went to the Louvre and jotted down
some notes on the Spanish school. Velasquez and Spagnoletto he took for
strong, swarthy men, "good soldiers or brigands at a pinch." He imagined
that these Spaniards painted with a certain ferocity.

On the boulevards politics grew tenser. Emerson calmly speculated
whether the revolution of February would prove to be worth the loss of the
trees cut down to make the barricades, but soon he realized that there were
plenty of radicals who thought that revolution had been too mild and were
looking forward to a new one. He had the good fortune to see the radicals'
ringleaders Blanqui and Barbes in action before the explosion occurred. He
and Forster and Mrs. Paulet failed in their first attempt to find the Barbes
club and attended the first sitting of a free trade club instead. But the next
evening, the evening of May 10, they saw from a side box the Barbes club
in such an uproar that even Emerson3s equanimity was disturbed. On the
1 3th, probably in the company of Dionysius Lardner, a popular scientific
writer who had once been professor of natural philosophy and astronomy
at University College, London, Emerson visited Blanqui5 s club. Blanqui, if
a Paris newspaper reported the meeting accurately, told his faithful to
boycott the national demonstration prematurely set for the following day.
"But wait," he counseled, "wait five or six weeks, and then the winds and
the tides will be in our favor . . ."

Emerson was back at Blanqufs club the next evening with Forster and
so witnessed its last sitting under its formidable leader. Blanqui, in spite of
Clough's notion that he had "a certain hang-dog conspirator aspect/3 was
a memorable sight. And his Rights of Man Club, as it was called, was a
first-rate as well as very timely attraction. At one of its meetings, Emerson
recorded, an orator in a blouse advised the rich not to worry about their
property. "We shall guard it," he assured them, "with the utmost care, in
the belief that it will soon be our own." Emerson seems to have witnessed
also the curious human drama in progress at the Women's Club. The
dignified and sensible leader had to be constantly on her guard against the
masculine part of the audience, for they were quick to find opportunities
to make the proceedings ridiculous.

On May 15, the day after Emerson's second visit to Blanqui's club,
suddenly came the entente, or, as the Parisians seemed to prefer to call it,
the echauffouree. Though it may have looked a few days later like nothing
more than a scuffle, it threatened at the moment to be more serious than
a riot. Early in the afternoon a crowd, soon swollen to several thousands,
invaded the National Assembly on the pretext of presenting a petition in

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 349

favor of Poland. The members of the clubs had appeared 'in force, ready
for violence. Barbes was bawling his demand that they be allowed to come
in and submit their petition. But the National Guard arrived in time. The
conspirators, ejected from the Assembly, retreated to the Hotel de Ville.
There they proclaimed a new government, but they could hold their ground
only a short time before they were captured.

Emerson was not at the center of the melee but "saw," as he said, "the
sudden & immense display of arms when the rappel was beaten . . . the
streets full of bayonets, and the furious driving of the horses dragging
cannon towards the National Assembly; the rapid succession of proclama-
tions proceeding from the Government, & pasted on the walls at the corners
of all streets, eagerly read by crowds of people;— and, not waiting for this,
the rapid passage of messengers with proclamations in their hands which
they read to knots of people, & then ran on to another knot & so on, down
a street . . ." The former orator of the peace society in Boston was thrilled
by the martial drama and its colorful setting. Lidian commented from
Concord, "Only think of your having been caught in a Revolution as
one might be in a shower . . ."

The "scuffle" was the grand climax of French political action so far
as Emerson was concerned, but his role of observer was not quite ended.
On the twenty-first he witnessed the elaborate fete of Concord, Peace, and
Labor. Clough, who got out early to the Place de la Concorde that glori-
ously bright Sunday morning and watched the arriving contingents from
various parts of France, from Poland, from Italy, and from Germany,
and even a green-flagged Irish Club consisting, as he said, of "about three
of our fellow-subjects of the sister-island," was inclined to look with con-
descension on the whole affair. But Emerson was pleased when, later in
the day, he observed the estimated 1,200,000 people standing in the Champ-
de-Mars "like an immense family the perfect good humour & fellowship
is so habitual to them all"; and that night he thought "the illumination in
the Champs Elysees was delicious." Perhaps he remembered miniature
Brook Farm. "It was easy," he said, "to see that France is far nearer to
Socialism than England & it would be a short step to convert Paris into
a phalanstery." With the ticket George Bancroft had got for him from
American minister Rush, he went to the Assembly to hear Lamartine's
"great speech" on Poland, a speech so long that it had to be delivered in
two instalments with a recess of twenty-five minutes between them. Emerson
was struck by the "manly handsome greyhaired gentleman with nothing
of the rust of the man of letters." The chamber seemed to him "an honest
country representation." He was glad of the defeat of the extremists at the
hands of the February revolutionists, the shopkeepers, as he called them.

350 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

He wanted to supplement his unexpected political and martial experi-
ences with some first-hand knowledge of French society. As late as May 17,
though he had had the promise of an introduction to some French ladies,
his concierge and the concierge's wife had been his only domestic acquaint-
ance. He was at length received in the home of Alexis de Tocqueville, but
this Frenchman had an English wife and was famous for a book on Amer-
ican democracy. Milnes, now gibed at in London as Citizen Milnes, was
in Paris and had arranged the meeting. Before the end of the month
Emerson added his critic the Gomtesse d'Agoult to his list but had seen
almost no other private society in Paris. Under more favorable circum-
stances, doubtless de Tocqueville and the countess could have introduced
him to a brilliant French social circle and he might have got some notion
of the part he had played in the growth of French political thought. But
as it was, his experience of French intellectuals was unsatisfying.

George Sand had turned journalist to aid the extremist faction and
had briefly burned with political ardor, but she had now gone back to the
country in disgust. The copy of Emerson's Poems Margaret Fuller had
given her bore no fruit that the poet could taste. He saw Leverrier
working out algebraic formulas on the blackboard for his class, "quite
heedless of politics and revolutions." He heard Michelet lecture on Indian
philosophy and lost some of his respect for him. The "creed of the Indian
Buddhists/' he commented, "was not meant for a Frenchman to analyze
and crack his joke and make his grimace upon." Perhaps he did not know
that Michelet had been one of his admirers and Michelet did not know that
Emerson was in his lecture room. Quinet, another of the old circle of
Emersonians at the College de France, had long since grown too radical
to keep his professorial chair. But Emerson, though his enthusiasm for
Quinet as a literary man was not great, seems to have missed him and
Lamennais only because he could not wait long enough for them in Paris.
Mickiewicz, presumably the first to make Emerson known in France, had
gone off to Italy and had raised a Polish legion to fight in the ill-starred
revolution there. The clever Comtesse d'Agoult was thus, as it turned out,
the only Emersonian with whom Emerson had any satisfactory meeting in
Paris. He recorded with restrained enthusiasm his "one very pleasant hour"
with her. She recorded her meeting with "the moralist" with no more emo-
tion but felt at least enough of her earlier admiration to have a crayon
sketch made of him by Charles Lehrnann, who rediscovered the Indian
type in Emerson's head.

Sometime before Emerson turned back across the Channel he sat for
the crayon sketch by Oswald Murray that came eventually into the pos-
session of Alexander Ireland. The Murrays apparently knew little of Emer-

MOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 351

son and were undisturbed by any rumors of his notoriety or fame. Mrs.
Murray used to let him hold the baby while he sat to her husband and
she prepared tea. His serious business, however, was not with artists and
not with any but Frenchmen. He stayed on in Paris until within four days
of his first London lecture. Along with experiences that he could compound
with the usual Anglo-American prejudices in a lecture on France, he was
getting some pleasing impressions. "All winter I have been admiring the
English and disparaging the French," he wrote home. "Now in these weeks
I have been correcting my prejudice & the French rise many entire de-
grees." He liked the "universal good breeding" of Parisians and their
apparent abolition of the British and American superstitious reverence for
broadcloth. They seemed "the most joyous race." In Paris the river was
an ornament, in London the Thames was out of sight. Paris had mag-
nificent gardens and palaces worthy of the name. London did not. For
enjoyment, for independence, Paris was best of all cities. Leaving Paris on
the second day of June, Emerson spent the night at Folkestone, then took
the express for London.

He had decided upon his London lectures only after a long period of
doubt. The need of money had made him consider them seriously, though
he had thought the time unfavorable. Alternatives to a London course had
seemed at first to be a return to the Liverpool platform, an experiment
in Bristol, and continued silence. Alexander Ireland had made the addi-
tional suggestion of "private classes" at Manchester; but by that time John
Chapman, publisher and landlord, had busied himself, with some other
friends of Emerson, about a London course. Still Emerson had almost de-
cided not to lecture. According to Espinasse's story, before he would budge
his friends had found it necessary to get up a petition. At any rate a formal
petition had been got up as early as April. One copy had been signed by
Carlyle, Dickens, and a few other celebrities. Whether or not this petition
had had any serious effect, final arrangements had soon been made for
a course of six lectures "on the Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury" to be read at the Literary and Scientific Institution in Edwards Street,
Portman Square, from June 6 to 17. And now Emerson, back in London
on June 3 and properly equipped, no doubt, with his new Parisian frock
coat and waistcoat, was ready to begin. The subjects he announced in The
Times were "Powers and Laws of Thought," "Relation of Intellect to
Natural Science," "Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought," "Politics
and Socialism," "Poetry and Eloquence," and "Natural Aristocracy."

He was fearful, he seems to have told his audience, of the Englishman's
"hard eyes" that were used to looking for practical things. He tried to give
his first lecture a practical and timely air. He kept abreast of the latest

352 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOJV

news by making an example of Lamartine. But his usual idealistic tone
soon reasserted itself. Instead of honoring the literary man who had aban-
doned his own craft for politics, he found the general praise of Lamartine's
act a sign of the prevalent lack of respect for the office of the intellectual
man. And he repeated, in the same lecture, his habitual dislike of naturalism
in literature. Much of the recent philosophy of poetry had been pathology,
he said; and the laws of the intellect had been transformed into the laws
of disease. The effect of a fine natural gift ought to be to exhilarate; and
beauty, not ugliness, was, he declared, the flowering of virtue. He still
spoke from his customary mountain peak.

Behind the scenes Alexander Ireland, his guest at Chapman's during
the course at Edwards Street, noticed that he wasted little time. Between
appearances on the platform Emerson "generally devoted many hours a
day to study, retiring to his room immediately after breakfast, and extend-
ing the forenoon to three o'clock.3' He also had social engagements. With
Ireland, he visited Leigh Hunt and was delighted; and with Ireland he
went to the home of the wealthy social reformer and associationist John
Minter Morgan. He was much amused as Morgan explained to his guests,
mostly socialists, a huge colored revolving view of future social life accord-
ing to the reformer's dreams. Emerson even found time for the theater and
once heard Jenny Lind.

But at precisely four o'clock on lecture afternoons he would suddenly
appear before his audience at the Literary and Scientific Institution. He
would stand there silent for a moment, producing an effect "at first some-
what startling, and then nobly impressive," said a British reporter. With
his manuscript on the desk before him he "turned over the first leaf, whis-
pering at the same time, 'Gentlemen and ladies/ The initial sentences were
next pronounced in a low tone, a few words at a time, hesitatingly . . ."
The audience smiled a little at "certain nervous twitches and angular move-
ments of the hand and arms" but were more impressed by his "eminent
bonhomie, earnestness, and sincerity, which bespoke sympathy and respect,
—nay, more, secured veneration." He made no attempt to play the lion.
"The moment he finished," Alexander Ireland observed, "he took up his
MS. and quietly glided away,— disappearing before his audience could give
vent to their applause."

But Emerson, an experienced lecturer, was by no means oblivious of
his audience, and while they studied him he studied them. It was, as he
wrote home, "a curious company that came to hear the Massachusetts
Indian." He was doubtless right in judging that some came to see others,
"for, besides our high Duchess of Sutherland & her sister, Lord Morpeth
& the Duke of Argyle & Lord Lovelace came, & other aristocratic people,

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 353

& as there could be no prediction what might be said to & therefore what
must be heard by them, & in the presence of Carlyle & Monckton Milnes,
&c. there might be fun: who knew?" Carlyle was himself a prime attrac-
tion and did his duty by making "loud Scottish Covenanter gruntings of
laudation, or, at least, of consideration," edifying those in his vicinity.
Other persons who came were Procter ("Barry Cornwall"); Charles Lyell,
the geologist; William Spence, the entomologist; Mrs. Jameson, the popular
writer; Thackeray, about to publish the final instalment of Vanity Fair
and fast becoming famous on account of that novel; John Forster, editor
of The Examiner,, a powerful journal; Douglas Jerrold, playwright, humor-
ist, and journalist; and William and Mary Howitt, a literary as well as
domestic team, tireless producers of wholesome verse and prose, original
or translated.

In spite of the high average intelligence of such an audience, the old
complaint of obscurity was heard again. Miss Hennell asked Carlyle whether
he thought they would understand better if they stood on their heads.
Actually Carlyle himself, according to Espinasse, could say nothing better
about the lectures than that they were very Emersonian and, when he
talked more freely, summed them up as "Moonshine" and "intellectual
sonatas." Carlyle, no idealist, was interested in the immediate business of
saving the economic and political world. Emerson wrote to Lidian that
he had no better persons at his lectures "than Jane Carlyle & Mrs Bancroft
who honestly come." Probably the "certain wife-like jealousy33 which,
Espinasse judged, made Jane Carlyle look on Emerson as "a sort of rival
of her husband" was no very serious matter. Lord Morpeth, appearing at
Edwards Street on the last day of the course, took alarm at the dynamite
he discovered in "Natural Aristocracy." Calling on the lecturer at Chap-
man's, he begged him not to repeat the passage asking who could blame
the peasant for burning the barns of the idle rich. Many years later Emer-
son remembered this with the somewhat exaggerated comment that "Aris-
tocracy is always timid."

Meantime, in London, he was wined and dined by Morpeth and other
aristocrats. The Duchess of Sutherland had him to lunch at her magnificent
Stafford House. Her son-in-law, the Duke of Argyll, got the impression
there, as in the lecture hall, that Emerson was charming but somewhat
cloying, wanting bone and gristle. For his own part Emerson, the aristo-
cratic democrat, observed the titled aristocrats with much interest as he
faced them across their dinner tables. He made the most of his opportunity
to study what was for him a new variety of humanity.

Though his "guinea-paying" audience at Edwards Street had grown
larger day by day, the price of admission was too high for what he called

354 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

cfmy public" and he received only £80 net instead of the £200 predicted.
Though he hated lending himself even to innocuous propaganda, he needed
money so much that he agreed to lecture, during the last days of June,
under the management of the Metropolitan Early Closing Association. For
a fee of thirty-five guineas he was to read his old manuscripts "Napoleon,5'
"Domestic Life," and "Shakespeare" in what he called "the Cave of the
Winds of Exeter Hall." The reticent lecturer, used to escaping from the vil-
lage of Concord to the Walden Woods, was unhappy, he wrote to Lidian,
when he saw "the advertising Vans that go up & down the Strand announc-
ing to all millions in huge red letters that R W E is to speak."

In the more popular lecture hall there was less glamour than at Edwards
Street, but some notable persons appeared. Chopin, already known to the
unmusical Emerson, had sent him a ticket to a matinee musicale, "his first
London Concert/' given on the same day with Emerson's opening lecture.
But as the lecture was read at night, the composer may have heard it in
spite of his busy day. William Michael Rossetti, a fervent admirer of the
essay "Self-reliance" and a member of a set who praised Emerson's poetry
"for its august seer-like qualities, notwithstanding some rustiness on the
hinges of verse/3 heard "Napoleon" on that first night of the course and
remembered the lecturer's "upright figure, clear-cut physiognomy, clear
elocution . . . resolved self-possession." Crabb Robinson, having attended
at least part of the earlier course, heard "Domestic Life" and thought it
probably the most liberal lecture ever delivered in Exeter Hall, Garlyle
came the same evening and "was seated by the joyful committee," Emerson
said, "directly behind me, as I spoke, a thing odious to me."

On the last night at Exeter Hall, Monckton Milnes, the chairman., made
some well-intentioned remarks on the visitor from over seas. The audience
did their part "by rising en masse, hearty cheering, and waving of hats, &c.'5
Emerson did his by corning forward to testify to "the unbroken kindness
he had received from a large number of Englishmen and Englishwomen
during his stay here— he had not been aware there was so much kindness
in the world.5' He declared "that increased knowledge had increased his
respect for the English character." Between the first and second lectures
at Exeter Hall, he had gone back to Edwards Street with "The Superla-
tive in Manners and Literature55 in order to get ten more guineas towards
his passage home. But it was his speech in response to Milnes's compli-
ments at Exeter Hall that actually ended his long, much interrupted British
lecture season. It had been almost eight months since his first lecture in
Manchester.

The day after the Exeter Hall course ended had "been set aside by pub-
lisher John Chapman for a kind of final celebration. Doubtless the Carlyles

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES JJV 355

came, as they had promised to do, along with other friends who were to
bid Emerson farewell. But Emerson had now postponed his sailing from the
8th of July to the I5th, and Garlyle and he had already planned a trip
together to Stonehenge as their own private farewell party. On the 5th of
July, Emerson made the rounds of Windsor, Eton, Stoke Poges "& so
forth" with some friends, and he spent the 6th at Cambridge. Next day
he and Carlyle took the train to Salisbury, discussing the British and the
Americans and other subjects along the road. From Salisbury they went
by carriage to Amesbury and then on foot to Salisbury Plain. Emerson was
struck by the drama of this meeting of "the two talkers one from America
one from Scotland5' beside this old ark of the race, which had guarded
these downs "in a long solitude of millenniums." While larks were soaring
and singing overhead in the windy sky, the two friends "counted and
measured by paces the biggest stones" and philosophized.

In the preceding October, in Cheyne Row, Emerson had spoken sharply
in reply to some talk of Carlyle's about Cromwell. He had informed his
friend "that he must not expect that people as old as I could look at Crom-
well as he did." Carlyle had "turned quite fiercely" upon him. Emerson
told George Phillips, or at least so Phillips said, that Carlyle "rose like a
great Norse giant from his chair— and, drawing a line with his finger across
the table, said, with terrible fierceness: Then, sir, there is a line of separa-
tion between you and me as wide as that, and as deep as the pit." In
London, the following spring, Emerson had discovered that his friend was
"no idealist in opinions, but a protectionist in political economy, aristocrat
in politics, epicure in diet" and that he went for "murder, money, punish-
ment by death, slavery, and all the pretty abominations, tempering them
with epigrams." He was obviously a little scornful of this "covenanter-
philosophe" and "sans-culotte-aristocrat" Carlyle's scorn for certain opin-
ions and qualities of Emerson was as obvious. It required a great funda-
mental mutual respect to hold the two men together in spite of the gulf
between them; and Mary Ann Evans, the future George Eliot, was not
being merely sentimental when she "shed some quite delicious tears35 over
certain eulogistic remarks of Carlyle's on Emerson and averred that "This
is a world worth abiding in while one man can thus venerate and love
another."

At Stonehenge old quarrels seemed forgotten and mutual respect, if
not love, was strong. Carlyle was "subdued and gentle." He was apologetic
about his incorrigible pessimism. "I plant cypresses wherever I go," he
said, "and if I am in search of pain, I cannot go wrong." Doubtless the
two men felt their impotence in a place that reminded them of the passing
of ages and the succession of religions. In the morning they returned to the

356 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

mound in company with the local antiquary and heard his explanations.

On the way back to Salisbury they visited Wilton and Wilton Hall,
"renowned seat of the Earls of Pembroke, a house known to Shakspeare
and Massinger, the frequent home of Sir Philip Sidney, where he wrote
the Arcadia." They had a brief look at Salisbury Cathedral. At Bishopstoke
they were joined by the "omniscient" Arthur Helps whom Emerson had
seen in London, and they went on with him to his house at Bishop's
Waltham.

It was a rainy Sunday at Bishop's Waltham, with plenty of time for
conversation. The Americans were discussed again, and Emerson amused
himself by arguing the doctrine of non-government and non-resistance with
his companions. Along the road to Winchester there were further ques-
tions about America. Emerson hedged and put off his friends as best he
could. He felt a stubborn loyalty to America but was conscious of her
human immaturity. There, in America, lay Nature, "sleeping, overgrowing,
almost conscious, too much by half for man in the picture, and so giving
a certain tristesse, like the rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at
night, steeped in dews and rains." In the high Allegheny pastures still slept
"the great mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows and
over-cultivated garden of England."

After the Stonehenge excursion Emerson visited Coventry and a few
other towns on his way to the steamer at Liverpool. The Coventry visit
of July 1 2 was for the sake of Charles Bray, author of a book on necessity
which Emerson liked and an enthusiastic reader of both Carlyle and Emer-
son. Mrs. Bray, with scant warning, hastened to get the best room ready,
and "the great spirit" was duly entertained at Rosehill with adoring atten-
tions, "though only for a few hours." Mary Ann Evans arrived to honor
the author of the essays that had been her friends in the loneliness of
Birdgrove. She was delighted with him. He was, she wrote to her friend
Sara Hennell, "the first man I have ever seen." The conversation at Rose-
hill was cut short by the coming of Edward Flower, a friend of Americans
as he had spent some boyhood years in Illinois. Flower insisted on carrying
the Brays, Miss Evans, and Emerson back to Stratford-on-Avon with him.
Finally, after returning to Coventry for tea, Emerson got off in the direction
of Liverpool. Probably none of the Coventry or Stratford Emersonians
remembered him more vividly than did the sharp-eyed Mary Ann Evans.
A dozen years later, as she read one of his lectures, she confessed that her
heart went out "with venerating gratitude to that mild face." But when
she became famous as George Eliot, Emerson was blind to the virtues of
her novels.

Near Liverpool, at the Paulets', there was a farewell gathering of many

JVOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES JJV 357

friends, apparently from all parts of the country. July 15 was the day of
sailing. Clough, one of the party at the Paulets3, stayed with Emerson to
the last, even accompanying him aboard the new Royal Mail steamer
Europa. As they paced the deck, Clough, it is said, complained that with
the American's departure the young men of England would be left leader-
less, for Carlyle had only led them into the desert and left them there.
Emerson agreed, it seems. But his agreement was at least half in jest if, as
the story goes, he ended by placing his hand on the head of Clough, declar-
ing him thereby ordained bishop of all England and admonishing him to
go up and down the country to gather the straying youth together and
to shepherd them into the promised land. The story Clough wrote next day
to a friend was merely that he left Emerson on the deck of the steamer
and saw him pass rapidly down the Mersey on his way home.

dough's farewell., doubtless a hearty one whatever the circumstances,
must have been echoed by many young men in England. Clough's friend
Matthew Arnold must have been one of these well-wishers. Some sixteen
years later he wrote Emerson that "I look back with great satisfaction to
having made your personal acquaintance when you were here . . . and
I can never forget the refreshing and quickening effect your writings had
upon me at a critical time of my life."

Others certainly welcomed the lecturer's departure with a sigh of relief.
The conservative guardians of English church and state had little reason
to regret his going, and soon, from some quarters, ripples of satiric laughter
were heard at the expense of his young disciples. Even the novelist Charles
Kingsley, in spite of his conservative churchman's prejudices a radical
sympathizer with the wrongs of the working class, made Alton Locke's
brief enthusiasm for the American Mr. Windrush and his "Emersonian
Sermon" on "the all-embracing benevolence of the Deity55 a warning plain
to all: "Socrates and Plato were noble ... but what were they but the
exclusive mystagogues of an enlightened few, like our own Emersons and
Strausses, to compare great with small? What gospel have they, or Strauss,
or Emerson, for the poor, the suffering, the oppressed? The People's Friend?
Where will you find him, but in Jesus of Nazareth?"

For his own part, Emerson had more gains than losses to count. Of the
three most important persons he had sought out on his first transatlantic
journey— Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge— two survived, and he had
talked with both of them again. To that short list he now added a remark-
able number of British, and a few French, intellectuals with whom he had
had some first-hand acquaintance. His observations of Britain and France
in political and economic turmoil had given him a better understanding
of the kind of world in which most persons lived, if it had not fully war-

358 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

ranted the jubilant Aunt Mary's judgment, based on reports from abroad,
that he was getting "beyond the mists & rainbow visions of transcendental
philosophy" and was once more mingling "with the woes & cares of prac-
tical life." Actually, however, it was not apparent that he had lost any of
Ms old, fundamental beliefs.

In spite of what he thought an admirable steamer and, since the witty
Tom Appleton was aboard, an admirable ship's company, Emerson was
glad to be nearing home at the rate of nearly twelve knots an hour and
was by this time in a mood to resolve never to travel again "until my
children force me to." He made a very incomplete inventory of the stock
in trade with which he had done the best he could in Europe: "Weak eyes,
that will only serve a few hours daily; no animal spirits, an immense &
fatal negative with our Anglican race. No Greek, no mathematics., no
politics,-How the deuce man do you contrive to live & talk with this
nervous exigent race? Alas, I know not how they have borne with me so
long-, and the oddity & ridicule of it all, is,-given me a literary reputa-
tion too, which I make dangerous drafts upon, every day I live." At Con-
cord he might feel less painfully the limitations that had troubled him
abroad:

At Concord, Lidian had been unhappy. Perhaps her almost chronic ill
health was the result of a serious sickness in her early years, as she believed,
or of the harsh "health" disciplines of her girlhood. Perhaps it was partly
her unconscious protest against a philosophy that she was unable to live
up to. The long absence of her husband and his habitually restrained expres-
sion of his regard for her might also conceivably have helped to explain
the chest of select homeopathic remedies that Lidian kept at hand. During
the last winter she had spent weeks in bed, the doctor coming every day.
She had sent word to her husband in England and had put an end to his
plan to invite Margaret Fuller to live with them when Margaret should
return from Italy. He had written Lidian enough letters, but she had asked
in vain for wha. he called "that unwritten letter always due, it seems,
always unwritten." He had apologized to her that a photometer could not
be a stove. A little later, apparently, she had read over the letters of Ellen
Tucker that he had preserved and had praised them. Her feeling about the
"precious file" was "just & noble/' he had assured her. Even with her
children, young Henry Thoreau, and, much of the time, her sister Lucy
in the house, she had been lonely, as her letters had let him know.

But he must have known from past experience that her distress was
mainly over imaginary ills and that, at the worst, it would cause no break
in the love and respect which had from the beginning made their marriage
a successful partnership. He had carried her picture with him abroad and

NOT A WORLD TO HIDE VIRTUES IN 359

had once shown it to friends with the comment that "If any of our family
are saved, it will be through her merits." Presumably, as the Europa entered
Boston Harbor, he worried quite as little about his domestic affairs as about
the weather or the condition of the garden.

His voyage ended at a quarter after six on the morning of July 27,
1848. He had told the Brays at Coventry that "his wife insisted on being
on the shore to meet him, though they live twenty miles inland." But the
early hour of his arrival may have prevented her from greeting him till
he reached Concord

2O.

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER

All duties that the dullards do

In selfish, greedy mood.
The wise should also do, detached,
For universal good.

—The Bhagavad-gita, translated by
Arthur W. Ryder

EMERSON, on his return from Europe, was perhaps in as robust
health as he had ever known. To some friends, he seemed to have
found better health of mind as well as of body because he now
made an effort to turn his attention more and more in the direction
of "practical" things. Charles Newcomb, guiltless of any great degree of
practicality himself, apparently believed that the English visit had helped
in both ways. Ellery Channing, a close observer of Emerson over a long
period of time, saw that by the end of the 18403 he had become less
nervous and sensitive and ate more heartily and was less ideal, less abstract,
more interested in men. Charming noticed thai Emerson was developed in
this direction by his now rapidly maturing children. "But as I have said,"
he wrote in his journal, "it was after his English visit that he became so
much happier and more joyous ... & also assumed a more public life
& habit, as he became more & more a lecturer."

Emerson had never been more than half-hearted about his separation
from society, and long before his second transatlantic voyage he had some-
times allowed social pleasures, as well as his acres and his finances, to
encroach dangerously upon the time he needed for essays and poems. But
now he was plainly less austere and scholarly in his habits. Having drawn
heavily upon his stock of original ideas, he repeated more and so did not
need to exert the same energy he had put into his earlier works. He re-
treated but little, or not at all, from his old doctrines but no longer felt
called upon to expound them so frequently or so fully. Past middle age,
and a little chilled by the temperature on his high platform, he wanted
to warm his hands at the common hearth.

He even showed signs of becoming a country squire. On his expanding
but still miniature woodlots and fields, the gentleman farmer enjoyed cas-

360

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 361

ually overseeing the business of the season. He had now got a foothold
beyond the Concord line in the town of Lincoln. Captain Abel Moore's
estate yielded up a "saw-mill-lot" of nine acres and some rods in 1849;
and next year this piece grew by the addition of more than two acres bought
from Cyrus and Nathan Stowe. One autumn Emerson agreed to buy half
of Cyrus Warren's four-acre lot with an option on the other half, and the
next spring he had all of it in his possession.

In the garden and orchard he kept close watch and even performed
some of the labor. He took his hoe and water pail and fell upon his sleepy
pear trees, determined to make them produce. He broke up the soil, pulled
out the weeds and grass, manured and mellowed, watered, pruned, and
washed; killed every slug on every leaf; detected and killed the detestable
pear worm. His pears and apples pleased him till he went for a look at
Edmund Hosmer's trees, three stories high and loaded with fruit. In his
diary he wrote a few weeks later:

"August 15. Apricot Plums.

"September 7. We are so late this year that I picked the first musk-
melons to-day,— four;— to-day the first ripe tomato: and all the Bartlett
pears to ripen in the house. The whole product of my Bartlett at the corner
of the garden might count forty-five pears.

"The Green Gages yield every day a supply, and the two purple plum
trees,

"To-day, too, we dig seven bushels of excellent Chenangoes.

"isth. To-day tomatoes for the first time on table.

"September is the month of melons: melons last with us till i5th
October."

He was an amateur in the original sense of the term. His daughter
Edith long remembered how, when she was eight or nine years old, he took
her to the orchard and introduced all the trees to her by name. But he
soon got something more than poetry from his orchard. In 1851 he paid
Edmund Hosmer $3 to carry six barrels of apples to market. By 1855 he
had a yield of apples estimated at seventy barrels.

As a practical horticulturist he could not compete with Ephraim Bull.
A little way down the Lexington Road the new Concord grape, with its
dark oval berries covered with a "thick blue bloom," was by this time being
exhibited to curious visitors from all over the United States and was destined
to win medals from European royalty. But Emerson was a thrifty farmer.
Year after year he sold his little cranberry crop. His fatted hog weighed
perhaps 276 pounds at butchering time and the new shoat he bought to
feed weighed less than a hundred pounds. He purchased first one cow and
then another. The barn, occasionally used to house such human beings as

362 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

the French-Canadian Colombe and his family, was now put to its proper
use. The brindled cow had to be sent to Turtle's bull and the heifer to
Wheeler's. The time came when a "Native" was exhibited in the fourth
class of heifers at the local Cattle Show. Horses began to move through
the pages of Emerson's account books, bringing with them their accessory
bridles and saddles and harnesses, together with chaises, buggy wagons,
carryalls,, sleighs, and buffalo robes. It was necessary to hire the services of
a James Burke or a John Sullivan to help care for all these things.

Abel Adams of Boston still advised about a miscellany of financial
details but could not relieve Emerson of much of the responsibility. Scat-
tered family properties or investments were often unproductive or other-
wise troublesome. When some complicated transactions in connection with
the settlement of the Haskins estate brought Emerson eleven hundred
dollars that his mother had owed him, Uncle Ralph Haskins "was very
im willing to see so much good money fall into such bad hands." Emerson
went back to Uncle Ralph's counting room "to hear his various proposals"
and to agree on an investment that would be convenient to his uncle as
well as to himself. He had to pay $25 as the third and fourth assessments
on his share of the Northern Telegraph Company. As agent for Charles
Lane, his English friend once of Fruitlands, he collected over nine hundred
dollars as full payment of a mortgage and bought £195 to send to England.

On the advice of Abel Adams he made unfortunate investments in
shares of the Vermont & Canada Railroad and of an Ohio road and anx-
iously debated the merits of the business with his brother William, and
with Adams and Sam Ward. Adams eventually made good the loss by
paying the expenses of Emerson's son through college; and the shares at
length revived and became saleable. A Fitchburg Rail Road engine had
set fire to the timber on the cc island lot/* and Emerson wanted $50 as
damages. The company finally agreed to cut the wood and pay him as
much for it as it was worth before the fire. He paid assessments on new
shares in the railroad and got dividends on old ones. In 1853 ^e so^ n^
twelve shares.

EUery Channing's opinion that Emerson was drawn out of his philoso-
pher's corner by his children was correct. When they carried a May basket
to Mr. Minott, a neighbor they habitually consulted about the weather on
festival occasions, Emerson contributed the accompanying poetical address
describing the flowers and not omitting some mention of the prowess of
the weather prophet. His administration of household discipline was indirect
and frequently humorous but extremely effective. He used to follow his
children through the nursery door and would croon them an improvised
lulling song that was fanciful or absurd. He usually began it with "Good^

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 363

night to Mr Minot's cow, Goodnight to Mr Minot's barn." His youthful-
ness and his poetic moods impressed his children, Edith remembered that
she "entirely recognized Father as a poet," and connected his blue eyes and
fresh appearance with Concord's skies, woods, and Walden Pond. She
"had an idea that Waldo & Walden had some relation to each other."
Emerson brought home fireworks from Boston for the Fourth of July.
When Ellen, then fourteen years old, was sent off to boarding school at
the western Massachusetts town of Lenox, he was her correspondent and
adviser on educational matters. He helped Edith and Edward with their
Latin lessons. Sometimes he enlivened such studies by repeating choice
passages of poetry. Doubtless the trouble he had with his eyes helped to
turn him often from his books to the children, though it was not till 1852
that he bought his first pair of glasses.

Lidian, still unflagging in her interest in domestic matters, had out-
lived her earlier enthusiasm for philosophical speculation dear to the heart
of her husband. She joined his mother in support of the Christianity that
had been superseded by Transcendentalism in his study. When she had
described herself during her husband's British lecture tour as "a Christian"
and "a Swedenborgian/' she had certainly been serious about at least the
first epithet. She exhorted her elder daughter to be a Christian and so
enjoy the inner peace she herself had in spite of many infirmities. She was
doing her best to transform Emerson himself into a practical man, though
she found him hard to budge from his old ways. As for the church, he took
formal legal action in the early 18503 to separate himself even from the
parish. Yet he went on paying what he pleased toward the support of the
minister, and Lidian's efforts to tame him and make him an acceptable
member of society were not without some slight success.

He used to come "every day to sit for a while with his mother." She
was never reconciled to his heresy and used to walk with others of the
household to the Unitarian Church "every Sunday morning," or she would
have the communion service read to her at home and would ask that her
grandchildren be present. Yet she had lived in his house contentedly almost
the whole time since his marriage. Even after she broke her hip in 1851
she would sometimes quietly appear among the family. Arthur Clough,
beginning his New England residence of some months with a visit to Con-
cord, found "Old Mrs. Emerson, called 'Madam* . . . sitting in the room
-a small, benevolent-looking, large-eyed old lady, the original of Ralph
Waldo." But she kept to her own room more than ever and needed more
attention than her nurse, Charlotte Haskins, could give her. Emerson did
his part for her with exemplary loyalty until November, 1853, when she
had "lived eighty four years, yet not a day too long, & died suddenly &

364 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

unexpectedly, at the last.35 He told his brother William that there was now
"one less room to go to for sure society in the house."

He was more often with William, in New York or at Concord, and the
regular flow of correspondence between the two on business and on family
matters continued year after year. Once the brothers went on a journey
to Cape Cod, and Emerson carried home some botanical specimens. "Henry
Thoreau," he said, "could hardly suppress his indignation that I should
bring him a berry he had not seen." Bulkeley still required looking after as
he was moved from place to place. Aunt Mary kept mainly on the outskirts
of the family but sometimes had to have financial advice. She was still apt
to lose control of her temper, and once, when she had made a descent upon
William's household, she "outraged all feeling and propriety." She would
rediscover some old writing of Waldo's and praise it. She singled out an
article of his in The Died because it was marked "by the spear of Uriel."
Aunt Sarah Alden Ripley, now a widow living in Concord, must have had
claims on his time. He more than once came to the aid of Lidian's brother,
Doctor Charles Jackson, and was always a firm believer in Jackson's right
to the honor of being the discoverer of the surgical use of sulphuric ether,
the first widely used anesthetic. When Jackson, a scientist with more than
one specialty, had to fight politicians in order to keep his place as geological
surveyor of United States mineral lands in Michigan, Emerson turned to
his own political friends for help and found his time "sadly occupied for
a fortnight" with the affair.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, purchasing Hillside in 1852, partly of Emerson,
returned to Concord for a year or so. But as far as Emerson was con-
cerned the chief event connected with Hawthorne during this second and
briefest period of his residence was the farewell dinner given to him in
Boston before he set sail for Liverpool to be the American consul there.
Thoreau, too, was less profitable than in earlier days. To Emerson, unable
to discover positive results of Thoreau's devoted study of nature, he some-
times seemed "like the wood-god who solicits the wandering poet and draws
him into antres vast and desarts idle, and bereaves him of his memory,
and leaves him naked, plaiting vines and with twigs in his hand." "As for
taking Thoreau's arm," Emerson declared, "I should as soon take the arm
of an elm tree." When Thoreau's first book, long since written, was finally
published, he refused to review it, excusing himself on the ground that he
and Thoreau were of the same clan and parish. Yet he continued to prize
the man who gave him "in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief,"
as he said, "my own ethics." Even if Thoreau, lacking ambition, sometimes
seemed most successful as captain of a huckleberry party, he had unique
values. By the early summer of 1855 the Emersons were alarmed by the

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 365

increasing feebleness of his health and urged him to spend a week in their
home.

Alcott, though not now living in Concord, was a frequent visitor there
and absorbed untold days of Emerson's time in conversation. According
to Emerson, though his good nature seemed to invite rats and mice to make
their nests in him, Alcott was "the most refined and the most advanced
soul" in New England and made Plato seem real. He would listen to the
reading of the introductory chapter to Representative Men, then still in
manuscript, or would discuss the chapters on Plato, Goethe, and Sweden-
borg. On a fair day he and Emerson might walk and talk as far as Walden
Pond. On a rainy day they merely talked, ideas pouring inside the house,
rain pouring outside. Emerson followed the fortunes of the public "con-
versations," or, more properly, monologues, that Alcott delightedly gave,
and in October of 1853 he helped him plan his first Western tour and even
paid his fare as far as Cincinnati. In 1855 he blocked Alcott's plans for
a return to England "in search of his pedigree" and persuaded him to
accept a subscription for the support of the Alcott family instead of passage
money. Emerson managed the subscription and paid a part of it out of
his own pocket.

Within a few weeks after coming back from his foreign travels, Emerson
was, as he said, going over Concord twice a week with Ellery Charming.
Channing, rather than Thoreau, was now and for years his chief companion
on long walks. The peripatetic conversations contributed to Ellery's manu-
script "Country Walking." Emerson encouraged the writing of this with
a promise, it seems, of $20 for each of five monthly parts if no publisher
would buy them, and no publisher did.

Meantime, in March of 1 849, Emerson had met with twenty-nine other
men at the Alcott home in Boston to plan the promotion of general socia-
bility in eastern Massachusetts through a large and loose-jointed Town and
Country Club. In a few weeks there were 120 members, partly because of
his zeal. Though he soon wanted either to reduce the membership or to
form a new and smaller club, he at first saw no reason why there should
not be five or six hundred. He prodded his friends, reminding them of their
duty to attend the meetings. A projected Town and Country Magazine,
informally connected with the club, was to have Lowell as its editor and
Emerson, Lowell, and Hawthorne as contributors— or so Alcott dreamed
—but nothing came of it. What did come out of the short-lived club was
doubtless, for Emerson, a marked access of sociability and some practice
in the conventional gestures that went along with it. It seems to have been
about this time of his first enthusiasm over clubs that, in his determination
to be sociable, he took to smoking cigars. Now and later he smoked them

366 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

very temperately and in a kind of tentative manner; but a philosopher,
and particularly a Transcendent alist, with a cigar in his mouth was to
some persons a disturbing spectacle. Henry James, the novelist's father,
was horrified and seems to have labored under the mistaken notion that
Emerson was a helpless innocent astray in a bad world.

Politics helped draw Emerson out of philosophic retirement. The
"dismal" election of 1848 brought the Whigs, "first-rate in opposition, but
not so good in government," into power under President Zachary Taylor.
They had elected him in spite of their dislike of him. Nothing was settled.
Emerson obviously had no political panacea in mind, but he was drifting
toward the Free Soil Party if he had not already joined it at the polls.
Though he soon had moments of admiration for even the extremist William
Lloyd Garrison, he was not blind to the man's narrowness and impervious-
ness to other ideas than his own. Garrison neighed like a horse when any
new view was suggested to him, Emerson said, "as when I told him that
the /dte-element in the negro question he had never considered." But when
the Compromise of 1850 gave slavery a long push forward, Emerson found
himself nearer Garrison's camp.

He was disgusted at the letter of commendation sent to Daiuel Webster
with eight hundred signatures collected in Boston. March 7, the day of
Webster's speech for the Union, a speech that seemed an insult to the
antislavery men, was to be kept at the Emerson home as an anniversary
of infamy. With the final enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law, an effec-
tive implementing of the right of the South to get back its runaway slaves
from the North, Emerson lost his respect for the authority of his govern-
ment. He was soon one of the implacables on the side of Charles Sumner.
He even made tentative attempts to give literary aid to the extremists. A
couple of days before the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, he told Edmund
Quincy, now an antislavery propagandist, that he was "never more at a
loss than when asked to send a scrap for an annual." Some two weeks
later Quincy suggested to him that the new law might prove a tonic to the
muse. It did, and Emerson sent several contributions in time for printing
in The Liberty Bell

During the following year his temperature rose. He was more bitter
than Whittier. Though the Quaker poet had promptly pronounced Webster
fallen and lost and dishonored, he had also asked in "Ichabod33 that the
reverence of old days be paid to the great orator's dead fame. Emerson
was full of reproaches. "The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster,"
he said, "sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan." He turned
more sharply than ever before upon Edward Everett. Everett, he said,
"advises pathetically a reverence for the Union." For his own part, he was

DOWN FROM HIS IVOR! TOWER 367

convinced that there could never be peace and a real Union while this
devilish slavery, seed of war, was in American soil. "Root it out," he wrote
in his journal, "burn it up, pay for the damage, and let us have done
with it"

This was his mood when, on May 3, 1851, he addressed the citizens
of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law. In both geography and patriotism,
his address was narrowed down almost to Massachusetts. It put the South
aside as essentially a separate nation. What it lacked in liberality, it made
up for in intensity. Infamy was in the air, Emerson warned his fellow
townsmen. Who could have believed that a hundred guns would be fired
in Boston to celebrate the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law? There had
been a political betrayal, and Webster was the arch betrayer. "All the drops
of his blood," Emerson declared, "have eyes that look downward." But
again there was a note of wisdom. As for action, the principal thing to do
was to follow the example of the British in the West Indies and buy the
slaves. There must have been by this time a good deal of loose talk about
the expense of such a move, and estimates were evidently going up by
leaps and bounds. But the increasing cost did not daunt Emerson. If it
was going to be two thousand million dollars, as was now said, it would
be paid more enthusiastically than any other contribution had ever been,
he was confident. A chimney tax would be paid. People would give up
their coaches and wine and watches, and the churches would melt their
plate. Everybody would help "to dig away this accursed mountain of sorrow
once and forever out of the world."

Emerson took to the campaign platform, repeating the speech at various
places in Middlesex County in support of John Palfrey, once the divinity
dean at Harvard but now out for election as congressman on the Free Soil
ticket. At Cambridge "students from Harvard College did what they could
to disturb the audience and insult the speaker, by hisses and groans, inter-
spersed with cheers for Webster, Clay, Fillmore, Everett, and 'Old Har-
vard.3 " But whether the disturbers were Southerners and their Northern
sympathizers, as was asserted and denied, or were mere rowdies conveniently
pretending to espouse the cause of the South, Emerson stood with perfect
composure till the hubbub died down and then resumed where he had
left off, as if nothing had happened. The interruption gave added weight
to his words.

In his journal he called the Fugitive Slave Law a "filthy enactment"
and swore, "I will not obey it, by God." He gave a little money for a
fugitive slave sponsored by Henry Thoreau's mother, it seems. In No-
vember he wrote to Anna Barker Ward that he made it a point of con-
science to cast his vote on the second Monday of that month whenever

368 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

it came round. This November he even received one stray vote in the Con-
cord election as undeclared candidate for representative in the General
Court, but Sam Staples was triumphantly elected. Emerson began to be
urged to enter more fully into the campaign. His friend Furness and Lucretia
Mott, the tireless Quaker, were on a committee that asked him in vain to
be a lecturer in the antislavery course at Philadelphia. Wendell Phillips
and the Vigilance Committee of Boston hoped he would make an address
at Tremont Temple on the anniversary of the celebrated Sims's forced
return to slavery under the authority of the Fugitive Slave Law.

Emerson bought some of the one-dollar Hungarian bonds when, in the
spring of 1852, Kossuth, the leader in the fight for Hungary's liberty, came
to Concord. Concord put her best foot forward. Townsman Wheildon's
Gobelin tapestry of "Fame" was placed against the waU over the platform
in the Town Hall. Emerson, with all his family present to encourage him,
was there to make the address of welcome. He warned the visitor of the
danger of his growing popularity, since "everything great and excellent in
the world is in minorities/3 but welcomed him as the man of fate, as the
first soldier of freedom in that age, and as a republican better entitled to
interpret George Washington than were "those who live idly in the city
called after his name." He had some difficulty understanding Kossuth's
speech. When the Hungarian appealed to him for the English word for
Osterreich, he suggested ostrich; but Kossuth cried, "No, no!'5 and some-
body realized it was Austria that was wanted.

A few months later Emerson was waking at night and bemoaning the
smallness of his part in the antislavery fight. He seemed to be almost at
the point of deserting what he had religiously guarded as the special sphere
of a scholar and thinker. "But then/' he wrote, "in hours of sanity, I recover
myself ... I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit,
imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts . . . which, important to the re-
public of Man, have no watchman, or lover, or defender, but I."

On October 24 he was at Plymouth, looking across the hazy water
toward Marshfield and thinking that Webster must have died. Webster had
died at three o'clock that morning. Emerson, again in a relenting mood,
thought that "Nature had not in our days, or not since Napoleon, cut out
such a masterpiece." He must have promptly refused the Boston petition
signed by friends who wanted to hear him speak on the character of Web-
ster, He was already starling out on a long lecture tour through the state
of New York and the West when Lucretia Mott and others again begged
him for an address at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Fair in December,
Even if he wished to accept this invitation, he could not. Periodically the
lyceuni platform almost isolated him from political controversy. Though

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 369

he had read by early August the circular letter his friend Arthur Helps
had written on Uncle Tornys Cabin, he apparently did not get seriously into
Mrs. Stowe's book till some five or six months later. But his views on the
slavery question had been spoken in no uncertain terms. Near the end of
1852, Arthur Clough, a fresh observer of the American scene, wrote home
to England that Emerson favored purchasing the slaves and was politically
a Free Soiler, "which only means that you won't have any new Slave
States." This was true as far as it went but understated Emerson's aboli-
tionism.

The Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1 854, annulling the long-established safe-
guards of the Missouri Compromise, was hardly before the Senate when
Emerson began to denounce it privately. But his chief public effort during
the long debate on the new bill was his New York address on the Fugitive
Slave Law. The occasion was the fourth anniversary of Webster's seventh
of March speech, a momentous plea for the adoption of Henry Clay's truce
with slavery. The speech in which Emerson now measured his political wits
against Webster's last great effort was not of the fighting kind he had made
at Concord, but more philosophical and calm. He began with an apology
for leaving a scholar's business for politics. He did not fail to remind his
hearers that self-reliance was the true salvation. But his speech was mainly
a call to political action through organization. In a burst of optimism, he
predicted a general rush to join the Anti-slavery Society.

At home the following June, he was paying the printer for "Nebraska"
posters, presumably already used in protest against the hated bill that had
now become law. On the Fourth of July, Lidian, having heard that there
was to be a celebration that day, wanted her family's disapproval known,
and, with her husband's consent, draped the gates as if for a funeral. It
was presumably about this time that Emerson began to be active, with
Samuel Hoar and others, in the Concord committee of correspondence. He
was thus helping prepare the way for a new Republican Party, a party
to be formed for the avowed purpose of putting an end to the extension
of slavery. He continued sporadically to hit hard at slavery from the plat-
form, but he would have agreed with Convers Francis that he had little
popular success as a political speaker. His antislavery discourses were, he
told William Furness, the worst in the country—only less bad than slavery.
He seemed to lose his strength when he abandoned his customary post as
a detached observer.

While black slaves wanted freedom, white women were fighting for
their own rights and were enlisting on their side every prominent male
they could persuade. In 1850, some two years after the feminine declara-
tion of independence was made at Seneca Falls in the neighboring state

3)0 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of New York, the women of Massachusetts tried to prod Emerson into
supporting their convention at Worcester. They must have remembered that
in The Did under his editorship Margaret Fuller had first published the
plea that grew into her book called Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
But the truth was that he saw the contradictory aspects of feminism. He
had made an English translation of the Vita nuova and had written an
essay on love. He did not care to see the old courtly and romantic ideals
of womanhood hastily abandoned for a dubious modern substitute. His
imagination balked when he pictured women with masculine aggressiveness
wrangling in public. Yet he would not oppose any striving for human
liberty and equality.

He wrote Paulina Davis, one of the Worcester convention leaders: "If
women feel wronged, then they are wronged. But the mode of obtaining
a redress, namely, a public convention called by women is not very agree-
able to me, and the things to be agitated for do not seem to me the best.
Perhaps I am superstitious & traditional, but whilst I should vote for every
franchise for women,— vote that they should hold property, and vote., yes
& be eligible to all offices as nien-whilst I should vote thus, if women
asked, or if men denied . . . these things, I should not wish women to wish
political functions, nor, if granted assume them," The following year he
begged off again. In 1853 Wendell Phillips urged him in vain to appear
as one of the first signers of a petition demanding action on women's rights
by the Massachusetts constitutional convention. In future years he weakened
in his already half-hearted resistance to the feminine crusaders. But in
1855, when he read his lecture "Woman" before the Woman's Rights
Convention in Boston, he still hoped that women would not after all wish
an equal share with men in public affairs.

He was open-minded about schemes for reform but distrusted organized
reformers. His dislike of propaganda, as well as his ignorance of naval
discipline, might have explained his apparent refusal of an invitation to
lecture on flogging a few weeks after Herman Melville had published
illuminating comments on that subject in White Jacket. He was not entirely
ignorant of new and ominous theories of class struggle. By late 1852 he
had some acquaintance with the early writings of Karl Marx, who was
already sending articles from London to Horace Greeley's paper in New
York and had other means of reaching the English-speaking world. In a
brief passage credited in his journals to Marx, Emerson found the inspira-
tion for two lines at the end of a detached quatrain. He seemed to con-
trast the self-reliant individual with the supine classes or races of men who
were the easy victims of fate:

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 371

WITH the key of the secret he marches faster,

From strength to strength, and for night brings day;

While classes or tribes, too weak to master
The flowing conditions of life, give way.

Emerson was obviously not the poet laureate of the new social revolution.
He had long observed various theories of communism ill action, and, though
they mostly went no more than halfway, his individualism had revolted
against them. He probably did not know much of Karl Marx's doctrines.
If he did, he was still a rank individualist. Marching in lock step would
have been intolerable to him. He was also an idealist, not a materialist.
Certainly he earned no future laurels as even the most unbellicose of fellow
travelers.

In these years he felt some steady literary loyalties but also had a
good many disenchantments. His eyes probably limited him more now than
they had done since the early days of his Concord life, but he often had
other eyes to use. During her long stay in his home in 1851-1852 his
cousin Charlotte Haskins read "quite a number of books" to him "while
he would sit with his back to the light," making "pithy and pleasing com-
ments." He had already declared himself uninterested in Germany since
Goethe's death; and soon he would not read Fichte, Kant, Schelling, and
Hegel, for they had failed, he was convinced, as purveyors of truth. But
while he more and more lost patience with the imposing logic of Western
thought, his affection for the ejaculatory, intuitive Oriental philosophies
grew. When his Bhagavadgita was worn out by the many friends he lent
it to, he refused to sponsor an American edition of it, because the old
Hindu song seemed too sacred to offer to unprepared readers.

The contemporary English and American literary scene did not move
him greatly until Walt Whitman appeared. He was soon weary of Vanity
Fair and must have agreed with Elizabeth Hoar in putting Thackeray
down as a man who despaired of the heart and accepted London. It was
true that he took much pleasure in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley. In his journal
he neatly summarized Tennyson's In Memoriam as "the commonplaces
of condolence among good Unitarians in the first week of mourning." He
thought Browning ingenious, yet Browning seemed to make him return
with some satisfaction to Tennyson. Tennyson, he said, was "the more
public soul" and walked "on the ecliptic/' He had a growing affection for
Longfellow as a person but not as poet or novelist, though he managed
to bring up for him the astonishing opinion that Kavanagh was the best
sketch so far in the direction of the American novel He more understand-

372 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOM

ably thought that in The Song of Hiawatha Longfellow had not done his
whole duty by the unintellectual Indians, for they required that the poet
should find them brains in order to make them worth while. His chief
enthusiasm was for a very different book of the same year, 1855— Whit-
man's Leaves of Grass.

Emerson probably had his gift copy of Leaves of Grass by about the
Fourth of July, the date of publication. The thin paper-bound quarto must
at first glance have struck him as likely to turn out to be another cheap
bundle of verses, as feeble as the many he had wearily examined year after
year in his vain search for the American poet. But on July 10 he wrote
to his friend Sam Ward that it was "so extraordinary for its oriental
largeness of generalization, an American Buddh,-— that I must send it to
you, & pray you to look it over." The prose preface resembled a little some
of the college orations Emerson had heard on the future greatness of
America and her literature, but this was different because of its sustained
intensity. Some of its ideas closely resembled those of his own essays. He
must have read with complete recognition many a line in the long initial
poem:

I loafe and invite my soul . . .

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am . . -.

I know I am august,

I do not trouble my spirii to vindicate itself or be understood,

I see that the elementary laws never apologize . . .

Magnifying and applying come I,

Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters . . .

Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah and laying them away,

Lithographing Kronos and Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson . . .

Honestly taking them all for what they are worth, and not a cent more,

Admitting they were alive and did the work of their day . . ,

Whitman, emulating the ideal poet of his preface, professed to love all
forms of human life; allowed many "long dumb voices," of slaves, of pros-
titutes, of deformed persons, to speak through his fresh rhythms. When he
identified himself with the hounded slave, flagging in the race and leaning
against the fence, blowing and covered with sweat mingled with blood, he
was pronouncing in verse his own address on the Fugitive Slave Law. As for
God, he declared that words could not say "how much I am at peace about
God and about death." Emerson must at once have recognized a kindred
spirit in the poet of Leaves of Grass, an oracular and ejaculatory writer, a
seer, and, in some respects, a Transcendentalism But he must also have seen

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 373

that if Whitman was a Transcendentalist he was one who had turned half
realist and was the poet of both body and soul.

Emerson was delighted, and on July 2 1 he wrote a letter calling the book
America's "most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom/* greeting its author
"at the beginning of a great career/' and declaring a desire to see him. Charles
Norton thought the new book partly superbly graphic, partly intolerably
coarse, but told Lowell that it was no wonder Emerson liked it. Its author,
he much too simply explained it, had read The Dial and Nature and was
a combination of Concord philosopher and New York fireman. At the end
of September, Emerson informed his friend Cabot that "the strange" Whit-
man seemed "a Mirabeau of a man, with such insight & equal expression,
but hurt by hard life & too animal experience." He still thought Leaves of
Grass "the American poem." He asked Furness, his old schoolmate, whether
he had read "that wonderful book—with all its formlessness & faults." He
sent out more inquiries and more praise. His letters and his talk with friends
were perhaps chiefly responsible for the movement of a thin column of the
curious in the direction of New York.

But though readers did not object violently to Leaves of Grass because
of its magnificent glorification of self-reliance, of the virtues of universal
brotherhood, and of a future democratic America, complaints soon began to
reach Emerson about the frank, fleshly passages. People marveled at his
sponsoring a book so well stocked with repulsively honest verses on sex. A
Philadelphia intellectual who had examined the "profane & obscene" Leaves
of Grass and made up his mind that the author was a pretentious ass with-
out decency, was amazed to be confronted with a newspaper clipping con-
taining what purported to be a letter of respect and gratitude to that same
author over the name of one whom, of all American thinkers, he most revered.
He wanted Emerson to back him up in his indignant refusal to believe that
the letter in question could be more than a malignant jest. But it was no
jest. As Emerson had told Samuel Longfellow, Whitman had "done a strange
rude thing in printing in the Tribune . . . my letter of thanks for his book."
By now the letter was no doubt available in all corners of the country. To
help it along, Whitman had it printed as a leaflet He was, as he saw it, doing
his part in the legitimate fight of a book for the world. In the second edition
of Leaves of Grass he again printed the letter, much to Emerson's astonish-
ment. He even had a telling excerpt stamped on the back of the volume.

The strong medicine of Leaves of Grass did not much upset such liberals
as Alcott and Thoreau, and they soon visited Whitman. Moncure Conway,
a young radical just then in his Emersonian phase, had, according to one
story, taken fire when Emerson had first spoken to him of the book, had

374 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

read it on his way to New York next day, had called on Whitman in Brook-
lyn, and had come away delighted. But even Emerson experienced moments
of regret. After receiving complaints from friends who had tried reading the
poems aloud in the presence of ladies, he told Conway that if he had known
his letter would be printed he might have made some deductions from his
praise; and he confessed that "There are parts of the book where I hold my
nose as I read. One must not be too squeamish/5 he commented, "when a
chemist brings him to a mass of filth and says, 'See, the great laws are at
work here also;' but it is a fine art if he can deodorize his illustration. How-
ever, I do not fear that any man who has eyes in his head will fail to see
the genius in these poems."

It may have been on December n, 1855, that Emerson first had Whit-
man to dinner at a New York hotel He seems to have been only mildly
surprised when his poet shouted for a tin mug for his beer. Later, Whitman
took him to "a noisy fire-engine society," a new experience for the Concord
man. But the friendship, uneasy as it was, lasted for many years. Whatever
halfway retractions he might make in old age, Emerson had, after a long
search, found his American poet. Whitman, however varied his stories of his
relation to Emerson might be, respected the essayist whose influence on him
was important when the first Leaves of Grass was about to take form. That
influence was most convincingly described in Whitman's statement to John
Trowbridge in 1860, "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson
brought me to a boil."

During the seven years following his return from England, Emerson pub-
lished little but some lectures and essays that had been long known to his
listening or reading public and some biographical writing he had done in
collaboration with friends. The small miscellany called Nature; Addresses,
and Lectures, appearing in September of 1849, set the pedestrian pace of his
achievement for this heptad of years. A new edition of the second series of
Essays followed, and a book he now printed for the first time, Representative
Men, a series of lectures already well known in the United States and in
Britain. Though these lectures were old, he had held them back for revision.
Cutting down the mechanical work as much as possible now, he had had
an amanuensis make a fair copy. In the last days, of December a few friends
began to receive copies of the volume and by the first of January it was
on sale. The title page bore the date 1850.

At the outset Emerson made it clear that he was attempting to institute
no cult of heroes but was using great men simply as convenient representa-
tives of things and ideas. Significantly, he went on to underscore the self-
reliance that was God-reliance. The great might be helpful in saving us from
our contemporaries but could not substitute their genius for ours. Emerson

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 375

must have consciously rebelled against Carlyle's less democratic view of
great men in the lectures On Heroes. He honored the great man for stand-
ing firm on legs of iron but honored him more when he could abolish
himself by letting in the element of reason/ the universal mind.

Plato, conveniently representing philosophy and connecting Asia and
Europe, posed in his person the always unresolved contradiction between
unity, the Oriental conception of the world, and diversity, the Occidental
conception. Plato was what the American lecturer must have known he him-
self was— "a balanced soul'3 and "a man who could see two sides of a thing."
Emerson also found in Plato a companion believer in the doctrine of in-
spiration—the Over-soul was once more on the march. The Yankee Tran-
scendentalist endowed the Greek philosopher with a degree of mysticism
much like his own. He excused Plato's indignation against popular govern-
ment as expressing "personal exasperation." He conceded that Plato had
the fault of being always literary and without the vital authority which the
screams of the prophets possessed, and that another of his weaknesses was
his lack of system. "He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory
is not complete or self-evident." No one could ever exactly tell what Pla-
tonism was. Plato had undoubtedly failed. The enigma of existence still
remained. Yet all these detractions sounded as much like an apology for
Emerson himself as for Plato, and Emerson could easily forgive the faults
he listed. Many writers might have produced a more scholarly and accurate
treatise on Plato, but few could have absorbed his spirit so completely as
Emerson had done.

In print the lecture on Swedenborg still unhesitatingly classed the great
religionist as a mystic, still praised his vision of the universality of every
natural law and of its correspondence to spiritual law, but still lamented his
"theological bias." That bias was pervasive in the thought of Swedenborg
and "fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature." It ended by making him
ridiculous in spite of his great genius.

Emerson was not happy about this chapter. He had felt that Jesus was
the representative mystic he ought to sketch, and later he envied Renan his
subject. Had he chosen Jesus, he would undoubtedly have had, in his view,
a purer mystic than Swedenborg, with less of the tough wrapping of theo-
logical determination to cut away. But his interpretation of Jesus, he knew
from experience, would have aroused antagonisms for which he would have
been bracing himself as he wrote. Such a sketch of Jesus as he would have
wished to make would have required, as he said, "great gifts,— steadiest in-
sight and perfect temper; else, the consciousness of want of sympathy in the
audience would make one petulant or sore, in spite of himself."

Placing the lecture on Montaigne alongside that on Swedenborg, Emer-

376 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

son managed to show himself in these contrasting lights. He stood halfway
between the Swedish religionist and the French skeptic, but to the skeptical
Montaigne he felt an older and more settled loyalty. He remembered his
first acquaintance with him and the delight he had had in the discovery of
so much wisdom. "It seemed to me/1 he said, "as if I had myself written
the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experi-
ence." His liking for the essays had not greatly changed since his youth. He
still found Montaigne's frankness and honesty irresistible and was obviously
troubled by no doubts regarding the Frenchman's sincerity, even in the
extraordinary apology of Raimond de Sebonde. The theory of skepticism
challenged the Transcendental sayer of Yes, for he was aware how important
skepticism had been in his own intellectual growth. When he wrote on Mon-
taigne as its exemplar, he quickly branched off into a treatise of his own
on it. But though he made the most liberal allowances for its function he
came back in the end to a strong affirmation of his private faith. Skepticism
was lost, at last, he said, "in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits its
supremacy."

Though Emerson took it for granted that Shakespeare was the greatest
of all his representative men, he had the least - success in judging him by
Transcendental standards. He saw more clearly than Carlyle that Shake-
speare triumphed in not being original at all in the narrow sense; and he
seems to have understood better the great Elizabethan's place in the develop-
ment of English drama. But at one point his difference from Carlyle was
more significant. Carlyle thought it better that Shakespeare, "everyway an
unconscious man, was conscious of no Heavenly message." Emerson dis-
sented, declaring that Shakespeare had ended as a mere master of the
revels to mankind— "never took the step which seemed inevitable to such
genius, namely to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols and
imparts this power." It was an old complaint. "The world," Emerson made
his final reservation, "still wants its poet-priest . . ." He meant that Shake-
speare lacked a full measure of the great Transcendental faculty of reason,
spiritual intuition. Yet he saw that this poet possessed in superlative measure
its supposedly attendant faculty of genius. Shakespeare was puzzling.

Both Napoleon and Goethe suffered from somewhat the same deficiency
as Shakespeare's but with more disastrous results. The downfall of Napoleon
was remembered as an exciting event of boyhood days. His nephew Murat
had been Emerson's friend. The great emperor had always seemed to pos-
sess a kind of magic. But now he was put down as "no hero, in the high
sense," useful as the brilliant, thoroughly modem representative of suc-
cessful mediocrity and as showing what the powers of intellect could do
divorced from conscience. Goethe, though his magnitude suffered less dimi-

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 377

nution in this new scale of values, was, in some respects. Napoleon's counter-
part in the literary world. Equally modern, equally successful, he also spoke
for the spirit of the age. While he represented well in his own mind the
German tendency to introspection and the study of the inner life, he failed
to ascend to the highest grounds of genius, for he had not worshiped the
highest unity. He preached the doctrine that man existed for culture. But,
though a lawgiver of art, he was not an artist. He was fragmentary, a writer
of occasional poems and an encyclopedia of sentences. Yet both he and
Napoleon, two stern realists, effectively set the ax of modernity to the root
of the decaying tree of cant and pretense.

Representative Men supplied little new incitement to the controversy over
Emerson. He was now commonly thought to be past the peak of his per-
formance. From now on he heard the refrain that his latest book, whatever
it was, had "less vigor and originality than the others." "The fate of my
books," he jested, "is like the impression of my face. My acquaintances, as
long back as I can remember, have always said, 'Seems to me you look
a little thinner than when I saw you last.' " J. J. Garth Wilkinson, the
Swedenborgian scholar, admitted that it would require "some tough work
at long arts and sciences" to refute the lecture on Swedenborg. But Froude,
a man Emerson had admired at Oxford, was sharp in the not very intelligent
comment he wrote for The Eclectic Review. He wanted Emerson to keep
more to his own side of the Atlantic and thought "he would be doing us in
Europe more real good by a great deal, if he would tell us something of
the backwoodsmen in Kentucky and Ohio." The book was quickly pirated
and put on sale at railroad stations in England at a shilling, and its name
circulated through the papers as an appropriate household word, Carlyle
reported. Carlyle himself thought the lectures excellent line engravings. As
he read each lecture, he gave warm assent till he neared the end of it, when
he usually had to dissent. He did not need to say why. At the end of an
essay or lecture of Emerson's one generally found the most optimistic, Tran-
scendental generalizations.

In France, Montegut, still firmly fixed hi his prejudice against a level-
ing kind of democracy, welcomed Emerson again as a hater of the vulgar
and a lover of individual greatness. He now discovered in him both the
mystic and the skeptic. He saw the contrast between Carlyle's violent and
angry rebellion against things as they were and Emerson's imperturbable
confidence in the eternal order. But Montegut deserted Emerson for Carlyle
when he compared the ideas of the two regarding great men. Emerson's
great man, in contrast with Carlyle's, was the man of easy grandeur. But
easy grandeur was hardly admissible since Christianity had recognized suf-
fering and the virtue of sacrifice.

378 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

As co-author and co-editor of the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli,
Emerson was qualified by acquaintance, understanding, and sympathy. Mar-
garet had been a familiar figure in Concord, where she had continued "for
years," as he said, to come "once in three or four months, to spend a week
or a fortnight with us.'* Toward the end of her life he was in correspond-
ence with her across the Atlantic and was offering to help her find a publisher
for her history of the ill-fated Roman revolution she had witnessed. In July
of 1850, when the Elizabeth ended her homeward voyage from Italy on
the beach of Fire Island, Emerson sent Thoreau to the scene of the wreck,
supplying him with funds. Thoreau, in turn, shared the funds with Ellery
Channing, who went out from New York. The "flame tormented by the
wind," as Emerson aptly called Margaret, was quenched in salt water as
the storm lashed Fire Island and the Long Island shore. Thoreau returned
to Concord to read his notes to the assembled Emersons and Elizabeth Hoar.
Lidian's faith was shaken when she tried to understand how a tender Provi-
dence could have ordered the loss of a whole family, for Margaret's husband
and child had died with her.

Emerson's first decision was that Margaret had not been an important
enough figure to require a detailed memoir. But Horace Greeley, editor of
the paper on which she had worked in New York, and William H. Channing,
an early friend of hers, insisted that something be done and that Emerson
must do it. Channing went so far as to name both the author and the book.
According to him the title was to be Margaret and her Friends. Channing
and Emerson came together for consultation; then Sam Ward, important in
the early life of Margaret, was drawn in temporarily, only to drop out after
a few weeks. Though Emerson was soon busy collecting Margaret's corre-
spondence and other papers, he was still doubtful whether he would go on
with the memoir. Many personalities were involved, and Margaret had been
personal. Emerson must have suspected chat he had long underestimated
the appeal of her personality. Now, or soon, a story was being told of how
the poet Mickiewicz had wanted a divorce in order to marry Margaret and
how Mazzini had offered to marry her. When Emerson expressed surprise
at these things and at the tale that "Ossoli a young nobleman prosecuted
his suit against all denial, & married her," Elizabeth Hoar replied, "It is
not at all wonderful Any one of those fine girls of sixteen she had known
here, would have married her, if she had been a man. For she understood
them." New light was sought abroad, but misfortune dogged Emerson's
attempts to get reminiscences from Browning and Mazzini. Within a year
or so, however., the project had been definitely decided upon. It had been
settled finally that the memoir should have a triumvirate of authors and

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 379

editors— Emerson, William H. Charming, and James Freeman Clarke— to-
gether with various informal collaborators.

The two volumes of the Boston edition of Memoirs of Margaret Fuller
Ossoli were out early in February, 1852. It was true, as Emerson told
George Bradford, that the Boston Post and the Boston Daily Advertiser
actually professed admiration. The Post "never saw a production in which
there was less tawdriness or fulsomeness of praise" and thought the col-
laborators succeeded in giving a clear and just idea of Margaret. This was
intelligent criticism. If the book made little attempt to tell a connected
story of Margaret's life, it gave the reader a rich confusion of excerpts from
her letters and journals and from other pertinent documents, together with
frank and incisive comments, principally by Emerson, on her character
and thought. It could not clear up the history of such matters as Mar-
garet's clandestine love affair with Ossoli and her marital relations with
him, but it made an effort at completeness in essentials and at honesty and
fairness such as had seldom been seen in American biography. Even the
Fullers seemed to be satisfied; and next year they vainly offered to pay
Emerson for an introductory essay to a volume of Margaret's writings.

During the seven years following the British lecture tour Emerson con-
tinued to collect facts and anecdotes for the character study of the Eng-
lish nation he had begun even before his return to America; and he wrote
much of this book before the end of 1855. But the chief literary business
of his seven years was reading lectures. He could now go almost anywhere
he pleased and expect to find an audience. Financial need drove him to
exploit his reputation.

In the last months of 1848, shortly after his return from abroad, he
was busy in New England lyceums. It struck the Rhode Islanders, at New-
port, that he could not say enough in praise of England in his lecture there
early in December. "He laid it on pretty thick, I assure you," one listener
reported. "Why England is England/' "England/' and "London" were
some of the new titles, not always for different lectures, that began to
appear in the press notices and lyceum records. Before the winter of 1849-
1850 was over the lecturer was once more on the road. Now he struck
farther away from home ground, where most of his manuscripts had grown
familiar. Before the end of January he was in New York. There, Nathaniel
Willis asserted, "England" and "Spirit of the Time" brought out as in-
tellectually picked an audience as he had ever seen. "From the great mis-
cellany of New York they come selectively out," Willis said, "like steel
filings out of a handfull of sand to a magnet." About the middle of March,
Emerson was back again. "Natural Aristocracy," first heard by an Edin-

380 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

burgh audience, struck The Evening Post as remarkable for "originality,
insight, varied learning, quaint and racy expression, and thorough absence
of logic.'5 The last lecture of the course brought out the largest audience.
One hearer was Martin Van Buren, the ex-President. Three of the New
York subjects were repeated in Brooklyn, and half a dozen lectures had
to be read in Philadelphia before Emerson could go home. By then it was
about the middle of April. From New York, Brooklyn, Newark, Paterson,
and Philadelphia together he had got a total of some $630 above all
expenses.

But for Emerson the lecture campaign of the year was the one that took
him for the first time beyond the Ohio and, though only for exploration,
as far west as the Mississippi. He had long been preaching national as
well as personal self-reliance, but though he had visited the Old World
twice he had never penetrated very deeply into his own country till now.
In the West he traded his lectures not only for fees but for an education
in American culture, supposed to be simon-pure only at this safe distance
from Europe. In Cincinnati a hundred men had signed a petition that he
should come and lecture. Early in May he still balanced the claims of
Cincinnati against those of his library and garden. But the chance to see
Niagara and the new West outweighed his melons and books.

His visit to Niagara Falls was only the beginning of his adventures.
He was a passenger in the steamer America when she caught fire on the
way from Buffalo to Cleveland but reached the latter port in time to
avoid destruction. After reading a lecture in Cleveland he had "a rough
pleasant ride over the lake to Sandusky," and then set out by railroad south-
ward. "Beautiful road, grand old forest, beeches, immense black walnuts,
oaks, rock maples, buckeyes (horse chestnuts) in bloom, cornels in white
flower, & red buds—a forest tree whose bloom is precisely the colour of the
peach-blossom,— made all the miles rich with beauty . . ."

At Cincinnati, Emerson was a pleasing surprise according to a local
critic— "so far, in his intellectual and oratorical lineaments, from resembling
the newspaper portraits above which we have at various times seen his
name written, that we half incline to think the wrong man has come along,
and attempted to play off a hoax upon us backwoods people." This was
a first impression, immediately after the critic had heard "Natural Aris-
tocracy." The attendance seems to have kept up well till the five lectures
that had been announced were completed. But when Emerson yielded to
the entreaties of friends and gave an additional three his luck changed.

He was eager to see the new country. He visited Fort Ancient, "one
of those primeval remains, for which Ohio is famed," with a party includ-
ing, it seems, Rutherford B. Hayes, a future President. Having got as far

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 381

west as Cincinnati, he wanted to go farther. The Cincinnatians easily per-
suaded him to make an expedition to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, and
with a company of sixteen men and women he set out by steamer for
Louisville. There, as neither the mail coach to Mammoth Cave nor avail-
able horses or carriages could accommodate so many, the party had to
take to the rivers again— 182 miles down the Ohio to Evansville, 150 miles
up the Green River and by Barren River to Bowling Green. In the Green
River, deepened by its locks, they passed through a primitive forest, the
trees marked far from the ground by the latest floods. Ducks clambered
up the shores with their broods, and wild turkeys flew before the steamer
from tree to tree. In the wider stretches of the river were great masses of
dry leaves matted together which, when stirred with a pole, would emit
dangerously inflammable gas. On the morning of the third day out from
Louisville the holiday-makers were at Bowling Green. That night they
arrived in coaches at the cave, and early next morning they made the chilly
descent. With their lamps, Roman candles, and Bengal lights, they were
prepared for an exciting fourteen hours of subterranean exploration that
took them through magnificent chambers and galleries and across rivers,
over the eighteen miles to Serena's Arbor and back, a hard journey. When
they came once more into the open air they learned that a violent thunder-
storm, of which they had had no hint, had passed above them. Next day
they made a visit of four hours "to new parts of the cavern— to the 'Gothic
Chapel,' to the 'Star Chamber,' and to 'Gorki's Dome.' " In the Star
Chamber the illusion was perfect when the guide collected and hid all the
lamps. Emerson lay on his back for a quarter of an hour while the more
musical members of the party sang "Night and Love."

By stage and by steamer he got to Paducah, and there he took pas-
sage in the General Washington down the broad Ohio, past the once
grand dream city of Cairo. The almost transparent green of the Ohio
poured into the vast muddy current of the Mississippi. The Mississippi, a
lonely river, was flanked by monotonous green wildernesses. There were
"no towns, no houses, no dents in the forest, no boats almost." But some-
times one could see "a flat wood boat lying under the shore," and the
steamer would blow her whistle, ring her bell, and near the land. Then
"out of some log-shed appear black or white men, & hastily put out their
boat, a large mud-scow, loaded with corded wood."

Among his fellow passengers Emerson saw some from the Eastern
states. Captain Mervine, of the U. S. Navy, introduced his daughter, Mrs.
Drury, of Canandaigua, New York. "Then there were planters travelling,"
Emerson noticed, "one with his family of slaves, (6 blacks;) peaceable
looking farmer like men who when they stretch themselves in the pauses

382 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of conversation disclose the butts of their pistols in their breast-pockets.
Then a knot of gamblers playing quite ostentatiously on the cabin-tables,
& large sums changing owners rapidly, and, as we Yankees fancied, with
some glances of hope aimed at us that we should sit down with these
amiable gentlemen who professed to be entire strangers to each other, &,
if asked any question respecting the river, 'had never been on these waters
before.' "

At St. Louis, "the Metropolis of the West, & on the frontier, the start-
ing point for Santa Fe & California, and for the Upper Missisippi," Emer-
son hesitated. The rivers were getting low, and he did not wish to be
caught on a sand bar. But when, after three days in company with cholera
and death in his hotel, he was ready to take the risk, lie encountered not
sand bars but more cholera and death aboard the steamboat Excelsior
between St. Louis and Galena. He meant to go as far north as the Falls
-of St. Anthony and see the Indians; but, learning that the council between
the Sioux and CMppewas and the territorial dignitaries was ended, and
finding no companions for the northern journey, he took the stage from
Galena, "across nearly the whole state of Illinois one measureless prairie"
to Elgin, and tbence came to Chicago by railroad. After crossing Lake
Michigan he climbed aboard a Michigan Central train to find John Murray
Forbes, president of the road, as a companion for the remainder of the
trip to Boston. Niagara River3 Lewiston, and Lake Ontario were markers
along the route home. It had been an exploring expedition rather than
a lecture tour; but the $471.71 Emerson had received for the Cincinnati
lectures was more than double the amount of his expenses during the
whole journey.

From this time his lecture territory was as narrow or as wide as he
chose to make it. He began the regular season of 1850-1851 with, it seems,
only scattering appointments in New England. But in February he was
as far west as Buffalo. He was now carrying some of his new manuscripts
on the general topic of "Conduct of Life.55 By late March he was in Pitts-
burgh, worn-out after two nights in the cars and a third "on the floor of
a canal-boat, where/3 he said, "the cushion allowed me for a bed was
crossed at the knees by another tier of sleepers as long limbed as I." His
course, half a dozen nights long, marked, said a local paper, "something
of an era in the history of the Iron City, whose fame has hitherto been
acquired chiefly by the products of her manufactories." The lecturer from
the East was recognized as a missionary of culture. Next winter he made
a few alterations in the course and repeated it in Boston, where he was
also a missionary of culture. He made a vigorous attempt to head off news-
paper reports. They were often annoyingly imperfect but accurate enough

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 383

to make his lectures too well known in towns where he had hoped to read
them later. The fuller the newspaper reports, the more they cut into his
fees.

At Montreal, in the following April, he reached his farthest north on
the American continent. He arrived in the Canadian city by crossing the
St. Lawrence on foot only two days before "the ice shoved, as they call it,
&," he wrote home, "I stood on the quay & saw acres & acres of ice roll-
ing swiftly down stream, & presently my road came floating down with
the rest, the well beaten black straight road I had traversed." Most of
the active business men were natives of England or Scotland, and it was
a piece of good luck that the American visitor began with his lecture "Eng-
land" instead of starting at once with his course on the "Conduct of Life."
He helped Anglo-American relations still more by a speech at the dinner
of the St. George's Society. Everybody, it seems, was pleased. A newspaper
critic called the lectures eloquent and had never known anything of the
kind to be so popular in Montreal.

Next winter, after some preliminary lecturing mainly in the state of
New York, Emerson was off again to the West. Cincinnati was his first
main objective, and he gave lectures there once more. He again saw Ormsby
Mitchel, the astronomer. After some acquaintance with the wine-making
Longworths, he made up his mind that they were "the most remarkable
people here," but he had other reasons for liking Cincinnati and would
"almost feel compelled to go thither again" if the same persons should ask
him. After a slow river voyage he arrived at St. Louis on Christmas Day.
As the citizens were just then feting Thomas Meagher, recently escaped
from exile in Van Diemen's Land to the American lecture platform, he
agreed to attend a dinner in the rebellious Irishman's honor. In St. Louis
he found "kind adventurous people" but apparently saw as yet no sign of
the surprising excitement over the German philosophy of Hegel that he
witnessed there a few years later. Though he had nothing but admiration
for Eliot, the Unitarian minister and "the Saint of the West," he believed
"no thinking or even reading man" was to be found "in the 95000 souls."
By the seventh of January he had, however, given St. Louis his six or
seven lectures, principally drawn from his newest course, the "Conduct of
Life" ; and he was prepared to try his luck, for the first time, on the lecture
platforms of the thirty-four-year-old state of Illinois.

At Springfield he was "in the deep mud of the prairie." "In the prairie,"
he wrote to Lidian, "it rains, & thaws incessantly, &, if we step off the short
street, we go up to the shoulders, perhaps, in mud. My chamber is a cabin.
My fellow boarders are legislators, but of Illinois, or the big bog. Two or
three Governors or ex-Governors live in the house.— But in the prairie, we

384 THE LIFE OP RALPH WALDO EMERSON

are all new men, just come, & must not stand for trifles." In the raw
little town that had vainly tried for more than a dozen years to look like
a state capital Emerson was naturally not on the lookout for one of the
world's greatest living men and so may excusably have given only a pass-
ing glance to the law office of Abraham Lincoln. In spite of the bad weather
and a local paper's warning that this master of wonderful style and thought
was not a lecturer in the usual sense but a monologist, talking rather to
himself than to his audience, many people came to Representatives Hall
to hear the visiting lecturer. He read them, it seems, "The Anglo-Saxon/'
"Power," and "Culture.33

Through with Springfield on January 12, he was lecturing in Jackson-
ville the following day; but his next appointment was in Cleveland, Ohio.
He raced back to St. Louis, thence down the Mississippi and up the Ohio
by steamboat, and overland by train to Cleveland. Financially the Western
tour had been a success. Cincinnati, St. Louis, Springfield, and Jacksonville
had, together,, paid him slightly over a thousand dollars. He went home
with a growing respect for the potentialities of the new country. His im-
pressions of its cultural condition were not very flattering, but he was hope-
ful. He saw both sides and included both in his "Anglo-American" lecture.

"Your western romance," he said in the "Anglo-American," "fades into
reality of some grimness. Every thing wears a raw & ordinary aspect, You
find much coarseness in manners; much meanness in politics; much swagger
& vaporing & low filibusterism ; the men have not shed their canine teeth.
Well; don't be disgusted . , ." These \vere poor country people and lived
hard. But their sense of freedom and equality was never interrupted. The
people were all kingss and the scepter was a cattle dealer's driving whip. The
condition of the Western states today had been the condition of all the
states fifty or a hundred years ago. Here was practical democracy, Emerson
saw with his usual freedom from snobbishness.

The West and the South needed, in this time of national unrest, to
be drawn into a closer cultural relation with New England and with
New York and the other Middle Atlantic states, where he now lectured
year after year. There seems to be only the evidence of a partly -canceled
rough draft of a letter to show that he had an invitation in 1853 to
read lectures, presumably a course of eight or ten, in New Orleans; and
one can only conjecture the reasons back of such an invitation and the
reasons why it proved abortive. What is clear is that the failure of Emerson
to give such lectures was part of the fateful failure of the American lyceum
to bring North and South together in a common forum of ideas. Early
in the following year, however, he set out on another tour of the West.
This time Detroit., Chicago, and Milwaukee marked the main line of his

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 385

penetration. When the railroad was out of commission, he traveled some
sixty-five miles in a sleigh along the shore of Lake Michigan. He was
getting a vivid impression of the vast geography of the region of the Great
Lakes. In Concord that spring Henry Thoreau and others petitioned him
for a reading of as many of the lectures he had delivered in other places
during the past winter as might be convenient for him to give, "though/5
said their letter, plainly the work of Thoreau, "they promise to repay him
only with an eager attention." Concord promptly got a couple of lectures.

During these years Emerson made a few addresses outside the lyceum
circuits. With his oration at Williams College in August of 1854 he un-
wittingly stirred young James A. Garfield, later a President of the United
States. Garfield once declared that, though he could remember only a sen-
tence of the address, he dated his real intellectual life from the hour when
he sat under the high pulpit in the old parish church at Williamstown and
was dazed by the new vision Emerson opened before him. In January of
1855 Emerson thought his engagement to speak before the Massachusetts
Anti-slavery Society was "like Hamlet's task imposed on so unfit an agent
as Hamlet." To him "the mountains of cotton & sugar" seemed as "unper-
suadeable by any words as Sebastopol to a herald's oration." At Amherst
College in August of 1855, he appeared as substitute orator. In the fol-
lowing month he spoke at the dedication of the Concord cemetery. Sleepy
Hollow.

Meantime the old treadmill of lectures for village and city lyceums had
to be kept turning through each lecture season. Once a tour was decided
upon, an extensive correspondence settled the details. Requests came in
from dozens of towns. A tentative schedule for only two weeks of the winter
of 1855 included nine towns in the state of New York and one in Canada
—Rochester, February 15; Syracuse, 16; Rome, 17; Oneida, 19; Vernon,
20; Rochester again, 21; Lockport, 22; Hamilton, Ontario, 23; Syracuse
again, 24; Canandaigua, 26; Watertown, 28; Cazenovia, March i. This
meant twelve lectures, and every one required a tiresome journey. But for
Emerson, perennially in need of funds, it was a very familiar sort of business.

Near the end of December, 1855, he paused at the Tremont House in
Chicago, bound for Iowa. "I rode incessantly," he informed Lidian, "from
Salem Mass where I took the cars on Thursday morning two days & two
nights & was here at nine yesterday A. M. Tonight at eleven or else to-
morrow at seven A. M. I go again to the Missisippi & across it to Daven-
port & then to Rock Island But it is a little doubtful still as there is no
arrival from that quarter whether snow & wind will allow me to reach the
river As for the crossing, once there, there is now no difficulty, for it is
frozen." On the next day, the last day of the year, he lectured in Daven-

386 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOJV

port, Iowa; and in his diary he noted that he had three times crossed the
Mississippi on foot.

If hard travel taught him something of the unbookish world, his lec-
tures not only made it possible for him to give months of every year to
writing but helped spread the reputation of his books. With his lectures
on England ready for use as a part of English Traits and with those on
the "Conduct of Life" written and read from lyceuni platforms, Emerson's
distinctive achievement was not far from complete. But as the ecliptic of
his career slanted downward a little, his literary reputation continued to
grow. Emile Montegut's translation, Essais de philosophie americaine, pub-
lished in 1851, helped to establish more firmly the Emersonian bridgehead
in France. For Americans the basis of Emerson's increasing fame was ably
surveyed by the learned and radical religious controversialist Theodore
Parker in The Massachusetts Quarterly Review. Moncure Conway doubted
whether Parker ever comprehended Emerson. It was true that Parker was
in some respects at the opposite pole of Transcendentalism from the Con-
cord man, but he understood him well enough.

On the whole he placed him very high, among geniuses of the first
order. He called him the most American as well as the most cosmopolitan
among all American writers. But he also listed the glaring faults of his hero
—lack of any exact scholarship,, lack of exact mental discipline, lack of any
systematic training in the sciences to which he appealed so often, lack of
proper esteem for the logical, demonstrative, and historical understanding
and consequently too much dependence on intuition, too much inclination
to be the complete mystic. Emerson, he found, discouraged hard and con-
tinuous thought, conscious argument, and discipline, though the Emer-
sonidae were more guilty on this score than was their master. But in spite
of the fact that Emerson demonstrated nothing, Parker said, he assumed
his position far in advance of his time. Not a pantheist, so Parker thought,
Emerson did not sink God in nature though he sometimes made man iden-
tical with God. Not creative as Goethe and Shakespeare were, he exhibited
a body of writing of remarkable consistency, and his life and writings
together formed a consistent whole that might challenge the world. Parker
saw Emerson as the child of Christianity and of American political idealism
and yet outside the church and outside the state. He was unrelenting in
his attack on the want of logic of which Emerson was certainly guilty but
nevertheless ended by raising him up to the highest place among writers
of English since the time of Milton. He even thought that Milton had not
added so many thoughts to the treasury of the race or created so much
loveliness.

In comparison with such astonishing praise, it was a small matter that

DOWN FROM HIS IVORY TOWER 387

Emerson attracted to Concord a minor foreign literary figure like Fredrika
Bremer, the Swede, or the sculptor Horatio Greenough, "grandest of dem-
ocrats" if not of sculptors; or that he, though no Baconian, found himself
cast in the role of friend and aider of Delia Bacon when she was trying to
shift Shakespeare's laurels to the head of the Elizabethan Francis Bacon;
or that he continued to show his old power over youth, exercising it in these
years on such new friends and disciples as Moncure Conway and Frank
Sanborn; or that he drew to America for a time his English friend Arthur
Clough.

Emerson now had all the praise he needed. There were other judgments
hardly less flattering to him than Theodore Parker's. Clough, after some
months of American residence, called him "the only profound man in this
country3' but later modified this estimate so that it was less unjust to the
country though scarcely less favorable to Emerson. "I more and more
recognise his superiority to everybody I have seen," he wrote home to Eng-
land. But acceptance and success, instead of spurring Emerson on to new
achievement, seemed to make him more content, in the latter half of his
life, to abandon his lonely tower in order to regain his hold on what Haw-
thorne called "the magnetic chain of humanity."

THINGS IN THE SADDLE

If I refuse

My study for their politique,

Which at the best is trick,

The angry Muse

Puts confusion in my brain. . . .

'T is the day of the chattel.,

Web to weave, and corn to grind;

Things are in the saddle.

And ride mankind.

—"Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing"

Y 1856 the dangerous rivalry between North and South had at last
got out of hand. The two greedy economic systems could not be
reconciled however much one might depend upon the other. The
social cleavage was fast becoming even more fundamental than the
economic. While the South angrily resisted the harsh Northern industrial
hegemony, she was aroused by the growing threat to her social order, an
order founded on the absolute supremacy of whites over blacks. The North,
though equally guilty with the South in introducing slavery into the coun-
try, had found her soil and climate unsuited to it. She had at length freed
her Negroes and, having only a small population of ex-slaves, felt no danger
from their presence and could afford some generous gestures toward them.
Out of the ancient trap, she prided herself on having got abreast once more
of European opinion on the sanctity of human freedom. The South, caught
fast in the old system, had to resist any change. Thoroughly alarmed at
the aggressiveness of the North, she was making a final effort to arm her-
self with political power and was at the same time considering the alterna-
tive of secession. The hotheads on both sides were loud in their demands.
Even ethical idealists could behave with fatal unwisdom. The moral in-
dignation of the impatient antislavery reformers at the North threatened
to end not only the slave economy but the Union itself and was, as it turned
out, pushing the country toward the blood bath of a fratricidal war.

The stench of political decay was in the American air and penetrated
the study of even the most retired scholar. Growth was giving way to dis-

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 389

integration. Optimism received a severe check. The dream of a good life
on the fresh, clean soil of the New World had to be postponed or given
up in favor of a more realistic view of things. The thinker, though he had
little faith in victories to be won by political or military shock troops, had
to quit thinking for action.

Emerson already felt himself drawn closer to friends like Theodore
Parker., tireless enemy of slavery. The praise Parker had heaped upon
Emerson in The Massachusetts Quarterly Review article of 1850 did not
at all explain Emerson's growing admiration for Parker. Parker's acceler-
ating attacks on slavery explained that. From 1851 through 1855 Emerson
had been urging Parker on: "We all love & honour you here, & have come
to think every drop of your blood & every moment of your life of a national
value. . . . Ever new strength & victory be to you ! . . . People love war
too well, now, as aforetime, not to love the best soldier of these days."

Emerson became suspicious of friends who cared more for the Union
than for the antislavery cause. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a speech at New
York, tried to moderate the Northern hatred of the slaveholders because
it was dangerous to the welfare of the country. Emerson, though he acknowl-
edged Holmes's disclaimer of any advocacy of slavery, drafted a sad but
severe rebuke. As "for the Union with Slavery," he declared, "no manly
person will suffer a day to go by without discrediting disintegrating & finally
exploding it."

When Charles Sumner, the intransigent foe of the Southern bloc in
the Senate, was brutally assaulted as he sat at his desk in the Senate cham-
ber, Emerson was carried away by anger. To him the shame of Simmer's
assailant seemed to be shared by the whole South, and Sumner was "the
whitest soul I ever knew." In the free states, he told his fellow townsmen,
life was "adorned with education, with skilful labor, with arts, with long
prospective interests, with sacred family ties, with honor and justice." But
in the slave states, he rounded out his contrast, life was a fever and man
was "an animal, given to pleasure, frivolous, irritable, spending his days
in hunting and practising with deadly weapons to defend himself against
his slaves and against his companions brought up in the same idle and
dangerous way."

With such a speech, though it was spoken only to his Concord neigh-
bors, Emerson came near making himself a political figure. He received
word that he had been appointed an alternate delegate to the first national
nominating convention of the Republican Party, to be held at Philadel-
phia on June 1 7 ; and soon he was being urged by the poet Whittier, though
apparently in vain, to go to Philadelphia, as ex-Governor Boutwell could

390 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

not He proclaimed -uncompromising political views with more boldness.
To his brother William he wrote that "If the Free States do not obtain the
government next fall, which our experience does not entitle us to hope,
nothing seems left, but to form at once a Northern Union, & break the ,
old." The following winter, when Ellen Emerson visited the home of the
poet Longfellow she saw a picture of her father and one of Charles Sumner
linked together with a wreath.

In Concord relief for the Union men fighting to keep their hold in bloody
Kansas unloosed purse strings. Emerson^ one of the subscribers,, proudly
estimated that the well over a thousand dollars raised during a few days
in June of 1856 amounted to one percent of the valuation of the town.
He told a relief meeting at Cambridge that in the case of Kansas "all the
right is on one side." He made his speech vivid by naming persons from
Massachusetts towns who had been murdered or seized in the border war.
He indicted the government of the United States as the chief culprit and
made probably the most open statement he had ever made of his theory
of the supremacy of the individual conscience over the authority of gov-
ernment. All the Emersons were delighted when schoolmaster Frank San-
born, head of Kansas relief for Middlesex County and later for Massa-
chusetts, came to talk to them on this favorite theme. In November, William
Lloyd Garrison asked permission to include Emerson's portrait in a com-
posite "magnificent lithographic print" along with portraits of Theodore
Parker, Wendell Phillips, Joshua Giddings, Gerrit Smith, Samuel May, and
other antislavery heroes.

Meantime Emerson lectured again as far west as the Mississippi Valley.
This meant "plenty of night travelling and arriving at 4 in the morning, to
take the last & worst bed in the tavern." In January of 1856 the mercury
fell to twenty-two degrees below zero on the twelfth day of the cold snap.
"Winter in Illinois.,3' Emerson wrote home, "has a long whip. To cuddle
into bed is the only refuge in these towns." During a "sleigh jaunt35 on the
Mississippi he caught a cold and could hardly speak. The clothing supplied
him from home also made him unhappy. "One petty misfortune/3 he in-
formed Lidian, "causes me a deal of trouble,— those shirts are not measured
rightly, & will not button." His audiences, too, were a problem. Sometimes
they seemed to him like children. But when the stout Illinois farmer walked
out of the hall after a short trial of the Easterner's wares, Emerson thought
the Illinoisan must be right. The committee told him that what the people
wanted was a hearty laugh. But he used what spare time he could between
lectures to work on his next book, English Traits. At Chicago he lamented
that the bitter cold kept him from getting off some sheets of it to his pub-

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 391

Usher. Thoreau, appointed his agent during his absence, would, he knew,
be vexed by this failure.

As Emerson moved eastward he got better press reports on "Beauty,"
his favorite lecture on the Western tour. In Illinois a Dixon paper had said
flatly that his style was "most miserable,53 while a Freeport print, though
conceding that for intellectual quality "Beauty" was "vastly superior to any
lecture we have yet had," judged that there was in it none of the mag-
netism important in popular oratory. In Ohio people liked these things
somewhat better, it seemed. At Cleveland they listened with profound atten-
tion, and some even liked the sober style of delivery. At Columbus the local
critic regretted that a man who possessed so many graces of mind should
not give some study to graces of attitude, yet he asserted that "Beauty"
would long be remembered as "the finest lecture ever delivered at the
Atheneum." Back in Boston the Freeman Place Chapel was the scene of
a minor triumph when half a dozen lectures, including "Beauty," made a
net profit of $772.36. "France," another lecture of the course, roused the
ire of Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, once a student of medicine in Paris,
because it charged his most admired professor, the famous Doctor Louis,
with professional showmanship.

There was much miscellaneous business that had to be attended to. The
alert red-headed and bewhiskered Boston lawyer Horatio Woodman craved
the society of literary men and benevolently wished to make them wealthy.
By 1856 he was arranging a small but profitable investment in Wisconsin
land for Emerson. Hermann Raster, a German newspaper editor in New
York, negotiated with Emerson, on behalf of the scholar and critic Doctor
Karl Elze of Germany, for the inclusion of Representative Men in Durfs
Collection of Standard American Authors at Leipzig this year. A thousand
new copies of each series of Essays were printed in Boston, and there was
a reprint of the Poems, called the fifth edition.

There were minor adventures on the farm. Jessie the calf could not be
found and had to be searched for by Emerson and his hired man, but,
as it turned out, she had been lying all the time under the quince trees in
the garden. On the two following days there was a great storm, the wind
and rain knocked down many pears, and the floor of Ellen's closet had
to be commandeered for the Flemish Beauties and other varieties thus
prematurely harvested.

The family income, as Emerson recorded it day by day in his account
books, made an oddly variegated picture. On October 17 he received
through Phillips, Sampson, & Co. the sum of $100. This was the result of
the promise made by G. Routledge of London to pay him £20 for an

392 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

advance copy of English Traits in order to beat British pirates to the press.
On the igth he got seven cents a pound for his, yoo-pound cow; on the
22nd, $1.50 for apples; and on the 23rd, $20 from the Marlboro Lyceum.
For the whole of the year 1856 the major items of his income would prob-
ably have amounted to a little over $1400 of dividends and rents and per-
haps a little less than $1700 in lecture fees; but his expenses were heavy
and he was far from rich.

His social and even convivial times were, however, growing more im-
portant; and this year they fell into a more regular pattern, with one
climactic day of each month "assigned to the Saturday Club, The Saturday
Club, which he helped to found, was just beginning its long career as the
social focus of the leading intellectuals of the Boston area. The original
members, those of 1856, were Louis Agassiz, the immigrant scientist just
then piecing out his meager income by serving as schoolmaster to Emer-
son's daughter Ellen and other pupils; the younger Richard Henry Dana,
more than a successful lawyer and antislavery agitator now that his Cali-
fornia voyage before the mast was a matter of literary history; John Sullivan
Dwight, once the teacher of music at Brook Farm; Emerson; Elizabeth
Hoar's brother Rockwood, the jurist; James Russell Lowell; John Lothrop
Motley, now a popular author because of his recently published first book
on the Dutch; Benjamin Peirce, mathematician and astronomer; Sam Ward,
Emerson's friend and correspondent for years past; Edwin Percy Whipple,
already adding the dignity of critic to his lesser repute as a bank clerk ; and
Horatio Woodman, social manager and financial adviser to his better-
known friends. Longfellow and Holmes entered the club a year or so later,
and were soon followed by the historian Prescott, by Whittier, and by Haw-
thorne. Henceforth, year after year, Emerson made his trips to Boston,
commonly every month, for the meetings of the club.

Far removed from this exemplary brotherhood was the disturbing figure
of Walt Whitman. As critic Whipple of the Saturday Club jested of him,
"he had every leaf but the fig leaf'; and of all this New England Parnassus,
Emerson alone recognized his great qualities. Emerson was untroubled by
nearsightedness. Though he saw no first-rate genius in any fellow member
of the Saturday Club, even in Hawthorne, he was sure he saw it in Whit-
man. Unfavorable judgments of Leaves of Grass continued to come in
from friends as liberal-minded as Arthur Clough. To Clough it seemed
remarkable but perhaps "rather a waste of power & observation/3 But
Emerson, oddly bracketing "wild Whitman, with real inspiration but choked
by Titanic abdomenf and the Baconian enthusiast Delia Bacon, "with

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 393

genius, but mad," called them "the sole producers that America has yielded
in ten years."

Herman Grimm and Gisela von Arnim, daughter of Emerson's old
favorite who had once exploited with great success her correspondence with
Goethe and was thenceforth familiarly known to the world as Bettina,
began to write to Emerson from Europe. Grimm and Gisela seem to have
been almost Emerson's first German correspondents. Grimm had read Emer-
son in 1855 and believed that he and his friend Joseph Joachim, the vio-
linist, were perhaps the first in their country to know the American's writ-
ings. In the Emerson home the amusing struggle with the German script
began. Success depended on the wits of Ellen, since her father read German
only from the printed page. Once a particularly difficult letter from Gisela
required a whole winter of intermittent labor to unriddle it. Emerson him-
self was unable to keep his reading up to date in Grimm's numerous volumes
that came to him as gifts from year to year. One of these, a book of essays,
was dedicated to him. Herman Grimm's father and uncle, already known
as collectors of fairy tales, were bringing out their great German dictionary
so slowly that one was dubious of their ever arriving at the latter half of
the alphabet; but Emerson soon began to buy the expensive work.

To those who had heard Emerson lecture frequently since 1848, im-
portant parts of English Traits were likely to seem familiar when the book
appeared in print. From its informal beginnings in England, it had grown
to hundreds of manuscript pages some five years after his second visit there.
But the "first of, say, sixteen or seventeen chapters" of it did not go to
the American publisher until the autumn of 1855; and it did not reach
the public till August 6, 1856. It was a success and, though Emerson refused
to allow puffing advertisements, seventeen hundred copies were sold within
four days.

The whole of it related in some manner to Britain, and nearly all to
England. Though the more personal chapters were not well integrated with
the general analysis of English character, this was Emerson's most unified
and coherent book. Of all his writings it was also the most objective and
had the firmest foundation in first-hand observation of men and manners.
Garlyle called it such a book as did not turn up "often in the decade, in
the century," and thought that Benjamin Franklin might have written such
a thing, in his own way, but no one since. Franklin would certainly have
made shrewder observations on trade and on government but would not
have gone so deep under the surface as Emerson went. As matters stood,
no other American account of England could compare with this, and seldom

394 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

had any traveler made so wise an appraisal of the character of a nation.

It was true that some dissenting criticism from Hawthorne and other
well-informed persons did not entirely miss the mark. Hawthorne, then
the American consul at Liverpool, was "not unconscious/' he admitted, "of
a certain malevolence and hostility in my own breast, such as a man must
necessarily feel, who lives in England without melting entirely into the mass
of Englishmen." Still he had some justification for his fear that the book
would "please the English only too well; for," he told Emerson, "you give
them credit for the possession, in very large measure, of all the qualities
that they value, or pride themselves upon ; and they never will comprehend
that what you deny is far greater and higher than what you concede." This
view of the matter was partly confirmed when Glough wrote from England,
"I think you praise us too highly— I was anxious for more rebuke— and
profitable reprimand." But perhaps Carlyle saw the deeper intention of the
author better than either Hawthorne or Clough did. When he first learned
from an Irish newspaper that the book showed a "medicinal intention" he
remarked, "God knows there was hardly ever such a Hospital of Lepers"
and wished the doctor more power; and having seen the book, he made
no complaint that it was not sufficiently medicinal. Emerson, if one saw
below the surface of English Traits, had really succeeded in striking a bal-
ance between admiration and censure.

Doubtless praise of the Teutonic heritage of England as well as of
America, a country that figured as a sort of transplanted England, was
excessive. Scotland and France were used principally as convenient foils
to set off the excellence of England. The Normans "came out of France
into England worse men than they went into it one hundred and sixty years
before," and "Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings" to become
"founders of the House of Lords." "The Frenchman invented the ruffle;
the Englishman added the shirt." Yet Emerson explained the more per-
vasive influence of the French on the Continent in a manner to delight
a Frenchman. "What influence the English have," he unsmilingly an-
nounced, "is by brute force of wealth and power; that of the French by
affinity and talent." He laughed at the islanders' pretensions abroad. He
gave the chief reason for their attachment to home and home habits as
merely their dullness.

If he found every islander a self-sufficient island himself and glorified
the Englishman as the man who, of all the world, stood firmest in his
shoes, he also noted that cold and repressive manners prevailed among the
English. If he seemed to admire wealth and success along with the wealthy
and successful Englishman, he was not blind to this successful man's un-

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 395

imaginative passion for utility and found his hero heavy at fine arts while
he was adroit at the coarse. The spiritual quality that Emerson prized
seemed to be lacking in most of the English literature of the time. He pic-
tured the Church of England as the victim of artificiality, English religion
was torpid. Englishmen were warned that they would have to pay a penalty
for conformity. "That Chapter on the Church," Carlyle approved, "is
inimitable . . . and the matter too dreadfully true in every part." The
feudal character of the English state, Emerson went on, was getting obsolete
and glared a little in contrast with democratic tendencies. And though Eng-
land was the best of actual nations, the English mind was in a state of
arrested development.

English Traits, within a month of publication, had sold 3,000 copies and
was selling a new edition of 2,000. But the author, now read with eager-
ness by many who cared nothing for his earlier books, soon went back to
his lecture platform. Early the following year, after going southward to
Philadelphia, he set out again on a Western tour. At Rochester, where he
tried to lecture between spells of darkness when the gas lights failed to burn,
he learned that a literary reputation could not compete with a political
one, or at least not in these times tense with political excitement. Horace
Greeley, having missed an appointment of his own, sat on the platform
to the too great delight of the audience. Emerson "could scarcely keep the
people quiet" as "they were so furious to shout Greeley! Greeley!" At the
hotel he had the misfortune to share with the restless man cca parlour with
two little bed chambers opening into it." Greeley was good enough com-
pany in the evening, but in the morning "he rose at 6, lit the candles, &
scribbled political paragraphs to send away to the Tribune. He is an ad-
mirable editor/5 Emerson wrote home, "but I had as lief travel with an
Express man or with Barnum." He came upon Greeley again at the Tre-
mont House in Chicago. At Cincinnati, on his return trip, he found that
most of his lectures, as well as the Unitarian church, were under the man-
agement of his friend Moncure Conway.

At home that spring, he soon recovered from what looked like a belated
attack of measles. The domestic scene was not entirely a restful one. The
house echoed with the half articulate cries of Mary Martha Macaw the
parrot, a disturber of the peace destined, it seems, to stay on for years to
come. It was already an old story that the children had to be got off in
relays to schools, or on visits to Boston or New York. Edward brought
home the latest slang from Sanborn's school, and the family, including Emer-
son himself, began to talk it. It was in 1857 that Emerson altered his
house by making a den for his own use; but as this retreat was accessible

396 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

from his study only by a roundabout route leading up two steep flights of
stairs and proved to be hot in summer and cold in winter, he probably
did not often use it.

The routine of domestic life was interrupted when the family escaped
briefly from the summer heat of Concord. In August of 1857 Emerson
seems to have signed his name for the first time in the "Island Book" at
Naushon, the charming domain of his friend John Murray Forbes. Naushon,
one of the Elizabeth Islands, was eight miles long; and every mile, for-
ested or open, had its varied attractions. From a secluded spot among moss-
bearded trees or rock-studded hillocks or beside a miniature lake one quickly
emerged upon the shore of Vineyard Sound or of Buzzards Bay.

In Concord, Emerson could take to the roads and fields. Ellery Chan-
ning and Henry Thoreau still sometimes walked and talked with him. Both
made willful, temperamental companions. On his worst days Thoreau would
merely talk for victory, or he would annoyingly arrive to bring up some-
thing he had just read and then leave unceremoniously. He and Emerson,
overcharged with individualism, resembled a couple of lobsters trying to
be affectionate. Ellery Channing would come to Concord only occasionally
now. He would hide for a fortnight in a chamber of the house he had
rented to Sanborn, would emerge to walk and dine a few times with Emer-
son, and would then disappear perhaps for months.

In 1857 Alcott was back in Concord developing new plans for the im-
provement of Emerson's yard, and Emerson himself was gathering facts
for a biographical sketch of Alcott for The New American Cyclopedia.
Alcott's purchase of the Orchard House and his return that autumn to
live once more in Concord marked a new advance in the social life of the
village. The Alcott girls loved acting and had talent for it. Plays and enter-
tainments were now given in the vestry of the Unitarian Church, and the
Emerson children took some part in them.

The Atlantic Monthly, beginning publication with Lowell as editor and
with other members of the Saturday Club as the chief contributors, was
henceforth the most prized periodical in the Emerson study and parlor.
Among the poems in the first number were Emerson's delicately chiseled
"Days/' a masterpiece in unemotional black and white, and his "Brahma,"
an extremely faithful transcript from Hindu scriptures. "Brahma" pro-
voked the laughter of those who were ignorant of Hindu lore— and they
must have comprised most of the readers of The Atlantic. Some parodies
resulted. Emerson simply allowed his audience to get along the best they
could in their ignorance. The poem, however, was no tour de force but
a natural outgrowth of his now habitual Oriental reading. A year or so

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 397

later, when Philip Jogut Sangooly took tea with him, Ellen was delighted
"to have a real live Brahmin, brought up a priest to Kreeshna &c, knowing
Sanscrit and all the Vedas and able to tell Father all he wanted to know,
in our house here in America, in Concord." During many years following
Sangooly's visit Emerson paid dues and assessments to the Oriental So-
ciety. Meantime he looked critically at The Atlantic as an instrument for
the guidance of the age. As for the contributors, he remarked that only
"the sentiment of freedom is the sting which all feel in common." The
Atlantic was meant to be no mere literary magazine but also a new weapon
against slavery, and its political aim made it sectional and limited.

The appearance of John Brown of Kansas at the Concord Town Hall
had already effectively dramatized the slavery question for Emerson and
his fellow townsmen. It seems that Emerson was introduced to John Brown
by Thoreau. He admired the tough Kansan and approved the doctrine of
armed resistance to the slavery men on the frontier. He asked that a sub-
scription of $15 he had made to the Concord Lyceum be turned over to
John Brown instead. It is not clear whether he yielded that year to Elihu
Burritt's request that he sign the call for a national convention in support
of the same compensated emancipation that he himself had publicly advo-
cated a few years earlier. On the Fourth of July, when the Concord people
gathered at a breakfast and floral exhibition for the benefit of Sleepy
Hollow Cemetery, they probably sang Emerson's ode printed with the day's
program, but some may have been surprised to find that it was really a
call for the freeing of the slaves.

There was more lecturing of the usual unpolitical kind from New Eng-
land southward to Philadelphia. In March and April of 1858 there was
another course at the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston, but Convers Francis,
an early admirer, was disappointed. Emerson seemed to him to make no
progress in the subject. There was no opening out, no expanding of the
thought; and as for the structure of the lecture it was the familiar mis-
cellany. The truth was that the need for money pushed Emerson out into
the lyceum circuit whether he had anything new to offer or not. However
old his lectures seemed, Freeman Place Chapel alone could still yield him
nearly $900 in fees.

Time was beginning to leave its mark on him as he completed his fifty-
fifth year. The Rowse drawing, made during this period, betrayed no signs
of age in him; but it did not give the impression of lifelikeness. Rowse
overrefined his subject. The features were too delicately formed. Though
the face perhaps properly wore an expression half humorous and half sad,
it was too young. It was in March of 1858 that Louisa Dewey first saw

398 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

in Emerson evidences of age. In spite of his limited physical strength he
had been leading, much of each year, a strenuous life. Away from home
for weeks or months at a time, he had traveled in uncomfortable trains,
lived in primitive hotels, lectured in ill-ventilated and poorly lighted halls
in all kinds of weather. At home, he was involved in wearisome business
affairs. A lawsuit to test the validity of his title to one of the little pieces
of land he had purchased near Walden Pond was finally settled but in
favor of "the enemy"; and he "sat," as he said, "expectant for a fortnight,"
waiting for sheriffs or messengers to summon him "to pay whatever dam-
ages accrue." The case had dragged on for years. Once the jury had
disagreed and had been discharged.

In July of 1858, shortly after the annoying litigation was ended, Emer-
son visited the Bancrofts at Newport, and by the end of August he was
with the Forbeses at Naushon. The woody isolation of Naushon must have
given him the solace he needed, for his poem "Waldeinsamkeit" seemed
to him to suit the landscape there so well that he copied it into the island
guest book. But the climax of his summer was his more than two weeks
with the Adirondack Club, a sporting outgrowth of the Saturday Club.

He and his fellow members traveled, by way of Lake George and Lower
Saranac Lake, to Follensby Pond and Big Tupper Lake, where the artist
William J. Stillman, their captain of the hunt and chief guide, taught them
how to rough it. The experience was a severe test for a philosopher accus-
tomed to escape into privacy after brief social encounters; and it is perhaps
significant that though Emerson stood, erect and apparently alert, at the
center of the group painted by Stillman, he was quite apart from the two
well-defined knots of his fellow campers.

Yet if he proved himself useless to the captain of the hunt, he was
easily recognizable as the chief poet of the expedition. "The Adirondacs"
showed what rich sensuous impressions he brought back as his share of
the game. He remembered the club's flotilla passing through "gold-moth-
haunted beds of pickerel-flower" and through perfumed banks of blossoms
where the deer fed at night and the teal by day, the loud chorus of the
dogs as they scoured the shores for game, the whipping of the rough waters
for trout, the bathing, the laughter of the loon, the procession, as the boats
moved past, of the pines whose images were sharpened by the low glow
of twilight. Once, he recalled, he was

In the boat's bows, a silent night-hunter
Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds
Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist.

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 399

But as he could see nothing but the mist where he was told to aim at the
deer, he did not fire.

In Concord, he mounted the platform at the local agricultural fair,
having been "drawn into this trap of a Cattle Show Speech, by neglecting to
say No early enough." He suffered, as frequently, the annoyance of pursuit
by newspaper reporters who were determined to publicize what he wanted
to reserve for his own use in the lyceums. His speech made the farmer fit
company for philosophers and poets but otherwise kept close to the soil.
Convers Francis, now rebelling against the monotonous Transcendentalism
of the lectures, judged that the Cattle Show speech showed Emerson just
what people thought he was not— a practical man. This practicality may
have been probed to the core when the Emerson family entertained the
Social Circle, which included some Concord farmers.

Quite different guests were present when Alcott gave, in the Emerson
house, his conversation on "Private Life." There was some general debate,
but the occasion was long remembered because of a clash between Aunt
Mary Moody Emerson and the equally sharp-tongued and pugnacious elder
Henry James. Aunt Mary, though at last humble enough to forget her vow
not to enter the home of her nephew, wtas still formidable; and, if the not
unbiased Alcott reported truly, she administered a severe check to James
and won the admiration of everybody present.

Aunt Mary, now in her eighties, was as much trouble as a course of
lectures, even though she boarded outside the Emerson home. When she
indignantly refused to pay her Concord landlady more than $3 a week,
Emerson and Elizabeth Hoar, seeing that $5 was not too much for such
a boarder, paid the difference themselves. But the spectacular scenes in
which Aunt Mary was the central figure were about over. Late in October
she was packed up and carried to Mrs. Cobb's in Boston, "a large part of
Concord assisting55 ; and a few weeks later she was ready to go peaceably
with Emerson to Williamsburg, Long Island, where, on what was then the
margin of the metropolitan area, she was to spend most of her remaining
years under the guardianship of a niece.

The trip of December, 1858, 'was for lectures in the New York region
and Philadelphia as well as for Aunt Mary's convenience. At Philadelphia,
Lucretia Mott, the Quakeress and abolitionist, found "The Law of Suc-
cess" "full of gems" and knew Emerson was telling the truth when he
confided to her that " CI got some leaves out of yr. book3— addg, 'from yr
New Bedford Fr^' "; but she denied his doctrine of compensation so far
as it concerned morals. In morals, she put it, "wickedness works only evil
& that continually & the only way ... to destroy it is with unquench-

400 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

able fire.55 Before the end of the year Emerson was facing Canadians at
Hamilton and Toronto. Emerson the lecturer now had success after success,
and the financial returns from his writings were also becoming important.
It must have been with satisfaction that he set down the sum of $1988 as
the income from his lectures in a year when he had given fewer than usual
and traveled less widely. Adding in his dividends from banks and railroads
with his rentals and some minor business profits, his $215 from The Atlantic
Monthly, and his $872 in royalties from his Boston publisher, he computed
his total income for 1858 as $4162.11. Early in the new year he earned
more with lectures in Baltimore, Brooklyn, and various towns along the
road to the West. Then, after his speech at the Burns centenary celebration
in Boston, a speech copied into British and German newspapers and praised
by Burns's compatriot Carlyle, he gave in the same city a course of lec-
tures which brought him nearly $700 above expenses.

But he felt now that his intellectual life was on the wane and asserted
that he was a natural reader, not a writer. He dug in his garden, pre-
sumably with more contentment. Once when Ellen came into the Concord
railroad station she met him "walking along with a spade in his hand,35
and looking "very rural.35 Events conspired to turn him toward an easier
way of life. He felt a new sense of relief that spring when the heavy respon-
sibility for Bulkeley that he had shared with his brother William for many
years was at last ended. On the 27th of May, Reuben Hoar's wife came
from Littleton to say that his brother Bulkeley, a boarder with her family
and helper with their farm work, had died that day. Thoreau took charge
of the funeral at Concord. For Bulkeley half a century of mental twilight
was finished. "His face was not much changed by death,'3 Emerson told
William, "but sadly changed by life from the comely boy I can well re-
member.55

The Saturday Club continued to school Emerson in sociability and
conviviality, and he was a loyal member. He warmly advocated the election
of several friends, labored hard on verses for the club5s celebration of Lowell's
fortieth birthday, and prepared a speech for Holmes's fiftieth birthday.
He wrote a lecture on clubs and believed' that their history from antiquity
to the present would be an important chapter in the history of civilization.
He defined the proper qualifications of members as mainly good manners
and a willingness to sink trifles and know solid values, and held that com-
panions so qualified had great worth for scholars, who did not want to
be always pumping their brains but needed gossips. Yet at bottom he was
still the individualist, only less radically so than he had been in the early

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 401

essay on friendship, and he warned that the highest results from conversa-
tion required the enforcement of the rule of one to one.

The prospects of a "vacation of independence" at Waterford in Maine,
of a second outing with the Adirondack Club, and of a return to Naushon
vanished on the slopes of Wachusett early in July, 1859. Since his first
camping trip Emerson had had greater enthusiasm for the wilds, and here,
even from the summit called Little Wachusett, he could look out over a
scene that filled him with admiration. Around the horizon he could see
Monadnock, the Hoosac Mountain, or what he took for it, in Berkshire
County with a hint of the Catskills beyond, and, to the eastward, the tamer
counties sprinkled with towns or shining with rivers or ponds. But his en-
thusiasm cooled when he suffered a sprain as he was making the descent.
For months he was an invalid. It seemed to him that he might as well have
sprained his head. After consulting no fewer than four reputable doctors
and getting contradictory advice, he eventually went to Doctor Hewett,
apparently the same "quack doctor Hewitt53 who had cured his knee thirty
years earlier; and somehow he gradually got well.

The nightmare of slavery had now grown into a horrible specter, and
it seemed to shout to every house where people with consciences lived that
there would be no more sleep till it was laid. This spring John Brown, the
Kansas partisan, had reappeared in the Concord Town Hall, prophesying
an end of all comfortable dreaming, while persons Alcott called the "best
people" of the town— Emerson, Thoreau, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar,
and Mrs. Alcott— had listened, some being moved to contribute to his funds
without asking particulars of his plans. The old man had not yet lost his
fire, though since he had first been seen in Concord a flowing beard had,
as Alcott thought, given the look of an apostle to the soldierly figure. In
October his long years of fanatical apostleship came to a fiery and bloody
climax in his attack on Harpers Ferry. Two days later he was captured by
a government force including some marines commanded by Colonel Robert
E. Lee.

Emerson wrote to his brother in New York: "We are all very well,
in spite of the sad Harpers Ferry business, which interests us all who had
Brown for our guest twice. ... He is a true hero, but lost his head there."
Three days later he told Sarah Swain Forbes that Brown was "a hero of
romance, & seems to have made this fatal blunder only to bring out his
virtues. I must hope for his escape to the last moment." Many Concord
people waited in tense excitement. Sanborn, too much involved in John
Brown's affairs, left his school and took refuge in Canada till Emerson per-

402 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

suaded him to return, had to retire to Canada again, defied the authority
of the United States Senate in a fracas in Concord, and soon got discharged
from a merely nominal custody.

In Emerson's lecture "Courage," read in Boston on November 8, John
Brown seemed already to have achieved sainthood of a superior sort. He
was "The Saint, whose fate yet hangs in suspense, but whose martyrdom,
if it shall be perfected, will make the gallows as glorious as the cross," or
so, at any rate, the New-York Daily Tribune quoted the lecture as it was
first given. The day before Brown's conviction of treason and of murder
in the first degree Thoreau called his fellow Concordians together to hear
his plea for the captain and for the slaves. In several speeches Emerson
asked aid for John Brown's family and openly championed the cause of
the man he thought fit to be a martyr. At the meeting in Boston on No-
vember 1 8 he foretold what a favorite his hero would be with history. This
was six days after Edmund Clarence Stedman's ballad had been published
in Greeley's Tribune. Stedman had warned,

And Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,

May trouble you more than ever, when you've nailed
his coffin down!

Possibly Emerson had already seen the New Yorker's verses, but both he
and Stedman soon seemed to be good prophets. Before two years were
past, John Brown's soul began its march over the battlefields of the Civil
War.

Meantime, on December 2, the day of Brown's execution, a quiet meet-
ing, planned by Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson, was held at Concord, with
the three philosophers and two other men reading verse and prose in solemn
commemoration. The town, for its people were mostly present, it was said,
with many others from neighboring places, sang Sanborn's dirge. Fortu-
nately for the peace of Concord's literary circle, Hawthorne did not return
from abroad for some months to come. When he eventually got round to
the subject of John Brown, he could hardly believe that the newspapers
had reported Emerson's Boston lecture correctly. He shrank "unutterably"
from the notion "that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has cmade
the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!' " and, in spite of his admiration
for Brown's integrity of character, he judged that "Nobody was ever more
justly hanged."

In January and February of 1860 Emerson went far into the West again
with his lectures. Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison, Wis-

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 403

consin, made the rough outline of his difficult tour. From Lafayette, Indiana,
he had to charter a special train to Michigan City in order to reach Chicago
in time, In Wisconsin the wells were dry and it was hard to find water
for the^ horses that were, for one whole day, the lecturer's motive power.
Once, in Michigan, Emerson had to ride nearly fifty miles in a buggy to
keep an appointment. When he caught cold from wet clothing, imperfectly
laundered in Chicago, he sucked troches and, as he told it, only awed the
Wisconsin legislators with a richer orotund than he could normally boast.
After the Western tour he went as far southward as New York again but
had to give up Philadelphia, where he was not wanted since he had got
a reputation as a John Brown sympathizer.

He was still keeping in touch with rebels and with revolutionary think-
ers and poets as well as he could, James Redpath dedicated his book The
Public Life of Capt. John Brown uTo Wendell Phillips, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and Henry D. Thoreau, Defenders of the Faithful, who, when
the mob shouted, 'Madman!5 said, 'Saint!5 " From Indiana, Emerson had
written home: "I have not yet been able to obtain Darwin's book which
I had depended on as a road book You must read it,— 'Darwin on Species.'
It has not arrived in these dark lands." He had hardly returned home, it
seems, when he found Walt Whitman in Boston and walked with him up
and down the common to discuss the sheaf of sex poems ready for insertion
in Leaves of Grass. This time, as usual, he wanted to go along with the
radical but also wanted the radical to listen to reason.

Whitman keenly felt the appeal of the objections Emerson made but
could not let himself be budged. "During those two hours/3 as Whitman
put it many years later, "he was the talker and I the listener. . . . each
point of E.'s statement was unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more com-
plete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put— and then I
felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all,
and pursue my own way. 'What have you to say then to such things?'
said E., pausing in conclusion. 'Only that while I can't answer them at
all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and exem-
plify it,' was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good
dinner at the American House." "Enfans d'Adam," as the group of sex
poems was then called, duly appeared, apparently without any alterations
out of deference to Emerson's judgment, in the new edition; but whether
Emerson's argument had any influence or not, it was a fact that in his
later writings Whitman moved in the direction of the spiritual.

That spring Emerson attended a reunion that took him back to his
days as a schoolmaster. Nearly forty years had transformed the girk he

404 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

and his brother William had once ruled over in their school for young
ladies in Boston. Now he faced some twenty oldish women; but he could
decipher most of them at once, as he wrote William. He needed help to
discover Isabella Tilden under her disguise as Mrs, Brown, and Miss Bangs
was hard to recognize in the person of Mrs. Williams. Miss Norwood was
much altered. Ann Carter had kept her beauty in spite of the stoutness she
had acquired. Emerson would hardly have chosen his own transformation,
but he had at least gained by getting rid of some of his shyness. He made
his speech, received rings for himself and William, and found the occasion
so "entirely pleasant35 that he missed the return train to Concord.

His favorite theory of moral sentiment, as old for him as his school-
teaching, had reappeared a little earlier as the subject of his lecture at the
Music Hall in Boston, where he now sometimes helped fill in the gap left
when Theodore Parker was forced out by ill health. In May, Parker died
in Italy. At the memorial meeting in Boston, Emerson reluctantly made
a brief speech. Though he desired to honor Parker as a great liberal, he felt
aloof from that logical, sledge-hammer mind. To Moncure Conway's new
magazine at Cincinnati., he sent the manuscript of his lecture on "Domestic
Life" but would promise nothing on Parker. "My relations to him/3 he
explained to Conway, "are quite accidental & our differences of method
& working such as really required & honored all his Catholicism & mag-
nanimity to forgive in me."

Emerson now found life grown more mellow. About health he was
easier than ever before* He had never been able to give, as he said, "much
reality to evil and pain." Advancing age made him care less. People now
took his distinction as an author for granted, and he had the respect of
his own village. When he kissed Anna Alcott at her wedding, her sister
Louisa thought that his kiss would make even matrimony endurable, for
he was, she said, "the god of my idolatry, and has been for years." His
dream of a Concord literary community had been realized beyond any
reasonable expectation. At the end of June, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and
Alcott ate strawberries and cream with him to celebrate Hawthorne's return
from abroad. With Hawthorne at the Wayside, the house that had in
earlier years been Alcott's Hillside, Concord once more had its full quota
of literary celebrities.

In August, twenty-three-year-old William Dean Howells arrived from
the West, by way of Boston, to look them over. Having worshiped at the
shrines of Hawthorne and Thoreau, he advanced on the Emerson house,
armed with a card of introduction procured at the Wayside. He knew the
fame of Emerson as the impossibly incomprehensible one but had himself

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 405

read the essays published in The Atlantic and a few of the poems and had
got a strong impression not only of etherealness but of force, beauty, and
wisdom. Confronting the fabulous man, he was struck by the youthfulness
of his face and by the strange charm of eyes that looked at the stranger
with a vague serenity. He was reminded of Lincoln's eyes, though Emer-
son's were pleasanter and less sad. The profile of the Concord man sug-
gested an indescribable combination of gravity, quaintness, and subtle but
kindly sportiveness. But the part Emerson played in the conversation was
hardly worthy of him. He spoke of Hawthorne and pronounced The Marble
Faun "mere mush." He talked not very accurately or weightily about the
West. He wanted Howells to know the poems of Ellery Channing, and
when he learned that his visitor knew of them only through Foe's cruel
criticism, he dismissed Poe abruptly as "the jingle-man/' Howells retreated
in confusion.

Politics was now the recurring, inescapable subject of debate in every
American village. The new Republican Party, a radical reform party,
reawakened hope in the antislavery men of the North. Down to the Emer-
son house on the night of October 24, some two weeks before the fateful
election day, marched the Republican youth in their torchlight procession.
" 'Close order! open order! halt! ground torches! three honest A. I. cheers
for the gentleman and his son! R. W. Emerson!3 Cheers, speech, left face,
a march by ... a march by again with hats off as each passed, a turn
again round the mile post and march on to Mr Bull's, with fife and drums."
The air was electric. On Saturday evening, the 3d of November, came
the general Republican rally for which the Wide-awakes had been prepar-
ing. On Tuesday the 6th, at the Town Hall, Alcott cast his first ballot in
any Presidential election, voting for Abraham Lincoln and the other Re-
publican candidates. Emerson must have cast his for the same party leader,
but undoubtedly it was not his first Presidential vote. Next morning the
news was, he said, "sublime, the pronunciation of the masses of America
against Slavery."

To the superficial reader, Emerson's new book3 The Conduct of Life,
published on the 8th of December, must have seemed strangely out of
place in the midst of the exciting events that were sweeping the nation into
war. Politics seemed perhaps a distant and unreal thing to one who could
leave it long enough to enter fully into the mind of this cairn, self-possessed
observer of life under the aspect of eternity. But Charles Norton may have
come nearer the truth when he told Clough that the book could not have
appeared at a fitter time. To him it seemed that its confirmation of moral
principles based on eternal laws was what was most needed.

406 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Carlyle, with no thought of connecting it with American issues, found
it "the best of all your Books95 and "read it ... with a satisfaction/3 he
said, "given me by the Books of no other living mortal." He was certain
that Emerson had grown, not only older, but "more pungent, piercing."
He was, for once, without a word of blame to say, and he became almost
ecstatic in his praise of "The finale of all, that of 'Illusions' falling on us
like snow-showers, but again of 'the gods sitting steadfast on their thrones'
all the while,— what a Fiat Lux is there, into the deeps of a philosophy,
which the vulgar has not, which hardly three men living have, yet dreamt
of!" Undoubtedly Carlyle liked the book partly because of its less daring
tone and less bold claims for the Transcendental ideals, now implicit rather
than explicit. Alcott and Thoreau did not think so much of it. Thoreau
was displeased because it was moderate and wanted the fire and force of
the earlier books. Emerson agreed with Carlyle in believing that this one
would sell. As he still kept the control of his works in his own hands, he
ordered his printers to provide six thousand copies for Ticknor & Fields,
his new publishers.

The Conduct of Life had no chapter on politics or on slavery and
frankly gave up any debate on the spirit of the times in favor of the eternal
question, "How shall I live?" But in undertaking once more the solution
of the problem of the individual way of life, Emerson seemed resolved to
offend common sense as little as possible. Some of his friends regretted the
low plane to which he kept in discussing fate, power, and wealth. To those
who had earlier accused him of refusing to open his eyes to the evil in the
world, he now seemed, at least until he had got well along in his essay
on fate, to have made a complete about-face. His imagination reveled in
instances of nature's cruelty. He heard too distinctly the crackle of the
bones of the victim in the coils of the anaconda and visualized the slaughter
house at the graceful distance of some miles from the dinner table. No
use to try to whitewash Providence "or to dress up that terrific benefactor
in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity." Great men
were perceivers of the terror of life and manned themselves to face it.

In general the essay on "Power" was on a this-worldly plane. The
grand principle of compensation appeared there divested of its former halo.
The "belief in compensation, or that nothing is got for nothing," charac-
terized, Emerson said, all valuable minds "and must control every effort
that is made by an industrious one." In "Wealth" he seemed vaguely to
make morals one with industry, fell back upon the time-honored laissez-
faire theory of economics, and did not quite save the day for ethical idealism
when he made economics one of the lower rungs in a kind of Platonic

THINGS IN THE SADDLE 407

ladder to climb which was the object of true thrift. The reader must have
been reminded of the old Protestant— or Catholic— theory that God pros-
pered his own and that they in turn glorified God with their gain. Even in
"Worship/3 where, as the essayist plainly believed, he was making up for
any lowness of tone in the preceding chapters, he declared that " ST is
remarkable that our faith in ecstasy consists with total inexperience of it."
It was sensible enough, in the essay "Beauty," to insist on the functional
theory of art, and it was not the first time he had done so; but this too
looked a little in the direction of the practical, non-Transcendental ideal of
life.

Yet the old Emersonian products were by no means marked down or
put in the basement. It was as if a merchant had taken his most valuable
stock out of the window in order that the cheaper wares might have their
turn on bargain day. It took only a little looking about to discover the
familiar favorites. If fate seemed to threaten to grind down the soul into
despair, the individual mind and will were there to insure a sphere of lib-
erty. If this one was true, so was that other, its contrary. Underlying all
was a determined optimism, as in the unquestioning faith that evolution
pointed upward. There was no moral deformity that was not simply a good
passion out of place. Self-reliance held its old virtue. The moral sentiment
was, as before, a thing to conjure with when evil threatened. And the law
that ruled throughout existence, "Law which is not intelligent but intelli-
gence;—not personal nor impersonal . . . dissolves persons . . . vivifies
nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence," was
hardly less than the Over-soul, now no longer known by that name. Though
they seemed to have lost a little of their lonely grandeur, the old gods
were still sitting on their thrones.

22.

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger . . .
—Shakespeare, Henry V

The thinking class are looked at inquisitively in these
times by the actors, as if some counsel were expected from
them. But the thinker seldom speaks to the actor in his time,
but ever to actors in the next age. . . .
—Journals

Everything about a civil war is lamentable . . . but
nothing more so than victory itself.

—Cicero to Marcus Marcellus, from the Latin
text quoted in Journals

URING the final months of President Buchanan's administration
many Southerners believed that the Confederacy would peace-
fully assume its place as an independent nation, and many North-
erners did not care if it did. Harassed and weary, the honest
old statesman who had been a compromise candidate acceptable to both
Northern and Southern Democrats only wanted to hold things together
until his successor could take over the responsibility and decide upon a
definite policy. Meantime the abolitionists kept their one goal always in
sight— the end of slavery, whether the Union survived or not.

After a few lectures that took him into the state of New York in Jan-
uary, 1 86 1, Emerson, now avowedly an abolitionist, appeared on the 24th
of that month as one of the speakers at the annual meeting of the Massa-
chusetts Anti-Slavery Society at Tremont Temple in Boston. Wendell Phil-
lips, the archabolitionist, had just stirred up pandemonium with his speech;
and though some policemen who entered the room were asked for aid,
they would not interfere with trouble-makers. When Emerson was an-
nounced the sympathetic audience raised three vigorous cheers for him,
while the mob matched these with three for the Union; and for some time
he waited for a chance to speak. After he began to talk he was more than
once interrupted by noisy persons in the gallery and by the unruly crowd
pressing in underneath, and there were hisses, groans, and cries of "Put him

408

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR 409

out," "Dry up," "Unbutton your coat," and so forth. It was in vain that
he tried to ingratiate himself with his Boston audience by recalling his Bos-
ton origin. He had a hard time even to get through a story he wanted
to tell. His own summary of the experience was that "sorely against my
inclination and habit, I went, and, though I had nothing to say, showed
myself. If I were dumb, yet I would have gone and mowed and muttered
or made signs. The mob roared whenever I attempted to speak, and after
several beginnings, I withdrew."

The financial prospects of the lyceum platform looked dark in this
political crisis, but Emerson still received some invitations. Even San Fran-
cisco asked him for a course, though no transcontinental railroad was ready
until some years afterward. There were, as before, his lectures to Parker's
old congregation at the Music Hall. And there was the class of women,
friends of the Emerson family, to whom he was to read lectures privately.
He could also talk as much as he cared to before audiences that paid no
admission fees. The exhibition of the Concord schools in March required
"Remarks" to the pupils and townsmen impressively massed at the Town
Hall. Emerson had long since served his time as teacher and as school
committeeman. "And yet," he said, "when I heard new recitations and
exercises I was willing to feel new interest still."

Once the period of indecision was over, the war began to appear and
reappear like some monstrous crimson thread crossing the warp of every
American's life. Lincoln, the President-elect, had kept silent as long as he
could on questions of policy involving force but had managed, when he
did speak, to rouse the dislike of the abolitionists by his reiterated promises
to look to the Union, leaving slavery untouched wherever it already existed.
In his inaugural address, on the 4th of March, he quoted himself, "I
have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of
slavery in the States where it exists." He made it plain that he would obey
the Constitution in its provision that fugitives from service or labor should
be delivered up on demand, and this meant in plain English that fugitive
slaves would be returned to their owners. He insisted that Southerners and
Northerners were not enemies but friends and that the "mystic chords of
memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living
heart and hearthstone" would yet "swell the chorus of the Union." There
was nothing in all this to give much comfort to an abolitionist. Lincoln,
no matter what happened, was obviously going to continue to put the sal-
vation of the Union above emancipation. Emancipation could wait till it
was an essential means to the preservation of the Union.

The test of the President's ability to keep the loyalty of his people came
when the first cannon was fired against the flag of the Union at Fort Sum-

410 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

ter. The whole North was electrified, and Lincoln became, in the people's
eyes, the leader of a divinely sponsored crusade. Those who wanted to
regard it as simply for the preservation of the Union were at liberty to do
so, as that was the official view. But the old reformers, the irreconcilables
like Garrison, and Phillips, and Emerson's friend Charles Sumner, were
determined that the chief end should be the destruction of slavery.

Many years earlier Emerson had pleaded the cause of peace and had
believed that war might be finally abolished once- the individual citizen
acquired the proper degree of mental and spiritual culture; but he had also
cautioned the members of the peace society that "A wise man will never
impawn his future being and action, and decide beforehand what he shall
do in a given extreme event.55 Now he used his reserved right to become
warlike. At the same time he cursed the unbearable evils that pushed him
into this position. However consistent with his oration on peace, this new
position he was forced to take was essentially false to his character and
philosophy. He tried to be philosophic still. To Clough he wrote of "our
mad war,— the most wanton piece of mischief that bad boys ever devised.5'
Remembering the inflexible spiritual laws, he added, "But of shallow things
the causes are not shallow . . ."

Two days before the anniversary of historic April 19, broadsides were
shouting in capital letters through Concord village, "WAR! WAR! WAR!"
and calling, "TO ARMS!!" One exhorted everybody to leave the farm
and the workshop, the counting room and the office, and come to the Town
Hall and prove that Concordians were not the degenerate sons of brave
sires. The other demanded volunteers to fill up the ranks of the company
about to march from the Old North Bridge. Within five days another
handbill was repeating, "WAR! WAR! WAR!" and asking for volunteers,
good men and true who would be ready for any emergency at a moment's
notice. These were to be the modern minute men. Emerson had caught
the enthusiasm by the igth. On that day, as he told his daughter Edith,
"our village was all alive . . . with the departure of our braves. Judge
Hoar made a speech to them at the Depot, Mr Reynolds made a prayer
. . . the cannon which was close by us making musical beats every minute
to his prayer. And when the whistle of the train was heard, & George
Prescott (the commander) who was an image of manly beauty, ordered
his men to march, his wife stopped him & put down his sword to kiss him,
& grief & pride ruled the hour. All the families were there. They left Con-
cord 45 men, but on the way recruits implored to join them, &, when they
reached Boston, they were 64."

Emerson had just begun a course of half a dozen lectures in Boston
when the war broke. On the first day of his course, April 9, he had remarked

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR 411

that the critical times invited rather than repelled his themes; it would be
wholesome to turn one's eyes from the alarms that threatened the fall of
a character-destroying civilization to what was pure and permanent. But
he soon had a change of heart. After discoursing on genius and on art, he
explained that he had intended to offer next some illustrations of a law
which had great importance in science, literature, and daily life, but that
the tumult of the time made that lecture impertinent. Instead, he had
something prepared for the occasion— "Civilization at a Pinch." This was
on April 23, after the Concord company had marched away.

His thoughts were on the war. The war, he said, was giving the coun-
try a chance at last to stay honest in the eyes of Europe. Now the con-
spiracy had been forced out of doors. There was a hardy refreshment about
war. He called for sacrifices. The South was well officered and, with some
right, despised the peaceful North. Who knew the future of this war?
Who knew whether a separation would not be the best issue, "a separation
for the time33? He was drifting into a plainer, less poetic style, appealing
more surely to the average intelligence of his audience. His daughter Ellen,
watching him in action before a Boston audience some two weeks later,
sat hi a daze of pride and fear, sorry that she understood everything. She
did not want to believe that his lectures were less intellectual now than
they used to be. She "couldn't bear to have Father come down at all from
his pinnacle.33

On or off the lecture platform., he was out to help win the war. When
he found that the drill club his son, Edward, belonged to lacked arms, he
went to the adjutant-general of Massachusetts, got an order for thirty mus-
kets from the Cambridge arsenal, and came home triumphant. He visited
the warship Minnesota in Boston Harbor, delighted in her numerous crew
and large cannon, and saw that guns of all kinds were arriving while he
was aboard. At the Charlestown navy yard he felt the indefinable thrill
that was a recognition of the terror and immense pretension of warlike
adventure. "Ah! sometimes gunpowdei smells good,3' he confessed.

He seemed to feel an upsurge of vitality. Thoreau, in his last, long
illness, was ready to start to the upper Mississippi Valley to try, in vain, a
change of climate. Emerson, once inferior to him in physical stamina, had
husbanded his resources better. Emerson still looked to the future. He
paid $500 for the Minott field on his western boundary line, thus round-
ing out his grounds. Early in July he accepted the offer made by Abel
Adams to pay Edward's way through college. Edward, only seventeen that
month, was excited over the war and was anxious to join the army but
not strong enough.

The war was continually returning to trouble Emerson. He had a sub-

412 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

scription of $50 to pay to the Concord Volunteer Relief Committee. He
lamented the undemocratic dependence of the country on a few generals
and cabinet officers. He painfully explained the causes of the war to his
friend Herman Grimm in Germany. Sometimes he thought it was a war
of manners, the difference being accounted for by climate and slavery; but
he also saw that Northern industry had encroached daily on the planters,
getting the balance of political power. He thought that the military effort
would be short, since the North had overwhelming advantages, but that
the period of adjustment would be hard. Confident of Northern success and
glad that the crisis had been reached in the national disease, he wrote to
Aunt Mary that "The shame of living seems taken away, & to mature &
old age the love of life will return, as we did not anticipate.55 From Clough
he got light on the English sentiment about the war. If it was true, as
Clough said, that people in England were "brutally ignorant & unfeeling"
about the American war: trouble might come from that quarter, given the
right political complications.

At Bull Run on July 2 1 the North was rudely shocked from its hundred
days of dreaming of a quick victory over the South. The bewildered Union
soldiers Emerson's friend Mrs. Drury saw dragging themselves back into
Washington seemed to tell a different story. The South, equally guilty of
over con fi den ce, had to wait longer for its awakening to realities. The North
felt a painful consciousness of divided purpose. Ellen put the crisis truly
though too simply. The only grief, she declared, was that the Northerners
had not yet made up their minds what they were fighting for. Emerson,
conceding to Elliot Cabot that the war had now assumed such huge pro-
portions that it threatened to engulf everybody— -c 'no preoccupation can
exclude it, & no hermitage hide us"— still thought it better than "what we
lately called the integrity of the Republic, as amputation is better than
cancer." He still believed in ultimate victory, but he poured out his wrath
upon the Southerners with little restraint and saw the crisis so grave that he
mentally put himself into the line of battle, declaring his hope "that 'scholar'
& 'hermit3 will no longer be exempts, neither by the country's permission
nor their own, from the public duty." He confided to his journal,, appar-
ently somewhat later, that though "practically nothing is so improbable or
perhaps impossible a contingency for me," he did not wish uto abdicate
so extreme a privilege as the use of the sword or the bullet.55

But his life continued to be largely that of the quiet literary man and
unpretentious country squire. By early August he had taken to riding horse-
back a little with his daughters. The Concord Cattle Show was still a great
social event, and his family received no fewer than ninety-nine guests. He
and his daughters went in the carryall with his exhibit of fruit. As there

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR 413

was slight competition that year, he was for once a successful competitor,
receiving two prizes totaling $3.00. Toward the end of every month the
Saturday Club was apt to draw him to Boston. He dined with the brilliant
and liberal Prince Napoleon, a remarkable replica of the great emperor.
The prince, the second of the great Napoleon's nephews that Emerson had
known, stuck to his French and Emerson to his English.

The Concord Soldiers Aid Society doubtless had much to do with the
activities of Emerson's family. The women of the house were members.
Presumably the three of them plied their knitting needles while Emerson
read from Shakespeare, or tried to read, in spite of an inflammation that
made him "very musical." He liked the sympathetic Frenchman Count
Gasparin's book on the United States in 1861, a thing related directly to
the present crisis. His own books, he told his brother, had had no sale this
year and his winter lectures would mostly omit their dividends. These losses
were serious, for he was now used to counting on a return of $500 or $600
a year from his books alone. His bank stock and other investments also
began to yield less.

In his "American Nationality," read at the Music Hall in November,
he painstakingly searched out benefits accruing from the war. He was
pleased by the complete awakening of the country from mental torpor and
by what he thought wholesale destruction of shams and counterfeits. He
now endorsed the administration's determination to win back its lost terri-
tory, and he remembered with admiration the fine military energy President
Jackson had once shown in thwarting South Carolina's defiance of the
government. However vacillating the administration might be, he had no
fear that half measures would succeed. Hawthorne reported with little
exaggeration to his English friend Henry Bright that Emerson, "like the
rest of us," was breathing slaughter. The partisan had almost swallowed
up the philosopher.

While the Emersons were busy "knitting socks & mittens for soldiers,
writing patriotic lectures, & economizing with all our mights," their familiar
world seemed more unstable than ever. Alcott, in January of 1862, seemed
a symbol of immortal leisure as he ended a spell of writing on "The Coun-
tryman in his Garden" and made the rounds of his friends' houses, taking
apples and cider to Hawthorne, Emerson, Charming, and Thoreau. But
Thoreau was consciously nearing his end, and Hawthorne, with two years
more to live, was somber and apathetic. News of Clough's premature death
had come from overseas. William Emerson's son William, now an invalid,
had gone off to Curagao, as his uncles Edward and Charles had gone off
to the West Indies a generation earlier. Aunt Mary, at last growing senile,
had asked and received assurance that her body would be brought back to

414 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Concord for burial. Many years earlier she had begun wooing and expect-
ing death, but this time she would not have long to wait. Emerson's son,
Edward, trying to rebuild his health, had been working as a surveyor in
Mount Auburn Cemetery at Cambridge and was now chopping a little
every day in the woods. He had heard of a land journey to California that
looked like the right road to health and so to a commission in the cavalry
such as his friend William Forbes had.

Called to Washington at the end of January, 1862, to lecture at the
Smithsonian Institution, Emerson studied the wartime leaders. Doubtless
Charles Surnner, his chief guide during one busy day, indoctrinated Mm
rapidly in Washington politics. From Sumner he must have got confirma-
tion of his own strong feeling against any retreat from extreme abolitionist
doctrine. From Seward, the secretary of state, his principal mentor on the
following day, lie could have had an antidote to this radicalism of Sum-
ner's. Yet Sumner, chairman of the Senate's committee on foreign relations,
exerted a steadying influence on the administration's foreign policy. He
showed some of his British correspondence to Emerson. He was resolved
that there should be no war with Britain. Seward had not long since sug-
gested a European war as the best means of uniting North and South.
Whether either of these political leaders was rational or not depended on
the subject under discussion, Emerson struck up an acquaintance with the
secretaries of war, navy, and treasury^ and with the attorney general. He
was twice taken to see the President, first by Sumner and later by Seward.

He saw when Suniner introduced him to Lincoln that the President,
for ail his lengthy awkwardness and uncouthness of movement, was quick
on the trigger. "Oh, Mr. Emerson," said Lincoln, <£I once heard you say
in a lecture, that a Kentuddan seems to say by his air and manners, 'Here
am I; if you don't like me, the worse for you.' " Emerson already knew the
kind of culture that gossip had derisively pictured as Lincoln's. He had seen
it in the West— possibly this same specimen of 'it, for Lincoln had very
probably come to hear him lecture there. Though he was not pleased by
its rawness, he could admire its force. The meeting with Lincoln made him
more certain of substantial virtues under an unprepossessing exterior and
minimized his fears. Already accustomed to the uncouthness of even such
literary geniuses as Thoreau and Whitman, he was not blinded by preju-
dice. He saw that the Westerner was a "frank, sincere, well-meaning man,
with a lawyer's habit of mind, good clear statement of his fact; correct
enough, not vulgar, as described, but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness.3'

He listened while Lincoln "argued to Sumner the whole case of Gordon,
the slave-trader, point by point, and added that he was not quite satisfied
yet, and meant to refresh his memory by looking again at the evidence."

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR 415

All this argument seemed to Emerson to show "fidelity and conscientious-
ness." Seward insisted on taking the unwilling Emerson to "the English
Church" on Sunday and tutoring him through the unfamiliar service but
afterward brought him to Lincoln for a second visit. Emerson observed
statecraft in action as the President and his secretary of state discussed the
dangerous Trent affair and the critical relations between the United States
and Britain.

At Coolidge Castle, or Bush, as the family had begun to call it by
about this time., life was becoming less retired than ever. Aunt Susan Emer-
son, William's wife, from New York, was a boarder for some months, and
two of her sons were with her a part of the time. Ellen's protegee, Edith
Davidson, later nicknamed "Ellen's daughter," came for long periods of
residence. The privacy of Bush was threatened still farther by the neighbor-
hood travel through the pasture and alongside the house. Emerson took up
his private bridge over the Mill Brook to halt this encroachment, but for
some unexplained reason he put it back again within a few months. On
Sunday nights visitors swarmed into the house. On weekdays Aunt Susan
would ride horseback to meet the mail. The whole family was eager for
news from Edward. Equipped with a new fund supplied by Abel Adams,
a friend whose benefactions to the Emersons did not cease until after his
death, Edward was now on his way to California. As Aunt Susan ap-
proached the house, waving a letter in her outstretched hand, her nieces
would be waiting, together with their father, back from his morning inspec-
tion of the pears.

Emerson, as in earlier years, entertained the family by reading such
a boyhood favorite of his as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, still a favorite
with him. Thanks to his traveler's and club man's habits, he had come to
enjoy a cigar in his study, where books were no longer the sole attraction;
but Edith, a lover of air unmixed with tobacco, might descend on him, open
his windows, and finally drive him outdoors. He got into the habit of going
out, even before breakfast, to visit the beehive, new this year. After break-
fast he would again observe the bees and would entertain his daughters
with remarks about them.

But outside Bush, Concord lost much of its worth this year. Henry
Thoreau had loved Walt Whitman with a love which, Emerson thought,
might have grown out of a taste "for wild nature, for an otter, a wood-
chuck, or a loon," but had "hated Alcott," "hated a sum that would not
prove." Now he ended his long search for basic realities. Sam Staples, his
former jailer, "Never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace."
At the funeral Emerson read his prose address, but he had left it to Ellery
Channing to compose the ode that was "plaintively sung," as other odes

416 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

for special occasions had been sung before in Concord. Alcott read selec-
tions from Thoreau's first book and one of Thoreau's poems.

For Emerson the muse remained dumb, but Channing wrote many
verses in honor of their former companion on country roads and in the
fields. Channing described the gnarled and unsocial Henry as a "sweet man
of Nature35 and associated him lovingly with White Pond and its dark,
familiar grove, and

deep green shadows, clefts of pasture ground;
Mayhap a distant bleat the single sound,
One distant cloud, the sailor of the sky,
One voice, to which my inmost thoughts reply.

Emerson sorted over his memories of Thoreau, found them satisfying, began
reading the voluminous manuscript journals, prophesied that if they were
published they would sow a new crop of naturalists, and considered setting
about their publication himself. He read a lecture on Henry at the Music
Hall in Boston. A few years later he published the first edition of Thoreau's
letters and refuted the charge, frequently made, that as a writer Thoreau
was a mere imitator of Emerson.

The war was dragging on with no end in sight, though sometimes
Northerners indulged in empty dreams of a brilliant military coup. One
day in June of 1862 Emerson, hearing cannon fired in Boston, wondered
whether Richmond had fallen. But the much puffed young Union general
proved a disappointment. "Strange,35 Emerson disgustedly wrote in his war
journal, "that some strongminded president of the Woman's Rights Con-
vention should not offer to lead the Army of the Potomac. She could not
do worse than General Maclellan."

Emerson wanted no peace so long as slavery existed. "If it costs ten
years of war," he declared, "and ten to recover the general prosperity, the
destruction of Slavery is worth so much." But now even emancipation
would not be enough, he thought. In August of this year he feared that if
Lincoln delayed much longer the South might adopt emancipation before
the North could and so appear before the world as the champion of free-
dom, gain recognition from France and England, and put the North in a
false and disastrous position. He was in agreement with Sumner but was
also swinging towards Lincoln's doctrine of the importance of the Union,
it seemed.

Though he remained more in Sumner's camp than in Lincoln's, the
preliminary Emancipation Proclamation., issued in September, caused him
to make an almost complete recantation of his distrust of Lincoln. Lincoln
had "been permitted to do more for America than any other American

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR 417

man," he publicly admitted. He was willing to forget "all that we thought
shortcomings, every mistake, every delay.55 Yet even this recantation con-
tained a note of warning. Lincoln must not fail to live up to his promise
and make emancipation an accomplished fact. In the privacy of his journal
Emerson commented that the President thought emancipation almost morally
wrong and resorted to it only as a desperate measure. It was true that
Lincoln, the supposed temporizer, had kept from the start his single-minded
devotion to the cause of Union. Only a few weeks before his preliminary
proclamation he had written to Greeley: "If I could save the Union with-
out freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all
the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leav-
ing others alone, I would also do that."

Edward, after some five months of travel, was home again with the
story of his severe hardships: At Omaha he joined a train of goldseeken?
and emigrants, mostly farm people from Minnesota who went on horse-
back or on foot beside their mule teams. He bought a roan mustang for
his own mount, and she nearly broke his neck after five minutes of ac-
quaintance. But for the next two months he rode her across the prairies
and the plains. There was never a settlement in sight and only here and
there a band of Pawnees or Sioux. The Indians were dangerous till the
travelers reached Fort Laramie. There the westward-bound column halted
till enough recruits had joined it to make a total of some eighty men or
boys bearing arms. At the Great Divide many of the company turned north
to look for gold in Montana, But Edward and some others followed the
California Trail, and in August they arrived in Salt Lake City. Thence,
with a single companion, Edward pushed on through the desert nearly
forty miles a day till they had the good luck to sell their animals and equip-
ment and took the overland stage. His companion bade him farewell and
settled in Nevada. But after four days and nights of miserable bumping
across the Sierra, Edward arrived in Sacramento, and early in September
he was at San Francisco. Before the end of that month he was at Panama,
ready to cross the isthmus from the Pacific to the Caribbean Sea. Early
in October he reached New York and quickly came to Concord, where the
family set to work to put some flesh on his bones. His heroic efforts to
prepare himself for a soldier's life had failed. Wanting health for the army,
he obeyed his father's wishes and went back to his studies. The family
were his classmates through Harvard. In his freshman year they were in-
dignant about hazing. Next year, when they heard of sophomore exploits,
they were sophomores.

On the ist of January, 1863, with Lincoln's new proclamation, the
provisions of the preliminary one took full effect, and emancipation was

4i 8 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSOM

a fact. A jubilee was held in Boston on that day. Fearful lest his part, "a
string of verses, a sort of Boston Hymn/' as he said, should not be ready
for the occasion, Emerson had refused to let his name appear on the pro-
gram. But at the last minute he whipped the recalcitrant verses into form,
and his was actually the opening gun in the sputtering fusillade of thanks-
giving and congratulation at the Music Hall. The poem, though it had
really been begun several years earlier, seemed made for the occasion and
was quite as devout and almost as militant a composition as Julia Ward
Howe's battle hymn. In it God addressed his admonitions not only to the
Pilgrims but to their successors and to all Americans of the year 1863. This
"Boston Hymn," as Emerson ended by calling it, showed that he had now
reversed his ante-bellum plea for the purchase of the blacks from their
white masters. One of his quatrains rang out like a bugle call:

Pay ransom to the owner

And fill the bag to the brim.

Who is the owner? The slave is owner,

And ever was. Pay him.

It was a fine burst of moral indignation. So far as the slave was con-
cerned, it was just; but it added to the general feeling of bitterness toward
the white Southerners, bitterness that later begot the madness of the recon-
struction era and disgraced the conquering North. Meantime, though the
"Boston Hymn35 was without the popular appeal of the familiar army
songs, to such Negro soldiers as could understand it, it was as good as a
ration of powder and bullets. A surgeon who read it to Thomas Went-
worth Higginson's black regiment on a South Carolina island thought that
"Emerson would have trembled for joy to see how much the men drank
in the religion of his poem." The black regiment's opportunist chaplain
promptly took the poem for his text. Emerson, putting his own preach-
ments into practice, spoke at a meeting in Boston for the support of Shaw's
Negro regiment and paid a subscription to the regiment fund.

Meantime, during the winter, he was back in the lyceum groove. With
the help of a friendly but either inefficient or unfortunate Western agent,
he made a tour that took him as far from home as Chicago and Milwaukee.
At Niagara Falls, in the only hotel then open, he was aroused at three
o'clock in the morning by the cry of fire. Gathering up some of his personal
belongings, he escaped through a cloud of smoke and cinders. The house
was thoroughly burned out, and he had managed in the confusion to lose
his ticket from Buffalo to Chicago. But having walked the two miles to
the Suspension Bridge, he came opportunely upon Reuben Rice, once co-

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR 419

director with him of the Concord Atheneum. Rice was now superintendent
of the Michigan Central Railroad, and, as if posted at the bridge by special
act of providence, he insisted on giving Emerson a pass from Detroit to
Chicago, thus saving him a large part of the expense of replacing the lost
ticket.

At Indianapolis, on the way back, Emerson heard the pianist Gott-
schalk and the prima donna Carlotta Patti mainly because he had to wait
several days for them to vacate Masonic Hall. Lawyers and college pro-
fessors were brought to see him while he waited. He attended an exam-
ination of the classes at the asylum for the blind, made a brief speech there,
and recited a ballad of Walter Scott's. When he finally lectured he seemed
to get small honor. According to one local reporter his delivery was just
good enough to get out an idea but could not keep it on its feet. What the
reporter admired was Emerson's trick, doubtless unconscious, of "seeming
to forget the last word or two, always significant . . . and stumbling upon
them unexpectedly with an effect that the most elaborate declamation could
not produce."

At Pittsburgh, having more days of enforced idleness, Emerson made
the most of his opportunities. At one forge he saw the casting of a fifteen-
inch cannon, "the sublime in mechanics.3' He was struck by the show of
power and beauty. "The look into the furnace," he said, "is like looking
at the sun, and, after the eye is a little used to it, you begin to see the
white iron thawing into drops & rivulets, like thawing glaciers, until pres-
ently you see floating islands, all white, in the white sea. We stayed a couple
of hours: at last the ore was ready in the two great furnaces; the great clay
spouts, one from each, were heated by burning chips, &c. and the rosy
iron brooks rushed out along these channels, say 40 feet long each, into
the mould, which is sunk into a perpendicular pit 1 8 or 20 ft deep Tis
a wonderful spectacle, & one comes to look at every one in the crowd of
workmen with vast respect.33 In February he was as far north as Montreal.

Emerson pondered the war again and tried to convince himself that
it had its good points. In Boston he joined the Union Club, which sym-
bolized devotion to the ideal of a united country. He watched Lincoln
closely. The President, he thought, "should remember that humanity in a
ruler does not consist in running hither and thither in a cab to stop the
execution of a deserter.33 He believed that the results of universal suffrage
ought to be accepted and that there was no use in pretending that fine
gentlemen could be elected who would please the English or the French.
Lincoln's taste could not be refined. But citizens ought to hug themselves
if they had got "good nature, honest meaning, and fidelity to public interest,
with bad manners,— instead of an elegant roue and malignant self-seeker."

420 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Emerson complained of the British government's winking at the building
in British ports of ships of war for the Confederates. He wrote English
friends letters of introduction for Moncure Conway and William Evarts,
Northern agents sent to England to try to influence English opinion. Some-
times he retreated into his naturally pacific Transcendental mood. He
confessed "that this mad war has made us all mad; that there was no
minority to stand fast for eternal truth., and say. Cannons and bayonets
for such as already knew nothing stronger; but we are here for immortal
resistance to wrong; we resist it by disobedience to every evil command,
and by incessant furtherance of every right cause."

His mind was carried away from the war and back to his boyhood
years. Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, having lived into her late eighties in
spite of her early desire for death, died at last on May i, 1863. Her body
was brought back to her native Concord, where Emerson, Lidian, Ellen,
Edith, and a few others followed it to Sleepy Hollow. Emerson brought
friends home with him and offered to "produce all the memorabilia of the
Sibyl/' but they failed to ask for any. "The present," he acknowledged,
"is ever too strong for the past, & in so many late years she has been only
a wreck, & in all years could so readily be repulsive, that few know or
care for her genius." He seemed to be the only one who cared. "Her genius,"
he said, "was the purest and though I have learned to discriminate &
drop what a huge alloy of theology & metaphysics, her letters & journals
charm me still as thirty years ago, & honor the American air."

One of the oddest events of the Civil War, or so it must have seemed
to him at first thought, was his appointment as member of a committee
of visitation to West Point. But he was known personally to Stanton, the
secretary of war, and to others at Washington, and the obvious effect of
choosing him was to give a certain moral dignity to the doings of the War
Department and brace the loyalty of citizens who cared for such a thing
as morality even in wartime. He did not learn until after his arrival at
West Point that his committee was expected to remain there for some two
weeks, a thing he had no intention of doing. But while he stayed he picked
up a few ideas for future use. He heard an examination in the scientific
classes. He went into the barracks, admired the perfect order, saw the mat-
tress on the iron bed rolled up into a scroll, talked with a cadet: " 'Who
makes your bed?' CI do.' 'Who brings you water?' CI do.' 'Who blacks your
boots?' el do.' " This was a lesson in self-help worth using in the address
Emerson was to make at Waterville College a few weeks later. He saw
flying artillery drill, watched a mortar practice with eight- to ten-inch shells,
witnessed a siege battery in action against a target over five thousand yards
away. He was, it seems, one of the most attentive members of the board.

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR 421

John Burroughs, a budding naturalist who was teaching a country school
near by and was much at West Point, learned to his surprise that a com-
mitteeman he had taken to be an eager and inquisitive farmer was Ralph
Waldo Emerson. After a sleepless night because of his discovery, Burroughs
got Myron Benton, a "rural philosopher and poet," to introduce him and
start him off on his first conversation with the Transcendentalist. Both
Benton and Donald Mitchell, known by his pen name of Ik Marvel, were
with Burroughs; and the three, filled with a sense of the importance of
coming upon Emerson much as if they had discovered Socrates on the
banks of the Hudson, carried his shiny black oilcloth bag as they trudged
beside him to the landing. They listened to his talk as he bought his ticket,
boarded the ferry, and started across the river, for he was still talking as
he moved out into the stream. He had come to examine and report on
an army establishment, but his true character had got the better of the
pretended military inspector when he had been challenged by Burroughs
and his friends. The committee, in making their report, confessed "some
embarrassment from the fact that all were inexperienced in the special
duties here assigned them" but commented resignedly that such, they
learned, had been the history of former boards.

Lectures at Dartmouth and Waterville Colleges were incidents of that
summer of 1863. At Waterville, and perhaps at Dartmouth, Emerson
lashed out angrily at England. He declared that the war had been a revela-
tion, had shown that it was not because of slavery that England disliked
the United States. England's deeper interest was not in freedom but in
trade and in her superiority of all kinds. As her dominant role had been
threatened by the Americans her joy was great in seeing this nation broken.
Her interest in the success of the rebellion was now undisguised. England
had great merits, Emerson wrote more calmly in his journal, but had failed
when the occasion for magnanimity, the Olympian hour, had arrived. Yet*
he took care to exempt some persons in England from the general blame.
He set Carlyle, culpable as he was in his political opinions,, safe to one side
on a high pedestal, for, as he decided, his friend's errors were nothing com-
pared with the merit of his manly attitude. He carefully excepted all of
"the truly cultivated class" of England. That class of persons, whether in
England, in France, in Germany, or in America, existed for each other
"across all possible nationalities." Having excepted these, he seemed will-
ing to condemn the rest, though he thought the proper American answer
was not war but contempt. He had never been so bitter against any nation.

His aroused fighting spirit had more than once flared up in verses
written in wartime. It had flamed high in what served as a dirge for
Colonel Robert Shaw and his slain followers of the Negro regiment later

THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

memorialized in bronze relief by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, He had quickly
forgotten the minor key of his opening verses,

Low and mournful be the strain,
Haughty thought be far from me;
Tones of penitence and pain.,
Moanings of the tropic sea;

and had drifted into a denunciation of the statesmen who failed to end
slavery. It was in this poern that he made his appeal to the heroism of
the young soldiers:

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,

The youth replies, I can.

To Emerson, Colonel E. N. Hallowell's letter of a few weeks later must
have made these lines seem ironical. Hallowell wanted permission to ask
Emerson's son, Edward, to join up. The colonel explained that his regi-
ment would soon have a vacancy among its second lieutenants, and he
mercilessly reminded Emerson that younger men than Edward had died
to establish freedom, Hallowell's regiment was the same Fifty-fourth that
Shaw had commanded- As for Edward, he would gladly have risked his
life if he could have found anybody who would pass him on the score of
health and let him into the army.

Wartime was a hard time for a philosopher, yet there were moments
when Emerson dropped his newspaper and calmed himself with the belief
that the universe was not going to blow up. "On the whole/' he reflected,
<£I know that the cosmic results will be the same, whatever the daily events
may be."

In such a mood, perhaps, he turned to the manuscript journals left by
Henry Thoreau. He saw, as he helped arrange selected pages and advised
about the contract with the publisher or read again in the manuscripts
with growing admiration, that Thoreau had been more a man of action
in some respects than he himself. He saw that the much younger man had
been more practical in carrying out ideas the two had had in common.
But it was he, Emerson, who had really been the pioneer, it seemed to him.
As he reviewed Thoreau's life he could imagine himself a mere spectator
in a gymnasium where youths were leaping, climbing, and swinging with
unapproachable force, yet he reflected that "their feats are only continua-
tions of rny initial grapplings and jumps."

He was back on the lecture platform in December with "The Fortune

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR 423

of the Republic/3 fighting his war once more, gathering up his accumu-
lated indictments of England and flinging them at her with what must have
been telling effect on his audience. He did not want a British war, but he
had to ease his mind. As for the republic, he was full of hope, seeing the
light breaking in all directions. Why should he not have faith in America?
For America, he told his listeners, existed for the regeneration of the world
by bringing social and political institutions to the ideal standard. That
winter he carried the same lecture through the New England towns and
to Brooklyn.

To his fame as a literary man was added his repute as a loyal and
influential citizen. He wrote his share of suggestions regarding promotions
and appointments. He had, it seems, been chiefly responsible for Charles
Sumner's election to the Saturday Club, the first election that the thorough-
going abolitionist had ever received to anything in Boston. He had also
used his acquaintance with Washington officials in an attempt to further
the fortunes of the picturesque Walt Whitman. The New York poet, having
wandered "through camp and battle scenes," had fetched up in Washing-
ton, as he himself put it, "in harsh and superb plight" and so found it
"necessary for me to fall for the time in the wise old way, to push my
fortune, to be brazen, and get employment, and have an income." Whit-
man had unblushingly provided Emerson with a model form of recom-
mendation, presumably of no use. In writing to Chase, the secretary of the
treasury, Emerson had acknowledged that his friend was not without
"marked eccentricities" but had loyally pointed out his "great powers and
valuable traits of character.5' "If his writings," he had explained, "are in
certain points open to criticism, they show extraordinary power and are
more deeply American, democratic and in the interest of political liberty
than those of any other poet." But when Whitman eventually got his gov-
ernment job it was not under Chase.

In Concord, Emerson had war matters and town and domestic mat-
ters to look after. He spoke at the Concord fair for the benefit of Negro
orphans. The fair was a part of the local war effort. The town meeting
elected him chairman of the school committee. If he was reformer and
educator, he was also gentleman farmer. He had long since become an
authority on horticulture. George Bancroft had asked him for advice about
pears and had been given a list of fifteen varieties recommended "with
much confidence" as suitable for filling the season. In 1864, the master
of Bush scored again at the Cattle Show, taking a third prize for pears.
Even at this late period the social life of Bush and the numerous cares of
house and farm could be too much for him. At times, it seems, he went
off to a hotel in order to write without interruption.

424 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

One of the most hopeful signs of the survival of a civilization diseased
with war was the Saturday Club's celebration of the tercentenary of Shake-
speare's birth. Emerson, with his fellow committeernen, Holmes and Lowell,
labored with might and main to gather in guests from the Boston and New
York areas. He also wrote a speech for the occasion, as the extant manu-
script proves, though it is possible that, for some unexplained reason,, he
did not give it. Elliot Cabot, a member of the club, said he remembered
Emerson at the dinner, getting up to speak, "looking about him tranquilly
for a minute or two, and then sitting down; serene and unabashed, but
unable to say a word upon a subject so familiar to his thoughts from boy-
hood.53 Yet Emerson's later silence and the silence, apparently, of all but
Cabot throw doubt upon the accuracy of Cabot's memory. Almost exactly
two years later, it wotild seem, Emerson was referring to this speech as
"My speech at the Shakspeare festival," as lie would hardly have done
had he failed to deliver it.

Hawthorne, too weak to attend the Shakespeare dinner, died within
a few weeks. With other members of the Saturday Club, Emerson walked
beside the coffin up the hill to Sleepy Hollow in "a pomp of sunshine and
verdure, and gentle winds." As he thought back over his late neighbor's
Concord days and over the somber tales and novels., or such of them as
he knew> he was struck by "the painful solitude of the man, which, I
suppose," he said, "could not longer be endured, and he died of it." As
Emerson had failed to discover the highest excellence of the tales and
novels, so, doubtless, he left out of account the part Sophia Hawthorne had
played in her husband's life. But he had long vainly waited on Hawthorne's
moods in the hope of conquering a friendship for himself. "Now/5 he said,
"it appears that I waited too long."

With both Thoreau and Hawthorne dead, Alcott made a larger part
than ever of Emerson's literary society; and, unfortunately^ he spoiled con-
versation by insisting too much on his theory of the nature of God— "per-
sonality," or "personalism"— while Emerson still held to his own belief in
the "profound need of distinguishing the First Cause as superpersonal."
The "thesis of personality" was hardly more than Alcotfs peculiar version
of a religious opinion held by much of Concord and Massachusetts, in-
cluding all the Emerson family, it seems, except Emerson himself. Much
to the surprise of some Bostonians, it came out that in their home village
both Emerson's daughters taught in Sunday school and, in spite of their
immense pride in their father, not only admired but emulated their mother's
more conventional religious faith. Edith Emerson was even persuaded that
if her mother had not brought them up as Christians her father would have
done so himself, Thus Alcott's retreat in the direction of religious orthodoxy

THE PIERCE STORM OF WAR 425

could not have completely upset his neighbor at Bush but might easily have
bored him as a too frequent subject of conversation.

Yet Alcott had values that were still prized, as he himself knew. He
seems to have suspected that Emerson came to him "to feed on him."
Emerson read his own mind differently, being convinced that he talked
with Alcott "not so much to get his thoughts as to watch myself under his
influence. He excites me/' Emerson explained it, "and I think freely."
Whatever reward Emerson had expected, he had cared enough about it
to go on raising what he called his Alcott Fund. During some eight years
this had grown at the rate of slightly less than $100 a year, the approxi-
mate amount of the contribution he himself had once made to it, but
had also decreased at times by reason of payments made to the beneficiary.

Emerson was more and more widely accepted. In 1864 he was elected
a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and neatly pigeon-
holed, in imitation of the French manner, in Glass III (Moral and Political
Sciences), section 4 (Literature and the Fine Arts). He was also to have
been a member of the National Academy of Literature and Art, being
one of the twenty persons named in the bill of incorporation that his friend
Sumner introduced in the Senate this year but never got through Con-
gress. Walt Whitman, obviously unacceptable to Congressional critics, was
not on the roll, nor was Herman Melville. If Congress could have under-
stood Emerson it might have eliminated his name; but, as matters stood,
public opposition to the Concord liberal was about dead. Alcott began to
lecture admiringly on "Mr Emison," much to Emerson's apparent disgust;
and the elder Henry James, a less merciful critic, entertained his own lec-
ture audience with a dissection of the man he had studied with such
voracious curiosity. Matthew Arnold, rising to important stature as a critic,
wrote Emerson a generous letter of recognition from England.

The war still overshadowed everything else. Edward, now twenty years
old, was insistent again on quitting college and entering the army. Emer-
son and Lidian began by giving him leave to enlist for garrison duty only.
Then Edward made up his mind to see active service, and they would not
command him to desist. But Edith wrote him a plea on behalf of then-
father. She could not help asking Edward, "Which seems to you of most
value to your country— the services of one private for a month or so or
Father's life and work?" She thought "that Father must break down; his
public life must cease with your going for he has neither heart nor health
for work." Edward, undersized and frail, tried to enlist before the war was
over but never saw active service and carried his bitter regret to the end
of his days.

Emerson meantime faced international and national political problems

426 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

with great anxiety. He thought the British all squinted when they looked
across the Atlantic— "lords, ladies, statesmen, scholars, poets . . . Edinburgh,
Quarterly, Saturday Review, Gladstone, Russell, Palmerston, Brougham,
nay, Tennyson; Carlyle,— I blush to say it; Arnold. . . . No Milton, no
Bacon, no Berkeley, no Montesquieu, no Adam Smith was there to hail
a new dawn of hope and culture for men . . ." He wrote to Carlyle that
a visit to America "would have made it impossible that your name should
be cited for one moment on the side of the enemies of mankind." He wel-
comed Edward Lyulph Stanley, later the fourth Baron Stanley, who,
though he arrived with an introduction from Carlyle, was "on our side in
politics." Emerson had him in Concord in company with Agassiz, Chan-
ning, Alcott, and Wendell Phillips. When Goldwin Smith came over with
an introduction from Matthew Arnold, Emerson did more missionary work
for the Northern cause. He went with this English guest to Naushon to show
him John M. Forbes, Emerson's admired "only 'Squire' in Massachusetts/'
an effective friend of the Union.

At the Bryant festival in New York, Emerson made a graceful speech
more fit for times when culture was nurtured than for wartime. But a few
days later came the national election. According to Alcott, Emerson dis-
trusted Lincoln, though less than Alcott himself did. But certainly voting
the Republican ticket seemed the best available means of saving the coun-
try, and probably Alcott did not understand how far Emerson had now
gone in accepting the President. Emerson seemed a determined supporter
of Lincoln when he congratulated George Bradford on the results of the
election. "Seldom in history/5 he said, "was so much staked on a popular
vote.— I suppose never in history." He made his sentiments clearer still when
he began the opening lecture of his course at the Melodeon, in Boston,
late in the same month. At last he spoke with something resembling Lin-
coln's enthusiasm for the Union, but he did not go the whole way. The
election, to his mind, decided that a nation was no casual combination to
be dissolved lightly, or by stealth, or by violence; but he thought it did not
decide that no separation should take place in an orderly fashion and by
a solemn act of both parties if either party, because of geographic necessities
or irreconcilable interests of production and trade, desired it.

The course on "American Life/' as it was called, proved a great bread-
winner, Emerson's daughter Ellen said. Requests came in from five or six
cities for repetitions of all the half dozen lectures, and from weaker lyceums
there were calls for at least one of them. Emerson was soon on the road,
doing his best to supply the demand. Even before finishing in Boston, he
had begun in the lesser New England towns, and by the middle of January
he was well on his way to the West, where his principal engagements were

THE FIERCE STORM OF WAR 427

at Chicago and Milwaukee. In February and March he used the Boston
lectures once more at Worcester, Massachusetts.

The red tide of war was rapidly running out. When Lee surrendered,
at the little Virginia village of Appomattox Court House that April, Emer-
son felt the full emotional impact of the great event. It was, he wrote, "a
joyful day . . . & proud to Alleghany ranges, Northern Lakes, Missisippi
rivers & all lands & men between the two Oceans, between morning &
evening stars." "Mankind," he said, "has appeared just now in its best
attitude around Mr Lincoln— in these recent experiences— & will aid him
to use sanely the immense power with which the hour clothes him." But
he was troubled by the fear that Grant's terms were too easy; and, worried
over the problem of reconstruction, he was once more tending in the direc-
tion of the extremists and away from Lincoln's policy. "If we let the South-
ern States into Congress," he predicted, "the Northern Democrats will join
them in thwarting the will of the Government. And the obvious remedy
is to give the negro his vote."

A few days after the surrender, Lincoln's death and the national pag-
eant- of the funeral, a prophecy of the War President's place in history,
stirred men's feelings up again to a high pitch. Across the land, night and
day, as Whitman wrote, journeyed a coffin, and hi remotest villages where
the news was known honor was done to the dead. In Concord, where they
had celebrated Lee's surrender with a social dance in the Town Hall, people
were asked to suspend all labor and business between 1 1 and 2 o'clock on
April 1 9, the day usually kept as- the chief local historic anniversary. The
people gathered in the Unitarian Church to join the rest of the country in
solemn funeral services. The order of services included music and selections
from the Scriptures and prayers, together with what the printed program
called addresses by R. W. Emerson and others. It was clear from what
Emerson said to his neighbors on that day that he saw Lincoln now with-
out any prejudice and acknowledged his virtues justly and fully: his sound-
ness, tenderness, good humor, great ability as a writer, fitness to represent
his people, fitness as leader in the great crisis. He conceded every point at
last. Many passages in the President's letters, messages, and speeches, Emer-
son saw, were destined to wide fame. "His brief speech at Gettysburg will
not easily be surpassed by words on any recorded occasion," he said. Lin-
coln's election to the Presidency was "a triumph of the good sense of man-
kind, and of the public conscience. . . . Rarely was man so fitted to the
event. . . . Only Washington can compare with him in fortune."

Lincoln had at least been more fortunate than most Americans in the
Civil War. If he had gone through the most terrible ordeal, he had had
the satisfaction of sticking to his principles from first to last, the Union

428 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he had been determined to save seemed to be saved, and his wish that all
men might be free from physical slavery was nearer realization. And if he
had finally suffered death at the hands of an assassin, he was a martyr in
the eyes of the world. Such fortune seemed to be the best that could have
been expected.

Others concerned with the war were less fortunate. Emerson's scholar,
the thinker, had, as Emerson had foreseen, been unable to speak very ef-
fectively in such an emotional crisis. He had inevitably been forced to
be as much a man of action as he could, and the kind of action required
had not given reality to his thought but had only made it seem less real.
Giving rein to his feelings of loyalty and patriotism, he had felt a pleasing
exhilaration. He had won ready acceptance as a loyal citizen and had
therefore gained social prestige. But his real occupation was now nearly
gone. He had had to retreat too far from his prized position as a philo-
sophical observer. And this was true of the Transcendental thinker even
more than of any other.

Emerson himself was a conspicuous example of this plight. For him,
an idealist, the war had been a disease in his own system as well as in
the body politic. He found it hard to get the poison of hate out of his
blood. At the end of the conflict he could not refrain from writing down
privately a list of the atrocities he charged against the South. His thinking
did not thrive so well as before. He no longer enjoyed a sphere of almost
limitless intellectual liberty. For him the idea of liberty had become too
much constricted in the symbol of the manumitted slave. It was hard even
for so puissant a liberal as Emerson to free himself from the narrowing
boundaries of his postwar world*

23.

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT

The god of bounds.

Who sets to seas a shore,

Came to me in his fatal rounds,

And said: 'No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament

To compass of a tent.'

-'Terminus"

FOR years Emerson nursed the idea of writing a History of Liberty.
He planned that it should come down from the earliest times, and
he presumably intended to make the Civil War his climactic chapter.
In his commemoration speech at Harvard, where, perhaps because
of his loyal support of the Northern cause, he had once more become
acceptable, he held that war was "within the highest right" and was a
"marked benefactor in the hands of the Divine Providence." He thanked
the soldiers for "a new era, worth to mankind all the treasure and all the
lives it has cost; yes, worth to the world the lives of all this generation of
American men, if they had been demanded."

It was hard for him to face disillusionment now that he had felt a keen
sense of triumph. It was not long before he realized that something had
gone wrong, but he adjusted himself to the facts slowly and painfully.
Everybody, it seemed to him, was back at his shop again and cared little
about patriotism any more, even when thieves were stealing the public gold
as well as the newly won rights of the slaves. After all, he saw, the war
had left wounds that were not clean and would not heal quickly. He could
already write with great tenderness to his old classmate and late enemy
Robert Barnwell, a South Carolinian who had been a senator of the Con-
federacy, "But I wish you to know," he told Barnwell, "that distance,
politics, war, even, at last, have not been able to efface in any manner the
high affectionate exceptional regard in which I, in common I believe with
all your old contemporaries of 181 7-21, have firmly held you as our avowed
chief, in days when boys, as we then were, give a tender & romantic value

4*9

430 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to that distinction, which they cannot later give again." Yet he was intent
mainly on upholding the newly won rights of the Negroes, and he shared
the average Northerner's ignorance of how criminal the reconstruction
policy was proving in practice and how dangerous it was to the future
welfare of both white and black races. He distrusted President Andrew
Johnson's attempt to continue Lincoln's policy of generosity. With many
other Northerners he regarded Johnson as a victim to the blandishments
of the Southern planters and as a traitor to the cause of liberty.

He gradually moved out of the shadow of the national tragedy and
put his mind on other matters. Soon after the close of the war, he visited
several of the smaller New England college towns. He read lectures at
Ripley Female College in Vermont and at Williamstown and Amherst in
Massachusetts, At Williamstown he left an indelible impression on Charles
Woodbury. Woodbury, seizing what scant opportunity he could find, at-
tempted in a much less than half-hearted manner the hopeless task of being
Emerson's BoswelL He was also one of the many enthusiastic students who
put up notices, rang the college and church bells, and collected both under-
graduates and faculty in the meetinghouse to hear Emerson.

In Concord, at what was officially called the seventy-first annual exhibi-
tion and cattle show of the Middlesex Agricultural Society but was locally
known as the Cattle Show, Emerson made a speech on the governor's
appointment of a commission to inquire into the means of replanting the
Concord and Merrimac Rivers with fish. Besides the speaking in the Town
Hall, there were a plowing match, a trial of strength and discipline of
working oxen, and a procession of officials and others escorted by the West
Cambridge Band. Various classes of livestock and farm produce were
exhibited—stallions, breeding mares, colts, farm horses, family and matched
horses, roadsters, bulls, milch cows, blood stock, milch heifers, working
oxen, fat cattle, swine, poultry, grain, fruits, vegetables, flowers. Ephraim
Bull, originator of the Concord grape, was naturally chairman of the com-
mittee on grapes. Being by this time a veteran exhibitor of pears, Emerson
served as a member of the committee on pears. He and his fellow com-
mitteemen required competitors to make full reports in writing on their
modes of cultivation and their methods of keeping and ripening pears.

At Bush the most important day was when young Colonel William
Forbes, the son of Emerson's friend of Milton and Naushon Island, was
married to twenty-three-year-old Edith before the long window in the parlor,
with the Unitarian minister conducting the ceremony. After the wedding
the bride made the final preparations for the "wedding-tour" of a week at
Pigeon Cove, "kissed all her family and went down the front stairs." Her
father and Ellen, looking out the front entry window into the bright October

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 431

sunshine, saw Will Forbes, the handsome ex-cavalry officer,, standing beside
the team of horses and the buggy; "and/3 as Ellen put it, "down the walk
went little Edith Emerson in her brown hat and dress, away from her
father's house for evermore and gave her hand to her bridegroom at the
gate and he put her into her seat, tucked the shawls all round her, walked
round and got in the other side, and they whirled away." Girls from the
neighborhood's literary families had their less important parts in the occa-
sion still to complete. Una Hawthorne, now "certainly become one of the
family at last," helped pack the presents. May Alcott, Louisa's sister, packed
up Edith's books.

Emerson, extremely fond of his daughter, began to make his daily com-
ments on his loss: "There are several very agreeable circumstances about
that child's going away, but there is one sad one and that is that she is
gone. . . . Yes she was an idle minx, but she has gone and she troubles
me." In his new son-in-law, however, he had a financial adviser to relieve
him of many of his old troubles. Now that he could not hope to continue
his lectures many seasons longer, he saw that the family resources needed
to be husbanded carefully. Within a few years Will Forbes had arranged
better investments for Emerson's money stocks and had looked into con-
tracts with publishers and spurred payment of royalties. Cousin Abraham
Jackson, the dishonest manager of Lidian's real estate, was eventually
brought to justice and to jail.

But meantime, the need of funds drove Emerson in December of 1 865
as far south as Brooklyn, where he read half a dozen lectures and had the
comfort of Charlotte Lynch Botta's hospitality in New York. In the fol-
lowing January and February the same need of money sent him westward
over the long road to the Mississippi Valley. With the aid of a friendly
Detroiter as his lyceum agent he had linked up towns in New York, Penn-
sylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa in de-
fiance of time and space.

The prospect of completing the three-year term of service on the school
committee to which he had been elected in 1864 could not have pleased
so experienced a man as he. And when he was called upon to assist Super-
intendent Bronson Alcott in examining teachers and pupils, he must have
been convinced that he could not go on with such time-consuming duties.
He quickly resigned, being succeeded in office by his brother William, a
resident of Concord since he had tentatively retired from his law practice
in New York. Emerson, however, continued his service as library commit-
teeman as long as he lived, obviously finding it congenial and only a
slight drain on his strength.

When he was home from his lectures he needed liberty for the recrea-

432 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

tion which his daughter Ellen urged him to take. Ellen might praise the
spring weather and summon him to a long walk as early as the first days
of April. He would wear his Illinois coat,, hunch up his shoulders, and
mutter abuse of the wind, the sky, and the earth. He would praise the fine
trees and lament that they must fall At Ripple Pond he would be enchanted
with the ripples. They were, he said, the Aeolian harp of the eye. Or at
home he might be discovered reading the Odyssey with one of the girls
visiting at Bush, or he would delve into the old family papers and entertain
all comers with them. Another day he would be at Milton with his daughter
Edith Forbes, listening to an opera mostly improvised by her husband and
her brother from old songs.

His Boston lectures in the spring of 1 866 were a kind of festival occa-
sion. The audience was much the same from year to year, so that the family
knew almost everybody and enjoyed a lecture as if it were a party. The
financial results were, as Emerson must have known in advance they would
be, flattering enough. His publishers, Ticknor & Fields, had managed the
course ably. In June a trip to Monadnock, where Emerson displayed sur-
prising bodily vigor, was a different kind of family party, only a few days
before Edward, still fighting hard for health, set out for some months in
Iowa. Just as Edward was about to depart, Emerson had a message from
the Forbeses at Milton. His voice broke as he read of the birth of his first
grandchild, Ralph Emerson Forbes, Edith's son.

But honors did not come singly to the sixty-three-year-old poet and essay-
ist. A week later he received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Harvard.
He knew nothing of it till a neighbor came to Bush with the news in the
evening after the ceremony. Next day it was announced in the Boston paper
that he had been proclaimed " 'jucundissimum poetam et hominem mul-
tarum literarum3 . . . delightful poet and man of letters." President Hill's
letter of notification explained that he had got the degree because he had
cultivated literature and philosophy with distinguished success and had thus
reflected honor upon his alma mater.

By the end of the following January, he had lectured his way for the
first time as far as Minnesota. He discovered that Minneapolis was the "town
of greatest promise in all the Northwest . . . the Falls of St Anthony being
the waterpower, & all behind & around it a land of wheat & lumber." The
Sautel Sioux warriors had been rounded up to the best of the white man's
ability, and removed elsewhere; but at Faribault an old chief still pre-
sided over an encampment of miscellaneous old women, girls, young men,
and dogs. Jean Baptiste Faribault, the French-Canadian fur trader who
was their patron, conducted Emerson from tent to tent. In one, Emerson
found a family all asquat and ready to devour their supper from a board

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 433

placed on the ground in lieu of table. In another he and his party inter-
rupted girls singing Indian psalms by the light, not of birch bark or pine
knot, but of a kerosene lamp. Farther down the Mississippi River the same
winter Emerson had a warm reception among the members of the St.
Louis Philosophical Society, founded little more than a year earlier and
already the chief American center of Hegelian thought. He could only
admire, not understand, the tireless talk of William Harris and his nineteen
or so philosophers and propagandists, Harris and his men were glad enough
to have him as their guest lecturer but were bursting with their own version
of the gospel according to Hegel. His curiosity was deeply stirred again
when, a little later, he received the opening numbers of The Journal of
Speculative Philosophy, the St. Louis society's remarkable publication that
seemed to make the Missouri town for the moment the capital of all Amer-
ican philosophical studies. His long lecture tour had taken him to a new
farthest west in Kansas. But he was growing weary of grueling journeys
nearly half way across the continent and was prematurely resolved never
to come to the West again.

On Concord's April 19 he was presumably escorted to the Town Hall,
as the handbills promised he would be, by the Concord Artillery and by
Gilmore's full band. As orator at the dedication of Soldiers' Monument
on that day, he did his best to list the virtues of war and alluded to recon-
struction in a tone little softened by two years of peace. But his tone was
appealing as he recalled incidents of the conflict, with the families of the
soldiers as his most interested hearers. A special section of the hall had
been reserved for relatives of the dead named on the monument. Some of
the incidents retold by the orator were drawn from the experience of the
Concord boys. It was a number of months later that he wrote, with the
inconsistency he shared with many wise men, that "Science shall not be
abused to make guns" and that "The poet shall bring out the blazing truth
that he who kills his brother commits suicide."

When the first bound copy of Emerson's May-day and Other Pieces
reached Bush on April 28, only the format was still to be looked at crit-
ically by the family; and Ellen's opinion that, though the binding was
pleasing, the print was "mean and cold and ugly" in spite of "all the fuss,
the critical comparing of every sort of type, the visits to Mr Fields, and
all the trumpeting I have heard" seemed a final judgment on that matter.
As for the contents, these poems had been read in the family circle and
doubtless greeted with an insistent demand for clarity; and there had been
plenty of time for polishing. It was true that, though almost all of them
had been written after the appearance of the first and heretofore only vol-
ume of his verse, a number had been printed during the twenty years since

434 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

that book, and so were familiar and could hardly be changed. But except
for "Brahma," which had by now an established reputation for impene-
trability, there was little that would annoy the uninitiated reader.

Emerson may already have had in mind the program for modern Amer-
ican poetry which he soon wrote in his journal,, a program calling upon
the poet to let old times go and write on tariff, on universal suffrage, on
woman suffrage, against war, against monopolistic greed, for freedom
of communication, for laws made for the common and not the particular
and selfish good. But if he was thinking it, he was not following it. Nor
did his theory that science was dimming and extinguishing much that had
been called poetry in the past— a theory he later explained to Mrs. Botta—
leave any deep trace in his new volume. The long title piece, remarkable
for its unflagging pleasure in the simple charm of nature, was such a con-
fession as might have been expected from one who had haunted Concord
woods and ponds half a lifetime. Memorabilia besides "Brahma" were
"The Romany Girl," "Days," and "Terminus." Though not his last verse,
the book was, as Emerson seemed to say in "Terminus," a valedictory to
his muse. "Terminus," however, said much more than that. It was early
to say so much, but the poem also announced Emerson's admirably re-
strained acceptance of the physical and mental decline that could not be
long postponed.

But if Emerson accepted the inevitable in advance, he did not, like
most aging men, turn conservative in his thinking. If his remarks at the
meeting for organizing the Free Religious Association raised no new ripples
on the surface of liberal thought, they showed no retreat from the divinity
school address of nearly thirty years earlier. Some two years later he assured
the same association that he rejected, not Christian doctrine, but the Chris-
tian claim of a miraculous dispensation, and he repeated his time-honored
belief that "the moral sentiment speaks to every man the law after which
the Universe was made.53 It was no accident that Emerson was the chief
speaker at what seems to have been the first meeting of the Radical Club.
He continued as unorthodox as ever. His English friend Lady Amberley,
visiting Concord about this time, remarked that he never went to church,
though his children went and Ellen taught in the Unitarian Sunday school.

In general the most orthodox had decided to forget his heresies, but
now and then somebody belatedly discovered them and complained. "A
man of wondrous mind, of most lovable nature," wrote a kindly critic after
hearing Emerson lecture at Oberlin, Ohio, "his philosophy fails beside the
faith of thousands of illiterate believing souls." A less tolerant Boston
preacher told his congregation "that Mr. R. W. Emerson was ca specimen

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 435

of miserable, mutilated morality.5 " Others reminded the veteran Tran-
scendentalist of the Last Judgment and offered to pray for him.

Even in his own family, Emerson was still occasionally reproved for his
freethinking. Lidian, as Lord Amberley said, was decided in her Christian
belief and did not understand her husband's mind. Confirmed in her opposi-
tion by her daughters' liking for her mild orthodoxy, she enjoyed exercising
her skill in debate. Emerson's skill in such an encounter was mainly in side-
stepping troublesome arguments without yielding. With the passing of
years the debate always remained unsettled. "Enchanting scene at dinner,"
Ellen once recorded, "Mother burning for theological controversy, hoping
to reduce Father to a sense of the error of his ways. But each charge ran
itself out in vain the smiling man had shifted his position."

The divinity school at Harvard was not yet in a relenting mood, but
the university, having recently made him a Doctor of Laws, sealed its ap-
proval at the annual commencement of 1867 by electing him an overseer.
And almost at the same moment he appeared for the second time as the
orator of Phi Beta Kappa. It had been nearly thirty years since his address
on the American scholar, and the second Phi Beta Kappa address was like
a historical supplement to the first. It seemed to prove his prophecy of 1837
correct. It also suggested new advances for liberalism. It openly upheld
women's claim to suffrage and cited "the search for just rules affecting
labor" as another evidence of progress. It made much of science as a force
of progress. It glorified the cultured minority. Self-reliance and the moral
sentiment came to the surface once more. But it was far from true that in
this address Emerson reached "the highest mark of his power as a writer" ;
and the solid but not extraordinary virtues it possessed were, moreover,
obscured by the accident of the orator's physical distress when he read it.
Ill health dogged Emerson that year, and on that day, for the first time
in Ellen's memory, his eyes refused to serve him. He could hardly read.

But he continued with his lectures. He culled pages from old ones and
carried them about New England and New York and even to the West.
In December, 1867, he was off to Chicago and lectured there after appear-
ing at scattered lyceums as far west as Des Moines. At St. Louis he stirred
up his friends the Hegelians. But to his journal he confessed that Hegel
was, to him, a bore.

Next spring he was as far south as Brooklyn. The New York journey,
commonplace to him, got new animation from Ellen, now frequently his
traveling companion and general assistant. Traveling was still an adventure
for her. "Father came," her pen fairly sang to her sister, Edith, "and oh!
the grandeur of starting to go to New York! The new-varnished car with

436 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

the exciting inscription 'New York & BRISTOL STEAMBOAT Line,' the
stateroom tickets in Father's pocket, the consciousness that there was a
new trunk with a canvass-cover (who would ever have thought of my
arriving at that dignity?) all full of new clothes, and a red flannel dress-
ing-gown, was enough to puff up anybody. I finished Father's new watch-
guard and presented it on the way, and Father read me all the poems in
the Transcript. . . . We were having a beautiful time when the boat be-
came so very unsteady that I went to bed." In the morning, she said, "the
anxious Papa was up and dressed and begging for me at twenty minutes
past six."

In New York came the first test of Emerson's supposed familiarity with
the surroundings still strange to Ellen, in spite of her visits there. Ellen, not
much impressed by his performance, told Edith the whole story: "I never
had thought that Father wouldn't know the way, but he did not in the
least. So I told him Uncle William said Canal Street; down Broadway;
and Fulton St. and we walked along securely, but oh! so slowly that when
we reached Broadway I was tired. So we went to Trinity Church and sat
there and enjoyed the window till it was time for Brooklyn, and easily then
found our way to my much-desired haven."

In Brooklyn they found Henry Ward Beecher's church almost empty,
but it filled fast. Ellen must have watched her father for signs of panic, for
she knew too well his fear of being caught and indoctrinated with ortho-
doxy. But he "was intent on the people's faces, and said there were few
Calvinists here, one woman, that just came in, was, and one or two men
but most of them were no such thing, it always made its mark on people's
faces, he could always tell them by sight, or Methodists either, Methodists
were very different, but equally marked." Having been persuaded to go
to church with his daughter to hear the famous preacher, Emerson now-
faced a new test of endurance. Some one was speaking, and Ellen looked
round. "There was Mr Beecher making the first prayer. I was pleased to
see that Father was so much interested at discovering him," she wrote, "that
there could be no doubt he had come willingly, for I had from the begin-
ning made such a point of coming that I had given him no smallest chance
to be recusant, and had feared secretly that it was wholly a self-sacrifice
for my benefit. Dear Mr Beecher, you are just as good as you were ... I
could not wish that Father should see you to better advantage than he does
at this minute. . . . Mr Beecher stopped to read some notices. . . . finally
he began to praise Mr Emerson, and to tell the congregation that he was
to lecture in Brooklyn this week, and when & where. Then ... he ...
preached about joining the church. There was nothing for it, but to forget
poor Papa as entirely as I could and devote myself to Mr Beecher on my

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 437

own account. . . . Father of course enjoyed the loud and cheerful uproar
of the singing . . ."

They went out by a side door but soon found themselves entirely blocked.
Emerson "caught a word from the winds/3 as Ellen told Edith, "and said
"Why! it is General Grant!' and hastened to push forward." The poet, still
young at heart, caught his daughter's youthful enthusiasm and surrendered
completely to it. "Father and I," Ellen said, "joined madly in this pursuit,
and ran along, now in the street, now out, like little boys beside the trainers,
and one way & another succeeded in seeing his head & shoulders, and, now
and then, an interrupted glimpse of his face. ... as we walked down the
ferry-street, we saw the procession and its outrunners turning into it from
a side-street nearer the boat than we, and immediately it was 'Up steam!
and after them O my Soul!5 . . . Then Father, saying cWe have nabbed
him now; he can't get to the boat without our seeing him,3 manned the
small gate, and posted me in an advantageous position behind him. But we
were outwitted. General Grant went in at the horse-gate. Father quickly
discovering his intention rushed to the gate and saw him very well, so
did I. He had an army-hat, but was dressed in old— Father wanted to say
shabby— clothes with nothing in the least military about him. We could see
just how tall & just how broad he was, and Father remembered and re-
sented Edward's saying he was as large as Mr Geo. Brooks, declaring he
was larger."

Emerson was insatiably curious about the man who had, people said,
won the war. "All the trouble about squeezing in," Ellen wrote, "and the
fact that we were all gazing at the General & not at the boat resulted in
the boat's going off without us, so we had a long opportunity of staring.
Our victim stood with his eyes cast down a little, as motionless as possible.
Now arrived the boat from New York and instantly the news spread to all
her passengers who crowded with all their might to get their share of the
show. Poor Gen. Grant hastened onto the boat and into the ladies' cabin,
his grateful country's people close at his heels or running in front as before.
In the cabin he was cornered, every one formed in circles round him and
then they began shaking his hand. Father & I as well as every one else
watching his every movement, and Father approved, in my ear, the line
of his nose, his 'resemblance to Michael Burke,' (which I do not see) his
eye, and called my attention to the shape of his head. The moment he
left the boat, we tumultuously followed and surrounded him, till he made
his escape into a horse-car, and Father told me as we walked up that he
had been much pleased with his manner and was glad there was nothing
distinguished in his look."

After these adventures the Concord villagers arrived safely at the house

438 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of the literary lioness Mrs. Botta, whose guests they were to be; but Emer-
son was hardly in trim for his Brooklyn lectures. Mrs. Botta saw that heroic
measures were necessary and promptly took charge of him. His cold., as
Ellen told the story on the following day, "grew much worse, and last
night she sent for Dr Knczsoffski a hydropathic doctor who packed Father's
throat and came again at six this morning and packed him all over. Then
at noon she introduced a rubbing-doctor who rubbed his throat, and he
is just barely able to speak (in public) now, and has gone over to Brooklyn
in a hack."

In July, Emerson persuaded Lidian, who was seldom farther from
home than Boston, to go with him for a few days in Newport, the Rhode
Island resort. In August a lecture at Middlebury, Vermont., was an excuse
for him and Ellen to climb Mt Mansfield from Underbill. The voice of
the mountain was hard to hear in the uproar made by a party of players
at the top, "filling the house, too, all night with violent fun.33 Though
balked in their enjoyment of what Emerson called their "religious visits to
the crags,35 he and Ellen had made up in advance for their loss by spending
a day on the banks of the Winooski River at Essex Junction. Some days
later he was guarding Bush alone against the danger of the night robberies
from which Concord was suffering.

Deserting his sentinel's post, he got away to the Boston banquet for the
Chinese embassy. There, as a lover of Oriental lore, he fittingly honored
Confucius and his wisdom along with gunpowder and printing and the
patient labor and stoical economy of the Chinese immigrants of California.
His speech was brief, and, if William Clapp's story was accurate, was de-
livered without benefit of manuscript but in a form similar to the extant
printed version, After the banquet Clapp asked for the copy he had been
promised for the press, Emerson, pursued even to the cloakroom, rum-
maged in vain in his old-style carpetbag and concluded that he must have
left the manuscript in Concord. But the press, still not willing to be put off
though it was now past midnight, insisted that he write out the speech from
memory; and, after a persuasive word from Charles Sumner, he agreed.
Though he was taken to a brilliantly lighted room to do the writing, he
wanted still more light, and candles were accordingly brought. From time
to time he stopped to ask Sumner's confirmation of some passage. It was
perhaps one o'clock in the morning when he finished. Next day he called
at the newspaper office and made a few corrections.

In the space of a couple of years he suffered serious losses from the
ranks of his friends and family. In a single month of 1867 had occurred
the deaths of both Sarah Alden Ripley, the aunt who had spurred him up
some of the lower rounds of the ladder of learning, and Abel Adams, his

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 439

faithful financial adviser. A bequest of $2000 to Emerson, with $1000
to each of the three children, showed how Adams had kept his respect for
his former pastor. Lucy Brown, Lidian's sister, a familiar figure in Concord;
Susan Haven Emerson, William's wife, a resident of the village; and Wil-
liam himself all died in 1868. William returned to New York after his
wife's death, but on a day in September, only a few hours after Emerson's
arrival at his bedside, he was dead. He was the last of Emerson's brothers,
and his death was a great loss. His probity had shone "in all his face and
demeanour" and had been easily legible in the voluminous correspondence
that had passed between New York and Concord over a long period of
years. The two brothers had never been far apart even in the matter of
religious opinion. When William's funeral was held in Concord, Ellen was
troubled because pastor Grindall Reynolds read the usual service. At many
funerals it had seemed to her to be appropriate, but she was sure that here
it jarred on the minds of all who knew that neither Emerson nor his brother,
nor his brother's sons, had accepted the creed it implied. Emerson, now
sixty-five years old, walked with his two nephews behind their father's
hearse.

In the autumn, when he lectured again in Boston, Emerson drew an
audience that was a fit symbol of the regard which the cultured persons
of that city had finally agreed was his due. Lowell was spokesman for
Boston and for much more of America when he published in The Nation
his homage to Emerson the lecturer. To Lowell, Emerson seemed to merit
Ben Jonson's praise of Bacon as the one noble speaker of his time, full of
gravity and nobly censorious in his language and so pithy in his thought
that his hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. This
was the judgment of a friend and did not describe the Emerson of the
present so much as of the past. Leslie Stephen, listening to the first lecture
of 1868 in a more critical mood, thought it rambling and incoherent. Cer-
tainly the purchasers of tickets who made, as Emerson said, "all my net
receipts, as I read it $1655.75, which is by much the largest sum I ever
received for work of this kind," did not hear so strong a voice as had been
heard in earlier years.

The course was hardly over before his son-in-law, William Forbes,
suggested that "a private class of young men," William Forbes's own
friends and acquaintances, should be summoned "for readings of poetry
or prose, & conversation." Emerson was delighted. James Thayer and
Others were brought into the directorate and agreed on a plan of readings
to a limited group of both men and women, a friendly circle in which the
lecturer could feel perfectly at ease. "I know what books I have found
unforgetable," Emerson assured Thayer, "& what passages in books. . . .

THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I should like, in poetry, especially, to mark certain authors & certain pas-
sages which I prize, & to state on what grounds I prize them; & to dis-
tinguish good poetry from what passes for good/3 He thought that he could
give some vogue to Oriental poetry and other "unfrequented sources'3
which he admired.

Measured in financial terms the readings were by no means so profitable
as the lectures of a few weeks earlier, but in other respects they were per-
haps as successful. The class was private and sharply restricted. The meet-
ings, probably lasting not quite two hours, required ten successive Satur-
days, or kept as near to that schedule as possible. A ticket for the course,
so it was rumored, cost ten dollars. It came out through one member of
the class that the readings were so quiet and leisurely that they gave one
the sense of repose. Emerson struck Annie Fields as "extremely natural
and easy55 in manners and speech. Once he shut his eyes as he endeavored
to recall a passage from Ben Jonson. Gradually, from week to week, he
picked his way among his old favorites, and fay the end of the course had
covered "the great circle of English poetry from Chaucer to Walt Whit-
man.5' There was a difference of opinion as to whether he read too little
and commented too much or commented too little and read too much. A
reliable account of what he said on Walt Whitman might be among the
most interesting of lost Emersoniana. But Ellen, often her father's faithful
reporter, had sailed away in the autumn for a visit of some months to Fayal
in the Azores; and if anybody else wrote an adequate account of the
Boston readings of this winter, it has not yet come to light.

Numerous lecture appointments took Emerson out of town and even
a few hundred miles westward before his Boston readings were ended.
During the same eleven or twelve weeks he managed to give a whole course
of lectures at Providence, where he soon afterwards added a couple of
readings similar to those he had given in Boston. He gave private readings
for friends or for clubs} and he lectured here and there through the season.
Making a speech at the Humboldt centennial celebration in Boston and
seeing the two volumes of The Prose Works through the press were for
him lesser events of the year 1869.

One of his important days this year was the 2 6th of May, when he
spoke before the New England Woman Suffrage Association and, to con-
firm the liberalism of his speech, allowed the women to elect him a vice-
president. As late as 1867 he had shown signs of continued resistance to the
feminists. When Alcott had gladly agreed to sign Lucy Stone's appeal for
suffrage rights Emerson had refused. But now he said what was equivalent
to signing that appeal. The suffrage movement, no whim but an organic
impulse generated in the progress of civilization., was right, he declared,

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 441

and the question might now well be put to the vote. Woman's claim to the
ballot was sure to be granted eventually; and when it was, he believed,
voting would be reformed, would be clean and honest and even polite.
He indulged in poetical fancies regarding that happy future and conjured
up palaces for voting booths instead of the taverns and corner groceries.
It was obvious that he was not going to stand in the way of the new move-
ment, yet the women did not escape without a few familiar words on
special feminine virtues and graces. He was still restrained, and some two
years later, in a family tea-table debate on the same subject, he drew fire
from both the radical and conservative sides. "Father;3 Ellen put it, "won't
speak one word till particularly requested he gives his views and as a
reward has directly the fury of all his household levelled at them,"

He was conscientious about his responsibility as an overseer of Harvard.
He agreed with many other persons that the university needed reform; and
he was presumably one of the majority of the overseers voting to approve
the selection of Charles Eliot as the new, reforming president, for he was
on the overseers5 committee of notification. When hazing was discussed,
he looked for counsel to Frederic Hedge, a person acquainted in his boy-
hood with conditions in Germany; but what action he took as a result is
not clear. For years the question of compulsory chapel troubled him as
well as the university authorities in general. There was much debate, and
in the meantime the students had to go to prayers.

As Emerson was soon enthusiastic about President Eliot, he was doubt-
less on the side of the innovators when the overseers endorsed the new
elective system early in 1870 and recommended its extension. He attended
the overseers' meeting that voted to ask the corporation not to permit the
granting of any degree in the academic department without an examination,
as "under the present system a degree is hardly more than a certificate of
residence at the University for a specified time and is of comparatively
little value." The corporation placed him on a committee to present a new
plan for the granting of Master's degrees. The plan recommended that an
end be put to the old system of offering a Master's degree, for a small fee,
to any well-behaved graduate of the college a few years after his gradua-
tion. Emerson often served on overseers' committees that visited the various
departments of the college. He aided the Harvard College Library by steer-
ing into it the books Carlyle had collected for the writing of his history of
Frederick the Great and wished to give to some library as a peace offering
to New England. The gift of these books was Carlyle's apology for his earlier
bitterness toward the New England antislavery reformers.

In October of 1869 Emerson carried the first four chapters of his "so-
called new book" to his friend James Fields, the publisher; and in March

442 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of 1870 he was in print once more. The title Society and Solitude signified
a long and still undecided contest between imponderable forces in his own
experience. But except for its use in the first essay of this new series, it was
merely a convenience, a roof under which he now stored old lumber from
his workshop of earlier years. The book sold faster than its predecessors, but
he saw that its popularity was mainly due to his fame. "Your name," he
said, "has been seen so often that your book must be worth buying." This
was doubtless the right explanation, though Carlyle averred that Emerson
was here his old self and something more and judged the style "inimitable,
best— Emersonian throughout." But Carlyle still looked in vain for the full
recognition of evil he had repeatedly demanded. "How you go," he com-
plained, "as if altogether on the 'Over-Soul/ the Ideal, the Perfect or Uni-
versal and Eternal in this life of ours; and take so little heed of the frightful
quantities of friction and perverse impediment there everywhere are; the
reflections upon which in my own poor life made me now and then very
sad, as I read you."

By the autumn of 1869, after a period of incubation, the University
Lectures, pointing vaguely in the direction of a graduate school, were enter-
ing upon their brief and unhappy existence at Harvard. Emerson, tem-
porarily a member of the faculty, found himself advertised to give a series,
not of half a dozen loosely connected or unconnected discourses such as he
was used to reading on the lyceum platform, but of eighteen lectures theo-
retically forming a unit and concentrated on his calendar between April 26
and June 3. Instead of being a free lance, he was a component part of an
omnibus course in philosophy. Francis Bowen, more than once his severe
critic, led off with the philosophy of the seventeenth century, with John
Fiske on Positivism and C. S. Peirce on the British logicians following.
Emerson's friends Cabot and Hedge came next with roughly concurrent
lectures. Cabot's were on Kant. Hedge's were on theism, pantheism, and
atheism. Emerson's own part of the course was announced as "Natural
History of the Intellect." George Fisher on Stoicism was last.

Now, at close range, Emerson did not find his new duties attractive.
He knew that any such systematic study as the university expected was not
for him. He still could not take formal philosophy with determined serious-
ness. He could not, he admitted, "read Hegel, or Schelling, or find interest
in what is told me from them." It was a foregone conclusion that he would,
for the most part, persist in his own very informal method. What attempts
he did, nevertheless, make this year to arrange his thoughts more conven-
tionally were painful.

On April 26 he began his instruction on schedule. Francis G. Peabody,
one of the mere handful of registrants in University Lectures, scribbled
a few catch words and captured a few characteristically Emersonian turns

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 443

of thought and speech. According to Peabody the Concord philosopher
denied any attempt at a system and wanted only to dot a little curve of
personal observation. System-makers were gnats straining at the universe.
The note-taking grew erratic after the opening weeks. Peabody got some
idealistic and pantheistic ideas out of the fourth lecture. He recorded that
mind made the world and matter was dead mind. He seems to have failed
to attend the sixth and eleventh meetings. Frequently he ended his version
of some Emersonian dictum with an exclamation point, presumably a
tribute to boldness or originality. He noted in his clipped college jargon
that XIV was cut by F. G. P. and XV by R. W. E. The truth was that
Emerson stayed at home because he could not get the fifteenth lecture ready.
He said he had the remaining ones pretty well mapped out, and the people
at Bush heard him boast that "If the Divine Providence will carry me
through this next lecture Fm not afraid of the rest.53 But Fisher, the last
man in the composite course, was to supplant him the following Friday,
and Emerson had to, or was glad to, cut his schedule two meetings short.
Peabody ended with fewer pages of notes on Emerson than on any other
teacher in the course except Cabot, though this did not necessarily mean
that Emerson was either one of the worst or one of the best of the
seven expounders of philosophy. His was, according to Peabody, the only
one of the seven series of lectures which was not rounded out by an
examination.

Emerson had seldom been more unhappy than in those spring weeks
when his college duties were "eating him all up." Ellen thought that "he
never was so hard worked & hurried before, and of course he never was
less able to bear it." It is doubtful whether his spirits were much affected
by the scant attendance. At any rate, his colleagues could have been
little better off, and he himself might perhaps have had the greatest num-
ber of disciples if the university had granted the petition of the divinity
school boys who wanted to attend his class without paying the fee. But the
experiment in university teaching not only came too late in his life but
could never have been congenial to him. He complained to Carlyle that "it
made me a prisoner, took away all rights of friendship, honor, and justice,
and held me to such frantic devotion to my work as must spoil that also."
He was paid $8.75 for each of his sixteen lectures.

To W. H. Channing, a guest at Bush a few weeks after the lectures
ended, it seemed that Emerson needed no other medicine than the routine
of domestic life. Emerson walked with his guest in the woods to show his
favorite hemlocks, oaks, pines, and wild flowers; talked of Thoreau as they
passed the crossed tree trunk that marked the site of the Walden hut; read
passages from his English journal of 1847-1848; discussed philosophy from
the Hindus to Hegel; volunteered some criticism of contemporary authors;

444 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

commented keenly on the latest scientific investigation as showing the unity
of life through the whole universe. But what most impressed the impression-
able Channing was the charm of the family life and the pride Emerson took
in his children. He seemed more genial than Channing had known him
before. He was teaching his children entire independence of his own per-
sonal faith, though Elizabeth Hoar declared that to her he was the most
profoundly religious person she had ever known. Ellen, now in the fore-
ground, read Homer, the Greek dramatists, and Dante under Elizabeth
Hoar's guidance; or she filed her father's correspondence and put his manu-
scripts and journals in order or helped her mother manage the household.

But all was not so well as Channing thought. The Forbeses, better in-
formed than he, schemed vacations from Bush for the sake of Emerson's
health. A couple of fine days with Ellen at the then fashionable Nantasket
Beach, where Emerson observed with great interest "the belles, Grecian
bend and all/' could not cure his weariness. Not even the news of the quick
Prussian victories in the opening days of the Franco-Prussian War was suf-
ficiently strong medicine, though he apparently associated the Prussians with
the prestige of German philosophy and of Goethe. He was distressed by
the conviction that he must write but could not. The chief trouble was that
the English publisher Hotten had threatened to collect and reprint old
pieces Emerson wanted to revise or forget. Tiresome negotiations had to be
carried on through Moncure Conway and Alexander Ireland. Conway and
Ireland, having at first innocently abetted the scheme of the publisher,
now persuaded him to wait on condition that a new volume of Emerson's
own collecting and editing would be furnished— a volume that turned out,
after years of worry on the part of its author, to be Letters and Social Aims.
For Emerson the obligation to get the promised book into shape was like
a suspended sentence of life imprisonment.

There was also the introduction he had promised to write for an Amer-
ican edition of Plutarch's Morals, the old translation by "Several Hands"
that William Goodwin was revising. Intermittently, from January to the
late summer or autumn of 1870, Emerson toiled at it. But this was a labor
of love, for since early youth the book had been "like my conscience,"
Emerson told his readers. The actual work must have consisted largely in
a search through his old journals and essays and a joining together of the
fragments he brought up from the depths. When the reader came suddenly
upon such a declaration as "The central fact is the superhuman intelligence,
pouring into us from its unknown fountain, to be received with religious
awe, and defended from any mixture of our will" he might as well have
been leafing through some essay of Emerson's published nearly thirty years

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 445

earlier, though the passage was not even at this late date a misstatement
of its author's still firm Transcendental faith.

Yet even such a labor of love as the introduction could distress an old
man. According to Ellen the "wicked Plutarch" hung on her father "with
a heavy weight." She noticed that he read both old and new translations
and bought for the occasion a Greek Plutarch and compared the English
"all along, with that/3 "Besides," she told Edith, "he has collected all the
authors who have written about Plutarch, and he has had a really delight-
ful time reading the whole. But alas! he hasn't yet begun to write and
doesn't feel quite able to.33 Doubtless Ellen overestimated the amount of
reading he did in the Greek text; but he took his task seriously, somehow
pieced together a charming essay on Plutarch, and earned all of the $500
the publishers paid him.

During the first days of September, while both the Hotten book and
the introduction to Plutarch were still on his conscience, he was persuaded
to go with Edward to Maine and New Hampshire on the plea that he must
show his son Aunt Mary's old haunts. He led the way to Elm Vale, where
twilight and clouds did not wholly obscure "the gleam of the lake and the
fine mountain terrace and elms in the lowland," and "looked with the eyes
of old times at Aunt Mary's Window/3 In the White Mountains he and
Edward came upon James Bryce, future author of the classic British analysis
of the American state. As it chanced, Bryce had letters of introduction to
Emerson in his pocket. Bryce and Edward, rambling off into a wilder region,
came upon Stillman, the artist of the Adirondack Club of years past.

Lecturing slackened in the following winter. Emerson went to New York
to speak at the annual reunion and dinner of the New England Society in
late December. In January he visited a few lyceums in New England towns
and went as far west as Buffalo and Detroit. Home again, he made his
brief speech at the meeting for the organization of the museum of fine arts
in Boston. Then he faced once more, with waning courage, the Harvard
course; for, though a failure at first trial, it had been granted another
year of life and he had somehow allowed himself to be put into the galling
harness a second time. He yielded too easily to requests for his time that
were coming in from all directions and was soon, as Ellen said, "all snarled
up in many engagements which the great cloud of lectures renders embar-
rassing." He altered his Harvard schedule of 1870, substituting a few
manuscripts not used then for those he wanted to omit. But he had lost
his sureness of touch and every responsibility was a mountain. His promise
to publisher Hotten made even the distant future look black.

Suddenly, before he could finish the eighteen lectures at the university,

446 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he got an offer of relief , an invitation from John M. Forbes, Edith's father-
in-law, to join the Forbes party in a journey, mainly by private Pullman
car, to the Pacific coast. California, the wonderful country, lay on his horizon
as dreamlike as Japan or Tahiti. Lidian, Ellen, and Edward were unanimous
in favoring the journey, and the doctor joined in their appeal. Emerson
was convinced that he could take care of Hotten on his return, he was
willing to cut his Harvard lectures short once more, and he sent in his
resignation as chairman of the overseers' committee on foreign languages.
On the afternoon of April 1 1, the day when he was to have read the next
to the last of his lectures in Boylston Hall, he was on his way to California.
The party, once they had assembled in Chicago, where George Pullman
himself saw them off, were nine persons. Edith and William Forbes were
Emerson's special aides. James Thayer, the husband of one of Uncle Samuel
Ripley's daughters, was the chief reporter of table and Pullman car talk
and historian of the expedition. He described the meeting, in Utah, with
Brigham Young, whose secretary, better informed than the president of the
Latter-Day Saints himself about literary reputations, recognized the essayist
and inquired, "Is this the justly celebrated Ralph Waldo Emerson?" Thayer
got a few vivid impressions of the vast desert region farther west. At a
little station in Nevada the air was invigorating in the early morning, a lone
meadow lark was singing, two or three Chinamen were standing near a
hut, and a white dog was jumping and playing about them. During the
day the travelers saw many Indians, "short and dirty creatures,— Utes and
Shoshones," owners of the wigwams, "all smoky at the open top," that were
visible here and there on the plains. On the following morning it was im-
possible for the passengers in the palace car "Huron" to see enough of the
beautifully forested Sierra Nevada as the train passed through mile after
mile of sheds that protected it against the snows still deep on these moun-
tains. Thayer also recorded that in San Francisco the party observed China-
town's night life in theater, gambling houses, opium dens, restaurants, and
joss houses; and he put down Emerson's mild comment on the opium dens
—that there was "not much aspiration there,— or inspiration." Emerson noted
in his own memorandum book that on the i3th he arrived in Chicago,
that on the igth he called on Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, and that
on the 22d he was watching the sea lions on the shore of the Pacific. The
next day, Sunday, in San Francisco, he read, it seems, "Immortality," a
lecture he commonly reserved for Sundays. On the 2 6th, doing what he
could to meet further demands without any special effort, he began to read
a short series of lectures in Doctor Stebbins's Unitarian church.

The San Franciscans were curious about the Transcendentalist. To a
writer for the Daily Evening Bulletin he seemed "tall, straight, well formed,

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 447

with a head constructed on the utility rather than the ornamental principle."
He was refreshing to see in spite of his black garb. His audience, having
gathered after only a few hours5 notice, doubtless listened to his first lecture
at Stebbins's church in a mood of determined appreciation. He accidentally
upset a vase in the pulpit, and when he descended and gathered up the
flowers he was applauded. His style was thought "entirely colloquial," but
people listened "with rapt attention." He apparently made no effort to
impress his hearers. According to a local critic who heard the second lec-
ture, they "would not dream that he had said anything during the whole
evening which he thought particularly worthy of being said." The man-
ner of the lecturer was much what many of his audiences had observed
in recent years. "His notes lie before him—a bulky mass of manuscript/5 the
San Francisco critic put it. "On commencing his discourse he fingers them
over backwards and forwards, as if at a loss whether to commence in the
first page or the middle; and finally selecting a good starting point, he
begins in a conventional tone of voice to read. He is so familiar with them
that he does not confine himself closely to them. . . . Sandwiched in be-
tween his selections from his manuscript are interpolations improvised for
the occasion. . . . But the difference between hearing him read his works
and reading them one's self is certainly in favor of the latter." In a third
lecture he was full of anecdote and ended with a tribute to the resources
of California.

His further lecturing at San Francisco and an engagement at Oakland
were postponed till he could visit some of the natural wonders of the state.
Even before he had seen these marvels he had fallen in love with Cali-
fornia. He wrote home that "if we were all young,— as some of us are not,—
we might each of us claim his quarter-section of the Government, & plant
grapes & oranges, & never come back to your east winds & cold summers."
Nine or ten days among the mountains and trees of the Yosemite and
Mariposa regions left him aghast with admiration, and there was no lack
of Californians willing to encourage him to remain in that mood.

Hearing that Emerson was in the Yosemite Valley but about to leave
it, the young Scotch-American naturalist and explorer John Muir pro-
tested. "Do not thus drift away with the mob while the spirits of these rocks
& waters hail you after long waiting as their kinsman & persuade you to
closer communion," he admonished, and urged Emerson to join him "in
a months worship with Nature in the high temples of the great Sierra Crown
beyond our holy Yosemite." He assured Emerson that it would cost him
"nothing save the time & very little of that for you will be mostly in
Eternity." Muir, a kind of ecstatic Thoreau devoted to giant trees, moun-
tains, and glaciers instead of hills, ponds, and marshes, managed to see

448 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Emerson several times and tried hard to convert him to the religion of the
outdoor life. The thirty-three-year-old Muir, apparently unimpressed by
any signs of age in his new friend, was disappointed but persistent. He was
sure his man was a spiritual kinsman.

He was right about the spiritual kinship, and, though without Muir's
exuberance, Emerson was sufficiently impressed by his month in California
to write from Truckee on his way home: "There is an awe & terror lying
over this new garden—all empty as yet of any adequate people, yet with
this assured future in American hands,— unequalled in climate & produc-
tion. Chicago & St Louis are toys to it in its assured felicity. I should think
no young man would come back from it." Early in July, when Emerson
had been home for some weeks, Muir wrote him a new prose poem on
California. Muir was about to "start for the high Sierra East of Yosemite"
and "would willingly/3 he said, "walk all the way to your Concord if so
I could have you for a companion." Some correspondence passed between
the two men, but the Californian probably did not know how much honor
the Concord man did him. Emerson began a new list of what he called
"My Men" with Thomas Carlyle and ended it with John Muir.

In October, California, in the person, not of John Muir, but of Bret
Harte, arrived in Concord. Ellery Channing "positively refused to have any
part in his reception, guidance, or dinner"; but the Emersons and others
offered their hospitality, and Harte came to Bush. At the preliminary skir-
mish which ensued, Emerson stuck to his guns when Harte told him that
the passage in Society and Solitude about learning and religion entering
the frontiersman's hut along with the piano was false. Harte averred that
"It is the gamblers who bring in the music to California. It is the prostitute
who brings hi the New York fashions of dress there, and so throughout."
Emerson retorted that he spoke also "from Pilgrim experience, and knew
on good grounds the resistless culture that religion effects."

Early the following month Bret Harte was back at Bush again. A strik-
ing figure with his blue eyes, his long nose, and his black hair just turning
gray, he sat in the green rocking chair before the blazing fireplace as
he filled out Emerson's imperfect reminiscences of California with his own
abundant information and gave his withering judgment of Joaquin Miller.
Ellen, though quickly convinced that Bret Harte was attractive except for
his detestable habit of smoking, waited hopefully, no doubt, for some illumi-
nation on his writings. A faint illumination came before dinner was over
but reached her only through her sister, as she explained: "I did not hear,
but Edith did, when Mother said, £Mr Harte I wanted to ask you if you
have really witnessed the instances of disinterested feeling, which you de-
scribe, in rough people, or rather whether you know that such have been

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 449

by personal experience?' There! wasn't that the test question of a radical
in search of fact? Edith says his answer was non-committal, she thus reports
it. 'Of course it must be there, if I said it was.3 1^ Ellen, however call that
a clear admission that he has never seen it, has created his tales out of
the whole cloth."

What Bret Harte made most of among his impressions of Emerson was
a "self-indulgence" quite out of character in one reputed remote from
sublunary commonplaces. He burlesqued the Concord sage's invitation to
a " £wet night' with him, over a glass of sherry," an invitation that had
been hospitably emphasized with a gesture of the sage's cigar. Harte failed
to understand that both the sherry and the cigar had served mainly to
cover up his host's troublesome shyness. But Emerson had explained to
James Thayer a few months earlier. He rarely cared to finish a cigar alone,
"But in company ... To one who found it difficult to meet people, as
he did, the effect of a cigar was agreeable; one who is smoking may be as
silent as he likes, and yet be good company."

Emerson was literary man of all work. Ellery Channing's colloquial
poem The Wanderer, momentarily expected from the press at the time of
Bret Harte's visit to Bush in early November, had cost him trouble and
money, though he had been surprised by the untamed poet's docility about
metrical changes. He still gave some lectures and addresses, and the rest
of the family waited anxiously for news of his success or failure. In August
he had made his brief address on Walter Scott at the Massachusetts His-
torical Society's centenary celebration. Late in November he set off to the
West, disconsolate at the thought of spending Thanksgiving away from
home. Chicago, in spite of her great fire, wanted him. Ellen implored him
"to write his lecture large and to give up turning over & skipping." At
Chicago he was greeted, it was said, with mild applause by a "coldly-
intellectual" audience. At least one of the audience was impressed by the
quaintness of the lecturer's appearance. Dressed in clerical garb and wear-
ing his hair long and "combed closely to his head," the celebrity from the
East had a platform manner "slightly stiff and awkward but that of the
true gentleman."

There were a few more lectures or readings in Illinois and Iowa. Later
in the winter Emerson kept his engagements in Baltimore and Washington
and in at least one or two other towns outside New England. Coming
down from Washington to Baltimore to hear him, Walt Whitman and John
Burroughs, once his enthusiastic disciples, found that he had lost much
of his old appeal. They agreed that his lectures showed no progress in
many years and were irrelevant to the problems of 1872. A little later,
as Emerson was boarding his train in Washington, Burroughs found out

450 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

from him, he said, what was the matter between him and Whitman. Emer-
son wanted Walt's friends to quarrel a little more with Walt and make
him pay more attention to the requirements of artistic taste. Whitman
doubtless needed such advice, but it made his loyal admirer boil. Bur-
roughs had, indeed, not quite cooled since hearing, a little earlier, that
Emerson had warned Whitman, through a mutual acquaintance, to write
the songs of a nation and not simply make inventories.

At Washington, Emerson visited Charles Sumner, whose invitation
Whitman had carried to Baltimore. With Baird of the Smithsonian Insti-
tution he discussed "present aspects of science, Darwin, Agassiz." Undoubt-
edly he was already well aware of the sharp rift between Darwin and
Agassiz. At the Saturday Club he must have heard Agassiz state his own
side of the quarrel. He had long owned a copy of Contributions to the
Natural History of the United States, a book in which Agassiz had repeated
his belief that the "branches in the animal kingdom are founded upon dif-
ferent plans of structure, and for that very reason have embraced from the
beginning representatives between which there could be no community of
origin." In the same work Agassiz had declared plainly enough that "the
arguments presented by Darwin in favor of a universal derivation, from
one primary form, of all the peculiarities existing now among living beings,
have not made the slightest impression on my mind." Emerson himself
made no sign, it seems, of sympathy with his friend Agassiz in this debate ;
if he was unable to make the Darwinian doctrines do his own philosophy
much service, he was not at all likely to be frightened by them. The Descent
of Man was stirring up a storm of indignation among the orthodox, but
Emerson had absorbed Lamarck's theories many years before even Darwin's
work On the Origin of Species had appeared, and now there was no reason
why he should be disturbed.

He did more than his scheduled lecturing in Washington, where there
were many things to remind him of the war years and their results. He
lectured in the G, A. R. course. He was not only taken to see the Negro
students in Howard University but "compelled by an artifice to speak to
them." He hated to be taken by surprise and hated extempore speaking.
"Nevertheless," he told Lidian, "I survived." The speech, at least partly
extempore, it seems, and an extremely poor one in his opinion, was re-
ported pretty fully in the press, much against his will. He quickly began to
receive letters of congratulation. His subject had been "What Books to
Read," and his very natural inclusion of his favorite George Herbert's poems
among his choice titles seems to have caused a run on that book in shops
as far away from the capital as Boston.

At the Concord Lyceum he was announced long in advance to lecture,

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 451

especially for the occasion, "upon local matters of interest to all citizens
of Concord.35 But when the yth of February arrived he read his essay
"Immortality." Alcott noticed the eager interest of the Concord audience,
and there were other evidences of the appeal of this charming commentary
on death and life. A few weeks later, when Mrs. Thoreau was taken seri-
ously ill, Lidian hastened to see her. "True to their instincts," Ellen told
her sister Edith, "they began patting with velvet paws but with a sharp
claw out enough to scratch, and had quite a terrific skirmish, till at last
the stern joy of finding themselves well matched reconciled them, and they
ended with a love-feast & a beautiful time. Mrs Thoreau repeated Cato's
Soliloquy with enthusiasm, and said she rejoiced in dying, and Mother sent
her a jar of honey dropping from the comb, & certain sheets from Father's
'Immortality,3 and Miss Thoreau said she enjoyed them to the utmost."
On the 1 2th Mrs. Thoreau, stoical as her son Henry had been, died after
remarking to her daughter, "It has been a pleasant sickness, hasn't it
Sophia?"

The annoying Hotten book made some progress. And Parnassus, the
collection of favorite poems from many authors with which Edith had for
years helped her father, had seemed almost ready in the fall of 1871 ; but
Osgood had decided that, before he published, he wanted a commentary
to connect the selections and to secure the copyright. This connecting com-
mentary was destined to be a mere publisher's dream; but the book was
held up and, in the following February, Osgood, still unsatisfied, offered
$500 on the day of publication and a royalty of 5 percent on the retail
price if Emerson would provide a critical introduction to each division.
This scheme also was destined to fail, but there was further delay.

James Fields wanted another series of "literary conversations" for April
and May, and Emerson agreed. In the meantime Mrs. Fields, apparently-
persuaded that a sort of preliminary, restricted showing of her lion would
be wise, had him read "Amita," his account of Aunt Mary. Nearly forty-
persons Mrs. Fields had invited to her home for the occasion were edified
by what she called "an extraordinary picture of a strange stoical noble
character." As the character of the amazing aunt unfolded, Doctor Holmes,
a mixer of medicine with fiction, and young Harry James, later known for
novels that were sometimes as much psychological studies as fiction, lis-
tened with interest.

The new Fields scheme for six Monday afternoon lectures, informal
enough to be called "conversations," became a reality at Mechanics3 Hall,
Boston, in the middle of April, 1872. The collections Emerson had made
for Parnassus were handy source material, and he had his numerous other
manuscripts to draw upon for much of his substance. Doubtless it was

452 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

mainly because of his age and his too hasty preparation that he often failed
to establish the connection between text and commentary. He made aston-
ishing leaps from piece to piece in his readings. He promised Ellen that
he would avoid such errors in the future, but at the next lecture she would
find that he had not reformed. "He won't read the lecture to me before
he goes," she complained, "nor give me any chances to know what poems
& how so I can't be of the least use except in telling him whether he speaks
loud enough. He says he hasn't time to spend on reading a word of it
aloud, he must work every minute by himself."

There was no privacy at Mechanics' Hall, and Ellen was tense with
worry, though she got nothing from others of "the usual friendly audience
of best people" or from the newspapers that was unfavorable. On the i6th,
the day after the opening, she wrote in desperation to Edward that she
had sat at the lecture "in about as great a fear as I was able to bear, lest
there should be some terrific crash, for I hadn't heard it beforehand as
I ought, and his memory is entirely gone, so that he blithely read the same
page twice over . . ." His memory could not have been entirely gone, but
it was weakening and she had reason to be fearful. Several times she came
home feeling blue because she had not been able to hear. Emerson was
aware that her heart died within her every Monday; but he himself was
unworried by his mistakes, because, he said, he knew and everybody knew
that he was worn out and passed by and that only his old friends came to
hear him and they only for friendship's sake. Ellen sometimes suspected
that she was having a case of nerves. "But I care," she wrote to her sister.
"I cant bear that he should show diminished lustre."

People who listened to the Boston lectures that spring had paid at least
$1400 into the private account of the lecturer, which was greatly helped
almost at the same time by the $2000 he and Lidian received when they
sold the Winslow House at Plymouth. But there were also some strokes of
ill fortune. Only a few days before the Boston course ended, the Emerson
family pride suffered by the burning of the woodlot on the shore of Walden
Pond toward the village. News came that the planted lot was all burned
and that the grove where Thoreau's hut had stood was badly hurt. Emer-
son, exploring the desolation, could only comfort himself with the belief
that some trees in the grove were not fatally injured. In the following sum-
mer came a far more severe disaster at Bush.

Early in the morning of the 24th of July, 1872, Emerson was awakened
by the sound of fire. At first he took it to be the sound of the rain coming
into his room. When he understood what was happening he brought water.
But he could not reach the fire, as it seemed to be inside the walls. He
tried to get above it but found the garret full of stifling smoke. When he

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 453

called to Lidian she was so much alarmed by his voice that she was relieved
to find that it was only the house on fire. As Ellen was not at home, the
responsibility fell on him, and he had to make quick decisions and act. He
rushed out into the yard, calling to the neighbors, "Fire! Whitcomb, Staples,
Fire!" Going back, he got the manuscripts of the nightmare Hotten book
and of Parnassus safely out. Staples and Whitcomb came in a few minutes.
Whitcomb stood at the gate and sent the first passing wagons to give the
alarm. Other men began to arrive, and presently most of the village, men
and women, were at work, pulling out whatever could be saved.

Almost everything was saved from complete destruction. With great
difficulty, holes were hacked in the slate roof, and smoke became flame.
The most remarkable sight was one-armed Ephraim Bull, son of the orig-
inator of the Concord grape. He was managing the hose on the roof. But
even invalids who never came out were out this time. One housekeeper
saw that flour and sugar were sheltered from the rain, another received all
the clothing and organized a band of helpers to get it to safety. Ellen's
piano was moved to the Staples parlor. Dishes and carpet were got out
before the roof fell in, smothering the fire, on which the engines were
already playing. Louisa May Alcott and her sister May looked after scat-
tered manuscripts. Some of these were charred about the edges, but all,
or nearly all, were saved, with nearly all the books. This was approximately
the story that could be pieced together from the testimony of various eye-
witnesses. Emerson, in his memorandum book under July 24, told it in
three words: "Our house burned.35

Ellen, returning home from Beverly, found all four lower rooms "safe,"
as she optimistically expressed it. She and her father and mother were at
once installed as boarders in the Old Manse, and her father hired a room
in the Court House for his study. There most of his books were soon getting
back into order, but a few had strayed. Four volumes of Goethe's nach-
gelassene Werke were not recovered from a local barber till some months
later. It was estimated that the $2500 of insurance would nearly pay for
rebuilding, but it would have been difficult to stop the flow of gifts intended
to pay for a new house and for a vacation of travel. Caroline Sturgis, now
William Tappan's wife, wrote to offer $5000 to rebuild the house. Judge
Hoar made his own account at the bank available to Emerson. Francis
Lowell, a college classmate, arrived and left a letter which, he said, was
to be given to Emerson later. When it was opened, it proved to contain a
check for $5000, the gift of several friends. This money was for the rebuild-
ing of the house or for any other purpose Emerson might prefer.

A sudden change for the worse in Emerson's health alarmed the family,
and William Forbes, without consulting Emerson, wrote to Hotten and

454 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Alexander Ireland that his father-in-law must be released from his agree-
ment about the book. A trip to Europe began to be thought imperative.
Next, the friendly machinations of Le Baron Russell and others came to
light in Concord when Judge Hoar announced himself the messenger of
an association that had chosen Emerson its treasurer. Hoar explained that
the purpose of the association would be attained when Emerson had spent
its funds, consisting of ten thousand dollars deposited to Emerson's credit
in the Concord National Bank; but he advised that part of the money be
used for a trip to Europe. Preparations for putting the new funds to work
soon got under way. William Ralph Emerson of Boston, a distant relative,
offered to serve as architect. John Keyes, whose daughter Annie became
engaged to Edward Emerson about this time, was to superintend the re-
building. But Emerson could not at once make up his mind to travel abroad.

Little more than a week after the fire he had to speak at the Boston
dinner to the Japanese envoys, though he tried to beg off. Doubtless he
had given no effective answer— if, indeed, he had given any answer at all
—to last February's request from the Japanese legation in Washington for
advice regarding an educational program for the mikado's subjects. Now,
however deep his interest in the Orient, he could do little about it. He mustered
up enthusiasm enough to discover the romantic aspect of the late emer-
gence of Japan from national privacy and praised "the enlightened policy
of President Fillmore" that "sent Commodore Perry to that country." Later
in August he attempted to work himself into a vacation mood by going
with Ellen for some days to the New Hampshire coast and to Maine. He
was trying to recover from a general decline of health, and she was nursing
her sprained ankle. As they discussed the proposed voyage to Europe, he
agreed that he would never again be so free. He wanted to see not only his
transatlantic friends but his son, for Edward had sailed for Europe nearly
a year earlier in the hope of carrying on the medical studies he had begun
at Harvard. It came out that the real reasons why Emerson did not want
to go were his weak and uncertain health and his unfortunately changed
appearance. He would hate to meet Ruskin, Huxley, Tennyson, and the
rest in his present condition. "When nature indicates that it is time," he
put it, "it is more graceful to retire at once, not to seek the world." Ellen
then proposed that he make the voyage incognito and meet only Edward.
He liked that plan.

Though he was very gay much of the time, he seemed to return to the
thought that this was possibly the end. He gave directions about the dis-
posal of his manuscripts. Edward, if only he were "a scholar by profession,"
could make use of them ; otherwise, Emerson thought, they would be worth-
less. He mentioned Hedge and Cabot as men who might be trusted with

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 455

them. He was sure that all the early manuscript books ought to be burned
and likewise all the sermons, for he considered that what was good in them
had been extracted for use in the essays and other writings. He enumerated
many manuscript journals by name and assessed their particular values.
He had meant to cross out in all the manuscript books the passages he had
published, but he had been very negligent about doing that. He did not
want the records of his interviews with Carlyle and Tennyson used in their
lifetime. He thought he had materials for beautiful lives of Ellery Chan-
ning and Alcott and said it would be a pity if they outlived him, for the
world would miss two very good chapters. But he spoke as if nothing could
be done about these things. Meantime he struggled for words to express
his thoughts.

He worried over the endless Hotten book, and could not bear to think
of letting his old things be reprinted as they were. He kept talking as he
and Ellen walked through the woods, and she could hear him bursting
out with "Hotten will say 'I shall lose a thousand pounds.3 "

"And I shall lose my life, you might answer," Ellen put in.

He wouldn't listen to the suggestion that it would be well for him to
go to England and see to the publishing of the book there. That would
spoil his plan to have Osgood bring it out in Boston and send the sheets
to Hotten and so run no risk of mistakes in the English edition. Ellen,
fearing that he would never be able to see any book through the press again,
remembered that Elliot Cabot was the one man he was always returning
to as fit to care for his manuscripts. Cabot was a dear friend and had an
understanding of philosophy. Possibly he would correct the proofs when
they were ready. At the first opportunity Ellen led on to the suggestion
that Cabot should be taken into partnership, but her father, though seem-
ing to consider the possibility for a moment, said decisively, "No, nobody

could do it."

In September he spent some days resting at Naushon, but his health
needed prolonged relaxation. Even before the fire his appearance had
strikingly altered. By the spring of this year his hair had been reduced to
a "mere outline." His mind was as much changed as his body. His memory
was less certain. It was especially unreliable when he searched for the exact
word, but it made a variety of troubles for him.

On the first day of September, after his return from New Hampshire
and Maine, Ellen sketched his case for Doctor Edward Clarke when she
asked for medical advice: "Memory went first. He used to be remarkable
for never forgetting errands &c. It must be 5 or 6 years since that faculty
failed and now for as much as 3 years he has been unable to remember
that he was asked to do things, even when reminded of details of asking.

456 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Not always, but very commonly. And now in giving him errands I often
see that he is trying to attend and cannot possibly so I write it. His work
on books and lectures has been very difficult to him for several years. . . .
I just took his proofs to read for him. He said 1 get an impression in read-
ing them that they talk too much about the same thing, but I cannot find
out.' There were 27 pages. One sentence slightly varied came in four times,
another twice word for word. In the spring he was able to set such things
right. Since the fire he cannot. ... In ordinary conversation about facts
he cannot remember words or names at all. (There's no such difficulty in
talking with people who are interested, on his own ground.) It is painful
to him of course in company. Alone with us he plays with it, and is very
witty in his stumbles. Sometimes having got through a short sentence
straight, tho' evidently jumping in the dark for his words, he laughs and
says 'It is a triumph to remember any word/ All this is very much increased
this last month but it is not wholly new, there has been all too much before,
and it has been coming on very gradually." The decline had undoubtedly
been gradual, but the downward curve dipped sharply in this, his seven-
tieth year.

George Bancroft sent $1000 to add to the funds raised for Emerson
by his friends after the fire. By the middle of October the total seems to
have been at least some seventeen or eighteen thousand dollars. With ample
funds collecting and with work on Bush already beginning, Europe loomed
larger. The funds could easily have increased to much greater proportions.
Friends as far away as England promptly offered their aid, but since it was
not needed it was refused. As the money poured in, Ellen commented, "No
one ever saw such an outburst of sympathy and kindness as our fire has
drawn from the world— or rather we seem to be another Chicago." By
the end of September, William Forbes was writing to engage transatlantic
passage for Ellen and her father. Presents on account of the fire had hardly
ceased before presents for the voyage began coming in. The not very definite
plan was that Emerson and Ellen should find Edward. After cutting short
his medical studies in Germany and abandoning plans for some work in
Austria, Edward had gone to England and remained there in order to
continue his studies at St. Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth; but there was
already doubt whether his health would let him stay on.

The plan that Emerson should travel incognito seems to have been still
at least half-heartedly adhered to, but when he had written to Charles
Norton and to Moncure Conway, who were both abroad, he had failed to
warn them to remain silent. Edward tried in vain to preserve secrecy. When
Norton spread the news, Edward had to explain to Carlyle and others that
Emerson wished to mend his health in the Mediterranean before he saw

THE FIRMAMENT SHRINKS TO A TENT 457

his English friends. But for Emerson there was no hope of remaining pri-
vate. He could not even refuse to make a special trip to New York in the
middle of October and speak at a banquet for Froude, for he himself had
helped to make Froude's American lecture tour possible.

If his French and German fame spread slowly., he was widely honored
in Britain, where he could hardly come privately. In returning to England
in 1872, he could expect to do nothing to further the doctrines he had
taught there a quarter of a century earlier; but he could expect to find that
those doctrines had not been forgotten. Besides a few of the older intel-
lectuals, such as Carlyle, there were younger men risen to some importance
since Emerson had last crossed the Atlantic who were now his friends or
disciples. A small stream of English peers and commoners had long since
been flowing through Concord. Max Miiller had already begun sending
his books there. Matthew Arnold, whom Emerson credited with "the true
critical perception and feeling of style5' and ranked as high in England as
he ranked Sainte-Beuve in France, had, it seemed, discovered more lasting
value in Emerson than in Carlyle. Emerson had maintained his reason,
Arnold thought, while Carlyle had not; and Emerson's popularity would
grow with the growth of reason in human affairs. Though Emerson once
asserted that he generally felt himself repelled by physicists and did not
know even their names., John Tyndall, perhaps the last transatlantic visitor
he had had at the Old Manse, had expended no small amount of enthusiasm
on the writings of Emerson. He had marked his copy of Nature, so he
said, "Purchased by inspiration." He exaggerated his debt to its author
by declaring that "Whatever I have done, the world owes to him." Tyndall
and the other friends from Carlyle down to youthful disciples made it
certain that Emerson would be welcomed again in Britain.

But the plan of foreign travel had quickly expanded. Britain covered
only a small part of the map on which Emerson marked his course as he
set out on his third eastward voyage across the Atlantic. He looked beyond
the British Isles to France, Italy, and Egypt. In a more favorable time
Greece, still unvisited, would doubtless have proved the strongest magnet
for him, but that country could hardly have been inviting in winter, or in *
any season so long as Greek brigands ran loose. As the goal of an old
scholar's winter travels, Egypt was best.

Egypt had strong attractions for Emerson. Her long valley, closely
hemmed in by deserts and covered with mild and cloudless winter skies,
was a pleasing dream for a sixty-nine-year-old veteran of nearly that many
New England winters. On the banks of her river stood pyramids that were
the world's most magnificent commentaries on the vanity of human greed
and pride, ruined temples that were memorials of man's ancient search for

458 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

answers to his deepest riddles, and sphinxes that were symbols of the in-
scrutable wisdom that refused to reveal the answers. These affecting monu-
ments marking the painfully narrow boundaries of human wisdom were
worthy of a pilgrimage by a student of philosophy and religion.

Somehow Emerson had vaguely focused his interest in these things on
the figure of Osiris, the most attractive member of the vast Egyptian pan-
theon, and had got the notion that, in spite of many contradictory stories,
Philae was the final resting place of the much abused earthly body of that
divine being. In one of his notebooks he wrote, "Who is he that sleeps at
Philae?" and answered, "Osiris." When Egypt had first been suggested as
the ultimate objective of his voyage, he had said, "Yes, I should like to see
the tomb of 'him who sleeps at Phylae.' "

And so it happened that Emerson and his daughter Ellen set out, by
way of New York, on a long and much interrupted voyage whose most
distant port of call was to be the little island far up the Nile.

24.

VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the master-
works and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea3 by
voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the
desert, Rome, Paris ... -"Wealth"

r*"Tr^HE Wyoming steamed out of New York Harbor on October 23,
I as scheduled. As she passed Staten Island in the gray but calm
I and pleasant weather, two missionaries bound for India sang

J- "We're out on the ocean sailing53 and "America." The Helvetia
was astern, sailing for London. Ellen and her father were "as happy as
clams" till, in the evening, they passed Fire Island Light and thought of
Margaret Fuller, who had been lost off this shore more than twenty years
ago. Next day they ran into stormy weather. Seasickness prevailed. But
Emerson did not suffer, and the following day was "warm & blue & still."

The steamer, one gradually became aware, was alive with missionaries.
Many of them were on their way to India. The editor of a religious paper
was going to visit Egypt, Sinai, the Holy Land, and Greece and would take
St. Paul's voyage before paying special attention to Germany. One min-
ister and his wife had left a Presbyterian church in Wisconsin in order to
establish Protestantism in Italy. A Quaker woman, though she apparently
possessed no tongue but her native English one, had got the conviction that
since the Franco-Prussian War there would be a great opening for the
gospel in the south of France. She was therefore on her way to the south
of France. There were Baptist missionaries and Methodist missionaries. On
Sunday an Episcopal clergyman, brother of the late President James
Buchanan, helped lead the choir. At table, Emerson was at first flanked
on one side by a speechless young Mormon woman from Utah with an
untidily stuffed head of reddish hair; but she soon disappeared, to return
no more, leaving unsaid whatever may have been in her mind. Emerson
wrote home to Lidian: "My well known orthodoxy, you will be glad to
know, is walled round by whole families of missionaries, & I heard two
sermons, & the English service, & many hymns on Sunday. But the liberal
ocean sings louder, & makes us all of one church." Lidian commented that

459

460 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he was probably glad to escape with his philosophy— Transcendental, was
it?— unharmed, if, indeed, he was so lucky.

As his cabin mate Emerson had a young Belfast man, a violent sym-
pathizer with the South, and so had to turn in some other direction for
comfort. But he found little. It was only after getting cozily settled in con-
versation with the editor of the religious paper that he discovered that
person's profession. Since his usual dread of publicity had now only grown
stronger, he resolved to beware of the dangerous man in the future. But even
with the greatest care -he could not avoid publicity. Soon there was nothing
for it but that he must gratify the desire of the ship's passengers, "for most
of whom it was the single opportunity of a lifetime to hear him." Ellen,
negotiating on his part, compromised and settled for a reading, explaining
that her father never did anything extempore. He accordingly read mis-
cellaneous poems. Some of these pleased everybody, though many of the
company were suspected of not being quite up to poetry. Next evening the
poet had to yield to the demand that he read from his own poems, but
he was not so successful as before.

On November 3 the Wyoming was at Liverpool, and next day he and
Ellen, reunited with Edward, were in Chester. Emerson, taking his son
with him, called on the Bishop of Chester, an old friend. On the 5th the
three Americans breakfasted with the bishop. Emerson wore his cowl, as
he did again in the evening when, upon urgent request, he went with
Edward to attend the meeting of the Archaeologic, Architectural and His-
toric Society. At the meeting he was much noticed, and when the cus-
tomary motion was made to thank the presiding officer, who happened to
be the bishop once more, Emerson was called upon to second it "that we
may have the opportunity of just hearing his voice"; and so he did, speak-
ing beautifully, according to Edward.

In London, Emerson was installed, with Ellen, in the Down Street rooms
Lowell had used earlier. Elizabeth Hoar, the most recent occupant of the
apartment, had just left it when its new American tenants arrived. From
Down Street, Emerson sallied out next day to Chelsea, where his "two or
three hours with Carlyle in his study" must have been the high point of
the brief English visit of this year. Carlyle "opened his arms & embraced
me after seriously gazing for a time, CI am glad to see you once more in
the flesh/— & we sat down ... & had a steady outpouring for two hours
& more on persons, events, & opinions," Emerson wrote home.

The Atlantic voyage had given the traveler more vigor, it seemed, and
he could better meet the people who, according to Edward's account, began
"to throng Fathers doors." But he kept quietly in his rooms whenever he
could, and when some amusement or business was suggested he would

VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 461

retort that "Old age loves leisure." When Dean Stanley and Lady Augusta
asked him to dinner "with the most learned men in England and the Queen
of Holland at a small round table," he refused, his real reason being, it
seems, that Ellen was not invited. And he refused for the same reason, so
Ellen believed, when he was invited to "a great dinner" at the Inner Temple.
Such familiar friends as Norton, Conway, Allingham, Charles Newcomb,
and W. H. Channing felt free to come to Down Street. Carlyle, most privi-
leged of all, came too; and though Ellen could not understand his burr-
ridden conversation, it kept her father laughing.

On November 13, when Edward was on his way home across the At-
lantic, Emerson obeyed Ellen's summons to move on to Canterbury. But
he was usually opposed to moving at all. At Canterbury he insisted that
he was dragged away from London and wanted to go back, but his pro-
tests to his daughter were interspersed with suggestions that they settle down
in Canterbury for good. As Una Hawthorne had observed in London,
Ellen was inexorable about hurrying on to Egypt and the Sahara. Now
that her father cared mainly for rest, she was his conscience.

But in France even Ellen began to weaken. When she and her father
arrived in the lodgings reserved for them by Lowell in the Hotel de Lor-
raine in Paris, Emerson was thankful that he had reached- a place where
he could "stay today, & tomorrow, & the next day, & longer." Ellen, find-
ing that she could easily make herself understood in French, decided to
agree with him. "I hate Egypt, it won't let us stop anywhere," she com-
plained. Here in Paris, in the same hotel with Lowell and his wife and with
John Holmes, the Autocrat's brother, the travelers found difficulties at a
minimum. These American friends answered all the troublesome questions,
and Lowell went with Emerson to the banker's and on miscellaneous errands.

Le Figaro was telling the story of the great Boston fire that had broken
out in the street where Emerson was born, and the American colony was
too much upset by the news to think of going on with plans for its banquet
to celebrate General Grant's re-election. The Parisians, just recovering from
their own catastrophic Prussian war and its sequel, were hailing the first
performances of Pailleron's Helene at the Comedie-Frangaise. But the Emer-
sons must have stirred out very little. Once they and the Lowells were at
dinner with the Laugels, but the Laugels had tried in vain to gather a
distinguished company to greet their guests. The Kenans were traveling,
Elizabeth Laugel apologized, while Montegut, Emerson's early admirer,
was in the country; the Lasteyries and Prince and Princess OrlofT were
likewise out of reach; Ivan Tourgueneff was in bed with the gout; and
Mme Viardot, though depended upon to sing, failed to appear.

Ellen summarized the rest of the brief Paris visit for her sister in a

462 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

few sentences: "In Paris from Friday Nov 15- soir till the following Thurs-
day we had a warm snug home, a capital table d'hote, where one side of
the table was our friends & selves the other all French 'It is a legitimist
hotel, and very respectable people come here,' said Mr Lowell. Two or three
members of the Chamber of Deputies, among them the Marquis de Gram-
mont grandson tell Mother of that beloved sister Rosalie of our friend
Mme de Montagu, Mme Lafayette's sister. . . . They talked politics daily.
'Twas as good as a play to see, & Mr Lowell highly enjoyed the privilege
of hearing, no one else could. Imagine my alarm when on the fourth day
one of the deputies took to looking at me on ending his remarks, and as
I strove to mind the rule of manners the Storers discovered & to put on
an intelligent expression, he wasn't slow in going a step farther and address-
ing various remarks to M^e There was no help for it, I struggled hard,
understood, composed my reply in the expectant silence of the whole table,
and brought it out, whereupon there was . . . applause on the French side
of the table . . . Monsieur was encouraged and talked to me more, and
next spoke to Father who finds it harder to understand than I do, and there
is no subject ancient or modern that we didn't hobble painfully through.
One was delightful. The language of America. They all supposed it of
course was the -American Indian speech, and that the higher classes learned
a little English. . . . On Sunday we went to church— for a whole month
Father never missed going to church on Sunday!— to the Chapelle £van-
gelique de 1'fitoile, M. le Pasteur Bersier, a handsome man whose speaking
charmed Father . . . Mr Lowell . . . devoted himself to Father very much
and was his guide about the city Harry James carne several times, and
once took Father to the Louvre and Father came home enchanted."

On November 21 Emerson and Ellen, accompanied by Curnex, a
traveling servant, left Paris and began the "endless journey" to Marseille.
Emerson was determined to be uncoitifortable, but on the second day,
tired as he was, he was delighted and advised Ellen that "if you want to
do the greatest kindness possible to anyone send him from Lyons to Mar-
seilles." They saw Avignon before darkness fell, and then, according to
Ellen, "there was nothing but weariness & hunger till we at last saw the
beautiful lights of Marseilles." The next afternoon they left Marseille for
Nice. Ellen, remembering her voyage to the Azores, was in ecstasies through
southern France and in Italy. Emerson condensed all experiences in Nice
and as far as Florence into three sentences: "Nice charmed us with gardens
palm-trees, pepper trees, & ... the Mediterranean washing the picturesque
shore, on our Sunday, &, the next morning being beautiful weather we
took the steamer for Genoa having heard bad news of the roads on account
of the great rains. The whole day on the Mediterranean was full of beauty,

VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 463

as we were passing ever in sight of castles towns & villages on the shore.
It was night by the time we reached Genoa & we were hindered from
paying our respects to the memory of Columbus, by being put on board
a steamer bound to Leghorn instantly to paddle aU night, & find Pisa in
the grey morning."

On the 2 6th they installed themselves for three or four days in the
Hotel du Nord at Florence. The city was quiet, with no greater excite-
ments than a few plays, such operas as Lucia di Lammermoor and Norma,
and the arrival of Prince Hassan Pasha for a few days on his way to Rome
and Cairo. La Nazione, though it lacked room for a list of all the notable
foreigners who were just then descending on Florence, announced that
Emerson, "one of the most distinguished poets and philosophers of Amer-
ica," had arrived there on his way to the Orient. Though he seems to have
done little at Florence but visit the Uffizi Gallery and view some places and
manuscripts out of love for Dante and a few other great spirits, he had
not lost all his youthful enthusiasm. After she had visited Santa Croce,
Ellen was amused to see that he felt as much elated as if she had met
Galileo, Michelangelo, Alfieri, and Machiavelli in person. He seemed to
respect her as if she had been in exalted society.

He even had zest for linguistic adventures. Neither he nor Ellen could
speak Italian without great effort, but on the train between Florence and
Rome they made use of the ample opportunity to test what skill they had.
After they had succeeded in putting a sentence together by their joint
labors, he enunciated it with fine clarity. The joyful Italian to whom it
was addressed believed for a moment that they understood his tongue but
had to content himself with the simplest exclamations until they got out
their dictionaries and guide books and used their fingers and a combination
of French and English with Italian.

At Rome they settled first at a Madame Tellenbach's pension in the
same Piazza di Spagna where Emerson had lived nearly forty years before,
saw St. Peter's and some historic ruins and art galleries, and found old
friends. Rumors of cholera up the Nile made their itinerary doubtful, and
they thought of giving up Egypt entirely. Ellen seemed ready to settle down
to reading Tacitus, but Emerson excused himself from any part in that
plan. Soon, however, they had better prospects.

Baron von Hoffmann, son-in-law of Emerson's friend Sam Ward, came
daily to call or to leave flowers, and the Concord villagers were guests at
his and his wife Lily Ward's Villa Celimontana during their last ten days
in Rome. By that time there had been, according to Ellen, "numberless
dinners & teas," and Curnex, the traveling servant, had delightedly col-
lected sheaves of cards from callers. Such dignitaries as the American and

464 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

French ministers came to pay their respects, as Curnex must have noted
with satisfaction. If Emerson did not receive the extraordinary attentions
that the chief foreign and Roman families had recently lavished upon Ernest
Renan, it was partly because he did not want them. Probably he did not
appear at the reception in the Capitoline Museum for the members of
the first Italian Juridical Congress, though he had an invitation through
George Marsh, the American minister.

At the Villa Celimontana, he and Ellen lived "in great glory" such as
had never been known in Concord. Though without much of the leisure
he had longed for, he seemed content. Ellen summarized the usual day:
"Then I go to breakfast with Father in his study and after breakfast comes
the Baron to arrange the pleasures of the day. . . . then away with the
Baron in a carriage we go to see churches, gardens or galleries. Come home
to lunch at one with Lily who is lovely, and then at 2.30 away we go
again. Company to dine finishes the day." After it was all over, Ellen wrote
home: "The hospitality of Villa Celimontana 'ran fine to the last.5 Father
said to the Baron in parting from him 'You are one of the knights of King
Arthur's Round Table3 . . . You see it is the longest visit Father ever
made, and he never took so kindly to visiting before."

On the 1 8th Emerson and Ellen, together with an American family
named Whitwell and a Scottish Miss Farquhar, went from Rome to Naples,
where the great Boston fire was still being discussed along with the San
Carlo Opera. There, on the sist, they boarded the steamer Nil of the
French line connecting Marseille and Alexandria. Two days of the passage
were rough, and Ellen got out her Bible and read the story of St. Paul's
voyage in "a ship of Alexandria sailing into Italy." The Nil's berths were
built across the boat instead of lengthwise, and forty-eight hours of rolling
meant that a passenger spent that time largely in shooting back and forth
between the head and foot of a berth. In the mood of dejection induced by
such exercises a passenger might have pondered the question whether this
unfriendly steamer, named for the great river toward which she was sail-
ing, was not an inauspicious omen. There to the south the river rose almost
erect, a monstrous serpent with his tail planted on the equator and his jaws
opened wide in a gesture of defiance toward Europe. But our travelers were
doubtless troubled by no such sinister fancies when, on Christmas Day,
they landed in Alexandria and were for the first time on Egyptian soil.

Curnex proved an able bodyguard, scolding "like any ten Americans"
as he fended off the wolves that preyed upon tourists. Emerson trudged
off through the mud to see Pompey's Pillar and Cleopatra's Needle, but to
Western eyes the whole city was a curiosity. Along the streets euphorbias
were ablaze with scarlet leaves, loaded camels reluctantly submitted to their

VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 465

masters' whims, tailors sat crosslegged on their window seats as they sewed,
and merchants of all kinds sat crosslegged in their gorgeous costumes at the
doors of dark little dens full of merchandise. It was the gateway to the
Orient. The local French paper, Le Nil, duly recorded the arrival of "the
celebrated American author" and his departure for Cairo on the follow-
ing day.

All the way through the delta to Cairo, Emerson turned a dismal stream
of wit against the country. It was a hopeless marsh and nothing could
argue a wilder insanity than to leave America to see the barrenness and
mud of such a place. He pointed out some water around which a crowd of
people had collected—to drown themselves, he explained. The weather,
though it should have been warm, was still hazy and cold in Cairo, and
the travelers faced the same fifty-eight degrees of temperature that had
dogged them from Boston onward through Europe.

But the thought of going southward up the Nile was pleasing, and Ellen
quickly began to point out the picturesque features of the country. She
had only to sit on her donkey and every time she turned her head she saw
"greater fun, more beauty" and did not know how to express her joy in
Africa. She even lost her prejudice against color and declared that brown
was far handsomer than white. Her father joined her in exclamations of
admiration when a sais, perhaps a native of Nubia or Abyssinia, dressed
"in white, except the black or green Zouave jacket without sleeves, em-
broidered with gold, and the long scarf wound five or six times round his
waist below it," ran beautifully ahead to clear a passage for some carriage
in the narrow streets and demonstrated with his roaring voice the utterly
unimpaired strength of his lungs. Amusing old men, large and tall, with
solemn faces framed in white beards, rode by on donkeys the size of a
rocking horse. The donkeys were so small that their riders' feet were barely
lifted off the ground. What was neither charming nor amusing was at least
memorable. Ellen got the impression that the children had only one eye
each or else had bad eyes covered with flies and were dirty. The women
were ugly in indigo-dyed cotton and vied with the children in filthiness.
Many a baby less than a year old rode calmly astride his mother's left
shoulder, holding on by her head without the least attention from her.

But Emerson, grown cheerful enough since reaching Cairo, had his
usual luck and soon found entertainment of a different sort. George Ban-
croft, now the American minister to Berlin, had just returned from upper
Egypt and had by some kind providence taken quarters, a day before the
Emersons, at the khedive's own New Hotel. During his several remaining
days in Cairo, Bancroft looked after Emerson much of the time. It was
Bancroft who got him the opportunity to see the great Museum of Egyp-

THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

tian Antiquities under the guidance of no less an Egyptologist than its
founder, Marietta. It was Bancroft who got him an invitation to breakfast
at the khedive's, Bancroft who took him there in a carriage, Bancroft who
sat next to the khedive. The General Stone on whose behalf Emerson had
once written a plea to Charles Sumner and who was now the head of
the Egyptian military establishment went along to the breakfast and turned
out to be another dependable companion for Emerson in Cairo. At the
breakfast Prince Hassan, home from Oxford, regaled the American essayist
with college talk, including much about boating and little about Pusey or
Ruskin. Having moved from the New Hotel to Shepheard's, the Emersons
found there the entertaining Charles Leland preparing to write his Egyptian
sketchbook. It seems to have been "in the shadow of the pyramids" that
Emerson came upon a man he could hardly have remembered from a much
earlier meeting-Leland's friend George Boker, the Philadelphia poet who
was then American minister to Turkey and, fortunately, a friend of the
khedive. But the excitements of Cairo and its environs could not make the
travelers forget old Concord customs. Ellen saw to it that there was a minia-
ture private New Year's celebration, with gifts and rhymes, at the same
hour as the customary observance at home, as nearly as it could be cal-
culated.

By now there were favorable reports of conditions upstream. Many
voyagers whose fears of quarantine had kept them in Cairo were begin-
ning their exodus southward. The Emersons and their party of Whitwells
—Mr. and Mrs, Whitwell and their daughters May and Bessie-and Miss
Farquhar had engaged their dragoman and their dahabeah, the Aurora,
and the date of sailing was tentatively set for the 6th of January. Besides
the dragoman, they were to have a captain and his mate, ten oarsmen,
two cooks, a factotum boy, and two waiters. Emerson, it is true, was talk-
ing of home again and might have been willing to start in that direction
with no further ado, saving out only time enough for a fortnight with
Lowell in Paris and for visits with Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning in
England. But Ellen steadied him, and by the 7th the Aurora was on her
way. The goal was now conservatively set as Thebes, or Luxor, some days
short of Assuan and Philae. Doubtless the recent excitement over the cholera
had had much to do with this temporizing and indecisive cutting down
of the itinerary.

For Emerson the dahabeah was not an ideal home but had strong at-
tractions. There was no place where he could sit with Ellen apart from
the others; but it was good for him to be all day on the deck, a kind of
parlor without walls or ceiling. There, with the temperature still hovering
around sixty degrees Fahrenheit after nearly a week of sailing southward.

VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 467

the passengers were apt to sit on their sofas, wrapped in blankets. Though
they wanted ten degrees more of heat, they were comfortable in the sun-
shine and liked to stay on to talk through the brilliant moonlight evenings.
Every day was "nothing less than heavenly." If the river was often like
a muddy pond, there were great groves of palms and a variety of life along
the shores, where, almost every day, the passengers had an opportunity to
stretch their legs for an hour. If the travelers led too lazy an existence, with
the dragoman ready to attend to any difficulty for them, they nevertheless
got some lessons in Arabic from the delighted waiters and had, daily,
two hours of reading on Egypt. As most of the company refused any
initiative, Ellen took command, said "now read, now stop, now go ashore/'
and established "manners and customs."

By the time they reached Luxor they had got their extra ten degrees
of heat and Emerson was obviously prospering in health as he sat all day
long in "the broadest sweetest sunshine that the heart of man can conceive
of," with a subsequent ten-hour night in which to recover from any excess
of this curative regimen. At times he fell into the gloomy frame of mind
which he styled Doctor Crump. It was true that he had few of his cus-
tomary amusements, had never since Cairo found anyone who enlivened
him, and had read out his little library except Martial, whose works he
now kept at for hours daily. Besides, the whole journey was, he felt, "a
perpetual humiliation, satirizing and whipping our ignorance. The people/'
he said, "despise us because we are helpless babies who cannot speak or
understand a word they say; the sphinxes scorn dunces; the obelisks, the
temple walls, defy us with their histories which we cannot spell." But this
was not the whole story. The possibility of meeting Sam Ward and his party-
farther up the river was exciting. Philae was still unvisited. Emerson was
already in treaty with Bedowy, the dragoman, to extend the voyage to
Philae, as he had originally intended.

Three or four days in the region of ancient Thebes helped put him
in better spirits. Luxor, the modern town, was a mere speck in this im-
pressive world of sun and sky and sand and stones where the traveler who
came there really lived. Emerson proposed settling down and never going
home. The vast temple of Karnak and several lesser ones lay mainly in
the rich plain which the Nile would invade at flood water. Beyond the
river and out of its reach, the tombs of the kings, high and dry, honey-
combed the barren cliffs. The ancient Roman gods, Jesus, and Mohammed
had left their marks. Decaying temples of early Egyptian deities had been
adapted to the worship of their successors. But the ancient Egyptian culture
dominated both the valley and the hills. There were bewildering arrays of
gigantic stone columns crowned with stone papyrus and lotus, avenues of

468 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

sphinxes, monotonously repeated designs and figures and hieroglyphs, bas-
reliefs of triumphant kings and gods in profusion. The inner walls of some
of the tombs were adorned with colorful scenes from ancient Egyptian life
—sowing, reaping, bread-making, hunting, sailing, fighting, the activities
of wild or domestic animals. All these were the enduring memorials of the
love of life and the fear of death and oblivion. This region was the nearest
thing to the Egypt of antiquity.

Though the travelers were not so fortunate here in finding expert in-
structors as they had been at Cairo, they had the luck to come upon Georg
Ebers, the German Egyptologist, in Tomb 35. He was, said Ellen, "a
charming man who showed us what everything meant.'5 There were quite
enough guides and advisers of a more political sort. Mustapha Agar, the
British consul, vied with his enemy, Ali Fendi Murrad, the American consul,
in showering friendly attentions upon Emerson and his party. The two
consuls alternated in visiting the travelers. The British consul sent his
Arabian horse, with circus housings of blue velvet and gold and tassels and
ornamental bridle so that Emerson could ride to the great temple of Karnak
mounted in state more befitting an ancient Pharaoh than a modern poet.
The American consul, hearing of the lavish generosity of his rival, hastened
to outdo him by inviting the whole dahabeah party to come and spend
a month at his house.

But the Aurora passed on southward, propelled by her oarsmen or by
the wind in her two lateen sails. Each sail was "the shadow of a pyramid,"
as the pyramid itself was "the simplest copy of a mountain, or of the form
which a pile of sand or earth takes when dropped from a cart," Emerson
noted. Every day was enchanting with its cloudless blue sky and reviving
sun, every night the stars were "in full glory" and the weather was "warm
enough,55 Ellen wrote, "to allow us to lie on deck and watch them." And
so the Aurora sailed on, her passengers living hardly more than a dream,
till, in the last week of January, she came to Assuan. There the first cat-
aract marked the limit of her progress.

Arriving at Assuan, the Emersons got the disappointing news that, as
the quarantine had been removed, Sam Ward, with his party, had set out
a few days earlier on their way southward to the second cataract. A reunion
with such a friend would have been, as Ellen read her father's mind, an
event of prime importance in any part of the world. But for Emerson there
remained Philae, the original goal, and now the end, of his long outward
journey.

In some later notes on his travels he wrote that great men of the ancient
Greek world felt the attraction of Egypt and "pined to visit the temple-
tomb of 'him who lies at Philae,5 that is, of Osiris" and that he himself

VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 469

"did not rest" till he saw the famed places of the lower Nile Valley and
came "to Philae, & to the temple of him who sleeps there." The British
consul at Luxor had given him a letter of introduction to a friend at Assuan.
The consul's friend, apparently notified in advance, promptly called when
the American dahabeah arrived, and next morning he sent donkeys for the
trip to Philae.

Ellen seems not to have traveled those final half dozen miles, and pre-
sumably what Emerson's visit to Philae mainly lacked was this enthusiastic
historian. For though she had yet found no Egyptian temple that pleased
her, Ellen could hardly have failed to admire had she seen this little garden
of beauty at the meeting place of the Libyan, Arabian, and Nubian Deserts.
The Assuan Dam would one day use the pylon towers of the highest temples
as measuring rods for the waters it impounded in the winter season, but
in 1873 the dam was decades in the future and Philae was still the Pearl
of Egypt. "Nothing," said the Frenchman Laurent Laporte in his book on
the Nile voyage, "can be more ravishingly beautiful than this island. A
lovely vision, it rises suddenly before you, brilliant and airily fantastic as
a dream. It is a strange and wonderful mirage . . . that seems just to have
emerged from the sleep of centuries, or from the waves of the Nile; a city
of temples, palaces, sculptured pylones . . ."

In the region of Assuan, Emerson first came upon the Englishman
George Owen. Owen confessed that Emerson "had been his idol and his
guide from his earliest youth," heaped incense on his idoPs shrine, brought
over "the book he valued most in the world, his Shakespeare," asking that
Emerson write his name in it, and also brought a Religio Medici with an
inscription as a present to him. The river was now alive with travelers, and
Emerson was inevitably cast in the role of a venerated idol, a symbol of
his own past.

On the way downstream, Edfu, though hardly more than a temple,
proved delightful even to Ellen. There the great temple built by Ptolemy III
and his successors, and recently cleansed by Mariette of its fungus growth
of Arab houses and incumbering heaps of rubbish, stood in a marvelous
state of preservation, barring the discoloration and the defacement of reliefs
by the Christians. At the beginning of February, in summer weather, Emer-
son and Ellen resumed the exploration of Luxor for a few days. He "liked
donkeys nearly as much as I," she reported, and "he usually seemed very
gay while mounted, though sometimes he had a slow donkey, and he had
apparently an ambition to be at the head of the caravan." On excursions
Curnex went along, carrying the chocolate bag, a little tumbler, Murray's
guide, and the opera glasses. George Owen, the Englishman whose dahabeah
had parted from the Aurora at Assuan with a salute of firearms on both

470 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

sides, had now turned up again in the Luxor region, and Emerson got much
comfort from him. Calling on his friends the consuls at Luxor, the Amer-
ican expounder of plain living and high thinking came away embarrassingly
loaded with stone monuments, wooden statues, and yards of mummy cloth,
all of which their rival generosity had forced upon him.

Four other dahabeahs became friendly with the Aurora^ and there were
gay social hours. The combined parties, including the Roosevelts of New
York, with their "Enchanting children, healthy, natural, well-brought-up,
and with beautiful manners," made a total of some twenty-five persons,
mostly Americans. One of the enchanting children was a future President
of the United States but was then, at the age of fourteen, busily collecting
Egyptian birds. The New Yorkers asked their new friends to luncheon.
"Almost before we were ready," Ellen wrote home, "the pretty little light
boat the Roosevelt children used was waiting alongside, and we were rowed
over to the Abou Erdan, by Theodore whose round red cheeks, honest blue
eyes, and perfectly brilliant teeth make him a handsome boy, though
plain . . ." The boy "rowed with a pair of sculls, and a sailor behind him
with another, talking to us," Ellen said, as she hoped her nephew Ralph
Forbes would talk when he was three years older, "and as big as Theodore."
Ellen cared less for the ruins of empires than for "that visit!" "I approved,"
she reported, "all I saw, I felt the comfort of a family, I had the delight
of seeing children again, and we agreed together, and could talk endlessly.
It came to an end all too soon, and we saw them no more."

By this time the boats were through with their visits to Dendera and,
presumably, Abydos. At Abydos, a city where Osiris was once much hon-
ored, the Emersons, by happy chance, found the German Egyptologist
Heinrich Brugsch, who "told us what the chapels were for who were the
personages on the walls, what the pictures meant." There they saw the
famed tablet recording the succession of Egyptian kings. Then, after de-
scending the river a little farther, partly with the help of oarsmen, Emerson,
Ellen, and Miss Farquhar, fearful of losing their steamer from Alexandria
to Naples, abandoned the Aurora and took the train for Cairo.

At Cairo there was much hurrying about in preparation for sailing.
Emerson had to miss a reunion with Richard Owen, the scientist, his ac-
quaintance of 1848. On the igth of February, after some days of delay
till storms subsided, the Emersons were "actually on board of the Rubattino
Line steamer for Messina & Naples." As he waited in Alexandria Harbor,
Emerson looked back upon the Nile journey with more affection. The whole
voyage up and down now seemed to him "full of agreeable incidents." He
was "not so blind or dependent," he wrote to William Forbes, his son-in-
law, "but that I could wake to the wonders of this strange old land." He

VOTAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 471

remembered the "colossal temples scattered over hundreds of miles" as
being, like the Greek and Gothic temples, a challenge to his own century
—"something you cannot do, & must respect." His lazy habits and the mild
Egyptian winter weather had been the medicines he needed, and he enjoyed
a surprising immunity from worry over the writing of books or even of
correspondence. He would hardly write a line and was pleased to think
how many "useless letters33 he had managed to escape by leaving home.

With only eight other passengers, all Pennsylvamans, he and Ellen found
plenty of room on the Egitto, their steamer. They saw Crete, "which,"
Ellen said, "principally interested Father because Jupiter was born there,
but its wonderful beauty of course held him longer." They were missing
Malta, Emerson's first place of landing in the Old World forty years be-
fore, and making for Naples by the shortest route. Ahead of them now and
on their left they saw the precipitous cliffs and promontories of Sicily, with
the imposing mass of Etna not far back from the shore. Ellen, at her
father's direction, stayed on deck now. Farther north they had more inti-
mate views of the land on either side. "Calabria on one side," wrote Ellen,
"& Sicily on the other are just in their early spring ... It is very pretty
& touching to see spring—after Egypt."

Her youthful enthusiasm was a tonic to her father. She was exactly
thirty-four years old on the day when she sailed into the Strait of Messina,
and she declared that whether she looked at past, present, or future, she
could only exclaim "how broad how bright how full" her life was. She had
vitality enough to defy time and the devil even when she was seasick. She
doubtless managed the Pennsylvanians as well as her father. "I didn't feel
strong enough to land at Messina," she wrote home, "nor Father." But the.
Emersons and the rest of the Egitto's passengers had not only a "very sick"
but a "most sociable & affectionate" six days together. His new friends "all
knew how to make the most of Father," Ellen said, "and we had readings
& much talk."

The Emersons were once more at their Hotel de Russie in Naples on
the 25th. Soon they were in Rome again. Young Henry James turned up
in the ancient capital and was a prime favorite with them. But Emerson
was kept busy by many persons. For some two weeks he lived through a
steady succession of lunches, dinners, and calls. He seemed strengthened
by his travels and had so much zest for society that he put off leaving Rome.
The cloud that Sarah Clarke had seen hovering over him a couple of
months earlier was gone, she perhaps too optimistically discovered.

Elizabeth Hoar, an artist named Tilton, the sculptress Margaret Foley,
the artist William Wetmore Story and his wife, diplomat Marsh, Lady
Ashburton, the von Hoffmanns, and at least one duke and a princess were

472 THZ LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

among the people, mostly not Roman, whom he was meeting. One evening,
at Mrs. Sumner's, he read "In State," doubtless the piece by Forceythe
Willson that eventually appeared in Parnassus. More was wanted and he
read "Timrod & Wm. Strode." This probably meant that he read Henry
Timrod's "Ode" sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Con-
federate dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, in Charleston, and the seventeenth-
century Englishman William Strode's "Music." These pieces and Tom
Taylor's apologetic poem in Punch on the death of Abraham Lincoln,
another thing he read at Mrs. Sumner's, were all published a little later
in his Parnassus. When, on March 10, he and Ellen ended their Roman
visit, not even the early hour of departure could discourage the artist Tilton
from taking them to the train in his carriage or Baron von Hoffmann from
being at the station to open the carriage door for them.

During their four or five days in Florence on their way northward they
made the usual visits to the art galleries, had a meeting with Bayard Taylor,
and saw, for the first time, their German correspondents Herman Grimm
and Gisela, his wife. As Emerson could speak no German, he learned with
much satisfaction that Grimm talked plain English. He left Ellen to struggle
with the German language for the benefit of Gisela. Grimm professed sur-
prise at finding a man who, in contrast to his pictures, looked fifty instead
of seventy and had "such bright colouring." Ellen herself was almost per-
suaded that the miracle had happened, though her father's hair was only
longer, not thicker, than in Egypt, and was brown only at the top of his
head. But within a few days she was dubious again about any improve-
ment in either his memory or his general bodily health. She and her father
"gave up all Italy," Ellen exaggerated, "and Venice & Milan," because
they were "not young energetic curious travellers, but old & lazy."

Leaving Florence just before the middle of March, they were in Paris,
at the Hotel de Lorraine once more, after two days of continuous travel.
Curnex, having served out his time as valet, guide, and factotum, spending
his master's funds and disbursing fees with a lavish hand, was allowed to
go. Emerson, dependent as he had grown, was willing to be Ellen's guide
to the Louvre and to the botanical garden, his old favorite. He had already
revisited the garden with his nephew Charles Emerson and had returned
there repeatedly alone. He and Ellen went to the theater a few times "with
great joy." One evening, with the Lowells, at the Theatre-Frangais, they
were delighted with Moliere's Le Malade imaginaire and the Medieval
farcical masterpiece Pathelin. Every day Emerson went somewhere with
his nephew or with Lowell.

There were some social hours with Frenchmen. The Laugels, undaunted
by their failure to rally their literary and artistic friends in Emerson's honor

V Or AGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 473

in November, had better luck now with their invitations for the 2jth of
March. Emerson dined with Taine and TourguenefT and had some con-
versation with Renan at last and with the geologist Elie de Beaumont.
Remembering that Emerson had read only part of the not very recent his-
tory of English literature, Taine next day sent a note to Elizabeth Laugel
with an inscribed copy of that book for him.

During this Parisian visit Emerson got much pleasure, it seems, from
James Cotter Morison, the Positivist, a knower and lover of things French.
After a couple of dinners, Morison came and spent an evening in Emer-
son's room. At the hotel, the Lowells and John Holmes were, as in Novem-
ber, the chief entertainers. Evenings were usually spent in Lowell's parlor,
where Emerson and Lowell smoked their cigars together. But at table there
was a Polish Count Savinsky who, with the aid of a bottle of Burgundy,
got an introduction; and it seems that there were also a couple of other
Poles, a minor French writer, and Ellen's favorite, the Marquis de Gram-
mont.

On April 5 Ellen returned with her father to London, and soon she
was busily recording their adventures: "We arrived Saturday night, and
Sunday while I was at church, Mr Froude and Max Miiller came Lord
& Lady Amberly a little later. . . . Monday Lady Stanley of Alderly, Tues-
day Mr Edw. Dicey Wednesday Mr Froude, Thursday Lady Amberley.
Mr Hughes & Mr Newcomb & Mr Conway have also called, small hope
for letters & sightseeing. Father bold as a lion (for him) about all this
going out. Is said to be much improved." Next day Emerson was "in the
full tide of dinners & calls, busy every moment." He liked this life better
than usual, though he had moments of homesickness when he proposed
"to take the Fitchburg train."

He was having occasional lapses of memory. Words escaped him. But
he was apparently not greatly annoyed as yet. Sometimes he put his fancy
to work when he was caught in errors. Ellen, seeing that he made no tragedy
of his misfortune, found him simply amusing when he wanted to "take an
obelisk" instead of an omnibus. Places, less surprisingly, were jumbled in
his mental map of London. "Then," Ellen wrote home, "when we went
to Westminster the other day, he expected to go to Charing -}- first and
then turn, whereas the driver took us across the top of Green Park . . .
he sat still and didn't interfere with the course of the cab, but he took it
out in talking . . . said he was expecting the driver to come to his senses
every moment, but the repentance must now be so late as inevitably to
lose our dinner for us." When Ellen pointed out the towers of the abbey
before them, he had to accept the facts but offered an explanation of his
own: "Well, the case was urgent and required a miracle, and the Abbey

474 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

has pirouetted and settled in the other end of London. Happily the fairies
are our friends and see to it that at all costs we come out right." Presum-
ably he was at his best when he faced strangers or at least made his most
determined efforts then.

With all his invitations to eat and drink and converse, it was hard to
find time for any serious conversation. He got rather far, however, with
George Howard, the future Earl of Carlisle; with Lecky, already the author
of a history of European rationalism; with Stanley, the liberal dean of
Westminster; and with Froude. He took a special liking to Howard as well
as to the Duke of Argyll. Argyll had more than a political reputation, being
long since known for his attempt to reconcile religion with science.

Emerson was still finding his proper place in the company of liberal
thinkers. It was no accident that Max Miiller, the student of comparative
religion, was one of his most attentive friends during this last English visit.
This was the year of Max Miiller's appearance as a lecturer on the science
of religion in Westminster Abbey at Dean Stanley's invitation, an occasion
without precedent in the history of the abbey. Moncure Conway, an Amer-
ican liberal settled in England, hovered about the compatriot by whom his
thinking had been shaped in earlier years. The English writers Emerson now
had to do with were, most of them, likewise unmistakably liberal. John
Stuart Mill, the vigorous leader mourned a few weeks later by British in-
tellectuals; George Henry Lewes; George Eliot; and Robert Browning were
all of that stripe. Carlyle was also a liberal so far as religion was concerned.
Of the political leaders with whom Emerson now became acquainted,
Gladstone was at the moment the most conspicuous; and, though only
gradually outgrowing his conservatism, he was, as prime minister, the titular
head of the Liberal Party.

Ellen, if not her father's secretary, was at least his social historian;
and her letters home, though hastily written and sometimes confused in
sequence of events because of the speed at which she was moving, bristled
with personalities. "Father dined," she wrote, "at Mrs GrenfelPs with Prof.
Miiller and Dow? Lady Stanley of Alderley. . . . Father went with the
gentlemen to the Cosmopolitan Club ... Mr Conway . . . told us of
an invitation through him from Mrs Rob! Crawshay of Cyfartha Castle
Merthyr Tydvil in Wales to make her a visit. ... we called on Mr W. H.
Channing . . . Mrs Edwin Arnold was there. . . . Father went to dine
at Mr Dicey's . . . When I came in from shopping I found Mrs Paulet
Miss Newton & Miss Jewsbury calling on Father. . . . Father . . . lunched
with Mrs Grenfell, called on Sir Henry Holland . . . When he came back
he went to the Nortons, lunched with them, and Mrs Baird Smith
DeQuincey's daughter ... At 7 we dined at Mr Froude's, Mr Stevens

VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 475

& Mr Carlyle were the other guests . . . Miss Norton called on me ...
Mr Carlyle also came. . . . That evening we dined at Lady Amberley's.
. . . The other guests were Mr J. S. Mill, his step-daughter Miss Taylor
& Prof. Frazer. The talk was chiefly on Goethe. . . . Father stayed and
was introduced to a Mr Leckie whom he liked particularly. . . . Father
went off with the Amberleys. . . . They had found Earl Russell ... We
reed, notes, from Lord Houghton inviting us to visit him in Yorkshire . .
from Mr Geo Howard . . . inviting us to dine, and from Prof. Max
Miiller inviting us to make him a visit in Oxford. This Father accepted
with joy. Lord Houghton's was for a time when we couldn't go ... Easter
. . . After breakfast as I recounted our invitations, and among them Lady
Augusta's to go to church with her, at the Abbey, Father suddenly resolved
on going. He wished to see the Abbey and to hear the Dean. . . . Happily
there was some history in the sermon, and that interested Father
After church we called on Mr Carlyle. I have seen no house yet that
seemed to me quite so interesting and pleasant. ... Mr C. ... was in
a more amiable and cheerful humour than he had been a few days before
when Father walked with him, and Father has been very happy in the
remembrance of this call. He said things about W. S. Landor that relieved
Papa's mind moreover, giving him a hope that the sins of his hero were
not so great as he had supposed. ... Mr Conway came and stayed till
we went out to dine at the Deanery. Dean Liddell of Christ Church,
Oxford, was there, and Mr & Mrs Leckie, and Dean Church of St Paul's
with his wife, and the Duke & Duchess of Argyll. . . . Deans Stanley &
Liddell . . . talked of Egypt. Why and how has Egypt such a hold upon
me? No other subject seems to interest me to the same degree, and the
memory of it is so lovely. . . . Dr Hinton came . . . author of Man &
his Dwelling Place. . . . Father went to Lady Amberley's where he met
Mr Browning and was well pleased. They disagreed about poetry. Mr
Browning praised Shelley. . . . Wednesday Apr 16 Today breakfast at
Argyll Lodge and a beautiful time. . . . Then went with Mr Geo. Howard
to his house, perfectly beautiful. . . ." These were some of the details
that Ellen jotted down from the experiences of the ten days from April
6 to 16.

She presently picked up the thread of the narrative in a new report
to Concord, continuing her day by day account. "The next day we dined
at the Norton's ... Mr Lewes who wrote the Life of Goethe & married
Miss Evans was there, and was skillful in telling stories. . . . April i8th
we went to breakfast with Mrs Smalley. . . . Friday ... we dined with
the Howards. Mr Howard is a young gentleman who loves Father as all
the Stanley family seem to ... The other guests were Sir Arthur Helps,

476 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Mr Browning, Mr Froude, the Duke & Duchess of Argyle . . . Saturday
... we dined in the P. M. at Kensington Museum and looked it over
with Mr Allingham host and Mr Browning. We had very good talk and

1 saw Raphael's Cartoons . . . Sunday to church. Then to lunch with
Dr Carpenter, then to St Paul's to hear Dr Liddon . . . Monday I went
to Seven Oaks . . . and Father the House of Commons, the Duke of Bed-
ford & Mr Playfair seemed to be the people who talked with him most.
... he went with Mr Hughes to the Workingmen's College. Tuesday we
breakfasted with dear Sir Henry Holland, perfect bliss. Then at 1 1 o'clock
went to Eton & Windsor with Miss Stanley and Mr Howard, lunched with
Mrs Ponsonby in the Castle, and saw all my soul desired . . . came home
and dined with the Hugheses and W. E. Forsters . . . Wednesday break-
fasted at Mr Cyrus W. Field's with Mr Gladstone, Duke of Argyle, Mr
Hughes Mr Norton, Mr Smalley. . . . lunched with Mr Tyndall, Mr
Huxley & Mr Hurst being the other guests ... Mr Allingham took us at
three to see Guild Hall ... we dined with Lady Airlie, the company was
the Duke & Duchess of Cleveland, D & D Argyle, Mr Campbell, Mr Howard
Lady Stanley, Mr Browning & Mr Cowper who was once in Concord. . . .
Thursday . . . Father after breakfast with Mr Gladstone spent the fore-
noon with Mr Carlyle with real comfort, bade him goodbye and then went
to the Howard's & lunched with Mrs Lewes. We dined. at Sir Frederick
Pollock's . . . Friday calls all day lunch at Mrs E. Arnold's with Mr
W. H. Channing, dined at the Conways' . . . Saturday packed & went
Sunday to Tintern Abbey & Raven'scroft— stayed with the Amberleys . . .
Monday to Cyfarthfa & luxury & the kindest hostess. Mr Conway also, for

2 days. Then to Oxford."

Before he had got through the hurried round of London dinner tables
and drawing rooms, Emerson was tired and, according to Ellen, could not
remember "half as well as when he came" but "rejoiced so much in seeing
Mr Gladstone, and Earl Russell, and the Howards that I am sure he will
look back on it with pleasure."

His one attempt at a speech on this English visit, it seems, was at the
Working-Men's College in London; and his address there was extempo-
raneous and therefore doubtless brief. Conway, present on that occasion,
remarked that when Emerson "spoke of the 'pathetically noble' effort of
English scholars to educate their humbler brethren, there was before us
another 'pathetically noble' sight in the figure of the white-haired sage
beaming his last farewell, and uttering his last animating word to the class
that received him as prophet at the dawn of a closing generation."

Emerson showed courage and wisdom in refusing urgent invitations from
Max Miiller, seconded by the vice-chancellor of the university, to appear

VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 477

as a lecturer, as the French critic Taine had done before him, for the
Taylor Institution at Oxford. "If I were at Oxford with any leisure, &
could believe that I could interest young men there," he told Max Miiller,
"I should willingly read something to them, but certainly not for a fee. I
go to see & to hear, & so pray you to secure me a corner in your Lecture-
room & Ruskin's." Being informed that Max Miiller would probably lec-
ture on the origin of language on May i, that Ruskin would lecture next
day, and that Ruskin, Jowett, and others were being asked to a dinner in
honor of the expected guest, Emerson went to Oxford at the appointed time.

The Two Paths had somehow struck his fancy decisively, he had long
wanted to know its author, and so did, as he had written ahead, "rejoice
like a boy in these expectations," The lectures were duly heard and the
dinner was eaten, but Emerson got more than enough "doleful opinions of
modern society" from Ruskin when they had retired to the lecturer's cham-
bers. Yet Ellen could attend both lectures and also hear Ruskin's pessimistic
conversation and still come away with unabated enthusiasm. She longed
for time to tell not only of "Prince Leopold's coming to lunch with us
and our going to tea with him and his showing me the pictures of his
family" but of "Mr Ruskin whom I fell in love with," and the "serious-
ness of his talk, the sweetness of his ways, the interest of his rooms and the
things he showed us." She also had pleasing memories of "dear Mr Max
Miiller" and of "a hundred things that come and go all unrecorded."

If the youth of Oxford had no chance to hear Emerson's voice, the
youth of England seemed still to be readers of his books and had no inten-
tion of letting him depart in peace. "That class," Ellen put it, "which Father
calls Very young persons' have discovered that he is in England and he
has letters asking him to arrange an interview anywhere, anyhow, only not
to refuse. Some he answers and often he has to let them go." His time was
too short and his strength too slight to allow him to act as father confessor
as he had done in 1847 and 1848, and he appointed no new bishop to
succeed Arthur Clough.

From Oxford he and Ellen went on to Warwick, where his friend
Flower met them and showed them the castle before carrying them home
with him to Stratford-on-Avon. At Stratford, church was attended for the
sake of Shakespeare. Beside his tomb the clerk seated the Americans and
their friends. Afterwards Emerson returned, as Ellen said, "to take a better
look at the tomb, and see how Miss Bacon probably would have planned
to disturb those mysterious bones." In the evening he entertained his hosts,
the Flowers, by reading aloud to them.

By the 6th of May he and Ellen were in Durham and on the next day
arrived in Edinburgh, where he "met a large party of notabilities" at the

478 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

home of Fraser, a professor of logic and metaphysics in the university. He
was entertained at dinner by William Smith, the translator of Fichte. Smith
had heard him preach in Edinburgh in 1833 and had listened to his lec-
tures in 1848. Emerson and Ellen hurried on southward again through
Keswick. At Bowdon, a few miles from Manchester, Alexander Ireland,
chief instigator of the lecture tour of 1847-1848, was their host for a couple
of days; and, at Ireland's, Emerson had a final interview with "many of
his old friends and hearers" of that earlier time. At Liverpool, R. C. Hall,
also known to him since the years of the second visit to Britain, saw him
off on the Cunarder Olympus when she sailed an May 15.

As the Emersons had expected, they found their American friends
Charles Norton and his family among the passengers on the crowded ship.
Norton talked little to anybody but Emerson and took care to preserve notes
of their conversations. Sometimes the two would smoke their cigars together
in the daytime, and at night they would have a couple of hours of talk
before the lights were extinguished in the saloon. Norton discovered that
though Emerson talked to everybody, was the greatest talker on the Olympus,
he was fresh and ready for more at night.

What struck Norton most in the aging man were the limits of his mind,
his firm closing of other avenues of truth in favor of his own optimistic
philosophy. Norton undoubtedly got an exaggerated idea of these weak-
nesses, but he was not so much wrong as unfortunate. He was getting his
most intimate view of Emerson when Emerson was in one of his weakest
phases. He was even persuaded that Emersonian optimism was degenerat-
ing "into fatalistic indifference to moral considerations, and to personal
responsibilities" and was "at the root of much of the irrational sentirnen-
talism in our American politics, of much of our national disregard of honour
in our public men." During the whole voyage he hardly caught a glimpse
of the real Emerson of other days. Yet he saw through the distorting medium
of old age some of the sage's faults and virtues. He detected a good deal of
inconsistency and much caprice in literary tastes and judgments, Emerson
was handicapped by imperfect sympathies. Extraordinary dicta like the
statement^ made, at Norton's dinner, to Lewes? Goethe's biographer, that
Faust was a bad book were now seasoned with a minimum of the familiar
Emersonian charm of phrase. Yet during the voyage Emerson read and
reread Omar Khayyam, forgetting that he had condemned it six months
before. He surprised Norton by admitting that he had just now, for the
first time, heard of the Finnish epic, the Kdewala. He had happened to
meet its French translator at the table d'h6te of the Hotel de Lorraine in
Paris. He also struck Norton as absolutely without conceit. He "blushed
like a youth one day/' Norton said, 'Vhen I spoke to him of his influence

VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND OF PHILAE 479

on the men of my generation.55 He was so insistent on the joy of living that
Norton quite logically took him up when he bewailed his seventieth birth-
day, which fell during the voyage, as the close of his youth. But Norton,
surprisingly enough, failed to realize that he was dealing with a man whose
faculties were far from what they had been. He wrote him some birthday
verses, assuring him that he would be a youth till he died.

On May 26, when the bitter cold of the voyage was changing to warmth,
the travelers saw the American shore set off with the fresh green of spring.
Boston, though recently scarred by the great fire, seemed, in the fiery halo
of the best sunset "since we were in Egypt," to be "beautiful & imposing."
After remaining on the Olympus over night, Emerson and Ellen were de-
layed many more hours before they could start for Concord with Edward
Emerson and William Forbes. Ellen, writing letters while she waited, ex-
plained that she was "spending the day in the depot as they haven't got
the house in order at home yet and hoped we shouldn't arrive till after-
noon." Meantime her father was "going about to attend to business and
see friends in the city."

The returning travelers were kept ignorant of the fact that the little
village of Concord had been preparing an elaborate reception for them.
A committee had purchased lumber and green cloth and accessories; had
kept a workman busy for two days erecting an arch of welcome near Bush;
and, at an additional expense of nearly thirty dollars, had hired a band
that included baritone, alto, and bass horns. The committee was hampered
by uncertainty. It was planned, possibly for the benefit of the schools, that
Emerson should be brought home in an afternoon train; but even the day
of his arrival was uncertain. A system of signals was arranged. As soon as
the Olympus arrived in Boston Harbor the Concord bells would ring for
fifteen minutes. Notice of the train on which Emerson was to reach Concord
would be given by striking the bell twelve times for the noon train, three
for the three o'clock train, five for the five o'clock train, six for the six
o'clock train, or seven for the seven o'clock train.

The bells first announced arrival by the noon train, but a telegram
changed the hour, or was intended to change it, to 3 : 30. In the mild state
of confusion Concord telegraphed to the president of the railroad and
arranged for the engineer of Emerson's train to give timely notice that
Emerson was aboard. Accordingly the engine of his train whistled all the
way from Walden Woods to the station so that no such noise was ever
heard before in the village.

At the station the whole town, it seemed to Ellen, had assembled "Just
as they always did in the war to see the Company off or receive it back,
just as they do on Decoration Day, or any great town occasion, a sight

480 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

always festal." As Emerson faced the crowd Sam Hoar ran to his side and
demanded and got three cheers for him. When the train started off, the
people in the cars threw up the windows and added a cheer of their own.
The school children may have been at the station to honor Ellen as well
as her father, for during her absence she had been re-elected to the school
committee. Some of them had come even from the outer districts, three
and four miles distant.

The band played while people in wagons and carryalls and people on
foot moved down Main Street and Lexington Road, all managing to reach
the arch of welcome before the returning travelers in order to greet them
again as they entered Bush. The school children sang "Home, Sweet Home."
Emerson and Ellen, with others of the family already in their party, found
Lidian at the east door and walked through the newly restored house to
the front to look out on the crowd. Emerson went to the gate to express
his thanks, and the crowd dispersed only after some more cheering.

Alcott was one of the most interested spectators. He had come to Bush
the evening before to bring a copy of his Concord Days, "bound in flexible
covers, with illustrated title page, and photograph," a gift for Emerson's
seventieth birthday. To him it seemed that both this spectacle in honor of
his neighbor and his neighbor's response were charming. "Whatever doubts,"
he wrote in his journal, "any may have had respecting its agreeableness
to him, were instantly dissipated by the hearty response and che&r with
which he returned this expression of his townsmen's regards. It was a sur-
prise to him. 'What meant this gathering? Was it a public day?' ... I
did not hear his speech distinctly, but trust someone gifted with a faithful
memory will preserve it." Edward Emerson thought he remembered, many
years later, that his father had only said, "My friends! I know that this
is not a tribute to an old man and his daughter returned to their house,
but to the common blood of us all— one family— in Concord!"

Alcott, perhaps in a wistful mood, thought it "a novelty in the history
of this our historic revolutionary village, this honoring scholars publicly"
and believed that it stirred "the latent patriotism which has slumbered
unfelt perhaps in the old citizens, descendants of the patriots of igth of
April, and now rekindled at the fame of their townsman." Whatever pa-
triotism it stirred, such a pleasing festival in honor of a village's own poet,
essayist, and seer was doubtless never witnessed before or since in America,
unless in fiction. To a reader of Hawthorne, the late storyteller of the
village, this gathering of 1873 might, however, have recalled the final scene
in "The Great Stone Face," a story which, Moncure Conway asserted, was
inspired by Emerson.

2J-

TERMINUS

Oh, but the play is not yet at an end., there are but
three Acts yet acted of it? thou hast well said: for
in matter of life, three Acts is the whole Play.

— Marcus Aurelius . . . Meditations,
translated by Meric Gasaubon

USH had been restored at an expense of more than $6500 drawn
from the cash paid by the insurance company and from the funds
given by friends after the fire, and though still unpretentious it
was a comfortable home. The bay windows in the dining room
and nursery, the large garret provided by the square roof, and especially
the well-lighted and spacious bathroom instead of the old dark, cramped
ones, made the house more pleasant than before. After establishing the
ritual of the daily bath in the 18505 Emerson had for eighteen years, win-
ter and summer, proudly taken his cold-water morning plunge, his "invari-
able," in a hat tub. The modern bathroom was a symbol of progress. The
whole of the reconstructed building, when it was shown at a great recepr
tion, with committees of the Emersons' friends acting as guides to the guests,
seemed to warrant the hope of a new and more prosperous era in the life
of the master of Bush.

He was well and lighthearted and imagined he was making progress
on the book long since promised to the English publisher. It was now
thought certain that Egypt had given him renewed life and health. His
enthusiasm for the beauty of his restored house and the comfort of his study
did not tire. The burning and restoration seemed to the whole family like
events in a novel, and day after day they surveyed their rooms and pos-
sessions "with a feeling of romantic interest.9' The lemon stick Emerson had
bought in Naples and its successor, the boxwood cane, must have given
him all the help he needed to get rapidly about over his favorite roads and
fields.

But in spite of all, he was growing old. In 1875 the Gutekunst photo-
graphs of "The Three Boys55— Emerson, William Furness, and Sam Brad-
ford—recorded admirably his changing moods. Dejection, chastened self-
confidence, restrained humor revealed themselves in his face. His long hair

481

482 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

was thin though still much darker than Furness's or Bradford's. His short
side whiskers were gray. Possibly the meeting with him in Beacon Street,
Boston, that Robert Collyer remembered occurred about this time. Collyer,
struck by his sadness, asked him about a friend. u 'He is growing old,' Mr.
Emerson replied sorrowfully. I asked for another. 'He is growing old,' still
more sadly. 'You are looking well, though, Mr. Emerson,' I said. 'Yes, I
am well enough,' he returned, 'but I am growing old too.' "

The most unmistakable sign of age was his loss of memory. The mind
of the intuitive philosopher seemed to be failing much as the mind of the
masterfully logical philosopher Kant had failed. By 1874 Alcott, Emer-
son's senior, saw the marked change in his friend. "It must be mortify-
ing," he commented, "to one of his accurate habits of thought and speech
and his former tenacity of memory to find himself wanting in his once
ready command of imagery to match his thought instantly. I remember
when the least hesitancy in another was painful to him in the extreme, so
facile was his genius, his rhetoric so fit and so brilliant."

But even now, it seemed, much of the old fire could flare up again.
Within a few months Alcott was chiefly troubled by the persistent opposi-
tion Emerson kept up against the Alcottian theories. It was only Emerson's
skeptical attitude that seemed to him to make their conversation drag.
"Was I still the visionary enthusiast, whom he must check by his mod-
erated sense and less hopeful mood? Or was he in the subjunctive?" Alcott
asked himself. "Yet my friend," he remembered, "complains of growing
old, says that his memory is gone, and that his Diary has few entrances
in these late days. Does he exaggerate, as the rhetorician must? I have
known not a single scholarly acquaintance whose memory of words was
ready and retentive like his." But, as Alcott observed, Emerson very cleverly
covered up failures of memory by circumlocution. Another thing that made
it harder to catch him in his lapses of memory was the habit he now had
of falling into subdued tones in his conversation.

Fortunately he had no longer any need to worry over finances. In 1873,
when his income from lectures was very low, he could expect $2,000 from
his $28,000 in railroad bonds now prospering under the skillful manage-
ment of the Forbeses. Apparently the money given him on account of the
fire was not exhausted by the rebuilding of the house or by travel. In 1874
the sale of the Jackson estate in Boston's strategic Court Street brought the
heirs, according to Emerson's account book, over $63,000, and of this
Lidian was expected to receive $20,000. In 1875 the Concord assessor re-
ported that Emerson then had $20,000 in stocks and bonds and Lidian
$16,000, that their buildings and 51^ acres of land were worth $7,500,
and that they had two cows, a horse, and two carriages. In the middle

TERMINUS 483

18705 Emerson usually kept a checking account of around $1700 in the
Atlantic National Bank of Boston. The outlay for domestic servants and
for his man John Clahan had to be remembered, but at least the farm and
garden paid him something for their keep. If his beloved pears— the Bart-
letts, the Napoleons, the Golden Beurres, the large greenish yellow and
russet Flemish Beauties, the juicy and rich Louise Bonne de Jerseys colored
pale green with a dark blush, the high-flavored Seckels, and the rest-
brought him but scant honor at the Cattle Show and but little cash at the
market, his orchard made other contributions to the family economy, and
the strawberry crop he sent to market in the summer of 1873 alone amounted
to at least some twenty-four hundred boxes.

With Lidian and Ellen in his house, Emerson must have found do-
mestic life entertaining. Ellen was full of enthusiasms. And both she and
her father considered Lidian in action a first-rate spectacle, though the
imaginary "calamities55 that marked her course "from day to day53 aroused
pity. Lidian had been, as Ellen saw her, "so innocent, so pathetic, and
so funny." "I don't think," Ellen had summed her up, "any family before
has ever contained so curious, and interesting a character as she is. I con-
template her all the time with increasing pleasure, and find her innocence
unfathomable. I wonder if she could have got into a family more unlike
her than the Emersons who are hardly born innocent, and cannot stay so."

But Lidian had at last entered a happy period of transformation. She
was no longer the pallid invalid that the Amberleys had visited in 1867.
She had begun to abandon what Ellen called her double emotional life
and to give up her perpetual brooding on the evils of the world. She had
now proved her prowess as a talker at the club May Alcott had founded.
People had noticed the delight which Emerson, who also attended the club,
took in these exhibitions of his wife's unsuspected abilities. For the most
part, the little world that Lidian knew had not seemed to put the highest
value on her. But Ellen had at last had her own eyes opened to a certain
beauty in her mother and had come to appreciate her courage and high-
mindedness and the excellence of even her amusing traits. Now in her
middle seventks, Lidian was constantly being invited out and- had, in
Ellen's eyes, become a belle. With social life, her spirits rose and she hardly
noticed her husband's gradual decline. She took to playing whist with the
Alcotts.

In 1874, Edward married Annie Keyes. Recently graduated from the
medical school at Harvard, he settled down in Concord as partner of
Doctor Bartlett, the Emerson family doctor. Edith, though she had long
since become Edith Forbes and had her growing family to care for, kept
in close touch with her Concord relatives and incited them to visit her at

484 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Milton and at Naushon Island. Naushon drew Emerson almost every year,
usually in August.

He now left the family circle much less frequently than he had used to
do. When, in 1874, he went with Ellen to the house of Caroline Sturgis
Tappan, a friend since early Transcendental days, he found Doctor Oliver
Wendell Holmes and William James among the guests there. He had not
ceased to go to the Saturday Club and was still successful in getting frietids
into it. He urged the election of Doctor Asa Gray, the botanist, an ex-
pounder of Darwinism with a difference partly due to Gray's religious
orthodoxy, and was delegated to inform him that he had been chosen. He
still valued the Concord Social Circle. When its meeting was held at Bush
in 1875 there was an extraordinary feast, perhaps because of his son
Edward's admission as a member.

He kept going through at least the formalities of his office of Harvard
overseer as faithfully as he could. He had been re-elected in 1873 for a
term of six years. He had long since helped collect funds for the memorial
to Harvard's dead soldiers, had even looked over the plans for the curious
Memorial Hall approvingly, and had proudly witnessed the laying of the
cornerstone. He had solicited donations to the college when it was poverty-
stricken, He had long served, and now still served, on the Greek committee
and other visiting committees of the overseers as well as on their special
committees.

Though he did not attend all the meetings at which the overseers con-
tinued to debate the old rule of compulsory attendance on prayers in the
college chapel, his interest in the subject must have been keen. The cor-
poration, the overseers, and the faculty debated and resolved. Opinion see-
sawed. The sentiments of individual overseers were seldom recorded in the
official minutes. Whatever sentiments Emerson expressed on the subject of
prayers were not even hinted at. Yet some rumors of his attitude got abroad.
In 1874, when the debate over prayers seemed critical, The Common-
wealth, a Boston paper, reported that he had favored keeping attendance
compulsory. Since prayer was the highest act of the human mind, he was
supposed to have argued, it would be wrong either to take it away from
young men or to permit them to deprive themselves of it.

If this report was correct, Emerson was for the moment not Emerson.
It is true that he had once preached ceaseless prayer and had apparently
never renounced it, but the ceaseless prayer he had advocated was a state
of spiritual health rather than a ceremonial and had nothing to do with
praying formally on schedule. It was also true that since his days as a
schoolmaster and as a school committeeman in Boston he had been inclined
to favor strict discipline for schoolboys. But this bias of his was not enough

TERMINUS 485

to make the argument reported by The Commonwealth sound Emersonian.
If Emerson actually argued and voted as rumor had it, Cabot's comment
on the rumor was probably the best explanation: "The truth was, he was
simply dwelling in his early associations." The aging man, Cabot doubtless
meant, was a boy again, sitting in chapel, and did not want his boyhood
memories disturbed.

Writing now meant collaboration, Emerson found. He helped his chil-
dren, and, before long, his friend Cabot, hunt out publishable passages
from old lectures or journals and fit them together. Ellen, naturally most
with her father, was the court of first appeal and remained the general
manager of literary collaboration till Cabot became supreme. It was a
severe test for her. As late as 1868, when she was in her thirtieth year, she
had read, she told Gisela Grimm, very little of her father's writings except
his poems. But she must have become far better acquainted with both his
books and his manuscripts in the half dozen years following. Her close asso-
ciation with her father had been her best preparation. But she needed all
the breadth of vision she had got from her formal education under Sanborn
at Concord, at the Sedgwick school in Lenox, and under the direction of
Agassiz at Cambridge as well as the liberalizing she had got from her travels
alone to the Azores and with her father in Europe and Africa. She was
completely loyal to her father, and yet she was unsympathetic with his
more radical doctrines. She was clever herself at writing, but in a style quite
different from his. Mainly she could help him by suggesting what ought to
be kept as likely to appeal to readers, what deleted, and what made more
clear. She found that he could still be stubborn in defense of his own taste.

Edith's pleasure in hearing her father read verse had, more than any-
thing else, kept alive the project for an anthology of his favorite poems by
miscellaneous authors. It had early been decided that it should be called
Parnassus, and that title had survived through many years while the editing
had languished or progressed slowly. During his travels of 1872-1873 Emer-
son had occasionally entertained his friends by reading from a tentative
notebook collection. Changes and additions were discussed at family con-
ferences and in much family correspondence. As late as November 17, 1874,
on the verge of publication, "God Save the King" was deleted from the
proof sheets in favor of "Bonnie Dundee." On the i8th of December,
William Forbes "came home proud as a peacock bearing the first copy of
Parnassus" to Edith.

The collection was by no means representative of Emerson's own best
literary judgment, which he had outlived. It was never meant to be limited
to great pieces of poetry. It contained much homely humorous and senti-
mental verse as well as some masterpieces of imaginative writing. The

486 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

extraordinary mistakes chargeable to editing were numerous enough to cause
much anguish. George Hillard complained that the text failed to keep
abreast of changes made by the authors. James Clarke objected that he had
been credited with what was not his. Stirling, the Scottish philosopher, was
perturbed, as many others must have been, by the deliberate omission of
Shelley. The greatest American poets were completely ignored— Poe, Whit-
man, and Emerson himself. Foe was dead, but Whitman had good reason
to be displeased, William Rolfe, already editing Shakespeare, sent in notes
on miscellaneous errors. There were complaints from a poet who was in-
cluded but not credited with his own verses. But the book was a financial
success. As Alcott was told, it was the best venture its editor had made and
had earned $1000 within some nine months after publication.

By the late summer of 1875, w^en Letters and Social Aims seemed
about to take final form but before Cabot took hold, Ellen was fully initiated
as managing collaborator. She found the work "interesting & painful" and
kept her sister fully informed about it. "I find it easier than three years
ago for two reasons/3 she told her, "I am better acquainted with it so feel
less blind & helpless., and I have now not the least scruple about showing
Father things, while then I couldn't bear to, because it was the beginning,
and I hated to shock him with the sense that his memory was failing him,
33ut as fast as one hill of difficulty with this book is ascended I come in sight
of another twice as appalling, so my spirits are seldom high about the
business. Father's, however, rose as soon as he began to feel the cable draw
and perceived that I was really helping him along. He is evidently more
cheerful ever since, and often sings praises, and proposes writing to the
Advertiser that a partnership has been iormed. He doesn't like to summon
Mr C. to this, but I foresee that 'twill be necessary. " Hotten, the original
Instigator of the book., was dead; but his successors, Chatto & Windus,
wanted it still. A few articles long ago printed in magazines were to be
used as chapters; but the contents of the volume were mostly being sifted
out of the literary stock piles at Bush, approved, and somehow arranged
and unified.

Within a few weeks Cabot had come to join Ellen and her father in
their extraordinary literary adventure. A publishable passage was boldly
wrenched from its old context and made to do service wherever Cabot and
Ellen thought it could. "In this way," Cabot confessed, "it happened some-
times that writing of very different dates was brought together: e, g, the
essay on Immortality, which has been cited as showing what were his latest
opinions on that subject, contains passages written fifty years apart from
each other/5 Emerson himself could do little but take part in the search for
materials. Though the new method of compilation was not unlike the

TERMINUS 487

method he himself had used when he had worked alone, he now had little
or nothing to do with the actual synthesis of the scraps gleaned in the
search. As Cabot candidly explained after publication, it was "open to any
one to say that he never really decided upon publishing them, and, if he
had been left to himself, never would have published them."

According to Ellen, her father was at first frightened at the spectacle
of a new hand holding his pen; and, according to Mrs. Cabot, Cabot was
frightened at being that new hand. But soon things were going smoothly
enough. It is impossible to determine the exact extent of each collaborator's
work. Cabot bore a heavy responsibility. To him Emerson "always spoke
... of the volume as cyour book.' " It seems at first to have been Ellen's
idea, if not Cabot's, that the collaboration should be kept secret, doubtless
to avoid wounding Emerson's pride; and the book, christened Letters and
Social Aims, appeared in the middle of December, 1875, without any word
of apology. But Cabot eventually made a very frank confession to the
reading public. Letters and Social Aims was almost posthumous, and its
compilation raised much the same ethical question as was faced by the
editors of Hegel when they had to bring order out of the confused manu-
scripts relating to, rather than giving, his lectures on the philosophy of
history.

If the book, even in its hitherto unprinted parts, was mostly an old
story, so were the papers Emerson infrequently read in public. Sometimes,
however, an audience might be surprised with something particularly suited
to the occasion. The address at the opening of the Concord Free Public
Library in October of 1873 had a local flavor, with its references to Con-
cord literary worthies, Thoreau being given the place of honor. Yet the
manuscript seems to have been prepared with little help. Ellen, fearful of
the outcome, witnessed what seemed almost a miracle of delivery, a miracle
possible, no doubt, only to a veteran lecturer. The easy mastery Emerson
had used to feel was suddenly restored to him. "I was proud of Father's
voice," Ellen assured Edith, "proud of his skill, and more thankful for it
than can be told, for I had read the address in part and was dismayed
at its fragmentary nature. But when he came to deliver it he neatly con-
nected it extempore in a manner no one would suspect. . . . When he
came to the end, the end was either left at home or shuffled, Wasn't it a
pity? But again he happily covered it up. No one knew but he & I."

He seemed to enjoy venturing out to read a poem or even a lecture
at a place like the Fields home in Boston, and he could sometimes be per-
suaded to face large audiences. In 1874 he turned up at the New England
Women's Club "poetical picnic." There he, William Lloyd Garrison, and
others read original poems.

488 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Few cared to debar him in his old age in spite of his unrepented reli-
gious liberalism. Even the divinity faculty at last ended its embargo of
thirty-six years. As late as June, 1873, that faculty had refused to grant
the petition of the senior class to have him appointed as commencement
preacher, and a few months later had locked the door against him by incit-
ing the Harvard overseers to forbid the divinity students to elect any
graduating-class preacher other than an instructor of the university. But
on May 12, 1874, he stood once more in the old chapel. Professors as well
as students were there to hear him. Emerson had told his friend Charles
Norton of the intended address and had fittingly asked that he might spend
the night at the Norton home on that occasion. Norton was the son of the
man who had so vehemently attacked the divinity school address of 1838.
There were thus gestures of reconciliation on every hand.

Charles Norton, and doubtless many others, had privately wondered
what Emerson could possibly add now to his masterpiece of 1838, He really
had nothing to add. But the students at least, according to their scribe, were
delighted with what he gave them in 1874. After the dean had introduced
him with some eulogistic remarks, Emerson arose, said the scribe, "and for
more than an hour gave the audience such a treat, intellectually and
morally, as is seldom enjoyed; claiming their closest attention by the magic
of that subtle thought, that happy expression, and that simple, but unique
manner, that have so long charmed and delighted the world—'3 The his-
torical significance of the moment must, however, have been more impres-
sive than the address. "The striking contrast manifested between the Dean
of the School on this occasion, and the spirit of a former one toward Mr.
Emerson, was,55 the scribe observed, "an element which forced itself upon
the minds of many present, and in no small degree added to the enjoyment
of the occasion—55

By this time even an appearance at the Concord Lyceum could put
Emerson into the news. When he read a lecture there on oratory and ora-
tors in February of 1875, three hundred people came on a special train
from New Hampshire to hear him, and it was said that he spoke "with
his old ease and confidence.55 If he cared to go far from home with a
lecture he could count on a much larger fee than he could have expected
in his prime. In March of 1875 he received $300 for a lecture in Philadel-
phia. But he had other and less pleasant reasons to remember that occasion.
He was overpowered by the size of the auditorium at the Academy of
Music. Ellen saw from the box where she sat with the Furnesses that he
was making no effort. She gauged his appeal to the audience by the response
to the passages which had been favorites with other listeners and concluded
that only a few persons could hear all he said. He had the feeling that it

TERMINUS 489

was impossible to give anything its right meaning when he had to struggle
to make himself heard. So he did not struggle.

A few weeks later he was making his igth of April centennial address
in Concord at the unveiling of Daniel Chester French's "Minute Man,33
the first serious work of the young sculptor. It was almost as much his
statue as French's. Some two years before,, a committee of the town meet-
ing had voted to erect on the American side of the river a statue of a
minute man "with the lines of Emerson, that are 'household words/ "
engraved on its base. As those lines had perhaps been heard almost as far
as the shot his embattled farmers had fired in 1775, ^ was appropriate that
their author should be added to the committee on the monument. He took
great interest in the progress of the statue. Granite was discarded for
bronze, Congress furnishing some cannon as materials for the completion
of the work. On the raw igth of April, Emerson delivered the short and
simple address which, according to his son, was the last he ever composed.
Hundreds of visitors, it is true, sought shelter in the hospitable homes of
the village and would not stir out even to the tents to hear Lowell's ode
and Curtis's oration. But in spite of the rough weather it was a memorable
day for Concord. President Grant, cabinet members, governors, regiments
of soldiers, and noted authors were among her guests.

In these years Emerson might still go as far as New Hampshire to
address the graduating class of an obscure academy, as he did at New
Hampton in the summer of 1875, or obediently appear in Boston at some
club or at some historic celebration. He had read the poem "Boston*' at
the centennial Boston Tea Party in 1873, anc^ had soon repeated it at the
Radical Club. The much later New Hampton address meant a serious
adventure of some days3 length. Emerson went shopping for a map of New
Hampshire and a new felt hat. The hat was so good a disguise that Ellen
could hardly recognize him. At the last moment she got the manuscript
of the address in hand and sewed the leaves, thus discouraging any inspira-
tional rearrangement on the spur of the moment. At New Hampton, social
and literary fraternities appeared with a band to convoy the Ernersons to
the academy. A marshal with a portentous baton was personal escort for
Emerson; another carrying a cane ornamented with pink ribbons took
charge of Ellen. Emerson pleased his audience with a few homely stories.

After the commencement he and Ellen traveled into the mountains,
stopping along the road to hunt strawberries. At the Flume House sudden
oblivion fell over his memory of a former visit there, and he wanted to
know whether the Flume was a mountain, a river., a tree, or a rock. At
length he said he remembered having admired something long ago and this
was it. Ellen prolonged the vacation, and he was delighted. He suggested,

490 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

as he often did on such occasions., that they should never go home. She
looked for signs of benefit to his health, but when she saw how pale and
thin he was, she feared a week would do little for him.

He was unmoved, to all appearances, by his fame. It had been so in
earlier years when long experience of it could not have accounted for his
unperturbed attitude. He was pursued by autograph-hunters. Literary so-
cieties were named for him. He had got used, no doubt, to such outbursts
as Benjamin Presbury's in 1867. Presbury, after hearing him lecture, had
described him as the greatest teacher of the age in the most bountiful hour
of his life. Emerson must have known that Alcott, lecturing on New Eng-
land authors, had hardly been able to get beyond Emerson. Privately, he
was very probably bored. When, at a town meeting in 1874, it was pro-
posed to call a Concord street by his name, he declined being so honored.
He suggested that the street be named for Thoreau, and it was. Alcott
commented that "We would not name one street Emerson, but all in the
village, were this possible, to signify our respect for our fellow-townsman."

Charles Sumner, with almost his last words, sent his love and reverence
to his Concord friend. Emerson was a pallbearer, with Whittier for his
mate. "Where does one put this crape?" he asked. Whittier, doubtless see-
ing how helpless Emerson was, replied, "I have put mine in my hat." Ellen
was not surprised when her father failed to return to Concord at the ex-
pected time. She knew that some of his bodyguard, as she called the
numerous friends nowadays on the lookout for his safety, would see that
he got back.

He was pleased when Max Miiller honored him by dedicating the In-
troduction to the Science of Religion to him in memory of the visit the
Emersons had made to Oxford, and again when one of the student parties
at Glasgow nominated him for the rectorship of their university. At Glas-
gow he was under the disadvantage of being a foreigner as well as of
being pitted against such a powerful political figure as Disraeli, then prime
minister and first lord of the treasury and at the height of his popularity.
The Independents, Emerson's sponsors, printed propaganda in The Uni-
versity Independent, sang their imprecations against "drivelling 'Dizzy' "
to the tune of the "Soldier's Chorus" in Gounod's Faust, demanded to
know whether the students would permit their souls to be sold for govern-
ment gold, and urged everybody to vote for the philosopher of the Over-
soul instead. The result was that Emerson got more than five hundred votes,
and Disraeli's margin of some two hundred was considered small in the
circumstances. Emerson, spurred on by his family, had been willing to face
the necessity of another voyage to Britain in case of his election but was
more than content to stay at home. There, in spite of old age, he continued

TERMINUS 491

to be host to visiting celebrities from abroad. In October of 1875

Monckton Milnes, now Lord Houghton, arrived. With Judge Hoar as chief
partner in the conversation, Houghton kept the dinner table at Bush in
a state of pleased excitement.

Emerson felt his faculties rapidly weakening. Ellen was both his memory
and his judgment. Now a notable figure in the village, she rode about on
her donkey Graciosa, a native of the island of that name in her beloved
Azores, and was busy with public-spirited projects as well as with her
father's affairs. But her most important business was to be her father's
companion. In conversation Emerson could still seem charming to some,
but he confessed that "an old man fears most his best friends." "I have
grown silent to my own household under this vexation/' he said, "& cannot
afflict dear friends with my tied tongue. Happily this embargo does not
reach to the eyes, and I read with unbroken pleasure."

W. H. Channing, arriving for a stay of two weeks or more at Bush in
the summer of 1877, found that his host could not remember even Alcott's
name and noticed that he asked where Henry Thoreau was when he wanted
the name of a plant he had known from youth but had now forgotten.
But it seemed to Channing that though Emerson's words halted sadly his
thoughts were as clear and swift as ever. Ellen continued to find his strug-
gles for words enchanting. He arrived at hen only after zigzagging from
cat to fish, fish to bird, and bird to cock. In trying to speak of the Capitol
at Washington he could only describe it as "United States— survey of the
beauty of eternal Government." More than a year later he had the courage
to read the Concord Lyceum a lecture entitled "Memory." He was serene
in the face of defeat.

He did not easily lose his interest in the social life he had become used
to. As late as 1878, in spite of his difficulty in spelling and in writing, he
was sending out invitations in his own hand for the big family festival of
Thanksgiving, though he may well have used models prepared by Ellen.
Mrs. Gilchrist, a visitor in Concord that autumn, told William Rossetti that,
as she had heard, Emerson usually gathered some twenty-two children,
grandchildren, and relations about him on Thanksgivings. His daughter
Edith Forbes then had five children and his son, Edward, had two, and
Mrs. Gilchrist's total was not far from correct. Some of his grandchildren
still remember these occasions, when the house was alive with fun by day
and the garret was turned into a dormitory for the boys at night. Every
August or September Emerson continued to enter his name in the "Island
Book" at Naushon.

He did not quite forget his old friends, living or dead. At the grave
of Thoreau's sister Sophia in 1876 he wished for "some public service, less

492 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

hurried, with opportunity for friends of Henry and his sister to have spoken
of their worth.35 He concerned himself with the disposal of Thoreau's manu-
scripts, he kept up his defense of Thoreau against critics, and helped keep
the memory of Thoreau green by reading an account of him to a club in
the village. He lived over again his friendship with Carlyle, a pessimist
plunged into deepening gloom since the death of Jane Carlyle. As early as
1870 it had been arranged that copies should be made of all Carlyle's
letters for greater convenience in rereading them. Some five years later
Carlyle had promised Edith that after his death all of her father's letters
should be sent back to America.

As late as 1876 Emerson was still jotting down in his memorandum
book the street address of Walt Whitman. In the following year the Eng-
lishman Edward Carpenter, having made a pilgrimage to Whitman, visited
Concord and questioned Emerson closely about his changed relations with
Walt. Emerson laughed, a little nervously, Carpenter thought, and ad-
mitted that he had once believed Walt had some merit. But now, accord-
ing to Carpenter's story, he called Walt a wayward, fanciful man and
complained of his lack of respect for meter. He took down a volume of
Tennyson from the shelf and dwelt upon the beauty of Tennysonian dic-
tion and meter as if to point his moral. As the two men sat in the book-
lined study or walked in the old-fashioned garden, Carpenter observed
Emerson's painful failure of memory and saw the fixed look of age in his
eyes yet found him active in body, full of fun, and enjoying intellectual
life. Carpenter was struck by what he called "a wonderful bird-like look
about the face.33 This was all the more impressive because Emerson had a
way of jerking his head forward as he spoke. Ellen was distressed because
her father quite forgot that his British guest had been invited to spend the
night. Emerson ostentatiously exhibited his fatigue in the hope that this
"most agreeable man" would start for his train. Carpenter, as Ellen sym-
pathetically observed, "had a funny visit, and behaved beautifully through
its extraordinary scenes."

When Mrs. Alcott died, Emerson attended the funeral, sitting beside
Bronson Alcott. He had been the friend of the Alcotts for forty years. That
summer he and Ellen went down Boston Harbor on the Parthia to bid
farewell to Lowell, now the new American minister to Spain. On return-
ing to shore, Emerson found one of what Ellen called his bodyguard on
the alert and was soon put into a barouche and carried uptown to the
Athenaeum in state. A long chapter in the history of his friendships ended
the following year with the loss of Elizabeth Hoar. Having missed what
had seemed her destined relation of sister-in-law to him, she had been like
a sister to him ever since. A few days before her death, remembering her

TERMINUS 493

Chaucer, she sent Emerson word that she was waiting till the grain should
be taken off her tongue. Sam Bradford and William Henry Furness, Emer-
son's schoolboy friends, still lived. Bradford was the treasurer of a railroad.
Furness lived the intellectual life but had, as he himself said, only two ideas.
He missed slavery because one lifelong interest ol his had been emancipa-
tion, and now it was out of date. His other idea, the life of Jesus, remained
a hobby; and, he said, one paid for a hobby by becoming a bore. At
seventy-six Emerson attended the Holmes birthday breakfast given by The
Atlantic Monthly's publishers. John Burroughs, seeing him there, thought
him the most divine-looking man he had ever seen, not like a saint but
like a god.

Though Emerson was no longer very helpful in his role of literary ad-
viser to promising young authors, he had for years occasionally tried to
guide the hand of Emma Lazarus, a New York poet. She was still eager
for his advice, and it was hard to make her understand that he had no
more advice to give. He had needed to use tact in order to preserve his
friendly relations with her. Not long since, her admiration for him had
been severely shaken by his failure to include any of her verses in Parnassus,
for, after the warm commendation he had given a few of her poems, she
had fully expected to appear in his volume of favorites.

She forgot all her bitterness when, in response to an invitation from
the Emersons, she arrived at Concord in the autumn of 1876. Though
surprisingly mature in appearance and, to Ellen's eyes, unexpectedly large,
she was only twenty-seven years old and was pleasant with her plain, natural
manners. She seemed an easy guest to entertain, being "at the very summit
of delight & joyful anticipation.3' Yet she faced some difficult problems of
adjustment.

When eight o'clock came on her first night she was astounded to hear
that it was, in general, the family bedtime. Learning that Emerson himself
would sit up longer, she begged and got the extraordinary privilege of sit-
ting up and talking with him. He was alarmed but got happily through an
hour and a half of conversation. She vanished at nine-thirty that night and
thereafter tried to accommodate herself to all the customs of Bush as soon
as she became aware of them. But she could learn them only with some
effort. The old poet, she discovered, still kept hours of seclusion in his study,
as he had done in his days of busy literary work. In the morning, after
waiting patiently on the doorstep till half past ten or so for him to appear,
she was told, to her consternation, "Oh he is always shut up in the study
till dinner-time." After an excursion with Ellen to the Cliffs she inquired
what Emerson would do that afternoon. "Oh he always spends his after-
noons shut up in his study till he takes his walk," was the reply she got.

494 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Having come under the misapprehension that she was Emerson's guest and
not Ellen's, she was, it seems, only gradually disillusioned.

But once these disappointments were over, she was constantly delighted
and was a delight to the people of Bush. "After that/' Ellen said, "every-
thing seemed only to fill her young enthusiastic mind with utter happiness,
and her youth & happiness were elixir to us all." The guest had a way
of revealing the character of her hosts, as Ellen saw. Lidian was a discovery
for Emma. Ellen thought "it was one of the highest entertainments I ever
had to hear them together, her ardent persistent questions sometimes and
Mother's utterly unexpected answers, which surprised now by their un-
fathomable innocence, now by their erudition. She got at many a corner
of Mother's mind never before visited. Then again Mother's sudden walk-
ing right into & onto all Emma's supposed feelings & opinions with such
loftly unconsciousness, and the pretty frankness with which Emma would
take it." The visitor stirred everybody into new life. "Father & she," Ellen
said, "were also a novel spectacle, the peaceful directness of her questions
astonished him she didn't see how much, and she got answers out of him
that I should have declared he wouldn't give. Not that I think she suc-
ceeded in getting at what she wanted to, but he wouldn't have treated
anyone else so well. Then think of what nuts it was to me, old S. S. teacher
that I am, to get at a real unconverted Jew (who had no objection to call-
ing herself one, and talked freely about 'our Church' and cwe Jews,' ) and
hear how Old Testament sounds to her, & find she has been brought up to
keep the Law, and the Feast of the Passover, and the Day of Atonement.
The interior view was more interesting than I could have imagined. She
says her family are outlawed now, they no longer keep the Law, but Chris-
tian institutions don't interest her either."

In a journal of her Concord days which is now lost except for a few
excerpts, Emma Lazarus noted every incident and detail. Her sister said
of it a dozen years after it was written that it was "touching to read now,
in its almost childlike simplicity." It must have given an intimate view of
more than one Concord worthy along with personalized portraits of Emer-
son himself and "the stately, white-haired Mrs. Emerson, and the beautiful,
faithful Ellen, whose figure seems always to stand by the side of her august
father." Back in her Newport summer home, Emma dispatched fruit to
Bush and worried over Ellery Channing's attempt to take Emerson's place
as critic of what she called her crude rhymes. From New York she was soon
inquiring hopefully for Emerson's opinion of a play of hers she had left in
his hands, and was carrying on a correspondence with the amazing Ellery
Channing and pondering his morbid and melancholy moods. Concord was
henceforth a great capital on her literary map, and she kept Emerson's

TERMINUS 495

picture before her on her mantelpiece. In the third summer after her visit,
Ellen invited her again, but Emma apparently did not go.

Writing grew more and more difficult for Emerson, and his long-lived
journals came finally to an end. One he called "Old Man," apparently meant
to record the mind of age, turned out to be a mere fragment. He still read,
even going back to his own books. They now seemed new to him. Ellen,
finding him poring over them, heard him say, "Why, these things are really
very good." His enthusiasm for Oriental lore was still strong, and he was
shocked when he learned that even a spurious Oriental work, The Desatir,
had been allowed to go out of his study without his knowledge. He had
something to do with the preparation of his Selected Poems, published late
in 1876, though he leaned heavily on the advice of others. About the
quality of some of his pieces he had very definite opinions still. He disliked
the early poem "Good-bye" so much that neither family nor friends could
persuade him to include it.

Ellen now carried on much of his correspondence, doubtless most of
it. She and Cabot did their best to leave Emerson's own words untouched
in what they thought still had to be published, but changes seemed essen-
tial. Sometimes the manuscripts, after years of hasty rearrangements for
lyceum audiences, were almost hopelessly confused, and it was too late to
make sure what order Emerson would really prefer for publication. When
Fortune of the Republic appeared in proof in a form unfamiliar to Edith,
Ellen explained: "The 'original order' was not Father's but Mr Cabot's
and mine. We have never changed his order I think where it could be
ascertained. This is a collection of every general remark on the country
from many lectures of many dates, each full of the moment when it was
written and so adapted to that occasion and no other that scarcely a page
entire could be saved. When you first heard it at Thanksgiving it was most
of it from the lecture named F. of R. which Mr C. had already sifted but
there was then no order at all. As read at the Old South it had copious
additions from Moral Forces and some from other lectures, one on N.
England particularly. As read at Dr Bartol's it had been helped by all we
could collect from American Nationality. So don't think this last is any
more my version than all the rest for from the beginning I have done as
much in arrangement as Mr Cabot."

But Cabot was becoming more important in such matters, especially
since he had been asked, in 1877, to write a life of Emerson and had
promptly announced his half-way acceptance of the task. He said he felt
incompetent to write a life but would be willing to collect materials for the
right man whenever he should appear and would meanwhile, if occasion
arose, make a sketch that might do for a time.

496 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

One of the last attempts of Emerson, Ellen, and Cabot at their now
habitual collaboration on printer's copy was in response to the British
Sampson Low & Company's request in 1878 for an introduction to The
Hundred Greatest Men. The ambitious project demanded Emerson's aid,
so the publishers assured Ellen, their correspondent. They thought only two
men at all fit to write the general introduction, "the two Fathers of the Cen-
tury/5 Emerson and Carlyle, and they rejected Carlyk because he was
not catholic enough, belonged to only part of the world, not to all of it as
Emerson did. A page or two would be enough. By March of 1879 Emer-
son, in receipt of a new and urgent request for action, was writing to Ellen,
then away for a visit, that if he was to do the work for Sampson Low &
Company it was "absolutely necessary that you should come home & tell
me what hints & what resources Mr Cabot & you have found in my work-
shop possible to this end." Before the year was over Emerson's general
introduction of two or three pages duly appeared in print, with Matthew
Arnold's introduction to Volume I immediately following it.

Lecturing, from old manuscripts, sometimes refurbished by the collab-
orators, continued intermittently. It was hard for the master of the art to
quit, and he could be successful still. Rounds of applause greeted his thirty-
five-minute lecture to the teachers5 convention at Concord in April of
1876. Some weeks later he and Ellen were at the University of Vir-
ginia after visiting the centennial exhibition then attracting the world to
Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. He was "dazzled & astounded" at the
exposition, "had no idea of the glories" he saw with his friends Furness
and Bradford at his side. At Charlottesville, almost to the last possible
moment he was still working desperately, with Ellen's help, to get his un-
satisfactory oration in order. But in their brief intervals of freedom the
representatives of the North, so lately the hated enemy country, were re-
ceived with great friendliness, and all might have gone well had Emerson's
voice been stronger and the hall less large and difficult to speak in.

Large as it was, the hall was packed, principally with students from
seventeen to nineteen years old and an average of some two belles to each
beau. There was also a large sprinkling of children from four years old
upwards and due proportions of parents and of professors' families. Ellen
felt a mixture of regret and satisfaction. "The uproar of people coming in
late and hunting seats/3 she wrote home, "continued some ten minutes into
the address and I saw with dismay that Father's voice seldom rose clear
above it, and all the young & gay perceived the same thing, and like the
audience at Mr Adams's oration at the Dedication of the Memorial Hall,
concluded they couldn't hear very well and had better enjoy themselves, so
the noise rather grew than decreased. Eight front rows; two knots of stu-

TERMINUS 497

dents, determined to hear, who left their seats and came up the two aisles,
and stood; a like knot above on each side hanging over the gallery rail-
ings; and as many of the faculty, & cjoint-committee-of-the-literary-societies'
on the platform as were on a line with Father or before him, heard. Here
& there people strained their ears in vain; and the larger part of the audi-
ence whispered together, while some talked & laughed aloud all the time.
It was too bad."

Emerson seemed hurt, but Ellen was in a better position to judge.
"Father thinks if they would only have been quiet he could easily have
made them all hear. I don't," she decisively commented. "I think 'he could
not have reached more than two thirds; his voice didn't sound strong enough.
... I know the oration was appreciated by some of the hearers; and in
introducing Father and in a speech made afterwards things were said just
such as I desired,— that it was a sign of re-union, his coming down,—that
£it was fit that Virginia should hear the sage of the North' &c We have
been treated with every attention, and have seen people from every southern
State, and I have enjoyed all very much. ... If the oration had been my
first thought in this visit, I should be disappointed, but as I regard the
expedition principally as a right hand of fellowship, I am contented."

In later years, as she looked back on the event and remembered how
unhappy her father had been over the failure of his address, Ellen imagined
that part of the trouble had been a determined hostility on the part of the
hearers; but this view was not in agreement with the full accounts she wrote
immediately after the oration. Her letters at that time were well filled with
evidences of the friendliness shown on every hand. She saw then that the
Southern audience at the University of Virginia behaved just as the New
England audience had done at Harvard's Memorial Hall.

The Charlottesville students and their friends, naturally not realizing
how much crippled by old age the orator was, hardly had patience to sit
and listen to what they could not quite hear. The reports of the occasion
in The Richmond Enquirer doubtless expressed well the contradictory moods
he aroused— disappointment "that even those who sat within a few feet of
him were able only to catch at intervals some terse sentence full of strength
and meaning," the feeling that the little that was heard "only served to
increase the desire of every one to hear more," anger because the gaunt
"Abolitionist philosopher of Boston" had visited the university at its expense
but with profit only to himself, suspicion that he was now going back to
Boston with the address in his carpetbag in order to put it into a book and
so receive a more substantial return than expenses and hospitality and
applause. But almost certainly the reporters failed to reflect the full measure
of the Virginians' friendliness, and certainly the university was "vexed and

498 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

humiliated" by the exhibition of journalistic bad taste. The whole episode
was, however, a memorable landmark in the revival of good feeling after
the bitterness Emerson himself had shared during the war of the i86os.

On the way back through Virginia, EUen was once more struck most
by the kindness and courtesy of the people. "Then the fun," she wrote
home from Washington, "which no one but I ever has, as I am the trav-
elling companion, of seeing all the world burn incense to Father was never
so great as now, just because it is the South. To hear him constantly called
by name ... To see people come & stand before him in the aisle of the
cars & gaze at him, and bring their children & ask him to shake hands with
them. People from Tennessee, Alabama, Texas . . ." At Washington more
kindness was shown to the Concord travelers. As they entered a horse car
to ride to the Capitol, Bret Harte seized upon Emerson. Another willing
guide turned up in the person of the librarian of Congress, and Ellen
thought her father seemed ten years younger all day. When they returned
to the hotel he was delighted to find that they had missed their train and
so had the prospect of "an afternoon & night, an oasis of quiet." But what-
ever peace they enjoyed in Washington that afternoon and night, the next
stage of their journey homeward, which brought them to Philadelphia for
another look at the exposition, was enlivened by new adventures.

A few somewhat confused notes were got together as the basis for the
speech Emerson made at the celebration by the Latin School Association
that autumn. He appeared at the Old South Church more than once in
these years, with worn wares of his, in obedience to the call of the com-
mittee for the preservation of the church. In February of 1878 he practiced
faithfully his reading of his lecture on education for a Concord audience,
but could not even remember the subject and continually asked what it
was. He was keenly aware of the humor of the situation. "A funny occasion
it will be— a lecturer who has no idea what he's lecturing about," he com-
mented., "and an audience who don't know what he can mean!" But when
the day came, though he was hoarse and had to be taken to the hall in
his heaviest clothes especially lined with wadding, he had one of his great
successes.

He kept on reading ''Education" in private and in public, taking it as
far away from home as Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. As
late as 1879 he boldly delivered "The Superlative" at Amherst. About the
same time the Divinity School Debating Club begged for a lecture or talk,
and soon Cabot was at work arranging a manuscript on preaching. But
on May 5> when Emerson tried to read it to the club, though he got on
well enough for a time, "there was some boggling at words," as Ellen noted,
"and a wicked choking cough set in towards the end, so that it was almost

TERMINUS 499

impassible to finish." Still undaunted, he was at the Concord celebration
of July 4 to read the Declaration of Independence. The occasion was, in
spite of his weakness, a triumph for him. The crowd stood and applauded
and there was a call for "Three cheers for the man whose voice is heard
round the world." He had studied the declaration for three days past and
supposed he knew every point of it, but, as he began to read, it seemed
suddenly unfamiliar, and he almost feared he was reading in the wrong
book. Yet he somehow got through it to the satisfaction of his friendly
audience.

As he grew very old, hawk-eyed critics were on the lookout for the
expected return to religious orthodoxy of the individualist who had in
his younger days stirred up controversy by his quietly issued declaration of
independence. He unwittingly encouraged them. Weary of sitting silent in
his study, he took to attending church, as he now attended almost any
kind of meeting or lecture, in order to break the monotony of his days. By
1876 he liked going to church almost as much as Ellen herself, so she
thought. He continued to show his customary toleration toward Protestants
and Catholics alike. When Lidian offered Bush for the Catholic wedding
of her niece Eugenia Jackson, he "said it was a very proper thing, and
he had no objection." He did his part as a witness while the priest in white
surplice and black robes officiated. Presumably he contributed nothing to
the support of the Roman Catholic Church, though he was solicited even
for a subscription to a monastery. Alcott, in 1877, saw his friend's per-
sistent individualism mellowing with age and infirmity but found his tem-
perament still too dominant and determined. Next year he judged Emerson
true to his old convictions, resting modestly in his individualism, silent
concerning immortality, and deserving to be classed somewhat uncertainly
"as an ideal theist, with that film of pantheistic haze that hovers always
about that school of thinkers."

The fact that Emerson now signed his name in the list of members of
the parish betrayed nothing concerning his religious belief. And his boyish
junketing with Ellen to attend a Unitarian convention at Saratoga in 1878
had no greater significance. The convention was only one objective in a
journey that was partly a vain search for George Tufts, a disappointing
literary protege of years past, and partly a visit to Niagara Falls. A great
stir was caused when the false rumor got round that Emerson was a dele-
gate to the Unitarian convention. It was true that he showed some enthu-
siasm for the proceedings during the brief time he witnessed them and was
much lionized before he could escape. Ellen had her first actual experience
of radical Unitarians tirelessly quoting her father in defense of their own
thought But for him the most exciting adventure had been his traveling

5oo THE LIFE OP RALPH WALDO EMERSON

alone for several days in search of Tufts. Quite unable to remember such
names as Niagara, Saratoga, Buffalo, and Clean, he had managed to get
along with the aid of some written directions from Ellen. He had arrived
at Saratoga, after a final night of sitting up on the train, fuller of zest than
usual, his faculties stimulated by his days of independence.

By 1879 the Rev. Joseph Cook had started the countrywide rumor
that Emerson had publicly renounced his liberal religious views, had become
a Christian, had accepted the Bible as divine, and had joined an orthodox
church. The rumor was good for a year or two of vigorous life. When
Emerson returned to Concord, New Hampshire, to read a hymn as his part
in the semicentennial of the church to which he had preached some of his
earliest sermons, he seemed to many, no doubt, to be making a new gesture
toward orthodoxy. But a more significant event of the same year had been
his re-election as a vice-president of the Free Religious Association. The
secretary reminded him that he had honored the vice-presidency with his
name for the past seven years.

Honors, fame, and notoriety came faster now that he did little or noth-
ing to earn them. In 1876 Lowell's second series of Among my Books was
dedicated to him by way of public acknowledgment of a debt. The younger
Oliver Wendell Holmes, future jurist, confessed that his own first interest
in philosophical ideas was due to Emerson more than to anyone else. From
Germany, Emerson learned that his photograph was wanted for publica-
tion in an illustrated magazine at Leipzig. He was punished by being used as
an exhibit at public meetings, or at celebrations such as the Whittier birth-
day dinner of The Atlantic Monthly in 1877, where he read "Ichabod"
in the face of old Webster partisans and thus seemed to reaffirm his pre-
war devotion to abolition, Union or no Union.

The Whittier birthday banqueters were, however, more amazed at the
temerity of Mark Twain, who read a skit he had written for the occasion.
Three ill-favored tramps masquerading under the names of Longfellow,
Emerson, and Holmes visited a California miner's cabin, made what Mark
Twain regarded as very amusing use of certain verses by their namesakes,
and, in general, behaved in ungentlemanlike manner. Or at least this must
have been approximately what the banqueters made of it all, and their
applause was weak enough to crush the temperamental humorist.

He quickly suffered an acute attack of remorse. The abject plea for
forgiveness that he wrote to Concord was answered on Emerson's part by
Ellen's confession of her own hurt feelings, now healed by the letter of
apology, and her assurance that her father never quite heard the skit in
the first place, never quite understood it, and forgot it easily and com-
pletely. Doubtless if Emerson had understood it and its humorous intention

TERMINUS 501

he would have been no more offended than Lidian was when she read it.
As for Mark Twain, he had, in his apology, unwittingly made up for any
lack of humor in his performance at the solemn dinner.

In 1878 Emerson became a member of the moral and political science
academy of the Institut de France. Dean Stanley, his guest at Concord that
year, had already honored him by posting in Westminster Abbey the verses
on England's abbeys from "The Problem." At a meeting of the newly
founded Concord School of Philosophy in 1879, Emerson sat with Lidian
and listened while Elizabeth Peabody, Frank Sanborn, Wentworth Hig-
ginson, and Bronson Alcott gave their reminiscences of him and of Haw-
thorne and Thoreau, Doubtless Hawthorne and Thoreau were hardly far-
ther back in Concord's past than he himself was as he struggled to catch the
meaning of the speakers. The youthful Frank Dempster Sherman, having
called upon the poet in Concord, paid him as genuine an honor as any
when he sent him a picture of Homer as a token of sincere affection and
as a sign of the appreciation of a boy for what Emerson had done "to help
him to become a man.3'

Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the "Minute Man" at the North
Bridge, added a memorable bust to the already extensive but very unsatis-
fying iconography of Emerson. Ellen, though she later lost some of her
enthusiasm, at first agreed with Edith that this was a piece of great good
fortune. French himself was not pleased. It was only after the work was
done that he accidentally discovered on Emerson's face the expression he
had vainly set out to capture. He had found the face a remarkable com-
bination of strength and delicacy, and difficult because of its extreme mo-
bility and consequent great variety of expression. Emerson was, he judged,
one of the most difficult subjects imaginable to portray adequately, and
he believed that he had failed in his attempt. Cabot, much with Emerson
at the time, thought French's bust "the best likeness of him ... by any
artist (except the sun), though unhappily so late in his life."

For lack of translations, Emerson had hitherto had no great vogue in
Continental Europe, though in England his name was a household word.
German versions of a number of his volumes, French of a few, and Danish
and Swedish that amounted to the merest samplings had not clearly fore-
cast his future importance in many countries. But now, with the advance
of his fame, even such skimmed Emerson as Letters and Social Aims could
find translators in Germany and France at least. By 1876 an authorized
rendering called Neue Essays had been published at Stuttgart. The general
preoccupation with politics in France made success more doubtful there,
and Jeanne Montagnon, finishing her French version of the same book
some three years after the German text had appeared, knew that the num-

5o2 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

ber of readers could only be very limited. The times proved to be even more
unfavorable than she had believed, and she failed to find a publisher.

But the clatter or the silence of the printing presses was not infallible
evidence of the growth or decay of ideas. Mental ferment could be going
on quietly and obscurely. The half dozen or so volumes of the American
essayist to be had in German translation seem to have been potent intel-
lectual yeast for at least one Continental genius— Friedrich Nietzsche, by
this time a professor of classical philology in the Swiss university of Basel.
As early as 1862, when he was still in his teens, this German pastor's son
who rebelled against the creed of his father discovered the rebel of Con-
cord. At times his enthusiasm for Emerson weakened, but his doubts were
overbalanced by his delight. The very incomplete record of his opinions
pieced out from meager published references to Emerson, and from fresh
passages brought up from the as yet inadequately explored depths of the
Weimar archives, warrants the belief that the resemblances between some
of the best-known doctrines of Nietzsche and the aphorisms on self-reliance
which he gleaned from Emerson are significant.

If Nietzsche discovered serious imperfections in Emerson— too much
repetition, too much love of life, tasteless extravagance of style learned from
Carlyle, regrettable haziness borrowed from German philosophy, and a
badly disciplined mind— he discovered far greater virtues. Emerson, named
first among his most read authors in 1863, was later, according to Nietzsche's
varying moods, an admirable writer, a glorious friend, one of the four
masters of prose in the nineteenth century, more enlightened and skillful
and more a man of taste than Carlyle, the most richly endowed of Amer-
icans, the author in whose book Nietzsche himself felt most at home though
he hardly felt at liberty to praise it as it was too near to his own thought,
a man richer in ideas than any other of his century, a brother soul. But as
Nietzsche once wished that he might have the privilege of re-educating
Emerson and of disciplining strictly, according to his own notions, that
splendid spiritual and intellectual specimen, so Emerson, had he known
Nietzsche's work, would doubtless have been glad of an opportunity to
make his German admirer over into a more restrained protagonist of self-
reliance and some of its related doctrines. Nietzsche had a systemless style
of thinking and writing strikingly resembling Emerson's but transformed
Emersonian thought into something far from Emersonian. He separated
the most iconoclastic ideas from their large admixture of less unconven-
tional moral doctrine and almost transmuted them in the intense heat of
his own fiery brain.

During the last years of Emerson's life there were few letters, few lec-
tures, and no more books. For the Concord School of Philosophy, meeting

TERMINUS 503

in what had recently been Alcott's Orchard House, irreverently dubbed
Apple Slump by Louisa, Emerson had read "Memory" in 1879. In 1880,
when the school began to use its new Hillside Chapel in the Apple Slump
orchard, he read "Aristocracy." In the latter year, according to one ob-
server, he still came "often" to the school, passing along the aisle on tiptoe
and seating himself "in a huge ear-lap chair at the left of the platform."
On at least one Sunday evening the parlor, study, and hall at Bush were
filled with friends from both the town and the school. Emerson rapped on
a doorjamb and announced that some present would speak and asked
them to begin. In 1880, the year of his last lecture at the School of Philoso-
phy, he read his "iooft lecture before the Lyceum" in Concord. At the
lyceum, as its secretary recorded, a "very large audience . . . rose en masse
to receive him," and he "read . . . with a clearness and vigor remarkable,
considering his advanced age." His last public reading of any kind may
have been that of his paper on Carlyle at the Massachusetts Historical
Society in February, 1881. Ellen, doubtless there to see him through the
risky adventure, thought that "It was a very pleasant occasion."

He lived only a twilight existence. To a visitor in the summer of 1880
he would hardly give an answer in conversation, but smiled and turned
away his head as if another person had been addressed. Next year the
octogenarian Alcott conquered his desire to report on his winter campaign
of lecturing in the West because he knew Emerson would forget as fast as
he was told. But to him Emerson's failure of memory did not seem tragic.
"His," he commented, "is a happy euthanasia, and a painless." Sometimes
there seemed to be marked but only momentary upsurges of memory. When
the sixteen-year-old Edward Bok, with Louisa May Alcott's aid, penetrated
Bush as far as the study, the old man rose with great dignity to greet him
but had no light in his eyes. As the boy insisted on an autograph, Emerson
had him write out exactly what he wanted copied, then proceeded to copy
his own name painfully letter by letter; then, the place, Concord; and
finally, the date, November 22, 1881. Suddenly transformed at this point,
Emerson rewrote both name and place without effort, thanked Bok for
coming, shook hands vigorously enough, and let his face and eyes light
up as if he had thrown off the weight of years.

The rumor started by Joseph Cook that Emerson had returned to
Christianity in old age continued to reverberate. Emerson had habitually
avoided public controversy and was now all but oblivious of such matters.
But he authorized his son to speak for him, and on February 17, 1880,
Edward wrote to Alfred Ferguson, an inquirer in Indianapolis, that the
rumor of a change to orthodoxy was "in every respect incorrect." Ralph
Waldo Emerson, he stated as explicitly as he could, "has not joined any

504 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

church, nor has he retracted any views expressed in his writings after his
withdrawal from the ministry." George Cooke came to the defense of Emer-
son in an article aimed at Joseph Cook, and The Commonwealth published
Edward's letter to the Indianapolis man, as The Index, a Boston journal,
did a few days later. Ellen was troubled, hating to see the family "appear
to rush into print about the matter, but,3: she explained,, "Father said he
was glad, he liked to have the truth told.53 It was good, he declared, to
have a son who could defend him.

Perhaps the final attempt to convert Emerson from the supposed error
of his ways was made by the founder of Christian Science and author of
Science and Health. According to hex own statement, Mrs. Eddy appeared
on the scene some months before Emerson's death. Taking her husband
along with her but letting no one else know, she went with the avowed
purpose of healing the slowly dying Transcendentalist. But a brief intro-
duction into his mind was sufficient to disabuse her completely of any
notion of carrying out her mission. He knew he was breaking up, he made
it clear to her, and he considered it simply profane to believe that man was
not mortal. If Mrs. Eddy's account was correct, he contradicted her flatly,
assuring her that he did not believe that God either could or would pre-
vent the deterioration of old age. She withdrew convinced that he was
a long way from being or becoming a Christian Scientist. Alcott, she de-
cided, was far nearer salvation than he.

While the battle over his religious opinions continued, Emerson, quite
too old and worn to give serious thought to religion or any other subject,
unconcernedly continued to fill his vacant hours as comfortably as he could.
He had long ago announced his desire, contrary to Cabot's better judg-
ment in that matter and therefore never complied with, that his own ser-
mons should be destroyed. But he was now quite willing to hear sermons
by other men. He would also appear at special Unitarian celebrations.
Anniversary week in Boston., a time-honored church festival., seerns to have
proved alluring to him in 1880 because his friends Furness,, Hedge, and
W. H. Channing were to speak on his early benefactor Doctor William
Ellery Channing. On his seventy-seventh birthday he joined Ellen at a
Unitarian anniversary meeting, but, once he had listened through W. H.
Channing's address, he made for the door and did not want to return for
another meeting. Later the same year he was placed on the platform at
the celebration of the 25oth anniversary of the First Church in Boston
once his father's. On a Sunday within some two months of his death he
was eager for church time to come and asked hopefully, "It is the day
of Heaven today, isn't it?"

He arranged in good time for a final settlement of his affairs. In 1876

TERMINUS 505

he had signed his new will, dividing his possessions among his wife and
their three children. Lidian, and afterwards Ellen, was to be in control of
the homestead; and Edward was to have possession of copyrights and
plates and the ownership of all published writings and contracts for pub-
lication. Elliot Cabot was to be literary executor with authority, in co-
operation with the Emerson children, to permit or to forbid future pub-
lications. Emerson's son, Edward, and son-in-law, William Forbes, were
to be the executors. In a codicil of March, 1881, a little more than a year
before his death, Emerson requested some changes. He asked his family to
see that one thousand dollars should be given to each of the children of
Elliot Cabot, "in recognition of his goodness in rendering to me a service
which no other could render" and that $500 be paid to the hired man,
John Clahan, with thanks for his "many years of faithful interest in my
affairs." And he wanted new dispositions made of a copy of Montaigne,
"the cup that was bought by Charles Sumner because it had belonged to
Goethe," "the diamond shaped piece of porphyry from the floor of the
Pantheon given to me by Margaret Fuller," his watch, his sole-leather
trunk, his teak cane, and his six-volume Moliere, once the property of
Joseph Bonaparte. But he doubtless made these adjustments mainly at the
suggestion of the members of his family in the interest of justice or of good
sense.

On his last birthday he had a visit from Bronson Alcott and his daughter
Louisa. Alcott came to present his grandchild, Louisa's niece; Louisa brought
flowers with verses in honor of the day concealed in their leaves. Emerson
could do little but listen approvingly to the tireless Alcott's adventures on
lecture tour and, being moved by his habitual anxiety to discover genius,
inquire repeatedly whether the traveler had "found any new men in those
parts,"

In September of the same year Walt Whitman turned up in Concord
to gaze, much in the attitude of a worshiper, upon his silent friend. At
Sanborn's house, where the literati were gathered, Whitman cared little
whether he was thought stupid in the conversation of the roomful of com-
pany, for he was spending what he called "a long and blessed evening with
Emerson," though this meant almost nothing but staring at his cornered
man. "My seat and the relative arrangement were such that, without being
rude, or anything of the kind," he explained, "I could just look squarely
at E., which I did a good part of the two hours." Next day he was invited
to Bush for dinner and had several hours with the family and some friends.
Again he was almost completely absorbed in observing, hardly listening to,
Emerson. "Of course," he put it, "the best of the occasion (Sunday, Sep-
tember 1 8, '81) was the sight of E. himself. ... a healthy color in the

5o6 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON <

cheeks, and good light in the eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount
of talking that best suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where
needed, and almost always with a smile."

It was in the same autumn that Robert Collyer, visiting Bush, found
Emerson "mousing about his study— not for books, as you may think, but
for some fine pears he had hidden away till they should grow ripe33 or
sitting "in his old chair like one in a dream," as he and his guest "looked
at each other like persons in a dream."

Emerson did not entirely give up the Saturday Club; and in August of
1 88 1 he was as far from home as Naushon Island, signing his name in the
"Island Book" for the last time. Even as late as the following February he
got through snowdrifts to a village club to hear Sanborn read from his life
of Thoreau then about to be published. Only a month before his death
he attended once more a meeting of the Social Circle, the Concord club
always highest in his esteem. But he was barely conscious of persons, places,
and time.

Alcott, though he found twelve hours without philosophical discussion
an unhappy experience, could now only remember better days with Emer-
son. He recalled in a sonnet the times

When all the long forenoon we two did toss
From lip to lip, in lively colloquy,
Plato, Plotinus, or some schoolman's gloss,
Disporting in rapt thought and ecstasy.
Then, by the tilting rail, Millbrook we cross,
And sally through the field to Walden wave,
Plunging within the cove, or swimming o'er.
Through woodpaths wending, he, with gesture quick,
Rhymes deftly in mid-air with circling stick,
Skims the smooth pebble from the leafy shore,
Or deeper ripples raises as we lave—
Nor will his pillow press, though late at night,
Till converse with the stars his eyes invite.

At Longfellow's funeral, after he had twice gone to the coffin, Emerson
asked Ellen, "Where are we? What house? And who is the sleeper?" When
he was told, he understood and was shocked afresh and went a third time
to see the face of the poet. Perhaps Conway had heard only a confused
report of this incident when he wrote that, after walking twice to the coffin
to see the face, Emerson explained, 'That gentleman was a sweet, beau-
tiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name." "In the evening," Ellen
recorded a few days after the event, "Father learned of Mr Longfellow's

TERMINUS 507

death once more, and was very sad about it. The next day he remembered
everything."

As late as the beginning of the following April, Emerson, still in love
with the country roads, would take the first opportunity for a long walk.
On April 2, "a delicious spring day after a week of cold," he and Ellen
went as far as Walden. Two weeks later he became hoarse, but a growing
restlessness drove him to take longer walks than usual. On the lyth he
came in only at half past nine at night, just as a search was being started
for him. Next day, though his cold affected his voice quite as much as
before, he took many walks. On the igth he walked round the Two-Mile-
Square and was caught in the rain. On the soth he was sick but not seri-
ously as yet, it seemed to Edward, his doctor. He struggled to find his
words as he talked to his son about objects in the room. He passed on
from a little figure of Psyche to a picture of Carlyle. Hardly more than
a year since, Carlyle, in dying, had seemed to Mary Carlyle to verify his
belief that death would be "like cataracts of sleep." Emerson remembered
Carlyle's picture but not his name. "That is that man—my man," he said,
and added regretfully to Edward, "You never saw him." When Edward
recalled his meeting with Carlyle in Devonshire, Emerson was greatly de-
lighted and surprised.

In the following days Emerson frequently asked whose house he was
in, but, perhaps discovering some familiar portraits by Mrs. Hildreth, would
be satisfied for a time that he was at home. Dizziness made him complain
"that he didn't wish it to come in this way, he would rather have fallen
down cellar." But comfortably settled in his bed, he was happy in the con-
viction that he was at home in his own house and that he had lived a happy
life.

Pneumonia now affected, one of his lungs and sealed his doom. But he
was much less troubled by the disease than a younger man might have
been, and insisted on dressing and coming downstairs as long as he could.
At bedtime on the 22d he locked the windows and shutters, raked down
the fire, and collected all the letters of the day. He ran lightly upstairs with
a lamp in his hand but stumbled badly, to his disgust, before he reached
the top.

In his five remaining days he did not come down. He had lucid inter-
vals and recognized many of the friends and relatives who came to tell him
good-bye. His cousin Mary Simmons, his attendant, jotted down bulletins
of happenings in his sick room. She recorded his visitors one by one and
the remarks that were made. Noticing the pictures on the wall, he ventured
that there were "a great many seemings here/3 His neighbor Sam Staples,
once the keeper of the town jail, brought him a bottle of choice brandy

508 THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON*

and said he was ready at any time to help take care of him. Alcott and
others came. With great difficulty Emerson tried to communicate some-
thing to Lidian, apparently a farewell. He seemed to remember his first
son. "Oh that beautiful boy," he exclaimed. On the morning of the 2yth
he still remembered Ellery Channing as the man who used to come and
dine, and he invited him to come again. Once on this last day he sat by
the fire for a while. He seemed to recognize Judge Hoar, Cabot, and San-
born when they came. At ten minutes of nine that evening, after being
some time under the influence of ether, he died.

The church bells of the village tolled seventy-nine times to announce
his death. It was the 27th of April, 1882, and he would have been seventy-
nine years old had he lived four weeks longer. On the soth, a cool day
with a threat of rain in the air, some thousand persons came into Concord,
by regular and special trains and other conveyances, to attend the funeral.
The first ceremony was in private, with William Furness, Emerson's boy-
hood friend, in charge. Then the funeral party moved from the home to
the Unitarian Church, where most of the townspeople and visitors were
waiting. There, since Frederic Hedge could not come, James Clarke made
the principal address. Alcott read a sonnet. On the way to Sleepy Hollow,
village friends from the Social Circle went before the hearse. The grave
was on a high ridge, not far from where Thoreau and Hawthorne lay.
Emerson's cousin Samuel Moody Haskins, rector of Saint Mark's Church
in Brooklyn, read a part of the Episcopal order for the burial of the dead
and threw upon the lowered coffin some ashes he had taken from the fire-
place in the study at Bush and had mixed with sand and dust from the
walk in front of the house.

Funeral eulogies and memorial addresses and essays recognized the
greatness of Emerson but limited the rich complexity of his thought and
character almost beyond recognition. Whitman's "just man, poised on him-
self . . . sane and clear as the sun," who had been one of the few flawless
excuses for the existence of the whole literary class, and Lowell's "least
vulgar of men, the most austerely genial, and the most independent of
opinion," were fragments of the real man. The rough-hewn quartz of the
gravestone that was erected within a few years and its inscribed lines on
the passive master from "The Problem" were fitting symbols of only two
of the many discordant elements which, as this book has tried to show,
were harmonized in Emerson.

NOTES

Abbreviations that are not self-explanatory are explained in the index.
Letters written by Emerson's daughter Ellen belong to his heirs. With a few
rather obvious exceptions— such as official records of towns, churches, and
colleges— other manuscripts whose ownership is not given in the notes or
index belong to the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association. In this
restricted space it has generally been impossible to discuss the dating of
manuscripts. Bold-faced numerals refer to pages in the text.

1 : MS J&Cbk, 25 May 1803. MS in FaBi.
MS J&Cbk, i Jan 1795-25 May 1803.
MS in Fleets for 1790, Boston, n.d. 2:
MS WmE(f) to PBER(grm), 11 June

1790. MS approbation by Assoc. of Min-
isters at East Sudbury, Mass., 16 Aug

1791. WmE(f) to HarCh, 17 Mar 1792,
copied in MS HarToRec, III, 160. MS
HarChRec, pp. 258-259 (23 May 1792) .
WmE (f) to HarCh, 27 June 1799, copied
ibid., pp. 273-276. MS WmE(f) to EzR,

6 Jan 1796, MS JfcCbk, 16 Oct 1795.
Ibid., 11 Feb 1796. MS HarToRec, III,
209, 212, 216, 236. MS J&Cbk, i June
1796. MS WmE(f) to EzR, 8 Mar 1796.
Memoir of . . . Eliza S.' M. Quincy, 1861,
pp. 93-94, and CabM, I, 13-17, passim.
MS WmE(f) to EzR, 6 Jan 1796. MS
HarChRec, p. 262. The new hymnal (cf.
note on p. 140 below) was Dr. Bel-
knap's Sacred Poetry, in the making of
which WmE (f) had had some slight
part, as shown in MS WmE (f) to Bel-
knap, 4 Aug 1794 (owned by MHS) ; cf.
WmE (f) to Belknap, 17 Aug 1795

(owned by MHS). MS HarChRec, p.
265; MS ]&Cbk, 1 1 Feb 1795. 3 : Nourse,
p. 384. MS J&Cbk, 10 Oct 1795. Ibid.,
10 Jan, 14 Apr 1795- Ibid., 9 and 10
Jan, 8 and 27 and 28 Apr, 6 and 19
and 20 and 22 and 28 and 29 May, i
July 1795. 4: Ibid., i Sept, 13 and 31
Oct, 21 and 26 Nov 1795. Ibid., 4 and

7 and 8 and 25 Jan, 4 May 1796. Nourse,

pp. 213-214. Cf. MS WmE(f) to Bel-
knap, 4 Aug 1794 (owned by MHS) ,
and WmE(f) to Belknap, 17 Aug 1795
(owned by MHS) . MS MME to WmE (f) ,
17 M (Mar or May?) 1795. 5: DGH,
pp. 4-5, 145. Ibid., pp. 14-15. MS MME
to WmE (f) , 17 M (Mar or May?) 1795.
MS J&Cbk, 8 and 11 June, 25 Oct 1796.
DGH, opposite p. 8. 6: MS J&Cbk, 27
Oct, 2 and 26 and 30 Nov 1796. MS
WmE (f) to John Haskins, 20 Feb 1797.
MS RHE to ElizHas, 24 Apr 1797. t
copy (by John L. Cooley) of RH, MS
prayer dated Boston, 2 Dec 1792 (in my
possession) . RHE, MS leaf containing
three precepts. MS J&Cbk, 9 Feb 1798.
7 * MS WmE (f) to ElizHas, 28 Mar 1799.
MS WmE(f) to SamR, 22 Jan 1806.
BoFCh to HarCh, June 1799, copied in
MS BoFChRecirjS6-i8i5, following min-
utes of 11 June 1799. WmE (f) , request
for dismission, 27 June 1799, copied in
MS HarChRec, pp. 273-276. Correspond-
ence between HarCh and BoFCh, 13
July 1800 (i.e., 1799) -11 Sept 1799, cop-
ied in MS BoFChRecij86-i8i5; and MS
HarToRec, III, 271-272, 274-275. MS
JfrCbk, 22 Sept 1799. MS BoFCkRec-
ir]S6-iSi5, 20 and 24 Sept 1799. WmE (f)
to BoFCh, 25 Sept 1799, copied in MS
BoFChReci*j86-iSi5. BoDir, 1803, gives
the number as 27. Cf. Ellis, p. 242, and
WmE (f) , HistSk, pp. 241-242, describ-
ing conditions nine years later. CabM,

^ 00

5*0

NOTES

I, 3. Drake, p. 381. CabM, I, 2. MS
What, p. 5; MS JLG to OWH, 26 Feb
1883. CabM, I, 2-3. 8: Drake, pp. 360,
381. MS RHE to ElizHas, 13 Aug 1799.
MS What, p. 5. MS JfrCbk, 22 Nov 1799,
28 Sept 1800. RHE, MS untiiled and
unsigned. MS J&Cbkj 31 July 1801. Ibid.,

19 Dec 1800, and 30 Jan, 14 Apr, 5
May, 9 June 1801; cf. Winsor, IV, 662.
MS J&Cbk, 10 June 1801. 9: Ibid., 7
and 9 and 10 July, 19 and 20 Aug, 15
and 30 Oct 1801, and 9 Apr, 11 May,

5 July, 20 Aug, 10 Dec 1802. Ibid,, 14
Jan and i June 1803, Ibid., 25 Jan and
11 Feb 1803. WmE (f) , MS Pra, pp. 6-7.
WmE (f) , HistSk, p. 230. 10: WmE (f) ,
SerBeede, pp. 14-17 passim. Poly, May
1812, p. 221. SerTh, p. 13. MS J&Cbk,

6 Sept 1803. BoGaz, 3 Oct 1803. MS
WmE(f) to RHE, 15 and 16 Oct 1799.
MS JbCbh, 14 Apr 1795. WmE(f), MS
"Catalogue of Books" (ownership of
books uncertain) . MS WmE (f) to EzR,

20 Nov and 31 Dec 1790. H;WmE(£),
SerBow, p. 6. ColCen, 21 Sept 1805.
WmE(f), DisBoFe, pp. 5 and 15-16.
WmE(f), OrAmln, pp. 6-^7, 8, 9, 12,
17-19. Poly, May 1812, opposite p. 217.
J. T. Buckingham, Personal Memoirs,
1855, p. 60, 12: RWE's comment on
the picture reproduced in Ellis, oppo-
site p. 230. J, I, 363. Pierce, in Sprague,
p, 243. Chas. Lowell, in Sprague, p. 244.
MS What, pp. 4-5, F. Hedge, in MS
CabCon, p. 19. MS JfrCbk, 25 and 26-
27 May 1803. Cf. Winsor, IV, 672.
WmE (f) , SerBow. Winsor, II, 540. 13;
DGH, pp. 54, 54-55. MS BoFChBa, p.
347. DGH, pp. 83-84, MS JfrCbk, 30
Mar 1803. 14: Winthrop Sargent, ist
ed., 1803, p. 5. Puffer, 1803, pp. 7, 9,
12. BoGaz, 12 May (Federalist victory)
and 7 Nov 1803 ("Extended empire") .
15: Ibid., 26 May 1803. 16: Ibid., 26
May 1803. Winthrop Sargent, ist ed.,
1803, pp. 5-17 and 11-16. MS JfcCbk,
6 Sept 1803. WmE(f), MS Pra, p. 12.
17: MS J&Cbk, i June 1803. Ellis, p.
234. Harlow, 1923, pp. 355~356- MS

WmE(f) to Paine, 3 Feb 1806 (owned
by MHS) , and MS WmE (f) to Paine,
4 Feb 1806 (owned by MHS) . BoGaz,
6 Oct 1803. Ibid., 2 June 1803. 18:
ColCen, 19 and 22 Jan 1803; BoGaz,
30 May 1803. Gazetteer, Boston, 21 and

28 Dec 1803. ColCen, 2 Feb 1803. Ph of
MS subscription list, 4 Dec 1801 (owned
by MHS) . AnSoJou, 1910, p. 4. Winsor,
III, 638. Let, IV, 179. 19: St. Augus-
tine, Oxford, 1838, p. 5. MS WmE(f)
to RHE, 14 Sept 1804. MS WmE(F) to
RHE, 25 May 1805. MS RHE to WmE-
(f), 3 and 5 Oct 1805. MS WmE(f)
to EzR and PBER(grm), 22 Oct 1805.
MS WmE(f) to John Clarke Emerson,
13 Dec 1805. MS RHE to PER (a), 9
and 12 Mar 1806. MS RHE to PER (a) .
20 Apr 1806. MS WmE(f) to John
Clarke Emerson, 17 May 1806. DGH,
pp. 55, 56. ColCen, 11 Nov 1809. DGH,
PP- 53* 55- MS RHE to MME, 5 Jan
1806. MS WmE(f) to RHE, 14 Apr
1810. 20: MS WmE(f) to RHE, 19 and
20 Sept 1806; MS RHE to PER (a), 10
and 1 1 Oct 1806. MS WmE (£) to RHE,
16 and 17 June 1806; cf. BoGaz, 12 June
1806. AnSoJou, pp. 43, 45, 46, et pas-
sim. BoGaz, 27 Feb and 3 and 6 Mar

1806. BoGaz, 7 July 1806. MS What,
pp. i, 8 (cf. back of p. 7, where EWE
wrote a slightly different version) . MS
WmE(f) to MME, 20 Apr 1807. 21:
MS WmE (f) to Lincoln Ripley, 25 Apr

1807. MS WmE(f) to PER (a), 28 and

29 Apr 1807. RHE, MS dated 5 July

1807. MS What, p. 5. MS WmE (f) to
MME, 11 Nov 1807. MS JbCbkNo.2-
('Dialling") , 20 Jan 1808. BuckSer, p.
8; Sprague, p. 242. 22: MS WmE(f) to
EzR, 18 June 1808. ColCen, 9 July 1808.
WmE(f), sermon 17 July 1808, HistSk,
pp. 230, 241-242; cf. ColCen, 20 and 23
July 1808. Ellis, pp. 235-238, 242. SelPs,
p. vi. See below, pp. 37 and 55, for learn-
ing hymns. MS JfrCbkNo.2 ("Dialling") ,
27 Oct and 3 Nov 1808. MS BoFChPr,
p. 6. MS JfcCbkNo.2 ("Dialling") , 8 Nov

1808. MS PierceExt, p. i. 23: MS in

NOTES

FaBi. MS JfrCbkNo.2 ("Dialling") , 20
Dec 1808. MS MME to RHE, 15 Aug
1809? MS What, p. 3. Let, IV, 179. A
Susanna Whilwell, 31 Summer St., is in
BoDir, 1813. RecLiLong, pp. 3, 159, 164;
MS Furness to "My dear Sir" (doubtless
Cabot) , 23 Sept 1882. Bradlnc, p. 36.
24: ColCen, 11 Jan 1812 (Lyon's adv.) .
MS Furness to "Dear children/' 22? Mar
1888. MS EEFchmem; cf. CEd, VII, 106.
MS EEFchmem. MS EEF to "Cousin
Lizzie" (Elizabeth Cabot?) , 29 Apr 1885.
/, VI, 305. CabM, I, 5. 25: MS WmE-
(f) to MME, 23 Oct 1809. CEd, X, 400,
411. Mo An, I and II, passim, as listed in
AnSoJou, pp. 317-319. CEd, X, 404—429,
passim, 26: MS WmE (£) to RHE, 14
Apr 1810. Bradlnc, p. 30. MS Furness to
Cabot? 23 Sept 1882. MS WmE (grf) to
WmE(f), 1776? MS WmE(f) to John
Clarke Emerson, 17 May 1806. P. Holmes,
p. 430. MS WmE (f) to PEER (grm) , 1 1
Jan 1810. DGH, p. 60. t EllenE to Edith
Davidson, 11 Dec 1865. DGH, p. 62.
27: DGH, pp. 56-64, passim. Poly, for
May 1812, p. 219. HistSk, p. 228. Poly,
for May 1812, p. 220. Mo An, I, ii; Mott-
1741-1850, pp. 253 ff. AnSoJou, passim.
28: Mo An, II, 541-647, passim. AnSo-
Jou, p. 215 (5 Dec 1809). ColCen, 4
Jan 1812. MS WmE(f) to Paine, 3 Feb
1806 (owned by MHS) . MS WmE (f) to
MME, 26 Feb 1811. MS "Record of Mar-
riages in the First Church." MS BoFCh-
Ba, p. 359. Sprague, p. 242. MS WmE (f)
to RHE, 16 Apr 1811; Ellis, p. 227. MS
WmE (f) to EzR and PBER (grm) , 18 Apr
1811. 29:£uc&$ffr,p.8.MSWmE(f) to
EzR and PBER (grm) , 18 Apr 1811. MS
WmE (f) to Mr. and Mrs. Joy, 19 Apr
1811. MME, MS journal, 12 May 1827.
MS BoFChPr, p. 8 (13 May 1811) . Col-
Cen, 15 May 1811. MS What, pp. 6-7.
DGH, p. 51. MS What, p. 7. 30: The
Prelude, London, 1850, p. 17. MS BoF-
ChPr, pp. 7-9. MS RHE to PER (a) , 18
June 1811. MS RHE to EzR, 24 June
1811. MS RHE to MME, 13 and 15 Aug
1811. RHE, MS dated 28 July and headed

"May 12. 1811. Died William Emerson."
ColCen, 24 Aug 1811. WmE (/) BroadCat
(now also printed in EtheEf II, 135-
137). MS RWE to Mrs. Sturgis, 11 Oct
1854 (owned by HCL) . HistSk, p. 7 and
back of title page. 31: MS RHE to PER-
(a) , 27 Jan 1812. /, IV, 231-232. ColCen,

23 Sept 1809. Emerson, in MS BPLS8-
Novi8j6, says he entered when N. L.
Frothingham was usher (1811-1812, ac-
cording to P. Holmes, appendix XXXI) .
Rufus Dawes, quoted in P. Holmes, p.
82. P. Holmes, pp. 242-248; Winsor, IV,
241. MS BPLS8Novi8?6. Jenks, 1886, p.
93- 32: Rufus Dawes, quoted in P.
Holmes, pp. 82-83. MS BPLS8Novi8?6;
Bradlnc, p. 41. See p. 37 below; P.
Holmes, pp. 411, 413. MS Furness to
Cabot, 8 Feb 1878; Winsor, II, xxiv.
EinC, p. 13. MS Furness to Cabot, 8 Feb
1878. J, X, 381. 33: MS copy of "The
Sabbath" owned by Mr. A. Le Baron
Russell. The copy was made (t signed
A. Le B. Russell to me, 5 Aug 1948) by
Laura Dewey Russell, daughter of Emer-
son's friend Andrew Leach Russell of
Plymouth, Mass. The copyist, who did
not sign her name, described the poem,
in a note at its end, as "Written by Ralph
Waldo Emerson at the age of nine years."
EinC, pp. 14-15. MS j "BL," p. 150.
t EllenE to EdithE, 29 Mar 1859. CEd,
VIII, 128. EinC, p. 14. 34: MS j "KL,"
p. 158. MS j "BL," p. 150. ColCen, 27
Apr and 4 May 1814. Ibid., 19 Sept and
10 Oct 1812. MS EEF to "Cousin Lizzie"
(Elizabeth Cabot?), 29 Apr 1885; MS
What, p. 1 1. MS Sam Bradford to Cabot,

24 May 1882. MS MME to RWE, 21
June 1813. ColCen, 2 and 5 June 1813.
MS copy of "Perry's Victory," not in
Emerson's hand but bearing his name
and the date 1814. 35: ColCen, i Jan
1814. MS "Perry's Victory," cited above.
MS RHE to MME, 28 Mar 1813; ColCen,
24 and 27 Mar 1813. "Poetical Essay"
(dated 1815), in Let, VI, 330-332. MS
RHE to PER (a) , 3 June 1813. MS RHE
to MME, 11 June 1813. RHE, MS Memo-

512

NOTES

BkWms, 2 Mar, 13 Apr, and 25 May WmE(grf) to PBE, c. June? 1774? EWE,
1813. ColCen, 14 July 1813. 36: MS Es, pp. 257-263. C/. Allen French, 1925,
RHE to MME, 20 July 1813. MS RHE passim, 46: Shattuck, pp. io5~io6.EWE,
to PER (a), 4 Sept 1813. MS RHE to Es, p. 264. Cf. Allen French, 1925, pas-
sim. MS WmE(grf) to PBE, 17 July
1775. WmE (grf) , MS draft of oration for
19 Apr 1776. MS ConFChRec, p. 10 (4
Aug 1776) . MS MME to LE, 26 July
1850. MS WmE (grf) to PBE, 26 and 28-

MME, 28 Dec 1813. MS RHE to PER (a) ,
27 Jan 1814. MS MME to RHE, 10 July
1810. 37: MS RWE to MME, 16 Apr
1813. Let, I, 4-6. 38: RecLiLong, pp.
178-185. MS records "City of Boston

School Committee 1792 to 1814," pp. 193 31 Aug 1776. MS WmE (grf) to PBE,
(9 Apr 1813) and 195 (12 Nov 1813). Friday evening, endorsed 12 Sept 1776.

MS report of subcommittee for Latin
School, 18 Mar 1814, MS BoSchComPa.
MS BPL$8Novi8j6. Death of Mary Car-

For discharge from army by Gen. Gates,
18 Sept 1776, see endorsement on MS
WmE (grf) to Lt. Col. Benj. Brown, 18

oline on 30 Apr 1814 (ColCen, 4 May Sept 1776. MS Lt. Col. Brown to John

1814; MS in FaBi). Bradlnc, p. 40. MS Flint, z8 Apr 1778. MS WmE (grf) to

What, p. 2. ColCen, e, g., 22 Dec 1813. PBE, 23 Sept 1776. MS Benajah Roots to

39: MS LydiaJ to Chas. Jackson, 3 Nov "Church and People of God at Concord,"

1813. ColCen, 4 June, 2 July, 27 Aug, 21 Oct 1776. Daniel Bliss's ordination,
7 and 14 Sept, i Oct, 2 Nov, and 14 Dec 7 Mar 1738/9, in MS ConFChRec, p. i.

1814. Ibid., 17 Sept 1814. 40: ColCen, Bliss's death, n May 1764, ibid., p. 70.

7 Sept-29 Oct 1814, passim. ], IX, 42.
MS "BL," p. 150. J, IX, 42. See above,

MS ConFChRecfc (owned by CFPL) ,
pp. 10-45, passim. Ibid., pp. 55—72, pas-

p. 30; USBoFChTr, pp. 51-54. Ellis, pp. sim. 47: HistSk, pp. 189-190. While-
244-246. MS BoFChPr, p. 19. MS RHE field's Journals, ed. Wale, London, Drane,
to WmE(b), 13 Dec 1814. DGH, p. 85.
MS MME to PER (a), 20 Sept 1814.
41: Ibid. Let, I, 48-49. MS RHE to

n.d., p. 475. IpsEm, p. 34. CEd, XI, 61,
63. IpsEm, p. 34. C. Mather, 1702, Bk.
Ill, p. 97. Ibid., p. 96; cf. MS WmE (f)

WmE(b) , 13 Oct 1814. 42: Ibid. Col- to Paine, 4 Feb 1806 (owned by MHS) .

Cen, 29 Oct 1814. DGH, p. 27. 43: CEd,
IX, 145. ColCen, 29 Oct 1814; DGH, p.

CEd, XI, 32, 34, 37-38. C. Mather, 1702,
Bk. VII, p. 16; Winthrop's Journal, ed.

26. MS RHE to FanHas, 11 Nov 1814. Hosmer, New York, 1908, 1, 232. P. Bulke-

ColCen, 30 Nov 1814. EBE to WmE (b) ,
30 Nov 1814. OrAmln, p. 20. MS WmE
(f) to PBER(grm), 22 July 1803. 44:
CEd, X, 383, 384, 386. Sprague, p. 117.
CEd, X, 391. MS notebook "Art/' p.

ley, The Gospel-covenant, London, 1646,
"To the Church and Congregation at
Concord" and pp. 335-336. 48: Ibid.,
pp. 294-382. Cf. CEd, XI, 40. Emerson's
extant copy of The Gospel-covenant was

106, CEd, X, 390, 394. IpsEm, passim, given him by G. F. Hoar, apparently not

CEd, X, 385-386. IpsEm, p. 126. MS earlier than 1869. CEd, IX, 35; XI, 30,

ConFChRecior 1738/9-1857, p. 72. EWE, 41, 557. MS j "GH," p. 123; IpsEm, pp.

Es, pp. 249-253; MS WmE (grf) to Phebe 74-76; Corey, p. 477 et passim; IpsEm,

Bliss, 27 May 1766; IpsEm, p. 126. 45; p. 74. J, III, 432. MS VBk"P," p. 63;

Ibid. MS ConToRecfc, XI, 277 (owned }, IV, 231. CabM, I, 10. HistSk, p. 190.

by CFPL) . MS "An Inventory . . . Wil- MS JfcCbk, 3 Mar 1803; cf. IpsEm, p.

liam Emerson." MS ConFChRec, pp. 71- 75. JEofMa, MS diary for 1737-1738, 29

102; MS of council convened 11 Apr Jan 1738. 49: MS JEofMa and MaryE

1769; MS "Covenant sign'd . . . July nth to WmE (grf) , 26 Oct 1763. MS VBk"P"

1776." MS EllenE to EWE, 9, 11, and p. 61. CabM, p. 9. /, VII, 338-341.

12 Sept 1871. EWE, Es3 pp. 254-255. MS IpsEm, pp. 50-51. Let, I, 247. EmC/pp.

NOTES

2-3. Antiquarian Papers (with running
head "Ipswich Antiquarian Papers") ,
Mar 1880. Morris C. Jones, n.d. (1863?) ,
p. i; Joseph D. Hall, Jr., pp. 8 and 121;
IpsEm, pp. 50 ff. J, G. Metcalf, 1880,
p. 19 et passim; IpsEm, pp. 32-36. CabM,
I, 8. IpsEm, pp. 32, 34; EinC, p. 2; A.
Hammatt, No. i, 1854, 85 ff.; Thomas
was "first" American Emerson of RWE's
ancestors, and Eliz. Bulkeley was Jos.'s
second wife. A. Hammatt, p. 86; cf. T.
F. Waters, p. 491. P. H. Emerson, The
English Emersons, London, 1898, pp.
l5$-lb9'* cf- IpsEm, pp. 18 ff. MS EWE-
SocCirMemLi, p. i. EinC, p. 2. Antiqua-
rian Papers, Ipswich, for Mar 1880, p. 5.
MS W. M. Eggleston to EllenE, 25 Feb
1881; P. H. Emerson, The English Emer-
sons, pp. 9-10, supported the theory of
a connection with Durham Emersons,
but, later in the same book, turned
against it; cf. IpsEm, pp. 9-25, and P.
H. Emerson's rejoinder in A Criticism,
n.d. (1901?) . For the bookplate, see
DGH, opposite p. 142; cf. frontispiece of
IpsEm. 50: /, II, 41-42. MS JawTr
(owned by CFPL) , pp. 24-35, 19%- Ibid.,
pp. 62-63, 82-83. Ibid., pp. 36-37> 367-
MS EBE to WmE (b) , 14 Dec 1814. 51:
CEd, IX, 385. Ibid., IX, 146. Let, I,
frontispiece and p. 7. Shattuck, p. 222.
52: EinC, pp. 16, 17. Let, VI, 329. Let,
I, 9. Facsimile of MS "Valedictory," dated
1815, is in The Month at Goodspeed's,
VII, 262-263 (Apr 1936) . 53: MS RHE
to PER (a), 31 Mar 1815. Let, I, 10-11.
54: MS WmE(f) to PBER(grm), 11
Jan 1810. MS RHE to PER (a) , 31 Mar
1815. MS FanHas to RHE, 16 Dec 1815.
RHE, MS MemoBkWms, pp. 46, 48. Let,
I, 13. MS CabCon, p. 2; MS RHE to
PER (a) , 5 Oct 1815; Sanborn in NEMag,
n.s., XV, 465. MS RHE to PER (a) , 5
Oct 1815. MS EzR to RHE, 18 Apr 1816.
Cfl&Af, I, 47. 55: Drake, 1873, pp. 337-
344; Winsor, IV, opposite 64, and 65.
RHE, MS MemoBkWms, p. 61. MS BoF-
ChBa, 418. MS BoFChRecfc, pp. 415-
416. MS AuLoLe, Feb 1839. MS EEF to

Eliz.? Cabot? July? 1886? MS What, pp.
10-11. /, IV, 286. 56: MS FanHas to
RHE, 16 Dec 1815. MS EBE to RHE,
19 Oct 1816. MS EBE to RHE, i Nov
1816. MS FanHas to EBE, 10 Nov 1816.
Thwing, 1920, pp. 234-235. Let, I, 12-
13. Let, I, 18. 57: MS Gould to BoSch-
Com, i Sept 1815, in MS BoSchComPa
for 1815. MS report of 19 Sept 1817, in
MS BoSchComPa for 1817. MS Furness
to Cabot, 8 Feb 1878. MS BPLS8NoviS?6.
Let, I, 23. MS BPLS8Novi8y6. The Li-
brary of the Late Mars den J. Perry, sale
at American Art Association Anderson
Galleries, 11 and 12 Mar 1936, pp. 98-
100. MS BPLS8NoviS?6. Broadside Or-
der of Performances at the Latin School,
August 25, j<§/5- 58: MS sheet num-
bered 1675, verso. ColCen, 24 Aug 1816;
MS copy titled "Poem on Eloquence by
R. W. Emerson" (owned by Lewis S.
Gannett) . Let, I, 32. MS AutoSkAmCy,
p. 2. Let, I, 14. 59: Let, I, 15-16. MS
j "AZ," p. 260. Cf. Let, I, 15; later com-
ments on mathematics are more positive.
], V, 270. MS JLG to OWH, 2 Aug 1883
(owned by HCL) . Let, I, 35. Let, I, 38-
40. EinC, p. 51. MS What, p. 9. Let, I,
29. 60: CEd, II, 133. EtheE, II, 138,
149, and 152-154. J, I, 11 et passim; Let,
I, 225 and 271. The recently discovered
MS RWE to MME, 28 Feb 1816 (owned
by the Trustees of Public Reservations,
of Mass.) , shows Emerson as a juvenile
collector of literary anecdote, with the
French pulpit orator Massillon as the im-
mediate object of his curiosity. ColCen,
4 and 8 Oct 1817. Let, I, 20, 33. BoDir,
1816. RHE, MS "Notes," p. 12. 61: Let,
1, 19, where my note makes the Emer-
sons live in Beacon St. a few weeks longer
than they actually did. Ibid., I, 28. MS
MME to John Emerson, 26 Feb 1817.
MS BoFChBa, p. 418. MS RHE to PER-
(a) , 18 Mar 1817; for Bulkeley, cf. other
correspondence of RHE. MS RHE to
PER (a) , 11 May 1817. MS BoFChBa, p.
418. RHE, MS "Notes," p. 63. 62: MS
RHE to MME, 28 Aug and i and 2 Sept

NOTES

1817. 63: Cowley, in "Miscellanies," p.
26 (The Works, 5th ed., London, 1678) .
Montaigne, Essays, tr. Cotton, III (Lon-
don, 1693) > 66- MS EBE to RWE, i Oct
1817; MS EBE to RWE, 5 Oct 1819;
BoDir, 1818, and Bowen's, 1833, pp. 51-
52. MS RHE to MME, 28 Aug and i and
2 Sept 1817. Let, I, 47. TickLi, I, 355,
358-359- 64: Cf. HCLa, 1816, p. 36.
See above, p. 62. HCLa, 1816, pp. i, 2,
15, 16. Ibid., pp. 6, 22, 27, 28. 65: MS
HCStewQBk, bills for quarters ending 2
Oct and 11 Dec 1817 and 2 Apr and 25
June 1818. Broadside HCCat, Oct 1817.
MS CabCon,, p. 22. LoSoRem, pp. 39-
50. Broadside HCCat, Oct 1817. J, VI,
94, and IX, 303.' Three, pp. 195-196.
Let, I, 68. P. Holmes, pp. 2-3. /, I, op-
posite p. 264. Three, p. 216. LoSoRem,
p. 43. 66: Augustus Peirce, 1863, p. 27.
MS HCFaRecfc, IX, 121-122. LoSoRem,
p. 51. J, III, 376-377. MS CabCon, p. i.
MS j "Z," pp. 43-44. 67: MS JLG to
OWH, 2 Aug 1883 (owned by HCL) ,
quoted less literally than here, but at
greater length, in HolmesRWE, pp. 39-
41. LoSoRem, p. 43. QuiFig, pp. 16-18.
MS HillSk, pp. 2-3. HillLitW, p. 180.
/, V, 166. MS HillSk, p. 6. T. McDowell,
in PMLA, XLV, 326-329; Let, I, 69-70.
68: CEd, II, 133. MS BPLS8Novi8j6.
MS HillSk, p. 5. Let, I, 67. Let, I, 68.
Let, 1, 48-49; HCM 1816, p. 37. T. Mc-
Dowell, in PMLA, XLV, 327. MS HillSk,
p. 5. Broadside HCCat, Oct 1817. Ever-
son, 1944, p. 50. Let, I, 262; MS j "BL,"
p. 244. CEd, VII, 330. Let, I, 66. HCLa,
1816, p. 37. MS HistSk, p. 5. 69: 7,
VIII, 123. LoSoRem, pp. 50-51, 61, 62.
MS CabCon, p. 22. LoSoRem, p. 62. MS
RHE to EBE, 21 Oct 1817. MS EBE to
MME, 12 Dec 1817. MS WmE (b) to
RHE, 15, 16, 19 Dec 1817. MS WmE (b)
to RHE, 24 Jan 1818 (owned by DrHE) .
Let, I, 54-55- 70: Let, I, 57. Let, I, 54-
57. MS EBE to RHE, 24 Mar 1818. MS
EBE to MME, 31 May 1818. Let, I, 60,
70-74. MS EBE to WmE (b) , 22 and 26
Sept 1818. Let, I, 63. LoSoRem, p. 62.

Let, I, 63. P. 67 above. MS What, pp.
42-43. 71: CEd, IX, 372. MS What, p.
14. Broadside HCCat, Oct 1818. HillLitW,
p. 180. MS HCHolAnRec, Oct 1818.
HCLa, 1816, pp. 21-22; Let, I, 73. Hill-
LitW, p. 180. MS HCFaRec for 1816-
1820, 23 Nov 1818. Ibid., 2 Nov 1818.
72: Ibid., 6 and 8 Nov 1818; also, MS
HCFaRecfc, IX, 172-173 (it is possible
that a few of the sophomores who chose
to remain were sent home for other rea-
sons than failure to attend chapel) . Let,
I, 74. MS RHE to WmE(b), 30 Nov
1818. HillLitW, p. 180. MS HCFaRec
for 1816-1820, 16 Nov and 7 Dec 1818.
J, VI, 37. Porcellian Club, Catalogue,
Aug 1825, pp. 18-19; cf. Three, p. 181.
Hasty Pudding Club, MS "Catalogue,"
for 1795 ff., p. 31; cf. Three, p. 182 et
passim. Order of Knights of the Square
Table, Catalogue, 1827, p. 12; MS HCFa-
Recfc, IX, 207. MS "Pierian Sodality.
Book No. IV," passim, and Catalogue,
1832. MS HCFaRec for 1816-1820, 3 Mar
1819 and 5 May 1821; MS HCFaRecfc,
IX, 232. Harvard Washington Corps, MS
"Laws and Records," II, passim (records
for i8i7~June 1819 are wanting). All
records of clubs and of the Harvard chap-
ter of Phi Beta Kappa that I have cited
are in HCL. 73: Phi Beta Kappa, Har-
vard chapter, MS "Records of the Im-
mediate Members," III, 30 June and
5 July 1820. MS records of the Satur-
day Evening Religious Society (becom-
ing records of the Society of the Christian
Brethren on p. 101) , passim, especially
pp. 109-110. MHS, Proceedings, L, 123-
132. Adelphoi Theologica, MS "Journal,"
V, meetings of 1820-1821, passim, and
MS "The Constitution," list of members
from the Class of 1821. HillLitW, p. 180;
], I, 7-9; Let, I, 107. Let, I, 85, 93. So-
ciety without a name, MS journal, pp.
7, 18, 23, 27. MS HCFaRecfc, IX, 121-
122. EtheE, I, 437 ft. Society without a
name, MS journal, p. 57. For this so-
ciety see also J, I, 34-51; Let, I, 85-86;
EtheE, I, 437-458. 74: MS j NoXVIJ,

NOTES

p. 57; the drinking song is, as Edward
W. Forbes showed me, a parody on
Moore's "A Canadian Boat-song." MS j
NoXVIIl, pp. 1-3 and 16-17, upside
down at the end. E.g., MS RHE to
WmE (b) , 29 and 30 Dec 1818 and i Jan
1819. Let, I, 71. MS RHE to WmE (b) ,
30 Nov 1818. MS deacons of BoFCh to
RHE, 9 Jan 1819; Let, I, 77. MS RHE
to WmE(b), 24 Mar 1819. Let, I, 87;
MS RHE to WmE (b) , 6 Aug 1819. DGH,
p. 32. Emerson kept the Penn legacy
through his four years at college (MS
BoFChBa, p. 418. Let, I, 80. 75: Let,
I, 78. HGLa, 1816, p. 24. Let, I, 74, 77.
MS EBE to RHE, 13 Nov 1818. Let, I,
75. MS CabCon, p. 2. /, VII, 227. Hedge's
Elements drew heavily on Locke, Reid,
Stewart, and Beattie (Elements, stereo-
type ed., 1829, p. v) . NARev, VI, 423
(Mar 1818); HCCat, Oct 1820, "Course
of Instruction." Let, I, 80, 84-85. ColCen,
3 Feb 1819; RHE, MS MemoBkWms,
p. 39. 76: Broadside HCCat, Oct 1818.
Let, I, 80-84, passim. MS HCFaRec for
j8i6~i820, 13 Aug 1819. NARev, VI, 423;
HCCat, Oct 1820. ColCen, 9 Oct: 1819;
prospectus of the school printed on card
and dated 20 Oct 1819; Let, I, 90. HCCat,
Oct 1819, p. 12; /, I, 3-4, and picture
opposite p. 4; EtheE, I, 437 and 439.
Let, I, 89, 91. MS RHE to EBE, 18 and
24 Feb 1820. RHE, MS "Notes," p. 12.
MS RHE to EBE, 18 and 24 Feb 1820.
Bowen's, 1833, pp. 149-150; Drake, p.
256. Bowen's, 1833, pp. 42-43; EtheE, II,
138 ff. 77: FroEEv, p. 62. Let, I, 89,
90. Let, I, 90. Allibone, 1874, I, 569. MS
j Wide, No. i, p. 20; cf. J, I, 20-22. CEd,
X, 331-333- MS j "CO," pp. 101-102.
HCCat, Oct 1819. E. T. Charming. Lec-
tures, 1856, pp. viii, x; Mottjo-tij, pp.
225-226. 78: MS HCFaRecfc, IX, 210.
ColCen, 11 Dec 1819. E. T. Channing,
Inaugural Discourse, 1819, pp. 12, 21-
23, 25, 30-31. MS CatBksRead, p. 9. E.
T. Channing, Lectures, 1856, passim, espe-
cially pp. 59, 71 245' 257- CanbyThor,
p. 52. MS j NoXVIL pp. 1-5- TwoUnEs,

pp. 23-38, passim; cf. J, III, 260; Let,
I, 63; MS "A Dissertation" (owned by
HCL) ; MS CCE to MME, 3 Sept 1820.
ColCen, 2 Sept 1820. 79: MS What, p.
12. MS HCHolAnRec, Oct 1820. MS j
"AC," p. 246. MS j "LN," p. 204. Same-
ness of junior and senior years, in spite
of HCCat, Oct 1820, pp. 1-2 at the end.
EEv, Synopsis of a Course of Lectures on
the History of Greek Literature, n.d.,
with MS annotations. TickLi, I, 319. /,
I, 65. MS "Prof. Ticknors Synopsis"
(dated Oct 1820) , pp. 15, 30, 32-35, 37,
40- 80: tj Wide, No. 2, pp. 11, 16, 23,
33-34. MS j Wide, No. 2, p. 28. MS j
NoXV III, pp. 86-88, upside down, at
end. HCCat, Oct 1820. MS LecEngLii
(course of 1835-1836), X, 11-12. MS
MME to RWE, 24 Feb 1821. 81: Ibid.
Block, pp. 101-102 et passim; EtheE, I,
253-255. MS MME to RWE, 24 Feb 1821.
RemTeach, p. 29. FrisCol, p. xx. Frisln,
pp. 10, 12, 21, 24. Frisbie, review of
Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sen-
timents, repr. from NARev in FrisCol, pp.
43-88. FrisCol, pp. 88, 150-151, 193, 199.
82: HCCat, Oct 1820, p. 14; cf. FroRip,
p. 13. Winsor, IV, 296-301. Cf. Bonar,
passim. Winsor, IV, 296. ], I, 161-162.
MS j NoXV, pp. 34-35. MS j Cabot's
"R," p. 9; MS j BlotBk, No. II, p. 5.
HCCat, Oct 1820; /, I, 71-72. J, X, 393.
MS j Wide, No. 2, p. 12. MS j NoXV II,
p. 49. MS EBE to WmE (b) , 22 and 26
Sept 1818. 83: MS WmE (f) to MME,
28 Sept 1803; WmE(f)BroadCat. MS
CatBksRead, p. 10. J. Everett, An Ora-
tion . . . July 14, 1818, 1818, p. 6. Let,
I, 66. MS j NoXVIIl, pp. 14, 129. MS
"Indian Superstition" (owned by John
L. Cooley) , p. 3. Let, I, 99-100. ], I,
68. MS "Dissertation . , . Philosophy"
(owned by HCL) ; cf. Let, I, 63. NEPal,
17 July 1821. QuiFig, p. 50. TwoUnEs,
pp. 43 fL, especially 76. 84: QuiFig, p.
50. MS -"Valedictory Poem" of July 1821,
pp. i et passim. Barnwell, MS "Valedic-
tory Oration ... 17 July 1821" (owned
by HCL), pp. 2, 3, 9. QuiFig, p. 17;

NOTES

EinC, p. 27; /, I, 95. QuiFig, p. 51. MS
HCFaRecfc, IX, 263. MS HCFaRec for
1816-1820, 18 July 1821. MS HCFaRecfc,
IX, 261. /, I, 95. Gushing, To the Mem-
bers of the Senior Class (dated, partly
in longhand, at end, 13 July 1821; copy
owned by HCL) , p. i. 85: MS CatBks-
Read, pp. 9-13. MS MME to RWE, 24
Feb 1821. J, I, 69, 80, and cf. 138, 197-
198. MS MemBki820&Misc, unnumbered
page. 86 : MS RHE to PER (a) , 16 May
1821; RHE, MS "Notes," p. 13. MS EBE
to RHE, 15 May 1822, and other MS
family letters. Bowen's, 1833, p. 141.
RemTeach, pp. 33, 51, 59. RHE, MS
MemoBkWms, p. 50, MS RHE to PER-
(a), 16 May 1821. Let, I, 100-101. MS
Sam Bradford to Cabot, 24 May 1882;
MS Sam Bradford to Cabot, 14 Eeb 1883.
Adams, MS "The Influence of Natural
Scenery on Poetry" (owned by HCL) .
John B. Hill, MS "An Essay" (owned by
HCL), pp. 3, 6. 87: Hatch, MS "Col-
loquial Discussion" (owned by HCL) ,
p. 6. Quincy, MS commencement part
on the "elegant literature of France and
Great Britain" (owned by HCL) , pp. i,
5. Let, I, 101. NEGal, 31 Aug 1821. Let,
III, 74; oration repr. in EtheE, II, 9-11.
Let, I, 101. J, I, 116. Let, I, 107. 88: 7,
III, 299. 89: The College Chaucer, ed.
MacCracken, 1913, pp. 9-10. Let, I, pas-
sim. MS letters of RHE earlier than
1821, passim. MS CabCon, p. 8. P. 86
above. MS EEF to "Cousin Lizzie" (Eliz-
abeth Cabot?) , 29 Apr 1885 (is in error
as to years of Cousin Ralph's residence) ,
Let, V, 242. Let, I, 101-104. For pros-
pectus of William's school, in newspaper
and on card, see notes on p. 76 above.
MS SchReun, pp. 1-2. 90: RemTeach,
PP- 3°> 33> 51-54- MS SchReun, pp. 3-4.
CookeRWE, p. 23. MS StevRec, pp. IV-
VI. t TilRem (given me by Lewis S.
Gannett) , p. 2. MS SchReun, p. 5. t
TilRem, p. 2. MS "Story for September
loth 1823 Ginevra" is in RWE's hand.
MS "Stories to be Written by Learners"
is in a doubtful hand. Other MS stories

are also among extant RWE papers, t
TilRem, p. 3. MS SchReun, p. 3. 91:
MS StevRec, p. V. t TilRem, p. 2. MS
StevRec, p. 5. MS SchReun, pp. 8-9.
Ibid., pp. 6-7. MS CabCon, pp. 24, 25.
MS VBkf'P," p. 99. Let, I, 106. ], I, 138.
92: Let, I, 114-115. Let, I, 115, 131. J,
II, 55. MS CatBksRead, pp. 13-15; cf.
index to Let, and EtheE, II, 158—161.
93: MS CatBksRead, pp. 13-14. Let, I,
121-122, 131. MS j NoXVIII, p. 64. ],
I, 145. Let, I, 306. MS j NoXVIH, p. 46.
Let, I, 116-117; "A Hymn to Narayena"
had been reprinted in The Asiatic Mis-
cellany, 1818, pp. 9-13; cf. p. 83 above.
For Roy, see also Christy, pp. 338-339,
and cf. MS MME to RWE, 24 May 1822,
which shows that MME had recently met
Roy and that he had inspired in her a
keen interest in Hindu lore. 94: Let,
I, 118. /. I, 96. Let, I, 127. J, I. 81. MS
j NoXVIII, pp. 25-26, 26-28, 48-50, 72-
73. J, I, 108-109. MS j Wide, No. 8, p.
33. J, I, 170-173, 177-180. J, I, 129. 95:
MS j NoXVIII, pp. 62, 74. MS j Wide,
No. 13, pp. 83-84. There is no longer
any doubt about the authorship. Ralph
Thompson's conjecture (AL, VI, 155-
157, and AmLitAn, 1936, p. 97) was cor-
rect. MS j NoXVI, pp. 16-17. MS j Wide,
No. 6, pp. 39-43, 47-50; MS j Wide, No.
7, pp. 7 ff.; / references in Let, I, 102.
Let, I, 103. J, I, 254-256. tj NoXVIII,
31-33- /, I, 185. J, I, 112-115, 135, 246.
96: /, I, 265. /, I, 198. /, I, 162-164,
210-211. MS j Wide, No. 10, pp. 16-32.
MS j Wide, No. 7, pp. 3-6, 10-11 and
later; MS j Wide, No. 8, passim to p. 46.
P. 92 above; MS j NoXVIII, pp. 75-87;
Let, I, 118. The Christian Disciple, n.s.,
IV, 401, 403-405, 407 (Nov and Dec
1822). MS MME to RWE, 25 and 26
July 1822. MS CCE to MME, Thursday
(c. Feb? 1823?) ; MS MME to CCE, 10
Feb 1823. 97: The Century, XXVI, 458.
MS Withington to RWE, i Aug 1823, is
the latest of the Emerson-Withington let-
ters I have seen. Cf. Motti^i-iS^o, p.
284. BoSChCom, p. x. J, I, 141-142. J,

NOTES

I, 137, 142. /, I, 140-142. RHE, MS
MemoBkWms, p. 96. 98: MS CCE to
EBE, 12 Mar 1831. Let, I, 133-134. MS
MME to WmE (b) , 27 May 1823. A bronze
tablet in Franklin Park records that
"NEAR THIS ROCK A-D-I 823-1 825 WAS THE
HOME OF SCHOOLMASTER RALPH WALDO
EMERSON." Cf. DGH, p. 149. Let, I, 132,
135. MS Sam Bradford to Cabot, 2 Mar
1883; CabM, 1, 83-84. MS EBE to WmE-
(b), 21 May 1824 (owned by DrHE) .
MS CCE to MME, 7 Dec 1823; MS RHE
to WmE (b) , 24 June and 23 July and
i Aug 1824 (owned by DrHE} . DGH,
pp. 86-87. Bowen's, 1833, pp. 98-100.
Let, I, 133. MS j Wide, No. 13, pp. 14-
15- 99: Ibid. J, I, 268-284. The Cen-
tury, XXVI, 457. /, II, 28-29. Let, I,
128. 100: Let, I, 132. The Christian
Disciple, V, 3 1 3-3 1 4 ( July-Aug 1823).
MS MME to RWE, 13 June? 1822. MS
Furness to Cabot, 8 Feb 1878. MS BoF-
ChRec i j 86— present (with omissions) , pp.
3-12. 101: MS CCE to MME, 7 Dec
1823. MS What, pp. 14-15. FroRip, pp.
20-21. MS CCE to MME, 16 Oct 1823;
Let, I, 135. Let, I, 136, 141. MS CCE to
MME, 7 Dec 1823; MS EBE to WmE (b) ,
21 May 1824 (owned by DrHE). EBE,
MS "The Encouragement o£ a Sound
Literature the Duty of the Patriot"
(owned by HCL) , pp. 3-11; cf. Univer-
sity in Cambridge. Order of Perform-
ances for 16 Aug 1823, P- 4- MS HCCorp-
Rec, VI, 156. 102: Ibid., VI, 159. Qui-
Fig, p. 56. Order of Exercises for Com-
mencement, XXV August, MDCCCXXIV.
QuiFig, p. 56; Let, I, 149. MS F. Hedge
to Cabot, 30 Sept 1882. MS What, pp.
23-24. The MS "Oration in English by
Edward B. Emerson," still preserved by
the family, is a juvenile piece of elo-
quence in the style of its period. The
opening passage, commemorating the
benefactors of Harvard, was, as is shown
by Let, I, 147, written at the direction
of the college authorities. The oration
asserts the idea of progress and ends with
a burst of praise for the New World. The

manuscript has been wrongly identified
as that of EBE's Master's oration of 1827.
Let, I, 146; MS CCE to WmE(b), 11
Sept 1824 (owned by DrHE) . Let, I,
148. Let, I, 143, 144, 146. 103: MS
RHE to WmE (b) , 24 June and 22 July
and i Aug 1824 (owned by DrHE) . Let,
I, 146. J, I, 290-291. MS CabCon, p. 21.
MS endorsed by RWE "Dr. Channing's
list . . . books for a theological student,
given by Dr. C. to rne^, probably in 1824."
Cf. T. P. Doggett's MS "Dr Channing's
Course of Study for Students in Divin-
ity" (owned by AnHarTheoLib) . The
date of this formidable list was presum-
ably soon after 1830. J, I, 360-367. 104:
J, I, 361-363. 105: L I, 364-365- J> I.
379-380. It was several months later than
the passage last cited that Emerson was
urged (27 Aug 1824) by his brother Wil-
liam to "Read all of Herder you can
get" (Let, I, 153) . The same idea of "the
full and regular series of animals" could,
no doubt, have come from Buffon, or
others, quite as well as from Herder. MS
MME to RWE, 10 Aug 1824. /, I, 382-
386. Let, I, 141. MS WmE(b) to RWE,
i Apr 1824 (owned by DrHE). 106:
MS WmE(b) to RWE, 29 May 1824
(owned by DrHE). MS WmE(b) to
EBE, 27 June 1824 (owned by DrHE) .
MS WmE(b) to RWE, 27 Aug 1824
(owned by DrHE) . Let, I, 149-150. Let,
I, 152. 107: Let, I, i54-*55> 160-162.
MS WmE (b) to RWE, 10 Oct and 6 Nov
1824 (owned by DrHE). Let, I, 161.
108: MS WmE(b) to RWE, 17 and 22
Jan 1825 (owned by DrHE) . MS WmE-
(b) to RWE, 2 Mar 1825 (owned by
DrHE). Let, I, 158-159- L II, 36, 55-
], I, 367- 109: Let, I, 159. ], II, 54-
CEd, IX, 384-385; these verses, also print-
ed in ], II, 39, were written, I conjecture,
late in Dec 1824 or early in the follow-
ing month. 110: Herbert, The Temple,
2d ed., 1633, p. 154. MS HCDivSFaRecfc
(owned by AnHarTheoLib), 16 Feb
1825- MS HCDivSStuRec (owned by An-
HarTheoLib) , pp. 3-5; MS "Records of

5*8

NOTES

the Trustees of the Society for Promot- Con, pp. 18, 21; MS CabLedgJEC, p. 117

ing Theological Education in Harvard
University" (owned by HCL) ; HCDiv-

(has map) . DGH, p. 1 10. MS Aut'obbovo,
i Apr 1826. AdDana, I, 2-3, 5. Holmes-

SGenCat, pp. vii-viii, 2; cf. R. S. Mori- RWE, p. 50. Let, I, 168. 7, II, 96. MS

son in Addresses . . . H award Divinity
School, 1917. ChrEx, IV, 193-195 (Mar-
Apr 1827) . MS HCDivSStuRec (owned

MME to RWE, 27 Apr 1826. 117: MS
MME to RWE, 21? May 1826. MS MME
to RWE, 13 June 1826. J, II, 97, 98. MS

by AnHarTheoLib) , passim. RHE, MS j Cabot's "Q," p. 58. On last page of

Memo3kWms, p. 96; Let, I, 159; MS
CabCon, pp. 10, 21; J, II, 68, 70. Ill:
MS HCStewQBk, Mar, June, Dec 1825;
MS HCStewLedg, p. 45. MS Autobbovo,
under Mar 1825. MS CabCon, p. 21.
NTWake, opposite pp. 17, 23, 38, 131,
18 1, and on leaf following the half title
"Notes," MS MME to RWE, 23 Aug
1825. 112: MS MME to RHE, 27? Sept
1825. MS MME to RWE, 23 Aug 1825.
J, II, 68. The inscriptions are described
as I saw them in 1945. DGH, p. 88. MS
Webster to EBE, 5 Dec 1824. 113: MS
CCE to MME, 12 Sept 1825 (the word
I have transcribed as "sad" may possi-
bly be read as "safe") . Let, I, 164. MS
CCE to MME, 12 Sept 1825. RHE, MS

MS sermon No. I, Emerson wrote: "As-
sociation of Camb & vie." MS AutoSk-
AmCy, p. 3, records the approbation.
EinC, p. 33. MS PrRec, 15 Oct 1826. J,
I, 14-16. 118: MS copy of MME to
WmE(b), 5 Nov 1826. Let, I, 170-175.
MS VBkRhymer, leaf now inserted at p.
97. MS BoFChBa, p. 418. Let, I, 172.
119: MS EBE to RWE, 14 July 1826.
MS EBEjEur, 21 July and 4 and 24 Aug
1826. Let, I, 177; RHE, MS MemoBk-
Wms, p. 62. Let, I, 312. MS EBE to

, 18 Nov 1826 (possibly a diary

entry and not a letter) . MS EBE to
RWE, 27 Dec 1826. Let, I, 178; mean-
time, HCCat, Sept 1826, p. 1 1, lists RWE,
not as a theological student, but only as

"Notes," p. 17, where the date of Wil- a resident graduate rooming at "Mrs.
liazn's arrival is given as 18 Oct 1825. Emerson's. >T MS PrRec, 12 Nov 1826; MS
MS What, pp. 15-16. MS WmE(b) to WmE (b) to RWE, 23 Dec 1826. MS

MME, 27 Oct 1825 (owned by DrHE) .
MS What, p. 16. MS MME to RWE,
24?-25 Sept and late Oct? or Nov? or
early Dec? and 13 Dec 1825. MS Cabot
to EllenE, 15 July 1882. 114: ]} IX,
235-236. HolmesRWE, pp. 49-50. MS
RHE to MME, 6 and 22 Jan and 12 Feb
1826; Reynolds was presumably Dr. Ed-
ward Reynolds (BoDir, 1826). Let, I,
163-165; MS RHE to MME, 6 and 22
Jan and 12 Feb 1826. Ibid.; DGH, p. no,
opposite p. no, p. 151. MS RHE to
MME, 6 and 22 Jan and 12 Feb 1826.
115: DGH, pp. 109-111. 7, II, 70, 72.
J, II, 77; Let, I, 166. /, II, 81, 83-85.
ThayRip, p. 39. MS RHE to MME, 6
and 22 Jan and 12 Feb 1826. tj Cabot's
"Q," p. 19. 7, II, 86. 116: 7, II, 86.
MS CCE to MME, 30 Jan 1826. Ibid.;

HCDivSStuRec (owned by AnHarTheo-
Lib) , 29 Aug 1826. Let, I, 179-180. MS
j NoXVHI, verso of title leaf. 7, II, 134.
Let, I, 179. I II, 141-142. 120: Let, I,
180. MS Gilman to RWE, 21 Dec 1826.
DuyCyc, II, 180. MS PrRec, Dec 1826.
Let, I, 180-185. 7, II, 149-151, 163-164,
166. 7, II, 167 ff.; Let, I, e.g., 187 ff.
Let, I, 189. MS PrRec, Mar 1827. 121:
7, II, 177, 180. Let, I, 192. For a general
account of Murat, see Hanna, 1946, pas-
sim. Let, I, 193-194. MS What, p. 30.
Let, I, 193. 122: 7, II, 183. MS Murat
to Hopkinson, 17 Apr 1827 (owned by
HistSocPa; I am indebted to Hanna for
a photostat). 7, II, 195-196. J, II, 188,
190. Achille Murat, The United Slates.,
sd ed., London, 1833, pp. 124-125. 123 :
7, II, 195- Let, I, 194. Let, I, 196; MS

MS EBEjEur, 21 Nov 1825. MS EBEjEur, PrRec, Apr 1827. Let, I, 194, 196-199.
15 Mar ff. and 5 Apr ff., 1826. MS Cab- Let, I, 200; MS PrRec, May 1827. Let,

NOTES

5*9

I, 172, 185, 199, 201; MS PrRec, June
1827. MS sermon No. III. MS sermon
No. IV, pp. i ff. and p. 19. MS sermon
No. V, especially p. i. 124: MS ser-
mons; 171 sermons, and a few unnum-
bered fragments, are preserved. Let, I,
201-202. MS EBE to RWE, 18 Feb 1827;
MS EBE to RWE, 5 Apr 1827. Let,

1, 201-202, 210; MS Webster to EBE,
2 Dec 1827; MS Webster to EBE, 15
and 16 Jan 1828; MS Webster to EBE,
17 Jan 1828; MS Webster to EBE, 17
and 18 Jan 1828; MS Webster to EBE,
23 Jan 1828. MS J. T. Kirkland to EBE,
7 July 1827. Let, I, 206, 209; Illustris-
simo Levi Lincoln (p. 2 has title "Or-
der of Exercises for . . . XXIX August,
MDCCCXXVII") , p. 3. MS HCCorpRec,
VII, 22. Let, I, 208, 211. MS What, pp.
43-44. Let, I, 211-218; MS PrRec, 9
Sept-28 Oct 1827, where Lenox is omit-
ted. MS incomplete copy of RWE to
EzR, 10 Nov 1827, in MS CabBlBkCal-
RWE, under 1827. MS PrRec, 6 Nov-
16 Dec 1827. 125: Let, I, 222; MS j
Cabot's "R," p. 115. MS VBk"P", p. 39,
where the date is given as "Cambridge
1827." Printed in CEd, IX, 381, and in
/, II, 217-218, where it is dated from 14
Divinity Hall, 7 Dec 1827. Let, 1, 221-
225; MS PrRec, 23 Dec 1827-6 Jan 1828.
Let, I, 222; L. V. Briggs, 1898, p. 80;
EtheE, I, 437. Let, I, 223, 225-226. Cf.
tj Cabot's "R," p. 97; J, II, 236; Let, I,
226, 228. HCCat for 1827-1828, pp. 7-9,
does not list Emerson as a candidate.
ThayRip, pp. 39-40. 126: Let, I, 234.
HCCat for 1827-1828, p. 8; LoHedge, p.

2. t room lists of Divinity Hall (owned
by AnHarTheoLib) . Let, I, 227. Let, I,
223, 229. NortonLet, I, u. Cf. Bowen's>
1833, p. 164. MS CCE to RHE, Feb 1828.
Let, I, 229. Cf. Block, pp. 144-149. NJ-
Mag, Boston, I (copy at Bush in 1945) ,
passim. Let, I, 223, 224. 127: EBE, MS
JouiS^-8, pp. 13-14, 18-19, and entry
of 8 May 1828. Let, I, 235. MS What,
p. 27. Let, I, 235-236; MS PrRec, 25 May
and 15 and 22 June 1828. MS What, p.

27. CabM, I, 140-141. 128: /, II, 245.
MS MME to RWE and CCE, 15? July
1828. Let, I, 215-224, passim. MS CCE
to RHE, Feb 1828. Let, I, 237, 238-240,
245. MS HCPhiBetaKRec, II, 12. Let, I,
237. MS HedgeRem, p. 5. HCCat for
1828-1829, p. 8. 129: MS AcctBki828-
ff., 8 Aug 1828, 17 Jan and 22 Apr 1829.
MS CabCon, p. 23. HCDivSGenCat, pp.
34, 35. t room lists of Divinity Hall
(owned by AnHarTheo Lib) . LoSoRem,
p. 63. MS HedgeRem, pp. 1-3. Let, I,
250. Let, I, 216; see also p. 123 above.
MS fragment CCE to MME, 1828, post-
marked 2 Nov. Let, I, 249, 251—252.
130: Let, I, 222, 252-254. MS AcctBk-
1828 ff.f 6 Dec 1828. The Forget me not
may have been either the Philadelphia
or the London gift book of that name.
131: Leconte de Lisle, Poesies completes
. . . Poemes barbares, Paris, 1927, p. 102.
Let, I, 256. Miniature of Ellen Tucker
(owned by RWEMA; now lent to the
Concord Antiquarian Society) , presum-
ably the same painted by Sarah Good-
ridge and all but finished on 10 Apr
1829 (Let, I, 269) and the same "Minia-
ture of E. L. T." that Emerson paid $30
for on the i6th of that month (MS
AcctBkiSzSff.) ; the black-and-white re-
production in /, II, opposite p. 256, is
less attractive than the -original. Let, I,
256. See above, p. 125. Let, 1/234, 235,
236; MS PrRec, 25 May and 15 and 22
June 1828. Ellen's MS Album, with print-
ed title page dated New Haven, 1826,
and with the name "Ellen L. Tucker,"
apparently in Emerson's hand, on the
second flyleaf and, on an early page, ?
poem "To Ellen," signed "Dad" and
dated Dec 1826. Ibid., recto of 4th leai
following title page. 132: Ibid., leaves
38 and 39. 133: MS ELT to RWE,
n.d., postmarked 29 Dec and endorsed by
RWE Dec 1828. Let, I, 256. /, II, 252.
/, II, 252-253. Let, I, 254. ], VI, 379. J,
II, 257. MS sermon No. XXVI, finished,
it seems, on 13 Nov 1828 (p. 19), and
preached at Concord, N. H., on 21 Dec

520

NOTES

(MS PrRec} . MS sermon No. XXVI, p.
8. 134: Ibid., pp. 9, 10-15. Let, I, 256.
BrakeRox, pp. 351-352. MS BoFChPr, p.
4. DrakeRox, pp. in, 352. Let, I, 256.
MS VerBkJouGWT-ELT, 15 Aug 1825.
Clipping "Poetry" inserted in MS F<?r-
BkElTuck. Let, VI, 169. £**, I, 33° «*
powiro. MS PrJto. MS AcctBkiSzSff., 26
Dec 1828. As early as 1878, F. Hedge
stated that Emerson wrote "2 poems &
a prose piece" that were published in
The Offering (MS CabCon, p. 20) ; for
the identity of the three pieces see Ralph
Thompson in AL, VI, 151-157* and his
AmLitAri, pp. 96 ff.; see also p. 95 above.
135: MS ELT to RWE, n.d., post-
marked 29 Dec and endorsed Dec 1828
by Emerson. MS ELT to RWE, 5 and 6
May 1829. MS ELT to RWE, 2 and 3
June 1829. MS ELT to RWE, July 1829.
MS ELT to RWE, 30? July 1829. MS
ELT to RWE, c. 3? or c. 8? Aug 1829;
MS MME to CCE3 9 Feb 1828; Let, I,
274. MS RHE to CCE, 20 Jan 1829. MS
EBE to MME dated 24 Jan 1829 by EBE
but 17 Jan by, apparently, the postmas-
ter. Let, I, 257. 136: /, VI, 456- Let,
I, 259-260. ThayRip, p. 40. MS MME
to ELT and RWE, 24 Jan 1829. Let, I,
259-261, 265-266. 137 : Let, I, 264-265;
MS CCE to WmE (b) , 12 Mar 1829. Ezra
Gannett, MS "Address . . . March 11,
1829" (owned by Lewis S. Gannett) , pp.
4, 5-6. John Milton, A Selection, Boston,
1826, I, 207, in a paragraph marked by
Emerson in his copy. Let, I, 265. "Holy
& happy" from my MS copy made from
the panel. Bowen's, 1833, pp. 126-127,
and opposite p. 128. 138: Drake, p.
155. The pulpit and pews of Emerson's
church were later sold, and I have de-
scribed them as I saw them, 14 Sept 1947,
in the church of the First Parish in Bil-
lerica, Unitarian. YoungEm, especially
pp. 28, 29, 31-33- 139: Let, I, 267, 269,
270. Alcjou, p. 19. W. C. Gannett, "Ralph
Waldo Emerson," The Union and Ad-
vertiser, Rochester, N. Y., 27 May 1893.
CabM, I, 154. CookeRWE, p. 27. Let, I,

273. Chandler Robbins, in MS Cab Con,
p. 11. MS notes of RWE in a book ol
psalms and hymns now without title page
but with RHE's name and the date 1796.
MS F. Hedge to Cabot, 30 Sept 1882.
140: No. 539 in A Collection of Psalms
and Hymns, ed. F. W. P. Greenwood,
Boston, 1830. MS What, pp. 47-48- E.
Stebbins, Boston, 1878, pp. 14, 19. Young-
Em, pp. 146-149, 247; Sacred Poetry, ed.
Jeremy Belknap, Boston, 1795 (or a later
edition of that book) , was the hymnal
and psalter that Emerson wanted to dis-
card; for his father's aid to Belknap as
its editor, see above, notes on p. 2. MS
BoSChPropReci8o4~iSj5, p. 129 (16 Oct
1831). MS F. Hedge to Cabot, 30 Sept
1882. Capt. Francis Green (sometimes
spelled Greene) of 157 Hanover St. died
5 Sept 1831 at the age of 81 (Heitman,
1914, p. 259; BoDaAdv, 6 Sept 1831; Bo-
Dir, 1828, 1829, 1830; StirnBoDir, 1831).
MS CabCon, p. 11. MS j "K," pp. 88-89.
141: J, III, 475. MS AcctBkxSzSff., 30
Mar 1829; cf- Let> l> s66- MS What, p.
46. Let, I, 270; MS ELT to RWE, post-
marked and endorsed May 1829; MSS
ELT to RWE of later dates. Let, I, 271.
MS ELT to RWE, postmarked 17? May
and endorsed by Emerson May 1829. Let,
I, 271-276. MS RhymJouNH, passim;
Let, I, 276-279. 142: Let, 1, 282-284;
MS PrRec, 13 Sept 1829. Let, I, 283-
286. MS AcctBkiSzSff., 7 Nov 1829, 27
and 30 Nov 1829, i Dec 1829, i Jan
1830, also passim. Let, I, 285, 287-289.
143: MS AcctBki828ff., 20 Jan, 29 Apr,
7 and 18 Nov, and 29 Dec 1829. RWE's-
Re, p. 47; for Herder, cf. Let, I, 153.
MS AcctBki828ff., 19? and 20 Jan and

23 July 1829. EtheE, II, 162-163. RWE's*
Re, pp. 17 ff. tj NoXVII, p. 28; tj No-
XVIII, p. 53; Let, I, 286; F. T. Thomp-
son in Studies in Philology, XXIII, 55-
76, /, II, 277; Let, I, 286. /, II, 278-279.
Let, I, 291. MS CCE to MME, 9 Jan
1830. MS copy of a letter of MME's on
same sheet with a copy of MME to CCE,

24 Dec 1829. 144: MS MME to SABR

NOTES '

521

and SamR, 31 Dec 1829. MS AcctEki828-
ff., 9 and 20 and 22 Feb, 19 and 29 Apr,
28 May, and 24 June 1830, and Jan 1831.
Ibid., 15 Jan and 22 Feb 1830 (but the
whole record of payments of rent is con-
fusing) . Let, I, 193; MS PrRec, 14 Mar
1830. MS RhymJouPhila. MS MME to
EBE, 15 Mar 1830. MS copy of MME to
WmE(b), 10 Apr 1834. MS MME to
EBE, 15 Mar 1830. Let, I, 295. 145:
MS RhymJouPhila. Let, I, 296-297. MS
RhymJouPhila. MS Furness to Cabot, 29
Sept 1882. Let, I, 296-299, 302; MS Pr-
Rec, 21 and 28 Mar 1830; MS Rhym-
JouPhila; MS MemBkiSzo&Misc, 10-27
Mar 1830. Let, I, 302 fL; /, II, 298-309,
passim. MS CCE to WmE (b) , 28 May

1830 (owned by DrHE) . MS CCE to
WmE (b) , 27 June 1830 (owned by Dr-
HE) . Let, I, 302. MS EllVer, folio 64.
Let, I, 303. MS CCE to MME, 12 Sept
1830. MS CCE to WmE (b) , 30 Oct 1830
(owned by DrHE). 146: Let, I, 302,
303. Let, I, 270. MS BoSchComReciSij-
1836, p. 268; ColCen, 16 Dec 1829. Reg-
ulations of the School Committee of the
City of Boston, 1830, pp. 3-5. MS BoSch-
ComReciS 1 5-1836, pp. 268 fL, 281-282.
MS BoSchComPa, May and Nov 1830.
MS Bo$chComReci8i 5-1836, pp. 294-
295. /, II, 309. 147: /, II, 310-311, 315,
327. Let, I, 310-313; MS RHE to EBE,
21 and 22 Dec 1830; Hanna, pp. 165-
166, 266; New-York Spectator, 18 Jan

1831 (shows Murat sailed for London
that month, apparently on the i3th).
Let, I, 310-313; MS RHE to EBE, 21
and 22 Dec 1830. MS partial copy of
RWE to EzR, 8 Oct 1830, in MS Cab-
BIBkCalRWE under 1830. /, VII, 357.
148: MS VerBkJouGWT-ELT, 25? Oct
1829 and p. 36 (or what might be so
numbered) . MS EllVer, folio 7 (or 77,
upside down) . MS version of "Lines" on
sheet now inserted in MS VerBkJou-
GWT-ELT. MS EllVer, p. 5, following
p. 10 (the pagination is erratic) . The
Dial, I, 72, 314. MS RHE to EBE, 21
and 22 Dec 1830. MS EllVer, folio 27

(upside down) ; remembered by Charles
in MS CCEJouFrags, entry of perhaps
1835. MS RHE to EBE, 21 and 22 Dec
1830; MS RHE to EBE, i and 3 Mar
1831. 149: Let, I, 316. MS CCE to
MME, 6 Feb 1831. MS RHE to EBE, 11
Feb 1831. MS fragmentary copy of RWE
to H. Ware, Jr., 15 Feb 1831, in MS
CabLedgJEC, p. 202. Boston Commercial
Gazette, 10 Feb 1831. MS RHE to EBE,
i and 3 Mar 1831. RWE's partial- MS
copy of CCE to ElizH, 7 Dec 1833, in
MS ETEVer, p. 11. DGH, pp. 111-112.
150: MS EllVer, verso of folio 25, up-
side down. MS j BlotBk, No. Ill (also
marked "£1" by Emerson), p. 36 (19
Sept 1831) . /, II, 469. J, IV, 401. /, III,
453-454- 151: MS j "Q," p. 76. MS
RHE to EBE, 7 Mar 1831. MS PrRec,
20 Feb 1831; MS dated 19 Feb 1831,
written for this occasion. YoungEm, pp.
138-144. MS PrRec, i Mar 1831; MS
RHE to EBE, 7 Mar 1831; MSS LecScr,
I (8 Mar 1831), III (presumably of 22
Mar 1831), IV (29 Mar 1831), V (5
Apr 1831), VIII (26 Apr 1831), IX (3
May 1831) . MS sermon CVIII, completed
26 Feb 1831 (p. 20) and preached next
day (MS PrRec). 152: MS sermon
CVIII, p. 15. MS copy by Cabot of part
of RWE to WmE (b) , 5 Apr 1830, in MS
BIBkLEx, p. 16. ColCen, 15 and 18 Dec
1830 (Emerson re-elected from the fourth
ward in a pretty general National Re-
publican victory on 13 Dec) . MS BoSch-
ComReciSx 5-1836, pp. 300, 301. MS re-
port (in Emerson's hand) of subcommit-
tee for the Mayhew School, 9 Aug 1831,
in MS BoSchComPa. MS BoSchComRec-
1815-1836, pp. 313-314; and pamphlet
City of Boston . . . Committee . . .
Uniform Mode of Classification . . . Re-
port, dated 29 Nov 1831, passim, but
especially p. 15. Let, I, 337. MS undated
petition of Thomas Appleton, H. G.
Ware, Levi Gushing, Charles Warren,
and others, in 1831 file of MS BoSch-
ComPa. MS undated petition of Moses
Jaquith in 1831 file of MS BoSchCom-

522

4 NOTES

Pa. 153: MS BoSchComReciSi 5-1836,
pp. 320, 323. J, II, 431. MS BoSchCom-
ReciSi^~i8^6, p. 326. MS report of 4
May on BPLS (in Emerson's hand) , in
MS BoSchComPa for 1831. Let, I, 337,
339. J, II, 408. Let, I, 330. /, II, 528. MS
CCE to EBE, 4 Jan 1831; L**, I, 317.
Slavery, in, e.g., MS sermons XCVI,
XCVII, XCIX, and C-all preached Nov-
Dec 1830 (MS PrRea). Alcjou, p. 418.
ChrReg, 28 May and 4 June 1831. MS
CCE to EBE, 12 Mar 1831. 154: CEd,
IX, 391-392; cf. J, II, 367. MS CCE to
EzR, 17 June 1831. Cf. MS CCE to MME,
12 June 1831; MS CCE to EBE, 16 June
1831; and Let, I, 323, 324, 325. /, II,
384. MS VBk"P;' p. 5 (dated i June
1831) ; slightly different texts are in CEd,
IX, 391, and /, II, 383. 155: MS EBE
to RWE, 4 Aug 1830. Cf. Freneau's poem.
MS NoStC&PR for Jan 1831. Ibid., e.g.,
Jan and Feb 1831; MS DrWEC to An-
drews Norton, 24 Jan 1831 (owned by
HCL) ; MS DrWEC to EBE, 13 Feb 1831.
MS NoStC&PR, 24 Feb, i and 18 Mar,
and 5 and 6 Apr 1831. Ibid., Apr, May,
June, July, and Sept 1831, passim., and
17 Nov 1831; Let, I, 313-337, passim.
MS MME to CCE, 2 Nov 1830. 156:
MS MME to CCE, 9 Feb? 1831. MS CCE
to MME, 7 May 1831. Let, I, 322-324,

326. MS CCE to MME, 15 Aug 1831. Let,
I* 33°- J> II, 4°i» 415-416; Emerson
marked the passage in his Montaigne,
Essays, tr. Cotton, 2d ed., 1693, I, 261.
/, II, 440. 157: /, II, 440-441- Let, I,

327, 349. Let, I, 338, 344. Review of Bur-
ton's Cheering Views of Man and Provi-
dence, 1832 (title and date from the re-
view) , ChrEx, XIII, 394-399- Let, I, 215,
338» 346> 348; MS CCE to EBE, 31 Aug
and 2 Sept 1831. 158: MS CCE to
WmE(b), 17 May 1832 (owned by Dr-
HE) . MS sermon XVI, p. 8 (written
1828, preached at BoSCh 6 Sept 1829, ac-
cording to MS PrRec) . MS sermons XXX,
pp. 2-3; XXXVII, pp. 11-15; XLV, PP-
2-3; XLVI, p. 12; XLIX, p. 3; XCVI,
pp. 16-18; CXIX, pp. 4, 7; CXXIII, pp.

10, 13; CXXIX, pp. 11-14; CXL, pp. u,
12, 20-21, 22. 159: MS sermon CLV,
p. 22. For Emerson's reading of Carlyle
on German literature as early as Get
1827, see Let, I, 218-219. J, II, 424, 444.
Emerson wrote his record of the 36 lec-
tures in the margins of the four Gospels
in his copy, still among his books, of The
New Testament in the Common Version
Conformed to Griesbach's Standard Greek
Text, Boston, 1828. ChrReg, 31 Oct 1829,
20 Nov 1830, 30 Apr 1831, 24 Dec 1831.
160: J, II, 448-449, 463- MS CCE to
WmE (b) , 29 May 1832 (owned by Dr-
HE) . /, II, 481, 491-492 (2 June 1832) .
Let,l, 351. ChrEx, V, 203-208. MS WmE-
(f) to SamR, 22 Jan 1806. MS WmE(b)
to EzR, 4 Apr 1830. 161: Let, I, 352,
and MS report of the committee, 16 June
1832 (owned by BoSCh) ; endorsement
on that MS report, and MS J. Mackin-
tosh, Jr., to RWE, 21 June 1832 (owned
by BoFCh) ; the endorsement and the
letter seem to differ as to the date of the
meeting of the church. MS WmE (b) to
RWE, 17 and 22 Jan 1825 (owned by
DrHE, quoted above, pp. 107-108) . MS
PrRec, 24 June— 29 July 1832. Let, I, 353.
"Lovewell's Fight," Collections, Histori-
cal and Miscellaneous; and Monthly Lit-
erary Journal, III, 64-66 (Feb 1824) • MS
CCE to WmE (b) , 6 July 1832 (owned
by DrHE) . Let, I, 353. /, II, 492. MS
CCE to WmE (b) , 6 July 1832 (owned
by DrHE) ; MS PrRec. 162: /, II, 492.
MS JouEurj, p. 48. MS MME to RWE,
14 or 15 July 1832. J, II, 495~497- MS
JouEurj, p. 40 (16 July 1832); cf. Bae-
deker, Les Etats-Unis, i2th ed., 1905,
p. 157. Let, I, 353. MS CCE to MME,
16 Aug 1832. MS PrRec, 5 Aug-2 Sept.
1832; Let, I, 351-352. 163: Let, I, 352-
354. MS EBE to WmE(b) , 7 Sept 1832.
Let, I, 355. CEd, XI, 4-5, 9-10, 13-15,
17, 19, 20, 22. 164: Ibid., XI, 24. Let,
I> 355~357- MS CCE to WmE(b), 26
Sept 1832 (owned by DrHE) ; Let, II,
330. MS CCE to WmE(b), 9 Oct 1832
(owned by DrHE) . MS CCE to RWE,

NOTES

523

u Jan 1833. The Dial, I, 47; printed
more fully in CEd, IX, 258-260. Young-
Em, pp. 180-190, especially 183-184, 188.
J> IJ> 459' 497-500- YoungEm, p. 186.
Luther copied in MS j "Q," p. 76, from
FraM, II, 743 (Jan 1831). 165: L H,
515. MS PrRec, 21 Oct 1832. MS CCE
to MME, 24 Oct 1832; Mrs. W. L. Watts,
of the American Unitarian Association
Historical Library, informs me that Rev.
William Steile Brown, a native of Eng-
land, was a Unitarian minister at Buf-
falo from 1832 to 1834, died at Columbia,
Texas, 4 Aug 1835, and was highly
praised in an obituary printed in C/zr-
Reg, 24 Oct 1835. Let, I, 356-358- 166:
Let, I, 358. MS CCE to EzR, i Oct 1832,
and later letters. Let, I, 358, 359. MS
PrRec, 28 Oct-3o Dec 1832. MS CCE to
EzR, 10 Dec 1832. Lett I, 361. Let, I, 360.
167: MS HedgeRem, p. 6. MS CCE to
MME, 20 Sept 1832; MS CCE to MME,
u Apr 1833. MS MME to CCE, 10 Feb
1833. MS MME to CCE, 6 Dec 1832. ],
II, 525. MS MME to CCE, 8 Jan 1833.
168: CEd, II, 81-82. Let, I, 359-360.
NortonLet, I, 510. Let, I, 359. Let, I,
337. For complicated but pretty convinc-
ing evidence that, in spite of a change of
captains, the "mule bearing Jasper" of
1831 was Emerson's brig Jasper of 1832,
see in addition to passages in Let re-
ferred to, ColCen, 14 and 17 Dec 1831
and 3 Nov 1832. BoDaAdv, IndepChron,
DaEvTrans, and presumably other Bos-
ton papers for approximately the same
dates, give all or parts of the same evi-
dence. /, III, 3. Let, I, 360. /, III, 3,
and X, 251. 169: DAB and ApCAB.
J, III, 33. Specimens, er*. Kettell, Boston,
1829, I> v- L HI* 7, 8. Let, I, 359, 361,
418, 421. J, III, 10, 11. 170: MS Man-
Globe, p. 22. J, III, 23. EPP's reminis-
cences in MS Cabot to EllenE, 15 July
1882, and in Cabot's MS notes "Miss E.
P. Peabody, July 14' 1882." MS "Pru-
dence," 17 Jan 1838, p. 48. The Malta
Government Gazette, 6 Feb 1833. MS
JouEurj, p. 9, 15 Feb 1833. J, III, 26-

2?> 30, 31- 171: /, HI, 32, 33, 35. In-
scription at entrance to palace, as I saw
it in 1939, says Coleridge lived and
worked "IN THIS BUILDING ... BE-
TWEEN MAY 1804 AND SEPTEMBER
1805." ], III, 35, 36. MS JouEurj, pp.
8-10; but for the spelling "Vicary's" and
for location, see Bigelow, p. 113. ], III,
37-38. The name of the Via Amalfitania
is misspelled by Emerson in J, III, 41,
and in Let, I, 366: Inscription "VENNE
. . ." as I copied it in 1939 from tablet
placed on the building in 1896. Let, I,
362,363. 172:^1,363. 173: Let,
I, 363. J, III, 39-41, 43-47, 49. CEd, IX,
353; Strauch in Modern Language Notes,
LVIII, 64-67; /, III, 467. /, III, 50-51,
53- 174: J, HI, 54- Let, I, 366. J, III,
55. Let, I, 364. 7, III, 55, 56. Let, I, 367.
Let, I, 363. J, III, 55. Let, I, 364. MS
JouEurj, p. 11. Let, I, 364; J, III, 56-
60. 175: J, Hi, 59. La Cerere, Palermo,
21, 25, 26, 28 Feb 1833. J, III, 480-481.
/, III, 58, 60-61. Let, I, 369; MS Italyl,
p. 11. /, III, 66. MS JouEurj, p. 12. 7,
III, 66-67. Let, I, 367. 7, III, 67. Let,
I, 367. 7, III, 62. MS ArtBeauty, p. 17.
Yl6iLet, I, 369. 7, III, 73. tj "Journal
in Europe 1833," No. 4, p. 8. MS Italyl,
pp. 45-46, 49-51. MS j "E," p. 256. MS
J "JX" P- 333- Let, I, 371. MS JouEurj,
p. 11. MS Italyl, p. 53. 7, III, 74, 76, 97.
Let, I, 368. 177: Copy of Officium,
Rome, 1799, still among the books of
Emerson, bears his signature dated Rome,
1833. 7, III, 81-82, 85-86. Newman, Let-
ters and Correspondence, ed. Anne Moz-
ley, London, 1891, I, 380, 390. J, III,
87-89- 178: L HI, QQ-Let, I, 374. Let,
I' 372-374>' tne misspelling "Thorwals-
den's" is probably chargeable to CCE,
whose copy of RWE's letter is here
quoted (see Let, I, 372, 374) . J, III, 78-
79- 179: 7, III, 77, 91, 92. J, III, 84,
7, HI, 76. Let, I, 380, 381. ], III, 79-80,
Let, I, 374, 380. Let, I, 373. J, III, 83,
95. 7, HI, 92. 180: Let, I, 373-374- /,
III, 103, 106. Let, I, 374. 7, III, 103-108.
Let, I, 384. J, III, no, 119, 121. Let, I,

524

NOTES

382; J, III, 120. J9 III, 105, 111, 119, 124-

181: Let, I, 377- J> HI, 122- L^ !• 384~

385. 7, III, 120-121. /, III, log. 7, III,

105, 108. Let, I, 382; VI, index. 182:
7. Ill, 112-113. ], III, 111-112. Let, I,
381-382. MS j Cabot's "1833" (Italian
and French journey) , p. 24. Lei, I, 382-
383. Let, I, 378, 384, 385. /, III, 125-129
(Caldani's name is misspelled) . 183 :
J, III, 130, 131. Weather reports in Gaz-
zetta privilegiata di Venezia, 4, 5 June
1833. ], III, 132-133. H. Gary, Memoir
of the Rev. Henry Francis Gary, London,
1847, II, 215, 240-243. T. W. Reid, The
Life . . . Milnes, I, 137-143. Gazzetta
privilegiata, 7 June 1833, gives day o£
Gary and Milnes's departure as 3 June.
Emerson's arrival in Venice and depar-
ture, ibid., 7, 8 June 1833. J, III, 139,
140. 184: 7, III, 142-145. Emerson, in
MS Italy II., p. 57, remembered his frus-
trated desire to meet Manzoni. /, III,
146-152, 154-155- Let, I, 388. /, III, 165.
Le Temps, 11 July 1833. JouDeb, 14 July

1833. 185: /, HI, iBS-^fc Let> l> e-£->
386-388. /, III, 155, 159- Let, I, 388. Let,
1, 387; J, III, 156. Let, I, 388, 390- Let>
I, 387-388, 389. J, III, 167. JouDeb, 25
June, 6 and 14 July 1833. Let, I, 39°~
391; Le Temps, 22 June 1833. /, III,
156-157. 186: J, HI, 167. Le Temps,
20, 23 June and 7 July 1833. Ibid., 28
June 1833. Ibid., i July 1833. Ibid., 28
June and i July 1833. JouDeb, i July
1833; Le Temps, 8 and 12 July 1833.
Let, I, 390. J, III, 168. Le Temps, 22
June 1833. Ibid., 21 June 1833. Let, I,
389. /, III, 168-169. 187: 7, HI, 160.
Let, I, 391; 7, HI, i?0- JouDeb, 10 July
1833. 7, III, 156. Emerson tells in The
Dial, III, 512-513, the story of his first
acquaintance with the Sorbonne and its
vicinity. Among his papers are still pre-
served his copies of the Programme des
cours of the Sorbonne for the second
semester, 1833, and Programme du Col-
lege Royal de France for the same se-
mester. I owe to Louis Cazamian (letter
of 21 Nov 1948) some illuminating notes

on the neighborhood where, as a student,
he knew the Gate Procope. The cafe, re-
christened in 1928 and now abandoned,
once had an important part in the in-
tellectual activity of Paris, much such a
part as that played by some of the coffee
houses of London in the literary life of
that city. The shop of Papinot, the book-
seller, quite obscure in comparison with
the Cafe* Procope, was, in the 18305, at
No. 14 in the rue de Sorbonne, as the
present rue de la Sorbonne was then
called. 7, HI, 156; Let, I, 387. J, III,
164. Let, I, 387. 7, HI, 161. 188: MS
UsNaH, pp. 9, 10. Ibid., p. 22; a some-
what altered version is in The Gift,
Phila., 1844, p. 146. Mrs. R. Lee, Mem-
oirs of Baron Cuvier, New York, 1833,
pp. 45-46, 56-57. J, I, 379; see above, p.
105 and a note on that page. As for
Herder's Ideen, on i Feb 1829 Emerson
had borrowed T. Churchill's English
translation, Outlines of a Philosophy of
the History of Man, London, 1800 (sec
above, p. 143, and a note on that page) .
189: MS HuSci, p. 8. J, III, 170-171;
Let, I, 392. J, III, 171; MS j "Visits,"
p. 34; MS j Cabot's "1833" (Italian and
French journey) , verso of back flyleaf;
the address in Russell Square, No. 63,
had been given to Emerson by a Mr.
Webb of Albany. MS RHE to EBE, 31
Oct 1833; 7, III, 80. MS MemBkiS}}, 23
July. Let, I, 374. The Letters of John
Stuart Mill, ed. H. S. R. Elliot, London,
1910, 1, 57. 190: Ibid., I, 60. J, II, 455.
J, III, 173. The Ti77iesf London, 23 July
1833. Ibid., 22, 24, 29 July 1833. Ibid.,
26 July 1833. Ibid., 24 and 27 July 1833.
CEd, II, 143. The Times, 22 July 1833.
The News, London, 4 Aug 1833. Ibid.,
21 July 1833. The Observer, London, 4
Aug 1833. 191 : Let, I, 392-393; cf.
above, p. 183. Let, I, 393; undated entry
in MS MemBkiS^; ConwayAut, I, 434-
435. Let, I, 393. Hazlett, 2d ed., London,
1825, PP- 90-91- L in, 173; MS MemBh-
1833, 25 and 28 July 1833; c&d> v> 41
cf. p. 190, above. J, III, 172. CEd, V, 12.

NOTES

5*5

MS j "Visits," pp. 23-31, for account of
Coleridge here and on p. 192. 192:
CEd, V, 14. Ibid., V, 4. J, III, 175-176;
Scott, Marmion, Canto I, stanza xi. J,
XII, 174. Let, I, 394; MS MemBkiS^,
15 Aug 1833.1.^1,394. \9$iIreRWE,
pp. 140-141, 142. Marmion, Canto IV,
stanza xxiv. IreRWE, pp. 143-144, 146-
147. The Edinburgh Observer, 16 and
20 Aug 1833, shows that the Scottish
Athens was at that time having its sense
of propriety offended by one Carlyle-
quite other than Thomas— who was preach-
ing on High Street, in front of St. Giles's
Church. J, III, 177; Let, I, 394. 194-
/, III, 177-179. ], III, 179-180; MS Jou-
hurj, p. 9. MS MemBkiSjj, back flyleaf.
CEd, V, 14-15. Let, I, 394. 195: CEd,
V, 15. Let, I, 394. /, III, 182. Let, I, 378,
394' 395- C-ECor, I, 192. EatHfcA, p. 77.
TC to Mill in CartoFrR, p. 335. C-ECor,
passim. CabM, I, 197. /, III, 186. 196:
/, III, 182; Let, I, 394. CEd, V, 19-23;
Let, I» 395- J, HI, 184, 187, 190-191. ],
III, 187. MS copy of James Martineau
to A. Ireland, 31 Dec 1882. MS MemBk-
i833. 197: J, HI, 187, 188, 190, 193;
Let, I, 396. /, III, 194, 196-197, 199-201;
cf. Let, I, 386. J, III, 185. MS VBkX,
pp. 98-99, 104-105; another version of
the poem in J, III, 206-207. Let, I, 396.
MS RHE to EBE, 31 Oct 1833, for Emer-
son's arrival at the Tremont House in
Boston on 9 Oct. 198: Areopagitica,
cd. T. Holt White, London, 1819, p. 180.
CEd, XI, 217. Let, I, 397. J, III, 232.
StimBoDir, 1833 and 1834. MS CCE to
EBE, 24 Dec 1833. Let, I, 410; StimBo-
Dir, 1833, lists Jerusha Palmer, keeper
of a boarding house at 18 Franklin Place.
MS RHE to EBE, i May 1834. MS RHE
to EBE, 30 May 1834; Let, I, 415; MS
CCE to EBE, 30 Apr and i and 3 May
1834; J, III, 291. NEMag, IV, 241 (Mar
1833). 199: E. S. Gannett, ibid., IV,
409-410 (May 1833) ; MS CCE to RWE,
9 and 11 May 1833; cf. W. C. Gannett,
Ezra Stiles Gannett, 1875, pp. 187-188.
MS PrRec, 27 Oct 1833. YoungEm, pp.

191-192, 195-202, passim. MS PrRec, 9
Nov 1833-30 Mar 1834, passim; Let, I,
397-408, passim. Let, I, 420. I am in-
debted to William M. Emery of Fair-
haven, Mass, (letter of 8 Jan 1942) , for
pertinent extracts from the MS records
of the First Congregational Society (Uni-
tarian) in New Bedford. MS CabCon,
p. 18. Let, I, 400; Emery, One Hundred
Years, New Bedford, Mass., 1938, p. 9.
Let, I, 415-417, 421-423. MS PrRec, 6-
27 July and 19 Oct-io Nov 1834. Let,
I, 399. MS PrRec, 15 Dec 1833. MS CCE
to RWE, 18 and 22 Jan 1833. 200: MS
CCE to RWE, 4 and 5 Apr 1833. MS
CCE to RWE, 27 June 1833. MS CCE
to WmE (b) , 25 Jan 1834 (owned by
DrHE) . MS record of decree "Supreme
Judicial Court Suffolk ss. March Term,
1834— Ralph W. Emerson Admr in Equity
v Pliny Cutler 8c als." Let, I, 413. MS
record of decree entitled "March Term
S. J. C 1837"; Let, I, 413-414. Let, I,
414— V, 154, passim. MS UsNaH, p. 70.
201 : Bliss Perry, Emerson Today, Prince-
ton, N. J., 1931, p. 46. Let, I, 397. MS
ManGlobe, p. 22. Ibid., pp. 7, 9, 40-41,
52. MS CCE to EBE, 11 and 15 Jan (and
perhaps 21 Jan and 5 Feb) 1834. Let,
I, 402. MS "Water," p. 79. Let, I, 414.
MS AdNatHis, pp. 2, 7, 9, 15, 27. 202:
Ibid., pp. 31-32. Cf. Let, III, 224.
Hodgin, p. 27; cf. p. 179 et passim above.
MS Italyl, pp. 5, 28, 81. MS Italyll,
passim. Let, I, 435. MSS TGM, Miang,
MarLu, GFo, and EdBu. For Emerson's
use of the lectures on Michelangelo and
Milton as articles in NARev, see Let, III,
359, and index. /, III, 394, 400-401, 439.
203: MS ConLyRecBk28-59, 11 Feb
1835, records the debate (I am indebted
to Sarah R. Bartlett for checking this
entry) . CEd, IX, 37-38. Early versions
of "The Rhodora" differ from the text
in CEd-cf. Let, II, 189; LitMWF, I, 183;
and tj Cabot's "U," p. 8, dated "New-
ton 1834"; but many other poems men-
tioned in the present book are preserved
in variant forms that I cannot record.

526

NOTES

Let, I, 418. /, III, 333. Let, I, 417-418,
419. Let, I, 4.02. J, III, 226-227, 272, 452,
e.g. 204: Let, I, 412-413, 433. ], III,
266. Let, I, 430; ], III, 430-432. £*k I»
430. J, III, 369- J, HI, 350. /, III, 325-
J, III, 308. 205: Let, III, 357- 7, HI,
446. Let, I, 417. MS PrRec, 3 Aug 1834-
&nd. MS sermon CLXVIII, p. 7. /frzd.,
p. 6. Jfczd., p. 3. Lei, I, 417. MS EBE to
RWE, 20 Jan 1833. 206: CEd, IX, 262.
Let, I, 422. EdRev, XLVI, 304-351 (Oct
1827), especially 341-343, 343 ff., 348.
C/. above, p. 203. TC to RWE, 12 Aug
1834 (C-ECor, I, 18-26) ; RWE to TC,
14 May 1834 (ibid., I, 11-17). MS GCE
to MME, 7 July 1834. Let, I, 424. 207:
HolmesRWE, p. 79. C-ECor, I, 20-21.
Sartor Resartus, London, 1869 (Vol. I of
CarlyleCoWks) , pp. 28, 50, 53, 65, 188.
Ibid., pp. 171, 184. Ibid., pp. 163, 185,
244. Le£, I, 432. /, III, 300-301. ChrEx,
XV, 193-218 (Nov 1833). Mid., XIV,
108-129 (Mar 1833) • Let, I, 402. ChrEx,
XV, 194, 196, 209 ff., 216-217. 208:
Ibid., XV, 218. Ibid., XIV, 122-126. JFC-
Auto, p. 85. Let, I, 425; II, 32. MS SMF
to F. Hedge, i Feb 1835, in Fuller MSS,
X, 99 (owned by HCL) . Alcjou, p. 56.
Let, I, 409. MS CCE to RWE, 15 Nov
1833. 209: Let, I, 420-421. RHE, MS
"Notes," p. 40. MS PrRec, 19 and 26
Oct and 3 and 10 Nov 1834. MS VBk-
"E.L." p. 47. J, III, 361, 422 (appar-
ently corrects CEd, I, 400) . ], III, 425-
426. 210s Let, I, 436, 439. Emerson
preached at the Twelfth Congregational
Church once each year of his regular
pastorate and always in the afternoon
(MS PrRec, 30 Aug 1829, 26 Sept 1830,
30 Jan 1831, and 27 May 1832) . "Cham-
bers" is the usual spelling, though Bow-
en's, 1833, p. 173, has "Chamber"; cf.
Thwing, p. 205. MS Lidian, p. 76. Ibid.,
pp. 82-83; MS CCE to WmE (b) , 13 Feb
1834 (owned by DrHE) . MS CCE to
EBE, 25 Jan 1834. Cf. MS PrRec, 26
Jan; 2, 9, 16 Feb; and 9, 16, 23, 30 Mar
1834. MS CCE to WmE (b) , 13 Feb 1834
(owned by DrHE) . MS Lidian, pp. 82-

83. MS PrRec, 13? Mar 1834. MS Lidian,
p. 83, 211: Ibid., p. 84. MS LydiaJ to
LJB, 3 Oct 1834. t copy, by Viola C.
White, of MS material sent by Le Baron
Russell to OWH and now in AbLib. Let,
I, 441. Let, I, 439- MS PrRec, 21 Jan
1835. J, III, 445. MS Lidian, pp. 84-85,
266. J, III, 446. 212: Let, I, 435 ff-
MS Lidian, p. 86. Let, I, 434-435- 213 :
Let, I, 435. MS RWE to LydiaJ, 3 Feb
1835. Dykema, in American Speech, XVII,
285-286, suggests that Emerson had per-
haps "had as much of Ralph Waldo-r-
Emerson as he could stand." t EllenE to
EEF, 24 Aug 1885. 214: MS RWE to
LydiaJ, 12 Feb 1835. Let, I, 436-437.
MS LydiaJ to CTJ, 29 July 1830. Let,
I, 439-441. MS LydiaJ to LJB, 5 Mar
1835; MS Lidian, p. 87. MS LydiaJ to
LJB, 23 May 1835. Let, I, 436. 215:
Let, I, 439. t excerpts from S. F. Clarke
to JFC, 28 Feb 1835, inserted in MS
Lidian. MS L. M. Child to LE, 22 May,
n.y. MS SMF to F. Hedge, 6 Mar 1835,
in Fuller MSS, X, 100 (owned by HCL) .
Let, I, 439-441; MS Lidian, p. 87; MS
LydiaJ to LJB, 5 Mar 1835. L. C. Cooley,
1945, p. 37; broadside Pedigree of Cot-
ton, t Lidian, p. 15. 216: Plymouth
Church Records, II (New York, 1923) ,
506; broadside Pedigree of Cotton, t
Lidian, p. 16. MS Lidian, pp. 23, 30.
Ibid., pp. 24-25; t Lidian, pp. 19, 26.
MS Lidian, p. 10. P. L. Ford, ed., p. 65
(text of 1727) . MS Lidian, p. 21. ColCen,
19 Aug 1812. MS bill, Dorchester, 15 Dec
1813, for instruction, books, etc., of Lucy
and Lydia for three months. A copy oi
N. G. Dufiefs Nature Displayed . . .
A New and Infallible Method, 3d ed.,
Phila., 1810, Vol. I, still among the Emer-
son books, is inscribed "L. C. and L.
Jackson's." MS receipt signed by J. F.
Saunders & C. Beach, 8 Sept 1813, on
behalf of J. Falcone, acknowledging pay-
ment of 130 for one quarter's instruc-
tion of Lucy and Lydia in dancing. MS
Lidian, pp. 14-15. MS LydiaJ to Mrs.
Lucy Jackson, 18 June 1813. 217: MS

NOTES

527

LydiaJ to Mrs. Lucy Jackson, 16 July
1813. MS LydiaJ to Mrs. Lucy Jackson,
29 July 1813. MS LydiaJ to Charles Jack-
son, Sr., 3 Nov 1813. MS LydiaJ to Mrs.
Lucy Jackson, 19 Nov 1813. MS Lidian,
p. 27. LydiaJ's MS composition and com-
monplace book for 1815-1816, and a
similar one mainly for 1817; also MS
copybook of Lydia's verse for 1819. "Trust
in Providence Recommended/' signed by
Lydia and dated 23 Nov 1815, is on the
same loose sheet with a poem called
"Resignation/' dated 22 Nov 1815 and
also signed by Lydia. MS Lidian, pp. 16,
39, 41. Ibid., pp. 43-44; Plymouth Church
Records, II (New York, 1923) , 611, 638,
666. 218: t Lidian, p. 18. MS Lidian,
p. 43. Ibid., pp. 42, 47, 58. Ibid., p. 49.
Ibid., pp. 48-52; ColCen, 27 Apr 1816.
MS Lidian, p. 52, according to which
"Next year," spent with aunts and uncles,
was 1819. t Lidian, p. 19. MS Lidian, pp.
52-54. MS LydiaJ to LJB, 5 Oct 1821.
219: MS Lidian, pp. 56-58. LydiaJ to
LJB, 14 Oct 1823. MS Lidian, pp. 58,
70-72. Ibid., p. 59. MS LydiaJ to LJB,
10 July 1825. MS LydiaJ to CTJ, 28 Feb
1832. MS Lidian, p. 74. 220: MS CTJ
to LydiaJ, May 1835. MS LydiaJ to EPP,
28 July 1835. t Lidian, p. 23; BoDir,
1826, 1827, 1828, 1829. t Lidian, p. 24;
MS ChasB to LJB, Constantinople, 11
Jan 1837, says he has been absent for
three and one-fourth years. 221: MSS
ChasB to LJB, 1 1 Jan 1837, 19 Aug 1853,
20 Jan 1854; MSS ChasB to LE, 25 Sept
and 2 Oct 1838, 11 Dec 1838, 16 Aug
1851,6 Aug 1852, Oct 1853, 11 July 1854;
t Lidian, p. 27; various entries in MS
AcctBk^o-44, MS AcctBkjj-yp, MS Acct-
Bk6^j2. MS Lidian, p. 91; MS AcctBk-
36-40, p. 15. MS Lidian, pp. 90-91. Ibid.,
pp. 88-89. MS LydiaJ to LJB, 23 May
1835. MS ConToRec, VIII, 37-38, 43.
/, III, 497. Let, I, 452. ], III, 499 *t
passim; but especially Let, I, 455. ], III,
507-508, 516. 222: Let, I, 455. Let, I,
452. ConFre, 5 Sept 1835. Lei> *> 453- MS
Joseph Willard to RWE, 26 Sept 1835.

MS Lidian, pp. 92-93; I Chronicles, 17:

10. 223: MS CCE to WmE (b) , 7 July
1835 (owned by DrHE) ; /, III, 540; MS
Lidian, p. 93. MS CCE to WmE (b) , 14
and 18 Sept 1835 (owned by DrHE) .
t EllenE to EEF, 24 Aug 1885. MS Li-
dian, pp. 98-101; cf. Let, I, 454. MS "A
Plan of the House Lot with the Build-
ings thereon, Belonging to Mr Charles
Coolidge . . . Surveyed March the 29th
1832 by Cyrus Hubbard." Ibid.; ], III,
540-541; MS Lidian, p. 103. Let, I, 448.
Let, I, 447. Let, I, 454, 456; and II, 19,
21. 224: MS LE to LJB, 16 Sept 1835.
MS LE to LJB, 22 Sept 1835. MS Con-
AsBk for 1835. MS CCE to RWE, 22
Sept 1835; Let> ll> 66 et passim. MS LE
to LJB, 28 Sept 1835. MS LE to LJB,
30 Sept 1835. 225: Ibid. MS without
signature, date, beginning, or close, but
presumably copied from a letter of 13
Sept 1835. 226: MS Lidian, pp. 123-
124. For Asia, see also Let, II, 112, 410,
427; /, IV, 182 and 206, and V, 93-94
and 97; C-ECor, I, 161. For Palestine,
see Let, II, 112, 113. MS Lidian, pp. 147-
148. MS LE to LJB, 10 (i.e., 9?) Oct
1835, reported that "to-day ... a 'tran-
scendental' also dined with us." 227:
Plato, The Dialogues, tr. Jowett, 3d ed.,
Oxford, 1892, I, 489 (where, however,
the names of the speakers are abbrevi-
ated) . EinC, pp. 96-97. Cf. Shattuck, p.
211, and YeoGaz, i July 1837. ConFree,
11 ff. and 20 Dec 1834 and 14 Nov 1835.
Ibid., 3, 10, and 31 Jan and 7 Feb 1835.
228: MS CCE to WmE (b) , 29 Apr 1835
(owned by DrHE) . MS LE to LJB, 10
(i.e., 9?) Oct 1835; MS CCE to WmE-
(b) , 10 Oct 1835 (owned by DrHE) ;

J, III, 546. William Lloyd Garrison . . .
Told by his Children, New York, 1885,

11, 11-28, 49-50. /, IV, 73. Cf. EinC,
pp. 99-100. Ibid., pp. 71-73. MS ConTo-
Rec, VIII, 58; EinC, p. 67. MS ConTo-
Rec, VIII, 46, 64. YeoGaz, 9 Apr 1836.
ECitCon, pp. 370-371. Broadside Report
of the Selectmen . . . Concord . . . up
to March 24, 1837; MS AcctBk$6—4o, p.

528

NOTES

31. MS ConToRec, VIII, 71-73. Let, II,

19, 21. MS AcctBk^6-40, p. 29; EinC,
p. 67. 229: Socza/ Library, printed and
MS certificate of Emerson's share, No. 44,
dated 4 Jan 1836 (owned by CFPL) .
MS ConSoLibRec (owned by CFPL) , pp.

20, 118, 120. Ibid., passim, showing Emer-
son was committeeman or officer 4 Jan
1836-3 Jan 1842, and 7 Jan 1850-20
Jan 1851, and presumably till 29 Nov
1851, when the library was taken over
by the town. After his marriage Emerson
preached at Dr. Ripley's church once in
1835, eleven times in 1836, twice in 1837,
twice in 1838, and twice in 1839 (MS
PrRec) . In 1836, e.g., Emerson lectured
not fewer than three times for the Con-
cord Lyceum, according to MS ConLy-
Rec28-5$ (owned by CFPL) , 27 Jan and
2 and 28 Dec. MS MME to RWE, 15
May 1841; Let, II, 397. MS MME to
RWE, 31? Mar 1836 (owned by AbLib) .
230: MS MME to CCE, 10 Feb 1833.
For MME's incipient consciousness of
what she called "transcendentalism," see
MS MME to CCE, 29 Apr 1833. Let, I,
429. MS RHE to CCE, 3 Mar 1836. Let,
I, 429. MS CCE to RWE, 3 May 1836.
Let, II, 9-20. 231: Let, II, 20. Holmes,
The Poetical Works, Boston and New
York, n.d., cop. 1892, 1 (XII of HolStan-
Lib), 58. Let, II, 24, 31, 34- /, IV, 40.
Let, II, 59. The Dial, 1, 13-16; III, 522-
526; IV, 88-92 (these ascriptions to CCE
were made by Emerson in his own copy
of the magazine, now in HCL) . Let, II,
24-25. MS AcctBkj6-4o, p. 9, mentions
Lucy's boarding with the Emerson s for
twenty-two weeks, up to Mar 1836. 232:

/, iv, 134-135- Let> n, 30. /, in, 501.

Alcjou, pp. 57-58; Pedlar 'sP, pp. 24, 34,
et passim. Let, I, 447-448. J, III, 501;
Alcjou, p. 68. Alcjou, pp. 68-69; /, III,
559-560. Alcjou, p. >7o; ]} in, 573. 233 :
Alcjou, pp. 70, 75. Let, II, 4-6; EtheE,
II, 101-125. ], II, 109, alludes to Words-
worth's famous "Ode," which is, signifi-
cantly, quoted in MS j "F No i" (dated
1836-1837), p. 57. Alcjou, pp. 75-76.

Let, II, 32; Alcjou, pp. 77-78. Let, II,
138-141; Alcjou, p. 102. J, IV, 69. Let,
II, 60-62. Let, II, 27-28, and VI, index;
MS AcctBk^6-40, passim. W. E. Chan-
ning the Younger, MS "Poetry," III, 92
(owned by HCL) ; Frederick T. McGill,
the best knower of the younger Chan-
ning's life and writings, first made me
acquainted with these verses. 234: C/.
p. 232 above. Let, II, 32. IreRWE, p.
83. Let, II, 32; /, IV, 79-80. Let, II, 32.
MS SMF to Ellen Fuller, 25 Aug 1836,
in Fuller MSS, IX, 43 (owned by HCL) .
235 : MS LE to EPP, n.d. (July or Aug
1836) ; I have supplied in square brackets
portions of words torn away with the
seal. LoHedge, pp. 3-15. Let, I, 446.
236: Let, II, 29. MS sermon CLXXI,
the last of the extant sermons of Emer-
son, was first preached 17 July 1836, ac-
cording to MS PrRec. MS AcctBktf-jo,
p. 9. J, IV, 131-132. /, III, 505-506, 512
ff.; EtheE, II, 83-87, 88-99, passim. MS
RWE to EPP, 12 June 1835 (owned by
HCL) , may relate to an at least partial
English translation of The True Messiah
in EPP's possession and possibly by her.
], III, 432, 5^4-525- IreRWE, p. 21. J}
IV, 10—1 1; MS j "B," pp. 132 ff. Among
Emerson's books there is still a copy oi
the first volume of Cabinets-Bibliothek
der deutschen Classiker. Anthologie aus
den Werken Jean Paul's, Hildburghausen
and New York, 1829, inscribed with the
name "Lidian Jackson/' in Emerson's
hand. J, IV, 17, 27; MS j "B," pp. 141-
148. MS j "B," especially pp. 142, 143;
/, IV, 28. Let, II, 32-33- 237 : MS MME
to LE, Wednesday, Aug n.y. (1837?). J,
IV, 94. Long afterwards Emerson remem-
bered the impress of Goethe on the Tran-
scendental movement as o£ first impor-
tance—"Goethe,— the one efficient source
of influence, twenty years ago" (MS
RWE to Charles Leland, 23 Dec 1861,
owned by HistSoPa) . MS GPB to RWE,
10 Oct 1835. C~ECor, I, 48-49. Incom-
plete MS copy T- Cabot of Le Baron
Russell to RWE, 16 Dec 1835. C-ECor,

NOTES

I, 86-87. /, HI, 477; IV, 89. C/. p. 156
above. 238: MS CCEJouFrags, 2 Aug
1835. /, HI, 536. MS F. Hedge to Cabot,
20 Nov 1883. Let, I, 449. Let, I, 447;
PoDaAdv, 3 Nov 1835-14 Jan 1836, pas-
sim. MS CCE to WmE (b) , 7 Nov 1835

(owned by DrHE) . 239: MS LecEng-
Lit, IV, pp. 3-45, passim. Ibid., VIII,
PP- 33> 38; IX, p. 48; X, pp. 22, 27, 31.
MS AcctBk$6-4o, p. 2. MS PrRec. MS
AcctBk36-4o, p. 4; L*k ii 9. 240: Let,

II, 26, 37. C£d, I, 3, 9, 10. Select Works
of Plotinus, tr. Thomas Taylor, London,
1817, p. 365; cf. J. S. Harrison, p. 105,
A notation on a back flyleaf of the copy
of the Select Works that belonged to
Emerson (now in HCL) refers to the
passage in question but is not very clearly
in his hand. CEd, I, 11, 12-14, 24. 241:
CEd, I, 70, 71, 72, 76. Let, II, 29. Let,
II, 26-27, 29, 30, 32. For discussion of
the Orphic poet, see EtheE, I, 361 ff.,
and my review in AL, XVII, 273. 242 :
Alcjou, p. 78. C-ECor, I, 112. Let, II, 42.
ChrReg, 24 Sept 1836. WMess, II, 385-
393, but especially 392; Osgood's identity
in PerTran, p. 22. ChrEx, XXI, 372, 376,
377, 380-381, 385. 243: DemRev, I,
319-329, but especially 320. The Intel-
lectual Repository and New Jerusalem
Magazine, I (n.s.) , 188-191 (Apr 1840) .
NJMag, XV, 48-52, passim. J, IV, 85-87;
Let, II, 37; StimBoDir, 1835 anc* ^37;
Ale] on, p. 78. ], IV, 87. 244: Alcjou,
pp. 78-79; HCDivSGenCat, passim; Coo-
Dw, p. 11; WHCMemWEC, III, 313;
ChadChan, pp. 29, 380-381. J, IV, 87.
J, IV, 113-114; Alcjou, p. 79; MS Fra-
JouEx, p. i. 245: Let, II, 48. MS W.
C. Martin to RWE, 5 Nov 1836. Bowen's,
1833, PP- 87-89 and 166, and pictures
opposite pp. 144, 180; for Alcott's school,
Pedlar'sP, pp. 164-165 et passim, and pic-
ture opposite p. 168. Let, II, 43. 246:
J, IV, 189; Shakespeare, MSND, II, i, 175-
176. MS PhHis, 1, 23, 25; II, 8, 21, 27.
Ibid., XII, 24. Ibid., V, passim, but espe-
cially 10-12, 36-38; VI, u, 18-22. 247:
Ibid., VII, 35; IX, 33-38, passim; X, 9-

529

10> 33-34- Alcjou, pp. 81-82. MS Fra-
JouEx, pp. 4-5. PeaRemChan, pp. 365-
366. 248:MannMann, pp. 51-52. 249:
Whitman, Leaves of Grass, New York,
1867, p. 10. Let, II, 81, 83. MS j "U,"
PP- 56-57'* Emerson read and indexed
the passage on Harvey in his copy of
Letters Written by Eminent Persons . . .
to which are Added . . . Lives of Emi-
nent Men, by John Aubrey, London,
1813, II, 380. MS RHE to CCE, 3 Mar
1836; /, IV, 57-58. MS TreesMajor, p.
3. MS AcctBk$6-4o, p. 17. MS Trees-
Major, passim; MS TreesMinor, passim.
250: /, IV, 236, 251, 260. C-ECor, I,
161. Jj V, 6. MS account books, passim.
MS Ledger '49-72, p. 60; a note in Let,
III, 371, confuses the "heater piece" with
a neighboring parcel of land later pur-
chased by Emerson. Let, II, 66. MS W.
D. Sohier to RWE, 27 July 1837; Let,
II, 87, 92. MS W. D. Sohier to RWE,
30 June 1837. 251: Let, II, 86 et pas-
sim, and later volumes, passim. MS Con-
AsBk for 1839. Let, II, 69, 95; VI, 81,

166. J, V, 43. MS LE to EPP, 4 Dec 1837.
J, IV, 398; V, 49-50. Let, II, 203. J, IV,
232. MS LE to LJB, 6 and 8 Oct 1837.
J, V, 114-115- 252: Let, II, 185; /, V,

167. J, IV, 290, 469; V, 23. EinC, p. 146.
Let, II, 168. Let, II, passim; Pedlar' sP,
pp. 203-210. J, IV, 225. 253: Let, II,
68-82, passim. J, e.g., V, 14. Let, II, 181-
184. MS SMF to Eugene Fuller, 31 Mar
1839, in Fuller MSS, IX, 59 (owned by
HCL) . MS ElizH to MME, 23 Apr 1839.
MS SMF to CRN, 18 Apr 1839, in Fuller
MSS, X, 128 (owned by HCL) . MS SMF
to Eugene Fuller, 31 Mar 1839, in Fuller
MSS, IX, 59 (owned by HCL) . Let, II,
197, 203, 234; II-IV, passim. MS ElizH
to MME, 23 Apr 1839. J, IV, 474; Let,
II, 135 and 137, and, in general, II fir.;
MS RWE to CS, 3 Mar 1838 (owned by
HCL), and MS RWE to CS, 23 Mar
1838 (owned by HCL) , and much other
correspondence between RWE and CS
that has become available and has been
placed in HCL since the publication of

53°

NOTES

Let in 1939. Let, II, 205. Cf. HigFul, pp.
36, 37. /, V, 279. Let, II, 338 <?£ passim.
254: C/. LetFriend, p. 9. EarlySClub,
pp. 109 ff.; TickLi, II, 85, 99-100. Let,
II-V, passim; VI, index. Ltft, II, 226-
228; MS RWE to SGW, 27 Oct 1839 (MS
owned by HCL; much other correspond-
ence between RWE and SGW has be-
come available since 1939 and is now in
HCL) . Let, II-VI, passim. Let, II, 446;

III, 80-81 et passim. MS Lidian, pp.
120-121; in MS LE to LJB, "Wednesday
Eveg." ("1836" added in pencil) , Lidian
was sorry to be packing Lucy's things,
realized that Lucy would not be back in
Concord that winter, and was especially
sorry because Lucy would now be unable
to see baby Waldo (born 30 Oct 1836) ,
and she also said that Mrs. and Miss
Ward reported Mrs. Thoreau's kind feel-
ings toward Lucy. On the other hand,
Sanborn (SanLiThor, pp. 128-129) quot-
ed Emerson as saying in conversation:
"My first intimacy with Henry began
after his graduation in 1837. Mrs. Brown,
Mrs. Emerson's sister from Plymouth,
then boarded with Mrs. Thoreau ..."
SanHDT, pp. 52-54. ThorWr, VII, 3;
cf. CanbyThor, pp. 65, 461. J, IV, 395,
397, 406. J, V, 128-130; cf. CEd, I, 230
ff. and 306 ff. Let, II, 182. 255: MS
G. B. Loring to JRL, 24? Feb 1839
(owned by HCL) . J, V, 241. Let, II, 225.

MS JRL to G. B. Loring, 22 Dec 1837
(owned by HCL) . MS LE to LJB, 19
and 21 July 1838. Let, II, 147, 159. /,

IV, 191, 236, 239, MS LE to LJB, 19 and
21 July 1838. That Emerson was too self-
ish and too earthy for Very emerges from
the whole record of the friendship of the
two men. MS LE to LJB, Fast Day, 5?
Apr 1838; VeryPo, pp. 18-19. 256: MS
G. B. Loring to JRL, 19 Sepr 1838
(owned by HCL). Let, II, 170-171. /,

V, 105; Very had by this time begun the
short series of letters to Emerson now in
the Wellesley College Library, and some-
weeks after the visit of late October he
wrote him an admonition to bind "the

strong man within you (that is your
will) " and so receive a spiritual weapon
with which to "plunder the goods of the
evil one" (MS Very to RWE, 30 Nov
1838, owned by Wellesley College Libra-
ry) ; Very's letters to Emerson are often
Biblical in style, and, though not im-
passioned, have a tone of authority sug-
gesting the speech of a Hebrew prophet.
Let, II, 171; BartlettJoVe, pp. 59, 80.
Let, II, 179, 204, 209. J, IV, 235; V, 103.
J, IV, 361. J, IV, 356. Let, II, 131- MS
LE to LJB, 19 and 21 July 1838. /, IV,
491. 257: J, V, 195, ed. note. Let, II,
98-99 et passim. J, IV, 363. Let, 11, 108;
MS Brownson to RWE, 10 Nov 1837.
J, IV, 405. Let, II, 122. Let, II, 109.
C-ECoy, I, 141. St-ECor, pp. 23-25 et pas-
sim. C-ECorSup, p. 6. /, IV, 137-138.
258: J, IV, 207, 235-236. CEd, IX, 38-
40. ], IV, 243. MS j "C," p. 84. 259:
], IV, 304. J, III, 369. MS HuLi, I, 15;
Let, II, 177. MS LE to LJB, "Tuesday
Evening," early 1838? ], V, 86-87, 233-
Herald, Vol. I, No. 4, is for 25 Apr 1838.
Let, II, 170-171; J, V, 234. /, V, 76. MS
PresAge, 1, 5, 54, 65, 76. 260: MS copy,
by F. B. Sanborn, of ThcoP to C. Fran-
cis, 6 Dec 1839. Alcjou, p. 137. MS LE
to Sophia Brown, 9 Sept 1837; The Lib-
erator, 25 Aug 1837, shows the Grimke's
were visiting neighboring towns; and
they presumably arrived in Concord on
i Sept 1837 (cf. Letters of Theodore
Dwight Weld . . . 1822-1 844, ed. Barnes
and Dumond, n.d. [cop. 1934], I, 440,
442) ; the sisters no longer lived in the
South. CabM, II, 425-426. J, IV, 371-
372, 374; V, 26-27, 301. J, IV, 316-319,
400, 411-412. J, V, 261. Let, II, 235 et
passim. Kant, Critick of Pure Reason,
London, William Pickering, 1838, pp.
431-432; a notation in Emerson's copy
indicates that the price was $6, the same
amount charged Emerson for the book
in MS MunAccttf-^, 19 Nov 1838; the
pertinent marginal marking on p. 432
of Emerson's autographed copy is in a
cramped, and therefore dubious, hand.

NOTES

7, IV, 185. 261: 7, IV, 247, 248. MS
j "C," p. 91 (17 July 1837). MS LE to
EPP, 20 Jan 1839. Let, II, 104. 262:
Let, II, 177, 244. Alcjou, p. 107. Thay-
Rip, pp. 46-47. See below, pp. 269 fL,
for the "recent attacks." ThayRip, p. 46;
Let, II, 177. MS LE to LJB, 2 Jan 1839;
Let, II, 177. MS AcctBk^6~4o} pp. 140-
141. Let, II, 60. MS AcctBk^6~40, pp.
34, 36, 38; MS MunAcctjj-jc}, under
"Tickets to Lectures, 1838-9." J, V, 373.
Let, II, 94. /, III, 537. 263: MS j "Con-
cord L," p. 144. J, IV, 56. Let, II, 94.
MS "Memoirs by John Pierce" (owned
by MRS) , VII, 155-156; MS HCPhiBeta-
KRec, II, 59. CookeRWE, p. 60. MS LE
to LJB, 2 Sept 183,7. LowLitEs, pp. 366-
367; Lowell may well have heard the
oration, but I have no definite proof.
HolmesRWEj p. 115; as Holmes was at
the dinner (see p. 265 below) , he pre-
sumably had heard the oration. MS Cab-
Con, p. 12. 264: CEd, I, 81, 84, 100,
113, 114-115. Ibid., I, 91. Ibid., I, 89, 94.
265: Ibid., I, 94-95. Copy of Emerson's
Miscellanies, Boston, 1868, bears the sig-
nature of William James and his mark
on this passage, p. 90 (owned by HCL) ;
John Dewey, as a young man, read Emer-
son, but does not remember that he was
directly influenced by the passage I have
quoted (letter to me, 16 Sept 1948) . CEd,
I, 102, 106, 108, 109-115. MSHCPhiBeta-
KRec, II, 59. 266: 7, IV, 294. FroEEv,
p. 367. MS LE to LJB, 2 Sept 1837. J,
IV, 289. MS LE to LJB, 2 Sept 1837. J,
IV, 341; Let, II, 99-100. MS LE to LJB,
6 and 8 Oct 1837. Let, II, 104. MS LE to
LJB, 23 Apr 1838. 267: 7, IV, 4*7-
MS RWE to John Pierpont, 7 June 1838
(owned by NYPL) . ], IV, 430; Let, II,
126-127. 7, HI, 502, 518. MS PrRec. J,
IV, 413. Let, II, 147. According to ChrEx,
XXV, 266, there were seven graduates;
and seven are named in HCDivSGenCat,
pp. 52-53. 268: MS HCDivSStuRec, p.
96 (owned by AnHarTheoLib) ; printed
in RWE'sRe, p. 130. MS HCDivSStuRec,
pp. 27, Jan 1831, and 98, 15 July 1838

(owned by AnHarTheoLib) ; description
of the chapel as I found it 3 July 1945;
a tablet, set in the wall, now commem-
orates the address of 15 July 1838. CEdf
I, 119, 120, 122-131, 145, 149-151. 269:
PeaRem.Chan, p. 373. Let, II, 147. MS N.
Hale, Jr., to JRL, 24 July 1838 (owned
by HCL) . MS JRL to G. B. Loring, 2
Aug 1838 (owned by HCL) . ScudLowell,
I, 57-58. MS G. B. Loring to JRL, 19
Sept 1838 (owned by HCL) . MS JRL to
G. B. Loring, 22 Sept 1838 (owned by
HCL) . MS G. B. Loring to JRL, 5 Oct
1838 (owned by HCL). Let, II, 147.
270: Let, II, 149-150. Let, II, 148-149.
ThayRip, p. 45. Let, II, 149. MS LE to
LJB, Aug? 1838. 7, V, 30. Let, II, 149;
cf. Commager in NEQ, VIII, 29-41, and
The Evening Post, New York, 27 June
1838, where the petition is given without
the names of the signers, as it is in The
Liberator,, 6 July 1838. }, V, 34, 91-92.
271: Let, II, 166; The Personality was
published on 4 Oct 1838, according to
MS HCDivSStuRec (owned by AnHar-
TheoLib) , p. 100. Let, II, 166-167.
WMess, VI, 37-42; this review begins
with a summary of the controversy to
date (Nov 1838). BoQR, I, 501, 514.
ChrEx, XXV, 266-268. PrincetonRev,XI,
43~9°; 91* 95> 97- "Unitarian Pope" was
Carlyle's epithet, according to SanHarris-
Alc, II, 360. A. Norton, Inaugural Dis-
course, 1819, p. 12. 272: A. Norton, A
Discourse . . . Infidelity, 1839, especially
pp. 9 fL and 39 fL Cf. CookeRWE, pp.
74—75. GR, "The Latest Form of Infidel-
ity" Examined, 1839, especially pp. 19,
22, 43, 119, 122, 125, 150. Let, II, 225.
MS MME to WmE (b) , 13 June 1840. J,
V, 123. ThayRip, p. 45. MS FraJouEx,
p. 13. Jf V, 83, 123. Incomplete rough
draft of "Uriel," almost illegible, MS j
"V," p. 147 (1845?) . MannMann, p. 52;
the comparison suggested by ed. note in
J, IV, 362. CEd, IX, 13-15. 273: Ibid.,
IX, 14-15. MS F. Hedge to OWH, 22
Dec 1884 (owned by HCL) . MS PrRec.
Let, II, i44-H5« 15B- CEd> I> i53-l87-

532

NOTES

Let, II, 176, 189-190; LitMWF, I, 182-
183. Let, II, 85. 274: MS ConToRec,
VIII, 165-166; ChrReg, 17 Dec 1836; Yeo-
Gaz, 8 July 1837; BoCou, 8 July 1837;
Let, II, 85. FeoGaz, 8 July 1837. Verses
quoted are from broadside text of "Orig-
inal Hymn" as reproduced in facsimile
in The Critic, XLII, 431 (MaY ^S) •
CookeBib, p. 63, gives an entirely er-
roneous date. J, V, 226, 227, 343- 275:
Goethe's Werke, Stuttgart and Tubingen,
1827, II, 85, 86, 87. C-ECor, I, 48. Let, II,
225. MS Parker Jou (owned by American
Unitarian Association Historical Libra-
ry) , volume for 1838-1840, under Sept
1839. Let, II, 231, 243- 276: MS F.
Hedge to SMF, 16 Jan 1840, in Fuller
MSS, XVI, 23 (owned by HCL) . Cabot's
notes on F. Hedge to SMF, 24 Mar 1840,
in MS CabBlBkCal Let, II, 270-271. Let,
II, 249, 276. Let, II, 253. Let, II, 285-
286; The Dial, I, i, in Emerson's anno-
tated copy (owned by HCL) ; names of
contributors mentioned in the present
chapter are from Emerson's notes in the
four volumes of this set of The Dial. Let,
II, 310. The Dial, I, 84 ("To Eva" is
there entitled "To ****"), 122-123.
Ibid., I, 5-11, 14, 47, 71-72. 277: Ibid.,
I, 117-121. Ibid., I, 72. Ibid., I, 83, 84;
other contributions by Ward are ibid.,

I, 121, 123. Ibid., 1, 86, 87, 89, 94. Let,

II, 294, 313, 322. C-ECor, I, 304. The
Dial, I, 137-158. MS PresAge, II. The
DiaLl, 242-245. Ibid.,1, 220-232. C-ECor,
I, 313-314- The Dial, I, 348-35°- "An
After-dinner Poem" (OWH, Poems, new
rev. ed., Boston, 1878, p. 68) . The Dial,
I, 497-5*9> 5*3~538- Ibid-> *> 536- 278:
Ibid., II, 207-214. Let, II, 456~458; 7"A*
D/aZ, II, No. 3 (Jan 1842) , back cover.
/, V, 506, 513-514- Let, II, 387. CEd, II,
318. Let, II, 387. Hegel, TVze Philosophy
of History, tr, Sibree, rev. ed., New York,
1899, especially p. 457. Cousin, Introduc-
tion, tr. Linberg, Boston, 1832, e.g., p.
312. Let, I, 322, 346. 279: Emerson's
new words and obsolete words seemed
particularly striking to a contributor to

A New English Dictionary (MS G. M.
Philips to RWE, 8 Jan 1880) . CEd, II,

45-47' 49> 50. 53. 57' 6l> 8l> 83-85> 89~
90. 280: Hindu law (The Dial, III,
336; but earlier quoted in MS PhHis, VI,
22) . Montaigne, Essays, tr. Cotton, 2d ed.,
London, 1693, I, 199. /, V, 484. CEd, II,
68, 70, 94. 281: CEd, II, 96, 98. Job,
42:3. CEd, II, 126, 131. 282: Ibid., II,
188. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics,
especially Bks. VIII and IX. Emerson
must also have been familiar enough with
Cicero on friendship. Montaigne, Es-
says, tr. Cotton, 2d ed., London, 1693, I,
296 (passage marked in Emerson's copy
of the book) . CEd, II, 208, 217. Ibid., II,
214. For Stoics, cf. Diogenes Laertius,
Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ir. Hicks,
London and New York, 1925, II, 229.
283: CEd, II, 222, 240, 268, 279, 304-
306, 308. /, V, 485. CEd, II, 328, 336, 342,
35i-353> 367- 284: MS MME to ElizH,
8 Apr 1841. MS Win. Foster to RWE, 12
Apr 1841. J, VI, 297. LowLitEs, I, 67.
ChrEx, XXX, 253, 262. Ibid., XXX, 255.
MS EdEv to Sarah Everett Hale, 2 Jan
1843 (owned by MHS) . C-ECor, I 263.
WestmRev, XXXIII, 345, 346. 285:
Ibid., XXXIII, 361, 363, 364. Essays, Lon-
don, 1841, p. v. C-ECor, I, 351. Ibid., I.
326. MS H. Martineau to RWE, 8 Aug
1841. C-ECor, II, 61-62; CookeBib, p. 77.
MS Chas. Sumner to RWE, 23 Aug 184 1.
St-ECor, pp. 45, 46, C. Fox, Memories,
ed. Pym, Phila., 1882, p. 140. Let, II,
444. Let, II, 260, 262. MS RWE to LE,
18 and 19 Mar 1840. Let, II, 266. 286:
CKN, The Journals, ed. J. K. Johnson,
1946, p. 24. Let, II, 266, 272, 419, 421,
434, 439-440, 454, 468. The Dial, III, 301.
Ibid., Ill, 297-300, 302, 306-307, 311-
313. 287: Let, III, 65. Let, III, H, 13-
14, 21. J, VI, 163. PartGree, pp. 1-91,
passim, and 158, 166-167. ThorWr, VI,
81. 288: Let, III, 15-23, passim; Part-
Gree, p. 169. Let, III, 18, 19-21, 23. Let,
III, 23; Warja, pp. 28-41, passim; PerWJ ,
I, 20-21. Let, III, 26, 33. Henry James.
A Small Boy, New York, 1913, p. 8. Cf.

NOTES

533

Baumgarten, n.d. (1938) , passim; and see
I-. I. Carpenter in NEQ, II, 458-474.
289: Let, III, 20. Let, II, 323-324. J,
V, 473. Let, II, 360-361, 364-365, 368-
37«» 382, 387, 389, 394. 290: Let, II,
especially 394, 402, 403. /, VI, 152. Thor-
Wr, VI, 328-329; for marriage of the
Watsons, in 1846, see Let, II, 85; for
Thoreau's sending a message to Mary in
1842 and his comment that "You must
not blame me if I do talk to the clouds
. . " see ThorWr, VI, 43. ], V, 558; VI,
74. HawAmNbkSt, p. 166. MS LE to LJB,
n.d. (Jan 1842) . HawAmNbkSt, p. 176.
ThorWr, VI, 53. E.g., MS LE to LJB,
"Tuesday evening" (n and >2 Jan 1842) .
ThorWr, VI, 76-78, 87-89, 113-113. On
the Staten Island letters and on "A Sis-
ter," a brief composition left by Thoreau
in a manuscript of uncertain date, H. S.
Canby (CanbyThor, pp. 155-163 et pas-
sim) , has based the theory— to me, en-
tirely unconvincing-of a one-sided love
affair on Thoreau's part, lasting, one
judges, half a dozen years or more. "A
Sister," if taken literally, is a surprisingly
erotic outpouring to come from such a
born bachelor and almost maidenly moral
purist as Thoreau and so deserves com-
ment But it offers no substantial ground
for conjecture as to the identity of the
woman addressed, if any real woman was.
If a person of flesh and blood has to be
found to explain the dreamlike figure
that Thoreau created, the Mary Russell
who was under the Emerson roof and in
the Emerson family circle at the same
time with him in 1841 would seem, in the
present stale of our knowledge, to be the
most likely choice (cf. Let, II, 402, 403,
420; and VI, index) . She was younger
than Thoreau (she was born in 1820, ac-
cording to M. Stockwell, pp. 122 and
264) , and he described his sister as older
than he. But such a discrepancy was pre-
sumably immaterial to him. In a frag-
ment apparently related to "A Sister/' he
made the significant confession that he
always thought of a woman as older than

himself, no matter what her age (cf. Can-
byThor.p. 163). 291: MS "Prolegom-
ena of Sketch of Thoreau" (dated 29
June 1862) , p. 45. Let, III, 41. HawAm-
NbkSt, p. 78. CEd, X, 364. CaryCurt, p.
19. MS GWC to Cabot, 10 June 1885. Cf.
Let, III, 99; /, VI, 416-417. MS CKNNbk,
pp. 134-135. MS GR to RWE, 25 Feb
1842; MS GR to RWE, 25 May 1842. ]}
VI, 396, 441-442. 292: Let, III, 203.
Let, III, 4. J, VI, 303. MS AcctBk4o-44,
p. 29. J, VI, 303. J, VI, 181, 201. AtlMo,
LXIX, 592-593. J, VI, 419. /, V, 422-423,
538. Repub, 28 May and 4 June 1841.
MS AcctBk40~44, pp. 45, 71. 293: MS
"Address to the Temperance Society at
Harvard, (Mass.) 4 July 1843," PP- *»
5~6> 3*-33- MS j "H," p. 86. MS RWE
to CS, i? Dec? 1840 (owned by HCL) ;
cf. Let, II, 360. CEd, X, 373-377; Let,
III, 41. HawAmNbkSt, p. 156. /, VI, 234-
235, 363, MS account books, passim. MS
AcctBk4o-44, p. 137. J, VI, 497-498;
CabM, II, 411-412. Let, II, 257. 294:
MS ConFChRecfc (owned by CFPL) , p.
300; Let, II, 450-451. Let, II, 465; III,
6 ff. EatH&A, p. 141. EinC, p. 167. Espe-
cially Let, III, passim. J, VI, 166. Thay-
Rip, p. 51. Let, III, 68. Mosses (Haw-
StanLib, II) , p. 42. Let, II, 332, 335. MS
RWE to CS, 26 Feb 1841 (owned by
HCL) ; MS AcctBk4o~44, pp. 35, 37; Let,

II, 384. Let, II, 459, 460; for an early
version of the well-known anecdote, see
H. Barnes, p. 256. 295: /, VI, 89-91;
some months later Emerson told John
Sterling the theater was "now so dead"
that he wondered why "so many English
poets of this time" should choose to write
tragedy (MS RWE to Sterling-, 15 Aug
1842, owned by NYPL) . Let, III, 33-38,
98. Let, III, 43-44, 54-55 et passim. Let,

III, passim. Let, III, 85. Let, III, 29-82,
passim. MS Very to RWE, 23 Nov 1842
(owned by Wellesley College Library) .
296: Let, III, 33-288, passim; Emerson's
MS notes in his own copy of The Dial
(owned by HCL) , III, IV. Let, III, 154,
159-160, 165. MS RWE to SGW, 23 Oct

534

NOTES

1843 (owned by HCL) . Early Curt, p.
167. Let, III, 40, 88, 107-108, no ff., 116.
Let, III, 112, 114, 125, 128, 131. 297:
Let, III, 120-124. Let, III, 119 at passim,
144, 149, 154-157. Let, II, 281; C-ECor,
I, 285-286. MS LE to LJB, 15 and 22
Mar 1842; Alcjou, p. 142. J, VI, 173. MS
AcctBk^o-44, pp. 24, 97. J, VI, 253. Ale-
Jou, p. 160. Ibid., pp. 161 ff.; C-ECor, II,
7-8, 17-18; EatHfcA, pp. 317-318; Ped-

Let, III, 214, 264-265. C-ECor, II, 69.
CookeBib, pp. 82-83. L<?£, III, 273. Espe-
cially C£d, III, 179-182. See above, p.
278. The Dial, IV, 93-95. 301: In Mel-
ville's annotated copy of Essays: Second
Series, Boston, 1844 (owned by HCL),
the most significant comments are on pp.
10, 20, 23, 24-25, 31, 32, and 33-34; a
general study of Melville's annotations
on Emerson's works has been made by

lar'sP, pp. 323 ff. ], VII, 179. The Dial, Braswell, AL, IX, 317 ff. CEd, III, 23-24,

I, 545-548- 298: Let, III, 88 et pas-
sim. Alcjou, p. 152. C/. Let, III, 221. J,
VI, 451-453. J, VI, 421. C/. St-ECor, p.
78. Let, III, 235. C/. Pedlar's? , pp. 381
ff. Let, III, 231-IV, 290, passim, and a
few later pages; Emerson's MS account
books; MS receipts relating to Lane's
affairs. Let, III, 246-252. /, VI, 258 ff.;
HawAmNbkSt,, pp. 170-171. MemHaw,

37, 125, 247. MS CS to RWE, 29 Aug
1844 (owned by HCL) . CEd, II, 267. Let,
III, 9. CEd, III, 48- 302: 7, VI, 158.
CEd, III, 50, 55, 65, 72, 75, 82-83. CEd,
III, 83-84; Platojow, I, 454. See above,
pp. 146, 153; also a note on p. 152. E.g.,
Let, II, 357. MS separate leaf headed
"New England Capitalist"; the poem men-
tions both the telegraph and the photo-

p. 53. MS AcctBkjo-44, pp. 93, 128. Atl- type. 303: Ibid. J, VI, 338. Early Curt,

Mo, LXIX, 589. HawStanLib, II, 224.
Let, III, 174. Let, III, 160 ff., 197, 181.
MS AcctBk4o-44, pp. 138, 146. 299:
Let, III, 268 ff. Let, III, 254. MS CS to
RWE, 23 Aug 1842 (owned by HCL) . MS
AuLoLe, leaf for 1843-1844. MS Lidian,
p. 175; cf. Let, II, 252; MS AcctBk40-44,
pp. 95 e£ ante. jLef, II, 413; III, 263 et
passim. Let, III, 257. MS ConAthRec
(owned by CFPL) , pp. i, 5. J, VI, 506.
MS AcctBk4O~44, p. 119 et passim. Let,
III, 256. /, VI, 322. MS AcctEk40-44, p.
151; MS Ledger4$-j2, p. 60. Le£, III, 74-
75. MS j "R," p. 53. J, VI, 360, 403; £**,
III, 179- E-g-> L VI, 293-294. MS C. S.
Wheeler to RWE, 11 June 1842. 300:
Let, III, 212. L*J, III, 102, 183. MS "The
New Life of Dante Alighieri"; this MS,
which I did not discover till after the
publication ol Let, seems too neat to be
a first draft, though it shows numerous

p. 193. /, VI, 541. CEd, III, 200, 205. Ibid.,
Ill, 204, 207. 304: Ibid., Ill, 209-210,
214, 215-216. ChildLet, pp. 44, 56-57.
Let, III, 269. See above, p. 242. ChrEx,
XXXVIII, 87-106. DemRev, n.s., XVI,
595' 598, 599- C-ECor, II, 80-82. 305:
CEd, III, 23-24. MS Griswold to RWE,
18 Sept 1841; Bayless, 1943, pp. 37-45,
passim. Poe, Co?nplete Works, eel. Harri-
son, New York, n.d. (cop. 1902) , XV,
260; XVI, index. C-ECor, II, 119. Laz-
Let, p. 48. Kalendarium, London, 1706,
still among Emerson's books, bears Al-
cott's inscription to Emerson; for Emer-
son's reading in the book, see MS RWE
to SGW, 17 June 1844 (owned by HCL) .
306: Middlesex South District Registry
of Deeds, MS book 454, p. 447 (official t
copy in my possession) . MS AcctBkjj-jQ,
p. 5. Let, IV, 234; MS AcctBh4$-49, P-
5. CabM, II, 575. J, VII, 5. J, VII, 4, 26.

alterations and its verse (the Englished MS RWE to CS, i Feb 1845 (owned by

canzoni) is very rough; I have no proof
that Emerson actually copied translations
of the canzoni by Ellery Charming. Let,
III, 183. MS "The New Life," sheet 36.
Let, III, 397-398. MS RWE to CS, 20
July (presumably 1844; owned by HCL) .

HCL). MS RWE to CS, endorsed Feb
1845 (owned by HCL) . Let, III, 279,
from Cabot's incomplete copy; original
MS, endorsed 1845, now owned by HCL.
J, VII, 7. Let, III, 283; /, VII, 52, 69. Let,
III, 288, 290, 303-304. 307: Let, III,

NOTES

281. MS RWE to Anna B. Ward, 30 Apr
1845 (owned by HCL) . ThorWr, VII,
361. Let, III, 285-286. MS CS to RWE,
10 July 1845 (owned by HCL) . MS RWE
to Anna B. Ward, 30 Apr 1845 (owned
by HCL) . MS RWE to CS, 2 Aug 1845
(owned by HCL) . Let, III, 305. /, VII,
50. MS will dated 13 Sept 1845. Mid., pp.
1-2; cf. Let, III, 334. MS will of 13 Sept
1845, paragraph 5 and marginal note
dated 5 Nov 1848. Let, III, 294-295; Ire-
RWE, pp. 299-300. 308: MS RWE to
CS, 17 Aug 1845 (owned by HCL) ; Let,
III, 294-296; MS AcctBk4$-4C)) p. 41. MS
AcctBk45-49, pp. 17, 45, 46, 47. Let, III,
293-294. 298-299, 303-304, 343, 345, 346.
J, VII, 54, 99. J, VII, 87. CabM, II, 575-
577; Let, III, 306. Let, III. 306-307. /,
VII, 115. MS AcctBkjj-w, P- 55- J, VII,
^S-iSS- L*t> HI, 312, 322-323. MS Acct-
Bk45-49> P- 61. 309: Ibid., p. 57. Let,
III, 287, 288, 296 ff., passim, but espe-
cially 307-308. Let, III, 315-332, passim;
C-JECor, II, 106-107. /, VII, !o6. Let, III,
306. MS AcctBh45-j$, p. 49; signatures
of Lane are in all volumes o£ the Syden-
ham and Taylor 'edition, and signatures
of Emerson are in four. RWE'sRe, p. 26.
310: MS CS to SMF, Thanksgiving Day
and 10 Dec 1845, in Fuller MSS, X, 27
(owned by HCL) . MS AcctBkjj-jg, pp.
14, 18; Let, III, 304, 380; cf. p. 262 above.
Let, III, 326-327, 340. C~ECor, II, 115. J,
V, 562. Let, III, 212. MS AcctBk.45~4$,
p. 81 (9 Apr 1846); Emerson's auto-
graphed copy of Der Diwan, 2 vols., Stutt-
gart and Tubingen, 1812 and 1813 (now
owned by HCL) , has notes in his hand
and contains some loose sheets of his
own translations. J, VII, 170-171. Cf. Yo-
hannan, in AL, XIV, 407-420, and XV,
25-41. Let, III, 341. J, VII, 193, 206.
311: ThorWr, II, 190; Let, III, 340. J,
VII, 223. Alcjou, p. 183. Let, III, 338.
MS Lidian, p. 192; Let, III, 331 and 415,
and IV, 117; MS bill paid to Mrs. Good-
win by Emerson, 27 Aug 1846. Cf. MS
EllenEJou, 25 July 1846. MS Lidian, p.
197. Let, III, 362, 371 (but cf. above, p.

535

250 and note) , 389-390; MS AcctBkjj-
49* P- 107- 312: Let, III, 353 ff. MS
"Memorandum of an Agreement," 21
Oct 1846; MS j "E," p. 374. MS "Mem-
orandum of an Agreement," 21 Oct 1846.
Let, III, 356, 358-359. MS j "E," p. 374;
Let, III, 366. 313: HDT, untitled MS
about "The Sphinx," p. 13. ThorWr, VII,
237 (the printed version of Thoreau's
commentary on "The Sphinx," ibid., pp.
229-237, contains both more and less
than is to be found in the MS version
just cited) . MS VBk"Pr CEd, IX, 24.
MS VBk"P." CEd, IX, 412. Ibid., IX,
20-25. 314: Ibid., IX. 315: Ibid., IX.
316: Ibid., IX. J, VII, 127-129; Let, III,
293. CEd, IX. 317: Ibid., IX. Evidence
(unconvincing to me) against the iden-
tification of the forest seer as Thoreau
is in CookeRWE, p. 245, and SanPer, p.
70; cf. CEd, IX, 420. Wordsworth, The
Prelude, London, 1850, pp. 122-123; tne
lines on the boy of Winander had been
published as early as 1800. CEd, IX.
318: Ibid., IX. Coleridge, Biographia
Liter aria, Chapter XVII. CEd, IX. 319;
Ibid., IX. ThorWr, VI, 115. CEd, IX.
320: CEd, IX. Dante, "Paradise/' ii, 20-
21, The Vision, tr. Gary, Oxford, 1916.
CEd, IX. 321 : Ibid., IX. LongLong, II,
69. Let, III, 364. J, VII, 234. MS OWH
to RWE, 18 Jan "1846," i.e.9 1847 (owned
by HCL) . MS Greeley to RWE, 26 Jan
1847. 322: MS MME to RWE, 17 July
1847. MS cs to R"WE, 15 no month 1847?
or 1846? (endorsed "Lenox 1846"; owned
by HCL). C-ECor, II, 121-122. Fuller-
Lit^ 'Art, p. 132. Let, III, 366. 323:
Brownson'sQR, n.s., I, 276; cf. Maynard,
pp. 215-216. LitWorldNY, I, 197-199;
cf. MS Mathews to RWE, 8 Apr 1847.
LitWorldNY, I, 197. NARev, LXIV, 402-
434. LowPo, III, 38. MS EllenEJou, 26
Dec 1846, 2 Jan 1847. Ms AcctBk4$-4$f
pp. 99, 100. 324: Let, III, 381 et pas-
sim. Let, III, 366-367, 378. Let, III, 366-
367, 379. Let, III, 367, 379-380. C-ECor,
II, 126-127. Let, III, 369-370, 392, 397.
Let, III, 405-406, 409; J, VII, 314-315'

536

NOTES

PerTran, pp. 160-163; CEd, XI, 381, 393.
325: MS TreesMinor, passim; MS Acct-
Bk45-49, p. 107; /, VII, 248; MS Trees-
Major, pp. 9, 19. MS TreesMajor, pp.
32-33. Alcjou, pp. 196-197. Let, III, 411.
Let, III, 407, 417-418. 326: £<?*, HI,
409; MS AcctBk45-4$, p. isi. L^t, III,
415. EinC, p. 156; SanPer, p. 8; pictures
and numerous accounts by observers. J,
V, frontispiece; VII, frontispiece. SanPer,
frontispiece and pp. 8-9; Alcjou, p. 485.
Lonely, frontispiece. MS NbkEngParis,
p. 61. Alcjou, p. 225. MS T. Ballantyne
to RWE, 3 Dec 1842. MS Samuel Brown
to RWE, Portobello, Scotland, 12 July
1843. Alcjou, p. 175. 327:MSHeraud
to RWE, 28 Nov 1846; cf. Let, III, 363.
Em-CloughLet, p. v and No. i. Arnold,
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems,
London, 1849, p. 53. MemMFO, II, 207.
Chazin, in PMLA, XLVIII, 147, 160.
Ibid., p. 148. Hans Keller, 1932, p. 77.
Quinet, Le Christianisme, Paris, n.d., pp.
195-196. Chazin, pp. 159-160. 323: For
convenient summaries of facts and au-
thorities relating to Emerson's early vogue
in France, see Hans Keller, passim, and
Chazin, pp. 147-163. Chasles, in Revue
des deux mondes, n.s., VII, 497~545- Mid.,
498-499. Chazin, p. 162. Hans Keller, pp.
84, 100. SMF, "De la Literature ameri-
caine," in La Revue independante, 2d
ser., 6th year, VI, 341 ff. Daniel Stern
(i.e., Comtesse d'Agoult) , ibid., 2d ser.,
6th year, IV, 195-209, but especially 195-
196, 198, 209. 329: Montdgut, in Revue
des deux mondes, n.s., XIX, 462-493, but
especially 466, 468, 470, 480-482, 486,
493. MS MemBkiSso&Misc, Oct 1847;
Ireln, p. 79; Let, III, 419- 330: CEd,

V, 41. MS Lidian, p. 199; RHE, MS
"Notes/' folded sheet sewed into front.
ThorWr, VI, 133. CEd, V, 26, 28. Let,
III, 420-421; MS SeaN 0184?, p. 9. /, VII,
338-341. 331: MS SeaNoi84J, p. 9 et
passim; Let, III, 421; CEd, V, 26, 28, and

VI, 68. /, VII, 342-343; CEd, V, 40, 41.
Carlyle, Latter-day Pamphlets, London,
1870 (Vol. XIX of CarlyleCoWks) . Let,

III, 422-423, 452- 332: Let, III, 4*3'
424. Mrs. William Elder to me, 7 Sept
1948; Laughlin, 2d ed., revised, Boston,
1948, p. 388. Let, III, 425-426, 437- MS
NbkEngParis, pp. 5, 8. 333: Let, III,
437, 439; PhilEm, p. 41. MS copy oi J.
Martineau to A. Ireland, 31 Dec 1882.
AtlMo, LXIX, 742. Let, III, 43°~43''
ChronList, pp. 244-245. Let, III, 444.
EatH&A, p. 321. Smithson to RWE, 2
Nov 1847. Hotson, in NewChMag, LII,
52-55. Let, III, 444- 334: EatHbA, pp.
321-322. PhilEm, p. 39- EatHbA, p. 322.
Let, III, ^g. ForCobden's triumphal tour,
ending 11 Oct 1847, see John Morley,
The Life of Richard Cob den, abridged
ed., London, etc., n.d., pp. 230-238. Cf.
EspLitRec, p. 158, mainly about a laler
banquet. CEd, V, 309-311; Lei, III, 436-
437; Lonely, pp. 74-86. MS NbkEng-
Paris, p. i. Let, III, 452-453- 335: Let,

III, 442 et passim; ChronList, pp. 245-
246. Let, III, 454, 455. ], VII, 361. Let,

IV, 3. MS J. H. Shaw to RWE, 12 Jan
1848. Lei, IV, 3-5; J, VII, 376. For all
the English and Scottish lectures, see
ChronList and Let, III and IV. Let, III,
454. Let, III, 437' 440, 444' 458*> 1V' 8,
12. Let, IV, 9; MS NbkEngParis, p. i(5.
AtlMo, LXIX, 745-746; cf\ Let, IV, 12.
Let, III, 451, 455- £<?^ IHi 447; V, 219;
VI, 312-313- 336: J, VII, 358; IraRWK,
pp. 165-169. Ltf£, III, 451. PhilEm, p. 44.
A copy of T/ztf Evangel, London, 1847,
is among Emerson's books. Let, III, 451.
Let, IV, 11, 15; PhilEm, p. 44. Lonely,
pp. 92-93. IreRWE, p. 164; Ltfj, IV, 15.
L0J, III, 447, and IV, 15; PltilEm, p. 45.
EspLitRec, p. 163; Lonely, pp. 48-49,
Z,£f, III, 447. PhilEm, p. 42; Lonely, p.
90. JreJ^H/E, p. 163. PhilEm, pp. 41-47.
76zd., p. 41. EspLitRec, p. 159. PhilEm,
pp. 42, 43-45- 337: PhilEm, p. 46; /re-
RWE, p. 164. PhilEm, pp. 46, 47. /re-
RWE, pp. 162-163. £tf/, IV, 15. /.6V, IV,
13 ff.; ChronList, p. 247. Ltf/, IV, 15-16.
Let, III, 460; IV, 16, 18, 23, 24. 338:
Let, IV, 18 If.; ChronList, pp. 247-248.
I,**, IV, 18. MS Win. Johnston to RWE,

NOTES

537

23 Feb 1848. MS Samuel Brown to RWE, lar'sP, pp. 321-322. Let, IV, 72; /, VII,

6 Dec 1847; Let, III, 449. /, VII, 392. 450, 459; Petit, Nomenclature des 'voies,

Let, IV, 18-19. 339: Let, IV, 19-22. 5th ed., Paris, 1911, p. 893. Let, III, 436,

340: Let, IV, 20. Let, IV, 19. MS De 443, and IV, 3, 73, 519; Lonely, p. 109.

Quincey to Derwent Coleridge, 21 Feb MS NbkEngParis, p. 24. L VII, 470.

1848. Let, IV, 25, 26. CEd, V, 294. Let, CloughPbPR, I, 131, ^3. j^ IV, 74,

IV, 27. C£d, V, 298. 341: Let, IV, 27, CloughPbPR, I, 126. 347: Jfcid., fron-

29> 32, S3- Jane Carlyle, New Letters, ed. tispiece and pp. 3-8. Let, IV, 72, 74, 519.

Thomas and Alexander Carlyle, London Let, IV, 72. /, VII, 560. J, VII, 459-460.

and New York, 1903, I, 244-245- Post J, VII, 440-441- JouDeb, 22 May 1848;

Office London Directory, 1849, p. 675. Jean-Jacques Ampere had been elected

For Chapman, his house, and his life, see to the academy 22 Apr 1847, according to

Haight, £<w«m. /, VII, 406-407. MS Hugh Franqueville, I (Paris, 1895), 270. MS

Whelan to RWE, n.d. (1847 or 1848). NbkEngParis, pp. 23-25. Let, IV, 73, 75,

/, III, 173. 342: /, VII, 403. Let, IV, 77. MS "France or Urbanity," 17 Jan

34, 54- /, VII, 402-403, 414. Let, IV, 34- 1854, p. 16. J, VII, 468. 348: MS Nbk-

35. /, VII, 428, 429. Let, IV, passim. Let, EngParis, p. 26. /, VII, 455-456. J, VII,
IV, 38. MS Milnes to RWE, 15 Jan 1848. 452/454-455- Let, IV, 72, 73. MS Lardner
MS Milnes to RWE, 20 Jan 1848. Let, to RWE, 12? May? 1848; Let, IV, 73.
IV, 42. Let, IV, 41-42. 343: Let, IV, JouDeb, 14 May 1848. Let, IV, 72, 73;
43, 46. Let, IV, 42. Athenceum. Rules and CloughPfrPR, I, 122; /, VII, 464. J, VII,
Regulations, 1847, pp. 7, 12. MS D. Simp- 487. /, VII, 456. CloughPfrPR, I, 131!
son to E. W. Field, 7 Apr 1848. 344: 349: Let, IV, 72, 73. MS LE to RWL.
Let, IV, 55. MS Eliza Gillies to RWE, 4 June 1848. CloughPbPR, I, 125. Let,
6 May 1848; Let, VI, index. Letters of IV, 76, 77. Let, IV, 67, 73. Let, IV, 77;
Matthew Arnold 1848-1888, ed. Russell, /, VII, 469-470. Let, IV, 73. 350: Let,
New York and London, 1895, I, 8. Let, IV, 75. Let, IV, 78; J, VII, 451. /, VII,
IV, 47-49. Let, IV, 47-48. 345: The 485. Let, IV, 78. CloughPkPR, I, 127.
grace is quoted from MS ] "DO," p. Let, III, 395. J, VII, 464. J, VII, 415. Let,
104; cf. CEd, V, 200. Let, IV, 48; VI, 192. IV, 80. MemMFO, II, 233; Wade, p. 227.
J, VII, 428. Let, IV, 47, 55. J, VII, 434. Let, IV, 78, So. /, VII, 495-496; Let, IV,

LetFriend, p. 66. Let, IV, 55-56; MS Nbk-
EngParis, pp. 20 ff.; /, VII, 443. /, VII,

80. 351: IreRWE, p. 55; EatHfrA, p.
329. Let, IV, 79, 80, Let, IV, 75-76, 79.

420, 42i, 480; Let, IV, 41. For Owen's Let, IV, 50-51. Ireln, p. 82. Let, IV, 55,

attending a lecture of Emerson's, and for 65. EspLitRec, p. 162. MS Forster No.

his wife's preference of Emerson the con- 193, Victoria and Albert Museum (partly

versationalist to Emerson the lecturer, printed by Scudder in AL, VIII, 26) . Let,

whose manner she thought ''studiously IV, 80. MS NbkEngParis, p. 23. Let, IV,

flat and cold/' see R. Owen, The Life of 80. MS "Natural History of Intellect," I
Richard Owen, London, 1894, I, 326; for
Emerson's visit to the museum, see ibid.,
I> 3*7- L VII, 420, 421, 480; Let, IV, 41.

Let, IV, 41-42, 51. Let, IV, 42, 87. Let,

(1848 version), p. 35. 352: Ibid., pp.
39, 59, 66, 68. IreRWE, pp. 169-170. Ire-
RWE, pp. 171-175; Let, IV, 86. IreRWE,
pp. 175-176. Ibid., p. 171. CookeRWE,

IV, 51. 346: Let, IV, 49-50; J, VII, pp. 115-116! IreRWE, p. 55. 353: Let,

438-439. MS Henry Crabb Robinson to
RWE, 2 May 1848; Let, IV, 66. Let, IV,

IV, 85. Let, IV, 84. A. Ireland in The
Manchester Guardian, 3 Dec 1889. /, VII,

66, 74; ], VII, 440-441, 444-449. Let, IV, 478. EspLitRec, pp. 163-164. Let, IV, 84.
28. MS NbkEngParis, p. 20. Let, IV, 72. EspLitRec, p. 163. MS j "LN," p. 185;

EatHfcA, p. 335; Let, IV, 16-17; ped-

IV, 86, 94. Let, IV, 85, 86, 89. Esp-

538

NOTES

LitRec, p. 163. Let, IV, 84. 354: MS
F. B. Barton to RWE, 2 June 1848; Lei,
IV, 84, 103. Let, IV, 84, 86-87, 103. Let,
IV, 87. Let, IV, 84, 87. MS W. M, Ros-
setti to Conway, 9 June 1882 (owned by
CUL) ; cf. EatH&A, pp. 334-335- Let, IV,
84, 94. EatHfcA, p. 325; ], VII, 485-486.
Let, IV, 103. 355; Let, IV, 92-94. Let,
IV, 97; J, VII, 490-492. CEd, V, 273-276.
MS NbkEngParis, p. 48 (upside down) .
CEd, V, 277. Lei, III, 460. PhilEm, p. 47.
J., VII, 441, 442. Mary Ann Evans to Sara
Hennell, Dec 1848, in CrossEliot, I, 193.
CEd, V, 279. 356: Ibid., V, 280-283,
284. Ibid., V, 285-287; Let, IV, 93, 94,
97. CEd, V, 288. Let, TV, 97-99. Bray,
Phases, n.d., p. 72; Let, IV, 98-99; Efli-
H&A, pp. 337-338; Tfee Cornhill, n.s.,
XX, 225-236. CrossEliot, I, 191; £a£H-
<z^, p. 339. EatHfcA, pp. 337-340; Bray,
Phases, p. 72; Lei, IV, 98, 139. CrossEliot,
II, 270. AmberleyPa, II, 68. 357: /re7n,
p. 18. Lei, IV, 99, 101. HaleLowFr, pp.
136-137; Lei, IV, 99. CloughP&PR, I,
133. Lei, V, 361; c/. p. 344 above. Kings-
ley, Alton Locke , New York, 1850, pp.
196-197 (in Chapter XXII, "An Emer-
sonian Sermon") . Alton Locke, p. 342.
358: MS MME to LE, 23? Jan ? 1848.
Let, IV, 101. J, VII, 494. Lei, IV, 101-
102. See pp. 218-219 above. MS Lidian,
p. 199. AtlMo, LXIX, 746-747. Let, IV,
28, 32, 33, 54. Cf. LE to RWE, 6 Mar
1848 (t in possession of EWF) . 359:
EspLitRec, p. 159. Lei, IV, 101. EatH&A,
P- 337- 360: The Bhagavad-gita, Chi-
cago, n.d. (cop. 1929) , p. 28. MS CKN
to SMF, 23 Jan 1849, in Fuller MSS, X,
148 (owned by HCL) . MS ChanzNbk-
57-64 (owned by HCL) , final leaf. 361 :
MS Ledger 4 9-7 2, pp. 60-61. MS AcctBk-
49-53* PP- *56> 193- J, VIII, 31-32, 47-48.
MS EEF to Elizabeth Cabot? July? 1886?
MS AcctBkjQ-H, p. 161. MS AcctBk^-
59, Oct 1855. Sarah Hosmer Lunt, as re-
ported in Somerville Journal, 11 Aug
1911; Swayne, pp. 217-218; broadside de-
scribing the Concord grape, dated Mar
1859 (copy owned by CFPL) . MS ac-

count boots, passim, especially entries of
1847-1850. MS AcctBkj5~49, p. 138. E.g.,
MS AcctBkjp-H, p. 43. MS account books
passim; MS Lidian p. 205. MS Lidian,
p. 200; cf. Let, III, 432. 362: MS Acct-
Bk4Q-53, p. 220. MS "Entries of Neat
Stock and Swine at the Cattle Show in
Concord" for 1842 ff. (owned by CFPL) ,
entry of 1854. MS account books, pas-
sim; Let, IV, passim. Let, IV, 215. MS
AcctBk49-$3, pp. 155, 186, 197. MS ac-
count books, passim; Let, IV, 350 et pas-
sim; V, 250, 264; ], VIII, 580-581. Let,
IV, 109-110; MS AcctBkjj-jo, p. 42. MS
account books, passim. MS AcctBkjy-jj,
p. 240. See p. 360 above. 363 : MS EEF-
ChMem. MS EWE to EllenE, 27 June
1853. Let, IV, 362-468, passim. DGH, p.
106. MS AcctBk4$~53, p. 223. MS LE to
RWE, "No 2," spring of 1848. MS LE to
EllenE, 28 June 1853. Lei, IV, 289. DGH,
pp. 104-105. Let, IV, 252-253. Clough-
P&PR, I, 183. Let, IV, 403. 364: Let,
IV, 401. Let, IV, 384, 388; /, VIII, 398
ff. E.g., MS MME to LE, 6 Apr 1849. Lei,
IV, 452. MS MME to ElizH, 29 Sept 1849.
Cf. Let, III, 45^-457- £•£•, Let, IV, 57; V,
317, 367-368. Let, IV, 140, 141-142, 146,
234, 291-292, 366. /, VII, 498. Let, IV,
i45> i5i./, VIII, 303. 7, VIII, 228. 365:
Let, IV, 512. 7, VII, 552. J, VIII, 362-

363. J, VIII, 303. Alcjou, pp. 211-212,

269, 274. Ibid., p. 258. 7, VIII, 93-94, 96.
Alcjou, p. 270. Let, IV, 511 et passim,
and V, 159-160; MS F. Beck to RWE, 30
June 1855. J, VII, 506. For long walks,
see especially J, VIII, passim. Let, IV,
389. ], VIII, 10. EarlySClub, pp. 7 fl. Cf.
MS RWE and others to "Sir," 12 Mar
1850 (owned by Trustees of the Long-
fellow House in Cambridge, Mass.) . Let,
IV, 146. EarlySClub, pp. 6-7. Alcjou, p.
223. MS AcctBk49-$3, p. 108. MS Chan-
sNbktf-Sj (owned by HCL) , last leaf.
366: H. James, Sr., The Literary Re-
mains, ed. Wm. James, Boston and New
York, n.d. (cop. 1884) , pp. 293-294. J,
VII, 547-548; VIII, 99-100, 111. MS Li-
dian, p. 205. MS RWE to Edmund Quin-

NOTES

539

cy, 16 Sept 1850 (owned by CUL) . Let,
IV, 229. The Liberty Bell, 1851, pp. 78-
81, 156-157; cf. AmLitAn, pp. 83, 89.
WhittStanLib, IV, 62-63. /, VIII, 182,
198. 367: }> VIII, 202. CEd, XI, 210-
214. Ibid., XI, 206. Ibid., XI, 179, 184,
204, 208, 209. Let, IV, 250; MS AcctBk-
49—53, p. 60. The Liberator, 23 May 1851;
MS J. B. Thayer to Cabot, 5 Dec 1886.
/, VIII, 236. MS AcctBkjp-H, p. 157.
Let, IV, 265. 368: MS ConToRec, IX,
election of 10 Nov 1851 and 2d trial;
ECitCon, p. 378. MS Philadelphia Anti-
Slavery Society's committee to RWE, 31
Dec 1851; MS Lucretia Mott and others
to RWE, 25 Nov 1852. MS Phillips to
RWE, 24 Mar 1852. MS AcctBk^-^^, p.
203. MS Lidian, p. 2O7E; CEd, XI, 395-
401. MS Lidian, p. 207F. /, VIII, 316,
335. MS J. T. Fisher to RWE, 19 Nov
1852. MS Lucretia Mott and others to
RWE, 25 Nov 1852. 369: Let, IV, 302,
343. CloughPfrPR, I, 190. J, VIII, 442-
443. CEd} XI, especially 217, 235, 244. MS
AcctBkjj-jg, 21 June 1854. MS Lidian,
pp. 216-217. Haynes, Charles Surnner,
Phila., n.d. (cop. 1909) , pp. 180-181. MS
FraJouEx, 27 Jan 1855. RecLiLong, p.
1 06. 370: Let, IV, 230, 260-261, 345-
346. Let, IV, 230. CEd, XI, especially 423-
426. MS Watson G. Haynes to RWE, 19
Mar 1850. J, VIII, 351. For articles signed
by Marx, see, e.g., New-York Weekly
Tribune, 4 and 1 1 Sept 1852, and New-
York Daily Tribune, 25 Nov and 22 Dec
1852. 371: CEdf IX, 357. DGH, pp.
103-104, 106. Jf VIII, 69, 530. Let, IV,
248 et passim, especially 350-351. /, VIII,
113-114, 416. Let, IV, 194. /, VIII, 163,
455; some five yearj> uaer, when the first
series of Idylls of the King was published,
Emerson commented, "What benefits still
come to us from the old island! . . ."
(MS RWE to Eliza T. Clapp, 10 Aug
1859, owned by LC) . LongLong, II, 151.
372: Ibid., II, 294-295. WhiimaniS^-
Fac, editor's introd., pp. v, viii, xii. MS
RWE to Ward, 10 July 1855 (owned by
HCL) . W hitman 18 5 sFac, pp. 13, 15, 26,

45. Ibid., pp. 29, 39, 54. 373: RWE to

Whitman, 21 July 1855, an incomplete
facsimile reproduction of the original,
The Bookman, New York, VI, 435 (Jan
1898). NortonLet, I, 135. Let, IV, 531.
RecLiLong, p. 107. For Emerson's later
relations with Whitman, see below, pas-
sim, and, e.g., Let, IV, 520-521, and The
Shock, ed. Edmund Wilson, Garden City,
1943, PP- 244-295. Let, IV, 520-521. MS
RWE to S. Longfellow, 24 Oct 1855
(owned by Trustees of the Longfellow
House, Cambridge, Mass.) . Whitman! 855-
Fac, opposite p. xvi of editor's introduc-
tion. Perry W hit ^ opposite p. 114. Let, IV,
521. 374: ConwayAut, I, 215-216. Eat-
H&A, p. 360. MS MemBkiSjj, 11 Dec
1855; MS WmE (b) to RWE, 5 Dec 1855
(owned by DrHE) ; MS WmE (b) to
RWE, 11? Dec? 1855 (owned by DrHE) .
CarpDays, pp. 166-167. Trowbridge, p.
367. Jf VIII, 48; Let, IV, 158. CookeBib,
p. 81. Let, IV, 149, 153. MS AcctBk49-
53, p. 55. Let, IV, 174. CEd, IV, 8, 27-30.
375: Ibid., IV, pp. 23, 49, 51, 52, 54, 58.
Ibid.f IV, pp. 40, 61, 62. Ibid., IV, 58, 76,
78. For a key to the not very important
use Emerson made of the new Bohn ver-
sion of Plato, see CEd, IV, 80-89. Tne
history of his use of various translations
—the Dacier, Sydenham and Taylor,
Cousin, Bohn, and Jowett versions— can
be traced through the index to Let (Vol.
VI). In 1861 Emerson confirmed and
added to his early impressions. The Da-
cier version he knew in his youth was "a
translation of a translation." Sydenham
and Taylor, "which I knew best, is not
yet English, but very Greekish 8c pedan-
tic," he said. Cousin's French version was,
as he put it, "elegant, &, I believe, faith-
ful/' He "found or fancied Bonn's trans-
lators great benefactors/' and their work
was in "good English" and had a "tone
of sense 8c culture/' But the truth was
that he made no pretense to exact schol-
arship in such matters. Of the Bohn ver-
sion he confessed characteristically: "I
have not, to be sure, looked into the book

54°

NOTES

to criticise, or even to compare, but only
for Plato." (MS RWE to WmE[n], 29
Mar 1861, owned by Scripps College Li-
brary.) CEd, IV, 97-98, 106, 121. J, IX,
579- 376: CEd, IV, 162, 164. Cf. C.
L. Young, New York, 1941, pp. 16-51.
CEd, IV, 170 ff., 183, 191 ff. Carlyle, On
Heroes (CarlyleCoWks, XII), p. 131.
CEd, IV, pp. 217, 219, 224-225, 257, 258.
377: Ibid., IV, 270, 280, 284, 285, 287,
289. ], VIII, 88. Let, IV, 175. The Eclec-
tic Review, n.s., Ill, 568-582. G-ECor, II,
187-189. Mont£gut, in Revue des deux
mondes, new period, VII, especially 722
(15 Aug 1850) , 725-726, 728-729. 378:
MemMFo, I, 217. Let, IV, 198-199. Let,
IV, 219-221; MS AcctBk40~53, p. 40. MS
"Ossoli," p. i. MS Lidian, p. 2i5b. /,
VIII, 250. Let, IV, 222, 225, 228 et pas-
sim; MS RWE to CS, 9 Oct 1850 (owned
by HCL) . Let, IV, 222. MS "Ossoli," p.
273. Let, IV, 257, 310; C-ECor, II, 209.
379: Cf. Let, IV, 257-258, 281, 384. Let,
IV, 281, 384. MS MemBkiS^S, 22 Nov-
27 Dec 1848. Let, IV, 125-126, 178. 380:
Let, IV, 183, 193. MS AcctBk4$-$3, p. 72.
Let, IV, 224. Let, IV, 201, 207. Let, IV,
203, 204-205, 207. 381: Let, IV, 211-
214. Let, IV, 209-210. 382: Let, IV,
210-211, 214, 216-217. MS AcctBk49-$3,
pp. 34, 91, 293. Let, IV, 242-244, 245-246,
270. 383: Let, IV, 267-268, 272-273,
290-291. J, VIII, 283-286. Let, IV, 291.
Let, IV, 314 ff.; cf. MS AcctBkjp-jj, p.
294. Let, IV, 330, 336-337, 338. Let, IV,
336, 342. 384: Let, IV, 342, 343. MS
AcctBk49~53, p. 198. MS now labeled
"Anglo-American" and dated Jan 1853
(pagination irregular) . Let, IV, passim.
Let, IV, 397. MS MemBki854, Jan-Feb,

passim; Let, IV, 423 ff. 385: C-ECor,

II, 233-234. MS HDT and others to RWE,

30 Mar 1854. MS ConLyRecBkzS-jy
(owned by CFPL) , 5 and 12 Apr 1854.

Let, IV, 455, 456, 460. MS, dictated, Edw.

Atkinson to J. B. Thayer, 3 May 1882;

Theo. C. Smith, New Haven, 1925, I, 76;

R. G. Caldwell, New York, 1931, p. 33.

Let, IV, 484-485, 524. CEd, XI, 427~436;

Let, IV, 530. Let, IV, 473 ff., especially
491-492, 540. 386: 7, VIII, 585. EatH-
iffA, pp. 178-179. Parker, The American
Scholar, ed. G. W. Cooke, Boston, n.d.
(cop. 1907) , p. 121. Ibid., pp. 62, 63, 69,
70, 80-83, 84, 93. Ibid., pp. 87, 94, 96, 97,
124. Ibid., p. 121. 387: Let, IV, 176,
177. J, VIII, 318 et passim; Let, IV, 271,
272, 306, 312. Let, IV, 295 et passim. Eat-
HfcA, pp. 6-7 et passim; ConwayAut, I,
134-138 et passim; Let, IV, 438, and V
and VI, passim; SanRec, I-II, passim.
CloughP&PR, I, 199, 207. HawStanLib,

III, 495. 388: CEd, IX, 76, 78. 389:
Let, IV, 249-250, 347, 536. MS OWH to
RWE, 26 Mar 1856 (owned by HCL) .
CEd, XI, 251. Ibid., XI, 247. Letf V, 23.
390: Let, V, 23. MS EllenE to RWE, 17
Jan 1857. MS AcctBkH-59, 6 Sept 1856.
J, IX, 51. CEd, XI, 255, 256, 258 ff. Let,
V, 46; MS EllenE to "Dear Addy," 8 Sept
1856. MS Garrison to RWE, 20 Nov
1856; Sanborn in NEMag, n.s., XV, 453,
466. Let, V, 4, 6. J, IX, 7. 391: Let,\,
7. Let, V, 4, 9. Let, V, 15, 23; MS Acct-
Bk53~59, 5 May 1856. MS j "T Tran-
script," p. 93; MS OWH to RWE, 4 Apr
1856 (owned by HCL) . Early S Club, pp.
124-127. Let, VI, 126. MS AcctBksj-sy,
9 May 1856; MS Ledger^/p-^, p. 150. Let,
V,3-4.MSM<2mJ3/ti<$5tf,26$ept 1856 (but
concerns Feb) . Poems, Boston, 5th ed.,
1856 (Lidian's copy is among Emerson's
books) . MS EdithE to EWE, 13 Aug 1856.
392: MS AcctBkH-50, 17 Oct 1856; Let,

IV, 528. MS AcctBk$3-59, 19, 22, 23 Oct
1856, and 1856, passim. EarlySClub, pp.
21-127. Cf. Let, V, 23; later, Edith attend-
ed Agassiz's school (Let,Vt 121 el passim) .
EarlySClub, pp. 19 et passim. J, IX, 33.
Em-CloughLet, No. 29. 393: Let, V, 87
(RWE to CST, 13 Oct 1857) ; a longer
MS version, also unsigned, and endorsed
by Emerson "Unsent," has now come to
light (owned by HCL) but, except for
length, does not differ significantly from
the version in Let. Grimm-RWECor, pp.
16, 17, 74, 75, 76, 77; for the early vogue
of Emerson in Germany, see also Julius

NOTES

Simon, pp. 108-112. Let, V, 157-158. In
some of the gift copies from Grimm still
among Emerson's books there are numer-
ous uncut leaves. Essays von Herman
Grimm, Hannover, 1859. MS AcctBk^-
59, 18 July 1859; also later MS account
books. C-ECor, II, 219. Let, IV, 533; V,
29, 30. C-ECor, II, 261-262. 394; Let,
V, 30. Em-CloughLet, No. 29. Let, V, 33.
CEd, V, 146. Ibid., V, 60, 84, 125. Ibid.,
V, 124. Ibid., V, 105. Ibid., V, 102, 112,
155-166. 395: Ibid., V, 82-83, e.g., 248-
249. Ibid., V, 98, 230. Ibid., V, 220-221,
527. C-ECor, II, 262. CEd, V, 172, 299,
304. Let, V, 34, 52, 56, 59, 63. MS EdithE
to "Dear Lizzy," 30 May 1857. C/- MS
AcctBkjg-tij, p. 115. Cf. Let, V, 31-34,
132-133. MS Lidian, p. 236. Ibid., p. 220;
for repairing the house, cf. Let, V, 74 et
passim. 396: MS EWF to me, 4 Dec
1947, in my possession. Cf. Let, V, 23-24;
J, IX, 54-55. MS IslandBk, II, 18 Aug
1857 (at Naushon) . The best-known ac-
count of Naushon Island was written by
Holmes about the time when Emerson's
visits began (HolStanLib, I, 39-41, in
The Autocrat] . J, IX, 15, 34. MS RWE
to CST, 13 Oct 1857, (owned by HCL) ;
/, IX, 1 10, 274. Alcjou, pp. 300-301; Let,
V, 76. Let, V, 79. Alcjou, p. 301. t EllenE
to WmE(n), 17 Nov 1857; Alcjou, p.
307. Cf. Christy, pp. 164 ff. 397: MS
EllenE to HavenE, 3 Dec 1858. MS Acct-
31153-59, 27 Dec 1858; also later MS ac-
counts. J, IX, 117. J, IX, 81. /, IX, 81-83;
ThorWr, VI, 358; SanRec, I, 104-110.
Let, V, 69; MS cited there is now in
AbLib. MS Burritt to RWE, 21 May
1857; cf. Curti, New York, 1937, pp. 120,
1 33. Broadside Fourth of July Breakfast;
CEd, IX, 199-200. Let, V, 95-97; MS
MemRkiS^j, MS MemBhiSjS. Let, V,
101. MS FraJouEx, 10 Apr 1858. MS Acct-
Bk$3-59, 22 Apr 1858. MS EllenE to
HavenE, 7 and n May 1858; Let,V, pas-
sim; J, IX, 154. Both Rowse's sketch and
his finished crayon portrait are repro-
duced in NEMag, n,s., XV, 456-457. The
finished portrait appears as frontispiece

in C-ECor, II, and in CabM, II; in both
books it is dated 1857, not 1858. MS
Louisa F. Dewey to MME, 15 Mar 1858.
398: Let, V, 111-112; /, VIII, 580; MS
j "A," p. 65. Let, V, 114. MS IslandBk,
II, 2 Sept 1858; Let, V, 118-119. MSAcct-
£^53-59, *8 Aug 1858. EarlySClub, pp.
169 ff. CEd, IX, 182-183, 186. 399:
Ibid., IX, 463-464. Let, V, 117-118. CEd,
VII, e.g., 153-154. MS FraJouEx, 2 Oct
1858. MS AcctBkfj-^g, program pasted
inside front cover. Alcjou, p. 310; MS
EllenE to Annie Fields, 12 Feb 1884
(owned by Huntington Library) . Let, V,
122, 124. Let, V, 125-126, 325; J, IX, 508.
MS Lucretia Mott to Martha Wright, 26
and 27 Dec 1858 (owned by Friends His-
torical Library of Swarthmore College) ;
Frederick Tolles has used this letter in
-4L,X, itf.Let,V, 158. 400: USLedger-
49-J2* P- 145- Let, V, 130-133. CEd, XI,
437-443- Let, V, 142. Let, V, 139; MS
RWE to H. Woodman, 34 May 1859
(owned by MHS) . J, IX, 181, 183. t
EllenE to EdithE, 22 Apr 1859. Let, V,
148-152. E.g., Let, V, 137, 138, 231. Early-
SClub, pp. 200—202. Ibid., pp. 203—205;
J, IX, 226-229. Let, V, 139. CEd, VII,
243, 245, 246. 401 : Ibid., VII, 250. Lett
V, 152-153. Let, V, 166; Emerson paid
assessments to the Adirondack Club as
late as 1862 (MS AcctBk^o-6^, 31 May
1862) ; MS SGW to RWE, 28 Mar 1876,
inclosed Emerson's share of the funds of
the club, which had then practically
ceased to exist. Let, V, 168. Let, V, 161.
MS RWE to CST, 7? July? 1859? (owned
by HCL) . MS RWE to SGW, 9 July 1859
(owned by HCL) . J, IX, 223; Let, V, 171.
Let, V, 174. Let, I, 287, 288. Alcjou, pp.
315-316; SanRec, I, 163 et passim. Let,
V, 178, 179-180. 402: Let, V, 179, 193-
194, sio.NYDaTrib, 14 Nov 1859. Canby-
Thor, p. 390. Let, V, 182 et passim. CEd,
XI, 269. NYDaTrib, 12 Nov 1859. Ale-
Jou, pp. 322-323. HawStanLib, XII, 327.
Let, V, 190-203. 403: Let, V, 196, 199.
Let, V, 197, 206-207. Let, V, 195, Speci-
men,p. 191; cf. Perry Whit, p. 127. Leaves

542

JVOTES

of Grass, 1860-61, pp. 287-314. Let, V,
214-216. 404: Ibid., V, 215. MS Mem-
Bki86o, 18 Mar 1860; CabM, II, 769. Let,
V, 72 et passim. Let, V, 220-221; CEd,
XI, 283-293. MS "Domestic Life" (owned
by CUL) . Let, V, 221. J, IX, 273. IMA-
edCheney, p. 122. Alcjou, p. 328; cf. Let,
V, 222. LowLet, I, 305; HowLitFrAcj p.
67. Ibid., p. 60. 405: Ibid., pp. 60-64.
t EllenE to "Dear Alice," 24 Oct 1860.
Broadside Wide-awake!! (copy owned by
CFPL) . Alcjou, p. 330. J, IX, 286. Let,
V, 233; MS Ledger49~j2, p. 32. Let, V,
233; NortonLet, I, 215. 406: C-ECor,
II, 275-276. Alcjou, pp. 330-331. C-EGor,

II, 275. MS AcctBkjcnSs, p. 82; Let, V,
177-178. CEd, VI, 3, 201. Ibid., VI, 7,
8. Ibid., VI, 5, 53 ff., 101, 105, 126. 407:
/&zd., VI, 213, 290. Ibid., VI, 4, 165-166,
258. /&ta., VI, e.g., 134. /Wd., VI, 28, 49.
408: Henry V, III, i, 5-6, text of T/z<?
Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare,
ed. Samuel Johnson, G. Steevens, and
others, rev. by Isaac Reed, New York,
1821, VI, 41. J, IX, 366. J, IX, 362. Let,
V, 236-238; MS MemBki86i. 409: The
Liberator, i Feb 1861, p. 18; I have cap-
italized the first word of each quoted
phrase. J, IX, 305. t EdithE to EllenE,
14 Jan 1861. Let, V, e.g., 240, 256. Let,
V, 243; MS EllenE to EdithE, 6, 8, and

9 Apr 1861. Leaflet Exhibition of the
Schools of Concord . . . March i6th, 1861.
J, IX, 315. Lincoln, Complete Works, ed.
Nicolay and Hay, New York, n.d. (cop.
1905), VI, 103-168 passim, 169-185 pas-
sim. 410: CEd,XL, 166-169. Em-Clough-
Let, No. 32. Copies of the two handbills
dated 17 Apr 1861 and of the one dated
22 Apr 1861 are owned by CFPL. Let,

V, 246, 247. 411: MS LifebLit, I, 9;

III, i. Let, V, 247. MS LifebLit, III, 59,
78, 97, 124, 135, 160. MS EllenE to
EdithE, 9 May 1861. MS EllenE to EdithE,

10 May 1861. CabM, II, 601. ThorWr,

VI, 383-384; MS EllenE to EdithE, 10
May 1861. MS Ledgevjy-jz, p. 140, Let,
V, 250, 256-257. 412: MS AcctBkjo-tij,
p. 98. J, IX, 330. Grimm-RWECor, pp.

61-62. Let, V, 249. Em-CloughLet, No,
33. MS Emily M. Drury to RWE, 19 Aug
1861. t EllenE to WmE (n) , 29 and 31
July 1861. Let, V, 253. MS j "War 8c Poli-
tics 8c Washington City," p. 4. MS EllenE
to EWE, 2 Aug 1861; MS EdithE to
EWE, 2 Aug 1861; MS EdithE to EWE,
4 and 5 Aug 1861. MS EdithE to EWE, 20
and 23? Sept 1861. 413: MS AcctBk-
59-65, p. 116. E.g., J, IX, 320. MS EdEv
to RWE, 23 Sept 1861; MS EllenE to
EWE, 27 Sept 1861. Concord Soldiers Aid
Society, MS list of members (owned by
CFPL) . MS EllenE to EWE, 19 Oct 1861.
Let, V, 257, 263-264. MS MemBki86x,
12 Nov 1861. MS "American National-
ity," 12 Nov 1861, pp. 39, 69, 108, 111-
112. MatherHaw, p. 317. Let, V, 259. Alc-
jou, pp. 342-343- J> IX> 36l« Lei> v> 260.
Let, V, 257. MS WmE (b) to RWE, 24
Nov 1861 (owned by DrHE) . 414: Let,
V, 249. Let, V, 258, 263. Let, V, 265; /,
IX, 372-374; evidence as to whether Lin-
coln heard this lecture is either uncon-
vincing or negative. J, IX, 375-394. ], IX,
393. J, IX, 375. HawStanLib, XII, 309.
J, IX, 375-376. 415: J, IX, 375, 385-
386, 387—388. Bush was pretty obviously
a familiar name for the Emerson home
by early 1863 (cf. MS EdithE to RWE,
7 and 13 Jan 1863) . Let, V, 279, 289-290.
MS Lidian, p. 246c; MS AcctBkjp-tij, p.
166. MS j "VA," p. 156. MS AcctBh^-6^
p. 130. MS EllenE to EWE, 11 and 17
June 1862. MS EWE to EdithE, 9 and
11 Feb 1862. t excerpts by EWF from
EdithE to EWE, 26 Mar 1863. MS El-
lenE to EWE, 11 and 17 June 1862. /,
IX, 401, 413. Let, V, 272. 416: Alcjou,
PP- 347-348. ChanThor, pp. 350-351. J,
IX, 430. MS "Prolegomena of Sketch of
Thoreau" dated 29 June 1862; CabM, II,
787-788. Let, V, 413, 423-424. MS EdithE
to EWE, 12? and 13? June 1862. MS j
"War 8c Politics Sc Washington City," p.
194. J, IX, 434, 442. 417: CEd, XI, 317.
Cf. Let, V, 290. CEd, XI, 320-321. J, IX,
457. Lincoln, Complete Works, ed. Nico-
lay and Hay, New York, n.d. (cop. 1905) ,

NOTES

543

VIII, 16. Let, V, 271-290, passim. MS
EWESocCirMemLi, p. 2. Let, V, 271-290,
passim. Let, V, 290, 290-291. MS Lidian,
pp. 243-244. 418: t EllenE to EdithE,
24 Jan 1859. Let, V, 301. CEd, IX, 204.
MS Higginson to RWE, 7 Jan 1864, quot-
ing an entry of 9 Feb 1863 in the diary
of his surgeon. Let, V, 320. Let, V, 300-
312; MS Edward W. Russell to RWE, 30
Dec 1862. 419: Let, V, 304; MS "Con-
cord Atheneum" (a record book, owned
by CFPL) , p. i ; MemMemSocCir, 3d ser.,
p. 146. Let, V, 308-311. Let, V, 310, 311,
313. J, IX, 492-494. MS AcctBk^-6^, p.
198. J, IX, 499, 556, 557. 420: Let, V,
322. Let, V, 319-325- J> IX> 501- Let> v>
325-326, 329-331. Cf. J, IX, 511-518. MS
Watervillei863, pp. 86-87. MS j "DL,"
p. 99. MS WatcrvilleiStj, pp. 87-88. MS
"West Point" (a single leaf) . 421 : Bar-
rusLiBur, I, 63. MS Burroughs to Cabot,
29 Mar 1883; BarrusLiBur, I, 63, 72-73.
Let, V, 329. /, IX, 525-526 and 528; Let,
V, 334-335- MS Watervillei86}, pp. 191-
192. ], IX, 552. J, IX, 532, 555- 422:
Let, V, 336. CEd, IX, 205, 207. MS Hal-
lo well to RWE, 29 Oct 1863; Hallowell
was colonel of the Fifty-fourth Regiment
Infantry, Massachusetts Volunteers, as
successor to Robert Gould Shaw, who
had been killed while leading his Negro
troops (Record of the Massachusetts Vol-
unteers. 1861-1865, II [1870], 846) ; cf.
Let, V, 318, 320, 336. J, IX, 541. J, IX,
522; Let, V, 336, 339, 344- 423: MS
"Fortune of the Republic" (Dec 1863) ,
pp. 31-171, passim. MS memorandum
books, Dec 1863, and 1864, passim. Let,
V, passim. MS Sumner to RWE, 11 Nov
1863; EarlySClub, p. 288, however, gives
the year of Sumner's election as 1862. Let,
V, 302-303. RWE to Chase, 10 Jan 1863,
printed by Carlos Baker in The Princeton
University Library Chronicle, VII, 108.
Let, V, 302; PerryWhit, p. 153. Let, V,
354, MS ConToliec, IX, 288. MS RWE
to Bancroft, 28 Sept 1863 (owned by
MHS) . MS TreesMajor, p. 96. J, X, 43.
424: Let, V, 355-375' passim. MS, con-

sisting of two separate parts— a single
folded sheet, "Shakspeare," and an un-
titled group of about a dozen unsewed
leaves. CabM, II, 621-622. MS j "ML,"
p. 196. J, X, 39, 40. J, IX, 503. Alcjou,
p. 306 et passim. MS EdithE to RWE, 29
Jan and 5 Feb 1865. 425: 7, X, 56. MS
"Alcott Fund," giving a "Statement of
monies received by Samuel G. Ward from
sundry persons, and held by him for the
benefit of A. Bronson Alcott Esq." Let,
V, 378; MS AcctBk$9-65, p. 249. Let, V,
392-393> 395-397; MS RWE to G. W.
Curtis, 15 Dec 1864 (owned by HCL) .
Let, V, 406". MS EllenE to RWE, 24 Jan
1865. Let, V, 361-362, 376. RWE, MS
undated draft of petition asking the fac-
ulty of Harvard College to allow Edward
to do guard duty at a fort; presumably
used as the basis of the petition Edward
actually presented; cf. Let, V, 376. MS
EdithE to EWE, 13 July 1864. EWE, Es,
p. xi. 426: L X, 56-57. C-ECor, II, 285.
Let, V, 382. Let, V, 384; J, X, 72. Let,
V, 385-386. Alcjou, p. 365. Let, V, 387,
389. J, X, 82-83. MS EllenE to SHE, 5
Jan 1865. Let,V, 389 et passim. MS Mem-
Bki864-i86^, Dec 1864. 427: Let, V,
397-407, 412. J, X, 93-94. Whitman,
When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard
Bloom* d, 1865-6, p. 4. Broadside Sur-
render of Lee!! (copy owned by CFPL) .
Handbill dated 18 Apr 1865, issued by
authority of the selectmen of Concord
(copy owned by CFPL) . Leaflet Order
of Services . . . Concord, at the Hour of
the Funeral . . . April 19, 1865 (copy
owned by CFPL). CEd, XI, 332-335.
Ibid., XI, 333, 334, 336. 428: L IX,
366. MS j "KL," p. 203. 429: CEd, IX,
251. J, X, 361; MS EllenE to EEF, 22
Aug 1872. CEd, XI, 342, 345. C-ECor, II,
296. 430: Let, V, 468. J, X, 132, 155-
156. Let, V, 420. J, X, 107. Let, V, 429.
Let, V, 433-434; Woodbury, passim. Let,
V, 425-426. Three broadsides (copies
owned by CFPL) relating to the Cattle
Show of 21 Sept 1865. Let, V, 426-427;
MS in FaBi, recto of 2d leaf pasted in.

544

NOTES

431: t ELlenE to Miss Waterman, 3 and
25 Jan 1866. MS EllenE to EEF, 3 and
4 Nov 1865. MS EllenE to EEF, 10 Oct

1865. ], X, 160; cf. Let, II, 95, and III-
VI, passim, but especially VI, 81, 166.
Let, V, 440-441, 443. Let, V, 435, 447-
458; MS MemBki866. ECitCon, pp. 371-
372; Lei, V3 430, 437; MSWmE(b) to Sam
Bradford, 28 June 1865; leaflet, Con-
cord Free Public Library, showing tenure
of officers; Concord Free Public Library
Seventy-fifth Anniversary, n.d. (1948) ,
passim. 432: MS EllenE to EEF, 6 Apr

1866. MS EllenE to HavenE, 12 May
1866; MS EllenE to Miss Waterman, 17
May 1866; MS EEF to EWE, 19 May

1866. Let, V, 461. MS EllenE to Sally
Gibbons Emerson, 5 May 1866. Let, V,
464. MS EllenE to EEF, 29 June 1876

(i.e., 1866); Let, V, 467. MS Lidian, p.
255; cf. Let, V, 471-473> 47^ 482- MS
EllenE to EWE, 21, 23, and 25 July 1866.
BoDaAd-v, 19 July 1866. Carbon or simi-
lar record of the original hand, Hill to
RWE, 18 July 1866 (owned by HCL) ;
incomplete MS copy of same letter

(owned by HCL) . Let, V, 487-509- 433 :
Let, V, 493-494- Let, V, 513-514; cf. Ale-
Jou, p. 420. Let, V, 521. Let, V, 508-509.
Let, V, 504. CEd, XI, 353 ff., 355, 357-
374. Handbill with dates 19 Apr 1861
and 19 Apr 1867 (copy owned by CFPL) ;
broadside Order of Procession . . , April
igth, i86j (copy owned by CFPL) . MS
ConToRec, IX, 331; CEd, XI, 347~379-
J, X, 231. MS EllenE to HavenE, 29 Apr

1867. MS EllenE to EWE, 4, 8, and 10
Oct 1866. E.g., Let3 V, 506-507; Fields-
An, p. 83. 434: /, X, 231. Let, VI, 63.
Apparently as late as 1867, Whitman
placed Emerson, but no other major au-
thor, decisively in the front rank of
American poets: "With the names of our
so-far noblest poets, Bryant, Emerson,
Whittier, Longfellow, I should put on
the scroll at any rate immediately below
the others, Edgar Poe and Bret Harte
though the scope of their song is limited
and its direction special" (MS, undated

and without title, owned by LC) . CEd,
XI, 475-481, 486, 488. Let, V, 521. Amber-
leyPa, II, 65. Let, V, 449. 435: Com?/?,,
27 Feb 1869. E.g., MS J. Donaldson to
RWE, 14 Mar 1870. AmberleyPa, II, 67.
E.g., MS EdithE to RWE, 29 Jan and 5
Feb 1865. MS EllenE to EWE, 27, 29,
and 30 Jan 1872. MS HCDivSStuRec, p.
359- P- 432 above. MS HCOvRec, X, 241;
cf. Let, VI, 26. MS HCPhiBetaKRec, III,
18 July 1867. CEd, VIII, 208-210, e.g.
211-213, e.g. 225 ff., 229-230. CookeRWE,
p. 184. MS EllenE to EEF, 2 Apr 1867;
MS EllenE to EEF, 30 Mar 1868; Let, V,
511, 532; MS AcctBki865-x8jz, p. 149.
MS EllenE to Annie Fields, 12 Feb 1884.
MS MemBki86j, Sept and Nov 1867. Let,

V, 539-546. Let, V, 545; cf. VI, 18-19. /,
X, 248. Let, VI, 10. MS EllenE to EEF,
20 Apr 1868. 436: Ibid. 437: Ibid.
438: Ibid. Let, VI, 24-26, 28-29. Let, VI,
30; t EllenE to EEF, 17 Aug 1868. Let,

VI, 30, 32. Let, VI, 30-31. CEd, XI, 469-
474. Clapp's MS narrative and the MS
Emerson wrote from memory for the press
(bo tli in Clapp's scrapbook, largely about
the Chinese banquet, owned by HCL) .
Let, V, 523-524, 529. 439: t Lidian, p.
26. Let, VI, 4, 33-34. J, IX, 3x9. MS
EllenE to EEF, c. 17? Sept 1868. Let, VI,
35. LowLitEs, I, 360. Let, VI, 35, 54-55.
440: Let, VI, 43-44, 46, 52-53. Let, VI,
48, 52. Let, VI, 52-53; extant manuscripts
of this course are fragmentary and in dis-
order. MS EEF to EWE, 11 Feb 1869.
Let, VI, 39, 55, 56, 58, 64. /, X, 280, 288;
Let, VI, 65. Let, VI, 86; CEd, XI, 455-
459. Let, VI, 78. Ale Jou, p. 389. 441:
BoDaAdv, 27 May 1869; cf. Let, VI, 78.
MS EllenE to EWE, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
Nov 1871. /, X, 258-259; Let, VI, 56-57.
MS HCOvRec,X, 327, 333-335. MS EWE
to EllenE, 19 Sept 1869. MS HCOvRec,
*•£•* X, S58-366, passim. MS HCFaRcc,
volume for ^1869-1872, p. n8, mentions
the overseers' action of 15 Feb 1870. MS
HCOvRec, X, 338-340 (3 June 1869) •
MS HCCoTpRec, XI, 195. RWEMA owns
a proof sheet, corrected by Emerson's

MOTES

545

hand, of recommendations of the com-
mittee, appointed by the corporation, on
the Master's degree; cf. Three, p. 334.
Let, VI, passim. C-ECor, II, 306-328, pas-
sim; Let, VI, 97-98, 104-108, 111-112. /,
X, 301. 442: Let, VI, 94, 96, 110. CEd,
VII, 1-16. J, X, 312. C-ECor, II, 324-325.
Let, VI, 73, 114-115; MS HCOvRec, X,
343; MS PeaNbkPhil (owned by HCL) ,
passim. J, X, 321. There were only seven
registrants, it seems, at the beginning of
the course, some months before Emer-
son's first lecture (Let, VI, 104). 443:
MS PeaNbkPhil (owned by HCL) , pas-
sim. MS EllenE to EEF, 27 May 1870. MS
PeaNbkPhil (owned by HCL) , passim.
MS EllenE to HavenE, 6 May 1870. MS
HCCorpRec, XI, 209. MS AcctEke^-jz,
p. 214. C-ECor, II, 326-327. 444: MS
WHChanRem, leaves 1-10, dated 20 June
1870. Let,Vl, 119. MS EllenE to HavenE,
21 July 1870. Let, VI, 126; Grimm-RWE-
Cor, pp. 85-86. Let, VI, 124-125, 134,
136, 180-181; MS A. Ireland to Conway,
24 Apr 1870 (owned by CUL) ; the letter
from Ireland shows that he was at once
suspicious of Hotten. J, X, 309; Let, VI,
128. CEd, X, 295, 306. 445: MS EllenE
to EEF, 19 Aug 1870. MS AcctBk65~j2,
p. 216. /, X, 225, 227-228. MS EWE to
EEF, 2 and 3 Sept 1870. MS EWE to
LE, 4 Sept 1870. MS MemBki 870-1871,
Dec 1870. Let, VI, 138. MS MemBk-
1871; Let, VI, 144. /, X, 347; MS Mem-
BhiSji, 3 Feb 1871. MS EllenE to EEF,
17 Feb 1871. /, X, 347-348; Let, VI, 145;
according to MS AcctBkSj-jz, p. 234,
Emerson received $340 from the college
for this year's lectures. 446: Let, VI,
145, 147-149; ForbesLetRec,!!, 175-176;
ThayerWest, p, 9. ThayerWest, p. 10. /,
X, 351. ThayerWest (based, at least part-
ly, on Thayer's letters written during the
journey), pp. 5, 36, 40-41, 43, 50. Let,
VI, 149, 152. 447: Let, VI, 152; the
much-debated passage about the mouse
trap may well be authentic and may have
been used in one of Emerson's California
lectures; its lineage might, perhaps, be

traced from a journal entry as early as
1840 (J, V, 392) to one of some fifteen
years later (/, VIII, 528-529) ; but the
problem receives adequate attention in
The Home Book of Quotations, New
York, 1937; for a suggestion that the
mouse trap owed something to a remark
of Daniel Webster's about Emerson's
brother Charles, see R. Adams, in Mod-
ern Language Notes for Nov 1947 (pp.
483-486) . Let, VI, 152, 157-158. Let, VI,
154~l 55- 448: Let, VI, 155; cf. Linnie
Wolfe, New York, 1945, pp. 146 fL Let,
VI, 158. Let, VI, 155-156- L X, 357- Let,
VI, 183. /, X, 362-363; CEd, VII, 21.
449: MS EllenE to EWE, 3 and 6 Nov
1871. MerwHarte, p. 227. ThayerWest,
p. 61. MS EllenE to EWE, 16 and 17 Oct
1871; MS EllenE to EWE, 3 and 6 Nov

1871. CEd, XI, 461-467. Let, VI, 188. MS
EllenE to EWE, 27 and 28 Nov 1871.
Let, VI, 187-197. 450: Let, VI, 193;
BarrusWhitfcBur, pp. 64-66, where the
date is slightly erroneous. Let, VI, 193,
195. MS AcctBkH-w, 14 Jan 1858; MS
AcctBk5$-65, pp. 84, 159; cf. Let, V, 58.
Agassiz, Contributions, Boston, 1860, III,
89. Let, VI, 195; MS EllenE to EEF, 5,
8, and 9 Feb 1872; J, X, 377-378. 451:
Concord Lyceum. Course of i8ji and '72
(copy in CFPL) . MS MemBkiSjs, 7 Feb

1872. Alcjou, p. 425. MS EllenE to EEF,
7, 8, and 9 Mar 1872. MS EllenE to EEF,
14? Mar 1872. MS EllenE to EEF, 7, 8,
and 9 Mar 1872. Let, VI, 172-173, 176,
179. MS James R. Osgood & Co. to RWE,
15 Feb 1872. MS EllenE to EEF, 7, 8,
and 9 Mar 1872. Let, VI, 207. t EllenE
to EWE, 26 Mar 1872. Let, VI, 209. t
EllenE to EEF, 25 and 26 Apr 1872.
452: MS EllenE to EW7E, 7 May 1872.
t EllenE to EEF, 10 May 1872. t EllenE
to EWE, 15 and 16 Apr 1872. MS EllenE
to EEF, 10 May 1872. Let, VI, 209; Fields-
An, p. 91. MS EllenE to EWE, 14 May
1872. MS EllenE to EEF, 17 May 1872.
MS EllenE to HavenE, 27 and 29 July
1872. 453: Ibid.; MS EllenE to EWE,
30 July and 2 Aug 1872. Let, VI, 214. t

546

NOTES

extracts, by EWF, of Annie Keyes to El-
lenE, 2 Mar 1873. MS EllenE to HavenE,
27 and 29 July 1872; MS EllenE to EWE,
30 July and 2 Aug 1872. 454: MS El-
lenE to HavenE, 16 Aug 1872; Let, VI,
218; CabM, II, 703-705. MS EllenE to
EWE, 30 July and 2 Aug 1872. MS Ari-
nori Mori (of the Japanese Legation in
Washington) to RWE, 3 Feb 1872; Comm,
10 Aug 1872. Let, VI, 217. MS EllenE to
EEF, 20 Aug 1872; Let, VI, 109, 173 et
passim. MS EllenE to EEF, 22 Aug 1872.
455: Ibid. Let, VI, 219-221. t EllenE
to EWE, 9 and 10 Apr 1872. E.g., J, X,
391-392. t EllenE to Edward H. Clarke,
i Sept 1872, where the doctor's name is
given as Clark. 456: Ibid. The 8th
folded sheet of MS EEF to Elizabeth
Cabot? July? 1886? HoweBan, II, 261-
262. The $17,000 or $18,000 would in-
clude the $1 1,020 accounted for in CabM,
II, 705-707, together with the {5000
brought by Francis Lowell and Bancroft's
$1000. Let, VI, 218-219. ConwayAut, II,
facsimile between pp. 358 and 359; MS
CabLedgJEC, p. 128. t EllenE to EWE?
22 and 23 Sept 1872. Fragmentary MS
EllenE to EWE, presumably 30 Sept 1872.
MS EllenE to EWE, 7 Oct 1872. MS EWE
to RWE and LE, 11 Aug 1872; MS El-
lenE to EWE, 7 Oct 1872; MS copy of
EWE, presumably to Annie Keyes, 7 and
10 Oct 1872; J, X, 387, 395. Let, VI, 219-
220; ConwayAut, II, between pp. 358 and
359. MS EWE to EEF, 20 Oct 1872. 457:
Let, VI, 150, 173-174, 222. Cf., e.g., ], X,
222. /, X, 216. Cf. Let, VI, 93. MS Ar-
nold to Conway, 8 Nov 1865 (in CUL) ,
partly printed in ConwayAut, II, 340. Jf
X, 364. Alcjou, p. 428. EalH&A, p. 150;
CookeRWE, p. 186; cf. Let, VI, 122-123.
458: MS "NQ," p. 284; /, X, 405; for
the possibility that Emerson here remem-
bered part of a passage in Diodorus Si-
culus, see, below, a note on pp. 468-469.
459: CEd} VI, 94. Let, VI, 224; MS El-
lenE to LE, 23 Oct 1872; EllenE's MS
LongLet. Let, VI, 225. 460: Let, VI,
225. MS LongLet. Let, VI, 226. MS El-

lenE to LE, 4 Nov 1872; Let, VI, 226.
MS EllenE to LE, 5, 6, and 8 Nov 1872.
MS EWE to EEF, 20 Oct 1872; MS El-
lenE to LE, 5, 6, and 8 Nov 1872. Let,
VI, 226. Incomplete MS EWE to LE, 10
Nov 1872. 461: MS EllenE to EEF,
"finished" 9 Nov 1872; MS EllenE to
EEF, 14 Nov 1872; Let, VI, 227. MS EWE
to EllenE, 13 Nov 1872; MS EllenE to
EEF, 14 Nov 1872. MS Una Hawthorne
to LE, 17 Nov 1872. MS EllenE to LE,
16 and 22 Nov 1872. Le Figaro, 14, 15,
and 16 Nov 1872. MS EllenE to EEF, 26
and 28 Nov 1872; Let, VI, 228. 462:
MS EllenE to EEF, 26 and 28 Nov 1872.
MS EllenE to LE, 16 and 22 Nov 1872;
MS EllenE to EEF, 26 and 28 Nov 1872.
463: Let, VI, 228-229. Let, VI, 228; MS
EllenE to EEF, 26 and 28 Nov 1872. La
Nazione, Florence, 27 and 28 Nov 1872.
Ibid., 27 and 30 Nov and 2 Dec 1872. MS
MemBkiSyz, 27-28 Nov 1872. MS EllenE
to LE, 4 Dec 1872. MS EllenE to EEF,

3 Dec 1872; MS EllenE to LE, 4 Dec
1872; Let, VI, 229. MS EllenE to EEF,
6 Dec 1872; Let, VI, 229. 464: La Na-
zione, Florence, 27 Nov 1872. MS George
P. Marsh to RWE, 4 Dec 1872; L'Opi-
nione, Rome, 5 Dec 1872, e.g. MS El-
lenE to EWE, 14 Dec 1872. MS EllenE
to LE, 25 Dec 1872. Ibid.; J, X, 406.
L' Omnibus, Naples, 17 (and later) Dec
1872. MS EllenE to LE, 25 Dec 1872.
465: Ibid. Le Nil, Alexandria, 29 Dec
1872. MS EllenE to EWE, i, 2, and 4
Jan 1873. Le Nil, Alexandria, 29 Dec
1872. MS EllenE to EWE, i, 2, and 4
Jan 1873; MS EllenE to EEF, 3 and 4
Jan 1873; Let, VI, 230-232. 466: MS
Bancroft to OWH, 19 Jan 1855 (owned
by HCL) . Let, VI, 230-231; MS EllenE
to EWE, i, 2, and 4 Jan 1873. Let, VI,
231-232; MS EllenE to EWE, i, 2, and

4 Jan 1873. E. S. Bradley, George Henry
Boker, 1927, pp. 289-290. MS EllenE to
EWE, i, 2, and 4 Jan 1873. Le Nil, Alex-
andria, 2 and 5 Jan 1873. ], X, 406; MS
EllenE to EWE, i, 2, and 4 Jan 1873.
MS EllenE to LE, 29 and 30 Jan and i

NOTES

547

Feb 1873. MS EllenE to LE, 13 Jan 1873.
467: Ibid. MS EllenE to EEF, 21 Jan
1873. /, X, 407-408. MS EllenE to EEF,
21 Jan 1873. MS EllenE to EWE, 23? Jan
1873. 468: Ibid.; in Die Geschichte
meines Lebens, 1893, Ebers was concerned
with the years prior to 1864, and Emer-
son seems not to be mentioned. MS El-
lenE to LE, 29 and 30 Jan and i Feb
1873. J, X, 409. MS EllenE to "My dear
daughter" (Edith Davidson?) , 27 and 29
Jan 1873. MS EllenE to LE, 29 and 30
Jan and i Feb 1873. 469: MS "Egypt"
and another manuscript numbered "2,"
on the same subject. Emerson, lover of
Plutarch and author of an introduction
to Plutarch's Morals, doubtless was, or
had been, familiar with the chapter on
Isis and Osiris, where Philae is, however,
only one of many towns claiming the
honor of being the god's final resting
place. I owe to La Rue Van Hook the
suggestion of Diodorus Siculus as the in-
spirer of Emerson's lively preference for
the legend that Osiris was buried at
Philae. Cf. The Historical Library of Dio-
dorus the Sicilian, tr. G. Booth, London,
1700, pp. 9-10. MS EllenE to LE, 29 and
30 Jan and i Feb 1873. MS EllenE to
EWE, 31 Jan and 6, 10, and 18 Feb 1873.
Laporte, Boston, 1872, p. 135. MS EllenE
to LE, 29 and 30 Jan and i Feb 1873.
MS EllenE to EWE, 31 Jan and 6, 10,
and 18 Feb 1873. MS EllenE to LE, 29
and 30 Jan and i Feb 1873. MS EllenE
to LE, 19, 24, and 25 Feb 1873. 470:
MS EllenE to LE, 29 and 30 Jan and i
Feb 1873; MS EllenE to EEF, 3 Feb
1873; MS EllenE to LE, 19, 24, and 25
Feb 1873. Theodore Roosevelt, New York,
1920, p. 19; a sister of young Theodore
was struck by Emerson's "lovely smile,
somewhat vacant . . . but very gentle,
with which he received the little children
of his fellow countryman" (Corinne R.
Robinson, New York, 1921, p. 62). MS
EllenE to LE, 19, 24, and 25 Feb 1873.
MS EllenE to EWE, 31 Jan and 6, 10,
and 18 Feb 1873. Brugsch, Berlin, 1894,

tells of experiences in Egypt but does not
mention Emerson. MS EllenE to LE, 19,
24, and 25 Feb 1873. Let, VI, 234, 235.
471: Let, VI, 236. Let, VI, 234. MS
EllenE to LE, 19, 24, and 25 Feb 1873.
In Let, VI, 234-235, I was misled by an
error in R. Owen, The Life of Richard
Owen, 1894, II, 222, into the belief that
it was "almost certain that Emerson re-
visited Malta on the way to Italy"; but
the "Emerson" there mentioned, certain-
ly not Ralph Waldo, was presumably a
J. T. Emmerson, as I learned when, a
few weeks after the publication of Let,
I visited Malta and studied the move-
ments of J. T. Emmerson as recorded in
the Malta newspapers Public Opinion
(26 Feb 1873) and // Portafoglio maltese
(25 Feb 1873) . As the Royal Malta Li-
brary, at Valetta, proved to be rich in
files covering the months of Feb and Mar
1873, I also examined The Malta News
and other local papers for that period
and found numerous notices of the ac-
tivities of both Owen and Emmerson but
nothing about Emerson. Let, I, 362. MS
EllenE to LE, 19, 24, and 25 Feb 1873.
MS EllenE to EEF, i and 8? Mar 1873.
472: MS EllenE to LE, 11 and 17 Mar
1873; Let, VI, 236-237; "Music," under
a somewhat different title, is in Strode,
ed. Dobell, London, 1907, pp. 2—3, where
the text is from a manuscript version.
MS EllenE to EEF, 14? Mar 1873. MS
EllenE to LE, 11 and 17 Mar 1873; MS
EllenE to EEF, 18, 19, and 21 Mar 1873.
MS EllenE to EWE, 28 and 29 Mar 1873.
MS EllenE to LE, 21 Mar and 8 Apr
1873. 473: Let, VI, 228; MS EllenE to
EEF, i, 3, and 7 Apr 1873, mentions an
earlier visit of Mar 1873 to the Laugels.
MS EllenE to EWE, 28 and 29 Mar 1873;
J, X, 413. Let, VI, 228; J, X, 413. MS
EllenE to LE, 16 and 18 Apr 1873. MS
EllenE to LE, 21 Mar and 8 Apr 1873;
/, X, 413. MS EllenE to EEF, i, 3, and
7 Apr 1873. MS EllenE to LE, 21 Mar
and 8 Apr 1873. MS EllenE to LE, 16
and 18 Apr 1873. 474: Ibid. MS EllenE

548

NOTES

to LE, 6?-i6? Apr 1873 (a diary letter
covering 6-16 Apr 1873; at top of p. i,
in different ink but apparently in Ellen's
hand, is "London April 1873"). 475:
Ibid.; in the original manuscript ditto
marks are used instead of my "Mr Brown-
ing" in the second of the two consecu-
tive sentences in which that name occurs.
MS EllenE to "Dear Family/' dated "R.
R. May i 1873." 476: Ibid. MS EllenE
to EEF, 26 Apr 1873. EatHfrA, p. 343.
477: Let, VI, 238-241- /, X, 417-418.
MS EllenE to "My dear childy" (Edith
Davidson?) , 3 May 1873. MS EllenE to
EEF, 5 May 1873. 478: Let, VI, 242;
IreRWE, pp. 177-178. Let, VI, 242. Ire-
RWE, p. 179; Let, VI, 242. Let, VI, 242-
243. NortonLet, I, 502, 503, 506, and, e.g.,
508. Ibid., I, 488, 508, 510, 511. 479:
Ibid., I, 511-512. MS EllenE to "Dear
Miss Clara" (Dabney?) , 27 May and 7
June 1873. MS bills submitted to the
"Committee on Reception of R. W. Emer-
son" by A. B. Warren dated 27 May 1873,
by A. W. Hosmer dated 28 May 1873,
and by Samuel W. Brown dated 3 June

1873 (owned by CFPL) . Broadside A
Public Reception, dated 24 May 1873

(copy owned by CFPL) . Alcjou, p. 432.
MS EllenE to "Dear Miss Clara" (Dab-
ney?), 27 May and 7 June 1873. 480:
Ibid. MS ConToRec, IX, 437. MS EllenE
to "Dear Miss Clara" (Dabney?) , 27 May
and 7 June 1873; Alcjou, p. 433. Alcjou,
pp. 432-433. EinC, p. 187. Alcjou, p. 433.
Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne,
London, n.d. (1890?) , p. 98. 481: Mar-
cus Aurelius . . . Meditations, 1635, p.
209. From Aug 1872 to July 1873, John
S. Keyes spent 16519.43 in rebuilding the
Emerson house; and of this amount,
$2500 had been received as insurance
(MS AcctBkj2-82, p. 19) . MS Lidian,
pp. 277, 279. MS LE to EllenE, 29 July
1873. t EllenE to Sarah G. Emerson, 16
Jan 1874. MS EllenE to Miss Dabney, 17
Sept 1875. Two Gutekunst photographs
are reproduced in RecLiLong, opposite
pp. 165 and 166; the date given ibid., pp.

xi-xii, is some weeks too late (ibid., pp.
165-167; and t EllenE to HavenE, 29
Mar 1873) . 482: Clipping from an un-
identified newspaper of 1882 (p. 9 of
Drury clippings owned by CUL) . J. H.
W. Stuckenberg, London, 1882, pp. 430-
431. Alcjou, pp. 454, 457. MS AcctBk-
72-82, pp. 17, 24. Let, VI, 272. MS Con-
AsBk, i May 1875. 483: MS bankbook
for 1874-1878. Let, VI, passim. MS Trees-
Major, p. 47 et passim. The descriptions
are from Emerson's fellow townsmen
Simon Brown and Albert Stacy's leaflet
Pear Trees for Sale, a copy of which is
inserted loosely in MS TreesMajor. MS
MemBkiSjj, 7 July 1873. MS EllenE to
EWE, 27, 29, and 30 Jan 1872. Amber-
leyPa, II, 67; MS Lidian, p. 226. MS
Lidian, pp. 225-226, 261. Ibid., pp. 261-
262, 301. Edward was married 19 Sept
1874 (MS in FaBi, verso of 2d leaf) . MS
Lidian, pp. 287-288. 484: MS Island-
BkWHF (at Naushon) , entries in 1873,
1874, 1876, 1877, 1878, 1879, 1880, 1881.
MS EllenE to Edith (Davidson?) , 24 Apr

1874. Let, VI, 259, 261. MS EllenE to
EEF, 8 Jan 1875; MS EllenE to EEF, 3
Feb 1875. MS HCOvRec, XI, 116. Let,
V, 469-471, 476-482, passim. J, X, 266,
332-333. Let, VI, 68-72, passim. Let, VI,
passim; MS HCOvRec, X and XI, pas-
sim; MS reports to overseers. MS records
of corporation, overseers, and faculty in
the 18705, passim. Comm, 14 Mar 1874
(the date 7 Mar also appears on the same

issue) . 485: CabM, II, 630. MS copy or
rough draft, by EllenE, of EllenE to
Gisela Grimm, with date 2 Mar 1868
added by another hand, together with
what seems to be "to 1871." Let, VI, pas-
sim; ], X, 437-438. MS EllenE to EEF,
17 Nov 1874. MS EEF to EllenE, 18 Dec
1874; Let, VI, 267. 486: MS EllenE to
HavenE, 15 and 23 Feb 1875. MS Hillard
to RWE, i Jan 1875. MS JFC to RWE,
10 Jan 1875. MS Stirling to RWE, 26
Feb 1875. MS Rolfe to RWE, 30 Aug

1875. MS J. W. Morris to RWE, 16 Sept
1875. Alcjou, p. 460. MS EllenE to EEF,

NOTES

549

16 and 17 Aug 1875. Let, VI, 180-181.
EmStanLib, VIII, iii, iv. 487; MS El-
lenE to EEF, 8 Sept and "Wednesday,"
1875; cf. MS EllenE to EEF, 15 Nov 1875.
J, X, 442. MS EllenE to EEF, 25 Sept
1875. Let, VI, 286. Letters and Social Aims,
Boston, 1876. EmStanLib, VIII, i-v; re-
printed in CEd, VIII, ix-xiii. Cf. Hegel,
The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree,
revised ed., New York, n.d. (cop. 1899) ,
pp. xi-xiii. CEd, XI, 493~5o8; Let, VI,
249. CEd, XI, 500-501. MS EllenE to
EEF, 2 Oct 1873. Let, VI, e.g., 253. Comm,
28 Feb 1874. 488: MS HCDivSStuRec
(owned by AnHarTheoLib) , p. 359. MS
HCDivSFaRecfc (owned by AnHarTheo-
Lib) , 28 Oct 1873; MS HCDivSStuRec
(owned by AnHarTheoLib) , p. 365. Let,
VI, 261. NortonLet, II, 43. MS HCDivS-
StuRec (owned by AnHarTheoLib) , pp.
367-368. MS ConLyRecBk59-8i (owned
by CFPL) , 10 Feb 1875 (gives no sub-
ject) . MS EllenE to HavenE, 15 and 23
Feb 1875. MS AcctBkj3-S2, p. 26. 489:
MS EllenE to LE, 20 and 21 Mar 1875.
MS GonToRec, IX, 441-442, 449, 451.
Ibid., IX, 442; MS EllenE to EEF, 18 Jan
1875; MS RWE to G. W. Curtis, 15 Mar
1875 (owned by HCL) ; Let, VI, 264-
265, 271; CookeRWE, p. 183. MS EllenE
to HavenE, 24 Apr and 20 June 1875.
Let, VI, 271; CookeRWE, pp. 182-183.
MS EllenE to HavenE, 24 Apr and 20
June 1875; /, X, 443-444. Let, VI, 277,
279. Let, VI, 253-255; CookeRWE, pp.
178-179. MS EllenE to EEF, 2 and 4 July
1875. 490: Ibid. Let, VI, passim, and
various MS letters to Emerson. MS Pres-
bury to RWE, 15 May 1867. Alcjou,
pp. 403-404, 447-448. MS E. R. Hoar to
RWE, 11 Mar 1874. MS EllenE to EEF,
18? and 19 Mar 1874. Letf VI, 245-247.
Monypenny and Buckle, London, 1920,
V, 266-288, passim. The University In-
dependent, ad ser., No. 2, is dated 31
Mar 1874. Leaflet Glasgow University
Rectorial Election, 1874, pp. 2-3. Let, VI,
258-270, passim; ], X, 436-437; MS EEF
to EllenE, 15 Mar 1874; MS EEF to

EllenE, 17 Nov 1874; MS W. H. Fish to
RWE, 15 Nov 1875. 491: MS EllenE
to EEF, 12 Oct 1875; Let, VI, 283-284.
MS Lidian, p. 304; MS AcctBkjz-Sz, p.
81. Alcjou, p. 466. Let, VI, 296, and cf.
304, 306, 307. MS WHChanRem, leaves
11-13 (20? July 1877). MS EllenE to
ElizH, 30 Oct and 3 Nov 1877. MS Con-
LyRecBk$9-8i, 5 Mar 1879. Let, VI, 315.
MS in FaBi. MS IslandBkWHF, 1876-
1881, passim. 492: Alcjou, p. 471. Let,
VI, 298-300, 303. MS EllenE to ElizH,
30 Oct and 3 Nov 1877. cf- C-ECor, II,
.298. Let, VI, 120-121. MS MemBki8?6,
7 Apr and 12 June 1876. CarpDays, pp.
3, 166-167. MS EllenE to EEF, 9 June

1877. Alcjou, p. 480. MS EllenE to EEF,
16 July 1877; ff- ScudLowell, II, 220.
493: Incomplete MS EllenE to EEF, 2
and 9 Apr 1878; MS Lidian, p. 312. Brad-
Inc, p. 69. MS Furness to RWE, 5 Sept

1878. BarrusLiBur, I, 213. Let, VI, pas-
sim; also in LazLet, pp. 3-16. Let, VI,
296, 297. MS EllenE to EEF, 26 Aug
1876. MS EllenE to "Edith" (presumably
EEF but possibly Edith Davidson) , 6
Sept 1876. 494: Ibid. The Poems of
Emma Lazarus, 1889, 1» 12-15. MS Emma
Lazarus to EllenE, 7 Sept 1876; LazLet,
p. 21. MS Emma Lazarus to EllenE, 2
Nov 1876. 495: MS EllenE to EEF, 18
July 1879; Ellen later thought she re-
called Emma's visiting Bush another time,
in the summer of 1881, but Ellen's re-
membrance of this was too hazy to offer
any satisfactory evidence (MS Lidian, p.
324) . Only a few pages of MS j "Old
Man" have any interest. J, X, 476. MS
EllenE to EEF, 16 Mar 1876. Alcjou, p.
470; Let, VI, 268; MS Sanborn to EllenE,
4 Mar 1876. MS EllenE to "My dear
Sally" (Sarah Gibbons Emerson, presum-
ably) , 27 Feb 1877. MS EllenE to EEF,
n.d. ("May 18? 78" supplied in pencil) .
Ibid.; Let, VI, 309-311. MS EWE to
Cabot, 10 Nov 1877; MS Cabot to EWE,
13 Nov 1877. 496: Let, VI, 318. MS
EllenE to EEF, 14 Apr 1876. MS EllenE
to EEF, 22 and 23 June 1876; MS EllenE

55°

NOTES

to Cabot, 12-26 Sept 1882. MS EllenE

to EEF, i July 1876. MS Ellen E to LE,

29 June 1876. 497: Ibid. MS EllenE

to Cabot, 12-26 Sept 1882. MS EllenE to

LE, 29 June 1876; MS EllenE to EEF,

i July 1876. Let, VI, 295. 498: MS El-

lenE to EEF, i July 1876. MS EllenE to

EWE, 30 June and i July 1876. t signed

EWF to me, 16 Dec 1947, pp. 3-4. MS

BPLSNo8Novi8j6; MS Joseph Healy to

RWE, 20 Oct 1876; CabM, II, 676-677;

7, X, 450. Let, VI, 304, 309, 311; Alcjou,

p. 484. MS EllenE to EEF, 6 Feb 1878.

MS EllenE to EEF, 8, 9, and 11 Feb 1878.

MS EllenE to EEF, 9 Mar 1878; MS

EllenE to HavenE, 17 June 1878. Let, VI,

317, MS Henry W. Robinson to RWE,

11 Feb 1879. MS EllenE to EEF, 9 and

10 Apr 1879. MS EllenE to EEF, 7 May

1879. 499: MS EllenE to EEF, 5 July

1879. MS EllenE to EEF, 17 June 1876;

MS Lidian, p. 326. MS EllenE to EEF,

29 Aug 1877. MS EllenE to "Dearest girl"

(EEF, presumably) , 26 and 27 Sept 1877.

MS Mary Pauline Alden to RWE, 20 Feb

1879. Alcjou, pp. 475, 485. ECitCon, p.

369. MS EllenE to LE, 16 Sept 1878. MS

EllenE to EEF, 25 Sept 1878. MS EllenE

to EEF, 23 Sept 1878; MS EllenE to LE,

17 Sept 1878; MS EllenE to EEF, 23 Sept

1878; MS EllenE to EEF, 25 Sept 1878.

500: MS EllenE to HavenE and SusyE,

17 Oct 1878. MS EllenE to EEF, 23 Sept

1878. MS EllenE to EEF, 25 Sept 1878.
MS B. B. Marshall to RWE, 3 June

1879. MS EllenE to EEF, 26 Sept 1879;
MS EllenE to "Cousin Sarah," 4 Oct
1879. MS W. J. Potter to RWE, 23 June
1879. Let, VI, 290. MS OWHjr to RWE,
16? Apr 1876. MS Otto Zacharias? to
RWE, 25 July 1876. Alcjou, p. 481. Mark
Twain's Speeches, with introduction by
W. D. Howells, New York and London,
1910, pp. 1-16. A. B. Paine, New York,
1912, II, 603-610; DeVoto, Boston, 1935,
pp. 196-205. MS Clemens to RWE (also
addressed, in same manuscript, to Long-
fellow and Holmes) , 27 Dec 1877. A.
B. Paine, New York, 1912, II, 608-609.

501: Let, VI, 311; Franqueville, Paris,
II (1896), 102; Emerson had been elect-
ed to the Institut de France 29 Dec
1877, was notified in a French Presiden-
tial decree of 9 Jan 1878, and accepted
in his letter of 6 Mar 1878 (so dated in
extant rough draft) , MS Stanley to RWE,
1877, quoted in MS EllenE to EEF, 12
July 1883; MS EllenE to Sarah Gibbons
Emerson, 30 Oct 1878; MS J. W. Sharp
to RWE, 14 July 1879. Alcjou, p. 498;
Genius&Char, p. xi. Sherman to RWE,
5 Aug 1879. t EllenE to HavenE and
Susan Tompkins Emerson, 11 and 12
June 1879; MS EllenE to EEF, 18 July

1879. MS French to Cabot, 17 Feb 1887.
CabM, II, 678-679. Cf. GookeBib, passim.
Let, VI, 274-287, passim, and 320-321.
502 : Let, VI, 320-321. Julius Simon, pp.
137-139; Hummel, pp. 64-66, 68, and
71-73; see also Baumgarten, pp. 81 ft.;
the problem of Nietzsche's relation to
Emerson needs much further study, to
which Hummel offers the most conven-
ient introduction. 503: MS Lidian, pp.
314 ft. Genius&Char, pp. x-xiii, xxi. Ire-
RWE, pp. 288-290. MS ConLyRecBk-
59-81, 4 Feb 1880- CEd, X, 487-498, 617
ff.; /, X, 476; MS EllenE to EEF, 12 Feb
1881. MS EllenE to EEF, 25 Aug 1880.
Alcjou, pp. 523-524. Bok, pp. 53-58.
504: MS EllenE to EEF, 4 Mar 1880;
cf. MS EllenE to EEF, 25 Aug 1880;
Comm, 28 Feb 1880; The Index, 4 Mar

1880, pp. 114-115. Mary Baker Eddy to
"Miss" Lane, printed without date in
The Autograph, Vol. I, No. 7 (Sept-Oct
1912), pp. 148-149, and reprinted in E.
S. Bates and J. V. Dittemore, New York,
1932, p. 171; other pertinent facts, and
comment on the untenable theory that
Mrs. Eddy derived much of her doctrine
from Emerson, are in Bates and Ditte-
more, pp. 156 and 168; see also especially
Lyman P. Powell, New York, 1930, pp.
131, 133, 284-285; I. C. Tornlinson, Bos-
ton, n.d. (cop. 1945) , p. 43, cites no doc-
umentary authority for his statement that
the Eddys had Emerson's own invitation

NOTES

to visit him; Alcjou, p. 463 et passim,
shows Alcott's attitudes toward Christian
Science. MS EllenE to EEF, 30 May-2
June 1880. Ellis, p. 318. MS EllenE to
EEF, 27 Feb 1882. 505: MS will signed
by Emerson 14 Apr 1876 (in files of
Register of Probate Court of Middlesex
County at East Cambridge, Mass.) . MS
codicil, or formal request, dated 26 Mar
1881 (apparently never probated; on the
same sheet there follows a request, signed
by Lidian, Ellen, Edith, and Edith's son
Ralph, that Emerson's executors comply
with the new provision) . Alcjou, p. 524.
Whitman, Specimen, pp. 189-190. 506:
Ibid., p. 190. Unidentified newspaper
clipping of 1882 (p. 9 of Drury clippings,
owned by CUL) . MS EllenE to EEF, 28
June 1880; MS EllenE to EEF, 26? Feb?
1881? MS IslandBkWHF, 18 Aug 1881.
EWF's t extracts from Annie Keyes Emer-
son to EEF, 5 Feb 1882. EinC, p. 146.-
Alcjou, p. 532. MS EllenE to EEF, 28

and 29 Mar 1882. EatH&A, p. 382. 507:
MS EllenE to EEF, 28 and 29 Mar 1882.
MS EllenE to Clara Dabney, 2 Apr 1882.
MS EllenE to Cabot, 16 Aug 1882. MS
EllenE to EEF, 20 Apr 1882. MS EWE
to Cabot, 17 Oct 1886. t EllenE to EWE,
6 May 1881. MS EWE to Cabot, 17 Oct
1886. MS EllenE to EEF, 22 Apr 1882.
MS EllenE to "Dear Cousin Sarah" (Sarah
Gibbons Emerson?) , 22 Apr 1882. MS
EllenE to HavenE, 24 Apr 1882. MS
Mary E. Simmons to EEF, 25 Apr 1882.
508: MS Mary E. Simmons to EEF, 26
Apr 1882. MSS Mary E. Simmons to
EEF (two separate letters) , 27 Apr 1882.
New-York Tribune, 28 Apr 1882. Ibid.,
i May 1882. MS F. Hedge to OWH, 22
Dec 1884 (owned by HCL) . New-York
Tribune, i May 1882. DGH, pp. 134-136.
Whitman, Specimen, p. 197. LowLitfc-
PolAd, p. 32. Cf. t EllenE to Miss Dab-
ney, 2 Apr 1885, and t EllenE to EEF,
3 Sept 1885.

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

This list includes the names of the persons and of the towns and other geographical
divisions mentioned in the text, together with the titles of books, essays, poems,
etc. Though not an index of the notes and without any page reference to them, it
is related to them. It includes the titles of Emerson's holograph writings, other than
letters, that are cited there. Other titles not followed by page numbers appear in
this list only because they have been abbreviated in the notes to avoid repetition
and save space. Dates and places of publication are not generally given here unless
they have been omitted from the notes. Published works that are fully cited there
are not mentioned here unless they also appear in the text.

No adequate description of printed books, printed articles, and manuscripts by
or about Emerson has yet been compiled ; but there are some bibliographical aids,
and a few of them are important. Manuscripts of Emerson's correspondence that
were available before 1938 are, in general, described in the six volumes ot The
Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York, 1939. And those volumes refer to,
or quote, many sources which the present book uses but, for lack of space, cites
only indirectly, through The Letters. Much useful information is to be found in
G. W. Cooke, A Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston and New York,
1908; in the bibliography by H. R. Steeves, published in The Cambridge History
of American Literature, ed. W. P. Trent and others, New York and Cambridge,
England, 1917 and later, I, 551-566; in the quarterly dissertation lists printed in
American Literature from 1929 to the present (but especially in the numbers for
January, 1933, and May, 1948) and in the same journal's bibliographies from 1946
to the present time; in Ralph Waldo Emerson Representative Selections, ed. F. I.
Carpenter, New York, Cincinnati, and elsewhere, cop. 1934, pp. xlix-lvi; in the
bibliography by H. Hartwick, published as part of W. F. Taylor, A History of
American Letters, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere, cop. 1936, pp. 509-513; in K. W.
Cameron's Ralph Waldo Emerson's Reading, Raleigh, N. C, 1941, and in his
Emerson the Essayist, Raleigh, N. C., 1945 ; in Lewis Leary, Articles on American
Literature Appearing in Current Periodicals. 1920-1945, Durham, N. C., 1947,
pp. 48-57; and in Literary History of the United States, ed. R. E. Spiller and
others, New York, 1948, III (Bibliography, ed. T. H. Johnson), 492-501.

Though they contain no formal bibliographical lists, the Centenary Edition
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson, Boston and
New York, n. d. (1903-1904), and the Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E.
W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, Boston and New York, 1909-1914, are invaluable
to readers concerned with Emerson or with the American cultural and liter-
ary scene of his day. There is, however, no edition of either works or journals
that approaches completeness (cf. "journals," ''lectures," and "sermons" below).
Typescript copies of most of the extant journals, including a great deal that has
never been printed, are in the Harvard College Library and in the Columbia Uni-
versity Libraries.

553

554

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

[A]

Abbeville, France, 189
Abbot, John, 35, 40
Abelard, 263

AbLib : Abernethy Library
abolition and abolitionists, 227, 228, 256, 260,
303, 3<H 308, 369, 399, 408, 409, 414, 423.
497, 500

"Abraham Lincoln" (Emerson), 427
Abydqs, Egypt, 470
Abyssinia, 465

"AC," MS journal (Emerson)
account book ledger, MS, for 1836-1848

(Emerson)
account book ledger, MS, for 1849-1872

(Emerson)

account books, nine MS volumes by Emer-
son, as follows : for 1828-1833 with some
entries for later years, for 1836-1840, for
1840-1844, for 1845-1849, for 1849-1^53,
for 1853-1859, for 1859-1865, for 1865-
1872, and for 1872-1882
AcctBk: MS account book (Emerson used
varying titles for his account books, or,
sometimes, no title at all)
Achray, Loch, 193
Adam (first man), 23, 216
Adams, Abel, 136, 141, 142, 165, 168, 205,

362, 411, 415, 438, 439
Adams, Chas. Francis (1807-1886), 496
Adams, Chas. Francis (1835-1915), Richard

Henry Dana, Bo and NY, 1890
Adams, David Phineas, 18
Adams, George Washington, "Influence of
Natural Scenery on Poetry, The," MS,
86

Adams, John, 17

Adams, John Quincy, 17, 18, 153
Adams, Samuel, 17
AdDana: see under Chas. F. Adams
Addison, Joseph, 67
"Address" at centennial celebration, 19 April

1875 (Emerson), 489

"Address at the Dedication of the Soldiers'
.Monument in Concord, April 19, 1867"
(Emerson), 433
"Address at the Opening of the Concord

Free Public Library" (Emerson), 487
Address . . . on the Anniversary of the
Emancipation of the Negroes in the Brit-
ish West Indies, An (Emerson), 296, 303
"Address to Kossuth" (Emerson), 368
"Address to the Natural History Society
... 7 May, 1834," MS (Emerson), 201
"Address to the Temperance Society at Har-
vard, (Mass.) 4 July 1843," MS (Emer-
son), 292-293

Adirondack Club, 398, 401, 445
"Adirondacs, The" (Emerson), 398
AdNatHis: "Address to the Natural His-
tory Society"
Aeneas, 37
Aeolian harp, 432

Aeschylus, 95, 172

Africa, 59, 94, 121, 465, 4§5

Agar, Mustapha, 468, 470

Agassiz, Louis, 392, 426, 485; Contributions
450

Agoult, Marie de Flavigny, Comtesse d'
("Daniel Stern"), 328, 350

Agricultural Society, Boston, 8

Airlie, Lady, 476

AL: American Literature (quarterly)

Alabama, 498

Albany, N. Y., 179

Alboni, Marietta, 345

Ale J ou: see under A. B. Alcott

Alcott, Abba May, wife of A. B. Alcott.
297- 3o6. 330, 40 1 1 492

Alcott, Amos Broiison, 139, 205, 232-252
passim, 262, 263, 276, 289-311 passim
321-338 passim, 346, 365. 373, 396, 401-
406 passim, 415, 416, 424, 420, 431, 440,
451, 455, 482, 486, 491, 492, 49£-5o6, pas-
sim; "Breath of Childhood": see also
""Psyche," 233; Concord Days, 480; Con-
versations with Children on the Gospels,
233; "Countryman in his Garden, The,"
413; diary, 208; Journals, The ed. Odell
Shepard, Bo, 1938; New England au-
thors, lecture on, 490; "Orphic Sayings.1
277; "Private Life," 399; "Psyche/' 233.
241; "R. Waldo Emerson," 425; sonnet
read at Emerson's funeral, 508

Alcott, Anna, 404

Alcott, Louisa May, 294, 404, 431, 453, 503,
505 ; Louisa May Alcott, ed. E. D. Cheney,
Bo, 1890

Alcott, May, 431, 453, 483

Alcott family, 289, 307, 365, 396, 483

Alcott Fund, 425

Alcott House School, Ham, Surrey, 297

Alden, Samuel, 73

Alexander I, of Russia, 35

Alexander, Francis, 179, 189

Alexandria, D. C (now Va.), 123

Alexandria, Egypt, 464, 470

Alfieri, Vittorio, 463

Algiers, 137

Alicante, 15

Alleghenies, 356, 427

Allen, Mrs., of Newton, Mass., 198

Allen, William, American Biographical and
Historical Dictionary, An, 222

Allibone, S. A., Critical Dictionary, A

Allingham, William, 335, 461, 476

Allston, Washington, 17, 191, 244

"Alphonso of Castile" (Emerson), 310, 315

Alphonso the Wise, 322

Amberley, John Russell, Viscount, 435, 473,
475, 476, 483

Amberley, Katharine Stanley Russell, Vis-
countess, 434, 473, 475, 476, 483

Amberley Pa: see under B. and P. Russell

Ambleside, England, 196

America, 9 et passim

"America," 459

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

555

American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
425

American authors and literature, passim;
e.g., 30, 93, 155, 219, 271, 329

American Buddh, 372

"American Life," course of lectures (Emer-
son), 426

"American Nationality," MS lecture (Emer-
son), 413, 495

American Revolution, n, 20, 154, 263

Americans, n et passim

American Scholar, The (Emerson) : see An
Oration . . . Phi Beta Kappa Society
(title of the early editions), 266, 280, 435

American Unitarian Association, 129

Ames, Fisher, 22

Amesbury, England, 355

Amherst, Mass., 99, 430

Amherst College, 385, 498

Amici, Giovanni, 182

"Amita" (Emerson), 451

AmLitAn: see under Ralph Thompson

Ampere, Jean-Jacques, 347

Anapo River, 173

ancestry of Emerson, 43-5°; see also Has-
kins family

Anchises, 37

Andover, Mass., 41, 56- 70

Andover Theological Seminary, 99

"Anglo-American," MS lecture now so la-
beled (Emerson), 384

"Anglo-Saxon, The" (Emerson), 384

AnHarTheoLib : Andover-Harvard Theo-
logical Library

AnSoJou: see under Anthology Society

Antarctic Continent, 297

Anthology Society, Boston, 18, 20, 65; An-
thology Society Journal of the Proceed-
ings, ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Bo, 1910

Anti-Corn-Law League, 334

antimasonry, 227

Antiquaries, Society of, London, 340

antislavery, 227, 260, 296, 306, 366, 368, 369,
388, 389, 390, 392. 405

Anti-slavery Society, 369

Antonines, 99, Joo

ApCAB: Appletons'

Apennines, 4, 181

Apollo, 58, 268

"Apollo," Belvedere, 178, 179

Apostles, the, 220

Appleton, Thomas Gold, 3S»

Appomattox Court House, Va., 427

approbation, or license, Emerson's, 117

approbation, or license, MS, of Win. Emer-
son, father of RWE, 2

Arabian Desert, 469

Arabian Nights, 60

Arabic, 467

Arabs, 174, 3*9

Arago, Dominique-Francois, liso, i»7

Archaeologic . . . Society, Chester, England,
460

Archimedes, 171

Arethusa. 172

Arezzo, Italy, 180

Argyll, Duchess of, 475, 476

Argyll, George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke

A of, 352, 353, 474, 475, 476

Anstides, 205

"Aristocracy" (Emerson), 503

Aristophanes, 77

Aristotle, 123, 158, 282; Aristotle's Ethics

and Politics, 143; Nicomachean Ethics,

The

Arminian, ip
Arnim, Elizabeth ("Bettina") Brentano

von, 344; Goethe's Correspondence with

a Child, 393

Arnim, Gisela von, 393 : see also Grimm
Arnold, Matthew, 344, 357, 425, 426, 457,

496; Letters; Strayed Reveller, The;

"Written in Emerson's Essays," 327
Arnold, Mrs. Edwin, 474, 476
Arnolds, the, 341, 344
Arnoult, Emile. 325
Arqua, Italy, 182
"Art," essay (Emerson), 283
"Art," MS lecture (Emerson), 411
"Art," MS notebook (Emerson)
ArtBeauty: MS "Beauty" 1836?
Artemis, 172
Arthur, King, 94

Ashburton, Alexander Baring, ist Baron, 343
Ashburton, Anne Bingham Baring, Lady

(wife of 1st Baron) 343, 471
Ashmun, John Hooker, 157, 199
Asia, 375

Asia, nickname for Lidian Emerson, 225
Asiatic Miscellany, The (Wm. Jones and

others), 83, 93

Aspinwall house, Brookline, Mass., 145
Assabet River, 51

"Assault upon Mr. Sumner, The" (Emer-
son), 389
Assisi, Italy, 180
Assuan, Egypt, 466, 468, 469
"Astrsea" (Emerson), 319
astronomy, 20, 75
Athenaeum Club, London, 343; Athenaum.

Rules and Regulations
Athenians, 172
Athens, Greece, 37, 172
Atlantic Monthly, The, 396, 397, 400, 405.

493, 500
Atlantic Ocean, 108-119 passim 167, 168

196, 206, 208, 209, 220 253, 297, 324, 328,

330, 377. 378, 426. 427, 457. 460. 461
Auber, Daniel-Frangois. Fra Diavolo, 186;

Gustave 111, 186

Auburn in "The Deserted Village," 71
Auckland, Lord, 343

AuLoLe: MS autobiography on loose, un-
numbered leaves (Emerson)
Austria and the Austrians, 182, 183, 184, 368,

456
Autobbovo: "Autobiography," MS bound

volume containing detailed calendar of

RWE's life ( Emerson ^ in

556

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

AutoSkAmCy: MS "Sketch prepared at re-
quest of E. P. Whipple, Esq to assist
his Memoir in 'American Cyclopaedia' "
(Emerson)

Avignon, France, 462

"AZ," MS journal (Emerson)

Azores, 170, 440, 462, 485 , 49 1

[B]

"B," MS journal (Emerson)

Bacchus, 68

"Bacchus" (Emerson), 320

Bacon, Delia, 387, 392-393, 477

Bacon, Francis, 147, 264, 278, 387, 4^6, 439;
Essays, 92, 99, 282

Baiae, Italy, 176

Bailey, Philip, Festus, 335

Baird, Spencer F., 450

Ballantyne, Thomas, 336

Baltimore, Md., 39, 123, 149, 180, 296, 400,
449, 450

Bancroft, Elizabeth Davis Bliss, 332, 353,
398; see also E. Davis and E. D, Bliss

Bancroft, George, 260, 342, 349, 398, 423<
456, 465, 466; History of the United
States, A, 222, 259

Bangor, Me., 199, 312

Bangs, Miss, 404

bankbook, MS (Emerson)

Baptists, 459

Barbes, Artnand, 348, 349

Baring, Lady Harriet Montagu, wife of W.
B. Baring, 342

Baring, William Bingharn (became 2d Baron
Ashburton in 1848), 343

Barker, Anna, 253, 254

Barmby, Goodwyn, 346

Barnard Castle, 337

Barnes, Homer, Charles Fenno Hoffman,
NY, 1930

Barnum, P. T., 395

Barnwell, Robert Woodward, 67, 72, 84, 87,
429; "Valedictory Oration," MS, 84

Barrett, Frank, 51

Barren, Nancy, 292

Barrus, Clara, Life and Letters of John Bur-
roughs, The, Bo and NY, 1925 ; Whit-
man and Burroughs, Bo and NY, 1931

Bartlett, Josiah, 127, 227 483

Bartlett, W. L, ]<me$ Very, Durham, N. C,
1942

Bartol, Cyrus, 244 256, 322, 323, 495

Bates, E. S., Mary Baker Eddy (with J. V.
Dittemore), NY, 1932

Battaglia. Italy. 182

Baumgarten, Eduard, Pragmatismus, Der

Bavless, Joy, Rufus Wilmot Griswold

Bay Psalm Book: see The Whole Booke

Bay State. 260

Beach. Miss, 216, 217

Beacon St., 482 ; Emerson home in, 54, 55,

Beatrice, Dante's, 300
Beattie, Tames. Essay on Truth, 4

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin, Caron de,

Mariage de Figaro, Le, 186
Beaumont, filie de, 473
Beaumont, Francis, works, 143
Beaumont, Gustave de, Du systems pem-

tcntiaire aux £tats-Unis (with de Tocque-

ville), 185

"Beauty," in The Conduct of Life (Emer-
son), 407

"Beauty/' lecture (Emerson), 391
"Beauty," MS, lecture III of PhHis? 1836?

(Emerson)

Beauvais, France, 189
Bedford, F. C. Hastings Russell, 9th Duke

of, 476

Bedowy, dragoman, 467
Beecher, Henry Ward, 436
Belfast, Ireland, 460
Belknap, Jeremy, 4, 17, 18; Sacred Poetry

(ed.), 140
Bellini, Vincenzo, / Montecchi e Capuleti,

190; Norma, 190, 463; Sonnambula, La,

190; Straniera, La, 181
Benedictine monastery, 173
Bennet St., Emerson home probably in, 40
Bcntham, Jeremy, 190
Benton, Myron B., 421
Benton, Thomas Hart, 296
Berkeley, George, 143, 155, 426
Berkshire County, Mass., 401
Berkshire Hills, 87, 299
Bersier, preacher, 462
"Best Mode of ^ Inspiring a Correct Taste

in English Literature, The" (Emerson),

238

Bettma : see E. B. von Arnim
Beverly, Mass., 453
Bhagavadgita, 306, 371
Bhagavad-gita, The (tr. Arthur W. Ryder).

360
Bible, lor, 125, 141, 158, 171, 191, 222, 236,

27*, 315, 4^4 500; John, in; Luke, in.

151; Mark, 151; Matthew, in, 151, 159;

New Testament, 152; New Testament

. . . Conformed to Griesbactis Standard

Greek Text, The; Old Testament, 494;

see also The Holy Bible and A Transla-
tion . . . by Gilbert Wake fie Id
Bible, criticism and history of, 23, no, 115
Bible, lectures on (Emerson), 151
Bible Convention, 293
Bible of love (Vita nuova), 300
Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review,

The, 271
Bigelow, Andrew, Travels in Malta and

Sicily, Bo, 1831
Biglow, William, 31, 32, 38
Big Tupper Lake, 398
Biot, Jean-Baptiste, 187
Birmingham, England, 334, 335, 336
"Birthday Verses for James Russell Lowell"

(Emerson), 400
Bishopstoke, England, 356
Bishop Stortford, England, 49

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

557

Bishop's Waltham, England, 356

"BL," MS journal (Emerson)

Black, Rebecca, 288

Blackford Hill, Edinburgh, 193

Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the
Laws of England, 119

Black-wood's Edinburgh Magazine, 337

Blair, Hugh, Lectures on Rhetoric, 75

Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, 348

BIBkLEx: MS "I. Extracts from Letters
of R. W. E to William Emerson"

Bliss, Daniel, great-grandfather of RWE,
^44, 46, 47, 48

Bliss, Elizabeth Davis, 215 ; see also E. Davis
and E. D. B. Bancroft

Bliss, Phebe, great-grandmother of RWE,
44

Bliss, Phebe (born, 1741 ; married Wm.
Emerson, 1766), 44; see also P. B. Emer-
son and P. B. E. Ripley, grandmother
of RWE

Block, Marguerite B., New Church, The,
NY, cop. 1932

Blood, Thaddeiib., 221

''Blotting Book," series of MS journals
(Emerson)

Bo : Boston, Mass.

Boboli Gardens, Florence, 180

Bodleian^ Library, Oxford, 344

Boetie, Etienne de la, 79

Bohme, Jakob, 236, 288

Boileau, poetical works, 92

Bok, Edward, 503; Americanization, The,
NY, 1920

Boker, George, 466

Bologna, Italy, 182

Bonaparte, Joseph, 505

Bonaparte, Prince Napoleon, 413

Bonar, James, Moral Sense, London, NY,
1930

"Bonnie Dundee," 485

Borromeo, Carlo, 184

Bossuet, Jacqucs-Benigne, 90

"Boston," poem (Emerson), 489

Boston, Mass., i et passim; selectmen, 9

Boston, First Church in, 7-13, 15, 17, 18, 22,
26-30, 35, 40, 43, 55, 61, 74, IIQ, 123,
134, 137, 244, 504 ; "Declaration of Faith,"
100 ; "Record of Marriages in the First
Church," MS covering i8oi-present ;
"Records of First Church 8," MS (rec-
ords of the proprietors, 1808-1868,
partly fair copy, partly original) ; "Rec-
ords of the First Church in Boston. From
1630 to 1847," MS (fair copy) ; records
of the First Church in Boston, untitled
MS, covering 1786-present incompletely ;
"Records of the First Church in Boston,"
MS covering 1786-1815; records of the
First Church in Boston, untitled MS, cov-
ering 1630-1853 (includes records of bap-
tisms and of Penn legacy), 13; records
of the First Church in Boston, untitled
MS, including treasurer's accounts for
1784-1814

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Emerson's
speech at organization of, 445

Boston, School Committee, 26, 146, 152-153 ;
City of Boston . . . Committee . . .
Uniform Mode of Classification . . . Re-
port; "City of Boston School Commit-
tee 1792 to 1814," MS records; papers
(MS reports of subcommittees, etc.) ;
"Records of the School Committee of
Boston," MS records for 1815-1836;
Regulations . . . School Committee, 1830

Boston, Second Church in, 97, 128-142 pas-
sim, 151, 153-168 passim, 196, 198, 199,
205, 249, 269-270, 293; "Proprietors
Records," MS, covering 1804-1845; Sec-
ond Church in Boston, The, Commemo-
rative Services, Bo, 1900; "Treasurers
Receipt Book," MS, covering 1805-1842

Boston, Twelfth Congregational Church in,
210

Boston Athenaeum, 18, 94, 119, 142, 143, 144,
309, 492

Boston Common, 8, 20, 24, 32, 54

Boston fire of 1872, 461, 464, 479

Boston Harbor, 39, 329, 359, 411, 479, 492

"Boston Hymn" (Emerson), 418

Bostonians, 12, 16, 17, 34 38, 176, 179

Boston Library Society, 60, 76, 143

Boston Lyceum, 309, 310

"Boston Massacre," 45

Boston Philosophical Society : see Philo-
sophical Society, Boston

Boston Public Latin School, 31, 36, 37, 38,
40, 57, 58, 59, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 89,
102, 146, 153; Order of Performances
. . . August 25, 1815

Boston Public Latin School, RWE's MS
notes for speech on, 8 Nov 1876, 498

Boston Quarterly Review, The, 257, 259, 271

Boston Society of Natural History, 201

Boston Tea Party, 489

Boswell, James, 430; Life of Samuel John-
son, The, 144

botany, 82

Botta, Charlotte Lynch, 431, 434, 438

Boulogne, France, 189, 346

Boutwell, George S., 3&P

Bowdoin, Elizabeth, II, 12

Bowdoin, James, 10

Bowdoin essay, 80, 128

Bowdoin prize, 70, 74, 76, 78, 83

Bowdon, England, 478

Bowen, Francis, 242, 243, 323, 442

Bowling Green, Ky., 381

Bowring, John, 190, 191

Boylston prize, 78

BPLS : Boston Public Latin School

BPLS8Novi8?6: Boston Public Latin
School, RWE's MS notes for speech on,
8 Nov 1876

Bradford, Gamaliel, 57, 58

Bradford, George Partridge, 75 ,126, 129,
210, 211, 219, 232, 263, 291, 339, 379, 426

Bradford, Samuel (sheriff), 74

Bradford, Samuel, son of the sheriff, 24, 26,

558

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

37, 86, 481, 482, 493, 496; Some Inci-
dents, Phila., 1880

Bradford, Sarah Alden (married Emerson's
half uncle Samuel Ripley, 1818), 37; see
also S. A. B. Ripley

Bradford, William, 222

Bradlnc: see under Samuel Bradford, son
of the sheriff

Bradley, E. S., George Henry Boker, Phila.,
1927

Bradshaw's Monthly Railway and Steam
Navigation Gw.de, 334

Bradstreet, Anne, 49

"Brahma" (Emerson), 396, 434

Brahmans, 83, 280, 397 '

Bray, Charles, 359; Phases of Opinion and
Experience, London, 1885?; Philosophy
of Necessity, The, 356

Bray, Mrs. Charles, 356, 359

Brayton, Deborah, 199

Brazer, John, 68

Bremer, Fredrika, 387

Bridgen, Anna, 179, 180, 184

Bridgen, Miss, sister of Anna, 179, 180, 184

Briggs, L. V., Genealogies . . . Kent

Brigham, William, Address, An, 222

Bright, Henry Arthur, 413

Bright, John, 334

Brighton, Mass., 40

Brisbane, Albert, 288; Social Destiny of
Man, 287

Bristol, England, 351

Britain, 34, 52, 87, 206, 285, 324, 331, 341,
346, 357, 374, 393, 4*4, 4*5, 457, 478, 490

British, the, n, 28, 35, 39, 43, 45, IQ3, 221,
239, 243, 284, 285, 324, 326, 333, 334, 337,
346, 347, 355, 367, 426

British Isles, 457

British Museum, 191, 345

Broglie, Leonce- Victor, due de, 186

Broke, Philip, 34

Bromfield, Henry, 2

Bronte, Charlotte, Shirley, 371

Brook Farm, 289, 291, 292, 349, 392

Brookline, Mass., 145, 146

Brooklyn, N. Y., 296, 374, 380, 400, 423, 431,
435, 436, 438

Brooks, George, 437

Brougham and Vaux, Henry Peter Brough-
am, 1st Baron, 426

Brown, Charles, husband of Lucy Jackson
Brown, 220, 221

Brown, Francis, son of Lucy Jackson Brown,

220, 221, 291

Brown, Isabella Tilden, 404
Brown, Capt. John, 397, 401, 402, 403
Brown, Capt. John, family of, 402
Brown, Lucy Jackson (married Charles
Brown, 1820; died, 1868), sister of Lidian
Emerson, 214-225 passim, 231, 251, 254,
266, 270, 308, 311, 358, 439; see also Lucy
Jackson

Brown, Samuel, 338, 339, 340 ^
Brown, Simon, Pear Trees (with A. Stacy)

Brown, Sophia, daughter of Lucy Jackson
Brown, 220, 221

Brown, Thomas, 82, 91

Brown, William Steile, 165

Browne, Sir Thomas, Hydriotaphia, 147;
Religio Medici, 469

Browning, Robert, 315, 371, 378, 466, 474.
475, 476 ; Paracelsus, 299

Brownson, Orestes, 243, 257, 271, 284, 3^3 \
"Democracy and Reform," 259

Brownson s Quarterly Review, 323

Bruce, John, 338

Brugsch, Heinrich, 470; Mein Leben

Brutus, Marcus, 19

Bryant, William Cullen, 87, 244, 285, 287

Bryant festival of the Century Club, 426

Bryce, James, American Commonwealth,
The, 445

Buchanan, Edward Y., 459

Buchanan, James, 408, 459

Buckingham, J. T., Personal Memoirs

Buckminster, Joseph S., Sermon . . . at the
Interment of the Reverend William
Emerson, A, Bo, 1811

BuckS er: see under Joseph S. Buckminster

Buddhists, Indian, 350

Buffalo, N. Y., 380, 382, 402, 418, 445, 500

Bulfihch, Charles, 54, 86

Bulkeley, Edward, ancestor in 6th genera-
tion before RWE, 47

Bulkeley, Elizabeth : see Elizabeth B. Emer-
son

Bulkeley, Peter, ancestor in 7th generation
before RWE, 48; Gospel-covenant; or
the Covenant of Grace Opened, The, 47,

222

Bull, Ephraim, 361, 405, 430, 453

Bull, Ephraim, Jr., 453

Bull Run, 412

Bunker Hill, 46

Bunsen, Chevalier, 342

Bunyan, John, Pilgrim's Progress, The, 298

Burke, Edmund, 202, 212 ; Works, The, 214;

writings of, 92
Burke, James, 362
Burke, Michael, 437
Burlington, Vt., 154
Burns, Jean Armour, 194
Burns, Robert, 156, 194, 400; life of, 92
Burns, Robert, son of, 194
Burritt, Elihu, 397
Burroughs, John, 421, 449, 450, 493
Burton, Warren, 79, 126, 157; Cheering

Views
Bush, Emerson's home at Concord, 415, 423-

456 passim, 479-508 passim
Bussey, Benjamin, 18, 20
Butler, Frances Kemble, 342, 345
Butler, Joseph, 81, 82; Analogy, The, 103
Buttrick, Jonas, 221
Buzzards Bay, 396
Byfield, Mass., 75
Byron, George Noel Gordon Byron, 6th

Baron, 179, 203, 207, 239; Childe Ear-

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

559

oltfs Pilgrimage, 415; "L'Amitie est
1' Amour sans Ailes," 131 ; tragedies, 92

[C]

"C," MS journal (Emerson)

CabBlBkCalRWE: see calendar under J.
E. Cabot

CabCon: see "Emerson" under J. E. Cabot

CabLedgJEC: "Ledger. J. E. C," MS scrap-
book

CabM : see Memoir under J. E. Cabot

Cabot, Elizabeth Dwight, 487

Cabot, James Elliot, 306, 373, 412, 424, 442,
443, 454, 455, 485, 486, 487, 495~5o8 pas-
sim; calendar of Emerson's life to 1881
(in untitled MS blue-covered booklet) ;
"Emerson," MS (record of Cabot's con-
versations with and about Emerson in
1877 and 1878) ; "Essay on Freedom"
(Schelling, tr. Cabot), 308; "Immanuel
Kant," 296; Memoir of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, A; "Miss E. P. Peabody, July
I4J 1882," MS notes

Cabot, James Elliot, children of, 505

Cabot's "1833," MS journal of Emerson's
so labeled

Caesar, Julius, 153, 179, 202

Cairo, Egypt, 463, 465-466, 467, 468, 470

Cairo, 111., 381

Calabria, Italy, 471

Calcutta, India, 82

Caldani, Professor, 182

Caldwell, Capt, 330, 331

Caldwell, R. G., James A. Gar field

Calhoun, John C, 296

California, 382, 392, 414, 415, 438, 446-448,
500

California Trail, 417

Callander, Scotland, 193

Calton Hill, Edinburgh, 193

Calvary, 124

Calvert, George Henry, 106

Calvin, John, 99, 184, 332

Calvinism, 99, 100, 159, 230, 288

Calvinists, 10, 25, 99, 114, 216, 230, 436

Cambridge, England, town and university,

337, 355
Cambridge, Mass., 8, 17, 41, 62-67, 69-72,

84, 87, 92, 99, 103, 106-109, 116, 117, 119,

125, 134, 222, 255, 262, 268, 308, 367, 390,

4H, 485

Cambridge Common, 71
Cambridge Parnassus, 270
Cameron, John, 335, 336
Cameron, K. W., Emerson the Essayist.

Raleigh, N. C, 1945; Ralph Waldo

Emerson's Reading, Raleigh, N. C., 1941
Campbell, Mr., 476
Campbell, Thomas, Pleasures of Hope, The,

57, 60

Canada, 383, 385, 401, 402
Canadians, 400
Canandaigua, N. Y., 381, 385
Canby, Henry Seidel, Thoreau, Bo, 1939

Canova, Antonio, 178

Canterbury, Archbishop of, 190

Canterbury, England, 461

Canterbury, N. H., 125, 131, 141

Canterbury, part of Roxbury, Mass., 98, 109

Cape Cod, 9, 164, 364

Capitol, Washington, D. C., 39, 77, 296, 297,
49i, 498

Capitoline Museum, Rome, 178, 464

Capuchins, 173, 175

Caribbean Sea, 417

Carlisle, Earl of, 474

Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 191, 195, 332, 336, 341,
346, 353, 354, 492; New Letters, ed. T.
and A. Carlyle, London and NY, 1903

Carlyle, Mary, 507

Carlyle, Thomas, 130, 159, 180-197 passim,
215, 232, 235, 242, 250, 263, 271, 277, 284,
285, 297, 300, 304, 309, 310, 322-357 pas-
si™, 376, 377, 393, 394, 395, 400, 406, 421,
426, 442, 443, 448, 455, 456, 457, 460, 461,
474, 475, 476, 492, 496, 502, 507; "Char-
acteristics," 165, 207 ; Corn-Law Rhymes,"
207; correspondence with Emerson, 492
(see also under Correspondence) ; Crit-
ical and Miscellaneous Essays, 257;
French Revolution, The, 257 ; History of
Friedrich II, 441 ; Latter-day Pamphlets;
"Life of Robert Burns, The," 207; On
Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic
in History, 375; "Sartor Resartus" (in
Eraser's) , 206, 207, 237 ; Sartor Resartus,
207 ; "State of German Literature," 208 ;
Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Li-
brary Edition, London, 1869-1871

"Carlyle" (Emerson), 503

Carolina (i.e., South Carolina), 303

Carolinians, 119

Carpenter, Edward, 492; Days with Walt
Whitman, NY and London, 1906

Carpenter, Lant, 191

Carpenter, William B., 476

Carrara, Italy, 181

Carroll, John, Bishop, 10

Carter, Ann, 404

Carthaginians, 172, 173

CartoFrR: see under D. A. Wilson

Cary, Edward, George William Curtis, Bo
and NY, 1894

Cary, H., Memoir of the Rev. Henry Francis
Cary

Cary, Henry Francis, 183, 191

Cassius, 19

Castalia, 58

Castlereagh, Lady, 343

Castlereagh, Lord, 343

"Castles in the Air" (Emerson), 80

"Catalogue— of Books Read from the Date
December 1819— in the Order of Time,"
MS (Emerson), 85

Catania, Sicily, 173, *74

CatBksRead: MS "Catalogue— of Books
Read"

Catholic Church: see Roman Catholic
Church

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Catholic emancipation, 190

Catholicism, 10, 243, 291, 407

Catholics, 76, 499

Cato, Marcus Porcius (the Younger?), 205

Cato's soliloquy, 451

Catskill Mountains, 401

Cattle Show, at Concord, 362, 399, 412, 423,
430, 4^3

Catullus, 183

Cazenovia, N. Y., 385

CCE: Charles Chauncy Emerson

CCEJouFrags: see under C. C. Emerson

C-ECor: Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle
and Ralph Waldo Emerson, The

CEd: Centenary Edition (Emerson)

Centenary Edition The Complete Works of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward
Waldo Emerson, Bo and NY, 1903-1904

Centennial exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876,
496, 498

Centre Harbor, N. H., 141

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, Don Qui-
xote, 155, 217

CFPL : Concord Free Public Library, Con-
cord, Mass.

Chadwick, J. W., William Ellery Channing,
Bo and NY, 1903

Chambers, Robert, 339 ; Vestiges of the Nat-
ural History of Creation, 306, 338

Champlain, Lake, 39

Channing, Edward Tyrrel, 77, 80, 85; In-
augural Discourse, 1819, 78; Lectures,
1856, 78

Channing, Ellen Fuller, 254

Channing, Mary, 247

Channing, Walter, 248

Channing, William Ellery (1780-1842), 17,
86, 101, 103, 104, 119, 139, 145, 155, 191,
198, 230, 243, 244, 247, 254, 255, 270, 275,
504; "Dr Channing's Course of Study/*
MS, once owned by T. P. Doggett;
"Dr. Channing's List . . . Books for a
Theological Student," MS so endorsed
by Emerson, 103 ; Dudleian lecture, 103,
104

Channing, William Ellery (1818-1901), 233,
254, 276, 277, 295, 296, 298, 300, 307,
310, 323, 339, 360, 362, 378, 396, 405, 413.
416, 426, 448, 455, 494, 508; "Country
Walking/' 365 ; notebook for 1857-1864,
MS; Poems, 2d series, 312; "Poetry,"
MS ; ThoreaUj Bo, 1902 ; "To Henry/'
415 ; Wanderer, The, 449

Channing, William Henry, 244, 255, 378, 379.
443, 444, 461, 474, 476, 491, 504; Memoir
of William Ellery Channing, Bo, 1848;
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (with
J. F. Clarke and Emerson) ; "Reminis-
cences," MS (extracts, apparently, from
letters or journal for 1870 and 1877)

ChanThor: see under Wm. E. Channing

(1818-1901)

ChamNbk 57-64: see under W. E. Channing
(1818-1901)

chaplain, RWE as, 145, H6; WmE(f) as,

9, 12; WmE(grf) as, 45, 46
Chapman, John, 300, 309, 3*2, 332, 341, 351,

352, 353, 354
Chardon St., homes of Emerson in, 136, 141,

142, 147, 151, 157, 165 ; conventions in, 293

Charles , cousin of Emerson, 37

Charles V, of the Holy Roman Empire, 170

Charleston, S. C, 119-123

Charlestown, Mass., 43, 46, 49, 244

Charlottesville, Va,, 496, 497

Charron, Pierre, 329

Chartists, 342, 343

Charybdis, 174

ChasB : Charles Brown

Chase, Salmon Portland, 423

Chasles, Philarete, 328, 347

chastity, 347

Chateaubriand, Frangois-Rene, Vicomte de,

Chatel, Ferdinand, 186
Chatto & Windus, 486
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 238, 440, 493 ; Canterbury

Talcs, The, 89; College Chaucer, The,

ed. H. N. MacCracken, New Haven, etc.,

1913

Chauncy, Charles, 27, 28
Chelmsford, Mass., 48, 113, 114
Chelsea, London, 341, 460
chemistry, 9, 82, 91, 256
Cheney, John M., 73
Cherokee Indians, 266, 267
Chester, England, 460
Chesterfield, England, 334
Cheverus, Jean-Louis, 76
Chicago, 111., 382, 384, 385, 390, 402, 403, 4*8,

419, 427, 435, 446, 448, 449, 456
Chickering, 142
Child, Lydia Maria, 215, 304; Letters, ed.

J. G. Whittier and Wendell Phillips, 4th

ed., Bo, 1884

Chinatown, San Francisco, 446
Chinese, 299, 438, 446
Chinese embassy, 438
Chinese embassy banquet, Emerson's speech

at, MS, 438
Chippewas, 382
cholera, 162, 382, 463, 466
Chopin, Frederic, 354
Christ, 10, 105, in, 220, 229, 256
Christ Church, Oxford, 475
Christendom, 10, 170, 178
Christian Disciple, 1 he, 96, 97
Christian Examiner, The, 144, 242, 243, 257,

271, 304, 322, 323
Christianity 96, 99, 105, 107, no, III, 115,

118, 121, 152, 158-159, 160, 165, 177, 187,

226, 230, 231, 244, 268, 293, 304, 322, 335,

363, 377, 386, 424, 434, 435, 469, 494, 500,

503

Christian Monitor, The, 27
Christian Register, 93, 242
Christian Science, 504
Christmas, 26, 52, 125, 131, 134, 168, 312,

323, 335, 383, 464

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

561

Christy, Arthur, Orient in American Tran-
scendentalism, The, NY, 1932

ChronList: see under T. Scudder, 3d

Church, H. F. Bennett, 475

Church, Richard William, 475

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 30, 57, 58, 60, 99,
104, 156, 172, 173, 264, 408, de Amicitia

Cincinnati, O., 365, 380-381, 382, 383, 384,
395, 404

"Circles" (Emerson), 283

"Civilization at a Pinch" (Emerson), 411

Civil War, in U. S., 402, 408-428 passim,
430 et passim, 498

Civita Castellana, Italy, 180

CKN : Chas. King Newcomb

CKNNbk: "Copies" under C. K. Newcomb

Clahan, John, 483, 505

Clapp, merchant, 291

Clapp, William, 438; scrapbook, partly MS

Clarens, Switzerland, 184

Clarke, Edward H., 455

Clarke, James Freeman, 243, 273, 379, 486,
508 ; Goethe and Carlyle, article on, 208 ;
James Freeman Clarke Autobiography,
Diary and Correspondence, ed. E. E.
Hale, Boston and New York, 1891 ; Mem-
oirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (with W.
H. Charming and Emerson)

Clarke, John, 8, 27

Clarke, Samuel, 104, 144; theological writ-
ings, 92

Clarke, Sarah Freeman, 215, 276, 471

Clay, Henry, 367, 369

Clemens, S. L. : sec Mark Twain

Cleveland, Duchess of, 476

Cleveland, Duke of, 337, 476

Cleveland. 0., 380, 384, 391

Cliffs, the, Concord, 493

Clongh, Arthur Hugh, 327, 344~349, 357, 3°3,
369, 387, 393 394, 405, 4io, 412, 413, 477J
Emerson-dough Letters (part author) ;
Poems and Prose Remains, The, ed.
Blanche Clough, London, 1869

"Clubs" (Emerson), 400

clubs, Emerson's : see Harvard College clubs,
and also Saturday Club, Social Circle,
Social Club, Town and* Country Club,
Union Club

"CO," MS journal (Emerson)

Cobb, Phcbe? Farnham? 399

Cobden, Richard, 334, 335, 342

ColCcn: Columbian Ccntincl

Coleridge, Derwent, 340

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 146, 154, *59, 165,
171, 190, 191, 196, 197, 203, 206, 207, 208,
263, 318, 340, 357; Aids to Reflection,
143, 192; Bwgraphia Litcraria, 193, 239;
Friend, The, 143, 193

College de France (or College Royal de
France), 327, 328, 350; Programme, 187

college training of Emerson, 62-88, passim;
see also schooling

Collier, John Payne, 346

Collyer, Robert, 482, 506

Tolman, Henry, 37

Colombe, Anthony, 325, 362

Columbus, Christopher, 463

Columbus, 0., 391

Combe, George, 339; Constitution of Man,
The, 143

Commons, House of, 343, 345, 476

Commonwealth, The (with slight change of
title), Boston journal, 484, 485, 504

communism, 347, 371

"Compensation" (Emerson), 280, 281

compensation, doctrine of, 104, 115, 123, 151,
156, 158, 203, 281, 290, 319, 399, 406

Complete Works., The (Emerson) : see Cen-
tenary Edition

Compromise of 1850, 366

Con: Concord, Mass.

Concord, Mass., 2 et passim; assessors5 books,
MS (title varies) ; "Concord Town Rec-
ords," MS records of town meetings (title
varies from volume to volume), 222;
Concord town records, MS fair copy (ex-
cerpts ; owned by CFPL) from Vol. IV
of the original ; school committee, 228,
423, 431, 480; schools, Exhibition . . .
March i6th, 1861; selectmen, Report . . .
Expenses . . . to March 24, 1837

Concord, Mass., First Church in, 227, 229,
292 ; council of churches convened n Apr
1769, MS minutes of; "Covenant" of n
July 1776, MS, 45; records, MS cover-
ing 1738/9-1857, 222; "Records of the
First Church in Concord 1739 to 1857,"
MS fair copy (owned by CFPL)

Concord, N. H., 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 134,
141, 142, 150

Concord, N. H., Unitarian society in, 125,
129, 131, 133, 500

Concord Atheneum, 299, 419; "Concord
Atheneum," MS record book

Concord Fight, 25, 46, 203, 221, 222

Concord Free Public Library, Concord,
Mass., 487 ; Concord Free Public Library;
Concord Free Public Library Seventy-
fifth Anniversary

"Concord Hymn" (Emerson), 273, 274, 312,
321, 489

Concordia, Santa Cruz, 155

Concordians, 222, 293

"Concord L," MS journal (Emerson)

Concord Lyceum, 203, 229, 306, 397, 450, 488,
49 1 j 503; Concord Lyceum. Course of
1871 and '72; programs (printed an-
nouncements) ; "Record Book," MS, cov-
ering 1828-1859; "Records," MS, cover-
ing 1859-1881

Concord River, 45, 51, 209, 290, 298, 311,
430, 489

Concord School of Philosophy, 501, 502, 503

Concord Social Library, 229; "Records,"
MS; Social Library, certificate

Concord Soldiers Aid Society, list of mem-
bers, MS

Concord Temperance Society, 227

Concord Volunteer Relief Committee, 412

562

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Condorcet, Marquis de, 327

"Conduct of Life," course of lectures (Emer-
son), 382, 383, 386

Conduct of Life, The (Emerson), 405, 406

Confederate States of America, 408, 420, 429

ConFre: Concord Freeman (with slight
changes of style), Concord, Mass.

Confucius, 159, 236, 438

Congregationalism, 5, 9, 45

Congress, U. S., 425, 427

ConLyRecBk: see under Concord Lyceum

Connecticut, 77

Connecticut Valley, 99, 124, 141, 144

Constantinople, Turkey, 220, 288

Conway, Ellen Dana, 476

Conway, Moncure Daniel, 373, 374, 386, 387,
395, 404, 420, 444, 456, 461, 473-476, 480,
506; Autobiography, Bo and NY, 1904;
Emerson at Home and Abroad, Bo, 1882 ;
Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Conway, N. H., 161

Conway Aut: see under Moncure Conway

CooDw: see under G. W. Cooke

Cook, James, voyages of, 92

Cook, Joseph, 500, 503, 504

Cooke, George Willis, 504; Bibliography of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, A, Bo and NY,
1908 ; John Sullivan Dwight, Bo, 1898 ;
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bo, 1881

Cooley, L. C, Short Biography of the Rev.
John Cotton . . . and . . . Genealogy , A,
Batavia, N. Y., 1945

Coolidge, Charles, 223

Coolidge, John, 223

Coolidge Castle : see Coolidge House

Coolidge House, Emerson's home, 223, 224,
226, 227, 253, 256, 266, 415

Cooper, James Fenimore," 143, 219 ; Pioneers,
The ,93- Spy, The, 93

Cooper, Thomas, 343

Copley, John Singleton, 17

Cordelia, 345

Corey, D. P., History of Maiden, The, Mai-
den, Mass., 1899

Corinth, Greece, 172

Cork, Ireland, 331

Corneille, Pierre, 90

Cornwall, Barry; see B. W. Procter

Correspondence between John Sterling and
Ralph Waldo Emerson, A, ed. E. W.
Emerson, Bo and NY, 1897

Correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emer-
son and Herman Grimm, ed. F. W. Holls,
Bo and NY, 1903

Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The, ed. C. E.
Norton, Bo, 1883

Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and
Ralph Waldo Emerson . . . Supplemen-
tary Letters, The, ed. C. E. Norton, Bo,
1886

Cortona, Italy, 180
Cotton, Charles, 63
Cotton, John, 215

Cotton, Lucy, 215, 216 ; see also Lucy Cotton

Jackson

"Courage" (Emerson), 402
Cousin, Victor, 186, 187, 271 ; Cours de philo-

sophic, 156; Introduction to the History

of Philosophy (tr. Linberg), 278
Coventry, England, 356, 359
Coverley, Roger de, 2
Cowley, Abraham, 56, 261, 312; "Tree of

Knowledge, The," 63
Cowper, William, 55
Cowper, William Francis, 476
Craig, Mr., 338
Craigenputtock, 194, 206, 332
Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 276
Cranch, John, 179, 185
Crawford, Ethan Allen, 162
Crawshay, George, 337
Crawshay, Mrs. Robert, 474
Crete, 471

Cristoforo, Fra, 181
Croghan, Colonel, 58
Cromwell, Oliver, 191, 355
Cross, J. W., George Eliot's Life, Edin-

burgh and London, 1885
Crowe, Catherine Stevens, 338, 339
Crucifixion, sermon on (Emerson), 123
Crump, Doctor, 467
CS : Caroline Sturgis
CST : Caroline Sturgis Tappan
CTJ : Charles Thomas Jackson
Cuba, 147

Cudworth, Ralph, 8 1
"Culture" (Emerson), 384
Cummings, Jacob A., Introduction to An-

cient and Modern Geography, An, 58
Cunningham, Francis? 103
Curasao, 413

Curnex, 462, 463, 464, 469, 472
Curti, Merle, Learned Blacksmith, The
Curtis, George William, 291, 296; Early

Letters, ed. G. W. Cooke, NY and Lon-

don, 1898; oration at Concord, 489
Curtis, Loring Pelham, 59
Curtis, Moses, 200
Gushing, Caleb, To the Members of the

Senior Class, 84
Cushman, Charlotte, 140
Cutler, Pliny, 157, 200, 250
Cuvier, Georges, 187, 188, 201
Cyane, creek and fountain, 172, 173
Cyfartha Castle, 474, 476

"D," MS journal (Emerson)

14 A," MS journal (Emerson)

DAB: Dictionary of American Biography

Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 116; Two Years
before the Mast, 392

Danes, 155, 179, 323-324

Danish language, 501

Dante Alighieri, 119, 183, 191, 320, 444, 463;
Divine Comedy, The, 300; "New Life,
The/' MS translation by Emerson, 300,

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

563

370; "Paradise," tr. Gary; Vision, The,

tr. Gary ; Vila, nuova, 300, 370
Dark Ages, 96
Darlington, England, 337
Dartmouth College, 421
Darwin, Charles, 345 ; Descent of Man, The,

450 ; On the Origin of Species, 403, 450
Darwin, Erasmus, Zoonomia, 143
Darwinism, 484
Daubeny, Charles G. B., 344
Davenport, la., 385
Davidson, Edith, 415
Davis, Abel, 221
Davis, Elizabeth, 218; see also E. D. Bliss

and E. D. B. Bancroft
Davis, Paulina W., 370
Davy, Humphry, 171
Davy, John, 171
Davy, Margaret Fletcher, 171
Dawson, George, 336
"Days" (Emerson), 396, 434
Declaration of Independence, 74, 499
Deerfield, Mass., 124
Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 155
Deity, 96, 239, 357
Delavigne, Casimir, Enfants d'&douard, Les,

186
democracy, n, 204, 285, 302, 303, 310, 331,

377

Democratic Republican, 146
Democrats, 216, 259, 260, 302, 304, 408, 427
Demosthenes, 105
DcmRcv: United States Magazine, and

Democratic Review, The
Dendera, Egypt, 470
depravity, doctrine of, 9
De Quincey, Thomas, 192, 193, 338, 339, 340,

474

De Quincey, daughters of, 339

Derby, England, 334, 335

Desatir, The, 495

Descartes, Rene, 30

Desenzano, Italy, 183

DCS Moines, la., 435

"Destiny" (Emerson), 316

Detroit, Mich., 384, 402, 419, 431, 445

Devonshire, England, 507

DeVoto, Bernard, Mark Twain's America

Dewey, John, 264

Dewey, Louisa Farnham, 397

Dewey, Orville, 124, 192, 199, 285

DGH : D. G. Haskins

Diadem, The, 323

Dial, a new, 309

Dial, The, Boston, 148, 231, 275-278, 288,
295-296, 298, 300, 305, 309, 3io, 312, 315,
321, 324, 333, 364, 370, 373

Dial, The, Cincinnati, 404

Dicey, Edward, 473, 474

Dickens, Charles, 330, 346, 347, 35*; Nich-
olas Nickleby, 31; Oliver Twist, 260

Dickson, Nancy, 23, 24

Diogenes Laertius, 78; Lives of Eminent
Philosophers

Dion, 172, 178

Dionysius, 171, 172

Diotima, 241

"Dirge" (Emerson), 43, 51, 321

"Discourse at Middlebury College," 22 July
t 1845 (Emerson), 307

Disraeli, Benjamin, 490

"Dissertation on the Character of Socrates,
A," MS (Emerson), 78, 80

"Dissertation on the Present State of Eth-
ical Philosophy," MS (Emerson), 83

Divine Mind, 239, 278

Divine Providence, 429, 443

Divine Reason, 239

Divinity, the, 118, 123, 246

Divinity Hall, Harvard, 119, 124-129, 136,
m 267, 268

Divinity School address, originally called
An Address Delivered before the Senior
Class (Emerson), 267, 268, 269, 270, 271
272, 273, 434, 488

Dixon, 111., 391

"DL," MS journal (Emerson)

"DO," MS journal (Emerson)

Doctor of Laws, Emerson's degree of, 432,

435

Doherty, Hugh, 347

"Domestic Life," lecture or chapter (Emer-
son)^ 24, 333, 335, 338, 354, 404

"Domestic Life," MS lecture (Emerson)

Donizetti, Gaetano, Lucia di Lammcrmoor,

463

Donne, John, 56, 261, 312

Dorchester, Mass., 39, 216, 217, 218

Dorr, 'William Bradley, 71

Doune, Scotland, 193

Dracopoli, a student, 180

Drake, F. S., Town of Roxbury, The, Bo,
1905

Drake, Samuel Adams, Old Landmarks and
Historic Personages of Boston

DrakeRox: see under F. S. Drake

"Dreamings" (Emerson), 132

Dresden, Germany, 107

DrHE : Haven Emerson, grandnephew of
RWE

Drummond, Mrs., 342

Drury, Emily Mervine, 381, 412

DrWEC: Wm. E. Channing (1780-1842)

Duchesne, Joseph, 39

Dufief, N. G., Nature Displayed, 216

Dumas, Alexandre, pere, 330, 347 ; Tour de
Nesle, La, 186

Dumfries, Scotland, 194, 195

Dumfriesshire, Scotland, 193

Dundee, Scotland, 340

Dunscore, Scotland, 194

Durham, England, 477

Durham, County of, England, 49

Diirr's Collection of Standard American Au-
thors, 391

Duyckinck, Evert, 309 ; Cyclopaedia of Amer-
ican Literature, NY, 1856 (with George
L. Duyckinck)

Dwight, John S., 244, 256, 392

"Dying Gladiator," 178

564

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

[E]

"E," MS journal (Emerson)

"Each and All" (Emerson), 312, 314

"Each in All" (Emerson), 273; see also

"Each and All"

Early Curt: see under G. W. Curtis
Early SClub: see under E. W. Emerson
East, the, of U. S,, 382, 449
East Boston, Mass., 39
EatH&A: see under Moncure Conway
EBE : Edward Bliss Emerson
Ebers, Georg, 468; Geschichte meines Le-

bens, Die

ECitCon: see under Hoeltje
Eclectic Review, The, 377
EdBu: "Edmund Burke"
Eddy, Asa G., 504

Eddy, Mary Baker, Science and Health, 504
EdEv or EEv : Edward Everett
Edfu, Egypt, 469
Edgeworth, Maria, 60
Edinburgh, Scotland, 185, 192, IQ3, 324, 337-

340, 379-380, 477, 478
Edinburgh, University of, 193, 336, 339, 478
Edinburgh philosophy, 82
Edinburgh Review, The, 144, 207, 426
EdithE: Edith Emerson
"Editors' Address," in The Massachusetts

Quarterly Revie^iv (Emerson), 324
"Editors to the Reader, The" (Emerson),

276
"Edmund Burke," MS lecture (Emerson),

202, 212, 214

education, address on (Emerson), 253
"Education" (Emerson), 498
Edwards, Jonathan, 28, 50; Careful and

Strict Enquiry into . . . Freedom of Will,

A, 30

EEF: Edith Emerson Forbes
figlise Catholique Franchise, 186
Egypt, 59, 457, 458, 459, 461, 463, 472, 475,

479, 481; Emerson in, 1872-1873: 464-

47i

"Egypt," MS (Emerson), 468-469
Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, higher criticism
of the Bible, 107; lectures on Matthew,
Mark and Luke, 105 ; investigations of
the origins of the gospels, 107; works,
152

Eichthal, Gustave d', 180, 189

EinC: see under E. W. Emerson

"E. L.," MS verse book (Emerson)

Elgin, 111., 382

Eliot, Charles William, 441

Eliot, George, 355, 356, 474, 475, 476

Eliot, William G., 383

Elizabeth, of England, 49, 145

Elizabeth Islands, 396

EljzH : Elizabeth Hoar

EHzHas : Elizabeth Raskins

EllenE : Ellen Emerson, daughter of RWE

Ellen's Isle, 194

Ellis, Arthur B., History of the First Church
in Boston

Ellis, Cornelius, 168, 169, 170

EllVer: MS "Ellen's Verses" (see under
Ellen T. Emerson, wife of RWE)

"Eloquence," lecture (Emerson), 333, 338

"Eloquence," poem (Emerson), 58

Elssler, Fanny, 190, 294, 295

Elssler, Therese, 190

Elze, Friedrich Karl, 391

emancipation of slaves, 409, 416, 417, 493

Em-CloughLct: Emerson-dough Letters

Emerson, Annie Keyes (married E. W.
Emerson, 1874), RWE's daughter-in-
law, 483 ; see also Annie Keyes

Emerson, B. 1C, Ipswich Emersons, The,
Bo, 1900

Emerson, Charles, nephew of RWE, 439, 472

Emerson, Charles Chauncy (1808-1836),
brother of RWE, 23, 51, 52, 96, 102, 112,
113, 116, 118, 124, 128, 129, 136-167 pas-
sim, 198, 201-208 passim, 214, 221-230
passim, 237, 238, 251, 258,^ 266, 321, 413;
journal fragments, MS; "Leaf from 'A
Voyage to Porto Rico,' A," 231 ; "Notes
from the Journal of a Scholar," 231, 276

Emerson, Edith (born, 1841 ; married, 1865),
daughter of RWE, 294, 297, 307, 358,
360-363, 395, 410, 412, 415, 420, 424, 425,
430; see also Edith E. Forbes

Emerson, Edward (1670-1743), great -great-
grandfather of RWE, 13, 49
Emerson, Edward Bliss ( 1805-1834), brother
of RWE, 30, 33, 4i, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 70,
75, 76, 78, 92, 109, 112, 114, 116, u8, 119,
124, 127-131, 136, 137, 142, 143, 147, 153-
158, 163, 1 66, 189, 203, 205, 206, 258, 266,
321, 413 ; "Advancement of the Age, The,"
102; "Encouragement of a Sound Lit-
erature, The," MS, 10 1; "Holy & happ>
stand," MS, on wooden panel, probably
by EBE, 137; JouiSjf-H (MS bundle of
19 journal leaves sewed together), 127;
"Last Farewell, The," 164, 276 ; notes,
MS, on his voyage to St. Croix and on
his life there and in Porto Rico (bundles
of small leaves ; first bundle is labeled
"Notes before & on arrival at St Croix"
and the remainder of them arc lettered
from B to M, and Z), 155; "Oration in
English by Edward B. Emerson," MS
commencement speech, 25 Aug 1824 (sec
"Advancement" above) ; "Scraps of my
Journal &c in Europe— 1826," MS, 116
Emerson, Edward Waldo (1844-1930), son
of RWE, 299, 358, 360, 362, 363, 395, 405,
411, 414, 415, 417, 422, 425, 432, 434, 437,
439, 444, 445, 446, 452, 454, 456, 460, 461,
479, 480, 483, 484, 485, 491, 503, 504, 505,
507; autobiographical sketch, MS, on
blank form Social Circle. (1783.) Mem-
bers3 Lives; Early Years of the Saturday
Club, The, Bo and NY, 1918; Emerson
in Concord, Bo and NY, 1889 (earlier
printed as "Memoir of Ralph Waldo
Emerson," Memoirs of Members of the
Social Circle in Concord, 2d sen, 2d pt,

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

565

1888) ; Essays, Addresses and Poems, ed.
Raymond Emerson, 1930

Emerson, Elizabeth (wife of Thomas),
RWE's grea t-great-great-great-grand-
mother, 49

Emerson, Elizabeth Bulkeley, ancestor of
RWE in the fifth generation before his,
49

Emerson, JEllen Louisa Tucker (married,
1829; died 1831), ist wife of RWE, 142-
163 passim, 200, 252; "Ellen's Verses,"
MS book containing copies of Ellen's
poems in Emerson's hand, 148; rhyming
journal of trip to Philadelphia, MS, part-
ly by RWE, 144-145; verse book and
journal, MS, first used by G. W. Tucker,
147-148 ; "Violet, The," 148 ; see also E.
L. Tucker

Emerson, Ellen Tucker (1839-1909), daugh-
ter of RWE, 251, 252, 297, 323, 358, 360,
362, 363, 390-400 passim, 411, 412, 415,
420, 424, 426, 430, 432-441, 443-446, 448,
449, 451-456, 458, 460-480, 483-501, 503-
507 ; "Ellen Emerson's journal," MS, not
entirely in one hand; "Life of Lidian
Emerson," MS (pp. 1-109 are written on
what are now loose leaves ; the remaining
pages, ending with 384, are contained in
six notebooks marked as Vols. III-VIII ;
some dates of the writing of the life are
indicated by Ellen— 25 July 1896, on p.
211, and Sept 1896, on p. 306) ; "Life of
Lidian Emerson," typescript (in three
loose-leaf notebooks ; pp. 1-35 contain
matter not in the original manuscript) ;
LongLet: MS EllenE to LidianE, EEF,
and "all my friends," 23 Oct-2 Nov 1872
(long letter written on board the Wyo-
ming) ; "What I Can Remember about
Father," MS notebook (p. i dated 7 Apr
1902, p. 44, 7 Aug 1908 ; narrative breaks
off abruptly at p. 49)

Emerson, George Barrell, 2d cousin of RWE,
75, 86, 89, 90, 161 ; Reminiscences of an
Old Teacher, Bo, 1878

Emerson, John Clarke (1799-1807), brother
of RWE, 8, 21, 26

Emerson, John Haven, nephew of RWE, 439

Emerson, Joseph of Byfield, Mass., 75

Emerson, Joseph of Maiden, great-grand-
father of RWE, 13; diary, MS, 48, 49,
330

Emerson, Joseph of Mendon, great-great-
great-grandfather of RWE, 49

Emerson, Lidian Jackson (married, 1835 J
died, 1892) 2d wife of RWE, 223-226,
228, 229, 231, 234-237, 251, 252, 255, 259-
262, 266, 270, 284, 288-291, 294, 307, 308,
311, 330-369 passim, 378-462 passim, 480,
482, 483, 494, 499, 501, 505, 508; see
also Lydia Jackson

Emerson, Mary Caroline (1811-1814), sister
of RWE, 28, 38

Emerson, Mary Moody, great-grandmother
of RWE, 13, 48, 49 ; see also Mary Moody

Emerson, Mary Moody (1774-1863), pa-
ternal aunt of RWE, 4, 5, 21-68 passim,
80-128 passim, 135, 136, 143, 144, 149.
154-167 passim, 199, 206, 221-230 passim,
237, 253, 259, 270, 272, 283, 284, 286, 321,
344, 358, 364, 399, 412, 413, 420, 445, 45 1 1
sketch of, 24-25 ; articles in The Monthly
Anthology, 25; journal, MS, 25

Emerson, Nathaniel, 49, 50

Emerson, P. H., Criticism of 'The Ipswich
Emersons,' A; English Emersons, The,
London, 1898

Emerson, Phebe Bliss (married Wm. Emer-
son, 1766; married Ezra Ripley, 1780),
grandmother of RWE, 45, 46; see also
Phebe Bliss and P. B. E. Ripley

Emerson, Phebe Ripley (1798-1800), sister
of RWE, 6, 8, 30

Emerson, Ralph, 2d cousin of RWE, 86?

89, 185

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882) : see
separate entries for events of his life, his
special interests, his ideas, his books, etc.

Emerson, Rebecca Waldo, great-great-grand-
mother of RWE, 13

Emerson, Robert Bulkeley (1807-1859),
brother of RWE, 20, 30, 41, 61, 86, 113,
200, 364, 400

Emerson, Ruth Haskins (married, 1796;
died, 1853), mother of RWE, I, 6, 8, 13,
14, 20-43 passim, 52-76 passim, 86, 89, 90,
98, 100, 102, 103, 109, no, 116, 123, 124,
127, 128, 135, 136, 145, H7, 149, 151, 159,

163, 164, 1 68, 198, 200, 208, 209, 212, 214,

221, 223, 228, 311, 330, 362, 363; "May
12. 1811. Died William Emerson," MS
prayer, 30 ; memorandum book, MS, with
printed label of Thos. Williams, London
(entries mainly by RHE) ; "Notes," MS
memoranda covering sketchily the years
1816-1852 ; prayer at death of her daugh-
ter Phebe, MS, 8, 30; precepts, MS, 6;
see also Ruth Haskins

Emerson, Susan Haven, wife of RWE's
brother William, 253, 415, 439

Emerson, Thomas, great-great-great-great-
grandfather of RWE, 13, 49, 50

Emerson, Waldo (i734~I735)> granduncle
of RWE, 13

Emerson, Waldo (1735-1774), granduncle of
RWE, 13

Emerson, Waldo (1836-1842), son of RWE,
231, 251, 294, 301, 321, 508

Emerson, William (1743-1776), grandfather
of RWE, I, 20, 26, 44-46, 48, 49, 5i> 104,

154

Emerson, William (1769-1811), father of
RWE, 1-31, 35, 43, 44, 47, 49, 54, 60,
65, 70, 76, 83, 104, 112, 119, 124, 134,
137, 146, 1 60, 244, 283, 504; "Catalogue
of Books," MS; Discowse . . . Boston
Female Asylum, September 20, 1805, A;
Historical Sketch of the First Church in
Boston, An, 28, 30 ; "Journal and Common-
placebook," No. I, MS, 1-4 9, *3 ; "Jour-

566

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

nal & Commonplace Book," No. 2, MS
(has added notes by RWE and new title
"Dialling") ; "Number of Church Pray-
ers, A," MS ,* Oration . . . July 5, 1802,
An, Q, ii ; oration for 19 Apr 1776, MS
draft ; Piety and Arms, 7 ; Selection of
Psalms and Hymns, A (ed.), 22, 28;
Sermon . , . after the Interment of
Madam Elisabeth Bowdoin, 1803 ; Ser-
mon . . . March 2, 1803, at the Ordina-
tion of . . . Thomas Beede, A; Sermon,
on . . . Peter Thacher . . . Dec. 31, 1802,
A; sermons, 9; "Thursday lectures/' 28

Emerson, William (1801-1868), brother of
RWE, 8, 19, 20, 29-42 passim, 55, 56, 58,
6 1, 62, 68-76 passim, 89, 90, 91, 98-134
passim, 142, 143, 152, 157, 160-169 passim,
205, 206, 210, 211, 214, 230, 238, 245, 249,
251, 253, 258, 270, 285, 287, 290, 362, 364,
390, 400, 401, 404, 413, 4*5, 431, 436, 439J
lectures on German literature, 123

Emerson, William (1835-1864), nephew of
RWE, 413

Emerson, William Ralph, nephew of G. B.
Emerson, 454

Emerson-Clough Letters (Emerson and A.
H. Clough), ed. H. F. Lowry and R. L.
Rusk, Cleveland, 1934

Emerson family, 2 et passim

Emerson's Orations to tfa Modern Atheni-
ans; or, Pantheism (Civis), 338

Emerson St, name at first proposed for Con-
cord street named for Thorean, 490

Empedocles, 173, 178

EmStanLib: Standard Library Edition of
The Works (Emerson)

Enfield, William, history of philosophy, 30

England, 11, 22, 47, 49, 119, 202, 228, 257,
279, 280, 284, 295, 297, 298, 315, 324-
330 passim, 347, 349, 358, 362, 365, 369,
374 377, 383, 387, 393, 394, 395, 412-425
passim, 455, 456, 457, 466, 501 ; Emerson
in, 1833: 189-192, 195-197; 1847-1848:
331-337, 340-346, 351-357; 1872: 460-
461; 1873: 473-477, 478
England" (Emerson), 379, 383

England, Church of, 177, 191, 333, 357, 395

English, the, 17, 67, 165, 176, 177, 179, 182,
183, 324, 346, 351, 354, 394, 395J see also
England

English Channel, 346, 350

English language, 30, 34, 56, 155, 239, 386,
413, 459, 462, 463, 472

English literature, 82, 180, 219, 329, 395

"English Literature" (title varies), ten MS
lectures, course of 1835-1836 (Emerson),
238-239

English Traits (Emerson), 221, 330, 379,
^ 386, 390, 392, 393-395
Enlightenment, the, 25
enthusiasm, history of, 144
Epictetus, 143, 155
Episcopalians, 5, 26
EPP : Elizabeth P. Peabody
Er, 241

Erie, Lake, 35, 380
Erminia, flower girl, 180
Erskine, Thomas (1788-1870), Internal Evi-
dence for the Truth of Revealed Religion,

92
Espinasse, Francis, 336, 351, 353; Literary

Recollections, NY 1893
Essais de philosophic americaine (Ernerson,

tr. and ed. fimile Montegut), Paris, 1851,

386
Essays, first series (Ernerson), 278-285, 286,

297, 300, 301, 304, 328, 391
Essays, first or second series (Emerson),

324, 326, 327, 337, 356
Essays, second series (Emerson), 300-304,

305, 3.09, 374, 391

essay-writing, Emerson's early attempts at,
57, 58, 76, 80, 85, 95, et passim

Essex Junction, Vt, 438

Essex St., Emerson home in, 63, 76

Este, Italy, 182

Este, Villa d', 250

ETEVer: "ETE Verses," MS in Emerson's
hand (some verses are possibly by Ellen,
his 1st wife, but many are his own)

EtheE: see under K. W. Cameron

ethics, 105, 246, 247, 364

"Etienne de la Boece" (Emerson), 319

Etna, Mt, 171, 173, 174, 471

Eton, England, 355, 476

Euganean Hills, 182

Euripides, 155

Europe, n et passim; see also England,
France, Italy, Malta, Scotland, Sicily, and
Switzerland for Emerson's travels in Eu-
rope

Europeans, 171, 326, 502

Euryalus, 37

Evangelists, the, 163

Evans, Mary Ann : see George Eliot "

Evansville, Ind., 381

Evarts, William M., 420

Evelyn, John, Kalcndarium Hortcnsc, 305

Everett, Alexander Hill, Europe, 92

Everett, Edward, 68, 76, 78, 83, 101, 105, 112,
124, 266, 284, 366, 367 ; introductory lec-
ture on Greece, 77 ; Synopsis . . . Greek
Literature, 79

Everett, John, Oration, An, 83

Everson, Ida G., George Henry Calvert

evil, problem of, 95, 247, 442

evolution, theory of, 105, 187-189, 246, 300,
345 J see also Lamarck and Darwin

EWE : Edward Waldo Emerson

EWF: Edward Waldo Forbes

Exeter, N. H., 73

"Experience," _essay (Emerson), 301-302

EzR: Ezra Ripley, Emerson's stepgrand-
father

[F]

FaBi : see The Holy Bible, Oxford 1770
"Fame," tapestry of, 368
FanHas: Fanny Haskins

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

567

Faraday, Michael, 341
Faribault, Jean Baptiste, 432
Faribault, MiniL, 432

"Farming," Cattle Show address (Emer-
son), 399

Farnham, William, 82
Farqtthar, Miss, 464, 466, 470
Farrar, John, 88
"Fate," in The Conduct of Life (Emerson),

406
"Fate," later called "Destiny" (Emerson),

316

Father (God), 38, ioo
Fayal, 440

Federalist, The (Hamilton, Jay, and Madi-
son), 82
Federalists, 14, 22, 34, 39, 65, 146, 153, 216,

302

Federal St., 18 ; Emerson home in, 86, 87, 97
Federal Street Church, 86
Fellows, Charles, 345
Felton, Cornelius C., 255, 284
Fenelon, Francois de Salignac, 90, 159, 164
Ferguson, Alfred, 503, 504
Ferney, France, 184
Ferrara, Italy, 182

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 206, 208, 371, 478
fiction, reading of, by Emerson, 93 et pas-
sim; writing of, by Emerson, 94
Field, Cyrus W., 476
Fields, Annie Adams, 440, 451, 487 ; Authors

and Friends, Bo and NY, 1896
Fields, James T., 433, 441, 45*, 487
Fields An: see iwder Annie Fields
Fillmore, Millard, 367, 454
finances of Emerson and his family, 7 et
passim; especially, 30, 64-65, 69, 70, 74,
76, 108-109, et passim, and especially 133,
157, 199-7200, 224, 250; later references,
passim; importance of inheritance for his
career, 251 ; see also poverty
Fire Island, 378
Fisher, George, 442, 443
Fiske, John, 442
Fitchburg Rail Road, 362, 473
Flaccus : see Horace
Fletcher, John, works, 143
Flint, Thomas, 48
Flinter, George D., 155
Flint's Pond, 325
Florence, Italy, 93, 116, 180-182, 183, 185,

202, 462, 463, 472
Florida Terr., 121, 147
Flower, Edward F., 356 ; and family, 477
Flume, the, White Mts., 489
"F No I," MS journal (Emerson)
Foley, Margaret, 471
Foligno, Italy, 180
Folkestone, England, 351
Follensby Pond, 398

Forbes, Edith Emerson (married W. H.
Forbes, 1865; died, 1929), daughter of
RWE, 430, 431, 432, 435, 436, 437, 439,
444, 445, 446, 448, 449, 451, 452, 461, 483,
485, 486, 487, 491, 492, 495, 501, 505;

childhood memories of RWE, untitled
MS of ten pages, beginning "Grandma
used to tell"

Forbes, John Murray, 382, 396, 426, 446;
Letters and Recollections, ed. Sarah
Forbes Hughes, Bo and NY, 1899
Forbes, Margaret P., 218
Forbes, Ralph Emerson, grandson of RWE,

432, 470

Forbes, Sarah Swain, 401
Forbes, William Hathaway (1840-1897),
Emerson's son-in-law, 414, 430, 431, 432,
439, 446, 453, 456, 470, 479, 485, 505
Forbes family, 398, 444, 482
ForbesLetRec: see under J. M. Forbes
Foreign Review, The, 207
Forest Essays, i.e., Essays, 1st series (Emer-
son), 278

Forget me not, 130
Forster, John, 342, 353
Forster, Wm. E., 346, 347, 348 ; family of,

476

Forth, river, Scotland, 193
Fort Laramie, 417
Fort Sumter, 409-410
"Fortune of the Republic," MS lecture of

Dec 1863 (Emerson), 495
Fortune of the Republic (Emerson), 495
"Fortune of the Republic, The" (Emerson),

422-423, 495

Fortus, hero of Emerson s poem, 38
Fourier, Charles, 287, 288, 306
Fourierism, 288, 289
Fourth of July, 20, 185, 255, 274, 363, 369,

372, 397

Fowler, Mrs., 189
Fox, Caroline, 285
Fox, George, 164, 202, 212
Fox, W. J.} 191

FraJouEx: see under Convers Francis
FraM: Eraser's Magazine
France, 14, 22, 76, 87, 121, 218, 280, 306, 325,
327-329, 338, 342, 343, 357, 377, 386, 394,
416, 421, 457, 459, 501 ; Emerson in, 1833:
184-189; 1848: 346-351; 1872: 461-462 ',
1873: 472-473

"France" (Emerson), 351, 391
"France or Urbanity," MS lecture (Emer-
son) ; cf. 35i

Francis, Convers, 243, 247, 259, 272, 369, 397,
399; "Extracts from the Journal of C.
Francis," MS (in two parts) containing
passages copied by Abby B. Francis from
her father's journal
Franco-Prussian War, 444, 459, 461
Franklin, Benjamin, 119, 153,280,393; Com-

plete Works, The, 92
"Franklin one night stopped at a public inn,"

19
Franklin Place, Emerson's homes in 76, 86,

198
Franqueville, Comte de, Premier siecle de

I'lnstitut de France, Le
Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 475? 478
Eraser's Magazine, 164, 206, 207

568

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freeport, 111., 391

Free Religious Association, 434, 500

Free Soil Party, 366, 367, 309

Free Trade banquet, 335

French, the, 5, ", 37, 67, 121, 122, 156, 163,
164, 179, 184, 185, 329, 346, 347, 350, 351,
394 413, 462, 464, 472

French, Allen, Day of Concord and Lexing-
ton, The, Bo, 1925

French, Daniel Chester, Emerson, bust of,
501; "Minute Man," 489, 501

French Academy, 347

French language, 17, 56, 79, 90, 106, 129, 131,
135, 136, 155, 185, 1 86, 198, 212, 216, 218,
300, 326, 413, 46i, 463, 50i

French literature, 79, 80

French Revolution, n, 203, 291

French revolution of 1848, 328, 341, 343, 348,
349

French Revolution, The, review of (Emer-
son), 257

French theater, London, 346

Freneau, Philip, "Beauties of Santa Cruz,
The," ^ 155

Freud, Sigmund, 287

Friends : see Quakers

"Friendship" (Emerson), 282, 301, 315, 401

friendship, 116, 131, 158, 282, 319

Friends of Universal Reform, 293

Frisbie, Levi, 82, 96, 118 ; Inaugural Address
. . . November 5, 1817 .... Harvard
University, 81 ; Collection of the Miscel-
laneous Writings of Professor Frisbie,
A, 8 1, 92; review of Adam Smith's The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, 81

Frost, Barzillai, 255

Frothingham, Nathaniel Langdon, 70, 100,
137, 244

Frothingham, O. B., George Ripley, 5th ed.,

Bo, 1886
Frothingham, Paul R., Edward Everett, Bo

and NY, 1925
Froude, James Anthony, 344, 345, 377, 457,

473, 474, 476
Fruitlands, 297, 298, 362
Fryeburg, Me., 161
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 366, 367, 368,

372

''Fugitive Slave Law, The," address at Con-
cord (Emerson), 367
''Fugitive Slave Law, The," address at New

York (Emerson), 198, 369
Fuller, Ellen, 234, 254

Fuller, Margaret (Sarah Margaret), 208,
215, 234, 235, 252, 254, 260, 266, 275, 276,
282, 289, 291, 294, 296, 299, 300, 304, 310,
322, 327, 338, 350, 358, 379, 459, 505 J "De
la Litterature americaine" ; Goethe, pro-
jected life of, 253 ; "Great Lawsuit, The/'
295 ; Papers on Literature and Art, Lon-
don, 1846, 328 ; "Romaic and Rhine Bal-
lads," 295 ; Roman Revolution, book on.
378; "Short Essay on Critics, A," 276;
Summer on the Lakes, 298; Woman in
the Nineteenth Century, 370

Fuller family, 379

Furness, William H., 23, 24, 32, 38, 59, 123,
145, 368, 369, 373, 48i, 482, 493, 496, 504,
508; Records of a Lifelong Friendship
(correspondence of Emerson and W. H.
Furness), ed. H. H. Furness, Bo and
NY, 1910

Furnesses, the, 488

[G]

Gaetano, 174

Galena, 111., 382

Galileo, 463

Gannett, Ezra Stiles, 152, 153, 198; "Address

to Socr. at Ordination of ... Ralph

Waldo Emerson . . . March n, 1829,"

MS, 137
Gannett, W. C, Ezra Stiles Gannett; "Ralph

Waldo Emerson"
Garda, Lago di, 183
Gardner, John Lowell, 59, 67
Garfield, James A., 385
Garrison, John, 325
Garrison, Wm. Lloyd, 228, 303, 366, 390, 410,

487
Gasparin, Agenor de, Etats-Unis en 1861,

Les, 413
Gay, Martin, 85
Gay-Lussac, Joseph-Louis, 187
Gehenna, 89
Geneva, Lake of, 184
Geneva, Switzerland, 184
"Genius," lecture (Emerson), 411
Geniiis and Character of Emerson, The, ed.

F. B. Sanborn, Bo, 1885
"Genius of the Age," lecture (Emerson), 338
Genoa, Italy, 462, 463
geography, 58, 91
Geological Club, London, 345
Geological Society, London, 345
geology, 82

George, Lake, 154, 398
"George Fox," MS lecture (Emerson), 202,

212

Georgia, 266
Gerando, Joseph-Marie (or Marie-Joseph)

de, 187 J Histoire comparec dcs systemes

de philosophic, 143

Germanic languages and literatures, 328
German language, 105, 106, 107, 108, 165,

181, 207, 219, 235, 236, 252, 256, 310, 393,

472, 501, 502
German literature, 123, 129, 130, 159, 165,

206, 208, 219, 329
German philosophers and philosophy, 83, 155,

206, 208, 242, 243, 271, 272, 304, 383, 444,

502
Germans, 75, 81, 115, 116, 159, 163, 179, 203,

336, 391, 393, 502
German script, 393
Germany, 101, 105-108, 171, 192, 254, 280,

295, 349, 371, 391, 412, 421, 441, 456, 459.

500, 501
GFo: MS "George Fox"

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

569

"GH," MS journal (Emerson)

Giardini, Sicily, 174

Gibbon, Edward, 340; History of the De-
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The,
92, 96, 179, 184; works, 92

Gibraltar, 116

Gibson, John, 178

Giddings, Joshua, 390

Gieseler, Johann K. L.? 151

"Gifts" (Emerson), 300

Giga, Italian servant, 180

Gilchrist, Anne, 491

Gilfillan, George, 337; Gallery of Literary
Portraits, A, 340

Gill, Thomas Hornblower, 336

Gillies, Eliza Maria, 344

Gillman, James, 191

Gilman, Samuel, 120, 123

Girgenti (ancient Agrigentum, now Agri-
gento), 173

"Give all to Love" (Emerson), 319

Gladstone, Wm. E., 426, 474, 476

Glasgow, Scotland, 194, 337, 338, 339

Glasgow University, 194, 490

Gloucester, Duke of, 190

Gloucester Harbor, 60

God, 2-10 passim, 22, 25, 28, 31, 41, 45, 48,
50, 58, 96, 100, 101, 103, 114-127 passim,
134, 138, 146, 147, H9, 155, 158, 165, 167,
187, 189, 195-208 passim, 217, 238, 240,
241, 244, 246, 261-271 passim, 280, 283,
293, 300, 315, 320, 333, 342, 367, 372, 386,
394, 407, 418, 422, 424, 504

God Almighty, 3, 338

Godhead, 239

God-reliance, 147, 374

God-reverence, 166

Godwin, William, 81 ; Life of Chaucer, The,
60

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 76, 81, 107,
113, 130, 158, 159, 163, 165, 175, 182, 192,
195, 208, 236, 237, 309, 326, 344, 365, 371,
376, 377, 386, 444, 475, 505 ; Paw*, 207,
478 ; Goethe's nachgelassene Werke, 236,
453 J Goethe's Werke, 236;- "Gottliche,
Das," 275; "Granzen der Menschheit,"
275 ; Memoirs of Goethe, 143 ; "Prome-
theus," 280 ; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(or Wander ]'ahre), 196, 219; works,
180

"Goethe," lecture, and chapter in Represent-
ative Men (Emerson), 376-377

Gohdes, C. L. F., Periodicals of American
Transcendentalism, Thef Durham, N. C.,

1931

Goldoni, Carlo, 169

Goldsmith, Oliver, 30, 60; "Deserted Vil-
lage, The," 71

"Good-bye, Proud World!" (Emerson), 98,

273, 495

Goodrich, S. G., 169: see also Peter Parley
Goodwin, Amos, 86
Goodwin, Mrs. Marston, 311
Goodwin, William W., 444
Gordon, slave-trader, 414

Gorham, David Wood, 73

Gorham, John, Elements of Chemical Sci-
ence, 82

Gospels, 151

Gottingen, Germany, and university at, 101,
105-108, 113, 152, 159

Gottschalk, L. M., 419

Gould, Benjamin A., 38, 57-62 passim, 68

Gounod, Charles, Faust, 490

Gourdin, John, 76

GPB : George P. Bradford

GR : George Ripley

grammar, 68

Grammont, Ferdinand, Marquis de, 462, 473

Grant, Patrick? 176, 179

Grant, Ulysses S., 427, 437, 461, 489

Grasmere, lake, 196

Gray, Asa, 484

Great Britain, 39

Great Divide, 417

Great Lakes, 385

"Greatness" (Emerson), 450

Great Original (i.e., Emerson), 255

Greece, 77, 78, 94, 457, 459

Greek authors and literature, 21, 51, 58, 75,
77, 78, 79, 95, 444

Greek committee, Harvard, 484

Greek language, 31, 57, 68, 76, 77, 91, 108,
116, 153, 169, 187, 256, 284, 358, 445

Greeks, 78, 172, 180, 181, 195, 375, 468

Greeley, Horace, 287, 288, 299, 321, 370, 378,
. 395, 402, 417

Green (or Greene), Francis, 140

Greene, Mr., 114

Greene, William, 288

Greenfield, Mass., 99, 124

Greenough, Horatio, 181, 182, 244, 296, 387;
Washington, George, statue of, 297

Greenwich, London, 189

Greenwood, F. W. P., Collection of Psalms
and Hymns, A (ed.), 140

Greg, William Rathbone, 341

Gregory XVI, Pope, 177

Grenfell, Mrs., 474

Grirnke, Angelina, 260

Grimke, Sarah, 260

Grimm, Gisela von Arnim, 472, 485

Grimm, Herman, 412, 472; Correspondence
(with Emerson) : see under Correspond-
ence; Essays von Herman Grimm, 393

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Deutsches
W orterbuch, 393 ; fairy tales collected by,

393
Grimm-RW EC or : Correspondence between

. . . Emerson and Herman Grimm
Grisi, Giulia, 341, 345
Gr is wold, Rufus Wilmot, 305
Grotius, De Veritate Religionis Christianize,

Guadeloupe, 15
Guido Reni, 176
Guizot, Frangois, 187
Gutekunst, photographer, 481
Guyon, Mme, 288
GWC : George W. Curtis

57<>

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

[H]

"H," MS journal (Emerson)

Hafiz, 310

Haight, Gordon S., George Eliot & John
Chapman, New Haven, 1940

Hale, Edward Everett (1822-1909), 284

Hale, Edward Everett (1863-1932), James
Russell Lowell and his Friends, Bo and
NY, 1899

Hale, Nathan, Jr., 269

Halifax, England, 335

Hall, Joseph D., Jr., Genealogy and Biog-
raphy of the Waldos of America, The,
1883

Hall, R. C.f 478

Hallam, Henry, 342 ; View of the State of
Europe during the Middle Ages, A, 92, 96

Hallowell, E. N., 422

Ham, Surrey, England, 297

"Hamatreya" (Emerson), 316

Hamilton, Ontario, 385, 400

Hamilton, William, 339

Hamlet, 276, 385

Hammatt, Abraham, . Hammatt Papers, The

Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von, Diwan von
Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis, Der
(tr.), 310

Hampstead, England, 343-344

Hancock, John, 54

Hancock St., Emerson home in, 60-6 1

Hanna, A. J., Prince in their Midst, A, Nor-
man, Okla., 1946

Hannah, servant, 62

Hannibal, 180

Har: Harvard, Mass.

Harlow, R. V., Samuel Adams

Harpers Ferry, Va. (now W. Va.), 401

Harring, Harro, 324

Harrington, Henry, 114

Harris, William T., 433 ; A. Bronson Alcott:
see under F. B. Sanborn

Harrison, John S., Teachers of Emerson,
The, NY, 1910

Harte, Bret, 448, 449, 498

Hartford, Conn., 142, 144

Hartford Convention, 39

Harvard, Mass., 2-4, 6-7, 8, 124, 293, 298;
"Town Records," MS

Harvard, Mass., church, 2 ff., 22 ; "A Book
of Church Records Belonging to the
Church of Harvard," MS

Harvard College (and University), espe-
cially 62-88 passim; Catalogue (title
varies), 79, 82, and later; clubs and so-
cieties, 66, 72-74, 76, 82, 86, 126; cor-
poration, 441 and later; corporation's
"College Records," MS; faculty, "Rec-
ords of the College Faculty," MS (title
varies), and "Records of the College
Faculty," MS fair copy (title varies) ;
Harvard Medical School, 248, 454, 483;
Harvard College Library, 64 and later,
441 ; Laws of Harvard College, for the
Use of Students, Cambridge, 1816, 64;

overseers, 8 (see also separate entry
overseer) ; overseers' "Records," MS, and
reports of subcommittees, MS; "Slate
of the Chambers in Hollis Hall," MS ;
"State of the Chambers in Holworthy
Hall," MS ; steward, 64, 65 ; steward's
"Journal," MS ; steward's "Ledger," MS ;
steward's "Quarter Bill Book," MS ; see
also Harvard Divinity School

"Harvard Commemoration Speech" (Emer-
son), 429

Harvard Divinity School (called Theolog-
ical School at Cambridge when Emerson
was a divinity student), 99, 100, 106, 109-
ui, 117-130 passim, 207, 244, 267, 268,
269, 271, 435, 498; faculty, "Records,
The," MS, fair copy ; General Catalogue,
1915; room lists, t; students, "Records,
The," MS, 488

Harvey, William, 249

Haskins, Ann (1770-1842), Emerson's ma-
ternal aunt Nancy, 27

Haskins, Casper, Emerson's cousin, 36

Haskins, Charlotte F. (later Mrs. Cleve-
land), Emerson's cousin, 363, 371

Haskins, David Greene, Emerson's cousin,
114, 149; Ralph Waldo Emerson his Ma-
ternal Ancestors, Bo, 1887

Haskins, Elizabeth (1771-1853), Emerson's
maternal aunt Betsey, 6, 27

Haskins, Fanny (1777-1854), Emerson's ma-
ternal aunt, 27, 43, 55, 56, 256

Haskins, Hannah Upham (1734-1819),
Emerson's maternal grandmother, 5, 26,

Haskins, John (1729-1814), Emerson's
grandfather, 4, 5, 6, 15, 26-27, 4^-43, 56

Haskins, John (1762-1840), Emerson's ma-
ternal uncle, 15

Haskins, John, Emerson's cousin, 37?

Haskins, Ralph (1779-1852), Emerson's ma-
ternal uncle, 13, 89, 98, 114, 362

Haskins, Ralph, Emerson's cousin, 114

Haskins, Rebecca, Emerson's cousin, 36

Haskins, Rebecca Emerson (1776-1845),
Emerson's paternal aunt, and wife of his
maternal uncle Robert Haskins, 37

Haskins, Robert, Emerson's cousin, 37

Haskins, Ruth (born, 1768; married Wm.
Emerson, 1796), mother of RWE, 4, 5;
see also Ruth Haskins Emerson

Haskins, Samuel Moody, Emerson's cousin,
508

Haskins, Thomas (1775-1853), Emerson's
maternal uncle, 26

Haskins, Mrs. Thomas, 41

Haskins, Thomas Waldo, Emerson's cousin,
136

Haskins estate, 74, 362

Haskins family, 3, 4-5, 26, 40, 54, 56, 102,
I 08, 109

Hassan, Prince of Egypt, 463, 466

Hastings, England, 394

Hatch, Samuel, 86 ; "Colloquial Discussion,"
MS, 87

INDEX AMD BIBLIOGRAPHY

HavenE : John Haven Emerson, nephew of
RWE

Haverhill, Mass., 19

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 290, 291, 293, 294,
307, 346, 364, 365, 387, 392, 394, 402, 404,
413, 424, 501, 508; American Notebooks,
The, ed. Randall Stewart, New Haven,
1932; "Celestial Railroad, The," 298;
"Great Stone Face, The," 480; Marble
Faun, The, 405 ; Mosses; Standard Li-
brary Edition

Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody, 294, 298, 424

Hawthorne, Una, 431, 461

Hayes, Rutherford B., 380

Haynes, George H., Charles Sunnier

Hazlitt, William, 191 ; Spirit of the Age, The

HCHolAnRec: see under Harvard College,
MS "State of the Chambers in Hollis
Hall"

HCL : Harvard College Library

HDT : H. D. Thoreau

health of Emerson, 19, 23, 97, 111-112, 114,
115-128 passim, and later, especially 162
ff., 168^ 169, 170, 249, 250, 360, 454-456,
et passim

Heaven, 108, 141, 163, 504

Hebrew language, 76, 106, 107, no

Hedge, Frederic Henry, 126, 128, 129, 130,
167, 199, 232, 235, 236, 243, 256, 263, 273,
275, 276, 304, 441, 442, 454, 504, 5o8;
Coleridge, review of, 208 ; "Reminiscences
of Emerson," MS inclosed in Hedge to
Cabot, 14 Sept 1882; Swedenborg, ar-
ticle on, 207; see also under Schelling

Hedge, Leyi, 76, 82, 88, 116, 126; Elements
of Logick, 75

HcdgeRem: see under F. H. Hedge

Hedge's club, 243

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 304, 327,
371, 383, 433, 435, 442, 443 ; lectures on
the philosophy of history, 278, 487 ; Phi-
losophy of Plistory, The, tr. Sibree

Hegelians, 435

Heitman, F. B., Historical Register . . . Con-
tinental Army, Washington, D. C, 1914

Helps, Arthur, 356, 475; Letter on "Uncle
Tom's Cabin" A, 369

Hennell, Sara, 353, 356

Hepsy, servant, 251

Pier aid of Holiness, 259

Heraud, John A., 324, 326

Herbert, George, 156, 211, 239, 450; "Priest-
hood, The," no; Temple, The

Herculaneum, Italy, 176

Hercules, 372

Herder, J. G, von, 106, 327 ; Ideen; Outlines,
143, 188

Hermes, 65

Herodotus, 77

"Heroism" (Emerson), 282, 283

Hertfordshire, England, 49

Hewett, Simon C., 401

HigFul: sec wider T. W. Higginson

Higginson, Francis, 222

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 418, 501 ;

^ Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Bo, 1884
Highgate, England, 191, 192, 193
High Holborn, London, 189
Highlanders, 194
Hildreth, Caroline Neagus, 507
Hill, John B., 67, 73, 86, gi, 94; "Essay, An,"

MS; "Mr J. B. Hill's Recollections of

Mr Emerson," MS given by Hill to Cabot
> in Mar 1883

Hill, Mrs., of Liverpool, 332
Hill, Thomas, 432
Hill, William Bancroft, "Emerson's College

Days," The Literary World, 22 May 1880
Hillard, George S., 293, 486 ; Life, Letters,

and Journals of George Ticknor (Hillard

and others)

HillLitW: see under Wm. B. Hill
Hillside, Alcott's home, 306, 307, 364, 404
HillSk: MS "Mr J. B. Hill's Recollections

of Mr Emerson"
Hindu literature and religious lore, 83, 93,

280, 306, 371, 396, 443
Hindus, 80, 93, 155
Hingham, Mass., 37
Hinton, James, Man and his Dwelling-place,

475

Historical Discourse, Delivered before the
Citizens of Concord, i2th September
?&35f ^ (Emerson), 221-222, 223, 238

"Historic Notes," Emerson's looth lecture
before the Concord Lyceum, 503

history, 21, 23, 68, 76, 94, 96, 245, 246, 278

History of Fortus, The, Emerson's poem,
not published till after his death but titled
to simulate the printed page and face-
tiously marked as the eighth ("Eigth")
edition, 38

History of Liberty (projected by Emerson),
429

HistSk : see under Wm. Emerson, father of
RWE

HistSocPa: Historical Society of Pennsyl-
vania

Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood, 255, 294, 392,
401, 410, 453, 454, 491, 508

Hoar, Elizabeth, 91, 208, 221, 230, 253, 266,
284, 294, 306, 310, 326, 371, 378, 392, 399,
444, 460, 471, 492, 493

Hoar, Reuben, 400

Hoar, Mrs. Reuben, 400 •

Hoar, Samuel, father of Elizabeth, 208, 227,
230, 274, 306, 369

Hoar, Samuel, nephew of Elizabeth, 480

Hobbes, Thomas, 81

Hodgin, E. S., One Hundred Years, New
Bedford, Mass., 1924

Hodgson, W. B., 336

Hoeltje, Hubert H., "Emerson, Citizen of
Concord," in AL, XI, 367-378 (Jan 1940)

Hoffmann, Lydia Ward von, 463, 464, 471

Hoffmann, R., Baron von, 463, 464, 471, 472

Holborn, London, 342

Holbrook, Miss, 168, 171, 173, 174, 176, 182

572

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Holbrook, Silas P., 168, 169, 171, 173, *74»

176, 182
Holbrook, Mrs. Silas P., 168, 171, 173, *74,

176, 182
Holland, Henry, 474, 476

Holland, Queen of, 461

Holmes, John, 116, 461, 473

Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894), 116,
185, 231. 263, 265, 277, 321, 389, 3Qi, 392,
490, 424, 451, 461, 484, 493, 500; "After-
dinner Poem, An"; Autocrat, The;
Poems, new rev. ed. ; Poetical Works,
The; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bo, 1885 ;
Standard Library Edition

Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1841-1935), 500

Holmes, Pauline, Tercentenary History of
the Boston Public Latin School, A, Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1935

HolStanLib: see under O. W. Holmes
(1809-1894)

Holy Bible, The, Oxford, 1770, Ruth Has-
kins Emerson's copy containing MS
Emerson family record

Holy Land, the, 459

Homer, 163, 165, 276, 301, 444 501; Iliad,
49; Odyssey, 432

"Home, Sweet Home," 480

Hooker, Thomas, 47

Hooker, William Jackson, 345

Hopkinton, Mass., 164

Horace, 68, 153, 156

Hosmer, Edmund, 292, 361

Hosmer, John, 325

Hosmer, , 48

Hotten, John Camden, 444, 445, 446, 451,
453, 455, 48i, 486

Houghton, Baron : see Milnes

"House, The" (Emerson), 320

"House that Jack Built, The," 23

Howard, George, 474, 475, 476?

Howard, Lady, 352

Howards, the, 475, 476

Howe, Julia Ward, "Battle Hymn of the
Republic, The," 418

Howe, M. A. DeWolfe, Life and Letters of
George Bancroft, The, 1908

Howe, Peter, 250

Howells, William Dean, 404, 405; Literary
Friends and Acqtiaintance, NY and Lon-
don, 1901

Howitt, Mary Bothara, 325, 353

Howitt, William, 353

HowLitFrAc: see under Howells

Hoxie, Capt., 196

Hubbard, William, Narrative of the Troubles
with the Indians in New-England, A, 222

Huddersfield, England, 334

Hudson, James, 325

Hudson River, 308, 421

Hughes, Thomas (1822-1896), 473, 476

Hugheses, the, 476
Hugo, Victor, 348

HuLi: "Human Life," MS course of lectures
"Human Culture," course of lectures of
1837-1838 (Emerson), 261-262

Humane Society, Boston, 8

humanitarians, 229, 230

"Humanity of Science" (PhHis, II), MS
lecture (Emerson)

"Humanity of Science, The," lecture (Emer-
son), 333

"Human Life" (with some variations in
title), ten MS lectures, course of 1838-
1839 (Emerson), 262

"Humble-bee, The" (Emerson), 258, 312, 317

Humboldt, F. H. A., Baron von, remarks
made at the celebration of the centennial
anniversary of the birth of (Emerson),
440

Hume, David, 104, 163 ; essay, 103 ; History
of England, 90, 145 ; Philosophical Essays
concerning Human Understanding, 92

Hummel, Hermann, "Emerson and Nie-
tzsche," in NEQ, XIX, 63-84 (Mar 1946)

Humphreys, Joshua. 34

Hundred Greatest Men, The, with general
introduction by Emerson, 496

Hungary, 368

Hunt, Benjamin Peter, 207; "Saturday and
Sunday among the Creoles," 295 ; "Voy-
age to Jamaica," 295

Hunt, Humphrey, 48

Hunt, Leigh, 352

Hunterian Museum, 194, 345

Hurst, Mr., 476

HuSci: MS "Humanity of Science"

Hutcheson, Francis, 82

Hutchinson, Anne, 28, 215

Hutchinson, Thomas, Collection of Original
Papers Relative to the History of the
Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, A (cd.)»
222; History of the Province of Massa-
chusetts-Bay, The, 222

Hutton, Robert, 345

Huxley, Thomas H., 454, 476

Hyde Park, London, 332

[I]

idealism, philosophical, 33, 241, 245, 280, 286

"I. Extracts 'from Letters of R. W. E to
William Emerson," MS (first of a series
of blue-backed notebooks kept by Cabot)

lie de la Cite, Paris, 346

Illinois, 260, 356 382, 383, 390, 391, 431, 432,

449

"Illusions" (Emerson), 406
immortality, 96, 116, 149, 151, 499
"Immortality" (Emerson), 446, 451, 486
"Improvement," poem (Emerson), 73
"Independence," poem (Emerson), 57
Independent Club, Glasgow University, 490
Index, The, Boston, 504
India, 82, 83, 93, 317, 459
Indiana, 403, 431
Indianapolis, Ind., 419, 503, 504
Indian physiognomy, Emerson's, 326, 350
Indians, American, 20, 31, 47, 49, 73, 95, 155,

161, 326, 372, 382, 417, 446
"Indian Superstition" (Emerson), 83, 93

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

573

"Initial, Daemonic and Celestial Love"
(Emerson), 319 •

Institut de France, 187 ; Academic des Sci-
ences Morales et Politiques, 501

"Intellect" (Emerson), 283

intuition, 118, 206, 207, 237, 241, 242, 244,
268, 280, 283, 284, 286, 291, 376, 386

Inversnaid, Scotland, 194

Iowa, 385, 431, 432, 449

Iphigenie en Auhde, 186

IpsEm: see under B. K. Emerson

Ipswich, Mass., 49

Ireland, 220, 335

Ireland, Alexander, 192, 193, 324, 325, 329,
331, 335, 336, 337, 338, 350, 351, 352, 444,
454, 478; In Memoriam, London, etc.,
1882; Ralph Waldo Emerson, London,
1882

Ireland, Mr., father of A. Ireland, 338

Irish, 155, 180, 292, 332, 347, 349, 383

Irish revolution, 342

Irving, Edward, 191

Irving, Washington, 85; Bracebridge Hall,
93; History of New York, A ("Knick-
erbocker's"), 93; Sketch-book, The, 93

IslandBk: MS "Island Book" (not so ti-
tled), guest book of John M. Forbes, 396

IslandBkWHF: MS "Island Book" (not so
titled), guest book of Wm. H. Forbes,
491, 5o6

Ismail, Khedive of Egypt, 466

Italian language, 17, 116, 119, 169, 174, 180,
181, 218, 256, 463

Italians, 320, 463

Italy, 166, 171, 185, 189, 202, 254, 310, 346,
349, 350, 358, 378, 404, 457, 459, 462;
Emerson in, 1833: 175-184; 1872: 463-
464; 1873 : 471-472; see also Sicily

"Italy Lecture I," MS (Emerson), 202

"Italy. Lecture II," MS (Emerson), 202

Itellario, 174

tJ]

j : journal

/: Journals (Emerson)

Jackson, Abraham, 251, 431

Jackson, Andrew, 135, 153, 246, 413

Jackson, Charles, father of Lidian Emerson,
39, 216, 217, 218

Jackson, Charles Thomas, brother of Lidian
Emerson, 216, 220, 364

Jackson, Eugenia, 499

Jackson, James, 127

Jackson, Lucy (born, 1798 ; married Charles
Brown in 1820), sister of Lydia Jackson
(later Lidian Emerson), 216, 217, 218;
see also Lucy Jackson Brown

Jackson, Lucy Cotton, mother of Lidian
Emerson, 216, 217, 218

Jackson, Lydia (born, 1802 ; married Emer-
son, 1835), 39, 55, 210-223; composition
and quotation book, MS, including poems
dated 1815 and 1816; composition and
quotation book, MS, for 1817; copybook
of verse, MS, for 1819; "Resignation,"

MS poem ; "Trust in Providence Recom-
mended," MS poem, 217; see also Lidian
Jackson Emerson

Jackson estate, 220, 482

Jacksonian party, 201, 204

Jacksonville, 111., 384

Jacobins, 259

Jacobson, William, 344

Jamaica Plain, Mass., 218

James, Henry (1811-1882), 288, 297, 366,
399, 425; Literary Remains, The

James, Henry (1843-1916), 366, 451, 462,
471 ; Small Boy, A

James, William, 264, 265, 288, 305, 484

Jameson, Anna B. M., 353

J&Cbk: see under Wm. Emerson, father of
RWE

J&CbkN 0.2 ("Dialling"} : see under Wm.
Emerson, father of RWE

Japan, 446, 454

Japanese envoys, Emerson's speech at din-
ner to, 454

Japanese Legation, Washington, D. C, 454

Jardin des Plantes, Paris, 187, 188, 189, 201,
472

Jarvis, Edward, "Traditions and Reminis-
cences of Concord/' MS (owned by
CFPL)

JarvTr: see under Edward Jarvis

Jefferson, Thomas, 14

Jeffrey, Charlotte Wilkes, 338

Jeffrey, Francis Jeffrey, Lord, 338, 339

Jehovah, 268, 372

Jenks, Henry F., Catalogue of the Boston
Public Latin School, 1886

JEofMa: Joseph Emerson of Maiden

Jerrold, Douglas, 353

Jesus, 101, 107, 115, 124, 151, 158, 163, 166,
167, IQI, 236, 267, 268, 326, 357, 375, 467,
493

Jesus, twelve disciples of, 115

Jesus Christ, 9, 271

Jews, 151, 180, 494

Jewsbury, Geraldine, 346, 347, 474

JFC : James Freeman Clarke

JLG: John Lowell Gardner

Joachim, Joseph, 393

Job, 281

John, King, 276

Johnson, Andrew, 430

Johnson, Edward, History of New-England,
A, 222

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 56, 60, 147, 322, 323,
341 ; London, 16

Jones, Elisha, 51

Jones, Morris C., Notes Respecting the Fam-
ily of Waldo

Jones, William, Asiatic Miscellany, The (co-
author), 83, 93 ; "Hymn to Narayena, A,"

Jonson, Ben, 92, 439, 440
Jordan, William H. S., 278
Josselyn, John, Account of Two Voyages

to New-England, An, 222; New-Eng-

lands Rarities, 222

574

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

JouDeb: Journal des debats

JouEur4: MS "Journal in Europe 1833,"
No. 4

Jouffroy, Theodore, 187

"Journal & Commonplace Book," No. 2, MS
(Wm. Emerson, father of RWE, with
added notes by RWE and new title "Dial-
ling")

Journal des debats, 185, 347

"Journal in Europe 1833," No. 4, MS (Emer-
son)

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The, 433

journals (MS and typescript journals men-
tioned in the notes are listed under their
individual titles. Many such journals re-
main partly or wholly unpublished.)

Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ed-
ward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emer-
son Forbes, Bo and NY, 1909-1914

Jove, 314

Jowett, Benjamin, 477; Phaedrus (Plato's,
tr.), 227

JRL : James Russell Lowell

Jupiter, 471 ; see also Zeus

Jussieu, Antoine-Laurent de, 187

[K]

"K," MS journal (Emerson)

Kalewala, 478

Kansas, 390, 397, 401, 433

Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 369

Kant, Immanuel, 144, 156, 206, 207, 208, 296,
371, 442, 482 ; Critic k of Pure Reason, 260

,Kantism, 155

Karnak, Egypt, 467, 468

Kast, Thomas, husband of Emerson's ma-
ternal aunt Hannah Haskins Kast, 26

Katrine, Loch, 194

Keating, Hannah, 142, 144

Keats, John, 179, 180; "Ode to a Nightin-
gale," 258

Keller, Hans, Emerson in Frankreich, Gies-
sen, 1932

Kendal, England, 196

Kendall, Sarah, 218

Kenilworth Castle, 192

Kennebunk, Me., 69

Kensington Museum : see South Kensington
Museum

Kent, Edward, 73, 125

Kent, Margaret Tucker (died, 1833), mother
of Emerson's first wife, 134, 136, 141, 142,
157, 199

Kent, William, 129

Kent, William Austin, 125, 129, 134, 142, 157

Kentucky, 177, 377, 381, 414

Keswick, England, 478

Ketchum & Fessenden, 123

Kettell, ^Samuel, 168, 171, 173, 174, 176;
Specimens of American Poetry (ed.),
169

Kew Gardens, near London, 345

Keyes, Annie (married E. W. Emerson,

1874), 454, 483; see also Annie Keyes
Emerson

Keyes, John, S., 454

khedive : see Ismail

Kimball, Squire, 2

King Arthur's Round Table, 464

Kinglake, Alexander William, Eothcn, 342

"King Richard's Death. A Ballad" (Emer-
son), 95

Kingsbury, Nathaniel, 73

Kingsley, Charles, Alton Locke, 357

Kingston, Mr., 179

Kirkland, John Thornton, 9, 18, 62, 64, 65,
69, 71, 74, 80, 84, 1-26

"KL/J MS journal (Emerson)

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 60

Knczsoffski, Dr., 438

Kneeland, Abner, 269, 270

Knox, John, 86

Kossuth, Lajos (Louis), 368

Krishna, 397

Kronos, 372

Kutuzoff, Mikhail, 35

[L]

Lacroix, S.-F., Elementary Treatise on Arith-
metic, An, 69

Ladd, William, husband of Emerson's ma-
ternal aunt Mary Haskins Ladd, 117

Ladds, the, 123

La Fayette, Marquis de, 25, 101, 102, 108,
119, 185

La Fayette, Mme, 462

Lafayette, Ind., 403

Lake Country, England, 192

Lake Erie, Battle of, 34

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 188, 246, 450

Lamartine, Alphonse de, 342, 349, 352

Lamb, Charles, Essays of Eliaf 143

Lambeth, London, 456

Lamennais, Felicite de, 350

Lancashire, England, 324, 335

Landor, Walter Savage, 185, 192, 195, 197,
475; Imaginary Conversations, 182

Lane, Charles, 297, 298, 309, 362

"Laocoon," 178, 179

Laplace, Pierre- Simon, Marquis de, 267

Laporte, Laurent, Sailing on the Nile, tr. V.
Vaughan, Bo, 1872, 469

Lardner, Dionysius, 348

Lasswade, Scotland, 339

Lasteyries, the, 461

Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne, Memories of
Hawthorne, Bo and NY, 1897

Latin authors and literature, 21, 75, 77, 82, 94

Latin language, 31, 57, 68, 69, 75, 82, 108,
116, 124, 153, 212, 363

Latter-Day Saints, 446

Laud, Archbishop William, 47

Laugel, Auguste, 461, 472

Laugel, Elizabeth, 461, 472, 473

Laughlin, Clara E., So you're Going to Eng-
land!

Lausanne, Switzerland, 184

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

575

"Law of Success, The" (Emerson), 399

Lawrence, James, 34

Lazarus, Emma, 493-495 ; Poems, The, ed.
Josephine Lazarus, Bo and NY, 1889

Lazarus, Josephine, 494

LazLet: Letters to Emma Lazarus

LC : Library of Congress

LE : Lidian Emerson

Lear, King, 345

LecEngLit: ten MS lectures on English lit-
erature, course of 1835-1836 (Emerson)

Lecky, Elizabeth de Dedem, 475

Lecky, William E. H., 475 ; History of the
Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Ra-
tionalism, 474

Leconte de Lisle, Charles, "Elfes, Les," 131

LecScr: MS lectures on the Scriptures
(Emerson)

lectures (MS lectures mentioned in the text
- or notes are listed under their individual
titles. Many of them are still unpub-
lished, and, for reasons explained on p.
495 above, not a few of the later manu-
scripts are fragmentary or otherwise quite
unfit for publication.)

Ledger 49-72 : see account book ledger

"Ledger. J. E. C," scrapbook of Emerson
materials, collected by Cabot (MS ex-
cerpts, newspaper clippings, etc.)

Lee, Mrs. R., Memoirs of Baron Cuvier, 188

Lee, Robert E., 401, 427

Leeds, England, 335

Leeds, mayor of, 335

Legendre, Adrien- Marie, Elements of Ge-
ometry, 75

Leghorn, Italy, 463

Lehmann, Charles, Emerson, crayon sketch
of, 350

Leicester, England, 334

Leipzig, Germany, 391, 500

Leith, Scotland, 193

Leland, Charles, Egyptian Sketch Book, The,
466

Lemaire, Henri, French Revolution, on the,
92

Lenox, Mass., 124, 363, 485

Leonardo da Vinci, 185 ; "Last Supper, The,"
184

Leopold, Prince, 477

Let; The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson

LetFriend: Letters from Ralph Waldo
Emerson to a Friend

Letters and Social Aims (Emerson), 444,
445, 451, 453, 455, 481, 486, 487, 501

Letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson to a
Friend, ed. C. E. Norton, Bo and NY,
1899

Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The, ed.
R. L. Rusk, NY, 1939

Letters to Emma Lazarus, ed. R. L. Rusk,
NY, 1939

Leverett, Frederic P., 59

Leverrier, Urbain-Jean-Joseph, 350

Lewes, George Henry, 474, 478; Life of
Goethe, The, 475

Lewes, Mrs. George H. : George Eliot

Lewiston, N. Y., 382

Lexington Road, Concord, 223, 227, 250, 306,

t 361, 480

Liberal Party, in England, 474
Liberty Bell, The, 366
Libyan Desert, 469
Liddell, Henry G., 475
Liddon, Henry P., 476
Lidian: see under Ellen Emerson, daughter

of RWE
"Life and Literature" (title advertised),

somewhat fragmentary MS lectures in

course of Apr-May 1861 (Emerson),

410-411
Ligeia, 150
Lincoln, Abraham, 384, 405, 409, 410, 414,

415, 419, 426, 428, 430; Complete Works;
Emancipation Proclamation, final, 417;
Emancipation Proclamation, preliminary,

416, 417; Gettysburg address, 427
Lincoln, Mass., 361

Lind, Jenny, 352

Linnaean Society, 60

Lisbon, Portugal, 15

Literary World, The, 323

literature, Emerson's early knowledge of,
67, 85, 92-93

LitMWF: The Literature of the Middle
Western Frontier (R. L. Rusk), NY,
1925

Little Chauncey, pond, 92

Littleton, Mass., 400

Little Wachusett, 401

Liverpool, England, 196, 324, 331, 332, 333,
m 334, 337, 346, 351, 356, 364, 46o, 478

Livingstons, of New York, 179

Livy, 30; Viri Romcs (with others, ed.
Charles -Frangois Lhomond), 153

LJB : Lucy Jackson Brown

LMAedCheney: see under L. M. Alcott

"LN," MS journal (Emerson)

Locke, John, 30, 80, 82, 104, 239, 242, 264,
266; Essay concerning Human Under-
standing, An, 75, 76; Two Treatises on
Government, 75, 76 ?

Lockport, N. Y., 385

Locofoco, 259

logic, 76, 339, 386, 478

Logos, 207

LoHedge: see under 0. W. Long

Lomond, Loch, 194

London, England, 49, 54 180, 189-192, 206,
260, 284, 285, 300, 309, 324, 328, 332, 341-
346, 347, 350, 351-355, 356, 370, 371, 391,
459, 460, 461, 473-476

"London," lecture (Emerson), 379

London and Westminster Review, The, 284

Lonely: see under T. Scudder

Long, 0. W., Frederic Henry Hedge, Port-
land, Me., 1940

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 309, 321,
390, 392, 500, 506 ; Kavanagh, 371 ; Song
of Hiawatha, The, 372

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Longfellow, Samuel, 373; Life of Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Bo and NY, cop.
1891

Longinus, 30

Long Island, 378

Long Island Sound, 144

Long Long: see under S. Longfellow

Longworth family, 383

Lord, the, 56, 100, 222, 307

Lord God, 23

Lord Jesus Christ, 100

Lords, House of, 394

"Lords of Life" (Emerson), 301

Lord's Supper, 138, 160, 163, 164, 166, 198

"Lord's Supper, The" (Emerson), 162-164

Lorenzo, 174

Loring, George Bailey, 269

LoSoRem: see under Lothrop

Lothrop, S. K., 65, 69, 70, 126, 129; Some
Reminiscences^ ed. T. K. Lothrop, 1882

Louis XIV, 80

Louis XVI, ii

Louis, Pierre-Charles-Alexandre, 391

Louisa, servant, 289

Louisiana Territory, 14

Louis -Philippe, 186, 342, 346

Louisville, Ky., 381

Louvre, the, 185, 348, 462, 472

"Love," essay (Emerson), 281, 301, 315, 319,
370

"Love," lecture (Emerson), 262

Love joy, Elijah Parish, 260

Lovelace, William King, 1st Earl of, 352

"Love of Praise" (Emerson), 57

"Lovewell's Fight," ballad, 161

Lovewell's Pond, 161

Low: see under J. R. Lowell

Low, Sampson, & Co. (Sampson Low &
Co.), 496

Lowell, Charles, 12

Lowell, Frances Dunlap, 461, 472, 473

Lowell, Francis Cabot, 453

Lowell, James Russell, 12, 254, 255, 263, 269,
365, 373, 392, 396, 400, 424, 439, 460, 461,
462, 466, 472, 473, 492, 508; Among my
Books, 2d ser., 500; Fable for Critics, A,
323 ; Letters, ed. C. E. Norton, NY, 1894
(date of Vol. I) ; Literary and Political
Addresses (in Riverside Edition), Bo and
NY, cop. 1890; Literary Essays (in Riv-
erside Edition of The Writings), Bo and
NY, cop. 1899; "Ode Read at the One
Hundredth Anniversary of the Fight at
Concord Bridge," 489 ; Poems (in River-
side Edition of The Writings), Bo and
NY, cop. 1896

Lowell, John, 18

Lowell, Mass., 239, 310

Lower Canterbury, Roxbury, Mass., 98

Lower Saranac Lake, 398

Lowth, Robert, Short Introduction to Eng-
lish Grammar, A, 68

Lucretius, 143

Lucrine Lake, Italy, 176

Ltmt, William Parsons, 263

Luther, Martin, 99, 151, 164, 166, 202, 212,

213

Luxembourg, museum, 185

Luxor, Egypt, 466, 467, 469, 470

Lydia, servant, 289

LydiaJ : Lydia Jackson

Lydian Queen, nickname of Lidian Emerson,

212

Lyell, Charles, 342, 345, 353
Lyell, Mary Horner, 342
Lyman, Anne Robbins, 124, 157
Lyman, Joseph, the judge, 124, 157
Lyman, Joseph, son of the judge, -157
Lyon, Lawson, 23-24
Lyons, France, 462

[M]

Macaulay, T. B., 341, 342

Maccall, William, 336

McClellan, George B., 416

M'Elroy, Sarah, 145

Machiavelli, Niccolo, 463

M'Keige, Mrs., 218

Mackintosh, James, introductory lecture, 92

Macphail's Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal
and Literary Review, 337

Macready, William Charles, 345

Madison, James, 34

Madison, Wis., 402

Maggiore, Lago, 184

"Magician" (Emerson), 94

Magnolia, Florida Terr., 147

Maine, district and state, 19, 30, 31, 40, 48,
54, 61, 73, 98, 117, 161, 205, 235, 303, 330,
445, 454, 455

Maker (God), 100

Maiden, Mass., 48, 49

Malibran, Maria-Felicia Garcia, 190

Malta, 169, 170-171, 176, 194, 286, 471

Malta, Knights of, 170

Malvern Hills, 335

Mammon, 142

Mammoth Cave, 381

Manchester, England, 196, 324, 331-346 /><w-
sim, 351, 354, 478

Manco Capac, 77

ManGlobe: MS "On the Relation of Man
to the Globe"

Manhattan Island, 288

Manigault, Joseph, 73

Mann, Horace, 247, 248, 256, 272

Mann, Mary Peabody, Life of Horace Mann,
Bo, 1891

"Manners" (Emerson), 301

Mansfield, Mt, 438

"Man the Reformer" (Emerson), 277; Eng-
lish reprint of, 326

Manzoni, Alessandro, / Promcssi sposi. 181,
184

Marcellus, Marcus, 408

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 143, 304 ; Mar-
cus Aurclius . . . Meditations, tr. Meric
Casaubon, 2d ed., London, 1635, 481

INDEX AMD BIBLIOGRAPHY

577

Margaret and her Friends, proposed title of
book later called Memoirs of Margaret
Fuller Ossoli, 378

Marie Stuart, 186

Marietta, Auguste-lidouard, 466, 469

Mariposa County, Calif., 447

Marlboro, Mass., 392

MarLu: MS "Martin Luther"

Marryat, Frederick, 330

Mars, Mile, 186

Marsamuscetto Harbor, Valetta, 170

"Marseillaise, La" (Rouget de Lisle), 342,

347

Marseille, France, 116, 310, 462, 464
Marsh, George, 464, 471
Marsh, James, 154
Marshfield, Mass., 368
Martial, works, 467
Martineau, Harriet, 231, 234, 285, 340, 341,

344

Martineau, Jarnes, 196, 333
"Martin Luther," MS lecture (Emerson),

202, 212, 213

Marvell, Andrew, 261

Marx, Karl, 371 ; articles by, 370

MaryE : Mary Emerson, great-grandmother
of RWE

Maryland, 91

Mason, Sidney, 155

Masonic Temple, Boston, 232, 238, 245, 261,
262, 286

Massachusetts, I et passim; Supreme Judi-
cial Court, 157, and records of its decrees
relating to Emerson, MS, 200

Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, 385, 408

Massachusetts Bay Colony, II, 47, 215

Massachusetts Historical Society, 9, 18, 449,

503
Massachusetts Quarterly Review, The, 300,

324, 386, 389

Massey, Mrs., of Manchester, 333
Massinger, Philip, 143, 356
Master's degree, 87, 102, 124, 441
mathematics, especially 21, 59, 68, 69, 75, 76,

9i» 358

Mather, Cotton, 138; Magnolia, 1702, 222

Mather, Edward (E. A. M. Jackson), Na-
thaniel Hawthorne, NY, 1940

Mather, Increase, 138

Mathers, the, 160

Mathews, Cornelius, 323

Matlock, England, 192

Max Miiller, Friedrich, 457, 473, 474, 475,
476, 477; Introduction to the Science of
Religion, 490

May, Samuel J., 306, 390; "Slavery in the
United States," 153

Maya, 302

May-day and Other Pieces (Emerson), 433

Mayer, Brantz, 180

Mayhew School, Boston, 146, 152, .153

Maynard, Theodore, Orestes Brownson, NY,

1943

Mazzini, Giuseppe, 378
Meagher, Thomas Francis, 383

Medford, Mass., 17

medievalism, 74

Mediterranean, 170, 172, 286, 456, 462

Meigs, Fort, 58

melancholy, in Emerson's early verse, 74

Mellen house, Cambridge, 109, no, 116

Melodeon, Boston, 426

Melville, Herman, 276, 300-301, 425 ; White

Jacket, 370
MemBk: MS memorandum book (the year

to which the memoranda belong is added

in the notes)
MemBki82o&Misc: "R. W. Emerson. Jan.

1820. Boston," MS

MemHaw: see under R. H. Lathrop
MemMemSocCir: see under Social Circle
MemMFO: Memoirs of Margaret Fuller

Ossoli
MemoBkWms: see under Ruth Ha skins

Emerson
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (W. H.

Channing, J. Clarke, and Emerson), Bo,

1852, 378, 379
memorandum books, MS, for various years

(Emerson), passim
"Memorandum of an Agreement," MS

(Emerson and James Munroe & Co.), 312
"Memory" (Emerson), 491, 503
Mendon, Mass., 49
Menu, 83, 311

Meredith Bridge, N. H., 141
Meriam, Joseph, 48
"Merlin" (Emerson), 310, 320
Merrimac (or Merrimack) River, 51, 142,

430

Mersey River, 331, 357
Merthyr Tydvil, Wales, 474
Mervine, William, 381
Merwin, Henry C, Life of Bret Harte, The,

Bo and NY, 1911
Messina, Sicily, 174, 470, 471
Messina, Strait of, 174, 471
Mestre, Italy, 182, 183
metaphysics, 76, 84, 105, 256, 478
Metcalf, J. G., Annals of the Town of Men-
don

Methodists, 117, 204, 293, 436, 459
"Method of Nature, The" (Emerson), 286
Mexican War, 310
Mexico, 65, 310, 318

Meyerbeer, Giacomo, Robert le Diable (li-
bretto by Scribe), 186
MHS: Massachusetts Historical Society
.Miang: MS "Michel Angelo Buonaroti"
Michelangelo, 177, 202, 212, 213, 325, 463;

"Last Judgment," 178
"Michel Angelo Buonaroti," MS lecture

(Emerson), 202, 212, 213
Michelet, Jules, 327, 350
Michigan, 364, 403, 431
Michigan, Lake, 382, 385
Michigan City, Ind., 403
Mickiewicz, Adam, 327, 328, 350, 378
Middle Atlantic states, 384
Middlebury, Vt, 438

578

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Middlebury College, 307, 308
Middlesex Agricultural Society, 430; "En-
tries of Neat Stock and Swine at the
Cattle Show in Concord," MS
Middlesex Anti- Slavery Society, 227
Middlesex Association, 117
Middlesex County, Mass., 227, 367, 390
Middletown, Conn., 308
Milan, Italy, 183, 184, 472
Miles, Henry, 180
Mill, John Stuart, 180, 189, 190, 474, 475;

Letters, The, ed. Elliot
Mill Brook, 223, 292, 415, 506
Miller, Joaquin, 448
Millerites, 298
Milman, Henry Hart, 342
Milnes, Richard Monckton (created Baron
Houghton in 1863), 183, 257, 284, 285,
342, 343, 350, 353, 354, 475, 49*
Milton, John 77, 112, 116, 191, 203, 206, 272,
300, 386, 426; Areopagitica, 198; "Ly-
cidas," 1 68 ; Paradise Lost, 25, 322 ; Prose
Works, The, with life by Charles Sym-
mons, London, 1806, 92; Selection from
the English Prose Works, A, 137 ; works,
92

Milton, John, lecture on (Emerson), 202, 212
Milton, Mass., 430, 432, 484
Milwaukee, Wis., 384, 402, 418, 427
"Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury," course of lectures (Emerson), 351
Minneapolis, Minn., 432
Minnesota, 417, 432
Minorcans, 120

Minot, George Richards, Continuation of the
History of the Province of Massachu-
setts Bay, from the Year 1748, 222
Minott, George, 362, 363, 411
Mirabeau, Honore- Gabriel Riquetti, Comte

de, 373

Miscellanies (Emerson)
"Miserere mei, Deus" 177
Mississippi River, 14, 266, 380, 381, 382, 384,

385,. 386, 390, 433
Mississippi Valley, 39x2, 411, 431
Missouri Compromise, 369
Mitchel, Ormsby, 383
Mitchell, Donald ("Ik Marvel"), 421
"Mithridates" (Emerson), 310, 316
"ML," MS journal (Emerson)
MME : Mary Moody Emerson, aunt of RWE
Mo An: The Monthly Anthology
Mohammed, 467
Mohammedans, 170

Moliere, Malade imaginaire, Le, 472 ; Misan-
thrope, Le, 79, 92 ; works, 505
"Monadnoc" (Emerson), 318
Monadnock, Mt., 6, 314, 318, 401, 432
Monreale, Sicily, 174
Monroe, James, 59
Monselice, Italy, 182
Montagnon, Jeanne, 501
Montagu, Mme de, 462
Montaigne, Michel de, 67, 143, 156, 158, 182,
195, 249, 254, 278, 280, 309, 318, 329;

essays of, 79, ^57, 282> 376, 505; "Of
Three Commerces," 63

"Montaigne," lecture (Emerson), 375-376

Montana, 417

Monteagle, Thomas Spring-Rice, 1st Baron,
342

Montegut, fimile, 328, 329, 377, 461 ; Essais
de philosophie americaine (tr. and ed.),
386 ; "Litterature americaine. Du Culte
des heros. Carlyle et Emerson," 377;
"Penseur et poete americain, Un," 329

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron
de, 426 ; Lettrcs persanes, 95

Monthly Anthology, The, 18, 20, 25, 27, 28

Monthly Magazine, The, 326

Montmartre, boulevard, Paris, 184

Montreal, Quebec, 383, 419

Monypenny, W. F., Life of Benjamin Dis-
raeli, The (with G. E. Buckle)

Moody, Mary (married Joseph Emerson of
Maiden, 1721), great-grandmother of
RWE, 48

Moody, Samuel Emerson's great-great-
grandfather, 48

Moore, Abel, 361

Moore, Thomas, 74, 81

"Moral Forces," MS lecture (Emerson),

495

"Moral Obligation" (Emerson), 96
moral philosophy, 84, 118, 339
morals, 91

moral sense, 81, 82, 96
moral sentiment 158, 246, 376, 407, 434, 435 ;

lecture on (Emerson), 404
moral truth, 151, 166
More, Hannah, Practical Piety, 103
More, Thomas, 202; Utopia, 92
Morgan, John Minter, 352
Morgan, Sydney Owcnson, 344
Morison, James Cotter, 473
Morison, S. E., Three Centuries of Harvard,

Cambridge, Mass., 1936
Mormon, 459
Morpelh, Lord (George W. F. Howard),

342, 352, 353
Moscow, Russia, 35
Moses, 159
Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von, Ecclesiastical

History, An (tr. Maclaine), 96
Mother Nature, 212, 314
Motley, John Lothrop, Rise of the Dutch

Republic, The, 392
Mott, F. L., History of American Magazines

1741-1850, A, NY and London, 1930;

History of American Magazines 1850-

1865, d, Cambridge, Mass., 1938
Mott, Lucretia Coffin, 296, 368, 399
Motte, Mellish Irving, 72, 120, 159
Mourt, G. : see A Relation or Journal!
Muir, John, 447, 448
Miiller, Max : see under Max
MunAcct 37-39: see under James Munroe

& Co.
Munroe, James & Co., 300; "Memorandum

of an Agreement" (with Emerson), MS,

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

579

312; "Rev. R. W. Emerson in a/c with
James Munroe & Co.," No. I, MS state-
ment covering 1837-1839

Murat, Achilla, 121-122, 147, 185, 376, 413;
United States, The

Murat, Catherine Willis, 121

Murat, Joachim, 121

Murillo, 185

Murrad, AH Fendi, 468, 470

Murray, Oswald, Emerson, crayon sketch of,
350, 351

Murray, Mrs. Oswald, 350, 351

Murray's guide to Egypt, 469

Muscovites, 35

Muses, the, 58, 125, 388

Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo, 465-
466

Music Hall, Boston, 404, 409, 413, 416, 418

"Musketaquid" (Emerson), 214, 320

mysticism, 25, 93, 207, 208, 240, 241, 245,
280, 283, 286, 306, 375 (and elsewhere)

[N]

Nancy, servant, 224, 225

Nantasket Beach, 164, 286, 444

Naples, Italy, 121, 166, 168, 175-176, 464,

470, 471, 481
Napoleon, 35, 39, 59, 121, 184, 218, 292, 309,

368, 376, 377, 413
"Napoleon," lecture (Emerson), 335, 338,

354

NARev: The North American Revie^v

Nash, Joshua, 157

Nash, Paulina Tucker, sister of Emerson's
first wife, 157; see also Paulina Tucker

Nathalie, 294

Nation, The, 439

National Academy of Literature and Art, 425

National Assembly, French, 348, 349

National Republicans, 146, 153, 302

Native American Party, 308

"Natural Aristocracy" (Emerson), 337, 351,
353, 379, 38o

natural history, 201-202

"Natural History of Intellect," MS lecture
in 1848 (Emerson) : cf. 35 1-35.2

"Natural History of the Intellect," i.e., "Nat-
ural History of Intellect," course of lec-
tures (Emerson), 442

natural religion, 118

nature, e.g., 25, 103, 200, 240-241, 244, 247,
290, 317, 356, 364, 386, 447; Emerson's
early love of, 51, 71, 92> 97-99

Nature (Emerson), 197, 203, 209, 238, 240-
243, 246, 257, 261, 264, 279, 300, 373, 457

"Nature," essay (Emerson), 300

Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (Emer-
son), 374

Naushon Island, Mass., 396, 39^, 401, 426,
430, 455, 484, 491, 5o6

Nazareth, 357

NbkEngParis: MS "Note Book England
Paris 1847-8"

Neal, Daniel, History of New-England, The,

222

N EG al: New-England Galaxy (clipping with
MS title)

Negroes, 153, 155, 260, 292, 293, 308, 366,
388, 418, 421, 423, 427, 430, 450

NEMag: New England Magazine

Neoplatonists, 280

NEPal: New-England Palladium, news-
paper

NEQ: The New England Quarterly

Netherlands, 49

Neuberg, Joseph, 336

Neue Essays (Emerson, ed. J. Schmidt), 501

Nevada, 417, 446

New American Cyclopedia, The, 396

Newark, N. J., 296, 380

New Bedford, Mass., 124, 139, 179, 192, 199,
202, 204, 308, 399

New Brunswick, Canada, 330

Newbury, Mass., 49

NewChMag: The New-Church Magazine

New Church : see New Jerusalem Church

Newcomb, Charles King, 253, 285-286, 291,
360, 461, 473 ; "Copies from Charles K.
Newcomb's Manuscripts," MS in Emer-
son's hand ; Journals, The, ed. J. K. John-
son; "Two Dolons, The," 295

New England, 2 et passim

"New England," course of lectures (Emer-
son), 296, 297

"New England," lecture (Emerson), 495

"New England Capitalist," MS poem (Emer-
son), 302-303

New Englanders, 39, 120, 213, 226, 445

New-England Magazine, The, 198

New-England Primer, The, 216

New England Woman Suffrage Association,
440

New England Women's Club, 487

New Hampshire, 77, 127, 131, 133, 141, 142,
161, 287, 303, 445, 454, 455, 488, 489, 498

New Hampton, N. H., 489

New Hampton Institute, 489

New Harmony, Ind., community, 308

New Haven, Conn., 144

New Jersey, 121

New Jerusalem Church, 118, 126, 207, 220,

243, 333

NCZSJ Jerusalem Magazine, The, 126, 144, 236
"New Life of Dante Alighieri, The," MS,

Emerson's translation of Dante, 300
Newman, John Henry, 177; Letters
New Orleans, La., 253, 384
"New Poetry" (Emerson), 277
Newport, R. L, 379, 398, 438, 494
New School (Transcendentalists), 272
Newton, Isaac, Principia, 247
Newton, Mass., 17, 117, 198, 203, 208
Newton, Miss, 474
New World. 47, 280, 389
New Year's Day, 26, 323, 466
New York, N. Y., 118, 123, 129, 142, 144,

147, 179, 182, 197, 199, 204, 209, 223, 230,

253, 258, 270, 285, 287-289, 296-310 pas-

58o

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

sim, 323, 364, 373-380 passim, 389-403
passim, 415, 4*7, 423-439 passim, 445, 457,
458, 470, 494
New York, state of, 368, 370, 383, 384, 385,

408, 431
New-York Daily Tribune, 287, 288, 299, 370,

373, 378, 395, 402

Niagara Falls, 380, 418, 459, 499, 50O
Niagara River, 382

Nice, France, 462

Nichol, John Pringle, 339

Nicolozi, Francesco, 174

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 502

"Night and Love" (E. Lytton), 381

Nile, river, 458-470, passim

Nile Valley, 457, 469

Nisus, 37

NJMag: The New Jerusalem Magazine

Noddle's Island, 39, 40

"Nominalist and Realist" (Emerson), 301

Normans, 394

North, Christopher : see John Wilson

North, the (of U. S.), 175, 366, 384, 388, 405,
410, 411, 412, 414, 416, 418, 429, 496, 497

North America, 107

North American Review, The, 18, 73, 77,
144, 203, 323

Northampton, Mass., 99, 124, 157

Northampton, Spencer J. A. Compton, 2d
Marquis of, 343

Northboro, Mass., 91

North Bridge, Concord, 46, 214, 410, 501

Northerners, American, 367, 389, 408, 409,
412, 416, 420, 430

Northern Union, proposed, 390

Northwest, the (of U. S.), 432

Norton, Andrews, 82, 100, Hi, 126, 129, 134,
270, 272, 488; Discourse on the Latest
Form of In fidelity, A, 27 I ; Inaugural Dis-
course

Norton, Charles Eliot, 373, 405, 456, 461, 476,
478, 479, 488 ; Letters, ed. Sara Norton
and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Bo and NY,
1913

Norton,* Miss, 475

Nortons, the, 474, 475, 478

Norwalk Roads, 144

Norwood, Miss, 404

NoStC&PR: see under E. B. Emerson

"Note Book England Paris 1847-8," MS
(Emerson)

Nottingham, England, 334, 336

Nourse, Henry S., History of the Town of
Harvard Massachusetts

NoXV: MS journal "No XV" (Emerson)

NoXVI: MS journal "No. XVI" (Emer-
son)

NoXV II: MS journal "No XVII" (Emer-
son)

NoXV III: MS journal "No XVIII" (Emer-
son)

"NoXVIII," tj : typed journal "No. XVIII"
(Emerson)

"NQ," MS notebook (Emerson)

NT Wake: A Translation of the Nczv Testa-
ment: by Gilbert Wake field
Nubia, 465
Nubian Desert, 469
N YPL : New York Public Library

[O]

Oakland, Calif., 447

Oberlin, 0,, 434

"Ode," for 4 July 1857 (Emerson), 397

"Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing" (Emer-
son), 318, 388

"Ode to Beauty" (Emerson), 319

Odin, 94

Oegger, G., 236

Offering, The, 134

Officium Hebdomads Sancta juxta Formam
Missalis, et Breviarii Romani sub Urbano
VIII, 177

O'Flanagan, priest, 180

Ohio, 377, 380, 391, 431

Ohio River, 380, 381, 384

Ohio Valley, 242, 271

Old Brick (a home of the First Church,
Boston), 7, 22

Old Hundred, 274

"Old Man," MS journal (Emerson), 495

Old Manse (name properly belongs to the
time after the publication of Hawthorne's
book), Concord, 43, 51, 53, 112, 211, 232,
273, 294, 307, 453, 457

Old South Church, Boston, 495, 498

Old World, 170, 197, 296, 326, 380, 471

Olean, N. Y., 500

Omaha, Neb., 417

Omar, 94

Omar Khayyam, 478

Oneida Depot, N. Y., 385

Ontario, Lake, 382

"On the Character of John Knox, William
Penn, and John Wesley" (Emerson and
others), 86

"On the Relation of Man to the Globe," MS
lecture (Emerson), 201

"On the Times," course of eight lectures
(Emerson), 286

optimism, 95, 104, 126, 156, 389, 407, 478

Or Ami n: see under Wm. Emerson, father
of RWE

Oration, Delivered before the Literary So-
cieties of Dartmouth College, July 24,
1838, An (Emerson), 273

Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta
Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31,
1837, An (Emerson), 262-265, 266, 270,
273

oratory, Emerson's early love of, and train-
ing in, 57, 77, 78, 79, 101-102, 104

"Oratory and Orators" (Emerson), 488

Oriel College, Oxford, 344

Orient, the, 454, 463, 465

Oriental lore, 93, 94, 246, 260, 396, 438, 440,
495

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

581

Oriental philosophy, 236, 246, 271, 371, 375

Oriental Society, 397

"Original Hymn" (Emerson) ; see "Con-
cord Hymn," the later title

Orloff, Prince Nikolai, 461

Orloff, Princess, 461

Orphic poet, 241, 242, 313

Ortygia, island, 172

Osawatomie, Kan., 402

Osgood, James R., 451, 455

Osgood, Samuel, 242

Osiris, 268, 458, 468, 470

Ossian, 30

Ossoli, Angelo, 378

Ossoli, Giovanni Angelo, Marchese d', 378,
379

Ossoli, Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d': see
Margaret Fuller

^Ossoli," MS (Emerson)

Osterreich, 368

Otis, Harrison Gray, 77

overseer at Harvard, Emerson as, 435, 441,
446, 484

Over-soul, 278, 283, 314, 375, 407, 442, 490

"Over-soul, The" (Emerson), 282, 283

Ovid, 30, 173

Owen, George L., 469, 470

Owen, Richard, 345, 470

Owen, Robert, 308

OWH: Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-
1894)

Oxford, Bishop of: see Samuel Wilberforce

Oxford, England, town and university, 327,
344-345, 346, 377, 466, 475, 476, 477, 490

.[P]

"P," MS verse book (Emersonj

Pacific Ocean, 13, 417, 427, 446

Padua, Italy, 182

Paducah, Ky., 381

Paesturn, 144

Paganini, Nicolo, 190

Pailleron, fidouard, Helene, 461

Paine, A. B., Mark Twain

Paine, Robert Treat, 17; and daughters, 74

Paine, Thomas, 270, 335; Age of Reason,
The, 10

Paisley, Scotland, 340

Palermo, Sicily, 174, 175

Palestine, nickname of Lidian Emerson, 226

Paley, William, 30, 76, 82; Principles of
Moral and Political Philosophy, The, 80

Palfrey, John Gorham, 269, 367

Palgrave, Francis T., 344

Palmer, Edward, 259

Palmer, Mrs., 198

Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3d Vis-
count, 344, 426

Palm Sunday, 177

Pan, 227, 228, 317

Panama, 417

pantheism, 93, 167, 182, 240, 241, 245, 306,
317, 328, 386, 442, 443, 499

Papinot, bookseller, 187

Paris, France, 79, 134, 180, 184-189, 327,
346-351, 391, 459, 461-462, 466, 472-473,
47§

Parisians, 186, 348, 351, 461

Parker, Daniel P., 54

Parker, Theodore, 244, 259, 269, 275, 295,
324, 387, 390, 404, 409 ; American Scholar,
The; journal, MS, 269; "Thoughts on
Labor," 277 ; "Writings of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, The," 386, 389

Parley, Peter (i.e., S. G. Goodrich and as-
sistants), 309; geography, 169

Parliament, British, 257

Parnassus, 392

Parnassus (ed. Emerson), 451, 453, 472, 485,
493

parrot, 395

Parsons, Hannah Haskins, Emerson's cousin,
399

PartGree: see under Parton

Parthenon, 315

Parton, James, Life of Horace Greeley, The,
Bo, 1897

, Pascal, Blaise, Pensees, 79

Passignano, Italy, 180

Passover, the, 163, 494

Paterson, N. J., 380

Pathelin, 472

Patmore, Coventry, 345

Patten, Oliver, 51, 52

Patti, Carlotta, 419

Paulet, Elizabeth, 348, 474

Paulets, the, 346, 347, 356, 357

Pawnees, 417

Payne, John Howard, Clari, 190

PBE: Phebe Bliss Emerson, later Ripley,
paternal grandmother of RWE

PBER(grm) : Phebe Bliss Emerson Ripley,
RWE's paternal grandmother

Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 91, 205, 210, 215,
220, 234, 236, 247, 255, 261, 269, 278, 310,
501 ; Record of a School, 232 ; Reminis-
cences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing,
Bo, 1880

Peabody, Francis G., "Notes on Lectures
on Philosophy," mainly MS, 442-443

Peabody, Mary, 205, 210

peace, 335, 410, 416

PeaNbkPhil: see under F. G. Peabody

PeaRemChan: see under E. P. Peabody

pears, 325, 361, 483

Pedlar' sP: see under O. Shepard

Peel, Robert, 190

Peirce, Augustus, Rebe Iliad ', The, Cambridge,
Mass., 1863, 66, 72

Peirce, Benjamin, 392

Peirce, C. S., 442

Pelletier, James, 198

Pembroke, Earls of, 356

Perm, William, 86

Penn legacy, 55, 61, 63, 74, n8

Pennsylvania, 431

Pennsylvanians, 471

PER (a) : Phebe Bliss Emerson Ripley,
RWE's paternal aunt

582

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Perkins, Jacob, 196

Perry, Bliss, Walt Whitman, 2d ed., Bo and
NY, cop. 1906

Perry, Matthew C, 454

Perry, R. B., Thought mid Character of
William James, The, 1935

"Perry's Victory" (Emerson), 35

Persephone, 172

Persian poetry, 310

Persius, 277

Perth, Scotland, 340

PerTran: see under Gohdes

Peru, 77

Perugia, Italy, 180

PcrWJ ' : see under R. B. Perry

petition to faculty of Harvard College, MS
draft (Emerson)

Petrarch, 180, 182

Petruchio, Shakespeare's hero, 223

ph : photostat

Phaedrus (in Plato's dialogue), 227

Pharaoh, 468

Pheidias, 178, 314

PhHis: "Philosophy of History," MS lec-
tures

Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard chapter, 73, 87,
128, 156, 203, 231, 263, 267, 277, 435;
"Records of the Immediate Members,"
MS ; "Records of the Phi Beta Kappa
Society. Vol. 2," MS ; "Records of the
$BK Vol 3," MS

Phi Beta Kappa address of 1837 (Emerson) :
see The American Scholar

Phi Beta Kappa poem (Emerson), 203

Phidias : see Pheidias

Philadelphia, Pa., 122, 123, 145, 149, 180, 296,
368, 373, 38o, 389, 395, 397, 399, 403, 466,
488, 496, 498

Philae, Egypt, 458, 459, 466, 467, 468-469

PhilEm: see under Geo. S. Phillips

Phillips, George Searle ("January Searle"),
334, 336, 355 ; Emerson, London, 1855

Phillips, John, 55

Phillips, Jonathan, 244

Phillips, Wendell, 306, 368, 370, 390, 403,
408, 410, 426

Phillips Academy, Andover, 56

Phillips Exeter Academy, 498

Phillips, Sampson, & Co., 391

Philosophical Society, Boston, 9

philosophy, passim ; e.g., 21, 8off., 107, 115

"Philosophy of History," twelve MS lec-
tures (general title sometimes lacking),
in course of 1836-1837 (Emerson), 245-
248

Phinney, Elias, History of the Battle at
Lexington, 222

Phocion. 202

Physiological Society, Boston, 9

Pickering, William, 260

Pickwick, 335

Pierce, John, 87, 263; journal, MS extracts
from, made by Cabot; "Memoirs," MS
PierceExt: see under J. Pierce
Pierpont, John, 267

Pigeon Cove, Mass., 430

Pilgrims, the, 418, 448

Pindar, 172

Pirsson, Mrs. Louis, 326

Pisa, Italy, 463

Pittsburgh, Pa., 382, 419

Platen-Hallermund, August, Graf von, 171

Plato, 78, 85, 105, 143, 172, 184, 186, 239,
241, 243, 282, 301, 332, 336, 357, 365, 375,
506 ; Dialogues, The, tr. Jowett ; (Euvres,
tr. Cousin ; Phaedrus, 227, 281 ; Sympo-
sium, 134, 281; Works, The (pub. by
Bohn) ; Works, The (tr. Sydenham
and T. Taylor), 309; Works of Plato
Abridged, The, tr. by several hands from
the French of Andre Dacicr

Platonism, 96, 149, 239, 240, 242, 245, 281,

319, 375, 406-407

"Plato, or the Philosopher,' lecture and
chapter, with slight changes of title
(Emerson), 309, 337, 375

play, Emerson and, 24

Play fair, John, Dissertation on the Progress
of Mathematical and Physical Science
(Parts I and II), 92

Play fair, Lyon, 476

Plotinus, 240, 304, 506; Select Works

Plutarch, 172, 173, 278, 304, 445; Lives, 114;
Plutarch's Morals, 143

Plutarch's Morals, "Introduction" (Emer-
son), 444, 445

Plymouth, Mass., 39, 55, 203, 210-225 pas-
sim, 237, 265, 274, 324, 368

Plymouth Colony, 216

Poe, Edgar Allan, 305, 322, 405, 4&6 ; Com-
plete Works; Raven and Other Poems,
The, 309

"Poem on Eloquence," MS copy of Emer-
son's verses ; see "Eloquence," the title
reported by ColCcn

Poems, 1847, published late in 1846 (Emer-
son), 312-323, 324, 327, 350, 433-434;
"fifth" ed., 1856, 391

"Poet, The" (Emerson), 300, 305

"Poetical Essay" (Emerson), 35

poetry, Emerson's early attempts at writ-
ing, 32-33, 34-35, ct passim

"Poetry and Eloquence" (Emerson), 351

Poland, 349

politics, lo-n, 45, 204, 246, 318, 342, 358,
366, 368, 369, 405, 406, 414, 425, 426, 429,
462 ; see also, e.g., Democrats, Federal-
ists, Free Soil Party, National Repub-
licans, Republican Party, and Whigs

"Politics" (Emerson), 302, 303-304

"Politics and Socialism" (Emerson), 351

Pollock, William Frederick, 476

Polonius, 339

Polyanthos, The, II, 12, 27

Pompeii, Italy, 176

Pompey, 179

Ponsard, Frangois, Lucrecc, 347

Ponsonby, Mrs., 476

Pope, Alexander, 30

Pope, William, 86

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

583

Popkin, John S., 8, 9, 68

Portland, Me., 19, 28, 37

Porto Rico, 155, 158, 163, 164, 205, 258

Portugal, 40

Portuguese language, 17

Potomac, Army of the, 416

poverty of Emerson and his family, 30-86,
passim, and later

Powell, Lyman P., Mary Baker Eddy, NY,
1930

"Power," in The Conduct of Life (Emer-
son), 406

"Power" (Emerson), 384

"Powers and Laws of Thought" (Emerson),
351

Pr: see iwderWm. Emerson, father of RWE

Pradier, James, bust of Cuvier, 187

pragmatism, 105, 238, 288

Pratt, William, 189

Praxiteles, 178

prayer, in and elsewhere

"Pray without ceasing" (Emerson), 117, 119,
120, 123

"Preacher, The" (Emerson), 498

"Preaching Record," MS (Emerson ; "School
Record," the first title, doubtless indicates
the use to which Emerson put leaves that
are now lacking) ; last sermon recorded
in, 273

predestination, 9, 247

P res Age: "Present Age, The"

Presbury, Benjamin F., 490

Presbyterian churches and Presbyterianism,
99, 243, 271, 337, 459

Prescott, George L.t 410

Prescott, Mrs. George L., 410

Prescott, William H., 124, 392

"Present Age, The" (with some variations
in title), ten MS lectures, course of 1839-
1840 (Emerson), 262

president's freshman, Emerson as, 64, 66, 69,

7^, 74

Preston, England, 334
Price, Richard, Review of the Principal

Questions in Morals, 81
Priestley, Joseph, 10; Letters to a Philo-
sophical Unbeliever, 3
PrincctonRev: The Biblical Repertory
"Problem, The" (Emerson), 276, 312, 314,

501, 508

Proclus, 299, 304, 306
Procter, Bryan Waller, 342, 353
"Prof. Ticknors Synopsis," MS notes on
Ticknor's lectures (Emerson, perhaps
partly or largely from a syllabus or out-
line), 79-8o

"Progress of Culture," Phi Beta Kappa ad-
dress, 1867 (Emerson), 435
"Prolegomena of Sketch of Thoreau," MS

(Emerson)

Prose Works, The, 1869 (Emerson), 440
Prospect Hill, Harvard, Mass., 6
"Prospects" (Emerson), 241, 242
Protestants and Protestantism, 76, 107, 171,
177, 181, 322, 328, 407, 459, 499

providence, God's (or God), 6, 9, 31, 128,

217, 378, 406

Providence, R. L, 89, 252, 285, 286, 287, 440
PrRec: "Preaching Record"
"Prudence," essay (Emerson), 282, 283
"Prudence," MS lecture (Emerson)
Prussians, 323, 444
Psyche, 507
Ptolemy III, 469
Puck, 246
Puffer, Reuben, Sermon . . . May 25, 1803,

Being the Day of General Election, A,

12, 14

Pullman, George, 446
Punch, 342, 472
Puritans and Puritanism, n, 26, 44, 45, 47,

64, 138, 181, 215, 244, 294, 329, 336
Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 19, 345, 466
Pygmalion, 232
Pyrenees, 4

[Q]

"Q," MS journal (Emerson), 151

"Q>" tj, typescript copy of Emerson's jour-
nal so labeled by Cabot

Quakers and Quakerism, 22, 158, 164, 199,
204, 296, 346, 366, 368, 399, 459

Quarterly Review, The, 426

QuiFig: see under Josiah Quincy (1802-
1882)

Quincy, Edmund, 366

Quincy, Eliza, 12

Quincy, Josiah (1772-1864), 18, 67

Quincy, Josiah (1802-1882), 67; commence-
ment part, MS, 87; Figures of the Past,
Bo, 1883

Quinet, Edgar, 327, 350; Christianisme, Le

Quixote, Don, 233

[R]

"R," Emerson's MS journal so labeled by
Cabot

"R," tj, typescript of Emerson's MS journal
so labeled by Cabot

Rachel (filisa Felix), 347

Racine, Jean, 90; Andromaque, 79; Mithn-
date, 347; Phedre, 79, 347

Radcliffe, Ann Ward, Mysteries of Udolpho.
The, 4; Sicilian Romance, A, 4

Radical Club, Boston, 434, 489

Rains ford's Lane, Boston, 4, 5, 26, 40, 54,
102

Rambler, The, 30, 95

Ramsay, Andrew Crombie, 345

Raphael, cartoons, 476; "Madonna di Fo-
ligno," 180; paintings, 176, 178; rooms
in Vatican Museum, 178-9; "Transfigu-
ration, The," 178

Raster, Hermann, 391

Ravenscroft, Chepstow, home of the Am-
berleys, 476

Rawdon, England, 346

584

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Reading," lecture (Emerson), 333

"Readings," MS notes and selections used
in course of Jan-Mar 1869 (Emerson),
440

reason, 203-204, 206, 207, 239, 268, 375, 376 ;
see also understanding (the contrasting
faculty, according to Transcendental
theory)

Rebelliad, The (A. Peirce), 72

Rebellion Tree, 84

Recamier (Anna Barker), 253

RecLiLong: Records of a Lifelong Friend-
ship

Records of a Lifelong Friendship (corre-
spondence of Emerson and W. H. Fur-
ness), ed. H. H. Furness, Bo and NY,
1910

Redeemer, 33

Redpath, James, Public Life of Capt. John
Brown, The,, 403

Reed, Sampson, 126, 236 ; genius, oration on,
87; Observations on the Growth of the
Mind, 118

Reform Bill, the, 331

Reform Club, London, 343

reform movements, e.g., 247

Reid, Thomas, 83, 91 ; Essays on the^ Intel-
lectual Powers of Man, 3, 4 ; Inquiry into
the Human Mind} An, 75

Reid, T. Wemyss, Life . . . Milnes, The,
NY, cop. 1891

"Relation of Intellect to Natural Science"
(Emerson), 351

Relation or Journall, A, called Mourt's, 222.

religion, passim, e.g.,j£7> ^J10, ".S-^S;-^

religious training, Emerson's ',~"%6~et passim,
and especially 36, 37, 44, 55-56, 64, 75,

99 ff-

"Remarks" (Emerson; printed in Exhibi-
tion of the Schools of Concord . . .
March i6th, 1861), 409
"Remarks at the Meeting for Organizing
the Free Religious Association, Boston
May 30, 1867" (Emerson), 434
RemTeach: see under Geo. B. Emerson
Renaissance, 179
Renan, Ernest, 464, 473 ; Vie de Jesus, La,

375

Renans, the, 461
Rennie, John, 341
Representative Men (Emerson), 365, 374,

377, 391
"Representative Men," course of lectures

(Emerson), 309, 310, 333
Republican Party, 369, 389, 405, 426
Resina, Italy, 176
revelation, 103, 105, 206
Revue des deiix mondes, 328, 329
Revue independante, La, 328
Reynolds, Edward, 114
Reynolds, Grindall, 410, 439
RH : Ruth Haskins
RHE: Ruth Haskins Emerson
rhetoric, 68, 76
Rhodes, 170

"Rhodora, The" (Emerson), 203, 273, 312,

317

Rhone, valley of the, 184

"Rhymer," MS verse book (Emerson)

rhyming journal of trip through N. H., Aug
1829, MS (Emerson), 141

RhymJoiiPhila: see under Ellen T. Emer-
son, 1st wife of RWE

Ribera, Giuseppe (Spagnoletto), 176, 34$

Rice, Reuben N., 418, 419

Richard, King (in Emerson's fiction), 94, 95

"Richards Confession" (Emerson), 94

Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa Harlowe, 143

Richmond, Va., 416

Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich, Cabinets-
Bibliothek der deutschen Classiker. An-
thologic aus den Wcrken Jean Paul's, 236

Rights of Man Club, Blanqui's, 348

Ripley, Ezra (1751-1841), Emerson's step-
grandfather, 2, 30, 41-54 passim, 127, 130,
I3S, 137, 159, 160, 167, 208, 209, 227, 229,
249, 251, 270, 273, 274, 292, 293, 294;
sketch of, 44; Half Century Discourse,
222 ; History of the Fight at Concord, A,

222

Ripley, George, 82, 243, 275, 276, 278, 289;
"Latest Form of Infidelity, The" Ex-
amined, 272 ; Specimens of Foreign Stand-
ard Literature (ed.), 260

Ripley, Lincoln (1761-1858), husband of
Emerson's paternal aunt Phebe, 41 ?

Ripley, Major General, 58

Ripley, Phebe Bliss Emerson (married Ezra
Ripley, 1780; ; died, 1825), paternal grand-
mother of RWE, 26, 43, 44, 46, 54; sec
also Phebe Bliss and P. B. Emerson

Ripley, Phebe Bliss Emerson, wife of Lin-
coln Ripley and paternal aunt of RWE,

37, 55?

Riplev, Samuel (1783-1847), son of Ezra
Ripley and half uncle of RWE, 37, 59,
62, 69, 70, 75, 86, 117, 119, 124, 125, 137,
159, 262, 270, 272, 294, 307, 446

Ripley, Sarah (1781-1826), daughter of
Ezra Ripley and half aunt of Emerson, 86

Ripley, Sarah, Emerson's cousin, 213

Ripley, Sarah Alden Bradford, wife of Sam-
uel Ripley, half uncle of RWE, 37, 75,
81, 117, 126, 143, 163, 232, 256, 266, 284,
364, 438

Ripley, Sophia Dana, 289

Ripley Female College, 430

Ripleys, the, in Concord, 112, 123

Ripon, England, 335

Robbins, Chandler, 199

"Robert Burns" (Emerson), 400

Robertson, William, History of Scotland,
The, 60; History of the Reign of the
Emperor Charles V , The, 60, 134-135

Robinson, Corinne R., My Brother Theo-
dore Roosevelt

Robinson, Henry Crabb, 343, 346, 354

Rochester, N. Y., 385, 395

Rock Island, III, 385

Rocky Mountains, 14

INDEX AMD BIBLIOGRAPHY

585

Rogers, Samuel, 332

Rolfe, William J., 486

Rollin, Charles, Ancient History, The, 37

Roman Catholic Church, 10, 76, 296, 323, 499

Roman revolution, 378

Romans, 99, 183, 3*6

Romantic Movement, 71, 245, 265

"Romany Girl, The" (Emerson), 434

Rome, Italy, 56, 94, 116, 176-180, 181, 185,
189, 191, 202, 3io, 315, 459, 463-464, 471-
472

Rome, N. Y, 385

Romeo (Shakespeare's), 276

Roosevelt, Theodore, 470; Theodore Roose-
velt

Roosevelt family, 470

Rosalie, 462

Roscoe Club, Liverpool, 333, 335

Rossetti, William Michael, 354, 49 x

Rossini, Gioachino Antonio, Guillaume Tell,
1 86; Otcllo, 190

Rotch, Mary, 199

Rothschild, Lionel Nathan de, 34*

Round-Pointers, 24, 33

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 81, 143, 184

Routledge, George, 391

Rowse, Samuel, Emerson, drawing of, 397

Rowson, Susanna Haswell, 17

Roxbury, Mass., I, 98, 99, 102, 110-116 pas-
sim, 134, I4r, M9, 153, 198; Baptist
Church, 134

Roy, Rammohun, 93

Rush, Richard, 349

Ruskin, John, 454, 466 ; Two Paths, The, 477

Russell, Bertrand and Patricia, Amberley
Papers, The (eel), NY (1937)

Russell, Francis, 339

Russell, John Russell, 1st Earl, 426, 475, 470

Russell, Le Baron, 211, 237, 454

Russell, Lucia Jane, 211

Russell, Mary, later Mrs. B. M. Watson, 290

Russell, Mary Rowland, 211, 218

Russell, Nathaniel, 210, 211

Russia and the Russians, 35

Rutland, Vt, 46, 154

RWE : Ralph Waldo Emerson

RWEMA : Ralph Waldo Emerson Memo-
rial Association

"R. W. Emerson. Jan. 1820. Boston," MS
memorandum book of 1820 and various
years (Emerson)

RWE'sRe: see under K. Cameron

[S]

Saadi, Gulistan, The, 300, 310
"Saadi" (Emerson), 299-300, 310
"Sabbath, The" (Emerson), 32-33
SABR : Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley
Sacramento, Calif., 417
Sahara, 461

St. Anthony, Falls of, 382, 432
St. Augustine, Confessions, The, 19
St. Augustine, Florida Terr., 120-121
St. Croix, West Indies, 155

St. Denis, France, 189

Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 457

St. Francis of Assisi, 180

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, "Shaw Memorial,"
422

St. John, 336

St. Lawrence River, 383

St. Louis, Mo., 382, 383, 384, 435, 448

St. Louis Philosophical Society, 433

St. Mary's, Ga., 121

St. Paul, 163, 459, 464

St. Paul's, London, 189, 191, 475, 476

St. Peter's, Rome, 177, 178, 315, 463

Salem, Mass., 73, 239, 256, 385

Sales, Francis, 17

Sales, Miss, 56

Salisbury, England, 355, 356

Sallust, 58

Salt Lake City, Utah Terr., 417, 446

Sampson, George Adams, 136, 141, 161, 198,
205, 233

Sampson, Hillman B., 233

SamR : Samuel Ripley, half uncle of RWE

San: see under F. B. Sanborn

Sanborn, Franklin B., 326, 387, 390, 395, 396,
401, 402, 485, 501, 505, 508; A. Branson
Alcott (with W. T. Harris), Bo, 1893;
Genius and Character of Emerson, The
(ed.) ; Henry D. Thoreau,Bo, 1884, 506;
Life of Henry David Thoreaii, The, Bo
and NY, 1917; Personality of Emerson,
The, Bo, 1903; Recollections, Bo, 1909

Sand, George, 260, 350

San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy, 182

Sandusky, 0., 380

San Francisco, Calif., 409, 417, 446, 447

San Giovanni, Cathedral of, Valetta, 170, 171

Sangooly, Philip Jogut, 397

San Juan, Porto Rico, 155, 206

Sanskrit, 397

Santa Croce, Florence, 181, 184 463

Santa Cruz (St. Croix), West Indies, 147,

155

Santa Fe, District of N. M., 382

Santa Maria, one of the Azores, 170

Saratoga, N. Y., 499, 500

Sargent, Winthrop, Boston. A Poem, 1803,
14, 1 6

Sartor Resartus (T. Carlyle, ed. Emerson,
Bo, 1836), 237

Saturday Club, 392, 396, 398, 400, 413, 4^3,
424, 450, 484, 5o6

Saturday Review, The, 426

Saunders, Mrs., 216

Sautel Sioux, Indians, 432

Savinsky, Count, 473

Savior, the, 237

Saxons, 66, 334 364

Schelling, F. W. J. von, 206, 208, 304 3o8,
371, 442 ; "Schilling's Introductory Lec-
ture in Berlin" (tr. F. Hedge), 295

Schiller, Joh. Christoph Friedrich von, 165;
History of the Thirty Years3 War, The,

143
School for Young Ladies, Wm. Emerson's

586

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

and RWE's, 76, 89-91, 97, 101, 102, 108,

404

School for Young Ladies, MS speech at re-
union of (Emerson), 404

schooling of Emerson, 19-61, passim; see
also college training

schoolmaster, Emerson as, in Boston, 89-
108, passim; Cambridge, 116; Chelms-
ford, 113-114; Roxbury, 114-115, 116;
f Waltham, 69-70, 75

science, 20, 60, 64, 82, and especially 187
if., 200 ff., 246 ; see also Darwin, evolu-
tion, etc.

Scotland, 324, 335, 355, 383, 394; Emerson
in, 1833: 192-195; 1848: 337-340; 1873:
477-478

Scott, David, 326, 338, 339, 340

Scott, Walter, 60, 92, 193, 419, 449; Fortunes

of Nigel., The, 93; Marmion, 143, 192;

Pirate, The, 93; Quentin Dunvard, 93;

, Redgauntlet, 93; Rob Roy, 194; Rokeby,

337; St. Ronan's Well, 93

Scottish philosophy and philosophers, 82,

83, 91, 193

Scriptures, 21, 27, 46, 114, 121, 124, 138, 139,
151, 165, 205, 224

Scriptures, the, lectures on (Emerson), 151

Scudder, H. E., James Russell Lozvell, Bo
and NY, 1901

Scudder, Townsend, 3d, "Chronological List
of Emerson's Lectures on his British Lec-
ture Tour of 1847-1848, A," in PMLA,
LI, 243-248 (Mar 1936) ; Lonely Way-
faring Man, The, London and NY, 1936

Scylla, 174

Seamen's Bethel, Boston, 255

ScaNoiStf: MS "Sea-notes. Oct. 1847"
(Emerson)

Sebastopol, Russia, 385

Sebonde, Raimond de, 376

Sedgwick school, Lenox, 485

Seine, river, 351

Selected Poems (Emerson), 495

self-reliance, 6, 104, 105, 123, 146, 147, 158,
164, 202, 203, 204, 246, 247, 280, 282, 283,
284, 285, 290, 293, 302, 319, 329, 369, 370,
373, 374, 38o, 407, 435, 502

"Self-reliance" (Emerson), 168, 279-280,
281, 283, 354

self-reverence, in, 115, 158, 166, 204, 259

self-trust, 264, 265, 280, 281

SelPs: sec under Win. Emerson, father of
RWE

Senate, U. S., 14, 296, 369, 389, 402, 425

Seneca, 156

Seneca Falls, N. Y, 369

sensibility, in Emerson's early verse, 74

Sermione, Italy, 183

Sermon on the Mount, 151

sermons, MS, in Emerson's hand (171 num-
bered manuscripts, together with a few
fragments), 117 et passim
SerTh: see under Wm. Emerson, father of

RWE
Sevenoaks, England, 476

Severn, River, 335

Sewall, Samuel, 306

Sewalls, the, 160

Seward, William Henry, 414, 415

SGW: Samuel Gray Ward

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3d
Earl of, 82

Shakers and Shakcrism, 125, 131, 141, 298

Shakespeare, William, 16, 30, 60, 67, 163,
203, 231, 239, 267, 309, 329, 332, 356, 376,
386, 387, 413, 424, 469, 477, 4&6 ; Dramatic
Works, The; Hamlet, 18, 93, 276; Henry
V, 408; Julius Caesar, 19, 179; King
John, 276 ; Midsummer Night's Dream,
A; sonnets, 346; works, 93

"Shakespeare," lecture (Emerson), 335, 338,

354

"Shakspeare," MS (Emerson), 424

Shattuck, Lemuel, History of the Town of
Concord, A, 221

Shaw, Lemuel, 54

Shaw, Robert Gould, 418, 421, 422

SHE: Susan Haven Emerson

Sheffield, England, 192, 335

Shelley, P. B., 182, 475, 4§6

Shenstone, William, 30

Shepard, Odcll, Pedlar's Progress, Bo, 1937

Shepard, Thomas, Clear Sun-shine of the
Gospel, The, 222 ; New Englands Lamen-
tation, 222

Sherman, Frank D., 501

Shock of Recognition, Thc,cd. Edmund Wil-
son

Shoshone Indians, 446

Shurtleff, Samuel A., 220

Sibyl (Mary Moody Emerson), 420

Sicilians, 174, 175

Sicily, 286, 471 ; Emerson in, 171-175

Sidney, Philip, Arcadia, 356

Sierra Nevada, in Calif., 417, 446, 447, 448

Sierra Nevada, in Spain, 170

Simmons, Mary Ripley, 507

Simon, Julius, Ralph Waldo Emerson in
Dcutschland (1831-1932), Berlin, 1937

Simple Cobbler : see Nathaniel Ward

Simplon, pass, 184

Sims, Thomas, 368

Sinai, 459

Sioux, the, 382, 417

Sismondi, Leonard de, DC la littcrciiurc du
midi de I* Europe, 92, 96; works, 180

Sisline Chapel, Vatican, 177

slavery, 90, 95, 121, 153, 185, 205, 228, 230,
260, 303, 306, 355, 366, 367, 368, 369, 389,
397, 401, 405, 406, 408, 409, 410, 412, 416,
421, 422, 493

slavery, address on (Emerson), 260

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, 385, 397,
420, 424, 508

Smalley, George Washburn, 476

Smalley, Phoebe G., 475

SMF: Margaret Fuller

Smith, Adam, 426 ; Theory of Moral Senti-
ments, The, 8 1

Smith, Mrs. Baird, 474

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

587

Smith, Gerrit, 390

Smith, Goldwin, 426

Smith, Theodore Clarke, Life ... o/ ...

Gar field, The

Smith, William, translator of Fichte, 478
Smithson, J. H., 333
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C,

414, 450

Smolensk, Prince of, 35
"Snow-storm, The" (Emerson), 312
Social Circle, Concord, 252, 399, 484, 506,

508; Memoirs of Members
socialists and socialism, 349, 352
Society and Solitude (Emerson), 441, 442,

448
Society for the Promotion of Theological

Education in Harvard University, no;

"Records of the Trustees," MS
Socrates, 78, 80, 159, 182, 195, 202, 227, 267,

282, 357, 421
Sohier, William D., 224
"Soldier's Chorus" (Gounod), 490
"Solitude" (Emerson), 57, 58
Sophocles, 95

Sorbonne, Paris, 187 ; Programme des cours
South, the, in the U. S., 99, 124, 175, 366,

367, 3^4, 388, 389, 4", 412, 414, 4i6, 428,

460, 498

South Carolina, 175, 306, 413, 418
South Carolinians, 17, 67, 76, 429
Southerners, American, 367, 389, 408, 409,

412, 418, 430, 497
Southey, Robert, Curse of Keliama, The,

83; Thalaba, 143
Soyer, Alexis Benoit, 341
Spagnoletto : see Ribera
Spain, 120, 170
Spaniards, 5, 10, 120, 348
Spanish language or literature, 17, 129, 155
Spectator, The, 30, 95
"Speech at the Dinner to Dr. Holmes, Au-
gust 29" (Emerson), 400
"Speech on Affairs in Kansas" (Emerson),

390

Spence, William, 353
Spencer, Herbert, 335
Spenser, Edmund, Fowre Hymncs, 319
"Sphinx, The" (Emerson), 277, 312-314
Spinoza, Baruch (or Benedict), 144, 308
"Spirit" (Emerson), 242
"Spirit of the Time" (Emerson), 379
Spiritual Inquirer, The, 235
"Spiritual Laws" (Emerson), 281
Spofford, A. R., librarian of Congress, 498
Sprague, William B., Annals of the Amer-
ican Unitarian Pulpit, NY, 1865
Springfield, III, 383, 384
Springfield, Mass., 142
Spurzheim, Kaspar, 167
Stackpole, Joseph Lewis, 179
Stael, Mme de, 163, 206
Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 344, 461, 474, 475>

50i
Stanley, Augusta, 461, 475

Stanley, Edward Lyulph (later 4th Baron

Stanley), 426
^Stanley, Miss, 476

Stanley of Alderley, Lady, 473, 474, 476

Stanton, Edwin McMasters, 420

Staples, Samuel, 256, 368, 415, 453, 507

Staten Island, N. Y., 145, 285, 290, 459

Stebbins, E.} Charlotte Cushman

Stebbins, Horatio, 446, 447

St-ECor: see A Correspondence

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, "John Brown's
Invasion. How Old Brown Took Har-
per's Ferry," 402

Stephen, Leslie, 439

Stephenson, George, 196, 335

Sterling, John, 257, 285, 298; correspond-
ence : see A Correspondence

Sterne, Laurence, 67

Stetson, Caleb, 263

Stevens, Mr., 474

Stevenson, Hannah, "Miss Stevenson's Rec-
ollections of R. W. E's School," MS
record by E. W. Emerson

StevRcc: see under Hannah Stevenson

Stewardson, Thomas, 182, 183, 184

Stewart, Dugald, 76, 81, 82, 83, 91, 193;
Elements of the Philosophy of the Hu-
man Mind, 80; General View of the
Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and
Political Philosophy, A (2d part), 92

Stillman, William J., 398, 445

Stimp son's Boston Directory

Stirling, James Hutchison, 486

Stirling, Scotland, 193

Stockwell, Mary, Descendants of Francis
Le Baron, Bo, 1904

Stoics, 10, 280, 282

Stoke Poges, England, 355

Stone, Charles P., 466

Stone, Lucy, 440

Stonehenge, 355, 356

Storers, the, 462

"Stories to be written by learners" (Emer-
son), 90

Story, Emelyn Eldredge, 471

Story, William Wetmore, 471

"Story for September loth 1823 Ginevra"
(Emerson), 90

Stowe, Cyrus, 361

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin,

369

Stowe, Nathan, 361
Stratford-on-Avon, England, 356, 477
Strauss, David Friedrich, 357
Strode, William, "Music," 472; Poetical

Works, The
Stromboli, volcano, 174
Strong, Caleb, governor of Mass., r, 9, 12
Stuart, Gilbert, 17
Stuckenberg, J. H. W., Life of Immanuel

Kant, The
Sturgis, Caroline (married Wm. A. Tappan,

1847), 214, 253, 276, 282, 299, 300, 307,

308, 309, 310, 322, 453; see also C. S.

Tappan

588

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sturgis, Ellen, 214

Sturgis, Mrs. 214

Stuttgart, Wiirttemberg, 236, 501

Sudbury River, 51

Suffolk County, Mass., 58

Sullivan, John, 362

Sully, Maximilien de Bethune, Due de,

Memoirs (tr. C. Lennox), 92
Summer St., in which was the first Boston

home of the Emersons, 7, 8, 23, 24, 32,

33, 39, 40, 59, 65, 67, 102
Sumner, Charles, 324, 366, 389, 390, 410, 414,

416, 423, 4^5, 438, 450, 490, 505
Sumner, Mrs., 472
"Superlative in Manners and Literature,

The," lecture (Emerson), 333, 354
"Superlative, or Mental Temperance, The"

(Emerson), 498
Surrey, county, England, 346
Suspension Bridge, N. Y., 418
Sussex, Augustus Frederick, Duke of, 190
SusyE: Susan Tompkins Emerson
Sutherland, Harriet Howard Leveson-

Gower, Duchess of, 352, 353
Sutton, Henry, Evangel of Love, The, 336
Swayne, Josephine L., Story of Concord,

The, 2d ed., Bo, 1939
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 207, 208, 220, 243,

263, 309, 333, 365

Swedenborgians and Swedenborgianism, 81,
87, 118, 126, 167, 204 215, 220, 236, 243,
256, 288, 333, 363, 377

"Swedenborg; or, the Mystic," in Repre-
sentative Men (Emerson), 375

"Swedenborg, or the Mystic," lecture (Emer-
son), with some changes in title, 333, 377

Swedish language, 501

Swift, Jonathan, 30, 67, 81 ; Gulliver's Trav-
els, 143

Switzerland, 184, 502

Symposium (Transcendental Club), 243, 244

Syracuse, N. Y., 385

Syracuse, Sicily, 171-173

[T]

t : typescript

Tacitus, 60, 68, 295, 463

Tahiti, 446

Taine, Hippolyte, 477 ; Histoire de la littera-
ture anglaise, 473

Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, 337

Tallahassee, Florida Terr., 121, 122

Tamworth, England, 192

Taormina, Sicily, 174

Tappan, Caroline Sturgis, 453, 484 ; see also

Caroline Sturgis

Tappan, William A., 297, 308, 453
Tarbox, Mr., 117
Tasso, Torquato, 179
Taylor, Bayard, 472
Taylor, Edward, 204, 255
Taylor, Jane, 217

Taylor, Jeremy, Holy Dying, 92, 103 ; Holy
Living, 103

Taylor, Miss, 475

Taylor, Tom (1817-1880), "Abraham Lin-
coln," 472

Taylor, Zachary, 366

Taylor Institution, Oxford, 477

TC: Thomas Carlyle

teachers' convention, Emerson's speech at,
496

Tellenbach, Madame, 463

temperance movement, 292, 293

Temple, Lady, 12

Temple, William, 143

Temple School (Alcptt's), 233, 245, 252

"Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought"
(Emerson), 351

Tennessee, 498

Tennyson, Alfred, 250, 260, 299, 340, 346,
426, 454, 455, 466, 492; Idylls of the
King; In Memoriam, 371

Tenth Muse : see Anne Bradstreet

"Terminus" (Emerson), 429, 434

Terni, Italy, 180

"Tests of Great Men," MS lecture (Emer-
son)

Teufelsdrockh, 207

Texas, 306, 308, 498

Texas Convention, 306

TGM: MS "Tests of Great Men"

Thacher, Judge, 269

Thacher, Peter, 138

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 342, 343;
Vanity Pair, 353, 371

Thames, river, 189, 341, 351

Thanksgiving Day, 26, 50, 217, 449, 491, 495

Thayer, James B., 439, 446, 449 ; Rev. Sam-
uel Ripley of Waltham, Cambridge, Mass.,
1897 ; Western Journey with Mr. Emer-
son, A, Bo, 1884

Thayer, Sophia Ripley, 446

Theatre-Frangais, 186, 472

Thebes, Egypt, 466, 467-468 ; sec also Luxor

theism, 268, 442

Thenard, Louis-Jacques, 187

Theological School at Cambridge : see Har-
vard Divinity School (later name)

theology, 84, 99, 103, 105, 108, no, 112, 115,
124, 256, 269

TheoP: Theo. Parker

Thiers, Adolphe, 186

Thompson, George, 227, 228

Thompson, Ralph, American Literary An-
nuals & Gift Books, NY, 1936

Thoreau, Cynthia Dunbar, 291, 367, 451

Thoreau, Henry David, 78, 254, 282, 287-
319 passim, 325, 330, 333, 358, 365, 367,
373, 378, 385, 391, 396~4i5 passim, 424
443, 447, 451, 487, 490, 491, 492, 501, 508 ;
"Aulus Persius Flaccus," 277; journals,
MS, 416, 422 ; Letters to Various Persons
(ed. Emerson), 416; "Maiden in the
East," 290; "Sister, A"; "Sphinx, The,"
MS commentary on; "Sympathy," 255,
276; Week on the Concord and Herri-
mack Rivers, A, 311, 364, 416 ; Writings,
The, Walden Edition, Bo and NY, 1906

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

589

Thoreau, H. D., address at funeral of, later
published as "Thoreau" (Emerson), 415

Thoreau, H. D,, lectures on (Emerson), 416,
492

Thoreau, John, Jr., 290

Thoreau, Sophia, 451, 491, 492

Thoreau family, 291

Thoreau St., Concord, 490

Thorwaldsen (or Thorvaldsen), Bertel, 116,
178, 179

ThorWr: see under H. D. Thoreau

"Thoughts on Modern Literature" (Emer-
son), 277

"Thoughts on the Religion of the Middle
Ages" (Emerson), 96, 97

Three: see wider S. E. Morison

"Three Boys, The," Gutekunst photographs,
481

Three Glorious Days, the (les Trois Glo-
rieuses), 186

"Threnody" (Emerson), 294, 321

Thule, 120

Thwing, Annie H., Crooked & Narrow
Streets, The

Tiber, river, 280

TickLi: Life . . . of George Ticknor (G.
S. Hillard and others)

Ticknor, George, 63, 79, 80, 90, 101, 105, 254

Ticknor & Fields, 406, 432

Ticonderoga, fort, 46, 154

Tilden, Isabella, 404

Tilden, Katharine, reminiscences in sketch
of her life, typescript excerpt from

Tilton, J. R., 471, 472

Times, The, London, 341, 351

Timoleon, 172

Timrod, Henry, "Ode," 472

Tintern Abbey, 476

Titian, 176

"To * * * *" (Emerson)

Tocqueville, Alexis de, De la Democratie en
Amerique, 185, 350; Du systeme peniten-
tiaire aux 6tats-Unis, 185

Tocqueville, Mme de, 350

"To Eva" (Emerson), 276

Tomlinson, Irving C, Twelve Years, Bo,
cop. 1945

"To Rhea" (Emerson), 312, 315

Toronto, Ontario, 400

"To the Humble-bee" (Emerson), 273

Tourgueneff, Ivan, 461, 473

Town and Country Club, Boston, 365

Town and Country Magazine, projected, 365

Townsend, Eliza, 166

Trajan, Column of, 178

Transcendental Club, 243, 245, 266, 272, 275

Transcendentalism and Transcendentalisms,
44, 82, 207, 208, 215, 220, 224-230 passim,
235-245 passim, 255, 256, 260-312 pas-
sim, 316, 324, 327, 337, 358, 363, 366, 372-
377 passim, 386, 399, 406, 420, 421, 428,
435, 445, .446, 460, 484, 504 ; sources and
characteristics of Transcendentalism, es-
pecially 244-245

"Transcendentalist, The," lecture (Emer-
son), 286

Transcendentalist, The, proposed name for
a journal, 235

Transcendental university, proposed, 289

Translation of the New Testament: by Gil-
bert Wake field, A, from 2d London ed.,
Cambridge, 1820, Emerson's interleaved
copy, with many MS notes by him

Trasimenp, Lago, 180

TreesMajor: MS "Trees," a notebook of
over 100 pages (Emerson), 249

TreesMinor: MS "Trees," a miniature note-
book (Emerson), 249

Tree Society, 249

Trent affair, 415

Trinita de' Monti, Rome, 178

trinitarianism, 2, 10, in

Trinity Church, Boston, 5, 23, 43, 102

Trinity Church, New York, 436

Triune God, 293

Trojan War, 37

TroUcpe, Frances Milton, 185

Trossachs, the, 104

Trowbridge, John T., 374; My Own Story,
Bo and NY, 1903

Troy, ancient, 276

Truckee, Calif., 448

"T Transcript/1 MS journal (Emerson)

Tubingen, Wiirttemberg, 236

Tucker, Abraham, Light of Nature Pur-
sued, The, 60

Tucker, Beza, 134, 149, 157

Tucker, Ellen Louisa (born, 1811? married,
1829), 125, 130, 131-142 passim, 211, 214
219, 319, 358; Album, MS with printed
title page, 131 ; "Lines," beginning "Love
scatters oil," 277; verse and common-
place book "Ellen Tucker," MS ; see also
E. L. T. Emerson

Tucker, George, 134, 147

Tucker, Margaret (died, 1832), sister of
Emerson's first wife, 134, 142, 144, 145,
157, 199, 219

Tucker, Mary, 134

Tucker, Paulina (sister of Emerson's first
wife), 134; see also P. T. Nash

Tucker estate, 133, 157, 199, 200, 224, 250

Tufts, George, 499, 500

Tuileries, Paris, 186

Tumbledown Hall, 325

Tuscan language, 181

Tuttle, Augustus, 362

Twain, Mark (S. L. Clemens), 500, 501

Twelfth-night, 26

Twist, Eliza, 37

TwoUnEs: Two Unpublished Essays

Two Unpublished Essays (Emerson, ed. E.
E. Hale), Bo and NY, 1896

Tyndall, John, 457, 476

[U]

"U," Emerson's MS journal so labeled by
Cabot

590

INDEX AMD BIBLIOGRAPHIC

Uffizi Gallery, 202, 463
Uilsa, 94

Underbill, John, Newes from America, 222
Underbill, Vt, 438

understanding, 203-204, 206, 268; see also
reason (the contrasting faculty, accord-
ing to Transcendental theory)
Union, the American, 34, 39, 366, 367, 388,
389, 390> 408, 409, 4io, 4I6, 417, 426, 427.
500

Union Club, Boston, 419
Unitarians and Unitarianism, 9, 10, 17, 44,
65, 93-101 passim, 120-124 passim, 138,
159, 160, 165, 176, 177, 186, 191-198 pas-
sim, 209, 215, 220, 228, 230, 242, 243, 244,
267-272 passim, 293, 333, 336, 363, 371,
383, 395, 396, 427, 430, 434, 446, 447, 499,
504, 508
United States, 14, 73, 146, 322, 361, 364, 374,

385, 390, 415, 421, 470, 49i
United States Magazine, and Democratic

Review, The, 242, 298, 304
unity, 240, 241, 246, 247, 261, 283, 304, 317,

375, 377

Universal Being, 240
Universalist, 243

Universal Mind, 149, 246, 301, 375
"Universes/* MS journals (Emerson), 85
University Lectures, Harvard, 442, 445, 446
Upham, Charles Wentworth, 73, 87, 100, 137
Uriel, archangel, 272, 273, 364
"Uriel" (Emerson), 272, 312
"Uses of Great Men, The," lecture (Emer-
son), 309

"Uses of Natural History, The," MS lec-
ture (Emerson), 200
Utah, 446, 459
Ute Indians, 446
utilitarianism, 190, 191

[V]

"V," MS journal (Emerson)

"VA," MS journal (Emerson)

"Valedictory Poem" of July 1821 (Emer-
son), 84

"Valedictory Poem Spoken at Concord"
(Emerson), 52

Valetta (or Valletta), Malta, 170, 171

Valette, Jean Parisot de la, 170

Van Buren, Martin, 250, 267, 380

Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), 383

Vatican, 178

VBk"E.L.": MS "E. L."

VBk"P": MS "P"

VBkRhymer: MS "Rhymer"

VBkX: MS verse book "X"

Vedas, 397

Velasquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y, 348

Venice, Italy, 93, 182-183, 191, 472

Vennachar, Loch, 193

"Venus," Medici, 181

Venus, temple of, Baiae, Italy, 176

VerBkElTuck: see MS verse and common-
place book under Ellen Tucker

VerBkJouGWT-ELT: see verse book and
journal under Ellen T. Emerson, wife of
RWE

Vergil, 37, 173

Vermont, 287, 307, 430

Vermont, University of, 154

Vermont & Canada Railroad, 362

Vernon, N. Y., 385

Verona, Italy, 183

Very, Jones, 255 ; "Epic Poetry," 256 ; Es-
says and Poems, 256; "Evening Choir,
The," 295 ; "Hamlet," 256 ; "Shakspeare,"
256; sonnets, 256

Vesuvius, 176

Viardot, Paulina Garcia (Pauline Viardot-
Garcia), 461

Vicenza, Italy, 183

Vico, Giovanni Battista, 327

Vigilance Committee, Boston, 368

Villiers de I'lsle-Adam, Philippe de, 170

Vineyard Sound, 396

Virginia, 76, 263,^427, 497, 498

Virginia, University of, 496-497

Viri Roma (Livy and others, adapted by
Charles-FraiiQois Lhomoiid and again by
F. P. Leverett and T. G. Bradford), 153

Vishnu Pnrana, The, 316

"Visit, The" (Emerson), 312, 315

"Visits to Maine France England 1833-
1834," MS journal (Emerson)

Vita nuova (Dante), Emerson's translation
of, 300, 370

Voltaire, 184; Histoirc de Charles XII f 92

[W]

Wachusett, Mt, 6, 401

Wade, Mason, Margaret Fuller, NY, 1940

Wainwright, Jonathan Mayhew, 262

Wakefield, Gilbert, Translation of the New
Testament, A, in

Wakefield, England, 336

"Waldeinsamkeit" (Emerson), 398

Walden hut, Thoreau's, 307, 308, 311, 443,
452

Walden Pond, 252, 293, 299, 307, 309, 363,
365, 398, 452, 506

Walden Woods, 292, 311, 325, 330, 354, 479,
507

Waldo, Cornelius, grcat-great-great-grand-
father of Emerson, 13

Waldo, Giles, 297

Waldo, Rebecca (married Edward Emer-
son, 1697), great-great-grandmother of
RWE, 13

Waldo family, 49

Wales, 331

Walker, James, 244, 257

Walker, John (1732-1807) , Rhetorical Gram-
mar, 68

Wall, William Allen, 179, 180, 182 184 202

Wall St., New York. 258

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walsh, Robert M., 180
"Walter Scott" (Emerson), 449
Waltham, Mass., 69, 70, 75, 117, 123, 124,

211, 214, 270
Waltham school (Samuel Ripley's), 69, 70,

75, 81

Walton, Izaak, 311
war, 409, 4io, 429, 433, 434
"War," lecture on peace (Emerson), 410
"War & Politics £ Washington City," MS

j ournal ( Emerson )
Ward, Anna Barker, 253, 367
Ward, Nathaniel, 49
Ward, Samuel Gray, 253, 254, 276, 277, 282,

306, 310, 362, 372, 378, 392, 463, 467, 468;

Essays on Art by Goethe (tr.), 307
War Department, U. S., 420
Ware, Henry, Jr., 97, 128, 130, 135, 136, 138,

139, 149, 196, 269, 270; Personality of

the Deity, The, 271
Ware, Henry, Sr., 88
WarJa: sec under Austin Warren
War of 1812, 34-35, 38-41, 43, 50, 52, 54
Warren, Austin, Elder Henry James, The,

NY, 1934

Warren, Cyrus, 249, 361
Warren, James? Sullivan? 176, 179
Warren, Mr., of Plymouth, 265
Warren field, 311, 325
Warsaw, Poland, 57
Warwick Castle, 192, 477
Washington, George, 20, 34, 52, 102, 119,

121, 153, 205, 368, 427
Washington, D. C, 7, 39, 123, 296, 297, 368,

412, 414, 420, 423, 449, 450, 498
Washington, ML, 162
Washington St., Emerson's home in, 198
"Water" (Emerson), 201
Waterford, Me., 36, 161, 401
Waterloo, Netherlands (now Belgium), 119
Waters, T. F., Ipswich in the Massachusetts

Bay Colony, Ipswich, 1905
Watertown, Mass., 124, 273
Watertown, N. Y., 385
Waterville, Me., 286
Waterville College (now Colby College),

420, 421
"Waterville 1863," MS lecture (Emerson),

420, 421

Watson, Benjamin Marston, 290
Watts, Isaac, psalms, 171
Wayside, Hawthorne's home, 404; see also

Hillside

"Wealth," in The Conduct of Life (Emer-
son), 406, 459
Webb, Rufus, 32, 37, 38
Webster, Daniel, 112, 119, 124, 308, 367, 368,

500 ; "Seventh of March" speech, 366, 369
Weeks, Jordan, and Company, 276, 278
Weimar, Germany, 107, 113, 195, 502
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 190
"We're out on the ocean sailing," 459
Wesley, Charles, New Year's hymn, 140
Wesley, John, 86; "Wesley's testament," 4
Wesleyan University, 308

West, the (in the U. S.), 14, 292, 368, 380,
383, 384, 400, 402, 404, 405, 414, 426, 433,
435, 449, 503

West End, London, 341

Western Messenger, The, 242, 271, 273, 274

West Indies, 120, 147, 155, 160, 166, 168, 367,
413

Westminster, London, 332

Westminster Abbey, London, 190, 191, 473,
474, 475, 501

WestmRev: The London

"West Point," MS (Emerson)

West Point, N. Y., 420-421

West Roxbury, Mass., 289, 291

What: see under Ellen Emerson, daughter
of RWE

"What Books to Read" (Emerson), 450

WHChanRem: see under W. H. Channing

WHCMemWEC: see under W. H. Chan-
ning

Wheeler, Charles Stearns, 295

Wheeler, Mr., 362

Wheildon, William Willder, 368

Whelan, Hugh, 299, 332, 341

Whiggism, 227, 306, 308

Whig Party, 308

Whigs, 205, 259, 302, 366

Whipple, Edwin Percy, 392

Whitcomb, Mr., 453

White, Deacon, 52

Whitefield, George, 47, 48

White House, Washington, D. C., 14, 39

White Mountains, 141, 161, 162, 445

White Pond, 416

Whitman, Walt, 276, 371, 393, 414, 415, 423,
425, 440, 449, 450, 486, 492, 505, 508;
"Enfans d'Adam," 403 ; Leaves of Grass,
372, 373, 374, 392, 403 J Leaves of Grass
. . . Reproduced from the First Edition
(i#55), with introduction by C. J.. Fur-
ness (facsimile edition), NY, 1939; Spec-
imen Days 6- Collect, Phila., 1882- '83;
"Starting from Paumanok," 249 ; "When
Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd,"

427
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 260, 389, 392, 490 ;

"Ichabod," 366, 500; Poetical Works,

The, Standard Library Edition, Bo and

NY, cop. 1892
Whitwell, Bessie, 464, 466
Whit well, May, 464, 466
Whitwell, Mr., 464, 466
Whitwell, Mrs., 464, 466
Whitwell, Susanna, 19? 23? 24?
Whole Booke of Psalmes, The (tr. R.

Mather, T. Welde, and J. Eliot), 222
'Why England is England" (Emerson), 379
Wide-awakes, 405
"Wide World, The," series of MS journals

by Emerson (title varies slightly), 77, 85
Wilberforce, Samuel, Bishop of Oxford, 343
Wilberforce, William, 190
Wiley & Putnam, 309
Wiley and Putnam's Library of American

Books, 309

592

INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wiley and Putnam's Library of Choice

Reading, 309
Wilkes, Charles, 297
Wilkinson, James John Garth, 343, 377
will dated 13 Sept 1845, with marginal note

added 5 Nov 1848, MS (Emerson), 307
will of 14 Apr 1876, MS (Emerson), 504-

505

will, codicil to, 26 Mar 1881 (Emerson) , 505
Willard, Sidney, 76
Willard, Simon, 48
William and Mary, College of, 263
"William Rufus and the Jew" (Emerson),

Williams, Mrs., former pupil of the Emer-
sons, 404

Williamstown, Mass., 430

Wilson, D. A., Carlyle to "The French Rev-
olution" (1826-1837), London, 1924

Winslow House, Plymouth, Mass., 210, 223,
452

Winsor, Justin, Memorial History of Bos-
ton, The

Winthrop, John, n, 28, 215; History of
New England, The (ed. J. Savage), 222;
Winthrop's Journal, ed. Hosmer, NY,

. 1908

Wisconsin, 391, 403, 431, 459

Wisdom of the. Nine, The, improvised news-
paper, 218

Withington, William, 73, 97

Wittenberg, Germany, 166

WmE(b) : Wm. Emerson, brother of RWE

WmE(f) : Wm. Emerson, father of RWE

WmE(f)BroadCat: Catalogue of . . . the
Library of the Late Rev. William Emer-
son, broadside

WmE(grf) : Wm. Emerson, grandfather of
RWE

WmE (n) : Wm. Emerson, nephew of RWE

WMess: The Western Messenger

Wolfe, Linnie, Son of the Wilderness

"Woman" (Emerson), 370

woman's rights conventions, 369-370, 416

Wonder-working Providence: see^( History
of New-England (Edward Johnson)

Wood, Nathaniel, 73

Woodbury, Chas. J., 430 ; Talks with Ralph
Waldo Emerson, NY, cop. 1890

Woodman, Horatio, 391, 392

"Woodnotes" (Emerson), 277, 278, 317

Woods Hole, Mass., 219

Worcester, England, 335

Worcester, Mass., 99, 142, 370, 427

Word (God), 239

Wordsworth, William, 118, 159, 165, 172,
192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 3i§, 344, 357;
"Borderers, The," 299; Lyrical Ballads,
93; "Ode Intimations of Immortality,"
233, 340; Prelude, The, 30, 317

Working-Men's College, London, 476 ^

Works, The, Standard Library Edition
(Emerson, ed. Cabot)

Works, The Complete (Emerson) : see Cen-
tenary Edition

Worms, Diet of, 164

"Worship," in The Conduct of Life (Emer-
son), 407

Wright, Henry G., 297, 208

Wyatt, Richard James, 178

Wyman, Rufus, 127

Wyman field, 299, 325

[X]

Xenophon, 57, 78 ; Memorabilia of Socrates,
143

[Y]

Yankees, 197, 263, 343, 375, 382

YeoGaz: Yeoman's Gazette, Concord, Mass.

York, District of Maine, 48

York, England, 192, 335

Yorkshire, England, 324, 335, 336, 475

Yorkshire Union of Mechanics' Institutes,

325

Yosernite Valley, 447, 448

"You'd scarce expect one of my age," 19

Young, Brigham, 446

Young, C. L., Emerson s Montaigne

Young, Edward, 55

Young Em: Young Emerson Speaks, a se-
lection of 25 of Emerson's sermons, ed.
A. C. McGiffert, Jr., Bo, 1938

[Z]

"Z," MS journal (Emerson)

Zeus, 65, 172, 173, 372

Zimmermann, Johann Georg von, Solitude, 3

116942

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