critical miscellanies by john morley vol. i. essay 5: emerson london macmillan and co., limited new york: the macmillan company 1904 introductory 293 i. early days 296 takes charge of an unitarian church in boston (1829) 297 resigns the charge in 1832 298 goes to europe (1833) 299 coleridge, wordsworth, and carlyle 300 settles in concord (1834) 301 description of concord by clough 301 death of his first wife 302 income 303 hawthorne 305 thoreau 305 views on solitude 306 effect of his address in the divinity school of harvard (1838) 307 contributes to the _dial_ (1840) 309 first series of his essays published in 1841 310 second series three years later 310 second visit to england (1847), and delivers lectures on 'representative men,' collected and published in 1850 310 poems first collected in 1847; final version made in 1876 310 essays and lectures published in 1860, under general title of _the conduct of life_ 310 and the civil war 310 general retrospect of his life 312 died april 27, 1882 312 ii. style of his writings 313 manner as a lecturer 314 dr. holmes 314 his use of words 314 sincerity 316 and landor 316 mr. lowell 316 description of his library 317 a word or two about his verses 319 iii. hawthorne 322 and carlyle 323 the friends of universal progress in 1840 323 bossuet 324 remarks on new england 325 one of the few moral reformers 327 essays on 'domestic life,' on 'behaviour,' and on 'manners' 329 compared to franklin and chesterfield 330 is for faith before works 333 a systematic reasoner 335 the emersonian faith abundantly justified 337 carlyle's letter to (june 4, 1871) 337 one remarkable result of his idealism 341 on death and sin 342, 344 conclusion 346 emerson. a great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation, least of all can he need it for contemporaries. when time has wrought changes of fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful turn in giving to a poet or a teacher his true place, and in recovering ideas and points of view that are worth preserving. interpretation of this kind emerson cannot require. his books are no palimpsest, 'the prophet's holograph, defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's.' what he has written is fresh, legible, and in full conformity with the manners and the diction of the day, and those who are unable to understand him without gloss and comment are in fact not prepared to understand what it is that the original has to say. scarcely any literature is so entirely unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a pithy text with a windy sermon. for our time at least emerson may best be left to be his own expositor. nor is emerson, either, in the case of those whom the world has failed to recognise, and whom therefore it is the business of the critic to make known and to define. it is too soon to say in what particular niche among the teachers of the race posterity will place him; enough that in our own generation he has already been accepted as one of the wise masters, who, being called to high thinking for generous ends, did not fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the pure search for truth, without propounding a system or founding a school or cumbering himself overmuch about applications, lived the life of the spirit, and breathed into other men a strong desire after the right governance of the soul. all this is generally realised and understood, and men may now be left to find their way to the emersonian doctrine without the critic's prompting. though it is only the other day that emerson walked the earth and was alive and among us, he is already one of the privileged few whom the reader approaches in the mood of settled respect, and whose names have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere of religion. it is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for emerson one of the labels out of the philosophic handbooks. was he the prince of transcendentalists, or the prince of idealists? are we to look for the sources of his thought in kant or jacobi, in fichte or schelling? how does he stand towards parmenides and zeno, the egotheism of the sufis, or the position of the megareans? shall we put him on the shelf with the stoics or the mystics, with quietist, pantheist, determinist? if life were long, it might be worth while to trace emerson's affinities with the philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to the everlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set of coherent and reasoned opinions about knowledge and faculty, experience and consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the relative. but such inquiries would only take us the further away from the essence and vitality of emerson's mind and teaching. in philosophy proper emerson made no contribution of his own, but accepted, apparently without much examination of the other side, from coleridge after kant, the intuitive, _à priori_ and realist theory respecting the sources of human knowledge, and the objects that are within the cognisance of the human faculties. this was his starting-point, and within its own sphere of thought he cannot be said to have carried it any further. what he did was to light up these doctrines with the rays of ethical and poetic imagination. as it has been justly put, though emersonian transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a philosophy, it is more justly regarded as a gospel.[1] but before dwelling more on this, let us look into the record of his life, of which we may say in all truth that no purer, simpler, and more harmonious story can be found in the annals of far-shining men. [footnote 1: frothingham's _transcendentalism in new england: a history_--a judicious, acute, and highly interesting piece of criticism.] i. ralph waldo emerson was born at boston, may 25, 1803. he was of an ancient and honourable english stock, who had transplanted themselves, on one side from cheshire and bedfordshire, and on the other from durham and york, a hundred and seventy years before. for seven or eight generations in a direct and unbroken line his forefathers had been preachers and divines, not without eminence in the puritan tradition of new england. his second name came into the family with rebecca waldo, with whom at the end of the seventeenth century one edward emerson had intermarried, and whose family had fled from the waldensian valleys and that slaughter of the saints which milton called on heaven to avenge. every tributary, then, that made emerson what he was, flowed not only from protestantism, but from 'the protestantism of the protestant religion.' when we are told that puritanism inexorably locked up the intelligence of its votaries in a dark and straitened chamber, it is worthy to be remembered that the genial, open, lucid, and most comprehensive mind of emerson was the ripened product of a genealogical tree that at every stage of its growth had been vivified by puritan sap. not many years after his birth, emerson's mother was left a widow with narrow means, and he underwent the wholesome training of frugality in youth. when the time came, he was sent to harvard. when clough visited america a generation later, the collegiate training does not appear to have struck him very favourably. 'they learn french and history and german, and a great many more things than in england, but only imperfectly.' this was said from the standard of rugby and balliol, and the method that clough calls imperfect had merits of its own. the pupil lost much in a curriculum that had a certain rawness about it, compared with the traditional culture that was at that moment (1820) just beginning to acquire a fresh hold within the old gray quadrangles of oxford. on the other hand, the training at harvard struck fewer of those superfluous roots in the mind, which are only planted that they may be presently cast out again with infinite distraction and waste. when his schooling was over, emerson began to prepare himself for the ministrations of the pulpit, and in 1826 and 1827 he preached in divers places. two years later he was ordained, and undertook the charge of an important unitarian church in boston. it was not very long before the strain of forms, comparatively moderate as it was in the unitarian body, became too heavy to be borne. emerson found that he could no longer accept the usual view of the communion service, even in its least sacramental interpretation. to him the rite was purely spiritual in origin and intent, and at the best only to be retained as a commemoration. the whole world, he said, had been full of idols and ordinances and forms, when 'the almighty god was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke and forms were shadows. this man lived and died true to that purpose; and now with his blessed word and life before us, christians must contend that it is a matter of vital importance, really a duty, to commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be agreeable to their understandings or not. is not this to make vain the gift of god? is not this to make men forget that not forms but duties--not names but righteousness and love--are enjoined?' he was willing to continue the service with that explanation, and on condition that he should not himself partake of the bread and wine. the congregation would fain have kept one whose transparent purity of soul had attached more than his heresy had alienated. but the innovation was too great, and emerson resigned his charge (1832). for some five or six years longer he continued occasionally to preach, and more than one congregation would have accepted him. but doubts on the subject of public prayer began to weigh upon his mind. he suspected the practice by which one man offered up prayer vicariously and collectively for the assembled congregation. was not that too, like the communion service, a form that tended to deaden the spirit? under the influence of this and other scruples he finally ceased to preach (1838), and told his friends that henceforth he must find his pulpit in the platform of the lecturer. 'i see not,' he said, 'why this is not the most flexible of all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness, permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of proscription. the pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain sound; and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much from that of those under it as to embarrass the conscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from the fact of standing there.' the lecture was an important discovery, and it has had many consequences in american culture. among the more undesirable of them has been (certainly not in emerson's own case) the importation of the pulpit accent into subjects where one would be happier with out it. earlier in the same year in which he retired from his church at boston, emerson had lost his young wife. though we may well believe that he bore these agitations with self-control, his health suffered, and in the spring of 1833 he started for europe. he came to be accused of saying captious things about travelling. there are three wants, he said, that can never be satisfied: that of the rich who want something more; that of the sick who want something different; and that of the traveller who says, anywhere but here. their restlessness, he told his countrymen, argued want of character. they were infatuated with 'the rococo toy of italy.' as if what was true anywhere were not true everywhere; and as if a man, go where he will, can find more beauty or worth than he carries. all this was said, as we shall see that much else was said by emerson, by way of reaction and protest against instability of soul in the people around him. 'here or nowhere,' said goethe inversely to unstable europeans yearning vaguely westwards, 'here or nowhere is thine america.' to the use of travel for its own ends, emerson was of course as much alive as other people. 'there is in every constitution a certain solstice when the stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when there is required some foreign force, some diversion or alteration, to prevent stagnation. and as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best.' he found it so in 1833. but this and his two other voyages to europe make no odyssey. when voltaire was pressed to visit rome, he declared that he would be better pleased with some new and free english book than with all the glories of amphitheatre and of arch. emerson in like manner seems to have thought more of the great writers whom he saw in europe than of buildings or of landscapes. 'am i,' he said, '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?' the two englishmen to whom he owed most were coleridge and wordsworth; and the younger writer, some eight years older than himself, in whom his liveliest interest had been kindled, was carlyle. he was fortunate enough to have converse with all three, and he has told the world how these illustrious men in their several fashions and degrees impressed him.[2] it was carlyle who struck him most. 'many a time upon the sea, in my homeward voyage, i remembered with joy the favoured condition of my lonely philosopher,' cherishing visions more than divine 'in his stern and blessed solitude.' so carlyle, with no less cordiality, declares that among the figures that he could recollect as visiting his nithsdale hermitage--'all like apparitions now, bringing with them airs from heaven, or the blasts from the other region, there is not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself; so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into the azure inane, as an apparition should.' [footnote 2: _english traits_, 7-18. _ireland_, 143-152. froude's _carlyle_, ii. 355-359.] * * * * * in external incident emerson's life was uneventful. nothing could be simpler, of more perfect unity, or more free from disturbing episodes that leaves scars on men. in 1834 he settled in old concord, the home of his ancestors, then in its third century. 'concord is very bare,' wrote clough, who made some sojourn there in 1852, 'and so is the country in general; it is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses, painted white, with venetian blinds, green outside, with two white wooden churches. there are some american elms of a weeping kind, and sycamores, i.e. planes; but the wood is mostly pine--white pine and yellow pine--somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, and marshy hay-land between, very brown now. a little brook runs through to the concord river.'[3] the brook flowed across the few acres that were emerson's first modest homestead. 'the whole external appearance of the place,' says one who visited him, 'suggests old-fashioned comfort and hospitality. within the house the flavour of antiquity is still more noticeable. old pictures look down from the walls; quaint blue-and-white china holds the simple dinner; old furniture brings to mind the generations of the past. at the right as you enter is mr. emerson's library, a large square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant by pictures and sunshine. the homely shelves that line the walls are well filled with books. there is a lack of showy covers or rich bindings, and each volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant service. mr. emerson's study is a quiet room upstairs.' [footnote 3: clough's _life and letters_, i. 185.] fate did not spare him the strokes of the common lot. his first wife died after three short years of wedded happiness. he lost a little son, who was the light of his eyes. but others were born to him, and in all the relations and circumstances of domestic life he was one of the best and most beloved of men. he long carried in his mind the picture of carlyle's life at craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his own choice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly in the busy world, nor quite beyond it.' 'besides my house,' he told carlyle in 1838, 'i have, i believe, 22,000 dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. i have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter 800 dollars. well, with this income, here at home, i am a rich man. i stay at home and go abroad at my own instance, i have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. go away from home, i am rich no longer. i never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. as no wise man, i suppose, ever was rich in the sense of _freedom to spend_, because of the inundation of claims, so neither am i, who am not wise. but at home i am rich--rich enough for ten brothers. my wife lidian is an incarnation of christianity,--i call her asia,--and keeps my philosophy from antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and run for us, make all my household. here i sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle. 'in summer, with the aid of a neighbour, i manage my garden; and a week ago i set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to protect me or my son from the wind of january. the ornament of the place is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the year.' as time went on he was able to buy himself 'a new plaything'--a piece of woodland, of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide or more, called walden pond. 'in these may days,' he told carlyle, then passionately struggling with his _cromwell_, with the slums of chelsea at his back, 'when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, and pine, are in their spring glory, i go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an indian path through the thicket, all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures' (1845). he loved to write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer or by readings of plato, or whatsoever else is dearest to the morning muse.' yet he could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. he confesses that he sometimes craves 'that stimulation which every capricious, languid, and languescent study needs.' carlyle's potent concentration stirs his envy. the work of the garden and the orchard he found very fascinating, eating up days and weeks; 'nay, a brave scholar should shun it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious enchantments.' in the doings of his neighbourhood he bore his part; he took a manly interest in civil affairs, and was sensible, shrewd, and helpful in matters of practical judgment. pilgrims, sane and insane, the beardless and the gray-headed, flocked to his door, far beyond the dozen persons good and wise whom he had mentioned to carlyle. 'uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto' (_hawthorne_). to the most intractable of transcendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was never impatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where the case was not yet beyond hope. hawthorne was for a time his neighbour (1842-45). 'it was good,' says hawthorne, 'to meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart.' the most remarkable of all his neighbours was thoreau, who for a couple of years lived in a hut which he had built for himself on the shore of walden pond. if he had not written some things with a considerable charm of style, thoreau might have been wisely neglected as one of the crazy. but emerson was struck by the originality of his life, and thought it well in time to edit the writings of one 'who was bred to no profession; never married; lived alone; never went to church; never voted; refused to pay a tax to the state; ate no flesh, drank no wine, never knew the use of tobacco; had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no passions, refused all invitations, preferred a good indian to highly cultivated people, and said he would rather go to oregon than to london.' the world has room for every type, so that it be not actively noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his place in the catalogue. he was, after all, in his life only a compendium, on a scale large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions which emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. yet we may agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with socratic force to the heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be too purely material, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused. emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the hermit's trap of banishment to the rocks and echoes. 'solitude,' he said, 'is impracticable, and society fatal.' he steered his way as best he could between these two irreconcilable necessities. he had, as we have seen, the good sense to make for himself a calling which brought him into healthy contact with bodies of men, and made it essential that he should have his listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they were not actually present to the eye. as a preacher emerson has been described as making a deep impression on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by 'the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and the singular simplicity and directness of a manner free from the least trace of dogmatic assumption.' 'not long before,' says this witness, 'i had listened to a wonderful sermon by chalmers, whose force and energy, and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, carried for the moment all before him--his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. but i must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendours of chalmers' (_ireland_, 141). at the lecturer's desk the same attraction made itself still more effectually felt. 'i have heard some great speakers and some accomplished orators,' mr. lowell says, 'but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he. there is a kind of undertone in that rich barytone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with a drift that we cannot and would not resist. search for his eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your thoughts.' the same effect was felt in its degree wherever he went, and he took pains not to miss it. he had made a study of his art, and was so skilful in his mastery of it that it seemed as if anybody might do all that he did and do it as well--if only a hundred failures had not proved the mistake. in 1838 emerson delivered an address in the divinity school of harvard, which produced a gusty shower of articles, sermons, and pamphlets, and raised him without will or further act of his to the high place of the heresiarch. with admirable singleness of mind, he held modestly aloof. 'there is no scholar,' he wrote to a friend, 'less willing or less able to be a polemic. i could not give account of myself if challenged. i delight in telling what i think, but if you ask me how i dare say so, or why it is so, i am the most helpless of men,' the year before, his oration on the american scholar had filled carlyle with delight. it was the first clear utterance, after long decades of years, in which he had 'heard nothing but infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate twittering and screeching.' then carlyle enjoined on his american friend for rule of life, 'give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that that is _not_ it; on the one side is as heaven, if you have strength to keep silent and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right hand and one's left, is the frightfullest abyss and pandemonium' (dec. 8, 1837). emerson's temperament and his whole method made the warning needless, and, as before, while 'vociferous platitude was dinning his ears on all sides,' a whole world of thought was 'silently building itself in these calm depths.' but what would those two divinities of his, plato and socrates, have said of a man who 'could not give an account of himself if challenged'? assuredly not every one who saith plato, plato, is admitted to that ideal kingdom. it was soon after this that the _dial_ was projected. it had its origin in the transcendental club, a little knot of speculative students at boston, who met four or five times a year at one another's houses to discuss questions mainly theological, from more liberal points of view than was at that time common, 'the air then in america getting a little too close and stagnant.' the club was first formed in 1836. the _dial_ appeared in 1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals. emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last half of its existence he acted as editor. 'i submitted,' he told carlyle, 'to what seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism--i know not what else to call it--and took charge of our thankless little _dial_ here, without subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any labourer; it has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be transcribed or circulated, and we always are waiting until somebody shall come and make it good. but i took it, and it took me and a great deal of good time to a small purpose' (july 1, 1842). on the whole one must agree that it was to small purpose. emerson's name has reflected lustre on the _dial_, but when his contributions are taken out, and, say, half a dozen besides, the residuum is in the main very poor stuff, and some of it has a droll resemblance to the talk between mrs. hominy and the literary ladies and the honourable elijah pogram. margaret fuller--the miranda, zenobia, hypatia, minerva of her time, and a truly remarkable figure in the gallery of wonderful women--edited it for two years, and contributed many a vivid, dashing, exuberant, ebullient page. her criticism of goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word, but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose contributor, again saving the one great name, has anything to say that is so readable. nearly all the rest is extinct, and the _dial_ now finds itself far away from the sunshine of human interest. in 1841 the first series of emerson's essays was published, and three years later the second. the poems were first collected in 1847, but the final version was not made until 1876. in 1847 emerson paid his second visit to england, and delivered his lectures on representative men, collected and published in 1850. the books are said to have had a very slow sale, but the essays and lectures published in 1860, with the general title of _the conduct of life_, started with a sale of 2,500 copies, though that volume has never been considered by the emersonian adept to contain most of the pure milk of the word. then came that great event in the history of men and institutions, the civil war. we look with anxiety for the part played by the serene thinker when the hour had struck for violent and heroic action. emerson had hitherto been a free soiler; he had opposed the extension of slavery; and he favoured its compulsory extinction, with compensation on the plan of our own policy in the west indies. he had never joined the active abolitionists, nor did he see 'that there was any particular thing for him to do in it then.' 'though i sometimes accept a popular call, and preach on temperance or the abolition of slavery, i am sure to feel, before i have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own' (_to carlyle_, 1844). but he missed no occasion of showing that in conviction and aim he was with good men. the infirmities of fanatics never hid from him either the transcendent purity of their motives or the grandeur of their cause. this is ever the test of the scholar: whether he allows intellectual fastidiousness to stand between him and the great issues of his time. 'cannot the english,' he cried out to carlyle, 'leave cavilling at petty failures and bad manners and at the dunce part, and leap to the suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men?' these finger-pointings emerson did not mistake. he spoke up for garrison. john brown was several times in concord, and found a hearty welcome in emerson's house. when brown made his raid at harper's ferry, and the crisis became gradually sharper, emerson felt that the time had come, and his voice was raised in clear tones. after the sword is drawn, it is deeds not words that interest and decide; but whenever the word of the student was needed emerson was ready to give the highest expression to all that was best in his countrymen's mood during that greatest ordeal of our time. the inward regeneration of the individual had ever been the key to his teaching, and this teaching had been one of the forces that, like central fire in men's minds, nourished the heroism of the north in its immortal battle. the exaltation of national character produced by the civil war opened new and wider acceptance for a great moral and spiritual teacher, and from the close of the war until his death in 1882, emerson's ascendency within his own sphere of action was complete, and the public recognition of him universal. of story, there is no more to tell. he pursued his old way of reading, meditating, conversing, and public lecturing, almost to the end. the afternoon of his life was cloudless as the earlier day, and the shades of twilight fell in unbroken serenity. in his last years there was a partial failure of his memory, and more than one pathetic story is told of this tranquil and gradual eclipse. but 'to the last, even when the events of yesterday were occasionally obscured, his memory of the remote past was unclouded; he would tell about the friends of his early and middle life with unbroken vigour.' so, tended in his home by warm filial devotion, and surrounded by the reverent kindness of his village neighbours, this wise and benign man slowly passed away (april 27, 1882).[4] [footnote 4: the reader who seeks full information about emerson's life will find it scattered in various volumes: among them are-_ralph waldo emerson_; by george willis cooke (sampson low & co., 1882)--a very diligent and instructive work. _r.w.e._; by alexander ireland (simpkin, marshall, & co. 1882), described by carlyle, and known by others, as 'full of energy and broad sagacity and practicality; infinitely well affected to the man emerson too,'--and full moreover of that intellectual enthusiasm which in his scotch countrymen goes so often with their practicalities. _emerson, at home and abroad_; by moncure d. conway (trübner & co., 1883): the work of a faithful disciple, who knew emerson well, and has here recorded many interesting anecdotes and traits.] ii. it cannot be truly said that emerson is one of the writers who make their way more easily into our minds by virtue of style. that his writing has quality and flavour none but a pure pedant would deny. his more fervent votaries, however, provoke us with a challenge that goes far beyond this. they declare that the finish, charm, and beauty of the writing are as worthy of remark as the truth and depth of the thought. it is even 'unmatchable and radiant,' says one. such exaggerations can have no reference to any accepted standard. it would in truth, have been a marvel if emerson had excelled in the virtues of the written page, for most of his published work was originally composed and used for the platform. everybody knows how different are the speaker's devices for gaining possession of his audience, from the writer's means of winning, persuading, and impressing the attention of his reader. the key to the difference may be that in the speech the personality of the orator before our eyes gives of itself that oneness and continuity of communication, which the writer has to seek in the orderly sequence and array of marshalled sentence and well-sustained period. one of the traits that every critic notes in emerson's writing, is that it is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous, so inconsecutive. dislike of a sentence that drags made him unconscious of the quality, that french critics name _coulant_. everything is thrown in just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell is enough to persuade us that pope did not exaggerate when he said that no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts. his manner as a lecturer, says dr. holmes, was an illustration of his way of thinking. 'he would lose his place just as his mind would drop its thought and pick up another, twentieth cousin or no relation at all to it.' the same manner, whether we liken it to mosaic or to kaleidoscope, marks his writing. it makes him hard to follow, oracular, and enigmatical. 'can you tell me,' asked one of his neighbour, while emerson was lecturing, 'what connection there is between that last sentence and the one that went before, and what connection it all has with plato?' 'none, my friend, save in god!' this is excellent in a seer, but less so in the writer. apart from his difficult staccato, emerson is not free from secondary faults. he uses words that are not only odd, but vicious in construction; he is not always grammatically correct; he is sometimes oblique, and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after epigrams that do not always come. when people say that emerson's style must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget that though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still something to be said about its cut and fashion. no doubt, to borrow carlyle's expression, 'the talent is not the chief question here: the idea--that is the chief question.' we do not profess to be of those to whom mere style is as dear as it was to plutarch; of him it was said that he would have made pompey win the battle of pharsalia, if it could have given a better turn to a phrase. it would not be worth while to speak of form in a thinker to whom our debt is so large for his matter, if there were not so much bad literary imitation of emerson. dr. holmes mournfully admits that 'one who talks like emerson or like carlyle soon finds himself surrounded by a crowd of walking phonographs, who mechanically reproduce his mental and oral accents. emerson was before long talking in the midst of a babbling simonetta of echoes.' inferior writers have copied the tones of the oracle without first making sure of the inspiration. they forget that a platitude is not turned into a profundity by being dressed up as a conundrum. pithiness in him dwindles into tenuity in them; honest discontinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical incoherencies in the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations of the original degenerate in the imitators into a trick of unmeaning surprise and vapid antithesis; and his pregnant sententiousness set the fashion of a sententiousness that is not fertility but only hydropsy. this curious infection, which has spread into divers forms of american literature that are far removed from philosophy, would have been impossible if the teacher had been as perfect in expression as he was pure, diligent, and harmonious in his thinking. yet, as happens to all fine minds, there came to emerson ways of expression deeply marked with character. on every page there is set the strong stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated melody. the uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of the thought, and that too is a kind of eloquence. an honest reader easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start, when it shows a thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks. even at the roughest, emerson often interjects a delightful cadence. as he says of landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm, place them how or where you will. he criticised swedenborg for being superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the ignorance of men. 'men take truths of this nature,' said emerson, 'very fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this capacity for granted in us. in 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of which mr. lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own in this generation. he is terse, concentrated, and free from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation. nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. the accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical unction. that modest and lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm to his companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us from finding any page of it cold or hard or dry. though emerson was always urgent for 'the soul of the world, clean from all vestige of tradition,' yet his work is full of literature. he at least lends no support to the comforting fallacy of the indolent, that originating power does not go with assimilating power. few thinkers on his level display such breadth of literary reference. unlike wordsworth, who was content with a few tattered volumes on a kitchen shelf, emerson worked among books. when he was a boy he found a volume of montaigne, and he never forgot the delight and wonder in which he lived with it. his library is described as filled with well-selected authors, with curious works from the eastern world, with many editions in both greek and english of his favourite plato; while portraits of shakespeare, montaigne, goethe, dante, looked down upon him from the walls. produce a volume of plato or of shakespeare, he says somewhere, or '_only remind us of their names_,' and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. that is the scholar's speech. opening a single essay at random, we find in it citations from montesquieu, schiller, milton, herodotus, shelley, plutarch, franklin, bacon, van helmont, goethe. so little does emerson lend himself to the idle vanity of seeking all the treasures of wisdom in his own head, or neglecting the hoarded authority of the ages. it is true that he held the unholy opinion that a translation is as good as the original, or better. nor need we suppose that he knew that pious sensation of the book-lover, the feel of a library; that he had any of the collector's amiable foolishness about rare editions; or that he nourished festive thoughts of 'that company of honest old fellows in their leathern jackets in his study,' as comrades in a sober old-world conviviality. his books were for spiritual use, like maps and charts of the mind of man, and not much for 'excellence of divertisement.' he had the gift of bringing his reading to bear easily upon the tenor of his musings, and knew how to use books as an aid to thinking, instead of letting them take the edge off thought. there was assuredly nothing of the compiler or the erudite collegian in him. it is a graver defect that he introduces the great names of literature without regard for true historical perspective in their place, either in relation to one another, or to the special phases of social change and shifting time. still let his admirers not forget that emerson was in his own way scholar no less than sage. a word or two must be said of emerson's verses. he disclaimed, for his own part, any belief that they were poems. enthusiasts, however, have been found to declare that emerson 'moves more constantly than any recent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. since milton and spenser no man--not even goethe--has equalled emerson in this trait.' _the problem_, according to another, 'is wholly unique, and transcends all contemporary verse in grandeur of style.' such poetry, they say, is like westminster abbey, 'though the abbey is inferior in boldness.' yet, strangely enough, while emerson's poetic form is symbolised by the flowing lines of gothic architecture, it is also 'akin to doric severity.' with all the good will in the world, i do not find myself able to rise to these heights; in fact, they rather seem to deserve wordsworth's description, as mere obliquities of admiration. taken as a whole, emerson's poetry is of that kind which springs, not from excitement of passion or feeling, but from an intellectual demand for intense and sublimated expression. we see the step that lifts him straight from prose to verse, and that step is the shortest possible. the flight is awkward and even uncouth, as if nature had intended feet rather than wings. it is hard to feel of emerson, any more than wordsworth could feel of goethe, that his poetry is inevitable. the measure, the colour, the imaginative figures, are the product of search, not of spontaneous movements of sensation and reflection combining in a harmony that is delightful to the ear. they are the outcome of a discontent with prose, not of that high-strung sensibility which compels the true poet into verse. this must not be said without exception. _the threnody_, written after the death of a deeply loved child, is a beautiful and impressive lament. pieces like _musquetaquid_, the _adirondacs_, the _snowstorm_, _the humble-bee_, are pretty and pleasant bits of pastoral. in all we feel the pure breath of nature, and the primal mind, that flows in streams, that breathes in wind. there is a certain charm of _naiveté_, that recalls the unvarnished simplicity of the italian painters before raphael. but who shall say that he discovers that 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,' which a great poet has made the fundamental element of poetry? there are too few melodious progressions; the melting of the thought with natural images and with human feeling is incomplete; we miss the charm of perfect assimilation, fusion, and incorporation; and in the midst of all the vigour and courage of his work, emerson has almost forgotten that it is part of the poet's business to give pleasure. it is true that pleasure is sometimes undoubtedly to be had from verse that is not above mediocrity, and wordsworth once designed to write an essay examining why bad poetry pleases. poetry that pleases may be bad, but it is equally true that no poetry which fails to please can be really good. some one says that gems of expression make emerson's essays oracular and his verse prophetic. but, to borrow horace's well-known phrase, 'tis not enough that poems should be sublime; _dulcia sunto_,--they must be touching and sympathetic. only a bold critic will say that this is a mark of emerson's poems. they are too naked, unrelated, and cosmic; too little clad with the vesture of human associations. light and shade do not alternate in winning and rich relief, and as carlyle found it, the radiance is 'thin piercing,' leaving none of the sweet and dim recesses so dear to the lover of nature. we may, however, well be content to leave a man of emerson's calibre to choose his own exercises. it is best to suppose that he knew what he was about when he wandered into the fairyland of verse, and that in such moments he found nothing better to his hand. yet if we are bidden to place him among the poets, it is enough to open keats at the _ode to a nightingale_, or shelley at _the cloud_, the _skylark_, or the _sensitive plant_, or wordsworth at _tintern abbey_, or goethe at _das göttliche_, or victor hugo in the _contemplations_. then in spite of occasional formality of rhythm and artifice in ornament, we cannot choose but perceive how tuneful is their music, how opulent the resources of their imagination, how various, subtle, and penetrating their affinity for the fortunes and sympathies of men, and next how modest a portion of all these rare and exquisite qualifications reveals itself in the verse of emerson. iii. few minds of the first order that have busied themselves in contemplating the march of human fortunes, have marched forward in a straight line of philosophic speculation unbroken to the end. like burke, like coleridge, like wordsworth, at a given point they have a return upon themselves. having mastered the truths of one side, their eyes open to what is true on the other; the work of revolution finished or begun, they experience fatigue and reaction. in hawthorne's romance, after miles coverdale had passed his spring and summer among the utopians of blithedale, he felt that the time had come when he must for sheer sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the conservatives, the merchants, the politicians, 'and all those respectable old blockheads, who still in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning.' 'no sagacious man,' says hawthorne, 'will long retain his sagacity if he lives exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old stand-point.' yet good men rightly hoped that 'out of the very thoughts that were wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble and happy life.' now that we are able to look back on the crisis of the times that hawthorne describes, we perceive that it was as he expected, and that in the person of emerson the ferment and dissolvency of thought worked itself out in a strain of wisdom of the highest and purest. in 1842 emerson told carlyle, in vindication of the _dial_ and its transcendentalisms, that if the direction of their speculations was as deplorable as carlyle declared, it was yet a remarkable fact for history that all the bright young men and young women in new england, 'quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession to fathers and mothers--the boys, that they do not wish to go into trade; the girls, that they do not like morning calls and evening parties. they are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead.' it is worth while to transcribe from the _dial_ itself the scene at one of the many bostonian conventions of that date--the friends of universal progress, in 1840:--'the composition of the assembly was rich and various. the singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from all parts of new england, and also from the middle states, men of every shade of opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. a great variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and enthusiasm. if the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. madmen, madwomen, men with beards, dunkers, muggletonians, come-outers, groaners, agrarians, seventh-day baptists, quakers, abolitionists, calvinists, unitarians, and philosophers, all came successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their _hour_, wherein to chide or pray or preach or protest. the faces were a study. the most daring innovators, and the champions-until-death of the old cause, sat side by side. the still living merit of the oldest new england families, glowing yet after several generations, encountered the founders of families, fresh merit emerging and expanding the brows to a new breadth, and lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. the assembly was characterised by the predominance of a certain plain sylvan strength and earnestness' (_dial_, iii. 101). if the shade of bossuet could have looked down upon the scene, he would have found fresh material for the sarcasms which a hundred and fifty years before he had lavished on the variations of the protestant churches. yet this curious movement, bleak and squalid as it may seem to men nurtured in the venerable decorum of ecclesiastical tradition, was at bottom identical with the yearning for stronger spiritual emotions, and the cravings of religious zeal, that had in older times filled monasteries, manned the great orders, and sent wave upon wave of pilgrims and crusaders to holy places. 'it is really amazing,' as was said by franklin or somebody else of his fashion of utilitarianism, 'that one of the passions which it is hardest to develop in man is the passion for his own material comfort and temporal well-being.' emerson has put on record this mental intoxication of the progressive people around him, with a pungency that might satisfy the philistines themselves.[5] from 1820 to 1844, he said, new england witnessed a general criticism and attack on institutions, and in all practical activities a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organisations. calvinists and quakers began to split into old school and new school. goethe and the germans became known. swedenborg, in spite of his taint of craziness, by the mere prodigy of his speculations, began 'to spread himself into the minds of thousands'--including in no unimportant degree the mind of emerson himself.[6] literary criticism counted for something in the universal thaw, and even the genial humanity of dickens helped to break up the indurations of old theology. most powerful of all was the indirect influence of science. geology disclosed law in an unsuspected region, and astronomy caused men to apprehend that 'as the earth is not the centre of the universe, so it is not the special scene or stage on which the drama of divine justice is played before the assembled angels of heaven.' [footnote 5: _new england reformers: essays_, ii. 511-519.] [footnote 6: the swedenborgians--'a sect which, i think, must contribute more than all other sects to the new faith, which must come out of all.'--_to carlyle_, 1834.] a temper of scrutiny and dissent broke out in every direction. in almost every relation men and women asked themselves by what right conformity levied its tax, and whether they were not false to their own consciences in paying it. 'what a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! one apostle thought that all men should go to farming; and another thought that no man should buy or sell--that use of money was the cardinal evil; another thought the mischief was in our diet--that we eat and drink damnation. these made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of man over brute instinct. these abuses polluted his food. the ox must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart; the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him.... others assailed particular vocations.... others attacked the institution of marriage as the fountain of social evils.... who gave me the money with which i bought my coat? why should professional labour and that of the counting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labour of the porter and the woodsawer? am i not too protected a person? is there not a wide disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister?' one of emerson's glories is, that while wise enough to discern the peril and folly of these excesses, he was under no temptation to fall back. it was giddy work, but he kept his eye on the fixed stars. certainly emerson was not assailed by the stress of mighty and violent events, as burke and wordsworth were in some sense turned into reactionaries by the calamities of revolution in france. the 'distemper of enthusiasm,' as shaftesbury would have called it, took a mild and harmless form in new england: there the work in hand was not the break-up of a social system, but only the mental evolution of new ideals, the struggle of an ethical revival, and the satisfaction of a livelier spirit of scruple. in face of all delirations, emerson kept on his way of radiant sanity and perfect poise. do not, he warned his enthusiasts, expend all energy on some accidental evil, and so lose sanity and power of benefit. '_it is of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses._ society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest, and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result. it is handsomer to remain in the establishment, better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration.' emerson, then, is one of the few moral reformers whose mission lay in calming men rather than in rousing them, and in the inculcation of serenity rather than in the spread of excitement. though he had been ardent in protest against the life conventional, as soon as the protest ran off into extravagance, instead of either following or withstanding it with rueful petulancies, he delicately and successfully turned a passing agitation into an enduring revival. the last password given by the dying antonine to the officer of the watch was _æquanimitas_. in a brighter, wider, and more living sense than was possible even to the noblest in the middle of the second century, this, too, was the watchword of the emersonian teaching. instead of cultivating the tormenting and enfeebling spirit of scruple, instead of multiplying precepts, he bade men not to crush their souls out under the burden of duty; they are to remember that a wise life is not wholly filled up by commandments to do and to abstain from doing. hence, we have in emerson the teaching of a vigorous morality without the formality of dogma and the deadly tedium of didactics. if not laughter, of which only shakespeare among the immortals has a copious and unfailing spring, there is at least gaiety in every piece, and a cordial injunction to men to find joy in their existence to the full. happiness is with him an aim that we are at liberty to seek directly and without periphrasis. provided men do not lose their balance by immersing themselves in their pleasures, they are right, according to emerson, in pursuing them. but joy is no neighbour to artificial ecstasy. what emerson counsels the poet, he intended in its own way and degree for all men. the poet's habit of living, he says beautifully, should be set on a key so low that the commonest influences should delight him. 'that spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump and half-embedded stone on which the dull march sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. if thou fill thy brain with boston and new york, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and french coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods' (ii. 328). it was perhaps the same necessity of having to guide men away from the danger of transcendental aberrations, while yet holding up lofty ideals of conduct, that made emerson say something about many traits of conduct to which the ordinary high-flying moralist of the treatise or the pulpit seldom deigns to stoop. the essays on domestic life, on behaviour, on manners, are examples of the attention that emerson paid to the right handling of the outer conditions of a wise and brave life. with him small circumstances are the occasions of great qualities. the parlour and the counting-house are as fit scenes for fortitude, self-control, considerateness, and vision, as the senate or the battlefield. he re-classifies the virtues. no modern, for example, has given so remarkable a place to friendship among the sacred necessities of well-endowed character. neither plato nor cicero, least of all bacon, has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangely commingled of all human affections. there is no modern thinker, again, who makes beauty--all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming--so conspicuous and essential a part of life. it would be inexact to say that emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or of prudence into one complex sentiment, as the greeks did, but his theory of excellence might be better described than any other of modern times by the [greek: kalokagathia], the virtue of the true gentleman, as set down in plato and aristotle. so untrue is it that in his quality of sage emerson always haunted the perilous altitudes of transcendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but the everlasting snows of himalaya, the earth shrinking to a planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars.' he never thinks it beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor morals, or to say a good word for what he somewhere calls subterranean prudence. emerson values mundane circumspection as highly as franklin, and gives to manners and rules of daily behaviour an importance that might have satisfied chesterfield. in fact, the worldly and the selfish are mistaken when they assume that common sense is their special and exclusive portion. the small transcendentalist goes in search of truth with the meshes of his net so large that he takes no fish. his landscapes are all horizon. it is only the great idealists, like emerson, who take care not to miss the real. the remedy for the break-down of the old churches would, in the mind of the egotist, have been to found a new one. but emerson knew well before carlyle told him, that 'no truly great man, from jesus christ downwards, ever founded a sect--i mean wilfully intended founding one.' not only did he establish no sect, but he preached a doctrine that was positively incompatible with the erection of any sect upon its base. his whole hope for the world lies in the internal and independent resources of the individual. if mankind is to be raised to a higher plane of happiness and worth, it can only be by the resolution of each to live his own life with fidelity and courage. the spectacle of one liberated from the malign obstructions to free human character, is a stronger incentive to others than exhortation, admonition, or any sum of philanthropical association. if i, in my own person and daily walk, quietly resist heaviness of custom, coldness of hope, timidity of faith, then without wishing, contriving, or even knowing it, i am a light silently drawing as many as have vision and are fit to walk in the same path. whether i do that or not, i am at least obeying the highest law of my own being. in the appeal to the individual to be true to himself, emerson does not stand apart from other great moral reformers. his distinction lies in the peculiar direction that he gives to his appeal. all those regenerators of the individual, from rousseau down to j.s. mill, who derived their first principles, whether directly or indirectly, from locke and the philosophy of sensation, experience, and acquisition, began operations with the will. they laid all their stress on the shaping of motives by education, institutions, and action, and placed virtue in deliberateness and in exercise. emerson, on the contrary, coming from the intuitional camp, holds that our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will. translated into the language of theology, his doctrine makes regeneration to be a result of grace, and the guide of conscience to be the indwelling light; though, unlike the theologians, he does not trace either of these mysterious gifts to the special choice and intervention of a personal deity. impulsive and spontaneous innocence is higher than the strength to conquer temptation. the natural motions of the soul are so much better than the voluntary ones. 'there is no such thing as manufacturing a strong will,' for all great force is real and elemental. in all this emerson suffers from the limitations that are inseparable from pure spiritualism in all its forms. as if the spiritual constitution were ever independent of the material organisation bestowed upon the individual at the moment when he is conceived, or of the social conditions that close about him from the instant of his birth. the reaction, however, against what was superficial in the school of the eighteenth century went to its extreme length in emerson, and blinded his eyes to the wisdom, the profundity, and the fruitfulness of their leading speculations. it is enough for us to note the fact in passing, without plunging into contention on the merits. all thoughts are always ready, potentially if not actually. each age selects and assimilates the philosophy that is most apt for its wants. institutions needed regeneration in france, and so those thinkers came into vogue and power who laid most stress on the efficacy of good institutions. in emerson's america, the fortunes of the country made external circumstances safe for a man, and his chance was assured; so a philosophy was welcomed which turned the individual inwards upon himself, and taught him to consider his own character and spiritual faculty as something higher than anything external could ever be. again to make a use which is not uninstructive of the old tongue, emerson is for faith before works. nature, he says, will not have us fret and fume. she does not like our benevolences, our churches, our pauper-societies, much better than she likes our frauds and wars. they are but so many yokes to the neck. our painful labours are unnecessary and fruitless. a higher law than that of our will regulates events. if we look wider, things are all alike: laws and creeds and modes of living are a travesty of truth. only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become strong. our real action is in our silent moments. why should we be awed by the name of action? 'tis a trick of the senses.[7] [footnote 7: _essays_: spiritual laws, etc.] justification by faith has had a savour of antinomianism and indifferency ever since the day when saint paul so emphatically denied that he made void the law through faith, and said of certain calumniators that their damnation was just. emerson was open to the same charge, and he knew it. in a passage already quoted, emerson says good-humouredly that his wife keeps his philosophy from running to antinomianism he could not mistake the tendency of saying that, if you look wider, things are all alike, and that we are in the grasp of a higher law than our own will. on that side he only paints over in rainbow colours the grim doctrine which the high calvinist and the materialistic necessarian hold in common. all great minds perceive all things; the only difference lies in the order in which they shall choose to place them. emerson, for good reason of his own, dwelt most on fate, character, and the unconscious and hidden sources, but he writes many a page of vigorous corrective. it is wholesome, he says, to man to look not at fate, but the other way; the practical view is the other. as mill says of his wish to disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances--'remembering the wish of fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments, that it might never be forgotten by kings nor remembered by subjects, i said that it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be believed by all _quoad_ the characters of others, and disbelieved in regard to their own.' so emerson knew well enough that man's consciousness of freedom, action, and power over outer circumstances might be left to take care of itself, as the practical view generally can. the world did not need him to tell it that a man's fortunes are a part of his character. his task was the more far-reaching one of drawing them to recognise that love is the important thing, not benevolent works; that only impure men consider life as it is reflected in events, opinions, and persons; that they fail to see the action until it is done, whereas what is far better worth considering is that its moral element præ-existed in the actor. it would be easy to show that emerson has not worked out his answers to these eternal enigmas, for ever reproducing themselves in all ages, in such a form as to defy the logician's challenge. he never shrinks from inconsistent propositions. he was unsystematic on principle. 'he thought that truth has so many facets that the best we can do is to notice each in turn, without troubling ourselves whether they agree.' when we remember the inadequateness of human language, the infirmities of our vision, and all the imperfections of mental apparatus, the wise men will not disdain even partial glimpses of a scene too vast and intricate to be comprehended in a single map. to complain that emerson is no systematic reasoner is to miss the secret of most of those who have given powerful impulses to the spiritual ethics of an age. it is not a syllogism that turns the heart towards purification of life and aim; it is not the logically enchained propositions of a _sorites_, but the flash of illumination, the indefinable accent, that attracts masses of men to a new teacher and a high doctrine. the teasing _ergoteur_ is always right, but he never leads nor improves nor inspires. any one can see how this side of the emersonian gospel harmonised with the prepossessions of a new democracy. trust, he said, to leading instincts, not to traditional institutions, nor social ordering, nor the formulæ of books and schools for the formation of character; the great force is real and elemental. in art, mr. ruskin has explained the palpable truth that semi-civilised nations can colour better than we do, and that an indian shawl and china vase are inimitable by us. 'it is their glorious ignorance of all rules that does it; the pure and true instincts have play, and do their work; and the moment we begin teaching people any rules about colour, and make them do this or that, we crush the instinct, generally for ever' (_modern painters_, iii. 91). emerson said what comes to the same thing about morals. the philosophy of democracy, or the government of a great mixed community by itself, rests on a similar assumption in politics. the foundations of a self-governed society on a great scale are laid in leading instincts. emerson was never tired of saying that we are wiser than we know. the path of science and of letters is not the way to nature. what was done in a remote age by men whose names have resounded far, has no deeper sense than what you and i do to-day. what food, or experience, or succour have olympiads and consulates for the esquimaux seal-hunter, for the kanáka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter? when he is in this vein emerson often approaches curiously near to rousseau's memorable and most potent paradox of 1750, that the sciences corrupt manners.[8] [footnote 8: what so good, asks rousseau, 'as a sweet and precious ignorance, the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds all its blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow happiness in the opinion of other people as to its enlightenment?'] most men will now agree that when the great fiery trial came, the emersonian faith and the democratic assumption abundantly justified themselves. even carlyle wrote to emerson at last (june 4, 1871): 'in my occasional explosions against anarchy, and my inextinguishable hatred of _it_, i privately whisper to myself, "could any friedrich wilhelm now, or friedrich, or most perfect governor you could hope to realise, guide forward what is america's essential task at present, faster or more completely than 'anarchic america' is now doing?" such "anarchy" has a great deal to say for itself.' the traits of comparison between carlyle and emerson may be regarded as having been pretty nearly exhausted for the present, until time has changed the point of view. in wit, humour, pathos, penetration, poetic grandeur, and fervid sublimity of imagination, carlyle is the superior beyond measure. but emerson is as much his superior in that high and transparent sanity, which is not further removed from midsummer madness than it is from a terrene and grovelling mediocrity. this sanity, among other things, kept emerson in line with the ruling tendencies of his age, and his teaching brings all the aid that abstract teaching can, towards the solution of the moral problems of modern societies. carlyle chose to fling himself headlong and blindfold athwart the great currents of things, against all the forces and elements that are pushing modern societies forward. beginning in his earlier work with the same faith as emerson in leading instincts, he came to dream that the only leading instinct worth thinking about is that of self-will, mastery, force, and violent strength. emerson was for basing the health of a modern commonwealth on the only real strength, and the only kind of force that can be relied upon, namely, the honest, manly, simple, and emancipated character of the citizen. this gives to his doctrine a hold and a prize on the work of the day, and makes him our helper. carlyle's perverse reaction had wrecked and stranded him when the world came to ask him for direction. in spite of his resplendent genius, he had no direction to give, and was only able in vague and turbid torrents of words to hide a shallow and obsolete lesson. his confession to emerson, quoted above, looks as if at last he had found this out for himself. if emerson stood thus well towards the social and political drift of events, his teaching was no less harmoniously related to the new and most memorable drift of science which set in by his side. it is a misconception to pretend that he was a precursor of the darwinian theory. evolution, as a possible explanation of the ordering of the universe, is a great deal older than either emerson or darwin. what darwin did was to work out in detail and with masses of minute evidence a definite hypothesis of the specific conditions under which new forms are evolved. emerson, of course, had no definite hypothesis of this sort, nor did he possess any of the knowledge necessary to give it value. but it was his good fortune that some of his strongest propositions harmonise with the scientific theory of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for material existence. he connects his exhortation to self-reliance with the law working in nature for conservation and growth,--to wit, that 'power is in nature the essential measure of right,' and that 'nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself.' the same strain is constantly audible. nature on every side, within us and without, is for ever throwing out new forms and fresh varieties of living and thinking. to her experiments in every region there is no end. those succeed which prove to have the best adaptation to the conditions. let, therefore, neither society nor the individual check experiment, originality, and infinite variation. such language, we may see, fits in equally well with democracy in politics and with evolution in science. if, moreover, modern science gives more prominence to one conception than another, it is to that of the natural universe of force and energy, as one and a whole. this too is the great central idea with emerson, repeated a thousand times in prose and in verse, and lying at the very heart of his philosophy. newton's saying that 'the world was made at one cast' delights him. 'the secret of the world is that its energies are _solidaires_.' nature 'publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries. a little heat, that is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates.' not only, as professor tyndall says, is emerson's religious sense entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science; all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates. 'by emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer lines of an ideal world.' that these transmutations are often carried by emerson to the extent of vain and empty self-mystifications is hard to deny, even for those who have most sympathy with the general scope of his teaching. there are pages that to the present writer, at least, after reasonably diligent meditation, remain mere abracadabra, incomprehensible and worthless. for much of this in emerson, the influence of plato is mainly responsible, and it may be noted in passing that his account of plato (_representative men_) is one of his most unsatisfactory performances. 'the title of platonist,' says mill, 'belongs by far better right to those who have been nourished in, and have endeavoured to practise plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the least intelligible of his works.' nothing is gained by concealing that not every part of emerson's work will stand the test of the elenchus, nor bear reduction into honest and intelligible english. one remarkable result of emerson's idealism ought not to be passed over. 'the visible becomes the bestial,' said carlyle, 'when it rests not on the invisible.' to emerson all rested on the invisible, and was summed up in terms of the invisible, and hence the bestial was almost unknown in his philosophic scheme. nay, we may say that some mighty phenomena in our universe were kept studiously absent from his mind. here is one of the profoundest differences between emerson and most of those who, on as high an altitude, have pondered the same great themes. a small trait will serve for illustration. it was well known in his household that he could not bear to hear of ailments. 'there is one topic,' he writes, 'peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. if you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, i beseech you by all angels to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and groans. come out of the azure. love the day'--(_conduct of life_, 159). if he could not endure these minor perturbations of the fair and smiling face of daily life, far less did he willingly think of death. of nothing in all the wide range of universal topics does emerson say so little as of that which has lain in sombre mystery at the very core of most meditations on life, from job and solon down to bacon and montaigne. except in two beautiful poems, already mentioned, death is almost banished from his page. it is not the title or the subject of one of his essays, only secondarily even of that on immortality. love, friendship, prudence, heroism, experience, manners, nature, greatness, and a score of other matters--but none to show that he ever sat down to gather into separate and concentrated shape his reflections on the terrifying phantom that has haunted the mind of man from the very birth of time. pascal bade us imagine a number of men in chains and doomed to death; some of them each day butchered in sight of the others; those who remained watching their own lot in that of their fellows, and awaiting their turn in anguish and helplessness. such, he cried, is the pitiful and desperate condition of man. but nature has other cruelties more stinging than death. mill, himself an optimist, yet declares the course of natural phenomena to be replete with everything which, when committed by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, so that 'one who endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men.' to man himself, moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more unnatural than most of the virtues.' we need not multiply from poets and divines, from moralists and sages, these grim pictures. the sombre melancholy, the savage moral indignation, the passionate intellectual scorn, with which life and the universe have filled strong souls, some with one emotion and some with another, were all to emerson in his habitual thinking unintelligible and remote. he admits, indeed, that 'the disease and deformity around us certify that infraction of natural, intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed such compound misery.' the way of providence, he says in another place, is a little rude, through earthquakes, fever, the sword of climate, and a thousand other hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature. providence has a wild rough incalculable road to its end, and 'it is of no use to try to white-wash its huge mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.' but he only drew from the thought of these cruelties of the universe the practical moral that 'our culture must not omit the arming of the man.' he is born into the state of war, and will therefore do well to acquire a military attitude of soul. there is perhaps no better moral than this of the stoic, but greater impressiveness might have marked the lesson, if our teacher had been more indulgent to the man's sense of tragedy in that vast drama in which he plays his piteous part. in like manner, emerson has little to say of that horrid burden and impediment on the soul, which the churches call sin, and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature of man. he had no eye, like dante's, for the vileness, the cruelty, the utter despicableness to which humanity may be moulded. if he saw them at all, it was through the softening and illusive medium of generalised phrases. nor was he ever shocked and driven into himself by 'the immoral thoughtlessness' of men. the courses of nature, and the prodigious injustices of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. he will see no monster if he can help it. for the fatal nemesis or terrible erinnyes, daughters of erebus and night, emerson substitutes a fair-weather abstraction named compensation. one radical tragedy in nature he admits--'the distinction of more and less.' if i am poor in faculty, dim in vision, shut out from opportunity, in every sense an outcast from the inheritance of the earth, that seems indeed to be a tragedy. 'but see the facts clearly and these mountainous inequalities vanish. love reduces them, as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. the heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of his and mine ceases. his is mine.' surely words, words, words! what can be more idle, when one of the world's bitter puzzles is pressed on the teacher, than that he should betake himself to an altitude whence it is not visible, and then assure us that it is not only invisible, but non-existent? this is not to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes of obscuration round them. when he comforts us by saying 'love, and you shall be loved,' who does not recall cases which make the jean valjean of victor hugo's noble romance not a figment of the theatre, but an all too actual type? the believer who looks to another world to redress the wrongs and horrors of this; the sage who warns us that the law of life is resignation, renunciation, and doing-without (_entbehren sollst du_)--each of these has a foothold in common language. but to say that all infractions of love and equity are speedily punished--punished by fear--and then to talk of the perfect compensation of the universe, is mere playing with words, for it does not solve the problem in the terms in which men propound it. emerson, as we have said, held the spirit of system in aversion as fettering the liberal play of thought, just as in morals, with greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and cramping interpretation of duty. we are not sure that his own optimistic doctrine did not play him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at least one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome possibilities of things. it had no unimportant effect on emerson's thought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose from old history. the black and devious ways through which the race has marched are not real in north america, as they are to us in old europe, who live on the very site of secular iniquities, are surrounded by monuments of historic crime, and find present and future entangled, embittered, inextricably loaded both in blood and in institutions with desperate inheritances from the past. there are many topics, and those no mean topics, on which the best authority is not the moralist by profession, as emerson was, but the man of the world. the world hardens, narrows, desiccates common natures, but nothing so enriches generous ones. for knowledge of the heart of man, we must go to those who were closer to the passions and interests of actual and varied life than emerson ever could have been--to horace, montaigne, la bruyère, swift, molière, even to pope. if a hostile critic were to say that emerson looked at life too much from the outside, as the clergyman is apt to do, we should condemn such a remark as a disparagement, but we should understand what it is in emerson that the critic means. he has not the temperament of the great humorists, under whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or saturnine. even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism. the persistent identification of everything in nature with everything else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. though he warns us that our civilisation is not near its meridian, but as yet only in the cock-crowing and the morning star, still all ages are much alike with him: man is always man, 'society never advances,' and he does almost as little as carlyle himself to fire men with faith in social progress as the crown of wise endeavour. but when all these deductions have been made and amply allowed for, emerson remains among the most persuasive and inspiring of those who by word and example rebuke our despondency, purify our sight, awaken us from the deadening slumbers of convention and conformity, exorcise the pestering imps of vanity, and lift men up from low thoughts and sullen moods of helplessness and impiety. end of vol. i. _printed by_ r. & r. clark, limited, _edinburgh_. four american leaders by charles w. eliot boston american unitarian association 1906 copyright, 1906 american unitarian association _note_ the four essays in this volume were written for celebrations or commemorations in which several persons took part. each of them is, therefore, only a partial presentation of the life and character of its subject. the delineation in every case is not comprehensive and proportionate, but rather portrays the man in some of his aspects and qualities. _contents_ i. franklin 1 an address delivered before the meeting of the american philosophical society to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of benjamin franklin, philadelphia, april 20, 1906. ii. washington 31 an address given before the union league club of chicago at the exercises in commemoration of the birth of washington, february 23, 1903. iii. channing 57 an address made at the unveiling of the channing statue on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of william ellery channing, boston, june 1, 1903. iv. emerson 73 an address delivered on the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of ralph waldo emerson, boston, may 24, 1903. _four american leaders_ franklin the facts about franklin as a printer are simple and plain, but impressive. his father, respecting the boy's strong disinclination to become a tallow-chandler, selected the printer's trade for him, after giving him opportunities to see members of several different trades at their work, and considering the boy's own tastes and aptitudes. it was at twelve years of age that franklin signed indentures as an apprentice to his older brother james, who was already an established printer. by the time he was seventeen years old he had mastered the trade in all its branches so completely that he could venture, with hardly any money in his pocket, first into new york and then into philadelphia without a friend or acquaintance in either place, and yet succeed promptly in earning his living. he knew all departments of the business. he was a pressman as well as a compositor. he understood both newspaper and book work. there were at that time no such sharp subdivisions of labor and no such elaborate machinery as exist in the trade to-day; and franklin could do with his own eyes and hands, long before he was of age, everything which the printer's art was then equal to. when the faithless governor keith caused franklin to land in london without any resources whatever except his skill at his trade, the youth was fully capable of supporting himself in the great city as a printer. franklin had been induced by the governor to go to england, where he was to buy a complete outfit for a good printing office to be set up in philadelphia. he had already presented the governor with an inventory of the materials needed in a small printing office, and was competent to make a critical selection of all these materials; yet when he arrived in london on this errand he was only eighteen years old. thrown completely on his own resources in the great city, he immediately got work at a famous printing house in bartholomew close, but soon moved to a still larger printing house, in which he remained during the rest of his stay in london. here he worked as a pressman at first, but was soon transferred to the composing room, evidently excelling his comrades in both branches of the art. the customary drink money was demanded of him, first by the pressmen with whom he was associated, and afterwards by the compositors. franklin undertook to resist the second demand; and it is interesting to learn that after a resistance of three weeks he was forced to yield to the demands of the men by just such measures as are now used against any scab in a unionized printing office. he says in his autobiography: "i had so many little pieces of private mischief done me by mixing my sorts, transposing my pages, breaking my matter, and so forth, if i were ever so little out of the room ... that, notwithstanding the master's protection, i found myself obliged to comply and pay the money, convinced of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with continually." he was stronger than any of his mates, kept his head clearer because he did not fuddle it with beer, and availed himself of the liberty which then existed of working as fast and as much as he chose. on this point he says: "my constant attendance (i never making a st. monday) recommended me to the master; and my uncommon quickness at composing occasioned my being put upon all work of dispatch, which was generally better paid. so i went on now very agreeably." on his return to philadelphia franklin obtained for a few months another occupation than that of printer; but this employment failing through the death of his employer, franklin returned to printing, becoming the manager of a small printing office, in which he was the only skilled workman and was expected to teach several green hands. at that time he was only twenty-one years of age. this printing office often wanted sorts, and there was no type-foundry in america. franklin succeeded in contriving a mould, struck the matrices in lead, and thus supplied the deficiencies of the office. the autobiography says: "i also engraved several things on occasion; i made the ink; i was warehouse man and everything, and in short quite a factotum." nevertheless, he was dismissed before long by his incompetent employer, who, however, was glad to re-engage him a few days later on obtaining a job to print some paper money for new jersey. thereupon franklin contrived a copperplate press for this job--the first that had been seen in the country--and cut the ornaments for the bills. meantime franklin, with one of the apprentices, had ordered a press and types from london, that they two might set up an independent office. shortly after the new jersey job was finished, these materials arrived in philadelphia, and franklin immediately opened his own printing office. his partner "was, however, no compositor, a poor pressman, and seldom sober." the office prospered, and in july, 1730, when franklin was twenty-four years old, the partnership was dissolved, and franklin was at the head of a well-established and profitable printing business. this business was the foundation of franklin's fortune; and better foundation no man could desire. his industry was extraordinary. contrary to the current opinion, dr. baird of st. andrews testified that the new printing office would succeed, "for the industry of that franklin," he said, "is superior to anything i ever saw of the kind; i see him still at work when i go home from the club, and he is at work again before the neighbors are out of bed." no trade rules or customs limited or levied toll on his productiveness. he speedily became by far the most successful printer in all the colonies, and in twenty years was able to retire from active business with a competency. one would, however, get a wrong impression of franklin's career as a printer, if he failed to observe that from his boyhood franklin constantly used his connection with a printing office to facilitate his remarkable work as an author, editor, and publisher. even while he was an apprentice to his brother james he succeeded in getting issued from his brother's press ballads and newspaper articles of which he was the anonymous author. when he had a press of his own he used it for publishing a newspaper, an almanac, and numerous essays composed or compiled by himself. his genius as a writer supported his skill and industry as a printer. the second part of the double subject assigned to me is franklin as philosopher. the philosophy he taught and illustrated related to four perennial subjects of human interest--education, natural science, politics, and morals. i propose to deal in that order with these four topics. franklin's philosophy of education was elaborated as he grew up, and was applied to himself throughout his life. in the first place, he had no regular education of the usual sort. he studied and read with an extraordinary diligence from his earliest years; but he studied only the subjects which attracted him, or which he himself believed would be good for him, and throughout life he pursued only those inquiries for pursuing which he found within himself an adequate motive. the most important element in his training was reading, for which he had a precocious desire which was imperative, and proved to be lasting. his opportunities to get books were scanty; but he seized on all such opportunities, and fortunately he early came upon the "pilgrim's progress," the spectator, plutarch, xenophon's "memorabilia," and locke "on the human understanding." practice of english composition was the next agency in franklin's education; and his method--quite of his own invention--was certainly an admirable one. he would make brief notes of the thoughts contained in a good piece of writing, and lay these notes aside for several days; then, without looking at the book, he would endeavor to express these thoughts in his own words as fully as they had been expressed in the original paper. lastly, he would compare his product with the original, thus discovering his shortcomings and errors. to improve his vocabulary he turned specimens of prose into verse, and later, when he had forgotten the original, turned the verse back again into prose. this exercise enlarged his vocabulary and his acquaintance with synonyms and their different shades of meaning, and showed him how he could twist phrases and sentences about. his times for such exercises and for reading were at night after work, before work in the morning, and on sundays. this severe training he imposed on himself; and he was well advanced in it before he was sixteen years of age. his memory and his imagination must both have served him well; for he not only acquired a style fit for narrative, exposition, or argument, but also learned to use the fable, parable, paraphrase, proverb, and dialogue. the third element in his education was writing for publication; he began very early, while he was still a young boy, to put all he had learned to use in writing for the press. when he was but nineteen years old he wrote and published in london "a dissertation on liberty and necessity, pleasure and pain." in after years he was not proud of this pamphlet; but it was, nevertheless, a remarkable production for a youth of nineteen. so soon as he was able to establish a newspaper in philadelphia he wrote for it with great spirit, and in a style at once accurate, concise, and attractive, making immediate application of his reading and of the conversation of intelligent acquaintances on both sides of the ocean. his fourth principle of education was that it should continue through life, and should make use of the social instincts. to that end he thought that friends and acquaintances might fitly band together in a systematic endeavor after mutual improvement. the junto was created as a school of philosophy, morality, and politics; and this purpose it actually served for many years. some of the questions read at every meeting of the junto, with a pause after each one, would be curiously opportune in such a society at the present day. for example, no. 5, "have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?" and no. 6, "do you know of a fellow-citizen ... who has lately committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?" when a new member was initiated he was asked, among other questions, the following: "do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name, or goods, for mere speculative opinions or his external way of worship?" and again, "do you love truth for truth's sake, and will you endeavor impartially to find it, receive it yourself, and communicate it to others?" the junto helped to educate franklin, and he helped greatly to train all its members. the nature of franklin's own education accounts for many of his opinions on the general subject. thus, he believed, contrary to the judgment of his time, that latin and greek were not essential subjects in a liberal education, and that mathematics, in which he never excelled, did not deserve the place it held. he believed that any one who had acquired a command of good english could learn any other modern language that he really needed when he needed it; and this faith he illustrated in his own person, for he learned french, when he needed it, sufficiently well to enable him to exercise great influence for many years at the french court. as the fruit of his education he exhibited a clear, pungent, persuasive english style, both in writing and in conversation--a style which gave him great and lasting influence among men. it is easy to say that such a training as franklin's is suitable only for genius. be that as it may, franklin's philosophy of education certainly tells in favor of liberty for the individual in his choice of studies, and teaches that a desire for good reading and a capacity to write well are two very important fruits of any liberal culture. it was all at the service of his successor jefferson, the founder of the university of virginia. franklin's studies in natural philosophy are characterized by remarkable directness, patience, and inventiveness, absolute candor in seeking the truth, and a powerful scientific imagination. what has been usually considered his first discovery was the now familiar fact that northeast storms on the atlantic coast begin to leeward. the pennsylvania fireplace he invented was an ingenious application to the warming and ventilating of an apartment of the laws that regulate the movement of hot air. at the age of forty-one he became interested in the subject of electricity, and with the aid of many friends and acquaintances pursued the subject for four years, with no thought about personal credit for inventing either theories or processes, but simply with delight in experimentation and in efforts to explain the phenomena he observed. his kite experiment to prove lightning to be an electrical phenomenon very possibly did not really draw lightning from the cloud; but it supplied evidence of electrical energy in the atmosphere which went far to prove that lightning was an electrical discharge. the sagacity of franklin's scientific inquiries is well illustrated by his notes on colds and their causes. he maintains that influenzas usually classed as colds do not arise, as a rule, from either cold or dampness. he points out that savages and sailors, who are often wet, do not catch cold, and that the disease called a cold is not taken by swimming. he maintains that people who live in the forest, in open barns, or with open windows, do not catch cold, and that the disease called a cold is generally caused by impure air, lack of exercise, or overeating. he comes to the conclusion that influenzas and colds are contagious--a doctrine which, a century and a half later, was proved, through the advance of bacteriological science, to be sound. the following sentence exhibits remarkable insight, considering the state of medical art at that time: "i have long been satisfied from observation, that besides the general colds now termed influenzas (which may possibly spread by contagion, as well as by a particular quality of the air), people often catch cold from one another when shut up together in close rooms and coaches, and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other's transpiration; the disorder being in a certain state." in the light of present knowledge what a cautious and exact statement is that! there being no learned society in all america at the time, franklin's scientific experiments were almost all recorded in letters written to interested friends; and he was never in any haste to write these letters. he never took a patent on any of his inventions, and made no effort either to get a profit from them, or to establish any sort of intellectual proprietorship in his experiments and speculations. one of his english correspondents, mr. collinson, published in 1751 a number of franklin's letters to him in a pamphlet called "new experiments and observations in electricity made at philadelphia in america." this pamphlet was translated into several european languages, and established over the continent--particularly in france--franklin's reputation as a natural philosopher. a great variety of phenomena engaged his attention, such as phosphorescence in sea water, the cause of the saltness of the sea, the form and the temperatures of the gulf stream, the effect of oil in stilling waves, and the cause of smoky chimneys. franklin also reflected and wrote on many topics which are now classified under the head of political economy,--such as paper currency, national wealth, free trade, the slave trade, the effects of luxury and idleness, and the misery and destruction caused by war. not even his caustic wit could adequately convey in words his contempt and abhorrence for war as a mode of settling questions arising between nations. he condensed his opinions on that subject into the epigram: "there never was a good war or a bad peace." franklin's political philosophy may all be summed up in seven words--"first freedom, then public happiness and comfort." the spirit of liberty was born in him. he resented his brother's blows when he was an apprentice, and escaped from them. as a mere boy he refused to attend church on sundays in accordance with the custom of his family and his town, and devoted his sundays to reading and study. in practising his trade he claimed and diligently sought complete freedom. in public and private business alike he tried to induce people to take any action desired of them by presenting to them a motive they could understand and feel--a motive which acted on their own wills and excited their hopes. this is the only method possible under a rã©gime of liberty. a perfect illustration of his practice in this respect is found in his successful provision of one hundred and fifty four-horse wagons for braddock's force, when it was detained on its march from annapolis to western pennsylvania by the lack of wagons. the military method would have been to seize horses, wagons, and drivers wherever found. franklin persuaded braddock, instead of using force, to allow him (franklin) to offer a good hire for horses, wagons, and drivers, and proper compensation for the equipment in case of loss. by this appeal to the frontier farmers of pennsylvania he secured in two weeks all the transportation required. to defend public order franklin was perfectly ready to use public force, as, for instance, when he raised and commanded a regiment of militia to defend the northwestern frontier from the indians after braddock's defeat, and again, when it became necessary to defend philadelphia from a large body of frontiersmen who had lynched a considerable number of friendly indians, and were bent on revolutionizing the quaker government. but his abhorrence of all war was based on the facts, first, that during war the law must be silent, and, secondly, that military discipline, which is essential for effective fighting, annihilates individual liberty. "those," he said, "who would give up essential liberty for the sake of a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." the foundation of his firm resistance on behalf of the colonies to the english parliament was his impregnable conviction that the love of liberty was the ruling passion of the people of the colonies. in 1766 he said of the american people: "every act of oppression will sour their tempers, lessen greatly, if not annihilate, the profits of your commerce with them, and hasten their final revolt; for the seeds of liberty are universally found there, and nothing can eradicate them." because they loved liberty, they would not be taxed without representation; they would not have soldiers quartered on them, or their governors made independent of the people in regard to their salaries; or their ports closed, or their commerce regulated by parliament. it is interesting to observe how franklin's experiments and speculations in natural science often had a favorable influence on freedom of thought. his studies in economics had a strong tendency in that direction. his views about religious toleration were founded on his intense faith in civil liberty; and even his demonstration that lightning was an electrical phenomenon brought deliverance for mankind from an ancient terror. it removed from the domain of the supernatural a manifestation of formidable power that had been supposed to be a weapon of the arbitrary gods; and since it increased man's power over nature, it increased his freedom. this faith in freedom was fully developed in franklin long before the american revolution and the french revolution made the fundamental principles of liberty familiar to civilized mankind. his views concerning civil liberty were even more remarkable for his time than his views concerning religious liberty; but they were not developed in a passionate nature inspired by an enthusiastic idealism. he was the very embodiment of common sense, moderation, and sober honesty. his standard of human society is perfectly expressed in the description of new england which he wrote in 1772: "i thought often of the happiness in new england, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the manufacture perhaps of his own family. long may they continue in this situation!" such was franklin's conception of a free and happy people. such was his political philosophy. the moral philosophy of franklin consisted almost exclusively in the inculcation of certain very practical and unimaginative virtues, such as temperance, frugality, industry, moderation, cleanliness, and tranquillity. sincerity and justice, and resolution--that indispensable fly-wheel of virtuous habit--are found in his table of virtues; but all his moral precepts seem to be based on observation and experience of life, and to express his convictions concerning what is profitable, prudent, and on the whole satisfactory in the life that now is. his philosophy is a guide of life, because it searches out virtues, and so provides the means of expelling vices. it may reasonably determine conduct. it did determine franklin's conduct to a remarkable degree, and has had a prodigious influence for good on his countrymen and on civilized mankind. nevertheless, it omits all consideration of the prime motive power, which must impel to right conduct, as fire supplies the power which actuates the engine. that motive power is pure, unselfish love--love to god and love to man. "thou shalt love the lord thy god with all thy heart ... and thy neighbor as thyself." franklin never seems to have perceived that the supreme tests of civilization are the tender and honorable treatment of women as equals, and the sanctity of home life. there was one primary virtue on his list which he did not always practise. his failures in this respect diminished his influence for good among his contemporaries, and must always qualify the admiration with which mankind will regard him as a moral philosopher and an exhorter to a good life. his sagacity, intellectual force, versatility, originality, firmness, fortunate period of service, and longevity combined to make him a great leader of his people. in american public affairs the generation of wise leaders next to his own felt for him high admiration and respect; and the strong republic, whose birth and youthful growth he witnessed, will carry down his fame as political philosopher, patriot, and apostle of liberty through long generations. washington the virtues of washington were of two kinds, the splendid and the homely; i adopt, for my part in this celebration, some consideration of washington as a man of homely virtues, giving our far-removed generation a homely example. the first contrast to which i invite your attention is the contrast between the early age at which washington began to profit by the discipline of real life and the late age at which our educated young men exchange study under masters, and seclusion in institutions of learning, for personal adventure and responsibility out in the world. washington was a public surveyor at sixteen years of age. he could not spell well; but he could make a correct survey, keep a good journal, and endure the hardships to which a surveyor in the virginia wilderness was inevitably exposed. our expectation of good service and hard work from boys of sixteen, not to speak of young men of twenty-six, is very low. i have heard it maintained in a learned college faculty that young men who were on the average nineteen years of age, were not fit to begin the study of economics or philosophy, even under the guidance of skilful teachers, and that no young man could nowadays begin the practice of a profession to advantage before he was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. now, washington was at twenty-one the governor of virginia's messenger to the french forts beyond the alleghanies. he was already an accomplished woodman, an astute negotiator with savages and the french, and the cautious yet daring leader of a company of raw, insubordinate frontiersmen, who were to advance 500 miles into a wilderness with nothing but an indian trail to follow. in 1755, at twenty-three years of age, twenty years before the revolutionary war broke out, he was a skilful and experienced fighter, and a colonel in the virginia service. what a contrast to our college under-graduates of to-day, who at twenty-two years of age are still getting their bodily vigor through sports and not through real work, and who seldom seem to realize that, just as soon as they have acquired the use of the intellectual tools and stock with which a livelihood is to be earned in business or in the professions, the training of active life is immeasurably better than the training of the schools! yet washington never showed at any age the least spark of genius; he was only "sober, sensible, honest, and brave," as he said of major-general lincoln in 1791. by inheritance and by marriage washington became, while he was still young, one of the richest men in the country; but what a contrast between his sort of riches and our sorts! he was a planter and sportsman--a country gentleman. all his home days were spent in looking after his farms; in breeding various kinds of domestic animals; in fishing for profit; in attending to the diseases and accidents which befall livestock, including slaves; in erecting buildings, and repairing them; in caring for or improving his mills, barns, farm implements, and tools. he always lived very close to nature, and from his boyhood studied the weather, the markets, his crops and woods, and the various qualities of his lands. he was an economical husbandman, attending to all the details of the management of his large estates. he was constantly on horseback, often riding fifteen miles on his daily rounds. at sixty-seven years of age he caught the cold which killed him by getting wet on horseback, riding as usual about his farms. compare this sort of life, physical and mental, with the life of the ordinary rich american of to-day, who has made his money in stocks and bonds, or as a banker, broker, or trader, or in the management of great transportation or industrial concerns. this modern rich man, in all probability, has nothing whatever to do with nature or with country life. he is soft and tender in body; lives in the city; takes no vigorous exercise, and has very little personal contact with the elemental forces of either nature or mankind. he is not like washington an out-of-door man. washington was a combination of land-owner, magistrate, and soldier,--the best combination for a leader of men which the feudal system produced. our modern rich man is apt to possess no one of these functions, any one of which, well discharged, has in times past commanded the habitual respect of mankind. it is a grave misfortune for our country, and especially for our rich men, that the modern forms of property,--namely, stocks and bonds, mortgages, and city buildings--do not carry with them any inevitable responsibilities to the state, or involve their owner in personal risks and charges as a leader or commander of the people. the most enviable rich man to-day is the intelligent industrial or commercial adventurer or promoter, in the good sense of those terms. he takes risks and assumes burdens on a large scale, and has a chance to develop will, mind, and character, just as queen elizabeth's adventurers did all over the then known world. again, washington, as i have already indicated, was an economical person, careful about little expenditures as well as great, averse to borrowing money, and utterly impatient of waste. if a slave were hopelessly ill, he did not call a doctor, because it would be a useless expenditure. he insisted that the sewing woman, carolina, who had only made five shirts in a week, not being sick, should make nine. he entered in his account "thread and needle, one penny," and used said thread and needle himself. all this closeness and contempt for shiftlessness and prodigality were perfectly consistent with a large and hospitable way of living; for during many years of his life he kept open house at mt. vernon. this frugal and prudent man knew exactly what it meant to devote his "life and fortune to the cause we are engaged in, if needful," as he wrote in 1774. this was not an exaggerated or emotional phrase. it was moderate, but it meant business. he risked his whole fortune. what he lost through his service in the revolutionary war is clearly stated in a letter written from mt. vernon in 1784: "i made no money from my estate during the nine years i was absent from it, and brought none home with me. those who owed me, for the most part, took advantage of the depreciation, and paid me off with sixpence in the pound. those to whom i was indebted, i have yet to pay, without other means, if they will wait, than selling part of my estate, or distressing those who were too honest to take advantage of the tender laws to quit scores with me." should we not all be glad if to-day a hundred or two multi-millionaires could give such an account as that of their losses incurred in the public service, even if they had not, like washington, risked their lives as well? in our times we have come to think that a rich man should not be frugal or economical, but rather wasteful or extravagant. we have even been asked to believe that a cheap coat makes a cheap man. if there were a fixed relation between a man's character and the price of his clothes, what improvement we should have seen in the national character since 1893! at harvard university, twelve hundred students take three meals a day in the great dining-room of memorial hall, and manage the business themselves through an elected president and board of directors. these officers proscribe stews, apparently because it is a form in which cheap meat may be offered them, neglecting the more important fact that the stew is the most nutritious and digestible form in which meats can be eaten. mr. edward atkinson, the economist, invented an oven in which various kinds of foods may be cheaply and well prepared with a minimum of attention to the process. the workingmen, among whom he attempted to introduce it, took no interest in it whatever, because it was recommended to them as a cheap way of preparing inexpensive though excellent foods. this modern temper affords a most striking contrast to the practices and sentiments of washington, sentiments and practices which underlay his whole public life as well as his private life. if he were alive to-day, would he not be bewildered by much of our talk about the rights of men and animals? washington's mind dwelt very little on rights and very much on duties. for him, patriotism was a duty; good citizenship was a duty; and for the masses of mankind it was a duty to clear away the forest, till the ground, and plant fruit trees, just as he prescribed to the hoped-for tenants on his ohio and kanawha lands. for men and women in general he thought it a duty to increase and multiply, and to make the wilderness glad with rustling crops, lowing herds, and children's voices. when he retired from the presidency, he expressed the hope that he might "make and sell a little flour annually." for the first soldier and first statesman of his country, surely this was a modest anticipation of continued usefulness. we think more about our rights than our duties. he thought more about his duties than his rights. posterity has given him first place because of the way in which he conceived and performed his duties; it will judge the leaders of the present generation by the same standard, whatever their theories about human rights. having said thus much about contrasts, let me now turn to some interesting resemblances between washington's times and our own. we may notice in the first place the permanency of the fighting quality in the english-american stock. washington was all his life a fighter. the entire american people is to-day a fighting people, prone to resort to force and prompt to take arms, the different sections of the population differing chiefly in regard to the nature and amount of the provocation which will move them to violence and combat. to this day nothing moves the admiration of the people so quickly as composure, ingenuity, and success in fighting; so that even in political contests all the terms and similes are drawn from war, and among american sports the most popular have in them a large element of combat. washington was roused and stimulated by the dangers of the battlefield, and utterly despised cowards, or even men who ran away in battle from a momentary terror which they did not habitually manifest. his early experience taught him, however, that the indian way of fighting in woods or on broken ground was the most effective way; and he did not hesitate to adopt and advocate that despised mode of fighting, which has now, one hundred and fifty years later, become the only possible mode. the indian in battle took instantly to cover, if he could find it. in our civil war both sides learned to throw up breastworks wherever they expected an engagement to take place; and the english in south africa have demonstrated that the only possible way to fight with the present long range quick-firing guns, is the way in which the "treacherous devils," as washington called the indians, fought general braddock, that is, with stratagem, surprise, and ambuscade; with hiding and crawling behind screens and obstacles; with the least possible appearance in open view, with nothing that can glitter on either arms or clothes, and with no visible distinction between officers and men. war is now a genuinely indian performance, just as washington saw one hundred and fifty years ago that it ought to be. the silent washington's antipathy to the press finds an exact parallel in our own day. he called the writers of the press "infamous scribblers." president cleveland called them "ghouls." but it must be confessed that the newspapers of washington's time surpassed those of the present day in violence of language, and in lack of prophetic insight and just appreciation of men and events. when washington retired from the presidency the _aurora_ said, "if ever a nation was debauched by a man, the american nation has been debauched by washington." some of the weaknesses or errors of the congresses of washington's time have been repeated in our own day, and seem as natural to us as they doubtless seemed to the men of 1776 and 1796. thus, the continental congress incurred all the evils of a depreciated currency with the same blindness which afflicted the congress of the southern confederacy and the union congress during the civil war, or the democrat-populist party of still more recent times. the refusal of the congress of 1777 to carry out the agreement made with the hessian prisoners at saratoga reminds one of the refusal of congress, in spite of the public exhortations of our present executive, and his cabinet, to carry out the understanding with cuba in regard to the commercial relations of the island with the united states. in both cases the honor of the country was tarnished. the intensity of party spirit in washington's time closely resembles that of our own day, but was certainly fiercer than it is now, the reason being that the questions at issue were absolutely fundamental. when the question was whether the constitution of the united states was a sure defence for freedom or a trap to ensnare an unsuspecting people, intensity of feeling on both sides was well-nigh inevitable. during washington's two administrations a considerable number of the most eminent american publicists feared that dangerous autocratic powers had been conferred on the president by the constitution. washington held that there was no ground for these fears, and acted as if the supposition was absurd. when the question was whether we should love and adhere to revolutionary france, or rather become partisans of great britain--the power from which we had just won independence--it is no wonder that political passions burnt fiercely. on this question washington stood between the opposing parties, and often commended himself to neither. in spite of the tremendous partisan heat of the times, washington, through both his administrations, made appointments to public office from both parties indifferently. he appointed some well-known tories and many democrats. he insisted only on fitness as regards character, ability, and experience, and preferred persons, of whatever party, who had already proved their capacity in business or the professions, or in legislative or administrative offices. it is a striking fact that washington is the only one of the presidents of the united states who has, as a rule, acted on these principles. his example was not followed by his early successors, or by any of the more recent occupants of the presidency. his successors, elected by a party, have not seen their way to make appointments without regard to party connections. the civil service reform agitation of the last twenty-five years is nothing but an effort to return, in regard to the humbler national offices, to the practice of president washington. in spite of these resemblances between washington's time and our own, the profound contrasts make the resemblances seem unimportant. in the first years of the government of the united states there was widespread and genuine apprehension lest the executive should develop too much power, and lest the centralization of the government should become overwhelming. nothing can be farther from our political thoughts to-day than this dread of the power of the national executive. on the contrary, we are constantly finding that it is feeble where we wish it were strong, impotent where we wish it omnipotent. the senate of the united states has deprived the president of much of the power intended for his office, and has then found it, on the whole, convenient and desirable to allow itself to be held up by any one of its members who possesses the bodily strength and the assurance to talk or read aloud by the week. other forces have developed within the republic quite outside of the government, which seem to us to override and almost defy the closely limited governmental forces. quite lately we have seen two of these new forces--one a combination of capitalists, the other a combination of laborers--put the president of the united states into a position of a mediator between two parties whom he could not control, and with whom he must intercede. this is part of the tremendous nineteenth century democratic revolution, and of the newly acquired facilities for combination and association for the promotion of common interests. we no longer dread abuse of the power of state or church; we do dread abuse of the powers of compact bodies of men, highly organized and consenting to be despotically ruled, for the advancement of their selfish interests. washington was a stern disciplinarian in war; if he could not shoot deserters he wanted them "stoutly whipped." he thought that army officers should be of a different class from their men, and should never put themselves on an equality with their men; he went himself to suppress the whiskey rebellion in 1794, and always believed that firm government was essential to freedom. he never could have imagined for a moment the toleration of disorder and violence which is now exhibited everywhere in our country when a serious strike occurs. he was the chief actor through the long struggles, military and civil, which attended the birth of this nation, and took the gravest responsibilities which could then fall to the lot of soldiers or statesmen; but he never encountered, and indeed never imagined, the anxieties and dangers which now beset the republic of which he was the founder. we face new difficulties. shall we face them with washington's courage, wisdom, and success? finally, i ask your attention to the striking contrast between the wealth of washington and the poverty of abraham lincoln, the only one of the succeeding presidents who won anything like the place in the popular heart that washington has always occupied. washington, while still young, was one of the richest men in the country; lincoln, while young, was one of the poorest; both rendered supreme service to their country and to freedom; between these two extremes men of many degrees as regards property holding have occupied the presidency, the majority of them being men of moderate means. the lesson to be drawn from these facts seems to be that the republic can be greatly served by rich and poor alike, but has oftenest been served creditably by men who were neither rich nor poor. in the midst of the present conflicts between employers and employed, between the classes that are already well to do and the classes who believe it to be the fault of the existing order that they too are not well to do, and in plain sight of the fact that democratic freedom permits the creation and perpetuation of greater differences as regards possessions than the world has ever known before, it is comforting to remember that true patriots and wise men are bred in all the social levels of a free commonwealth, and that the republic may find in any condition of life safe leaders and just rulers. channing we commemorate to-day a great preacher. it is the fashion to say that preaching is a thing of the past, other influences having taken its place. but boston knows better; for she had two great preachers in the nineteenth century, and is sure that an immense and enduring force was theirs, and through them, hers. channing and brooks! men very unlike in body and mind, but preachers of like tendency and influence from their common love of freedom and faith in mankind. this city has learned by rich experience that preaching becomes the most productive of all human works the moment the adequate preacher appears--a noble man with a noble message. such was channing. his public work was preceded and accompanied by a great personal achievement. all his life he grew in spirit, becoming always freer, broader, and more sympathetic. in forty years he worked his way out of moderate calvinism without the trinity into such doctrines as these:--"the idea of god ... is the idea of our own spiritual natures purified and enlarged to infinity." "the sense of duty is the greatest gift of god. the idea of right is the primary and highest revelation of god to the human mind; and all outward revelations are founded on and addressed to it." there is "but one object of cherished and enduring love in heaven or on earth, and that is moral goodness." "i do and i must reverence human nature.... i honor it for its struggles against oppression, for its growth and progress under the weight of so many chains and prejudices, for its achievements in science and art, and still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue. these are marks of a divine origin and pledges of a celestial inheritance." "perfection is man's proper and natural goal." what an immense distance between these doctrines of channing's maturity and the calvinism of his youth! he was a meditative, reflecting man, who read much, but took selected thoughts of others into the very substance and fibre of his being, and made them his own. the foundation of his professional power and public influence was this great personal achievement, this attuning of his own soul to noblest harmonies. thousands of ministers and spiritually-minded laymen of many denominations have travelled since channing's death the road he laid out, and so have been delivered from the inhuman doctrines of the fall of man, the wrath of god, vicarious atonement, everlasting hell for the majority, and the rescue of a predestined few. they should all join in giving heartfelt praise and thanks to channing, who thought out clearly, and preached with fervid reiteration, the doctrines which have delivered them from a painful bondage. another remarkable quality of channing's teachings is their universality. men of learning and spirituality in all the civilized nations have welcomed his words, and found in them teachings of enduring and expansive influence. many biblical scholars, in the technical sense, have arrived eighty years later at channing's conclusions about the essential features of christianity, although channing was no scholar in the modern sense; while they go far beyond him in treating the bible as a collection of purely human writings and in rejecting the so-called supernatural quality of the jewish and christian scriptures. indeed, many biblical scholars belonging to-day to evangelical sects have arrived not only at channing's position, but also at emerson's. just how much channing's published works have had to do with this quiet but fateful revolution no man can tell. the most eminent to-day of american presbyterian divines preached an excellent sermon in the harvard college chapel one sunday evening not many years ago, and asked me, as we walked away together, how i liked it. i replied: "very much; it was all straight out of channing." "that is strange," he said, "for i have never read channing." it is great testimony to the pervasive quality of a prophet's teachings when they become within fifty years a component of the intellectual atmosphere of the new times. at a dinner of harvard graduates i once complained that, although i heard in the college chapel a great variety of preachers connected with many different denominations, the preaching was, after all, rather monotonous, because they all preached channing. phillips brooks spoke after me and said: "the president is right in thinking our present preaching monotonous, and the reason he gives for this monotony is correct; we all do preach channing." the direct influence of channing's writings has been vast, for they are read in english in all parts of the world, and have been translated into many languages. thirty years ago i spent a long day in showing don pedro, the emperor of brazil, some of the interesting things in the laboratories and collections of harvard university. he was the most assiduous visitor that i ever conducted through the university buildings, intelligently interested in a great variety of objects and ideas. late in the afternoon he suddenly said, with a fresh eagerness: "now i will visit the tomb of channing." we drove to mount auburn, and found the monument erected by the federal street church. the emperor copied with his own hand george ticknor's inscriptions on the stone, and made me verify his copies. then, with his great weight and height, he leaped into the air, and snatched a leaf from the maple which overhung the tomb. "i am going to put that leaf," he said, "into my best edition of channing. i have read all his published works,--some of them many times over. he was a very great man." the emperor of brazil was a roman catholic. channing's philanthropy was a legitimate outcome of his view of religion. for him practical religion was character-building by the individual human being. but character-building in any large group or mass of human beings means social reform; therefore channing was a preacher and active promoter of social regeneration in this world. he depicted the hideous evils and wrongs of intemperance, slavery, and war. he advocated and supported every well-directed effort to improve public education, the administration of charity, and the treatment of criminals, and to lift up the laboring classes. he denounced the bitter sectarian and partisan spirit of his day. he refused entire sympathy to the abolitionists, because of the ferocity and violence of their habitual language and the injustice of their indiscriminate attacks. he distrusted money worship, wealth, and luxury. these sentiments and actions grew straight out of his religious conceptions, and were their legitimate fruit. all his social aspirations and hopes were rooted in his fundamental conception of the fatherhood of god, and its corollary the brotherhood of men. it was his lofty idea of the infinite worth of human nature and of the inherent greatness of the human soul, in contrast with the then prevailing doctrines of human vileness and impotency, which made him resent with such indignation the wrongs of slavery, intemperance, and war, and urge with such ardor every effort to deliver men from poverty and ignorance, and to make them gentler and juster to one another. in no subject which he discussed does the close connection between channing's theology and his philanthropy appear more distinctly than in education. he says in his remarks on education: ... "there is nothing on earth so precious as the mind, soul, character of the child.... there should be no economy in education. money should never be weighed against the soul of a child. it should be poured out like water for the child's intellectual and moral life." it is more than two generations since those sentences were written, and still the average public expenditure on the education of a child in the united states is less than fifteen dollars a year. eastern massachusetts is the community in the whole world which gives most thought, time, and money to education, public and endowed. whence came this social wisdom? from protestantism, from congregationalism, from the religious teachings of channing and his disciples. listen to this sentence: "benevolence is short-sighted indeed, and must blame itself for failure, if it do not see in education the chief interest of the human race." it is impossible to join in this centennial celebration of the advent to boston of this religious pioneer and philanthropic leader without perceiving that in certain respects the country has recently fallen away from the moral standards he set up. channing taught that no real good can come through violence, injustice, greed, and the inculcation of hatred and enmities, or of suspicions and contempts. he believed that public well-being can be promoted only through public justice, freedom, peace, and good will among men. he never could have imagined that there would be an outburst in his dear country, grown rich and strong, of such doctrines as that the might of arms, possessions, or majorities makes right; that a superior civilization may rightly force itself on an inferior by wholesale killing, hurting, and impoverishing; that an extension of commerce, or of missionary activities, justifies war; that the example of imperial rome is an instructive one for republican america; and that the right to liberty and the brotherhood of man are obsolete sentimentalities. nevertheless, in spite of these temporary aberrations of the public mind and heart, it is plain that many of channing's anticipations and hopes have already been realized, that his influence on three generations of men has been profound and wholly beneficent, and that the world is going his way, though with slow and halting steps. his life brightened to its close. in its last summer but one he wrote: "this morning i plucked a globe of the dandelion--the seed-vessel--and was struck as never before with the silent, gentle manner in which nature sows her seed.... i saw, too, how nature sows her seed broadcast.... so we must send truth abroad, not forcing it on here and there a mind, and watching its progress anxiously, but trusting that it will light on a kindly soil, and yield its fruit. so nature teaches." may those who stand here one hundred years hence say,--the twentieth century supplied more of kindly soil for channing seed than the nineteenth. emerson emerson was not a logician or reasoner, and not a rhetorician, in the common sense. he was a poet, who wrote chiefly in prose, but also in verse. his verse was usually rough, but sometimes finished and melodious; it was always extraordinarily concise and expressive. during his engagement to the lady who became his second wife, he wrote thus to her: "i am born a poet,--of a low class without doubt, yet a poet; that is my nature and vocation. my singing, be sure, is very husky, and is, for the most part, in prose. still, i am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those." this husky poet had his living to get. his occupations in life were those of the teacher, minister, lecturer, and author. he was a teacher at various times between 1818 and 1826; but he never liked teaching. he was a preacher at intervals from 1826 to 1847, but a settled minister only from 1829 to 1832. his career as a lecturer began in the autumn of 1833; and his first book, "nature," was published in 1836, when he was thirty-three years old. his lectures for money were given as a rule during the winter and early spring; and for thirty years the travelling he was obliged to do in search of audiences was often extremely fatiguing, and not without serious hardships and exposures. these occupations usually gave him an income sufficient for his simple wants; but there were times when outgo exceeded income. the little property his first wife left him ($1200 a year) relieved him from serious pecuniary anxiety by 1834; although it did not relieve him from earning by his own labor the livelihood of his family. in 1834 he went to live in concord, where his grandfather had been the minister at the time of the revolution, and in 1835 he bought the house and grounds there which were his home for the rest of his days. before settling in concord, he had spent one winter and spring (1826-27) in the southern states, and seven months of 1833 in europe. both of these absences were necessitated by the state of his health, which was precarious during his young manhood. with these exceptions, he had lived in boston or its immediate neighborhood, until he settled in concord. his progenitors on both sides were chiefly new england ministers. his formal education was received in the boston latin school and harvard college, and was therefore purely local. how narrow and provincial seems his experience of life! a little city, an isolated society, a country village! yet through books, and through intercourse with intelligent persons, he was really "set in a large place." the proof of this largeness, and of the keenness of his mental and moral vision, is that, in regard to some of the chief concerns of mankind, he was a seer and a fore-seer. this prophetic quality of his i hope to demonstrate to-night in three great fields of thought--education, social organization, and religion. although a prophet and inspirer of reform, emerson was not a reformer. he was but a halting supporter of the reforms of his day; and the eager experimenters and combatants in actual reforms found him a disappointing sort of sympathizer. his visions were far-reaching, his doctrines often radical, and his exhortations fervid; but when it came to action, particularly to habitual action, he was surprisingly conservative. with an exquisite candor, and a gentle resolution of rarest quality he broke his strong ties to the second church of boston before he was thirty years old, abandoning the profession for which he had been trained, and which, in many of its aspects, he honored and enjoyed; yet he attended church on sundays all his life with uncommon regularity. he refused to conduct public prayer, and had many things to say against it; but when he was an overseer of harvard college, he twice voted to maintain the traditional policy of compelling all the students to attend morning prayers, in spite of the fact that a large majority of the faculty urgently advocated abandoning that policy. he manifested a good deal of theoretical sympathy with the community experiments at brook farm and fruitlands; but he declined to take part in them himself. he was intimate with many of the leading abolitionists; but no one has described more vividly their grave intellectual and social defects. he laid down principles which, when applied, would inevitably lead to progress and reform; but he took little part in the imperfect step-by-step process of actual reforming. he probably would have been an ineffective worker in any field of reform; and, at any rate, strenuous labor on applications of his philosophy would have prevented him from maintaining the flow of his philosophic and prophetic visions. the work of giving practical effect to his thought was left for other men to do,--indeed for generations of other serviceable men, who, filled with his ideals, will slowly work them out into institutions, customs, and other practical values. when we think of emerson as a prophet, we at once become interested in the dates at which he uttered certain doctrines, or wrote certain pregnant sentences; but just here the inquirer meets a serious difficulty. he can sometimes ascertain that a given doctrine or sentence was published at a given date; but he may be quite unable to ascertain how much earlier the doctrine was really formulated, or the sentence written. emerson has been dead twenty-one years, and it is thirty years since he wrote anything new; but his whole philosophy of life was developed by the time he was forty years old, and it may be doubted if he wrote anything after 1843, the germinal expression of which may not be found in his journals, sermons, or lectures written before that date. if, therefore, we find in the accepted thought, or established institutions, of to-day recent developments of principles and maxims laid down by emerson, we may fairly say that his thought outran his times certainly by one, and probably by two generations of men. * * * * * i take up now the prophetic teachings of emerson with regard to education. in the first place, he saw, with a clearness to which very few people have yet attained, the fundamental necessity of the school as the best civilizing agency, next to steady labor, and the only sure means of permanent and progressive reform. he says outright: "we shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. what we call our root-and-branch reforms, of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. we must begin higher up--namely, in education." he taught that if we hope to reform mankind, we must begin not with adults, but with children: we must begin in the school. there are some signs that this doctrine has now at last entered the minds of the so-called practical men. the cubans are to be raised in the scale of civilization and public happiness; so both they and we think they must have more and better schools. the filipinos, too, are to be developed after the american fashion; so we send them a thousand teachers of english. the southern states are to be rescued from the persistent poison of slavery; and, after forty years of failure with political methods, we at last accept emerson's doctrine, and say: we must begin earlier,--at school. the city slums are to be redeemed; and the scientific charity workers find the best way is to get the children into kindergartens and manual training schools. since the civil war, a whole generation of educational administrators has been steadily at work developing what is called the elective system in the institutions of education which deal with the ages above twelve. it has been a slow, step-by-step process, carried on against much active opposition and more sluggish obstruction. the system is a method of educational organization which recognizes the immense expansion of knowledge during the nineteenth century, and takes account of the needs and capacities of the individual child and youth. now, emerson laid down in plain terms the fundamental doctrines on which this elective system rests. he taught that the one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil, dissipation. he said: "you must elect your work: you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest." to this exhortation he added the educational reason for it,--only by concentration can the youth arrive at the stage of doing something with his knowledge, or get beyond the stage of absorbing, and arrive at the capacity for producing. as emerson puts it, "only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing." the educational institutions of to-day have not yet fully appreciated this all-important step from knowing to doing. they are only beginning to perceive that, all along the course of education, the child and the youth should be doing something as well as learning something; should be stimulated and trained by achievement; should be constantly encouraged to take the step beyond seeing and memorizing to doing,--the step, as emerson says, "out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness." emerson carried this doctrine right on into mature life. he taught that nature arms each man with some faculty, large or small, which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society; and that this faculty should determine the man's career. the advocates of the elective system have insisted that its results were advantageous for society as a whole, as well as for the individual. emerson put this argument in a nutshell at least fifty years ago: "society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do." education used to be given almost exclusively through books. in recent years there has come in another sort of education through tools, machines, gardens, drawings, casts, and pictures. manual training, shop-work, sloyd, and gardening have come into use for the school ages; the teaching of trades has been admitted to some public school systems; and, in general, the use of the hands and eyes in productive labor has been recognized as having good educational effects. the education of men by manual labor was a favorite doctrine with emerson. he had fully developed it as early as 1837, and he frequently recurred to it afterwards. in december of that year, in a course of lectures on human culture, he devoted one lecture to the hands. he saw clearly that manual labor might be made to develop not only good mental qualities, but good moral qualities. to-day, it is frequently necessary for practical teachers, who are urging measures of improvement, to point this out, and to say, just as emerson said two generations ago, that any falseness in mechanical work immediately appears; that a teacher can judge of the moral quality of each boy in the class before him better and sooner from manual work than from book-work. emerson taught that manual labor is the study of the external world; that the use of manual labor never grows obsolete, and is inapplicable to no person. he said explicitly that "a man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture"; that there is not only health, but education in garden work; that when a man gets sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper by simply signing his name to a cheque, it is the producers and carriers of these articles that have got the education they yield, he only the commodity; and that labor is god's education. this was emerson's doctrine more than sixty years ago. it is only ten years since the mechanic arts high school was opened in boston. we are all of us aware that within the last twenty years there has been a determined movement of the american people toward the cultivation of art, and toward the public provision of objects which open the sense of beauty and increase public enjoyment. it is curious to see how literally emerson prophesied the actual direction of these efforts:- "on the city's paved street plant gardens lined with lilac sweet; let spouting fountains cool the air, singing in the sun-baked square; let statue, picture, park, and hall, ballad, flag, and festival the past restore, the day adorn, and make to-morrow a new morn!" we have introduced into our schools, of late years, lessons in drawing, modelling, and designing,--not sufficiently, but in a promising and hopeful way. emerson taught that it is the office of art to educate the perception of beauty; and he precisely describes one of the most recent of the new tendencies in american education and social life, when he says: "beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten." that sentence is the inspiration of one of the most recent of the efforts to improve the arts and crafts, and to restore to society the artistic craftsman. but how slow is the institutional realization of this ideal of art education! we are still struggling in our elementary and secondary schools to get a reasonable amount of instruction in drawing and music, and to transfer from other subjects a fair allotment of time to these invaluable elements of true culture, which speak a universal language. yet the ultimate object of art in education is to teach men to see nature to be beautiful and at the same time useful, beautiful because alive and reproductive, useful while symmetrical and fair. take up to-day the last essays on education, the last book on landscape architecture, or the freshest teachings of the principles of design, and you will find them penetrated with emerson's doctrine of art as teacher of mankind. emerson insists again and again that true culture must open the sense of beauty; that "a man is a beggar who only lives to the useful." it will probably require several generations yet to induce the american people to accept his doctrine that all moments and objects can be embellished, and that cheerfulness, serenity, and repose in energy are the "end of culture and success enough." it has been clearly perceived of late that a leading object in education is the cultivation of fine manners. on this point the teachings of emerson are fundamental; but the american institutions of education are only beginning to appreciate their significance. he teaches that genius or love invents fine manners, "which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and by the advantage of a palace better the instruction. they stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode." there is much in that phrase, "by the advantage of a palace." for generations, american institutions of education were content with the humblest sort of shelters, with plain wooden huts and brick barracks, and unkempt grounds about the buildings. they are only lately beginning to acquire fine buildings with pleasing surroundings; that is, they are just beginning to carry into practice emerson's wisdom of sixty years ago. the american cities are beginning to build handsome houses for their high schools. columbia university builds a noble temple for its library. the graduates and friends of harvard like to provide her with a handsome fence round the yard, with a fair array of shrubs within the fence, with a handsome stadium instead of shabby, wooden seats round the football gridiron, and to take steps for securing in the future broad connections between the grounds of the university and the cambridge parks by the river. they are just now carrying into practice emerson's teaching; by the advantage of a palace they mean to better harvard's instruction in manners. they are accepting his doctrine that "manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth; that for the most part his manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries manners. when we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what high lessons, and inspiring tokens of character they convey, and what divination is required in us for the reading of this fine telegraph,--we see what range the subject has, and what relations to convenience, power, and beauty." in emerson's early days there was nothing in our schools and colleges which at all corresponded to what we now know too much about under the name of athletic sports. the elaborate organization of these sports is a development of the last thirty years in our schools and colleges; but i find in emerson the true reason for the athletic cult, given a generation before it existed among us. your boy "hates the grammar and gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. well, the boy is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training.... football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business to learn.... besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them, secret free-masonries." we shall never find a completer justification of athletic sports than that. in his memorable address on the american scholar, which was given at cambridge in 1837, emerson pointed out that the function of the scholar should include creative action, or, as we call it in these days, research, or the search for new truth. he says: "the soul active ... utters truth, or creates.... in its essence it is progressive. the book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius.... they look backward and not forward. but genius looks forward. man hopes: genius creates. whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the deity is not his;--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame." and more explicitly still, he says: "colleges have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. but they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create." when emerson wrote this passage, the spirit of research, or discovery, or creation had not yet breathed life into the higher institutions of learning in our country; and to-day they have much to do and to acquire before they will conform to emerson's ideal. there are innumerable details in which emerson anticipated the educational experiences of later generations. i can cite but two of them. he taught that each age must write its own books; "or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. the books of an older period will not fit this." how true that is in our own day when eighty thousand new books come from the press of the civilized world in a single year! witness the incessant remaking or re-casting of the books of the preceding generation! emerson himself has gone into thousands of books in which his name is never mentioned. even history has to be re-written every few years, the long-surviving histories being rather monuments of style and method than accepted treasuries of facts. again, contrary to the prevailing impression that the press has, in large measure, stripped eloquence of its former influence, emerson taught that "if there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is the united states." he included under eloquence the useful speech, all sorts of political persuasion in the great arena of the republic, and the lessons of science, art, and religion which should be "brought home to the instant practice of thirty millions of people," now become eighty. the colleges and universities have now answered in the affirmative emerson's question, "is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to train and arm his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of grace, and of character to serve such a constituency?" but then emerson's definition of eloquence is simple, and foretells the practice of to-day rather than describes the practice of webster, everett, choate, and winthrop, his contemporaries: "know your fact; hug your fact. for the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity.... eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak." * * * * * i turn next to some examples of emerson's anticipation of social conditions, visible to him as seer in his own day, and since become plain to the sight of the ordinary millions. when he accumulated in his journals the original materials of his essay on worship, there were no large cities in the united states in the present sense of that term. the great experiment of democracy was not far advanced, and had not developed many of its sins and dangers; yet how justly he presented them in the following description: "in our large cities, the population is godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. these are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. how is it people manage to live on, so aimless as they are? ... there is faith in chemistry, in meat and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine wheels, sewing-machines, and in public opinion, but not in divine causes." in emerson's day, luxury in the present sense had hardly been developed in our country; but he foresaw its coming, and its insidious destructiveness. "we spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred trifles, i know not what, and not for the things of a man. our expense is almost all for conformity. it is for cake that we run in debt; it is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs us so much. why needs any man be rich? why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and places of amusement? only for want of thought.... we are first thoughtless, and then find that we are moneyless. we are first sensual and then must be rich." he foresaw the young man's state of mind to-day about marriage--i must have money before i can marry; and deals with it thus: "give us wealth and the home shall exist. but that is a very imperfect and inglorious solution of the problem, and therefore no solution. give us wealth! you ask too much. few have wealth; but all must have a home. men are not born rich; in getting wealth the man is generally sacrificed, and often is sacrificed without acquiring wealth at last." we have come to understand by experience that the opinion of masses of men is a formidable power which can be made safe and useful. in earlier days this massed opinion was either despised or dreaded; and it is dreadful, if either confined or misdirected. emerson compares it to steam. studied, economized, and directed, steam has become the power by which all great labors are done. like steam is the opinion of political masses! if crushed by castles, armies, and police, dangerously explosive; but if furnished with schools and the ballot, developing "the most harmless and energetic form of a state." his eyes were wide open to some of the evil intellectual effects of democracy. the individual is too apt to wear the time-worn yoke of the multitude's opinions. no multiplying of contemptible units can produce an admirable mass. "if i see nothing to admire in a unit, shall i admire a million units?" the habit of submitting to majority rule cultivates individual subserviency. he pointed out two generations ago that the action of violent political parties in a democracy might provide for the individual citizen a systematic training in moral cowardice. it is interesting, at the stage of industrial warfare which the world has now reached, to observe how emerson, sixty years ago, discerned clearly the absurdity of paying all sorts of service at one rate, now a favorite notion with some labor unions. he points out that even when all labor is temporarily paid at one rate, differences in possessions will instantly arise: "in one hand the dime became an eagle as it fell, and in another hand a copper cent. for the whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it." emerson was never deceived by a specious philanthropy, or by claims of equality which find no support in the nature of things. he was a true democrat, but still could say: "i think i see place and duties for a nobleman in every society; but it is not to drink wine and ride in a fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for the multitude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perseverance, self-devotion, and the remembrance of the humble old friend,--by making his life secretly beautiful." how fine a picture of the democratic nobility is that! in his lecture on man the reformer, which was read before the mechanics' apprentices' association in boston in january, 1841, emerson described in the clearest manner the approaching strife between laborers and employers, between poor and rich, and pointed out the cause of this strife in the selfishness, unkindness, and mutual distrust which ran through the community. he also described, with perfect precision, the only ultimate remedy,--namely, the sentiment of love. "love would put a new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long.... the virtue of this principle in human society in application to great interests is obsolete and forgotten. but one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine." it is more than sixty years since those words were uttered, and in those years society has had large experience of industrial and social strife, of its causes and consequences, and of many attempts to remedy or soften it; but all this experience only goes to show that there is but one remedy for these ills. it is to be found in kindness, good fellowship, and the affections. in emerson's words, "we must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible." the world will wait long for this remedy, but there is no other. like every real seer and prophet whose testimony is recorded, emerson had intense sympathy with the poor, laborious, dumb masses of mankind, and being a wide reader in history and biography, he early arrived at the conviction that history needed to be written in a new manner. it was long before green's history of the english people that emerson wrote: "hence it happens that the whole interest of history lies in the fortunes of the poor." in recent years this view of history has come to prevail, and we are given the stories of institutions, industries, commerce, crafts, arts, and beliefs, instead of the stories of dynasties and wars. for emerson it is always feats of liberty and wit which make epochs of history. commerce is civilizing because "the power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast." the invention of a house, safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, gives play to the finer faculties, and introduces art, manners, and social delights. the discovery of the post office is a fine metre of civilization. the sea-going steamer marks an epoch; the subjection of electricity to take messages and turn wheels marks another. but, after all, the vital stages of human progress are marked by steps toward personal, individual freedom. the love of liberty was emerson's fundamental passion:- "for he that ruleth high and wise, nor pauseth in his plan, will take the sun out of the skies ere freedom out of man." the new national league of independent workmen of america has very appropriately taken its motto from emerson:- "for what avail the plough or sail or land or life, if freedom fail?" the sympathetic reader of emerson comes often upon passages written long ago which are positively startling in their anticipation of sentiments common to-day and apparently awakened by very recent events. one would suppose that the following passage was written yesterday. it was written fifty-six years ago. "and so, gentlemen, i feel in regard to this aged england, with the possessions, honors, and trophies, and also with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering around her, irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which cannot be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing populations,--i see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before;--indeed with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon." before the civil war the jew had no such place in society as he holds to-day. he was by no means so familiar to americans as he is now. emerson speaks twice of the jew in his essay on fate, in terms precisely similar to those we commonly hear to-day: "we see how much will has been expended to extinguish the jew, in vain.... the sufferance which is the badge of the jew has made him in these days the ruler of the rulers of the earth." those keen observations were made certainly more than forty years ago, and probably more than fifty. landscape architecture is not yet an established profession among us, in spite of the achievements of downing, cleveland, and olmsted and their disciples; yet much has been accomplished within the last twenty-five years to realize the predictions on this subject made by emerson in his lecture on the young american. he pointed out in that lecture that the beautiful gardens of europe are unknown among us, but might be easily imitated here, and said that the landscape art "is the fine art which is left for us.... the whole force of all arts goes to facilitate the decoration of lands and dwellings.... i look on such improvement as directly tending to endear the land to the inhabitant." the following sentence might have been written yesterday, so consistent is it with the thought of to-day: "whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape." in regard to books, pictures, statues, collections in natural history, and all such refining objects of nature and art, which heretofore only the opulent could enjoy, emerson pointed out that in america the public should provide these means of culture and inspiration for every citizen. he thus anticipated the present ownership by cities, or by endowed trustees, of parks, gardens, and museums of art or science, as well as of baths and orchestras. of music in particular he said: "i think sometimes could i only have music on my own terms; could i ... know where i could go whenever i wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,--that were a bath and a medicine." it has been a long road from that sentence, written probably in the forties, to the symphony orchestra in this hall, and to the new singing classes on the east side of new york city. for those of us who have attended to the outburst of novels and treatises on humble or squalid life, to the copious discussions on child-study, to the masses of slum literature, and to the numerous writings on home economics, how true to-day seems the following sentence written in 1837: "the literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life are the topics of the time." * * * * * i pass now to the last of the three topics which time permits me to discuss,--emerson's religion. in no field of thought was emerson more prophetic, more truly a prophet of coming states of human opinion, than in religion. in the first place, he taught that religion is absolutely natural,--not supernatural, but natural:- "out from the heart of nature rolled the burdens of the bible old." he believed that revelation is natural and continuous, and that in all ages prophets are born. those souls out of time proclaim truth, which may be momentarily received with reverence, but is nevertheless quickly dragged down into some savage interpretation which by and by a new prophet will purge away. he believed that man is guided by the same power that guides beast and flower. "the selfsame power that brought me here brought you," he says to beautiful rhodora. for him worship is the attitude of those "who see that against all appearances the nature of things works for truth and right forever." he saw good not only in what we call beauty, grace, and light, but in what we call foul and ugly. for him a sky-born music sounds "from all that's fair; from all that's foul:"- "'tis not in the high stars alone, nor in the cups of budding flowers, nor in the redbreast's mellow tone, nor in the bow that smiles in showers, but in the mud and scum of things there alway, alway something sings." the universe was ever new and fresh in his eyes, not spent, or fallen, or degraded, but eternally tending upward:- "no ray is dimmed, no atom worn, my oldest force is good as new, and the fresh rose on yonder thorn gives back the bending heavens in dew." when we come to his interpretation of historical christianity, we find that in his view the life and works of jesus fell entirely within the field of human experience. he sees in the deification of jesus an evidence of lack of faith in the infinitude of the individual human soul. he sees in every gleam of human virtue not only the presence of god, but some atom of his nature. as a preacher he had no tone of authority. a true non-conformist himself, he had no desire to impose his views on anybody. religious truth, like all other truth, was to his thought an unrolling picture, not a deposit made once for all in some sacred vessel. when people who were sure they had drained that vessel, and assimilated its contents, attacked him, he was irresponsive or impassive, and yielded to them no juicy thought; so they pronounced him dry or empty. yet all of emerson's religious teaching led straight to god,--not to a withdrawn creator, or anthropomorphic judge or king, but to the all-informing, all-sustaining soul of the universe. it was a prophetic quality of emerson's religious teaching that he sought to obliterate the distinction between secular and sacred. for him all things were sacred, just as the universe was religious. we see an interesting fruition of emerson's sowing in the nature of the means of influence, which organized churches and devout people have, in these later days, been compelled to resort to. thus the catholic church keeps its hold on its natural constituency quite as much by schools, gymnasiums, hospitals, entertainments, and social parades as it does by its rites and sacraments. the protestant churches maintain in city slums "settlements," which use the secular rather than the so-called sacred methods. the fight against drunkenness, and the sexual vice and crimes of violence which follow in its train, is most successfully maintained by eliminating its physical causes and providing mechanical and social protections. for emerson inspiration meant not the rare conveyance of supernatural power to an individual, but the constant incoming into each man of the "divine soul which also inspires all men." he believed in the worth of the present hour:- "future or past no richer secret folds, o friendless present! than thy bosom holds." he believed that the spiritual force of human character imaged the divine:- "the sun set, but set not his hope: stars rose; his faith was earlier up: fixed on the enormous galaxy, deeper and older seemed his eye." yet man is not an order of nature, but a stupendous antagonism, because he chooses and acts in his soul. "so far as a man thinks, he is free." it is interesting to-day, after all the long discussion of the doctrine of evolution, to see how the much earlier conceptions of emerson match the thoughts of the latest exponents of the philosophic results of evolution. the present generation of scholars and ministers has been passing through an important crisis in regard to the sacred books of judaism and christianity. all the features of the contest over "the higher criticism" are foretold by emerson in "the american scholar." "the poet chanting was felt to be a divine man; henceforth the chant is divine also. the writer was a just and wise spirit; henceforward it is settled the book is perfect. colleges are built on it; books are written on it.... instantly the book becomes noxious; the guide is a tyrant." this is exactly what has happened to protestantism, which substituted for infallible pope and church an infallible book; and this is precisely the evil from which modern scholarship is delivering the world. in religion emerson was only a nineteenth-century non-conformist instead of a fifteenth or seventeenth century one. it was a fundamental article in his creed that, although conformity is the virtue in most request, "whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." in the midst of increasing luxury, and of that easygoing, unbelieving conformity which is itself a form of luxury, boston, the birthplace of emerson, may well remember with honor the generations of non-conformists who made her, and created the intellectual and moral climate in which emerson grew up. inevitably, to conformists and to persons who still accept doctrines and opinions which he rejected, he seems presumptuous and consequential. in recent days we have even seen the word "insolent" applied to this quietest and most retiring of seers. but have not all prophets and ethical teachers had something of this aspect to their conservative contemporaries? we hardly expect the messages of prophets to be welcome; they imply too much dissatisfaction with the present. the essence of emerson's teaching concerning man's nature is compressed into the famous verse:- "so nigh is grandeur to our dust, so near is god to man, when duty whispers low, thou must, the youth replies, i can." the cynic or the fall-of-man theologian replies--grandeur indeed, say rather squalor and shame. to this ancient pessimism emerson makes answer with a hard question--"we grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean?" to this question no straight answer has been found, the common answer running in a circle. it is hard indeed to conceive of a measure which will measure depths but not heights; and besides, every measure implies a standard. * * * * * i have endeavored to set before you some of the practical results of emerson's visions and intuitions, because, though quite unfit to expound his philosophical views, i am capable of appreciating some of the many instances in which his words have come true in the practical experience of my own generation. my own work has been a contribution to the prosaic, concrete work of building, brick by brick, the new walls of old american institutions of education. as a young man i found the writings of emerson unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible. i was concerned with physical science, and with routine teaching and discipline; and emerson's thinking seemed to me speculative and visionary. in regard to religious belief, i was brought up in the old-fashioned unitarian conservatism of boston, which was rudely shocked by emerson's excursions beyond its well-fenced precincts. but when i had got at what proved to be my lifework for education, i discovered in emerson's poems and essays all the fundamental motives and principles of my own hourly struggle against educational routine and tradition, and against the prevailing notions of discipline for the young; so when i was asked to speak to you to-night about him, although i realized my unfitness in many respects for such a function, i could not refuse the opportunity to point out how many of the sober, practical undertakings of to-day had been anticipated in all their principles by this solitary, shrewd, independent thinker, who, in an inconsecutive and almost ejaculatory way, wrought out many sentences and verses which will travel far down the generations. i was also interested in studying in this example the quality of prophets in general. we know a good deal about the intellectual ancestors and inspirers of emerson; and we are sure that he drank deep at many springs of idealism and poetry. plato, confucius, shakespeare, and milton were of his teachers; oken, lamarck, and lyell lent him their scientific theories; and channing stirred the residuum which came down to him through his forbears from luther, calvin, and edwards. all these materials he transmuted and moulded into lessons which have his own individual quality and bear his stamp. the precise limits of his individuality are indeterminable, and inquiry into them would be unprofitable. in all probability the case would prove to be much the same with most of the men that the world has named prophets, if we knew as much of their mental history as we know of emerson's. with regard to the semitic prophets and seers, it is reasonable to expect that as semitic exploration and discovery advance, the world will learn much about the historical and poetical sources of their inspiration. then the jewish and christian peoples may come nearer than they do now to emerson's conceptions of inspiration and worship, of the naturalness of revelation and religion, and of the infinite capacities of man. meantime, it is an indisputable fact that emerson's thought has proved to be consonant with the most progressive and fruitful thinking and acting of two generations since his working time. this fact, and the sweetness, fragrance, and loftiness of his spirit, prophesy for him an enduring power in the hearts and lives of spiritually-minded men. version by al haines. essays before a sonata by charles ives table of contents: brief biographical sketch introductory footnote by charles ives introduction i--prologue ii--emerson iii--hawthorne iv--"the alcots" v--thoreau vi--epilogue information about this e-text edition ********************************************************** brief biographical sketch charles ives (1874-1954) was probably one of the most psycho-intellectually brilliant, imaginative and flexible americans to ever "walk the land of freedom." a graduate of yale, he became a multi-millionaire in the american insurance industry, introducing brilliant innovations within that industry. he also, unlike a few composers, found the time and the money (being a shrewd and practical businessman) to get married and have children. his accomplishments for which he is best known, however, are those in the field of music. at the time of its composition, ives' music was probably the most radically modern in history, and by itself had enough material to serve as the foundation of modern 20th century music. for example, at the turn of the century, this eccentric composer created band works featuring multiple melodies of multiple time signatures opposing and complimenting each other within the same piece. ives was also a revolutionary atonal composer, who created, essentially without precedent, many atonal works that not only pre-date those of schoenberg, but are just as sophisticated, and arguably even more so, than those of the 12-tone serialist. among those atonal works was his second, "concord" piano sonata, one of the finest, and some would say the finest, works of classical music by an american. it reflects the musical innovations of its creator, featuring revolutionary atmospheric effects, unprecedented atonal musical syntax, and surprising technical approaches to playing the piano, such as pressing down on over 10 notes simultaneously using a flat piece of wood. what a mischievious creative genius! and yet, despite the musically innovative nature of these works, from a thematic standpoint, they are strictly 19th century. ives, like american band-composer sousa, consciously infused patriotic or "blue-blood" themes into his pieces. in the "concord," he attempted to project, within the music, the 19th century philosophical ideas of the american transcendentalists, who obviously had a great impact on his world-view. thus, while other atonal composers such as schoenberg or berg attempted to infuse their music with "20th century" themes of hostility, violence and estrangement within their atonal music, the atonal music of ives is, from a thematic standpoint, really quite "tonal." ives wrote the following essays as a (very big) set of program notes to accompany his second piano sonata. here, he puts forth his elaborate theory of music and what it represents, and discusses transcendental philosophy and its relation to music. the essays explain ives' own philosophy of and understanding of music and art. they also serve as an analysis of music itself as an artform, and provide a critical explanation of the "concord" and the role that the philosophies of emerson, hawthorne, thoreau and the alcotts play in forming its thematic structure. ************************************************************* "essays before a sonata," by charles ives ************************************************************* introductory footnote by charles ives "these prefatory essays were written by the composer for those who can't stand his music--and the music for those who can't stand his essays; to those who can't stand either, the whole is respectfully dedicated." introduction the following pages were written primarily as a preface or reason for the [writer's] second pianoforte sonata--"concord, mass., 1845,"--a group of four pieces, called a sonata for want of a more exact name, as the form, perhaps substance, does not justify it. the music and prefaces were intended to be printed together, but as it was found that this would make a cumbersome volume they are separate. the whole is an attempt to present [one person's] impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with concord, mass., of over a half century ago. this is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of emerson and thoreau, a sketch of the alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of hawthorne. the first and last movements do not aim to give any programs of the life or of any particular work of either emerson or thoreau but rather composite pictures or impressions. they are, however, so general in outline that, from some viewpoints, they may be as far from accepted impressions (from true conceptions, for that matter) as the valuation which they purport to be of the influence of the life, thought, and character of emerson and thoreau is inadequate. i--prologue how far is anyone justified, be he an authority or a layman, in expressing or trying to express in terms of music (in sounds, if you like) the value of anything, material, moral, intellectual, or spiritual, which is usually expressed in terms other than music? how far afield can music go and keep honest as well as reasonable or artistic? is it a matter limited only by the composer's power of expressing what lies in his subjective or objective consciousness? or is it limited by any limitations of the composer? can a tune literally represent a stonewall with vines on it or with nothing on it, though it (the tune) be made by a genius whose power of objective contemplation is in the highest state of development? can it be done by anything short of an act of mesmerism on the part of the composer or an act of kindness on the part of the listener? does the extreme materializing of music appeal strongly to anyone except to those without a sense of humor--or rather with a sense of humor?--or, except, possibly to those who might excuse it, as herbert spencer might by the theory that the sensational element (the sensations we hear so much about in experimental psychology) is the true pleasurable phenomenon in music and that the mind should not be allowed to interfere? does the success of program music depend more upon the program than upon the music? if it does, what is the use of the music, if it does not, what is the use of the program? does not its appeal depend to a great extent on the listener's willingness to accept the theory that music is the language of the emotions and only that? or inversely does not this theory tend to limit music to programs?--a limitation as bad for music itself--for its wholesome progress,--as a diet of program music is bad for the listener's ability to digest anything beyond the sensuous (or physical-emotional). to a great extent this depends on what is meant by emotion or on the assumption that the word as used above refers more to the expression, of, rather than to a meaning in a deeper sense--which may be a feeling influenced by some experience perhaps of a spiritual nature in the expression of which the intellect has some part. "the nearer we get to the mere expression of emotion," says professor sturt in his "philosophy of art and personality," "as in the antics of boys who have been promised a holiday, the further we get away from art." on the other hand is not all music, program-music,--is not pure music, so called, representative in its essence? is it not program-music raised to the nth power or rather reduced to the minus nth power? where is the line to be drawn between the expression of subjective and objective emotion? it is easier to know what each is than when each becomes what it is. the "separateness of art" theory--that art is not life but a reflection of it--"that art is not vital to life but that life is vital to it," does not help us. nor does thoreau who says not that "life is art," but that "life is an art," which of course is a different thing than the foregoing. tolstoi is even more helpless to himself and to us. for he eliminates further. from his definition of art we may learn little more than that a kick in the back is a work of art, and beethoven's 9th symphony is not. experiences are passed on from one man to another. abel knew that. and now we know it. but where is the bridge placed?--at the end of the road or only at the end of our vision? is it all a bridge?--or is there no bridge because there is no gulf? suppose that a composer writes a piece of music conscious that he is inspired, say, by witnessing an act of great self-sacrifice--another piece by the contemplation of a certain trait of nobility he perceives in a friend's character--and another by the sight of a mountain lake under moonlight. the first two, from an inspirational standpoint would naturally seem to come under the subjective and the last under the objective, yet the chances are, there is something of the quality of both in all. there may have been in the first instance physical action so intense or so dramatic in character that the remembrance of it aroused a great deal more objective emotion than the composer was conscious of while writing the music. in the third instance, the music may have been influenced strongly though subconsciously by a vague remembrance of certain thoughts and feelings, perhaps of a deep religious or spiritual nature, which suddenly came to him upon realizing the beauty of the scene and which overpowered the first sensuous pleasure--perhaps some such feeling as of the conviction of immortality, that thoreau experienced and tells about in walden. "i penetrated to those meadows ... when the wild river and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead if they had been slumbering in their graves as some suppose. there needs no stronger proof of immortality." enthusiasm must permeate it, but what it is that inspires an art-effort is not easily determined much less classified. the word "inspire" is used here in the sense of cause rather than effect. a critic may say that a certain movement is not inspired. but that may be a matter of taste--perhaps the most inspired music sounds the least so--to the critic. a true inspiration may lack a true expression unless it is assumed that if an inspiration is not true enough to produce a true expression--(if there be anyone who can definitely determine what a true expression is)--it is not an inspiration at all. again suppose the same composer at another time writes a piece of equal merit to the other three, as estimates go; but holds that he is not conscious of what inspired it--that he had nothing definite in mind--that he was not aware of any mental image or process--that, naturally, the actual work in creating something gave him a satisfying feeling of pleasure perhaps of elation. what will you substitute for the mountain lake, for his friend's character, etc.? will you substitute anything? if so why? if so what? or is it enough to let the matter rest on the pleasure mainly physical, of the tones, their color, succession, and relations, formal or informal? can an inspiration come from a blank mind? well--he tries to explain and says that he was conscious of some emotional excitement and of a sense of something beautiful, he doesn't know exactly what--a vague feeling of exaltation or perhaps of profound sadness. what is the source of these instinctive feelings, these vague intuitions and introspective sensations? the more we try to analyze the more vague they become. to pull them apart and classify them as "subjective" or "objective" or as this or as that, means, that they may be well classified and that is about all: it leaves us as far from the origin as ever. what does it all mean? what is behind it all? the "voice of god," says the artist, "the voice of the devil," says the man in the front row. are we, because we are, human beings, born with the power of innate perception of the beautiful in the abstract so that an inspiration can arise through no external stimuli of sensation or experience,--no association with the outward? or was there present in the above instance, some kind of subconscious, instantaneous, composite image, of all the mountain lakes this man had ever seen blended as kind of overtones with the various traits of nobility of many of his friends embodied in one personality? do all inspirational images, states, conditions, or whatever they may be truly called, have for a dominant part, if not for a source, some actual experience in life or of the social relation? to think that they do not--always at least--would be a relief; but as we are trying to consider music made and heard by human beings (and not by birds or angels) it seems difficult to suppose that even subconscious images can be separated from some human experience--there must be something behind subconsciousness to produce consciousness, and so on. but whatever the elements and origin of these so-called images are, that they do stir deep emotional feelings and encourage their expression is a part of the unknowable we know. they do often arouse something that has not yet passed the border line between subconsciousness and consciousness--an artistic intuition (well named, but)--object and cause unknown!--here is a program!--conscious or subconscious what does it matter? why try to trace any stream that flows through the garden of consciousness to its source only to be confronted by another problem of tracing this source to its source? perhaps emerson in the _rhodora_ answers by not trying to explain that if eyes were made for seeing then beauty is its own excuse for being: why thou wert there, o, rival of the rose! i never thought to ask, i never knew; but, in my simple ignorance, suppose the self-same power that brought me there brought you. perhaps sturt answers by substitution: "we cannot explain the origin of an artistic intuition any more than the origin of any other primary function of our nature. but if as i believe civilization is mainly founded on those kinds of unselfish human interests which we call knowledge and morality it is easily intelligible that we should have a parallel interest which we call art closely akin and lending powerful support to the other two. it is intelligible too that moral goodness, intellectual power, high vitality, and strength should be approved by the intuition." this reduces, or rather brings the problem back to a tangible basis namely:--the translation of an artistic intuition into musical sounds approving and reflecting, or endeavoring to approve and reflect, a "moral goodness," a "high vitality," etc., or any other human attribute mental, moral, or spiritual. can music do more than this? can it do this? and if so who and what is to determine the degree of its failure or success? the composer, the performer (if there be any), or those who have to listen? one hearing or a century of hearings?-and if it isn't successful or if it doesn't fail what matters it?--the fear of failure need keep no one from the attempt for if the composer is sensitive he need but launch forth a countercharge of "being misunderstood" and hide behind it. a theme that the composer sets up as "moral goodness" may sound like "high vitality," to his friend and but like an outburst of "nervous weakness" or only a "stagnant pool" to those not even his enemies. expression to a great extent is a matter of terms and terms are anyone's. the meaning of "god" may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world. there is a moral in the "nominalist and realist" that will prove all sums. it runs something like this: no matter how sincere and confidential men are in trying to know or assuming that they do know each other's mood and habits of thought, the net result leaves a feeling that all is left unsaid; for the reason of their incapacity to know each other, though they use the same words. they go on from one explanation to another but things seem to stand about as they did in the beginning "because of that vicious assumption." but we would rather believe that music is beyond any analogy to word language and that the time is coming, but not in our lifetime, when it will develop possibilities unconceivable now,--a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind. ii--emerson 1 it has seemed to the writer, that emerson is greater--his identity more complete perhaps--in the realms of revelation--natural disclosure--than in those of poetry, philosophy, or prophecy. though a great poet and prophet, he is greater, possibly, as an invader of the unknown,--america's deepest explorer of the spiritual immensities,--a seer painting his discoveries in masses and with any color that may lie at hand--cosmic, religious, human, even sensuous; a recorder, freely describing the inevitable struggle in the soul's uprise--perceiving from this inward source alone, that every "ultimate fact is only the first of a new series"; a discoverer, whose heart knows, with voltaire, "that man seriously reflects when left alone," and would then discover, if he can, that "wondrous chain which links the heavens with earth--the world of beings subject to one law." in his reflections emerson, unlike plato, is not afraid to ride arion's dolphin, and to go wherever he is carried--to parnassus or to "musketaquid." we see him standing on a summit, at the door of the infinite where many men do not care to climb, peering into the mysteries of life, contemplating the eternities, hurling back whatever he discovers there,--now, thunderbolts for us to grasp, if we can, and translate--now placing quietly, even tenderly, in our hands, things that we may see without effort--if we won't see them, so much the worse for us. we see him,--a mountain-guide, so intensely on the lookout for the trail of his star, that he has no time to stop and retrace his footprints, which may often seem indistinct to his followers, who find it easier and perhaps safer to keep their eyes on the ground. and there is a chance that this guide could not always retrace his steps if he tried--and why should he!--he is on the road, conscious only that, though his star may not lie within walking distance, he must reach it before his wagon can be hitched to it--a prometheus illuminating a privilege of the gods--lighting a fuse that is laid towards men. emerson reveals the less not by an analysis of itself, but by bringing men towards the greater. he does not try to reveal, personally, but leads, rather, to a field where revelation is a harvest-part, where it is known by the perceptions of the soul towards the absolute law. he leads us towards this law, which is a realization of what experience has suggested and philosophy hoped for. he leads us, conscious that the aspects of truth, as he sees them, may change as often as truth remains constant. revelation perhaps, is but prophecy intensified--the intensifying of its mason-work as well as its steeple. simple prophecy, while concerned with the past, reveals but the future, while revelation is concerned with all time. the power in emerson's prophecy confuses it with--or at least makes it seem to approach--revelation. it is prophecy with no time element. emerson tells, as few bards could, of what will happen in the past, for his future is eternity and the past is a part of that. and so like all true prophets, he is always modern, and will grow modern with the years--for his substance is not relative but a measure of eternal truths determined rather by a universalist than by a partialist. he measured, as michel angelo said true artists should, "with the eye and not the hand." but to attribute modernism to his substance, though not to his expression, is an anachronism--and as futile as calling today's sunset modern. as revelation and prophecy, in their common acceptance are resolved by man, from the absolute and universal, to the relative and personal, and as emerson's tendency is fundamentally the opposite, it is easier, safer and so apparently clearer, to think of him as a poet of natural and revealed philosophy. and as such, a prophet--but not one to be confused with those singing soothsayers, whose pockets are filled, as are the pockets of conservative-reaction and radical demagoguery in pulpit, street-corner, bank and columns, with dogmatic fortune-tellings. emerson, as a prophet in these lower heights, was a conservative, in that he seldom lost his head, and a radical, in that he seldom cared whether he lost it or not. he was a born radical as are all true conservatives. he was too much "absorbed by the absolute," too much of the universal to be either--though he could be both at once. to cotton mather, he would have been a demagogue, to a real demagogue he would not be understood, as it was with no self interest that he laid his hand on reality. the nearer any subject or an attribute of it, approaches to the perfect truth at its base, the more does qualification become necessary. radicalism must always qualify itself. emerson clarifies as he qualifies, by plunging into, rather than "emerging from carlyle's soul-confusing labyrinths of speculative radicalism." the radicalism that we hear much about today, is not emerson's kind--but of thinner fiber--it qualifies itself by going to _a_ "root" and often cutting other roots in the process; it is usually impotent as dynamite in its cause and sometimes as harmful to the wholesome progress of all causes; it is qualified by its failure. but the radicalism of emerson plunges to all roots, it becomes greater than itself--greater than all its formal or informal doctrines--too advanced and too conservative for any specific result--too catholic for all the churches--for the nearer it is to truth, the farther it is from a truth, and the more it is qualified by its future possibilities. hence comes the difficulty--the futility of attempting to fasten on emerson any particular doctrine, philosophic, or religious theory. emerson wrings the neck of any law, that would become exclusive and arrogant, whether a definite one of metaphysics or an indefinite one of mechanics. he hacks his way up and down, as near as he can to the absolute, the oneness of all nature both human and spiritual, and to god's benevolence. to him the ultimate of a conception is its vastness, and it is probably this, rather than the "blind-spots" in his expression that makes us incline to go with him but half-way; and then stand and build dogmas. but if we can not follow all the way--if we do not always clearly perceive the whole picture, we are at least free to imagine it--he makes us feel that we are free to do so; perhaps that is the most he asks. for he is but reaching out through and beyond mankind, trying to see what he can of the infinite and its immensities--throwing back to us whatever he can--but ever conscious that he but occasionally catches a glimpse; conscious that if he would contemplate the greater, he must wrestle with the lesser, even though it dims an outline; that he must struggle if he would hurl back anything--even a broken fragment for men to examine and perchance in it find a germ of some part of truth; conscious at times, of the futility of his effort and its message, conscious of its vagueness, but ever hopeful for it, and confident that its foundation, if not its medium is somewhere near the eventual and "absolute good" the divine truth underlying all life. if emerson must be dubbed an optimist--then an optimist fighting pessimism, but not wallowing in it; an optimist, who does not study pessimism by learning to enjoy it, whose imagination is greater than his curiosity, who seeing the sign-post to erebus, is strong enough to go the other way. this strength of optimism, indeed the strength we find always underlying his tolerance, his radicalism, his searches, prophecies, and revelations, is heightened and made efficient by "imagination-penetrative," a thing concerned not with the combining but the apprehending of things. a possession, akin to the power, ruskin says, all great pictures have, which "depends on the penetration of the imagination into the true nature of the thing represented, and on the scorn of the imagination for all shackles and fetters of mere external fact that stand in the way of its suggestiveness"--a possession which gives the strength of distance to his eyes, and the strength of muscle to his soul. with this he slashes down through the loam--nor would he have us rest there. if we would dig deep enough only to plant a doctrine, from one part of him, he would show us the quick-silver in that furrow. if we would creed his compensation, there is hardly a sentence that could not wreck it, or could not show that the idea is no tenet of a philosophy, but a clear (though perhaps not clearly hurled on the canvas) illustration of universal justice--of god's perfect balances; a story of the analogy or better the identity of polarity and duality in nature with that in morality. the essay is no more a doctrine than the law of gravitation is. if we would stop and attribute too much to genius, he shows us that "what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no one man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse." if we would find in his essay on montaigne, a biography, we are shown a biography of scepticism--and in reducing this to relation between "sensation and the morals" we are shown a true montaigne--we know the man better perhaps by this less presentation. if we would stop and trust heavily on the harvest of originality, he shows us that this plant--this part of the garden--is but a relative thing. it is dependent also on the richness that ages have put into the soil. "every thinker is retrospective." thus is emerson always beating down through the crust towards the first fire of life, of death and of eternity. read where you will, each sentence seems not to point to the next but to the undercurrent of all. if you would label his a religion of ethics or of morals, he shames you at the outset, "for ethics is but a reflection of a divine personality." all the religions this world has ever known, have been but the aftermath of the ethics of one or another holy person; "as soon as character appears be sure love will"; "the intuition of the moral sentiment is but the insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul"; but these laws cannot be catalogued. if a versatilist, a modern goethe, for instance, could put all of emerson's admonitions into practice, a constant permanence would result,--an eternal short-circuit--a focus of equal x-rays. even the value or success of but one precept is dependent, like that of a ball-game as much on the batting-eye as on the pitching-arm. the inactivity of permanence is what emerson will not permit. he will not accept repose against the activity of truth. but this almost constant resolution of every insight towards the absolute may get a little on one's nerves, if one is at all partial-wise to the specific; one begins to ask what is the absolute anyway, and why try to look clear through the eternities and the unknowable even out of the other end. emerson's fondness for flying to definite heights on indefinite wings, and the tendency to over-resolve, becomes unsatisfying to the impatient, who want results to come as they walk. probably this is a reason that it is occasionally said that emerson has no vital message for the rank and file. he has no definite message perhaps for the literal, but messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his indefiniteness, as in spite of it. there is a suggestion of irony in the thought that the power of his vague but compelling vitality, which ever sweeps us on in spite of ourselves, might not have been his, if it had not been for those definite religious doctrines of the old new england theologians. for almost two centuries, emerson's mental and spiritual muscles had been in training for him in the moral and intellectual contentions, a part of the religious exercise of his forebears. a kind of higher sensitiveness seems to culminate in him. it gives him a power of searching for a wider freedom of soul than theirs. the religion of puritanism was based to a great extent, on a search for the unknowable, limited only by the dogma of its theology--a search for a path, so that the soul could better be conducted to the next world, while emerson's transcendentalism was based on the wider search for the unknowable, unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast bounds of innate goodness, as it might be revealed to him in any phenomena of man, nature, or god. this distinction, tenuous, in spite of the definite-sounding words, we like to believe has something peculiar to emerson in it. we like to feel that it superimposes the one that makes all transcendentalism but an intellectual state, based on the theory of innate ideas, the reality of thought and the necessity of its freedom. for the philosophy of the religion, or whatever you will call it, of the concord transcendentalists is at least, more than an intellectual state--it has even some of the functions of the puritan church--it is a spiritual state in which both soul and mind can better conduct themselves in this world, and also in the next--when the time comes. the search of the puritan was rather along the path of logic, spiritualized, and the transcendentalist of reason, spiritualized--a difference in a broad sense between objective and subjective contemplation. the dislike of inactivity, repose and barter, drives one to the indefinite subjective. emerson's lack of interest in permanence may cause him to present a subjectivity harsher on the outside than is essential. his very universalism occasionally seems a limitation. somewhere here may lie a weakness--real to some, apparent to others--a weakness in so far as his relation becomes less vivid--to the many; insofar as he over-disregards the personal unit in the universal. if genius is the most indebted, how much does it owe to those who would, but do not easily ride with it? if there is a weakness here is it the fault of substance or only of manner? if of the former, there is organic error somewhere, and emerson will become less and less valuable to man. but this seems impossible, at least to us. without considering his manner or expression here (it forms the general subject of the second section of this paper), let us ask if emerson's substance needs an affinity, a supplement or even a complement or a gangplank? and if so, of what will it be composed? perhaps emerson could not have risen to his own, if it had not been for his unitarian training and association with the churchmen emancipators. "christianity is founded on, and supposes the authority of, reason, and cannot therefore oppose it, without subverting itself." ... "its office is to discern universal truths, great and eternal principles ... the highest power of the soul." thus preached channing. who knows but this pulpit aroused the younger emerson to the possibilities of intuitive reasoning in spiritual realms? the influence of men like channing in his fight for the dignity of human nature, against the arbitrary revelations that calvinism had strapped on the church, and for the belief in the divine in human reason, doubtless encouraged emerson in his unshackled search for the infinite, and gave him premises which he later took for granted instead of carrying them around with him. an over-interest, not an under-interest in christian ideal aims, may have caused him to feel that the definite paths were well established and doing their share, and that for some to reach the same infinite ends, more paths might be opened--paths which would in themselves, and in a more transcendent way, partake of the spiritual nature of the land in quest,--another expression of god's kingdom in man. would you have the indefinite paths always supplemented by the shadow of the definite one of a first influence? a characteristic of rebellion, is that its results are often deepest, when the rebel breaks not from the worst to the greatest, but from the great to the greater. the youth of the rebel increases this characteristic. the innate rebellious spirit in young men is active and buoyant. they could rebel against and improve the millennium. this excess of enthusiasm at the inception of a movement, causes loss of perspective; a natural tendency to undervalue the great in that which is being taken as a base of departure. a "youthful sedition" of emerson was his withdrawal from the communion, perhaps, the most socialistic doctrine (or rather symbol) of the church--a "commune" above property or class. picking up an essay on religion of a rather remarkable-minded boy--perhaps with a touch of genius--written when he was still in college, and so serving as a good illustration in point--we read--"every thinking man knows that the church is dead." but every thinking man knows that the church-part of the church always has been dead--that part seen by candle-light, not christ-light. enthusiasm is restless and hasn't time to see that if the church holds itself as nothing but the symbol of the greater light it is life itself--as a symbol of a symbol it is dead. many of the sincerest followers of christ never heard of him. it is the better influence of an institution that arouses in the deep and earnest souls a feeling of rebellion to make its aims more certain. it is their very sincerity that causes these seekers for a freer vision to strike down for more fundamental, universal, and perfect truths, but with such feverish enthusiasm, that they appear to overthink themselves--a subconscious way of going godward perhaps. the rebel of the twentieth century says: "let us discard god, immortality, miracle--but be not untrue to ourselves." here he, no doubt, in a sincere and exalted moment, confuses god with a name. he apparently feels that there is a separable difference between natural and revealed religion. he mistakes the powers behind them, to be fundamentally separate. in the excessive keenness of his search, he forgets that "being true to ourselves" is god, that the faintest thought of immortality is god, and that god is "miracle." over-enthusiasm keeps one from letting a common experience of a day translate what is stirring the soul. the same inspiring force that arouses the young rebel, brings later in life a kind of "experience-afterglow," a realization that the soul cannot discard or limit anything. would you have the youthful enthusiasm of rebellion, which emerson carried beyond his youth always supplemented by the shadow of experience? perhaps it is not the narrow minded alone that have no interest in anything, but in its relation to their personality. is the christian religion, to which emerson owes embryo-ideals, anything but the revelation of god in a personality--a revelation so that the narrow mind could become opened? but the tendency to over-personalize personality may also have suggested to emerson the necessity for more universal, and impersonal paths, though they be indefinite of outline and vague of ascent. could you journey, with equal benefit, if they were less so? would you have the universal always supplemented by the shadow of the personal? if this view is accepted, and we doubt that it can be by the majority, emerson's substance could well bear a supplement, perhaps an affinity. something that will support that which some conceive he does not offer. something that will help answer alton locke's question: "what has emerson for the working-man?" and questions of others who look for the gang-plank before the ship comes in sight. something that will supply the definite banister to the infinite, which it is said he keeps invisible. something that will point a crossroad from "his personal" to "his nature." something that may be in thoreau or wordsworth, or in another poet whose songs "breathe of a new morning of a higher life though a definite beauty in nature"--or something that will show the birth of his ideal and hold out a background of revealed religion, as a perspective to his transcendent religion--a counterpoise in his rebellion--which we feel channing or dr. bushnell, or other saints known and unknown might supply. if the arc must be completed--if there are those who would have the great, dim outlines of emerson fulfilled, it is fortunate that there are bushnells, and wordsworths, to whom they may appeal--to say nothing of the vedas, the bible, or their own souls. but such possibilities and conceptions, the deeper they are received, the more they seem to reduce their need. emerson's circle may be a better whole, without its complement. perhaps his "unsatiable demand for unity, the need to recognize one nature in all variety of objects," would have been impaired, if something should make it simpler for men to find the identity they at first want in his substance. "draw if thou canst the mystic line severing rightly his from thine, which is human, which divine." whatever means one would use to personalize emerson's natural revelation, whether by a vision or a board walk, the vastness of his aims and the dignity of his tolerance would doubtless cause him to accept or at least try to accept, and use "magically as a part of his fortune." he would modestly say, perhaps, "that the world is enlarged for him, not by finding new objects, but by more affinities, and potencies than those he already has." but, indeed, is not enough manifestation already there? is not the asking that it be made more manifest forgetting that "we are not strong by our power to penetrate, but by our relatedness?" will more signs create a greater sympathy? is not our weak suggestion needed only for those content with their own hopelessness? others may lead others to him, but he finds his problem in making "gladness hope and fortitude flow from his page," rather than in arranging that our hearts be there to receive it. the first is his duty--the last ours! 2 a devotion to an end tends to undervalue the means. a power of revelation may make one more concerned about his perceptions of the soul's nature than the way of their disclosure. emerson is more interested in what he perceives than in his expression of it. he is a creator whose intensity is consumed more with the substance of his creation than with the manner by which he shows it to others. like petrarch he seems more a discoverer of beauty than an imparter of it. but these discoveries, these devotions to aims, these struggles toward the absolute, do not these in themselves, impart something, if not all, of their own unity and coherence--which is not received, as such, at first, nor is foremost in their expression. it must be remembered that "truth" was what emerson was after--not strength of outline, or even beauty except in so far as they might reveal themselves, naturally, in his explorations towards the infinite. to think hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may produce a first impression, either of great translucence, or of great muddiness, but in the latter there may be hidden possibilities. some accuse brahms' orchestration of being muddy. this may be a good name for a first impression of it. but if it should seem less so, he might not be saying what he thought. the mud may be a form of sincerity which demands that the heart be translated, rather than handed around through the pit. a clearer scoring might have lowered the thought. carlyle told emerson that some of his paragraphs didn't cohere. emerson wrote by sentences or phrases, rather than by logical sequence. his underlying plan of work seems based on the large unity of a series of particular aspects of a subject, rather than on the continuity of its expression. as thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them, along the ground first. among class-room excuses for emerson's imperfect coherence and lack of unity, is one that remembers that his essays were made from lecture notes. his habit, often in lecturing, was to compile his ideas as they came to him on a general subject, in scattered notes, and when on the platform, to trust to the mood of the occasion, to assemble them. this seems a specious explanation, though true to fact. vagueness, is at times, an indication of nearness to a perfect truth. the definite glory of bernard of cluny's celestial city, is more beautiful than true--probably. orderly reason does not always have to be a visible part of all great things. logic may possibly require that unity means something ascending in self-evident relation to the parts and to the whole, with no ellipsis in the ascent. but reason may permit, even demand an ellipsis, and genius may not need the self-evident part. in fact, these parts may be the "blind-spots" in the progress of unity. they may be filled with little but repetition. "nature loves analogy and hates repetition." botany reveals evolution not permanence. an apparent confusion if lived with long enough may become orderly. emerson was not writing for lazy minds, though one of the keenest of his academic friends said that, he (emerson) could not explain many of his own pages. but why should he!--he explained them when he discovered them--the moment before he spoke or wrote them. a rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. yet it is a part of the day's unity. at evening, nature is absorbed by another experience. she dislikes to explain as much as to repeat. it is conceivable, that what is unified form to the author, or composer, may of necessity be formless to his audience. a home-run will cause more unity in the grand stand than in the season's batting average. if a composer once starts to compromise, his work will begin to drag on him. before the end is reached, his inspiration has all gone up in sounds pleasing to his audience, ugly to him--sacrificed for the first acoustic--an opaque clarity, a picture painted for its hanging. easy unity, like easy virtue, is easier to describe, when judged from its lapses than from its constancy. when the infidel admits god is great, he means only: "i am lazy--it is easier to talk than live." ruskin also says: "suppose i like the finite curves best, who shall say i'm right or wrong? no one. it is simply a question of experience." you may not be able to experience a symphony, even after twenty performances. initial coherence today may be dullness tomorrow probably because formal or outward unity depends so much on repetition, sequences, antitheses, paragraphs with inductions and summaries. macaulay had that kind of unity. can you read him today? emerson rather goes out and shouts: "i'm thinking of the sun's glory today and i'll let his light shine through me. i'll say any damn thing that this inspires me with." perhaps there are flashes of light, still in cipher, kept there by unity, the code of which the world has not yet discovered. the unity of one sentence inspires the unity of the whole--though its physique is as ragged as the dolomites. intense lights--vague shadows--great pillars in a horizon are difficult things to nail signboards to. emerson's outward-inward qualities make him hard to classify, but easy for some. there are many who like to say that he--even all the concord men--are intellectuals. perhaps--but intellectuals who wear their brains nearer the heart than some of their critics. it is as dangerous to determine a characteristic by manner as by mood. emerson is a pure intellectual to those who prefer to take him as literally as they can. there are reformers, and in "the form" lies their interest, who prefer to stand on the plain, and then insist they see from the summit. indolent legs supply the strength of eye for their inspiration. the intellect is never a whole. it is where the soul finds things. it is often the only track to the over-values. it appears a whole--but never becomes one even in the stock exchange, or the convent, or the laboratory. in the cleverest criminal, it is but a way to a low ideal. it can never discard the other part of its duality--the soul or the void where the soul ought to be. so why classify a quality always so relative that it is more an agency than substance; a quality that disappears when classified. "the life of the all must stream through us to make the man and the moment great." a sailor with a precious cargo doesn't analyze the water. because emerson had generations of calvinistic sermons in his blood, some cataloguers, would localize or provincialize him, with the sternness of the old puritan mind. they make him that, hold him there. they lean heavily on what they find of the above influence in him. they won't follow the rivers in his thought and the play of his soul. and their cousin cataloguers put him in another pigeon-hole. they label him "ascetic." they translate his outward serenity into an impression of severity. but truth keeps one from being hysterical. is a demagogue a friend of the people because he will lie to them to make them cry and raise false hopes? a search for perfect truths throws out a beauty more spiritual than sensuous. a sombre dignity of style is often confused by under-imagination and by surface-sentiment, with austerity. if emerson's manner is not always beautiful in accordance with accepted standards, why not accept a few other standards? he is an ascetic, in that he refuses to compromise content with manner. but a real ascetic is an extremist who has but one height. thus may come the confusion, of one who says that emerson carries him high, but then leaves him always at that height--no higher--a confusion, mistaking a latent exultation for an ascetic reserve. the rules of thorough bass can be applied to his scale of flight no more than they can to the planetary system. jadassohn, if emerson were literally a composer, could no more analyze his harmony than a guide-to-boston could. a microscope might show that he uses chords of the 9th, 11th, or the 99th, but a lens far different tells us they are used with different aims from those of debussy. emerson is definite in that his art is based on something stronger than the amusing or at its best the beguiling of a few mortals. if he uses a sensuous chord, it is not for sensual ears. his harmonies may float, if the wind blows in that direction, through a voluptuous atmosphere, but he has not debussy's fondness for trying to blow a sensuous atmosphere from his own voluptuous cheeks. and so he is an ascetic! there is a distance between jowl and soul--and it is not measured by the fraction of an inch between concord and paris. on the other hand, if one thinks that his harmony contains no dramatic chords, because no theatrical sound is heard, let him listen to the finale of "success," or of "spiritual laws," or to some of the poems, "brahma" or "sursum corda," for example. of a truth his codas often seem to crystallize in a dramatic, though serene and sustained way, the truths of his subject--they become more active and intense, but quieter and deeper. then there comes along another set of cataloguers. they put him down as a "classicist," or a romanticist, or an eclectic. because a prophet is a child of romanticism--because revelation is classic, because eclecticism quotes from eclectic hindu philosophy, a more sympathetic cataloguer may say, that emerson inspires courage of the quieter kind and delight of the higher kind. the same well-bound school teacher who told the boys that thoreau was a naturalist because he didn't like to work, puts down emerson as a "classic," and hawthorne as a "romantic." a loud voice made this doubly true and sure to be on the examination paper. but this teacher of "truth and dogma" apparently forgot that there is no such thing as "classicism or romanticism." one has but to go to the various definitions of these to know that. if you go to a classic definition you know what a true classic is, and similarly a "true romantic." but if you go to both, you have an algebraic formula, x = x, a cancellation, an apercu, and hence satisfying; if you go to all definitions you have another formula x > x, a destruction, another apercu, and hence satisfying. professor beers goes to the dictionary (you wouldn't think a college professor would be as reckless as that). and so he can say that "romantic" is "pertaining to the style of the christian and popular literature of the middle ages," a roman catholic mode of salvation (not this definition but having a definition). and so prof. b. can say that walter scott is a romanticist (and billy phelps a classic--sometimes). but for our part dick croker is a classic and job a romanticist. another professor, babbitt by name, links up romanticism with rousseau, and charges against it many of man's troubles. he somehow likes to mix it up with sin. he throws saucers at it, but in a scholarly, interesting, sincere, and accurate way. he uncovers a deformed foot, gives it a name, from which we are allowed to infer that the covered foot is healthy and named classicism. but no christian scientist can prove that christ never had a stomach-ache. the architecture of humanism [footnote: geoffrey scott (constable & co.)] tells us that "romanticism consists of ... a poetic sensibility towards the remote, as such." but is plato a classic or towards the remote? is classicism a poor relation of time--not of man? is a thing classic or romantic because it is or is not passed by that biologic--that indescribable stream-of-change going on in all life? let us settle the point for "good," and say that a thing is classic if it is thought of in terms of the past and romantic if thought of in terms of the future--and a thing thought of in terms of the present is--well, that is impossible! hence, we allow ourselves to say, that emerson is neither a classic or romantic but both--and both not only at different times in one essay, but at the same time in one sentence--in one word. and must we admit it, so is everyone. if you don't believe it, there must be some true definition you haven't seen. chopin shows a few things that bach forgot--but he is not eclectic, they say. brahms shows many things that bach did remember, so he is an eclectic, they say. leoncavallo writes pretty verses and palestrina is a priest, and confucius inspires scriabin. a choice is freedom. natural selection is but one of nature's tunes. "all melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating keynote of nature and spirit is sounded--the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which make the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood and the sap of the trees." an intuitive sense of values, tends to make emerson use social, political, and even economic phenomena, as means of expression, as the accidental notes in his scale--rather than as ends, even lesser ends. in the realization that they are essential parts of the greater values, he does not confuse them with each other. he remains undisturbed except in rare instances, when the lower parts invade and seek to displace the higher. he was not afraid to say that "there are laws which should not be too well obeyed." to him, slavery was not a social or a political or an economic question, nor even one of morals or of ethics, but one of universal spiritual freedom only. it mattered little what party, or what platform, or what law of commerce governed men. was man governing himself? social error and virtue were but relative. this habit of not being hindered by using, but still going beyond the great truths of living, to the greater truths of life gave force to his influence over the materialists. thus he seems to us more a regenerator than a reformer--more an interpreter of life's reflexes than of life's facts, perhaps. here he appears greater than voltaire or rousseau and helped, perhaps, by the centrality of his conceptions, he could arouse the deeper spiritual and moral emotions, without causing his listeners to distort their physical ones. to prove that mind is over matter, he doesn't place matter over mind. he is not like the man who, because he couldn't afford both, gave up metaphysics for an automobile, and when he ran over a man blamed metaphysics. he would not have us get over-excited about physical disturbance but have it accepted as a part of any progress in culture, moral, spiritual or aesthetic. if a poet retires to the mountain-side, to avoid the vulgar unculture of men, and their physical disturbance, so that he may better catch a nobler theme for his symphony, emerson tells him that "man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material, converts all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power." the latest product of man's culture--the aeroplane, then sails o'er the mountain and instead of an inspiration--a spray of tobacco-juice falls on the poet. "calm yourself, poet!" says emerson, "culture will convert furies into muses and hells into benefit. this wouldn't have befallen you if it hadn't been for the latest transcendent product of the genius of culture" (we won't say what kind), a consummation of the dreams of poets, from david to tennyson. material progress is but a means of expression. realize that man's coarseness has its future and will also be refined in the gradual uprise. turning the world upside down may be one of its lesser incidents. it is the cause, seldom the effect that interests emerson. he can help the cause--the effect must help itself. he might have said to those who talk knowingly about the cause of war--or of the last war, and who would trace it down through long vistas of cosmic, political, moral evolution and what not--he might say that the cause of it was as simple as that of any dogfight--the "hog-mind" of the minority against the universal mind, the majority. the un-courage of the former fears to believe in the innate goodness of mankind. the cause is always the same, the effect different by chance; it is as easy for a hog, even a stupid one, to step on a box of matches under a tenement with a thousand souls, as under an empty bird-house. the many kindly burn up for the few; for the minority is selfish and the majority generous. the minority has ruled the world for physical reasons. the physical reasons are being removed by this "converting culture." webster will not much longer have to grope for the mind of his constituency. the majority--the people--will need no intermediary. governments will pass from the representative to the direct. the hog-mind is the principal thing that is making this transition slow. the biggest prop to the hog-mind is pride--pride in property and the power property gives. ruskin backs this up--"it is at the bottom of all great mistakes; other passions do occasional good, but whenever pride puts in its word ... it is all over with the artist." the hog-mind and its handmaidens in disorder, superficial brightness, fundamental dullness, then cowardice and suspicion--all a part of the minority (the non-people) the antithesis of everything called soul, spirit, christianity, truth, freedom--will give way more and more to the great primal truths--that there is more good than evil, that god is on the side of the majority (the people)--that he is not enthusiastic about the minority (the non-people)--that he has made men greater than man, that he has made the universal mind and the over-soul greater and a part of the individual mind and soul--that he has made the divine a part of all. again, if a picture in economics is before him, emerson plunges down to the things that are because they are better than they are. if there is a row, which there usually is, between the ebb and flood tide, in the material ocean--for example, between the theory of the present order of competition, and of attractive and associated labor, he would sympathize with ricardo, perhaps, that labor is the measure of value, but "embrace, as do generous minds, the proposition of labor shared by all." he would go deeper than political economics, strain out the self-factor from both theories, and make the measure of each pretty much the same, so that the natural (the majority) would win, but not to the disadvantage of the minority (the artificial) because this has disappeared--it is of the majority. john stuart mill's political economy is losing value because it was written by a mind more "a banker's" than a "poet's." the poet knows that there is no such thing as the perpetual law of supply and demand, perhaps not of demand and supply--or of the wage-fund, or price-level, or increments earned or unearned; and that the existence of personal or public property may not prove the existence of god. emerson seems to use the great definite interests of humanity to express the greater, indefinite, spiritual values--to fulfill what he can in his realms of revelation. thus, it seems that so close a relation exists between his content and expression, his substance and manner, that if he were more definite in the latter he would lose power in the former,--perhaps some of those occasional flashes would have been unexpressed--flashes that have gone down through the world and will flame on through the ages--flashes that approach as near the divine as beethoven in his most inspired moments--flashes of transcendent beauty, of such universal import, that they may bring, of a sudden, some intimate personal experience, and produce the same indescribable effect that comes in rare instances, to men, from some common sensation. in the early morning of a memorial day, a boy is awakened by martial music--a village band is marching down the street, and as the strains of reeves' majestic seventh regiment march come nearer and nearer, he seems of a sudden translated--a moment of vivid power comes, a consciousness of material nobility, an exultant something gleaming with the possibilities of this life, an assurance that nothing is impossible, and that the whole world lies at his feet. but as the band turns the corner, at the soldiers' monument, and the march steps of the grand army become fainter and fainter, the boy's vision slowly vanishes--his "world" becomes less and less probable--but the experience ever lies within him in its reality. later in life, the same boy hears the sabbath morning bell ringing out from the white steeple at the "center," and as it draws him to it, through the autumn fields of sumac and asters, a gospel hymn of simple devotion comes out to him--"there's a wideness in god's mercy"--an instant suggestion of that memorial day morning comes--but the moment is of deeper import--there is no personal exultation--no intimate world vision--no magnified personal hope--and in their place a profound sense of a spiritual truth,--a sin within reach of forgiveness--and as the hymn voices die away, there lies at his feet--not the world, but the figure of the saviour--he sees an unfathomable courage, an immortality for the lowest, the vastness in humility, the kindness of the human heart, man's noblest strength, and he knows that god is nothing--nothing but love! whence cometh the wonder of a moment? from sources we know not. but we do know that from obscurity, and from this higher orpheus come measures of sphere melodies [note: paraphrased from a passage in sartor resartus.] flowing in wild, native tones, ravaging the souls of men, flowing now with thousand-fold accompaniments and rich symphonies through all our hearts; modulating and divinely leading them. 3 what is character? in how far does it sustain the soul or the soul it? is it a part of the soul? and then--what is the soul? plato knows but cannot tell us. every new-born man knows, but no one tells us. "nature will not be disposed of easily. no power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. the perfect enigma remains." as every blind man sees the sun, so character may be the part of the soul we, the blind, can see, and then have the right to imagine that the soul is each man's share of god, and character the muscle which tries to reveal its mysteries--a kind of its first visible radiance--the right to know that it is the voice which is always calling the pragmatist a fool. at any rate, it can be said that emerson's character has much to do with his power upon us. men who have known nothing of his life, have borne witness to this. it is directly at the root of his substance, and affects his manner only indirectly. it gives the sincerity to the constant spiritual hopefulness we are always conscious of, and which carries with it often, even when the expression is somber, a note of exultation in the victories of "the innate virtues" of man. and it is this, perhaps, that makes us feel his courage--not a self-courage, but a sympathetic one--courageous even to tenderness. it is the open courage of a kind heart, of not forcing opinions--a thing much needed when the cowardly, underhanded courage of the fanatic would force opinion. it is the courage of believing in freedom, per se, rather than of trying to force everyone to see that you believe in it--the courage of the willingness to be reformed, rather than of reforming--the courage teaching that sacrifice is bravery, and force, fear. the courage of righteous indignation, of stammering eloquence, of spiritual insight, a courage ever contracting or unfolding a philosophy as it grows--a courage that would make the impossible possible. oliver wendell holmes says that emerson attempted the impossible in the over-soul--"an overflow of spiritual imagination." but he (emerson) accomplished the impossible in attempting it, and still leaving it impossible. a courageous struggle to satisfy, as thoreau says, "hunger rather than the palate"--the hunger of a lifetime sometimes by one meal. his essay on the pre-soul (which he did not write) treats of that part of the over-soul's influence on unborn ages, and attempts the impossible only when it stops attempting it. like all courageous souls, the higher emerson soars, the more lowly he becomes. "do you think the porter and the cook have no experiences, no wonders for you? everyone knows as much as the savant." to some, the way to be humble is to admonish the humble, not learn from them. carlyle would have emerson teach by more definite signs, rather than interpret his revelations, or shall we say preach? admitting all the inspiration and help that sartor resartus has given in spite of its vaudeville and tragic stages, to many young men getting under way in the life of tailor or king, we believe it can be said (but very broadly said) that emerson, either in the first or second series of essays, taken as a whole, gives, it seems to us, greater inspiration, partly because his manner is less didactic, less personally suggestive, perhaps less clearly or obviously human than carlyle's. how direct this inspiration is is a matter of personal viewpoint, temperament, perhaps inheritance. augustine birrell says he does not feel it--and he seems not to even indirectly. apparently "a non-sequacious author" can't inspire him, for emerson seems to him a "little thin and vague." is emerson or the english climate to blame for this? he, birrell, says a really great author dissipates all fears as to his staying power. (though fears for our staying-power, not emerson's, is what we would like dissipated.) besides, around a really great author, there are no fears to dissipate. "a wise author never allows his reader's mind to be at large," but emerson is not a wise author. his essay on prudence has nothing to do with prudence, for to be wise and prudent he must put explanation first, and let his substance dissolve because of it. "how carefully," says birrell again, "a really great author like dr. newman, or m. renan, explains to you what he is going to do, and how he is going to do it." personally we like the chance of having a hand in the "explaining." we prefer to look at flowers, but not through a botany, for it seems that if we look at them alone, we see a beauty of nature's poetry, a direct gift from the divine, and if we look at botany alone, we see the beauty of nature's intellect, a direct gift of the divine--if we look at both together, we see nothing. thus it seems that carlyle and birrell would have it that courage and humility have something to do with "explanation"--and that it is not "a respect for all"--a faith in the power of "innate virtue" to perceive by "relativeness rather than penetration"--that causes emerson to withhold explanation to a greater degree than many writers. carlyle asks for more utility, and birrell for more inspiration. but we like to believe that it is the height of emerson's character, evidenced especially in his courage and humility that shades its quality, rather than that its virtue is less--that it is his height that will make him more and more valuable and more and more within the reach of all--whether it be by utility, inspiration, or other needs of the human soul. cannot some of the most valuable kinds of utility and inspiration come from humility in its highest and purest forms? for is not the truest kind of humility a kind of glorified or transcendent democracy--the practicing it rather than the talking it--the not-wanting to level all finite things, but the being willing to be leveled towards the infinite? until humility produces that frame of mind and spirit in the artist can his audience gain the greatest kind of utility and inspiration, which might be quite invisible at first? emerson realizes the value of "the many,"--that the law of averages has a divine source. he recognizes the various life-values in reality--not by reason of their closeness or remoteness, but because he sympathizes with men who live them, and the majority do. "the private store of reason is not great--would that there were a public store for man," cries pascal, but there is, says emerson, it is the universal mind, an institution congenital with the common or over-soul. pascal is discouraged, for he lets himself be influenced by surface political and religious history which shows the struggle of the group, led by an individual, rather than that of the individual led by himself--a struggle as much privately caused as privately led. the main-path of all social progress has been spiritual rather than intellectual in character, but the many bypaths of individual-materialism, though never obliterating the highway, have dimmed its outlines and caused travelers to confuse the colors along the road. a more natural way of freeing the congestion in the benefits of material progress will make it less difficult for the majority to recognize the true relation between the important spiritual and religious values and the less important intellectual and economic values. as the action of the intellect and universal mind becomes more and more identical, the clearer will the relation of all values become. but for physical reasons, the group has had to depend upon the individual as leaders, and the leaders with few exceptions restrained the universal mind--they trusted to the "private store," but now, thanks to the lessons of evolution, which nature has been teaching men since and before the days of socrates, the public store of reason is gradually taking the place of the once-needed leader. from the chaldean tablet to the wireless message this public store has been wonderfully opened. the results of these lessons, the possibilities they are offering for ever coordinating the mind of humanity, the culmination of this age-instruction, are seen today in many ways. labor federation, suffrage extension, are two instances that come to mind among the many. in these manifestations, by reason of tradition, or the bad-habit part of tradition, the hog-mind of the few (the minority), comes in play. the possessors of this are called leaders, but even these "thick-skins" are beginning to see that the movement is the leader, and that they are only clerks. broadly speaking, the effects evidenced in the political side of history have so much of the physical because the causes have been so much of the physical. as a result the leaders for the most part have been under-average men, with skins thick, wits slick, and hands quick with under-values, otherwise they would not have become leaders. but the day of leaders, as such, is gradually closing--the people are beginning to lead themselves--the public store of reason is slowly being opened--the common universal mind and the common over-soul is slowly but inevitably coming into its own. "let a man believe in god, not in names and places and persons. let the great soul incarnated in some poor ... sad and simple joan, go out to service and sweep chimneys and scrub floors ... its effulgent day beams cannot be muffled..." and then "to sweep and scrub will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions ... and all people will get brooms and mops." perhaps, if all of emerson--his works and his life--were to be swept away, and nothing of him but the record of the following incident remained to men--the influence of his soul would still be great. a working woman after coming from one of his lectures said: "i love to go to hear emerson, not because i understand him, but because he looks as though he thought everybody was as good as he was." is it not the courage--the spiritual hopefulness in his humility that makes this story possible and true? is it not this trait in his character that sets him above all creeds--that gives him inspired belief in the common mind and soul? is it not this courageous universalism that gives conviction to his prophecy and that makes his symphonies of revelation begin and end with nothing but the strength and beauty of innate goodness in man, in nature and in god, the greatest and most inspiring theme of concord transcendental philosophy, as we hear it. and it is from such a world-compelling theme and from such vantage ground, that emerson rises to almost perfect freedom of action, of thought and of soul, in any direction and to any height. a vantage ground, somewhat vaster than schelling's conception of transcendental philosophy--"a philosophy of nature become subjective." in concord it includes the objective and becomes subjective to nothing but freedom and the absolute law. it is this underlying courage of the purest humility that gives emerson that outward aspect of serenity which is felt to so great an extent in much of his work, especially in his codas and perorations. and within this poised strength, we are conscious of that "original authentic fire" which emerson missed in shelley--we are conscious of something that is not dispassionate, something that is at times almost turbulent--a kind of furious calm lying deeply in the conviction of the eventual triumph of the soul and its union with god! let us place the transcendent emerson where he, himself, places milton, in wordsworth's apostrophe: "pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, so didst thou travel on life's common way in cheerful godliness." the godliness of spiritual courage and hopefulness--these fathers of faith rise to a glorified peace in the depth of his greater perorations. there is an "oracle" at the beginning of the fifth symphony--in those four notes lies one of beethoven's greatest messages. we would place its translation above the relentlessness of fate knocking at the door, above the greater human-message of destiny, and strive to bring it towards the spiritual message of emerson's revelations--even to the "common heart" of concord--the soul of humanity knocking at the door of the divine mysteries, radiant in the faith that it will be opened--and the human become the divine! iii--hawthorne the substance of hawthorne is so dripping wet with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical--so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater imaginative impulse than emerson or thoreau. he was not a greater poet possibly than they--but a greater artist. not only the character of his substance, but the care in his manner throws his workmanship, in contrast to theirs, into a kind of bas-relief. like poe he quite naturally and unconsciously reaches out over his subject to his reader. his mesmerism seeks to mesmerize us--beyond zenobia's sister. but he is too great an artist to show his hand "in getting his audience," as poe and tschaikowsky occasionally do. his intellectual muscles are too strong to let him become over-influenced, as ravel and stravinsky seem to be by the morbidly fascinating--a kind of false beauty obtained by artistic monotony. however, we cannot but feel that he would weave his spell over us--as would the grimms and aesop. we feel as much under magic as the "enchanted frog." this is part of the artist's business. the effect is a part of his art-effort in its inception. emerson's substance and even his manner has little to do with a designed effect--his thunderbolts or delicate fragments are flashed out regardless--they may knock us down or just spatter us--it matters little to him--but hawthorne is more considerate; that is, he is more artistic, as men say. hawthorne may be more noticeably indigenous or may have more local color, perhaps more national color than his concord contemporaries. but the work of anyone who is somewhat more interested in psychology than in transcendental philosophy, will weave itself around individuals and their personalities. if the same anyone happens to live in salem, his work is likely to be colored by the salem wharves and salem witches. if the same anyone happens to live in the "old manse" near the concord battle bridge, he is likely "of a rainy day to betake himself to the huge garret," the secrets of which he wonders at, "but is too reverent of their dust and cobwebs to disturb." he is likely to "bow below the shriveled canvas of an old (puritan) clergyman in wig and gown--the parish priest of a century ago--a friend of whitefield." he is likely to come under the spell of this reverend ghost who haunts the "manse" and as it rains and darkens and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely "to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands" ... "that thought grows moldy," and as the garret is in massachusetts, the "thought" and the "mold" are likely to be quite native. when the same anyone puts his poetry into novels rather than essays, he is likely to have more to say about the life around him--about the inherited mystery of the town--than a poet of philosophy is. in hawthorne's usual vicinity, the atmosphere was charged with the somber errors and romance of eighteenth century new england,--ascetic or noble new england as you like. a novel, of necessity, nails an art-effort down to some definite part or parts of the earth's surface--the novelist's wagon can't always be hitched to a star. to say that hawthorne was more deeply interested than some of the other concord writers--emerson, for example--in the idealism peculiar to his native land (in so far as such idealism of a country can be conceived of as separate from the political) would be as unreasoning as to hold that he was more interested in social progress than thoreau, because he was in the consular service and thoreau was in no one's service--or that the war governor of massachusetts was a greater patriot than wendell phillips, who was ashamed of all political parties. hawthorne's art was true and typically american--as is the art of all men living in america who believe in freedom of thought and who live wholesome lives to prove it, whatever their means of expression. any comprehensive conception of hawthorne, either in words or music, must have for its basic theme something that has to do with the influence of sin upon the conscience--something more than the puritan conscience, but something which is permeated by it. in this relation he is wont to use what hazlitt calls the "moral power of imagination." hawthorne would try to spiritualize a guilty conscience. he would sing of the relentlessness of guilt, the inheritance of guilt, the shadow of guilt darkening innocent posterity. all of its sins and morbid horrors, its specters, its phantasmas, and even its hellish hopelessness play around his pages, and vanishing between the lines are the less guilty elves of the concord elms, which thoreau and old man alcott may have felt, but knew not as intimately as hawthorne. there is often a pervading melancholy about hawthorne, as faguet says of de musset "without posture, without noise but penetrating." there is at times the mysticism and serenity of the ocean, which jules michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in its waters." there is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound waves. hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint them rather than explain them--and here, some may say that he is wiser in a more practical way and so more artistic than emerson. perhaps so, but no greater in the deeper ranges and profound mysteries of the interrelated worlds of human and spiritual life. this fundamental part of hawthorne is not attempted in our music (the 2nd movement of the series) which is but an "extended fragment" trying to suggest some of his wilder, fantastical adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms. it may have something to do with the children's excitement on that "frosty berkshire morning, and the frost imagery on the enchanted hall window" or something to do with "feathertop," the "scarecrow," and his "looking glass" and the little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do with the old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to those in the churchyard, to protect them from secular noises, as when the circus parade comes down main street; or something to do with the concert at the stamford camp meeting, or the "slave's shuffle"; or something to do with the concord he-nymph, or the "seven vagabonds," or "circe's palace," or something else in the wonderbook--not something that happens, but the way something happens; or something to do with the "celestial railroad," or "phoebe's garden," or something personal, which tries to be "national" suddenly at twilight, and universal suddenly at midnight; or something about the ghost of a man who never lived, or about something that never will happen, or something else that is not. iv--"the alcotts" if the dictagraph had been perfected in bronson alcott's time, he might now be a great writer. as it is, he goes down as concord's greatest talker. "great expecter," says thoreau; "great feller," says sam staples, "for talkin' big ... but his daughters is the gals though--always doin' somethin'." old man alcott, however, was usually "doin' somethin'" within. an internal grandiloquence made him melodious without; an exuberant, irrepressible, visionary absorbed with philosophy as such; to him it was a kind of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family. apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, gave a kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his oracles; a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. but he was sincere and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what he could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw it. in fact, there is a strong didactic streak in both father and daughter. louisa may seldom misses a chance to bring out the moral of a homely virtue. the power of repetition was to them a natural means of illustration. it is said that the elder alcott, while teaching school, would frequently whip himself when the scholars misbehaved, to show that the divine teacher-god-was pained when his children of the earth were bad. quite often the boy next to the bad boy was punished, to show how sin involved the guiltless. and miss alcott is fond of working her story around, so that she can better rub in a moral precept--and the moral sometimes browbeats the story. but with all the elder alcott's vehement, impracticable, visionary qualities, there was a sturdiness and a courage--at least, we like to think so. a yankee boy who would cheerfully travel in those days, when distances were long and unmotored, as far from connecticut as the carolinas, earning his way by peddling, laying down his pack to teach school when opportunity offered, must possess a basic sturdiness. this was apparently not very evident when he got to preaching his idealism. an incident in alcott's life helps confirm a theory--not a popular one--that men accustomed to wander around in the visionary unknown are the quickest and strongest when occasion requires ready action of the lower virtues. it often appears that a contemplative mind is more capable of action than an actively objective one. dr. emerson says: "it is good to know that it has been recorded of alcott, the benign idealist, that when the rev. thomas wentworth higginson, heading the rush on the u.s. court house in boston, to rescue a fugitive slave, looked back for his following at the court-room door, only the apostolic philosopher was there cane in hand." so it seems that his idealism had some substantial virtues, even if he couldn't make a living. the daughter does not accept the father as a prototype--she seems to have but few of her father's qualities "in female." she supported the family and at the same time enriched the lives of a large part of young america, starting off many little minds with wholesome thoughts and many little hearts with wholesome emotions. she leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy, new england childhood days,--pictures which are turned to with affection by middle-aged children,--pictures, that bear a sentiment, a leaven, that middle-aged america needs nowadays more than we care to admit. concord village, itself, reminds one of that common virtue lying at the height and root of all the concord divinities. as one walks down the broad-arched street, passing the white house of emerson--ascetic guard of a former prophetic beauty--he comes presently beneath the old elms overspreading the alcott house. it seems to stand as a kind of homely but beautiful witness of concord's common virtue--it seems to bear a consciousness that its past is living, that the "mosses of the old manse" and the hickories of walden are not far away. here is the home of the "marches"--all pervaded with the trials and happiness of the family and telling, in a simple way, the story of "the richness of not having." within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. and there sits the little old spinet-piano sophia thoreau gave to the alcott children, on which beth played the old scotch airs, and played at the fifth symphony. there is a commonplace beauty about "orchard house"--a kind of spiritual sturdiness underlying its quaint picturesqueness--a kind of common triad of the new england homestead, whose overtones tell us that there must have been something aesthetic fibered in the puritan severity--the self-sacrificing part of the ideal--a value that seems to stir a deeper feeling, a stronger sense of being nearer some perfect truth than a gothic cathedral or an etruscan villa. all around you, under the concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human faith melody, transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope--a common interest in common things and common men--a tune the concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance--for that part of greatness is not so difficult to emulate. we dare not attempt to follow the philosophic raptures of bronson alcott--unless you will assume that his apotheosis will show how "practical" his vision in this world would be in the next. and so we won't try to reconcile the music sketch of the alcotts with much besides the memory of that home under the elms--the scotch songs and the family hymns that were sung at the end of each day--though there may be an attempt to catch something of that common sentiment (which we have tried to suggest above)-a strength of hope that never gives way to despair--a conviction in the power of the common soul which, when all is said and done, may be as typical as any theme of concord and its transcendentalists. v--thoreau thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to boston to hear "the symphony." the rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer. he was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude. in this consciousness he sang of the submission to nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of simplicity--a philosophy distinguishing between the complexity of nature which teaches freedom, and the complexity of materialism which teaches slavery. in music, in poetry, in all art, the truth as one sees it must be given in terms which bear some proportion to the inspiration. in their greatest moments the inspiration of both beethoven and thoreau express profound truths and deep sentiment, but the intimate passion of it, the storm and stress of it, affected beethoven in such a way that he could not but be ever showing it and thoreau that he could not easily expose it. they were equally imbued with it, but with different results. a difference in temperament had something to do with this, together with a difference in the quality of expression between the two arts. "who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he would speak extravagantly forever," says thoreau. perhaps music is the art of speaking extravagantly. herbert spencer says that some men, as for instance mozart, are so peculiarly sensitive to emotion ... that music is to them but a continuation not only of the expression but of the actual emotion, though the theory of some more modern thinkers in the philosophy of art doesn't always bear this out. however, there is no doubt that in its nature music is predominantly subjective and tends to subjective expression, and poetry more objective tending to objective expression. hence the poet when his muse calls for a deeper feeling must invert this order, and he may be reluctant to do so as these depths often call for an intimate expression which the physical looks of the words may repel. they tend to reveal the nakedness of his soul rather than its warmth. it is not a matter of the relative value of the aspiration, or a difference between subconsciousness and consciousness but a difference in the arts themselves; for example, a composer may not shrink from having the public hear his "love letter in tones," while a poet may feel sensitive about having everyone read his "letter in words." when the object of the love is mankind the sensitiveness is changed only in degree. but the message of thoreau, though his fervency may be inconstant and his human appeal not always direct, is, both in thought and spirit, as universal as that of any man who ever wrote or sang--as universal as it is nontemporaneous--as universal as it is free from the measure of history, as "solitude is free from the measure of the miles of space that intervene between man and his fellows." in spite of the fact that henry james (who knows almost everything) says that "thoreau is more than provincial--that he is parochial," let us repeat that henry thoreau, in respect to thought, sentiment, imagination, and soul, in respect to every element except that of place of physical being--a thing that means so much to some--is as universal as any personality in literature. that he said upon being shown a specimen grass from iceland that the same species could be found in concord is evidence of his universality, not of his parochialism. he was so universal that he did not need to travel around the world to prove it. "i have more of god, they more of the road." "it is not worth while to go around the world to count the cats in zanzibar." with marcus aurelius, if he had seen the present he had seen all, from eternity and all time forever. thoreau's susceptibility to natural sounds was probably greater than that of many practical musicians. true, this appeal is mainly through the sensational element which herbert spencer thinks the predominant beauty of music. thoreau seems able to weave from this source some perfect transcendental symphonies. strains from the orient get the best of some of the modern french music but not of thoreau. he seems more interested in than influenced by oriental philosophy. he admires its ways of resignation and self-contemplation but he doesn't contemplate himself in the same way. he often quotes from the eastern scriptures passages which were they his own he would probably omit, i.e., the vedas say "all intelligences awake with the morning." this seems unworthy of "accompanying the undulations of celestial music" found on this same page, in which an "ode to morning" is sung--"the awakening to newly acquired forces and aspirations from within to a higher life than we fell asleep from ... for all memorable events transpire in the morning time and in the morning atmosphere." thus it is not the whole tone scale of the orient but the scale of a walden morning--"music in single strains," as emerson says, which inspired many of the polyphonies and harmonies that come to us through his poetry. who can be forever melancholy "with aeolian music like this"? this is but one of many ways in which thoreau looked to nature for his greatest inspirations. in her he found an analogy to the fundamental of transcendentalism. the "innate goodness" of nature is or can be a moral influence; mother nature, if man will but let her, will keep him straight--straight spiritually and so morally and even mentally. if he will take her as a companion, and teacher, and not as a duty or a creed, she will give him greater thrills and teach him greater truths than man can give or teach--she will reveal mysteries that mankind has long concealed. it was the soul of nature not natural history that thoreau was after. a naturalist's mind is one predominantly scientific, more interested in the relation of a flower to other flowers than its relation to any philosophy or anyone's philosophy. a transcendent love of nature and writing "rhus glabra" after sumac doesn't necessarily make a naturalist. it would seem that although thorough in observation (not very thorough according to mr. burroughs) and with a keen perception of the specific, a naturalist--inherently--was exactly what thoreau was not. he seems rather to let nature put him under her microscope than to hold her under his. he was too fond of nature to practice vivisection upon her. he would have found that painful, "for was he not a part with her?" but he had this trait of a naturalist, which is usually foreign to poets, even great ones; he observed acutely even things that did not particularly interest him--a useful natural gift rather than a virtue. the study of nature may tend to make one dogmatic, but the love of nature surely does not. thoreau no more than emerson could be said to have compounded doctrines. his thinking was too broad for that. if thoreau's was a religion of nature, as some say,--and by that they mean that through nature's influence man is brought to a deeper contemplation, to a more spiritual self-scrutiny, and thus closer to god,--it had apparently no definite doctrines. some of his theories regarding natural and social phenomena and his experiments in the art of living are certainly not doctrinal in form, and if they are in substance it didn't disturb thoreau and it needn't us... "in proportion as he simplifies his life the laws of the universe will appear less complex and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. if you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost; that is where they should be, now put the foundations under them." ... "then we will love with the license of a higher order of beings." is that a doctrine? perhaps. at any rate, between the lines of some such passage as this lie some of the fountain heads that water the spiritual fields of his philosophy and the seeds from which they are sown (if indeed his whole philosophy is but one spiritual garden). his experiments, social and economic, are a part of its cultivation and for the harvest--and its transmutation, he trusts to moments of inspiration--"only what is thought, said, and done at a certain rare coincidence is good." thoreau's experiment at walden was, broadly speaking, one of these moments. it stands out in the casual and popular opinion as a kind of adventure--harmless and amusing to some, significant and important to others; but its significance lies in the fact that in trying to practice an ideal he prepared his mind so that it could better bring others "into the walden-state-of-mind." he did not ask for a literal approval, or in fact for any approval. "i would not stand between any man and his genius." he would have no one adopt his manner of life, unless in doing so he adopts his own--besides, by that time "i may have found a better one." but if he preached hard he practiced harder what he preached--harder than most men. throughout walden a text that he is always pounding out is "time." time for inside work out-of-doors; preferably out-of-doors, "though you perhaps may have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor house." wherever the place--time there must be. time to show the unnecessariness of necessities which clog up time. time to contemplate the value of man to the universe, of the universe to man, man's excuse for being. time from the demands of social conventions. time from too much labor for some, which means too much to eat, too much to wear, too much material, too much materialism for others. time from the "hurry and waste of life." time from the "st. vitus dance." but, on the other side of the ledger, time for learning that "there is no safety in stupidity alone." time for introspection. time for reality. time for expansion. time for practicing the art, of living the art of living. thoreau has been criticized for practicing his policy of expansion by living in a vacuum--but he peopled that vacuum with a race of beings and established a social order there, surpassing any of the precepts in social or political history. "...for he put some things behind and passed an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws were around and within him, the old laws were expanded and interpreted in a more liberal sense and he lived with the license of a higher order"--a community in which "god was the only president" and "thoreau not webster was his orator." it is hard to believe that thoreau really refused to believe that there was any other life but his own, though he probably did think that there was not any other life besides his own for him. living for society may not always be best accomplished by living with society. "is there any virtue in a man's skin that you must touch it?" and the "rubbing of elbows may not bring men's minds closer together"; or if he were talking through a "worst seller" (magazine) that "had to put it over" he might say, "forty thousand souls at a ball game does not, necessarily, make baseball the highest expression of spiritual emotion." thoreau, however, is no cynic, either in character or thought, though in a side glance at himself, he may have held out to be one; a "cynic in independence," possibly because of his rule laid down that "self-culture admits of no compromise." it is conceivable that though some of his philosophy and a good deal of his personality, in some of its manifestations, have outward colors that do not seem to harmonize, the true and intimate relations they bear each other are not affected. this peculiarity, frequently seen in his attitude towards social-economic problems, is perhaps more emphasized in some of his personal outbursts. "i love my friends very much, but i find that it is of no use to go to see them. i hate them commonly when i am near." it is easier to see what he means than it is to forgive him for saying it. the cause of this apparent lack of harmony between philosophy and personality, as far as they can be separated, may have been due to his refusal "to keep the very delicate balance" which mr. van doren in his "critical study of thoreau" says "it is necessary for a great and good man to keep between his public and private lives, between his own personality and the whole outside universe of personalities." somehow one feels that if he had kept this balance he would have lost "hitting power." again, it seems that something of the above depends upon the degree of greatness or goodness. a very great and especially a very good man has no separate private and public life. his own personality though not identical with outside personalities is so clear or can be so clear to them that it appears identical, and as the world progresses towards its inevitable perfection this appearance becomes more and more a reality. for the same reason that all great men now agree, in principle but not in detail, in so far as words are able to communicate agreement, on the great fundamental truths. someone says: "be specific--what great fundamentals?" freedom over slavery; the natural over the artificial; beauty over ugliness; the spiritual over the material; the goodness of man; the godness of man; have been greater if he hadn't written plays. some say that a true composer will never write an opera because a truly brave man will not take a drink to keep up his courage; which is not the same thing as saying that shakespeare is not the greatest figure in all literature; in fact, it is an attempt to say that many novels, most operas, all shakespeares, and all brave men and women (rum or no rum) are among the noblest blessings with which god has endowed mankind--because, not being perfect, they are perfect examples pointing to that perfection which nothing yet has attained. thoreau's mysticism at times throws him into elusive moods--but an elusiveness held by a thread to something concrete and specific, for he had too much integrity of mind for any other kind. in these moments it is easier to follow his thought than to follow him. indeed, if he were always easy to follow, after one had caught up with him, one might find that it was not thoreau. it is, however, with no mystic rod that he strikes at institutional life. here again he felt the influence of the great transcendental doctrine of "innate goodness" in human nature--a reflection of the like in nature; a philosophic part which, by the way, was a more direct inheritance in thoreau than in his brother transcendentalists. for besides what he received from a native unitarianism a good part must have descended to him through his huguenot blood from the "eighteenth-century french philosophy." we trace a reason here for his lack of interest in "the church." for if revealed religion is the path between god and man's spiritual part--a kind of formal causeway--thoreau's highly developed spiritual life felt, apparently unconsciously, less need of it than most men. but he might have been more charitable towards those who do need it (and most of us do) if he had been more conscious of his freedom. those who look today for the cause of a seeming deterioration in the influence of the church may find it in a wider development of this feeling of thoreau's; that the need is less because there is more of the spirit of christianity in the world today. another cause for his attitude towards the church as an institution is one always too common among "the narrow minds" to have influenced thoreau. he could have been more generous. he took the arc for the circle, the exception for the rule, the solitary bad example for the many good ones. his persistent emphasis on the value of "example" may excuse this lower viewpoint. "the silent influence of the example of one sincere life ... has benefited society more than all the projects devised for its salvation." he has little patience for the unpracticing preacher. "in some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. such a one might make a good shepherd dog but is far from being a good shepherd." it would have been interesting to have seen him handle the speculating parson, who takes a good salary--more per annum than all the disciples had to sustain their bodies during their whole lives--from a metropolitan religious corporation for "speculating" on sunday about the beauty of poverty, who preaches: "take no thought (for your life) what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink nor yet what ye shall put on ... lay not up for yourself treasure upon earth ... take up thy cross and follow me"; who on monday becomes a "speculating" disciple of another god, and by questionable investments, successful enough to get into the "press," seeks to lay up a treasure of a million dollars for his old age, as if a million dollars could keep such a man out of the poor-house. thoreau might observe that this one good example of christian degeneracy undoes all the acts of regeneracy of a thousand humble five-hundred-dollar country parsons; that it out-influences the "unconscious influence" of a dozen dr. bushnells if there be that many; that the repentance of this man who did not "fall from grace" because he never fell into it--that this unnecessary repentance might save this man's own soul but not necessarily the souls of the million head-line readers; that repentance would put this preacher right with the powers that be in this world--and the next. thoreau might pass a remark upon this man's intimacy with god "as if he had a monopoly of the subject"--an intimacy that perhaps kept him from asking god exactly what his son meant by the "camel," the "needle"--to say nothing of the "rich man." thoreau might have wondered how this man nailed down the last plank in his bridge to salvation, by rising to sublime heights of patriotism, in his war against materialism; but would even thoreau be so unfeeling as to suggest to this exhorter that his salvation might be clinched "if he would sacrifice his income" (not himself) and come--in to a real salvation army, or that the final triumph, the supreme happiness in casting aside this mere $10,000 or $20,000 every year must be denied him--for was he not captain of the ship--must he not stick to his passengers (in the first cabin--the very first cabin)--not that the ship was sinking but that he was ... we will go no further. even thoreau would not demand sacrifice for sacrifice sake--no, not even from nature. property from the standpoint of its influence in checking natural self-expansion and from the standpoint of personal and inherent right is another institution that comes in for straight and cross-arm jabs, now to the stomach, now to the head, but seldom sparring for breath. for does he not say that "wherever a man goes, men will pursue him with their dirty institutions"? the influence of property, as he saw it, on morality or immorality and how through this it mayor should influence "government" is seen by the following: "i am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as i did, then thieving and robbery would be unknown. these take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough- nec bella fuerunt, faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes-you who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments? have virtue and the people will be virtuous." if thoreau had made the first sentence read: "if all men were like me and were to live as simply," etc., everyone would agree with him. we may wonder here how he would account for some of the degenerate types we are told about in some of our backwoods and mountain regions. possibly by assuming that they are an instance of perversion of the species. that the little civilizing their forbears experienced rendered these people more susceptible to the physical than to the spiritual influence of nature; in other words; if they had been purer naturists, as the aztecs for example, they would have been purer men. instead of turning to any theory of ours or of thoreau for the true explanation of this condition--which is a kind of pseudo-naturalism--for its true diagnosis and permanent cure, are we not far more certain to find it in the radiant look of humility, love, and hope in the strong faces of those inspired souls who are devoting their lives with no little sacrifice to these outcasts of civilization and nature. in truth, may not mankind find the solution of its eternal problem--find it after and beyond the last, most perfect system of wealth distribution which science can ever devise--after and beyond the last sublime echo of the greatest socialistic symphonies--after and beyond every transcendent thought and expression in the simple example of these christ-inspired souls--be they pagan, gentile, jew, or angel. however, underlying the practical or impractical suggestions implied in the quotation above, which is from the last paragraph of thoreau's village, is the same transcendental theme of "innate goodness." for this reason there must be no limitation except that which will free mankind from limitation, and from a perversion of this "innate" possession: and "property" may be one of the causes of this perversion--property in the two relations cited above. it is conceivable that thoreau, to the consternation of the richest members of the bolsheviki and bourgeois, would propose a policy of liberation, a policy of a limited personal property right, on the ground that congestion of personal property tends to limit the progress of the soul (as well as the progress of the stomach)--letting the economic noise thereupon take care of itself--for dissonances are becoming beautiful--and do not the same waters that roar in a storm take care of the eventual calm? that this limit of property be determined not by the voice of the majority but by the brain of the majority under a government limited to no national boundaries. "the government of the world i live in is not framed in after-dinner conversation"--around a table in a capital city, for there is no capital--a government of principles not parties; of a few fundamental truths and not of many political expediencies. a government conducted by virtuous leaders, for it will be led by all, for all are virtuous, as then their "innate virtue" will no more be perverted by unnatural institutions. this will not be a millennium but a practical and possible application of uncommon common sense. for is it not sense, common or otherwise, for nature to want to hand back the earth to those to whom it belongs--that is, to those who have to live on it? is it not sense, that the average brains like the average stomachs will act rightly if they have an equal amount of the right kind of food to act upon and universal education is on the way with the right kind of food? is it not sense then that all grown men and women (for all are necessary to work out the divine "law of averages") shall have a direct not an indirect say about the things that go on in this world? some of these attitudes, ungenerous or radical, generous or conservative (as you will), towards institutions dear to many, have no doubt given impressions unfavorable to thoreau's thought and personality. one hears him called, by some who ought to know what they say and some who ought not, a crabbed, cold-hearted, sour-faced yankee--a kind of a visionary sore-head--a cross-grained, egotistic recluse,--even non-hearted. but it is easier to make a statement than prove a reputation. thoreau may be some of these things to those who make no distinction between these qualities and the manner which often comes as a kind of by-product of an intense devotion of a principle or ideal. he was rude and unfriendly at times but shyness probably had something to do with that. in spite of a certain self-possession he was diffident in most company, but, though he may have been subject to those spells when words do not rise and the mind seems wrapped in a kind of dull cloth which everyone dumbly stares at, instead of looking through--he would easily get off a rejoinder upon occasion. when a party of visitors came to walden and some one asked thoreau if he found it lonely there, he replied: "only by your help." a remark characteristic, true, rude, if not witty. the writer remembers hearing a schoolteacher in english literature dismiss thoreau (and a half hour lesson, in which time all of walden,--its surface--was sailed over) by saying that this author (he called everyone "author" from solomon down to dr. parkhurst) "was a kind of a crank who styled himself a hermit-naturalist and who idled about the woods because he didn't want to work." some such stuff is a common conception, though not as common as it used to be. if this teacher had had more brains, it would have been a lie. the word idled is the hopeless part of this criticism, or rather of this uncritical remark. to ask this kind of a man, who plays all the "choice gems from celebrated composers" literally, always literally, and always with the loud pedal, who plays all hymns, wrong notes, right notes, games, people, and jokes literally, and with the loud pedal, who will die literally and with the loud pedal--to ask this man to smile even faintly at thoreau's humor is like casting a pearl before a coal baron. emerson implies that there is one thing a genius must have to be a genius and that is "mother wit." ... "doctor johnson, milton, chaucer, and burns had it. aunt mary moody emerson has it and can write scrap letters. who has it need never write anything but scraps. henry thoreau has it." his humor though a part of this wit is not always as spontaneous, for it is sometimes pun shape (so is charles lamb's)--but it is nevertheless a kind that can serenely transport us and which we can enjoy without disturbing our neighbors. if there are those who think him cold-hearted and with but little human sympathy, let them read his letters to emerson's little daughter, or hear dr. emerson tell about the thoreau home life and the stories of his boyhood--the ministrations to a runaway slave; or let them ask old sam staples, the concord sheriff about him. that he "was fond of a few intimate friends, but cared not one fig for people in the mass," is a statement made in a school history and which is superficially true. he cared too much for the masses--too much to let his personality be "massed"; too much to be unable to realize the futility of wearing his heart on his sleeve but not of wearing his path to the shore of "walden" for future masses to walk over and perchance find the way to themselves. some near-satirists are fond of telling us that thoreau came so close to nature that she killed him before he had discovered her whole secret. they remind us that he died with consumption but forget that he lived with consumption. and without using much charity, this can be made to excuse many of his irascible and uncongenial moods. you to whom that gaunt face seems forbidding--look into the eyes! if he seems "dry and priggish" to you, mr. stevenson, "with little of that large unconscious geniality of the world's heroes," follow him some spring morning to baker farm, as he "rambles through pine groves ... like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs and rippling with light so soft and green and shady that the druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them." follow him to "the cedar wood beyond flint's pond, where the trees covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before valhalla." follow him, but not too closely, for you may see little, if you do--"as he walks in so pure and bright a light gilding its withered grass and leaves so softly and serenely bright that he thinks he has never bathed in such a golden flood." follow him as "he saunters towards the holy land till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever it has done, perchance shine into your minds and hearts and light up your whole lives with a great awakening, light as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn." follow him through the golden flood to the shore of that "holy land," where he lies dying as men say--dying as bravely as he lived. you may be near when his stern old aunt in the duty of her puritan conscience asks him: "have you made your peace with god"? and you may see his kindly smile as he replies, "i did not know that we had ever quarreled." moments like these reflect more nobility and equanimity perhaps than geniality--qualities, however, more serviceable to world's heroes. the personal trait that one who has affection for thoreau may find worst is a combative streak, in which he too often takes refuge. "an obstinate elusiveness," almost a "contrary cussedness," as if he would say, which he didn't: "if a truth about something is not as i think it ought to be, i'll make it what i think, and it will be the truth--but if you agree with me, then i begin to think it may not be the truth." the causes of these unpleasant colors (rather than characteristics) are too easily attributed to a lack of human sympathy or to the assumption that they are at least symbols of that lack instead of to a supersensitiveness, magnified at times by ill health and at times by a subconsciousness of the futility of actually living out his ideals in this life. it has been said that his brave hopes were unrealized anywhere in his career--but it is certain that they started to be realized on or about may 6, 1862, and we doubt if 1920 will end their fulfillment or his career. but there were many in concord who knew that within their village there was a tree of wondrous growth, the shadow of which--alas, too frequently--was the only part they were allowed to touch. emerson was one of these. he was not only deeply conscious of thoreau's rare gifts but in the woodland notes pays a tribute to a side of his friend that many others missed. emerson knew that thoreau's sensibilities too often veiled his nobilities, that a self-cultivated stoicism ever fortified with sarcasm, none the less securely because it seemed voluntary, covered a warmth of feeling. "his great heart, him a hermit made." a breadth of heart not easily measured, found only in the highest type of sentimentalists, the type which does not perpetually discriminate in favor of mankind. emerson has much of this sentiment and touches it when he sings of nature as "the incarnation of a thought," when he generously visualizes thoreau, "standing at the walden shore invoking the vision of a thought as it drifts heavenward into an incarnation of nature." there is a godlike patience in nature,-in her mists, her trees, her mountains--as if she had a more abiding faith and a clearer vision than man of the resurrection and immortality! there comes to memory an old yellow-papered composition of school-boy days whose peroration closed with "poor thoreau; he communed with nature for forty odd years, and then died." "the forty odd years,"--we'll still grant that part, but he is over a hundred now, and maybe, mr. lowell, he is more lovable, kindlier, and more radiant with human sympathy today, than, perchance, you were fifty years ago. it may be that he is a far stronger, a far greater, an incalculably greater force in the moral and spiritual fibre of his fellow-countrymen throughout the world today than you dreamed of fifty years ago. you, james russell lowells! you, robert louis stevensons! you, mark van dorens! with your literary perception, your power of illumination, your brilliancy of expression, yea, and with your love of sincerity, you know your thoreau, but not my thoreau--that reassuring and true friend, who stood by me one "low" day, when the sun had gone down, long, long before sunset. you may know something of the affection that heart yearned for but knew it a duty not to grasp; you may know something of the great human passions which stirred that soul--too deep for animate expression--you may know all of this, all there is to know about thoreau, but you know him not, unless you love him! and if there shall be a program for our music let it follow his thought on an autumn day of indian summer at walden--a shadow of a thought at first, colored by the mist and haze over the pond: low anchored cloud, fountain head and source of rivers... dew cloth, dream drapery- drifting meadow of the air.... but this is momentary; the beauty of the day moves him to a certain restlessness--to aspirations more specific--an eagerness for outward action, but through it all he is conscious that it is not in keeping with the mood for this "day." as the mists rise, there comes a clearer thought more traditional than the first, a meditation more calm. as he stands on the side of the pleasant hill of pines and hickories in front of his cabin, he is still disturbed by a restlessness and goes down the white-pebbled and sandy eastern shore, but it seems not to lead him where the thought suggests--he climbs the path along the "bolder northern" and "western shore, with deep bays indented," and now along the railroad track, "where the aeolian harp plays." but his eagerness throws him into the lithe, springy stride of the specie hunter--the naturalist--he is still aware of a restlessness; with these faster steps his rhythm is of shorter span--it is still not the tempo of nature, it does not bear the mood that the genius of the day calls for, it is too specific, its nature is too external, the introspection too buoyant, and he knows now that he must let nature flow through him and slowly; he releases his more personal desires to her broader rhythm, conscious that this blends more and more with the harmony of her solitude; it tells him that his search for freedom on that day, at least, lies in his submission to her, for nature is as relentless as she is benignant. he remains in this mood and while outwardly still, he seems to move with the slow, almost monotonous swaying beat of this autumnal day. he is more contented with a "homely burden" and is more assured of "the broad margin to his life; he sits in his sunny doorway ... rapt in revery ... amidst goldenrod, sandcherry, and sumac ... in undisturbed solitude." at times the more definite personal strivings for the ideal freedom, the former more active speculations come over him, as if he would trace a certain intensity even in his submission. "he grew in those seasons like corn in the night and they were better than any works of the hands. they were not time subtracted from his life but so much over and above the usual allowance." "he realized what the orientals meant by contemplation and forsaking of works." "the day advanced as if to light some work of his--it was morning and lo! now it is evening and nothing memorable is accomplished..." "the evening train has gone by," and "all the restless world with it. the fishes in the pond no longer feel its rumbling and he is more alone than ever..." his meditations are interrupted only by the faint sound of the concord bell--'tis prayer-meeting night in the village--"a melody as it were, imported into the wilderness..." "at a distance over the woods the sound acquires a certain vibratory hum as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept... a vibration of the universal lyre... just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to the eyes by the azure tint it imparts." ... part of the echo may be "the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by the wood nymph." it is darker, the poet's flute is heard out over the pond and walden hears the swan song of that "day" and faintly echoes... is it a transcendental tune of concord? 'tis an evening when the "whole body is one sense," ... and before ending his day he looks out over the clear, crystalline water of the pond and catches a glimpse of the shadow--thought he saw in the morning's mist and haze--he knows that by his final submission, he possesses the "freedom of the night." he goes up the "pleasant hillside of pines, hickories," and moonlight to his cabin, "with a strange liberty in nature, a part of herself." vi--epilogue 1 the futility of attempting to trace the source or primal impulse of an art-inspiration may be admitted without granting that human qualities or attributes which go with personality cannot be suggested, and that artistic intuitions which parallel them cannot be reflected in music. actually accomplishing the latter is a problem, more or less arbitrary to an open mind, more or less impossible to a prejudiced mind. that which the composer intends to represent as "high vitality" sounds like something quite different to different listeners. that which i like to think suggests thoreau's submission to nature may, to another, seem something like hawthorne's "conception of the relentlessness of an evil conscience"--and to the rest of our friends, but a series of unpleasant sounds. how far can the composer be held accountable? beyond a certain point the responsibility is more or less undeterminable. the outside characteristics--that is, the points furthest away from the mergings--are obvious to mostly anyone. a child knows a "strain of joy," from one of sorrow. those a little older know the dignified from the frivolous--the spring song from the season in which the "melancholy days have come" (though is there not a glorious hope in autumn!). but where is the definite expression of late-spring against early-summer, of happiness against optimism? a painter paints a sunset--can he paint the setting sun? in some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones--when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now--perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. but maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. maybe it is better to hope that music may always be a transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. possibly the power of literally distinguishing these "shades of abstraction"--these attributes paralleled by "artistic intuitions" (call them what you will)-is ever to be denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a circle are to be denied. 2 there may be an analogy--and on first sight it seems that there must be--between both the state and power of artistic perceptions and the law of perpetual change, that ever-flowing stream partly biological, partly cosmic, ever going on in ourselves, in nature, in all life. this may account for the difficulty of identifying desired qualities with the perceptions of them in expression. many things are constantly coming into being, while others are constantly going out--one part of the same thing is coming in while another part is going out of existence. perhaps this is why the above conformity in art (a conformity which we seem naturally to look for) appears at times so unrealizable, if not impossible. it will be assumed, to make this theory clearer, that the "flow" or "change" does not go on in the art-product itself. as a matter of fact it probably does, to a certain extent--a picture, or a song, may gain or lose in value beyond what the painter or composer knew, by the progress and higher development in all art. keats may be only partially true when he says that "a work of beauty is a joy forever"--a thing that is beautiful to me, is a joy to me, as long as it remains beautiful to me--and if it remains so as long as i live, it is so forever, that is, forever to me. if he had put it this way, he would have been tiresome, inartistic, but perhaps truer. so we will assume here that this change only goes on in man and nature; and that this eternal process in mankind is paralleled in some way during each temporary, personal life. a young man, two generations ago, found an identity with his ideals, in rossini; when an older man in wagner. a young man, one generation ago, found his in wagner, but when older in cesar franck or brahms. some may say that this change may not be general, universal, or natural, and that it may be due to a certain kind of education, or to a certain inherited or contracted prejudice. we cannot deny or affirm this, absolutely, nor will we try to even qualitatively--except to say that it will be generally admitted that rossini, today, does not appeal to this generation, as he did to that of our fathers. as far as prejudice or undue influence is concerned, and as an illustration in point, the following may be cited to show that training may have but little effect in this connection, at least not as much as usually supposed--for we believe this experience to be, to a certain extent, normal, or at least, not uncommon. a man remembers, when he was a boy of about fifteen years, hearing his music-teacher (and father) who had just returned from a performance of siegfried say with a look of anxious surprise that "somehow or other he felt ashamed of enjoying the music as he did," for beneath it all he was conscious of an undercurrent of "make-believe"--the bravery was make-believe, the love was make-believe, the passion, the virtue, all make-believe, as was the dragon--p. t. barnum would have been brave enough to have gone out and captured a live one! but, that same boy at twenty-five was listening to wagner with enthusiasm, his reality was real enough to inspire a devotion. the "preis-lied," for instance, stirred him deeply. but when he became middle-aged--and long before the hohenzollern hog-marched into belgium--this music had become cloying, the melodies threadbare--a sense of something commonplace--yes--of make-believe came. these feelings were fought against for association's sake, and because of gratitude for bygone pleasures--but the former beauty and nobility were not there, and in their place stood irritating intervals of descending fourths and fifths. those once transcendent progressions, luxuriant suggestions of debussy chords of the 9th, 11th, etc., were becoming slimy. an unearned exultation--a sentimentality deadening something within hides around in the music. wagner seems less and less to measure up to the substance and reality of cesar franck, brahms, d'indy, or even elgar (with all his tiresomeness), the wholesomeness, manliness, humility, and deep spiritual, possibly religious feeling of these men seem missing and not made up for by his (wagner's) manner and eloquence, even if greater than theirs (which is very doubtful). from the above we would try to prove that as this stream of change flows towards the eventual ocean of mankind's perfection, the art-works in which we identify our higher ideals come by this process to be identified with the lower ideals of those who embark after us when the stream has grown in depth. if we stop with the above experience, our theory of the effect of man's changing nature, as thus explaining artistic progress, is perhaps sustained. thus would we show that the perpetual flow of the life stream is affected by and affects each individual riverbed of the universal watersheds. thus would we prove that the wagner period was normal, because we intuitively recognized whatever identity we were looking for at a certain period in our life, and the fact that it was so made the franck period possible and then normal at a later period in our life. thus would we assume that this is as it should be, and that it is not wagner's content or substance or his lack of virtue, that something in us has made us flow past him and not he past us. but something blocks our theory! something makes our hypotheses seem purely speculative if not useless. it is men like bach and beethoven. is it not a matter nowadays of common impression or general opinion (for the law of averages plays strongly in any theory relating to human attributes) that the world's attitude towards the substance and quality and spirit of these two men, or other men of like character, if there be such, has not been affected by the flowing stream that has changed us? but if by the measure of this public opinion, as well as it can be measured, bach and beethoven are being flowed past--not as fast perhaps as wagner is, but if they are being passed at all from this deeper viewpoint, then this "change" theory holds. here we shall have to assume, for we haven't proved it, that artistic intuitions can sense in music a weakening of moral strength and vitality, and that it is sensed in relation to wagner and not sensed in relation to bach and beethoven. if, in this common opinion, there is a particle of change toward the latter's art, our theory stands--mind you, this admits a change in the manner, form, external expression, etc., but not in substance. if there is no change here towards the substance of these two men, our theory not only falls but its failure superimposes or allows us to presume a fundamental duality in music, and in all art for that matter. does the progress of intrinsic beauty or truth (we assume there is such a thing) have its exposures as well as its discoveries? does the non-acceptance of the foregoing theory mean that wagner's substance and reality are lower and his manner higher; that his beauty was not intrinsic; that he was more interested in the repose of pride than in the truth of humility? it appears that he chose the representative instead of the spirit itself,--that he chose consciously or unconsciously, it matters not,--the lower set of values in this dualism. these are severe accusations to bring--especially when a man is a little down as wagner is today. but these convictions were present some time before he was banished from the metropolitan. wagner seems to take hugo's place in faguet's criticism of de vigny that, "the staging to him (hugo) was the important thing--not the conception--that in de vigny, the artist was inferior to the poet"; finally that hugo and so wagner have a certain pauvrete de fond. thus would we ungenerously make wagner prove our sum! but it is a sum that won't prove! the theory at its best does little more than suggest something, which if it is true at all, is a platitude, viz.: that progressive growth in all life makes it more and more possible for men to separate, in an art-work, moral weakness from artistic strength. 3 human attributes are definite enough when it comes to their description, but the expression of them, or the paralleling of them in an art-process, has to be, as said above, more or less arbitrary, but we believe that their expression can be less vague if the basic distinction of this art-dualism is kept in mind. it is morally certain that the higher part is founded, as sturt suggests, on something that has to do with those kinds of unselfish human interests which we call knowledge and morality--knowledge, not in the sense of erudition, but as a kind of creation or creative truth. this allows us to assume that the higher and more important value of this dualism is composed of what may be called reality, quality, spirit, or substance against the lower value of form, quantity, or manner. of these terms "substance" seems to us the most appropriate, cogent, and comprehensive for the higher and "manner" for the under-value. substance in a human-art-quality suggests the body of a conviction which has its birth in the spiritual consciousness, whose youth is nourished in the moral consciousness, and whose maturity as a result of all this growth is then represented in a mental image. this is appreciated by the intuition, and somehow translated into expression by "manner"--a process always less important than it seems, or as suggested by the foregoing (in fact we apologize for this attempted definition). so it seems that "substance" is too indefinite to analyze, in more specific terms. it is practically indescribable. intuitions (artistic or not?) will sense it--process, unknown. perhaps it is an unexplained consciousness of being nearer god, or being nearer the devil--of approaching truth or approaching unreality--a silent something felt in the truth-of-nature in turner against the truth-of-art in botticelli, or in the fine thinking of ruskin against the fine soundings of kipling, or in the wide expanse of titian against the narrow-expanse of carpaccio, or in some such distinction that pope sees between what he calls homer's "invention" and virgil's "judgment"--apparently an inspired imagination against an artistic care, a sense of the difference, perhaps, between dr. bushnell's knowing god and knowing about god. a more vivid explanation or illustration may be found in the difference between emerson and poe. the former seems to be almost wholly "substance" and the latter "manner." the measure in artistic satisfaction of poe's manner is equal to the measure of spiritual satisfaction in emerson's "substance." the total value of each man is high, but emerson's is higher than poe's because "substance" is higher than "manner"--because "substance" leans towards optimism, and "manner" pessimism. we do not know that all this is so, but we feel, or rather know by intuition that it is so, in the same way we know intuitively that right is higher than wrong, though we can't always tell why a thing is right or wrong, or what is always the difference or the margin between right and wrong. beauty, in its common conception, has nothing to do with it (substance), unless it be granted that its outward aspect, or the expression between sensuous beauty and spiritual beauty can be always and distinctly known, which it cannot, as the art of music is still in its infancy. on reading this over, it seems only decent that some kind of an apology be made for the beginning of the preceding sentence. it cannot justly be said that anything that has to do with art has nothing to do with beauty in any degree,--that is, whether beauty is there or not, it has something to do with it. a casual idea of it, a kind of a first necessary-physical impression, was what we had in mind. probably nobody knows what actual beauty is--except those serious writers of humorous essays in art magazines, who accurately, but kindly, with club in hand, demonstrate for all time and men that beauty is a quadratic monomial; that it _is_ absolute; that it is relative; that it _is _not_ relative, that it _is _not_... the word "beauty" is as easy to use as the word "degenerate." both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you. for our part, something that roussel-despierres says comes nearer to what we like to think beauty is ... "an infinite source of good ... the love of the beautiful ... a constant anxiety for moral beauty." even here we go around in a circle--a thing apparently inevitable, if one tries to reduce art to philosophy. but personally, we prefer to go around in a circle than around in a parallelepipedon, for it seems cleaner and perhaps freer from mathematics--or for the same reason we prefer whittier to baudelaire--a poet to a genius, or a healthy to a rotten apple--probably not so much because it is more nutritious, but because we like its taste better; we like the beautiful and don't like the ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don't like is ugly--and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly, for if it were we would like something we don't like. so having unsettled what beauty is, let us go on. at any rate, we are going to be arbitrary enough to claim, with no definite qualification, that substance can be expressed in music, and that it is the only valuable thing in it, and moreover that in two separate pieces of music in which the notes are almost identical, one can be of "substance" with little "manner," and the other can be of "manner" with little "substance." substance has something to do with character. manner has nothing to do with it. the "substance" of a tune comes from somewhere near the soul, and the "manner" comes from--god knows where. 4 the lack of interest to preserve, or ability to perceive the fundamental divisions of this duality accounts to a large extent, we believe, for some or many various phenomena (pleasant or unpleasant according to the personal attitude) of modern art, and all art. it is evidenced in many ways--the sculptors' over-insistence on the "mold," the outer rather than the inner subject or content of his statue--over-enthusiasm for local color--over-interest in the multiplicity of techniques, in the idiomatic, in the effect as shown, by the appreciation of an audience rather than in the effect on the ideals of the inner conscience of the artist or the composer. this lack of perceiving is too often shown by an over-interest in the material value of the effect. the pose of self-absorption, which some men, in the advertising business (and incidentally in the recital and composing business) put into their photographs or the portraits of themselves, while all dolled up in their purple-dressing-gowns, in their twofold wealth of golden hair, in their cissy-like postures over the piano keys--this pose of "manner" sometimes sounds out so loud that the more their music is played, the less it is heard. for does not emerson tell them this when he says "what you are talks so loud, that i cannot hear what you say"? the unescapable impression that one sometimes gets by a glance at these public-inflicted trade-marks, and without having heard or seen any of their music, is that the one great underlying desire of these appearing-artists, is to impress, perhaps startle and shock their audiences and at any cost. this may have some such effect upon some of the lady-part (male or female) of their listeners but possibly the members of the men-part, who as boys liked hockey better than birthday-parties, may feel like shocking a few of these picture-sitters with something stronger than their own forzandos. the insistence upon manner in its relation to local color is wider than a self-strain for effect. if local color is a natural part, that is, a part of substance, the art-effort cannot help but show its color--and it will be a true color, no matter how colored; if it is a part, even a natural part of "manner," either the color part is bound eventually to drive out the local part or the local drive out all color. here a process of cancellation or destruction is going on--a kind of "compromise" which destroys by deadlock; a compromise purchasing a selfish pleasure--a decadence in which art becomes first dull, then dark, then dead, though throughout this process it is outwardly very much alive,--especially after it is dead. the same tendency may even be noticed if there is over-insistence upon the national in art. substance tends to create affection; manner prejudice. the latter tends to efface the distinction between the love of both a country's virtue and vices, and the love of only the virtue. a true love of country is likely to be so big that it will embrace the virtue one sees in other countries and, in the same breath, so to speak. a composer born in america, but who has not been interested in the "cause of the freedmen," may be so interested in "negro melodies," that he writes a symphony over them. he is conscious (perhaps only subconscious) that he wishes it to be "american music." he tries to forget that the paternal negro came from africa. is his music american or african? that is the great question which keeps him awake! but the sadness of it is, that if he had been born in africa, his music might have been just as american, for there is good authority that an african soul under an x-ray looks identically like an american soul. there is a futility in selecting a certain type to represent a "whole," unless the interest in the spirit of the type coincides with that of the whole. in other words, if this composer isn't as deeply interested in the "cause" as wendell phillips was, when he fought his way through that anti-abolitionist crowd at faneuil hall, his music is liable to be less american than he wishes. if a middle-aged man, upon picking up the scottish chiefs, finds that his boyhood enthusiasm for the prowess and noble deeds and character of sir wm. wallace and of bruce is still present, let him put, or try to put that glory into an overture, let him fill it chuck-full of scotch tunes, if he will. but after all is said and sung he will find that his music is american to the core (assuming that he is an american and wishes his music to be). it will be as national in character as the heart of that grand army grandfather, who read those cragmore tales of a summer evening, when that boy had brought the cows home without witching. perhaps the memories of the old soldier, to which this man still holds tenderly, may be turned into a "strain" or a "sonata," and though the music does not contain, or even suggest any of the old war-songs, it will be as sincerely american as the subject, provided his (the composer's) interest, spirit, and character sympathize with, or intuitively coincide with that of the subject. again, if a man finds that the cadences of an apache war-dance come nearest to his soul, provided he has taken pains to know enough other cadences--for eclecticism is part of his duty--sorting potatoes means a better crop next year--let him assimilate whatever he finds highest of the indian ideal, so that he can use it with the cadences, fervently, transcendentally, inevitably, furiously, in his symphonies, in his operas, in his whistlings on the way to work, so that he can paint his house with them--make them a part of his prayer-book--this is all possible and necessary, if he is confident that they have a part in his spiritual consciousness. with this assurance his music will have everything it should of sincerity, nobility, strength, and beauty, no matter how it sounds; and if, with this, he is true to none but the highest of american ideals (that is, the ideals only that coincide with his spiritual consciousness) his music will be true to itself and incidentally american, and it will be so even after it is proved that all our indians came from asia. the man "born down to babbitt's corners," may find a deep appeal in the simple but acute "gospel hymns of the new england camp meetin'," of a generation or so ago. he finds in them--some of them--a vigor, a depth of feeling, a natural-soil rhythm, a sincerity, emphatic but inartistic, which, in spite of a vociferous sentimentality, carries him nearer the "christ of the people" than does the te deum of the greatest cathedral. these tunes have, for him, a truer ring than many of those groove-made, even-measured, monotonous, non-rhythmed, indoor-smelling, priest-taught, academic, english or neo-english hymns (and anthems)--well-written, well-harmonized things, well-voice-led, well-counterpointed, well-corrected, and well o.k.'d, by well corrected mus. bac. r.f.o.g.'s-personified sounds, correct and inevitable to sight and hearing--in a word, those proper forms of stained-glass beauty, which our over-drilled mechanisms-boy-choirs are limited to. but, if the yankee can reflect the fervency with which "his gospels" were sung--the fervency of "aunt sarah," who scrubbed her life away, for her brother's ten orphans, the fervency with which this woman, after a fourteen-hour work day on the farm, would hitch up and drive five miles, through the mud and rain to "prayer meetin'"--her one articulate outlet for the fullness of her unselfish soul--if he can reflect the fervency of such a spirit, he may find there a local color that will do all the world good. if his music can but catch that "spirit" by being a part with itself, it will come somewhere near his ideal--and it will be american, too, perhaps nearer so than that of the devotee of indian or negro melody. in other words, if local color, national color, any color, is a true pigment of the universal color, it is a divine quality, it is a part of substance in art--not of manner. the preceding illustrations are but attempts to show that whatever excellence an artist sees in life, a community, in a people, or in any valuable object or experience, if sincerely and intuitively reflected in his work, and so he himself, is, in a way, a reflected part of that excellence. whether he be accepted or rejected, whether his music is always played, or never played--all this has nothing to do with it--it is true or false by his own measure. if we may be permitted to leave out two words, and add a few more, a sentence of hegel appears to sum up this idea, "the universal need for expression in art lies in man's rational impulse to exalt the inner ... world (i.e., the highest ideals he sees in the inner life of others) together with what he finds in his own life--into a spiritual consciousness for himself." the artist does feel or does not feel that a sympathy has been approved by an artistic intuition and so reflected in his work. whether he feels this sympathy is true or not in the final analysis, is a thing probably that no one but he (the artist) knows but the truer he feels it, the more substance it has, or as sturt puts it, "his work is art, so long as he feels in doing it as true artists feel, and so long as his object is akin to the objects that true artists admire." dr. griggs in an essay on debussy, [john c. griggs, "debussy" yale review, 1914] asks if this composer's content is worthy the manner. perhaps so, perhaps not--debussy himself, doubtless, could not give a positive answer. he would better know how true his feeling and sympathy was, and anyone else's personal opinion can be of but little help here. we might offer the suggestion that debussy's content would have been worthier his manner, if he had hoed corn or sold newspapers for a living, for in this way he might have gained a deeper vitality and truer theme to sing at night and of a sunday. or we might say that what substance there is, is "too coherent"--it is too clearly expressed in the first thirty seconds. there you have the "whole fragment," a translucent syllogism, but then the reality, the spirit, the substance stops and the "form," the "perfume," the "manner," shimmer right along, as the soapsuds glisten after one has finished washing. or we might say that his substance would have been worthier, if his adoration or contemplation of nature, which is often a part of it, and which rises to great heights, as is felt for example, in la mer, had been more the quality of thoreau's. debussy's attitude toward nature seems to have a kind of sensual sensuousness underlying it, while thoreau's is a kind of spiritual sensuousness. it is rare to find a farmer or peasant whose enthusiasm for the beauty in nature finds outward expression to compare with that of the city-man who comes out for a sunday in the country, but thoreau is that rare country-man and debussy the city-man with his weekend flights into country-aesthetics. we would be inclined to say that thoreau leaned towards substance and debussy towards manner. 5 there comes from concord, an offer to every mind--the choice between repose and truth, and god makes the offer. "take which you please ... between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. he in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets," most likely his father's. he gets rest, commodity, and reputation. here is another aspect of art-duality, but it is more drastic than ours, as it would eliminate one part or the other. a man may aim as high as beethoven or as high as richard strauss. in the former case the shot may go far below the mark; in truth, it has not been reached since that "thunder storm of 1828" and there is little chance that it will be reached by anyone living today, but that matters not, the shot will never rebound and destroy the marksman. but, in the latter case, the shot may often hit the mark, but as often rebound and harden, if not destroy, the shooter's heart--even his soul. what matters it, men say, he will then find rest, commodity, and reputation--what matters it--if he find there but few perfect truths--what matters (men say)--he will find there perfect media, those perfect instruments of getting in the way of perfect truths. this choice tells why beethoven is always modern and strauss always mediaeval--try as he may to cover it up in new bottles. he has chosen to capitalize a "talent"--he has chosen the complexity of media, the shining hardness of externals, repose, against the inner, invisible activity of truth. he has chosen the first creed, the easy creed, the philosophy of his fathers, among whom he found a half-idiot-genius (nietzsche). his choice naturally leads him to glorify and to magnify all kind of dull things--stretched-out geigermusik--which in turn naturally leads him to "windmills" and "human heads on silver platters." magnifying the dull into the colossal, produces a kind of "comfort"--the comfort of a woman who takes more pleasure in the fit of fashionable clothes than in a healthy body--the kind of comfort that has brought so many "adventures of baby-carriages at county fairs"--"the sensation of teddy bears, smoking their first cigarette"--on the program of symphony orchestras of one hundred performers,--the lure of the media--the means--not the end--but the finish,--thus the failure to perceive that thoughts and memories of childhood are too tender, and some of them too sacred to be worn lightly on the sleeve. life is too short for these one hundred men, to say nothing of the composer and the "dress-circle," to spend an afternoon in this way. they are but like the rest of us, and have only the expectancy of the mortality-table to survive--perhaps only this "piece." we cannot but feel that a too great desire for "repose" accounts for such phenomena. a ms. score is brought to a concertmaster--he may be a violinist--he is kindly disposed, he looks it over, and casually fastens on a passage "that's bad for the fiddles, it doesn't hang just right, write it like this, they will play it better." but that one phrase is the germ of the whole thing. "never mind, it will fit the hand better this way--it will sound better." my god! what has sound got to do with music! the waiter brings the only fresh egg he has, but the man at breakfast sends it back because it doesn't fit his eggcup. why can't music go out in the same way it comes in to a man, without having to crawl over a fence of sounds, thoraxes, catguts, wire, wood, and brass? consecutive-fifths are as harmless as blue laws compared with the relentless tyranny of the "media." the instrument!--there is the perennial difficulty--there is music's limitations. why must the scarecrow of the keyboard--the tyrant in terms of the mechanism (be it caruso or a jew's-harp) stare into every measure? is it the composer's fault that man has only ten fingers? why can't a musical thought be presented as it is born--perchance "a bastard of the slums," or a "daughter of a bishop"--and if it happens to go better later on a bass-drum (than upon a harp) get a good bass-drummer. [footnote: the first movement (emerson) of the music, which is the cause of all these words, was first thought of (we believe) in terms of a large orchestra, the second (hawthorne) in terms of a piano or a dozen pianos, the third (alcotts)--of an organ (or piano with voice or violin), and the last (thoreau), in terms of strings, colored possibly with a flute or horn.] that music must be heard, is not essential--what it sounds like may not be what it is. perhaps the day is coming when music--believers will learn "that silence is a solvent ... that gives us leave to be universal" rather than personal. some fiddler was once honest or brave enough, or perhaps ignorant enough, to say that beethoven didn't know how to write for the violin,--that, maybe, is one of the many reasons beethoven is not a vieuxtemps. another man says beethoven's piano sonatas are not pianistic--with a little effort, perhaps, beethoven could have become a thalberg. his symphonies are perfect-truths and perfect for the orchestra of 1820--but mahler could have made them--possibly did make them--we will say, "more perfect," as far as their media clothes are concerned, and beethoven is today big enough to rather like it. he is probably in the same amiable state of mind that the jesuit priest said, "god was in," when he looked down on the camp ground and saw the priest sleeping with a congregational chaplain. or in the same state of mind you'll be in when you look down and see the sexton keeping your tombstone up to date. the truth of joachim offsets the repose of paganini and kubelik. the repose and reputation of a successful pianist--(whatever that means) who plays chopin so cleverly that he covers up a sensuality, and in such a way that the purest-minded see nothing but sensuous beauty in it, which, by the way, doesn't disturb him as much as the size of his income-tax--the repose and fame of this man is offset by the truth and obscurity of the village organist who plays lowell mason and bach with such affection that he would give his life rather than lose them. the truth and courage of this organist, who risks his job, to fight the prejudice of the congregation, offset the repose and large salary of a more celebrated choirmaster, who holds his job by lowering his ideals, who is willing to let the organ smirk under an insipid, easy-sounding barcarolle for the offertory, who is willing to please the sentimental ears of the music committee (and its wives)--who is more willing to observe these forms of politeness than to stand up for a stronger and deeper music of simple devotion, and for a service of a spiritual unity, the kind of thing that mr. bossitt, who owns the biggest country place, the biggest bank, and the biggest "house of god" in town (for is it not the divine handiwork of his own-pocketbook)--the kind of music that this man, his wife, and his party (of property right in pews) can't stand because it isn't "pretty." the doctrine of this "choice" may be extended to the distinction between literal-enthusiasm and natural-enthusiasm (right or wrong notes, good or bad tones against good or bad interpretation, good or bad sentiment) or between observation and introspection, or to the distinction between remembering and dreaming. strauss remembers, beethoven dreams. we see this distinction also in goethe's confusion of the moral with the intellectual. there is no such confusion in beethoven--to him they are one. it is told, and the story is so well known that we hesitate to repeat it here, that both these men were standing in the street one day when the emperor drove by--goethe, like the rest of the crowd, bowed and uncovered--but beethoven stood bolt upright, and refused even to salute, saying: "let him bow to us, for ours is a nobler empire." goethe's mind knew this was true, but his moral courage was not instinctive. this remembering faculty of "repose," throws the mind in unguarded moments quite naturally towards "manner" and thus to the many things the media can do. it brings on an itching to over-use them--to be original (if anyone will tell what that is) with nothing but numbers to be original with. we are told that a conductor (of the orchestra) has written a symphony requiring an orchestra of one hundred and fifty men. if his work perhaps had one hundred and fifty valuable ideas, the one hundred and fifty men might be justifiable--but as it probably contains not more than a dozen, the composer may be unconsciously ashamed of them, and glad to cover them up under a hundred and fifty men. a man may become famous because he is able to eat nineteen dinners a day, but posterity will decorate his stomach, not his brain. manner breeds a cussed-cleverness--only to be clever--a satellite of super-industrialism, and perhaps to be witty in the bargain, not the wit in mother-wit, but a kind of indoor, artificial, mental arrangement of things quickly put together and which have been learned and studied--it is of the material and stays there, while humor is of the emotional and of the approaching spiritual. even dukas, and perhaps other gauls, in their critical heart of hearts, may admit that "wit" in music, is as impossible as "wit" at a funeral. the wit is evidence of its lack. mark twain could be humorous at the death of his dearest friend, but in such a way as to put a blessing into the heart of the bereaved. humor in music has the same possibilities. but its quantity has a serious effect on its quality, "inverse ratio" is a good formula to adopt here. comedy has its part, but wit never. strauss is at his best in these lower rooms, but his comedy reminds us more of the physical fun of lever rather than "comedy in the meredithian sense" as mason suggests. meredith is a little too deep or too subtle for strauss--unless it be granted that cynicism is more a part of comedy than a part of refined-insult. let us also remember that mr. disston, not mr. strauss, put the funny notes in the bassoon. a symphony written only to amuse and entertain is likely to amuse only the writer--and him not long after the check is cashed. "genius is always ascetic and piety and love," thus emerson reinforces "god's offer of this choice" by a transcendental definition. the moment a famous violinist refused "to appear" until he had received his check,--at that moment, precisely (assuming for argument's sake, that this was the first time that materialism had the ascendancy in this man's soul) at that moment he became but a man of "talent"--incidentally, a small man and a small violinist, regardless of how perfectly he played, regardless to what heights of emotion he stirred his audience, regardless of the sublimity of his artistic and financial success. d'annunzio, it is told, becoming somewhat discouraged at the result of some of his fiume adventures said: "we are the only idealists left." this remark may have been made in a moment of careless impulse, but if it is taken at its face value, the moment it was made that moment his idealism started downhill. a grasp at monopoly indicates that a sudden shift has taken place from the heights where genius may be found, to the lower plains of talent. the mind of a true idealist is great enough to know that a monopoly of idealism or of wheat is a thing nature does not support. a newspaper music column prints an incident (so how can we assume that it is not true?) of an american violinist who called on max reger, to tell him how much he (the american) appreciated his music. reger gives him a hopeless look and cries: "what! a musician and not speak german!" at that moment, by the clock, regardless of how great a genius he may have been before that sentence was uttered--at that moment he became but a man of "talent." "for the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considered with his devotion to his art." his art never taught him prejudice or to wear only one eye. "his art is less for every deduction from his holiness and less for every defect of common sense." and this common sense has a great deal to do with this distinguishing difference of emerson's between genius and talent, repose and truth, and between all evidences of substance and manner in art. manner breeds partialists. "is america a musical nation?"--if the man who is ever asking this question would sit down and think something over he might find less interest in asking it--he might possibly remember that all nations are more musical than any nation, especially the nation that pays the most--and pays the most eagerly, for anything, after it has been professionally-rubber stamped. music may be yet unborn. perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. perhaps the birth of art will take place at the moment, in which the last man, who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever. in the history of this youthful world the best product that human-beings can boast of is probably, beethoven--but, maybe, even his art is as nothing in comparison with the future product of some coal-miner's soul in the forty-first century. and the same man who is ever asking about the most musical nation, is ever discovering the most musical man of the most musical nation. when particularly hysterical he shouts, "i have found him! smith grabholz--the one great american poet,--at last, here is the moses the country has been waiting for"--(of course we all know that the country has not been waiting for anybody--and we have many moses always with us). but the discoverer keeps right on shouting "here is the one true american poetry, i pronounce it the work of a genius. i predict for him the most brilliant career--for his is an art that...--for his is a soul that ... for his is a..." and grabholz is ruined;--but ruined, not alone, by this perennial discoverer of pearls in any oyster-shell that treats him the best, but ruined by his own (grabholz's) talent,--for genius will never let itself be discovered by "a man." then the world may ask "can the one true national "this" or "that" be killed by its own discoverer?" "no," the country replies, "but each discovery is proof of another impossibility." it is a sad fact that the one true man and the one true art will never behave as they should except in the mind of the partialist whom god has forgotten. but this matters little to him (the man)--his business is good--for it is easy to sell the future in terms of the past--and there are always some who will buy anything. the individual usually "gains" if he is willing to but lean on "manner." the evidence of this is quite widespread, for if the discoverer happens to be in any other line of business his sudden discoveries would be just as important--to him. in fact, the theory of substance and manner in art and its related dualisms, "repose and truth, genius and talent," &c., may find illustration in many, perhaps most, of the human activities. and when examined it (the illustration) is quite likely to show how "manner" is always discovering partisans. for example, enthusiastic discoveries of the "paragon" are common in politics--an art to some. these revelations, in this profession are made easy by the pre-election discovering-leaders of the people. and the genius who is discovered, forthwith starts his speeches of "talent"--though they are hardly that--they are hardly more than a string of subplatitudes, square-looking, well-rigged things that almost everybody has seen, known, and heard since rome or man fell. nevertheless these signs of perfect manner, these series of noble sentiments that the "noble" never get off, are forcibly, clearly, and persuasively handed out--eloquently, even beautifully expressed, and with such personal charm, magnetism, and strength, that their profound messages speed right through the minds and hearts, without as much as spattering the walls, and land right square in the middle of the listener's vanity. for all this is a part of manner and its quality is of splendor--for manner is at times a good bluff but substance a poor one and knows it. the discovered one's usual and first great outburst is probably the greatest truth that he ever utters. fearlessly standing, he looks straight into the eyes of the populace and with a strong ringing voice (for strong voices and strong statesmanship are inseparable) and with words far more eloquent than the following, he sings "this honor is greater than i deserve but duty calls me--(what, not stated)... if elected, i shall be your servant" ... (for, it is told, that he believes in modesty,--that he has even boasted that he is the most modest man in the country)... thus he has the right to shout, "first, last and forever i am for the people. i am against all bosses. i have no sympathy for politicians. i am for strict economy, liberal improvements and justice! i am also for the--ten commandments" (his intuitive political sagacity keeps him from mentioning any particular one).--but a sublime height is always reached in his perorations. here we learn that he believes in honesty--(repeat "honesty");--we are even allowed to infer that he is one of the very few who know that there is such a thing; and we also learn that since he was a little boy (barefoot) his motto has been "do right,"--he swerves not from the right!--he believes in nothing but the right; (to him--everything is right!--if it gets him elected); but cheers invariably stop this great final truth (in brackets) from rising to animate expression. now all of these translucent axioms are true (are not axioms always true?),--as far as manner is concerned. in other words, the manner functions perfectly. but where is the divine substance? this is not there--why should it be--if it were he might not be there. "substance" is not featured in this discovery. for the truth of substance is sometimes silence, sometimes ellipses,--and the latter if supplied might turn some of the declarations above into perfect truths,--for instance "first and last and forever i am for the people ('s votes). i'm against all bosses (against me). i have no sympathy for (rival) politicians," etc., etc. but these tedious attempts at comedy should stop,--they're too serious,--besides the illustration may be a little hard on a few, the minority (the non-people) though not on the many, the majority (the people)! but even an assumed parody may help to show what a power manner is for reaction unless it is counterbalanced and then saturated by the other part of the duality. thus it appears that all there is to this great discovery is that one good politician has discovered another good politician. for manner has brought forth its usual talent;--for manner cannot discover the genius who has discarded platitudes--the genius who has devised a new and surpassing order for mankind, simple and intricate enough, abstract and definite enough, locally impractical and universally practical enough, to wipe out the need for further discoveries of "talent" and incidentally the discoverer's own fortune and political "manner." furthermore, he (this genius) never will be discovered until the majority-spirit, the common-heart, the human-oversoul, the source of all great values, converts all talent into genius, all manner into substance--until the direct expression of the mind and soul of the majority, the divine right of all consciousness, social, moral, and spiritual, discloses the one true art and thus finally discovers the one true leader--even itself:--then no leaders, no politicians, no manner, will hold sway--and no more speeches will be heard. the intensity today, with which techniques and media are organized and used, tends to throw the mind away from a "common sense" and towards "manner" and thus to resultant weak and mental states--for example, the byronic fallacy--that one who is full of turbid feeling about himself is qualified to be some sort of an artist. in this relation "manner" also leads some to think that emotional sympathy for self is as true a part of art as sympathy for others; and a prejudice in favor of the good and bad of one personality against the virtue of many personalities. it may be that when a poet or a whistler becomes conscious that he is in the easy path of any particular idiom,--that he is helplessly prejudiced in favor of any particular means of expression,--that his manner can be catalogued as modern or classic,--that he favors a contrapuntal groove, a sound-coloring one, a sensuous one, a successful one, or a melodious one (whatever that means),--that his interests lie in the french school or the german school, or the school of saturn,--that he is involved in this particular "that" or that particular "this," or in any particular brand of emotional complexes,--in a word, when he becomes conscious that his style is "his personal own,"--that it has monopolized a geographical part of the world's sensibilities, then it may be that the value of his substance is not growing,--that it even may have started on its way backwards,--it may be that he is trading an inspiration for a bad habit and finally that he is reaching fame, permanence, or some other under-value, and that he is getting farther and farther from a perfect truth. but, on the contrary side of the picture, it is not unreasonable to imagine that if he (this poet, composer, and laborer) is open to all the overvalues within his reach,--if he stands unprotected from all the showers of the absolute which may beat upon him,--if he is willing to use or learn to use, or at least if he is not afraid of trying to use, whatever he can, of any and all lessons of the infinite that humanity has received and thrown to man,--that nature has exposed and sacrificed, that life and death have translated--if he accepts all and sympathizes with all, is influenced by all, whether consciously or sub-consciously, drastically or humbly, audibly or inaudibly, whether it be all the virtue of satan or the only evil of heaven--and all, even, at one time, even in one chord,--then it may be that the value of his substance, and its value to himself, to his art, to all art, even to the common soul is growing and approaching nearer and nearer to perfect truths--whatever they are and wherever they may be. again, a certain kind of manner-over-influence may be caused by a group-disease germ. the over-influence by, the over-admiration of, and the over-association with a particular artistic personality or a particular type or group of personalities tends to produce equally favorable and unfavorable symptoms, but the unfavorable ones seem to be more contagious. perhaps the impulse remark of some famous man (whose name we forget) that he "loved music but hated musicians," might be followed (with some good results) at least part of the time. to see the sun rise, a man has but to get up early, and he can always have bach in his pocket. we hear that mr. smith or mr. morgan, etc., et al. design to establish a "course at rome," to raise the standard of american music, (or the standard of american composers--which is it?) but possibly the more our composer accepts from his patrons "et al." the less he will accept from himself. it may be possible that a day in a "kansas wheat field" will do more for him than three years in rome. it may be, that many men--perhaps some of genius--(if you won't admit that all are geniuses) have been started on the downward path of subsidy by trying to write a thousand dollar prize poem or a ten thousand dollar prize opera. how many masterpieces have been prevented from blossoming in this way? a cocktail will make a man eat more, but will not give him a healthy, normal appetite (if he had not that already). if a bishop should offer a "prize living" to the curate who will love god the hardest for fifteen days, whoever gets the prize would love god the least. such stimulants, it strikes us, tend to industrialize art, rather than develop a spiritual sturdiness--a sturdiness which mr. sedgwick says [footnote: h. d. sedgwick. the new american type. riverside press.] "shows itself in a close union between spiritual life and the ordinary business of life," against spiritual feebleness which "shows itself in the separation of the two." if one's spiritual sturdiness is congenital and somewhat perfect he is not only conscious that this separation has no part in his own soul, but he does not feel its existence in others. he does not believe there is such a thing. but perfection in this respect is rare. and for the most of us, we believe, this sturdiness would be encouraged by anything that will keep or help us keep a normal balance between the spiritual life and the ordinary life. if for every thousand dollar prize a potato field be substituted, so that these candidates of "clio" can dig a little in real life, perhaps dig up a natural inspiration, arts--air might be a little clearer--a little freer from certain traditional delusions, for instance, that free thought and free love always go to the same cafe--that atmosphere and diligence are synonymous. to quote thoreau incorrectly: "when half-gods talk, the gods walk!" everyone should have the opportunity of not being over-influenced. again, this over-influence by and over-insistence upon "manner" may finally lead some to believe "that manner for manner's sake is a basis of music." someone is quoted as saying that "ragtime is the true american music." anyone will admit that it is one of the many true, natural, and, nowadays, conventional means of expression. it is an idiom, perhaps a "set or series of colloquialisms," similar to those that have added through centuries and through natural means, some beauty to all languages. every language is but the evolution of slang, and possibly the broad "a" in harvard may have come down from the "butcher of southwark." to examine ragtime rhythms and the syncopations of schumann or of brahms seems to the writer to show how much alike they are not. ragtime, as we hear it, is, of course, more (but not much more) than a natural dogma of shifted accents, or a mixture of shifted and minus accents. it is something like wearing a derby hat on the back of the head, a shuffling lilt of a happy soul just let out of a baptist church in old alabama. ragtime has its possibilities. but it does not "represent the american nation" any more than some fine old senators represent it. perhaps we know it now as an ore before it has been refined into a product. it may be one of nature's ways of giving art raw material. time will throw its vices away and weld its virtues into the fabric of our music. it has its uses as the cruet on the boarding-house table has, but to make a meal of tomato ketchup and horse-radish, to plant a whole farm with sunflowers, even to put a sunflower into every bouquet, would be calling nature something worse than a politician. mr. daniel gregory mason, whose wholesome influence, by the way, is doing as much perhaps for music in america as american music is, amusingly says: "if indeed the land of lincoln and emerson has degenerated until nothing remains of it but a 'jerk and rattle,' then we, at least, are free to repudiate this false patriotism of 'my country right or wrong,' to insist that better than bad music is no music, and to let our beloved art subside finally under the clangor of the subway gongs and automobile horns, dead, but not dishonored." and so may we ask: is it better to sing inadequately of the "leaf on walden floating," and die "dead but not dishonored," or to sing adequately of the "cherry on the cocktail," and live forever? 6 if anyone has been strong enough to escape these rocks--this "scylla and charybdis,"--has survived these wrong choices, these under-values with their prizes, bohemias and heroes, is not such a one in a better position, is he not abler and freer to "declare himself and so to love his cause so singly that he will cleave to it, and forsake all else? what is this cause for the american composer but the utmost musical beauty that he, as an individual man, with his own qualities and defects, is capable of understanding and striving towards?--forsaking all else except those types of musical beauty that come home to him," [footnote: contemporary composers, d. g. mason, macmillan co., n. y.] and that his spiritual conscience intuitively approves. "it matters not one jot, provided this course of personal loyalty to a cause be steadfastly pursued, what the special characteristics of the style of the music may be to which one gives one's devotion." [footnote: contemporary composers, d. g. mason, macmillan co., n. y.] this, if over-translated, may be made to mean, what we have been trying to say--that if your interest, enthusiasm, and devotion on the side of substance and truth, are of the stuff to make you so sincere that you sweat--to hell with manner and repose! mr. mason is responsible for too many young minds, in their planting season to talk like this, to be as rough, or to go as far, but he would probably admit that, broadly speaking--some such way, i.e., constantly recognizing this ideal duality in art, though not the most profitable road for art to travel, is almost its only way out to eventual freedom and salvation. sidney lanier, in a letter to bayard taylor writes: "i have so many fair dreams and hopes about music in these days (1875). it is gospel whereof the people are in great need. as christ gathered up the ten commandments and redistilled them into the clear liquid of the wondrous eleventh--love god utterly and thy neighbor as thyself--so i think the time will come when music rightly developed to its now little forseen grandeur will be found to be a late revelation of all gospels in one." could the art of music, or the art of anything have a more profound reason for being than this? a conception unlimited by the narrow names of christian, pagan, jew, or angel! a vision higher and deeper than art itself! 7 the humblest composer will not find true humility in aiming low--he must never be timid or afraid of trying to express that which he feels is far above his power to express, any more than he should be afraid of breaking away, when necessary, from easy first sounds, or afraid of admitting that those half truths that come to him at rare intervals, are half true, for instance, that all art galleries contain masterpieces, which are nothing more than a history of art's beautiful mistakes. he should never fear of being called a high-brow--but not the kind in prof. brander matthews' definition. john l. sullivan was a "high-brow" in his art. a high-brow can always whip a low-brow. if he "truly seeks," he "will surely find" many things to sustain him. he can go to a part of alcott's philosophy--"that all occupations of man's body and soul in their diversity come from but one mind and soul!" if he feels that to subscribe to all of the foregoing and then submit, though not as evidence, the work of his own hands is presumptuous, let him remember that a man is not always responsible for the wart on his face, or a girl for the bloom on her cheek, and as they walk out of a sunday for an airing, people will see them--but they must have the air. he can remember with plotinus, "that in every human soul there is the ray of the celestial beauty," and therefore every human outburst may contain a partial ray. and he can believe that it is better to go to the plate and strike out than to hold the bench down, for by facing the pitcher, he may then know the umpire better, and possibly see a new parabola. his presumption, if it be that, may be but a kind of courage juvenal sings about, and no harm can then be done either side. "cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator." 8 to divide by an arbitrary line something that cannot be divided is a process that is disturbing to some. perhaps our deductions are not as inevitable as they are logical, which suggests that they are not "logic." an arbitrary assumption is never fair to all any of the time, or to anyone all the time. many will resent the abrupt separation that a theory of duality in music suggests and say that these general subdivisions are too closely inter-related to be labeled decisively--"this or that." there is justice in this criticism, but our answer is that it is better to be short on the long than long on the short. in such an abstruse art as music it is easy for one to point to this as substance and to that as manner. some will hold and it is undeniable--in fact quite obvious--that manner has a great deal to do with the beauty of substance, and that to make a too arbitrary division, or distinction between them, is to interfere, to some extent, with an art's beauty and unity. there is a great deal of truth in this too. but on the other hand, beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. many sounds that we are used to, do not bother us, and for that reason, we are inclined to call them beautiful. frequently,--possibly almost invariably,--analytical and impersonal tests will show, we believe, that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep. a narcotic is not always unnecessary, but it is seldom a basis of progress,--that is, wholesome evolution in any creative experience. this kind of progress has a great deal to do with beauty--at least in its deeper emotional interests, if not in its moral values. (the above is only a personal impression, but it is based on carefully remembered instances, during a period of about fifteen or twenty years.) possibly the fondness for individual utterance may throw out a skin-deep arrangement, which is readily accepted as beautiful--formulae that weaken rather than toughen up the musical-muscles. if the composer's sincere conception of his art and of its functions and ideals, coincide to such an extent with these groove-colored permutations of tried out progressions in expediency, that he can arrange them over and over again to his transcendent delight--has he or has he not been drugged with an overdose of habit-forming sounds? and as a result do not the muscles of his clientele become flabbier and flabbier until they give way altogether and find refuge only in a seasoned opera box--where they can see without thinking? and unity is too generally conceived of, or too easily accepted as analogous to form, and form (as analogous) to custom, and custom to habit, and habit may be one of the parents of custom and form, and there are all kinds of parents. perhaps all unity in art, at its inception, is half-natural and half-artificial but time insists, or at least makes us, or inclines to make us feel that it is all natural. it is easy for us to accept it as such. the "unity of dress" for a man at a ball requires a collar, yet he could dance better without it. coherence, to a certain extent, must bear some relation to the listener's subconscious perspective. for example, a critic has to listen to a thousand concerts a year, in which there is much repetition, not only of the same pieces, but the same formal relations of tones, cadences, progressions, etc. there is present a certain routine series of image-necessity-stimulants, which he doesn't seem to need until they disappear. instead of listening to music, he listens around it. and from this subconscious viewpoint, he inclines perhaps more to the thinking about than thinking in music. if he could go into some other line of business for a year or so perhaps his perspective would be more naturally normal. the unity of a sonata movement has long been associated with its form, and to a greater extent than is necessary. a first theme, a development, a second in a related key and its development, the free fantasia, the recapitulation, and so on, and over again. mr. richter or mr. parker may tell us that all this is natural, for it is based on the classic-song form, but in spite of your teachers a vague feeling sometimes creeps over you that the form-nature of the song has been stretched out into deformity. some claim for tchaikowsky that his clarity and coherence of design is unparalleled (or some such word) in works for the orchestra. that depends, it seems to us, on how far repetition is an essential part of clarity and coherence. we know that butter comes from cream--but how long must we watch the "churning arm!" if nature is not enthusiastic about explanation, why should tschaikowsky be? beethoven had to churn, to some extent, to make his message carry. he had to pull the ear, hard and in the same place and several times, for the 1790 ear was tougher than the 1890 one. but the "great russian weeper" might have spared us. to emerson, "unity and the over-soul, or the common-heart, are synonymous." unity is at least nearer to these than to solid geometry, though geometry may be all unity. but to whatever unpleasantness the holding to this theory of duality brings us, we feel that there is a natural law underneath it all, and like all laws of nature, a liberal interpretation is the one nearest the truth. what part of these supplements are opposites? what part of substance is manner? what part of this duality is polarity? these questions though not immaterial may be disregarded, if there be a sincere appreciation (intuition is always sincere) of the "divine" spirit of the thing. enthusiasm for, and recognition of these higher over these lower values will transform a destructive iconoclasm into creation, and a mere devotion into consecration--a consecration which, like amphion's music, will raise the walls of thebes. 9 assuming, and then granting, that art-activity can be transformed or led towards an eventual consecration, by recognizing and using in their true relation, as much as one can, these higher and lower dual values--and that the doing so is a part, if not the whole of our old problem of paralleling or approving in art the highest attributes, moral and spiritual, one sees in life--if you will grant all this, let us offer a practical suggestion--a thing that one who has imposed the foregoing should try to do just out of common decency, though it be but an attempt, perhaps, to make his speculations less speculative, and to beat off metaphysics. all, men-bards with a divine spark, and bards without, feel the need at times of an inspiration from without, "the breath of another soul to stir our inner flame," especially when we are in pursuit of a part of that "utmost musical beauty," that we are capable of understanding--when we are breathlessly running to catch a glimpse of that unforeseen grandeur of mr. lanier's dream. in this beauty and grandeur perhaps marionettes and their souls have a part--though how great their part is, we hear, is still undetermined; but it is morally certain that, at times, a part with itself must be some of those greater contemplations that have been caught in the "world's soul," as it were, and nourished for us there in the soil of its literature. if an interest in, and a sympathy for, the thought-visions of men like charles kingsley, marcus aurelius, whit tier, montaigne, paul of tarsus, robert browning, pythagoras, channing, milton, sophocles, swedenborg, thoreau, francis of assisi, wordsworth, voltaire, garrison, plutarch, ruskin, ariosto, and all kindred spirits and souls of great measure, from david down to rupert brooke,--if a study of the thought of such men creates a sympathy, even a love for them and their ideal-part, it is certain that this, however inadequately expressed, is nearer to what music was given man for, than a devotion to "tristan's sensual love of isolde," to the "tragic murder of a drunken duke," or to the sad thoughts of a bathtub when the water is being let out. it matters little here whether a man who paints a picture of a useless beautiful landscape imperfectly is a greater genius than the man who paints a useful bad smell perfectly. it is not intended in this suggestion that inspirations coming from the higher planes should be limited to any particular thought or work, as the mind receives it. the plan rather embraces all that should go with an expression of the composite-value. it is of the underlying spirit, the direct unrestricted imprint of one soul on another, a portrait, not a photograph of the personality--it is the ideal part that would be caught in this canvas. it is a sympathy for "substance"--the over-value together with a consciousness that there must be a lower value--the "demosthenic part of the philippics"--the "ciceronic part of the catiline," the sublimity, against the vileness of rousseau's confessions. it is something akin to, but something more than these predominant partial tones of hawthorne--"the grand old countenance of homer; the decrepit form, but vivid face of aesop; the dark presence of dante; the wild ariosto; rabelais' smile of deep-wrought mirth; the profound, pathetic humor of cervantes; the all-glorious shakespeare; spenser, meet guest for allegoric structure; the severe divinity of milton; and bunyan, molded of humblest clay, but instinct with celestial fire." there are communities now, partly vanished, but cherished and sacred, scattered throughout this world of ours, in which freedom of thought and soul, and even of body, have been fought for. and we believe that there ever lives in that part of the over-soul, native to them, the thoughts which these freedom-struggles have inspired. america is not too young to have its divinities, and its place legends. many of those "transcendent thoughts" and "visions" which had their birth beneath our concord elms--messages that have brought salvation to many listening souls throughout the world--are still growing, day by day, to greater and greater beauty--are still showing clearer and clearer man's way to god! no true composer will take his substance from another finite being--but there are times, when he feels that his self-expression needs some liberation from at least a part of his own soul. at such times, shall he not better turn to those greater souls, rather than to the external, the immediate, and the "garish day"? the strains of one man may fall far below the course of those phaetons of concord, or of the aegean sea, or of westmorland--but the greater the distance his music falls away, the more reason that some greater man shall bring his nearer those higher spheres. ************************************************************** info about this e-text edition this edition of charles ives' "essays before a sonata" was originally published in 1920 by the knickerbocker press. it has also been republished unabridged by dover publications, inc., in a 1962 edition, isbn 0-486-20320-4. this electronic text was prepared by john mamoun with help from numerous other proofreaders, including those associated with charles franks' distributed proofreaders website. this e-text is public domain, freely copyable and distributable for any non-commercial purpose, and may be included without royalty or permission on a mass media storage product, such as a cd-rom, that contains at least 50 public domain electronic texts, whether offered for non-commercial or commercial purposes. any other commercial usage requires permission. use of the project gutenberg trademark requires separate permission. proofreaders emerson and other essays by john jay chapman ams press new york _second printing 1969_ reprinted from the edition of 1899, new york first ams edition published 1965 manufactured in the united states of america library of congress catalog card number: 75-108126 sen: 404-00619-1 contents emerson 3 walt whitman 111 a study of romeo 131 michael angelo's sonnets 153 the fourth canto of the inferno 173 robert browning 185 robert louis stevenson 217 emerson i "leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. i wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. the worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. masses! the calamity is the masses. i do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. if government knew how, i should like to see it check, not multiply the population. when it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men spoken on their honor and their conscience." this extract from the conduct of life gives fairly enough the leading thought of emerson's life. the unending warfare between the individual and society shows us in each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or a musician who exalts and deifies the individual, and leads us back again to the only object which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which can permanently excite it,--the character of a man. it is surprising to find this identity of content in all great deliverances. the only thing we really admire is personal liberty. those who fought for it and those who enjoyed it are our heroes. but the hero may enslave his race by bringing in a system of tyranny; the battle-cry of freedom may become a dogma which crushes the soul; one good custom may corrupt the world. and so the inspiration of one age becomes the damnation of the next. this crystallizing of life into death has occurred so often that it may almost be regarded as one of the laws of progress. emerson represents a protest against the tyranny of democracy. he is the most recent example of elemental hero-worship. his opinions are absolutely unqualified except by his temperament. he expresses a form of belief in the importance of the individual which is independent of any personal relations he has with the world. it is as if a man had been withdrawn from the earth and dedicated to condensing and embodying this eternal idea--the value of the individual soul--so vividly, so vitally, that his words could not die, yet in such illusive and abstract forms that by no chance and by no power could his creed be used for purposes of tyranny. dogma cannot be extracted from it. schools cannot be built on it. it either lives as the spirit lives, or else it evaporates and leaves nothing. emerson was so afraid of the letter that killeth that he would hardly trust his words to print. he was assured there was no such thing as literal truth, but only literal falsehood. he therefore resorted to metaphors which could by no chance be taken literally. and he has probably succeeded in leaving a body of work which cannot be made to operate to any other end than that for which he designed it. if this be true, he has accomplished the inconceivable feat of eluding misconception. if it be true, he stands alone in the history of teachers; he has circumvented fate, he has left an unmixed blessing behind him. the signs of those times which brought forth emerson are not wholly undecipherable. they are the same times which gave rise to every character of significance during the period before the war. emerson is indeed the easiest to understand of all the men of his time, because his life is freest from the tangles and qualifications of circumstance. he is a sheer and pure type and creature of destiny, and the unconsciousness that marks his development allies him to the deepest phenomena. it is convenient, in describing him, to use language which implies consciousness on his part, but he himself had no purpose, no theory of himself; he was a product. the years between 1820 and 1830 were the most pitiable through which this country has ever passed. the conscience of the north was pledged to the missouri compromise, and that compromise neither slumbered nor slept. in new england, where the old theocratical oligarchy of the colonies had survived the revolution and kept under its own waterlocks the new flood of trade, the conservatism of politics reinforced the conservatism of religion; and as if these two inquisitions were not enough to stifle the soul of man, the conservatism of business self-interest was superimposed. the history of the conflicts which followed has been written by the radicals, who negligently charge up to self-interest all the resistance which establishments offer to change. but it was not solely self-interest, it was conscience that backed the missouri compromise, nowhere else, naturally, so strongly as in new england. it was conscience that made cowards of us all. the white-lipped generation of edward everett were victims, one might even say martyrs, to conscience. they suffered the most terrible martyrdom that can fall to man, a martyrdom which injured their immortal volition and dried up the springs of life. if it were not that our poets have too seldom deigned to dip into real life, i do not know what more awful subject for a poem could have been found than that of the new england judge enforcing the fugitive slave law. for lack of such a poem the heroism of these men has been forgotten, the losing heroism of conservatism. it was this spiritual power of a committed conscience which met the new forces as they arose, and it deserves a better name than these new forces afterward gave it. in 1830 the social fruits of these heavy conditions could be seen in the life of the people. free speech was lost. "i know no country," says tocqueville, who was here in 1831, "in which there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in america." tocqueville recurs to the point again and again. he cannot disguise his surprise at it, and it tinged his whole philosophy and his book. the timidity of the americans of this era was a thing which intelligent foreigners could not understand. miss martineau wrote in her autobiography: "it was not till months afterwards that i was told that there were two reasons why i was not invited there [chelsea] as elsewhere. one reason was that i had avowed, in reply to urgent questions, that i was disappointed in an oration of mr. everett's; and another was that i had publicly condemned the institution of slavery. i hope the boston people have outgrown the childishness of sulking at opinions not in either case volunteered, but obtained by pressure. but really, the subservience to opinion at that time seemed a sort of mania." the mania was by no means confined to boston, but qualified this period of our history throughout the northern states. there was no literature. "if great writers have not at present existed in america, the reason is very simply given in the fact that there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in america," wrote tocqueville. there were no amusements, neither music nor sport nor pastime, indoors or out of doors. the whole life of the community was a life of the intelligence, and upon the intelligence lay the weight of intellectual tyranny. the pressure kept on increasing, and the suppressed forces kept on increasing, till at last, as if to show what gigantic power was needed to keep conservatism dominant, the merchant province put forward daniel webster. the worst period of panic seems to have preceded the anti-slavery agitations of 1831, because these agitations soon demonstrated that the sky did not fall nor the earth yawn and swallow massachusetts because of mr. garrison's opinions, as most people had sincerely believed would be the case. some semblance of free speech was therefore gradually regained. let us remember the world upon which the young emerson's eyes opened. the south was a plantation. the north crooked the hinges of the knee where thrift might follow fawning. it was the era of martin chuzzlewit, a malicious caricature,--founded on fact. this time of humiliation, when there was no free speech, no literature, little manliness, no reality, no simplicity, no accomplishment, was the era of american brag. we flattered the foreigner and we boasted of ourselves. we were over-sensitive, insolent, and cringing. as late as 1845, g.p. putnam, a most sensible and modest man, published a book to show what the country had done in the field of culture. the book is a monument of the age. with all its good sense and good humor, it justifies foreign contempt because it is explanatory. underneath everything lay a feeling of unrest, an instinct,--"this country cannot permanently endure half slave and half free,"--which was the truth, but which could not be uttered. so long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid upon all subjects. they wear an iron crown and talk in whispers. such social conditions crush and maim the individual, and throughout new england, as throughout the whole north, the individual was crushed and maimed. the generous youths who came to manhood between 1820 and 1830, while this deadly era was maturing, seem to have undergone a revulsion against the world almost before touching it; at least two of them suffered, revolted, and condemned, while still boys sitting on benches in school, and came forth advancing upon this old society like gladiators. the activity of william lloyd garrison, the man of action, preceded by several years that of emerson, who is his prophet. both of them were parts of one revolution. one of emerson's articles of faith was that a man's thoughts spring from his actions rather than his actions from his thoughts, and possibly the same thing holds good for society at large. perhaps all truths, whether moral or economic, must be worked out in real life before they are discovered by the student, and it was therefore necessary that garrison should be evolved earlier than emerson. the silent years of early manhood, during which emerson passed through the divinity school and to his ministry, known by few, understood by none, least of all by himself, were years in which the revolting spirit of an archangel thought out his creed. he came forth perfect, with that serenity of which we have scarce another example in history,--that union of the man himself, his beliefs, and his vehicle of expression that makes men great because it makes them comprehensible. the philosophy into which he had already transmuted all his earlier theology at the time we first meet him consisted of a very simple drawing together of a few ideas, all of which had long been familiar to the world. it is the wonderful use he made of these ideas, the closeness with which they fitted his soul, the tact with which he took what he needed, like a bird building its nest, that make the originality, the man. the conclusion of berkeley, that the external world is known to us only through our impressions, and that therefore, for aught we know, the whole universe exists only in our own consciousness, cannot be disproved. it is so simple a conception that a child may understand it; and it has probably been passed before the attention of every thinking man since plato's time. the notion is in itself a mere philosophical catch or crux to which there is no answer. it may be true. the mystics made this doctrine useful. they were not content to doubt the independent existence of the external world. they imagined that this external world, the earth, the planets, the phenomena of nature, bore some relation to the emotions and destiny of the soul. the soul and the cosmos were somehow related, and related so intimately that the cosmos might be regarded as a sort of projection or diagram of the soul. plato was the first man who perceived that this idea could be made to provide the philosopher with a vehicle of expression more powerful than any other. if a man will once plant himself firmly on the proposition that _he is_ the universe, that every emotion or expression of his mind is correlated in some way to phenomena in the external world, and that he shall say how correlated, he is in a position where the power of speech is at a maximum. his figures of speech, his tropes, his witticisms, take rank with the law of gravity and the precession of the equinoxes. philosophical exaltation of the individual cannot go beyond this point. it is the climax. this is the school of thought to which emerson belonged. the sun and moon, the planets, are mere symbols. they signify whatever the poet chooses. the planets for the most part stay in conjunction just long enough to flash his thought through their symbolism, and no permanent relation is established between the soul and the zodiac. there is, however, one link of correlation between the external and internal worlds which emerson considered established, and in which he believed almost literally, namely, the moral law. this idea he drew from kant through coleridge and wordsworth, and it is so familiar to us all that it hardly needs stating. the fancy that the good, the true, the beautiful,--all things of which we instinctively approve,--are somehow connected together and are really one thing; that our appreciation of them is in its essence the recognition of a law; that this law, in fact all law and the very idea of law, is a mere subjective experience; and that hence any external sequence which we coördinate and name, like the law of gravity, is really intimately connected with our moral nature,--this fancy has probably some basis of truth. emerson adopted it as a corner-stone of his thought. such are the ideas at the basis of emerson's philosophy, and it is fair to speak of them in this place because they antedate everything else which we know of him. they had been for years in his mind before he spoke at all. it was in the armor of this invulnerable idealism and with weapons like shafts of light that he came forth to fight. in 1836, at the age of thirty-three, emerson published the little pamphlet called nature, which was an attempt to state his creed. although still young, he was not without experience of life. he had been assistant minister to the rev. dr. ware from 1829 to 1832, when he resigned his ministry on account of his views regarding the lord's supper. he had married and lost his first wife in the same interval. he had been abroad and had visited carlyle in 1833. he had returned and settled in concord, and had taken up the profession of lecturing, upon which he in part supported himself ever after. it is unnecessary to review these early lectures. "large portions of them," says mr. cabot, his biographer, "appeared afterwards in the essays, especially those of the first series." suffice it that through them emerson had become so well known that although nature was published anonymously, he was recognized as the author. many people had heard of him at the time he resigned his charge, and the story went abroad that the young minister of the second church had gone mad. the lectures had not discredited the story, and nature seemed to corroborate it. such was the impression which the book made upon boston in 1836. as we read it to-day, we are struck by its extraordinary beauty of language. it is a supersensuous, lyrical, and sincere rhapsody, written evidently by a man of genius. it reveals a nature compelling respect,--a shelley, and yet a sort of yankee shelley, who is mad only when the wind is nor'-nor'west; a mature nature which must have been nourished for years upon its own thoughts, to speak this new language so eloquently, to stand so calmly on its feet. the deliverance of his thought is so perfect that this work adapts itself to our mood and has the quality of poetry. this fluency emerson soon lost; it is the quality missing in his poetry. it is the efflorescence of youth. "in good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, i have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. i am glad to the brink of fear. in the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. in the woods is perpetual youth. within these plantations of god, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years.... it is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect." perhaps these quotations from the pamphlet called nature are enough to show the clouds of speculation in which emerson had been walking. with what lightning they were charged was soon seen. in 1837 he was asked to deliver the phi beta kappa oration at cambridge. this was the opportunity for which he had been waiting. the mystic and eccentric young poet-preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns out to be a man exclusively interested in real life. this recluse, too tender for contact with the rough facts of the world, whose conscience has retired him to rural concord, pours out a vial of wrath. this cub puts forth the paw of a full-grown lion. emerson has left behind him nothing stronger than this address, the american scholar. it was the first application of his views to the events of his day, written and delivered in the heat of early manhood while his extraordinary powers were at their height. it moves with a logical progression of which he soon lost the habit. the subject of it, the scholar's relation to the world, was the passion of his life. the body of his belief is to be found in this address, and in any adequate account of him the whole address ought to be given. "thus far," he said, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. as such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill.... the theory of books is noble. the scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. it came into him life; it went out from him truth.... yet hence arises a grave mischief. the sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. the poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine, also. the writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant.... books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. what is the right use? what is the one end which all means go to effect? they are for nothing but to inspire.... the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. this every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. the soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. in this action it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man.... genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. the literature of every nation bears me witness. the english dramatic poets have shakspearized now for two hundred years.... these being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. he, and he only, knows the world. the world of any moment is the merest appearance. some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. the odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. 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." dr. holmes called this speech of emerson's our "intellectual declaration of independence," and indeed it was. "the phi beta kappa speech," says mr. lowell, "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals,--a scene always to be treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. what crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" the authorities of the divinity school can hardly have been very careful readers of nature and the american scholar, or they would not have invited emerson, in 1838, to deliver the address to the graduating class. this was emerson's second opportunity to apply his beliefs directly to society. a few lines out of the famous address are enough to show that he saw in the church of his day signs of the same decadence that he saw in the letters: "the prayers and even the dogmas of our church are like the zodiac of denderah and the astronomical monuments of the hindoos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and business of the people. they mark the height to which the waters once rose.... it is the office of a true teacher to show us that god is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake. the true christianity--a faith like christ's in the infinitude of man--is lost. none believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. ah me! no man goeth alone. all men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the god who seeth in secret. they cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. they think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world." it is almost misleading to speak of the lofty utterances of these early addresses as attacks upon society, but their reception explains them. the element of absolute courage is the same in all natures. emerson himself was not unconscious of what function he was performing. the "storm in our wash-bowl" which followed this divinity school address, the letters of remonstrance from friends, the advertisements by the divinity school of "no complicity," must have been cheering to emerson. his unseen yet dominating ambition is shown throughout the address, and in this note in his diary of the following year:- "_august_ 31. yesterday at the phi beta kappa anniversary. steady, steady. i am convinced that if a man will be a true scholar he shall have perfect freedom. the young people and the mature hint at odium and the aversion of forces to be presently encountered in society. i say no; i fear it not." the lectures and addresses which form the latter half of the first volume in the collected edition show the early emerson in the ripeness of his powers. these writings have a lyrical sweep and a beauty which the later works often lack. passages in them remind us of hamlet:- "how silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without space to insert an atom;--in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. it will not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor shown.... the great pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things and the firmament, his coat of stars,--was but the representative of thee, o rich and various man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the city of god; in thy heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong.... every star in heaven is discontent and insatiable. gravitation and chemistry cannot content them. ever they woo and court the eye of the beholder. every man who comes into the world they seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into his mind, for they desire to republish themselves in a more delicate world than that they occupy.... so it is with all immaterial objects. these beautiful basilisks set their brute glorious eyes on the eye of every child, and, if they can, cause their nature to pass through his wondering eyes into him, and so all things are mixed." emerson is never far from his main thought:- "the universe does not attract us till it is housed in an individual." "a man, a personal ascendency, is the only great phenomenon." "i cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity." on the other hand, he is never far from his great fear: "but truth is such a fly-away, such a sly-boots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light." "let him beware of proposing to himself any end.... i say to you plainly, there is no end so sacred or so large that if pursued for itself will not become carrion and an offence to the nostril." there can be nothing finer than emerson's knowledge of the world, his sympathy with young men and with the practical difficulties of applying his teachings. we can see in his early lectures before students and mechanics how much he had learned about the structure of society from his own short contact with the organized church. "each finds a tender and very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success. each requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and lofty integrity.... the fact that a new thought and hope have dawned in your breast, should apprise you that in the same hour a new light broke in upon a thousand private hearts.... and further i will not dissemble my hope that each person whom i address has felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidity, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him to go in honor and with benefit...." beneath all lay a greater matter,--emerson's grasp of the forms and conditions of progress, his reach of intellect, which could afford fair play to every one. his lecture on the conservative is not a puzzling _jeu d'esprit_, like bishop blougram's apology, but an honest attempt to set up the opposing chessmen of conservatism and reform so as to represent real life. hardly can such a brilliant statement of the case be found elsewhere in literature. it is not necessary to quote here the reformer's side of the question, for emerson's whole life was devoted to it. the conservatives' attitude he gives with such accuracy and such justice that the very bankers of state street seem to be speaking:- "the order of things is as good as the character of the population permits. consider it as the work of a great and beneficent and progressive necessity, which, from the first pulsation in the first animal life up to the present high culture of the best nations, has advanced thus far.... "the conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical would talk sufficiently to the purpose if we were still in the garden of eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory is right, but he makes no allowance for friction, and this omission makes his whole doctrine false. the idealist retorts that the conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other extreme. the conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and pap-spoon, swallowing pills and herb tea. sickness gets organized as well as health, the vice as well as the virtue." it is unnecessary to go, one by one, through the familiar essays and lectures which emerson published between 1838 and 1875. they are in everybody's hands and in everybody's thoughts. in 1840 he wrote in his diary: "in all my lectures i have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. this the people accept readily enough, and even with commendation, as long as i call the lecture art or politics, or literature or the household; but the moment i call it religion they are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which they receive elsewhere to a new class of facts." to the platform he returned, and left it only once or twice during the remainder of his life. his writings vary in coherence. in his early occasional pieces, like the phi beta kappa address, coherence is at a maximum. they were written for a purpose, and were perhaps struck off all at once. but he earned his living by lecturing, and a lecturer is always recasting his work and using it in different forms. a lecturer has no prejudice against repetition. it is noticeable that in some of emerson's important lectures the logical scheme is more perfect than in his essays. the truth seems to be that in the process of working up and perfecting his writings, in revising and filing his sentences, the logical scheme became more and more obliterated. another circumstance helped make his style fragmentary. he was by nature a man of inspirations and exalted moods. he was subject to ecstasies, during which his mind worked with phenomenal brilliancy. throughout his works and in his diary we find constant reference to these moods, and to his own inability to control or recover them. "but what we want is consecutiveness. 't is with us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again. ah! could we turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of copernican worlds!" in order to take advantage of these periods of divination, he used to write down the thoughts that came to him at such times. from boyhood onward he kept journals and commonplace books, and in the course of his reading and meditation he collected innumerable notes and quotations which he indexed for ready use. in these mines he "quarried," as mr. cabot says, for his lectures and essays. when he needed a lecture he went to the repository, threw together what seemed to have a bearing on some subject, and gave it a title. if any other man should adopt this method of composition, the result would be incomprehensible chaos; because most men have many interests, many moods, many and conflicting ideas. but with emerson it was otherwise. there was only one thought which could set him aflame, and that was the thought of the unfathomed might of man. this thought was his religion, his politics, his ethics, his philosophy. one moment of inspiration was in him own brother to the next moment of inspiration, although they might be separated by six weeks. when he came to put together his star-born ideas, they fitted well, no matter in what order he placed them, because they were all part of the same idea. his works are all one single attack on the vice of the age, moral cowardice. he assails it not by railings and scorn, but by positive and stimulating suggestion. the imagination of the reader is touched by every device which can awake the admiration for heroism, the consciousness of moral courage. wit, quotation, anecdote, eloquence, exhortation, rhetoric, sarcasm, and very rarely denunciation, are launched at the reader, till he feels little lambent flames beginning to kindle in him. he is perhaps unable to see the exact logical connection between two paragraphs of an essay, yet he feels they are germane. he takes up emerson tired and apathetic, but presently he feels himself growing heady and truculent, strengthened in his most inward vitality, surprised to find himself again master in his own house. the difference between emerson and the other moralists is that all these stimulating pictures and suggestions are not given by him in illustration of a general proposition. they have never been through the mill of generalization in his own mind. he himself could not have told you their logical bearing on one another. they have all the vividness of disconnected fragments of life, and yet they all throw light on one another, like the facets of a jewel. but whatever cause it was that led him to adopt his method of writing, it is certain that he succeeded in delivering himself of his thought with an initial velocity and carrying power such as few men ever attained. he has the force at his command of the thrower of the discus. his style is american, and beats with the pulse of the climate. he is the only writer we have had who writes as he speaks, who makes no literary parade, has no pretensions of any sort. he is the only writer we have had who has wholly subdued his vehicle to his temperament. it is impossible to name his style without naming his character: they are one thing. both in language and in elocution emerson was a practised and consummate artist, who knew how both to command his effects and to conceal his means. the casual, practical, disarming directness with which he writes puts any honest man at his mercy. what difference does it make whether a man who can talk like this is following an argument or not? you cannot always see emerson clearly; he is hidden by a high wall; but you always know exactly on what spot he is standing. you judge it by the flight of the objects he throws over the wall,--a bootjack, an apple, a crown, a razor, a volume of verse. with one or other of these missiles, all delivered with a very tolerable aim, he is pretty sure to hit you. these catchwords stick in the mind. people are not in general influenced by long books or discourses, but by odd fragments of observation which they overhear, sentences or head-lines which they read while turning over a book at random or while waiting for dinner to be announced. these are the oracles and orphic words that get lodged in the mind and bend a man's most stubborn will. emerson called them the police of the universe. his works are a treasury of such things. they sparkle in the mine, or you may carry them off in your pocket. they get driven into your mind like nails, and on them catch and hang your own experiences, till what was once his thought has become your character. "god offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. take which you please; you can never have both." "discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will." "it is impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself." the orchestration with which emerson introduces and sustains these notes from the spheres is as remarkable as the winged things themselves. open his works at a hazard. you hear a man talking. "a garden is like those pernicious machineries we read of every month in the newspapers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible destruction. in an evil hour he pulled down his wall and added a field to his homestead. no land is bad, but land is worse. if a man own land, the land owns him. now let him leave home if he dare. every tree and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he has done and all he means to do, stand in his way like duns, when he would go out of his gate." your attention is arrested by the reality of this gentleman in his garden, by the first-hand quality of his mind. it matters not on what subject he talks. while you are musing, still pleased and patronizing, he has picked up the bow of ulysses, bent it with the ease of ulysses, and sent a shaft clear through the twelve axes, nor missed one of them. but this, it seems, was mere byplay and marksmanship; for before you have done wondering, ulysses rises to his feet in anger, and pours flight after flight, arrow after arrow, from the great bow. the shafts sing and strike, the suitors fall in heaps. the brow of ulysses shines with unearthly splendor. the air is filled with lightning. after a little, without shock or transition, without apparent change of tone, mr. emerson is offering you a biscuit before you leave, and bidding you mind the last step at the garden end. if the man who can do these things be not an artist, then must we have a new vocabulary and rename the professions. there is, in all this effectiveness of emerson, no pose, no literary art; nothing that corresponds even remotely to the pretended modesty and ignorance with which socrates lays pitfalls for our admiration in plato's dialogues. it was the platform which determined emerson's style. he was not a writer, but a speaker. on the platform his manner of speech was a living part of his words. the pauses and hesitation, the abstraction, the searching, the balancing, the turning forward and back of the leaves of his lecture, and then the discovery, the illumination, the gleam of lightning which you saw before your eyes descend into a man of genius,--all this was emerson. he invented this style of speaking, and made it express the supersensuous, the incommunicable. lowell wrote, while still under the spell of the magician: "emerson's oration was more disjointed than usual, even with him. it began nowhere, and ended everywhere, and yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling that something beautiful had passed that way, something more beautiful than anything else, like the rising and setting of stars. every possible criticism might have been made on it but one,--that it was not noble. there was a tone in it that awakened all elevating associations. he boggled, he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses; but it was as if a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and it was _our_ fault, not his. it was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as stars are made of, and you couldn't help feeling that, if you waited awhile, all that was nebulous would be whirled into planets, and would assume the mathematical gravity of system. all through it i felt something in me that cried, 'ha! ha!' to the sound of the trumpets." it is nothing for any man sitting in his chair to be overcome with the sense of the immediacy of life, to feel the spur of courage, the victory of good over evil, the value, now and forever, of all great-hearted endeavor. such moments come to us all. but for a man to sit in his chair and write what shall call up these forces in the bosoms of others--that is desert, that is greatness. to do this was the gift of emerson. the whole earth is enriched by every moment of converse with him. the shows and shams of life become transparent, the lost kingdoms are brought back, the shutters of the spirit are opened, and provinces and realms of our own existence lie gleaming before us. it has been necessary to reduce the living soul of emerson to mere dead attributes like "moral courage" in order that we might talk about him at all. his effectiveness comes from his character; not from his philosophy, nor from his rhetoric nor his wit, nor from any of the accidents of his education. he might never have heard of berkeley or plato. a slightly different education might have led him to throw his teaching into the form of historical essays or of stump speeches. he might, perhaps, have been bred a stonemason, and have done his work in the world by travelling with a panorama. but he would always have been emerson. his weight and his power would always have been the same. it is solely as character that he is important. he discovered nothing; he bears no relation whatever to the history of philosophy. we must regard him and deal with him simply as a man. strangely enough, the world has always insisted upon accepting him as a thinker: and hence a great coil of misunderstanding. as a thinker, emerson is difficult to classify. before you begin to assign him a place, you must clear the ground by a disquisition as to what is meant by "a thinker", and how emerson differs from other thinkers. as a man, emerson is as plain as ben franklin. people have accused him of inconsistency; they say that he teaches one thing one day, and another the next day. but from the point of view of emerson there is no such thing as inconsistency. every man is each day a new man. let him be to-day what he is to-day. it is immaterial and waste of time to consider what he once was or what he may be. his picturesque speech delights in fact and anecdote, and a public which is used to treatises and deduction cares always to be told the moral. it wants everything reduced to a generalization. all generalizations are partial truths, but we are used to them, and we ourselves mentally make the proper allowance. emerson's method is, not to give a generalization and trust to our making the allowance, but to give two conflicting statements and leave the balance of truth to be struck in our own minds on the facts. there is no inconsistency in this. it is a vivid and very legitimate method of procedure. but he is much more than a theorist: he is a practitioner. he does not merely state a theory of agitation: he proceeds to agitate. "do not," he says, "set the least value on what i do, or the least discredit on what i do not, as if i pretended to settle anything as false or true. 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." he was not engaged in teaching many things, but one thing,--courage. sometimes he inspires it by pointing to great characters,--fox, milton, alcibiades; sometimes he inspires it by bidding us beware of imitating such men, and, in the ardor of his rhetoric, even seems to regard them as hindrances and dangers to our development. there is no inconsistency here. emerson might logically have gone one step further and raised inconsistency into a jewel. for what is so useful, so educational, so inspiring, to a timid and conservative man, as to do something inconsistent and regrettable? it lends character to him at once. he breathes freer and is stronger for the experience. emerson is no cosmopolitan. he is a patriot. he is not like goethe, whose sympathies did not run on national lines. emerson has america in his mind's eye all the time. there is to be a new religion, and it is to come from america; a new and better type of man, and he is to be an american. he not only cared little or nothing for europe, but he cared not much for the world at large. his thought was for the future of this country. you cannot get into any chamber in his mind which is below this chamber of patriotism. he loves the valor of alexander and the grace of the oxford athlete; but he loves them not for themselves. he has a use for them. they are grist to his mill and powder to his gun. his admiration of them he subordinates to his main purpose,--they are his blackboard and diagrams. his patriotism is the backbone of his significance. he came to his countrymen at a time when they lacked, not thoughts, but manliness. the needs of his own particular public are always before him. "it is odd that our people should have, not water on the brain, but a little gas there. a shrewd foreigner said of the americans that 'whatever they say has a little the air of a speech.'" "i shall not need to go into an enumeration of our national defects and vices which require this order of censors in the state.... the timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or, shall i say, the publicness of opinion, the absence of private opinion." "our measure of success is the moderation and low level of an individual's judgment. dr. channing's piety and wisdom had such weight in boston that the popular idea of religion was whatever this eminent divine held." "let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity, the squalid contentment of the times." the politicians he scores constantly. "who that sees the meanness of our politics but congratulates washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud and forever safe." the following is his description of the social world of his day: "if any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics. the sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers." it is the same wherever we open his books. he must spur on, feed up, bring forward the dormant character of his countrymen. when he goes to england, he sees in english life nothing except those elements which are deficient in american life. if you wish a catalogue of what america has not, read english traits. emerson's patriotism had the effect of expanding his philosophy. to-day we know the value of physique, for science has taught it, but it was hardly discovered in his day, and his philosophy affords no basis for it. emerson in this matter transcends his philosophy. when in england, he was fairly made drunk with the physical life he found there. he is like caspar hauser gazing for the first time on green fields. english traits is the ruddiest book he ever wrote. it is a hymn to force, honesty, and physical well-being, and ends with the dominant note of his belief: "by this general activity and by this sacredness of individuals, they [the english] have in seven hundred years evolved the principles of freedom. it is the land of patriots, martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged should wash it away, it will be remembered as an island famous for immortal laws, for the announcements of original right which make the stone tables of liberty." he had found in england free speech, personal courage, and reverence for the individual. no convulsion could shake emerson or make his view unsteady even for an instant. what no one else saw, he saw, and he saw nothing else. not a boy in the land welcomed the outbreak of the war so fiercely as did this shy village philosopher, then at the age of fifty-eight. he saw that war was the cure for cowardice, moral as well as physical. it was not the cause of the slave that moved him; it was not the cause of the union for which he cared a farthing. it was something deeper than either of these things for which he had been battling all his life. it was the cause of character against convention. whatever else the war might bring, it was sure to bring in character, to leave behind it a file of heroes; if not heroes, then villains, but in any case strong men. on the 9th of april, 1861, three days before fort sumter was bombarded, he had spoken with equanimity of "the downfall of our character-destroying civilization.... we find that civilization crowed too soon, that our triumphs were treacheries; we had opened the wrong door and let the enemy into the castle." "ah," he said, when the firing began, "sometimes gunpowder smells good." soon after the attack on sumter he said in a public address, "we have been very homeless for some years past, say since 1850; but now we have a country again.... the war was an eye-opener, and showed men of all parties and opinions the value of those primary forces that lie beneath all political action." and it was almost a personal pledge when he said at the harvard commemoration in 1865, "we shall not again disparage america, now that we have seen what men it will bear." the place which emerson forever occupies as a great critic is defined by the same sharp outlines that mark his work, in whatever light and from whatever side we approach it. a critic in the modern sense he was not, for his point of view is fixed, and he reviews the world like a search-light placed on the top of a tall tower. he lived too early and at too great a distance from the forum of european thought to absorb the ideas of evolution and give place to them in his philosophy. evolution does not graft well upon the platonic idealism, nor are physiology and the kindred sciences sympathetic. nothing aroused emerson's indignation more than the attempts of the medical faculty and of phrenologists to classify, and therefore limit individuals. "the grossest ignorance does not disgust me like this ignorant knowingness." we miss in emerson the underlying conception of growth, of development, so characteristic of the thought of our own day, and which, for instance, is found everywhere latent in browning's poetry. browning regards character as the result of experience and as an ever changing growth. to emerson, character is rather an entity complete and eternal from the beginning. he is probably the last great writer to look at life from a stationary standpoint. there is a certain lack of the historic sense in all he has written. the ethical assumption that all men are exactly alike permeates his work. in his mind, socrates, marco polo, and general jackson stand surrounded by the same atmosphere, or rather stand as mere naked characters surrounded by no atmosphere at all. he is probably the last great writer who will fling about classic anecdotes as if they were club gossip. in the discussion of morals, this assumption does little harm. the stories and proverbs which illustrate the thought of the moralist generally concern only those simple relations of life which are common to all ages. there is charm in this familiar dealing with antiquity. the classics are thus domesticated and made real to us. what matter if æsop appear a little too much like an american citizen, so long as his points tell? it is in emerson's treatment of the fine arts that we begin to notice his want of historic sense. art endeavors to express subtle and ever changing feelings by means of conventions which are as protean as the forms of a cloud; and the man who in speaking on the plastic arts makes the assumption that all men are alike will reveal before he has uttered three sentences that he does not know what art is, that he has never experienced any form of sensation from it. emerson lived in a time and clime where there was no plastic art, and he was obliged to arrive at his ideas about art by means of a highly complex process of reasoning. he dwelt constantly in a spiritual place which was the very focus of high moral fervor. this was his enthusiasm, this was his revelation, and from it he reasoned out the probable meaning of the fine arts. "this," thought emerson, his eye rolling in a fine frenzy of moral feeling, "this must be what apelles experienced, this fervor is the passion of bramante. i understand the parthenon." and so he projected his feelings about morality into the field of the plastic arts. he deals very freely and rather indiscriminately with the names of artists,--phidias, raphael, salvator rosa,--and he speaks always in such a way that it is impossible to connect what he says with any impression we have ever received from the works of those masters. in fact, emerson has never in his life felt the normal appeal of any painting, or any sculpture, or any architecture, or any music. these things, of which he does not know the meaning in real life, he yet uses, and uses constantly, as symbols to convey ethical truths. the result is that his books are full of blind places, like the notes which will not strike on a sick piano. it is interesting to find that the one art of which emerson did have a direct understanding, the art of poetry, gave him some insight into the relation of the artist to his vehicle. in his essay on shakespeare there is a full recognition of the debt of shakespeare to his times. this essay is filled with the historic sense. we ought not to accuse emerson because he lacked appreciation of the fine arts, but rather admire the truly goethean spirit in which he insisted upon the reality of arts of which he had no understanding. this is the same spirit which led him to insist on the value of the eastern poets. perhaps there exist a few scholars who can tell us how far emerson understood or misunderstood saadi and firdusi and the koran. but we need not be disturbed for his learning. it is enough that he makes us recognize that these men were men too, and that their writings mean something not unknowable to us. the east added nothing to emerson, but gave him a few trappings of speech. the whole of his mysticism is to be found in nature, written before he knew the sages of the orient, and it is not improbable that there is some real connection between his own mysticism and the mysticism of the eastern poets. emerson's criticism on men and books is like the test of a great chemist who seeks one or two elements. he burns a bit of the stuff in his incandescent light, shows the lines of it in his spectrum, and there an end. it was a thought of genius that led him to write representative men. the scheme of this book gave play to every illumination of his mind, and it pinned him down to the objective, to the field of vision under his microscope. the table of contents of representative men is the dial of his education. it is as follows: uses of great men; plato, or the philosopher; plato, new readings; swedenborg, or the mystic; montaigne, or the sceptic; shakespeare, or the poet; napoleon, or the man of the world; goethe, or the writer. the predominance of the writers over all other types of men is not cited to show emerson's interest in the writer, for we know his interest centred in the practical man,--even his ideal scholar is a practical man,--but to show the sources of his illustration. emerson's library was the old-fashioned gentleman's library. his mines of thought were the world's classics. this is one reason why he so quickly gained an international currency. his very subjects in representative men are of universal interest, and he is limited only by certain inevitable local conditions. representative men is thought by many persons to be his best book. it is certainly filled with the strokes of a master. there exists no more profound criticism than emerson's analysis of goethe and of napoleon, by both of whom he was at once fascinated and repelled. ii the attitude of emerson's mind toward reformers results so logically from his philosophy that it is easily understood. he saw in them people who sought something as a panacea or as an end in itself. to speak strictly and not irreverently, he had his own panacea,--the development of each individual; and he was impatient of any other. he did not believe in association. the very idea of it involved a surrender by the individual of some portion of his identity, and of course all the reformers worked through their associations. with their general aims he sympathized. "these reforms," he wrote, "are our contemporaries; they are ourselves, our own light and sight and conscience; they only name the relation which subsists between us and the vicious institutions which they go to rectify." but with the methods of the reformers he had no sympathy: "he who aims at progress should aim at an infinite, not at a special benefit. the reforms whose fame now fills the land with temperance, anti-slavery, non-resistance, no-government, equal labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for themselves as an end." again: "the young men who have been vexing society for these last years with regenerative methods seem to have made this mistake: they all exaggerated some special means, and all failed to see that the reform of reforms must be accomplished without means." emerson did not at first discriminate between the movement of the abolitionists and the hundred and one other reform movements of the period; and in this lack of discrimination lies a point of extraordinary interest. the abolitionists, as it afterwards turned out, had in fact got hold of the issue which was to control the fortunes of the republic for thirty years. the difference between them and the other reformers was this: that the abolitionists were men set in motion by the primary and unreasoning passion of pity. theory played small part in the movement. it grew by the excitement which exhibitions of cruelty will arouse in the minds of sensitive people. it is not to be denied that the social conditions in boston in 1831 foreboded an outbreak in some form. if the abolition excitement had not drafted off the rising forces, there might have been a merry mount, an epidemic of crime or insanity, or a mob of some sort. the abolition movement afforded the purest form of an indulgence in human feeling that was ever offered to men. it was intoxicating. it made the agitators perfectly happy. they sang at their work and bubbled over with exhilaration. they were the only people in the united states, at this time, who were enjoying an exalted, glorifying, practical activity. but emerson at first lacked the touchstone, whether of intellect or of heart, to see the difference between this particular movement and the other movements then in progress. indeed, in so far as he sees any difference between the abolitionists and the rest, it is that the abolitionists were more objectionable and distasteful to him. "those," he said, "who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefits to mankind are narrow, conceited, self-pleasing men, and affect us as the insane do." and again: "by the side of these men [the idealists] the hot agitators have a certain cheap and ridiculous air; they even look smaller than others. of the two, i own i like the speculators the best. they have some piety which looks with faith to a fair future unprofaned by rash and unequal attempts to realize it." he was drawn into the abolition cause by having the truth brought home to him that these people were fighting for the moral law. he was slow in seeing this, because in their methods they represented everything he most condemned. as soon, however, as he was convinced, he was ready to lecture for them and to give them the weight of his approval. in 1844 he was already practically an abolitionist, and his feelings upon the matter deepened steadily in intensity ever after. the most interesting page of emerson's published journal is the following, written at some time previous to 1844; the exact date is not given. a like page, whether written or unwritten, may be read into the private annals of every man who lived before the war. emerson has, with unconscious mastery, photographed the half-spectre that stalked in the minds of all. he wrote: "i had occasion to say the other day to elizabeth hoar that i like best the strong and worthy persons, like her father, who support the social order without hesitation or misgiving. i like these; they never incommode us by exciting grief, pity, or perturbation of any sort. but the professed philanthropists, it is strange and horrible to say, are an altogether odious set of people, whom one would shun as the worst of bores and canters. but my conscience, my unhappy conscience respects that hapless class who see the faults and stains of our social order, and who pray and strive incessantly to right the wrong; this annoying class of men and women, though they commonly find the work altogether beyond their faculty, and their results are, for the present, distressing. they are partial, and apt to magnify their own. yes, and the prostrate penitent, also,--he is not comprehensive, he is not philosophical in those tears and groans. yet i feel that under him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth and the sea and all that in them is, and the axis around which the universe revolves passes through his body where he stands." it was the defection of daniel webster that completed the conversion of emerson and turned him from an adherent into a propagandist of abolition. not pity for the slave, but indignation at the violation of the moral law by daniel webster, was at the bottom of emerson's anger. his abolitionism was secondary to his main mission, his main enthusiasm. it is for this reason that he stands on a plane of intellect where he might, under other circumstances, have met and defeated webster. after the 7th of march, 1850, he recognized in webster the embodiment of all that he hated. in his attacks on webster, emerson trembles to his inmost fibre with antagonism. he is savage, destructive, personal, bent on death. this exhibition of emerson as a fighting animal is magnificent, and explains his life. there is no other instance of his ferocity. no other nature but webster's ever so moved him; but it was time to be moved, and webster was a man of his size. had these two great men of new england been matched in training as they were matched in endowment, and had they then faced each other in debate, they would not have been found to differ so greatly in power. their natures were electrically repellent, but from which did the greater force radiate? their education differed so radically that it is impossible to compare them, but if you translate the phi beta kappa address into politics, you have something stronger than webster,--something that recalls chatham; and emerson would have had this advantage,--that he was not afraid. as it was, he left his library and took the stump. mr. cabot has given us extracts from his speeches:- "the tameness is indeed complete; all are involved in one hot haste of terror,--presidents of colleges and professors, saints and brokers, lawyers and manufacturers; not a liberal recollection, not so much as a snatch of an old song for freedom, dares intrude on their passive obedience.... mr. webster, perhaps, is only following the laws of his blood and constitution. i suppose his pledges were not quite natural to him. he is a man who lives by his memory; a man of the past, not a man of faith and of hope. all the drops of his blood have eyes that look downward, and his finely developed understanding only works truly and with all its force when it stands for animal good; that is, for property. he looks at the union as an estate, a large farm, and is excellent in the completeness of his defence of it so far. what he finds already written he will defend. lucky that so much had got well written when he came, for he has no faith in the power of self-government. not the smallest municipal provision, if it were new, would receive his sanction. in massachusetts, in 1776, he would, beyond all question, have been a refugee. he praises adams and jefferson, but it is a past adams and jefferson. a present adams or jefferson he would denounce.... but one thing appears certain to me: that the union is at an end as soon as an immoral law is enacted. he who writes a crime into the statute book digs under the foundations of the capitol.... the words of john randolph, wiser than he knew, have been ringing ominously in all echoes for thirty years: 'we do not govern the people of the north by our black slaves, but by their own white slaves.' ... they come down now like the cry of fate, in the moment when they are fulfilled." the exasperation of emerson did not subside, but went on increasing during the next four years, and on march 7, 1854, he read his lecture on the fugitive slave law at the new york tabernacle: "i have lived all my life without suffering any inconvenience from american slavery. i never saw it; i never heard the whip; i never felt the check on my free speech and action, until the other day, when mr. webster, by his personal influence, brought the fugitive slave law on the country. i say mr. webster, for though the bill was not his, it is yet notorious that he was the life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had. it cost him his life, and under the shadow of his great name inferior men sheltered themselves, threw their ballots for it, and made the law.... nobody doubts that daniel webster could make a good speech. nobody doubts that there were good and plausible things to be said on the part of the south. but this is not a question of ingenuity, not a question of syllogisms, but of sides. _how came he there_? ... but the question which history will ask is broader. in the final hour when he was forced by the peremptory necessity of the closing armies to take a side,--did he take the part of great principles, the side of humanity and justice, or the side of abuse, and oppression and chaos? ... he did as immoral men usually do,--made very low bows to the christian church and went through all the sunday decorums, but when allusion was made to the question of duty and the sanctions of morality, he very frankly said, at albany, 'some higher law, something existing somewhere between here and the heaven--i do not know where.' and if the reporters say true, this wretched atheism found some laughter in the company." it was too late for emerson to shine as a political debater. on may 14, 1857, longfellow wrote in his diary, "it is rather painful to see emerson in the arena of politics, hissed and hooted at by young law students." emerson records a similar experience at a later date: "if i were dumb, yet would i have gone and mowed and muttered or made signs. the mob roared whenever i attempted to speak, and after several beginnings i withdrew." there is nothing "painful" here: it is the sublime exhibition of a great soul in bondage to circumstance. the thing to be noted is that this is the same man, in the same state of excitement about the same idea, who years before spoke out in the american scholar, in the essays, and in the lectures. what was it that had aroused in emerson such promethean antagonism in 1837 but those same forces which in 1850 came to their culmination and assumed visible shape in the person of daniel webster? the formal victory of webster drew emerson into the arena, and made a dramatic episode in his life. but his battle with those forces had begun thirteen years earlier, when he threw down the gauntlet to them in his phi beta kappa oration. emerson by his writings did more than any other man to rescue the youth of the next generation and fit them for the fierce times to follow. it will not be denied that he sent ten thousand sons to the war. in speaking of emerson's attitude toward the anti-slavery cause, it has been possible to dispense with any survey of that movement, because the movement was simple and specific and is well remembered. but when we come to analyze the relations he bore to some of the local agitations of his day, it becomes necessary to weave in with the matter a discussion of certain tendencies deeply imbedded in the life of his times, and of which he himself was in a sense an outcome. in speaking of the transcendentalists, who were essentially the children of the puritans, we must begin with some study of the chief traits of puritanism. what parts the factors of climate, circumstance, and religion have respectively played in the development of the new england character no analysis can determine. we may trace the imaginary influence of a harsh creed in the lines of the face. we may sometimes follow from generation to generation the course of a truth which at first sustained the spirit of man, till we see it petrify into a dogma which now kills the spirits of men. conscience may destroy the character. the tragedy of the new england judge enforcing the fugitive slave law was no new spectacle in new england. a dogmatic crucifixion of the natural instincts had been in progress there for two hundred years. emerson, who is more free from dogma than any other teacher that can be named, yet comes very near being dogmatic in his reiteration of the moral law. whatever volume of emerson we take up, the moral law holds the same place in his thoughts. it is the one statable revelation of truth which he is ready to stake his all upon. "the illusion that strikes me as the masterpiece in that ring of illusions which our life is, is the timidity with which we assert our moral sentiment. we are made of it, the world is built by it, things endure as they share it; all beauty, all health, all intelligence exist by it; yet we shrink to speak of it or range ourselves by its side. nay, we presume strength of him or them who deny it. cities go against it, the college goes against it, the courts snatch any precedent at any vicious form of law to rule it out; legislatures listen with appetite to declamations against it and vote it down." with this very beautiful and striking passage no one will quarrel, nor will any one misunderstand it. the following passage has the same sort of poetical truth. "things are saturated with the moral law. there is no escape from it. violets and grass preach it; rain and snow, wind and tides, every change, every cause in nature is nothing but a disguised missionary." ... but emerson is not satisfied with metaphor. "we affirm that in all men is this majestic perception and command; that it is the presence of the eternal in each perishing man; that it distances and degrades all statements of whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and confused stammerings before its silent revelation. _they_ report the truth. _it_ is the truth." in this last extract we have emerson actually affirming that his dogma of the moral law is absolute truth. he thinks it not merely a form of truth, like the old theologies, but very distinguishable from all other forms in the past. curiously enough, his statement of the law grows dogmatic and incisive in proportion as he approaches the borderland between his law and the natural instincts: "the last revelation of intellect and of sentiment is that in a manner it severs the man from all other men; makes known to him _that the spiritual powers are sufficient to him if no other being existed_; that he is to deal absolutely in the world, as if he alone were a system and a state, and though all should perish could make all anew." here we have the dogma applied, and we see in it only a new form of old calvinism as cruel as calvinism, and not much different from its original. the italics are not emerson's, but are inserted to bring out an idea which is everywhere prevalent in his teaching. in this final form, the moral law, by insisting that sheer conscience can slake the thirst that rises in the soul, is convicted of falsehood; and this heartless falsehood is the same falsehood that has been put into the porridge of every puritan child for six generations. a grown man can digest doctrine and sleep at night. but a young person of high purpose and strong will, who takes such a lie as this half-truth and feeds on it as on the bread of life, will suffer. it will injure the action of his heart. truly the fathers have eaten sour grapes, therefore the children's teeth are set on edge. * * * * * to understand the civilization of cities, we must look at the rural population from which they draw their life. we have recently had our attention called to the last remnants of that village life so reverently gathered up by miss wilkins, and of which miss emily dickinson was the last authentic voice. the spirit of this age has examined with an almost pathological interest this rescued society. we must go to it if we would understand emerson, who is the blossoming of its culture. we must study it if we would arrive at any intelligent and general view of that miscellaneous crop of individuals who have been called the transcendentalists. between 1830 and 1840 there were already signs in new england that the nutritive and reproductive forces of society were not quite wholesome, not exactly well adjusted. self-repression was the religion which had been inherited. "distrust nature" was the motto written upon the front of the temple. what would have happened to that society if left to itself for another hundred years no man can guess. it was rescued by the two great regenerators of mankind, new land and war. the dispersion came, as emerson said of the barbarian conquests of rome, not a day too soon. it happened that the country at large stood in need of new england as much as new england stood in need of the country. this congested virtue, in order to be saved, must be scattered. this ferment, in order to be kept wholesome, must be used as leaven to leaven the whole lump. "as you know," says emerson in his eulogy on boston, "new england supplies annually a large detachment of preachers and schoolmasters and private tutors to the interior of the south and west.... we are willing to see our sons emigrate, as to see our hives swarm. that is what they were made to do, and what the land wants and invites." for purposes of yeast, there was never such leaven as the puritan stock. how little the natural force of the race had really abated became apparent when it was placed under healthy conditions, given land to till, foes to fight, the chance to renew its youth like the eagle. but during this period the relief had not yet come. the terrible pressure of puritanism and conservatism in new england was causing a revolt not only of the abolitionists, but of another class of people of a type not so virile as they. the times have been smartly described by lowell in his essay on thoreau:- "every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. bran had its prophets.... everybody had a mission (with a capital m) to attend to everybody else's business. no brain but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. some had an assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons. communities were established where everything was to be common but common sense.... conventions were held for every hitherto inconceivable purpose." whatever may be said of the transcendentalists, it must not be forgotten that they represented an elevation of feeling, which through them qualified the next generation, and can be traced in the life of new england to-day. the strong intrinsic character lodged in these recusants was later made manifest; for many of them became the best citizens of the commonwealth,--statesmen, merchants, soldiers, men and women of affairs. they retained their idealism while becoming practical men. there is hardly an example of what we should have thought would be common in their later lives, namely, a reaction from so much ideal effort, and a plunge into cynicism and malice, scoundrelism and the flesh-pots. in their early life they resembled the abolitionists in their devotion to an idea; but with the transcendentalists self-culture and the aesthetic and sentimental education took the place of more public aims. they seem also to have been persons of greater social refinement than the abolitionists. the transcendentalists were sure of only one thing,--that society as constituted was all wrong. in this their main belief they were right. they were men and women whose fundamental need was activity, contact with real life, and the opportunity for social expansion; and they keenly felt the chill and fictitious character of the reigning conventionalities. the rigidity of behavior which at this time characterized the bostonians seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes disagreeable to the foreign visitor. there was great gravity, together with a certain pomp and dumbness, and these things were supposed to be natural to the inhabitants and to give them joy. people are apt to forget that such masks are never worn with ease. they result from the application of an inflexible will, and always inflict discomfort. the transcendentalists found themselves all but stifled in a society as artificial in its decorum as the court of france during the last years of louis xiv. emerson was in no way responsible for the movement, although he got the credit of having evoked it by his teaching. he was elder brother to it, and was generated by its parental forces; but even if emerson had never lived, the transcendentalists would have appeared. he was their victim rather than their cause. he was always tolerant of them and sometimes amused at them, and disposed to treat them lightly. it is impossible to analyze their case with more astuteness than he did in an editorial letter in the dial. the letter is cold, but is a masterpiece of good sense. he had, he says, received fifteen letters on the prospects of culture. "excellent reasons have been shown us why the writers, obviously persons of sincerity and elegance, should be dissatisfied with the life they lead, and with their company.... they want a friend to whom they can speak and from whom they may hear now and then a reasonable word." after discussing one or two of their proposals,--one of which was that the tiresome "uncles and aunts" of the enthusiasts should be placed by themselves in one delightful village, the dough, as emerson says, be placed in one pan and the leaven in another,--he continues: "but it would be unjust not to remind our younger friends that whilst this aspiration has always made its mark in the lives of men of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not remain a detached object, but is satisfied along with the satisfaction of other aims." young americans "are educated above the work of their times and country, and disdain it. many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty criticism ... which only embitters their sensibility to the evil, and widens the feeling of hostility between them and the citizens at large.... we should not know where to find in literature any record of so much unbalanced intellectuality, such undeniable apprehension without talent, so much power without equal applicability, as our young men pretend to.... the balance of mind and body will redress itself fast enough. superficialness is the real distemper.... it is certain that speculation is no succedaneum for life." he then turns to find the cure for these distempers in the farm lands of illinois, at that time already being fenced in "almost like new england itself," and closes with a suggestion that so long as there is a woodpile in the yard, and the "wrongs of the indian, of the negro, of the emigrant, remain unmitigated," relief might be found even nearer home. in his lecture on the transcendentalists he says: "... but their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world: they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprises of education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. they do not even like to vote." a less sympathetic observer, harriet martineau, wrote of them: "while margaret fuller and her adult pupils sat 'gorgeously dressed,' talking about mars and venus, plato and goethe, and fancying themselves the elect of the earth in intellect and refinement, the liberties of the republic were running out as fast as they could go at a breach which another sort of elect persons were devoting themselves to repair; and my complaint against the 'gorgeous' pedants was that they regarded their preservers as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and their work as a less vital one than the pedantic orations which were spoiling a set of well-meaning women in a pitiable way." harriet martineau, whose whole work was practical, and who wrote her journal in 1855 and in the light of history, was hardly able to do justice to these unpractical but sincere spirits. emerson was divided from the transcendentalists by his common sense. his shrewd business intellect made short work of their schemes. each one of their social projects contained some covert economic weakness, which always turned out to lie in an attack upon the integrity of the individual, and which emerson of all men could be counted on to detect. he was divided from them also by the fact that he was a man of genius, who had sought out and fought out his means of expression. he was a great artist, and as such he was a complete being. no one could give to him nor take from him. his yearnings found fruition in expression. he was sure of his place and of his use in this world. but the transcendentalists were neither geniuses nor artists nor complete beings. nor had they found their places or uses as yet. they were men and women seeking light. they walked in dry places, seeking rest and finding none. the transcendentalists are not collectively important because their _sturm und drang_ was intellectual and bloodless. though emerson admonish and harriet martineau condemn, yet from the memorials that survive, one is more impressed with the sufferings than with the ludicrousness of these persons. there is something distressing about their letters, their talk, their memoirs, their interminable diaries. they worry and contort and introspect. they rave and dream. they peep and theorize. they cut open the bellows of life to see where the wind comes from. margaret fuller analyzes emerson, and emerson margaret fuller. it is not a wholesome ebullition of vitality. it is a nightmare, in which the emotions, the terror, the agony, the rapture, are all unreal, and have no vital content, no consequence in the world outside. it is positively wonderful that so much excitement and so much suffering should have left behind nothing in the field of art which is valuable. all that intelligence could do toward solving problems for his friends emerson did. but there are situations in life in which the intelligence is helpless, and in which something else, something perhaps possessed by a ploughboy, is more divine than plato. if it were not pathetic, there would be something cruel--indeed there is something cruel--in emerson's incapacity to deal with margaret fuller. he wrote to her on october 24, 1840: "my dear margaret, i have your frank and noble and affecting letter, and yet i think i could wish it unwritten. i ought never to have suffered you to lead me into any conversation or writing on our relation, a topic from which with all persons my genius warns me away." the letter proceeds with unimpeachable emptiness and integrity in the same strain. in 1841 he writes in his diary: "strange, cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversation with margaret, whom i always admire, most revere when i nearest see, and sometimes love; yet whom i freeze and who freezes me to silence when we promise to come nearest." human sentiment was known to emerson mainly in the form of pain. his nature shunned it; he cast it off as quickly as possible. there is a word or two in the essay on love which seems to show that the inner and diaphanous core of this seraph had once, but not for long, been shot with blood: he recalls only the pain of it. his relations with margaret fuller seem never normal, though they lasted for years. this brilliant woman was in distress. she was asking for bread, and he was giving her a stone, and neither of them was conscious of what was passing. this is pitiful. it makes us clutch about us to catch hold, if we somehow may, of the hand of a man. there was manliness in horace greeley, under whom miss fuller worked on the new york tribune not many years afterward. she wrote: "mr. greeley i like,--nay, more, love. he is in his habit a plebeian, in his heart a nobleman. his abilities in his own way are great. he believes in mine to a surprising degree. we are true friends." this anæmic incompleteness of emerson's character can be traced to the philosophy of his race; at least it can be followed in that philosophy. there is an implication of a fundamental falsehood in every bit of transcendentalism, including emerson. that falsehood consists in the theory of the self-sufficiency of each individual, men and women alike. margaret fuller is a good example of the effect of this philosophy, because her history afterward showed that she was constituted like other human beings, was dependent upon human relationship, and was not only a very noble, but also a very womanly creature. her marriage, her italian life, and her tragic death light up with the splendor of reality the earlier and unhappy period of her life. this woman had been driven into her vagaries by the lack of something which she did not know existed, and which she sought blindly in metaphysics. harriet martineau writes of her: "it is the most grievous loss i have almost ever known in private history, the deferring of margaret fuller's married life so long. that noble last period of her life is happily on record as well as the earlier." the hardy englishwoman has here laid a kind human hand on the weakness of new england, and seems to be unconscious that she is making a revelation as to the whole transcendental movement. but the point is this: there was no one within reach of margaret fuller, in her early days, who knew what was her need. one offered her kant, one comte, one fourier, one swedenborg, one the moral law. you cannot feed the heart on these things. yet there is a bright side to this new england spirit, which seems, if we look only to the graver emotions, so dry, dismal, and deficient. a bright and cheery courage appears in certain natures of which the sun has made conquest, that almost reconciles us to all loss, so splendid is the outcome. the practical, dominant, insuppressible active temperaments who have a word for every emergency, and who carry the controlled force of ten men at their disposal, are the fruits of this same spirit. emerson knew not tears, but he and the hundred other beaming and competent characters which new england has produced make us almost envy their state. they give us again the old stoics at their best. very closely connected with this subject--the crisp and cheery new england temperament--lies another which any discussion of emerson must bring up,--namely, asceticism. it is probable that in dealing with emerson's feelings about the plastic arts we have to do with what is really the inside, or metaphysical side, of the same phenomena which present themselves on the outside, or physical side, in the shape of asceticism. emerson's natural asceticism is revealed to us in almost every form in which history can record a man. it is in his philosophy, in his style, in his conduct, and in his appearance. it was, however, not in his voice. mr. cabot, with that reverence for which every one must feel personally grateful to him, has preserved a description of emerson by the new york journalist, n.p. willis: "it is a voice with shoulders in it, which he has not; with lungs in it far larger than his; with a walk which the public never see; with a fist in it which his own hand never gave him the model for; and with a gentleman in it which his parochial and 'bare-necessaries-of-life' sort of exterior gives no other betrayal of. we can imagine nothing in nature (which seems too to have a type for everything) like the want of correspondence between the emerson that goes in at the eye and the emerson that goes in at the ear. a heavy and vase-like blossom of a magnolia, with fragrance enough to perfume a whole wilderness, which should be lifted by a whirlwind and dropped into a branch of aspen, would not seem more as if it could never have grown there than emerson's voice seems inspired and foreign to his visible and natural body." emerson's ever exquisite and wonderful good taste seems closely connected with this asceticism, and it is probable that his taste influenced his views and conduct to some small extent. the anti-slavery people were not always refined. they were constantly doing things which were tactically very effective, but were not calculated to attract the over-sensitive. garrison's rampant and impersonal egotism was good politics, but bad taste. wendell phillips did not hesitate upon occasion to deal in personalities of an exasperating kind. one sees a certain shrinking in emerson from the taste of the abolitionists. it was not merely their doctrines or their methods which offended him. he at one time refused to give wendell phillips his hand because of phillips's treatment of his friend, judge hoar. one hardly knows whether to be pleased at emerson for showing a human weakness, or annoyed at him for not being more of a man. the anecdote is valuable in both lights. it is like a tiny speck on the crystal of his character which shows us the exact location of the orb, and it is the best illustration of the feeling of the times which has come down to us. if by "asceticism" we mean an experiment in starving the senses, there is little harm in it. nature will soon reassert her dominion, and very likely our perceptions will be sharpened by the trial. but "natural asceticism" is a thing hardly to be distinguished from functional weakness. what is natural asceticism but a lack of vigor? does it not tend to close the avenues between the soul and the universe? "is it not so much death?" the accounts of emerson show him to have been a man in whom there was almost a hiatus between the senses and the most inward spirit of life. the lower register of sensations and emotions which domesticate a man into fellowship with common life was weak. genial familiarity was to him impossible; laughter was almost a pain. "it is not the sea and poverty and pursuit that separate us. here is alcott by my door,--yet is the union more profound? no! the sea, vocation, poverty, are seeming fences, but man is insular and cannot be touched. every man is an infinitely repellent orb, and holds his individual being on that condition.... most of the persons whom i see in my own house i see across a gulf; i cannot go to them nor they come to me." this aloofness of emerson must be remembered only as blended with his benignity. "his friends were all that knew him," and, as dr. holmes said, "his smile was the well-remembered line of terence written out in living features." emerson's journals show the difficulty of his intercourse even with himself. he could not reach himself at will, nor could another reach him. the sensuous and ready contact with nature which more carnal people enjoy was unknown to him. he had eyes for the new england landscape, but for no other scenery. if there is one supreme sensation reserved for man, it is the vision of venice seen from the water. this sight greeted emerson at the age of thirty. the famous city, as he approached it by boat, "looked for some time like nothing but new york. it is a great oddity, a city for beavers, but to my thought a most disagreeable residence. you feel always in prison and solitary. it is as if you were always at sea. i soon had enough of it." emerson's contempt for travel and for the "rococo toy," italy, is too well known to need citation. it proceeds from the same deficiency of sensation. his eyes saw nothing; his ears heard nothing. he believed that men travelled for distraction and to kill time. the most vulgar plutocrat could not be blinder to beauty nor bring home less from athens than this cultivated saint. everything in the world which must be felt with a glow in the breast, in order to be understood, was to him dead-letter. art was a name to him; music was a name to him; love was a name to him. his essay on love is a nice compilation of compliments and elegant phrases ending up with some icy morality. it seems very well fitted for a gift-book or an old-fashioned lady's annual. "the lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards.... the soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. they appear and reappear and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the substance. this repairs the wounded affection. meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each, and acquaint each with the weakness of the other.... at last they discover that all which at first drew them together--those once sacred features, that magical play of charms--was deciduous, had a prospective end like the scaffolding by which the house was built, and the purification of the intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness.... thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex nor person nor partiality, but which seeks wisdom and virtue everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom.... there are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. but in health the mind is presently seen again," etc. all this is not love, but the merest literary coquetry. love is different from this. lady burton, when a very young girl, and six years before her engagement, met burton at boulogne. they met in the street, but did not speak. a few days later they were formally introduced at a dance. of this she writes: "that was a night of nights. he waltzed with me once, and spoke to me several times. i kept the sash where he put his arm around me and my gloves, and never wore them again." a glance at what emerson says about marriage shows that he suspected that institution. he can hardly speak of it without some sort of caveat or precaution. "though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a moral union of two superior persons whose confidence in each other for long years, out of sight and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious proof of probity to gods and men, causing joyful emotions, tears, and glory,--though there be for heroes this _moral union_, yet they too are as far as ever from, an intellectual union, and the moral is for low and external purposes, like the corporation of a ship's company or of a fire club." in speaking of modern novels, he says: "there is no new element, no power, no furtherance. 'tis only confectionery, not the raising of new corn. great is the poverty of their inventions. _she was beautiful, and he fell in love_.... happy will that house be in which the relations are formed by character; after the highest and not after the lowest; the house in which character marries and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable motives.... to each occurs soon after puberty, some event, or society or way of living, which becomes the crisis of life and the chief fact in their history. in women it is love and marriage (which is more reasonable), and yet it is pitiful to date and measure all the facts and sequel of an unfolding life from such a youthful and generally inconsiderate period as the age of courtship and marriage.... women more than all are the element and kingdom of illusion. being fascinated they fascinate. they see through claude lorraines. and how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage effects and ceremonies by which they live? too pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to mirage." we are all so concerned that a man who writes about love shall tell the truth that if he chance to start from premises which are false or mistaken, his conclusions will appear not merely false, but offensive. it makes no matter how exalted the personal character of the writer may be. neither sanctity nor intellect nor moral enthusiasm, though they be intensified to the point of incandescence, can make up for a want of nature. this perpetual splitting up of love into two species, one of which is condemned, but admitted to be useful--is it not degrading? there is in emerson's theory of the relation between the sexes neither good sense, nor manly feeling, nor sound psychology. it is founded on none of these things. it is a pure piece of dogmatism, and reminds us that he was bred to the priesthood. we are not to imagine that there was in this doctrine anything peculiar to emerson. but we are surprised to find the pessimism inherent in the doctrine overcome emerson, to whom pessimism is foreign. both doctrine and pessimism are a part of the puritanism of the times. they show a society in which the intellect had long been used to analyze the affections, in which the head had become dislocated from the body. to this disintegration of the simple passion of love may be traced the lack of maternal tenderness characteristic of the new england nature. the relation between the blood and the brain was not quite normal in this civilization, nor in emerson, who is its most remarkable representative. if we take two steps backward from the canvas of this mortal life and glance at it impartially, we shall see that these matters of love and marriage pass like a pivot through the lives of almost every individual, and are, sociologically speaking, the _primum mobile_ of the world. the books of any philosopher who slurs them or distorts them will hold up a false mirror to life. if an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an italian opera than he would by reading emerson's volumes. he would learn from the italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin. in a review of emerson's personal character and opinions, we are thus led to see that his philosophy, which finds no room for the emotions, is a faithful exponent of his own and of the new england temperament, which distrusts and dreads the emotions. regarded as a sole guide to life for a young person of strong conscience and undeveloped affections, his works might conceivably be even harmful because of their unexampled power of purely intellectual stimulation. * * * * * emerson's poetry has given rise to much heart-burning and disagreement. some people do not like it. they fail to find the fire in the ice. on the other hand, his poems appeal not only to a large number of professed lovers of poetry, but also to a class of readers who find in emerson an element for which they search the rest of poesy in vain. it is the irony of fate that his admirers should be more than usually sensitive about his fame. this prophet who desired not to have followers, lest he too should become a cult and a convention, and whose main thesis throughout life was that piety is a crime, has been calmly canonized and embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved. he is become a tradition and a sacred relic. you must speak of him under your breath, and you may not laugh near his shrine. emerson's passion for nature was not like the passion of keats or of burns, of coleridge or of robert browning; compared with these men he is cold. his temperature is below blood-heat, and his volume of poems stands on the shelf of english poets like the icy fish which in caliban upon setebos is described as finding himself thrust into the warm ooze of an ocean not his own. but emerson is a poet, nevertheless, a very extraordinary and rare man of genius, whose verses carry a world of their own within them. they are overshadowed by the greatness of his prose, but they are authentic. he is the chief poet of that school of which emily dickinson is a minor poet. his poetry is a successful spiritual deliverance of great interest. his worship of the new england landscape amounts to a religion. his poems do that most wonderful thing, make us feel that we are alone in the fields and with the trees,--not english fields nor french lanes, but new england meadows and uplands. there is no human creature in sight, not even emerson is there, but the wind and the flowers, the wild birds, the fences, the transparent atmosphere, the breath of nature. there is a deep and true relation between the intellectual and almost dry brilliancy of emerson's feelings and the landscape itself. here is no defective english poet, no shelley without the charm, but an american poet, a new england poet with two hundred years of new england culture and new england landscape in him. people are forever speculating upon what will last, what posterity will approve, and some people believe that emerson's poetry will outlive his prose. the question is idle. the poems are alive now, and they may or may not survive the race whose spirit they embody; but one thing is plain: they have qualities which have preserved poetry in the past. they are utterly indigenous and sincere. they are short. they represent a civilization and a climate. his verse divides itself into several classes. we have the single lyrics, written somewhat in the style of the later seventeenth century. of these the humble bee is the most exquisite, and although its tone and imagery can be traced to various well-known and dainty bits of poetry, it is by no means an imitation, but a masterpiece of fine taste. the rhodora and terminus and perhaps a few others belong to that class of poetry which, like abou ben adhem, is poetry because it is the perfection of statement. the boston hymn, the concord ode, and the other occasional pieces fall in another class, and do not seem to be important. the first two lines of the ode, "o tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire." are for their extraordinary beauty worthy of some mythical greek, some simonides, some sappho, but the rest of the lines are commonplace. throughout his poems there are good bits, happy and golden lines, snatches of grace. he himself knew the quality of his poetry, and wrote of it, "all were sifted through and through, five lines lasted sound and true." he is never merely conventional, and his poetry, like his prose, is homespun and sound. but his ear was defective: his rhymes are crude, and his verse is often lame and unmusical, a fault which can be countervailed by nothing but force, and force he lacks. to say that his ear was defective is hardly strong enough. passages are not uncommon which hurt the reader and unfit him to proceed; as, for example:- "thorough a thousand voices spoke the universal dame: 'who telleth one of my meanings is master of all i am.'" he himself has very well described the impression his verse is apt to make on a new reader when he says,- "poetry must not freeze, but flow." the lovers of emerson's poems freely acknowledge all these defects, but find in them another element, very subtle and rare, very refined and elusive, if not altogether unique. this is the mystical element or strain which qualifies many of his poems, and to which some of them are wholly devoted. there has been so much discussion as to emerson's relation to the mystics that it is well here to turn aside for a moment and consider the matter by itself. the elusiveness of "mysticism" arises out of the fact that it is not a creed, but a state of mind. it is formulated into no dogmas, but, in so far as it is communicable, it is conveyed, or sought to be conveyed, by symbols. these symbols to a sceptical or an unsympathetic person will say nothing, but the presumption among those who are inclined towards the cult is that if these symbols convey anything at all, that thing is mysticism. the mystics are right. the familiar phrases, terms, and symbols of mysticism are not meaningless, and a glance at them shows that they do tend to express and evoke a somewhat definite psychic condition. there is a certain mood of mind experienced by most of us in which we feel the mystery of existence; in which our consciousness seems to become suddenly separated from our thoughts, and we find ourselves asking, "who am i? what are these thoughts?" the mood is very apt to overtake us while engaged in the commonest acts. in health it is always momentary, and seems to coincide with the instant of the transition and shift of our attention from one thing to another. it is probably connected with the transfer of energy from one set of faculties to another set, which occurs, for instance, on our waking from sleep, on our hearing a bell at night, on our observing any common object, a chair or a pitcher, at a time when our mind is or has just been thoroughly preoccupied with something else. this displacement of the attention occurs in its most notable form when we walk from the study into the open fields. nature then attacks us on all sides at once, overwhelms, drowns, and destroys our old thoughts, stimulates vaguely and all at once a thousand new ideas, dissipates all focus of thought and dissolves our attention. if we happen to be mentally fatigued, and we take a walk in the country, a sense of immense relief, of rest and joy, which nothing else on earth can give, accompanies this distraction of the mind from its problems. the reaction fills us with a sense of mystery and expansion. it brings us to the threshold of those spiritual experiences which are the obscure core and reality of our existence, ever alive within us, but generally veiled and sub-conscious. it brings us, as it were, into the ante-chamber of art, poetry, and music. the condition is one of excitation and receptiveness, where art may speak and we shall understand. on the other hand, the condition shows a certain dethronement of the will and attention which may ally it to the hypnotic state. certain kinds of poetry imitate this method of nature by calling on us with a thousand voices at once. poetry deals often with vague or contradictory statements, with a jumble of images, a throng of impressions. but in true poetry the psychology of real life is closely followed. the mysticism is momentary. we are not kept suspended in a limbo, "trembling like a guilty thing surprised," but are ushered into another world of thought and feeling. on the other hand, a mere statement of inconceivable things is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of poetry, because such a statement puzzles the mind, scatters the attention, and does to a certain extent superinduce the "blank misgivings" of mysticism. it does this, however, _without_ going further and filling the mind with new life. if i bid a man follow my reasoning closely, and then say, "i am the slayer and the slain, i am the doubter and the doubt," i puzzle his mind, and may succeed in reawakening in him the sense he has often had come over him that we are ignorant of our own destinies and cannot grasp the meaning of life. if i do this, nothing can be a more legitimate opening for a poem, for it is an opening of the reader's mind. emerson, like many other highly organized persons, was acquainted with the mystic mood. it was not momentary with him. it haunted him, and he seems to have believed that the whole of poetry and religion was contained in the mood. and no one can gainsay that this mental condition is intimately connected with our highest feelings and leads directly into them. the fault with emerson is that he stops in the ante-chamber of poetry. he is content if he has brought us to the hypnotic point. his prologue and overture are excellent, but where is the argument? where is the substantial artistic content that shall feed our souls? the sphinx is a fair example of an emerson poem. the opening verses are musical, though they are handicapped by a reminiscence of the german way of writing. in the succeeding verses we are lapped into a charming reverie, and then at the end suddenly jolted by the question, "what is it all about?" in this poem we see expanded into four or five pages of verse an experience which in real life endures an eighth of a second, and when we come to the end of the mood we are at the end of the poem. there is no question that the power to throw your sitter into a receptive mood by a pass or two which shall give you his virgin attention is necessary to any artist. nobody has the knack of this more strongly than emerson in his prose writings. by a phrase or a common remark he creates an ideal atmosphere in which his thought has the directness of great poetry. but he cannot do it in verse. he seeks in his verse to do the very thing which he avoids doing in his prose: follow a logical method. he seems to know too much what he is about, and to be content with doing too little. his mystical poems, from the point of view of such criticism as this, are all alike in that they all seek to do the same thing. nor does he always succeed. how does he sometimes fail in verse to say what he conveys with such everlasting happiness in prose! "i am owner of the sphere, of the seven stars and the solar year, of cæsar's hand and plato's brain, of lord christ's heart and shakespeare's strain." in these lines we have the same thought which appears a few pages later in prose: "all that shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself." he has failed in the verse because he has thrown a mystical gloss over a thought which was stronger in its simplicity; because in the verse he states an abstraction instead of giving an instance. the same failure follows him sometimes in prose when he is too conscious of his machinery. emerson knew that the sense of mystery accompanies the shift of an absorbed attention to some object which brings the mind back to the present. "there are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, a boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field is more suggestive to the mind than the yosemite gorge or the vatican would be in another hour. in like mood, an old verse, or certain words, gleam with rare significance." at the close of his essay on history he is trying to make us feel that all history, in so far as we can know it, is within ourselves, and is in a certain sense autobiography. he is speaking of the romans, and he suddenly pretends to see a lizard on the wall, and proceeds to wonder what the lizard has to do with the romans. for this he has been quite properly laughed at by dr. holmes, because he has resorted to an artifice and has failed to create an illusion. indeed, dr. holmes is somewhere so irreverent as to remark that a gill of alcohol will bring on a psychical state very similar to that suggested by emerson; and dr. holmes is accurately happy in his jest, because alcohol does dislocate the attention in a thoroughly mystical manner. there is throughout emerson's poetry, as throughout all of the new england poetry, too much thought, too much argument. some of his verse gives the reader a very curious and subtle impression that the lines are a translation. this is because he is closely following a thesis. indeed, the lines are a translation. they were thought first, and poetry afterwards. read off his poetry, and you see through the scheme of it at once. read his prose, and you will be put to it to make out the connection of ideas. the reason is that in the poetry the sequence is intellectual, in the prose the sequence is emotional. it is no mere epigram to say that his poetry is governed by the ordinary laws of prose writing, and his prose by the laws of poetry. the lines entitled days have a dramatic vigor, a mystery, and a music all their own:- "daughters of time, the hypocritic days, muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, and marching single in an endless file, bring diadems and fagots in their hands. to each they offer gifts after his will, bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. i, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, forgot my morning wishes, hastily took a few herbs and apples, and the day turned and departed silent. i, too late, under her solemn fillet saw the scorn." the prose version of these lines, which in this case is inferior, is to be found in works and days: "he only is rich who owns the day.... they come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away." that emerson had within him the soul of a poet no one will question, but his poems are expressed in prose forms. there are passages in his early addresses which can be matched in english only by bits from sir thomas browne or milton, or from the great poets. heine might have written the following parable into verse, but it could not have been finer. it comes from the very bottom of emerson's nature. it is his uttermost. infancy and manhood and old age, the first and the last of him, speak in it. "every god is there sitting in his sphere. the young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. on the instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of illusions. he fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movements and doings he must obey; he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. the mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. what is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him. and when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,--they alone with him alone." with the war closes the colonial period of our history, and with the end of the war begins our national life. before that time it was not possible for any man to speak for the nation, however much he might long to, for there was no nation; there were only discordant provinces held together by the exercise on the part of each of a strong and conscientious will. it is too much to expect that national character shall be expressed before it is developed, or that the arts shall flourish during a period when everybody is preoccupied with the fear of revolution. the provincial note which runs through all our literature down to the war resulted in one sense from our dependence upon europe. "all american manners, language, and writings," says emerson, "are derivative. we do not write from facts, but we wish to state the facts after the english manner. it is the tax we pay for the splendid inheritance of english literature." but in a deeper sense this very dependence upon europe was due to our disunion among ourselves. the equivocal and unhappy self-assertive patriotism to which we were consigned by fate, and which made us perceive and resent the condescension of foreigners, was the logical outcome of our political situation. the literature of the northern states before the war, although full of talent, lacks body, lacks courage. it has not a full national tone. the south is not in it. new england's share in this literature is so large that small injustice will be done if we give her credit for all of it. she was the academy of the land, and her scholars were our authors. the country at large has sometimes been annoyed at the self-consciousness of new england, at the atmosphere of clique, of mutual admiration, of isolation, in which all her scholars, except emerson, have lived, and which notably enveloped the last little distinguished group of them. the circumstances which led to the isolation of lowell, holmes, longfellow, and the saturday club fraternity are instructive. the ravages of the war carried off the poets, scholars, and philosophers of the generation which immediately followed these men, and by destroying their natural successors left them standing magnified beyond their natural size, like a grove of trees left by a fire. the war did more than kill off a generation of scholars who would have succeeded these older scholars. it emptied the universities by calling all the survivors into the field of practical life; and after the war ensued a period during which all the learning of the land was lodged in the heads of these older worthies who had made their mark long before. a certain complacency which piqued the country at large was seen in these men. an ante-bellum colonial posing, inevitable in their own day, survived with them. when jared sparks put washington in the proper attitude for greatness by correcting his spelling, sparks was in cue with the times. it was thought that a great man must have his hat handed to him by his biographer, and be ushered on with decency toward posterity. in the lives and letters of some of our recent public men there has been a reminiscence of this posing, which we condemn as absurd because we forget it is merely archaic. provincial manners are always a little formal, and the pomposity of the colonial governor was never quite worked out of our literary men. let us not disparage the past. we are all grateful for the new england culture, and especially for the little group of men in cambridge and boston who did their best according to the light of their day. their purpose and taste did all that high ideals and good taste can do, and no more eminent literati have lived during this century. they gave the country songs, narrative poems, odes, epigrams, essays, novels. they chose their models well, and drew their materials from decent and likely sources. they lived stainless lives, and died in their professors' chairs honored by all men. for achievements of this sort we need hardly use as strong language as emerson does in describing contemporary literature: "it exhibits a vast carcass of tradition every year with as much solemnity as a new revelation." the mass and volume of literature must always be traditional, and the secondary writers of the world do nevertheless perform a function of infinite consequence in the spread of thought. a very large amount of first-hand thinking is not comprehensible to the average man until it has been distilled and is fifty years old. the men who welcome new learning as it arrives are the picked men, the minor poets of the next age. to their own times these secondary men often seem great because they are recognized and understood at once. we know the disadvantage under which these humanists of ours worked. the shadow of the time in which they wrote hangs over us still. the conservatism and timidity of our politics and of our literature to-day are due in part to that fearful pressure which for sixty years was never lifted from the souls of americans. that conservatism and timidity may be seen in all our past. they are in the rhetoric of webster and in the style of hawthorne. they killed poe. they created bryant. since the close of our most blessed war, we have been left to face the problems of democracy, unhampered by the terrible complications of sectional strife. it has happened, however, that some of the tendencies of our commercial civilization go toward strengthening and riveting upon us the very traits encouraged by provincial disunion. wendell phillips, with a cool grasp of understanding for which he is not generally given credit, states the case as follows:- "the general judgment is that the freest possible government produces the freest possible men and women, the most individual, the least servile to the judgment of others. but a moment's reflection will show any man that this is an unreasonable expectation, and that, on the contrary, entire equality and freedom in political forms almost invariably tend to make the individual subside into the mass and lose his identity in the general whole. suppose we stood in england to-night. there is the nobility, and here is the church. there is the trading class, and here is the literary. a broad gulf separates the four; and provided a member of either can conciliate his own section, he can afford in a very large measure to despise the opinions of the other three. he has to some extent a refuge and a breakwater against the tyranny of what we call public opinion. but in a country like ours, of absolute democratic equality, public opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omnipresent. there is no refuge from its tyranny, there is no hiding from its reach; and the result is that if you take the old greek lantern and go about to seek among a hundred, you will find not one single american who has not, or who does not fancy at least that he has, something to gain or lose in his ambition, his social life, or his business, from the good opinion and the votes of those around him. and the consequence is that instead of being a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly blurting out his own convictions, as a nation, compared to other nations, we are a mass of cowards. more than all other people, we are afraid of each other." if we take a bird's-eye view of our history, we shall find that this constant element of democratic pressure has always been so strong a factor in moulding the character of our citizens, that there is less difference than we could wish to see between the types of citizenship produced before the war and after the war. charles pollen, that excellent and worthy german who came to this country while still a young man and who lived in the midst of the social and intellectual life of boston, felt the want of intellectual freedom in the people about him. if one were obliged to describe the america of to-day in a single sentence, one could hardly do it better than by a sentence from a letter of follen to harriet martineau written in 1837, after the appearance of one of her books: "you have pointed out the two most striking national characteristics, 'deficiency of individual moral independence and extraordinary mutual respect and kindness.'" much of what emerson wrote about the united states in 1850 is true of the united states to-day. it would be hard to find a civilized people who are more timid, more cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than we. it is easy to-day for the educated man who has read bryce and tocqueville to account for the mediocrity of american literature. the merit of emerson was that he felt the atmospheric pressure without knowing its reason. he felt he was a cabined, cribbed, confined creature, although every man about him was celebrating liberty and democracy, and every day was fourth of july. he taxes language to its limits in order to express his revolt. he says that no man should write except what he has discovered in the process of satisfying his own curiosity, and that every man will write well in proportion as he has contempt for the public. emerson seems really to have believed that if any man would only resolutely be himself, he would turn out to be as great as shakespeare. he will not have it that anything of value can be monopolized. his review of the world, whether under the title of manners, self-reliance, fate, experience, or what-not, leads him to the same thought. his conclusion is always the finding of eloquence, courage, art, intellect, in the breast of the humblest reader. he knows that we are full of genius and surrounded by genius, and that we have only to throw something off, not to acquire any new thing, in order to be bards, prophets, napoleons, and goethes. this belief is the secret of his stimulating power. it is this which gives his writings a radiance like that which shone from his personality. the deep truth shadowed forth by emerson when he said that "all the american geniuses lacked nerve and dagger" was illustrated by our best scholar. lowell had the soul of the yankee, but in his habits of writing he continued english tradition. his literary essays are full of charm. the commemoration ode is the high-water mark of the attempt to do the impossible. it is a fine thing, but it is imitative and secondary. it has paid the inheritance tax. twice, however, at a crisis of pressure, lowell assumed his real self under the guise of a pseudonym; and with his own hand he rescued a language, a type, a whole era of civilization from oblivion. here gleams the dagger and here is lowell revealed. his limitations as a poet, his too much wit, his too much morality, his mixture of shrewdness and religion, are seen to be the very elements of power. the novelty of the biglow papers is as wonderful as their world-old naturalness. they take rank with greatness, and they were the strongest political tracts of their time. they imitate nothing; they are real. emerson himself was the only man of his times who consistently and utterly expressed himself, never measuring himself for a moment with the ideals of others, never troubling himself for a moment with what literature was or how literature should be created. the other men of his epoch, and among whom he lived, believed that literature was a very desirable article, a thing you could create if you were only smart enough. but emerson had no literary ambition. he cared nothing for belles-lettres. the consequence is that he stands above his age like a colossus. while he lived his figure could be seen from europe towering like atlas over the culture of the united states. great men are not always like wax which their age imprints. they are often the mere negation and opposite of their age. they give it the lie. they become by revolt the very essence of all the age is not, and that part of the spirit which is suppressed in ten thousand breasts gets lodged, isolated, and breaks into utterance in one. through emerson spoke the fractional spirits of a multitude. he had not time, he had not energy left over to understand himself; he was a mouthpiece. if a soul be taken and crushed by democracy till it utter a cry, that cry will be emerson. the region of thought he lived in, the figures of speech he uses, are of an intellectual plane so high that the circumstances which produced them may be forgotten; they are indifferent. the constitution, slavery, the war itself, are seen as mere circumstances. they did not confuse him while he lived; they are not necessary to support his work now that it is finished. hence comes it that emerson is one of the world's voices. he was heard afar off. his foreign influence might deserve a chapter by itself. conservatism is not confined to this country. it is the very basis of all government. the bolts emerson forged, his thought, his wit, his perception, are not provincial. they were found to carry inspiration to england and germany. many of the important men of the last half-century owe him a debt. it is not yet possible to give any account of his influence abroad, because the memoirs which will show it are only beginning to be published. we shall have them in due time; for emerson was an outcome of the world's progress. his appearance marks the turning-point in the history of that enthusiasm for pure democracy which has tinged the political thought of the world for the past one hundred and fifty years. the youths of england and germany may have been surprised at hearing from america a piercing voice of protest against the very influences which were crushing them at home. they could not realize that the chief difference between europe and america is a difference in the rate of speed with which revolutions in thought are worked out. while the radicals of europe were revolting in 1848 against the abuses of a tyranny whose roots were in feudalism, emerson, the great radical of america, the arch-radical of the world, was revolting against the evils whose roots were in universal suffrage. by showing the identity in essence of all tyranny, and by bringing back the attention of political thinkers to its starting-point, the value of human character, he has advanced the political thought of the world by one step. he has pointed out for us in this country to what end our efforts must be bent. * * * * * walt whitman it would be an ill turn for an essay-writer to destroy walt whitman,--for he was discovered by the essayists, and but for them his notoriety would have been postponed for fifty years. he is the mare's nest of "american literature," and scarce a contributor to the saturday review but has at one time or another raised a flag over him. the history of these chronic discoveries of whitman as a poet, as a force, as a something or a somebody, would write up into the best possible monograph on the incompetency of the anglo-saxon in matters of criticism. english literature is the literature of genius, and the englishman is the great creator. his work outshines the genius of greece. his wealth outvalues the combined wealth of all modern europe. the english mind is the only unconscious mind the world has ever seen. and for this reason the english mind is incapable of criticism. there has never been an english critic of the first rank, hardly a critic of any rank; and the critical work of england consists either of an academical bandying of a few old canons and shibboleths out of horace or aristotle, or else of the merest impressionism, and wordy struggle to convey the sentiment awakened by the thing studied. now, true criticism means an attempt to find out what something is, not for the purpose of judging it, or of imitating it, nor for the purpose of illustrating something else, nor for any other ulterior purpose whatever. the so-called canons of criticism are of about as much service to a student of literature as the nicene creed and the lord's prayer are to the student of church history. they are a part of his subject, of course, but if he insists upon using them as a tape measure and a divining-rod he will produce a judgment of no possible value to any one, and interesting only as a record of a most complex state of mind. the educated gentlemen of england have surveyed literature with these time-honored old instruments, and hordes of them long ago rushed to america with their theodolites and their quadrants in their hands. they sized us up and they sized us down, and they never could find greatness in literature among us till walt whitman appeared and satisfied the astrologers. here was a comet, a man of the people, a new man, who spoke no known language, who was very uncouth and insulting, who proclaimed himself a "barbaric yawp," and who corresponded to the english imagination with the unpleasant and rampant wildness of everything in america,--with mormonism and car factories, steamboat explosions, strikes, repudiation, and whiskey; whose form violated every one of their minor canons as america violated every one of their social ideas. then, too, whitman arose out of the war, as shakespeare arose out of the destruction of the armada, as the greek poets arose out of the repulse of the persians. it was impossible, it was unprecedented, that a national revulsion should not produce national poetry--and lo! here was whitman. it may safely be said that the discovery of whitman as a poet caused many a hard-thinking oxford man to sleep quietly at night. america was solved. the englishman travels, but he travels after his mind has been burnished by the university, and at an age when the best he can do in the line of thought is to make an intelligent manipulation of the few notions he leaves home with. he departs an educated gentleman, taking with him his portmanteau and his ideas. he returns a travelled gentleman, bringing with him his ideas and his portmanteau. he would as soon think of getting his coats from kansas as his thoughts from travel. and therefore every impression of america which the travelling englishman experienced confirmed his theory of whitman. even rudyard kipling, who does not in any sense fall under the above description, has enough anglo-saxon blood in him to see in this country only the fulfilment of the fantastic notions of his childhood. but imagine an oxford man who had eyes in his head, and who should come to this country, never having heard of whitman. he would see an industrious and narrow-minded population, commonplace and monotonous, so uniform that one man can hardly be distinguished from another, law-abiding, timid, and traditional; a community where the individual is suppressed by law, custom, and instinct, and in which, by consequence, there are few or no great men, even counting those men thrust by necessary operation of the laws of trade into commercial prominence, and who claim scientific rather than personal notice. the culture of this people, its architecture, letters, drama, etc., he would find were, of necessity, drawn from european models; and in its poetry, so far as poetry existed, he would recognize a somewhat feeble imitation of english poetry. the newspaper verses very fairly represent the average talent for poetry and average appreciation of it, and the newspaper verse of the united states is precisely what one would expect from a decorous and unimaginative population,--intelligent, conservative, and uninspired. above the newspaper versifiers float the minor poets, and above these soar the greater poets; and the characteristics of the whole hierarchy are the same as those of the humblest acolyte,--intelligence, conservatism, conventional morality. above the atmosphere they live in, above the heads of all the american poets, and between them and the sky, float the constitution of the united states and the traditions and forms of english literature. this whole culture is secondary and tertiary, and it truly represents the respectable mediocrity from which it emanates. whittier and longfellow have been much read in their day,--read by mill-hands and clerks and school-teachers, by lawyers and doctors and divines, by the reading classes of the republic, whose ideals they truly spoke for, whose yearnings and spiritual life they truly expressed. now, the oxford traveller would not have found whitman at all. he would never have met a man who had heard of him, nor seen a man like him. the traveller, as he opened his saturday review upon his return to london, and read the current essay on whitman, would have been faced by a problem fit to puzzle montesquieu, a problem to floor goethe. and yet whitman is representative. he is a real product, he has a real and most interesting place in the history of literature, and he speaks for a class and type of human nature whose interest is more than local, whose prevalence is admitted,--a type which is one of the products of the civilization of the century, perhaps of all centuries, and which has a positively planetary significance. there are, in every country, individuals who, after a sincere attempt to take a place in organized society, revolt from the drudgery of it, content themselves with the simplest satisfactions of the grossest need of nature, so far as subsistence is concerned, and rediscover the infinite pleasures of life in the open air. if the roadside, the sky, the distant town, the soft buffeting of the winds of heaven, are a joy to the aesthetic part of man, the freedom from all responsibility and accountability is nirvana to his moral nature. a man who has once tasted these two joys together, the joy of being in the open air and the joy of being disreputable and unashamed, has touched an experience which the most close-knit and determined nature might well dread. life has no terrors for such a man. society has no hold on him. the trifling inconveniences of the mode of life are as nothing compared with its satisfactions. the worm that never dies is dead in him. the great mystery of consciousness and of effort is quietly dissolved into the vacant happiness of sensation,--not base sensation, but the sensation of the dawn and the sunset, of the mart and the theatre, and the stars, the panorama of the universe. to the moral man, to the philosopher or the business man, to any one who is a cog in the wheel of some republic, all these things exist for the sake of something else. he must explain or make use of them, or define his relation to them. he spends the whole agony of his existence in an endeavor to docket them and deal with them. hampered as he is by all that has been said and done before, he yet feels himself driven on to summarize, and wreak himself upon the impossible task of grasping this cosmos with his mind, of holding it in his hand, of subordinating it to his purpose. the tramp is freed from all this. by an act as simple as death, he has put off effort and lives in peace. it is no wonder that every country in europe shows myriads of these men, as it shows myriads of suicides annually. it is no wonder, though the sociologists have been late in noting it, that specimens of the type are strikingly identical in feature in every country of the globe. the habits, the physique, the tone of mind, even the sign-language and some of the catch-words, of tramps are the same everywhere. the men are not natally outcasts. they have always tried civilized life. their early training, at least their early attitude of mind towards life, has generally been respectable. that they should be criminally inclined goes without saying, because their minds have been freed from the sanctions which enforce law. but their general innocence is, under the circumstances, very remarkable, and distinguishes them from the criminal classes. when we see one of these men sitting on a gate, or sauntering down a city street, how often have we wondered how life appeared to him; what solace and what problems it presented. how often have we longed to know the history of such a soul, told, not by the police-blotter, but by the poet or novelist in the heart of the man! walt whitman has given utterance to the soul of the tramp. a man of genius has passed sincerely and normally through this entire experience, himself unconscious of what he was, and has left a record of it to enlighten and bewilder the literary world. in whitman's works the elemental parts of a man's mind and the fragments of imperfect education may be seen merging together, floating and sinking in a sea of insensate egotism and rhapsody, repellent, divine, disgusting, extraordinary. our inability to place the man intellectually, and find a type and reason for his intellectual state, comes from this: that the revolt he represents is not an intellectual revolt. ideas are not at the bottom of it. it is a revolt from drudgery. it is the revolt of laziness. there is no intellectual coherence in his talk, but merely pathological coherence. can the insulting jumble of ignorance and effrontery, of scientific phrase and french paraphrase, of slang and inspired adjective, which he puts forward with the pretence that it represents thought, be regarded, from any possible point of view, as a philosophy, or a system, or a belief? is it individualism of any statable kind? do the thoughts and phrases which float about in it have a meaning which bears any relation to the meaning they bear in the language of thinkers? certainly not. does all the patriotic talk, the talk about the united states and its future, have any significance as patriotism? does it poetically represent the state of feeling of any class of american citizens towards their country? or would you find the nearest equivalent to this emotion in the breast of the educated tramp of france, or germany, or england? the speech of whitman is english, and his metaphors and catch-words are apparently american, but the emotional content is cosmic. he put off patriotism when he took to the road. the attraction exercised by his writings is due to their flashes of reality. of course the man was a poseur, a most horrid mountebank and ego-maniac. his tawdry scraps of misused idea, of literary smartness, of dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. the world of men remained for him as his audience, and he did to civilized society the continuous compliment of an insane self-consciousness in its presence. perhaps this egotism and posturing is the revenge of a stilled conscience, and we ought to read in it the inversion of the social instincts. perhaps all tramps are poseurs. but there is this to be said for whitman, that whether or not his posing was an accident of a personal nature, or an organic result of his life, he was himself an authentic creature. he did not sit in a study and throw off his saga of balderdash, but he lived a life, and it is by his authenticity, and not by his poses, that he has survived. the descriptions of nature, the visual observation of life, are first-hand and wonderful. it was no false light that led the oxonians to call some of his phrases homeric. the pundits were right in their curiosity over him; they went astray only in their attempt at classification. it is a pity that truth and beauty turn to cant on the second delivery, for it makes poetry, as a profession, impossible. the lyric poets have always spent most of their time in trying to write lyric poetry, and the very attempt disqualifies them. a poet who discovers his mission is already half done for; and even wordsworth, great genius though he was, succeeded in half drowning his talents in his parochial theories, in his own self-consciousness and self-conceit. walt whitman thought he had a mission. he was a professional poet. he had purposes and theories about poetry which he started out to enforce and illustrate. he is as didactic as wordsworth, and is thinking of himself the whole time. he belonged, moreover, to that class of professionals who are always particularly self-centred, autocratic, vain, and florid,--the class of quacks. there are, throughout society, men, and they are generally men of unusual natural powers, who, after gaining a little unassimilated education, launch out for themselves and set up as authorities on their own account. they are, perhaps, the successors of the old astrologers, in that what they seek to establish is some personal professorship or predominance. the old occultism and mystery was resorted to as the most obvious device for increasing the personal importance of the magician; and the chief difference to-day between a regular physician and a quack is, that the quack pretends to know it all. brigham young and joseph smith were men of phenomenal capacity, who actually invented a religion and created a community by the apparent establishment of supernatural and occult powers. the phrenologists, the venders of patent medicine, the christian scientists, the single-taxers, and all who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make the same majestic and pontifical appeal to human nature. it is this mystical power, this religious element, which floats them, sells the drugs, cures the sick, and packs the meetings. by temperament and education walt whitman was fitted to be a prophet of this kind. he became a quack poet, and hampered his talents by the imposition of a monstrous parade of rattletrap theories and professions. if he had not been endowed with a perfectly marvellous capacity, a wealth of nature beyond the reach and plumb of his rodomontade, he would have been ruined from the start. as it is, he has filled his work with grimace and vulgarity. he writes a few lines of epic directness and cyclopean vigor and naturalness, and then obtrudes himself and his mission. he has the bad taste bred in the bone of all missionaries and palmists, the sign-manual of a true quack. this bad taste is nothing more than the offensive intrusion of himself and his mission into the matter in hand. as for his real merits and his true mission, too much can hardly be said in his favor. the field of his experience was narrow, and not in the least intellectual. it was narrow because of his isolation from human life. a poet like browning, or heine, or alfred de musset deals constantly with the problems and struggles that arise in civilized life out of the close relationships, the ties, the duties and desires of the human heart. he explains life on its social side. he gives us some more or less coherent view of an infinitely complicated matter. he is a guide-book or a note-book, a highly trained and intelligent companion. walt whitman has no interest in any of these things. he was fortunately so very ignorant and untrained that his mind was utterly incoherent and unintellectual. his mind seems to be submerged and to have become almost a part of his body. the utter lack of concentration which resulted from living his whole life in the open air has left him spontaneous and unaccountable. and the great value of his work is, that it represents the spontaneous and unaccountable functioning of the mind and body in health. it is doubtful whether a man ever enjoyed life more intensely than walt whitman, or expressed the physical joy of mere living more completely. he is robust, all tingling with health and the sensations of health. all that is best in his poetry is the expression of bodily well-being. a man who leaves his office and gets into a canoe on a canadian river, sure of ten days' release from the cares of business and housekeeping, has a thrill of joy such as walt whitman has here and there thrown into his poetry. one might say that to have done this is the greatest accomplishment in literature. walt whitman, in some of his lines, breaks the frame of poetry and gives us life in the throb. it is the throb of the whole physical system of a man who breathes the open air and feels the sky over him. "when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed" is a great lyric. here is a whole poem without a trace of self-consciousness. it is little more than a description of nature. the allusions to lincoln and to the funeral are but a word or two--merest suggestions of the tragedy. but grief, overwhelming grief, is in every line of it, the grief which has been transmuted into this sensitiveness to the landscape, to the song of the thrush, to the lilac's bloom, and the sunset. here is truth to life of the kind to be found in king lear or guy mannering, in æschylus or burns. walt whitman himself could not have told you why the poem was good. had he had any intimation of the true reason, he would have spoiled the poem. the recurrence and antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought of death, the beauty of nature, are in a balance and dream of natural symmetry such as no cunning could come at, no conscious art could do other than spoil. it is ungrateful to note whitman's limitations, his lack of human passion, the falseness of many of his notions about the american people. the man knew the world merely as an observer, he was never a living part of it, and no mere observer can understand the life about him. even his work during the war was mainly the work of an observer, and his poems and notes upon the period are picturesque. as to his talk about comrades and manhattanese car-drivers, and brass-founders displaying their brawny arms round each other's brawny necks, all this gush and sentiment in whitman's poetry is false to life. it has a lyrical value, as representing whitman's personal feelings, but no one else in the country was ever found who felt or acted like this. in fact, in all that concerns the human relations walt whitman is as unreal as, let us say, william morris, and the american mechanic would probably prefer sigurd the volsung, and understand it better than whitman's poetry. this falseness to the sentiment of the american is interwoven with such wonderful descriptions of american sights and scenery, of ferryboats, thoroughfares, cataracts, and machine-shops that it is not strange the foreigners should have accepted the gospel. on the whole, whitman, though he solves none of the problems of life and throws no light on american civilization, is a delightful appearance, and a strange creature to come out of our beehive. this man committed every unpardonable sin against our conventions, and his whole life was an outrage. he was neither chaste, nor industrious, nor religious. he patiently lived upon cold pie and tramped the earth in triumph. he did really live the life he liked to live, in defiance of all men, and this is a great desert, a most stirring merit. and he gave, in his writings, a true picture of himself and of that life,--a picture which the world had never seen before, and which it is probable the world will not soon cease to wonder at. * * * * * a study of romeo the plays of shakespeare marshal themselves in the beyond. they stand in a place outside of our deduction. their cosmos is greater than our philosophy. they are like the forces of nature and the operations of life in the vivid world about us. we may measure our intellectual growth by the new horizons we see opening within them. so long as they continue to live and change, to expand and deepen, to be filled with new harmony and new suggestion, we may rest content; we are still growing. at the moment we think we have comprehended them, at the moment we see them as stationary things, we may be sure something is wrong; we are beginning to petrify. our fresh interest in life has been arrested. there is, therefore, danger in an attempt to "size up" shakespeare. we cannot help setting down as a coxcomb any man who has done it to his own satisfaction. he has pigeon-holed himself. he will not get lost. if you want him, you can lay your hand on him. he has written an autobiography. he has "sized up" himself. in writing about shakespeare, it is excusable to put off the armor of criticism, and speak in a fragmentary and inconclusive manner, lest by giving way to conviction, by encouraging ourselves into positive beliefs, we hasten the inevitable and grow old before our time. perhaps some such apology is needed to introduce the observations on the character of romeo which are here thrown together, and the remarks about the play itself, the acting, and the text. it is believed by some scholars that in the second quarto edition of romeo and juliet, published in 1599, shakespeare's revising hand can be seen, and that the differences between the first and second editions show the amendments, additions, and corrections with which shakespeare saw fit to embellish his work in preparing it for the press. if this were actually the case; if we could lay the two texts on the table before us, convinced that one of them was shakespeare's draft or acting copy, and the other shakespeare's finished work; and if, by comparing the two, we could enter into the workshop and forge of his mind,--it would seem as if we had at last found an avenue of approach towards this great personality, this intellect the most powerful that has ever illumined human life. no other literary inquiry could compare in interest with such a study as this; for the relation which shakespeare himself bore to the plays he created is one of the mysteries and blank places in history, a gap that staggers the mind and which imagination cannot overleap. the student who examines both texts will be apt to conclude that the second is by no means a revised edition of the first, but that (according to another theory) the first is a pirated edition of the play, stolen by the printer, and probably obtained by means of a reporter who took down the lines as they were spoken on the stage. the stage directions in the first edition are not properly the stage directions of a dramatist as to what should be done on the stage, but seem rather the records of an eye-witness as to what he saw happen on the stage. the mistakes of the reporter (or the perversions of the actors) as seen in the first edition generally injure the play; and it was from this circumstance--the frequency of blotches in the first edition--that the idea gained currency that the second edition was an example of shakespeare's never-failing tact in bettering his own lines. perhaps, after all, it would little advance our understanding of the plays, or solve the essential puzzle,--that they actually had an author,--if we could follow every stroke of his revising pen. we should observe, no doubt, refinement of characterization, changes of stage effect, the addition of flourishes and beauties; but their origin and true meaning, the secret of their life, would be as safe as it is at present, as securely lost in the midst of all this demonstration as the manuscripts themselves were in the destruction of the globe theatre. if we must then abandon the hope of seeing shakespeare in his workshop, we may, nevertheless, obtain from the pirated text some notion of the manner in which shakespeare was staged in his own day, and of how he fared at the hands of the early actors. romeo and juliet is an exceptionally difficult play to act, and the difficulties seem to have been about the same in shakespeare's time as they are to-day. they are, in fact, inherent in the structure of the work itself. as artists advance in life, they develop, by growing familiar with the conditions of their art, the power of concealing its limitations,--a faculty in which even the greatest artists are often deficient in their early years. there is an anecdote of schumann which somewhat crudely illustrates this. it is said that in one of his early symphonies he introduced a passage leading up to a climax, at which the horns were to take up the aria in triumph. at the rehearsal, when the moment came for the horns to trumpet forth their message of victory, there was heard a sort of smothered braying which made everybody laugh. the composer had arranged his climax so that it fell upon a note which the horns could not sound except with closed stops. the passage had to be rewritten. the young painter is frequently found struggling with subjects, with effects of light, which are almost impossible to render, and which perhaps an older man would not attempt. it is not surprising to find among the early works of shakespeare that some of the characters, however true to life,--nay, because true to life,--are almost impossible to be represented on the stage. certainly romeo presents us with a character of the kind. shakespeare's knowledge of human nature seems to have antedated his knowledge of the stage. in imagining the character of romeo, a character to fit the plot of the old story, he took little thought for his actors. in conjuring up the probabilities which would lead a man into such a course of conduct as romeo's, shakespeare had in his mind the probabilities and facts in real life rather than the probabilities demanded by the stage. romeo must be a man almost wholly made up of emotion, a creature very young, a lyric poet in the intensity of his sensations, a child in his helplessness beneath the ever-varying currents and whirlpools of his feeling. he lives in a walking and frenzied dream, comes in contact with real life only to injure himself and others, and finally drives with the collected energy of his being into voluntary shipwreck upon the rocks of the world. this man must fall in love at first sight. he must marry clandestinely. he must be banished for having taken part in a street fight, and must return to slay himself upon the tomb of his beloved. shakespeare, with his passion for realism, devotes several scenes at the opening of the play to the explanation of romeo's state of mind. he will give us a rationalistic account of love at first sight by bringing on this young poet in a blind chaos of emotion owing to his rejection by a woman not otherwise connected with the story. it is perfectly true that this is the best and perhaps the only explanation of love at first sight. the effect upon romeo's very boyish, unreal, and almost unpleasant lovesickness of the rejection (for which we must always respect rosaline) is to throw him, and all the unstable elements of which he is made, into a giddy whirl, which, after a day or two, it will require only the glance of a pair of eyes to precipitate into the very elixir of true love. all this is true, but no audience cares about the episode or requires the explanation. indeed, it jars upon the sentimental notion of many persons to this day, and in many stage versions it is avoided. these preparatory scenes bring out in a most subtle way the egoism at the basis of romeo's character,--the same lyrical egoism that is in all his language and in all his conduct. when we first see romeo, he is already in an uneasy dream. he is wandering, aloof from his friends and absorbed in himself. on meeting juliet he passes from his first dream into a second dream. on learning of the death of juliet he passes into still a third and quite different dream,--or stage of dream,--a stage in which action is necessary, and in which he displays the calculating intellect of a maniac. the mental abstraction of romeo continues even after he has met juliet. in capulet's garden, despite the directness of juliet, he is still in his reveries. the sacred wonder of the hour turns all his thoughts, not into love, but into poetry. juliet's anxieties are practical. she asks him about his safety, how he came there, how he expects to escape. he answers in madrigals. his musings are almost impersonal. the power of the moonlight is over him, and the power of the scene, of which juliet is only a part. "with love's light wings did i o'er-perch these walls; for stony limits cannot hold love out, and what love can do that dares love attempt; therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me. * * * * * lady, by yonder blessed moon i swear that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops- * * * * * it is my soul that calls upon my name: how silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears." these reflections are almost "asides." they ought hardly to be spoken aloud. they denote that romeo is still in his trance. they have, however, another and unfortunate influence: they retard the action of the play. as we read the play to ourselves, this accompaniment of lyrical feeling on romeo's part does not interfere with our enjoyment. it seems to accentuate the more direct and human strain of juliet's love. but on the stage the actor who plays romeo requires the very highest powers. while speaking at a distance from juliet, and in a constrained position, he must by his voice and gestures convey these subtlest shades of feeling, throw these garlands of verse into his talk without interrupting its naturalness, give all the "asides" in such a manner that the audience feels they are in place, even as the reader does. it is no wonder that the rôle of romeo is one of the most difficult in all shakespeare. the demands made upon the stage are almost more than the stage can meet. the truth to nature is of a kind that the stage is almost powerless to render. the character of romeo cannot hope to be popular. such pure passion, such unreasonable giving way, is not easily forgiven in a man. he must roll on the floor and blubber and kick. there is no getting away from this. he is not romeo unless he cries like a baby or a greek hero. this is the penalty for being a lyric poet. had he used his mind more upon the problems of his love, and less upon its celebration in petalled phrases, his mind would not have deserted him so lamentably in the hour of his need. in fact, throughout the play, romeo, by the exigencies of the plot, is in fair danger of becoming contemptible. for one instant only does he rise into respectability,--at the moment of his quarrel with tybalt. at this crisis he is stung into life by the death of mercutio, and acts like a man. the ranting manner in which it is customary to give romeo's words in this passage of the play shows how far most actors are from understanding the true purport of the lines; how far from realizing that these few lines are the only opportunity the actor has of establishing the character of romeo as a gentleman, a man of sense and courage, a formidable fellow, not unfit to be the hero of a play:- "alive, in triumph! and mercutio slain! away to heaven, respective lenity, and fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now! now, tybalt, take the 'villain' back again that late thou gay'st me;--for mercutio's soul is but a little way above our heads, staying for thine to keep him company: either thou, or i, or both, must go with him." the first three lines are spoken by romeo to himself. they are a reflection, not a declamation,--a reflection upon which he instantly acts. he assumes the calmness of a man of his rank who is about to fight. more than this, romeo, the man of words and moods, when once roused, as we shall see later, in a worser cause,--when once pledged to action,--romeo shines with a sort of fatalistic spiritual power. he is now visibly dedicated to this quarrel. we feel sure that he will kill tybalt in the encounter. the appeal to the supernatural is in his very gesture. the audience--nay, tybalt himself--gazes with awe on this sudden apparition of romeo as a man of action. this highly satisfactory conduct is soon swept away by his behavior on hearing the news of his banishment. the boy seems to be without much stamina, after all. he is a pitiable object, and does not deserve the love of fair lady. at mantua the tide of his feelings has turned again, and by one of those natural reactions which he himself takes note of he wakes up unaccountably happy, "and all this day an unaccustom'd spirit lifts him above the ground with cheerful thoughts." it is the lightning before the thunderbolt. "her body sleeps to capel's monument, and her immortal part with angels lives. i saw her laid low in her kindred's vault, and presently took post to tell it you." balthasar makes no attempt to break the news gently. the blow descends on romeo when he least expects it. he is not spared. the conduct of romeo on hearing of juliet's death is so close to nature as to be nature itself, yet it happens to be conduct almost impossible to be given on the stage. _he does nothing._ he is stunned. he collapses. for fully five minutes he does not speak, and yet in these five minutes he must show to the audience that his nature has been shaken to its foundations. the delirium of miraculously beautiful poetry is broken. his words are gone. his emotion is paralyzed, but his mind is alert. he seems suddenly to be grown up,--a man, and not a boy,--and a man of action. "is it even so?" is all he says. he orders post-horses, ink and paper, in a few rapid sentences; it is evident that before speaking at all he has determined what he will do, and from now on to the end of the play romeo is different from his old self, for a new romeo has appeared. he is in a state of intense and calm exultation. all his fluctuating emotions have been stilled or stunned. he gives his orders in staccato. we feel that he knows what he is going to do, and will certainly accomplish it. meanwhile his mind is dominant. it is preternaturally active. his "asides," which before were lyrical, now become the comments of an acute intellect. his vivid and microscopic recollection of the apothecary shop, his philosophical bantering with the apothecary, his sudden violence to balthasar at the entrance to the tomb, and his as sudden friendliness, his words and conflict with paris, whom he kills incidentally, absent-mindedly, and, as it were, with his left hand, without malice and without remorse,--all these things show an intellect working at high pressure, while the spirit of the man is absorbed in another and more important matter. there is a certain state of mind in which the will to do is so soon followed by the act itself that one may say the act is automatic. the thought has already begun to be executed even while it is being formed. this occurs especially where the intent is to do some horrid deed which requires preparation, firmness of purpose, ingenuity, and, above all, external calmness. "between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma, or a hideous dream. the genius and the mortal instruments are then in council; and the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection." this is the phase through which romeo is passing on the way from mantua to verona. his own words give us a picture of him during that ride:- "what said my man when my betossed soul did not attend him as we rode?" he has come like an arrow, his mind closed to the external world, himself in the blind clutch of his own deadly purpose, driving on towards its fulfilment. only at the end, when he stands before the bier of juliet, sure of his will, beyond the reach of hindrance, alone for the first time,--only then is his spirit released in floods of eloquence; then does his triumphant purpose break into speech, and his words soar up like the flames of a great bonfire of precious incense streaming upward in exultation and in happiness. the whole course of these last scenes of romeo's life, which are scarcely longer than this description of them, is in the highest degree naturalistic; but the scenes are in the nature of things so difficult to present on the stage as to be fairly impossible. the very long, the very minute description of the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose heart has stopped beating, but whose mind is at work more actively and more accurately than it has ever worked before, is a thing highly sane as to its words. it must be done quietly, rapidly, and yet the impression must be created, which is created upon balthasar, that romeo is not in his right mind. a friend seeing him would cross the street to ask what was the matter. the whole character of romeo, from the beginning, has been imagined with reference to this self-destroying consummation. from his first speech we might have suspected that something destructive would come out of this man. there is a type of highly organized being, not well fitted for this world, whose practical activities are drowned in a sea of feeling. egoists by their constitution, they become dangerous beings when vexed, cornered, or thwarted by society. their fine energies have had no training in the painful constructive processes of civilization. their first instincts, when goaded into activity, are instincts of destruction. they know no compromise. if they are not to have all, then no one shall possess anything. romeo is not suffering in this final scene. he is experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life. he glories in his deed. it satisfies his soul. it gives him supreme spiritual activity. the deed brings widespread desolation, but to this he is indifferent, for it means the destruction of the prison against which his desires have always beaten their wings, the destruction of a material and social universe from which he has always longed to be free. "o, here will i set up my everlasting rest, and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh." how much of all this psychology may we suppose was rendered apparent to the motley collection of excitable people who flocked to see the play--which appears to have been a popular one--in the years 1591-97? probably as much as may be gathered by an audience to-day from a tolerable representation of the piece. the subtler truths of shakespeare have always been lost upon the stage. in turning over the first quarto of romeo and juliet, we may see that many such matters were pruned ruggedly off by the actors. the early audiences, like the popular audiences of to-day, doubtless regarded action as the first merit of a play, and the stage managers must have understood this. it is noticeable that, in the authentic text, the street fight with which this play opens is a carefully-worked-up scene, which comes to a climax in the entry of the prince. the reporter gives a few words only to a description of the scene. no doubt, in shakespeare's time, the characters spoke very rapidly or all at once. it is impossible that the longer plays, like king lear, should have been finished in an evening, unless the scenes moved with a hurry of life very different from the declamatory leisure with which our actors move from scene to scene. to make plain the course of the story was evidently the chief aim of the stage managers. the choruses are finger-posts. it is true that the choruses in shakespeare are generally so overloaded with curious ornament as to be incomprehensible except as explanations of things already understood. the prologue to romeo and juliet is a riddle to which the play is the answer. one might at first suppose that the need of such finger-posts betrayed a dull audience, but no dull person was ever enlightened by shakespeare's choruses. they play variations on the theme. they instruct only the instructed. if interest in the course of the story be the first excitement to the theatre-goer, interest in seeing a picture of contemporary manners is probably the second. our chief loss in reading shakespeare is the loss of the society he depicts, and which we know only through him. in every line and scene there must be meanings which have vanished forever with the conditions on which they comment. a character on the stage has need, at the feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will remind us of something we know in real life. the types of shakespeare which have been found substantial enough to survive the loss of their originals must have had an interest for the first audiences, both in nature and in intensity, very different from their interest to us. the high life depicted by shakespeare has disappeared. no one of us has ever known a mercutio. fortunately, the types of society seem to change less in the lower orders than in the upper classes. england swarms with old women like juliet's nurse; and as to these characters in shakespeare whose originals still survive, and as to them only, we may feel that we are near the elizabethans. we should undoubtedly suffer some disenchantment by coming in contact with these coarse and violent people. how much do the pictures of contemporary england given us by the novelists stand in need of correction by a visit to the land! how different is the thing from the abstract! or, to put the same thought in a more obvious light, how fantastic are the ideas of the germans about shakespeare! how germanized does he come forth from their libraries and from their green-rooms! we in america, with our formal manners, our bloodless complexions, our perpetual decorum and self-suppression, are about as much in sympathy with the real element of shakespeare's plays as a baptist parson is with a fox-hunt. our blood is stirred by the narration, but our constitution could never stand the reality. as we read we translate all things into the dialect of our province; or if we must mouth, let us say that we translate the dialect of the english province into the language of our empire; but we still translate. mercutio, on inspection, would turn out to be not a gentleman,--and indeed he is not; juliet, to be a most extraordinary young person; tybalt, a brute and ruffian, a type from the plantation; and the only man with whom we should feel at all at ease would be the county paris, in whom we should all recognize a perfectly bred man. "what a man!" we should cry. "why, he's a man of wax!" * * * * * michael angelo's sonnets michael angelo is revealed by his sonnets. he wears the triple crown of painter, poet, and sculptor, and his genius was worshipped with a kind of awe even while he lived, yet we know the man best through these little pieces of himself which he broke off and gave to his friends. the fragments vibrated with the life of the man, and were recognized as wonderful things. even in his lifetime they were treasured and collected in manuscript, and at a later day they were seized upon by the world at large. the first published edition of the sonnets was prepared for the press many years after the death of the author by his grandnephew, who edited them to suit the taste of the seventeenth century. the extent and atrocity of his emendations can be realized by a comparison of texts. but the sonnets survived the improvements, and even made headway under them; and when, in 1863, guasti gave the original readings to the public, the world was prepared for them. the bibliography of editions and translations which guasti gives is enough to show the popularity of the sonnets, their universal character, their international currency. there are upward of one hundred sonnets in every stage of perfection, and they have given rise not only to a literature of translations, but to a literature of comment. some years ago mrs. ednah cheney published a selection of the sonnets, giving the italian text, together with english translations by various hands. this little volume has earned the gratitude of many to whom it made known the sonnets. the italians themselves have gone on printing the corrupt text in contempt of guasti's labors. but it has not been left to the italians to protect the treasures of their land. the barbarians have been the devoutest worshippers at all times. the last tribute has come from mr. john addington symonds, who has done the sonnets into the english of the pre-raphaelites, and done them, on the whole, amazingly well. his translations of the more graceful sonnets are facile, apt, and charming, and rise at times into beauty. he has, however, insisted on polishing the rugged ones. moreover, being deficient in reverence, mr. symonds fails to convey reverence. nevertheless, to have boldly planned and carried out the task of translating them all was an undertaking of so much courage, and has been done with so much success, that every rival must give in his admiration. the poems are exceedingly various, some being rough and some elegant, some obvious and some obscure, some humorous, some religious. yet they have this in common, that each seems to be the bearer of some deep harmony, whose vibrations we feel and whose truth we recognize. from the very beginning they seem to have had a provocative and stimulating effect upon others; ever since they were written, cultivated people have been writing essays about them. one of them has been the subject of repeated academical disquisition. they absorb and reflect the spirit of the times; they appeal to and express the individual; they have done this through three centuries and throughout who shall say how many different educational conditions. place them in what light you will, they gleam with new meanings. this is their quality. it is hard to say whence the vitality comes. they have often a brilliancy that springs from the juxtaposition of two thoughts,--a brilliancy like that produced by unblended colors roughly but well laid on. they have, as it were, an organic force which nothing can render. the best of them have the reflective power which gives back light from the mind of the reader. the profounder ones appear to change and glow under contemplation; they re-echo syllables from forgotten voices; they suggest unfathomable depths of meaning. these sonnets are protean in character; they represent different things to different people,--religion to one, love to another, philosophy to a third. it is easy to guess what must be the fate of such poems in translation. the translator inevitably puts more of himself than of michael angelo into his version. even the first italian editor could not let them alone. he felt he must dose them with elegance. this itching to amend the sonnets results largely from the obscurity of the text. a translator is required to be, above all things, comprehensible, and, therefore, he must interpret, he must paraphrase. he is not at liberty to retain the equivocal suggestiveness of the original. the language of a translation must be chastened, or, at least, grammatical, and michael angelo's verse is very often neither the one nor the other. the selections which follow are not given as representative of the different styles in the original. they have been chosen from among those sonnets which seemed most capable of being rendered into english. the essential nature of the sonnet is replete with difficulty, and special embarrassments are encountered in the italian sonnet. the italian sonnet is, both in its form and spirit, a thing so foreign to the english idea of what poetry should be, that no cultivation can ever domesticate it into the tongue. the seeds of flowers from the alps may be planted in our gardens, but a new kind of flower will come up; and this is what has happened over and over again to the skilled gardeners of english literature in their struggles with the italian sonnet. in italy, for six hundred years, the sonnet has been the authorized form for a disconnected remark of any kind. its chief aim is not so much to express a feeling as an idea--a witticism--a conceit--a shrewd saying--a clever analogy--a graceful simile--a beautiful thought. moreover, it is not primarily intended for the public; it has a social rather than a literary function. the english with their lyrical genius have impressed the form, as they have impressed every other form, into lyrical service, and with some success, it must be admitted. but the italian sonnet is not lyrical. it is conversational and intellectual, and many things which english instinct declares poetry ought not to be. we feel throughout the poetry of the latin races a certain domination of the intelligence which is foreign to our own poetry. but in the sonnet form at least we may sympathize with this domination. let us read the italian sonnets, then, as if they were prose; let us seek first the thought and hold to that, and leave the eloquence to take care of itself. it is the thought, after all, which michael angelo himself cared about. he is willing to sacrifice elegance, to truncate words, to wreck rhyme, prosody, and grammar, if he can only hurl through the verse these thoughts which were his convictions. the platonic ideas about life and love and art, which lie at the bottom of most of these sonnets, are familiar to us all. they have been the reigning commonplace ideas of educated people for the last two thousand years. but in these sonnets they are touched with new power; they become exalted into mystical importance. we feel almost as if it were plato himself that is talking, and the interest is not lessened when we remember that it is michael angelo. it is necessary to touch on this element in the sonnets, for it exists in them; and because while some will feel chiefly the fiery soul of the man, others will be most struck by his great speculative intellect. it is certain that the sonnets date from various times in michael angelo's life; and, except in a few cases, it must be left to the instinct of the reader to place them. those which were called forth by the poet's friendship for vittoria colonna were undoubtedly written towards the close of his life. while he seems to have known vittoria colonna and to have been greatly attached to her for many years, it is certain that in his old age he fell in love with her. the library of romance that has been written about this attachment has added nothing to condivi's simple words:- "he greatly loved the marchesana of pescara, with whose divine spirit he fell in love, and was in return passionately beloved of her; and he still keeps many of her letters, which are full of most honest and tenderest love, such as used to issue from a heart like hers; and he himself had written her many and many a sonnet full of wit and tenderness. she often left viterbo and other places, where she had gone for pleasure, and to pass the summer, and came to rome for no other reason than to see michael angelo. and in return he bore her so much love that i remember hearing him say that he regretted nothing except that when he went to see her on her death-bed he had not kissed her brow and her cheek as he had kissed her hand. he was many times overwhelmed at the thought of her death, and used to be as one out of his mind." it seems, from reading the sonnets, that some of those which are addressed to women must belong to a period anterior to his friendship with vittoria. this appears from the internal evidence of style and feeling, as well as by references in the later sonnets. one other fact must be mentioned,--both vittoria and michael angelo belonged to, or at least sympathized with, the piagnoni, and were in a sense disciples of savonarola. now, it is this religious element which makes michael angelo seem to step out of his country and out of his century and across time and space into our own. this religious feeling is of a kind perfectly familiar to us; indeed, of a kind inborn and native to us. whether we be reading the english prayer-book or listening to the old german passion music, there is a certain note of the spirit which, when we hear it, we perfectly recognize as a part of ourselves. what we recognize is, in fact, the protestantism which swept over europe during the century of michael angelo's existence; which conquered teutonic europe, and was conquered, but not extinguished, in latin europe; and a part of which survives in ourselves. if one wishes to feel the power of savonarola, one may do so in these sonnets. we had connected michael angelo with the renaissance, but we are here face to face with the reformation. we cannot help being a little surprised at this. we cannot help being surprised at finding how well we know this man. few of us are familiar enough with the language of the plastic arts to have seen without prompting this same modern element in michael angelo's painting and sculpture. we might, perhaps, have recognized it in the pieta in st. peter's. we may safely say, however, that it exists in all his works. it is in the medicean statues; it is in the julian marbles; it is in the sistine ceiling. what is there in these figures that they leave us so awestruck, that they seem so like the sound of trumpets blowing from a spiritual world? the intelligence that could call them forth, the craft that could draw them, have long since perished. but the meaning survives the craft. the lost arts retain their power over us. we understand but vaguely, yet we are thrilled. we cannot decipher the signs, yet we subscribe to their import. the world from which michael angelo's figures speak is our own world, after all. that is the reason they are so potent, so intimate, so inimitably significant. we may be sure that the affinity which we feel with michael angelo, and do not feel with any other artist of that age, springs from experiences and beliefs in him which are similar to our own. his work speaks to the moral sense more directly and more powerfully than that of any one,--so directly and so powerfully, indeed, that we whose physical senses are dull, and whose moral sense is acute, are moved by michael angelo, although the rest of the _cinque cento_ culture remain a closed book to us. it is difficult, this conjuring with the unrecoverable past, so rashly done by us all. yet we must use what light we have. remembering, then, that painting is not the reigning mode of expression in recent times, and that in dealing with it we are dealing with a vehicle of expression with which we are not spontaneously familiar, we may yet draw conclusions which are not fantastic, if we base them upon the identity of one man's nature some part of which we are sure we understand. we may throw a bridge from the ground in the sonnets, upon which we are sure we stand firmly, to the ground in the frescos, which, by reason of our own ignorance, is less certain ground to us, and we may walk from one side to the other amid the elemental forces of this same man's mind. xxxviii give me again, ye fountains and ye streams, that flood of life, not yours, that swells your front beyond the natural fulness of your wont. i gave, and i take back as it beseems. and thou dense choking atmosphere on high disperse thy fog of sighs--for it is mine, and make the glory of the sun to shine again on my dim eyes.--o, earth and sky give me again the footsteps i have trod. let the paths grow where i walked them bare, the echoes where i waked them with my prayer be deaf--and let those eyes--those eyes, o god, give me the light i lent them.--that some soul may take my love. thou hadst no need of it. this rough and exceedingly obscure sonnet, in which strong feeling has condensed and distorted the language, seems to have been written by a man who has been in love and has been repulsed. the shock has restored him to a momentary realization of the whole experience. he looks at the landscape, and lo! the beauty has dropped out of it. the stream has lost its power, and the meadow its meaning. summer has stopped. his next thought is: "but it is i who had lent the landscape this beauty. that landscape was myself, my dower, my glory, my birthright," and so he breaks out with "give me back the light i threw upon you," and so on till the bitter word flung to the woman in the last line. the same clearness of thought and obscurity of expression and the same passion is to be found in the famous sonnet--"_non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto_,"--where he blames himself for not being able to obtain her good-will--as a bad sculptor who cannot hew out the beauty from the rock, although he feels it to be there; and in that heart-breaking one where he says that people may only draw from life what they give to it, and says no good can come to a man who, looking on such great beauty, feels such pain. it is not profitable, nor is it necessary for the comprehension of the poems, to decide to whom or at what period each one was written. there is dispute about some of them as to whether they were addressed to men or women. there is question as to others whether they are prayers addressed to christ or love poems addressed to vittoria. in this latter case, perhaps, michael angelo did not himself know which they were. vittoria used to instruct him in religion, and he seems to have felt for her a love so deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touching that the words are alive in which he mentions her. "i wished," he writes beneath a sonnet which he sent her, evidently in return for some of her own religious poems, "i wished, before taking the things that you had many times deigned to give me, in order that i might receive them the less unworthily, to make something for you from my own hand. but then, remembering and knowing that the grace of god may not be bought, and that to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, i confess my fault, and willingly receive the said things, and when they shall arrive, not because they are in my house, but i myself as being in a house of theirs, shall deem myself in paradise." we must not forget that at this time michael angelo was an old man, that he carried about with him a freshness and vigor of feeling that most people lose with their youth. a reservoir of emotion broke loose within him at a time when it caused his hale old frame suffering to undergo it, and reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope with it. a mystery play was enacted in him,--each sonnet is a scene. there is the whole of a man in each of many of these sonnets. they do not seem so much like poems as like microcosms. they are elementally complete. the soul of man could be evolved again from them if the formula were lost. xl i know not if it be the longed for light of its creator which the soul perceives, or if in people's memory there lives a touch of early grace that keeps them bright or else ambition,--or some dream whose might brings to the eyes the hope the heart conceives and leaves a burning feeling when it leaves- that tears are welling in me as i write. the things i feel, the things i follow and the things i seek--are not in me,--i hardly know the place to find them. it is others make them mine. it happens when i see thee--and it brings sweet pain--a yes,--a no,--sorrow and grace surely it must have been those eyes of thine. there are others which give a most touching picture of extreme piety in extreme old age. and there are still others which are both love poems and religious poems at the same time. lv thou knowest that i know that thou dost know how, to enjoy thee, i did come more near. thou knowest, i know thou knowest--i am here. would we had given our greetings long ago. if true the hope thou hast to me revealed, if true the plighting of a sacred troth, let the wall fall that stands between us both, for griefs are doubled when they are concealed. if, loved one,--if i only loved in thee what thou thyself dost love,--'tis to this end the spirit with his belovéd is allied. the things thy face inspires and teaches me mortality doth little comprehend. before we understand we must have died. li give me the time when loose the reins i flung upon the neck of galloping desire. give me the angel face that now among the angels,--tempers heaven with its fire. give the quick step that now is grown so old, the ready tears--the blaze at thy behest, if thou dost seek indeed, o love! to hold again thy reign of terror in my breast. if it be true that thou dost only live upon the sweet and bitter pains of man surely a weak old man small food can give whose years strike deeper than thine arrows can. upon life's farthest limit i have stood- what folly to make fire of burnt wood. the occasion of the following was probably some more than wonted favor shown to him by vittoria. xxvi. great joy no less than grief doth murder men. the thief, even at the gallows, may be killed if, while through every vein with fear he's chilled, sudden reprieve do set him free again. thus hath this bounty from you in my pain through all my griefs and sufferings fiercely thrilled, coming from a breast with sovereign mercy filled, and more than weeping, cleft my heart in twain. good news, like bad, may bring the taker death. the heart is rent as with the sharpest knife, be it pressure or expansion cause the rift. let thy great beauty which god cherisheth limit my joy if it desire my life- the unworthy dies beneath so great a gift. xxviii the heart is not the life of love like mine. the love i love thee with has none of it. for hearts to sin and mortal thought incline and for love's habitation are unfit. god, when our souls were parted from him, made of me an eye--of thee, splendor and light. even in the parts of thee which are to fade thou hast the glory; i have only sight. fire from its heat you may not analyze, nor worship from eternal beauty take, which deifies the lover as he bows. thou hast that paradise all within thine eyes where first i loved thee. 't is for that love's sake my soul's on fire with thine, beneath thy brows. the german musicians of the seventeenth century used to write voluntaries for the organ, using the shorthand of the older notation; they jotted down the formulas of the successive harmonies expressed in terms of the chords merely. the transitions and the musical explanation were left to the individual performer. and michael angelo has left behind him, as it were, the poetical equivalents of such shorthand musical formulas. the harmonies are wonderful. the successions show a great grasp of comprehension, but you cannot play them without filling them out. "is that music, after all," one may ask, "which leaves so much to the performer, and is that poetry, after all, which leaves so much to the reader?" it seems you must be a kapellmeister or a student, or dilettante of some sort, before you can transpose and illustrate these hieroglyphics. there is some truth in this criticism, and the modesty of purpose in the poems is the only answer to it. they claim no comment. comment claims them. call them not poetry if you will. they are a window which looks in upon the most extraordinary nature of modern times,--a nature whose susceptibility to impressions of form through the eye allies it to classical times; a nature which on the emotional side belongs to our own day. is it a wonder that this man was venerated with an almost superstitious regard in italy, and in the sixteenth century? his creations were touched with a superhuman beauty which his contemporaries felt, yet charged with a profoundly human meaning which they could not fathom. no one epoch has held the key to him. there lives not a man and there never has lived a man who could say, "i fully understand michael angelo's works." it will be said that the same is true of all the very greatest artists, and so it is in a measure. but as to the others, that truth comes as an afterthought and an admission. as to michael angelo, it is primary and overwhelming impression. "we are not sure that we comprehend him," say the centuries as they pass, "but of this we are sure: _simil ne maggior uom non nacque mai_." * * * * * the fourth canto of the inferno there are many great works of fiction where the interest lies in the situation and development of the characters or in the wrought-up climax of the action, and where it is necessary to read the whole work before one can feel the force of the catastrophe. but dante's poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held together only by the slender thread of the itinerary. the scenes vary in length from a line or two to a page or two; and the power of them comes, one may say, not at all from their connection with each other, but entirely from the language in which they are given. a work of this kind is hard to translate because verbal felicities, to use a mild term, are untranslatable. what english words can render the mystery of that unknown voice that calls out of the deep,- "onorate 'l altissimo poeta, torna sua ombra che era dipartita"? the cry breaks upon the night, full of awful greeting, proclamation, prophecy, and leaves the reader standing next to virgil, afraid now to lift up his eyes to the poet. awe breathes in the cadence of the words themselves. and so with many of the most splendid lines in dante, the meaning inheres in the very italian words. they alone shine with the idea. they alone satisfy the spiritual vision. of all the greatest poets, dante is most foreign to the genius of the english race. from the point of view of english-speaking people, he is lacking in humor. it might seem at first blush as if the argument of his poem were a sufficient warrant for seriousness; but his seriousness is of a nature strange to northern nations. there is in it a gaunt and sallow earnestness which appears to us inhuman. in the treatment of the supernatural the teutonic nations have generally preserved a touch of humor. this is so intrinsically true to the teutonic way of feeling that the humor seems to go with and to heighten the terror of the supernatural. when hamlet, in the scene on the midnight terrace, addresses the ghost as "old mole," "old truepenny," etc., we may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excitement and apprehension. perhaps the explanation of this mixture of humor and terror, is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its foundations by the immediate presence of the supernatural,--palsied, as it were, with fear,--there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of levity. staggered by the unknown, the mind opposes it with the homely and the familiar. the northern nations were too much afraid of ghosts to take them seriously. the sight of one made a man afraid he should lose his wits if he gave way to his fright. thus it has come about that in the sincerest terror of the north there is a touch of grotesque humor; and this touch we miss in dante. the hundred cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single scene of comedy. the strain of exalted tragedy is maintained throughout. his jests and wit are not of the laughing kind. sometimes they are grim and terrible, sometimes playful, but always serious and full of meaning. this lack of humor becomes very palpable in a translation, where it is not disguised by the transcendent beauty of dante's style. there is another difficulty peculiar to the translating of dante into english. english is essentially a diffuse and prodigal language. the great english writers have written with a free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. shakespeare, sir thomas browne, sir walter scott, robert browning, all the typical writers of english, have been many-worded. they have been men who said everything that came into their heads, and trusted to their genius to make their writings readable. the eighteenth century in england, with all its striving after classical precision, has left behind it no great laconic english classic who stands in the first rank. our own emerson is concise enough, but he is disconnected and prophetic. dante is not only concise, but logical, deductive, prone to ratiocination. he set down nothing that he had not thought of a thousand times, and conned over, arranged, and digested. we have in english no prototype for such condensation. there is no native work in the language written in anything which approaches the style of dante. my heavy sleep a sullen thunder broke, so that i shook myself, springing upright, like one awakened by a sudden stroke, and gazed with fixed eyes and new-rested sight slowly about me,--awful privilege,- to know the place that held me, if i might. in truth i found myself upon the edge that girds the valley of the dreadful pit, circling the infinite wailing with its ledge. dark, deep, and cloudy, to the depths of it eye could not probe, and though i bent mine low, it helped my vain conjecture not a whit. "let us go down to the blind world below," began the poet, with a face like death, "i shall go first, thou second." "say not so," cried i when i again could find my breath, for i had seen the whiteness of his face, "how shall i come if thee it frighteneth?" and he replied: "the anguish of the place and those that dwell there thus hath painted me with pity, not with fear. but come apace; the spur of the journey pricks us." thus did he enter himself, and take me in with him, into the first great circle's mystery that winds the deep abyss about the brim. here there came borne upon the winds to us, not cries, but sighs that filled the concave dim, and kept the eternal breezes tremulous. the cause is grief, but grief unlinked to pain, that makes the unnumbered peoples suffer thus. i saw great crowds of children, women, men, wheeling below. "thou dost not seek to know what spirits are these thou seest?" thus again my master spoke. "but ere we further go, thou must be sure that these feel not the weight of sin. they well deserved,--and yet not so.- they had not baptism, which is the gate of faith,--thou holdest. if they lived before the days of christ, though sinless, in that state god they might never worthily adore. and i myself am such an one as these. for this shortcoming--on no other score- we are lost, and most of all our torment is that lost to hope we live in strong desire." grief seized my heart to hear these words of his, because most splendid souls and hearts of fire i recognized, hung in that limbo there. "tell me, my master dear, tell me, my sire," cried i at last, with eager hope to share that all-convincing faith,--"but went there not one,--once,--from hence,--made happy though it were through his own merit or another's lot?" "i was new come into this place," said he, who seemed to guess the purport of my thought, "when him whose brows were bound with victory i saw come conquering through this prison dark. he set the shade of our first parent free, with abel, and the builder of the ark, and him that gave the laws immutable, and abraham, obedient patriarch, david the king, and ancient israel, his father and his children at his side, and the wife rachel that he loved so well, and gave them paradise,--and before these men none tasted of salvation that have died." we did not pause while he was talking then, but held our constant course along the track, where spirits thickly thronged the wooded glen. and we had reached a point whence to turn back had not been far, when i, still touched with fear, perceived a fire, that, struggling with the black, made conquest of a luminous hemisphere. the place was distant still, but i could see clustered about the fire, as we drew near, figures of an austere nobility. "thou who dost honor science and love art, pray who are these, whose potent dignity doth eminently set them thus apart?" the poet answered me, "the honored fame that made their lives illustrious touched the heart of god to advance them." then a voice there came, "honor the mighty poet;" and again, "his shade returns,--do honor to his name." and when the voice had finished its refrain, i saw four giant shadows coming on. they seemed nor sad nor joyous in their mien. and my good master said: "see him, my son, that bears the sword and walks before the rest, and seems the father of the three,--that one is homer, sovran poet. the satirist horace comes next; third, ovid; and the last is lucan. the lone voice that name expressed that each doth share with me; therefore they haste to greet and do me honor;--nor do they wrong." thus did i see the assembled school who graced the master of the most exalted song, that like an eagle soars above the rest. when they had talked together, though not long, they turned to me, nodding as to a guest. at which my master smiled, but yet more high they lifted me in honor. at their behest i went with them as of their company, and made the sixth among those mighty wits. thus towards the light we walked in colloquy of things my silence wisely here omits, as there 'twas sweet to speak them, till we came to where a seven times circled castle sits, whose walls are watered by a lovely stream. this we crossed over as it had been dry, passing the seven gates that guard the same, and reached a meadow, green as arcady. people were there with deep, slow-moving eyes whose looks were weighted with authority. scant was their speech, but rich in melodies. the walls receding left a pasture fair, a place all full of light and of great size, so we could see each spirit that was there. and straight before my eyes upon the green were shown to me the souls of those that were, great spirits it exalts me to have seen. electra with her comrades i descried, i saw æneas, and knew hector keen, and in full armor cæsar, falcon-eyed, camilla and the amazonian queen, king latin with lavinia at his side, brutus that did avenge the tarquin's sin, lucrece, cornelia, martia julia, and by himself the lonely saladin. the master of all thinkers next i saw amid the philosophic family. all eyes were turned on him with reverent awe; plato and socrates were next his knee, then heraclitus and empedocles, thales and anaxagoras, and he that based the world on chance; and next to these, zeno, diogenes, and that good leech the herb-collector, dioscorides. orpheus i saw, livy and tully, each flanked by old seneca's deep moral lore, euclid and ptolemy, and within their reach hippocrates and avicenna's store, the sage that wrote the master commentary, averois, with galen and a score of great physicians. but my pen were weary depicting all of that majestic plain splendid with many an antique dignitary. my theme doth drive me on, and words are vain to give the thought the thing itself conveys. the six of us were now cut down to twain. my guardian led me forth by other ways, far from the quiet of that trembling wind, and from the gentle shining of those rays, to places where all light was left behind. * * * * * robert browning there is a period in the advance of any great man's influence between the moment when he appears and the moment when he has become historical, during which it is difficult to give any succinct account of him. we are ourselves a part of the thing we would describe. the element which we attempt to isolate for purposes of study is still living within us. our science becomes tinged with autobiography. such must be the fate of any essay on browning written at the present time. the generation to whom his works were unmeaning has hardly passed away. the generation he spoke for still lives. his influence seems still to be expanding. the literature of browning dictionaries, phrase-books, treatises, and philosophical studies grows daily. mr. cooke in his guide to browning (1893) gives a condensed catalogue of the best books and essays on browning, which covers many finely printed pages. this class of book--the text-book--is not the product of impulse. the text-book is a commercial article and follows the demand as closely as the reaper follows the crop. we can tell the acreage under cultivation by looking over the account books of the makers of farm implements. thousands of people are now studying browning, following in his footsteps, reading lives of his heroes, and hunting up the subjects he treated. this browningism which we are disposed to laugh at is a most interesting secondary outcome of his influence. it has its roots in natural piety, and the educational value of it is very great. browning's individuality created for him a personal following, and he was able to respond to the call to leadership. unlike carlyle, he had something to give his disciples beside the immediate satisfaction of a spiritual need. he gave them not only meal but seed. in this he was like emerson; but emerson's little store of finest grain is of a different soil. emerson lived in a cottage and saw the stars over his head through his skylight. browning, on the other hand, loved pictures, places, music, men and women, and his works are like the house of a rich man,--a treasury of plunder from many provinces and many ages, whose manners and passions are vividly recalled to us. in emerson's house there was not a peg to hang a note upon,--"this is his bookshelf, this his bed." but browning's palace craves a catalogue. and a proper catalogue to such a palace becomes a liberal education. robert browning was a strong, glowing, whole-souled human being, who enjoyed life more intensely than any englishman since walter scott. he was born among books; and circumstances enabled him to follow his inclinations and become a writer,--a poet by profession. he was, from early youth to venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality, the very embodiment of spontaneous life; and the forms of poetry in which he so fully and so accurately expressed himself enable us to know him well. indeed, only great poets are known so intimately as we know robert browning. religion was at the basis of his character, and it was the function of religious poetry that his work fulfilled. inasmuch as no man invents his own theology, but takes it from the current world and moulds it to his needs, it was inevitable that robert browning should find and seize upon as his own all that was optimistic in christian theology. everything that was hopeful his spirit accepted; everything that was sunny and joyful and good for the brave soul he embraced. what was distressing he rejected or explained away. in the world of robert browning _everything_ was right. the range of subject covered by his poems is wider than that of any other poet that ever lived; but the range of his ideas is exceedingly small. we need not apologize for treating browning as a theologian and a doctor of philosophy, for he spent a long life in trying to show that a poet is always really both--and he has almost convinced us. the expositors and writers of text-books have had no difficulty in formulating his theology, for it is of the simplest kind; and his views on morality and art are logically a part of it. the "message" which poets are conventionally presumed to deliver, was, in browning's case, a very definite creed, which may be found fully set forth in any one of twenty poems. every line of his poetry is logically dedicated to it. he believes that the development of the individual soul is the main end of existence. the strain and stress of life are incidental to growth, and therefore desirable. development and growth mean a closer union with god. in fact, god is of not so much importance in himself, but as the end towards which man tends. that irreverent person who said that browning uses "god" as a pigment made an accurate criticism of his theology. in browning, god is adjective to man. browning believes that all conventional morality must be reviewed from the standpoint of how conduct affects the actor himself, and what effect it has on his individual growth. the province of art and of all thinking and working is to make these truths clear and to grapple with the problems they give rise to. the first two fundamental beliefs of browning--namely: (1) that, ultimately speaking, the most important matter in the world is the soul of a man; and (2) that a sense of effort is coincident with development--are probably true. we instinctively feel them to be true, and they seem to be receiving support from those quarters of research to which we look for light, however dim. in the application of his dogmas to specific cases in the field of ethics, browning often reaches conclusions which are fair subjects for disagreement. since most of our conventional morality is framed to repress the individual, he finds himself at war with it--in revolt against it. he is habitually pitted against it, and thus acquires modes of thought which sometimes lead him into paradox--at least, to conclusions at odds with his premises. it is in the course of exposition, and incidentally to his main purpose as a teacher of a few fundamental ideas, that browning has created his masterpieces of poetry. never was there a man who in the course of a long life changed less. what as a boy he dreamed of doing, that he did. the thoughts of his earliest poems are the thoughts of his latest. his tales, his songs, his monologues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his rage, his prayer, are all upon the same theme: whatever fed his mind nourished these beliefs. his interest in the world was solely an interest in them. he saw them in history and in music; his travels and studies brought him back nothing else but proofs of them; the universe in each of its manifestations was a commentary upon them. his nature was the simplest, the most positive, the least given to abstract speculation, which england can show in his time. he was not a thinker, for he was never in doubt. he had recourse to disputation as a means of inculcating truth, but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. his conclusions are fixed from the start. standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as absolute as that of a martyr, he has never for one instant undergone the experience of doubt, and only knows that there is such a thing because he has met with it in other people. the force of his feelings is so much greater than his intellect that his mind serves his soul like a valet. out of the whole cosmos he takes what belongs to him and sustains him, leaving the rest, or not noting it. there never was a great poet whose scope was so definite. that is the reason why the world is so cleanly divided into people who do and who do not care for browning. one real glimpse into him gives you the whole of him. the public which loves him is made up of people who have been through certain spiritual experiences to which he is the antidote. the public which loves him not consists of people who have escaped these experiences. to some he is a strong, rare, and precious elixir, which nothing else will replace. to others, who do not need him, he is a boisterous and eccentric person,--a heracles in the house of mourning. let us remember his main belief,--the value of the individual. the needs of society constantly require that the individual be suppressed. they hold him down and punish him at every point. the tyranny of order and organization--of monarch or public opinion--weights him and presses him down. this is the inevitable tendency of all stable social arrangements. now and again there arises some strong nature that revolts against the influence of conformity which is becoming intolerable,--against the atmosphere of caste or theory; of egyptian priest or manchester economist; of absolutism or of democracy. and this strong nature cries out that the souls of men are being injured, and that they are important; that your soul and my soul are more important than cæsar--or than the survival of the fittest. such a voice was the voice of christ, and the lesser saviors of the world bring always a like message of revolt: they arise to fulfil the same fundamental need of the world. carlyle, emerson, victor hugo, browning, were prophets to a generation oppressed in spirit, whose education had oppressed them with a jewish law of adam smith and jeremy bentham and malthus, of clarkson and cobden,--of thought for the million, and for man in the aggregate. "to what end is all this beneficence, all this conscience, all this theory?" some one at length cries out. "for whom is it in the last analysis that you legislate? you talk _of man_, i see only _men_." to men suffering from an age of devotion to humanity came robert browning as a liberator. like carlyle, he was understood first in this country because we had begun earlier with our theoretical and practical philanthropies, and had taken them more seriously. we had suffered more. we needed to be told that it was right to love, hate, and be angry, to sin and repent. it was a revelation to us to think that we had some inheritance in the joys and passions of mankind. we needed to be told these things as a tired child needs to be comforted. browning gave them to us in the form of a religion. there was no one else sane or deep or wise or strong enough to know what we lacked. if ever a generation had need of a poet,--of some one to tell them they might cry and not be ashamed, rejoice and not find the reason in john stuart mill; some one who should justify the claims of the spirit which was starving on the religion of humanity,--it was the generation for whom browning wrote. carlyle had seized upon the french revolution, which served his ends because it was filled with striking, with powerful, with grotesque examples of individual force. in his hero worship he gives his countrymen a philosophy of history based on nothing but worship of the individual. browning with the same end in view gave us pictures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in france and italy. he glorified what we had thought crime and error, and made men of us. he was the apostle to the educated of a most complex period, but such as he was, he was complete. those people to whom he has been a poet know what it is for the heart to receive full expression from the lips of another. the second thesis which browning insists on--the identity of spiritual suffering with spiritual growth--is the one balm of the world. it is said that recent physiological experiment shows that muscles do not develop unless exercised up to what is called the "distress point." if this shall prove to be an instance of a general law,--if the struggles and agony of the spirit are really signs of an increase of that spiritual life which is the only sort of life we can conceive of now or hereafter,--then the truth-to-feeling of much of browning's poetry has a scientific basis. it cannot be denied that browning held firmly two of the most moving and far-reaching ideas of the world, and he expanded them in the root, leaf, flower, and fruit of a whole world of poetic disquisition. it is unnecessary at this day to point out the beauties of browning or the sagacity with which he chose his effects. he gives us the sallow wife of james lee, whose soul is known to him, pippa the silk-spinning girl, two men found in the morgue, persons lost, forgotten, or misunderstood. he searches the world till he finds the man whom everybody will concur in despising, the mediæval grammarian, and he writes to him the most powerful ode in english, the mightiest tribute ever paid to a man. his culture and his learning are all subdued to what he works in; they are all in harness to draw his thought. he mines in antiquity or drags his net over german philosophy or modern drawing-rooms,--all to the same end. in that miracle of power and beauty--the flight of the duchess--he has improvised a whole civilization in order to make the setting of contrast which shall cause the soul of the little duchess to shine clearly. in childe roland he creates a cycle, an epoch of romance and mysticism, because he requires it as a stage property. in a death in the desert you have the east in the first century--so vividly given that you wish instantly to travel there, bible in hand, to feel the atmosphere with which your bible ought always to have been filled. his reading brings him to euripides. he sees that alcestis can be set to his theme; and with a week or two of labor, while staying in a country house, he draws out of the greek fable the world of his own meaning and shows it shining forth in a living picture of the greek theatre which has no counterpart for vitality in any modern tongue. the descriptive and narrative powers of browning are above, beyond, and outside of all that has been done in english in our time, as the odd moments prove which he gave to the pied piper, the ride from ghent to aix, incident in the french camp. these chips from his workshop passed instantly into popular favor because they were written in familiar forms. how powerfully his gifts of utterance were brought to bear upon the souls of men will be recorded, even if never understood, by literary historians. it is idle to look to the present generation for an intelligible account of one word more, rabbi ben ezra, prospice, saul, the blot on the 'scutcheon. they must be judged by the future and by men who can speak of them with a steady lip. it must be conceded that the conventional judgments of society are sometimes right, and browning's mission led him occasionally into paradox and _jeux d'esprit_. bishop blougram is an attempt to discover whether a good case cannot be made out for the individual hypocrite. the statue and the bust is frankly a _reductio ad absurdum_, and ends with a query. there is more serious trouble with others. the grammarian's funeral is false to fact, and will appear so to posterity. the grammarian was not a hero, and our calmer moments show us that the poem is not a great ode. it gave certain people the glow of a great truth, but it remains a paradox and a piece of exaggeration. the same must be said of a large part of browning. the new testament is full of such paradoxes of exaggeration, like the parable of the unjust steward, the rich man's chance for heaven, the wedding garment; but in these, the truth is apparent,--we are not betrayed. in browning's paradoxes we are often led on and involved in an emotion over some situation which does not honestly call for the emotion. the most noble quality in browning is his temper. he does not proceed, as liberators generally do, by railing and pulling down. he builds up; he is positive, not negative. he is less bitter than christianity itself. while there is no more doubt as to the permanent value of the content of browning than of the value of the spiritual truths of the new testament, there is very little likelihood that his poems will be understood in the remote future. at present, they are following the waves of influence of the education which they correct. they are built like palladio's theatre at vicenza, where the perspective converges toward a single seat. in order to be subject to the illusion, the spectator must occupy the duke's place. the colors are dropping from the poems already. the feeblest of them lose it first. there was a steady falling off in power accompanied by a constant increase in his peculiarities during the last twenty years of his life, and we may make some surmise as to how balaustion's adventure will strike posterity by reading parleyings with certain people. the distinctions between browning's characters--which to us are so vivid--will to others seem less so. paracelsus and rabbi ben ezra, lippo lippi, karshish, caponsacchi, and ferishtah will all appear to be run in the same mould. they will seem to be the thinnest disguises which a poet ever assumed. the lack of the dramatic element in browning--a lack which is concealed from us by our intense sympathy for him and by his fondness for the trappings of the drama--will be apparent to the after-comers. they will say that all the characters in the blot on the 'scutcheon take essentially the same view of the catastrophe of the play; that pippa and pompilia and phene are the same person in the same state of mind. in fact, the family likeness is great. they will say that the philosophic monologues are repetitions of each other. it cannot be denied that there is much repetition,--much threshing out of old straw. those who have read browning for years and are used to the monologues are better pleased to find the old ideas than new ones, which they could not understand so readily. when the later browning takes us on one of those long afternoon rambles through his mind,--over moor and fen, through jungle, down precipice, past cataract,--we know just where we are coming out in the end. we know the place better than he did himself. nor will posterity like browning's manners,--the dig in the ribs, the personal application, and _de te fabula_ of most of his talking. these unpleasant things are part of his success with us to whom he means life, not art. posterity will want only art. we needed doctrine. if he had not preached, we would not have listened to him. but posterity evades the preachers and accepts only singers. posterity is so dainty that it lives on nothing but choice morsels. it will cull such out of the body of browning as the anthologists are beginning to do already, and will leave the great mass of him to be rediscovered from time to time by belated sufferers from the philosophy of the nineteenth century. there is a class of persons who claim for browning that his verse is really good verse, and that he was a master of euphony. this cannot be admitted except as to particular instances in which his success is due to his conformity to law, not to his violation of it. the rules of verse in english are merely a body of custom which has grown up unconsciously, and most of which rests upon some simple requirement of the ear. in speaking of the power of poetry we are dealing with what is essentially a mystery, the outcome of infinitely subtle, numerous, and complex forces. the rhythm of versification seems to serve the purpose of a prompter. it lets us know in advance just what syllables are to receive the emphasis which shall make the sense clear. there are many lines in poetry which become obscure the instant they are written in prose, and probably the advantages of poetry over prose, or, to express it modestly, the excuse for poetry at all, is that the form facilitates the comprehension of the matter. rhyme is itself an indication that a turning-point has been reached. it punctuates and sets off the sense, and relieves our attention from the strain of suspended interest. all of the artifices of poetical form seem designed to a like end. naturalness of speech is somewhat sacrificed, but we gain by the sacrifice a certain uniformity of speech which rests and exhilarates. we need not, for the present, examine the question of euphony any further, nor ask whether euphony be not a positive element in verse,--an element which belongs to music. the negative advantages of poetry over prose are probably sufficient to account for most of its power. a few more considerations of the same negative nature, and which affect the vividness of either prose or verse, may be touched upon by way of preface to the inquiry, why browning is hard to understand and why his verse is bad. every one is more at ease in his mind when he reads a language which observes the ordinary rules of grammar, proceeds by means of sentences having subjects and predicates, and of which the adjectives and adverbs fall easily into place. a doubt about the grammar is a doubt about the sense. and this is so true that sometimes when our fears are allayed by faultless grammar we may read absolute nonsense with satisfaction. we sometimes hear it stated as a bitter epigram, that poetry is likely to endure just in proportion as the form of it is superior to the content. as to the "inferiority" of the content, a moment's reflection shows that the ideas and feelings which prevail from age to age, and in which we may expect posterity to delight, are in their nature, and of necessity, commonplace. and if by "superiority of form" it is meant that these ideas shall be conveyed in flowing metres,--in words which are easy to pronounce, put together according to the rules of grammar, and largely drawn from the vulgar tongue,--we need not wonder that posterity should enjoy it. in fact, it is just such verse as this which survives from age to age. browning possesses one superlative excellence, and it is upon this that he relies. it is upon this that he has emerged and attacked the heart of man. it is upon this that he may possibly fight his way down to posterity and live like a fire forever in the bosom of mankind. his language is the language of common speech; his force, the immediate force of life. his language makes no compromises of any sort. it is not subdued to form. the emphasis demanded by the sense is very often not the emphasis demanded by the metre. he cuts off his words and forces them ruthlessly into lines as a giant might force his limbs into the armor of a mortal. the joints and members of the speech fall in the wrong places and have no relation to the joints and members of the metre. he writes like a lion devouring an antelope. he rends his subject, breaks its bones, and tears out the heart of it. he is not made more, but less, comprehensible by the verse-forms in which he writes. the sign-posts of the metre lead us astray. he would be easier to understand if his poems were printed in the form of prose. that is the reason why browning becomes easy when read aloud; for in reading aloud we give the emphasis of speech, and throw over all effort to follow the emphasis of the metre. this is also the reason why browning is so unquotable--why he has made so little effect upon the language--why so few of the phrases and turns of thought and metaphor with which poets enrich a language have been thrown into english by him. let a man who does not read poetry take up a volume of familiar quotations, and he will find page after page of lines and phrases which he knows by heart--from tennyson, milton, wordsworth--things made familiar to him not by the poets, but by the men whom the poets educated, and who adopted their speech. of browning he will know not a word. and yet browning's poetry is full of words that glow and smite, and which have been burnt into and struck into the most influential minds of the last fifty years. but browning's phrases are almost impossible to remember, because they are speech not reduced to poetry. they do not sing, they do not carry. they have no artificial buoys to float them in our memories. it follows from this uncompromising nature of browning that when, by the grace of inspiration, the accents of his speech do fall into rhythm, his words will have unimaginable sweetness. the music is so much a part of the words--so truly spontaneous--that other verse seems tame and manufactured beside his. rhyme is generally so used by browning as not to subserve the true function of rhyme. it is forced into a sort of superficial conformity, but marks no epoch in the verse. the clusters of rhymes are clusters only to the eye and not to the ear. the necessity of rhyming leads browning into inversions,--into expansions of sentences beyond the natural close of the form,--into every sort of contortion. the rhymes clog and distress the sentences. as to grammar, browning is negligent. some of his most eloquent and wonderful passages have no grammar whatever. in sordello grammar does not exist; and the want of it, the strain upon the mind caused by an effort to make coherent sentences out of a fleeting, ever-changing, iridescent maze of talk, wearies and exasperates the reader. of course no one but a school-master desires that poetry shall be capable of being parsed; but every one has a right to expect that he shall be left without a sense of grammatical deficiency. the invocation in the ring and the book is one of the most beautiful openings that can be imagined. "o lyric love, half angel and half bird, and all a wonder and a wild desire--boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, took sanctuary within the holier blue, and sang a kindred soul out to his face- yet human at the red-ripe of the heart- when the first summons from the darkling earth reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, and bared them of the glory--to drop down, to toil for man, to suffer or to die- this is the same voice: can thy soul know change? hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! never may i commence my song, my due to god who best taught song by gift of thee, except with bent head and beseeching hand- that still, despite the distance and the dark what was, again may be; some interchange of grace, some splendor once thy very thought, some benediction anciently thy smile;- never conclude, but raising hand and head thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn for all hope, all sustainment, all reward, their utmost up and on--so blessing back in those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, some whiteness, which, i judge, thy face makes proud, some wanness where, i think, thy foot may fall." these sublime lines are marred by apparent grammatical obscurity. the face of beauty is marred when one of the eyes seems sightless. we re-read the lines to see if we are mistaken. if they were in a foreign language, we should say we did not fully understand them. in the dramatic monologues, as, for instance, in the ring and the book and in the innumerable other narratives and contemplations where a single speaker holds forth, we are especially called upon to forget grammar. the speaker relates and reflects,--pours out his ideas in the order in which they occur to him,--pursues two or three trains of thought at the same time, claims every license which either poetry or conversation could accord him. the effect of this method is so startling, that when we are vigorous enough to follow the sense, we forgive all faults of metre and grammar, and feel that this natural niagara of speech is the only way for the turbulent mind of man to get complete utterance. we forget that it is possible for the same thing to be done, and yet to be subdued, and stilled, and charmed into music. prospero is as natural and as individual as bishop blougram. his grammar is as incomplete, yet we do not note it. he talks to himself, to miranda, to ariel, all at once, weaving all together his passions, his philosophy, his narrative, and his commands. his reflections are as profuse and as metaphysical as anything in browning, and yet all is clear,--all is so managed that it lends magic. the characteristic and unfathomable significance of this particular character prospero comes out of it. "_prospero_. my brother and thy uncle, called antonio- i pray thee mark me,--that a brother should be so perfidious!--he whom next thyself, of all the world i lov'd, and to him put the manage of my state; as at that time through all the seignories it was the first, and prospero, the prime duke, being so reputed in dignity and for the liberal arts, without a parallel: those being all my study, the government i cast upon my brother, and to my state grew stranger, being transported and wrapped in secret studies. thy false uncle- dost thou attend me?" it is unnecessary to give examples from browning of defective verse, of passages which cannot be understood, which cannot be construed, which cannot be parodied, and which can scarcely be pronounced. they are mentioned only as throwing light on browning's cast of mind and methods of work. his inability to recast and correct his work cost the world a master. he seems to have been condemned to create at white heat and to stand before the astonishing draft, which his energy had flung out, powerless to complete it. we have a few examples of things which came forth perfect, but many of even the most beautiful and most original of the shorter poems are marred by some blotches that hurt us and which one feels might have been struck out or corrected in half an hour. how many of the poems are too long! it is not that browning went on writing after he had completed his thought,--for the burst of beauty is as likely to come at the end as at the beginning,--but that his thought had to unwind itself like web from a spider. he could not command it. he could only unwind and unwind. pan and luna is a sketch, as luminous as a correggio, but not finished. caliban upon setebos, on the other hand, shows creative genius, beyond all modern reach, but flounders and drags on too long. in the poems which he revised, as, for instance, hervé riel, which exists in two or more forms, the corrections are verbal, and were evidently done with the same fierce haste with which the poems were written. we must not for an instant imagine that browning was indolent or indifferent; it is known that he was a taskmaster to himself. but he _could_ not write other than he did. when the music came and the verse caught the flame, and his words became sweeter, and his thought clearer, then he could sweep down like an archangel bringing new strains of beauty to the earth. but the occasions when he did this are a handful of passages in a body of writing as large as the bible. just as browning could not stop, so he found it hard to begin. his way of beginning is to seize the end of the thread just where he can, and write down the first sentence. "she should never have looked at me, if she meant i should not love her!" "water your damned flowerpots, do--" "no! for i'll save it! seven years since." "but give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!" "fear death? to feel the fog in my throat." sometimes his verse fell into coils as it came, but he himself, as he wrote the first line of a poem, never knew in what form of verse the poem would come forth. hence the novel figures and strange counterpoint. having evolved the first group of lines at haphazard, he will sometimes repeat the form (a very complex form, perhaps, which, in order to have any organic effect, would have to be tuned to the ear most nicely), and repeat it clumsily. individual taste must be judge of his success in these experiments. sometimes the ear is worried by an attempt to trace the logic of the rhymes which are concealed by the rough jolting of the metre. sometimes he makes no attempt to repeat the first verse, but continues in irregular improvisation. browning never really stoops to literature; he makes perfunctory obeisance to it. the truth is that browning is expressed by his defects. he would not be robert browning without them. in the technical part of his art, as well as in his spirit, browning represents a reaction of a violent sort. he was too great an artist not to feel that his violations of form helped him. the blemishes in the grammarian's funeral--_hoti's business, the enclitic de_--were stimulants; they heightened his effects. they helped him make clear his meaning, that life is greater than art. these savageries spoke to the hearts of men tired of smoothness and platitude, and who were relieved by just such a breaking up of the ice. men loved browning not only for what he was, but also for what he was not. these blemishes were, under the circumstances, and for a limited audience, strokes of art. it is not to be pretended that, even from this point of view, they were always successful, only that they are organic. the nineteenth century would have to be lived over again to wipe these passages out of browning's poetry. in that century he stands as one of the great men of england. his doctrines are the mere effulgence of his personality. he himself was the truth which he taught. his life was the life of one of his own heroes; and in the close of his life--by a coincidence which is not sad, but full of meaning--may be seen one of those apparent paradoxes in which he himself delighted. through youth and manhood browning rose like a planet calmly following the laws of his own being. from time to time he put forth his volumes which the world did not understand. neglect caused him to suffer, but not to change. it was not until his work was all but finished, not till after the publication of the ring and the book, that complete recognition came to him. it was given him by men and women who had been in the nursery when he began writing, who had passed their youth with his minor poems, and who understood him. in later life browning's powers declined. the torrent of feeling could no longer float the raft of doctrine, as it had done so lightly and for so long. his poems, always difficult, grew dry as well. but browning was true to himself. he had all his life loved converse with men and women, and still enjoyed it. he wrote constantly and to his uttermost. it was not for him to know that his work was done. he wrote on manfully to the end, showing, occasionally, his old power, and always his old spirit. and on his death-bed it was not only his doctrine, but his life that blazed out in the words:- "one who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph. held, we fall to rise--are baffled to fight better- sleep to wake." * * * * * robert louis stevenson in the early eighties, and in an epoch when the ideals of george eliot were still controlling, the figure of stevenson rose with a sort of radiance as a writer whose sole object was to entertain. most of the great novelists were then dead, and the scientific school was in the ascendant. fiction was entering upon its death grapple with sociology. stevenson came, with his tales of adventure and intrigue, out-of-door life and old-time romance, and he recalled to every reader his boyhood and the delights of his earliest reading. we had forgotten that novels could be amusing. hence it is that the great public not only loves stevenson as a writer, but regards him with a certain personal gratitude. there was, moreover, in everything he wrote an engaging humorous touch which made friends for him everywhere, and excited an interest in his fragile and somewhat elusive personality supplementary to the appreciation of his books as literature. toward the end of his life both he and the public discovered this, and his railleries or sermons took on the form of personal talk. beneath these matters lay the fact, known to all, that the man was fighting a losing battle against mortal sickness, and that practically the whole of his work was done under conditions which made any productivity seem a miracle. the heroic invalid was seen through all his books, still sitting before his desk or on his bed, turning out with unabated courage, with increasing ability, volume after volume of gayety, of boys' story-book, and of tragic romance. there is enough in this record to explain the popularity, running at times into hero-worship and at times into drawing-room fatuity, which makes stevenson and his work a fair subject for study. it is not impossible that a man who met certain needs of the times so fully, and whom large classes of people sprang forward to welcome, may in some particulars give a clew to the age. any description of stevenson's books is unnecessary. we have all read them too recently to need a prompter. the high spirits and elfin humor which play about and support every work justifies them all. one of his books, the child's garden of verses, is different in kind from the rest. it has no prototype, and is by far the most original thing that he did. the unsophisticated and gay little volume is a work of the greatest value. stevenson seems to have remembered the impressions of his childhood with accuracy, and he has recorded them without affectation, without sentimentality, without exaggeration. in depicting children he draws from life. he is at home in the mysteries of their play and in the inconsequent operations of their minds, in the golden haze of impressions in which they live. the references to children in his essays and books show the same understanding and sympathy. there is more than mere literary charm in what he says here. in the matter of childhood we must study him with respect. he is an authority. the slight but serious studies in biography--alas! too few--which stevenson published, ought also to be mentioned, because their merit is apt to be overlooked by the admirers of his more ambitious works. his understanding of two such opposite types of men as burns and thoreau is notable, and no less notable are the courage, truth, and penetration with which he dealt with them. his essay on burns is the most comprehensible word ever said of burns. it makes us love burns less, but understand him more. the problems suggested by stevenson are more important than his work itself. we have in him that rare combination,--a man whose theories and whose practice are of a piece. his doctrines are the mere description of his own state of mind while at work. the quality which every one will agree in conceding to stevenson is lightness of touch. this quality is a result of his extreme lucidity, not only of thought, but of intention. we know what he means, and we are sure that we grasp his whole meaning at the first reading. whether he be writing a tale of travel or humorous essay, a novel of adventure, a story of horror, a morality, or a fable; in whatever key he plays,--and he seems to have taken delight in showing mastery in many,--the reader feels safe in his hands, and knows that no false note will be struck. his work makes no demands upon the attention. it is food so thoroughly peptonized that it is digested as soon as swallowed and leaves us exhilarated rather than fed. writing was to him an art, and almost everything that he has written has a little the air of being a _tour de force_. stevenson's books and essays were generally brilliant imitations of established things, done somewhat in the spirit of an expert in billiards. in short, stevenson is the most extraordinary mimic that has ever appeared in literature. that is the reason why he has been so much praised for his style. when we say of a new thing that it "has style," we mean that it is done as we have seen things done before. bunyan, de foe, or charles lamb were to their contemporaries men without style. the english, to this day, complain of emerson that he has no style. if a man writes as he talks, he will be thought to have no style, until people get used to him, for literature means _what has been written_. as soon as a writer is established, his manner of writing is adopted by the literary conscience of the times, and you may follow him and still have "style." you may to-day imitate george meredith, and people, without knowing exactly why they do it, will concede you "style." style means tradition. when stevenson, writing from samoa in the agony of his south seas (a book he could not write because he had no paradigm and original to copy from), says that he longs for a "moment of style," he means that he wishes there would come floating through his head a memory of some other man's way of writing to which he could modulate his sentences. it is no secret that stevenson in early life spent much time in imitating the styles of various authors, for he has himself described the manner in which he went to work to fit himself for his career as a writer. his boyish ambition led him to employ perfectly phenomenal diligence in cultivating a perfectly phenomenal talent for imitation. there was probably no fault in stevenson's theory as to how a man should learn to write, and as to the discipline he must undergo. almost all the greatest artists have shown, in their early work, traces of their early masters. these they outgrow. "for as this temple waxes, the inward service of the mind and soul grows wide withal;" and an author's own style breaks through the coverings of his education, as a hyacinth breaks from the bulb. it is noticeable, too, that the early and imitative work of great men generally belongs to a particular school to which their maturity bears a logical relation. they do not cruise about in search of a style or vehicle, trying all and picking up hints here and there, but they fall incidentally and genuinely under influences which move them and afterwards qualify their original work. with stevenson it was different; for he went in search of a style as coelebs in search of a wife. he was an eclectic by nature. he became a remarkable, if not a unique phenomenon,--for he never grew up. whether or not there was some obscure connection between his bodily troubles and the arrest of his intellectual development, it is certain that stevenson remained a boy till the day of his death. the boy was the creature in the universe whom stevenson best understood. let us remember how a boy feels about art, and why he feels so. the intellect is developed in the child with such astonishing rapidity that long before physical maturity its head is filled with ten thousand things learned from books and not drawn directly from real life. the form and setting in which the boy learns of matters sticks in the mind as a part of the matters themselves. he cannot disentangle what is conventional from what is original, because he has not yet a first-hand acquaintance with life by which to interpret. every schoolboy of talent writes essays in the style of addison, because he is taught that this is the correct way of writing. he has no means of knowing that in writing in this manner he is using his mind in a very peculiar and artificial way,--a way entirely foreign to addison himself; and that he is really striving not so much to say something himself as to reproduce an effect. there is one thing which young people do not know, and which they find out during the process of growing up,--and that is that good things in art have been done by men whose entire attention was absorbed in an attempt to tell the truth, and who have been chiefly marked by a deep unconsciousness. to a boy, the great artists of the world are a lot of necromancers, whose enchantments can perhaps be stolen and used again. to a man, they are a lot of human beings, and their works are parts of them. their works are their hands and their feet, their organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions. to a man, it is as absurd to imitate the manner of dean swift in writing as it would be to imitate the manner of dr. johnson in eating. but stevenson was not a man, he was a boy; or, to speak more accurately, the attitude of his mind towards his work remained unaltered from boyhood till death, though his practice and experiment gave him, as he grew older, a greater mastery over his materials. it is in this attitude of stevenson's mind toward his own work that we must search for the heart of his mystery. he conceived of himself as "an artist," and of his writings as performances. as a consequence, there is an undertone of insincerity in almost everything which he has written. his attention is never wholly absorbed in his work, but is greatly taken up with the notion of how each stroke of it is going to appear. we have all experienced, while reading his books, a certain undefinable suspicion which interferes with the enjoyment of some people, and enhances that of others. it is not so much the cream-tarts themselves that we suspect, as the motive of the giver. "i am in the habit," said prince florizel, "of looking not so much to the nature of the gift as to the spirit in which it is offered." "the spirit, sir," returned the young man, with another bow, "is one of mockery." this doubt about stevenson's truth and candor is one of the results of the artistic doctrines which he professed and practised. he himself regards his work as a toy; and how can we do otherwise? it seems to be a law of psychology that the only way in which the truth can be strongly told is in the course of a search for truth. the moment a man strives after some "effect," he disqualifies himself from making that effect; for he draws the interest of his audience to the same matters that occupy his own mind; namely, upon his experiment and his efforts. it is only when a man is saying something that he believes is obviously and eternally true, that he can communicate spiritual things. ultimately speaking, the vice of stevenson's theories about art is that they call for a self-surrender by the artist of his own mind to the pleasure of others, for a subordination of himself to the production of this "effect" in the mind of another. they degrade and belittle him. let stevenson speak for himself; the thought contained in the following passage is found in a hundred places in his writings and dominated his artistic life. "the french have a romantic evasion for one employment, and call its practitioners the daughters of joy. the artist is of the same family, he is of the sons of joy, chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of men. the poor daughter of joy carrying her smiles and her finery quite unregarded through the crowd, makes a figure which it is impossible to recall without a wounding pity. she is the type of the unsuccessful artist." these are the doctrines and beliefs which, time out of mind, have brought the arts into contempt. they are as injurious as they are false, and they will checkmate the progress of any man or of any people that believes them. they corrupt and menace not merely the fine arts, but every other form of human expression in an equal degree. they are as insulting to the comic actor as they are to michael angelo, for the truth and beauty of low comedy are as dignified, and require of the artist the same primary passion for life for its own sake, as the truth and beauty of the divine comedy. the doctrines are the outcome of an alexandrine age. after art has once learnt to draw its inspiration directly from life and has produced some masterpieces, then imitations begin to creep in. that stevenson's doctrines tend to produce imitative work is obvious. if the artist is a fisher of men, then we must examine the works of those who have known how to bait their hooks: in fiction,--de foe, fielding, walter scott, dumas, balzac. to a study of these men, stevenson had, as we have seen, devoted the most plastic years of his life. the style and even the mannerisms of each of them, he had trained himself to reproduce. one can almost write their names across his pages and assign each as a presiding genius over a share of his work. not that stevenson purloined or adopted in a mean spirit, and out of vanity. his enthusiasm was at the bottom of all he did. he was well read in the belles lettres of england and the romanticists of france. these books were his bible. he was steeped in the stage-land and cloud-land of sentimental literature. from time to time, he emerged, trailing clouds of glory and showering sparkles from his hands. a close inspection shows his clouds and sparkles to be stage properties; but stevenson did not know it. the public not only does not know it, but does not care whether it be so or not. the doughty old novel readers who knew their scott and ainsworth and wilkie collins and charles reade, their dumas and their cooper, were the very people whose hearts were warmed by stevenson. if you cross-question one of these, he will admit that stevenson is after all a revival, an echo, an after-glow of the romantic movement, and that he brought nothing new. he will scout any comparison between stevenson and his old favorites, but he is ready enough to take stevenson for what he is worth. the most casual reader recognizes a whole department of stevenson's work as competing in a general way with walter scott. kidnapped is a romantic fragment whose original is to be found in the scotch scenes of the waverley novels. an incident near the beginning of it, the curse of jennet clouston upon the house of shaws, is transferred from guy mannering almost literally. but the curse of meg merrilies in guy mannering--which is one of the most surprising and powerful scenes scott ever wrote--is an organic part of the story, whereas the transcript is a thing stuck in for effect, and the curse is put in the mouth of an old woman whose connection with the plot is apocryphal, and who never appears again. treasure island is a piece of astounding ingenuity, in which the manner is taken from robinson crusoe, and the plot belongs to the era of the detective story. the treasure of franchard is a french farce or light comedy of bourgeois life, of a type already a little old-fashioned, but perfectly authentic. the tone, the _mise-en-scène_, the wit, the character-drawing, the very language, are all so marvellously reproduced from the french, that we almost see the footlights while we read it. the sieur de maletroit's door embodies the same idea as a well-known french play in verse and in one act. the version of stevenson is like an exquisite water-color copy, almost as good as the original. the isle of voices is the production of a man of genius. no one can too much admire the legerdemain of the magician who could produce this thing; for it is a story out of the arabian nights, told with a perfection of mannerism, a reproduction of the english in which the later translators of the arabian nights have seen fit to deal, a simulation of the movement and detail of the eastern stories which fairly takes our breath away. it is "ask and have" with this man. like mephistopheles in the raths-keller, he gives us what vintage we call for. olalla is an instance in point. any one familiar with mérimée's stories will smile at the naïveté with which stevenson has taken the leading idea of lokis, and surrounded it with the spanish sunshine of carmen. but we have "fables," moralities, and psychology, jekyl and hyde, markheim, and will o' the mill. we have the pasteboard feudal style, in which people say, "ye can go, boy; for i will keep your good friend and my good gossip company till curfew--aye, and by st. mary till the sun get up again." we must have opera bouffe, as in prince otto; melodrama, as in the pavilion on the links; the essay of almost biblical solemnity in the manner of sir thomas browne, the essay of charming humor in the style of charles lamb, the essay of introspection and egotism in the style of montaigne. let us not for a moment imagine that stevenson has stolen these things and is trying to palm them off on us as his own. he has absorbed them. he does not know their origin. he gives them out again in joy and in good faith with zest and amusement and in the excitement of a new discovery. if all these many echoing voices do not always ring accurately true, yet their number is inordinate and remarkable. they will not bear an immediate comparison with their originals; but we may be sure that the vintages of mephistopheles would not have stood a comparison with real wine. one of the books which established stevenson's fame was the new arabian nights. the series of tales about prince florizel of bohemia was a brilliant, original, and altogether delightful departure in light literature. the stories are a frank and wholesome caricature of the french detective story. they are legitimate pieces of literature because they are burlesque, and because the smiling mephistopheles who lurks everywhere in the pages of stevenson is for this time the acknowledged showman of the piece. a burlesque is always an imitation shown off by the foil of some incongruous setting. the setting in this case stevenson found about him in the omnibuses, the clubs, and the railways of sordid and complicated london. in this early book stevenson seems to have stumbled upon the true employment of his powers without realizing the treasure trove, for he hardly returned to the field of humor, for which his gifts most happily fitted him. as a writer of burlesque he truly expresses himself. he is full of genuine fun. the fantastic is half brother to the burlesque. each implies some original as a point of departure, and as a scheme for treatment some framework upon which the author's wit and fancy shall be lavished. it is in the region of the fantastic that stevenson loved to wander, and it is in this direction that he expended his marvellous ingenuity. his fairy tales and arabesques must be read as they were written, in the humor of forty fancies and without any heavy-fisted intention of getting new ideas about life. it will be said that the defect of stevenson is expressed by these very qualities, fancy and ingenuity, because they are contradictory, and the second destroys the first. be this as it may, there are many people whose pleasure is not spoiled by elaboration and filigree work. our ability to follow stevenson in his fantasias depends very largely upon how far our imaginations and our sentimental interests are dissociated from our interest in real life. commonplace and common-sense people, whose emotional natures are not strongly at play in the conduct of their daily lives, have a fund of unexpended mental activity, of a very low degree of energy, which delights to be occupied with the unreal and the impossible. more than this, any mind which is daily occupied in an attempt to grasp some of the true relations governing things as they are, finds its natural relaxation in the contemplation of things as they are not,--things as they cannot be. there is probably no one who will not find himself thoroughly enjoying the fantastic, if he be mentally fatigued enough. hence the justification of a whole branch of stevenson's work. after every detraction has been allowed for, there remain certain books of stevenson's of an extraordinary and peculiar merit, books which can hardly be classed as imitations or arabesques,--kidnapped, weir of hermiston, the merry men. these books seem at first blush to have every element of greatness, except spontaneity. the only trouble is, they are too perfect. if, after finishing kidnapped, or the merry men, we take up guy mannering, or the antiquary, or any of scott's books which treat of the peasantry, the first impression we gain is, that we are happy. the tension is gone; we are in contact with a great, sunny, benign human being who pours a flood of life out before us and floats us as the sea floats a chip. he is full of old-fashioned and absurd passages. sometimes he proses, and sometimes he runs to seed. he is so careless of his english that his sentences are not always grammatical; but we get a total impression of glorious and wholesome life. it is the man walter scott who thus excites us. this heather, these hills, these peasants, this prodigality and vigor and broad humor, enlarge and strengthen us. if we return now to weir of hermiston, we seem to be entering the cell of an alchemist. all is intention, all calculation. the very style of weir of hermiston is english ten times distilled. let us imagine that directness and unconsciousness are the great qualities of style, and that stevenson believes this. the greatest directness and unconsciousness of which stevenson himself was capable are to be found in some of his early writings. across the plains, for instance, represents his most straightforward and natural style. but it happens that certain great writers who lived some time ago, and were famous examples of "directness," have expressed themselves in the speech of their own period. stevenson rejects his own style as not good enough for him, not direct enough, not unconscious enough; he will have theirs. and so he goes out in quest of purity and truth, and brings home an elaborate archaism. although we think of stevenson as a writer of fiction, his extreme popularity is due in great measure to his innumerable essays and bits of biography and autobiography, his letters, his journals, and travels and miscellaneous reminiscences. it was his own belief that he was a very painstaking and conscientious artist, and this is true to a great extent. on the day of his death he was engaged upon the most highly organized and ambitious thing he ever attempted, and every line of it shows the hand of an engraver on steel. but it is also true that during the last years of his life he lived under the pressure of photographers and newspaper syndicates, who came to him with great sums of money in their hands. he was exploited by the press of the united states, and this is the severest ordeal which a writer of english can pass through. there was one year in which he earned four thousand pounds. his immeasurable generosity kept him forever under the harrow in money matters, and added another burden to the weight carried by this dying and indomitable man. it is no wonder that some of his work is trivial. the wonder is that he should have produced it at all. the journalistic work of stevenson, beginning with his inland voyage, and the letters afterwards published as across the plains, is valuable in the inverse ratio to its embellishment. sidney colvin suggested to him that in the letters across the plains the lights were turned down. but, in truth, the light is daylight. the letters have a freshness that midnight oil could not have improved, and this fugitive sketch is of more permanent interest than all the polite essays he ever wrote. if we compare the earlier with the later work of stevenson as a magazine writer, we are struck with the accentuation of his mannerisms. it is not a single style which grows more intense, but his amazing skill in many which has increased. the following is a specimen of stevenson's natural style, and it would be hard to find a better:- "the day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at north platte, stood together on the stern platform singing the sweet by-and-by with very tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. but it was not so; for the train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of them in little more than night-gear, some with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale." the following is from an essay written by stevenson while under the influence of the author of rab and his friends. "one such face i now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us labor to dissemble. in his youth he was a most beautiful person, most serene and genial by disposition, full of racy words and quaint thoughts. laughter attended on his coming.... from this disaster like a spent swimmer he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had deserted; with broken wing never more to rise. but in his face there was the light of knowledge that was new to it. of the wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation. of his wounded pride we knew only by his silence." the following is in the sprightly style of the eighteenth century:- "cockshot is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. his manner is dry, brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. the point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. you can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready made or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it on the minute. 'let me see,' he will say, 'give me a moment, i should have some theory for that.'" but for serious matters this manner would never do, and accordingly we find that, when the subject invites him, stevenson falls into english as early as the time of james i. let us imagine bacon dedicating one of his smaller works to his physicians:- "there are men and classes of men that stand above the common herd: the soldier, the sailor, and the shepherd not unfrequently; the artist rarely; rarelier still the clergyman; the physician almost as a rule.... i forget as many as i remember and i ask both to pardon me, these for silence, those for inadequate speech." after finishing off this dedication to his satisfaction, stevenson turns over the page and writes a note in the language of two and one-half centuries later. he is now the elegant _littérateur_ of the last generation--one would say james russell lowell:- "the human conscience has fled of late the troublesome domain of conduct for what i should have supposed to be the less congenial field of art: there she may now be said to rage, and with special severity in all that touches dialect, so that in every novel the letters of the alphabet are tortured, and the reader wearied, to commemorate shades of mispronunciation." but in this last extract we are still three degrees away from what can be done in the line of gentility and delicate effeteness of style. take the following, which is the very peach-blow of courtesy:- "but upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a man be not frugal he has no business in the arts. if he be not frugal he steers directly for that last tragic scene of _le vieux saltimbanque_; if he be not frugal he will find it hard to continue to be honest. some day when the butcher is knocking at the door he may be tempted, he may be obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. if the obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commended, for words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man should support his family than that he should attain to--or preserve--distinction in the arts," etc. now the very next essay to this is a sort of intoned voluntary played upon the more sombre emotions. "what a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged in slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes." there is a tincture of carlyle in this mixture. there are a good many pages of gothic type in the later essays, for stevenson thought it the proper tone in which to speak of death, duty, immortality, and such subjects as that. he derived this impression from the works of sir thomas browne. but the solemnity of sir thomas browne is like a melodious thunder, deep, sweet, unconscious, ravishing. "time sadly overcometh all things and is now dominant and sitteth upon a sphinx and looketh upon memphis and old thebes, while his sister oblivion reclineth semi-somnous upon a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. history sinketh beneath her cloud. the traveller as he passeth through these deserts asketh of her 'who builded them?' and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not." the frenzy to produce something like this sadly overcomes stevenson, in his later essays. but perhaps it were to reason too curiously to pin stevenson down to browne. all the old masters stalk like spectres through his pages, and among them are the shades of the moderns, even men that we have dined with. according to stevenson, a certain kind of subject requires a certain "treatment," and the choice of his tone follows his title. these "treatments" are always traditional, and even his titles tread closely on the heels of former titles. he can write the style of charles lamb better than lamb could do it himself, and his hazlitt is very nearly as good. he fences with his left hand as well as with his right, and can manage two styles at once like franz liszt playing the allegretto from the 7th symphony with an air of offenbach twined about it. it is with a pang of disappointment that we now and then come across a style which we recognize, yet cannot place. people who take enjoyment in the reminiscences awakened by conjuring of this kind can nowhere in the world find a master like stevenson. those persons belong to the bookish classes. their numbers are insignificant, but they are important because they give countenance to the admiration of others who love stevenson with their hearts and souls. the reason why stevenson represents a backward movement in literature, is that literature lives by the pouring into it of new words from speech, and new thoughts from life, and stevenson used all his powers to exclude both from his work. he lived and wrote in the past. that this scotchman should appear at the end of what has been a very great period of english literature, and summarize the whole of it in his two hours' traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place in the history of that literature. he is the improvisatore, and nothing more. it is impossible to assign him rank in any line of writing. if you shut your eyes to try and place him, you find that you cannot do it. the effect he produces while we are reading him vanishes as we lay down the book, and we can recall nothing but a succession of flavors. it is not to be expected that posterity will take much interest in him, for his point and meaning are impressional. he is ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. he is the mistletoe of english literature whose roots are not in the soil but in the tree. but enough of the nature and training of stevenson which fitted him to play the part he did. the cyclonic force which turned him from a secondary london novelist into something of importance and enabled him to give full play to his really unprecedented talents will be recognized on glancing about us. we are now passing through the age of the distribution of knowledge. the spread of the english-speaking race since 1850, and the cheapness of printing, have brought in primers and handbooks by the million. all the books of the older literatures are being abstracted and sown abroad in popular editions. the magazines fulfil the same function; every one of them is a penny cyclopedia. andrew lang heads an army of organized workers who mine in the old literature and coin it into booklets and cash. the american market rules the supply of light literature in great britain. while lang culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the norse or provensal, stevenson will engage to supply us with tales and legends of his own--something just as good. the two men serve the same public. stevenson's reputation in england was that of a comparatively light weight, but his success here was immediate. we hailed him as a classic--or something just as good. everything he did had the very stamp and trademark of letters, and he was as strong in one department as another. we loved this man; and thenceforward he purveyed "literature" to us at a rate to feed sixty millions of people and keep them clamoring for more. does any one believe that the passion of the american people for learning and for antiquity is a slight and accidental thing? does any one believe that the taste for imitation old furniture is a pose? it creates an eddy in the maelstrom of commerce. it is a power like niagara, and represents the sincere appreciation of half educated people for second rate things. there is here nothing to be ashamed of. in fact there is everything to be proud of in this progress of the arts, this importation of culture by the carload. the state of mind it shows is a definite and typical state of mind which each individual passes through, and which precedes the discovery that real things are better than sham. when the latest palace hotel orders a hundred thousand dollars' worth of louis xv. furniture to be made--and most well made--in buffalo, and when the american public gives stevenson an order for pulvis et umbra--the same forces are at work in each case. it is chicago making culture hum. and what kind of a man was stevenson? whatever may be said about his imitativeness, his good spirits were real. they are at the bottom of his success, the strong note in his work. they account for all that is paradoxical in his effect. he often displays a sentimentalism which has not the ring of reality. and yet we do not reproach him. he has by stating his artistic doctrines in their frankest form revealed the scepticism inherent in them. and yet we know that he was not a sceptic; on the contrary, we like him, and he was regarded by his friends as little lower than the angels. why is it that we refuse to judge him by his own utterances? the reason is that all of his writing is playful, and we know it. the instinct at the bottom of all mimicry is self-concealment. hence the illusive and questionable personality of stevenson. hence our blind struggle to bind this proteus who turns into bright fire and then into running water under our hands. the truth is that as a literary force, there was no such man as stevenson; and after we have racked our brains to find out the mechanism which has been vanquishing the chess players of europe, there emerges out of the box of maelzel a pale boy. but the courage of this boy, the heroism of his life, illumine all his works with a personal interest. the last ten years of his life present a long battle with death. we read of his illnesses, his spirit; we hear how he never gave up, but continued his works by dictation and in dumb show when he was too weak to hold the pen, too weak to speak. this courage and the lovable nature of stevenson won the world's heart. he was regarded with a peculiar tenderness such as is usually given only to the young. honor, and admiration mingled with affection followed him to his grave. whatever his artistic doctrines, he revealed his spiritual nature in his work. it was this nature which made him thus beloved. [illustration: concord elms, on main street.] sketches from concord and appledore concord thirty years ago; nathaniel hawthorne; louisa m. alcott; ralph waldo emerson; matthew arnold; david a. wasson; wendell phillips; appledore and its visitors; john greenleaf whittier by frank preston stearns to a jacqueminot rose. contents. preface concord thirty-odd years ago hawthorne louisa m. alcott emerson himself matthew arnold's lecture david a. wasson wendell phillips appledore and the laightons whittier illustrations. concord elms, on main street the concord river, near battle ground hawthorne, after an engraving from the painting by c. g. thompson the old manse, residence of dr. ripley louisa alcott, from a photograph taken in 1868 the alcott house king's bust of emerson, modelled in 1854 autograph letter from matthew arnold david a. wasson in 1878, from a portrait by his son george wendell phillips as he appeared before the phi beta kappa twilight at the isles of shoals celia thaxter, photographed by miss annie richards in 1890 whittier's house at amesbury john g. whittier in his seventy-second year, from a photograph by thompson the merrimac river, near amesbury, by moonlight preface. a volume of reminiscences is commonly the last book that an author publishes, if indeed he does not leave the task to his literary administrator. there are not wanting, however, instances to the contrary; and in the present case my object is more especially to attract public attention to the lives and works of two distinguished men, one of whom has hitherto been little appreciated, and the other, as it seems to me, greatly misunderstood. my position in regard to david a. wasson has already been challenged, but i have faith that it will endure the test of time. if these pages shall also succeed in restoring to wendell phillips a portion of the fame which he lost by the wayward course of his declining years, they will not have been written in vain. the other characters that i have brought upon this stage are such as both the writer and the public have long taken an interest in. to the few living personages who have been introduced, i would apologize, and excuse myself on the ground that the picture would be imperfect without them. sketches from concord and appledore concord thirty years ago. to one looking westward from boston state house there appears a line of rugged, precipitous hills extending across the country from southwest to northeast. having ascended these heights, we perceive beyond them an irregular line of pale blue mountains, of which wachusett is the most southerly peak, and which is in fact a portion of the white mountain range extending through new hampshire and into the northern part of maine. the watershed between these two forms the valley of the concord and merrimac rivers, which is the first military line of defence in new england west of the sea-coast. it is for this reason that the first struggle for american independence took place on the banks of the concord river, and not elsewhere; a fact that might have been predicted, though not of course with certainty, when boston was first settled. one would like to know how this rural community with martial destiny before it happened to obtain the name of concord. did the rev. peter bulkley, descendant of the plantagenets, who first organized society in that valley, did he come there for peace and repose after a religious controversy in boston? no doubt the sloping hillsides and broad sunny plain with the sluggish river winding through it looked very restful to him, after the rugged country through which he had passed; but we fear that he found discord and contention already before him, as many have who came there since for a like purpose. was there a strange fatality in the name, so that patrick henry might say with added force, "gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace"? is it true that peace and war are reciprocal like night and day,--one a rest and preparation for the other, and at the same time its natural consequence? certain it is that no individual life is interesting or valuable in which there has not been a severe struggle; and periods of warfare have often proved to be powerful stimulants for human energy and intellect. in one respect, however, the rev. peter bulkley was fully justified, for concord has become more famous in the arts of peace than if a marengo or gravelotte had been fought there. it has a place in the history of literature, and its name is pleasant either to speak or think of. the town is beautifully situated and seems to sleep in the hollow of the hills. it is now a suburb of boston, with artistic bridges, water from sandy pond, a bronze statue of the minute man, and a good deal of suburban elegance; but thirty years ago it was one of the neat, unpretending, yet so respectable looking, new england villages, such as are still to be met with in the central part of massachusetts. the country roads wound into the town and wound out of it; the river crept lazily by with only a slight swirl or eddy on its surface; and the wild flowers on its banks bloomed and faded without attracting more attention than in the days of the indians. early in the morning ten or a dozen well-dressed gentlemen might be seen hastening to the railway station; then after the children had gone to school there was a nearly unbroken silence until they came out again. occasionally a farmer in his hay-cart or other rude vehicle would jingle through the village, or a woman with a shawl and sun-bonnet would call at one of the stores, make some small purchase, and return as she came. towards evening the children would come out of school, and fill the streets with noise and excitement for a time; the gentlemen would return from boston looking quite as much fatigued as if they had been working all day in a cornfield. the houses on main street were mostly so white as to be hardly distinguishable from the snow in winter, though many of them belonged, architecturally at least, to the last century, and had brass knockers on the doors. yet there was a certain harmony among them; and it seemed as if the place must always have been as it was at that time. there is, however, a compensation in the dullness of country life, which may be expressed in the word nature. the real architecture of concord was not in private or public edifices, but in its magnificent elms, whose branches spanned the streets like the arches of a gothic cathedral. the largest of them stands in front of the town hall, and its trunk measures just sixteen feet in circumference; though doctor holmes has failed to enumerate it in his list of the great trees of the state. another on the road to lexington is remarkable for its straight stem and perfect wineglass form. in autumn the scarlet maples set between the elms are no bad substitute for stained-glass windows. there were no fine pictures in the town, but every turn of the river disclosed a landscape equal to a claude or a kenset. it is rare good fortune to live by a river of clear, pure water which serves equally well for boating and swimming or skating. there are very few such rivers. in the larger ones the current is usually too strong to make a long rowing expedition pleasant entertainment, and tide rivers are always inconvenient. in small rivers shoals and sand-bars commonly abound. river skating, also, is a science by itself, and requires, like alpine climbing, well-seasoned knowledge and experience. it is a very different matter from whirling around in a city rink with half an inch of snow on the ice. the young men of concord used to skate to lowell, on favorable occasions, and back again, nearly thirty miles in all, and thought nothing of it. concord river with its grassy banks, picturesque bridges and continual change of hill and meadow scenery is one of the prettiest that can be found anywhere. then such walks and drives as there were in the town! from concord common roads branch off in all directions like the spokes of a wheel. the oldest road, by which the british troops made their entry and exit, runs northeasterly to the hawthorne house and lexington with a firm, dry sidewalk for more than a mile; another goes northwesterly to the battle-ground and esterbrook farm, where there were magnificent chestnut trees equal in size and shape to the persian walnuts of europe, as well as huge granite boulders scattered about from some pre-historic glacier. the emerson farm lies between two interesting roads, one going straight over the hills of boston, and the other to walden lake and thoreau's hermitage, or where it was. between them runs a lively, gurgling brook, which used to be frequented by woodcock, and the virginia rail, and passes close by mrs. emerson's garden. two or three miles to the south there is another lakelet called fairhaven bay, the south branch of the river flowing through it, quite equal in its way to walden, or to an irish lake, for that matter. on the outskirts of the village, there was many a quaint old weather-beaten house with a well-sweep, perhaps, for accompaniment,--excellent subjects for a sketchbook,--and walden woods were always full of natural side-shows and those charming effects of color and shadow which artists delight in. on the western side, there were the two mile square, the three mile square, and five mile square, for those who liked an exact measure for their constitutional exercise; and on the north the road went straight to sleepy hollow, now one of the famous cemeteries of the world. thence, paths went through the fields and woods to the lexington road on one side and to the north bridge on the other; and these paths are memorable from the fact that they were hawthorne's favorite walk during the last years of his life. a curious accident happened somewhere about 1860 just beyond sleepy hollow. a farmer returning to the next town felt the earth shaking under his wagon, and looked behind him just in time to see a piece of the road disappear into a pool of black water. the natives thought it had gone down to china for they were all summer filling the place up, and the expense was not less than that of a new district school-house. the indian name of the river was muskataquid, and there was formerly an indian encampment on the site of the old ripley manse and battleground. a great quantity of arrow-heads of flint, jasper and quartz have been found in the neighboring fields, and emerson used sometimes to bring his visitors to search for them. the ripley family had a fine collection of indian relics, and it is almost pathetic to think of the pains and labor the aborigines must have expended in manufacturing those household and warlike implements,--the arrows especially being often so soon lost again. it is likely that they chose this situation for its sunny exposure, and as a favorable landing for their canoes, rather than from a decided feeling for landscape beauty. no doubt they had their battles and invasions, and perhaps repulsed their enemies from the same ground where the british line was afterwards formed. what one wonders at, in regard to the concord fight, is that the english commander should have drawn off his men after the first volley and so slight a loss. he had as good a position as his opponents, and after an obstinate struggle might have succeeded in carrying the bridge, the bayonets of his soldiers giving him a certain advantage. this would seem to have been more prudent than to retreat so long a distance before a confident enemy. it has been agreed that the position of the minute men was the best they could have selected, for after repulsing the british troops they were able to send a detachment across by sleepy hollow and hawthorne's path to attack them again in flank on the lexington road. this success was as fortunate for the colonies as in the summer of 1861 bull run was unlucky for our southern friends. the men who were drawn up to be shot at on lexington common were no doubt as brave as their friends who contested the battle of the old north bridge, but their position was not a favorable one to hold against a superior force. it was an excellent position to retreat from, and perhaps that is what their commander had in view. evidently they should have withdrawn to concord, or have intrenched themselves on the nearest hillside commanding the boston and concord road. such was the difference between these two fights. [illustration: the concord river, near battleground.] the life of concord, at the time of which we write, was not its celebrated people so much as mr. frank b. sanborn's school for youth of both sexes. there were not young people enough in the town to make a dance or a picnic out of, and this school introduced an element from the outside world which was both useful and improving. most of his pupils came from the vicinity of boston, but there were many also from springfield, now and then one from the west indies, and finally a sandwich islander, a genuine kanaka. they supported several boarding-houses, the candy-store and the corner grocery, besides greatly increasing the revenue of the post-office. it was a cheerful sight to see these ruddy youths and blooming maidens of a winter's day come trooping in to get the evening mail with their skates in their hands. there was also a daily delegation of farmers' boys from acton, staunch, worthy fellows, and generally better behaved than their more aristocratic companions. mr. sanborn himself, (afterwards for more than twenty years the efficient inspector of our state charities,) was the most genial and good-humored of schoolmasters. he enjoyed teaching, and wished his scholars to enjoy learning. he liked to see the bright young faces about him, and it was their own fault if he was not liked by his pupils. he was impartial, frank, and perfectly sincere; knew how to keep discipline without being a martinet. he was especially a good instructor for young ladies for he never showed them any sentimental tenderness. it was not a very good training school, like the boston latin school, or phillips academy at exeter, and this is usually the case in a school where there are pretty young women; but, as emerson indeed said, much could be learned with mr. sanborn which was not to be had at other schools,--especially this, that the true aim of life should not be riches or success or even scholarship, but moral and intellectual development. mr. sanborn's ideal of his profession was a high one, and but for his interest in the larger field of philanthropy he might have succeeded in realizing it. mr. sanborn's most troublesome boy had a scriptural name, which we will call david,--afterwards quite a distinguished lawyer. there was no harm in david, but an immense deal of mischief. in fact he was irrepressible. "david, stand up on the floor," was part of the customary routine; and when this was accompanied by the use of a large lexicon his situation was a truly amusing one. if he succeeded in escaping this penalty of transgression until the first recess he was considered fortunate. he usually returned from the school sports too much exhausted for any further exertion, but in half an hour was as lively again as ever. all veneration for authority seemed to have been replaced in david by a strong sense of the ridiculous. his seat was immediately under the eye of the master, with his face to the wall, and a large map of ancient rome before him, but this did not prevent him from turning about on all possible occasions and expressing his various states of mind in such ludicrous pantomime as would set off the young girls and small boys like a row of torpedoes. whatever might be said or done in the school without bringing condign punishment on his head david was sure to say or do; and his criticism of passing events and comments during recitations were quite as edifying as those of the instructor,--which is saying a good deal. he had committed to memory one of the longest lists of exceptions in the latin grammar, and never missed an opportunity of repeating it as rapidly as possible and with a comical look. his one object of aversion was mr. sanborn's rattan, and what to do about it he did not know; until coming to school one morning very early with another youth of the same disposition, they cut it into sections and smoked it. after this he was in great terror for several days lest the theft should be discovered, but as the rattan was more for ornament than exercise, its absence did not appear to have been noticed. of course these performances made quite a hero of him with the girls, and he was rewarded with their smiles and favor at the school dances and other social occasions. as an artistic contrast to this picture we remember three beautiful girls who boarded with the wife of the village blacksmith, in one of the whitest and most neatly kept houses in the town. they were not merely pretty young women, but each possessed a style of beauty peculiarly her own. one was a bright, rosy blonde, with sparkling eyes and a lively, spirited manner; another more quiet and composed, with an ivory-white complexion, and large, dreamy, tender-looking eyes; and the third was a light brunette with an oval face and regular features, reserved and dignified. slightly idealized, with these fine qualities, they might have served for a picture of the three graces. they had the advantage of pretty manners, and being fast friends and of a single mind, made a strong impression wherever they went. though the eldest was not more than seventeen, the bigelow girls, as they were called from the blacksmith's family name, took the lead in concord social life for the time being, and gave a tone to it. their influence helped to make the boys more manly and the other girls more respectful. such a trio could not long escape the notice of the harvard students, a number of whom made their acquaintance through graduates of the school; and one of them, inspired with admiration, composed a song which was quite popular at the time, beginning thus: "there was an old lady in concord did dwell, who had but three boarders, and each one a belle; grace, jennie and maggie, more priceless than pearls; then here's to the health of the bigelow girls." truly the days of their youth were the days of their glory; but it is not so for everyone. in fact many of us never obtain any glory. and who is that plainly dressed girl with the meekly determined look who goes back and forth so quietly and regularly? if you speak to her she will smile, but her voice is not often heard. it is miss evans' mary garth, or the prototype of louisa alcott's "old fashioned girl." she is the best scholar in school, and already has important plans in her mind for the future. mr. alcott would sometimes come in on a wednesday afternoon, listen to the declamations and afterwards give his young friends a conversation on the faculties of the human mind. he was an agreeable speaker, and knew how to hold the attention of his youthful audience. on one of these occasions while he was discoursing on the higher mental faculties which are not possessed by the lower animals, a small boy suddenly called out from his corner, "dogs have a conscience; i've seen it." the whole school roared at this, and it nearly disconcerted mr. alcott; but he quickly recovered himself, and explained that the apprehension of punishment often supplies the place of a conscience in dogs, as well as in boys and men; and a highly interesting discussion ensued on this subject. such a method of instruction was highly refreshing after the dry routine in latin and mathematics. there was a yearly nutting excursion in october to esterbrook farm where there were tall chestnut trees, flying squirrels and plenty of wood for a bonfire. may-day was usually celebrated at conantum,--a pine-clad hill on the south side of fairhaven bay, opposite the cliffs. as soon as winter came committees were chosen to provide dancing or theatricals for every friday evening; but the climax of pleasure was a half-holiday for a skating carnival on walden pond,--where thoreau was sure to be present, and also a miss caroline moore, daughter of the deputy sheriff, and afterwards widely known in europe and america as the skatorial queen. "three cheers for the giver of this glorious afternoon," and then the caps would go up in the air, and the rocks and hills echo the hoarse shouts of the boys. i can hear now the jingling of the skates, the crackling of the snow and the merry laughter as we came from under the pine trees of walden into the keen starlight, with the great comet streaming in front of us. on the first of may, 1859, emerson wrote in a letter to carlyle: "my boy divides his time between cicero and cricket,--and will go to college next year. sam ward and i tickled each other the other day, in looking over a very good company of young people, by finding in the newcomers a marked improvement on their parents." there are those who still remember seeing the two distinguished men on the concord playground, and wondering what they thought of it. mr. ward came to place his boy under mr. sanborn's care; and a remarkable boy he proved to be,--equally generous, fearless and high-minded. twenty years later, that same boy, looking out of his new york office window, saw his former guide and preceptor striding through wall street. he rushed down the stairs, and out upon the sidewalk, but the friend of his youth had disappeared and was nowhere to be found. with two or three exceptions, mr. sanborn's young men held him in high regard, and when, in 1860, the united states marshals tried to carry him off by force to testify at washington in regard to the harper's ferry invasion, they all rushed to his rescue, and foremost among them a baltimore boy, who had been cursing his teacher as an infernal abolitionist for the previous six months. mr. sanborn is much better known for his connection with the harper's ferry invasion than for his concord school, or later service on the board of state charities. he was secretary of the kansas aid committee in boston during 1856, and in this way became acquainted with john brown, who visited the school, and the two were afterwards intimate friends. none of brown's new england supporters approved of his invasion of virginia, and mr. sanborn especially argued the matter with him and endeavored to dissuade him from it. he thus became acquainted, however, with brown's plans, and was the only person outside of brown's immediate followers who knew of the proposed attack on harper's ferry. when the attempt failed and john brown was a prisoner in charlestown jail, mr. sanborn found himself, as an accessory before the act, in a most trying situation. if carried to virginia either as a witness or as "particeps criminis" his chance for life would be a slight one. the question was, would general banks, who was then governor of massachusetts, refuse to surrender him. john a. andrew did not consider it safe to rely on him; and mr. sanborn accordingly disappeared for the winter, his school being carried on meanwhile by an assistant and some public spirited concord ladies, one of whom was a sister of hon. e. r. hoar. in the spring mr. sanborn reappeared, and was almost immediately summoned by a united states marshal to give an account of himself before the senate committee in washington. this he declined to do, believing that the townspeople would forcibly resist any attempts to carry him off. the marshal, however, set a trap for him that missed little of being successful. he came to concord at midnight, and secreted himself in an old barn which was close to the school-house, and belonged to one mr. holbrook, a custom-house officer. there he remained all the next day, keeping watch of mr. sanborn's movements through the cracks in the boards. a little after nine in the evening he was joined by four assistants in a carriage. they then proceeded to mr. sanborn's house, seized him at the door, and in spite of his great size and strength, would certainly have carried him off had it not been for the courage and energy of his sister sarah. she screamed "murder," and seizing the carriage-whip, made such good use of it that the horses were with difficulty prevented from running away. her cries waked up the blacksmith in the next house, and he quickly came to the rescue. the "bigelow girls" ran through the village like wild cats ringing door-bells and calling on the people. in less than twenty minutes nearly every man in town, emerson included, was on the spot. the crowd showed a determined spirit, and the marshals were probably glad enough when judge hoar appeared with a writ of "habeas corpus," and took the prisoner out of their hands in a legal manner. the case was tried in boston next day, and mr. sanborn was adjudged to have the right of it. a lively celebration followed in the concord town hall that evening, and miss sarah sanborn was presented with an elegant revolver; but the old borough had not been so stirred up since '75. the place was not without some small entertainments. every autumn there was an annual cattle-show at which the same bulls, horses and poultry were brought for exhibition, and one might suppose also the same fruit and vegetables; for they differed little in appearance from one year to another. a live bittern in a cage of laths was an unusual curiosity. ventriloquists and every kind of a juggler, as well as native indians and the wild men of borneo, came to perform in the town hall. then there was the concord lyceum. people in those days believed in obtaining nourishment for the mind as well as the body. pretty dry nourishment it often proved to be; but it served to bring them together for an hour or two, and take them out of themselves and their dull routine. wiser remarks and more fresh information were sometimes heard upon the stairway than in the lecture-hall. yet emerson was always good, and every man and woman who came to hear him probably felt better for it, even if they were unable to comprehend what he said to them. in the mind's eyes one can see now his spare figure standing at the desk between two large kerosene lamps, bending forward slightly to catch the familiar sentence with his eye, and then calmly surveying his audience as if to see where he could deliver it most effectively. henry ward beecher drew the largest house, and produced great enthusiasm by comparing the united states to an elephant,--though at that time there can hardly be said to have been any united states; but the fine oratory of wendell phillips made the strongest impression, rather too rhetorical to be permanent--but it was intense while it lasted. a young lady who was obliged to take laughing-gas a few days after his lecture on toussaint l'ouverture repeated passages from it with appropriate gestures, in the dentist's chair, and finally concluded, not with the name of the negro statesman, but of the concord high-school teacher. phillips was an especial favorite with the older ladies of the town, who organized a local anti-slavery society in his honor, and held a meeting of it whenever he came there. but neither phillips nor beecher could equal a lecture by the unitarian clergyman on the naval policy of england, which was based on valuable facts and might well be compared to a few grains of wheat in the midst of infinite chaff. judge hoar did not lecture before the lyceum, which seemed strange, for he was not only a man of vigorous intellect, but had, as lowell said, "more wit and gumption and shrewd yankee sense than there are mosses on an old stone-fence," and he could have made any subject interesting in which he was interested himself. the hoar family for some time past had been almost kings in concord, as frequently happens where there is an uncommonly strong man, either a lawyer or a manufacturer, in a town of two or three thousand inhabitants. they were a hardy new england race, lawyers by an inherited tendency, and had now made their mark in public affairs for three generations. they can count among their immediate relatives more senators and representatives to congress than any other american family. it was said in 1775 that while samuel adams represented the force and virtue of new england life, john adams was the best product of its cultivated side; and it would seem as if old samuel hoar, the founder of his line, were a mean between the two. fortunate is such a father if he has a son who inherits his talents and virtues as well as his property; and fortunate is the son whose father knows from his own experience what is best to do for him. the judge was always an interesting figure in the concord streets, and also a pleasant person to meet, for there was never the least pretention about him. he usually had the air of a man with an object before him, and yet it was sufficiently evident that he did not intend to claim more than his rightful share. he walked the ground with a tenacious step, but with no unseemly haste. there was a keen, frosty sparkle in his eye, and a certain severity of manner which, however, covered a great deal of kindness. he liked successful men such as were his own equal in ability, but he was quite as likely to take an interest in those who were unfortunate. a brother of dr. holmes, a constant invalid and great sufferer, who required much consideration, was a more frequent visitor at his house than lowell or agassiz. his face bore a striking resemblance to raphael's portrait of the war-like pope julius second, the last of the great popes. he admired emerson, and was frequently seen in his company; but alcott and thoreau he seemed to have little respect for. mr. alcott once said, "i suppose judge hoar looks on me as the most useless person on the continent; but i can at least appreciate _him_." he was the youngest judge that had ever been appointed to the supreme bench of massachusetts, member of congress, president of the harvard alumni, etc.; but his real distinction now is that as a member of general grant's cabinet he was the first american in public life to take a determined stand in regard to civil-service reform. for thirty years he had seen the government patronage turned into an enormous engine of political corruption, and endure it longer he could not. he went to washington, much to his own inconvenience, mainly to strike a blow at this monster. did he realize the magnitude of the work before him--one which thousands of patriotic men have since attempted and signally failed to accomplish? it was like taking the meat away from a tiger, or trying to lift the mitgard serpent. judge hoar found himself quite alone in the president's cabinet, and with the exception of sumner, garfield, and a few others, senators and representatives united against him in a massive phalanx. even the friendship of general grant was unable to protect him from the fury of his opponents. he returned, not unwillingly, to his native heath and the practice of a better profession than washington politics. in his report to congress on the battle of bull run, general winfield scott gave the opinion that it was lost through the lack of capable officers for the volunteer regiments; and it is generally true that men who like to play soldier in time of peace are not the best material to make real soldiers out of. this would not apply however to captain george l. prescott of concord, who commanded the embattled farmers in that engagement. he was leading an advance on the enemy's centre--"a magnificent sight to look at," his colonel said--when the right wing of the army was outflanked by general kirby smith, and the union forces obliged to retreat. the colonel also appears to have done his duty there, and being severely wounded at this juncture could hear nothing in the feverish condition he was in for the next few days but prescott saying, "steady, men, steady!" to the soldiers. previous to 1861 he was station master at concord, and also carried on a business in lumber, cement, and other building materials, which he could easily do, for trains in those days were not so very numerous. he was the first person that attracted the attention of visitors to the town; for he had a commanding figure and a frank, manly countenance, only too fearless and kindly,--a very handsome man. the hoar family were evidently yankees, and so were emerson, alcott, and sanborn, but captain prescott was an american without seeming to belong to any particular part of the country. his cordial frankness and independence of manner reminded one of a virginian. the refined side of his nature is indicated by an anecdote of his first few days in camp on the potomac. a cadet freshly graduated from west point was directed by general mcdowell to drill the different companies of the regiment in succession, and having but slight respect for volunteer soldiers, he gave an emphasis to his orders by the plentiful use of profane language. when he came to the concord company, captain prescott, who was standing at one side, walked across to him and said, "i must request you, sir, to give your orders in the plain terms of the military code, for my men do not like profanity. if you do otherwise, i shall order them to march off the ground; and they will obey me and not you." this brought the cadet to terms very quickly. in the spring of 1862 he recruited another company for the massachusetts thirty-second; soon rose to the rank of colonel; and after escaping the peril of a dozen hard-fought battles, he was finally killed, with nearly half his command, in grant's advance upon richmond. perhaps no other man would have been so greatly missed in his native town. thoreau used to walk through concord with the long step of an indian, looking straight before him, but at the same time observing everything. occasionally he would stop, make an incision in the bark of a tree with his knife, or pick up a stone and examine it. it was not often that he was met with in anybody's house, or seen in company with other men. his profession was that of a surveyor; and it is easy to imagine how, with his poetic temperament, while laying out roads and measuring wood-lots, he came to be what he was. many people thought his peculiar ways were an affectation, but i believe that he was one of the plainest and simplest of men; as plain and single-minded as president lincoln himself. it was his theory of the way men should live. he was a diogenes without being a cynic. james russell lowell (as he himself tells us) was sent to concord to rusticate while he was at college, and conceived at that time an aversion for thoreau which never left him. in his celebrated "fable for critics" he satirized him as an imitator of emerson, and so plainly that there was no mistaking the portrait. this could not have troubled thoreau much for he was a perfect stoic, and cared little for the opinions of others so long as he satisfied his own conscience. emerson, however, felt it keenly, for it was equally a reflection on his friend and his own sagacity. in his last volume of poems lowell also speaks of emerson in a way which indicates rather a diminished respect for him. it is true that thoreau imitated emerson's manner of speech a good deal--and it was often difficult to avoid doing this while in emerson's company--but lowell also in his younger days affected a grave and reserved demeanor which he afterwards became tired of and threw entirely aside. about the time of which we speak emerson complained that he saw too little of thoreau, and was afraid that he avoided him. the man was sufficiently original. he did not pretend to be a poet, and his prose writing is not at all like emerson. in point of style it is purer and more classic than either emerson's or lowell's; and these two lines of his, "in the good then who can trust. only the wise are just," certainly deserve to be set up somewhere in letters of gold. he had a strong dislike of matrimony. once while walking across a field with david a. wasson he kicked a skunk-cabbage with his boot and said, "there, marriage is like that." lowell was without doubt right about him in this respect. thoreau's notions of life, like the socialistic theories of henry george, would if generally adopted put an end to civilization. he wanted like the french theorists of the last century to separate himself from the history of his race; a most dangerous attempt. it is like cutting a tree from its roots. wasson had many a hard argument with him on this point, and tried to show him that customs are the good logic of the human race: but it was too late. however, logic is one thing and character another. the best eulogy of thoreau is to be found in emerson's poetry. he is evidently the subject of the beautiful little poem called "forbearance." the opening lines, "thou who hast named the birds without a gun; loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk; at rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse;--" this describes the hermit of blue walden exactly. a large portion of "woodnotes" is devoted to an account of his pilgrimage in the forests of maine; and the ode to "friendship" must have been inspired either by him or carlyle. "i fancied he was fled- and after many a year, glowed unexhausted kindliness, like daily sunrise there." he delivered a lecture one winter before the concord lyceum on wild apple-trees. the subject made his audience laugh, but their laughter was of short duration. the man who had lived there so long unknown was at last revealed before them, it was the best lecture of the season, and at its close there was long continued applause. hawthorne. the literary celebrities of concord, with the exception of thoreau, were not indigenous. emerson may have gone there from an hereditary tendency, but more likely because his cousins the ripleys dwelt there. hawthorne came there by way of the brook farm experiment. how, with his reserved and solitary mode of life, he should have embarked in such a gregarious enterprise is not very clear; but the election of general harrison had deprived him of a small government office--it seems as if webster might have interfered in his behalf--his writings brought him very little, and perhaps he hardly knew what to do with himself. all accounts agree that he joined the west roxbury association of his own free-will, and without solicitation of any kind. he not only threw himself into this hazardous scheme with an energy that astounded his friends but he embarked in it all the money he had in the world, which was nearly a thousand dollars. he has left no explanation from which we might infer what his hopes or his motives were. since three wise men went to sea in a bowl, or the army of german children set out for the holy land in the twelfth century, there was never a more hare-brained or chimerical undertaking. i once knew of a boy who after much reading of robinson crusoe, started for the woods at five o'clock of a summer afternoon, with the full intention of spending the night there alone. he took with him a light fowling-piece, and some crackers in his jacket pocket. he gathered some berries and shot some small birds, and cooked them after the indian fashion. when it grew dark, however, he became frightened and climbed into a tree; but he could not sleep there, and finally returned home about one o'clock in the morning to find his family in great agitation. this was not very unlike the brook farm enterprise, which was inspired by the writings of fourier, a seductive french socialist and one of the most unreasonable of men. he considered, like diogenes, that since all men could not be rich and comfortable, it was better that they should all be needy and miserable. it was one of the sentimental out-growths of the french revolution, for which napoleonism is always the proper remedy. one of his peculiar notions was that every man should black his own boots. george ripley and his friends do not seem to have made any definite calculation of what might be the result of their experiment. they expected, by working six hours a day and limiting themselves to the simplest and most frugal living, to have six left for literary pursuits and the enjoyment of profound conversation. any practical farmer would have told them that this could not be done and make both ends meet at the close of the year. any political economist would have told them that a community which disregards the advantage of division of labor, could not compete with one which recognizes that advantage. the principles of fourier, if generally adopted, would produce general starvation and soon reduce the population of europe to one fourth of its present numbers. london, which depends for its size on its commercial and political importance, would become almost as desolate as ancient thebes. there was lately an essay published in one of our magazines entitled, "why socialism appeals to artists," and the reason alleged was that artists, being more sensitive and delicately organized than most people, were less capable of enduring the hard struggle with the world which all are obliged to sustain who make their own way in it. this is no doubt the true explanation of the brook farm enterprise, and it carries with it its own contradiction. the more realistic sort of literature might survive in the communistic order, but sculpture and painting, which depend upon the undivided surplus of production which we call wealth, would inevitably perish. even literature would disappear at length, then science, or at least all advancement of science, precedent in law would be disregarded, and the dark ages come again. the present organization of society is the accumulated wisdom of mankind for thousands of years. like the language we speak, it was rather an intellectual growth than the invention of an individual or any number of individuals. those who have done the most for it have added but little to the whole. it may be subverted by revolution for a time, but will always reassert itself again. it may be amended or modified by reason, but cannot be replaced, either by the ingenuity of one man or that of a whole generation. the logic of custom is the most cogent of all reasoning, for it is inherited in our veins from our ancestors. the man who tries to escape from it is like a plant being pulled up by the roots. it is exactly this which writers like fourier and henry george leave out of their reckoning. they see that in individual cases custom is often blind, cruel, and oppressive, and being kind-hearted and sympathetic they hate it; but they might as well hate the earth itself because there are deserts and swamps and malarious places on its surface. it is, no doubt, the special business of man to remodel the earth as much as possible; to drain its swamps, and level its forests; but in spite of that its rivers and mountains will always remain the same, and separate ourselves from it we cannot. the greater number of the brook farm community were transcendentalists, and we have no desire to depreciate the work which the transcendentalists accomplished. they were the needful men and women of their time; the importers of fresh thought and a more elevated mental activity. the most critical and conservative of american reviews has said of them: "they put aside worldly ambition and desire as truly as ever did medieval monk or oriental ascetic, and thus gave what was essential in their surroundings, a practical proof of their sincerity. the result was almost startling. their yankee audience first ridiculed them as dreamers; but when they found that what the transcendentalists actually recommended to them was dreaming, their ridicule changed to wonder, and finally to a sort of awe-struck admiration, something like that we imagine a roman to have felt on learning that a christian was capable of giving up his fish-ponds and nightingales' tongues, and his afternoons at the amphitheatre, for the sake of what he called 'truth' proclaimed by an obscure few." this is not saying too much, but if anything too little. since the time of the early christians there was never a more pure-minded and loyal-hearted congregation than that which was gathered at brook farm. they were really the best society of the day. george ripley himself, one of the finest scholars and most agreeable writers of that time, afterwards found his right place as literary editor of the new york tribune, where for twenty-five years he disseminated the knowledge of the best thought and literature broadcast over the land. when we consider the immense circulation of that periodical and the quality of its readers, we can hardly overestimate the value of his work. many have become famous for less. there were poets, painters, musicians in the community; especially john s. dwight, who as the life-long editor of the "journal of music," also deserves a place on the roll of our public educators. george william curtis was one of the youngest members of the community, but always one of the most brilliant. sometimes of a rainy day there was very good cheer and entertainment in the "hive" as they called their most commodious building, but generally the men were too drowsy and fatigued after their work was done for much intellectual activity. it is necessary, however, to distinguish between the new england transcendentalists and the german school of philosophy, from which they are supposed to have derived their inspiration. a german critic has said of them that they were not so much philosophers as poetical rhapsodists, and this is about the truth of it. their business was not so much thinking, as to celebrate thinking. there was also in the composition of their creed a strong element of french naturalism, which is not easily reconciled with the teachings of the german transcendentalists. kant, fichte, and schelling were true metaphysicians, and would never have encouraged their pupils to establish a socialistic community in the suburbs of leipsic, nor would they have approved of emerson's lines: "who liveth with the stalwart pine foundeth an heroic line; who liveth in the palace hall waneth fast and spendeth all;--" for they would have said, "there are the hohenzollerns; and the experience of mankind is also worth something." it was this empirical french quality in new england transcendentalism which gave it a certain popularity, but at the same time prevented it from striking its roots deeply into the national soil. the law of nature has its value, but where it conflicts with the historical method it is invariably defeated. emerson was the elected chief of the transcendental movement on account of his influence with the public, but its true leader and representative character was margaret fuller. this remarkable woman, whose life was adventure from the cradle, who lived in everybody's house except her own, who went everywhere and did everything on nothing a year, who made enemies by the dozen and friends by the score, still remains one of the most distinguished persons of that period. with some faults of character, she still possessed those strong qualities which are required for the conduct of a great enterprise. she had that personal magnetism which comes from courage, confidence, and clear perceptions. she inspired great enthusiasm in others for whatever she was interested in herself. as a talker, she was the rival of carlyle and coleridge; the best we have ever had on this side of the water, and with such an artistic style that one could hardly decide whether it was studied or natural. she was a terrible antagonist; for she united the tongue of a woman to the logical faculty of a man, and it was impossible to get the better of her. her faults were the faults of youth, as she was occasionally vain, saucy or overbearing, and always self-conscious. it was this last trait that lowell referred to when he represented her as saying that since her earliest years she had "lived cheek by jowl with the infinite soul." much youthful vanity, however, can be forgiven to those who are generous and faithful. besides, margaret fuller was splendidly domestic. she advocated women's rights to a certain extent; but she was no forerunner to the modern brood of platform women who fumble their night-keys while they discourse on the duties of wives and mothers. she carried a helping hand into the families that she entered, as well as stirring all the inmates to an unwonted mental activity. she would knit socks while she talked plato: but the best testimony to her character is the character of her friends. people are known by the company they keep. the one quality which hawthorne had in common with the transcendentalists, except such qualities as are common to all good people, was ideality. next to the grand structure of his head, this is the most noticeable characteristic in the pictures of him. he seems to have been attracted to them at first, and was even mistaken for a transcendentalist by edgar a. poe, and was attacked by that fiery virginian in a most belligerent manner. at brook farm, however, he soon began to differentiate from them, and finally acquired for them something like an aversion. neither is this to be wondered at. hawthorne was an artist pure and simple. he looked for ideality in human life; not in the ideas that control and direct it. he was not like raphael and shakspeare, men who could enjoy philosophy and make their art so much the richer and deeper for it. he saw everything in a pictorial form; facts and conditions which did not make a picture had no value for him, and reasoning was a weariness and a disagreeable effort. nevertheless he did the best he could. it is delightful to think of the tremendous energy with which he worked at brook farm. no one else seems to have done so much hard labor there. he was better fitted for this than many of his colleagues, having a strong, full-chested frame, and is said in his youth to have been a very swift runner and skater; but nothing indicates better the latent force that was in this quiet and usually inactive man. many of the brook farm adventurers were not physically equal to a solid day's work, but this was a contingency which nobody had foreseen. [illustration: hawthorne. after an engraving from the painting by c. g. thompson.] hawthorne was one of the first to discover the futility of the experiment. early in the following year he wrote to miss sophia peabody to whom he was then engaged: "it has become quite evident to me that our fortunes are not to be found in this place;" a conclusion which he no doubt arrived at from an examination of the accounts of the association. it was hawthorne's salvation in the difficult path of life he had chosen; a path as difficult and dangerous as that of an alpine climber, that, poet as he was, he always looked facts sternly in the face and did not permit himself to be misled by romantic or sentimental illusions. it had been expected that the more brilliant members of the community would be able to write magazine articles, or other remunerative literature, in their hours of leisure, and money thus obtained would go into the common fund. hawthorne found that he could do nothing of the kind. two or three hours' work in the sun did not quite deprive him of the use of his brains, but it left him without either fancy or imagination. he also felt the want of that external refinement which a nature like hawthorne's requires as a fulfilment of its internal condition. the lack of nicety in the housekeeping became continually more and more unpleasant to him. the expenditures at the end of the first year were largely in excess of the receipts; in fact the inmates had eaten up nearly everything that the farm produced. his friend franklin pierce, who was just beginning to be prominent in politics, asked him the salutary question, "what are you gaining by this peculiar mode of life?" his experience there served as a foundation for the "blithedale romance," and caused no further injury than the loss of his money. it would have required a thackeray to have realized and described the humorous side of it--the highly practical joke of so many well-educated and cultivated people making life unnecessarily hard for themselves. in the autumn of 1841 a reverend gentleman, the brother of mrs. l. maria child, went to visit his friend at brook farm accompanied by his niece, who is one of the few persons now living who have a distinct memory of the place. on calling at the "hive" they learned that only a few members of the association were present at that moment, but mr. ripley himself could be found in the turnip field, where they soon discovered him with two others, throwing turnips into a cart. on the approach of his friends, mr. ripley came forward and said, "dr. francis, this is really kind of you, to come such a distance to see an old fellow. you perceive i am occupied with the philosophy of 'de cart.'" this referred to some writings he had lately published on descartes' philosophy, and made his audience laugh heartily. mr. dwight then appeared and gave an interesting account of a flock of wild geese which he had discovered early in the morning marching through the cornfield. he said they looked exactly like tame geese, but as soon as he came in sight of them they flew away in a most surprising manner. mr. bradford, who is frequently mentioned in hawthorne's note-book, looked sunburnt and very thin, and averred that milking the cows on a frosty morning was a chilly kind of business. hawthorne himself had gone to boston; probably to sell the pig referred to in his conversation with franklin pierce. the visitors walked about the premises and were shown through the "hive," but found it rather a dreary and comfortless building. the farm did not appear to be well kept. there was too evidently a lack of order and discipline there; and without order and discipline no enterprise in which numbers are concerned can succeed. having discovered nothing better than fool's gold at brook farm, hawthorne suddenly came across the true metal in the domestic privacy of his married life at concord. it would appear from one of mrs. hawthorne's letters that george ripley was so sanguine of the success of his experiment that he had given hawthorne a sort of guarantee for the thousand dollars which the latter had invested in it. when, at the close of the first year, hawthorne had decided to withdraw from the association, he naturally hoped to regain a portion of his capital. mr. ripley was too deeply involved to accommodate him in that way, and offered instead the rent of the old ripley mansion in concord, which then happened to be vacant. so hawthorne and miss peabody were happily married, with no immediate fund save the rent of an ancient house in the country, and no better expectations than the uncertain income from his pen. it was a hazardous undertaking, but he was now nearly forty years old, his _fiancee_ more than thirty, nor could the sharpest foresight discover any advantage from waiting longer. emerson, in his lecture on heroism, has signalled especially the heroism of the scholar, and selected as an example the frenchman anquetil duperron, who worked his passage on a vessel to india, and then worked his way, mostly on foot, through afghanistan and persia, learning languages as he went, in order to obtain copies of the sacred books of the persians, which were then unknown in europe. were it not for fear of giving offence he might have found a finer heroism in literary genius, and selected an example from his own village. for fifteen years hawthorne had been like a ship detained from port by adverse winds. the handsomest and most gifted man in america had nearly reached to forty years without being married or finding a home of his own. it was a life of hardship; of social starvation almost like exile. it tested his courage, his faith in human nature, to the utmost. how difficult were the earlier years of irving and bryant and longfellow. that he remained always true to himself and never lost sight of that ideal of excellence which was his guiding-star. we are not surprised to learn that his difficulties were rather augmented than diminished by matrimony. even in plain, rural concord he found at the end of three years, that his expenses had exceeded his income by what seemed to him quite a formidable debt. this distressed him the more because he had not yet learned that all men must lose in some manner, and that the whole community is bound to take a share in such losses as are honestly incurred. this is what charity and philanthropy, as well as the various forms of insurance, finally result in. but hawthorne was the last man to apply such a principle to his own case. he had continually hoped that when a balance-sheet was drawn up at brook farm some portion of his investment there would be returned to him; but this resource also failed him. at last bancroft the historian, whom james k. polk strangely enough had made secretary of the navy, heard of his situation, and had him appointed collector of the port at salem. he was again removed from that position by president taylor, and it has been said that his wife heroically supported him by her skill in drawing and painting until the "scarlet letter" could be finished and money procured from its publication. the nomination of franklin pierce for the presidency was a piece of good fortune for hawthorne such as the wildest expectation could never have imagined; and at length in his fiftieth year, with the consulate of liverpool, he finally saw the wolves driven from his door. this realistic side of his life seems to have escaped the attention of his biographers. yet he may be called fortunate to have lived when he did. it is easy to say that we should have appreciated emerson and hawthorne better than their cotemporaries appreciated them, but it is one thing to recognize a genius when we meet him and a very different matter to admire him after we have been informed that he is a famous man. it is doubtful if writers in whom the ideality is so strongly marked would be received with favor at the present time either by editors or the public. the tendency to materialism would have been too strong for them. lyceum lectures, on which emerson depended chiefly, are not what they were; and either of them in a magazine would appear in too startling a contrast with the smooth impersonal writing of to-day. the two cardinal sins of a writer now are to have a style of his own and ideas of his own. complaint is frequently made that we have no great men like those of the past; but such grand individualities as hawthorne and webster, or even self-centred characters like horace greeley, are no longer possible. everywhere, in the college, in the market, and in society, war is waged upon originality and independence of character. it is the same in politics as in literature. our novelist critic said of the rage for christmas cards, some years since, "the truth is that art must obey the popular will or cease to be." there was not much art certainly in christmas cards; but nothing could express better the truculent spirit of the age. most husbands are fortunate if their honeymoon lasts a month, but hawthorne's lasted two years. it would seem as if during that space not a cloud came across his sky. he gathered flowers for his wife--water lilies, which he must have sought for in a boat, fringed gentians and the queenly "lilium canadensis"--and then felt that the most beautiful of them were unequal to the loveliness of her nature. after the first months, few visitors came to see them. "george prescott," he says, "sometimes enters our paradise to bring us the products of the soil, but for weeks the snow in our avenue has been untrodden by any other guest." mrs. hawthorne's letters at this period are exceedingly interesting, for nowhere in her husband's writings, or in those of others, do we come so close to this rare and remarkable man. the following description of his character seems to have been a genuine case of thought transferrence, so much is it like his own writing in grace and purity of expression: "he loves power as little as any mortal i ever knew; and it is never a question of private will between us, but of absolute right. his conscience is too fine and high to permit him to be arbitrary. his will is strong, but not to govern others. he is so simple, so transparent, so just, so tender, so magnanimous, that my highest instinct could only correspond to his will. i never knew such delicacy of nature." this is a classic gem, and nothing could be added to it. the character of hilda in "the marble faun," is simply mrs. hawthorne at the age of twenty-two. she was a pure-hearted, unselfish person, but not self-reliant or over wise. there is a golden edge or rainbow hue to his description of the old manse which distinguishes it from his other writings and betrays the deeply penetrating happiness he felt there. it is like a morning landscape painted while the dew is on the grass. one notices especially his delight in the great yellow squash-blossoms and the way in which he idealizes them. this, and the three years he spent in europe after the expiration of his consulate, were the holidays of his life and the reward of all the rest. with the exception of william ellery channing, he made no friends in concord, though he speaks kindly of thoreau, and compares channing to him. it is to be suspected that this was largely on account of his political principles--or the lack of them. he had held office under a democratic administration and felt that his interests were connected with that party. further than that, he does not appear to have distinguished between the two parties. of his most intimate friends, one was a democrat and the other a whig. but the annexation of texas was now in sight, and concord was stirred again with the spirit of '75. hawthorne, as is well known, did not take interest in the antislavery movement, and a heated discussion of any subject must have been jarring and unpleasant to him. it is not impossible that in this way he came into conflict with margaret fuller and conceived an abiding dislike to her. miss fuller would not have spared her eloquence in regard to what she considered a matter of principle, nor is it likely that she would have been more considerate of the respect which is due in such matters from a woman to a man. there were not a few persons whom she offended by too much "bounce." to a reverend gentleman who asked her, as they were parting at the house of a mutual friend, where her office was in boston, she replied, "oh! look in the directory for it"; instead of politely giving him the street and number. thus she lost a pleasant acquaintance and a subscriber to "the dial." hawthorne and his wife had not been four days in concord before she came to them with a proposition that they should take ellery channing and his wife, who was her own sister, into their family as boarders. one cannot help some astonishment at this proceeding, for it is an instinct with all women to know that a newly married couple do not like to be interfered with. no word has ever been published from which we can infer how the grievance between them originated, but it is morally certain that there was a grievance of some kind, and as hawthorne was the most inoffensive of men, it is not likely that he was responsible for it. now in regard to what follows, it is well to carry in mind two important points. in the first place, a writer of fiction acquires a habit, very naturally, of dealing with all tales and anecdotes as if they were subjects for his art, and is not therefore so accurate a judge of their veracity as a lawyer or a critic might be. whatever holds together as a story is to him as good as true. the second point is that although hawthorne understood human nature better than the rest of us, it is nevertheless with certain limitations. his romance characters are of a rare sort and are well sustained, but they form a group by themselves. he has not the range of scott, thackeray, or goethe. there is not the slightest evidence that he appreciated the character of emerson; and if so, he would not be likely to appreciate emerson's intimate friends. a man like john brown, always ready to rush upon destruction for an idea, must have been an inexplicable riddle to him. yet john brown was the only american who could match hawthorne in ideality--totally different as they were in other respects. twelve years later, while hawthorne was in rome, he became acquainted with a sculptor named mosier, who gave him a most disparaging account of margaret fuller's marriage to count d'ossoli. this informant said that the d'ossoli family, though pretending to be noble, actually lived like peasants; that the count's brother had for some years been a servant to a gentleman he knew of; that the count himself was an exceedingly handsome man, but ignorant and clownish; that he could not even speak italian; and that margaret fuller had become a good deal demoralized in rome, and could neither write nor converse with her former brilliancy. hawthorne accepted this statement and entered it in his diary with inferences of his own which are still more unfavorable to miss fuller. we like to believe that he wrote this rather to relieve his own mind than with the expectation of influencing the minds of others. we can easily forgive him for it, for in the whole course of his life there is no other instance of the same kind; but he was most certainly in error to believe such an imputation on the character of a respectable lady from the authority of a single witness. c. p. cranch, the poet and landscape-painter, says that this mr. mosier was the veriest munchausen, and nobody in rome thought of crediting his stories. but mosier's statement shows on its face signs of internal weakness. when he says that count d'ossoli in attempting to model a foot placed the big-toe on the wrong side, he states what is altogether incredible, and discloses his own splenetic humor. neither is it more likely that margaret fuller permitted him to examine her manuscripts so that she might obtain his assistance in regard to their publication. whatever may be said of her, she was not a fool, and was better acquainted with both english and american publishers than all the sculptors in italy. miss fuller's marriage was rather a peculiar one, but nothing is more common than for a highly intellectual woman to select a mate who is a decided contrast to her. hawthorne has given us an example of this in the romance of monte beni--the brilliant miriam falling in love with that italian child of nature donatello. margaret fuller was always attracted strongly by personal beauty, and when she was a girl at school she chose her favorites rather for that than for their mental endowments. the handsome d'ossoli was no doubt all the more interesting to her because he belonged to a noble family which had come to misfortune. is it not better for us to look at the matter in this way? margaret fuller's marriage, voyage, and final destruction against the rocks of her native land, would form the subject for a magnificent poem. how could it happen that hawthorne deceived himself? is it possible that he was in the right, and men like emerson, ripley, and james freeman clarke in the wrong? why does he consider miss fuller to have had a strong, coarse nature, and to have been morally unsound? here we enter into the deepest recesses of the author's nature. hawthorne was not wholly a fatalist, or he never could have conceived the character of donatello, but he was very largely so. a man for whom a life of action is impossible, and who is thus unable to escape wholly from his own shadow, naturally comes to look on any series of events as an inevitable chain of cause and effect. he speaks somewhere of byron's virtues and vices as being so closely interwoven that he could not have had one without the other, and if the objectionable passages in his poetry were expurgated, the life and genius of it would go with them. his story of "the birth-mark" is an allegory of the same description. he did not agree with shakspeare, that the best men are moulded out of faults, but believed that as we are in the beginning, so we remain essentially till the end. he says that whenever margaret fuller heard of a rare virtue, she wished to possess it and adorn herself with it; so that she finally became a sort of brilliant external patchwork, dazzling to the eye, but internally quite different. there is a certain truth in this, but it is not a whole truth; for there is socrates--a compendium of all the ancient virtues, consistent throughout, and who formed himself in the manner hawthorne describes. it is true that in a search after rare and exceptional virtues we are apt to lose sight of the more homely kind which form the bone and sinew of human-life. but is not this effort a virtue in itself? is not all progress in this world accomplished as the frog escaped from the well, by jumping up three feet and falling back two? is not the very crown of character that which we derive from failure, penitence, and self-reproach? human nature is a mysterious labyrinth and the wisest have only found a partial clue to it. george s. hillard--a brilliant amateur sort of writer, orator and editor--came to visit hawthorne one of the last sundays while he remained in the old manse, and the two went together to spend the forenoon in walden woods, calling on emerson by the way to inquire what the best road might be. emerson prudently detained them until after the townspeople were safely in their churches, and then accompanied them. it is a pleasant retrospect to think of those two mighty men, so like and yet so unlike, together with their amiable and gifted friend, going off on this sunday excursion. mr. hillard was a fortunate companion for him, for no one could serve better as a mean between two extremes. at the close of hawthorne's rehearsal of this episode, he makes this note, in commentary:-"i find that my respect for clerical people, as such, and my faith in the utility of their office, decrease daily. we certainly do need a new revelation, a new system; for there seems to be no life in the old one." was this the summary and net result of their stroll in walden woods? it must be confessed that such was the opinion of the most thoughtful and high-minded people in those days; but we do not feel so now. schism and separation have done their work, and liberal thinkers everywhere are now returning to the christian fold. * * * * * about the first of june 1860 the hawthorne family returned from their long residence in england and italy. there was no little curiosity concerning them in the quiet old settlement, which was increased by the fact that nothing was seen of them for several months after they came. if thoreau was a recluse, hawthorne was an anchorite. he brought up his children in such purity and simplicity as is scarcely credible,--not altogether a wise plan. it was said that he did not even take a daily paper. in the following year martin f. conway, the first united states representative from kansas, went to concord to call on emerson, and emerson invited hawthorne to dine with them. judge conway afterwards remarked that mr. hawthorne said very little during the dinner, and whenever he spoke he blushed. imagine a man five times as sensitive as a young lady in her first season, with the will of a titan, and a mind like a crown-glass mirror, and you have nathaniel hawthorne. while he was in a state of observation, the expression of his face reflected everything that was going on about him; in his reflective moods, it was like looking in at the window of a dark room, or perhaps a picture-gallery; and if any accident disturbed him his look was something like a cracked pane of glass. moreover there was something unearthly or superterrestrial about him, as if he had been born and brought up in the planet saturn. wherever he went he seemed to carry twilight with him. he walked in perfect silence looking furtively about for fear he might meet some one that he knew. his large frame and strong physique ought to have lasted him till the year 1900. there would seem to be something strange and mysterious about his death, as there was in his life. his head was massive, and his face handsome without being attractive. [footnote: this, however, was near the close of his life.] the brow was finely chiseled, and the eyes beneath it were dark, luminous and fathomless. i never saw him smile, except slightly with his eyes. if his son invited a friend to dinner it was always when his father was away from home. neither do i remember seeing him at his daughter's out-coming party,--an occasion when the town musician declined to appear because the sister of his particular friend had not been invited. emerson has given an account of this trait in hawthorne's character, but he has failed to discover the mainspring of it. who indeed can explain it? it was part of the man, and without it we could not have had hawthorne. perhaps the easiest solution is that of thoreau's wild apple-tree. when the sprout from an apple-seed comes up in the grass a cow pretty soon bites it off. the next year it puts out two more shoots, and the ends of these are again nipped off. thus it continues to grow under severe restrictions and forms at length a large thorn-bush, from which finally the tree is able to shoot up beyond the cow's reach and bears its proper fruit. so no doubt hawthorne in his youth, being a tender plant, was greatly annoyed by brutal and inconsiderate people. a sensitive, proud and refined nature inevitably becomes a target for all the cheap wits and mischievous idlers in the neighborhood. to escape from this we may suppose that hawthorne surrounded himself with an invisible network of reserve, behind which his pure and lofty spirit could develop itself in a harmonious manner. this he certainly succeeded in doing. in purity of expression and a graceful diction hawthorne takes the lead of his century. he was the romance writer of the anglo-saxon race; in that line only goethe has surpassed him. nor is it possible for pure and beautiful work to emanate from a mind which is not equally pure and beautiful. wells of english undefiled cannot flow from a turbid spring. in purity emerson probably equaled him, but not in his sense of beauty. where he surpassed hawthorne was in manliness, and in his broad humanitarian interests. otherwise no two men could be more unlike than these, and it would seem to be part of the irony of fate that they should have lived on the same street, and been obliged to meet and speak with each other. one was like sunshine, the other shadow. emerson was transparent, and wished to be so, he had nothing to conceal from friend or enemy. hawthorne was simply impenetrable. emerson was cordial and moderately sympathetic. hawthorne was reserved, but his sympathies were as profound as the human soul itself. to study human nature as hawthorne and shakespeare did, and to make models of their acquaintances for works of fiction, emerson would have considered a sin; while the evolution of sin and its effect on character was the principal study of hawthorne's life. one was an optimist, and the other what is sometimes unjustly called a pessimist: that is, one who looks facts in the face and sees people as they are. hawthorne could not have felt quite comfortable in the presence of a man who asked such searching questions as emerson frequently did, and emerson could scarcely have found satisfaction in conversing with one who never had any opinion to express. a good many people claimed to have been hawthorne's friends after his death who were sufficiently afraid of him while he was alive. he does not appear to have ever had but two very intimate friends, franklin pierce and george s. hillard, both remarkably amiable and sympathetic men,--qualities to which they owed equally their successes and failures in life. ex-president pierce used to come to concord and carry hawthorne off to the white mountains, the isles of shoals or philadelphia, just as two college-students will drop their books and go off somewhere to have a good time. once while hawthorne was in boston, mr. hillard tried to persuade him to go to cambridge and dine with longfellow; but he would not, and went home by the next train. he was pro-slavery in politics, partly because his two friends were so, and partly because he disliked the abolitionists. it is not necessary to suppose that the pro-slavery people of the north in those days believed that human slavery was morally right. it is doubtful if any one believed that. a great many considered it, as webster did, a serious evil but a dangerous matter to interfere with (and so it proved); some were influenced by mercenary motives; and the northern democrats, misled by the illogical doctrine of state sovereignty, believed they had no right to interfere with it. mr. hillard held the first of these positions, and general pierce the last. very likely hawthorne shared in both of them; but he never explained himself, and what he thought on the subject will always remain a mystery. the political element seems almost to have been left out of his composition; and in one of his books he speaks of the concord fight with a certain kind of indifference. alcott was almost the only man in concord who had the courage to call on hawthorne. sometimes they even went to walk together. how much satisfaction hawthorne found in these visits it would be difficult to say, for the very philosophic breadth and extension of alcott's interest were enough to make hawthorne feel rather shy of him. alcott's conversation about books and literature was often very fine, but even this could not have given hawthorne much entertainment. his own library, as he states himself somewhere, was of a miscellaneous character, and contained the works of scarcely any author of repute except shakespeare. alcott's sense of humor and keen knowledge of human nature may have been a sort of common ground between them. meanwhile hawthorne, as afterwards appeared, was making a study of alcott to see whether he would serve his purpose as the mainspring for a new work of fiction. the manuscript plot of a romance was found among hawthorne's papers in which he describes a personage in general outline like his neighbor alcott, but without his ideality and good-humor. this imaginary character was supposed to live in a retired manner, together with an old housekeeper, a boy of whom he is the legal guardian, and a huge spider in which his interest and solicitude are more especially centred. what the catastrophe of this strange story was to have been, we are not informed, but it naturally would have arisen from the unhealthy and oppressive social position in which the boy must have found himself as he advanced towards manhood. at the close of his memoranda hawthorne says, "in person and figure mr. alcott--". to be selected as the mainspring of a romance is properly a compliment. [illustration: the old manse, residence of dr. ripley.] there was a certain dutch artist who made a specialty of sheep, and painted them so well that goethe said of him, "this painter so entered into the life of his subject that i think he must have been a sheep, and i shall become one if i continue to look at his pictures." in the same way hawthorne had such penetrating sympathy for all living things, that he unconsciously absorbed certain qualities from those with which he was most familiar. he would sometimes write a letter to his publisher, mr. fields, which was almost like what mr. fields would have written to him. venomous creatures appeared to have been especially interesting to him, and he even fancied a poisonous influence in the roman sunshine. perhaps his liking for spiders may account for a certain cobwebby feeling which comes over one at times while reading his books. there can be no doubt of this, for when i once spoke of it, a lawyer who was present replied, "i have said the same myself; and when i was in paris reading a french newspaper, i had a feeling as if cobwebs were being drawn across my face, and looking down to the end of the column, i saw that it was a translation from hawthorne." but these peculiarities are like the soil which gives flavor to the grape, and the wine that comes from the grape. if the reader thinks that in these few paragraphs hawthorne has hardly received proper justice, he may not be far wrong. yet how can any personal account of such a man do him justice. it may be said of him that he was a model husband, a kind father, and an exemplary citizen, and that is all. during his lifetime there were people who did him great injustice. his reserved life was looked upon as a morbid selfishness. the rare publication of his writings was supposed to arise from indolence. it was thought that he wrote the life of franklin pierce for the sake of a government office, and when he was actually appointed consul at liverpool, the case was proved beyond a doubt. the anti-slavery people looked upon him as a lamentable exception to the other literary men of america, who were all on their side: they doubted if he had been born with any sense of right and wrong. what answer can be made to such accusations? when it is a question of motive, of moral consciousness, how are such charges to be refuted? so president garfield has often been accused of appointing an efficient and honest collector for the port of new york, in the interest of mercenary politics. charles sumner for preventing the annexation of san domingo, was called a traitor to the negro race, and it was said that his speech on the subject was delivered under the influence of brandy. a college-professor informed his class that sumner was a man of small erudition, and garrison spoke of him as one who had evidently joined the anti-slavery cause from interested motives. a boston merchant whose word had been as good as his note for thirty years was gibbetted soon after his death by a high-minded journalist, as the type of mendacious duplicity. but why multiply these unpleasant examples of misrepresentation? hardly a great and good man has ever lived without suffering from it at one time or another. they originate in bad temper, in partisan malice, and those believe them who have no just criterion to distinguish truth from falsehood. after all, what other american has accomplished a literary work equal to hawthorne's. he was an artist, purely an artist, and of the finest quality. the raw material may be in us, but to develop it requires pains and labor. the greater the talent the more difficult is its fruition. hawthorne's life was absorbed in this. his habitual mood was a dreamy, brooding observation. when englishmen say that no great work of art has been produced in america; that allston's magnificent pictures remain half-finished; that neither emerson or lowell has been able to write a book, but only essays; that we have no historian as good as macaulay, and that the best of our poetry consists of ballads and other short pieces; my reply is, "the scarlet letter" and "the marble faun." these are great works of art. the most unique and original, perhaps, of the present century; and if they have not the lyrical form they are exquisitely written, and none the less poetic. there is a difference in kind between a great work and a small one. a good sonnet may be finished in an hour, and is a pleasant recreation; but the composition of a tragedy requires a severe, protracted and laborious effort. goethe's finest songs were written in a moment, a flash of inspiration; but faust may be called the work of his lifetime. he himself describes the difficulties which attend the composition of a tragedy, in such a manner as may well deter others from attempting it. how few, indeed, are the dramatic poets in all times and countries! even byron did not succeed in this. mrs. hawthorne said that during the period while her husband was occupied with the "scarlet letter," there were a contraction of his brow, and a look of care and anxiety in his face, which were reflected in her own nerves and made her unhappy, although she knew little of what he was writing. both these romances are tragedies; and there is something in tragedy that places it at the top of all literature. their subjects also indicate that he was in full sympathy with his own time, and perhaps understood the nineteenth century better than it does itself. emerson has been called a greek, but hawthorne was more hellenic than he. this may be perceived in his version of the greek legends in "tanglewood tales." his style is much like that of isocrates. where webster or emerson would use saxon words, hawthorne would use greek or latin ones, and gain in grace and flexibility what he lost in force and vigor. he would seem to have been a southerner by nature, fond of warm weather and an inactive life. his short stories are of equal value comparatively with those that are longer and more complete. i remember in my youth being attracted by the title of one of them. it was called "the unpardonable sin," and described a man, who, having spent many years in search of this iniquity, finds it too heavy a burden for his soul to carry, and destroys himself one night in a limekiln. next morning the lime-burner discovered a marble heart floating on the surface of the seething lime. this was the unpardonable sin,--to have a cold, unfeeling heart. such allegories make a more lasting impression than many sermons. his note-books also are of great value, especially the american ones. he makes dramatic situations out of the simplest incidents, and we read between the lines sentences he never wrote. we remember them without in the least intending to do so, and find ourselves reflecting upon them as if they were important events. no writer since fielding has given so faithful a picture of the time in which he lived. one can envy such a man the three years he spent in italy. during that time he resided chiefly in a villa on the height called bellosguardo, near florence, a villa which he has described with some changes, in the "marble faun," as the mountain residence of donatello. a more delightful summer abode cannot be conceived, for it has the advantage of mountain air, and the view from it is unsurpassable. picturesque florence, with its towers and battlements, lies almost beneath it, while the green and sylvan valley of the arno stands before it, with the far-off purple mists of the mediterranean. behind it the apennines stretch from livorno to rome. the interior of this chateau, finished in ancient marble, he has described himself. hawthorne's life was not a very easy one, as judged by ordinary standards; and until he went to england it was a weary and uncomfortable struggle. let us be thankful that for once he had a full measure of rest and enjoyment, and let us be grateful to the man who made this possible for him. more than ten years after his death on a summer afternoon mr. alcott was entertaining some friends, and as they looked towards the hawthorne house one of them said, "would you be surprised, mr. alcott, to see nathaniel hawthorne some day gliding past your rustic fence as he used to do?" "no, sir, i should not," replied the old philosopher, "for while he lived he always seemed to me like an apparition from some other world. i used to see him coming down from the woods between five and six o'clock, and if he caught sight of any one in the road he would go under cover like a partridge. then those strange suspicious side-glances of his! they are not anywhere in his writings. i believe they were inherited from some ancestor who was a smuggler, or perhaps even an old pirate. in his investigation of sin he was expiating the sins of his progenitors." there is reason for believing that alcott was not far wrong in this conjecture. julian hawthorne, in the biography of his father, says of their ancestors: "his forefathers, whatever their less obvious qualities may have been, were at all events enterprising, active, practical men, stern and courageous, accustomed to deal with and control lawless and rugged characters; they were sea-captains, farmers, soldiers, magistrates; and, in whatever capacity, they were used to see their iron will prevail, and to be answerable to no man." a man who does not subordinate his will to the common law and the common good must eventually become a lawless man; unless restrained by such natural refinement and rare sense of propriety as we meet with in hawthorne himself. it is not necessary to suppose that any of them were pirates, which was probably a mere flourish of alcott's rhetoric. * * * * * there is another legend that daniel webster, rufus choate and nathaniel hawthorne were all distantly related through the batchelder family. there are said to be red and black batchelders, like the douglas family in scotland; and the black batchelders have a rare gift of intellect which only comes to the surface when united with some other stock. one would like to know how much truth there is in this. there are indeed certain striking points of resemblance between these three; each in his own line surpassing all others of the same period. their complexion, and their great physical strength, their deeply arched eye-brows, their genius for language, their reticent and contemplative habits, and especially a certain pregnant gloominess of expression, would seem to indicate a nearer unity than the general one of the aryan races. yet the case remains to be proven by documentary evidence. louisa m. alcott. mr. alcott's house in concord was situated on the lexington road about three-quarters of a mile from the village centre. it was the best-looking house almost in the town, being of simple but faultless architecture, while the others were mostly either too thin or too thick, or out of proportion in some way. it lacked a coat of fresh paint sometimes, but this was to its advantage from an artistic point of view. fine old elm-trees shaded the path in front of it, and across the road a broad level meadow stretched away to walden woods. in the rear it was half surrounded by low pine-wooded hills, which protected it from the north-easterly storms and the cold draughts of winter. mr. alcott had quite a genius for rustic architecture, as is proved by the summer-house which he and thoreau built for emerson, and the fences, seats and arbors with which he adorned his little place added a final charm to the rural picture. in summer nights the droning of the bittern could be heard across the meadows, and woodcock came down familiarly from the hills to look for worms in the vegetable-garden. the snow melted here in spring and the grass grew green earlier than in other places. it was the fitting abode and haven of rest for a family that had found the conflict of life too hard for them. within the house was as pleasant as without. there is no better decoration for a room than a good library, and though mr. alcott's books were not handsomely bound one could see at a glance they were not of a common sort. they gave his study an air of distinction, which was well carried out by the refined look and calm demeanor of its occupant. the room opposite, which was both parlor and living-room, always had a cheerful homelike appearance; and after the youngest daughter may entered on her profession as a painter, it soon became an interesting museum of sketches, water-colors and photographs. i remember an engraving of murillo's virgin, with the moon under her feet, hanging on the wall, and some excellent copies of turner's water-color studies. the alcotts were a hospitable family, not easily disturbed by callers, and ready to share what they had with others. the house had a style of its own. how emerson accomplished what he did, with his slight physique and slender strength, will always be one of the marvels of biography. his is the only instance, i believe, on record of a man who was able to support a family by writing and talking on abstract subjects. it is true he inherited a small property, enough to support a single man in a modest way, and without this his career would not have been possible; but the main source of his income was winter lecturing--a practice which evidently killed theodore parker, naturally a strong and powerful man. yet he was not satisfied with this, but wished also to provide for others who had no claims of relationship upon him. his generous efforts in behalf of carlyle have long since been made public; but the help he gave mr. alcott will probably never be known. least of all would emerson have wished it to be known. one can imagine that he said to himself: "here is a man of rare spiritual quality, with whom i am in the closest sympathy: i cannot permit him to suffer any longer." so after the philosophic school in the masonic temple had come to an end, he invited him to concord and cared for him like a brother. mr. alcott deserved this, for though he was not more a philosopher than thoreau was a naturalist, and equally with thoreau he was a character. the primal tenet in his creed was like the ancient mariner's, to harm neither man nor bird nor beast; and he exemplified this doctrine with incredible consistency for full fifty years. he lived a blameless life. many laughed at him for his unpractical theories; but the example of one such man, even in a reactionary way, is worth more to the community than the practical efforts of ten ordinary men. he has besides the distinction of being the person, whom, during the middle portion of his life, emerson most liked to converse with. froude the historian calls charles the fifth one of nature's gentlemen: so was mr. alcott. it is easy to distinguish the man whose behavior is an emanation of himself from people of well-bred manners or of cultivated manners. well-bred manners come from habit and association, and though always pleasant may be nothing more than a superficial varnish; while cultivated manners imply a certain amount of self-restraint. no man was ever more free from formality or affectation. he was neither condescending to inferiors nor would he yield ground to those who considered themselves above him, but met all people on the broad equality of self-respect. he was always most respected where society was most polite and refined. neither was he lacking in personal courage. during the anthony burns excitement in boston in 1852, he took a prominent position among the rescuers, and if a collision of the guards had taken place he would likely have been killed. he had a fine philosophical mind, and if it had only been trained properly in early life he might have won a distinguished place among metaphysicians. that however was hardly possible in the america of that time. he was not a philosopher in the modern sense, but he was in the ancient sense--a disciple of pythagoras, dropped down from the pure grecian sky into the restless turmoil of the nineteenth century. he wished to discover everything anew for himself, instead of building upon the discoveries of others. his conversations, usually in the parlors of some philanthropic gentlemen, were made up partly of pythagorean speculation and partly of fine ethical rhapsody which sometimes rose to genuine eloquence. they served to interest neophytes in the operations of their own minds, and the more experienced found much the same satisfaction in it as in emerson's discourses. he was an excellent speaker; confident, quick-witted and conciliatory. i remember a very eloquent address that he delivered at an anniversary meeting in 1868, and at an anti-slavery convention, where garrison and phillips fell out, mr. alcott made the best speech of the occasion, discriminating between the two leaders in a just and sensible manner. he was memorable for shrewd observations. he said once to a lady who was fretting because the clergyman did not cone in time, "meanwhile, mrs. d., there is providence." of a good-humored young radical who wished to make war on all conventional forms, religious and political parties, he remarked, "unless our friend changes his ideas he will not be the happy man at forty that he is now;" and the saying came true. if we are to judge the value of alcott's thought by the constant cheerfulness and contentment of his daily life, his ideas must have been of an excellent quality. his flowing white hair, and the calmness and purity of his aspect, gave him quite an apostolic look; and once while visiting at the house of a friend, a certain small boy--the same for whom john brown afterwards wrote his autobiography of a boy--asked his mother if that man was one of christ's disciples. such was the father of "little women." the alcotts received their friends weather permitting on monday evenings, and some favored youths of mr. sanborn's school would go there to play whist, make poker-sketches, and talk with the ladies; while mrs. alcott, who had played with the famous automaton in her younger days, would have a quiet game of chess with some older person in a corner. louisa usually sat by the fire-place, knitting rapidly with an open book in her lap, and if required to make up a table would come forward with a quiet look of resignation and some such remark as "you know i am not a sarah battles." then after a while her love of fun would break forth, and her bright flashes of wit would play about the heads of all who were in the room. just after ten mr. alcott would come in with a dish of handsome apples and his wife produce some ginger cakes; a lively chat for fifteen or twenty minutes would follow, and then the guests would walk home. it was in this way louisa acquired that stock of information about young people and their affairs which she made such good use of afterwards. human nature to the poet and novelist is like a calumet and hecla mine which never becomes exhausted. louisa alcott resembled her mother in figure, features and color, and in her ardent and impulsive temperament. in the greater number of families the eldest child resembles the father; the second and third are more like their mother, and the fifth (if there be so many) is often like the grandparents. in the alcott family however it was just the reverse of this, for may the youngest daughter was the only one like her father, inheriting the artistic side of his nature, instead of the philosophical. neither did louisa resemble her grandmother's family, the sewalls. she was emphatically a may, and the best of all the mays, though there have been many of them who were excellent. i think she was indebted to her father for her enterprising spirit and keen sense of character. mr. alcott knew the people of concord much better than they understood him, and was always most interesting when he talked of the distinguished people with whom he had been acquainted. may was fond of society, and a walk to and from the school dances cold winter nights; and then ready next morning for a skating party on walden pond; but she said her sisters had little entertainment in their youth, dressing always in the plainest manner and practising a stoical self-denial. louisa liked to look at other people dancing, and generally it made her happy to see the young folks enjoy themselves. this shows the true woman in her. the portrait she has given of herself as jo in "little women" is not to be taken too literally. like thackeray in "pendennis" she has purposely left out the noble side of her nature,--for indeed that was only disclosed at rare intervals and for those who had eyes to see. she had the strongest features of the family, and a quick decisive manner which was sometimes mistaken for arrogance. [illustration: louisa alcott. from a photograph taken in 1858.] louisa and her sister annie (now mrs. pratt) were excellent actresses, and were always in demand when private theatricals were on foot. to see them perform in the "two buzzards" with her sister and f. b. sanborn was a treat of the first order. i can hear louisa now saying, "brother benjamin, brother benjamin!" in a scene of which all the rest is gone from my memory. another favorite _role_ of hers was dickens' character of sarah gamp in the nocturnal interview with her friend betsy prig. as mrs. jarley exhibiting her wax tableaux she was inimitable. she did it with a snap. once she was called upon to assist at an entertainment given at the house of the village blacksmith: she invented a charade which was both novel and appropriate. she arranged her father to look like the boston statue of franklin--and the resemblance was a very striking one--and then came in with another gentleman in a travelling dress, and surveyed and criticized him. when she said, "he seems to have rather a brassy expression," mr. alcott could scarcely hold his face. this was the first part: the second consisted of the scene from the "two buzzards" already mentioned, and for the third a witty dialogue about mr. sanborn's school. as more than half of the audience was composed of mr. sanborn's pupils this charade produced a great effect. her acting had this peculiarity, that she seemed always to be herself and the character she was representing at the same time. this is the case also with some professional actors and actresses, notably with madame ristori and edwin booth: but it is not the finest kind of acting. the anti-slavery conflict and the civil-war with which it ended appealed strongly to her ardent and sympathetic nature; and this finally resulted in her enlisting as a nurse to tend the wounded soldiers. her lively and picturesque "hospital sketches" written at washington for the "boston commonwealth" are the echo of this period. very few passed through that crisis without bearing the scars of it for life, and the fever which louisa alcott contracted in the camp sapped her vitality and probably shortened her days. she was one of the veterans, and deserved a pension. while she was convalescing she said to a friend who condoled with her on her misfortunes, "the loss of my hair was the worst of it" (this had been cut off by order of the doctor); "i felt as if that were a disgrace." when some one asked her how she amused herself she replied, "i think out sketches of stories and put them away in little pigeon-holes in my brain for future use." on the fourth of july 1864 there was an evening-party at the house of hon. e. r. hoar, and nearly at the close of it miss alcott came to me with a humorous twinkle in her eye and said: "a few of us are going to have a picnic to-morrow at conantum"--a picturesque bluff owned by one conant, about three miles up the river--"and mrs. austin and i have engaged a boat for the occasion and are now looking for a muscular heathen to row it. will you come?" nothing could have pleased me better; so next morning we all started in the best of spirits. there was however a head wind, the boat was without a rudder, and the concord river is very crooked. i think miss may alcott was also in the party. i found it terribly hard rowing, and finally exclaimed, "this is the darnedest boat i ever pulled." "frank," said louisa, "never say darn. much better to be profane than vulgar. i had rather live in hell than in some places on earth. strong language, but true. here, take some cold tea." she had a claret-bottle full of this beverage, and gave me a good drink of it. her vigorous piece of common-sense was also very refreshing, and conantum being now in sight, miss alcott and her sister insisted on landing at the next bridge, leaving mrs. austin [footnote: mrs. jane g. austin, a bright little story-writer of those days and very much like her english namesake.] and myself to continue the way alone. unluckily there was no one now to care for the bottle of cold tea, and rolling about in the stern of the boat the cork came out and the tea was spilled. this was a severe loss to miss alcott who was not yet strong enough for an all-day picnic, and when i explained it to her she said, "don't talk to me. i know you college-boys. that cork never came out by accident. you drank the tea yourself, and now in what way i am going to punish you for it i cannot tell." with such biting humor she partly relieved and partly concealed her just vexation. characteristic writers are commonly the last to be appreciated, and miss alcott's first novel did not meet with an encouraging reception from the public. some tender critics even complained that the story was subversive of conservative morality. "i cannot help that," louisa remarked in her emphatic manner, "i did not make morality or human nature, and am not responsible for either: but people who are given to moods act as i have described; sometimes they like one person and sometimes another." perhaps she was thinking not so much of moody natures as of those contradictory characters who have inherited the traits of very dissimilar ancestors. she wrote another novel which she herself liked much better and had great hopes of, which was lost in some miraculous way by her publisher mr. fields. he paid her for it what many people would consider a handsome compensation--exactly the sum that stuart mill paid carlyle for burning up the first volume of his "french revolution"--but it was a trying affair for both sides. how so bulky an object as a novel in manuscript could have been lost without its falling into the hands of some person who knew what to do with it, is most difficult to imagine. that so many of the world's benefactors are doomed to incalculable torments here on earth may be a good argument for immortality, but for divine providence it is no better evidence than the lisbon earthquake which so startled the optimists and thinking men of the last century. there is no telling why this is so; for misfortune falls upon the just as well as the unjust, and often no human foresight can prevent it. louisa alcott supposed that she was nearly well of her fever when inflammatory rheumatism set in. the worst of this was the loss of sleep which it occasioned. long continued wakefulness is a kind of nervous cremation, and resembles in its physical effect the perpetual drop of water on the head with which the spanish inquisitors used to torment their heretics. any mental agitation makes the case very much worse, and it requires great self-control to prevent this. it was melancholy to behold her at that time. her pallid face, the dark rings about her eyes, and her dreary, hopeless expression might have penetrated the most obdurate heart. "i don't suppose it is going to kill me," she said, "but i shall never get over it. i go to bed at nine o'clock and think steadily of the wood-box in order to keep my mind from more serious subjects." it is not always darkest before dawn, especially when the moon is on its last quarter, but happily it was so in this instance. three years later she was in much better health, and had published "little women." first the young people read it; then their fathers and mothers; and then the grandparents read it. grave merchants and lawyers meeting on their way down town in the morning said to each other, "have you read 'little women'"; and laughed as they said it. the clerks in my office read it, so also did the civil engineer, and the boy in the elevator. it was the rage in '69 as "pinafore" was in '78. it was re-published in london,--a rare compliment for a book of its kind. rumors of this unusual success had reached the little household in concord and filled their home with pleasant expectations; but they had no idea of the extent of it. the evening papers announced on the night before christmas that miss alcott's publishers had sent her that day a very large cheque. there were many glad hearts at this news beside those in the alcott family; where, i fancy, tears and prayers were not wanting to complete the sacrament. the long struggle was ended, and peace and rest had come at last. louisa had won a glorious victory, and the laurel wreath was on her brow. the style of "little women" is not classic; but as goldsmith says in his preface to the "vicar of wakefield," "it matters not." it filled a vacant place in american and perhaps also in english literature, and must continue to fill it. novelists usually take up their characters at the age of twenty-one, or somewhere in the twenties, and there have also been many excellent books written for children; but to describe the transition period between fifteen and twenty there had not as yet been anything adequate--if we partially except thomas hughes' sketches of life at rugby and oxford. it is a period of life which deserves much more consideration than it often receives. it is the integrating period, during which we make our characters and form those habits of thought and action which mainly determine our destiny. the bloom of youth may conceal this internal conflict, but it is there none the less, and frequently a very severe one. "you have no idea how many trials i have," i once heard a schoolgirl of sixteen say, the perfect picture of health and happiness; and those who remember well their own youth will not be inclined to laugh at this. the tragedy of childhood is the commonest form of tragedy; and youth is a melodrama in which pathos and humor are equally mingled. those who by some chance have escaped this experience and have had the path of early life made smooth for them, may grow to be thrifty trees but are not likely to bear much fruit. it is for her clear perception of these conditions and her skill and address in dealing with them that miss alcott deserves the celebrity that is now attached to her name. her simple pictures of domestic country life are drawn with a firm and confident hand. they stand out in strong relief, and take their color from her own warm-hearted womanly nature. her characters act unconsciously before us as if we looked at them through a window. in american fiction "little women" holds the next place to the "scarlet letter" and "marble faun." there is one of boccaccio's stories which differs so much from the others in closeness of statement and fulness of detail that it is judged to have been an experience of his own. as the critics say, he knew too much about his subject. louisa alcott wisely avoided this error. her characters are always real, but,--in her best work at least,--not realistic. there are people in natural life, full of peculiarities, whom it would take pages to describe, while others can be hit off in a few sentences. miss alcott knew that characters of a few simple traits were best suited to her purpose; and she was too good an artist to imitate her model. her impersonation of herself as jo was pretty near the truth, but beth, amy, and meg only resemble her sisters in a very general way. if the book were more of a biography it would not be good fiction. some of the incidents in it were taken from her own or the family experiences, but more are either imaginary or conventional. it is said that her primary intention was to leave jo in a state of single blessedness, and that roberts brothers fairly declined to publish the second volume unless she was married off to somebody. thus originated the episode of the german professor, one of the best in the story. laurie was supposed to have been taken from julian hawthorne, because he lived in the next house and was rather an attractive kind of boy. louisa herself said there was no ground for this: and yet laurie seems to me a good deal like him. i remember meeting her at the radical club in boston in january 1868, and her drawing me into a corner where she told me that she was writing a book for young people and would like to know about the game of cricket. this fixes the time pretty closely when "little women" was begun. she was frequently to be seen at the meetings of the radical club, afterwards called the chestnut street club, where her father was one of the leading members. she did not care for lectures, but greatly enjoyed listening to the discussion of learned and thoughtful men. it was an era of large designs and great mental activity; and in such periods the best literary work is always accomplished. once she said (in her father's presence), "it requires three women to take care of a philosopher, and when the philosopher is old the three women are pretty well used up." but at another time she said, "to think of the money i make by writing this trash, while my father's, words of immortal wisdom only bring him a little celebrity." she honored her father, and lived more for him than for anybody else, including herself. her journey through europe was like a triumphal procession. doors were opened to her everywhere; not the palace of the rothschilds or the apartments of the ex-queen of naples, but those of distinguished artists and literary people. mr. healy, the best american painter in rome, requested permission to paint her portrait. this she consented to, and was rather surprised when he afterwards presented it to her. "i wondered," she said while we were looking at the picture, "what was going to come next; when one day mr. healy's daughter appeared with a novel in manuscript which she wished i would give an opinion of. i found it to be good and sent it to my london publisher, who happily published it for her." posterity ought to be grateful for healy's little manoeuvre. [illustration: the alcott house.] the same attentions followed her on her return to boston; but she did not care for them. she had learned that the satisfaction of good work is the only one which we never have to regret. she was busy with plans for the future, considering especially how she might order and arrange her affairs for the benefit of her family. ladies whose names she had never heard, came in fine carriages and sent in their cards to her. this amused her very much. "i don't care who their grandfathers and grandmothers were," she said. "john hancock was my great-great-grandfather, but nobody ever came to see me on his account." if she had leisure she received them: otherwise not. in her next novel, the "old fashioned girl," she introduces herself with the name of katie king, and says to her young friends: "beware of popularity; it is a delusion and a snare; it puffeth up the heart of man, and just as one gets to liking the taste of this intoxicating draught, it suddenly faileth." when "little men" was published a rather censorious critic complained that miss alcott's boys and girls had no very good manners, and made some inquiry after the insipid "rollo" books which were in circulation forty years ago. it is true their manners are not of the best, but they are the concord manners of that period. were they otherwise they would not be true to life. very few boys and girls of sixteen have fine manners; and even after they have acquired the art of good behavior in company they continue to act in quite a different fashion towards each other. what else can we expect of them? exactly the same objection has been made to "school days at rugby"; and when some one complained of goethe that the characters in "wilhelm meister" did not belong to good society he replied in verse, "i have often been in society called 'good,' from which i could not obtain an idea for the smallest poem." concord was large enough for thoreau, but not for louisa alcott. she had no proclivity for paddling up and down concord river in search of ideas. she had a broad cosmopolitan mind, and the slow routine of a country-town was irksome to her. she did not care for nature; and the great world was not too large a field of observation for her. even in rome she preferred the living image of a healthy bambino to the statue of the gladiator who has been dying in marble for so many centuries. she loved the society of people who were abreast of the times, who could give her fresh thought and valuable information. the books she read were of the most vigorous description. when some one asked her if she had read mallock's "new republic" she replied, "i do not read cotemporary writers; only emerson and the classics." "louisa," said i, "you speak to my soul." "do i?" said she, with a tenderness of feeling such as i had never noticed before. her attachments were strong; but her resentments were of long duration. emerson himself. emerson might be seen on his way to the post-office at precisely half-past five every afternoon, after the crowd there had dispersed. his step was deliberate and dignified, and though his tall lean figure was not a symmetrical one, nor were his movements graceful, yet there was something very pleasant in the aspect of him even at a distance. the same has also been said of good statuary, even before we know what is its subject. he knew all the people old and young in the village, and had a kindly word or a smile for every one of them. his smile was better than anything he said. there is no word in the language that describes it. it was neither sweet nor saintly, but more like what a german poet called the mild radiance of a hidden sun. no picture, photograph or bust of emerson has ever done him justice for this reason; only such a master as giorgione could have painted his portrait. every morning after reading the "boston advertiser" he would go to his study, to take up the work of the day previous and cross out every word in it that could possibly be spared. this procedure and his taste for unusual words is what gives the peculiar style to his writing. it was characteristic of him physically and mentally. he had a spare figure; was sparing of speech, sparing of praise, and sparing of time; in all things temperate and stoical. he had an aquiline face, made up of powerful features without an inch of spare territory. "with beams december planets dart his keen eye truth and conduct scanned." his eyes were sometimes exceedingly brilliant; his nose was strong and aquiline; and the lower part of his face, especially the mouth, was notably like the busts of julius caesar. his voice was a baritone of rapid inflections, and when he was very much in earnest it changed to a deep bass. he once said, "whenever i look in the glass i feel a depression of spirits"; but his friends did not feel so. he was always an agreeable object to them, even in his last years when he looked in his study like an old eagle in his eyrie. mental power is more attractive than beauty even to ladies. he was a modern stoic, and carried that kind of life to a high degree of perfection. he sometimes smoked a cigar, and sometimes drank a glass of wine, but the only real luxury he indulged in was dining with the atlantic club once a month in boston. during his lecturing tours he was the recipient of a great deal of hospitality, and became the objective centre of many a social gathering; but how much he enjoyed this it would be difficult to tell. he was too modest and genuine to like being lionized. he had neither pride, vanity, nor self-conceit; and his great celebrity never weighed heavily upon him, or discovered itself in his manners. in this respect he carried his stoicism a little too far, for he never would permit any one to talk with him about himself, and enthusiastic admirers of his genius commonly met with a rather cold reception. he repelled everything in the shape of a compliment. dr. edward emerson says somewhere that his father was used to eat whatever was set before him with spartan-like indifference. this mistake may have arisen from the good quality of mrs. emerson's housekeeping, and the excellent fare which she provided for her husband and his friends. emerson wished to bear the hardships of life without complaining, but he also knew that to make life unnecessarily hard is not only unwise but has an injurious effect on character. as he would have said, it is not according to nature. a horse seeks the best of the road, and a cow the freshest grass in the pasture. studious people and others who live mostly indoors are obliged to be careful of what they eat. you could not call emerson an epicure, but he knew how to appreciate a fine dinner. several witnesses have given their testimony in regard to his partiality for what he called "pie." he was also fond of pears; knew the best varieties and the order in which they ripened. he used to say that there is only ten minutes in which a pear is fairly ripe: before that it is too hard and afterwards too soft. his friend dr. f. h. hedge once made a similar remark concerning ripe scholars. perhaps the most remarkable trait in his character was his absolute self-poise. he had a balanced mind if there ever was one. carlyle considered the "conduct of life" to be emerson's best book, and there was reason why it should be. it was the subject of all others which he knew most about. conduct had been the study of his life. behavior was a fine art with him, cultivated partly from motives of prudence but more for its own sake. from early morning till bed-time he was always the same, always self-possessed. there was no relaxation of it; he was like an athlete in full training. it was difficult to place him in a position where he did not appear to advantage. but he expected nearly as much from others, and had small patience with those who from ignorance or carelessness infringed the rules of etiquette. one of his expressions was, that death or mutilation was the only excuse for being late to dinner. the notion that poets are an unpractical class of people is pure illusion. the lives of our chief american poets will be sufficient to contradict it; if dante had not been a just governor of florence and aeschylus had not fought like a tiger in the battle of salamis. bryant was the able editor of a newspaper; lowell made an excellent ambassador; and longfellow also had the reputation with his publishers of being a very shrewd man of business. so was emerson in all things eminently practical. he would sometimes say, "i allow myself to be cheated by one irishman"; but i do not think he was cheated very much. in fair weather he always left his books half an hour or so before dinner and walked out, to get fresh-air and see what was going forward on his little place. the poem called "hamatreya" and many of his best thoughts were evidently suggested by these short excursions. he says in the "conduct of life": "the scholar goes into his garden to obtain a juster statement of his thought. he puts down his hand to pull up a weed. behind that is a second; behind the second is a third; behind the third a fourth; and beyond that a thousand and four." who can doubt that this was a personal experience with him, as it has been with some others? there are many anecdotes of his good sense and sagacity, and the following is perhaps equal to any of them. one summer there was a camp-meeting of spiritualists at walden pond, and every evening they held an entertainment of speeches, singing and music, to which a small admittance-fee was charged. it happened, however, that the picnic pavilion was situated close to mr. emerson's land, and numbers of concord people went out of curiosity and leaning against his fence heard and saw everything that went on. a committee of spiritualists consequently called on mr. emerson and requested permission to collect fees from those who stole their entertainment in this manner. at first thought this might not seem to be unreasonable; but emerson replied, "no, i have always enjoyed the privilege of walking upon my neighbors' fields, and i cannot now refuse the same right to them." could a chief justice have decided the case better? emerson's _no_ was always decisive, and if one person could not induce him to change his mind i do not believe twenty millions would have succeeded in doing so. when he was involved in a lawsuit regarding some property, and the suggestion was made that he should compromise it, he said: "by no means. if it is mine i want the whole of it; if it is not mine i do not want any of it." he avoided controversies and often showed great tact in escaping from an argument. what he had once published was of no consequence to him, and he cared little whether others liked it or not. if people advanced opinions or judgments with which he disagreed he made a plain statement of the fact and then changed the subject of conversation. opponents who wished to corner him, and had perhaps set snares for him to fall into, found themselves outwitted by his unfailing desire for peace and harmony. he went to the polls and voted; he attended town-meetings and political caucuses, but never took an active share in them. the prohibition of liquor, the tariff question, the woman suffrage movement, and other like vexatious matters he left severely alone. i doubt if any one discovered from first to last what his real opinions were on these subjects. at the boston radical club in 1868 he was asked to give an opinion on woman suffrage, and he replied that he had no doubt that when all women had agreed as to what they wanted, what was in fact best for them, they could easily obtain it through the home influence. these he would say are questions of judgment. the slavery question was a matter of principle; and on that point he gave forth no uncertain sound. he did not, however, engage actively in the controversy till the passage of the fugitive-slave bill warned him how seriously the republic was in danger. then he threw himself into the struggle with all the energy of his nature, and stumped the middlesex district for the free-soil candidate dr. palfrey. in one of his speeches at this time referring to webster's support of the bill, he forged this terrible figure, "every drop of blood in the man's veins has eyes that look downward." the final test of a deep mind is to respect forms and at the same time recognize how little comparatively they are worth. the technical skill of the pianist requires years of laborious effort, and yet it has no value unless he can also appreciate the intention and spirit of the composer whose music he plays. so it is in art, politics, religion,--and all human affairs. when the national government was captured by the slavocracy, and converted in all its branches into an engine for the oppression of the negro race and white laborers as well, emerson saw clearly that the season of respect for law had passed by, and he celebrated john brown as the apostle and martyr of a holy cause. this accurate historical penetration on the part of one who knew but little of history is the finest flower in the poet's crown. what he said of john brown may now seem somewhat exaggerated; but the importance of the event has never been exaggerated. an argument, however, is not always to be avoided even at such times as we are least inclined for it. in february 1865 the good people of concord called a town-meeting to consider the advisability of building a new high-school house. alcott, who held some office connected with the town schools, was strongly in favor of the project, and on his way to the meeting called on emerson to secure his vote for it. he soon found, however, that he had waked up the wrong person. emerson, who was finishing his dinner, considered that in time of war retrenchment and economy were first to be thought of, and that the new school-house had better be deferred for three years at least. but alcott had also good reasons for his opinion, and with all his deference for emerson in philosophy and literature he did not seem inclined to yield on the present occasion. so the two friends argued the case together with equal good humor and determination, and the discussion had not ceased when they left the house. the popular legend that during the mexican war mr. alcott refused to pay taxes that supported an unjust invasion, and was imprisoned for this, is so far true; but it can not be true that when emerson came to visit him in jail to pay the tax-bill he said, "bronson, why are you here?" and that alcott answered, "waldo, why are you not here?"; for they never called each other anything but mr. emerson and mr. alcott. the story of emerson's going with margaret fuller to see fanny ellsler, the danseuse, was a pure invention of the enemy and had not even the corner-stone of a foundation in fact. goethe says in his analysis of manners that the man of noble manners may sometimes give way to his emotions, the man of well-bred manners never. emerson's manners were half way between these two; a fortunate union of natural courtesy and dignified reserve. it was not possible to be familiar with him. they were better than fine manners, or even well-bred manners, for they were so natural and simple as scarcely to attract attention. yet he was not a man of noble manners, for he never fully acted out himself. carlyle had noble manners, but was lacking in courtesy. emerson's house stands about twenty-five yards from the street, and there is a smooth white-marble walk from his gate to the front-door. this, together with the pine trees he planted for protection against the north wind, had a cool refreshing effect in midsummer, but at other seasons gave the visitor rather a chilly reception. there was something in emerson himself that reminded one of this white-marble walk; not that he was cold-hearted, far from it, nor was he lacking in tenderness; but warmth of color he had not. he was too purely moral to be altogether human. he never could have written a tragedy, or made a speech like that of john adams on the question of separation. how could it be otherwise? can the descendant of five generations of new england clergymen have the same blood in his veins that warmed the hearts of marshal ney and mirabeau? perpetual constraint and self-denial may strengthen character, but will human nature be better for it in the end? constant trimming must finally weaken the tree; and if we consider history we find that the greatest services to mankind have been those ardent, self-forgetful natures who lived in a large, grand manner, and who cared more for the affairs they have in hand than for their reputations or the salvation of their souls. it was not the just and virtuous aristides but the bold reckless themistocles who saved greece from the persian invasion. luther and shakespeare are brilliant examples of it. our american poets have all except poe a high reputation for virtue and good behavior, but i do not find in them the summer climate of burns or the magnetism of byron and heine. there is such a thing as valuing our faults too highly. emerson did not like such men, and was apt to do them injustice. he admired napoleon and goethe--a generous nature cannot help that--and his estimate of napoleon's character is the best that has yet been made; but he preferred lafayette to mirabeau, considered caesar wholly lacking in principle, and thought machiavelli was the fiend incarnate. his friends were like himself, cool-headed and scrupulous; but they were not the persons who cared most for him and appreciated him the best. such men as theodore parker, m. d. conway, david a. wasson and wendell phillips did more for emerson almost than his own writings, in spreading his reputation and celebrating his genius. wherever phillips and parker lectured in the west and were asked, as often happened, who were the best of the new england lecturers, they always placed emerson at the head of the list. they served as mediators between him and the large class of persons who could not readily understand him. if he was an exacting moralist, he was never a narrow or pettifogging one. it is true he laid down the rule that a young lady had always the right to break off an engagement, but not so a gentleman, for he has the opportunity, which she has not, of making his own choice,--what no man would have said who was aware of the arts and stratagems which women often practise to obtain the man they desire; but he was not generally a censorious man. [illustration: king's bust of emerson. modelled in 1854.] he believed firmly in the old saying of every man to his trade. he never preached sermons on week-days; or discoursed on public and private duties; or lectured about self-sacrifice and the necessity of living for others. he believed that such talk did quite as much harm as good. "do not try to be good," he would say, "but true to yourself." wisdom was the best of all virtues because it included all. he thought there were cases in which divorce from incompatibility is justifiable. when a certain transcendentalist left his wife and children in newport, and came to concord to write poetry and live the life of an old bachelor, there were many who blamed him severely; but emerson said, "he is no doubt to blame, but you cannot tell how much; perhaps this is the only way in which he can live." so that there was a large portion of liberality mixed with his natural severity. literature is the most satisfactory of all professions, but it is also the most difficult to succeed in. the high-minded writer easily finds themes congenial to his own lofty thoughts, and in the contemplation of these and the companionship of fine books he escapes the weariness and loneliness which often pursue those who are engaged in the busiest avocations. his life is like working in a rose-garden: beautiful images are always before him. his time is his own: he can arrange his own hours for study, rest, and recreation. especially he can avoid the friction and annoyance of dealing with rude and uncongenial people. but how is he to persuade others to take an interest in these subjects? the currents of men's thoughts run in certain habitual channels, and to change their course, as every writer who becomes popular is sure to do, is sometimes as great an undertaking as changing the bed of a river. it requires many years for some to be appreciated, and others never are. "we know those who have reached the goal, but who can tell how many have fallen by the way?" emerson's term of probation, however, was a short one. more fortunate than many, there was a demand for him before he came. besides the so-called transcendental movement carried him forward in a swift current. he said of it: "at first everybody laughed at me. then i had ten readers; then a hundred; and then a thousand." and those who laughed at him at first were his most devoted admirers after he had become famous. if emerson had not inherited a good property early in life, his career would hardly have been possible. he never was able to publish more than a third of what he wrote, and his books were not a source of large profit to him. he was obliged to make up the deficiency by lecturing. with what fortitude he did this, considering his slender physique, travelling long distances in the coldest weather over such railroads as then were, with a dismal hotel and bad food at the end of every journey, will always be remembered of him. no wonder that he consoled himself with such maxims as, "no man has ever estimated his own troubles too lightly," and such verses as, "cast the bantling on the rock." truly it was severe discipline. at niagara falls in 1863 the hotel caught fire and emerson rushed forth at midnight, manuscripts in hand, as caesar formerly swam with his "commentaries" from a sinking vessel. the compensation for it was that in this way he made the acquaintance of many interesting and distinguished persons. it also added to his celebrity. he was the same under all circumstances. it has been said that in his poems we feel the essayist; but perhaps even more we recognize the poet in his essays. so too in his conversation at table and in the parlor, there was something that reminded one of the lecturer: when he appeared on the platform before his audience he was always the plain country gentleman. he affected no graces of oratory, and shunned everything like rhetorical flourish. he was the first of our public speakers to introduce this improvement which has since found its way into the court-room and the theatre. his manner was direct, terse and earnest, with an habitual pause or hesitation to select just the right verb or adjective that would convey the idea he wished to express. his delivery was suited to his thought. his hearers were not commonly pleased with it at first, but if they continued to listen most of them came to have a great liking for it. he had a habit of pausing now and then and turning over the pages before him, as if he had lost his place or was looking for a passage which he could not find; but he never made any explanation for it, and his own family did not know the reason. it may have been done to rest himself; or perhaps to give time for his ideas to settle in the minds of his audience. some people were foolishly annoyed by it; but not those who understood him. he used to say that either a speaker commands his audience, or his audience commands him. he was the best lecturer of his time: the one who wore the best. between 1860 and 1870 he gave four courses of lectures in boston which were well and profitably attended. no one else could have done this, except perhaps agassiz. there were others who drew larger houses, but the quality was not so good. very rarely have such cultivated and intellectual audiences been brought together. a few of his most ardent admirers used to carry opera-glasses with them in order to watch the expression of his face. william robinson, the ablest political critic of that time, wrote in 1868, "in spite of an increased hesitation in his delivery emerson is of all men the one most worth hearing, even better than phillips and his matchless oratory." he had the most telling way of saying a thing, and knew how to give their full force to his wonderfully brilliant sentences. these would sometimes electrify his hearers, as people are roused on the announcement of some great and fortunate event. he liked the society of statesmen, scientists, business men, railroad managers, of all who could tell him about what was going on in the world--something, he complained, that the newspapers would not do for him. he preferred their society to that of other poets and scholars. though an unlimited reader of books he was not properly a scholar himself, and perhaps he felt his own limitation too much in their company. he studied little at college and it is doubtful if he afterwards made a thorough and systematic investigation of any subject. he was called a philosopher, but he knew little more than the outlines of metaphysics. he could read french fairly, but latin was the only language with which he was well acquainted. carlyle tried to persuade him to study german. he did not believe in study, but in the inspiration of nature. this did well enough for him, but he made a mistake in applying the same principle to others. he was wont to excuse alcott's rambling rhapsodical conversations on the ground that it was the only talent the man had, that he must do that or nothing; but many people considered that emerson was more to blame in the matter than alcott himself. a person who makes a profession of philosophy, as alcott certainly did, ought to be well acquainted with the writings of other philosophers of his own time; and it surely would have done no harm for emerson to have suggested this to him. when the boston radical club was formed emerson thought it would be a good opportunity for alcott to place his ideas before the public, but alcott found himself at a disadvantage among the scholarly minds he encountered there. at the close of his essay on plato emerson says, "i am sorry to see him after so many fine thoughts throwing a little mathematical dust in our eyes." does he partially expose here a peculiarity in his literary procedure? other people do not read plato for his fine thoughts, though there are many such, but for the charm of his discourse and his beautiful exposition of greek philosophy. from this and from hints let fall in conversation we may suspect that he read books not so much for what was in them as for ideas which they suggested to him, and which he might make use of in his essays and lectures. alcott said that he carried slips of paper with him on which to jot down these considerations by the way. thus he came to value books too much from a single point of view, and his friends were sometimes surprised at what he recommended them to read. he would estimate a second-rate novel like "christie johnstone" above thackeray's "newcomes." however, it may generally be said that the greater and more high-minded an author might be the better was emerson a judge of him. he liked in a writer what he called the eternal spirit, that is, what makes his work valuable for all time. he prized plato, shakespeare, and goethe above others; and gave the next place to homer, dante, and swedenborg. he gave carlyle a very high rank: considered his history of frederick the second even better than thucydides. during the last year of his life, when he had almost lost his memory for names and people, he said to a visitor who called on him, "i have lately been reading a most interesting book about--" he hesitated for some time, "the greatest man that has lived for more than two centuries." then he walked across the room and pointing to a long row of books added, "about that man." his friend looked and saw it was an edition of goethe's forty volumes. grimm's lectures on goethe had lately been published. the colored students of howard university requested emerson to give them a conversation on books, and tell them what they had better read; and he, remembering his own maxim, that the greatest prudence lies in concentration, limited himself purposely to a very few. he recommended shakespeare and milton of course; gibbon's "decline and fall"; boswell's "life of johnson"; goethe's conversations with eckermann and goethe's autobiography. "faust" he spoke of in rather a slighting manner; he did not think it possessed the eternal spirit. that so much of a puritan as emerson should have admired goethe is as remarkable as goethe's admiration for so stanch an old puritan as milton. the english writers of his own time, with the exception of carlyle and possibly tennyson, he did not like. he met macaulay at one of lady holland's celebrated show dinners, and conceived a decided aversion for him. such severely critical writers as froude, ruskin, and matthew arnold he never could like. he once had an interview with ruskin, but it did not prove to be satisfactory. they differed on all points, and ruskin complained that emerson did not understand him. six months afterwards emerson remarked with his most amiable smile, "i expect mr. ruskin is still miserable because i could not understand him." but ruskin's province lay outside of emerson's, who cared little either for painting, sculpture, or music, or even for literature considered as an art. he had in his study a copy of giotto's portrait of dante which he evidently prized; and also raphael morghen's engraving of guido's aurora: but these were presents from his friends, and it is doubtful if he ever purchased a picture himself. he was a frequent visitor at the boston athenaeum, and seized upon every new book of value as soon as it appeared: was the first to read translations of the zendavesta and confucius. he read almost every readable book in the english language as well as translations from all languages. he said he would as soon think of swimming across charles river when he might make use of a bridge as to read a foreign book in the original if he could obtain a good translation. this statement contains a good deal of truth, though it has been often traversed by those who learn languages easily and think because they get the literal meaning of tacitus or rousseau that they know all about the matter. the full significance, however, of any good writer can only be obtained by reflecting while we read, and the continuous exertion required to decipher a foreign tongue interferes with this not a little. if the reader can think in the language before him well and good, but few are so fortunate; and of those few not more than one in ten will be able to think in three or four different languages. any person who has merely a conversational knowledge of italian, for instance, would do much better to read the excellent translation we now have of machiavelli than to read the original; and no one except a greek professor would think of stumbling over thucydides instead of using jowett's version of it. so it is with taine's "english literature" and von hoist's history of american politics. on the other hand it may be said that no translation of the "odes" of horace has any value at all; and a faithful study of one book of the "iliad" is worth all the translations from homer that have ever been made. but the subject is an extensive one. the tendency of pure democracy to caesarism or imperialism has often been noticed, and the frequent change from one to the other has now become an established historical fact. of this principle there is a curious illustration in emerson's political opinions. he was in theory a pure democratist, but he would now and then make a remark which showed that he also believed in the rule of the strong hand. in his prose writings may be found two distinct lines of political thought emanating from these opposite views. he wrote a poem on cromwell, and an essay on napoleon, and evidently admired them both. in his "boston hymn" and in several other poems he comes very close to socialism. in "woodnotes" he says: "the lord is the peasant that was; the peasant the lord that shall be, the lord is the hay, the peasant the grass; one dry, and one the living tree." democracy is limited in america by the conservative structure of our government and the good sense of the community. during jackson's administration we came rather close to pure democracy, and nearly as close also to absolute despotism. emerson was far from knowing this, but he felt that something was wrong. he wrote to carlyle, "we have a most unfit man for president." on another occasion he wrote, "politics are now in such a condition that the best principles are in one party, and the best men in the other." he appears to have voted with the best men. again he would say, "if we can only once get the best man at the head of affairs we should be only too glad to turn everything over to him." emerson, however, did not allow these theories to affect his practice. he always voted the whig ticket till 1844, and after that the free-soil and republican tickets. it was the same with his doctrine of living according to nature. he never thought of doing this himself, except so far as a sensible mode of life and unaffected behavior may be considered so. he was the most conventional man in concord, and as scrupulous of etiquette as an english clergyman. he was oftener seen with a silk-hat--what mr. howells calls a cylinder-hat--than any other person in the town. in his later years he declined to wear a wig, because it was not according to nature; but neither had he formerly worn a beard, which was quite as little according to nature. in his earlier writings he celebrates the advantages of living in the country, but at sixty he concludes that the city is after all the best, if one has sufficient means,--especially for women, who require a current of human life to keep their minds healthy and cheerful. this reminds one of thorwaldsen's four seasons; in which spring and summer are represented by an out-of-door life, in autumn the corner of a house appears, and winter is wholly within doors. we expect a certain change of opinion in the course of years: it is the sign of a veracious character. neither is it inconsistent for a practical man to sometimes deviate from the rules he has laid down for himself. emerson's real fault, if he may be said to have had one, was his optimism. because he had been born with genius and was otherwise fortunate he thought every one else might succeed as easily as he had. in this way he often did people great injustice. if they were unfortunate he concluded that it must be their own fault. "wherever there is failure," he said, "there is some giddiness, some lack of adaptation of means to ends." if he heard of anyone who could not obtain work he would say there is always plenty to do for willing hands. those who were incapacitated by nature from earning their own living fared no better. he thought there was something which every one could do better than anybody else--which might possibly be true if there were as many professions as individuals. when some one spoke of a young german poet, whom it was thought but for his untimely death might have been the rival of schiller, he said, "yes, but he died: that was against him." this line of thought logically resulted also in a kind of pessimism. he seemed at times to despise human nature. somewhere about 1860 he wrote to a friend, "there is not one man in twenty that is worth the ground he stands on"; and speaking of napoleon he affirms that, in the well-nigh universal negligence and inefficiency of mankind, we cannot be too thankful for this prompt and ready actor. no one who realizes the hard and bitter struggle for daily bread with which three-fourths of the human race are constantly occupied, would have written such a sentence. the transition from optimism to pessimism is very much like that from democracy to imperialism. [footnote: the peculiar type of emerson's optimism is illustrated in his poem called "sea shore" where he makes a fine catalogue of the gifts and advantages which the ocean brings to mankind, but says nothing of the terrible destructive power of the sea. he forgot that his old friend the greek represented neptune as even more cruel than the god of war. did this man of heroic nature lack the courage to face tragedy?] we regret to see him deciding the discovery of etherization in favor of his brother-in-law, dr. jackson; a question which a congressional committee found itself unable to determine. he had one trait of character which his biographers have not mentioned, and which might pass by the name of incredulity. he was the most difficult of men to persuade of any strange and remarkable event. neither did he take the least pains to conceal his disbelief; and when you were telling him the living truth this was rather difficult to bear. when we said that a woodpecker had been seen in walden woods nearly as large as a crow and quite as black, he shook his head and looked up at the pine trees. that was not according to his idea of a woodpecker. neither did he like to hear anything which tended to prove the depravity of human nature. stories of fraud and corruption in commercial or political life were not pleasant to his ears; and if the perpetrators escaped punishment he was evidently much annoyed. he liked to tell the truth better than he did to hear it. when nearly sixty years of age both emerson and alcott fell in love with a charming young school-teacher of the transcendental sort, and it is rather pleasant to think that there was so much human nature still left in those grave old philosophers. he was the most famous american of his time; not so celebrated perhaps in his own country as president lincoln, but in foreign countries he surpassed all others,--such is the deep impression which a great writer makes on the minds of men. in europe he was looked upon as the best representative of our western hemisphere. carlyle celebrated him in england, and grimm in germany. the latter said, "there is no other living writer to whom i feel that i owe so much." he had no public receptions in foreign cities, but everywhere the finest people united to honor him. on his second visit to england he complained that his time was almost consumed in answering letters of invitation. an english guest at the harvard phi beta kappa dinner said that when he returned home he would be asked two questions,--if he had seen niagara falls, and if he had met emerson. he was a particular favorite with the english nobility, and whenever we saw a glittering carriage rolling down concord turn-pike we felt sure it contained some earl or viscount who was paying his compliments to the poet of the pines. emerson liked to entertain these distinguished visitors in his modest little parlor, but he never slighted his old friends for them; for he lived the wisdom that he taught, and the final virtue of this man was the religious humility of his nature. matthew arnold's lecture. during the earlier part of emerson's career his religious philosophy met with such decided opposition that his friends were, very properly, all the more enthusiastic in his defence; and when the tide turned in his favor, and his fame rose continually higher and higher, the enthusiasm of his admirers reached a climax, and, like webster before him, he became a veritable subject of idolization. his opponents, finding the current too strong for them, retreated into smooth water, waiting, like a defeated political party, for a favorable change of the tide. when, therefore, matthew arnold came to america in the autumn of 1883 expressly to lecture on emerson, as a writer and thinker, there was great expectation on both sides, and both were equally disappointed. his friends who knew that he liked emerson, thought he had found too much fault with him, and the other party considered he had praised him too highly. few men have ever done so much good in england as matthew arnold. somewhere about the year 1830 goethe remarked, that englishmen, as such, were without reflection; party politics and the interests of trade interfered to prevent it; but they were great as practical men. this continued to be the order of the day, in spite of an occasional warning from macaulay, for thirty years more, until finally matthew arnold came forward and said, "do not be blinded any longer by the prejudices of self-interest, but endeavor to see things as they actually are." this was the continual chant of his life, repeated in a hundred different forms. he made use of the popularity he had gained by his fine, classic poetry, to teach his countrymen a lesson in culture. [footnote: lowell also made an excellent point when he warned englishmen, at the coleridge memorial, that if they were to regain the intellectual altitude of their ancestors, they must give up the adoration of common-sense, and pay more respect to imagination and ideality.] never did demosthenes expose their faults to the athenians more frankly and fearlessly, and with such manliness that at the time of his death there was no person in the british islands more generally respected. on a trial vote that was taken by a london newspaper for membership to a proposed british academy, gladstone received the largest number of ballots, tennyson the next and matthew arnold came third. he was considered the best literary critic in england, and if he had outlived tennyson he would have succeeded him as laureate. he showed a dignified reserve in only publishing a very few books. two small volumes of poetry, his "essays in criticism", which has become a standard work, and his american essays, are all that i know of. for all that, few writers were more celebrated in his own time, and it may be said that he fully deserved his monument in westminster abbey. however, it must be admitted that as a critic he had certain peculiarities. he was, perhaps, too sensitive and impressible; too easily thrown off his guard by qualities in a writer for which he had an aversion. he would not only mention them once, but again and again. he ignored schiller, who was at least one of the world's greatest dramatists; he was dissatisfied with tennyson and could not endure shelley at all. his attack on francis newman's translation of the "iliad" was so severe that he finally discovered the fact himself. his preference for the classic style in literature was rather too decided; for we must never forget that shakespeare himself was chiefly romantic. he liked poetry which was like his own, and seems to have unconsciously judged other poets by that standard. he had no patience with idiomatic writing like that of carlyle or jean paul; and he made incessant warfare on the subjective method. it is true that subjectivity may be called the peculiar vice of the nineteenth century, and yet it is a vice like the self-consciousness of the early christians, that ought finally to end in virtue. there are thousands of readers whose minds cannot be reached in any other way. allowances must sometimes be made also for the physical condition of a writer. not always; for carlyle wrote the greatest of dramatic histories while he was suffering from dyspepsia in the most distressing manner. however, i think in matthew arnold's case something may be conceded to him. he came to lecture in america for a double purpose--to tell the truth and to repair his fortunes. it was a sad story. his son had failed in business; his father, of course, had endorsed his notes, and he found himself at the threshold of old age as poor as in the beginning. such a shock is felt severely enough by tough, hard-fisted men of the world, but to the tender sensibility of a poet it must have been a crushing blow. there can be as little doubt that it brought on the malady that abbreviated his life, as that it gave a melancholic tone to his thought and filled his mind with gloomy forebodings. the opening of his address was very beautiful. he recalls the impression made upon him in his youth by the writing of carlyle, goethe, emerson and francis newman, and says: "forty years ago, when i was an undergraduate at oxford, voices were in the air which haunt my memory still. happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to him forever. no such voices are there now. oxford has more criticism now, more knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth it has no longer. the name of cardinal newman is a great name to the imagination still; his genius and his style are things of power..... a greater voice still,--the greatest voice of the century,--came to us in those youthful years through carlyle: the voice of goethe. to this day,--such is the force of youthful associations,--i read his 'wilhelm meister' with more pleasure in carlyle's translation than in the original. the large, liberal view of human life in 'wilhelm meister,' how novel it was to the englishman in those days! and it was salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel..... and besides those voices, there came to us in that old oxford time a voice also from this side of the atlantic,--a clear and pure voice, which for my ear, at any rate, brought a strain as new, and moving, and unforgettable, as the strain of newman, or carlyle, or goethe.... he was your newman, your man of soul and genius visible to you in the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination. that is surely the most potent of all influences!" i confess i enjoy these clear classic sentences so full of tenderness, and yet with the latent fire of manhood in them, much better than emerson's weird, concentrated epigrams, wonderful as those sometimes are. comparatively speaking it is like the difference between a living elm and oak timber. but the writer does not long maintain this elevated tone. he soon becomes despondent, and his glorious sunrise, like that in shakespeare's sonnet, is lost to him again. "for out alack, he was but one hour mine; the region cloud hath veiled him from me now." he remembers that francis newman is now cardinal newman; that carlyle's career had ended with his furious "latter-day pamphlets," and even in emerson he had found a certain kind of disappointment. yet there may be a deeper reason in this;--the reason that sometimes underlies a coincidence. we too in early life were strengthened and filled with enthusiasm by the earnest voice of emerson, the trenchant eloquence of wendell phillips, and the brilliant wit and penetrating humor of lowell; but the public activity of emerson soon afterwards ceased; phillips became a socialist and ultimately a demagogue; while lowell changed his verses for foreign missions and after-dinner speeches. there is a prevalent feeling that the nineteenth century, which was ushered in to the sound of napoleon's cannon and is now going rather tamely out in a discussion of the laws of economics, has not more than half accomplished the work that was assigned it. there is everywhere among thinking men a feeling of distrust and half disappointment. lowell felt it here, george eliot in england; and herman grimm in germany, a sanguine man, speaks of the deep-seated unrest which almost drives us to despair. as i turn from my desk to the morning's newspaper i find in it the following extract from one of emerson's earlier essays: "trust the time. what a fatal prodigality to condemn our age--we cannot overvalue it--it is our all. as the wandering sea-bird which, crossing the ocean, alights on some rock or islet to rest for a moment its wings, and to look back on the wilderness of waves behind, and onward to the wilderness of waters before--so stand we perched on this rock or shoal of time, arrived out of the immensity of the past, bound and road-ready to plunge into immensity again. not for nothing it dawns out of everlasting peace, this great discontent, this self-accusing reflection. the very time sees for us, thinks for us. it is a microscope such as philosophy never had. insight is for us which was never for any, and doubt not, the moment and the opportunity are divine. wondering we come into this lodge of watchmen, this office of espial; let us not retreat astonished and ashamed. let us go out of the hall door, and doubt never but a good genius brought us in and will carry us out." now this is a prose poem, so beautiful that it seems hardly to need the help of rhyme and metre to make it sing; and, as high art always must, it covers a profound truth,--truth that lies at the foundation of all tragedy,--namely, that we are obliged to trust time though time destroys us; that we must trust our fellow men though they often deceive us; that we must trust the ground we stand on though the earthquake devour us. but emerson does not say this, and i doubt if he anywhere says it. he was too much of an optimist to perceive it. he wished all the stories he read to turn out fortunately, and if they did not so much the worse for them. gladstone is the same kind of a man. he believes that the right will always finally conquer; and so it may when the day of judgment arrives and the affairs of the universe are at last wound up. it gives him, as it did emerson, a tremendous energy,--almost like fanaticism, but it must in the nature of things affect his political judgment. the lives of these two stretch nearly across the nineteenth century, and their popularity is evidence that they represent their own time better than most others. what does emerson intend by trusting the time? does he mean the spirit of the age? if we replace the word time by divine providence, the passage becomes intelligible and notably significant; but if he meant the prevailing spirit of the time, the earlier part of emerson's career is a perfect contradiction of it. if in his youth he had trusted the prevailing tendency of his time he would have become a conservative formalist, and never heard of as an independent thinker. it might even be said that few men have ever trusted their own time less. like gladstone, he was dissatisfied with the present and looked toward the future. they both exerted themselves with all their might to revolutionize public opinion and give to the future the stamp of their own ideas. the old hebrew prophets whom emerson so much resembled did not trust their own time, but were constantly complaining of it. so cicero cried out, "o tempora, o mores!" and savonarola, and many others. it would seem as if in this poetic rhapsody the writer had lost sight of his subject almost immediately upon stating it, and had substituted providence for it in his mind. this was not unfrequently the case with him, and may account for those vague aerial flights which his commentators have referred to. hawthorne says, "mr. emerson is a great searcher for facts, but they seem to melt away and become unsubstantial in his grasp." however, it was not facts but ideas that he was in quest of. the whole of matthew arnold's essay is thoughtful and interesting, but it has one grand defect. after saying that emerson's writings constituted the most important prose work of the nineteenth century, he fails to support the statement by sufficient arguments. if he had developed this point to such a length as its importance deserved, and then finished his discourse with a glowing tribute to emerson as a man, his audience might have found slight cause to complain of him; but after simply stating the fact, he proceeded to a lengthy discussion of emerson's stoical philosophy, and finally branched off on a criticism of carlyle and the consideration of happiness as the true end of life. we will only pause here to remark that the true end of life does not seem to us to be happiness so much as development, and the evolution of such characters as emerson and matthew arnold. his condemnation of emerson's poetry was a still severer blow. emerson's friends had endured enough already on that score. nothing was ever made so much fun of by parodists and other small wits. in any social company, if emerson's poetry was mentioned somebody was sure to raise a laugh; and there was nothing that could be done about it. it was hoped that matthew arnold's prestige would put a final end to this nonsense, which was nothing but a fashionable habit; but he added the weight of his position as professor of literature to the other side of the scale. he praised certain portions very highly, but averred that these were exceptional, and concluded with what seems to be a "reductio ad absurdum," namely, that longfellow's poem of "the bridge" or whittier's "school days" was worth the whole body of emerson's verse. as these were anything but the best of longfellow and whittier it seemed rather inconsistent in matthew arnold to have praised emerson's poetry at all; and this was the more surprising after his courageous defence of wadsworth a short time before. those who like emerson's poetry usually like wordsworth's and _vice versa_. but emerson's poetry is a peculiar subject. carlyle and lowell, both eminent critics, did not condemn it, but at the same time they were slow to praise it. dr. f. h. hedge, who probably knew more about literature than either of them, considered it poetry of a very high order, and rev. william furness of philadelphia, when some one spoke slightingly of emerson as a poet, exclaimed, "he is heaven high above our other poets!" in many obituary notices at the time of his death, he was mentioned as being easily the first of american poets. professor tyndall has a great admiration for his poetry; and so has another professor we know of whom we will not mention, but who is an equally good chemist. dr. o. w. holmes' life of emerson was dreaded by many for fear of the position he might assume on this question, but to the general surprise of the public, he took strong grounds in favor of it; so that since that time, whenever people laugh at emerson's poetry it is only necessary to ask them if they have read dr. holmes' biography of him. immediately after the lecture, a lively discussion began about it in the newspapers, in which leading writers, scholars and professors took an active part. how much soever they might disagree in regard to emerson, they all united in a disapproval of the lecturer's estimate of him. matthew arnold did not seem to have a partisan in the country. the discussion was renewed a year later when his book of discourses in america was published, and then david a. wasson wrote the following letter which was published in the "christian register": arnold on emerson. "it may be doubted whether matthew arnold's critical estimate of emerson as a prose writer is well understood by most of those who take it in ill part. the judgment expressed is that emerson is the pre-eminent prose writer of his century, not as being either a great philosopher or great in his style of workmanship, but for the reason that he is a great spiritual light, the purest, whitest, serenest, of a century now drawing toward its close. this taken together is valuable praise, and converted into disparagement by its denial to emerson of two special distinctions; and in respect to both, the denial is taken, i think, to cover much more ground than it was intended to cover. to keep within the limits, i will here attend to but one of these, where it must be confessed, mr. arnold is himself to blame for the misconstruction put upon him, since he has expressed himself in a way to facilitate, if not to invite, such a mistake. emerson, it is said, was the most important writer of this century, yet was not a great writer. how should this be, unless, indeed, the century as a whole is inferior, and prominence in it is no token of greatness? in truth, mr. arnold has used the term 'writer' in two widely different senses. in the one use it refers to the content of the writing, to its intellectual and moral import, its spiritual significance; in the other use it refers to the writing itself considered as showing more or less of literary power,--that is, of power in the ordering and verbal embodiment of thoughts and conceptions. "declining to be misled by this ambiguity, let us inquire what is meant, when it is said that emerson was not a great writer. to my apprehension the meaning is simply that his literary execution, taken by and for itself, was not of the highest order. a cotton fabric may be better woven than one of silk, a chain of copper be better wrought and linked than a chain of gold. he that should recognize the better workmanship where it exists would not thereby set the cheaper material above the more precious, for he would not institute a comparison to any effect whatsoever between the two. nor would he betray a shallow and petty mind, as making much of things trivial. mr. arnold says of emerson's writings, the matter is gold, but the workmanship does not evince the highest skill. were this last urged as determining the value of the writer we might indeed say that the critic offends by exalting a subordinate distinction to the first place. but it is not so urged, nor is there anything to indicate that mr. arnold makes perfection of literary execution the be-all and end-all of excellence in literature; indeed one does not see that he at all exaggerates its importance. those whom he mentions as great writers were for the most part second-rate men--second-rate men that is as measured by the standard of the ages; and it does not appear that he thinks of them otherwise than as such. cicero receives the title while it is not given to marcus antoninus; but it is sufficiently apparent that mr. arnold sets a higher value upon marcus antoninus than upon cicero. voltaire is one of the great writers; but in the world's literature he is at best but first among the lesser lights, and there is no sign that matthew arnold attributed to him a higher importance. or take the case of swift. the literary talents of this unhappy man were indeed prodigious: he performed feats to which we cannot say that any other would have been equal: he is as unique as shakespeare,--though, of course, in a vastly lower way. but did he contribute one great thought or one grand and salutary imagination to the world's stock? not to my knowledge. did he shed light upon any important province of human interest, upon religion, morals, politics, art, science, history, education, manners or whatever else? i cannot report that he did so. did he lay a noble emphasis upon any great truth or order of truths and so recommend it effectually to the attention and consideration of mankind? or did he even write a single sentence which one treasures up as an imperishable jewel? in fine, does his work serve to enlarge the souls, enlighten the minds, direct the wills or quicken and inspire the better powers of man? does it so much as breathe upon them a salubrious air? alas no! to all such questions the answer, or mine own at least, will be negative. yet he was indeed a great writer: that is, he had a great, a truly wonderful power of conception and representation. mr. arnold, who for aught one can discover to the contrary, distinguishes the nature of swift's genius and prizes it only for what it is worth, does not claim that emerson was a greater writer in the same sense, but thinks his deliverance somewhat faulty, especially as wanting that continuity which belongs to good literary tissue, as to every other. "suppose him quite wrong in this, still the error is not one to be warm about, since it leaves the concord essayist in his place of pre-eminence, and is put forth only by way of determining the kind of value which shall be attributed to his writings. "d. a. wasson." this was forwarded to matthew arnold, who was then at his own home, and in due time this reply was received from him: "cobham, surrey, "jan. 7th., 1886. "dear sir, "i have just had, on my return to england, your letter and mr. wasson's paper, and must thank you for them. "very much of what mr. wasson says is true; yet literary style is more than he makes it--the mere dressing up of a material which may be inferior; it is itself in the material and has an extraordinary value. no great writer is to be disposed of as mr. wasson disposes of addison and swift; he says, nothing is to be learned from swift; why, a sense for the blatant nonsense and claptrap which constitutes three-fourths of our public writing and speaking, and which is a greater curse to your country that even to ours, is to be got from him. addison has his valuable criticism of life too; i doubt whether to a taine, a hundred years hence, he will not seem of more importance than emerson, who was above all things of value in his own day. but i love emerson. "truly yours, "matthew arnold." [illustration: autograph letter from matthew arnold.] [illustration: autograph letter from matthew arnold.] taine, who preferred macaulay to carlyle, might also prefer addison to emerson; but it is not likely that a future grimm or another sainte-beuve would do so. in his "essays in criticism," matthew arnold enters a general complaint against english prose writers for a lack of mental flexibility, and against addison particularly for the commonplaceness of his ideas. he was a severe and exacting critic. david a. wasson. bryant, longfellow, emerson, hawthorne and whittier were all nearly of the same age, and formed a literary galaxy such as has been rare enough in any country or period of history. they are distinguished, however, by one peculiarity--a slight sentimentalism which belonged to the time in which they grew up, and is most strongly marked in longfellow and least so in hawthorne. fifteen or twenty years later there appeared, as usually happens, a number of talented imitators or admirers, and with them two men of equal genius who may be looked upon as the corrective and antidote for their predecessors. these were james russell lowell and david atwood wasson. they were as different as goldsmith and dr. johnson. lowell was a fine poet, a humorist and man of the world. he wrote easily and lived easily. he was the companion of wealthy and distinguished men. he acquired prosperity, as it were, by natural inclination. next to the king of prussia he was the most fortunate man of his time. he knew something of sorrow, but of hardship and misfortune only by hearsay. he was the child of summer, and revelled in it; but this continual happiness brought with it certain limitations. though he was a veracious man, he was rarely a serious one. he never became thoroughly in earnest until he was stimulated by partisan feeling. his best poems were inspired by the anti-slavery conflict, and the rendition of mason and slidell; and it was just on these occasions that his humor was most brilliant and pleasant flavored. his productiveness was not great, and his other writings do not make a strong impression. it is said that he often tried to write a book, but was never able to concentrate himself on one subject for a sufficient length of time. he is easily the first of american humorists. the greatest compliment ever paid thoreau was that such a man as lowell could not understand him. wasson must have been born under the constellation of the little bear. as the germans say, his life was always winter. every possible obstacle was placed in his way, and misfortune came to him at one time or another in almost every shape. the difficulties he encountered in life were too great for him, and prevented the full fruition of his genius. the wonder is that they did not crush him altogether. he never acquired the sufficient public influence nor received the recognition his merit deserved. he was by nature a thinker--a seeker after truth. there was no problem,--social, political or philosophical,--which he was not ready to grapple with. he could plunge into these subjects like a pearl-diver who means to touch bottom, and would never come out till his last breath was spent. this mental habit and his continual suffering made him only too serious, too much in earnest. jests were not in his line, but he sometimes wrote poetry of the very highest order. he is the first and most original of american thinkers. what these two dissimilar men had in common was good anglo-saxon manliness--which is after all the foundation of common-sense. they wished to live as other men had lived before them, and not in any new, unusual, or eccentric manner. they believed that virtue was to be found in the great world rather than out of it; among human habitations, and in dealing with all kinds of people rather than by an isolated life at brook farm or in walden woods. they sought not after any rare and utopian excellencies, but contented themselves with a plain, sensible, every-day morality. they were neither vegetarians, teetotalers, non-resistants, nor socialists. they considered it no sin to love a woman or to fight a man. they may be called anti-sentimentalists. neither were they blind followers of custom and tradition. they wished to be in the vanguard of civilization, and they were conscious that to do this they must not only accept the results of others, but add something of their own. they endeavored to become acquainted with the best that was thought and known in their time, both in literature and in other matters. they thus became excellent critics, as well as versatile and many-sided men. they were among the most cultivated men of the century, and are the most cosmopolitan of american writers. that they should not have possessed greater influence was largely owing to the tendencies of their time. the current of the age was too strong for them, and in their later years they both expressed gloomy forebodings of the future, both for their own country and the rest of the civilized world. wasson went to concord in 1859 intending to make it his permanent abode, but the offer of a philanthropic gentleman who wished to take him into his own house for a year and care for him, as mr. badams of manchester entertained carlyle, induced him to emigrate again. he continued however in friendly communication with the literary people there, often visited them, and now lies buried in sleepy hollow cemetery, so that he deserves to be classed among them, rather than with any other group of literary men. he was born in brooksville, maine, on the fourteenth of may, 1823. he was named david for his father, and atwood for miss harriet atwood, a female preacher and missionary who was at that time his mother's devoted friend,--and it has been said that wasson attributed his unusual mental activity largely to her influence. his mother died while he was still too young to recollect her, but her place was fortunately supplied by a kindly and sensible stepmother; not such a rare phenomenon as some people think. his father belonged to a class of men only to be found on the coast of maine, who are at once fishermen, farmers and navigators; a much more intelligent and cultivated class than the agricultural people of the interior. it is a beautiful sail among the islands from rockland to mount desert, and the pleasantest part of it, to me at least, is the sight of the well kept farms with their handsome cattle and clean-shaven hay-fields, which line the coast. our best ship-builders have originated among these people. brooksville is a thinly scattered settlement on the westerly side of a rocky and even mountainous peninsula. a deep and narrow strait separates it from castine, which has to be crossed in a ferry-boat. the house of david wasson, senior, is something more than half-a-mile from the ferry landing; a large, commodious, two-story house, much better than the average of farm-houses, with two large barns and numerous out-buildings. between it and the street is an orchard, and on one side a latticed porch or piazza. west of it there is a trout-brook and beyond that a hemlock grove, and the blue hills of camden in the distance. on the south side the sea comes up to the edge of the farm, and the road to sedgwick winds about the ridge on the east. it was a fitting birthplace for a poet or a painter. he has left us a valuable and quite unique sketch of his early boyhood, [footnote: essays, religious, social, political. d. a. wasson. boston: lee and shepard.] in which he confesses to having been a sensitive, excitable and passionate little fellow such as the more cool-headed and phlegmatic sort could tease and worry at pleasure. since he was also very high-spirited, this resulted inevitably in a good many fights, and from being naturally peaceable and tender-hearted he became at last the most noted pugilist in that community. it is said that at seventeen he could smash a door-panel with his fist. that he disliked work on the farm is not surprising. manual labor is injurious to boys physically and mentally; and they should be saved from it, except perhaps in the haying or harvesting seasons, as much as possible. otherwise he was modest, orderly, truthful, and the finest scholar that had ever been known about castine. his father recognized his superior abilities, and made an effort to send him to bowdoin college. there were many obstacles in the way, however, and he did not enter until 1845. he never told me much about his college life. he was older than his companions and more serious. the light spirit that makes it a joyous festival to many was not in him. of the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty he knew nothing. he distinguished himself in mathematics (especially in geometry, which is the most logical of studies) and in the students' debating-societies. he was also an excellent gymnast. in almost every college class there are a number of over-grown boys who had better have been sent to the reform-school. on the occasion of a class supper, or some such celebration, young wasson saved half-a-dozen of these roaring blades from disgrace and suspension, by his timely interference. it was already far into the night, and being fairly intoxicated, they took it into their minds to return and attend morning prayers in the college chapel. in order to prevent this catastrophe, wasson arranged a bowling match for a fictitious sum of money with the most sober man he could find, and in that way delayed the party until the dangerous hour had passed. it was supposed to have been some of the same set who the following autumn set fire to and consumed the college wood-pile--a severe loss, and a dangerous precedent. no trace of the incendiaries could be discovered and the college faculty suspended on suspicion right and left. among those whom the lightning struck were several that wasson knew or felt sure could have had nothing to do with it; and he accordingly went to the president and argued the case with him. this resulted in his being summoned before the next faculty meeting. when asked whether he knew who the perpetrators of the outrage were, he declined to answer, not because he had positive knowledge but because he felt morally certain in regard to them. a few weeks later, after he had gone into the country to teach school for the winter, he received word that he had been suspended. indignant at what he considered an injustice to his character and scholarship, he left bowdoin forever: nor did he perhaps lose much by this. the philosophical studies of the senior year could be mastered as easily by a mind like wasson's without an instructor as with one. he never studied for rank and cared little or nothing for college honors or degrees. there is no good art without a sense of delicacy; and this mental delicacy is usually matched by some kind of physical sensitiveness. artists are, according to the vulgar phrase, more thin-skinned than other people. both at bowdoin college, and afterwards while at the divinity-school, wasson worked hard in summer and taught school in winter so as to help in defraying the expense of his education. in this mode of life he encountered many hardships that were too severe for him. i notice among my own classmates that very few of those who lived in this manner reached the age of thirty-five. the food which wasson encountered during his winter peregrinations was anything but what human beings are intended to eat. on one occasion he returned from his school to dine as usual in a cold room, and found himself provided there with the skeleton of a chicken, two large beets, a pie made of preserved barberries, and biscuits which pulled out when separated, like a telescope. the meat, unless fried, was always cooked too much; bread and vegetables insufficiently. like many another young hero he believed in facing these obstacles, and overcoming them by main force. a strain which he received in a wrestling match during the celebrated tippecanoe campaign may have done him harm; but a more serious injury was incurred while on a trip to bangor in one of his father's schooners the summer after he was suspended from college. the captain of the schooner appears to have been a sea-faring brute who had a secret grudge, a sort of town-and-gown feeling, against the scholar, and was ready to do him any mischief he could. they were to take on a cargo of lumber at bangor and the captain requested wasson, who was not actually under his orders, to stow it away in the hold while two men on deck handed the boards to him as fast as possible. wasson felt that something was wrong and might have protested against it, but his youthful pride, and perhaps a feeling of indifference in regard to his fate, prevented him. i believe he finally fainted from over-exertion and the close air, and was never a well man again. the trouble was not very bad at first, and might easily have been cured by suitable treatment, and a quiet, methodical life: but there was no doctor in that part of maine who could prescribe properly for him. he tried some short sea-voyages, but these did him little good. so prescott injured his eyesight through the same proud spirit; but it was this pride which made him afterwards what he was. his ill-health however did not prevent him from studying and writing. the following autumn he went into the office of a lawyer and member of congress in castine and read "blackstone," "chitty on bills," and some other law-books. the study of law is in itself an excellent nerve tonic, balancing the mind and strengthening the character. nothing could have been better for him at this juncture, and it is an unlimited pity that he did not continue it longer. but the law could never have satisfied the aspirations of his nature any more than columbus might have been satisfied with sailing a packet in the mediterranean. he liked the study of it, and once spoke with great respect of "chitty on bills" wishing he could find a work on theology or politics that contains so much good sense; but he longed for something beyond it. the congressman had a good opinion of his abilities and held out the prospect of a partnership to him, but personal ambition was not an ingredient in wasson's nature. he was discontented and ready for a change. one day in june 1849 he was sent to a distant town on what was to his sensitive moral nature a most disgusting expedition; namely, to help a lucrative client take the poor debtor's oath, and so avoid a partially unjust debt. on his return home he stopped at a country store to make a small purchase, and there at the end of the shelf he saw a cheap dingy copy of carlyle's "sartor resartus." he purchased it, and read it in his wagon by the evening light. he had tried to read it before, but failed to make his way in it. it was the first clear message and sure token of a spiritual life that had yet reached him. he had lived through the "everlasting no," and here was the "everlasting yea" set plainly before him. years afterward m. d. conway told carlyle of walking in the woods at groveland with wasson, and how his face became radiant with internal light when he spoke of "sartor resartus." this new-birth from above seized upon him like a fever. he now felt that he had a mission in life; a message to mankind. and in what way could he deliver this message? how could he make known to others what was in his full heart, except from the pulpit? for the first time he conceived the ministry as a high-minded and ennobling profession. he decided accordingly to go into the church. his family were calvinists, and calvinism was the only mode of faith of which he knew very much. that such a step should have been inspired by the writings of a heretic like carlyle was in itself a contradiction which foreboded an ultimate collision. yet no man perhaps ever lived who had a clearer sense of a divine presence in the universe than thomas carlyle, and it was this which wasson recognized in him. poets and philosophers are naturally heretical, because they take the short road of genius which others find it difficult to follow. but all believers finally arrive at the same destination. he entered the theological seminary at bangor in 1849 and graduated in 1851. it may be he went there with a youthful idea of reforming the church. at any rate his boldness of thought and free utterance brought him into suspicion with his fellow students, and at one time reports were in circulation that he was to be expelled for heresy. with his customary directness he went to the president, dr. pond, and inquired if there was any truth in this. the doctor, who really liked wasson, received him with a kindly, patriarchal manner and said: "do not be troubled, my young friend, we all have our seasons of doubt. i have had mine; but take my word for it that it is all right. for look at those saints up there in glory. how did they get there?" such an argument was not likely to relieve the fermentation in his mind. walking the streets of bangor at this time was dr. frederick henry hedge, the man of all others who might have solved wasson's doubts in a satisfactory manner, and with whom wasson afterwards found himself in more complete moral and intellectual sympathy than with any other of his friends. wasson saw him frequently, but had no opportunity of making his acquaintance. so nearly do we either hit it, or miss it, all through life! the only person who sympathized with him in his progressive views of religion was miss abbie smith, the daughter of an apothecary in newburyport, massachusetts. she was visiting at the house of her brother who was one of the instructors at the seminary. that he should have fallen in love with her, and soon become engaged to her is therefore not surprising. they were married the year after his graduation, and she continued a faithful, industrious and uncomplaining wife; his mainstay in ill-health and misfortune till the end. they were not always happy together; but it is a rare marriage where that is the case. wasson's struggle with the world was often reflected in his own family, disturbing the harmony and comfort of it. his wife once said quite gravely, that there were others from whom her husband would probably have made a selection if he had not offered himself to her. he was always a favorite with the other sex, and equally fond of their society. as he never troubled himself much as to what people said of him, this gave rise to a good deal of talk which his opponents took advantage of to disparage his character. he was once a witness in a divorce case, and a rather tricky lawyer who had a remarkable faculty for what bacon calls "turning the cat in the pan," succeeded in making him appear at a disadvantage; but mrs. wasson told me that he was in the right. if his wife had no suspicion of him we need have none. he went directly from bangor to groveland, a pleasant village beautifully situated on the merrimack, which from haverhill to the sea is one of the finest american rivers. his _fiancee_ had numerous relatives in the place, and it was owing to her influence that he received a call there. at first all the signs were favorable; the young minister was well liked, and his parishioners were only afraid that a man of such rare ability would soon gravitate to a larger congregation. so he might have done, if his ardent, aspiring soul would have permitted him to temporize with his conscience, and to be content with mere popularity and doing good on a small scale. but the thought that was matured within him could no longer be restrained. the dangerous seed sown by reading "sartor resartus" had now become a strong young tree and must have air and light or it would perish. in october 1852 he preached a sermon that fairly astounded his amiable parishioners. he argued that regeneration and salvation were not to be obtained by blind faith in jesus, but by intelligent moral culture and spiritual development. this view was, as far as i know, original with wasson, and should be distinguished from the anti-miraculous standpoint of parker and the natural supernaturalism of emerson. almost at the same hour an english naturalist was applying the same principle to the origin of species, and the evolution of the human race from the lower animals. the englishman's clear, inductive insight was matched by the philosophical penetration of an american. the darwinian theory now stands uncontested among scientific men, and whether admitted or not there is quite as surely an evolution apparent in the history of religion, not very unlike it. this is the lesson of the nineteenth century. the following day one of the deacons of the church called upon wasson to inform him that his sermon had given offence and that he must retract from his position. "but," replied the minister, "i cannot! i am not going to retract it." thirty years after this wasson laughed as heartily, as a suffering person very well could, while he recollected the expression of astonishment on the worthy deacon's face. that a man should do wrong for the sake of money or some material advantage was conceivable to him--he had known instances of that; but that any man should so stand in his own light both for this world and the next, was a moral incongruity which he could not understand. wasson would not withdraw from his position, but followed it up the next sunday by a still more energetic statement. there was nothing left now but deposition. a conference was called and wasson regularly expelled from the congregational brotherhood. even some unitarians also shared in the horror. about a third part of his congregation, however, were converted by him and established an independent church; so that after all he achieved a kind of victory. wasson had now escaped in a two-fold sense from the fog-banks and shallow waters of his native coast and henceforward was to sail forth bravely upon the high seas. the conflict he had passed through attracted no little attention from thoughtful and cultivated people, and even those who did not wholly agree with him admired the honest manliness with which he defended his views. polite society opened its doors to him. wherever he went now he was received as a distinguished guest. he soon made the acquaintance of eminent scholars and men of letters,--of sumner, parker and emerson. he made friends everywhere. he began to publish essays and poems; at first in the "christian examiner," and afterwards in the "atlantic monthly." in those days of plain living and high thinking it was not customary for magazine writers to sign their names, (so modest were they,) to their contributions; and in this way wasson just missed the general celebrity which they might have brought him, but their merit was recognized by those of whose good opinion he was chiefly desirous. the effort, however, had been too much for him. the only chance of recovery from a nervous disorder lies in freedom from mental agitation. an injured nerve requires a longer time to heal than a broken bone and quite as much care and self-denial. any serious disturbance to the circulation produces a pressure in the blood vessels of the nervous centres, and tears away the improvement that has commenced there. then nature has to begin her work over again; and if this happens repeatedly nature becomes tired of working in vain and refuses to give further assistance. this was wasson's misfortune. he was sensitive and excitable by temperament, the injury to his spine had made him still more so, and the mental agitation he experienced during 1852 and 1853 was enough to prevent him from ever being restored to perfect health. during these two years he must have endured nothing less than the tortures of the inquisition; and no doubt some of his calvinistic neighbors considered it a judgment on him for his heresy. a mutilated life is not so very bad after one is used to it, but the beginning is terrible. it is like being surrounded with invisible barbed fences, which we inevitably run against and lacerate ourselves with, until we learn to bear in mind their exact position. accidents too happen to nervous invalids which other people seem generally to escape from. wasson was at one time making fair progress in his condition when suddenly one day, as he was walking through boston, the door of a house opened and a lady slipping on some ice and tripping over the steps fell right into his arms. this was a highly diverting adventure for a young clergyman, but it cost him weeks of suffering. a somewhat similar strain came upon him when his first child was born. he does not seem to have ever met with a physician who understood his case. one worthy doctor in worcester invited him to his house and drove with him in his sulky for more than half a year, without accomplishing anything for him. he went on a voyage to london and another to smyrna, without any better result than suffering from bad food and stormy weather. after the first voyage his condition was so bad that, as he said of it once, he scarcely knew whether it was day or night: but the climate of asia minor agreed with him and he returned from smyrna at least better for so much experience. i think his first real improvement came during his stay at my father's house. there he had plentiful repose, both of mind and body, and if good medical treatment had been added he might have made a substantial gain. in the spring of 1864 bradford, the marine artist, being ambitious to paint icebergs in their native wilds, organized a sailing party for labrador and invited wasson to go with them. this was the first enterprise of the kind that gave him permanent benefit. fortunately they encountered no severe storms. the cool, bracing air of the polar regions was better than galvanism and stimulated his nerves to work in the proper way. sailing along the coast they were able to anchor almost every night in smooth water. the fish they caught, the strange birds they saw and stranger human creatures, were a cheerful entertainment to him. he became quite a sportsman, and even joined one day in the pursuit of a polar bear. he returned in the autumn practically cured of his trouble, but to regain his strength was out of the question: he suffered besides very badly from dyspepsia. however he was able to preach regularly, to make speeches in public, to work in his garden and write perhaps three hours a day. such a person is not greatly to be pitied, and if he had fortunately possessed a small competency we might now look upon him as a prosperous man: but his only property consisted of a good working library and five hundred dollars which a friend had given him. the next eight years were the best and most productive of his life; and he might have continued in the same course but for another most unfortunate accident. the supply of coal in his government office gave out, and the requisition for a fresh quantity was not promptly filled. wasson sat writing in a cold room. there was a sudden change of weather, a severe snow squall, and the result was--pleurisy. this changed to bronchitis which worried and weakened him for the following ten years, and finally carried him off in his sixty-fifth year. that he went through a severe fever at the house of his friend henry a. page of medford is hardly worth considering, for he was so tenderly and beautifully cared for there as almost to make it an enviable experience; but in 1879 cataracts formed on both eyes, one of which had been injured long before, and when they were operated on, two years later, the sight was restored to his injured eye (such as it was previously) but not to the other, so that he was left very nearly blind. he attributed this catastrophe to the quantity of belladonna which had been prescribed for him. such was his pathological history and a truly terrible one it is. who can remember the like of it? certainly job's trials were not heavier nor were they borne with more fortitude and patience. in the midst of his severest troubles he wrote "all is well:" a noble religious poem equal to the hymn of cleanthes or the twelfth ode of horace; and in one of his earlier essays he speaks of tragedy as possessing such beauty and grandeur that he is almost ready to believe it is the proper goal and destination of earthly life. in "epic philosophy" he says: "strife is around man, and strife is within him; the lightning thrusts its blazing scymitar through his roof, the thief creeps in at his door, and remorse at his heart. who, looking on these things, does not acknowledge that man is indeed fearfully as well as wonderfully made? who would not sometimes cry, 'o that my eyes were a fountain of tears, that i might weep, not the desolations of israel alone, but the hate of israel to edom and of edom to israel, the jar, the horror, the ensanguined passion and ferocity of nature'? but when we would despair, behold we cannot. out of the conscious heart of humanity issues forever, more or less clearly, a voice of infinite, pure content. 'through the valley of the shadow of death i will fear no evil, for thou art with me.' sometimes, when our trial is sorest, that voice is clearest, singing as from the jaws of death and the gates of hell. and now, though the tears fall, they become jewels as they fall; and the sorrow that begot them wears them in the diadem of its more than regal felicity." this is the echo of his own experience; the spiritual diagnosis of his case. with what fortitude he endured his maladies those who knew him best can bear witness. he was no ideal stoic nor self-conscious martyr; but more like an homeric hero fighting his troubles, bearing them bravely, talking of them sensibly, always glad to receive sympathy but never seeking it, and complaining when he could endure no longer. he never tried to comfort himself by sophistical reflections, but elevated thoughts were always his chief consolation. conversation about great writers and thinkers always seemed to strengthen him. mr. frothingham in his excellent memoir speaks of wasson as a self-consuming nature. such a statement may apply to men like schiller and john sterling but it can hardly be said of one who lived to be sixty-four years old. if he had not been a remarkably patient, prudent, temperate and altogether practical man his disorder would have consumed him long before that time. it gave him no margin for wilfulness. except when he spoke in public, his life was regulated with mathematical accuracy. there was something almost death-like in his self-control, and yet at times that also had to give way. if he had lived otherwise his case would have grown continually worse. the only recreation he had was working in his garden, and an occasional game of billiards. four or five times a year he would go to a symphony concert, to hear matthew arnold lecture, or to see a distinguished actor. people who blamed him for not recovering his health knew not what they did. a philadelphia doctor has made himself quite famous by curing women who have become nervous and debilitated from an unhealthy mode of life and drinking strong tea, but that is a very different thing from curing a true nervous disorder. sumner's case was almost exceptional. he was cured in three years by dr. brown-sequard and made perfectly well; but he had temperament, climate, and everything that money might give, in his favor. a good many invalids have been helped by brown-sequard after other doctors had failed to help them. a sturdy new hampshire farmer wounded his foot with an axe and was supposed to have split a nerve in it. the wound healed perfectly but he never was able to do a whole day's work afterward. an oarsman in the international regatta of 1869 who was a man of enormous physical strength, deranged his nerves in some way and shot himself rather than endure the kind of life that was forced upon him. the wasson family was of ulster-irish descent, or as it is often improperly called scotch-irish. there is little scotch blood in ulster however, and the wassons claimed to be descended from the lollard heretics who were driven out of england in henry the fifth's time. john c. calhoun belonged also to this class of men, who are noted for their industry, sobriety, mental vigor and inflexible tenacity. the county of ulster contains only about one-eighth of the population of ireland and yet it pays forty-six per cent of the irish taxes. david wasson, senior, was trial justice for brooksville, and was greatly dreaded by disorderly persons. he presided with dignity, and maintained better order than is often found in a country court-room. wasson himself was more than saxon; he was a german in mind, body and character, though he never went to germany till after he was fifty. he had a german figure, much like his father's but broader; high square shoulders, a straight forehead and wide mouth. his features were strong and refined without being specially handsome. his brow was very fine and the eyes beneath it of so clear a blue as to be noticeable even at some distance. there are men whom it is a delight to be with, whose "actions are as pleasant as roses," whose absence we regret as soon as they leave the room; but wasson was not one of these. he had no personal charm like longfellow or wendell phillips. he was more of a gentleman than many who pride themselves on that distinction, and he had very good manners, but not a very good style. a noted snob of those days and parasite of distinguished people said that he could have no faith in the genius of a man who dressed like mr. wasson. he would probably have dressed much better if he had possessed more abundant means, but i never saw him dressed in a way that anyone could rightfully complain of. his voice was pleasant but there was neither grace nor elegance in his speech. usually it was direct, forcible, monotonous, with a very distinct enunciation; but sometimes it became drawling and wearisome with a peculiar accent on certain words which struck the ear too pointedly. this however was only among his friends; it did not happen in public. but all thought of human imperfections vanished as soon as he began to talk on one of his favorite topics; and there was a long list of them. you recognized that you were in the presence of a master mind, an analytical genius, who could take the world to pieces and put it together before your very eyes. his conversation was better than his writing; in form, in freedom, and in warmth of feeling. he must have been the finest talker of his time. carlyle could match him perhaps in quite a different manner; but i have never heard of any others. lowell was what would have been called in shakespeare's time a "witty and conceited gentleman" and john weiss still more so; but neither of them could give the flow of original thought which came from wasson like a pure mountain stream. neither were they such complete masters of their subject. like carlyle he required suitable auditors to bring him forth at his best: but while carlyle was mightiest when, his hearers were opposed to him wasson always needed a somewhat sympathetic audience. if he saw unfriendly faces around him his ideas became congealed and his discourse controversial. at other times it was like following the course of a great unknown river, full of grand views and surprising discoveries. nothing interests like imagination, or is more wholesome than good criticism. yet he had no desire to be an autocrat of the drawing-room. he welcomed the opinions of others and encouraged free discussion. no man could be more ready to accept amendments to his propositions. pride of opinion was nowhere to be found in him: he was only too modest and unassuming. if his friends did not agree with him he would reply with a mildly interrogative "yes?" and then proceed as before. the finest rhetoric and even splendid oratory seemed poor compared with the plain statement of this unswerving seeker of the truth. his knowledge was prodigious. he was a good linguist, a fine mathematician and versed in all the different schools of philosophy. he knew english literature as well as macaulay; french and german as well as carlyle. there seemed to be no period of history with which he was unacquainted. he remembered everything. if he had not read a book he had heard of it and had a pretty clear notion of what it contained. the only picture-gallery he ever visited was the small national gallery in london, but from the few master-pieces he saw there he formed a quite correct judgment of the art of painting and could talk about any picture in an interesting way. he had also a good ear for music and divided with lowell the honor among american literati of being able to appreciate music of the best quality. besides this, his knowledge of practical affairs such as farming, gardening, housebuilding, fishing, sailing and other industrial arts was well-nigh endless also. how his head, which was not one of the largest, could contain it all i do not know. he could not recite the odes of horace from memory; but he was able to repeat lengthy quotations from both english and foreign authors, and that without ever having committed them. in religious writings and controversies he was as much at home as a good lawyer in the statutes. in his wanderings he had become acquainted with many curious, strange and original people, and had gained their confidence by his friendly, open-hearted manner. perhaps he had learned as much from the great book of human nature as from all other books; so that his fund of information was fairly inexhaustible. he may almost be said to have contained the material for another shakespeare. in 1877 just after the turco-russian war had begun we found him one evening in a smoking-car on the railway, surrounded by a crowd of young men who were listening eagerly to his account of the various wars which had already taken place between russia and turkey, and the political significance of the present one. "a man who possesses such a fund within has need of little from without." he cannot be called poor so long as he has a roof to shelter him and a single suit of clothes. yet the acquisition of knowledge was never with wasson for its own sake, though a good deal of adventitious knowledge came to him incidentally, but always for the attainment of wisdom. he did not believe in the emersonian doctrine of obtaining inspiration through nature. "that was not the way," he would say, "in which the great minds of history became what they were. if we are to do lasting work we must know what the world is made of. emerson himself does not work in that way." he quoted schiller as saying, "he who would do benefit to the age in which he lives must bathe deep in the spirit of classical antiquity and then return to his own time to be in it, but not of it." that is, if we are to move the world with archimedes' lever, we must have an historical basis to rest on. if a man ever had this it was wasson. he went back to the vedas in his study of religion; to the german forests and the pyramids in his investigation of politics and history. it was this which gave his arguments such cogency and made his discourse so fresh, vigorous and original. arguments, however, will only serve for reasonable people. the ram that butted the locomotive had to learn from experience. his sincerity was absolute. a devoted friend says of him: "during twelve years of familiar intercourse and eight more of less frequent communication, i never knew him once to take on the slightest color of insincerity. for it is not only in the use of words but in the tone of voice, the expression of the face and the movement of the body that duplicity can be detected." like sumner, he would rather lose a case than make use of an unfair argument. this may seem to many a super-sensitive morality, but it was not so for the work which these men had to do. wasson believed in telling lies; to save life, to protect innocence, or even to prevent people from obtaining information which they had no right to. he considered it justifiable not only to deceive insane people, but also those demented creatures who do more mischief than lunatics because they cannot be shut up. the more honor to him therefore for his truthfulness. in the case of a strong temperance woman who refused to allow a gentleman to marry her daughter unless he took the pledge, which he did with the deliberate intention of breaking it afterwards, he said, "i do not like to approve of his action, but she might just as well have held a pistol to his head." neither did his own virtue make him uncharitable towards others. he recognized how impossible it is for servants and many other people to be always veracious, and claimed that the impostures practised by frederick in the seven years' war might be justified by the strait he was in and the importance of the matter in hand. the main thing was to do honest work. for careless, sleazy, or fraudulent work he had no patience. he was greatly amused at the story of dr. francia ordering an army contractor who had cheated the government of paraguay to be promenaded for an hour under the gallows, and he wished that more of them might be treated in that manner. he thought the torrent of mendacity which accompanies our presidential elections must have a bad influence on the morals of the american people. the question of veracity was once discussed at the chestnut street club, and emerson said that desdemona's lie seemed to him the best thing in the play of othello. but there is, as plato remarks, a more insidious evil than the deception of others and that is deceiving oneself. to detect an intentional falsehood is not very difficult, but when people tell lies with perfect assurance of their own sincerity the confusion that results is endless. the wisest of men are some times misled in this way. when we try to deceive others we have before us the danger of public exposure, while in self-deception we have only our own consciences to deal with. neither do the two always go hand in hand. there are persons who are formally careful in regard to the truth, and yet live in perpetual delusion. wasson recognized this danger and protected himself against it by a constant and severe self-examination. he knew himself at least better than most, and if he erred anywhere it was in too moderate an opinion of his own value. he had visually a clear consciousness of what he was about, in spite of his lively imagination. he was in fact an american doctor johnson: a large hearted, high minded, sympathetic and logical _man_; and it is only a pity that he had not some boswell of a friend who could have recorded his wise sayings and valuable criticism of men and things. he was more of an idealist than doctor johnson, and at the same time like doctor johnson in personal solidity, his english aplomb of character. they were both men of sterling quality. he was in all things especially human. his sympathies equalled the breadth of his mind. there was scarcely a subject in which he did not take an interest, and was not ready to converse on. as soon as he obtained a little money he wanted to help those who were in lack of it. his sister's husband being out of work, he designed the model for a small yacht and gave him an order for it. he had known the depths of human misery, and could make his experience of benefit to his friends. poignant grief for the loss of a relative i think he never knew, and yet he did not neglect his duty to those in affliction, little as such duty might be expected of him. he was not a humorist or wit, and his conversation was only saved from dryness by its elevated tone; but he had a quick appreciation of the wit of others, and would sometimes laugh as heartily as carlyle's professor in "sartor resartus." ridicule and those books which are written to make people laugh were intolerable to him. he had a large stock of anecdotes at command, but he used them wisely and sparingly. he was refined as only a poet can be. the general public, as balzac says, judges only by results; and those who were themselves only practical in some specialty, or had made fortunes for themselves out of the gratuity of nature, were wont to look upon wasson as a visionary and unpractical person. to those who acted only from motives of self-interest he was a perpetual puzzle. neither was he ignorant of this unfavorable opinion, for he could see through people almost as if they were glass, and he endured it with true emersonian serenity. if they had known what he thought of them they would not have felt so very comfortable. he was sufficiently practical for the profession to which he belonged, though not so diplomatic as some of them are. he could be diplomatic enough on occasion, and knew how to preserve an impenetrable secrecy when necessity required. he was too sensitive, and too dead-in-earnest to make much of an orator, but he was an effective speaker, and if he had remained in the law he would no doubt have made a success of it, and very likely would have become a member of congress. his adventure with a drunken sea-captain, while crossing from england in a sailing vessel has become proverbial. he probably saved the ship, and the lives of all on board, for a terrific storm arose immediately afterwards, the worst he had ever known, such as only a sober captain could possibly have weathered. there never was a better seaman when he was himself, so wasson said. his judgment in regard to the investment of money, buying or selling a house, or in most of the small affairs of life, was excellent, and his advice in more serious matters so good that wise men might well have gone far to obtain it. wherever he lived his house soon became conspicuous among all others for its refined air and tasteful appearance. in his half acre of a garden, he raised as fine fruit and vegetables as the most accomplished horticulturist, and even made wine from his own grapes equal to the best californian. no man ever accomplished more with inadequate means. the interior of his house at west medford had a pleasant style peculiarly its own. it reminded one of an old dutch painting. in one of the last summers of his life he hybridized a seedling grape of large size and excellent flavor. he hoped to make a valuable property of this but his strength failed him too rapidly. the house in west medford was the only one he ever owned, and he gave a number of good reasons for purchasing it. it was cheap, and large enough for three people; there was a small garden with two fine apple-trees attached to it, and the salt water came almost to the foot of the garden. he had noticed also that the streets became dry after a rain more quickly in that portion of the town than elsewhere and judged from that it must be a healthy locality. he very quickly remodelled the place giving it the stamp of his own style and character. he showed good judgment also in the education of his son george, now a marine-painter of well recognized merit. the boy inherited his father's sincerity and artistic feeling but not his intellectual tastes. in many respects he was more like his mother. he did not take to his studies nor was he fond of games, but liked bathing and sailing. when he was thirteen his father remarked that he did not know what he should be able to do with him. well-intending friends said, you should get him a place in a store so that he may be earning something to help his parents, but wasson replied: "no! i care too much for my boy to make a drudge of him for life, if it is possible for him to do better." soon after this george began to draw ships and naval engagements on the black-boards at school, and one of these was so good that the teacher gave an order to have it remain until his father could be called in to look at it. wasson took notice of this talent in the boy and encouraged it, watching its development as time went on. there were no schools of art in boston then, and one reason for his going to germany in 1872 was to obtain systematic instruction for him in drawing and painting. wasson's friends were now greatly discouraged. "what hope is there for him," they said, "in such a profession? it is not likely the boy is a genius, and who is going to purchase his pictures?" yet his father persevered bravely in spite of many "outs" and temporary failures and finally lived to see the merit of his son admitted by those who were at first most sceptical of it. the son is now a fairly successful artist; especially noted for his skill in representing the motion of water and the attitude of floating vessels. he was never prone to think evil, but he considered it a mischievous habit to try to think better of people than they were--an injustice to character and virtue. "treat people better than they deserve," he would say, "but see them as they are." his kindness of heart now and then led him into difficulties which those who care more for their reputation than anything else, would have avoided. during his arctic expedition bradford took a number of stereopticon-views from icebergs and other indigenous scenery with the intention of exhibiting them in public on his return. this he finally did, more as a private celebration than with a hope of making money from it, and requested wasson to assist him by giving an oral explanation of the pictures. wasson wanted to say, "that is not my business," but he felt under great obligation to mr. bradford for the partial recovery of his strength, and did not like to refuse. he had no conception however of what was in store for him. he sent to bradford for a list of the different views and prepared an address suitable for the occasion; but when the performance took place bradford either forgot this or lost his presence of mind, for he exhibited the pictures without order or regularity, so that wasson soon became confused and was able to give but a very poor account of them. this affair was the more vexatious because it was quite impossible to give any explanation of it. matthew arnold distinguishes between plato as a great writer and thinker and aristotle, who is only a great thinker. in this respect wasson was more like aristotle, though he resembled plato again in being always an idealist. his writing shows the influence of his early studies in the law, and derives much of its virtue as well as some peculiarities from that source. it usually takes the form of an argument and is clear, logical and accurate, but also in style rather hard and dry. what it lacks is the pictorial element--what carlyle possessed in such luxuriance. no law book ever was or could be written for entertainment, and those who expect to be amused by reading wasson or aristotle had better look elsewhere. his essays are like hard wood. he worked hard in writing them and we must work also when we read them. sometimes we meet with passages in them of the purest, most limpid english, though these are more common in his later than his earlier writings. he said once, "i make no effort to please my readers, or even to obtain a graceful diction, i only try to say what i have to in the plainest manner." there is a decided charm in this perfect plainness, this absence of all decoration. one likes to think how old vanderbilt had the brass and ornaments taken off the locomotives on the new york central road. telling the truth was wasson's business in life, and he turned neither to the right nor the left in doing it. however, he did not reach this philosophy at once. his earlier work is marred slightly by a love of the grotesque, a sort of plough-boy rhetoric, which is ill-assorted with the elevated character of his ideas. he suffers also occasionally by an hair-splitting attempt to prove his point beyond the possibility of contradiction. in two or three of his essays there is an unsuccessful effort for liveliness, the result of complaints from his magazine editors, and now and then will appear an unconscious imitation of carlyle; but what does it all amount to? we are inundated now-a-days with writing that is perfect, or nearly so, in form and yet brings no message to mankind. it pleases the understanding, but it does not satisfy the soul. it gives us no new ideas: in fact ideas are hateful to it. "time and space conquering steam, and the light-out-speeding telegraph bears nothing on its beam." wasson's writing compared with this is as an old-time stage-coach journey in which an interesting conversation, moral or political, is carried on by men like fisher ames and rev. david osgood, compared with the empty elegance and despatch of a modern railway-train. it is fresh because it is genuine; vigorous because it is manly; and original because it is true. he is more original than carlyle, and so profound that it seems as if only a pearl-diver could follow him to such a depth. yet his natural element is so pure, calm and tranquil, that we easily accomplish what seems at first an impossible descent. in "epic philosophy" he has dealt with the problem of good and evil in a manner more noble and penetrating than was ever before attempted. in his essay on the "genius of woman" he enters on a new and important field of investigation, a virgin soil as yet untried. in "unity," the greatest of his essays, he boldly climbs the jacob's ladder of philosophy and walks serene among the stars, grappling even with infinity. he had achieved unity for himself; the one complete cosmopolitan mind of his time. in his highest flights he is never cold or inexorable, but always human, tender, and sympathetic. he loved the unkind, heedless world; life was wonderful to him. "what do i think of wasson?" said professor james of harvard, a few days after his death, "i look upon him as one of the great instructors of mankind." it was complained by a critic of emerson's "parnassus" that only two of wasson's poems were to be found in that collection; and alcott, who had a keen scent for superior literature, once turned a visitor out of his study for denying the superiority of wasson's poetry. many of his sonnets are gems, unsurpassed in any language, and the one called "pride" seems to me in its grand simplicity to be without a rival. if there is any american poem which sings itself like "all's well," it is longfellow's ballad of "mary garvin." "the plover" has a pensive grace which is as rare as its subtile and elevated thought. they are however few in number and he did not think there was enough of them to publish in a volume. they were finally published _post mortem_ in what was, if the truth be told, a rather unfortunate manner. two of his finest sonnets, on "silence" and "wendell phillips," were by mischance omitted, and a good many included that were either failures or written for some trifling occasion, and never intended for publication. as if to prevent all chance of popularity, the best pieces were placed at the close of the book and a long unfinished hegelian poem at the beginning. even the paper they were printed on was such as wasson especially disliked. it seems a pity that he should have been denied this little celebrity. he received better justice from mr. frothingham, who has published an excellent memoir of his life and work together with a number of his essays,--a handsome volume well bound and printed. yet one cannot help thinking that here also the author's fame, as well as the interest of the general public, might have been better consuited by a more careful selection and a wider range of subjects. "epic philosophy" at least ought by no means to have been omitted, nor is there any example given of wasson's fine literary criticism, in itself enough to have made a writer celebrated. his essay on whittier is not only a just estimate, but seems also in its wise and tender application to include whittier poetically, as the sea encircles an island. in this department of writing he was the equal of lessing and almost of goethe; but with characteristic modesty he celebrated lowell as the first of american critics. wasson's book notices in the "boston commonwealth" were most interesting reading and contained much of his finest thought. his famous groveland address was not directed against a faith in the divinity of christ, for he held that belief in profound respect, as signifying the divine origin and mission of mankind. he considered every spiritually gifted person to be the result of an immaculate conception. at the close of the essay on "unity" he says: "verily, i believe that he who was born at bethlehem, that majestic witness for the soul, was messias, christ, one sent from the father; that the eternal godhood concurred in the production of his being; that the consciousness of a divine inhabitation lived in his heart." it was no new evil he complained of, but one older than the brazen serpent in the wilderness. it might be called the fossilization of religious ideas. he called to his support the testimony of a witness whose orthodoxy has never been questioned. this was the poet milton, who says: "a man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determine, without other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy." then wasson adds: "and it is no more than a different application of this aphorism to say that one may be an idolater in the reverence of that which is truly venerable; for if he render it homage only in blind conformity to custom, and in implicit submission to the discipline of ancient use and wont, though the object be worthy, yet his worship is an idolatry." it is indeed a type of idolatry which becomes continually more subtle and dangerous with the progress of civilization. in politics wasson was a republican without being a democrat. he hailed the advent of the republican party in 1856 as indicating an improvement in our political consciousness. democracy, he said, led to political selfishness and disintegration. he pointed out many years before von holst that the secession of the southern states was the legitimate fruit of democratic principles. he thought that suffrage ought not to be a right, but a privilege, the privilege of good citizenship. he was also the first to argue in favor of civil-service reform, and a selection of officials by competitive examination. he might have found sufficient arguments from experience, but he was not content with that. he went back to the first principles of political science as indicated in the social organization of mankind. he laid down the rule that society is not more for the benefit of the individual than the individual for the benefit of society; and our last war sufficiently proved the truth of this. when he first brought forward these arguments at the boston radical club in 1879 he was met by a storm of opposition and almost personal invective. one reason for this was that a large portion of his audience was composed of what is sometimes called strong-minded women, who fully expected to acquire the right of suffrage on democratic principles. his hearers had been accustomed to think of a republic and a democracy as one and the same thing, and they could not understand wasson at all. they concluded that he must be a monarchist, an emissary of bismarck. they had no arguments to oppose him with, for it was a subject they had never reflected upon; so they complained that he was illiberal, re-actionary, and lacked faith in human nature. since they were in a numerical majority they thought they had the best of the discussion, but the most impartial of his listeners did not find it so. louisa alcott said once after a lively discussion, in her decisive manner, "i like mr. wasson, and i admire the way in which he fights against odds." his views on politics were similar to those held by washington, adams, hamilton, and most of the founders of the constitution, as also by all the great minds of history, by aristotle, cicero, dante, shakespeare, milton, and leibnitz. wasson however did not look to the past, but wished to improve in a rational manner on what we already have. he considered woman suffrage as a political monstrosity, and considered it even more dangerous in its tendencies than socialism. the true reward of a man of genius lies not in his fame but in his influence. his celebrity is of more value to those who receive the rich gifts of his intellect than to himself. wasson's direct influence during his life was limited to a very small circle; but who can tell how far it extended indirectly beyond this? to those who knew him the thought of this patient, indomitable truth-seeking hero was like an elixir of moral and spiritual vitality. so the orders of a field-marshal are carried to the generals of division, and from these pass onward till every private-soldier feels the impulse of a single will. perhaps the time will come when he will be better appreciated. the future historian of our literature cannot well neglect so independent and original a thinker, and perhaps americans of the next century may find him more congenial to their modes of thought than do those of the present era. if he lives at all, it is likely he will outlive every other writer of his time. one may read plato or bacon or goethe, and then return to wasson and still find something new and instructive in his essays--something we did not know before. wendell phillips if hawthorne was the antipodes of emerson, wendell phillips was of wasson. one might form a proportion out of these four, in which phillips and hawthorne would be the extremes, and emerson and wasson the mean terms. he was, in his way, as perfect an artist as hawthorne, while he differed from him as the sea does from the land. he was more like emerson in his mental methods, and was a man of action. while he took the same interest in public affairs as wasson, the slavery question was the only point on which the two could ever agree. one was an ardent and unreflecting revolutionist; the other a systematic thinker and conservative supporter of the general order of affairs. when in 1870 he was candidate for governor of massachusetts, on a hopeless ticket, and was taunted with being ambitious, he proudly replied, "born of six generations of yankees, i knew the way to office and turned my back on it thirty years ago." his family was one of the earliest and most generally respected in new england; and at one time was influential and flourishing, but now nearly extinct. rev. george phillips of rainham in norfolk, england, was a graduate of cambridge university, and entered the church of england, but soon became a dissenter, and embarked with governor winthrop on the ship arabella, in 1630, for the western world. he was the first minister at watertown; a position in those days as important as the presidency of a trunk line is in our own. cotton mather and the early writers speak of him almost as the founder of the congregational church in new england; and he and his descendants were all cultivated gentlemen. two of his great-grandsons founded the preparatory academies at andover and exeter, called by that name. john phillips, the father of wendell, graduated at harvard in 1788. he was the president of the massachusetts senate for one term, and the first mayor of boston, distinctly so called. his wife was a miss sarah walley of brookline, and wendell himself was their eighth child, born november 29th, 1811--a year memorable for the appearance of a comet with six tails. during his boyhood, the family lived in a large mansion house in old cambridge, which has since been occupied by professor andrews norton and his son. in a large and amiable household, with a mother for whom he always showed the deepest respect, his earlier years must have been happy much beyond the lot of ordinary mortals. he was fitted for college at the boston latin school, where he was distinguished both for scholarship, faultless behavior, and fine declamations. charles sumner was his companion there, as well as in college and at the law-school. they are both said to have given striking proof of their oratorical talent, though perhaps not more so than many others have before and since. he entered at harvard in 1827, while sumner was a sophomore, and dr. holmes and his celebrated twenty-niners were in their junior year. his college life was a dream of wonder-land. rich, gifted, full of good-humor, handsome in form and feature, a brilliant scholar, he seemed above all others to be fortune's favored child. work was easy to him, and his play was the sport of genius. he was everywhere among the first; president of the porcellian club, president and orator of the hasty pudding club--the apollo belvedere of his classmates. he also belonged to a society called "the owls," which only met at midnight, and the one who could control his face so as to look most like an owl was considered the best fellow. yet in the midst of this happiness, like the hindoo prince, the spirit of sadness comes over him when he reflects that very few are so fortunate as himself, and that a great many seem to be born to positive misfortune. the change in him was so marked that his classmates took notice of it and attributed it to too much of a religious interest; but it was not that. he accepted religion as he found it, and lived and died in the faith of his ancestors. what is called a religious experience never came to him; but from this time forward he showed an especial tenderness and consideration for unfortunate people. it is well we bear this trait of his character in mind, for it is the interpretation of the various phases of his career. he studied law, but does not appear to have ever taken a serious interest in it. sumner, on the contrary, became a shining light in the law-school, and there laid the solid foundation of his future eminence. looking back at the past, we see now how the lives of these two men diverged. in tact and readiness, in mental gifts, and fineness of nature, phillips was slightly the superior of sumner, but sumner easily surpassed him in greatness of design. phillips wished to be an orator, and afterwards confessed that at this period of his life his admiration for webster knew no legitimate bounds. but oratory is an art which requires a liberal profession for its basis; and webster and sumner became orators by virtue of their profession. an orator merely as such is simply an actor, and it requires a strong and well-balanced character to withstand the temptations of the stage and the platform. wendell phillips afterwards found a basis for his oratory in the anti-slavery conflict; and then, when that came to an end, his occupation was gone. it is also to be doubted if he had the right sort of intellect to make a lawyer of, though no man could be better qualified in other respects for practice in the courts. although one of his professors predicted a term in congress for him, he did not obtain any clients for several years; which is more remarkable as there could have been no question in regard to his capacity or popularity. another strange fact is that when he went to europe and asked judge story for letters-of-introduction, he failed to obtain them; while sumner, who was story's favorite, was presented a few days later with more than a dozen. had judge story already discovered a centrifugal and uncontrollable element in the man? it is difficult to understand, at this distance, the persecution of the early abolitionists. they were the most harmless and inoffensive of men, and the spirit in which they approached the slavery question, and the arguments they used in regard to it, were like those by which the christian church obtained the abolition of serfdom in europe. they were the most purely christian people of their time; certainly much better christians than those ministers of the gospel who denounced them as disturbers of a hollow peace. so suetonius speaks of the christians as being disturbers of the peace, and tacitus, like a late writer in the "atlantic monthly," refers to them as enemies of society. it is true they finally became narrow-minded, intolerant, and almost misanthropic, as always happens when a small minority are fatally enclosed within an unfriendly community; but they were not so in the beginning. their methods were mild and pacific: they wished to influence public-opinion, and even hoped to persuade the slaveholders to assist in general emancipation. that the slave-holder should have been somewhat irritated at this suggestion to part with so much valuable property is not surprising; but why should it have disturbed their neighbors in massachusetts and connecticut where the question of free and slave labor had been agitated forty years before, and satisfactorily settled? the same speakers who harangued against the abolitionists, would say in the next breath that it was contrary to democratic principles for people in one section of the country to concern themselves about the affairs of those in another. was it an inherited public tendency from the spirit of intolerance which formerly persecuted the quakers? however that may be, it is an historical fact that great social reformers always have begun in a similar manner, and their importance can fairly be measured by the violence and duration of the opposition to them. wendell phillips did not at first take an interest in the anti-slavery cause. the abolitionists were not personally known to him, and his mind was largely occupied with the pleasures of fashionable society, where he shone before all others. there was a certain strength and good sense in this; the reserve of a man who waits for opportunity, and who does not risk shipwreck at the start by rushing hastily into troubled waters. in october 1837, he was married to miss mary anna green, the daughter of benjamin green of boston, and cousin, or other near relative, to mrs. maria chapman, a friend of harriet martineau and other english philanthropists. in november occurred the riot at alton, illinois, and the assassination of lovejoy. dr. channing's first petition for an indignation-meeting in faneuil hall was refused by the authorities; but a second and more urgent one was granted: evidently with the anticipation that the anti-slavery people might, after all, find themselves in a minority. as it happened, the audience was nearly divided between the two parties, but the pro-slavery faction, led by government officials, had the advantage of being able to make all the noise and disturbance they wished without being interfered with by the police for it. it seemed as if the meeting would end in confusion and a vote of disagreement. twenty-five years later wendell phillips said of it: "i went there without the least intention of making a speech or taking any part in the proceedings. my wife and mrs. chapman wished to go, and i accompanied them. i remember wearing a long surtout, a brand-new one, with a small cape (as was the fashion of the day), and after the attorney-general made his speech denouncing lovejoy as a fool, i suddenly felt myself inspired, and tearing off my overcoat, started for the platform. my wife seized me by the arm, half terrified, and said, 'wendell, what are you going to do?' i replied, 'i am going to _speak_, if i can make myself heard.'" the uproar was so great that the chairman asked dr. channing if he could stand thunder; but the personal beauty and intrepidity of phillips,--coming like a meteor out of the night,--so surprised all hearers, that they paused to listen to him, and were so charmed by his eloquence that they neglected to make any further disturbance. the attorney-general was wholly discomfited, and dr. channing's resolutions were carried by a substantial majority. it is surprising that so thorough an historian as von holst should have omitted to make mention of this speech, which really struck the key-note of the anti-slavery movement from first to last. as we have it now, revised by its author from the newspaper reports of the time, it is one of the purest, most spontaneous and magnetic pieces of oratory in existence. it deserves a place beside those two famous speeches of james otis and patrick henry which ushered in the war of separation from england. it possesses even a certain advantage, in the fact that it never has been nor is likely to be made use of for school declamations. it will always remain fresh, vigorous, and original as when it was first delivered. but phillips was not content merely with silencing the opposition. he claimed that the cause for which he spoke, and for which the meeting had been called, was one of higher importance than any that had preceded it in faneuil hall. when the audience murmured at this, he boldly continued: "insomuch as _thought_ is better than _money_, is the cause for which lovejoy died superior to that for which our ancestors contended. james otis thundered within these walls when the king did but touch his pocket; imagine his indignant eloquence if they had attempted to put a gag upon his lips." for this statement, if for nothing else, wendell phillips deserves an immortality in the history of his country. with such an achievement at the age of twenty-six, what might not have been expected of his maturer years,--of the full fruition of his genius? what but a future candidate for the senate of the united states, or even for the presidency? the full fruition of his genius, the development that nature intended for him, never was realized. it is true, he accomplished much, and was in himself even more,--but by no means what he might have been. even in the first hour of success, the temptation comes to us which determines our future destiny in one way or another. the two ladies were of course delighted at his triumph, and overwhelmed him with congratulations; but mrs. chapman, "the born duchess", as she was called, saw instantly what an advantage would accrue to the small band of abolitionists from the alliance of this able young aristocrat, with his suddenly revealed gift. that evening she used all the arts of persuasion to induce him to relinquish his profession and cast his fortune to sink or swim on the broad ocean of reform. she argued that webster and everett had the field; that years must elapse before he could win equality with those veterans; while as an anti-slavery orator, a fresh field would be open to his genius, in which he would meet with no competitor. the hour only waited for the man, and what a glorious reward to have finally secured--the freedom of a whole race! unhappily this coincided with a natural inclination in phillips, of which we have already spoken, and a few days later he decided to follow her advice. one could heartily wish that the born duchess had left wendell phillips to work out his own salvation. it is hardly the sign of a strong character for a man to be guided in the choice of a profession by feminine counsel; but he was still young, tender-hearted, and susceptible, and if left to himself might have escaped the impending danger. it was a temptation at once to his ambition as an orator and the latent heroism in him,--his disposition to self-sacrifice. his law practice was not satisfactory, and he could not look forward to immediate success in that direction--especially since the faneuil hall meeting. much better however for him to have gone patiently forward in the path already cleared by webster and everett, until, fully equipped in experience and maturity, he could have carried his anti-slavery principles into the arena of practical politics and become a leader in the house of representatives, or have stood by sumner in the senate. a woman can hardly be expected to understand the long-drawn persistent struggle by which a man rises to the top of his profession; but it seems as if mrs. chapman might have been more considerate of the fortune and prospects of this young apollo, himself of more value than many negroes. he did not properly belong with the abolitionists. they always felt so. they were excellent people, stainless in thought and in action, but limited in education and ability. men of the highest mental endowments naturally form a class by themselves, though not an exclusive one. if phillips had consulted john quincy adams on the subject, he would have been answered with a "no" such as might have been heard across court street. his life was now as much changed as if spring had suddenly been succeeded by winter. it was like a penitential pilgrimage. he had inherited from his father a moderate property upon which he and his wife, who was already much of an invalid, could live in a moderate way. he resided for a time in florence, massachusetts, and then purchased a small house in essex street, boston, which has since been torn down to make room for the extension of harrison avenue. it was a house of very small dimensions, such as is commonly occupied by a mechanic's family; but possessed the advantage of admitting as much sunshine as possible into mrs. phillips' lonely chamber, which was probably his reason for selecting it. he wished to live economically in order to save money for the cause of freedom, and also for private charities. the number of persons whom he assisted in the course of his life may be called countless; and he was even too careful in preventing a knowledge of this from being made public. he selected for his motto the latin sentence which he had translated while at school, "phocian always remained poor, though he might have been very rich." his fashionable friends deserted from him in a body, and old family acquaintances passed him in the street without recognition. the only society he had was his wife and mrs. chapman and the families of the few abolitionists who lived in boston. he was as careful of his diet, exercise, and sleep, as a trainer is in regard to a race-horse; and was rewarded for this with the most magnificent health. in all things he illustrated the words of the poet:- "the hero is not fed on sweets; daily his own heart he eats: the chambers of the great are jails and head winds right for royal sails." he never lost an opportunity of speaking on the slavery question. he joined the corps of lyceum-lecturers, and soon won the first place among them. if they would listen to him on slavery, or "toussaint l'ouverture," his lecture was free; otherwise it must be paid for. no one else did so much to arouse public consideration in regard to this great evil, as the conservative webster had already designated it. all through the northern states, wherever the railroads went, there wendell phillips was also, exhorting the people with burning words, and warning especially the farmers and laboring classes that free and slave labor could not exist together, and unless the negroes were emancipated they would ultimately become enslaved themselves. stumping new england, it was said, made wendell phillips an orator; and that, after all, was the right name for it. it was refined and elegant as could be, but still stump-oratory. it became so inevitably from the nature of the case, and in one sense this is to his credit, for it would seem to prove that he cared more for the cause than for his own reputation. he never attained to the well-considered architectural oratory of webster and burke, though in his best period he sometimes came very close to this, but neither did he speak to the house of commons, nor before a bench of judges. nothing is more fatiguing to untrained minds than a consistent and elaborate argument; and the mixed character of phillips' speeches, like a bonfire made out of all inflammable materials, was remarkably well suited to the audiences whom he addressed. it is said that even burke often emptied the benches, as if his associates in parliament did not appreciate him so well as those who now enjoy reading his works. an artist who draws with a free hand, will be able to develop his talent to its full extent, but one who draws in a cramped or false manner will always suffer more or less from the effects of it; but this was not the worst of the matter. self-control does much for the artist, but unprejudiced criticism is also necessary. this phillips never could obtain. there were persons who judged him impartially, but he was not in the way of obtaining their opinions. he was surrounded by a small band of adherents who praised him without discrimination, and who fiercely repelled the attacks of those who found fault with him. the newspapers all took sides against him, for both political parties dreaded the agitation of the slavery question, and phillips could rarely look into one of them without meeting with a savage attack on himself by some subaltern who knew of no better use for his quill than the manufacture of these venomous darts. neither could he walk through the streets of boston without hearing himself cursed and execrated. meanwhile mrs. chapman and mrs. l. maria child extolled him to the skies. faithful and undistorted picture of himself he could meet with nowhere. we read of saintly characters who have endured persecution with christian humility and resignation, who have blessed those who cursed them, and loved those who hated them; but how many such have we been personally acquainted with? if we except desdemona there are none in the great dramatists. it is an excellent principle, this of returning good for evil; but is it not also true that nature has planted hatred in us as a protection against future imposition? there may be such personages, but wendell phillips was not one of them. he endured the stings of the pro-slavery hornets, as they were called, with stoical dignity and forbearance, but in spite of all good resolutions, they had an effect upon the inner man. like the good maritornes when sancho panza mistook her for an evil spirit, he endured the drubbing as long as flesh-and-blood would stand it, and then retaliated in good earnest. it was discovered at length, that wendell phillips had a sharp tongue, as well as a silver one, and could use it also with some temper. of course he was blamed for this, and very few considered what provocation he had, or gave him credit for his previous forbearance. the habit increased rather than abated in him with age, and finally acquired the nature of a familiar demon that would appear unexpectedly in the midst of a brilliant discourse and sadly mar the effect of it. his tendency to exaggeration, disregard of fact, and recklessness of statement, may all be attributed to his irregular, improvised manner of working. there are few public speakers, indeed, who escape these faults. what preparation he made for his speeches will probably never be known. he was always as mysterious on this point as a professional juggler. to a lady who once asked him about it, he replied, that he never made any preparation. for those of his speeches that have been published, we are obliged to a skilful short-hand writer named yerrinton, who was wendell phillips' devoted admirer, and never missed an opportunity of hearing him on a fresh subject in boston or new york. to judge from internal evidence, it would seem likely that having divided his subject, as a lawyer does his argument, into a number of points, and having filled his mind somewhat full of them, he wrote out a careful and well-studied opening to his address, and then committed it to memory. this would enable him to make terms, as it were, with his audience in those first critical moments of his speech, and afterwards he could rely on his native wit and genius to carry him through. when his subject was a criticism of public events, this was not so difficult, and it gave him the advantage of a certain vivacious energy which appealed strongly to his hearers; but it was a dangerous practice. an orator who has a certain length of time to fill, and a reputation to sustain, is obliged to go on at all hazards. he cannot afford to be dull, nor to stop for a moment's reflection. if his memory fails him for an instant, imagination must supply its place. in this manner he often made misstatements which were quite unintentional, and must have been deeply regretted afterwards. some allowance too should be made for a man who feels himself in a desperate position. his historical lectures on "the lost arts," "daniel o'connel," and "toussaint," must sooner or later have been committed to memory, and were repeated again and again in a nearly identical form. to amend for these deficiencies, his delivery was perfect, and even more than that. one of our best critics has called him matchless in this respect, and no other orator of the century, except possibly canning, may be compared to him. webster was more effective, but rather ponderous. choate's style was peculiar, and everett's cold and studied. gladstone resembles him more, perhaps, than any other, but gladstone has a decided solemnity of manner which is a help to him among his countrymen, but a defect as judged by classic standards. with wendell phillips, it was not only that every phase of thought and feeling was portrayed at once in his face, attitude, and gestures, but this was done with such grace and purity as only belongs to the very highest art. it was as if a figure in raphael's "school at athens" had suddenly stepped out from the picture and explained the thought of the master to us in words. there is nothing i can compare with the unconscious grace and purity of phillips in his best moments except a picture by raphael, or one of milton's shorter poems. it was no lurid brilliancy or artificial light that shone from him, but rather the cheerful radiance of spring sunshine. no matter how gloomy the political outlook might be, or in what sombre colors he depicted it, this light from the man himself illuminated his subject and gave encouragement to his hearers. the most prolonged applause could not disturb a muscle in his countenance, and a storm of hisses appeared to have as little effect on him. from the first word to the last, he was master of the platform, and no one dreamed of contesting his right to it. his gestures were his own, and could not be imitated, for they were the creation of the moment. there was something magical in this art of his, and if his wisdom and judgment had only equalled it, he might have counted among the greatest of men. emerson sent one of webster's orations to carlyle, and the latter complained that it was monotonous and lacked the poetic quality of demosthenes. this is quite true, but at the same time it may be said that webster's speeches, judged simply as literature, have not been surpassed by five other american writers. the grand roll of his sentences does not become wearisome to a lover of sound reasoning, and in the presentation of his subject he has rarely been equalled. an oration of his is not like a picture hanging on the wall, but rather a public building which one can walk around and look at from the four cardinal points. even his speech on the fugitive-slave bill, for which he has been so much blamed, contains the best analysis of the slavery question up to that time which had yet been made. he considered slavery a great evil, and his mistake evidently consisted in supposing that a great evil could exist in one part of the nation without vitiating the whole of it. [illustration: wendell phillips. as he appeared before the phi beta kappa.] phillips looked upon slavery as a crime, and attacked it in an uncompromising manner. his speeches are not much like webster's, but they are excellent reading; full of keen, vivid thought, bright sayings, and genial humor. he had the imagination of demosthenes, but without the logical faculty. many of them possess historical value, and but for too much _voix blanc_, like the brightness of new silver, might be compared with emerson's essays. certain passages and individual sentences are of rare beauty. speaking of lovejoy thirty years after his death, he said, "how cautiously men sink into nameless graves, while now and then one forgets himself into immortality." at the time of the dred scott decision, he exclaimed: "is liberty dead? is the valley of the mississippi her grave? are the rocky mountains her monument; and shall the falls of niagara chant forever her requiem?" in his brooklyn address of november 1st, 1859, the finest of his orations, and one which he must have prepared with exceptional care, after telling the story of tsar nicholas, who insisted on building a straight railroad from moscow to st. petersburg in spite of the opposition of the engineers, he continued: "an intelligent democracy says of slavery, or a law, or a creed, 'this is justice, or it is not'; the track of god's thunderbolt is a straight line from justice to iniquity, and the church or state that cannot stand it must get out of the way." or take this illustration of his subject from athenian life--which is itself athenian, and very much in the vein of demosthenes:-"anacharsis went into the forum at athens, and heard a case argued by the great minds of the day, and saw the vote. he walked out into the streets, and somebody said to him, 'what think you of athenian liberty?' 'i think,' said he, 'wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.' just what the timid scholar two thousand years ago said in the streets of athens, that which calls itself the scholarship of the united states says today of popular agitation, that it lets wise men argue questions, and fools decide them. but that unruly athens, where fools decided the gravest questions of polity and right and wrong, where it was not safe to be just, and where property, which you had garnered up by the thrift and industry of to-day, might be wrung from you by the caprices of the mob to-morrow,--that very athens probably secured the greatest human happiness and nobleness of its era, invented art, and sounded for us the depths of philosophy: god lent to it the noblest intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch that gilds yet the mountain-peaks of civilization." at a memorial meeting of sumner's friends in 1874, phillips concluded his remarks with the same expression that cicero used in regard to homer:--"there was no one like sumner." he was not a mellow-toned orator of peace and conciliation, but soul-stirring, and one could detect the distant flash of a sword-blade in his periods. in private life, he was the most delightful of men. good orators always have the finest manners, for it is from them that we learn the art of behavior; but wendell phillips never brought the great man of the world to the drawing-room or dining-table, but was so perfectly a gentleman that he seemed almost like a prince who had abdicated his hereditary possessions. he did not seem to have been bred to good manners, but born to them, so natural and unconstrained was everything he said and did. never self-conscious and never self-forgetful; where consideration was needed he was sure to be at hand. he was at once dignified and deferential, even to children and servants, whom he was sure to remember in the homes where he visited, and usually had a kind word for them at the right moment. i do not think he could have treated even the meanest of women with disrespect. he never talked too long or too brilliantly, but seemed to be on the watch to give everyone present a fair chance. his presence in a room was stimulating, and made people brighter than their ordinary wont. of small conversation, conversational pleasantries, and what is called table-talk, he happily knew nothing. he had no sharp wit or repartee, but plenty of genial humor, and could of course tell a story to perfection. his imitations of other orators were highly amusing, especially what he called webster's rochester speech: "the public debt; it must be paid; and it _shall_ be paid;--how much is it?" he would go through the performance and then resume his seat at the table, laughing like a child. when emerson and phillips dined together they would look at one another, as it seemed, with a kind of awe, as if they were more wonderful to each other than to ordinary mortals. it was after such an occasion that emerson said, "this man is such a perfect artist that he ought to be walking all the galleries of europe, and yet here he is fighting these hard questions." he did not appear to care much for society however, and always declined an invitation where he was in danger of being lionized, or otherwise made use of. a characteristic anecdote is told of him during the expedition of the abolitionists to england in 1853. they were entertained there by their british allies, and also by members of the nobility. a certain duchess (or countess perhaps) invited them to a lawn-party, and while they were engaged in drinking coffee on her lawn, an uncomfortable drizzling mist came down on the company. the gentlemen all carried their hats in their hands, out of respect for the duchess, who wore a sort of lace tiara; but in this emergency phillips, who had a speech to make at birmingham next evening, placed his on his head and continued to wear it. the consequence was that when the duchess gave them a second entertainment phillips was not invited. he was as independent as this on all occasions. the anti-slavery movement carried along with it a variety of other social and political movements such as spiritualism, total abstinence, and the prevention of capital punishment; which prevented many sympathetic friends of the cause from joining it, and gave it a quaint, and sometimes even a comical aspect. these utopian and impracticable notions were accepted by the abolitionists partly on the log-rolling principle, and partly from a tendency of those people to separate themselves from what is real and tangible. it seems strange that a man of wendell phillips' culture and mental endowments should not have been able to distinguish between a necessary and possible reform, and those vague theories of human happiness and perfection which are not based on the logic of experience, but indicate rather a wayward mental condition in the devotees. if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, what should be said of unripe and superficial thinking? we wonder what were wendell phillips' reflections concerning the women in bloomer costume, and the paradoxical persons who frequented the anti-slavery fairs, and created disturbances at the anti-slavery conventions. if questioned about them he would probably have said, with a laugh, "oh, those are our barnacles;" but they were only extreme cases of the general tendency. it was not the right element for a man of his calibre: he did not become a spiritualist, nor was he so intolerant as to object to the use of brandy for cooking purposes; but he published an injudicious and even intemperate letter to the chief-justice of massachusetts and the president of harvard college, arraigning them for drinking wine at a public banquet. he exerted himself strenuously to obtain the repeal of capital punishment; and when that failed, and also an attempt to obtain a pardon for a miserable murderer, whom it was merely a kindness to hang, he attacked the governor of the state in a sermon before the theodore parker society, which was little better than a tirade of invectives. he never appeared as an advocate of woman suffrage before the public, but he is said to have approved of it. neither would he go to the polls to vote; at first because the national constitution supported slavery, and afterwards because the government maintained an army and encouraged war. he missed a fine opportunity to escape from this narrow routine and enter the arena of practical politics when the free-soil party was formed to prevent the extension of slavery. however, he either did not think of it, or preferred to hold fast to his former friends, though he little knew how little they cared for him, and he continued for ten years longer to lecture on toussaint and talk moral-suasion,--riding hard on the garrisonian formula. it seems like small business when we recollect the work that seward and sumner and chase were doing meanwhile. it was the attack on harper's ferry that broke the spell at last, and awoke wendell phillips to a higher and more useful life. it is difficult to realize now, the courage that was required to appear before the public in defence of what was generally considered the outrage of a madman. it is easier for men to understand the differential calculus, than that rebellion against government is either the greatest of crimes or the highest of virtues. when government becomes so bad that honesty and virtue cannot endure it, revolution is imminent. phillips, emerson and thoreau, john a. andrew and rev. j. m. manning, pastor of the old south church, were the ones who asserted this. andrew and his friends called a meeting, nominally to obtain funds for the wife and daughters of john brown. the hall was crowded with a remarkably intelligent looking class of people. andrew presided, and claimed that whatever might be thought of his virginia raid, john brown himself, considered from his own standpoint, was in the right. rev. mr. manning said, if john brown had consulted him in regard to inciting a slave insurrection he should certainly have advised him not to do it, but he was far from regretting that the attempt had been made. phillips was the last speaker, and treated his subject in the boldest revolutionary manner; and before he had finished the applause was deafening. a judge of the superior-court sat on the front bench clapping his hands with a noise like pistol shots. this served him as a preparation for the brooklyn address already referred to, which, if it had been equal throughout, might be classed among the world's great speeches, and it is certainly one of the most brilliant orations of either ancient or modern times. certain passages in it remind one of a shower of falling stars. it is remarkable for its light and shade. he began with a gay and graceful compliment to thomas corwin, an old statesman of the henry clay school, who was seated on the platform; but he soon became intensely serious. "the lesson of the hour is insurrection. and why is it? because we are all recreant americans; recreant to the principles of our ancestors." after a while he changed to a sort of rippling humor, which was peculiar to him, and delighted his audience immensely, describing the subterfuges which had come into fashion to escape using the word slavery. "hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." then he became deeply pathetic as he referred to the heroic man condemned to death and lying wounded in a virginia prison; and concluded with an outburst of spiritual triumph like that in goethe's tragedy of egmont. "they have brave men in virginia: it was not an old, grey-headed man entering harper's ferry that they were afraid of, it was the john brown in every man's own conscience that made them tremble." he achieved an equal success of a different kind soon after, in attempting to deliver the same speech in new york city. a portion of the hall was filled with pro-slavery roughs who cursed and reviled him, and threw various missiles at him. a stone which struck a chair near him on the platform might have done him very serious injury. nothing dismayed, he continued his speech, and taking his text from the insults of his enemies, hurled defiance back in their teeth. his friends who accompanied him and were ready to defend him from personal violence, said that on this occasion phillips surpassed any thing they had known of him before; and fairly quelled the mob by his courage, address, and personal magnetism. it was during the following eight years that wendell phillips proved himself the great orator. wasson, who never quite approved of him, said that webster might have excelled him, but that choate or everett could not be compared with him. the largest halls could not contain the people who wished to hear him. he was several times mobbed, and his life was in continual danger. a body-guard of devoted young friends escorted him to and from his house. he never ceased calling for the emancipation of the negroes, and when that was accomplished, for their enlistment as volunteers and a more vigorous prosecution of the war. his criticism of public affairs was not always judicious, but it warmed the hearts of the people and strengthened the hands of the anti-slavery party in washington. the real difficulty at that time was best known to lincoln and his cabinet; the difficulty of organizing such large armies with so small a number of trained and experienced officers. good judges have given an opinion that the practice of appointing noted politicians to important commands lengthened the war at least two years, and one after another, all these men had to be removed; but what else could the government do? the officers of the regular army nearly all belonged to the democratic party, and president lincoln hardly knew whom he could trust. phillips knew as little of military affairs as grant did of oratory. just one year after the brooklyn address, he was called upon to celebrate the election of abraham lincoln in boston music hall. for once phillips and his audience were in perfect harmony, and also in the best of spirits. men little dreamed at that time of the awful chasm that was to open beneath them. his speech was full of the most delicious humor; rather a biting humor at times, as we read it now, but it did not seem so in the way he spoke it. it was like a wedding feast: laughter and applause were so frequent that the wonder is that the speaker was able to keep the thread of his discourse. among a dozen witty passages, he said, "now i would like to have a law that one-third of our able men should not be eligible for the presidency. then every third man could be depended on to tell the truth. listen to mr. seward on the prairies; what magnificent speeches he has made there since mr. lincoln's nomination. when he ceased to be a candidate for the presidency, he became a man again." in the winter of 1863 he went to washington for the first time, and lectured on the lesson of the hour. "old abe" went to hear him and expressed himself as being greatly pleased with the exhibition, as he called it. next day a committee of influential citizens called on him to inquire if he could deliver his oration on "toussaint" that evening for the benefit of his admirers; and then that was not enough, but they must have his lecture on "the lost arts" the evening afterward. this was a fine triumph for him after twenty-five years of social ostracism but his anxiety in regard to the condition of the country, prevented him from enjoying it as he might have. meanwhile a storm was preparing for him in the quarter he least expected it. the old abolitionists, whom nobody had thought of since the repeal of the missouri compromise and who were beginning to feel a good deal neglected, looked upon phillips now as a deserter from their standard of non-resistance and moral suasion, and perhaps also eyed his brilliant course with some little jealousy. in the spring of 1865 garrison returned from hoisting the flag at fort sumter, fully satisfied that the negroes could be safely trusted in future to the patriarchal care of the central government. phillips thought otherwise. he argued that the black man still suffered from the effects of slavery; that they were very much at the mercy of their former masters, who would naturally bear them no good-will; that their future political position would depend on the action of congress and not on the administration; and that it was still advisable for northern friends to keep watch over their interests. from this private difference of opinion an obstinate controversy soon developed itself, in which a large portion of the public took part on one side or the other. senator sumner and his friends supported phillips; while governor andrew, who disliked him for no very good reason, and senator wilson for a much better one, supported garrison. both parties being thus strongly reinforced, the dispute rose to a high pitch. phillips finally carried the day, and was fully justified afterwards for doing so; but the garrison party took mortal offence at him for this, and would never afterwards recognize him except by a cold and distant courtesy. george thompson, an english friend of garrison who came over providentially at that time, quoted phillips' earlier speeches against him (an inconsistency which was rather to his credit) and exclaimed, "i appeal from phillips drunk to phillips sober:" nor was this the worst of it. [footnote: a year after this he said to two rhode island ladies, who were among the few friends that remained faithful to him all through life, "it seems hard that of the men whom i worked with for thirty years only three or four are willing to speak to me now."] but phillips endured the storm like a man. he argued his case with all the ardor and energy of his nature, but there escaped from him not one opprobrious or resentful sentence towards his former associates. emerson said (to quote him again, and we hope for the last time): "how handsomely mr. phillips has behaved in his controversy with mr. garrison. in fact phillips was the same we have always known him." but the wound went deep into him; and seven years later, when he said at the radical club, "i have known cases in which it only took _one_ to make a quarrel," we all recognized what he was thinking of. this was the acme of his career, and alas! how soon he fell away from it. about a year before this time, his friends began to notice certain expressions in his speeches which puzzled them not a little. at length a severe and unjust attack on senator wilson as a frequenter of drinking-saloons explained the new departure to them. phillips was evidently taking a hand in practical politics, and as wilson's term was nearly expiring, wished to make general butler his successor. so strangely are good and evil united in us, that this happened about the same period as the garrison controversy. the less said about general butler perhaps the better. at the same time wendell phillips' support of him would seem to be no worse than judge hoar's continued support of blaine for the presidency; and it is also true that general butler's reputation was better at this time than it afterwards became; he was well received at the political clubs, and even considered in the light of a presidential candidate by prominent republicans. phillips' subsequent explanation of the matter was, that the negro was his client, and general butler was the only person who had the will and ability to manage his case. he was not inconsistent in this, for he afterwards supported general grant in the machine governments at the south for the same reason. another bond of mutual interest between them was socialism. when or where phillips became a socialist is uncertain. he was conservative in religion, and there is no more necessary connection between the abolition of slavery and socialism than between socialism and free-trade. on the contrary, the votes of the irish laborers, who now divided his interest with the negroes, had always been the chief bulwark and mainstay of the slave power in the northern states. it must however, have been a question of principle with him, a theory of abstract right, for the course and conduct of his whole life is a true witness against any meaner motive. but general butler's socialism was doubtless a matter of personal ambition--a bait to catch the popular vote. nobody except phillips, not even the laborers themselves, imagined anything else in his case. [footnote: in the autumn of 1884 my brother asked a plumber then working for him, if he intended to vote for general butler, who was presidential candidate that year for the labor-party. "no," replied the fellow, "butler is a bad man; he will do for governor of massachusetts, but for president of the united states we want something different."] this unholy alliance was productive of no good to either party: phillips injured his reputation by it, and what advantage butler may have gained is yet to be discovered. in 1870 phillips injured himself still more by a public attack on the bird club; a company of merchants and politicians who met together for a saturday-afternoon dinner. this was done so evidently in butler's interest that the general's future plans were disclosed by it. he wished to obtain the nomination for governor the following year, and looked upon the bird club as the chief obstacle in the way of his doing so. frank w. bird, who usually presided at the table, was one of the most patriotic and single-minded men that ever labored for the good of his country. he was so sincere and warm-hearted that there was no possibility of mistaking his character. he was in the legislature for nearly twenty years, and a member of the governor's council; but offices were not what he cared for. he was at once the most intimate friend of andrew and sumner,--two men who never could agree because one wanted to organize all men under his banner, and the other was equally determined to be independent of everybody. he might almost have been called the balance-wheel of massachusetts politics. at the state house he was the terror of all mean and mischievous members; a sentinel always on the watch to prevent extravagance, fraud, and political chicanery. his persistent opposition to that monstrous abortion the houssac tunnel, for which our children and grandchildren will be taxed _ad infinitum_, cost him an election to congress. upon this account he had numerous enemies, but even general butler could not discover the smallest reproach against his character. he was one of the most useful men in the state. the club was called by his name because it had neither name nor organization. it originated with a few friends who used to meet at chevalier howe's office during the kansas excitement; and wendell phillips' charge against them that they managed the politics of massachusetts, had less than half a leg to stand on. while the governor and both senators were members of the club it must have been of course an influential body. sumner certainly never made use of official patronage to promote his private interests. yet this was the only charge, mixed with some dark insinuations, that phillips could bring against them; and even this might have had some excuse if it had not been in the interest of general butler. the remainder of his life was a wreck, though he may not have been aware of it. frank bird and his associates were the best friends that wendell phillips ever had. they were friends who would have held fast to him through everything except such an attack as he made on them. alone now with his invalid wife, childless and well-nigh friendless, his life must have been gloomy and miserable. no company was ever invited to his house, and it was by the rarest chance that he went to any entertainment. who his associates were in this new phase of his life, is often a matter of conjecture. revolutionary socialists mostly, practical and unpractical--not of the harmless theoretical sort: but he never was seen on the street in company with other men. whoever they were, they could not have been either cheerful or elevating society. the audiences that went to hear him were composed of quite a different class of people from those of the preceding era, and could not sustain him with the same moral force as formerly. no wonder if his temper became sharp and his mind melancholic; if the lines deepened in his face and the quick, bright look of his eye changed to a fitful, suspicious and desperate expression; if his splendid talent deteriorated too much into mannerism. although this was his own fault, we could not help feeling pity for him, and the kind of regret with which we look on the fragments of a beautiful statue. he was evidently carried away with the ambition of becoming a world reformer. there is a sentence in his speech on lincoln's election which may cast light on wendell phillips' socialistic views. he says, "caesar crossed the rubicon borne in the arms of a people trodden into poverty and chains by an oligarchy of slaveholders; but that oligarchy proved too strong even for caesar and his legions." this was a bold and original opinion in those days, for mommsen's history, to which we are mainly indebted for our change of sentiment in regard to caesar, had not yet been translated. there is at the present time an oligarchy of land owners and capitalists in england of whom froude has predicted that they will come to the same catastrophe as the roman oligarchy did finally, and as that of bohemia in the sixteenth century, and of france in the eighteenth, unless the present course of events shall be arrested by judicious legislation and magnanimous sacrifices. phillips had already taken a hand in suppressing one american oligarchy, who have been compared by mommsen to the roman senatorial party, and he thought he foresaw another rising in our midst from the iron kings, and other great industrial magnates. he may have been far-sighted in this, for he often proved to be a true prophet, and there are many now who think the same; but that would not justify the methods by which he undertook to provide against the evil. the condition of the laboring classes in america, where a thrifty and temperate mechanic can occupy as good a house as a country doctor in europe, is the most favorable yet known in history; much more favorable, comparatively, than that of our professional classes; but phillips had seen the most wealthy and highly educated people ranged against him throughout the long conflict with slavery, and had acquired the habit of considering them a dangerous element in the community. there is a certain artistic perfection in the contrasts of his life. thirty-seven years after his lovejoy speech, he appeared again in faneuil hall attended by a retinue of government employees, with intent to capture a meeting called to protest against the interference of the government at washington in louisiana politics. there was wrong no doubt on both sides of this question, but the interference of the government was equally illegal and injudicious. phillips appeared now more on the side of the oppressor than for the oppressed, and though his speech was, as formerly, the best of the occasion, it failed to win the sympathy of the audience. he was consistent in his devotion to the interests of the freed, men, but he would have been more true to himself if he had been willing to recognize, as the more reasonable anti-slavery people did, how absurd and even abominable, were the negro governments in the southern states; but he had long since lost his good judgment, and when president hayes removed the troops for whose maintenance he could obtain no appropriation from congress, and the pyramid which had been so long supported on its apex suddenly fell over, phillips could scarcely find terms harsh enough to express his rage and exasperation. his attacks on the hayes administration might fairly be called philippics had they possessed the saving grace of hellenic self-control, but they remind us rather of carlyle's furious "latter day pamphlets." yet even in december there are bright days, and when in his seventieth year the veteran orator was invited to deliver an address before the graduates of his own college, from whose festivities he had been excluded since the time of his lovejoy speech, warmed with the recollections of his youth, his genius blazed forth with all its former brilliancy. with customary hardihood he selected for his subject "the danger from the educated classes"; that is, the tendency of intellectual culture to exclusiveness and separation from the less fortunate portion of mankind. it is not to be supposed that the harvard alumni were well pleased with this topic, but he presented it with so much skill, and even eloquence, as to win applause from some of his most inveterate opponents. this sympathy for the unfortunate had been the key-note and true explanation of his course in life. it came to him there in the days of his youthful gayety like a dream, and now after fifty years he had returned to celebrate his last triumph in the same place where this vision of heavenly mercy had appeared to him. he looked like cicero, and there is a bust of cicero on the pincian hill at rome, which if placed in boston would certainly be mistaken for him. his figure, however, was better than cicero's, who is reported to have had a long neck and rather slender legs. he resembled cicero in his refined tastes, his admiration for great writers his command of language, his tact, fluency, fiery invective, and in the anti-climax of his career. if he had prepared his speeches for a body of men like the roman senate, he might have been more nearly cicero's equal. he used to wear a high-crowned soft felt hat, which was remarkably suited to the roman-like contour of his face. he was skillful in all things, and might have been equally celebrated as a writer, an actor, or possibly as an artist, if his interest and inclination had led him in either of these directions. what we feel the lack of in him is contemplative depth: he was more gallic than germanic. he possessed a deep nature, but his character was not equal to it. he was too refined, too much of an artist perhaps, for the rough work fortune gave him to do. he had the heart of a lion, but the mind of a woman. yet as we view his life from a distance it has grand outlines. when the western continent was discovered, it seemed as if it were a paradise which had been kept in reserve for the most civilized races; but this had no sooner happened, than a curse was fastened upon it,--the curse of slavery, which had already been abolished in europe in its mildest type. this may have been necessary at first in the tropical portions of america, where it is impossible for a white man to labor in the sun; but it was contrary to the spirit of christianity and inimical to true civilization. to eradicate this wide-spread, deep-rooted evil was a tremendous undertaking, one of the most gigantic in history; and among those who contributed to this, none, except perhaps john brown and charles sumner, accomplished more--and few have done so much as wendell phillips. the right aspect then in which to regard his career, is as a sacrifice to this great cause. let it be said of him that he loved mankind not wisely, but too well. appledore and the laightons. the isles of shoals are seven: duck, appledore, cedar, haley's, star, londoner's, and white. besides these there are square rock, mingo rock, and a number of other out-lying rocks and reefs. appledore, haley's, cedar, star, and londoner's form almost a semi-circle, or horse-shoe, nearly a mile in width with the tips turned toward the west. duck island lies a mile-and-a-half to the north of this group, and white island with it's light-house about the same distance to the south-east. they are mostly bare rocks, like mountain tops rising above the water. they are not however submerged mountains, for as their name indicates the sea is nowhere very deep about them. if the points of the horse-shoe had been turned toward the east instead of the west they would not have been habitable and the place would have been known to navigators as the devil's reef, the devil's horse-shoe or by some other term ominous of shipwrecks. the group of islands now form a cosy though not very safe harbor where every evening in the mackerel season a small fleet of fishing-vessels sail in there to anchor for the night. as might be expected the fauna and flora of the shoals is neither rare nor extensive. gulls are to be seen of course at all times,--especially the large burgomaster gull, one of the finest of birds in size and ferocity, and in power of sight nearly equal to an eagle. in spring and fall flocks of coot and the more fishy sort of ducks are to be found there together with a good many loons. snowy owls are not uncommon in cold weather, and during winter almost any kind of arctic bird may arrive there. a flock of eider ducks once took refuge and were shot under the same overhanging rock where the terrified servant-girl concealed herself when pursued by the murderer wagner. there are probably more green snakes on appledore than anywhere else in america. wild roses and morning-glories are the only flowers large enough to attract the notice of a passing tourist, but celia thaxter has also written a pretty poem on the pimpernel. there are no trees to speak of. their geological structure is more interesting. it is generally supposed that the soil of new england rests on a foundation of primeval granite, but it is not exactly that. there is very little true granite in new england, what is taken for it commonly being syenite, a rock indeed that differs from granite only in the substitution of hornblend for mica. the so-called quincy granite is a finer sort of syenite, and the white mountains are composed of syenite capped with granite. the isles of shoals are also mostly syenite, but there are large boulders of coarse granite lying about, and in some places the syenite changes suddenly to granite as if the two had been welded together. then there are dykes of dark brown trap or ancient lava, from four to ten feet wide running across the islands from south-west to north-east, and others again at right-angles to these. this would seem to indicate that the elevation above the surrounding plateau was due to volcanic action. the structure of white island is very different from the others, a large portion of the rock being studded with innumerable small garnets, while veins of some grayish white minerals run through it in which there are still smaller garnets. how did these bare, bleak and barren rocks come to be inhabited? originally it was from love of gold. men will go wherever there is money to be made, and wherever men go women are pretty sure to follow. in 1879 a city suddenly arose in the most desolate and uncomfortable part of the rocky mountains; and in the middle of the last century there was a large settlement on the isles of shoals, with a young ladies' boarding-school at appledore, and a fort on star island for protection against pirates and indians. fish merchants carried on a flourishing trade with france and spain. in course of time however cod and haddock became largely fished out and the settlement on appledore disappeared with them, boarding-school and all. so it is predicted that some day leadville will again become a silent wilderness. in 1850 the population of the shoals had dwindled to about a dozen families of poor fishermen when a fresh impulse was given to the activity of the place from a direction that nobody could ever have imagined. the laightons were residents of portsmouth. the father of thomas b. laighton was a spar-maker and did a considerable business when shipbuilding was thriving in those times. thomas b. in his youth was afflicted with a fever which confined him to his room for many months and from the effects of which he never recovered. he married miss eliza rymes, a woman of remarkable good-sense and strong physique. he preferred journalism to spar-making, and his connection with the new hampshire gazette soon led him into politics. he was an ardent supporter of "old hickory" and rewarded for it finally with the position of postmaster for his native city. whether he surrendered this position for the forlorn and less lucrative one of white island lighthouse on account of ill-health or from a different motive, is uncertain. there was formerly a story in circulation that he was defeated as a candidate for some political office and retired in disgust from the haunts and ways of men. this however is not likely. thomas laighton was a man of a blunt and rugged sincerity, tenacious and determined; such as would not be likely to lose his mental balance at the first unfavorable turn of fortune. [illustration: twilight at the isles of shoals.] he went to white island in 1838, was removed by harrison the first and reappointed by tyler. his life there must have been a rough one. of all the isles of shoals, white island is the most difficult of access. it is not easy to land there in good summer weather, and during winter communication with the outer world is as rare as cold days in july. from december till may the breakers thunder on the cliff beneath the light-house like the roar of artillery. one would like to know what his reflections may have been during this alexander selkirk kind of life,--how he and his wife managed to entertain themselves. rev. john weiss and a friend going to portsmouth in the summer of '46 visited the lighthouse and made friends with the family there. they found old laighton a pretty rough customer, but good humored enough, and his wife uncommonly glad to see them. their daughter celia was a very bright looking, rosy faced girl, and the two boys oscar and cedric had their hair cut straight across their foreheads to keep it out of their eyes. mr. weiss thought that when they were in the water they must have looked a good deal like seals. in 1848 he resigned his position and removed to appledore; then as always on the charts of the coast-survey known as hog island. it would seem to be the last stretch of a fisherman's imagination to call every long sloping island by that name. there he and his brother joseph, who had thus far been a grocer in portsmouth, built cottages for themselves and went into the fishing business, purchasing boats, seines, and hiring a large number of men. this lasted for some years and finally came to an end through the death of joseph and the invalidism of thomas, who was always lame and unable to give the work his personal supervision. meanwhile their friends came over from the mainland to visit them, and admired the climate so much and remained so long that the brothers concluded to build a small hotel where these and others could pay for their entertainment. it was a three-story building, almost square, the parent stem of that great banyan-tree which has since spread over a large portion of the island. the accomodations at first were primitive. a visitor in '51 was obliged to wait an hour for a room and an opportunity to wash his hands, though he was at the time the only guest in the house. an empty flour-barrel turned upside down served for a wash-stand. however, the sailing and fishing were good, as also were mrs. laighton's doughnuts, of which there was always an unfailing supply, so that numbers of people came there. among them was a recent graduate of harvard, from the vicinity of boston, named levi thaxter. he was a young man of refined tastes and rare intellectual endowment; afterwards widely known as the apostle of browning's poetry in america. he was not one of those college graduates who seemed to have been run in a mould like bullets, but already possessed character and a mind of his own. he was by nature rather an admirer of art than an artist; in fact he was a critic, and with a right opportunity he might have become a froude, a taine, or a ruskin. a wise father might have done much for him, but his father belonged to that class of men who are only acquainted with a small circle of their own affairs; he had not the least conception of what was needed for his brilliant son. so the best years of young thaxter's life were consumed in fruitless efforts to harmonize his lofty aspirations with the stubborn facts about him. it was like a fruit-tree planted in a stone quarry. too late he learned from experience the wisdom that should have come to him from his ancestors. he might have succeeded better if he had been less unwilling to compromise his sincerity,--to duck his head to the golden calf. but he would not do that, he intended to remain levi thaxter or die in the attempt: and once he came very near doing so. he was a romance character, and if his biography could be written it would be more interesting than that of some of our most celebrated men. socially he was delightful; and a hundred friends could bear witness to his integrity, his fidelity, his kindly nature, his wit, humor, and keen appreciation. william hunt the painter and doctor henry i. bowditch were his two most intimate friends. he studied dramatic reading, and nearly made a profession of it. actors sometimes studied with him to learn a good pronunciation and dramatic effect. his partiality for browning's poetry is quite generally known. he first read it to his friends; then in private companies; and finally in public halls. when in 1882 he went to philadelphia to read browning there he created such enthusiasm for the subject that the libraries and bookstores were quickly exhausted and fresh copies of browning had to be sent for from other cities to supply the demand. he considered browning, aeschylus and shakespeare the three most dramatic writers. all the browning clubs that have nourished so extensively for many years past might be considered levi thaxter's lineal descendants. his conversation on art and literature was often so interesting that it is a pity his occasional bursts of eloquence could not have been preserved. but the important matter at this moment is that he fell in love with celia laighton, married her and carried her off to the environs of boston, where she made valuable friends and met with larger opportunities for intellectual development. hawthorne came to the shoals on the thirtieth of august, 1852, and has given a full account of his visit in his usual minute and pictorial manner. he left franklin pierce, who was then candidate for the presidency, in concord, new hampshire, and embarked at portsmouth in a small schooner which was then the only mode of conveyance,---and often a very dilatory one. on the way two of his fellow passengers became sea-sick, and another "sat in the stern looking very white." on arriving at appledore he was met in the doorway by mr. laighton of whom he gives rather a realistic description; adding, however, "he addressed me in a hearty, hospitable tone, and judging that it must be my landlord, i delivered a letter of introduction from pierce, which of course gave me the best the house afforded." it seems strange that hawthorne, who understood human nature better than any other american writer, should have so rarely penetrated into the character of the people whom he mentions in his note-books. old laighton was a solid rock of sense and grit, and the chief impression he made upon strangers was of a man whom it was best to keep on the right side of. the detonations of his frankness sometimes cleared the air in a truly remarkable manner, and would scatter all light spirits to a prudent distance. he reminded one of longfellow's description of simon danz: "restless at times with heavy strides he paces his parlor to and fro; he is like a ship that at anchor rides, and swings with the rising and falling tides, and tugs at her anchor-tow." hawthorne seems to have found a kindred spirit in mr. thaxter, who invited him to their cottage to meet the ladies and drink apple-jack. there he also found john weiss, a man of wit and genius little inferior to his own. neither did celia thaxter impress him, except in a rather external way. he says, "we found mrs. thaxter sitting in a neat little parlor, very simply furnished, but in good taste. she is not now, i believe, more than eighteen years old, very pretty, and with the manners of a lady,--not prim and precise, but with enough of freedom and ease." the ideality in her face, which probably attracted her husband and is visible in her earliest pictures, was not observed by the idealist himself. he spent the next two weeks in company with mr. thaxter, roaming about on the water, visiting different islands, and conversing with the inhabitants. it must have been a rare occasion for young thaxter, and hawthorne for once found a companion who could either be silent or talk in an interesting manner. hawthorne's account of it would suffice as a guide-book for the shoals. he tells the story of betty moody, who was said to have concealed herself with her baby in a sort of cave on star island in order to escape from the indians who had made a raid on the place while her husband was fishing out at sea. unhappily the child screamed, and the wretched mother is said to have murdered it to prevent discovery. how the other wives and mothers on the island saved themselves at this juncture is not reported; and the myth no doubt originated from a dark red lichen growing on the rocks there which resembles blood-stains and has a scientific name to that effect. much more probable is the tradition that a large heap of stones formed like an esquimaux hut on the highest point of appledore, was built there by captain john smith and his men as a memorial of their discovery of the islands. this heap of stones is a veritable cairn, such as climbers of the alps build on the summits of those peaks which they have ascended for the first time. it is customary in such cases to insert a champagne bottle among the stones, containing the card of the fortunate explorer; but perhaps captain smith was not provided with these articles while cruising off the coast of north america. it is at least more interesting and more in keeping with the rugged aspect of the place than the delicate triangular plinth that has been erected to his memory on star island. another poetic subject is the spaniards' graves on smutty nose: hapless mariners, wrecked where no friendly or kindred eye will look on the cold stones which mark their interment! eleven years elapsed before hawthorne visited the shoals again, and for the last time in his life. meanwhile much had changed there. the hotel had grown by the addition of a large dormitory; and the boys, oscar and cedric, had grown up with it to be vigorous and very healthy looking young men. the hon. thomas p. laighton had become a confirmed invalid; nor did he live very long after this time. the management of the property was wholly in the hands of his sons. mrs. thaxter had grown to a bright, self-possessed woman with three small boys to look after, and with her reputation as a poet now well assured to her both by critics and the general public. her face, figure and manner all gave evidence of a concentrated personality. her husband, a handsome and full-bearded man, was now in the prime of life and intellectual vigor. rev. john weiss, their never-failing friend and a constant habitue of the place, had written the life of theodore parker, and received due recognition as a gifted man and elegant speaker. and there was another, more distinguished than them all,--a tall figure, more erect than a soldier, pacing across the long piazza, or watching a game in the billiard-room, or seated in a retired corner of mrs. thaxter's parlor, whose face had long since been known to hawthorne as that of john g. whittier. social life at the shoals has had its incipient childhood, its period of youthful strength and gaiety, its bright noontide of maturity, and seems now to be lapsing into a serene and comfortable old age. many, at least, of the brilliant men and women who made it what it was, are gone, and others do not appear to take their places. the isles of shoals are changing as all things change except the rocks and sea. the south-easterly parlor in mrs. thaxter's cottage is historic ground. "there have been fine people here," she said one day in september, about ten years ago, as the house was closing for the season, "but the summer is gone, and they have gone with it." nowhere else since margaret fuller's time have so many wits, geniuses and brilliant women been gathered together. whittier and hawthorne are enough to have consecrated it, but there have been many others. hunt, the painter, came there, and professor paine, the composer, as well as other fine artists and musicians. even ole bull, that norwegian waif and celebrated violinist, wandered in there of a forenoon, and entertained the company with accounts of sea-serpents standing on their tails in front of water-falls, and other marvels only visible in norway:--supposing, i presume, that his hearers would believe anything that he told them. mrs. thaxter's poetry, like all genuine poetry, is indigenous,--native to the soil. she has taken her subjects from the life and incidents about her: the little sand-piper, the burgomaster gull, the pimpernel, and the wreck on white island--where a vessel was once wrecked in a dense fog right under the light-house. [footnote: in the winter of 1876, centennial year, a schooner laden with salt somehow ran on to the southerly reef of white island and lost its rudder. the vessel consequently became unmanageable, and was finally thrown up on londoner's, where the island is so low that at high tide the sea nearly divides it in two. the crew tried to escape by jumping on to the rocks. only three succeeded in doing this, the captain, the cabin-boy and one sailor, a tremendous wave washed over them, and when it had subsided the sailor found himself alone. fortunately he knew where he was, and by clinging flat to the rocks, like a starfish, and watching his chances, he succeeded after a time in reaching a point of safety. but no sooner was he fairly out of the water than his clothes became a mass of ice. there is a rude, unplastered house on londoner's. the door was fastened, but he broke through it with a blow of his foot, then wiping his hands as well as he could on the rough boards, he felt along the first transverse beam-joist until, to his great delight, he came upon some matches. these saved his life, for there can be no doubt that otherwise he would have been frozen to death before morning. there was a stove in the house, and even a few sticks of wood. for kindling-wood he tore off splinters from the edges of the boards. he could see nothing within the house, and it is said that after his fire was lighted, he had only one match left. next morning people on haley's island saw the wreck and the smoke from his fire, and went to his rescue. mrs. rymes is authority for the statement that white island was not called so from its color, but from a family of whites who lived on it before the light-house was built, and that the miser white who was murdered by crowninshield in salem was born on that island.] [illustration: celia thaxter. from a photograph taken in 1890.] [illustration: david a. wasson. from a portrait by his son george, taken in 1878.] she made the best use of her material, which after all is much the same as emerson's, with the difference between a barren island and a well-wooded country town taken into account. another difference is that she looks at her subject objectively, and then treats it subjectively; whereas emerson does exactly the reverse. it is like the difference between schiller and goethe, or longfellow and browning; and is the manner in which a poet always must write in order to be popular. her verses are graceful, refined, and--as they should be--feminine. yet there is a good deal of strength in it also: or if the phrase is permissible, a good deal of back-bone. her style reminds one of whittier, but is sufficiently original. sometimes she escapes from concrete things into abstract subjects; and her short poem on "heroism" seems to me the best she ever wrote. there was formerly a strong prejudice against this kind of poetry, but it seems to be disappearing. those of her poems which whittier included in his collection of english and american poetry are also fine, and may be said to deserve their place. her criticism was better than is usually the case with poets; and her conversation about authors and literature always interesting. it was not didactic at all, but frank, spontaneous and open to correction. she liked the most diverse writers; tennyson, and dickens, and browning. in early years i remember her speaking of hawthorne in a tone of veneration; but later in life she preferred emerson, even to whittier. there was formerly a portrait of goethe in her parlor with emerson's lines about him underneath it, copied in her own picturesque hand-writing. it seems strange that she never tried her hand at a novel, for of all resorts on the coast the isles of shoals is the best ground to study human nature on. people lose their artificial ways in that atmosphere and their peculiarities are brought out distinctly, as oil brings out the veins in black walnut. the epic gift, however, is very different from the lyric and the two are not often united in the same person. mrs. thaxter's prose writings are almost as rare as whittier's. she published a detailed account of a murder that was committed on haley's island about twenty years ago;--what would seem to be a peculiar subject for a cultivated person to fasten on--and yet she succeeded in giving it a good deal of dignity. one consequence of this has been that hundreds of people cross over every summer to smutty nose to stare at the miserable old shanty where the event took place, though there is absolutely nothing to be seen there. it was a choice occasion in the old shoals days when mrs. thaxter consented to read browning or tennyson to her friends. i think it was the finest reading i ever heard, simply because it was neither dramatic, rhetorical, nor elocutionary. it was plain, distinct reading with just enough of the dramatic element to give fullness to the meaning,--and with such a voice! why is it that some people who have unpleasant voices are yet able to sing sweetly, and others who cannot sing are able to read or converse so it is music to hear them? i was formerly acquainted with an old man, much beyond the period of life when singers retire from the stage, whose voice was nevertheless, as one heard it at some distance, as musical as a stradivarius. with all her frankness and fearlessness, she was as sensitive to personal influences as poets usually are; and persons who called on her, who lacked delicacy of feeling, not only wearied her, but sometimes caused her positive suffering. in such cases she fortified herself with what she called a strong dose of conversation; would talk with great volubility on all possible subjects, as if in this manner to keep the unpleasant influence at a distance. "i wish all good people," she said, "were pleasant, and all the bad people disagreeable; for then life would be a more simple affair than it is now. the world is such a mixture that i never quite know how to take it." at times she was a merciless critic. an admiring quaker in philadelphia wrote some verses in honor of whittier, which were presented to mrs. thaxter for her approval. when she was asked how she liked them, she replied, "i do not like it all; it goes humpety, lumpety, dumpety, bump;" and immediately changed the subject of conversation. on another occasion she took up a volume of poetry which had been printed for private circulation, and said, "there are two really fine poems in this, which is more than can be usually said of such collections." then she read them to us with such expressive grace as might almost make poetry out of latin grammar. one was called the "whip of the sky," and the other was a sonnet about pompeii. she early discovered in herself the mesmeric power of a spiritist; and wasson was present at a _seance_ which she gave at the house of a friend in newburyport, reporting messages from another world to various persons in the room. she thus naturally became a believer in spiritism, and finally a theosophist; but she found that such supernatural performances were physically injurious and mentally demoralizing, so that in later years she rarely indulged in them. one cold, foggy evening in august, 1868, we were gathered in the parlor of the thaxter cottage, when some one proposed that we should make an experiment with planchette. so the little triangular board was produced, with a long pencil in the apex, and a large sheet of brown paper. mrs. thaxter placed her left hand on it, and mrs. h., a new york lady, placed her right hand, while the rest of us formed a circle around the table. in five or ten minutes, planchette began to move, and wrote out "john laighton," in plain, bold letters. "he was my great-uncle," said mrs. thaxter; "and there used to be a proverb in portsmouth, 'as honest as john laighton.'" then she wrote on the paper: "where is my father?" a few minutes afterward, mrs. h. closed her eyes, and fell back in her chair, as if she were fainting. suddenly coming to herself, she seized the pencil from planchette and wrote rapidly on the paper, while mrs. thaxter held her other hand. she was at the left of mrs. thaxter, but i cannot remember now whether mrs. h. wrote with her right or left hand. mrs. thaxter was greatly excited and looked all the time in mrs. h.'s face in the most earnest and impressive manner. mrs. h. behaved like a person under the influence of strong emotion, and continued to write intermittently until the sheet of paper was nearly covered. mrs. thaxter read the sentences eagerly, but without saying a word. several times mr. h. entreated his wife to desist, but she paid no attention to him. the whole performance lasted nearly half an hour, and when it was over, mrs. thaxter said, "they are all answers to questions which i asked of my father," and remained very grave and quiet during the rest of the evening. the next forenoon we examined the paper and found the writing on it was intelligible, but at the same time conveyed no real information. they were such answers as a woman might herself suggest to a person who was slow in making a reply. one of them was, "you will know everything perfectly when the right time comes." mr. h. said, "my wife never could have imagined all this; there must have been some occult communication between her and mrs. thaxter. neither do i think she ever heard before of john laighton." mrs. thaxter evidently was satisfied that she had received messages from her father, who had been dead about two years; and though the rest of us did not credit this, the fact in itself seemed marvellous enough. when some one remarked that he would give five dollars at any time to see a ghost, mrs. thaxter retorted, "i think you would give fifty to have him leave you again." where the poetical talent of the laighton family came from is a rare mystery. both of mrs. thaxter's brothers inherited a share of it. a poem of oscar's was published in the "atlantic" many years ago, and afterwards included in her first volume of poetry. cedric wrote a very amusing parody on his sister's "little sandpiper," and sent it to her when she was staying in boston. the scene was represented in winter when there wasn't any little sandpiper. mrs. thaxter's poetry, however, was the making of appledore as a summer resort. between 1865 and 1875 thousands of people came there every summer to catch a sight of her. how she dared to go to the dinner-table in the face of such a multitude, i do not know; but after a time she retained a body-guard of friends, old and young, who were quite sufficient to keep intruders at a distance; and they could not be prevented from walking around her cottage, peering in at the windows, and stealing an occasional flower from her garden. some even walked boldly into her parlor to demand an autograph. she received strange letters also from her unknown admirers. one was from a woman who wished to come to see her, but was afraid to do so on account of the green snakes which hawthorne speaks of as inhabiting appledore. (hawthorne accidentally caught one of these pretty reptiles by the tail, and was not a little startled by it.) another was from a naval officer who had been forcibly retired to a plantation in maryland. i suppose she was secretly pleased by this rude homage of the vulgar, but no one knew better that the approval of her friends weiss and whittier was worth the whole of it. meanwhile social life at appledore had risen to a height. mrs. thaxter welcomed every one who had a claim upon her recognition. open table was her motto, rather than exclusiveness; but those who considered themselves of superior clay found no chairs to sit on in her parlor. her cottage was a scene of gaiety by day, and revelry at night. beautiful girls, charming women, and distinguished men dazzled the beholder. singing and laughter as well as instrumental music could often be heard there at a late hour. there are no people who are so full of good spirits in vacation as clergymen and college-professors--it is the reaction from their well-sustained gravity during the remainder of the year--and there was no lack of either. among them all none was so brilliant as john weiss, though eichberg the violinist came pretty close to him. both were german jews; weiss, however, having been born in america. he belonged to the same type of men as james russell lowell and david a. wasson. he was the friend of both and equal to either in genius. he was the most eloquent preacher in new england at that time, and as a humorist only second to lowell, if indeed second to any. his wit and his preaching were not, however, of a popular character: something more than phlegmatic common-sense was required to appreciate them. if he was not so popular as lowell with the public, he was more so among his friends, in whose list might be counted almost every man of note and influence in boston and vicinity. bright flashes of his imagination came like the sudden gleam of a diamond, and would often convulse the company with laughter when one would least have expected it. he was an excellent pantomimist; could perform all the parts in a comedy himself, and with the help of fred loring, or some other, would improvise a burlesque on almost any well-known play. it was after one of these performances that whittier (who sat in his quiet corner enjoying it as much as an honest quaker dared to) said to mrs. thaxter, "celia, thou knowest i have never been to the theatre, but i think at last the theatre has come to me." weiss was gay with the gay, but could be profoundly serious again at a moment's warning, and the biting shafts of his satire never wounded a human soul. when some one spoke of the peculiarity of john brown's spelling he exclaimed: "so much the better, so much the better! what good would a webster's dictionary have been at harper's ferry? a whole edition of them could not have accomplished anything." he was always ailing, and his friends in college doubted if he would ever reach maturity; yet he lived to be a grey-haired man, and published a number of excellent books. when he died, in 1878, there were not wanting malicious people to spread the report that he died of intemperance, though the wonder is how he could have lived so long. his death cast a shadow over the social life at appledore so that it never quite recovered its former gaiety. about the same time several millionaires made their appearance; cottages began to arise upon the rocks; a small steam-yacht plied like a water-bug between the different islands, and the place became continually more fashionable and conventional. whittier, feeling that he did not belong to this new order of things, retired to a quiet little inn at west ossipee, in the white mountains. it was now that professor john k. paine, the musical composer, introduced a new element into the shoals life. one morning he walked into mrs. thaxter's parlor with a large folio under his arm and said, "i am going to play you one of beethoven's sonatas, for i think you will like it." mrs. thaxter was not quite sure that she would, but listened attentively. there had been a good deal of music before, in a small way; pupils of eichberg playing on the violin with piano accompaniment, and even eichberg himself,--which was quite a treat, though a single violin can never express a wide range of musical ideas. beethoven's music she had also heard indifferently performed by young lady amateurs; but this was another affair. professor paine is rather an organist than a pianist, and does not pretend to rare technical skill; but what is much better, he understands the music as only players like rubinstein and von bulow can understand it, and he brought out the meaning with such joyous fullness as even the master himself might have been pleased to hear. it was a revelation to celia thaxter: it was easy to see there was no affectation in her enjoyment; neither did she lack words to express her delight. "mr. paine," said a classical gentleman who was present, "your playing reminds me of what cicero said of caesar's commentaries, that a fool might think he could improve on it, but a wise man would not like to try." the professor was so much pleased with mrs. thaxter's frank enthusiasm, that he dedicated a sonata he was composing to her, which was performed the following winter in boston, and greatly praised also by the critics. piano recitals and concertos thus became the fashion at appledore, and classical music was in good demand. its refining and quieting influence on the little community was quite perceptible. it produced a change like the transition from flamboyant gothic architecture to the pure grecian style. at first only a few came to hear it: then the parlor was filled. the piazza became crowded, and finally gentlemen were obliged to find places on the rocks outside. it is one thing to hear music in a crowded concert-room with gas-light and bad air just after we have left the jarring discords of the street; and quite a different affair to listen to it with congenial spirits in the summer air of these islands, which seems to have been made for attuning the senses to fine perceptions. to enjoy any kind of art, the mind needs to be like a clean slate on which every mark tells. in 1881 professor paine improved his good reputation both here and in europe by composing what is called his greek music; that is, an overture to the play of "oedipus tyrannus," which was acted at harvard in the spring of that year. of course his seashore friends wished to hear him play it himself, and after the applause which followed had subsided, he said: "a little approbation is all the reward i get for my compositions. a good deal of money was made out of the greek play by speculators, but none of it came to me." there was a general expression of regret; and then mrs. thaxter said, as if to herself, "if i were only the commonwealth of massachusetts i know what i would do." a physician at the house that summer warned mrs. paine never to let her husband work so hard again as he had that year. i remember william hunt, the portrait painter, in 1872 wheeling his youngest child, a beautiful boy named paul, in a go-cart in front of the cottage. he looked like an arab, with a beard nearly to his waist, and a decidedly semitic head; but he had an aristocratic style, and the air of a man who was used to command. his friends congratulated themselves on his resemblance to titian, and to the french artist horace vernet. despite his proud bearing he was a tender-hearted man, and when in trouble always went to levi thaxter, who was a rarely sympathetic person. in 1879 he came again to the shoals, flying from domestic affliction. he was also suffering from a severe nervous strain, the result of painting two immense pictures in the hall of the new york assembly, at albany; and was no longer able to work. either of these by itself he might have contended against, but both together were too much for him. one dark, rainy night he left the thaxter cottage at a late hour, looking very sad and gloomy. the next morning his body was found in a freshwater cistern which had been built in a hollow between the rocks. there were some who thought that his death might have been accidental, but old doctor bowditch said, "my friends, there was only too much reason for it." of all the wrecks on that dangerous coast was not this the most piteous and tragical! william hunt narrowly missed being one of the greatest of painters. though some of his portraits are wretched failures, there are others of his pictures that might grace any gallery in europe. mountain air is better than sea air, both for those who are well and strong, and generally speaking for invalids; but people go to the sea because they like it,--for love of the dark blue ocean. few things are more monotonous than sailing in a yacht. it is a confining sort of existence, subjects of conversation soon become exhausted, there are many inconveniences about it, and being becalmed in a ground swell is worse than riding in a stage coach on a hot and dusty road; yet how many men prefer spending their summer vacation in this manner to any other. it is that rolling, lisping, gurgling, mysterious, unfathomable unity which attracts them. earth is the masculine element, sea the feminine; and all the cycles and epicycles of organic nature have resulted from these two. it develops imagination and romance in persons who would never have been suspected of possessing either. no wonder that the sailor delights in marvelous tales. it is a terrible destroyer, but at the same time a friend that we cannot do without. nowhere perhaps is that closeness to the ocean, this familiarity with the sea, so strongly felt as at the isles of shoals. there is really no land there: nothing but sky, rock and water. living there is like a sea-voyage without the discomforts thereof. during the great storm of march '52, when the light-house on minot's ledge was overturned, an immense wave rolled across the centre of appledore from side to side. there are windows in the hotel on star island where one can drop a pebble into the sea, and go to sleep listening to the murmur of the waves. even in summer the surf sometimes runs so high that it is dangerous to approach the edge of the cliffs; and few people know how pleasant it is to watch the eddying swirl of the water round the promontories on the westerly side. one can sail in every direction, and if the wind does not suit one quarter it always will another. better than any sailing, however, is rowing in an open boat at sunset or by moonlight, with one or two friends. their climate is equally remarkable, and doctor bowditch considered it, from its soothing and also stimulating quality, one of the finest in the world, and much the best on the atlantic coast. this is owing to their geographical position, islands on the coast of maine being afflicted with cold fogs, and those south of cape cod with warm ones. there are no sultry nights in summer, and the cutting east-winds of mount desert are unknown there. the climate is warmer in april and november than on the mainland; in may and october about the same. the winters are disagreeable enough; but there is a kind of glory there in summer, and the view at night from the piazza of the oceanic is beautiful beyond all faculty of description. whittier. from under the north star's beam, through a region wild and free, the waters of a mighty stream roll onward to the sea. in the deep clefts of the mountain, lie never melting snows; and there from an icy fountain a clear cold torrent flows. when we go to see the falls of niagara, we expect to be astonished, and are not disappointed; though the expectation takes away somewhat from our sensation. the grand phenomenon makes a strong and permanent impression on us, and yet there is no feeling of affection mingled with this. we have seen it once and do not care to visit the place again. many pictures have been painted of it, but they are not genuine pictures, for the human element is wanting in them. niagara can turn no mill-wheels, and will float no ships. how different is it with those scenes of natural beauty which we never heard of and come upon by surprise--which we remember always with affection and a kindred interest. such were my thoughts many years ago at amesbury, as i walked on the banks of the merrimac and watched the calm, clear current of the river, as it hastened by, irresistible as time itself. i also reflected how often the poet whittier must have walked in that same path; how dear to him must be that silent flood with its elm-trees, and great rolling hills; and how in times of darkness and discouragement he must have come to it for strength and consolation. the beauty of a river depends very much on its clearness and purity. the rhine and the tiber are more famous than the merrimac; but their water is muddy and undrinkable. indeed the current of whittier's life might not improperly be compared to the river beside which he dwelt so long. commencing in the pure mountain air of the social and religious seclusion of his sect, the difficulties and limitations, which in his case waited upon the acquisition of knowledge, may well be compared to the passage through a rocky and unfruitful region, leaping as it were from one granite boulder to another; then no sooner has he gained depth and fulness from contact with natures like his own than he is caught in the mill-wheels of a great political revolution, he enters ardently into the anti-slavery conflict--as he says of himself in the "tent on the beach," "and one there was a dreamer born, who with a mission to fulfill had left the muses' haunts to turn the crank of an opinion mill"-and finally having escaped past all expectation from this turmoil, victorious and laurel-crowned, he goes calmly and steadily forward to the end. what makes this parallel rather surprising in its perfection is that concord river empties itself into the merrimac, and one might fancy that its waters carried emerson's magnetic thought and influence to whittier's own door. may not the career of any great man be compared to the course of a river? and especially the lives of our american poets would seem to resemble in their purity and transparency the rivers of new england. whittier's house, however, does not stand by the river's brim, but near the centre of the village, almost a mile away. it was a modest looking structure, in appearance much like the alcott house at concord, but not nearly so well situated. it faces towards the north, and has little land about it, though there is a vegetable-garden in the rear. neither is there any protection for it from the cold blasts of winter. here he lived, at first with his sister and after her death with his niece, miss lizzie whittier, and i believe with another niece, who married a mr. caldwell; but also a large portion of the time quite alone, except for one or two servants, reading, meditating and writing poetry. a man who has that kind of work to do, can never be very lonely. the interior of the house, was plainly and comfortably furnished, and contained some fine pictures and handsome books, the gifts of boston friends; but its chief ornament was the quiet dignity and amiable courtesy of the poet himself. the eastern coast of new england is famous for its thunder-storms, and in the summer of 1872 there was one in the midst of nearly every afternoon. a number of persons were killed by the lightning that season, and whittier also met with a narrow escape. it was one of the last days of june, and from our piazza we could see the masses of black cloud rolling down the merrimac valley, not thinking of the imminent peril, which they were bringing to our poet. at the same time miss lizzie whittier and a lady friend were seated in the room on the right hand of the front-door, when crash! an electric bolt came through the wall like a rifle-shot, just above her friend's head, laying her out upon the floor, shivering a mirror into splinters; then went through the doorway and meeting john g. whittier in the front hall, knocked him senseless, and seizing two slats from a blind it escaped through an open window into the garden. miss lizzie was the first to regain her feet, and her anxiety and terror, when she saw her uncle lying senseless on the floor, may readily be surmised. it proved, however, that none of them were seriously injured, though their heads were confused and unserviceable for several days, and they did not wholly recover from the effects of this _coup d' eclair_ until after an excursion to the isles of shoals. [illustration: whittier's house at amesbury.] when whittier was asked how the stroke felt, he said, "it was like a blow from a pile-driver,--and i would not like to have it repeated." the hole which the lightning made in the side of the house, could scarcely be distinguished from that of a large rifle bullet. a few days afterwards i saw a small house set on fire by the lightning, and it was consumed in a very few minutes, so one may infer how narrowly the whittier family escaped a double danger. he was a tall, and rather slender man, measuring almost exactly six feet, with sloping shoulders, and he stood so straight, as almost to be the personification of uprightness. no soldier was ever more erect, and this without the least stiffness or conventionality. his head was not large at the base, but high-crowned and finely arched. his eyes were magnificent, and can only be compared to hawthorne's eyes, though not so clear. marshal von moltke had eyes like two brilliant lights; even the emperor dared not look into them. whittier's were not like this, but seemed to be lighted by hidden fires; very large, dark, and powerful. he had a sensitive and refined mouth, which was closed, as if by an effort of the will. in general appearance he resembled men of the revolutionary period, as if a cotemporary of washington had luckily been dropped out of the eighteenth century. he looked like copley's portrait of samuel adams, but with a more intellectual, and less stubborn expression. from boyhood he was always fragile and ailing, could not sleep well at night, and would repeat poetry to himself (for he knew any quantity of it, without making an effort to memorize it) until he fell asleep again: yet to what an age he lived, and how much work he accomplished! i am tempted here to quote from an essay by david a. wasson, written nearly thirty years ago:-"god gave whittier a deep, hot, simple, strenuous and yet ripe and spherical, nature, whose twin necessities were, first that it _must_ lay an intense grasp upon the elements of its experience, and, secondly, that it _must_ work these up into some form of melodious completeness. history and the world gave him quakerism, america, and rural solitude; and through this solitude went winding the sweet, old merrimac stream, the river that we would not wish to forget, even by the waters of the river of life! and it is into these elements that his genius, with its peculiar vital simplicity and intensity, strikes root. historic reality, the great _facts_ of his time, are the soil in which he grows, as they are with all natures of depth and energy." "we did not wish," said goethe, "to learn, but to live." the anti-slavery movement originated with the quakers. it seems to have been their mission in america. benjamin lundy was a quaker: garrison and his friends were non-resistants, which is political quakerism. whittier was one of the first to join them, and none of them afterwards, except wendell phillips, had such influence with the public. neither was he content with writing poetry for the cause, controversial lyrics and war-songs of freedom, but he took a lively interest in the affairs of the new england society, went to its meetings and served on committees. phillips said that once, when the socialistic element in the movement was threatening to come to open rupture with the more moderate garrisonian party, whittier by his tact and good sense, and a few timely remarks, did more than any other to harmonize matters, and prevent a dissolution. when emerson was informed of this, he remarked, "i have always held mr. whittier in great respect; but this is the finest flower in the poet's wreath." it is astonishing enough now to reflect what the early abolitionists attempted to do, and the manner in which they expected to do it. the empire of christianity, and of true civilization, was to be established here in america for the first time and finally; the slaves were to be emancipated, intemperance prevented, and all warfare ended. this was to happen in a world where the malthusian theory of population is a dominant reality, where millions are fighting every day for the bread of life, and thousands are dying from the lack of proper food, raiment and shelter. one of their number whose name will not appear in history, published a book, entitled "true civilization an immediate necessity." surely enough true civilization is and always has been an immediate necessity: a necessity like the feast of tantalus: but how is it to be realized? the purest saints and noblest statesmen have struggled and died in despair in the attempt to elevate humanity a single inch above the condition in which they found it. of course such a chimera as that of the abolitionists could only be entertained by young, inexperienced and slightly educated men. their effort was a noble one, a blunder in the right direction; but they had no conception of the explosive material which was contained in the doctrine of non-resistance. instead of moral persuasion and an era of peace, there followed a desolating war in itself worse than fifty years of african slavery. the abolitionists were blamed for that calamity very much as the protestants have been blamed for the massacre of st. bartholomew; and yet without doubt they were responsible for a portion of it. gunpowder cannot be made of sulphur and carbon alone, but saltpetre also must be added. those who remain in this immature condition of fixed ideas throughout life, purchase their experience at too high a rate. whittier's poetic art saved him from this and separated him finally from his garrisonian allies. with garrison himself he always remained the best of friends; but after the kansas troubles began he did not continue to look upon him as a leader, and in 1872 they were in political antagonism, whittier endorsing sumner, and garrison supporting grant. perhaps the writing of "ichabod" and webster's subsequent death gave an indication to whittier of deeper life currents than he had known before; for about that time, it seems to have dawned on him that didactic poetry was not after all the best kind of poetry, and a work of art to be pure and holy, must exist for its own sake, and be justified by its own excellence. he refers to this intellectual change, not only in the lines already quoted, but in a sort of confession, written at an earlier period. he says- "art's perfect forms no moral need, and beauty is its own excuse," and regrets that the highest reward of merit will never come to him on this account. he realizes now that he belongs to a party and has been looking at the world from the stand-point of party interest. in devoting himself more closely to his vocation as a poet he acquired that moral repose and better mental balance with which alone it is possible to see things as they are. from this time forward the quality of his verses shows a steady improvement. the man possessed a deep nature and true breadth of character in spite of the limitations of his environment; yet there were certain prejudices and antipathies that adhered to him still. his unwillingness to listen to music, is rather to be attributed to the old quaker, puritanical notion that all sensuous enjoyment is sinful, than to the well known indifference of poets, for that sister art to which they owe so much. he once went so far as to take an interest in some musical glasses, and seemed to be pleased with the simple tunes that were played on them; but pianos and violins he had no liking for. he enjoyed looking at portraits of distinguished men, but did not approve of religious pictures. bayard taylor presented him with a copy of his translation of "faust," and he read it, for the sake of old acquaintance, but he did not like it and wondered especially what explanation "goethe's apologists could make for the strange, and extraordinary characters in the second part." when some one asked him why he did not make a trip to europe he said: "travelling does not seem to agree with me; but beside that, i do not think i should find pleasure in it. their great cathedrals which people go to see, would not be of any account to me; and i am afraid i should not enjoy the works of art. i should like to see switzerland; but there are also fine mountains over there"--pointing to new hampshire. his prohibitory friends alleged that he was a good deal disturbed by the five kinds of wine provided for the seventieth birth-day dinner, with which his boston publishers honored him. he endeavored to escape from this dinner, and messrs. osgood and company were obliged to send for him three times, and most urgently, before he could be persuaded to come. it is doubtful however if he objected to people's drinking wine in their own homes. [footnote: to a friend, who sent him on his seventy-fifth birth-day a bottle of rare old andalusian "olovosa" with a bouquet of flowers, he wrote:-"i hasten to thank thee, dear mrs. ----, for thy kind note, and accompanying flowers, wreathing like hafiz on omar khayyam's roses, the wine--not of shiraz, but of storied andalusia. "i am not accustomed to tarry long at the wine--in this case i shall remember paul's advice to timothy. "i am gratefully thy old friend, "john g. whittier. "boston, dec. 17, 1892."] he is the only american poet who may be fairly said to have earned his living by his poems, though longfellow might have done so, if it had been his fortune to reside in a country town. whittier may have assisted sometimes in editing the local newspaper, and he once published a volume of rather tame prose-studies of the shakers and other strange people who are found in the southern counties of new hampshire. i never met with but one copy of it, and it could not have had a large circulation. he was not so much an observer of life and manners, as an imaginative thinker,--one whose reflections took the shape of ideal pictures. this, as shakespeare would have called it, is the right complexion of the lyric poet. his exchequer suffered however in the earlier part of his career on account of his principles. all the anti-slavery people suffered for their convictions in one way or another--just as the slave-holders suffered for theirs, in the end. garrison was mobbed: phillips, who might have amassed wealth, like phocian, died in poverty: sumner was murderously assaulted: john brown, lost his life; and george l. stearns, died of unresting toil during the war, and wrecked his fortune: but whittier represented the heart of the american people, and after the publication of "barbara frietchie" the tide turned in his favor. "snow-bound" had an extensive sale, and brought him in nearly ten-thousand dollars. "the tent on the beach" paid almost as well; and his collection of english and american poetry was a fortunate hit, on the part of his publishers, which whittier's modest nature would not otherwise have thought of; so that he was well provided for, in old age, and could even have made a journey around the world like general grant, if he had been so disposed. [illustration: whittier in his seventy-second year. from a photograph by thompson.] his popularity soon attracted the attention of politicians who hoped to make use of it for the good of the country. he was too influential a member of the community to be overlooked. senator wilson, speaker colfax, governor claflin and others called upon him, congratulated him on the fortunate turn of affairs, and hoped they might be of service to him. quakers have always had a good reputation for shrewdness, and whittier was not lacking in that quality. he understood perfectly well what they wanted of him, and was a good deal amused by it, but he liked to converse with vigorous and experienced men, and could obtain from them a better understanding of affairs than was to be found in the newspaper. his letters on politics were always able and interesting; and he sometimes adopted exactly the opposite view from what his advisors would have liked to have him. it is true he formerly dedicated a poem to colfax as an ideal statesman, but perhaps whittier was more nearly right in this than public opinion has been, since that time. he disliked being lionized and was rarely seen in public. the adoration of young women was of all things the most disagreeable to him. he created quite a sensation by appearing at one of emerson's noon-day lectures in may, 1866, and as soon as the discourse was over he became the centre of a small circle of celebrities. yet he seemed even more glad to meet his humbler and more familiar friends. he said, "if i come again, it will be to hear that man," referring to wendell phillips, who stood a little at one side watching emerson and whittier with the air of an art critic. he said of the boston radical club (which nevertheless contained the best intellectual life of its time) that he feared the saints went there not only to worship but to be worshipped:--a large part of the audience consisting of pretty young women. yet he finally went there himself, for the sake of an interview with the most distinguished of his admirers, the emperor of brazil. this magnificent monarch, who may even be called the marcus aurelius of modern times, openly declared that there was nothing in north america that he wished so much to see as the poet whittier. a meeting was accordingly arranged, and no sooner had dom pedro caught sight of whittier (whom he recognized from the pictures he possessed) than he hastened to embrace him, and would certainly have kissed the astonished quaker, after the fashion that prevails among the latin races, if whittier had permitted him the least opportunity. after paying his compliments in a handsome manner to the assembled company the emperor took his leave again, and insisted on carrying off the poet with him. one might like to know what sort of a conversation two such different and almost antipodal friends had together for that one hour in a lifetime. the climate of the isles of shoals exactly suited whittier's dreamy nature. he would wander from the piazza into the billiard-room, and back again to the piazza, and then look at the sea for an hour or more without speaking a word to any one. indeed he talked very little even with those who knew him best, and strangers had no chance at all with him. there was something respectful in the hush of conversation whenever he approached a group of people who were talking loudly or laughing. i never met him walking over the rocks, or knew of his going out on the water either for sailing or fishing. one foggy evening when some of us were playing a game of writing verses in the hotel parlor, one of the ladies seeing whittier alone, in a corner of the room, boldly invited him to join us, which he did with a very pleasant alacrity. it was noticed however that his compositions were not any better or even so good as those of the others, and we suspected that he took pains not to excel the rest of the company. yet he could talk in a vigorous manner when the right occasion presented itself. there was a certain colonel greene who frequented appledore in those years: a high-minded socialistic thinker, who had resigned a commission in the united states army, during the war with the florida indians, on account of the government's breach of faith with osceola. he was a born controversialist and always ready to discuss any subject in politics, religion or philosophy. john weiss was not far behind him in this line, and delighted to set him going for the benefit of those who liked to hear. no sea air was sufficiently narcotic to dull the edge of colonel greene's argument. when these two were once discussing a book on pantheism, which had lately been published by rev. j. w. manning of the old south church, whittier, who had been walking to and fro on the piazza just within reach of their voices, finally, came up and said: "i told manning that the one kind of pantheist he had omitted from his book, was the orthodox pantheist. for that matter, i believe there are pantheists in every religious sect. they start like professor parsons the swedenborgian, with the proposition that as even god could not make the universe out of nothing, he must have made it out of himself; and you cannot argue them away from it. at the same time, they will insist that they are perfectly good christians." he then cited several instances of this which had come under his own observation: and colonel greene also remembered some cases; but this was the only time we knew whittier to speak on a religious question. longfellow, tennyson and whittier were the three most popular poets of the latter part of the present century, and it is difficult to determine which of them may be considered the best. while neither of them rises to the very highest rank, each has excellences peculiarly his own. whittier does not equal the others in their graceful diction and rare metrical skill, but he surpasses them in earnestness and intensity. he paints in deeper colors, and with a firmer touch. the longer and more ambitious poems of tennyson and longfellow are interesting, but they lack the strength, vigor and greatness of design which are inseparable from all the noblest works of art. they are written to please, rather than to educate the human race. their shorter pieces are the best ones. whittier's chief excellence is to be found in his ballads; in the "wreck at rivermouth," "skipper ireson," "the relief of lucknow," "barbara frietchie" and others. nothing is more rare than a fine ballad. coleridge's ballad of the "ancient mariner" is probably the greatest english poem written since milton's time, and there are many old english ballads which are nearly equal to it. the ballad of "mary garvin," simply as a work of art, takes the first place among longfellow's poems. tennyson and whittier both tried their hands on the siege of lucknow, and whittier carried off the prize. his verses are always sensible, healthy and elevating. complaint has been made that they are too much haunted by the spectre of his schoolmate; but without saying this, we could wish that such an immature affection had been replaced afterwards by a deeper and more manly attachment. he was assisted in the arrangement of his collection of poetry (which lowell and other good critics considered the best we have) by his poetical friend miss lucy larcom, and this was chiefly no doubt that she might receive a share of the profits from its publication. the sonnets from shakespeare and many others, were of her selection. the art of poetry came so naturally to whittier, that he said he could not understand why every one did not write it as well as or better than he could. at the time of hawthorne's last visit to the isles of shoals in company with his friend the ex-president, there was also a party of business men from concord, new hampshire, who tried to make his acquaintance, but without much success. afterwards we went to portsmouth with the same party and were becalmed on the way for nearly four hours, so that we had an excellent chance to become acquainted with our fellow passengers. one of them said:--"nathaniel hawthorne was a very reserved man. there's franklin pierce: he has been president of the united states, and yet anyone can go up and speak to him; but we found hawthorne very different." of course we had to tell this on our return, and whittier laughed heartily. mrs. thaxter said, "reserved was no word for it;" and whittier added, "hawthorne was a strange puzzle. i never felt quite sure whether i knew him or not. he never seemed to be doing anything, and yet he did not like to be disturbed at it." he disliked to hear people say that hawthorne wrote the life of general pierce for the sake of a government office. they were old college friends, and without doubt he would have obtained the office whether he wrote it or not. if he wished to live in italy buchanan should have given him the consulship of leghorn or venice. he looked on "septimus felton" as a failure, and thought that probably hawthorne considered it so himself. he thought it not unlikely that hawthorne would outlive every other writer of his time. at another time he came to me and said, "what deep problems of government are you thinking over there all by yourself?" i laughed and told him that i was thinking of rome; and how much that little patch of water looked like the piece of sea in guido's aurora; but i was glad to have him speak of politics, for the present condition of affairs was such as to give every serious man anxiety for the moral welfare of the country. "indeed it is," he replied. "what we read in the newspapers is bad enough; but i have information from private sources which represents matters as being even worse than is generally supposed." [footnote: this was in 1875.] "perhaps," i said, "it is one of those evils which will cure itself after a certain time." "it will, no doubt," he answered, "bring about a strong reaction against the republican party; but even that is a thing to be deplored. meanwhile what an example we present to the monarchical governments of europe!" [illustration: the merrimac river, near amesbury, by moonlight.] "i suppose," said i, "that it is one of the consequences of our civil war." "yes," said he, "i am ready to agree to that,--a long and protracted war must have a hardening and brutalizing influence on the community even when it is fought for a good cause." "did not hawthorne," i said, "predict something like this in an article in the 'atlantic monthly'?" "yes," he replied, "i remember that article,--it was just a year before his death,--and there was a good deal of wisdom in it. some of my friends are inclined to think that woman suffrage would improve the present condition of politics, but i do not feel sure that it would." "i have no doubt it would do good if only the sensible women were permitted to vote," i said. "my faith is that what we need to purify politics in america is not an extension, but a restriction of the suffrage. it is easy to see, for instance, how favorably that would work in the city of new york, which with its custom-house is now the heaviest burden we have to bear." what whittier thought of this idea i never knew; he seemed to be reflecting on it when the ladies of his party came in sight and we both rose to meet them. though he was not fond of travelling, he liked to read books of travel; and once, according to his doctor's advice, spent a winter at amesbury reading everything of the kind that he could hear of and obtain. he spoke of wilson's book on the himalaya mountains as the most interesting of them. "it seems as if there was nothing that a cultivated englishman could not and would not go through with," he said. i mentioned humboldt. "yes," he replied, "humboldt certainly accomplished wonderful things, but the germans are generally more cautious and prudent. a cultivated englishman seems to be equal to anything." among modern travellers however, vambery, the hungarian, takes the highest rank. at a later period, i was journeying through the white mountains and reached west ossipee one afternoon tired with travelling and weary from a sleepless night. i hastened to my room and threw myself upon the bed, but had scarcely closed my eyes when there was a knock at the door and there stood mr. whittier,--the pleasantest of all apparitions for some years. the next few days were like dwelling in the islands of the blest, compared with the ordinary current of human life. it was a holiday within a holiday. he was surrounded by charming ladies, among them his niece mrs. caldwell, and as it was late in the season we had the bear camp house--a place that now ought to be historic--almost to ourselves. we had never known whittier to be so friendly and companionable before. we walked under the elms, talked about books, and our absent friends, gazed at the mountains, and admired the sunsets which just at that time were remarkably brilliant. there was one, i remember, composed largely of luminous clouds, and a general translucent effect of the atmosphere, which whittier could not remember he had ever seen the like of. he said, "i don't believe emerson loves nature any better than i do, though he has written more about it." there was a delightful lady in the party who told us pleasant and amusing stories of new york social life. she could go on in this way for a very good length of time, and whittier would listen to her without saying a word, exactly as if she were reading to him. the magnates of west ossipee had named a mountain near chocorua for whittier and challenged him to climb to the top of it and christen it properly with a bottle of champagne, but he said no, that his days for climbing were over; that he thought mountains belonged to the whole country and he had no desire to appropriate any of them. he liked such names as chocorua, katahdin and wachusett much better for mountains than washington and adams. the bear camp house is a rare sort of a tasteful country inn, and its proprietor was of course very proud of his distinguished guest, but at the same time sufficiently dignified to prevent this from being too apparent. it was there whittier spent the last summers of his life, as long as he was able to leave his own home. in his old age he enjoyed the celebrity of his more vigorous years as if it had been the fame of a constant friend; but i think he enjoyed still more the consciousness of having succeeded in living through life as he intended to do in the beginning. proofreading team. authors and friends by annie fields '"the company of the leaf" wore laurel chaplets "whose lusty green may not appaired be." they represent the brave and steadfast of all ages, the great knights and champions, the constant lovers and pure women of past and present times.' keping beautie fresh and greene for there nis storme that ne may hem deface. geoffrey chaucer. contents longfellow: 1807-1882 glimpses of emerson oliver wendell holmes: personal recollections and unpublished letters days with mrs. stowe celia thaxter whittier: notes of his life and of his friendships tennyson lady tennyson longfellow: 1807-1882 every year when the lilac buds begin to burst their sheaths and until the full-blown clusters have spent themselves in the early summer air, the remembrance of longfellow--something of his presence--wakes with us in the morning and recurs with every fragrant breeze. "now is the time to come to cambridge," he would say; "the lilacs are getting ready to receive you." it was the most natural thing in the world that he should care for this common flower, because in spite of a fine separateness from dusty levels which everyone felt who approached him, he was first of all a seer of beauty in common things and a singer to the universal heart. perhaps no one of the masters who have touched the spirits of humanity to finer issues has been more affectionately followed through his ways and haunts than longfellow. but the lives of men and women "who rule us from their urns" have always been more or less cloistral. public curiosity appeared to be stimulated rather than lessened in longfellow's case by the general acquaintance with his familiar figureand by his unceasing hospitality. he was a tender father, a devoted friend, and a faithful citizen, and yet something apart and different from all these. from his early youth longfellow was a scholar. especially was his power of acquiring language most unusual. as his reputation widened, he was led to observe this to be a gift as well as an acquirement. it gave him the convenient and agreeable power of entertaining foreigners who sought his society. he said one evening, late in life, that he could not help being struck with the little trouble it was to him to recall any language he had ever studied, even though he had not spoken it for years. he had found himself talking spanish, for instance, with considerable ease a few days before. he said he could not recall having even read anything in spanish for many years, and it was certainly thirty since he had given it any study. also, it was the same with german. "i cannot imagine," he continued, "what it would be to take up a language and try to master it at this period of my life, i cannot remember how or when i learned any of them;--to-night i have been speaking german, without finding the least difficulty." a scholar himself, he did not write for scholars, nor study for the sole purpose of becoming a light to any university. it was the energy of a soul looking for larger expansion; a spirit true to itself and its own prompting, finding its way by labor and love to the free use and development of the power within him. of his early years some anecdotes have been preserved in a private note-book which have not appeared elsewhere; among them this bit of reminiscence from hawthorne, who said, in speaking of his own early life and the days at bowdoin college, where he and longfellow were in the same class, that no two young men could have been more unlike. longfellow, he explained, was a tremendous student, and always carefully dressed, while he himself was extremely careless of his appearance, no student at all, and entirely incapable at that period of appreciating longfellow. the friendship between these two men ripened with the years. throughout longfellow's published correspondence, delightful letters are found to have been exchanged. the very contrast between the two natures attracted them more and more to each other as time went on; and among the later unpublished letters i find a little note from longfellow in which he says he has had a sad letter from hawthorne, and adds: "i wish we could have a little dinner for him, of two sad authors and two jolly publishers, nobody else!" as early as 1849, letters and visits were familiarly exchanged between fields and himself, and their friendship must have begun even earlier. he writes:-"my dear fields,--i am extremely glad you like the new poems so well. what think you of the enclosed instead of the sad ending of 'the ship'? is it better?... i send you also 'the lighthouse,' once more: i think it is improved by your suggestions. see if you can find anything more to retouch. and finally, here is a letter from hirst. you see what he wants, but i do not feel like giving my 'dedication' to the 'courier.' therefore i hereby give it to you so that i can say it is disposed of. am i right or wrong?" of longfellow's student days, mr. fields once wrote: "i hope they keep bright the little room numbered twenty-seven in maine hall in bowdoin college, for it was in that pleasant apartment, looking out on the pine groves, that the young poet of nineteen wrote many of those beautiful earlier pieces, now collected in his works. these early poems were all composed in 1824 and 1825, during his last years in college, and were printed first in a periodical called 'the united states literary gazette,' the sapient editor of which magazine once kindly advised the ardent young scholar to give up poetry and buckle down to the study of law! 'no good can come of it,' he said; 'don't let him do such things; make him stick to prose!' but the pine-trees waving outside his window kept up a perpetual melody in his heart, and he could not choose but sing back to them." one of the earliest pictures i find of the every-day life of longfellow when a youth is a little anecdote told by him, in humorous illustration of the woes of young authors. i quote from a brief diary. "longfellow amused us to-day by talking of his youth, and especially with a description of the first poem he ever wrote, called 'the battle of lovell's pond.' it was printed in a portland newspaper one morning, and the same evening he was invited to the house of the chief justice to meet his son, a rising poet just returned from harvard. the judge rose in a stately manner during the evening and said to his son: 'did you see a poem in to-day's paper upon the battle of lovell's pond?' 'no, sir,' said the boy, 'i did not.' 'well, sir,' responded his father, 'it was a very stiff production. g----, get your own poem on the same subject, and i will read it to the company.' the poem was read aloud, while the perpetrator of the 'stiff production' sat, as he said, very still in a corner." the great sensitiveness of his nature, one of the poetic qualities, was observed very early, and the description of him as a little boy was the description of the heart and nature of the man. "active, eager, impressionable; quick-tempered, but as quickly appeased; kindhearted and affectionate,--the sunlight of the house." one day when a child of ten he came home with his eyes full of tears. his elder brother was fond of a gun, and had allowed henry to borrow his. to the little boy's great distress, he had aimed at and shot a robin. he never tried to use a gun again. longfellow was said to be very like his mother. his brother wrote of him: "from her must have come to henry the imaginative and romantic side of his nature. she was fond of poetry and music, and in her youth, of dancing and social gayety. she was a lover of nature in all its aspects. she would sit by a window during a thunderstorm enjoying the excitement of its splendors. her disposition, through all trials and sorrows, was always cheerful, with a gentle and tranquil fortitude." no words could describe her son's nature more nearly. when he was only sixteen years old we find him writing to his father: "i wish i could be in washington during the winter, though i suppose it is rather vain to wish when it is almost impossible for our wishes to become realities. it would be more pleasant to get a peep at southern people and draw a breath of southern air, than to be always freezing in the north; but i have very resolutely concluded to enjoy myself heartily wherever i am. i find it most profitable to form such plans as are least liable to failure." his mother's sympathy with his literary tastes was certainly unusual. he writes to her from college when he was sixteen years old. "i have this evening been reading a few pages in gray's odes. i am very much pleased with them." ... to which she replies: "i wish you would bring gray home with you. i have a strong inclination to read the poems, since you commend them so highly. i think i should be pleased with them, though dr. johnson was not. i do not think the doctor possessed much sensibility to the charms of poetry, and he was sometimes most unmerciful in his criticism." the single aim of longfellow's life, the manner in which from his earliest days he dedicated himself to letters, would prove alone, if other signs were lacking, the strength of his character. when he was only eighteen he wrote to his mother: "with all my usual delinquency, however, i should have answered your letter before this, had i not received, on monday, chatterton's works, for which i had some time since sent to boston. it is an elegant work in three large octavo volumes; and since monday noon i have read the greater part of two of them, besides attending two lectures a day, of an hour each, and three recitations of the same length, together with my study-hours for preparation." this is said to have been the first handsome book the young student owned, and it was earned by the work of his pen. in this same year, too, we find him hurrying with his lessons (not slighting them), that he might get leisure to read and think. "leisure," he wrote his father, "which is to me one of the sweetest things in the world." ... "i wish i could read and write at the same time." the eager activity of his mind was already asserting itself, an activity which hardly slackened to the very end. the severe criticism of his poem on the battle of lovell's pond may have cost him a few tears one night, but it did not alter his determination. he continued to send contributions to the newspapers, and when his father somewhat later suggested that he should consider the question of "studying for a profession," he replied: "if so, what profession? i have a particular and strong prejudice for one course of life to which you, i fear, will not agree." he was not unwilling to pay the price for what he intended to attain. he knew himself, and his only suffering was at the thought of being obliged to turn aside from the aims which nature held before him. he was seventeen years old when he wrote to a friend: "somehow, and yet i hardly know why, i am unwilling to study a profession. i cannot make a lawyer of any eminence, because i have not a talent for argument; i am not good enough for a minister,--and as to physic, i utterly and absolutely detest it." to his father the same year he wrote: "i have already hinted to you what would best please me. i want to spend one year at cambridge for the purpose of reading history, and of becoming familiar with the best authors in polite literature; whilst at the same time i can be acquiring the italian language, without an acquaintance with which i shall be shut out from one of the most beautiful departments of letters.... the fact is--and i will not disguise it in the least, for i think i ought not--the fact is, i most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature; my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centres in it.... whether nature has given me any capacity for knowledge or not, she has at any rate given me a very strong predilection for literary pursuits, and i am almost confident in believing that, if i can ever rise in the world, it must be by the exercise of my talent in the wide field of literature. with such a belief i must say that i am unwilling to engage in the study of the law.... whatever i do study ought to be engaged in with all my soul,-for i will be eminent in something.... let me reside one year at cambridge; let me study belles-lettres; and after that time it will not require a spirit of prophecy to predict with some degree of certainty what kind of a figure i could make in the literary world. if i fail here, there is still time left for the study of a profession." ...his father could not make up his mind to trust his son to the uncertain reed of literature. "as you have not had the fortune (i will not say whether good or ill) to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation." there was, however, a friendly compromise between father and son, and the young student was allowed to pass a year in cambridge. he replied to his father: "i am very much rejoiced that you accede so readily to my proposition of studying general literature for one year at cambridge. my grand object in doing this will be to gain as perfect knowledge of the french and italian languages as can be gained without travelling in france and italy,--though to tell the truth i intend to visit both before i die.... the fact is, i have a most voracious appetite for knowledge. to its acquisition i will sacrifice everything.... nothing could induce me to relinquish the pleasures of literature;... but i can be a lawyer. this will support my real existence, literature an ideal one. "i purchased last evening a beautiful pocket edition of sir william jones's letters, and have just finished reading them. eight languages he was critically versed in; eight more he read with a dictionary: and there were twelve more not wholly unknown to him. i have somewhere seen or heard the observation that as many languages as a person acquires, so many times is he a man." happily--how happily we can hardly say--madam bowdoin had left the sum of one thousand dollars towards establishing a professorship of modern languages at the college which was then only a few years older than longfellow. no steps had yet been taken; but one of the board, mr. orr, having been struck, it appears, by the translation of an ode from horace made by longfellow for the senior examination, warmly presented his name for the new chair. it is impossible to overestimate the value of these benefactions to men of talent and genius. where would wordsworth have been, what could he have done, without the gift bestowed upon him by raisley calvert! in america such assistance is oftener given in the more impersonal way of endowment of chairs or creating of scholarships. no method less personal or more elevating for the development of the scholar and man of genius could easily be adopted. the informal proposal of the board that longfellow should go to europe to fit himself for his position was precisely in a line with his most cherished wishes. it was nearly a year from that time, however, before he was actually on his way, "winter and rough weather" and the infrequency of good ships causing many delays. possibly also the thought of the mother's heart that he was not yet twenty--still young to cut himself off from home and friends--weighed something in the balance. he read law in his father's office, and wrote and read with ceaseless activity on his own account; publishing his poems and prose papers in the newspapers and annuals of the day. he sailed from new york at last, visiting boston on his way. there he heard dr. channing preach and passed part of an evening with him afterward. also professor ticknor was kind to him, giving him letters to washington irving, professor eichhorn, and robert southey. dr. charles lowell, the father of the future poet, gave him a letter to mrs. grant, of laggan, and president kirkland was interested in his welfare. thus he started away with such help and advice as the world could give him. from that moment his career was simply a question of development. how he could turn the wondrous joys, the strange and solitary experiences of life into light and knowledge and wisdom which he could give to others; this was the never-ending problem of his mind; to this end he turned the labor of his days. his temperament did not allow him the effervescent expression common to the young. on the contrary, when writing to his sisters from italy during these student days, he says: "but with me all deep impressions are silent ones." and thus the sorrows of life, of which he early bore so heavy a burden, found little expression. he wore them in his heart, whence they came again in his poems to soothe the spirit of humanity. the delightful story of his three years of study and absence can be traced step by step in the journals and letters edited by his brother; but however interesting it is to follow him in every detail, it is nevertheless true that the singleness of aim and strength of character which distinguished longfellow, combined with extreme delicacy and sensitiveness of perception, were his qualities from the beginning and remained singularly unchanged to the end. his history is not without its tragedies, but they were coã¶rdinated in his spirit to a sense of the unity of life. he was the psalmist, the interpreter. how could he render again the knowledge of divine goodness and divine love which were revealed to him? first came the duty of acquiring learning; of getting the use of many languages and thus of many forms of thought, in order to master the vehicles of expression. to this end he labored without ceasing, laughing at himself for calling that labor which gave him in the acquisition great pleasure. "if you call it labor!" he wrote in one of his letters home after speaking of his incessant studies. his journals and letters, except the few early ones to his father, seldom speak either of the heat of composition or of the toils of study. he kept any mention of these, like all his deeper experiences, to himself, but writes chiefly of more external matters; of his relaxations and pleasures,--such as are surely indispensable to an author and student after extreme tension of the brain and hours of emotion. longfellow was twenty-two years old when he took up his residence as professor at bowdoin college, where he translated and prepared the french grammar and the french and spanish text-books which he desired for his classes. he was also made college librarian--a duty which required only one hour a day in those early times, but, added to his other duties, gave him all the occupation he needed. "the intervals of college duty i fill up with my own studies," he wrote to his friend, george w. greene, with whom he had already formed a friendship which was to continue unbroken during their lives. at the age of twenty-four longfellow married a lovely young lady, the daughter of judge potter, of portland. she was entirely sympathetic with his tastes, having herself received a very unusual education for those days in greek and latin among her other studies. in the "footsteps of angels" she is commemorated as "the being beauteous who unto my youth was given, more than all things else to love me." his brother writes of this period: "they were tenderly devoted to each other: and never was a home more happy than theirs, when, soon after their marriage, they began housekeeping in brunswick.... in this pleasant home, and with this blessed companionship, mr. longfellow devoted himself with fresh interest to his literary pursuits." the monetary returns for all his labors at this period in america were inconceivably small. he amused his friends one day in later years by confessing that mr. buckingham paid him by one year's subscription to the "new england magazine" for his translation of the "coplas de manrique" and several prose articles. after this he sent his poems to messrs. allen and ticknor, who presented him the volume in which they appeared and sundry other books as compensation. what a singular contrast was this beginning to his future literary history! late in life his publisher wrote: "i remember how instantaneously in the year 1839 'the voices of the night' sped triumphantly on its way. at present his currency in europe is almost unparalleled. twenty-four publishing houses in england have issued the whole or a part of his works. many of his poems have been translated into russian and hebrew. 'evangeline' has been translated three times into german, and 'hiawatha' has not only gone into nearly all the modern languages, but can now be read in latin. i have seen translations of all longfellow's principal works, in prose and poetry, in french, italian, german, spanish, portuguese, dutch, swedish, and danish. the emperor of brazil has himself translated and published 'robert of sicily,' one of the poems in 'tales of a wayside inn,' into his native tongue, and in china they use a fan which has become immensely popular on account of the 'psalm of life' being printed on it in the language of the celestial empire. professor kneeland, who went to the national millennial celebration in iceland, told me that when he was leaving that faraway land, on the verge almost of the arctic circle, the people said to him: 'tell longfellow that we love him; tell him we read and rejoice in his poems; tell him that iceland knows him by heart.' to-day there is no disputing the fact that longfellow is more popular than any other living poet; that his books are more widely circulated, command greater attention, and bring more copyright money than those of any other author, not excepting tennyson, now writing english verse." meanwhile the young professor, after four years of retirement and work at bowdoin, began to look about him and to contemplate another flight. before his plans were laid, however, professor ticknor relinquished his position at harvard, which was immediately offered to mr. longfellow under what were for that period the most delightful conditions possible. president quincy wrote to him, "the salary will be fifteen hundred dollars a year. residence in cambridge will be required.... should it be your wish, previously to entering upon the duties of the office, to reside in europe, at your own expense, a year or eighteen months for the purpose of a more perfect attainment of the german, mr. ticknor will retain his office till your return." during his second visit to europe in the year 1835, this time accompanied by his wife, she became ill and died at rotterdam, "closing her peaceful life by a still more peaceful death." longfellow continued his journey and his studies. into his lonely hours, which no society and no occupation could fill, came, his brother tells us, "the sense and assurance of the spiritual presence of her who had loved him and who loved him still, and whose dying lips had said, 'i will be with you and watch over you.'" at christmas of the same year a new grief fell upon him in the death of his brother-in-law and dearest friend. he received it as an added admonition "to set about the things he had to do in greater earnestness." "henceforth," he wrote, "let me bear upon my shield the holy cross." no history of longfellow can hope to trace the springs which fed his poetic mind without recording the deep sorrows, the pain, the loneliness of his days. born with especial love of home and all domesticities, the solitary years moved on, bringing him a larger power for soothing the grief of others because he had himself known the darkest paths of earthly experience. he continued his lonely studies at heidelberg during the winter, but with the spring, when the almond-trees were blossoming, the spirit of youth revived and he again took up his pilgrimage and began the sketches published some years later as the consecutive story of "hyperion." in the opening chapter of that book he says: "the setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. the brightness of our life is gone. shadows of evening fall around us, and the world seems but a dim reflection,--itself a broader shadow. we look forward into the coming lonely night. the soul withdraws into itself. then stars arise and the night is holy. paul flemming had experienced this, though still young." seven long, weary years elapsed between the death of his young wife and the second and perfect marriage of his maturity. in spite of the sorrow and depression which had overwhelmed him, he knew that his work was the basis upon which his life must stand, and in those few years he planted himself firmly in his professorship, published "outre mer," and the early poems which won for him an undying reputation as a poet. during this period, too, he made the great friendships of his life, of which he allowed no thread to break during the long years to come. his characteristic steadiness of aim never failed even in this trying period. he enjoyed the singular advantage of travel in a europe which is now chiefly a demesne of the past and of the imagination. having known all the picturesqueness and beauty of england, he settled himself in the old vassall (or craigie) house, in cambridge, with serene enjoyment and appreciation. this house was then in a retired spot, and overwrought as he frequently found himself, the repose of the place was helpful to him. in 1842 he again visited europe, for the third time. his health suffered from solitude and the continued activities of his mind. "i sometimes think," he said, "that no one with a head and a heart can be perfectly well." therefore in the spring he obtained leave of absence for six months, and went abroad to try the water cure at marienberg. one of the chief events of this journey was the beginning of his friendship with freiligrath. the two men never met again face to face, but they began a correspondence which only ended with their lives. it is in one of his letters to freiligrath that he writes: "be true to yourself and burn like a watch-fire afar off there in your germany." his mind was full of poems; much of his future work was projected although little was completed. he wrote one sonnet called "mezzo cammin," never printed until after his death; perhaps he thought it too expressive of personal sadness. upon the return voyage, which was a stormy one, he accomplished a feat that many a storm-tossed traveler would consider marvelous indeed. "not out of my berth," he wrote, "more than twelve hours the first twelve days. there cabined, cribbed, confined, i passed fifteen days. during this time i wrote seven poems on slavery. i meditated upon them in the stormy, sleepless nights, and wrote them down with a pencil in the morning. a small window in the side of the vessel admitted light into my berth, and there i lay on my back and soothed my soul with songs." these poems, with one added as a dedication to dr. channing, "threw the author's influence on the side against slavery; and at that time it was a good deal simply to take that unpopular side publicly." he took up his correspondence at this period with renewed fervor, and what other life can show such devotion to friendship or such a circle of friends? through good report and evil report his friends were dear to him, and the disparagements of others failed to reach the ear of his heart. in one of his letters to g. w. greene he says: "it is of great importance to a man to know how he stands with his friends; at least, i think so. the voice of a friend has a wonder-working power; and from the very hour we hear it, 'the fever leaves us.'" upon his return home in december, 1836, he began his life in cambridge among the group of men who became inseparable friends,--felton, sumner, hillard, and cleveland. they called themselves the "five of clubs," and saw each other continually. later came agassiz and a few others. how delightful the little suppers were of those days! he used to write: "we had a gaudiolem last night." when, several years after, he married frances appleton and began, as it were, "the new life," his wife wrote to mr. greene: "felton and the rest of the club flourish in immortal youth, and are often with us to dine or sup. i have never seen such a beautiful friendship between men of such distinct personalities, though closely linked together by mutual tastes and affections. they criticise and praise each other's performances, with a frankness not to be surpassed, and seem to have attained that happy height of faith where no misunderstanding, no jealousy, no reserve, exists." it appears, however, that even these delightful friendships had left something to be desired. in his journal he wrote: "came back to cambridge and went to mr. norton's. there i beheld what perfect happiness may exist on this earth, and felt how i stood alone in life, cut off for a while from those dearest sympathies for which i long." his brother said of him that having known the happiness of domestic life for which his nature was especially formed, "he felt the need of more intimate affection." thus, after many years of lonely wandering, another period of longfellow's life opened with his marriage in 1843. had he himself been writing of another, he might have divided his story into cantos, each one with a separate theme. one of aspiration, one of endeavor, one with the despair of young sorrow, and one of triumphant love. advancing thus through the gamut of human experience he might have closed the scene with the immortal line loved of all poets:-"in sua voluntade e nostra pace." thus indeed, reviewing longfellow's life as a whole, we discern his days to be crowded with incident and experience. every condition of human life presented itself at his door, and every human being found a welcome there,--incidents and experience coming as frequently to him through the lives of others as through the gate of his own being. the note of love and unity with the divine will was the dominant one which controlled his spirit and gave him calm. he early chose craigie house as the most desirable place for his abode in all the world. the poems and journals are full of his enjoyment of nature as seen from its windows. in the beginning of his residence there he persuaded mrs. craigie to allow him to have two rooms; but he soon controlled the second floor, and at the time of his marriage to miss appleton her father presented them with the whole of the beautiful estate. here his life took shape and his happiness found increase with the days. it was like him to say little in direct speech of all this; but we find a few words describing his wife, of whom his brother wrote that "her calm and quiet face wore habitually a look of seriousness." and then evidently quoting from henry, he adds, "at times it seemed to make the very air bright with its smiles." she was a beautiful woman of deep but reserved feeling and cultivated tastes and manners. she understood and sympathized in his work, and, even more, she became often its inspiration. during their wedding journey they passed through springfield, whence she wrote: "in the arsenal at springfield we grew quite warlike against war, and i urged h. to write a peace poem." finally established in craigie house, as the children grew and his library enlarged, and guests, attracted by personal love and by his fame, became more numerous, he found the days almost overburdened with responsibilities. he wrote one day to charles sumner: "what you quote about the _pã¨re de famille_ is pretty true. it is a difficult role to play; particularly when, as in my case, it is united with that of _oncle d'amã©rique_ and general superintendent of all the dilapidated and tumble-down foreigners who pass this way!" the regulation of such a house in new england was far more difficult than it is at present, and cambridge farther away from boston, with its conveniences and privileges, than appeared. what anxieties if the hourly omnibus should be crowded! and what a pleasant slow ride into the far green land it seemed! nevertheless, this was his chosen home, his house beautiful, and such he made it, not only to his own eyes, but to the eyes of all who frequented it. the atmosphere of the man pervaded his surroundings and threw a glamour over everything. even those who were most intimate at craigie house felt the indescribable influence of tenderness, sweetness, and calm which filled the place. neither longfellow nor his wife was a brilliant talker; indeed, there were often periods of speechlessness; but in spite of mental absences, a habit of which he got the better in later years, one was always sure of being taken at one's best and of coming away with a sense of having "breathed a nobler air." "society and hospitality meant something real to him," his eldest daughter writes. "i cannot remember that there were ever any formal or obligatory occasion of entertainment. all who came were made welcome without any special preparation, and without any thought of personal inconvenience." the decorations and splendors of the great world neither existed nor were needed there. his orange-tree, "that busie plant," always stood in his study window, and remains, still cherished, to-day. the statuette of goethe, to which he refers in "hyperion," stands yet on the high desk at which he stood to write, and books are everywhere. even closets supposed to be devoted to pails and dust-cloths "have three shelves for books and one for pails." in his own bedroom, where the exquisite portrait of his wife by rowse hangs over the fireplace, there is a small bookcase near his bed which contains a choice collection of the english poets. vaughan, henry king, and others of that lovely company of the past. these were his most intimate friends. in the copy of henry king, i found the following lines marked by him in "the exequy:"- "sleep on, my love, in thy cold bed, never to be disquieted! my last good-night! thou wilt not wake, till i thy fate shall overtake; till age, or grief, or sickness, must marry my body to the dust it so much loves." his daughter says, "this library was carefully arranged by subjects; and although no catalogue was ever made, he was never at a loss where to look for any needed volume. his books were deeply beloved and tenderly handled." such was craigie house and such was the poet's life within it from the beginning to the end. "his poetry was not worked out from his brain," his daughter again writes, and who should know better than herself! "it was the blossoming of his inward life." in a brief paper upon longfellow written by mr. william winter i find the universal sentiment towards him more fully and tenderly expressed, perhaps, than elsewhere. mr. winter writes: "i had read every line he had then published; and such was the affection he inspired, even in a boyish mind, that on many a summer night i have walked several miles to his house, only to put my hand upon the latch of his gate, which he himself had touched. more than any one else among the many famous persons whom, since then, it has been my fortune to know, he aroused this feeling of mingled tenderness and reverence." the description of his person, too, as given by mr. winter, seems to me clearer and closer to the truth than any other i have chanced to see. "his dignity and grace, and the beautiful refinement of his countenance, together with his perfect taste in dress and the exquisite simplicity of his manners, made him the absolute ideal of what a poet should be. his voice, too, was soft, sweet, and musical, and, like his face, it had the innate charm of tranquillity. his eyes were blue-gray, very bright and brave, changeable under the influence of emotion (as afterward i often saw), but mostly calm, grave, attentive, and gentle. the habitual expression of his face was not that of sadness; and yet it was pensive. perhaps it may be best described as that of serious and tender thoughtfulness. he had conquered his own sorrows thus far; but the sorrows of others threw their shadow over him.... there was a strange touch of sorrowful majesty and prophetic fortitude commingled with the composure and kindness of his features.... his spontaneous desire, the natural instinct of his great heart, was to be helpful,--to lift up the lowly, to strengthen the weak, to bring out the best in every person, to dry every tear, and make every pathway smooth." although naturally of a buoyant disposition and fond of pleasure, longfellow lived as far as possible from the public eye, especially during the last twenty years of his life. the following note gives a hint of his natural gayety, and details one of the many excuses by which he always declined to speak in public; the one memorable exception being that beautiful occasion at bowdoin, when he returned in age to the scenes of his youth and read to the crowd assembled there to do him reverence his poem entitled "morituri salutamus." after speaking of the reasons which must keep him from the burns festival, he adds:-"i am very sorry not to be there. you will have a delightful supper, or dinner, whichever it is; and human breath enough expended to fill all the trumpets of iskander for a month or more. "i behold as in a vision a friend of ours, with his left hand under the tails of his coat, blowing away like mad; and alas! i shall not be there to applaud. all this you must do for me; and also eat my part of the haggis, which i hear is to grace the feast. this shall be your duty and your reward." the reference in this note to the trumpets of iskander is the only one in his letters regarding a poem which was a great favorite of his, by leigh hunt, called "the trumpets of doolkarnein." it is a poem worthy to make the reputation of a poet, and is almost a surprise even among the varied riches of leigh hunt. many years after this note was written, longfellow used to recall it to those lovers of poetry who had chanced to escape a knowledge of its beauty. in spite of his dislike of grand occasions where he was a prominent figure, he was a keen lover of the opera and theatre. he was always the first to know when the opera season was to begin and to plan that our two houses might take a box together. he was always ready to hear "lucia" or "don giovanni" and to make a festival time at the coming of salvini or neilson. there is a tiny notelet among his letters, with a newspaper paragraph neatly cut out and pasted across the top, detailing the names of his party at a previous appearance at a theatre, a kind of notoriety which he particularly shuddered at; but in order to prove his determination in spite of everything, he writes below:-"now for 'pinafore,' and another paragraph! saturday afternoon would be a good time." he easily caught the gayety of such occasions, and in the shadow of the curtains in the box would join in the singing or the recitative of the lovely italian words with a true poet's delight. the strange incidents of a life subject to the taskmaster popularity are endless. one day he wrote:-"a stranger called here and asked if shakespeare lived in this neighborhood. i told him i knew no such person. do you?" day by day he was besieged by every possible form of interruption which the ingenuity of the human brain could devise; but his patience and kindness, his determination to accept the homage offered him in the spirit of the giver, whatever discomfort it might bring himself, was continually surprising to those who observed him year by year. mr. fields wrote: "in his modesty and benevolence i am reminded of what pope said of his friend garth: 'he is the best of christians without knowing it.'" in one of longfellow's notes he alludes humorously to the autograph nuisance:--"do you know how to apply properly for autographs? here is a formula i have just received, on a postal card: "'dear sir: as i am getting a collection of the autographs of all honorable and worthy men, and think yours such, i hope you will forfeit by next mail. yours, etc.'" and of that other nuisance, sitting for a portrait, he laughingly wrote one day: "'two or three sittings'--that is the illusory phrase. two or three sittings have become a standing joke." and yet how seldom he declined when it was in his power to serve an artist! his generosity knew no bounds. when a refusal of any kind was necessary, it was wonderful to see how gently it was expressed. a young person having written from a western city to request him to write a poem for her class, he said: "i could not write it, but tried to say 'no' so softly that she would think it better than 'yes.'" he was distinguished by one grace which was almost peculiar to himself in the time in which he lived--his tenderness toward the undeveloped artist, the man or woman, youth or maid, whose heart was set upon some form of ideal expression, and who was living for that. whether they possessed the power to distinguish themselves or not, to such persons he addressed himself with a sense of personal regard and kinship. when fame crowned the aspirant, no one recognized more keenly the perfection of the work, but he seldom turned aside to attract the successful to himself. to the unsuccessful he lent the sunshine and overflow of his own life, as if he tried to show every day afresh that he believed noble pursuit and not attainment to be the purpose of our existence. in a letter written in 1860 longfellow says:-"i have no end of poems sent me for candid judgment and opinion. four cases on hand at this moment. a large folio came last night from a lady. it has been chasing me round the country; has been in east cambridge and in west cambridge, and finally came by the hands of policeman s---to my house. i wish he had waived examination, and committed it (to memory). what shall i do? these poems weaken me very much. it is like so much water added to the spirit of poetry." and again he writes:-"i received this morning a poem with the usual request to give 'my real opinion' of it. i give you one stanza." after quoting the verse and giving the subject of the poem, he continues:-"in his letter the author says, 'i did so much better on poetry than i thought i could as a beginner, that i really have felt a little proud of my poems.' he also sends me his photograph 'at sixty-five years of age,' and asks for mine 'and a poem' in return. i had much rather send him these than my 'real opinion,' which i shall never make known to any man, except on compulsion and under the seal of secrecy." his kindness and love of humor carried him through many a tedious interruption. he generously overlooked the fact of the subterfuges to which men and women resorted in order to get an interview, and to help them out made as much of their excuses as possible. speaking one day of the persons who came to see him at nahant, he said: "one man, a perfect stranger, came with an omnibus full of ladies. he descended, introduced himself, then returning to the omnibus took out all the ladies, one, two, three, four, and five, with a little girl, and brought them in. i entertained them to the best of my ability, and they stayed an hour. they had scarcely gone when a forlorn woman in black came up to me on the piazza, and asked for a dipper of water. 'certainly,' i replied, and went to fetch her a glass. when i brought it she said, 'there is another woman just by the fence who is tired and thirsty; i will carry this to her.' but she struck her head as she passed through the window and spilled the water on the piazza. 'oh, what have i done!' she said. 'if i had a floor-cloth, i would wipe it up.' 'oh, no matter about the water,' i said, 'if you have not hurt yourself.' then i went and brought more water for them both, and sent them on their way, at last, refreshed and rejoicing." once longfellow drew out of his pocket a queer request for an autograph, saying "that the writer loved poetry in most any style, and would he please copy his 'break, break, break' for the writer?" he also described in a note a little encounter in the street, on a windy day, with an elderly french gentleman in company with a young lady, who introduced them to each other. the frenchman said:-"'monsieur, vous avez un fils qui fait de la peinture.' "'oui, monsieur.' "'il a du mã©rite. il a beaucoup d'avenir.' "'ah,' said i, 'c'est une belle chose que l'avenir.' "the elderly french gentleman rolled up the whites of his eyes and answered:-"'oui, c'est une belle chose; mais vous et moi, nous n'en avons pas beaucoup!' "superfluous information!--h. w. l." it would be both an endless and unprofitable task to recall more of the curious experiences which popularity brought down upon him. there is a passage among mr. fields's notes, however, in which he describes an incident during longfellow's last visit to england, which should not be overlooked. upon his arrival, the queen sent a graceful message, and invited him to windsor castle, where she received him with all the honors; but he told me no foreign tribute touched him deeper than the words of an english hod-carrier, who came up to the carriage door at harrow, and asked permission to take the hand of the man who had written the "voices of the night." there was no break nor any change in the friendship with his publisher during the passing of the years; but in 1861 there is a note containing only a few words, which shows that a change had fallen upon longfellow himself, a shadow which never could be lifted from his life. he writes:-"my dear fields,--i am sorry to say no instead of yes; but so it must be. i can neither write nor think; and i have nothing fit to send you but my love, which you cannot put into the magazine." for ever after the death of his wife he was a different man. his friends suffered for him and with him, but he walked alone through the valley of the shadow of death. "the blow fell entirely without warning, and the burial took place upon the anniversary of her marriage day. some hand placed on her beautiful head, lovely and unmarred in death, a wreath of orange blossoms." there was a break in his journal at this time. after many days he inscribed in it the following lines from tennyson's poem addressed to james spedding:- "sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace. sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul! while the stars burn, the moons increase, and the great ages onward roll." his friends were glad when he turned to his work again, and still more glad when he showed a desire for their interest in what he was doing. it was not long before he began to busy himself continuously with his translation of the "divina commedia," and in my diary of 1863, two years later, i find:-"_august._--a delightful day with longfellow at nahant. he read aloud the last part of his new volume of poems, in which each one of a party of friends tells a story. ole bull, parsons, monti, and several other characters are introduced." "_september_ 1st.--a cold storm by the seashore, but there was great pleasure in town in the afternoon. longfellow, paine, dwight, and fields went to hear walcker play the new organ in the music hall for the first time since its erection. afterwards they all dined together. longfellow comes in from cambridge every day, and sometimes twice a day, to see george sumner, who is dying at the massachusetts general hospital." "_september_ 19th.--longfellow and his friend george w. greene, charles sumner, and dempster the singer, came in for an early dinner. a very cosy, pleasant little party. the afternoon was cool, and everybody was in kindly humor. sumner shook his head sadly when the subject of the english iron-clads was mentioned. the talk prolonged itself upon the condition of the country. longfellow's patriotism flamed. his feeling against england runs more deeply and strongly than he can find words to express. there is no prejudice nor childish partisanship, but it is hatred of the course she has pursued at this critical time. later, in speaking of poetry and some of the less known and younger poets, longfellow recalled some good passages in the poems of bessie parkes and jean ingelow. as evening approached we left the table and came to the library. there in the twilight dempster sat at the piano and sang to us, beginning with longfellow's poem called 'children,' which he gave with a delicacy and feeling that touched every one. afterwards he sang the 'bugle song' and 'turn, fortune,' which he had shortly before leaving england sung to tennyson; and then after a pause he turned once more to the instrument and sang 'break, break, break.' it was very solemn, and no one spoke when he had finished, only a deep sob was heard from the corner where longfellow sat. again and again, each time more uncontrolled, we heard the heartrending sounds. presently the singer gave us another and less touching song, and before he ceased longfellow rose and vanished from the room in the dim light without a word." "_september_ 27th.--longfellow and greene came in town in the evening for a walk and to see the moonlight in the streets, and afterwards to have supper.... he was very sad, and seemed to have grown an old man since a week ago. he was silent and absent-minded. on his previous visit he had borrowed sidney's 'arcadia' and christina rossetti's poems, but he had read neither of the books. he was overwhelmed with his grief, as if it were sometimes more than he could endure." "_sunday, october_.--took five little children to drive in the afternoon, and stopped at longfellow's. it was delightful to see their enjoyment and his. he took them out of the carriage in his arms and was touchingly kind to them. his love for children is not confined to his poetic expressions or to his own family; he is uncommonly tender and beautiful with them always." i remember there was one little boy of whom he was very fond, and who came often to see him. one day the child looked earnestly at the long rows of books in the library, and at length said:-"have you got 'jack the giant-killer'?" longfellow was obliged to confess that his library did not contain that venerated volume. the little boy looked very sorry, and presently slipped down from his knee and went away; but early the next morning longfellow saw him coming up the walk with something tightly clasped in his little fists. the child had brought him two cents with which he was to buy a "jack the giant-killer" to be his own. he did not escape the sad experiences of the war. his eldest son was severely wounded, and he also went, as did dr. holmes and other less famous but equally anxious parents, in search of his boy. the diary continues:-"_december_ 14th.--went to pass the afternoon with longfellow, and found his son able to walk about a little. he described his own arrival at a railway station south of washington. he found no one there but a rough-looking officer, who was walking up and down the platform. at each turn he regarded longfellow, and at length came up, and taking his hand said: "'is this professor longfellow? it was i who translated "hiawatha" into russian. i have come to this country to fight for the union.'" in the year 1865 began those wednesday evenings devoted to reading the new translation of dante. they were delightful occasions. lowell, norton, greene, howells, and such other dante scholars or intimate friends as were accessible, made up the circle of kindly critics. those evenings increased in interest as the work progressed, and when it was ended and the notes written and read, it was proposed to re-read the whole rather than to give up the weekly visit to longfellow's house. in 1866 he wrote to mr. fields:-"greene is coming expressly to hear the last canto of 'paradiso' tomorrow night, and will stay the rest of the week. i really hoped you would be here, but as you say nothing about it i begin to tremble. perhaps, however, you are only making believe and will take us by surprise. so i shall keep your place for you. "this is not to be the end of all things. i mean to begin again in september with the dubious and difficult passages; and if you are not in too much of a hurry to publish, there is still a long vista of pleasant evenings stretching out before us. we can pull them out like a spyglass. i am shutting up now to recommence the operation." in december of the same year he wrote:-"the first meeting of the dante club redivivus is on wednesday next. come and be bored. please not to mention the subject to any one yet awhile, as we are going to be very quiet about it." "_january_, 1867.--dante club at longfellow's again. they are revising the whole book with the minutest care. lowell's accuracy is surprising and of great value to the work; also norton's criticisms. longfellow stands apart at his desk taking notes and making corrections, though of course no one can know yet what he accepts." longfellow's true life was that of a scholar and a dreamer; everything else was a duty, however pleasurable or bountiful the experience might become in his gentle acceptation. he was seldom stimulated to external expression by others. such excitement as he could express again was always self-excitement; anything external rendered him at once a listener and an observer. for this reason, it is peculiarly difficult to give any idea of his lovely presence and character to those who have not known him. he did not speak in epigrams. it could not be said of him,- "his mouth he could not ope, but out there flew a trope." yet there was an exquisite tenderness and effluence from his presence which was more humanizing and elevating than the eloquence of many others. one quotation from a letter to charles sumner is too characteristic to be omitted even in the slightest sketch of longfellow. he writes: "you are hard at work; and god bless you in it. in every country the 'dangerous classes' are those who do no work; for instance, the nobility in europe and the slaveholders here. it is evident that the world needs a new nobility,--not of the gold medal and _sangre azul_ order; not of the blood that is blue because it stagnates, but of the red arterial blood that circulates, and has heart in it and life and labor." speaking one day of his own reminiscences, longfellow said, that "however interesting such things were in conversation, he thought they seldom contained legitimate matter for book-making; and ----'s life of a poet, just then printed, was, he thought, peculiarly disagreeable chiefly because of the unjustifiable things related of him by others. this strain of thought brought to his mind a call he once made with a letter of introduction, when a youth in paris, upon jules janin. the servant said her master was at home, and he was ushered immediately into a small parlor, in one corner of which was a winding stairway leading into the room above. here he waited a moment while the maid carried in his card, and then returned immediately to say he could go up. in the upper room sat janin under the hands of a barber, his abundant locks shaken up in wild confusion, in spite of which he received his guest, quite undisturbed, as if it were a matter of course. there was no fire in the room; but the fireplace was heaped with letters and envelopes, and a trail of the same reached from his desk to the grate. after a brief visit longfellow was about to withdraw, when janin detained him, saying: 'what can i do for you in paris? whom would you like to see?' "'i should like to know madame george sand.' "'unfortunately that is impossible! i have just quarreled with madame sand!' "'ah! then, alexandra dumas,--i should like to take him by the hand!' "'i have quarreled with him also, but no matter! _vous perdriez vos illusions.'_ "however, he invited me to dine the next day, and i had a singular experience; but i shall not soon forget the way in which he said, 'vous perdriez vos illusions.' "when i arrived on the following day i found the company consisted of his wife and himself, a little red-haired man who was rather quiet and cynical, and myself. janin was amusing and noisy, and carried the talk on swimmingly with much laughter. presently he began to say hard things about women, when his wife looked up reproachfully and said, 'dã©jã , jules!' during dinner a dramatic author arrived with his play, and janin ordered him to be shown in. he treated the poor fellow brutally, who in turn bowed low to the great power. he did not even ask him to take a chair. madame janin did so, however, and kindly, too. the author supplicated the critic to attend the first appearance of his play. janin would not promise to go, but put him off indefinitely, and presently the poor man went away. he tingled all over with indignation at the treatment the man received, but janin looked over to his wife, saying, 'well, my dear, i treated this one pretty well, didn't i?' "'better than sometimes, jules,' she answered." altogether it was a strange scene to the young american observer. "_july_, 1867.--passed the day at nahant. as longfellow sat on the piazza wrapped in his blue cloth cloak, he struck me for the first time as wearing a venerable aspect. before dinner he gathered wild roses to adorn the table, and even gave a careful touch himself to the arrangement of the wines and fruits. he was in excellent spirits, full of wit and lively talk. speaking of the use and misuse of words, he quoted chateaubriand's mistake (afterwards corrected) in his translation of 'paradise lost,' when he rendered "'siloa's brook that flowed fast by the oracle of god,' as "'le ruisseau de siloa qui coulait rapidement.'" in talking about natural differences in character and temperament, he said of his own children that he agreed with one of the old english divines who said, "happy is that household wherein martha still reproves mary!" in february, 1868, it was decided that longfellow should go to europe with his family. he said that the first time he went abroad it was to see places alone and not persons; the second time he saw a few persons, and so pleasantly combined the two; he thought once that on a third visit he should prefer to see persons only; but all that was changed now. he had returned to the feeling of his youth. he was eager to seek out quiet places and wayside nooks, where he might rest in retirement and enjoy the consecrated memorials of europe undisturbed. the following year found him again in cambridge, refreshed by his absence. the diary continues: "he has been trying to further the idea of buying some of the lowlands in cambridge for the colleges. if this can be done, it will save much future annoyance to the inhabitants from wretched hovels and bad odors, beside holding the land for a beautiful possession forever. he has given a good deal of money himself. this might be called 'his latest work.'" "_january_, 1870.--longfellow and bayard taylor came to dine. longfellow talked of translators and translating. he advanced the idea that the english, from the insularity of their character, were incapable of making a perfect translation. americans, french, and germans, he said, have much larger adaptability to and sympathy in the thought of others. he would not hear chapman's homer or anything else quoted on the other side, but was zealous in enforcing this argument. he anticipates much from taylor's version of 'faust.' all this was strikingly interesting, as showing how his imagination wrought with him, because he was arguing from his own theory of the capacity of the races and in the face of his knowledge of the best actual translations existing to-day, the result of the scholarship of england. "longfellow speaks of difficulty in sleeping. in his college days and later he had the habit of studying until midnight and rising at six in the morning, finding his way as soon as possible to his books. possibly this habit still prevents him from getting sufficient rest. however light may be the literature in which he indulges before going to bed, some chance thought may strike him as he goes up the stairs with the bedroom candle in his hand which will preclude all possibility of sleep until long after midnight. "his account of sainte-beuve during his last visit to europe was an odd little drama. he had grown excessively fat, and could scarcely move. he did not attempt to rise from his chair as longfellow entered, but motioned him to a seat by his side. talking of victor hugo and lamartine, 'take them for all in all, which do you prefer?' asked longfellow. "'charlatan pour charlatan, je crois que je prã©fã¨re monsieur de lamartine,' was the reply. "longfellow amused me by making two epigrams:- "'what is autobiography? it is what a biography ought to be.' "and again:- "'when you ask one friend to dine, give him your best wine! when you ask two, the second best will do!' "he brought in with him two poems translated from platen's 'night songs.' they are very beautiful. "'what dusky splendors of song there are in king alfred's new volume,' he said. 'it is always a delight to get anything new from him. his "holy grail" and lowell's "cathedral" are enough for a holiday, and make this one notable.'" when longfellow talked freely as at this dinner, it was difficult to remember that he was not really a talker. the natural reserve of his nature made it sometimes impossible for him to express himself in ordinary intercourse. he never truly made a confidant of anybody except his muse. "i never thought," he wrote about this time, "that i should come back to this kind of work." he was busying himself with collecting and editing "the poems of places." "it transports me to my happiest years, and the contrast is too painful to think of." and again in calmer mood: "the 'ruler of the inverted year' (whatever that may mean) has, you perceive, returned again, like a bourbon from banishment, and is having it all his own way, and it is not a pleasant way. very well, one can sit by the fire and read, and hear the wind roar in the chimney, and write to one's friends, and sign one's self 'yours faithfully,' or as in the present instance, 'yours always.'" his sympathetic nature was ever ready to share and further the gayety of others. he wrote one evening:-"i have been kept at home by a little dancing-party to-night.... i write this arrayed in my dress-coat with a rose in my buttonhole, a circumstance, i think, worth mentioning. it reminds me of buffon, who used to array himself in his full dress for writing 'natural history.' why should we not always do it when we write letters? we should, no doubt, be more courtly and polite, and perhaps say handsome things to each other. it was said of villemain that when he spoke to a lady he seemed to be presenting her a bouquet. allow me to present you this postscript in the same polite manner, to make good my theory of the rose in the buttonhole." how delightful it is to catch the intoxication of the little festival in this way. in his endeavor to further the gayeties of his children he had received a reflected light and life which his love for them had helped to create. "_december_ 14, 1870.--taylor's 'faust' is finished, and longfellow is coming with other friends to dinner to celebrate the ending of the work.... "a statuette of goethe was on the table. longfellow said goethe never liked the statue of himself by rauch, from which this copy was made. he preferred above all others a bust of himself by a swiss sculptor, a copy of which taylor owns. he could never understand, he continued, the story of that unpleasant interview between napoleon and goethe. eckermann says goethe liked it, but longfellow thought the emperor's manner of address had a touch of insolence in it. the haunts of goethe in weimar were pleasantly recalled by both longfellow and taylor, to whom they were familiar; also that strange portrait of him taken standing at a window, and looking out over rome, in which nothing but his back can be seen. "i find it impossible to recall what longfellow said, but he scintillated all the evening. it was an occasion such as he loved best. his _jeux d'esprit_ flew rapidly right and left, often setting the table in a roar of laughter, a most unusual thing with him." there was evidently no such pleasure to longfellow as that of doing kindnesses. one of many notes bearing on such subjects belongs to this year, and begins:-"a thousand thanks for your note and its inclosure. there goes a gleam of sunshine into a dark house, which is always pleasant to think of. i have not yet got the senator's sunbeam to add to it; but as soon as i do, both shall go shining on their way." "_january_, 1871.--dined at longfellow's, and afterwards went upstairs to see an interesting collection of east indian curiosities. passing through his dressing-room, i was struck with the likeness of his private rooms to those of a german student or professor; a goethean aspect of simplicity and space everywhere, with books put in the nooks and corners and all over the walls. it is surely a most attractive house!" again i find a record of a dinner at cambridge: "the day was springlike, and the air full of the odors of fresh blossoms. as we came down over the picturesque old staircase, he was standing with a group of gentlemen near by, and i heard him say aloud unconsciously, in a way peculiar to himself, 'ah, now we shall see the ladies come downstairs!' nothing escapes his keen observation--as delicate as it is keen." and in the same vein the journal rambles on:-"_friday._--longfellow came into luncheon at one o'clock. he was looking very well;... his beautiful eyes fairly shone. he had been at manchester-by-the-sea the day before to dine with the curtises. their truly romantic and lovely place had left a pleasant picture in his mind. coming away by the train, he passed in chelsea a new soldiers' monument which suggested an epigram to him that he said, laughingly, would suit any of the thousand of such monuments to be seen about the country. he began somewhat in this style:- "'the soldier asked for bread, but they waited till he was dead, and gave him a stone instead, sixty and one feet high!' "we all returned to cambridge together, and, being early for our own appointment elsewhere, he carried us into his library and read aloud 'the marriage of lady wentworth.' e----, with pretty girlish ways and eyes like his own, had let us into the old mansion by the side door, and then lingered to ask if she might be allowed to stay and hear the reading too. he, consenting, laughingly, lighted a cigar and soon began. his voice in reading was sweet and melodious, and it was touched with tremulousness, although this was an easier poem to read aloud than many others, being strictly narrative. it is full of new england life and is a beautiful addition to his works. he has a fancy for making a volume, or getting some one else to do it, of his favorite ghost stories, 'the flying dutchman,' 'peter rugg,' and a few others." on another occasion the record says:-"passed the evening at longfellow's. as we lifted the latch and entered the hall door, we saw him reading an old book by his study lamp. it was the 'chansons d'espagne,' which he had just purchased at what he called the massacre of the poets; in other words, at the sale that day of the library of william h. prescott. he was rather melancholy, he said: first, on account of the sacrifice and separation of that fine library; also because he is doubtful about his new poem, the one on the life of our saviour. he says he has never before felt so cast down. "what an orderly man he is! well-ordered, i should have written. diary, accounts, scraps, books,--everything where he can put his hand upon it in a moment." "_december_, 1871.--saturday mr. longfellow came in town and went with us to hear twelve hundred school children sing a welcome to the russian grand duke in the music hall. it was a fine sight, and dr. holmes's hymn, written for the occasion, was noble and inspiring. just before the grand duke came in i saw a smile creep over longfellow's face. 'i can never get over the ludicrousness of it,' he said. 'all this array and fuss over one man!' he came home with us afterwards, and lingered awhile by the fire. he talked of russian literature,-its modernness, and said he had sent us a delightful novel by tourguã©neff, 'liza,' in which we should find charming and vivid glimpses of landscape and life like those seen from a carriage window. we left him alone in the library for a while, and returning found him amusing himself over the 'ingoldsby legends.' he was reading the 'coronation of victoria,' and laughing over count froganoff, who could not get 'prog enough,' and was 'found eating underneath the stairs.' he wants to have a dinner for bayard taylor, whose coming is always the signal for a series of small festivities. his own 'divine tragedy' is just out, and everybody speaks of its simplicity and beauty." "_april._--in the evening longfellow came in town for the purpose of hearing a german gentleman read an original poem, and he persuaded me to go with him. the reader twisted his face up into frightful knots, and delivered his poem with vast apparent satisfaction to himself if not to his audience. it was fortunate on the whole that the production was in a foreign tongue, because it gave us the occupation, at least, of trying to understand the words,--the poem itself possessing not the remotest interest for either of us. it was in the old sentimental german style familiar to the readers of that literature. longfellow amused me as we walked home by imitating the sing-song voice we had been following all the evening. he also recited in the original that beautiful little poem by platen, 'in der nacht, in der nacht,' in a most delightful manner. 'ah,' he said, 'to translate a poem properly it must be done into the metre of the original, and bryant's "homer," fine as it is, has this great fault, that it does not give the music of the poem itself.' he came in and took a cigar before walking home over the bridge alone.... "emerson asked longfellow at dinner about his last visit to england, of ruskin and other celebrities. longfellow is always reticent upon such subjects, but he was eager to tell us how very much he had enjoyed mr. ruskin. he said it was one of the most surprising things in the world to see the quiet, gentlemanly way in which ruskin gave vent to his extreme opinions. it seems to be no effort to him, but as if it were a matter of course that every one should give expression to the faith that is in him in the same unvarnished way as he does himself, not looking for agreement, but for conversation and discussion. 'it is strange,' ruskin said, 'being considered so much out of harmony with america as i am, that the two americans i have known and loved best, you and norton, should give me such a feeling of friendship and repose.' longfellow then spoke of mrs. matthew arnold, whom he liked very much,--thought her, as he said, 'a most lovely person.' also of the 'beautiful lady herbert,' as one of the most delightful of women.... "longfellow came in to an early dinner to meet mr. joseph jefferson, mr. william warren, and dr. holmes. he said he felt like one on a journey. he had left home early in the morning, had been sight-seeing in boston all day, was to dine and go to the theatre with us afterwards. the talk naturally turned upon the stage. longfellow said he thought mr. charles mathews was entirely unjust in his criticisms upon mr. forrest's king lear. he considered mr. forrest's rendering of the part as very fine and close to nature. he could not understand why mr. mathews should underrate it as he did. longfellow showed us a book given him by charles sumner. in it was an old engraving (from a painting by giulio clovio) of the moon, in which dante is walking with his companion. he said it was a most impressive picture to him. he knew it in the original; also there is a very good copy in the cambridge library among the copies of illuminated manuscripts." there is a little note belonging to this period full of poetic feeling and giving more than a hint at the wearifulness of interrupting visitors:-"i send you the pleasant volume i promised you yesterday. it is a book for summer moods by the seaside, but will not be out of place on a winter night by the fireside.... you will find an allusion to the 'blue borage flowers' that flavor the claret-cup. i know where grows another kind of bore-age that embitters the goblet of life. i can spare you some of this herb, if you have room for it in your garden or your garret. it is warranted to destroy all peace of mind, and finally to produce softening of the brain and insanity. "'better juice of vine than berry wine! fire! fire! steel, oh, steel! fire! fire! steel and fire!'" the following, written in the spring of the same year, gives a hint of what a festival season it was to him while the lilacs which surround his house were in bloom:-"here is the poem, copied for you by your humble scribe. i found it impossible to crowd it into a page of note paper. come any pleasant morning, as soon after breakfast or before as you like, and we will go on with the 'michael angelical' manuscript. i shall not be likely to go to town while the lilacs are in bloom." the rambling diary continues: "to-day longfellow sent us half a dozen bottles of wine, and after them came a note saying he had sent them off without finding time to label them. 'they are wine of avignon,' he added, 'and should bear this inscription from redi:- "'benedetto quel claretto che si spilla in avignone.'" about this period longfellow invited an old friend, who had fallen into extreme helplessness from ill health, to come and make him a visit. it was a great comfort to his friend, a scholar like himself, "to nurse the dwindling faculty of joy" in such companionship, and he lingered many weeks in the sunshine of the old house. longfellow's patience and devoted care for this friend of his youth was a signal example of what a true and constant heart may do unconsciously, in giving expression and recognition to the bond of a sincere friendship. long after his friend was unable to rise from his chair without assistance or go unaccompanied to his bedroom, longfellow followed the lightest unexpressed wish with his sympathetic vision and performed the smallest offices unbidden. "longfellow, will you turn down my coat collar?" i have heard him say in a plaintive way, and it was a beautiful lesson to see the quick and cheerful response which would follow many a like suggestion. in referring to this trait of his character, i find among the notes made by mr. fields on longfellow: "one of the most occupied of all our literary men and scholars, he yet finds time for the small courtesies of existence, those minor attentions that are so often neglected. one day, seeing him employed in cutting something from a newspaper, i asked him what he was about. 'oh,' said he, 'here is a little paragraph speaking kindly of our poor old friend blank; you know he seldom gets a word of praise, poor fellow, nowadays; and thinking he might not chance to see this paper, i am snipping out the paragraph to mail to him this afternoon. i know that even these few lines of recognition will make him happy for hours, and i could not bear to think he might perhaps miss seeing these pleasant words so kindly expressed.'" "_may day_, 1876.--longfellow dined with us. he said during the dinner, when we heard a blast of wintry wind howling outside, 'this is may day enough; it does not matter to us how cold it is outside.' he was inclined to be silent, for there were other and brilliant talkers at the table, one of whom said to him in a pause of the conversation, 'longfellow, tell us about yourself; you never talk about yourself.' 'no,' said longfellow gently, 'i believe i never do.' 'and yet,' continued the first speaker eagerly, 'you confessed to me once'--'no,' said longfellow, laughing, 'i think i never did.'" and here is a tiny note of compliment, graceful as a poet's note should be:-"i have just received your charming gift, your note and the stately lilies; but fear you may have gone from home before my thanks can reach you. "how beautiful they are, these lilies of the field; and how like american women! not because 'they neither toil nor spin,' but because they are elegant and 'born in the purple.'" there is a brief record in 1879 of a visit to us in manchester-by-thesea. just before he left he said, "after i am gone to-day, i want you to read schiller's poem of the 'ring of polycrates,' if you do not recall it too distinctly. you will know then how i feel about my visit." he repeated also some english hexameters he had essayed from the first book of the iliad. he believes the work may be still more perfectly done than has ever yet been achieved. we drove to gloucester wrapped in a warm sea fog. his enjoyment of the green woods and the sea breeze was delightful to watch. "ay me! ay me! woods may decay," but who can dare believe such life shall cease from the fair world! seeing the portland steamer pass one night, a speck on the horizon, bearing as he knew his daughter and her husband, he watched it long, then said, "think of a part of yourself being on that moving speck." the sunday following that visit he wrote from portland:-"church bells are ringing; clatter of church-going feet on the pavement; boys crying 'boston herald;' voices of passing men and women: these are the sounds that come to me at this upper window, looking down into the street. "i contrast it all with last sunday's silence at manchester-by-thesea, and remember my delightful visit there. then comes the thought of the moonlight and the music and shelley's verses,- "'as the moon's soft splendor o'er the faint, cold starlight of heaven is thrown;' and so on "'of some world far from ours, where moonlight and music and feeling are one.' "how beautiful this song would sound if set to music by mrs. bell and chanted by her in the twilight." later he enclosed the song, which is as follows, and i venture to reprint it because it is seldom found among shelley's poems:-an ariette for music. _to a lady singing to her accompaniment on the guitar._ as the moon's soft splendor o'er the faint, cold starlight of heaven is thrown, so thy voice most tender to the strings without soul has given. its own. the stars will awaken, though the moon sleep a full hour later to-night; no leaf will be shaken, whilst the dews of thy melody scatter delight. though the sound overpowers, sing again, with thy sweet voice revealing a tone of some world far from ours, where music and moonlight and feeling are one. he added:-"i find the song in my scrapbook, and send it to save you the trouble of hunting for it. "h. w. l." it was first reprinted in "the waif," a thin volume of selections published by longfellow many years ago. "the waif" and "the estray" preserved many a lovely poem from oblivion, till it should find its place at length among its fellows. already in 1875 we find longfellow at work upon his latest collection of poems, which he called "poems of places." it was a much more laborious and unrewarding occupation than he had intended, and he was sometimes weary of his self-imposed task. he wrote at this period:-no politician ever sought for places with half the zeal that i do. friend and foe alike have to give place to yours truly, h. w. l. again he says:-"what evil demon moved me to make this collection of 'poems of places'? could i have foreseen the time it would take, and the worry and annoyance it would bring with it, i never would have undertaken it. the worst of it is, i have to write pieces now and then to fill up gaps." more and more his old friends grew dear to him as the years passed and "the goddess neuralgia," as he called his malady, kept him chiefly at home. he wrote in 1877:-"when are you coming back from your cottage on the cliffs? the trees on the common and the fountains are calling for you. "'thee, tityrus, even the pine-trees, the very fountains, the very copses are calling.' perhaps also your creditors. at all events i am, who am your debtor." the days were fast approaching when the old things must pass away. he wrote tenderly:-"i am sorry to hear that you are not quite yourself. i sympathize with you, for i am somebody else. it is the two w's, work and weather, that are playing the mischief with us.... you must not open a book; you must not even look at an inkstand. these are both contraband articles, upon which we have to pay heavy duties. we cannot smuggle them in. nature's custom-house officers are too much on the alert." in 1880 he again wrote, describing the wedding of the daughter of an old friend:-"a beautiful wedding it was; an ideal village wedding, in a pretty church, and the windmill cottage of our friend resplendent with autumnal flowers. in one of the rooms there was a tea-kettle hanging on a crane in the fireplace. "so begins a new household. but miss neilson's death has saddened me, and yesterday mrs. horsford came with letters from norway, giving particulars of ole bull's last days, his death and burial. the account was very touching. all bergen's flags at half-mast; telegrams from the king; funeral oration by bjã¶rnson. the dear old musician was carried from his island to the mainland in a steamer, followed by a long line of other steamers. no viking ever had such a funeral." and here the extracts from letters and journals must cease. it was a golden sunset, in spite of the increasing infirmities which beset him; for he could never lose his pleasure in making others happy, and only during the few last days did he lose his own happiness among his books and at his desk. the influence his presence gave out to others, of calm good cheer and tenderness, made those who knew him feel that he possessed, in larger measure than others, what jean paul richter calls "a heavenly unfathomableness which makes man godlike, and love toward him infinite." indeed, this "heavenly unfathomableness" was a strong characteristic of his nature, and the gracious silence in which he often dwelt gave a rare sense of song without words. therefore, perhaps on that day when we gathered around the form through which his voice was never again to utter itself, and heard his own words repeated upon the air saying, "weep not, my friends! rather rejoice with me. i shall not feel the pain, but shall be gone, and you shall have another friend in heaven," it was impossible not to believe that he was with us still, the central spirit, comforting and uplifting the circle of those who were most dear to him. glimpses of emerson the perfect consistency of a truly great life, where inconsistencies of speech become at once harmonized by the beauty of the whole nature, gives even to a slight incident the value of a bit of mosaic which, if omitted, would leave a gap in the picture. therefore we never tire of "whisperings" and "talks" and "walks" and "letters" relating to the friends of our imagination, if not of our fireside; and in so far as such fragments bring men and women of achievement nearer to our daily lives, without degrading them, they warm and cheer us with something of their own beloved and human presence. from this point of view the publication of so many of these side lights on the lives of what emerson himself calls "superior people," is easily accounted for, and the following glimpses will only confirm what he expresses of such natures when he says, "in all the superior people i have met i notice directness, truth spoken more truly, as if everything of obstruction, of malformation, had been trained away." in reading the correspondence between carlyle and emerson, few readers could fail to be impressed with the generosity shown by emerson in giving his time and thought without stint to the publication of carlyle's books in this country. nor was this the single instance of his devotion to the advancement of his friends. in a brief memoir, lately printed, of jones very, as an introduction to a collection of his poems, we find a like record there. after the death of thoreau, emerson spared no trouble to himself that his friend's papers might be properly presented to the reading world. he wrote to his publisher, mr. fields: "i send all the poems of thoreau which i think ought to go with the letters. these are the best verses, and no other whole piece quite contents me. i think you must be content with a little book, since it is so good. i do not like to print either the prison piece or the john brown with these clear skyborn letters and poems." after all his labor and his care, however, it was necessary to hold consultation with thoreau's sister, and she could not find it in her heart to leave out some of the tender personalities which had grown more dear to her since her brother's death, and which had been omitted in the selection. she said that she was sure mr. emerson was not pleased at the restorations she made after his careful work of elimination was finished, but he was too courteous and kind to say much, or to insist on his own way; he only remarked, "you have spoiled my greek statue." neither was he himself altogether contented with his work, and shortly afterward said he would like to include "the maiden in the east," partly because it was written of mrs. w----n, and partly because other persons liked it so well. "i looked over the poems again and again," he said, "and at last reserved but ten, finding some blemish in all the others which prevented them from seeming perfect to me. how grand is his poem about the mountains! as it is said of goethe that he never spoke of the stars but with respect, so we may say of thoreau and the mountains." it could hardly be expected of thoreau's sister to sympathize with such a tribunal, especially when the same clear judgment was brought to bear upon the letters. even touching the contract for publication he was equally painstaking--far more so than for his own affairs. he wrote, "i inclose the first form of contract, as you requested, with the alterations suggested by miss thoreau." after this follows a careful reiteration in his own handwriting of such alterations as were desired. the early loss of thoreau and his love for him were, i had believed, the root and flower which brought forth fruit in his noble discourse on "immortality;" but miss emerson generously informs me that i am mistaken in this idea. "most of its framework," she says, "was written seven or eight years earlier and delivered in september, 1855. some parts of it he may have used at mr. thoreau's funeral and some sentences of it may have been written then, but the main work was done long before, and it was enlarged twice afterwards." happy were they who heard him speak at the funeral of henry thoreau. at whatever period he first framed his intuitions upon the future in prose, on that day a light was flashed upon him which he reflected again upon the soul of his listeners, and to them it seemed that a new-born glory had descended. whatever words are preserved upon the printed page, the spirit of what was given on that day cannot be reproduced. he wrote, the day after thoreau's death, to mr. fields: "come tomorrow and bring ---to my house. we will give you a very early dinner. mr. channing is to write a hymn or dirge for the funeral, which is to be from the church at three o'clock. i am to make an address, and probably mr. alcott may say something." this was the only announcement, the only time for preparation. thoreau's body lay in the porch, and his townspeople filled the church, but emerson made the simple ceremony one never to be forgotten by those who were present. respecting the publication of this address i find the following entry in a diary of the time: "we have been waiting for mr. emerson to publish his new volume, containing his address upon henry thoreau; but he is careful of words, and finds many to be considered again and again, until it is almost impossible to extort a manuscript from his hands." there is a brief note among the few letters i have found concerning the poetry of some other writer whose name does not appear, but in the publication of whose work emerson was evidently interested. he writes: "i have made the fewest changes i could. so do not shock the _amour propre_ of the poet, and yet strike out the bad words. you must, please, if it comes to question, keep my agency out of sight, and he will easily persuade himself that your compositor has grown critical, and struck out the rough syllables." emerson stood, as it were, the champion of american letters, and whatever found notice at all challenged his serious scrutiny. the soul and purpose must be there; he must find one line to win his sympathy, and then it was given with a whole heart. he said one day at breakfast that he had found a young man! a youth in the far west had written him, and inclosed some verses, asking for his criticism. among them was the following line, which emerson said proved him to be a poet, and he should watch his career in future with interest: "life is a flame whose splendor hides its base." we can imagine the kindly letter which answered the appeal, and how the future of that youth was brightened by it. "emerson's young man" was a constant joke among his friends, because he was constantly filled with a large hope; and his friend of the one line was not by any means his only discovery. his feeling respecting the literary work of men nearer to him was not always one of satisfaction. when hawthorne's volume of "english sketches" was printed, he said, "it is pellucid, but not deep;" and he cut out the dedication and letter to franklin pierce, which offended him. the two men were so unlike that it seemed a strange fate which brought them together in one small town. an understanding of each other's methods or points of view was an impossibility. emerson spoke once with an intimate friend of the distance which separated hawthorne and himself. they were utterly at variance upon politics and every theory of life. mr. fields was suggesting to emerson one day that he should give a series of lectures, when, as they were discussing the topics to be chosen, emerson said: "one shall be on the doctrine of leasts, and one on the doctrine of mosts; one shall be about brook farm, for ever since hawthorne's ghastly and untrue account of that community, in his 'blithedale romance,' i have desired to give what i think the true account of it." the sons of henry james, senior, being at school in concord for a period, emerson invited mr. james, who had gone to visit his boys, to stay over and be present at one of mr. alcott's conversations, which were already "an institution" of the time. mr. alcott began to speak upon subjects which interested mr. james; and the latter, not understanding, naturally enough, that these so-called "conversations" were in truth monologues, replied to mr. alcott in his own striking style. finding the audience alive to what he wished to say, he continued, and "did the talking himself." miss mary emerson, emerson's well-beloved aunt, the extraordinary original of one of his most delightful papers, was present. she had never met mr. james before, and became greatly excited by some of the opinions he advanced. she thought he often used the word "religion," when, to her mind, he appeared to mean, sometimes "dogmatism" and sometimes, "ecclesiasticism." she bided her time, though a storm had gathered within her. at last, when a momentary silence fell and no one appeared ready to refute certain opinions advanced by mr. james, "amita" rose, took a chair, and, placing it in front of him, exclaimed, "let me confront the monster!" the discussion was then renewed, excited by this sally of "amita's" wit, and the company parted with a larger understanding of the subject and greater appreciation of each other. "it was a glorious occasion for those who love a battle of words," said one who was present. mr. james delighted his host by his remarks upon the character of the beloved "amita." he had many reservations with regard to dickens. he could not easily forgive any one who made him laugh immoderately. the first reading of "dr. marigold" in boston was an exciting occasion, and emerson was invited to "assist." after the reading he sat talking until a very late hour, for he was taken by surprise at the novelty and artistic perfection of the performance. his usual calm had quite broken down under it; he had laughed as if he might crumble to pieces, his face wearing an expression of absolute pain; indeed, the scene was so strange that it was mirth-provoking to those who were near. but when we returned home he questioned and pondered much upon dickens himself. finally he said: "i am afraid he has too much talent for his genius; it is a fearful locomotive to which he is bound, and he can never be freed from it nor set at rest. you see him quite wrong evidently, and would persuade me that he is a genial creature, full of sweetness and amenities, and superior to his talents; but i fear he is harnessed to them. he is too consummate an artist to have a thread of nature left. he daunts me. i have not the key." when mr. fields came in he repeated: "---would persuade me that dickens is a man easy to communicate with, sympathetic and accessible to his friends; but her eyes do not see clearly in this matter, i am sure!" the tenor of his way was largely stayed by admiration and appreciation of others, often far beyond their worth. he gilded his friends with his own sunshine. he wrote to his publisher: "give me leave to make you acquainted with ----" (still unknown to fame), "who has written a poem which he now thinks of publishing. it is, in my judgment, a serious and original work of great and various merit, with high intellectual power in accosting the questions of modern thought, full of noble sentiment, and especially rich in fancy, and in sensibility to natural beauty. i remember that while reading it i thought it a welcome proof, and still more a prediction, of american culture. i need not trouble you with any cavils i made on the manuscript i read, as ---assures me that he has lately revised and improved the original draft. i hope you will like the poem as heartily as i did." i find a record of one very warm day in boston in july when, in spite of the heat, mr. emerson came to dine with us:-"he talked much of forceythe willson, whose genius he thought akin to dante's, and says e---h---agrees with him in this, or possibly suggested it, she having been one of the best readers and lovers of dante outside the reputed scholars. 'but he is not fertile. a man at his time should be doing new things.' 'yes,' said ----, 'i fear he never will do much more.' 'why, how old is he?' asked emerson; and hearing he was about thirty-five, he replied, with a smile, 'there is hope till forty-five.' he spoke also of tennyson and carlyle as the two men connected with literature in england who were most satisfactory to meet, and better than their books. his respect for literature in these degenerate days is absolute. it is religion and life, and he reiterates this in every possible form. speaking of jones very, he said he seemed to have no right to his rhymes; they did not sing to him, but he was divinely led to them, and they always surprised you." we were much pleased and amused at his quaint expressions of admiration for a mutual friend in new york at whose hospitable house we had all received cordial entertainment. he said: "the great hindoo, hatim tayi, was nothing by the side of such hospitality as hers. hatim tayi would soon lose his reputation." his appreciation of the poems of h. h. was often expressed. he made her the keynote of a talk one day upon the poetry of women. the poems entitled "joy," "thought," "ariadne," he liked especially. of mrs. hemans he found many poems which still survive, and he believed must always live. matthew arnold was one of the minds and men to whom he constantly reverted with pleasure. every traveler was asked for the last news of him; and when an english professor connected with the same university as arnold, whom emerson had been invited to meet, was asked the inevitable question, and found to know nothing, emerson turned away from him, and lost all interest in his conversation. a few days afterward some one was heard to say, "mr. emerson, how did you like professor ----?" "let me see," he replied; "is not he the man who was at the same university with matthew arnold, and who could tell us nothing of him?" "how about matthew arnold?" he said to b---on his return from england. "i did not see him," was the somewhat cool reply. "yes! but he is one of the men one wishes not to lose sight of," said emerson. "arnold has written a few good essays," rejoined the other, "but his talk about homer is all nonsense." "no, no, no!" said emerson; "it is good, every word of it!" when the lecture on brook farm really came, it was full of wit and charm, as well as of the truth he so seriously desired to convey. the audience was like a firm, elastic wall, against which he threw the balls of his wit, while they bounded steadily back into his hand. almost the first thing he said was quoted from horatio greenough, whom he esteemed one of the greatest men of our country. but there is nothing more elusive and difficult to retain than emerson's wit. it pierces and is gone. some of the broader touches, such as the clothespins dropping out of the pockets of the brook farm gentlemen as they danced in the evening, were apparent to all, and irresistible. nothing could be more amusing than the boyish pettishness with which, in speaking of the rareness of best company, he said, "we often found ourselves left to the society of cats and fools." i find the following note in a brief diary: "october 20, 1868. last night mr. emerson gave his second lecture. it was full of touches of light which dropped from him, to us, his listeners, and made us burn as with a kind of sudden inspiration of truth. he was beautiful both to hear and see. he spoke of poetry and criticism.... "he discovered two reporters present and spoke to them, saying, 'it is not allowed.' whereat they both replied: 'they were only at work for their own gratification. of course i could say nothing more; but afterward the lord smote one of them and he came and confessed.' when he returned after speaking he brought one of the two bouquets which he found upon his desk. 'i bring you back your flowers,' he said gently. there was no loud applause last evening; but there were little shivers of delight or approbation running over the audience from time to time, like breezes over a cornfield." emerson was always faithful to his appreciation of channing's poems. when "monadnock" was written, he made a special visit to boston to talk it over, and the fine lines of channing were always ready in his memory, to come to the front when called for. his love and loyalty to elizabeth hoar should never be forgotten, in however imperfect a rehearsal of his valued companionships. one morning at breakfast i heard him describing her attributes and personality in the most tender and engaging way to mrs. stowe, who had never known her, which i would give much to be able to reproduce. emerson's truthfulness was often the cause of mirth even to himself. i remember that he thought he did not care for the work of bayard taylor, but he confessed one day with sly ruefulness that he had taken up the last "atlantic" by chance, and found there some noble hexameters upon "november;" and "i said to myself, 'ah! who is this? this is as good as clough.' when to my astonishment, and not a little to my discomfiture, i discovered they were bayard taylor's! but how about this 'faust'? we have had dante done over and over, and even now done, i see, again by a new hand, and homer forever being done, and now 'faust'! i quarrel somewhat with the overmuch labor spent upon these translations, but first of all i quarrel with goethe. 'faust' is unpleasant to me. the very flavor of the poem repels me, and makes me wish to turn away." the "divina commedia," too, he continued, was a poem too terrible to him to read. he had never been able to finish it. it is probable that poor translations of both "faust" and dante read in early youth were at the bottom of these opinions. emerson was a true appreciator of walter scott. at one of the saturday club dinners it was suggested that walter scott be made the subject of conversation, and the occasion be considered as his birthday. emerson spoke with brilliant effect two or three times. he was first called out by his friend judge hoar, who said he was chopping wood that morning in his woodshed, when emerson came in and said so many delightful things about sir walter that if he would now repeat to the table only a portion of the excellent sayings heard in the woodshed he would delight them all. emerson rose, and, referring pleasantly to the brilliancy of the judge's imagination, began by expressing his sense of gratitude to walter scott, and concluded a fine analysis of his work by saying that the root and gist of his genius was to be found, in his opinion, in the border minstrelsy. his loyalty to the saturday club was quite as sincere as dr. holmes's, but the difficulties in the way of his constant attendance were somewhat greater. emerson kept a friendly lookout over absent members, and greeted with approval any one who arrived at the monthly tryst in spite of hindrances. seeing mr. fields appear one day, bag in hand, at a time when he was living in the country, emerson glanced at him affectionately, saying half aloud, "good boy! good boy!" at this meeting it appeared that lowell and emerson had chanced to go together, while in paris, to hear renan. they spoke of the beauty and perfection of his hebrew script upon the blackboard; it was faultless, they said. emerson added that he could not understand renan's french, so he looked at lowell, who wore a very wise expression, instead. emerson was no lover of the sentimental school. the sharp arrow of his wit found a legitimate target there. of one person in especial, whom we all knew and valued for extraordinary gifts, he said: "---is irreclaimable. the sentimentalists are the most dangerous of the insane, for they cannot be shut up in asylums." the labor bestowed upon his own work before committing himself to print was limitless. i have referred to this already in speaking of the publication of his address after the death of thoreau. sometimes in joke a household committee would be formed to sit in judgment on his essays, and get them out of his hands. the "may-day" poem was long in reaching its home in print. there were references to it from year to year, but he could never be satisfied to yield it up. in april, 1865, after the fall of richmond, he dined with us, full of what he said was "a great joy to the world, not alone to our little america." that day he brought what he then called some verses on spring to read aloud; but when the reading was ended, he said they were far "too fragmentary to satisfy him," and quietly folded them up and carried them away again. this feeling of unreadiness to print sprang as much from the wonderful modesty as from the sincerity of his character. he wrote shortly after to his publisher:-"i have the more delight in your marked overestimate of my poem that i have been vexed with a belief that what skill i had in whistling was nearly or quite gone, and that i might henceforth content myself with guttural consonants or dissonants, and not attempt warbling. on the strength of your note, i am working away at my last pages of rhyme. but this has been and is a week of company. yet i shall do the best i can with the quarters of hours." again, with his mind upon the "may-day" poem, he wrote:-"i have long seen with some terror the necessity closing round me, in spite of all my resistance, that shall hold me from home. it now seems fixed to the 20th or 21st march. i had only consented to 1st march. but in the negotiations of my agent it would still turn out that the primary engagements made a year ago, and to which the others were only appendages--the primaries, st. louis, cincinnati, and pittsburgh--must needs thrust themselves into march, and without remedy. but i cannot allow the 'may-day' to come till i come. there were a few indispensable corrections made and sent to the printer, which he reserved to be corrected on the plates, but of which no revise was ever sent to me; and as good publish no book as leave these _errata_ unexpunged. then there is one quatrain, to which his notice was not called, for which i wish to substitute another. so i entreat you not to finish the book except for the fire until i come. as the public did not die for the book on the 1st january, i presume they can sustain its absence on the 1st april.... though i do not know that your courage will really hold out to publish it on the 1st april if i were quite ready." again in the same spirit he writes to his editor and publisher:-you ask in your last note for "leasts and mosts" for the "atlantic." you have made me so popular by your brilliant advertising and arrangements (i will say, not knowing how to qualify your social skill) that i am daily receiving invitations to read lectures far and near, and some of these i accept, and must therefore keep the readable lectures by me for a time, though i doubt not that this mite, like the mountain, will fall into the "atlantic" at last. ever your debtor, r. w. emerson. at another time he wrote:-"i received the account rendered of the blue and gold edition of the 'essays' and 'poems.' i keep the paper before me and study it now and then to see if you have lost money by the transaction, and my prevailing impression is that you have." it was seldom he showed a sincere willingness or desire to print. one day, however (it was in 1863), he came in bringing a poem he had written concerning his younger brother, who, he said, was a rare man, and whose memory richly deserved some tribute. he did not know if he could finish it, but he would like to print _that_. it was about the same period that he came to town and took a room at the parker house, bringing with him the unfinished sketch of a few verses which he wished mr. fields to hear. he drew a small table into the centre of the room, which was still in disorder (a former occupant having slept there the previous night), and then read aloud the lines he proposed to give to the press. they were written on separate slips of paper, which were flying loosely about the room and under the bed. a question arose of the title, when mr. fields suggested "voluntaries," which was cordially accepted and finally adopted. he was ever seeking suggestions, and ready to accept corrections. he wrote to his publisher: "i thank you for both the corrections, and accept them both, though in reading, one would always say, 'you pet,' so please write, though i grudge it [thou pet], and [mass], and [minster]. please also to write [arctic], in the second line with small [a] if, as i think, it is now written large [a]. and i forgot, i believe, to strike out a needless series of quotation commas with which the printing was encumbered." his painstaking never relaxed, even when he was to read a familiar lecture to an uncritical audience. he had been invited by the members of the young ladies' saturday morning club to read one of his essays in their parlor. this he kindly consented to do, as well as to pass the previous night with his friends in charles street, and read to them an unpublished paper, which he called "amita." some question having arisen as to the possibility of his keeping both the engagements, he wrote as follows:-"dear mrs. f.,--i mean surely to obey your first command, namely, for the visit to you on friday evening next, and i fully trust that i wrote you that i would.... and now i will untie the papers of 'amita,' and see if i dare read them on friday, or must find somewhat less nervous." i find the following brief record of the occasion:-"mr. emerson arrived from concord. he said he took it for granted we should be occupied at that hour, but he would seize the moment to look over his papers. so i begged him to go into the small study and find quiet there as long as he chose.... presently emerson came down to tea; the curtains were drawn, and a few guests arrived. we sat round the tea table in the library, while he told us of ----'s life in berlin, where mr. and mrs. hermann grimm and mr. and mrs. bancroft had opened a pleasant social circle for him. he also talked much of the grimms. his friendship for hermann grimm had extended over many years, and an interesting correspondence has grown up between them. more guests arrived, and the talk became general until the time came to listen to 'amita.'" the charm of that reading can never be forgotten by those who heard it. the paper itself can now be found upon the printed page; but emerson's enjoyment of his own wit, as reflected back from the faces of his listeners, cannot be reproduced, nor a kind of squirrel-like shyness and swiftness which pervaded it. the diary continues:-"c---and ---were first at breakfast, but mr. emerson soon followed. the latter had been some time at work, and his hands were cold. i had heard him stirring before seven o'clock. he came down bright and fresh, however, with the very spirit of youth in his face. at table they fell upon that unfailing resource in conversation, anecdotes of animals and birds. speaking of parrots, mr. emerson said he had never heard a parrot say any of these wonderful things himself, but the storer family of cambridge, who were very truthful people, had told him astonishing anecdotes of a bird belonging to them, which he could not disbelieve because they told him. "at ten o'clock we went to miss l----'s, where the young ladies' club was convened to hear mr. emerson on 'manners.' he told us we should do better to stay at home, as we had heard this paper many times. happily we did not take his advice. there were many good things added, beside the pleasure of hearing the old ones revived. one of the things new to me was the saying of a wise woman, who remarked that she 'did not think so much of what people said as of what made them say it.' it was pretty to see the enthusiasm of the girls, and to hear what celia thaxter called their 'virile applause.'" during the same season emerson consented to give a series of readings in boston. he was not easily persuaded to the undertaking until he felt assured of the very hearty coã¶peration which the proposed title of "conversations" made evident to him. the following note will give some idea of his feeling with regard to the plan. concord, 24th february, 1872. dear ----: you are always offering me kindness and eminent privileges, and for this courageous proposition of "conversations on literature with friends, at mechanics' hall," i pause and poise between pleasure and fear. the name and the undertaking are most attractive; but whether it can be adequately attempted by me, who have a couple of tasks which osgood and company know of, now on my slow hands, i hesitate to affirm. well, the very proposal will perhaps arm my head and hands to drive these tasks to a completion. and you shall give me a few days' grace, and i will endeavor to send you a considerate answer. later, in march, he wrote:-"for the proposed 'conversations,' which is a very good name, i believe i must accept your proposition frankly, though the second week of april looks almost too near." as the appointed time approached, a fresh subject for nervousness suggested itself, which the following note will explain:-concord, 12th april, 1872. my dear ----: i entreat you to find the correspondent of the new york "tribune," who reports miss vaughan's and henry james's lectures in boston, and adjure her or him, as he or she values honesty and honor, not to report any word of what mr. emerson may say or do at his coming "conversations." tell the dangerous person that mr. e. accepted this task, proffered to him by private friends, on the assurance that the audience would be composed of his usual circle of private friends, and that he should be protected from any report; that a report is so distasteful to him that it would seriously embarrass and perhaps cripple or silence much that he proposes to communicate; and if the individual has bought tickets, these shall gladly be refunded, and with thanks and great honor of your friend, r. w. emerson. in spite of all these terrors, the "conversations" were an entire success, financially as well as otherwise. i find in the diary:-"this afternoon mr. emerson gave his first 'conversation' in this course, which ---has arranged for him. he will make over fourteen hundred dollars by these readings. there was much new and excellent matter in the discourse to-day, and it was sown, as usual, with felicitous quotations. his introduction was gracefully done. he said he regarded the company around him as a society of friends whom it was a great pleasure to him to meet. he spoke of the value of literature, but also of the superior value of thought if it can be evolved in other ways, quoting that old saying of catherine de medicis, who remarked, when she was told of some one who could speak twenty languages: 'that means he has twenty words for one idea. i would rather have twenty ideas to one word.'" and again:-"_april_ 22.--to-day is the second of mr. emerson's 'readings,' or 'conversations,' and he is coming with longfellow and the hunts to have dinner afterward.... we had a gay, lovely time at the dinner; but, first about the lecture. emerson talked of poetry, and the unity which exists between science and poetry, the latter being the fine insight which solves all problems. the _un_written poetry of to-day, the virgin soil, was strongly, inspiringly revealed to us. he was not talking, he said, when he spoke of poetry, of the smooth verses of magazines, but of poetry itself wherever it was found. he read favorite single lines from byron's 'island,' giving byron great praise, as if in view of the injustice which has been done him in our time. after byron's poem he read a lyric written by a traveler to the tonga islands, which is in martin's 'travels;' also a noble poem called 'the soul,' and a sonnet, by wordsworth. we were all entranced as the magic of his sympathetic voice passed from one poetic vision to another. indeed, we could not bear to see the hour fade away." i find the following fragment of a note written during may of that year:-i received on my return home last night, with pleasure which is quite ceasing to surprise, the final installment of one hundred and seven dollars from the singular soliloquies called "conversations," inaugurated by the best of directors. evermore thanks. r. w. emerson. again, in the journal i find:-"another lecture from emerson--'poetry, religion, love'--'superna respicit amor.' his whole discourse was a storehouse of delights and inspirations. there was a fine contribution from goethe; a passage where he bravely recounts his indebtedness to the great of all ages. varnhagen von ense, jacob bã¶hmen, swedenborg, and the poets brought their share. "there was an interlude upon domestic life, 'where alone the true man could be revealed,' which was full of beauty. "he came in to-day to see ----. he flouts the idea of 'that preacher, horace greeley,' being put up as candidate for president. 'if it had been charles francis adams, now, we should all have voted for him. to be sure, it would be his father and his grandfather for whom we were voting, but we should all believe in him.' "we think this present course of lectures more satisfactory than the last. one thing is certain, he flings his whole spirit into them. he reads the poems he loves best in literature, and infuses into their rendering the pure essence of his own poetic life. we can never forget his reading of 'the wind,' a welsh poem by taliesin--the very rush of the elements was in it." emerson was perfectly natural and at ease in manner and speech during these readings. he would sometimes bend his brows and shut his eyes, endeavoring to recall a favorite passage, as if he were at his own library table. one day, after searching thus in vain for a passage from ben jonson, he said: "it is all the more provoking as i do not doubt many a friend here might help me out with it." when away from home on his lecture tours, emerson did not fail to have his share of disasters. he wrote from albany, in 1865, to mr. fields: --an unlucky accident drives me here to make a draft on you for fifty dollars, which i hope will not annoy you. the truth is that i lost my wallet--i fear to some pickpocket--in fairhaven, vermont, night before last (some $70 or $80 in it), and had to borrow money of a samaritan lady to come here. i pray you do not whisper it to the swallows for fear it should go to ----, and he should print it in "fraser." i am going instantly to the best book-shop to find some correspondent of yours to make me good. i was to have read a lecture here last night, but the train _walked_ all the way through the ice, sixty miles, from six in the morning, and arrived here at _ten_ at night. i hope still that albany will entreat me on its knees to read to-night. one other piece of bad news if you have not already learned it. can you not burn down the boston athenaeum to-night? for i learned by chance that they have a duplicate of the "liber amoris." i hope for great prosperity on my journey as the necessary recoil of such adversities, and specially to pay my debts in twenty days. yours, with constant regard, r. w. emerson. the apprehensions which assailed him before his public addresses or readings were not of a kind to affect either speech or behavior. he seemed to be simply detained by his own dissatisfaction with his work, and was forever looking for something better to come, even when it was too late. his manuscripts were often disordered, and at the last moment, after he began to read, appeared to take the form in his mind of a forgotten labyrinth through which he must wait to find his way in some more opportune season. in the summer of 1867 he delivered the address before the phi beta at harvard. he seemed to have an especial feeling of unreadiness on that day, and, to increase the trouble, his papers slipped away in confusion from under his hand as he tried to rest them on a poorly arranged desk or table. mr. hale put a cushion beneath them finally, after emerson began to read, which prevented them from falling again, but the whole matter was evidently out of joint in the reader's eyes. he could not be content with it, and closed without warming to the occasion. it was otherwise, however, to those who listened; they did not miss the old power: but after the reading he openly expressed his own discontent, and walked away dissatisfied. miss emerson writes to me of this occasion: "you recall the sad phi beta day of 1867. the trouble that day was that for the first time his eyes refused to serve him; he could not see, and therefore could hardly get along. his work had been on the whole satisfactory to him, and if he could have read it straight all would have been happy instead of miserable." on another and more private occasion, also, he came away much disappointed himself, because, the light being poor and his manuscript disarranged, he had not been just, he thought, even to such matter as lay before him. and who can forget the occasion of the delivery of the boston hymn?--that glad new year when the people were assembled in our large music hall to hear read the proclamation of abraham lincoln. when it was known that emerson was to follow with a poem, a stillness fell on the vast assembly as if one ear were waiting to catch his voice; but the awful moment, which was never too great for his will and endeavor, was confusing to his fingers, and the precious leaves of his manuscript fell as he rose, and scattered themselves among the audience. they were quickly gathered and restored, but for one instant it seemed as if the cup so greatly desired was to be dashed from the lips of the listeners. his perfect grace in conversation can hardly be reproduced, even if one could gather the arrows of his wit. but i find one or two slight hints of the latter which are too characteristic to be omitted. speaking of some friends who were contemplating a visit to europe just after our civil war, when exchange was still very high, he said that "the wily american would elude europe for a year yet, hoping exchange would go down." on being introduced to an invited guest of the saturday club, emerson said: "i am glad to meet you, sir. i often see your name in the papers and elsewhere, and am happy to take you by the hand for the first time." "not for the first time," was the reply. "thirty-three years ago i was enjoying my school vacation in the woods, as boys will. one afternoon i was walking alone, when you saw me and joined me, and talked of the voices of nature in a way which stirred my boyish pulses, and left me thinking of your words far into the night." emerson looked pleased, but rejoined that it must have been long ago indeed when he ventured to talk of such fine subjects. in conversing with richard h. dana ("two years before the mast") the latter spoke of the cold eyes of one of our public men. "yes," said emerson meditatively, "holes in his head! holes in his head!" in speaking once of education and of the slight attention given to the development of personal influence, he said "he had not yet heard of rarey" (the famous horse-tamer of that time) "having been made doctor of laws." after an agreeable conversation with a gentleman who had suffered from ill health, emerson remarked, "you formerly bragged of bad health, sir; i trust you are all right now." emerson's reticence with regard to carlyle's strong expressions against america was equally wise and admirable. his friends crowded about him, urging him to denounce carlyle, as a sacred duty, but he stood serene and silent as the rocks until the angry sea was calm. of his grace of manner, what could be more expressive than the following notes of compliment and acknowledgment? "when i came home from my pleasant visit to your house last week (or was it a day or two before last week?), mrs. hawthorne, arriving in concord a little later than i, brought me the photograph of raffaelle's original sketch of dante, and from you. it appears to be a fixed idea in your mind to benefit and delight me, and still in ingenious and surprising ways. well, i am glad that my lot is cast in the time and proximity of excellent persons, even if i do not often see their faces. i send my thanks for this interesting picture, which so strangely brings us close to the painter again, and almost hints that a supermarine and superaerial telegraph may bring us thoughts from him yet." and, again, with reference to a small photograph from a very interesting _rilievo_ done by a young roman who died early, leaving nothing in more permanent form to attest his genius:-"'the star-led wizards' arrived safely at my door last night, as the beauty and splendid fancy of their figures, and not less the generous instructions of their last entertainer and guide, might well warrant and secure. "it was surely a very unlooked-for but to me most friendly inspiration of yours which gave their feet this direction. but they are and shall be gratefully and reverently received and enshrined, and in the good hope that you will so feel engaged at some time or times to stop and make personal inquiry after the welfare of your guests and wards." and again:-how do you suppose that unskillful scholars are to live, if fields should one day die? _serus in coelum redeat_! affectionately yours and his, r. w. emerson. surely the grace and friendly charm of these conversational notes warrant their preservation even to those who are not held by the personal attraction which lay behind them. again he writes:-"i have been absent from home since the noble saturday evening, or should have sent you this book of mr. stirling's, which you expressed a wish to see. the papers on macaulay, tennyson, and coleridge interest me, and the critic is master of his weapons. "meantime, in these days, my thoughts are all benedictions on the dwellers in the happy home of number 148 charles street." his appreciation of the hospitality of others was only a reflection from his own. i find a few words in the journal as follows: "mr. emerson was like a benediction in the house, as usual. he was up early in the morning looking over books and pictures in the library." i find also the mention of one evening when he brought his own journal to town and read us passages describing a visit in edinburgh, where he was the guest of mrs. crowe. she was one of those ladies of edinburgh, he said, "who could turn to me, as she did, and say, 'whom would you like to meet?' of course i said, lord jeffrey, de quincey, samuel brown, called the alchemist by chemists, and a few others. she was able, with her large hospitality, to give me what i most desired. she drove with samuel brown and myself to call on de quincey, who was then living most uncomfortably in lodgings with a landlady who persecuted him continually. while i was staying at mrs. crowe's, de quincey arrived there one evening, after being exposed to various vicissitudes of weather, and latterly to a heavy rain. unhappily mrs. crowe's apparently unlimited hospitality was limited at pantaloons, and poor de quincey was obliged to dry his water-soaked garments at the fireside." emerson read much also that was interesting of tennyson and of carlyle. of the latter he said that the last time he was in england he drove directly to his house. "jane carlyle opened the door for me, and the man himself stood behind and bore the candle. 'well, here we are, shoveled together again,' was his greeting. carlyle's talk is like a river, full and never ceasing; we talked until after midnight, and again the next morning at breakfast we went on. then we started to walk to london; and london bridge, the tower, and westminster were all melted down into the river of his speech." after the reading that evening there was singing, and emerson listened attentively. presently he said, when the first song ended, "i should like to know what the words mean." the music evidently signified little to his ears. before midnight, when we were alone, he again reverted to tennyson. he loves to gather and rehearse what is known of that wonderful man. early in the morning he was once more in the library. i found him there laughing over a little book he had discovered. it was leigh hunt's copy of "english traits," and was full of marginal notes, which amused emerson greatly. not mrs. crowe's hospitality nor any other could ever compare in his eyes with that of the new york friend to whom i have already alluded. we all agreed that her genius was preeminent. here are two brief notes of graceful acknowledgment to his boston friends which, however, may hardly be omitted. in one of these he says:-"my wife is very sensible of your brave hospitality, offered in your note a fortnight since, and resists all my attempts to defend your hearth from such a crowd. of course i am too glad to be persuaded to come to you, and so it is our desire to spend the sunday of my last lecture at your house." in the other he says:-"i ought to have acknowledged and thanked you for the plus-arabian hospitality which warms your note. it might tempt any one but a galley-slave, or a scholar who is tied to his book-crib as the other to his oar, to quit instantly all his dull surroundings, and fly to this lighted, genial asylum with doors wide open and nailed back." there is a brief glimpse of emerson upon his return from california which it is a pleasure to recall. he came at once, even before going to concord, to see mr. fields. "we must not visit san francisco too young," he said, "or we shall never wish to come away. it is called the 'golden gate,' not because of its gold, but because of the lovely golden flowers which at this season cover the whole face of the country down to the edge of the great sea." he smiled at the nambypamby travelers who turned back because of the discomforts of the trip into the valley of the yosemite. it was a place full of marvel and glory to him. the only regret attending the trip seems to have been that he was obliged to miss the meetings of the saturday club, which were always dear to him. the following extract gives a picture of him about this time:--"a call from mr. emerson, who talked of lowell's 'joyous genius.' he said: 'i have read what he has done of late with great interest, and am sorry to have been so slow as not to have written him yet, especially as i am to meet him at the club dinner to-day. how is pope?' he continued, crossing the room to look at an authentic portrait by richardson of that great master of verse. 'such a face as this should send us all to re-reading his works again.' then turning to the bust of tennyson, by woolner, which stood near, he said, 'the more i think of this bust and the grand self-assertion in it, the more i like it....' emerson came in after the club dinner; longfellow also. mrs. g---was present, and bragged grandly, and was very smart in talk. afterward emerson said he was reminded of carlyle's expression with regard to lady duff gordon, whom he considered a female st. peter walking fearlessly over the waves of the sea of humbug." opportunities for social communication were sacred in his eyes, and never to be lightly thrown aside. he wore an expectant look upon his face in company, as if waiting for some new word from the last comer. he was himself the stimulus, even when disguised as a listener, and his additions to the evenings called mr. alcott's conversations were marked and eagerly expected. upon the occasion of longfellow's last departure for europe in 1869, a private farewell dinner took place, where emerson, agassiz, holmes, lowell, greene, norton, whipple, and dana all assembled in token of their regard. emerson tried to persuade longfellow to go to greece to look after the klephs, the supposed authors of romaic poetry, so beautiful in both their poetic eyes. finding this idea unsuccessful, he next turned to the nile, to those vast statues which still stand awful and speechless witnesses of the past. he was interesting and eloquent, but longfellow was not to be persuaded. it was an excellent picture of the two contrasting characters,--longfellow, serene, considerate, with his plans arranged and his thought resting in his home and his children's requirements; emerson, with eager, unresting thought, excited by the very idea of travel to plunge farther into the strange world where the thought of mankind was born. this lover of hospitalities was also king in his own domain. in the winter of 1872 mr. fields was invited to read a lecture in concord, and an early invitation came bidding us to pass the time under his roof-tree. a few days before, a note was received, saying that emerson himself was detained in washington, and could not reach home for the occasion. his absence, however, was to make no difference about our visit. he should return at the earliest possible moment. the weather turned bitterly cold before we left boston. it was certainly no less bleak when we reached concord. even the horse that carried us from the station to the house had on his winter coat. roaring fires were blazing when we reached the house, which were only less warm than our welcome. after supper, just as the lecture hour was approaching, i suddenly heard the front door open. in another moment there was the dear sage himself ready with his welcome. he had lectured the previous evening in washington, and left in the earliest possible train, coming through without pause to concord. in spite of the snow and cold, he said he should walk to the lecture-room as soon as he had taken a cup of tea, and before the speaker had finished his opening sentence mr. emerson's welcome face appeared at the door. after the lecture the old house presented a cheerful countenance. again the fire blazed, friends sent flowers, and mr. alcott joined in conversation. "quite swayed out of his habit," said emerson, "by the good cheer." the spirit of hospitality led the master of the house to be swayed also, for it was midnight before the talk was ended. it was wonderful to see how strong and cheerful and unwearied he appeared after his long journey. "i would not discourage this young acolyte," he said, turning to the lecturer of the evening and laughing, "by showing any sense of discomfort." when we arose the next morning the sun was just dawning over the level fields of snow. the air was fresh, the sky cloudless, the glory of the scene indescribable. the weight of weariness i had brought from the city was lifted by the scene before me, and by the influence of the great nature who was befriending us within the four walls. it was good to look upon the same landscape which was the source of his own inspirations. emerson was already in the breakfast-room at eight o'clock. there was much talk about the lack of education in english literature among our young people. emerson said a boston man who usually appeared sufficiently well informed asked him if he had ever known spinoza. he talked also of walt whitman and coventry patmore, and asked the last news of allingham: when suddenly, as it seemed, the little horse came again, in his winter coat, and carried us to the station, and that day was done. there is a bit of description of emerson as he appeared at a political meeting in his earlier years which i love to remember. the meeting was called in opposition to daniel webster, and emerson was to address the people. it was in cambridgeport. when he rose to speak he was greeted by hisses, long and full of hate; but a friend said, who saw him there, that he could think of nothing but dogs baying at the moon. he was serene as moonlight itself. the days came, alas! when desire must fail, and the end draw near. one morning he wrote from concord: "i am grown so old that, though i can read from a paper, i am no longer fit for conversation, and dare not make visits. so we send you our thanks, and you shall not expect us." it has been a pleasure to rehearse in my memory these glimpses of emerson, and, covered with imperfections as they are, i have found courage for welding them together in the thought that many minds must know him through his work who long to ask what he was like in his habit as he lived, and whose joy in their teacher can only be enhanced by such pictures as they can obtain of the righteousness and beauty of his personal behavior. oliver wendell holmes. personal recollections and unpublished letters dr. holmes's social nature, as expressed in conversation and in his books, drew him into communication with a very large number of persons. it cannot be said, however, in this age marked by altruisms, that he was altruistic; on the contrary, he loved himself, and made himself his prime study--but as a member of the human race, he had his own purposes to fulfill, his own self-appointed tasks, and he preferred to take men only on his own terms. he was filled with righteous indignation, in reading carlyle, to find a passage where, hearing the door-bell ring one morning when he was very busy, he exclaimed that he was afraid it was "the man emerson!" yet dr. holmes was himself one of the most carefully guarded men, through his years of actual production, who ever lived and wrote. his wife absorbed her life in his, and mounted guard to make sure that interruption was impossible. nevertheless, he was eminently a lover of men, or he could not have drawn them perpetually to his side. his writings were never aimed too high; his sole wish was to hit the heart, if possible; but if a shot hit the head also, he showed a childlike pride in the achievement. when the moment came to meet men face to face, what unrivaled gayety and good cheer possessed him! he was king of the dinner-table during a large part of the century. he loved to talk, but he was excited and quickened by the conversation of others, for reverence was never absent from his nature. how incomparable his gift of conversation was, it will be difficult, probably impossible, for any one to understand who had never known him. it was not that he was wiser, or wittier, or more profound, or more radiant with humor, than some other distinguished men; the shades of macaulay, sydney smith, de quincey, and coleridge rise up before us from the past, and among his contemporaries we recall the sallies of tom appleton, the charm of agassiz, of cornelius felton, and others of the saturday club; but with dr. holmes sunshine and gayety came into the room. it was not a determination to be cheerful or witty or profound; but it was a natural expression, like that of a child, sometimes overclouded and sometimes purely gay, but always open to the influences around him, and ready for "a good time." his power of self-excitement seemed inexhaustible. given a dinner-table, with light and color, and somebody occasionally to throw the ball, his spirits would rise and coruscate astonishingly. he was not unaware if men whom he considered his superiors were present; he was sure to make them understand that he meant to sit at their feet and listen to them, even if his own excitement ran away with him. "i've talked too much," he often said, with a feeling of sincere penitence, as he rose from the table. "i wanted to hear what our guest had to say." but the wise guest, seizing the opportunity, usually led dr. holmes on until he forgot that he was not listening and replying. it was this sensitiveness, perhaps, which made his greatest charm--a power of sympathy which led him to understand what his companion would say if he should speak, and made it possible for him to talk in a measure for others as well as to express himself. nothing, surely, could be more unusual and beautiful than such a gift, nor any more purely his own. his conversation reminded one of those beautiful _danseuses_ of the south upon whom every eye is fastened, by whom every sense is fascinated, but who dance up to their companions, and lead them out, and make them feel all the exhilaration of the occasion, while the leader alone possesses all the enchantment and all the inspiration. of course conversation of this kind is an outgrowth of character. his reverence was one source of its inspiration, and a desire to do everything well which he undertook. he was a faithful friend and a keen appreciator; he disliked profoundly to hear the depreciation of others. his character was clear-cut and defined, like his small, erect figure; perfect of its kind, and possessed of great innate dignity, veiled only by delightful, incomparable gifts and charms. our acquaintance and friendship with him lasted through many years, beginning with my husband's early association. i think their acquaintance began about the time when the doctor threatened to hang out a sign, "the smallest fevers gratefully received," and when the young publisher's literary enthusiasm led him to make some excuse for asking medical advice. the very first letter i find in dr. holmes's handwriting is the following amusing note accompanying the manuscript copy of "astraea: the balance of illusions." the note possibly alludes to "astraea" as the poem to be written. $100.00. my dear sir,--the above is an argument of great weight to all those who, like the late john rogers, are surrounded by a numerous family. i will incubate this golden egg two days, and present you with the resulting chicken upon the third. yours very truly, o. w. holmes. p. s. you will perceive that the last sentence is figurative, and implies that i shall watch and fast over your proposition for fortyeight hours. but i couldn't on any account be so sneaky as to get up and recite poor old "hanover" over again. oh, no! if anything, it must be of the "paullo majora." "silvae sint consule dignae." let us have a brand-new poem or none. yours as on the preceding page. the next letters which i find as having passed between the two friends are dated in the year 1851, and it must have been about this period that their relations began to grow closer. in every succeeding year they became more and more intimate; and when death interrupted their communication, dr. holmes's untiring kindness to me continued to the end. unfortunately for this record, the friendship was not maintained by correspondence. common interests brought the two men together almost daily, long before dr. holmes bought a house in charles street within a few doors of our own, and such contiguity made correspondence to any great extent unnecessary. the removal from montgomery place, where he had lived some years, to charles street was a matter of great concern. he says in the "autocrat" that "he had no idea until he pulled up his domestic establishment what an enormous quantity of roots he had been making during the years he had been planted there." before announcing his intention, he came early one morning, with his friend lothrop motley, to inspect our house, which was similar to the one he thought of buying. i did not know his intention at the time, but i was delighted with his enthusiasm for the view over charles river bay, which in those days was wider and more beautiful than it can ever be again. nothing would satisfy him but to go to the attic, which he declared, if it were his, he should make his study. shortly after, the doctor took possession of his new house, but characteristically made no picturesque study in which to live. he passed many long days and evenings, even in summer, in a lower room opening on the street, which wore the air of a physician's office, and solaced his love for the picturesque by an occasional afternoon at his early home in cambridge. of a visit to this latter house i find the following description in my note-book: "drove out in the afternoon and overtook professor holmes" (he liked to be called "professor" then), "with his wife and son, who were all on their way to his old homestead in cambridge. they asked us to go there with them, as it was only a few steps from where we were. the professor went to the small side door, and knocked with a fine brass knocker which had just been presented to him from the old hancock house. it was delightful to see his pleasure in everything about the old house. there hung a portrait of his father, abiel holmes, at the age of thirty-one,--a beautiful face it was; there also a picture of the reverend doctor's first wife, fair, and perhaps a trifle coquettish, or what the professor called 'a little romantic;' the old chairs from france were still there; but no modern knickknacks interfered with the old-fashioned, quiet effect of the whole. he has taken for his writing-room the former parlor looking into the garden. he loves to work there, and he and his wife evidently spend a good deal of time at the old place. there is a legend that washington spent three nights there, and that dr. bradshaw stepped from the door to make a prayer upon the departure of the troops from that point. behind the house are some fine trees where we sat in the shade talking until the shadows grew long upon the grass." during the very last years of dr. holmes's life he used to talk often of the old cambridge home and the days of his childhood there. "i can remember, when i shut my eyes," he said one day, "just as if it were yesterday, how beautiful it was looking out of the windows of my father's house, how bright and sunshiny the common was in front, and the figures which came and went of persons familiar to me. one day some one said, 'there go russell sturgis and his bride;' and i looked, and saw what appeared to me then two radiant beings! all this came back to me as i read a volume of his reminiscences lately privately printed, not published, by his children." dr. holmes's out-of-door life was not limited, however, to his excursions to cambridge. early in the morning, sometimes before sunrise, standing at my bedroom window overlooking the bay, i have seen his tiny skiff moving quickly over the face of the quiet water; or, later, drifting down idly with the tide, as if his hour of exercise was over, and he was now dreamily floating homeward while he drank in the loveliness of the morning. sometimes the waves were high and rough, and adventures were to be had; then every muscle was given a chance, and he would return to breakfast tired but refreshed. there was little to be learned about a skiff and its management which he did not acquire. he knew how many pounds a boat ought to weigh, and every detail respecting it. in the "autocrat" he says,--"my present fleet on the charles river consists of three rowboats: 1. a small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend to boys. 2. a fancy 'dory' for two pairs of sculls, in which i sometimes go out with my young folks. 3. my own particular water-sulky, a 'skeleton' or 'shell' race-boat, twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat i pull with ten-foot sculls, alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him out if he does not mind what he is about." the description is all delightful, and a little later on there is a reference to such a morning as i have already attempted to recall. "i dare not publicly name the rare joys," he says, "the infinite delights, that intoxicate me on some sweet june morning when the river and bay are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and i run along ripping it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after me, like those wounds of angels which milton tells of, but the seam still shining for many a long rood behind me.... to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean,--lying there, moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of tadmor in the desert could not seem more remote from life, --the cool breeze on one's forehead,--... why should i tell of these things!" since the autocrat has himself told the story of this episode so beautifully, no one else need attempt it. he drank in the very wine of life with the air of those summer mornings. returning to some of dr. holmes's early letters, written before he moved to charles street, i find him addressing his correspondent from pittsfield, where for seven years he enjoyed a country house in summer. "but," he said one day many years later, "a country house, you will remember, has been justly styled by balzac '_une plaie ouverte_.' there is no end to the expenses it entails. i was very anxious to have a country retreat, and when my wife had a small legacy of about two thousand dollars a good many years ago, we thought we would put up a perfectly plain shelter with that money on a beautiful piece of ground we owned in pittsfield. well, the architect promised to put the house up for that. but it cost just twice as much, to begin with; that wasn't much! then we had to build a barn; then we wanted a horse and carryall and wagon; so one thing led to another, and it was too far away for me to look after it, and at length, after seven years, we sold it. i couldn't bear to think of it or to speak of it for a long time. i loved the trees, and while our children were little it was a good place for them; but we had to sell it; and it was better in the end, although i felt lost without it for a great while." here is a letter from pittsfield which describes him there upon his arrival one year in spring:-pittsfield, june 13, 1852. my dear mr. fields,--i have just received your very interesting note, and the proof which accompanied it. i don't know when i ever read anything about myself that struck me so piquantly as that story about the old gentleman. it is almost too good to be true, but you are not in the habit of quizzing. the trait is so naturelike and dickens-like, no american--no living soul but a peppery, crotchety, good-hearted, mellow old john bull--could have done such a thing. god bless him! perhaps the verses are not much, and perhaps he is no great judge whether they are or not: but what a pleasant thing it is to win the hearty liking of any honest creature who is neither your relation nor compatriot, and who must fancy what pleases him for itself and nothing else! i will not say what pleasure i have received from miss mitford's kind words. i am going to sit down, and write her a letter with a good deal of myself in it, which i am quite sure she will read with indulgence, if not with gratification. if you see her, or write to her, be sure to let her know that she must make up her mind to such a letter as she will have to sit down to. i am afraid i have not much of interest for you. it is a fine thing to see one's trees and things growing, but not so much to tell of. i have been a week in the country now, and am writing at this moment amidst such a scintillation of fireflies and chorus of frogs as a cockney would cross the atlantic to enjoy. during the past winter i have done nothing but lecture, having delivered between seventy and eighty all round the country from maine to western new york, and even confronted the critical terrors of the great city that holds half a million and p---m----. all this spring i have been working on microscopes, so that it is only within a few days i have really got hold of anything to read--to say nothing of writing, except for my lyceum audiences. i had a literary rencontre just before i came away, however, in the shape of a dinner at the revere house with griswold and epes sargent. what a curious creature griswold is! he seems to me a kind of naturalist whose subjects are authors, whose memory is a perfect fauna of all flying, running, and creeping things that feed on ink. epes has done mighty well with his red-edged school-book, which is a very creditable-looking volume, to say the least. it would be hard to tell how much you are missed among us. i really do not know who would make a greater blank if he were abstracted. as for myself, i have been all lost since you have been away in all that relates to literary matters, to say nothing of the almost daily aid, comfort, and refreshment i imbibed from your luminous presence. do come among us as soon as you can; and having come, stay among your devoted friends, of whom count o. w. holmes. from this letter also we get a glimpse of the literary world of new england at that time, and an idea of his own occupations. by degrees, as the intimacy between the two friends and neighbors grew closer, we find the publisher asking his opinion of certain manuscripts. i have no means of knowing who was the author of the poems frankly described in the following note, [footnote: the name of the writer has been sent to me kindly. he was george h. miles, professor of english literature at st. mary's (catholic) college, baltimore, maryland.] but one can only wish that writers, especially young writers, could sometimes see themselves in such a glass--not darkly! 8 montgomery place, july 24, 1857. my dear mr. fields,--i return the three poems you sent me, having read them with much gratification. each of them has its peculiar merits and defects, as it seems to me, but all show poetical feeling and artistic skill. "sleep on!" is the freshest and most individual in its character. you will see my pencil comment at the end of it. "inkerman" is comparatively slipshod and careless, though not without lyric fire and vivid force of description. "raphael sanzio" would deserve higher praise if it were not so closely imitative. in truth, all these poems have a genuine sound; they are full of poetical thought, and breathed out in softly modulated words. the music of "sleep on!" is very sweet, and i have never seen heroic verse in which the rhyme was less obtrusive or the rhythm more diffluent. still it would not be fair to speak in these terms of praise without pointing out the transparent imitativeness which is common to all these poems. "inkerman" is a poetical macaulay stewed. the whole flow of its verse and resonant passion of its narrative are borrowed from the "lays of ancient rome." there are many crashing lines in it, and the story is rather dashingly told; but it is very inferior in polish, and even correctness, to both the other poems. i have marked some of its errata. "raphael," good as it is, is nothing more than browning browned over. every turn of expression, and the whole animus, so to speak, is taken from those poetical monologues of his. _call it_ an imitation, and it is excellent. the best of the three poems, then, is "sleep on!" i see keats in it, and one or both of the brownings; but though the form is borrowed, the passion is genuine--the fire has passed along there, and the verse has followed before the ashes were quite cool. talent, certainly; taste very fine for the melodies of language; deep, quiet sentiment. genius? if beardless, yea; if in sable silvered,--and i think this cannot be a very young hand,--why, then ... we will suspend our opinion. faithfully yours, o. w. holmes. i find several amusing personal letters of this period which are characteristic enough to be preserved. among them is the following: 21 charles street, july 6, 8:33 a. m. barometer at 30-1/10. my dear friend and neighbor,--your most unexpected gift, which is not a mere token of remembrance, but a permanently valuable present, is making me happier every moment i look at it. it is so pleasant to be thought of by our friends when they have so much to draw their thoughts away from us; it is so pleasant, too, to find that they have cared enough about us to study our special tastes,--that you can see why your beautiful gift has a growing charm for me. only mrs. holmes thinks it ought to be in the parlor among the things for show, and i think it ought to be in the study, where i can look at it at least once an hour every day of my life. i have observed some extraordinary movements of the index of the barometer during the discussions that ensued, which you may be interested enough to see my notes of. barometer. _mrs. h._ my dear, we shall of course keep this beautiful barometer in the parlor. _fair._ _dr. h._ why, no, my clear; the study is the place. _dry._ _mrs. h._ i'm sure it ought to go in the parlor. it's too handsome for your old den. _change._ _dr. h._ i shall keep it in the study. _very dry._ _mrs. h._ i don't think that's fair. _rain._ _dr. h._ i'm sorry. can't help it. _very dry._ _mrs. h._ it's--too--too--ba-a-ad. _much rain._ _dr. h._ (music omitted.) 'mid pleas-ures and paaal-a-a-c-es. _set fair._ _mrs. h._ i _will_ have it! you horrid- _stormy._ you see what a wonderful instrument this is that you have given me. but, my dear mr. fields, while i watch its changes it will be a constant memorial of unchanging friendship; and while the dark hand of fate is traversing the whole range of mortal vicissitudes, the golden index of the kind affections shall stand always at set fair. yours ever, o. w. holmes. there are many notes also showing how the two friends played into each other's hands. this one is a sample:-21 charles street, july 17, 1864. my dear mr. fields,--_can_ you tell me anything that will get this horrible old woman of the c---california off from my shoulders? do you know anything about this pestilent manuscript she raves about? this continent is not big enough for me and her together, and if she doesn't jump into the pacific i shall have to leap into the atlantic --i mean the original damp spot so called. yours always, o. w. holmes. p. s. to avoid the necessity of the latter, i have written to her, cordially recommending suicide as adapted to her case. surely there must have been something peculiarly exasperating about this applicant for literary honors, because dr. holmes erred, if at all, in the opposite direction. he was far more apt to write and to behave as the following note recommends: "will you read this young lady's story, and let me know what you propose to do with it? a young woman of tender feelings, i think, and to be treated very kindly." again: "will it be too late for a few paragraphs about forcey the willson? if not, in what paper? and can you tell me anything? will you do it yourself?" the number of these notes is legion, bringing every variety of form and subject and problem to his friend as editor or publisher, or for private advice. in one of them he says, "please give me your grandpaternal council." but i have quoted enough upon this head to give an idea of the kind and busy brain not too deeply immersed in its own projects to have a tender regard for those of others. meanwhile his own work was continually progressing. lowell had already made him feel that he was the mainspring of the "atlantic," which at the time of the war attained the height of its popularity, and achieved a position where it found no peer. the care which dr. holmes bestowed upon the finish of his work, the endless labor over its details, are almost inconceivable when we remember that "this power of taking pains," which carlyle calls one of the attributes of genius, was combined with a gay, mercurial temperament ready to take fire at every chance spark. one sunday afternoon in the sad spring of 1864, during the terrible days of the war, he came in to correct a poem. "i am ashamed," he said, "to be troubled by so slight a thing when battles are raging about us; but i have written:- where genoa's deckless caravels were blown. now columbus sailed from palos, and i must change the verse before it is too late." this habit of always doing his best is surely one of the fine lessons of his life. it has given his prose a perfection which will carry it far down the shores of time. the letter sent during the last summer of his life to be read at the celebration of bryant's birthday was a model of simplicity in the expression of feeling. it was brief, and at another time would have been written and revised in half a day; but in his enfeebled condition it was with the utmost difficulty that he could satisfy himself. he worked at it patiently day after day, until his labor became a pain; nevertheless, he continued, and won what he deserved--the applause of men practiced in his art who were there to listen and appreciate. any record of dr. holmes's life would be imperfect which contained no mention of the pride and pleasure he felt in the saturday club. throughout the forty years of its prime he was not only the most brilliant talker of that distinguished company, but he was also the most faithful attendant. he was seldom absent from the monthly dinners either in summer or in winter, and he lived to find himself at the head of the table where agassiz, longfellow, emerson, and lowell had in turn preceded him. could a shorthand writer have been secretly present at those dinners, what a delightful book of wise talk and witty sayings would now lie open before us! fragments of the good things were sometimes brought away, as loving parents bring sugarplums from a feast to the children at home; but they are only fragments, and bear out but inefficiently the reputation which has run before them. the following pathetic incident, related on one of those occasions by dr. holmes, need not, however, be omitted:-"just forty years ago," he said one day, "i was whipped at school for a slight offense--whipped with a ferule right across my hands, so that i went home with a blue mark where the blood had settled, and for a fortnight my hands were stiff and swollen from the blows. the other day an old man called at my house and inquired for me. he was bent, and could just creep along. when he came in he said: 'how do you do, sir; do you recollect your old teacher mr. ----?' i did, perfectly! he sat and talked awhile about indifferent subjects, but i saw something rising in his throat, and i knew it was that whipping. after a while he said, 'i came to ask your forgiveness for whipping you once when i was in anger; perhaps you have forgotten it, but i have not.' it had weighed upon his mind all these years! he must be rid of it before lying down to sleep peacefully." speaking of dining at taft's, an excellent eating-house at point shirley for fish and game, dr. holmes said: "the host himself is worth seeing. he is the one good _un_cooked thing at his table." he had been to philadelphia with one of his lectures, but he did not have a free chance at any conversation afterward. "i did go to philadelphia," he said, "with _one_ remark, but i brought it back unspoken. it struck in." soon after dr. holmes's removal to charles street began a long series of early morning breakfasts at his publisher's house--feasts of the simplest kind. many strangers came to boston in those days, on literary or historical errands--men of tastes which brought them sooner or later to the "old corner" where the "atlantic monthly" was already a power. of course one of the first pleasures sought for was an interview with dr. holmes, the fame of whose wit ripened early-even before the days of the "autocrat." it came about quite naturally, therefore, that they should gladly respond to any call which gave them the opportunity to listen to his conversation; and the eight-o'clock breakfast hour was chosen as being the only time the busy guests and host could readily call their own. occasionally these breakfasts would take place as frequently as two or three times a week. the light of memory has a wondrous gift of heightening most of the pleasures of this life, but the conversation of those early hours was far more stimulating and inspiring than any memory of it can ever be. there were few men, except poe, famous in american or english literature of that era who did not appear once at least. the unexpectedness of the company was a great charm; for a brief period boston enjoyed a sense of cosmopolitanism, and found it possible, as it is really possible only in london, to bring together busy guests with full and eager brains who are not too familiar with one another's thought to make conversation an excitement and a source of development. of dr. holmes's talk on these occasions it is impossible to give any satisfactory record. the simple conditions of his surroundings gave him a sense of perfect ease, and he spoke with the freedom which marked his nature. it was one of the charms by which he drew men to himself that he not only wore a holiday air of finding life full and interesting, but that he believed in freedom of speech for himself, and therefore wished to find it in others. this emancipation in expression did not extend altogether into the practical working of his life. conventionalities had a strong hold upon him. he loved to avoid the great world when it was inconvenient, and to get a certain freedom outside of it; but once in the current, the manners of the romans were his own. he reminded one sometimes of hawthorne's saying that "in these days men are born in their clothes," although dr. holmes's conventions were more easily shuffled off than a casual observer would believe. nothing could be farther from the ordinary idea of the romantic "man of genius" than was his well-trimmed little figure, and nothing more surprising and delightful than the way in which his childlikeness of nature would break out and assert itself. he declared one morning that he had discovered the happiest animal in creation-"next to a poet, of course, if we may call him an animal; it is the acheron, the parasite of the honey-bee. and why? because he attaches himself to the wing of the bee, is carried without exertion to the sweetest flowers, where the bee gathers the honey while the acheron eats it; and all the while the music of the bee attends him as he is borne through the air." he met hawthorne for the first time, i think, in this informal way. holmes had been speaking of renan, whose books interested him. "a long while ago," he began, "i said rome or reason; now i am half inclined to put it, rome or renan." then suddenly turning to hawthorne, he said, "by the way, i would write a new novel if you were not in the field, mr. hawthorne." "i am not," said hawthorne; "and i wish you would do it." there was a moment's silence. holmes said quickly, "i wish you would come to the club oftener." "i should like to," said hawthorne, "but i can't drink." "neither can i." "well, but i can't eat." "nevertheless, we should like to see you." "but i can't talk, either." after which there was a shout of laughter. then said holmes, "you can listen, though; and i wish you would come." on another occasion, when lowell was present, he was talking of changes in physical conditions. dr. holmes said, now, at the age of fifty-four, he could eat almost anything set before him, which he could by no means do formerly. lowell found opportunity somehow at this point to laugh at holmes for having lately said in print that "beecher was a man whose thinking marrow was not corrugated by drink or embrowned by meerschaum." lowell said _he_ had no "thinking marrow," and objected to such anatomical terms applied to the best part of a man. by and by lowell came out of his critical mood, and said pleasantly, after some talk upon lyric poetry in general, "i like your lyrics, you know, holmes." "well," said holmes, pleased, but speaking earnestly and with a childlike honesty, "but there is something too hopping about them. to tell the truth, nothing has injured my reputation so much as the too great praise which has been bestowed upon my 'windfalls.' after all, the value of a poet to the world is not so much his reputation as a writer of this or that poem, as the fact that the poet is known to be one who is rapt out of himself at times, and carried away into the region of the divine; it is known that the spirit has descended upon him, and taught him what he should speak." holmes's admiration of dickens's genius was very sincere. "he is the greatest of all of them," he loved to say. "such fertility, such shakespearean breadth,--there is enough of him; you feel as you do when you see the ocean." speaking of the difficulty of being a good listener, he said that it was a terrible responsibility for him to listen to a story. he could never be rid of the feeling that he must remember accurately, or all would be lost. there was one story in particular, told by a friend remarkable as a raconteur, which tried him more than anything he knew in the world,--of the kind. he felt like one of the old greek chorus with strophe and antistrophe, and it was a weight upon his mind lest he should not laugh properly at the end. i recall one day, when the subject of walt whitman's poetry was introduced, dr. holmes said he abhorred playing the critic, partly because he was not a good reader, --had read too cursorily and carelessly; but he thought the right thing had not been said about walt whitman. "his books sell largely, and there is a large audience of friends in washington who praise and listen. emerson believes in him; lowell not at all; longfellow finds some good in his 'yaup;' but the truth is, he is in an amorphous condition." longfellow was once speaking of an address he had heard which he considered quite a perfect performance. "yes--yes," said dr. holmes; "i don't doubt it was very good; but the speaker is such an unpleasant person! he is just one of those fungi that always grow upon universities." the following extract is from a brief diary: "charles sumner, longfellow, greene, dr. holmes, came to dine. the latter sparkled and coruscated as i have seldom heard him before. we are more than ever convinced that no one since sydney smith was ever so brilliant, so witty, spontaneous, naã¯f, and unfailing as he." in speaking of his own class in college he said: "there never was such vigor in any class before, it seems to me. almost every member turns out sooner or later distinguished for something. we have had every grade of moral status from a criminal to a chief justice, and we never let any one of them drop. we keep hold of their hands year after year, and lift up the weak and failing ones till they are at last redeemed. ah, there was one exception! years ago we voted to cast a man out who had been a defaulter or who had committed some offense of that nature. the poor fellow sank down, and before the next year, when we repented of this decision, he had gone too far down and presently died. but we have kept all the rest! "every fourth man in our class is a poet. sam. smith belongs to our class, who wrote 'my country 't is of thee.' sam. smith will live when longfellow, whittier, and all the rest of us have gone into oblivion.... "queer man, ----. looked ten years older than he was, like caliban. calibans look always ten years older than they are. a perfect potato of a man. if five hundred pieces of a man had been flung together from different points and stuck, they could not have been more awkwardly concocted than he was. "james freeman clarke was in our class. ever read his history of the 'ten great religions?' very good book. nobody knows how much clarke is until he reads that book. how he surprises us from time to time. came out well about 'bolting,' with regard to butler the other day. writes good verses, too,--not as good as mine, but good verses." ... holmes was abstemious and never ceased talking. "most men write too much. i would rather risk my future fame upon one lyric than upon ten volumes. but i have said 'boston is the hub of the universe;' i will rest upon that." he spoke also with great feeling of the women who came to him for literary advice and assistance. ----, he says, is his daughter in letters. he has only seen her once, but he has been a faithful correspondent and assistant to her. sumner said some one had called ---"an impediment in the path of science." what did he mean? "it means just this," said holmes: "---is no longer young, and i was reading the other day in a book on the sandwich islands of an old fejee man who had been carried away among strangers, but who prayed that he might be carried home and his brains beaten out in peace by his son, according to the custom of those lands. it flashed over me then that our sons beat out our brains in the same way. they do not walk in our ruts of thought or begin exactly where we leave off, but they have a new standpoint of their own." the talk went on for about four hours, when the company broke up. one evening the doctor came in after the phi beta kappa dinner at cambridge. "i can't stop," he said. "i only came to read you my verses which i gave at the dinner to-day: they made such a queer impression! i didn't mean to go, but james lowell was to preside, and sent me word that i really must be there, so i just wrote these off, and here they are. i don't know that i should have brought them in to read to you, but hoar declares they are the best i have ever done." after some delay, and in the fading light of sunset reflected from the river, he read the well-known verses "bill and joe." he must have been still warm with the excitement of the first reading, for i can never forget the tenderness with which he recited the lines. they are still pleasant on the printed page, but to those who heard him they are divested of the passion of affection with which they were written and read. late in life he said to a friend who was speaking of the warm friendships embalmed in his poetry, and which would help to make it endure: "i don't know how that may be; but the writing of these poems has been a passionate joy." the following amusing note gives a picture of dr. holmes in his most natural and social mood:-296 beacon street, february 11, 1872. my dear mr. fields,--on friday evening last i white-cravated myself, took a carriage, and found myself at your door at 8 of the clock p. m. a cautious female responded to my ring, and opened the chained portal about as far as a clam opens his shell to see what is going on in cambridge street, where he is waiting for a customer. her first glance impressed her with the conviction that i was a burglar. the mild address with which i accosted her removed that impression, and i rose in the moral scale to the comparatively elevated position of what the unfeeling world calls a "sneak-thief." by dint, however, of soft words, and that look of ingenuous simplicity by which i am so well known to you and all my friends, i coaxed her into the belief that i was nothing worse than a rejected contributor, an autograph collector, an author with a volume of poems to dispose of, or other disagreeable but not dangerous character. she unfastened the chain, and i stood before her. "i calmed her fears, and she was calm and told" me how you and mrs. f. had gone to new york, and how she knew nothing of any literary debauch that was to come off under your roof, but would go and call another unprotected female who knew the past, present, and future, and could tell me why this was thus, that i had been lured from my fireside by the ignis fatuus of a deceptive invitation. it was my turn to be afraid, alone in the house with two of the stronger sex; and i retired. on reaching home, i read my note and found it was friday the 16th, not the 9th, i was invited for.... dear mr. fields, i shall be very happy to come to your home on friday evening, the 16th february, at 8 o'clock, to meet yourself and mrs. fields and hear mr. james read his paper on emerson. always truly yours, o. w. holmes. on occasions of social dignity few men have ever surpassed dr. holmes in grace of compliment and perfection of easy ceremony. it was an acquired gift; perhaps it always must be. but as soon as human nature was given a chance to show itself, he was always eager, bringing an unsated store of intellectual curiosity to bear upon every new person or condition. he was generous to a fault in showing his own hand, moving with "infinite jest" over the current of his experiences until he could tempt his interlocutor out upon the same dangerous waters. if others were slow to embark, he nevertheless interested them in the history of his own voyage of life. dr. holmes had never known any very difficult hand to hand struggle with life, but he was quite satisfied with its lesser difficulties. he could laugh at his own want of courage, as he called a certain lack of love for adventure, and he could admire the daring of others. he was happy in the circle of his home affections, and never cared to stray faraway. he had a golden sense of comfort in his home life, an entire satisfaction, which made his rare absences a penance. added to this was his tendency to asthma, from which he suffered often very severely. in a letter written in 1867 from montreal, whither he had gone to obtain a copyright of one of his books, we can see how his domestic habits, as well as his asthma, made any long absence intolerable to him. montreal, october 23, 1867. dear mr. fields:... i am as comfortable here as i can be, but i have earned my money, for i have had a full share of my old trouble. last night was better, and to-day i am going about the town. miss frothingham sent me a basket of black hamburg grapes to-day, which were very grateful after the hotel tea and coffee and other 'pothecary's stuff. don't talk to me about taverns! there is just one genuine, clean, decent, palatable thing occasionally to be had in them,--namely, a boiled egg. the soups _taste_ pretty good sometimes, but their sources are involved in a darker mystery than that of the nile. omelettes taste as if they had been carried in the waiter's hat, or fried in an old boot. i ordered scrambled eggs one day. it must be that they had been scrambled for by _somebody_, but who--who in the possession of a sound reason _could_ have scrambled for what i had set before me under that name? butter! i am thinking just now of those exquisite little pellets i have so often seen at your table, and wondering why the taverns _always_ keep it until it is old. fool that i am! as if the taverns did not know that if it was good it would be eaten, which is not what they want. then the waiters, with their napkins,--what don't they do with those napkins! mention any one thing of which you think you can say with truth, "_that_ they do not do."... i have a really fine parlor, but every time i enter it i perceive that "still, sad 'odor' of humanity" which clings to it from my predecessor. mr. hogan got home yesterday, i believe. i saw him for the first time to-day. he was civil--they all are civil. i have no fault to find except with taverns here and pretty much everywhere. every six months a tavern should burn to the ground, with all its traps, its "properties," its beds and pots and kettles, and start afresh from its ashes like john phoenix-squibob. no; give me home, or a home like mine, where all is clean and sweet, where coffee has preã«xisted in the berry, and tea has still faint recollections of the pigtails that dangled about the plant from which it was picked, where butter has not the prevailing character which pope assigned to denham, where soup could look you in the face if it had "eyes" (which it has not), and where the comely anne or the gracious margaret takes the place of these napkin-bearing animals. enough! but i have been forlorn and ailing and fastidious--but i am feeling a little better, and can talk about it. i had some ugly nights tell you; but i am writing in good spirits, as you see. i have written once before to low, as i think i told you, and on the 25th mean to go to a notary with mr. dawson, as he tells me it is the right thing to do. yours always, o. w. h. p. s. made a pretty good dinner, after all; but better a hash at home than a roast with strangers. with much the same experience of asthma as a result, he visited princeton three or four years later, and wrote after his return:-296 beacon street, august 24, 1871. my dear fields:... i only sat up one whole night, it is true, which was a great improvement on montreal; but i do not feel right yet, and it is quite uncertain whether i shall be in a condition to enjoy the club by saturday. so if i come, all the better for me; and if i don't come, you can say that you have in your realm at parker's not "five hundred as good as he," but a score or so that will serve your turn. i cut the first leaves i wanted to meddle with in the last "atlantic" for no. ix. of the "whispering gallery," and took it all down like an oyster in the height of the season. it is captivating, like all the rest. why don't you make a book as big as allibone's out of your store of unparalleled personal recollections? it seems too bad to keep them for posterity. when i think of your bequeathing them for the sole benefit of people that are unborn, i want to cry out with horace:- "eheu--_postume, postume!_" always yours, o. w. holmes. again, three years later, he writes: "i hope you are reasonably careful of yourself during this cold weather. look out! a hot lectureroom, a cold ride, the best-chamber sheets like slices of cucumber, and one gives one's friends the trouble of writing an obituary, when he might just as well have lived and written theirs. we had a grand club last saturday. longfellow, emerson, lowell, adams, tom appleton (just home a few weeks ago), and norton (who has been sick a good while) were there, and lots of others, and lord hought on as a guest. you ought to have been there; it was the best club for a long time." the following note, written in 1873, shows how closely dr. holmes kept the growth of the club in mind, and his eagerness to bring into it the distinguished intellectual life of boston. 296 beacon street, february 21, 1873. my dear mr. fields,--i doubt whether i shall feel well enough to go to the club to-morrow, as i am somewhat feverish and sore-throaty to-day, though i must crawl out to my lecture. mr. parkman and professor wolcott gibbs are to be voted for, you know. president eliot, who nominated professor gibbs, will, i suppose, urge his claims if he thinks it necessary, or see that some one does it. as for mr. francis parkman, proposed by myself, i suppose his reputation is too solidly fixed as a scholar and a writer to need any words from me or others of his friends who may be present. he has been a great sufferer from infirmities which do not prevent him from being very good company, and which i have thought the good company he would find at the saturday club would perhaps enable him to forget for a while more readily. it has seemed to me so clear that he ought to belong to the club, if he were inclined to join it, that i should have nominated him long ago had i not labored under the impression that he must have been previously proposed.... yours very truly, o. w. holmes. for many years it seemed that time stood still with the autocrat. his happy home and his cheerful temper appeared to stay the hand of the destroyer. at last a long illness fell upon his wife; and after her death, when his only daughter, who had gone to keep her father's house, was suddenly taken from his side, the shadows of age gathered about him; then we learned that he was indeed an old man. for the few years that remained to him before his summons came he accepted the lot of age with extraordinary good cheer. his hearing became very imperfect. "i remind myself sometimes," he said, "of those verses i wrote some years ago. i wonder if you would remember them! i called the poem 'the archbishop and gil bias: a modernized version.'" he then repeated with great humor and pathos a few of the lines:- "_can you read as once you used to?_ well, the printing is so bad, no young folks' eyes can read it like the books that once we had. _are you quite as quick of hearing?_ please to say that once again. _don't i use plain words, your reverence?_ yes, i often use a cane." "as to my sight," he continued, "i have known for some years that i have cataracts slowly coming over my eyes; but they increase so very slowly that i often wonder which will win the race first--the cataracts or death." he was most carefully watched over during the succeeding years of disability by his distinguished son and his daughter-in-law, of whose talent he was sincerely proud. nevertheless, he suffered of necessity many lonely hours, in spite of all that devotion could do for him. such a wife and such a loving daughter could not pass from his side and find their places filled. but he did not "mope," as he wrote me one day, "i am too busy for that;" or, he might have said truthfully, too well sustained. his habit of carrying himself with an air of kindliness toward all, and of enjoyment in the opportunities still left him, was very beautiful and unusual. "if the lord thinks it best for me to stay until i tumble to pieces, i'm willing--i'm willing," he said. he was always capable of amusing his friends on the subject, as in the former days when old age came and offered him "a cane, an eyeglass, a tippet, and a pair of overshoes. 'no; much obliged to you,' said i.... so i dressed myself up in a jaunty way, and walked out alone; got a fall, caught a cold, was laid up with lumbago, and had time to think over the whole matter." who that heard him can ever forget the exquisite reading of "the last leaf" at the longfellow memorial meeting. the pathos of it was then understood for the first time. the poem had become an expression of his later self, and it was given with a personal significance which touched the hearts of all his hearers. his wit has left the world sparkling with the shafts it has let fly on every side. they are taken up continually and sent out again both by those who heard him utter them and by those who repeat them, unmindful of their origin. his attention was turned on some occasion to a young aspirant for artistic fame. he referred to the youthful person later as "one who performed a little on the lead pencil." he said to me one day, "i've sometimes made new words. in 'elsie venner' i made the word 'chrysocracy,' thinking it would take its place; but it didn't: 'plutocracy,' meaning the same thing, was adopted instead. oddly enough, i had a letter from a man to-day, asking if i did not make the word 'anaesthesia,' which i certainly did." in the sick-room he was always a welcome guest. a careful maid once asked if he minded climbing two flights of stairs to see his friend. "i laughed when she asked me," he said; "for i shall have to climb a good many more than that before i see the angels." "i gave two dinners to two parties of old gentlemen just before i left town," he said, the year before his death; and then added, "our baby was seventy-three!" his letters in the later years were full of feeling. he says in one of them, written on a christmas day, speaking of an old friend: "how many delightful hours the photographs bring back to me!... under his roof i have met more visitors to be remembered than under any other. but for his hospitality i should never have had the privilege of personal acquaintance with famous writers and artists whom i can now recall as i saw them, talked with them, heard them, in that pleasant library, that most lively and agreeable dining-room. how could it be otherwise, with such guests as he entertained, and with his own unflagging vivacity and his admirable social gifts? let me live in happy recollections to-day." only two years before dr. holmes's death he said in a letter received by me in italy: "but for this troublesome cold, which has so much better come out than i feared, i have been doing well enough--kept busy with letters and dictation of my uneventful history. it is strange how forgotten events and persons start out of the blank oblivion in which they seem to have been engulfed, as i fix my memory steadily on the past. i find it very easy, even fascinating, to call up the incidents, trivial oftentimes, but having for me a significance of their own, which lie in my past track like the broken toys of childhood. it seems as if the past was for each of us a great collection of negatives laid away, from which we can take positive pictures when we will--from many of them, that is; for only the recording angel can reproduce the pictures of every instant of our lives from these same negatives, of which he must have an infinite collection, with which sooner or later we are liable to be confronted." in another letter from beverly farms, when he was eighty-three, he says:-where this will find you, in a geographical point of view, i do not know; but i know your heart will be in its right place, and accept kindly the few barren words this sheet holds for you. yes; barren of incident, of news of all sorts, but yet having a certain flavor of boston, of cape ann, and, above all, of dear old remembrances, the suggestion of any one of which is as good as a page of any common letter. so, whatever i write will carry the fragrance of home with it, and pay you for the three minutes it costs you to read it.... i find great delight in talking over cathedrals and pictures and english scenery, and all the sights my traveling friends have been looking at, with mrs. bell. it seems to me that she knew them all beforehand, so that she was journeying all the time among reminiscences which were hardly distinguishable from realities. my recollections are to those of other people around me who call themselves old,--the sexagenarians, for instance,--something like what a cellar is to the ground-floor of a house. the young people in the upper stories (american spelling, _story_) go down to the basement in their inquiries, and think they have got to the bottom; but i go down another flight of steps, and find myself below the surface of the earth, as are the bodies of most of my contemporaries. as to health, i am doing tolerably well. i have just come in from a moderate walk in which i acquitted myself creditably. i take two-hour drives in the afternoon, in the open or close carriage, according to the weather; but i do not pretend to do much visiting, and i avoid all excursions when people go to have what they call a "good time." i am reading right and left--whatever turns up, but especially rereading old books. two new volumes of dr. johnson's letters have furnished me part of my reading. as for writing, when my secretary-miss gaudelet--comes back, i shall resume my dictation. no literary work ever seemed to me easier or more agreeable than living over my past life, and putting it on record as well as i could. if anybody should ever care to write a sketch or memoir of my life, these notes would help him mightily. my friends too might enjoy them--if i do not have the misfortune to outlive them all. with affectionate regards and all sweet messages to miss jewett. always your friend, o. w. holmes. this letter gives a very good picture of his life to the end. few incidents occurred to break the even current of the order he describes. he still dined out occasionally, and i find a few reminiscences of his delightful talk which linger with me. "i've several things bothering me," he confessed one day. "first, i am anxious to find a suitable inscription for a child's porringer. i never wrote a poem to a child, i believe. i love children dearly; i always want to stop them on the street: but i have never written about them; nor have i ever written much about women. i don't know why, but i _care_ too much to do the tom moore style of thing." he was eager to frame a letter to president eliot, and also one to president cleveland, in order to advance some one in need of help; but the grasshopper had become a burden. "i feel such things now when i have to do them," he said; "nevertheless, when young men and maidens come skipping in with an air of saying, 'please give me your autograph, and be quick about it; there may not be much time left,' i want to say, 'take care, young folks; i may be dancing over your graves yet!'" there was a clock which stood upon his table, the bequest of dr. henry j. bigelow. this remembrance from his dying friend was one of his most valued possessions. he loved to talk of dr. bigelow, and in a published discourse he has said of him: "he read men and women as great scholars read books. he took life at first hand, and not filtered through alphabets....he would get what he wanted out of a book as dexterously as a rodent will get the meat of a nut out of its shell.... he handled his rapidly acquired knowledge so like an adept in book-lore that one might have thought he was born in an alcove and cradled on a book-shelf." dr. bigelow was so frequently in dr. holmes's thought in the latter days that one can hardly give a picture of his later life without rehearsing something of his expression with regard to him. he says further: "dr. bigelow was unquestionably a man of true genius.... inexorable determination to have the truth, if nature could be forced to yield it, characterized his powerful intelligence." the doctor would often look up when the little clock was striking musically on his writing-table, and say, "it always reminds me tenderly of my dead friend." when the time came that writing was a burden, and indeed, except for limited periods, impossible, dr. holmes lived more and more in his affections. often, as i entered his room on a dull afternoon, he would say, "ah, now let's sit up by the fire and talk of all our friends." then would begin a series of opinions, witty and tender by turns, and interspersed with tears and smiles. on one such occasion he said: "there are very few modern hymns which have the old ring of saintliness in them. sometimes when i am disinclined to listen to the preacher at church, i turn to the hymn-book, and when one strikes my eye, i cover the name at the bottom, and guess. it is almost invariably watts or wesley; after those, there are very few which are good for much. "'calm on the listening ear of night' is a fine hymn, but even that lacks the virility of the old saints." our minds that day were full of one thought,--the death of phillips brooks,--and when, a moment later, he said:- "'sweet fields beyond the swelling flood'-there is nothing like that," it seemed quite natural that his voice should break and the tears come as he added, without mentioning the bishop's name, "how hard it is to think he is gone! i don't like to feel that i must live without him." his days grew gradually shorter, as the days of late october dwindle into golden noons. during the few hours when he was at his best he was wonderfully active, driving to his publisher's or to make an occasional visit, besides a daily walk. if to those who saw him continually the circle of his subjects of conversation began to appear somewhat circumscribed, upon those who met him only occasionally the old fascination still exerted itself. he set his door wide open when he made up his mind to receive and converse with any human being. there is nothing left to say of him which he did not cheerfully and truthfully say of himself. "i am intensely interested in my own personality," he began one day; "but we are all interesting to ourselves, or ought to be. i _know_ i am, and i see why. we take, as it were, a mold of our own thought. now let us compare it with the mold of another man on the same subject. his mold is either too large or too small, or the veins and reticulations are altogether different. no one mold fits another man's thought. it is our own, and as such has especial interest and value." it was really amazing to see his intellectual vigor in society even at this late period. when the conditions were satisfactory, at a small luncheon for instance, he would soon grow warm with excitement, his eyes would glow, and he would talk with his accustomed fire. he was like an old war-horse hearing the trumpet that called to battle. his activity and versatility of mind could still distance many a clever man in the prime of life. he responded in the most generous way to the expectations of strangers and foreigners who came to visit him as if on pilgrimage. he always found some entertainment for them. sometimes he would read them one of his poems; sometimes he would have a pretty scientific toy for their amusement; or again he would write his autograph in a volume of his works for them to carry away in remembrance. such guests could not help feeling that they had seen more than the dr. holmes of their imagination. he entered into their curiosity regarding himself with such charming sympathy that they came away thinking the half-hour they had passed in his study was one always to be remembered. as i think of those latest days, i recall what he himself wrote once, long ago, about old age: "one that remains walking," he says, "while others have dropped asleep, and keeps a little night-lamp flame of life burning year after year, if the lamp is not upset and there is only a careful hand held round it to prevent the puffs of wind from blowing the flame out. that's what i call an old man." "now," said the professor, "you don't mean to tell me that i have got to that yet? why, bless you, i am several years short of the time!" dr. holmes left this world, which he had found pleasant and had filled with pleasantness for others, after an illness that was happily brief. he passed, in the words of that great physician, sir thomas browne, "in drowsy approaches of sleep;... believing with those resolved christians who, looking on the death of this world but as a nativity of another, do contentedly submit unto the common necessity, and envy not enoch or elias." days with mrs. stowe in recalling mrs. stowe's life, with the remembrance of what she has been to her friends, to her country, and to the world, i am overborne by the sense of a soul instinct from its early consciousness with power working in her beyond her own thought or knowledge or will. her attitude seemed by nature to be that of contemplation. her heart was like a burning coal laid upon the altar of humanity; and when she stole up, as it were, in the night and laid it down for the slave with tears and supplications, it awakened neither alarm nor wonder in her spirit that in the morning she saw a bright fire burning there and lighting the whole earth. mrs. stowe had already passed through this great experience when i saw her for the first time in italy. it was only a few weeks before the war against slavery was openly declared, and she was like one who having "done all" must now "stand." this year indeed was one of the happiest of her life. she did not yet see the terrible feet of war already close upon us, yet she was convinced that the end of slavery was at hand. she was released at last from the toils which poverty had laid upon her overtasked body. her children were with her, and she was enjoying, as few persons know how to enjoy, the loveliness of italy. she delighted, too, in the congenial society of mr. and mrs. browning and the agreeable friends who were that winter grouped around them. after her long trial and her years of suffering she was to have "her day" in the world of beauty and love which lay about her. in one of her early letters to georgiana may, in 1833, she says, speaking of some relaxation which had come to her friend: "how good it would be for me to be put into a place which so breaks up and precludes thought. thought, intense emotional thought, has been my disease. how much good it might do me to be where i could not but be thoughtless." this letter was written when she was twenty-two years old, and there had never been any respite in her life until those sweet italian days of the winter of 1859 and '60. it was only about a year later than the date of the above letter when the subject of slavery was first brought under her own observation during a brief visit in kentucky. her father had received a call in boston, where he had been preaching for six years, to go to cincinnati, which at that period was considered the far west and almost like banishment; but the call was one not to be refused; the need of such preaching as dr. beecher's being greatly felt at that distant post. about a year after their arrival an invitation came to harriet to cross the river and to see something of kentucky in company with a young friend. she found herself on the estate which was later known as colonel shelby's in "uncle tom's cabin." her companion said later, in recalling their experience: "harriet did not seem to notice anything in particular that happened, but sat most of the time as though abstracted in thought. when the negroes did funny things and cut up capers, she did not seem to pay the slightest attention to them. afterwards, however, in reading uncle tom, i recognized scene after scene of that visit portrayed with the utmost fidelity, and knew at once where the material for that part of the story had been gathered." to show how completely her "style" was herself, there is a passage from one of her early letters describing her experience at niagara which burns with her own fire. "let me tell you," she says, "if i can, what is unutterable.... i did not once think if it were high or low; whether it roared or didn't roar.... my mind whirled off, it seemed to me, in a new strange world.... that rainbow, breaking out, trembling, fading, and again coming like a beautiful spirit walking the waters. oh, it is lovelier than it is great; it is like the mind that made it; great, but so veiled in beauty that we gaze without terror. i felt as if i could have gone over with the waters; it would be so beautiful a death; there would be no fear in it. i felt the rock tremble under me with a sort of joy. i was so maddened i could have gone, too, if that had gone." the first wife of mr. stowe was her most intimate friend, and his suffering at her death moved her to intense pity, which finally ripened into love. at the last moment of her maidenhood she wrote again to georgiana may: "in about half an hour more your old friend, companion, schoolmate, sister, etc., will cease to be hatty beecher and change to nobody knows who. my dear, you are engaged and pledged in a year or two to encounter a similar fate, and do you wish to know how you shall feel? well, my dear, i have been dreading and dreading the time, and lying awake all last week wondering how i should live through this overwhelming crisis, and lo! it has come and i feel _nothing at all_." her marriage with professor stowe was a congenial one. he discovered very early what her career must be and wrote to her once during a brief absence: "god has written it in his book that you must be a literary woman, and who are we that we should contend against god?" his admiration for her was perfect, a feeling which she reciprocated in a somewhat different form. "i did not know," she once wrote to him, "until i came away how much i was dependent upon you for information. there are a thousand favorite subjects on which i could talk with you better than with any one else. if you were not already my dearly loved husband, i should certainly fall in love with you." she can speak to him with an openness which she uses to no one else; she says, and in this sentence she gives the secret of much which has appeared inexplicable to the world: "one thing more in regard to myself. the absence and wandering of mind and forgetfulness that so often vexes you is a physical infirmity with me. it is the failing of a mind not calculated to endure a great pressure of care, and so much do i feel the pressure i am under, so much is my mind darkened and troubled by care that life seriously holds out few allurements,--only my children." she used to say laughingly sometimes in later years, "my brother henry and i are something like anacondas: we have our winter; when we are tired we curl up and disappear, within ourselves, as it were; nobody can get anything out of us; we move about and attend to our affairs and appear like other folks perhaps, but we are not there." the trouble was that no one could be prepared for these vanishings, not even herself. perhaps a dinner company of invited guests were eagerly listening to her conversation, when at some suggestion of a new train of ideas, she would suddenly become silent and hardly speak again. occasionally at a reception she would wander away, only to be found strolling about in the conservatory, if there were one, or quietly observant in some coign of vantage where she was not likely to be disturbed. my first meeting with mrs. stowe found her in one of her absent moods. we were in florence, and she was delighting herself in the fascinations of that lovely city. not alone every day but every second as it passed was full of eager interest to her. she could say with thoreau, "i moments live who lived but years." we had both been invited to a large reception, on a certain evening, in one of the old palaces on the arno. there were music and dancing, and there were lively groups of ladies and gentlemen strolling from room to room, contrasting somewhat strangely in their gayety with the solemn pictures hanging on the walls, and a sense of shadowy presence which seems to haunt those dusky interiors. an odd discrepancy between the modern company and the surroundings, a weird mingling of the past and the present, made any apparition appear possible, and left room only for a faint thrill of surprise when a voice by my side said, "there is mrs. stowe." in a moment she approached and i was presented to her, and after a brief pause she passed on. all this was natural enough, but a wave of intense disappointment swept over me. why had i found no words to express or even indicate the feeling that had choked me? was the fault mine? oh, yes, i said to myself, for i could not conceive it to be otherwise, and i looked upon my opportunity, the gift of the gods, as utterly and forever wasted. i was depressed and sorrowing over the vanishing of a presence i might perhaps never meet again, and no glamour of light, or music or pictures or friendly voices could recall any pleasure to my heart. meanwhile, the unconscious object of all this disturbance was strolling quietly along, leaning on the arm of a friend, hardly ever speaking, followed by a group of traveling companions, and entirely absorbed in the gay scene around her. she was a small woman; and her pretty curling hair and far-away dreaming eyes, and her way of becoming occupied in what interested her until she forgot everything else for the time, all these i first began to see and understand as i gazed after her retreating figure. mrs. stowe's personal appearance has received scant justice and no mercy at the hand of the photographer. she says herself, during her triumphal visit to england after the publication of "uncle tom:" "the general topic of remark on meeting me seems to be that i am not so bad looking as they were afraid i was; and i do assure you, when i have seen the things that are put up in the shop windows here with my name under them, i have been lost in wondering imagination at the boundless loving-kindness of my english and scottish friends in keeping up such a warm heart for such a gorgon. i should think that the sphinx in the london museum might have sat for most of them. i am going to make a collection of these portraits to bring home to you. there is a great variety of them, and they will be useful, like the irishman's guideboard which showed 'where the road did not go.'" i remember once accompanying her to a reception at a well-known house in boston, where, before the evening was over, the hostess drew me aside, saying, "why did you never tell me that mrs. stowe was beautiful?" and indeed, when i observed her in the full ardor of conversation, with her heightened color, her eyes shining and awake, but filled with great softness, her abundant curling hair rippling naturally about her head and falling a little at the sides (as in the portrait by richmond), i quite agreed with the lady of the house. nor was that the first time her beauty had been revealed to me, but she was seldom seen to be beautiful by the great world, and the pleasure of this recognition was very great to those who loved her. she was never afflicted with a personal consciousness of her reputation, nor was she trammeled by it. the sense that a great work had been accomplished through her only made her more humble, and her shy, absent-minded ways were continually throwing her admirers into confusion. late in life (when her failing powers made it impossible for her to speak as one living in a world which she seemed to have left far behind) she was accosted, i was told, in the garden of her country retreat, in the twilight one evening, by a good old retired sea captain who was her neighbor for the time. "when i was younger," said he respectfully, holding his hat in his hand while he spoke, "i read with a great deal of satisfaction and instruction 'uncle tom's cabin.' the story impressed me very much, and i am happy to shake hands with you, mrs. stowe, who wrote it." "i did not write it," answered the white-haired old lady gently, as she shook the captain's hand. "you didn't?" he ejaculated in amazement. "why, who did, then?" "god wrote it," she replied simply. "i merely did his dictation." "amen," said the captain reverently, as he walked thoughtfully away. this was the expression in age of what lay at the foundation of her life. she always spoke and behaved as if she recognized herself to be an instrument breathed upon by the divine spirit. when we consider how this idea absorbed her to the prejudice of what appeared to others a wholesome exercise of human will and judgment, it is not wonderful that the world was offended when she once made conclusions contrary to the opinion of the public, and thought best to publish them. mrs. stowe was a delightful talker. she loved to gather a small circle of friends around a fireside, when she easily took the lead in fun and story telling. this was her own ground, and upon it she was not to be outdone. "let me put my feet upon the fender," she would say, "and i can talk till all is blue." it appeared to those who listened most frequently to her conversation that a large part of the charm of her tales was often lost in the writing down; yet with all her unusual powers she was an excellent listener herself. her natural modesty was such that she took keen pleasure in gathering fresh thought and inspiration from the conversation of others. nor did the universal homage she received from high and low leave any unworthy impression upon her self-esteem. she was grateful and pleased and humble, and the only visible effect produced upon her was the heightened pleasure she received from the opportunities of knowing men and women who excited her love and admiration. her name was a kind of sacred talisman, especially in new and old england. it was a banner which had led men to battle against slavery. therefore it was often a cause of surprise and social embarrassment when the bearer of this name proved to be sometimes too modest, and sometimes too absent-minded, to remember that anything was expected of her or anything arranged for her special entertainment. she was utterly taken by surprise once in a foreign city by being invited out to breakfast, as she supposed privately, and finding herself suddenly in a large hall, upon a raised platform crowded with local dignitaries, and greeted before she could get her breath by a chorus of children's voices singing an anthem in her honor, especially composed for the occasion. her love of fun was greatly excited by this unexpected situation, and she used to relate the anecdote, with details about her unprepared condition which were irresistibly amusing. in a letter home she refers incidentally to the large breakfast party and says: "i could not help wondering if old mother scotland had put into 'the father of all the tea-kettles' two thousand teaspoonfuls of tea for the company and one for the teapot, as is our good yankee custom." the tributes paid to her were ceaseless, and her house in hartford testifies to many of them. "there," as her friend and neighbor the reverend joseph twichell wrote once in a brief sketch of her--a sketch full of deep feeling--"there, an observant stranger would soon discover whose house he was in, and be reminded of the world-wide distinction her genius has won and of that great service of humanity with which her name is forever identified. he would, for instance, remark on its pedestal in the bow-window a beautiful bronze statuette by cumberworth called 'the african woman of the fountain,' and on an easel in the back parlor a lovely engraving of the late duchess of sutherland and her daughter--a gift from her son, the present duke of that name, subscribed 'mrs. stowe, with the duke of sutherland's kind regards, 1869.' should he look into a low oaken case standing in the hall, he would find there the twenty-six folio volumes of the 'affectionate and christian address of many thousands of women in great britain and ireland to their sisters in the united states of america' pleading the cause of the slave, and signed with over half a million names, which was delivered to mrs. stowe in person at a notable gathering at stafford house, in england, in 1853; and with it similar addresses from the citizens of leeds, of glasgow, and edinburgh, presented at about the same time. the house, indeed, is a treasury of such relics, testimonials of reverence and regard, trophies of renown from many lands, enough to furnish a museum, all of the highest historic interest and value.... there are relics, too, of more private sort; for example, a smooth stone of two or three pounds weight, and a sketch or study of it by ruskin made at a hotel on lake neuchã¢tel, where he and mrs. stowe chanced to meet.... one of her most prized possessions is a gold chain of ten links, which, on occasion of the gathering at stafford house that has been referred to, the duchess of sutherland took from her own arm and clasped upon mrs. stowe's, saying, 'this is the memorial of a chain which we trust will soon be broken.' on several of the ten links were engraved the great dates in the annals of emancipation in england; and the hope was expressed that she would live to add to them other dates of like import in the progress of liberty this side the atlantic. that was in 1853. twelve years later every link had its inscription, and the record was complete." it was my good fortune to be in mrs. stowe's company once in rome when she came unexpectedly face to face with an exhibition of the general feeling of reverence and gratitude towards herself. we had gone together to the rooms of the brothers castellani, the world-famous workers in gold. the collection of antique gems and the beautiful reproductions of them were new to us. mrs. stowe was full of enthusiasm, and we lingered long over the wonderful things which the brothers brought forward to show. among them was the head of an egyptian slave carved in black onyx. it was an admirable work of art, and while we were enjoying it one of them said to mrs. stowe, "madam, we know what you have been to the poor slave. we ourselves are but poor slaves still in italy: you feel for us; will you keep this gem as a slight recognition of what you have done?" she took the jewel in silence; but when we looked for some response, her eyes were filled with tears, and it was impossible for her to speak. this feeling often found less refined manifestation. one day when she was shopping in boston, after making her purchase she gave her name in a low but distinct voice to the clerk who was to send the goods. "dear me," said a lively woman, audibly by my side, "i should be ashamed to give that name; i should as soon think of giving angel gabriel!" of course we were all greatly amused by this sally, but mrs. stowe smiled quietly according to her wont and passed on. great human tenderness was one of her chief characteristics. although she was a reformer by nature there was no sternness in her composition. forgetfulness of others there was certainly sometimes, arising from her hopeless absent-mindedness and the preoccupation consequent upon her work; but her whole life was swayed and ruled by her affections. her love was a sheet anchor which held in the stormiest seas. of her household devotion it is impossible to speak fitly; but there are few natures that can be said to have been more dependent upon human love. her tender ways were inexpressibly touching. early in life she had written to her brother while hardly more than a girl: "i wish i could bring myself to feel perfectly indifferent to the opinions of others. i believe there never was a person more dependent on the good and evil opinions of those around than i am. this desire to be loved forms, i fear, the great motive for all my actions." such a nature was quite unlikely to play the part of a famous woman of the world with any success, and she did not attempt it. she was always reaching out to the friends of her adoption and drawing them closer to her side. in those days of our early acquaintance in italy we had ample opportunity to discover the affectionate qualities of her character. if my first interview was a disappointment, her second greeting a few days later had the warmth of old acquaintance. from that moment we (my husband and i) were continually meeting her, in galleries and out of them; at bellosguardo, which hawthorne had just quitted, but where isa blagden and frances power cobbe still lingered, or in florence itself with francesca alexander and her family; at the trollopes', or elsewhere, while our evenings were commonly spent in each other's apartments. as the hours of our european play-days drew near the end, she began to lay plans for returning home in the steamer with those who had grown dear to her, and in one of her notes of that period she wrote to me:-"on the strength of having heard that you were going home in the europa june 16th, we also have engaged passage therein for that time, and hope that we shall not be disappointed.... it must be true, we can't have it otherwise.... our southern italy trip was a glory--it was a rose--a nightingale--all, in short, that one ever dreams; but alas! it is over." it was a delightful voyage homeward in every sense. at that period a voyage was no little matter of six days, but a good fourteen days of sitting together on deck in pleasant summer weather, and having time enough and to spare. hawthorne and his family also concluded to join the party. mrs. hawthorne, who was always the romancer in conversation, filled the evening hours by weaving magic webs of her fancies, until we looked upon her as a second scheherazade, and the day the head was to be cut off was the day we should come to shore. "oh," said hawthorne, "i wish we might never get there." but the good ship moved steadily as fate. meanwhile, mrs. stowe often took her turn at entertaining the little group. she was seldom tired of relating stories of new england life and her early experiences. when the ship came to shore, mrs. stowe and her daughters went at once to andover, where professor stowe had remained at his post during their long absence in europe. she went also with equal directness to her writing-desk; and though there are seldom any dates upon her letters, the following note must have been written shortly after her return:-my dear mr. fields,--"agnes of sorrento" was conceived on the spot,--a spontaneous tribute to the exceeding loveliness and beauty of all things there. one bright evening, as i was entering the old gateway, i saw a beautiful young girl sitting in its shadow selling oranges. she was my agnes. walking that same evening through the sombre depths of the gorge, i met "old elsie," walking erect and tall, with her piercing black eyes, roman nose, and silver hair,--walking with determination in every step, and spinning like one of the fates glittering silver flax from a distaff she carried in her hands. a few days after, our party, being weatherbound at salerno, had resort to all our talents to pass the time, and songs and stories were the fashion of the day. the first chapter was my contribution to that entertainment. the story was voted into existence by the voices of all that party, and by none more enthusiastically than by one young voice which will never be heard on earth more. it was kept in mind and expanded and narrated as we went on to rome over a track that the pilgrim agnes is to travel. to me, therefore, it is fragrant with love of italy and memory of some of the brightest hours of life. i wanted to write something of this kind as an author's introduction to the public. could you contrive to print it on a fly-leaf, if i get it ready, and put a little sort of dedicatory poem at the end of it? i shall do this at least in the book, if not now. a network of difficulties seems to have closed about her at this time, because in spite of her interest in the new story and the hopeful view which she took of its speedy completion, several months passed by before anything definite came respecting her literary plans. meanwhile she had been tempted into beginning a story for "the independent," which proved to be "the pearl of orr's island," a story good enough, if she had been left to herself and not overridden by greedy editors and publishers, to have added a lustre even to her name. it is to this she refers in the following letter when she speaks of her "maine story." unhappily this first number drew off power which belonged to "agnes of sorrento," and agnes served to prevent her from ending "the pearl of orr's island" in a manner worthy of its first promise. she says, writing in january, 1861, "authors are apt, i suppose, like parents, to have their unreasonable partialities. everybody has,--and i have a pleasure in writing 'agnes of sorrento' that gilds this icy winter weather. i write my maine story with a shiver, and come back to this as to a flowery home where i love to rest. "my manuscripts are always left to the printers for punctuation,--as you will observe,--i have no time for copying." mrs. stowe's health was not vigorous at this period. incessant drafts upon her energy had enfeebled her; but her spirit was indomitable, and when she was weary a brief visit to boston was, she considered, sufficient to restore her nervous force. during these visits she sometimes rehearsed the story of the early days of her married life, when she fought her way through difficulties and under the burden of sorrows which would have crushed many another woman. the tale of the arrival of the family on a wintry day in brunswick, me., where her husband had been appointed to a professorship in bowdoin college, of the dreary season, the bitter cold, the unopened door of an empty house, their future home, left a vivid impression upon the minds of her listeners; not because of its forlornness, but because of the splendid energy and patience which she brought to the occasion and the light she was able to cast over the grimness of circumstance. of course, at the date in which this is written, it is difficult to conceive anything like grimness as associated with the comfortable and social town of brunswick, but we must not fail to remember how rapid the growth of winter comfort has been throughout new england. this house in the village of brunswick was the birthplace of "uncle tom's cabin;" but long before her pen could be allowed to touch the paper the door of the house must be unlocked, the fire made, and her little children warmed and fed. the walls too must be freshly papered and painted with her own unassisted hands, and a long table spread which could serve as a family dining-table and her own and only place for writing. here, as mr. fields once said in one of his lectures, "a new england woman once wrote a great novel while beset with difficulties, pinched by poverty, and surrounded by hard work from sunrise to midnight, year in and year out. she was a pallid, earnest, tired little body, who sat in her white cottage down in brunswick in the state of maine. she had been busy all day, perhaps painting a room, for her means would not allow her to hire it done. besides that labor she cooked for the family, and had done all her other household duties, without assistance, and without flinching or groaning. the children were hushed to sleep; all was still about the house, and she trimmed the solitary lamp for a long session at her writing-table. "thus she sat many a night and wrote, and wept, and wrote again, until she had poured out her soul before the lord for humanity's sake. and then came, a little slowly at first, but rolling surely with an awful sound, that great universal response; the voice of the people of the whole earth speaking as one." the labor, the shock, were past, but the fatigue and the strain of the long struggle for freedom which she carried always on her own heart could never be over-lived. she was already, as mrs. hawthorne used to say, "tired far into the future." the woman who had written "uncle tom" was not to continue a series of equally exciting stories, but she was to bear the burden and heat of much everyday labor with the patience and the rejoicing of all faithful souls. we are reminded, as we study mrs. stowe's life, of swinburne's noble tribute to sir walter scott after reading his journals which appeared in full only five or six years ago. he says: "now that we have before us in full--in all reasonable or desired completeness--the great man's own record of his troubles, his emotions, and his toils, we find it, from the opening to the close, a record, not only of dauntless endurance, but of elastic and joyous heroism.... it is no longer pity that any one may presume to feel for him at the lowest ebb of his fortunes or his life; it is rapture of sympathy, admiration, and applause. 'this was a man.'" the war, the enlistment of her second son, the eldest having already died, filled her heart and mind afresh with new problems and anxieties. she wrote the following hurried note from hartford in 1862, which gives some idea of her occupations and frame of mind: "i am going to washington to see the heads of departments myself, and to satisfy myself that i may refer to the emancipation proclamation as a reality and a substance, not a fizzle out at the little end of the horn, as i should be sorry to call the attention of my sisters in europe to any such impotent conclusion.... i mean to have a talk with 'father abraham' himself, among others." mrs. stowe lost no time, but proceeded to carry out her plan as soon as practicable. of this visit to washington she says little in her letters beyond the following meagre words: "it seems to be the opinion here, not only that the president will stand up to his proclamation, but that the border states will accede to his proposition for emancipation. i have noted the thing as a glorious expectancy!... today to the home of the contrabands, seeing about five hundred poor fugitives eating a comfortable thanksgiving dinner, and singing, 'oh, let my people go!' it was a strange and moving sight." it was left for others to speak of her interview with president lincoln. her daughter was told that when the president heard her name he seized her hand, saying, "is this the little woman who made this great war?" he then led her apart to a seat in the window, where they were withdrawn from other guests, and undisturbed. no one but those two souls will ever know what waves of thought and feeling swept over them in that brief hour. afterwards she heard these words pronounced in the senate chamber in the message of president lincoln; it was in the darkest hour of the war, mrs. stowe wrote, when defeat and discouragement had followed the union armies and all hearts were trembling with fear: "if this struggle is to be prolonged till there be not a home in the land where there is not one dead, till all the treasure amassed by the unpaid labor of the slave shall be wasted, till every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be atoned by blood drawn by the sword, we can only bow and say, 'just and true are thy ways, thou king of saints'!" during her boston visits mrs. stowe was always interested to observe the benevolent work going on about her and to lend a hand if it were possible. one incident flavored with a strong touch of the ludicrous still lingers in my memory. we had fallen in somewhere with a poor little waif of a boy, one easily to be recognized by the practiced eye of to-day as a good specimen of the street arab. this little being was taken up by us and brought home. his arrival was looked upon with horror by the servants, who recognized existing facts and foresaw future miseries veiled from our less educated vision. a visit to the bathroom was at once suggested; but as none of the house maidens offered to take charge of the business, mrs. stowe announced herself as more than equal to the occasion, and proceeded to administer the first bath probably ever known to that specimen of the human family. hawthorne's clasping the leprous child was but a shadow compared to that hour, but happily mrs. stowe was not hawthorne and she combed and scrubbed faithfully. i cannot recall the precise ending of the tale. i can only remember the whole house being aroused at some unearthly hour of that night by the child's outcries, from his unusual indulgence in a good supper, and mrs. stowe's amusement at the situation. she declared the household was far better constituted to look after young cherubim than young male humans. something of the canary-bird order would be much more in its line, she said. i believe he ran away the next day, probably understanding the fitness of things better than ourselves. at any rate i find a comforting note on the subject from andover saying: "if we can do no more we must let him go. he certainly stands a better chance in his life's journey for the little good we have been able to put into him. when we try a little to resist the evil current and to pull here and there one out, we learn how dreadful is the downward gravitation, the sweep and whirl of the maelstrom. let us hope all these have a father, who charges himself with them somewhere further on in their eternal pilgrimage when our weak hold fails." in the autumn of 1862 a plan for leaving andover altogether was finally matured. she wrote, "you have heard that we are going to hartford to live, and i am now in all the bustle of house planning, to say nothing of grading, under-draining, and setting out trees around our future home. it is four acres and a half of lovely woodland on the banks of a river and yet within an easy walk of hartford; in fact, in the city limits; and when our house is done you and yours must come and see us. i would rather have made the change in less troublous times, but the duties here draw so hardly on mr. stowe's strength that i thought it better to live on less and be in a place of our own, and with no responsibilities except those of common gentlefolk." mrs. stowe's love of home, of the fireside, and her faith in family ties were marked characteristics of her nature. for the first time in her life she was now to make the material house at least after her own idea, and for many months she was entirely absorbed in the enjoyment of forming plans for her hartford home. in november, 1862, she was in hartford superintending the growing establishment. she wrote: "my house with _eight_ gables is growing wonderfully. i go over every day to see it. i am busy with drains, sewers, sinks, digging, trenching, and above all with manure! you should see the joy with which i gaze on manure heaps in which the eye of faith sees delaware grapes and d'angoulãªme pears, and all sorts of roses and posies, all which at some future day i hope you will be able to enjoy. "do tell me if our friend hawthorne praises that arch-traitor pierce in his preface and your loyal firm publishes it. i never read the preface, and have not yet seen the book, but they say so here, and i can scarcely believe it of you, if i can of him. i regret that i went to see him last summer. what! patronize such a traitor to our faces! i can scarce believe it." in the month of may, 1863, came her first letter from the new place. already we find that the ever-present need has driven her on to print her thoughts about "house and home." hartford, oakwold, may 1st. my dear friend,--i came here a month ago to hurry on the preparations for our house, in which i am now writing, in the high bow window of mr. stowe's study, overlooking the wood and river. we are not moved in yet, only our things, and the house presents a scene of the wildest chaos, the furniture having been tumbled in and lying boxed and promiscuous. i sent the sixth number of "house and home" papers a week ago, and, not having heard from it, am a little anxious. i always want faith that a bulky manuscript will go safe,--for all i never lost one.... i should like to show you the result here when we are fairly in, and the spring leaves are out. it is the brightest, cheerfullest, homeliest home that you could see,--not even excepting yours. the pursuit of literature under such circumstances is neither natural nor profitable. in mrs. stowe's case it proved that she was pursuing, not literature, but the necessities of life. everything in the household economy now depended upon her; and however strong her tendencies were naturally, she no longer possessed the reserved strength to forge the work from her brain. in the writing of "uncle tom," great as were the odds against her, she had been preparing to that end from the moment of her birth. her father's fiery powers of expression; her mother's nature absorbed in one still dream of love and duty; her own solitary childhood in spite of the enormous household in which she was brought up; above all her brooding nature quietly absorbing and assimilating the knowledge and thought which were finding expression around her; the first years of married life in cincinnati, where the slaves were continually harbored and assisted, notwithstanding the risks to life and property;--everything, in short, within and around her was nourishing the child of her genius which was to leap into being and gather the armies of america. on the whole we may rather wonder at the high average value of the literary work by which she lived, especially when we follow the hints given in her letters of her interrupted and crowded existence. in june, 1863, she says: "i wrote my piece in a sea of troubles. i had, as you see, to write by amanuensis, and yet my little senate of girls say they like it better than anything i have written yet." it was a touching characteristic to see how the "senate of girls," or of such household friends as she could muster wherever she might be, were always called in to keep up her courage and to give her a sympathetic stimulus. during the days when she was writing, it was never safe to be far away, for she was rapid as light itself, and before a brief hour was ended we were pretty sure to hear her voice calling "do come, come and hear, and tell me how you like it." her june letter continues: "can i begin to tell you what it is to begin to keep house in an unfinished home and place, dependent on a carpenter, a plumber, a mason, a bell-hanger, who come and go at their own sweet will, breaking in, making all sorts of chips, dust, dirt, going off in the midst leaving all standing,--reappearing at uncertain intervals and making more dust, chips, and dirt. one parlor and my library have thus risen piecemeal by disturbance and convulsions. they are now almost done, and the last box of books is almost unpacked, but my head aches so with the past confusion that i cannot get up any feeling of rest. i can't enjoy--can't feel a minute to sit down and say 'it is done.' "the fountain plays, the plants flourish, and our front hall minus the stair railing looks beautifully; my pictures are all hung in parlor and library, and yet i feel so unsettled. well, in a month more perhaps i shall get my brains right side up." the following year was made memorable in mrs. stowe's life by the marriage of her youngest daughter. again i find that no description can begin to give as clearly as the glimpses in her own letters the multifarious responsibilities which beset her. she says: "i am in trouble,--have been in trouble ever since my turtledoves announced their intention of pairing in june instead of august, because it entailed on me an immediate necessity of bringing everything out of doors and in to a state of completeness for the wedding exhibition in june. the garden must be planted, the lawn graded, harrowed, rolled, seeded, and the grass up and growing, stumps got out and trees got in, conservatory made over, belts planted, holes filled,--and all by three very slippery sort of irishmen who had rather any time be minding their own business than mine. i have back doorsteps to be made, and troughs, screens, and what not; papering, painting, and varnishing, hitherto neglected, to be completed; also spring house-cleaning; also dressmaking for one bride and three ordinary females; also ---and ---and ----'s wardrobes to be overlooked; also carpets to be made and put down; also a revolution in the kitchen cabinet, threatening for a time to blow up the whole establishment altogether." and so the letter proceeds with two more sheets, adding near the end: "i send you to-day a 'chimney-corner' on 'our martyrs,' which i have written out of the fullness of my heart.... it is an account of the martyrdom of a christian boy of our own town of andover, who died of starvation and want in a southern prison on last christmas day." just one month before the marriage she writes again: "the wedding is indeed an absorbing whirlpool, but amid it all i have the next 'chimney-corner' in good train and shall send it on to-morrow or next day." how small a portion of the world outside can understand the lives of writers, actors, and those whose professions compel them to depend directly upon the public! no private joy, no private sorrow, no rest, no change, is recognized by this taskmaster. it is well: on the whole we would not have it otherwise; because those who can minister to the great public embrace their profession in a spirit of conscious or unconscious self-denial. in either case the result is the same: development, advancement, and sometimes attainment. the wedding is not two days over when another letter arrives full of her literary work, yet adding that she longs for rest and if we will only tell her where campton is, whither we had gone, she would gladly join us. "i was a weary idiot," she continues, "by the time the wedding was over, and said 'yes ma'am' to the men and 'no sir' to the women in sheer imbecility." nevertheless she did not get to campton, but kept on, with the exception of a few brief visits at peekskill and elsewhere until the autumn. in one of her notes she says: "i have returned to my treadmill. a---is to leave as soon as she can get ready, and i am trying to see her off--helping her to get her things together, and trying to induce her to take a new stand in a new place and make herself a respectable woman. when she is gone a load will be off my back. if it were not for the good that is still left in our fellows our task would be easier than it is; we could cut them adrift and let them swim; but while we see much that may be turned to good account in them we hang on, or let them hang on, and our boat moves slow. so behold me fighting my good fight of womanhood against dust and disorganization and the universal downward tendency of everybody, hoping for easier times by and by." with her heroic nature she was always ready to lead the forlorn hope. the child no one else was willing to provide for, the woman the world despised, were brought into her home and cared for as her own. unhappily, her delicate health at this time (though she was naturally strong), her constant literary labors, her uncertain income, her private griefs, all united, caused her to fall short in ability to accomplish what she undertook; hence there were often crises from sudden illness and non-fulfillment of engagements which were very serious in their effects, but the elasticity of her spirits was something marvelous and carried her over many a hard place. in the autumn of 1864 she wrote: "i feel i need to write in these days, to keep from thinking of things that make me dizzy and blind, and fill my eyes with tears so that i cannot see the paper. i mean such things as are being done where our heroes are dying as shaw died. it is not wise that all our literature should run in a rut cut through our hearts and red with our blood. i feel the need of a little gentle household merriment and talk of common things, to indulge which i have devised the following." notwithstanding her view of the need and her skillfully devised plans to meet it, she soon sent another epistle, showing how impossible it was to stem the current of her thought. november 29, 1864. my dear friend,--i have sent my new year's article, the result of one of those peculiar experiences which sometimes occur to us writers. i had planned an article, gay, sprightly, wholly domestic; but as i began and sketched the pleasant home and quiet fireside, an irresistible impulse _wrote for me_ what followed,--an offering of sympathy to the suffering and agonized whose homes have forever been darkened. many causes united at once to force on me this vision, from which generally i shrink, but which sometimes will not be denied,--will make itself felt. just before i went to new york two of my earliest and most intimate friends lost their oldest sons, captains and majors,--splendid fellows physically and morally, beautiful, brave, religious, uniting the courage of soldiers to the faith of martyrs,--and when i went to brooklyn it seemed as if i were hearing some such thing almost every day; and henry, in his profession as minister, has so many letters full of imploring anguish, the cry of hearts breaking that ask help of him.... it was during one of mrs. stowe's visits to boston in the ensuing year that she chanced to talk with greater fullness and openness than she had done with us before on the subject of spiritualism. in the simplest way she affirmed her entire belief in manifestations of the nearness and individual life of the unseen, and gave vivid illustrations of the reasons why her faith was thus assured. she never sought after such testimony, so far as i am aware, unless it may have been to sit with others who were interested, but her conclusions were definite and unvarying. at that period such a declaration of faith required a good deal of bravery; now the subject has assumed a different phase, and there are few thinking people who do not recognize a certain truth hidden within the shadows. she spoke with tender seriousness of "spiritual manifestations" as recorded in the new testament and in the prophets. from his early youth her husband had possessed the peculiar power of seeing persons about him who could not be perceived by others; visions so distinct that it was impossible for him to distinguish at times between the real and the unreal. i recall one illustration which had occurred only a few years previous to their departure from andover. she had been called to boston one day on business. making her preparations hurriedly, she bade the household farewell, and rushed to the station, only to see the train go out as she arrived. there was nothing to do but to return home and wait patiently for the next train; but wishing not to be disturbed, she quietly opened a side door and crept noiselessly up the staircase leading to her own room, sitting down by her writing-table in the window. she had been seated about half an hour when professor stowe came in, looked about him with a preoccupied air, but did not speak to her. she thought his behavior strange, and amused herself by watching him; at last the situation became so extraordinary that she began to laugh. "why," he exclaimed, with a most astonished air, "is that you? i thought it was one of my visions!" it may seem a singular antithesis to say of the writer of one of the greatest stories the world has yet produced that she was not a student of literature. books as a medium of the ideas of the age, and as the promulgators of morals and religion, were of course like the breath of her life; but a study of the literature of the past as the only true foundation for a literature of the present was outside the pale of her occupations, and for the larger portion of her life outside of her interest. during the riper season of her activity with the pen, the necessity of studying style and the thoughts of others gained a larger hold upon her mind; but she always said, with a twinkle of amusement and pride, that she never could have done anything without mr. stowe. he knew everything, and all she had to do was to go to him. of her great work she has written, in that noble introduction to the illustrated edition of "uncle tom" speaking of herself in the third person: "the story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her.... the book insisted upon getting itself into being, and would take no denial." it is easily seen that it was neither a spirit of depreciation of knowledge nor lack of power to become a student which made her fail to obtain adjuncts indispensable to great writers, but her feet were led in other paths and her strength was needed for other ends. madame george sand said, writing of "uncle tom" soon after its publication: "if its judges, possessed with the love of what they call 'artistic work,' find unskillful treatment in the book, look well at them to see if their eyes are dry when they are reading this or that chapter.... i cannot say that mrs. stowe has talent, as one understands it in the world of letters, but she has genius, as humanity feels the need of genius,--the genius of goodness, not that of the rules of letters, but of the saint." all her life she stimulated the activity of her pen rather by her sympathy with humanity than by studies of literature. in one of her letters she says: "you see whoever can write on home and family matters, on what people think of and are anxious about and want to hear from, has an immense advantage. the success of the 'house and home papers' shows me how much people want this sort of thing, and now i am bringing the series to a close i find i have ever so much more to say; in fact, the idea has come in this shape.... a set of papers for the next year to be called 'christopher's evenings,' which will allow great freedom and latitude; a capacity of striking anywhere when a topic seems to be in the public mind and that will comprise a little series of sketches or rather little groups of sketches out of which books may be made. you understand christopher writes these for the winter-evening amusement of his family. one set will be entitled 'an account of the seven little foxes that spoil the vines.' this will cover seven sketches of certain domestic troubles. another set is the 'cathedral; or, the shrines of home saints,' under which i shall give certain sketches of home characters contrasting with that of the legends of the saints: the shirt-making, knitting, whooping-coughtending saints, the aunt esthers and aunt marias.... hum (her humming bird) is well--notwithstanding the dull weather; we keep him in a sunny upper chamber and feed him daily on sugar and water, and he catches his own mutton." thus in swift succession we find, not only charming little idylls here and there like her story of "hum the son of buzz" in the "young folks magazine," being the tale of her captured and tamed humming-bird, but also "little foxes," "the chimney-corner," a volume of collected poems, "oldtown folks," "sam lawson's fireside tales" and others, following with tireless rapidity, bearing the same stamp of living sympathy with difficulties of the time and breathing a spirit of helpfulness and faith. at this period, as she had an accessible home in the pleasant city of hartford, strangers and travelers often sought and found her. in one of her familiar notes of 1867 she wrote: "the amberleys have written that they are coming to us to-morrow, and of all times, accordingly, our furnace must spring a leak. we are hoping to make all right before they get here, but i am really ashamed to show such weather at this time of year. poor america! it's like having your mother expose herself by a fit of ill temper before strangers.... do, i beg, write to a poor sinner laboring under a book." and again, a little later: "_the book_ is almost done--hang it! but done _well_, and will be a good thing for young men to read, and young women too, and so i'll send you one. you'll find some things in it, i fancy, that i know and you don't, about the times before you were born, when i was 'hush, hush, my dear-ing' in cincinnati.... i smell spring afar off --sniff--do you? any smell of violets in the distance? i think it comes over the water from the pamfili doria." among other responsibilities assumed by her at this time was that of getting professor stowe to consent to publish a book. this was no laughing matter; at first the book was planned merely as an article on the "talmud" for the "atlantic magazine." afterwards professor stowe enlarged the design. later in speaking of his manuscript she says: "you must not scare him off by grimly declaring that you must have the _whole manuscript complete_ before you set the printer to work; you must take the three quarters he brings you and at least make believe begin printing, and he will immediately go to work and finish up the whole; otherwise what with lectures and the original sin of laziness, it will all be indefinitely postponed. i want to make a crisis that he shall feel that _now_ is the accepted time, and that this must be finished first and foremost." and again she says: "my poor _rab_ has been sick with a heavy cold this week, and if it hadn't been for me you wouldn't have had this article which i send in triumph. i plunged into the sea of rabbis and copied mr. stowe's insufferable chaldonic characters so that you might not have your life taken by wrathful printers.... thus i have ushered into the world a document which i venture to say condenses more information on an obscure and curious subject than _any_ in the known world--hosanna!" in these busy years she went away upon her boston trips more and more rarely, but she writes after her return from one of them in 1868: "i don't think i _ever_ enjoyed boston so much as in this visit. why was it! every cloud seemed to turn out its silver lining, everybody was delightful, and the music has really done me good. i feel it all over me now. i think of it with a sober certainty of waking bliss! our little 'hub' is a grand 'hub.' three cheers for it!... i have had sent me through the war department a french poem which i think is full of real nerve and strength of feeling. i undertook the reading only as a duty, but found myself quite waked up. the indignation and the feeling with which he denounces modern skepticism, that worst of all unbelief, the denial of all good, all beauty, all generosity, all heroism, is splendid. he is a live man this, and i wish you would read his poem and send it to longfellow, for it does one's heart good to see the french made the vehicle of so much real heroic sentiment. the description of a slave hunt is splendidly and bitterly satirical and indignant and full of fine turns of language. thank god _that_ is over. no matter what happens to you and me, _that_ great burden of sin and misery has tumbled off from our backs and rolled into the sepulchre, where it shall never arise more.... i have been the most industrious of beings since my return, and am steaming away on the obstacle that stands between me and my story, which i long to be at.... i want to get one or two special bits of information out of garrison, and so instead of sending my letter at random to boston i will trouble you (who have little or nothing to do!) to get this letter to him. _my own book_, instead of cooling, boils and bubbles daily and nightly, and i am pushing and spurring like fury to get to it. i work like a drag-horse, and i'll _never_ get in such a scrape again. it isn't my business to make up books, but to make them. i have lots to say."... the story which had so taken possession of her mind and heart was "oldtown folks," the one which she at the time fancied the best calculated of all her works to sustain the reputation of the author of "uncle tom's cabin." the many proofs of her own interest in it seem to show that she had been moved to a livelier and deeper satisfaction in this creation than in any of her later productions. she writes respecting it: "it is more to me than a story; it is my rã©sumã© of the whole spirit and body of new england, a country that is now exerting such an influence on the civilized world that to know it truly becomes an object." but there were weary lengths of roads to be traveled by a woman already overladen with responsibilities and in delicate health before such a book could reach its consummation. "i must cry you mercy," she begins one of the notes to her publisher, "and explain my condition to you as well as possible." the "condition" was frequently to be explained! proofs were not ready when they were promised, the press was stopped, and both author and publisher required all the tender regard they really had for each other and all the patience they possessed to keep in tune. she says, "i am sorry to trouble you or derange your affairs, but one can't always tell in driving such horses as we drive where they are going to bring up." she started off in this long journey very hopefully, writing that she would like to begin printing at once, because "to have the first part of my book in type will greatly assist me in the last." a month later she writes: "here goes the first of my nameless story, of which i can only say it is as unlike everything else as it is like the strange world of folks i took it from. there is no fear that there will not be as much matter as 'uncle tom's cabin,'--there will. there could be an endless quantity if i only said all i can see and think that is strange and curious. i partake in ----'s disappointment that it is not done, but it is of that class of things that cannot be commanded; as my friend sam lawson (_vide_ mss.) says, 'there's things that can be druv and then agin there's things that can't,' and this is that kind--as had to be humored. instead of rushing on, i have often turned back and written over with care, that nothing that i wanted to say might be omitted; it has cost me a good deal of labor to elaborate this first part, namely, to build my theatre and to introduce my actors. my labor has all, however, been given to the literary part. my printers always inform me that i know nothing of punctuation, and i give thanks that i have no responsibility for any of its absurdities! further than beginning my sentence with a capital, i go not,--so i hope my friend mr. bigelow, who is a direct and lineal descendant of 'my grandmother,' will put those things all right." who so well as authors can fully understand and sympathize with the burden of a long story in the head, long bills on the table, tempting offers to write for this and that in order to bring in two hundred dollars from a variety of pleasant editors who desire the name on their list, house and grounds to be looked after, cooks to be pacified, visits to be made;--it is no wonder that mrs. stowe wrote: "the thing has been an awful tax and labor, for i have tried to do it well. i say also to you confidentially, that it has seemed as if every private care that could hinder me as woman and mother has been crowded into just this year that i have had this to do." happily more peaceful days were in store for her. her daughters, now grown to womanhood, were beginning to take the reins of home work and government into their own hands; and as the darkest hour foreruns the dawn, so almost imperceptibly to herself her cares began to fade away from her. a new era opened in mrs. stowe's life when she made her first visit to florida, in the winter of 1867. she was tired and benumbed with care and cold. suddenly the thought came to her that she would go to the south, herself, and see what the stories were worth which she was constantly hearing about its condition. in the mean time, if she could, she would enjoy the soft air, and find retirement in which she might continue her book. she says in one of her letters:-"winter weather and cold seem always a kind of nightmare to me. i am going to take my writing-desk and go down to florida to f----'s plantation, where we have now a home, and abide there until the heroic agony of betweenity, the freeze and thaw of winter, is over, and then i doubt not i can write my three hours a day. meanwhile, i have a pretty good pile of manuscript.... the letters i have got about blossoming roses and loungers in linen coats, while we have been frozen and snowed up, have made my very soul long to be away. cold weather really seems to torpify my brain. i write with a heavy numbness. i have not yet had a _good_ spell of writing, though i have had all through the story abundant clairvoyance, and see just how it must be written; but for writing some parts i want _warm_ weather, and not to be in the state of a 'froze and thawed apple.'... the cold affects me precisely as extreme hot weather used to in cincinnati,--gives me a sort of bilious neuralgia. i hope to get a clear, bright month in florida, when i can say something to purpose. "i did want to read some of my story to you before i went. i have read it to my husband; and though one may think a husband a partial judge, yet mine is so nervous and so afraid of being bored that i feel as if it were something to hold him; and he likes it--is quite wakeful, so to speak, about it. all i want now, to go on, is a good _frame_, as father used to say about his preaching. i want calm, soft, even dreamy, enjoyable weather, sunshine and flowers. love to dear a----, whom i so much want to see once more." unhappily, she could not get away so soon as she desired. there were contracts to be signed and other business to arrange. these delays made her visit southward much shorter than she intended, but it proved to be only the introduction, the first brief chapter, as it were, of her future winter life in florida. before leaving she wrote as follows to her publisher:-"i am so constituted that it is absolutely fatal to me to agree to have _any_ literary work done at certain dates. i _mean_ to have this story done by the 1st of september. it would be greatly for my pecuniary interest to get it done before that, because i have the offer of eight thousand dollars for the newspaper use of the story i am planning to write after it. but i am bound by the laws of art. sermons, essays, lives of distinguished people, i can write to order at times and seasons. a story comes, grows like a flower, sometimes will and sometimes won't, like a pretty woman. when the spirits will help, i can write. when they jeer, flout, make faces, and otherwise maltreat me, i can only wait humbly at their gates, watch at the posts of their doors. "this story grows even when i do not write. i spent a month in the mountains in stockbridge _composing_ before i wrote a word. "i only ask now a good physical condition, and i go to warmer climes hoping to save time there. i put everything and everybody off that interferes with this, except 'pussy willow,' which will be a pretty story for a child's 'series.'" at last she sailed away, about the 1st of march, 1867, with that delightful power of knowing what she wanted, and being content when she attained her end, which is too rare, alas! her letters glowed and blossomed and shone with the fruit and flowers and sunshine of the south. it was hardly to be expected that her literary work could actually reach the printers' hands under these circumstances as rapidly as if she had been able to write at home: therefore it was with no sense of surprise that we received from her, during the summer of 1868, what proved to be a chapter of excuses instead of a chapter of her book: "i have a long story to tell you of _what_ has prevented my going on with my story, which you must see would so occupy all the nerve and brain force i have that i have not been able to write a word except to my own children. to them in their needs i _must_ write _chapters_ which would otherwise go into my novel." about this period she found herself able to come again to boston for a few days' visit. there were often long croonings over the fire far into the night; her other-worldliness and abstractions brought with them a dreamy quietude, especially to those whose harried lives kept them only too much awake. her coming was always a pleasure, for she made holidays by her own delightful presence, and she asked nothing more than what she found in the companionship of her friends. after her return to hartford and in december of the same year, i find some curious notes showing how easily she was attracted by new subjects of interest away from the work she had in hand; not that she saw it in that light, or was aware that her story was in the least retarded by such digressions, but her keen sympathy with everything and everybody made it more and more difficult for her to concentrate her power upon the long story which she considered after all of the first importance. she writes to the editor of the "atlantic monthly:" "i see that all the leading magazines have a leading article on 'planchette.' "there is a lady of my acquaintance who has developed more remarkable facts in this way than any i have ever seen; i have kept a record of these communications for some time past, and everybody is very much struck with them. "i have material to prepare a very curious article. shall you want it? and when?" we can imagine the feeling of a publisher waiting for copy of her promised story on reading this note! also the following of a few days later:-"i am beginning a series of articles called 'learning to write,' designed to be helpful to a great many beginners.... i shall instance hawthorne as a model and speak of his 'note book' as something which every young author aspiring to write should study.... my materials for the 'planchette' article are really very extraordinary,... but i don't want to write it now when i am driving so hard upon my book.... it costs some patience to you and certainly to me to have it take so long, yet i have conscientiously done all i could, since i began. now the end of it is in plain sight, but there is a good deal to be done to bring it out worthily, and i work upon it steadily and daily. i never put so much work into anything before." a week later she says again:-"i thank you very much for your encouraging words, for i really need them. i have worked so hard that i am almost tired. i hope that you will still continue to read, and that you will not find it dull.... i have received the books. what a wonderful fellow hawthorne was!" there is something truly touching to those who knew her in that phrase "almost tired." indeed, she was truly tired through and through, and these later letters from which i have made the foregoing extracts are all written by an amanuensis. happily the time was near for a second flight to florida, and she wrote with her own rested hand en route from charleston:-"room fragrant with violets, banked up in hyacinths, flowers everywhere, windows open, birds singing." she enclosed some fans, upon which she had been painting flowers busily during the journey in order to send them back to boston to be sold at a fair in behalf of the cretans: "make them do the cretes all the good you can," she said. it appears that by this time "oldtown folks" was fairly off her hands, and she was free once more. she evidently found mandarin very much to her mind, and wrote contentedly therefrom, save for a vision of having to go to canada in the early spring to obtain the copyright of her story. the visits to florida had now become necessary to her health. she saw the next step to take was to surrender her large house in hartford and pass her winters altogether at the south. she wrote from florida: "i am leaving the land of flowers on the 1st of june with tears in my eyes, but having a house in hartford, it must be lived in. i wish you and ---would just come to see it. you have no idea what a lovely place it has grown to be, and i am trying to sell it as hard as a snake to crawl out of his skin. thus on, till reason is pushed out of life. there's no earthly sense in having anything,--lordy massy, no! by the bye, i must delay sending you the ghost in the captain brown house till i can go to natick and make a personal inspection of the premises and give it to you hot." her busy brain was again at work with new plans for future books and articles for magazines. "gladly would i fly to you on the wings of the wind," she says, "but i am a slave, a bound thrall to _work_, and i cannot work and play at the same time. after this year i hope to have a little rest, and above all things i won't be hampered with a serial to write.... we have sold out in hartford." all this routine of labor was to have a new form of interruption, which gave her intense joy. "i am doing just what you say," she wrote, "being first lady-in-waiting on his new majesty. he is very pretty, very gracious and good, and his little mamma and he are a pair.... i am getting to be an old fool of a grandma, and to think there is no bliss under heaven to compare with a baby." later she wrote on the same subject: "you ought to see my baby. i have discovered a way to end the woman controversy. let the women all say that they won't take care of the babies till the laws are altered. one week of this discipline would bring all the men on their marrow-bones. only tell us what you want, they would say, and we will do it. of course you may imagine me trailing after our little king,--first granny-in-waiting." in the summer of 1869 there was a pleasant home at st. john's wood, in london, which possessed peculiar attractions. other houses were as comfortable to look at, other hedges were as green, other drawing rooms were gayer, but this was the home of george eliot, and on sunday afternoons the resort of those who desired the best that london had to give. here it was that george eliot told us of her admiration and deep regard, her affection, for mrs. stowe. her reverence and love were expressed with such tremulous sincerity that the speaker won our hearts by her love for our friend. many letters had already passed between mrs. stowe and herself, and she confided to us her amusement at a fancy mrs. stowe had taken that casaubon, in "middlemarch," was drawn from the character of mr. lewes. mrs. stowe took it so entirely for granted in her letters that it was impossible to dispossess her mind of the illusion. evidently it was the source of much harmless household amusement at st. john's wood. i find in mrs. stowe's letters some pleasant allusions to this correspondence. she writes: "we were all full of george eliot when your note came, as i had received a beautiful letter from her in answer to one i wrote from florida. she is a noble, true woman; and if anybody doesn't see it, so much the worse for _them_, and not her." in a note written about that time mrs. stowe says she is "coming to boston, and will bring george eliot's letters with her that we may read them together;" but that pleasant plan was only one of the imagination, and was never carried out. her own letter to mrs. lewes, written from florida in march, 1876, may be considered one of the most beautiful and interesting pieces of writing she ever achieved. although this letter is accessible in a life of mrs. stowe published by her son during her life, i am tempted to reproduce a portion of it in these pages for those who have not seen it elsewhere. it is a positive loss to cut such a letter, but it covers too much space to quote in full. she dates in orange blossom time, mandarin, march 18, 1876. my dear friend,--i always think of you when the orange-trees are in blossom; just now they are fuller than ever, and so many bees are filling the branches that the air is full of a sort of still murmur. and now i am beginning to hear from you every month in "harper's." it is as good as a letter. "daniel deronda" has succeeded in awaking in my somewhat worn-out mind an interest. so many stories are tramping over one's mind in every modern magazine nowadays that one is macadamized, so to speak. it takes something unusual to make a sensation. this does excite and interest me, as i wait for each number with eagerness. i wish i could endow you with our long winter weather,--not winter, except such as you find in sicily. we live here from november to june, and my husband sits outdoors on the veranda and reads all day. we emigrate in solid family; my two dear daughters, husband, self, and servants come together to spend the winter here, and so together to our northern home in summer. my twin daughters relieve me from all domestic care; they are lively, vivacious, with a real genius for practical life.... it was very sweet and kind of you to write what you did last. i suppose it is so long ago you may have forgotten, but it was a word of tenderness and sympathy about my brother's trial; it was womanly, tender, and sweet, such as at heart you are. after all, my love of you is greater than my admiration, for i think it more and better to be really a woman worth loving than to have read greek and german and written books.... it seems now but a little while since my brother henry and i were two young people together. he was my two years junior, and nearest companion out of seven brothers and three sisters. i taught him drawing and heard his latin lessons, for you know a girl becomes mature and womanly long before a boy.... then he married and lived a missionary life in the new west, all with a joyousness, an enthusiasm, a chivalry, which made life bright and vigorous to us both. then in time he was called to brooklyn.... i well remember one snowy night his riding till midnight to see me, and then our talking, till near morning, what we could do to make headway against the horrid cruelties that were being practiced against the defenseless blacks. my husband was then away lecturing, and my heart was burning itself out in indignation and anguish. henry told me he meant to fight that battle in new york; that he would have a church that would stand by him to resist the tyrannic dictation of southern slaveholders. i said: "i, too, have begun to do something; i have begun a story, trying to set forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves." "that's right, hattie," he said; "finish it, and i will scatter it thick as the leaves of vallombrosa,"--and so came "uncle tom," and plymouth church became a stronghold.... and when all was over, it was he and lloyd garrison who were sent by government once more to raise our national flag on fort sumter. you must see that a man does not so energize without making many enemies. half of our union has been defeated ... and there are those who never saw our faces that to this hour hate him and me. then he has been a progressive in theology. he has been a student of huxley and spencer and darwin,--enough to alarm the old school,--and yet remained so ardent a supernaturalist as equally to repel the radical destructionists in religion. he and i are christ-worshipers, adoring him as the image in the invisible god and all that comes from believing this. then he has been a reformer, an advocate of universal suffrage and woman's rights, yet not radical enough to please that reform party who stand where the socialists of france do, and are for tearing up all creation generally. lastly, he had had the misfortune of a popularity which is perfectly phenomenal. i cannot give you any idea of the love, worship, idolatry, with which he has been overwhelmed. he has something magnetic about him, that makes everybody crave his society, that makes men follow and worship him.... my brother is hopelessly generous and confiding. his inability to believe evil is something incredible, and so has come all this suffering.... but you see why i have not written. this has drawn on my life,--my heart's blood. he is myself; i know you are the kind of woman to understand me when i say i felt a blow at him more than at myself. i who know his purity, honor, delicacy, know that he has been from childhood of an ideal purity,--who reverenced his conscience as his king, whose glory was redressing human wrong, who spoke no slander, no, nor listened to it.... my brother's power to console is something peculiar and wonderful. i have seen him at deathbeds and funerals, where it would seem as if hope herself must be dumb, bring down the very peace of heaven and change despair to trust. he has not had less power in his own adversity.... well, dear, pardon me for this outpour. i loved you,--i love you,--and therefore wanted you to know just what i felt.... this friendship was one that greatly enlisted mrs. stowe's sympathies and enriched her life. her interest in any woman who was supporting herself, and especially in any one who found a daily taskmaster in the pen, and above all when, as in this case, the woman was one possessed of great moral aspiration half paralyzed in its action because she found herself in an anomalous and (to the world in general) utterly incomprehensible position, made such a woman like a magnet to mrs. stowe. she inherited from her father a faith in the divine power of sympathy, which only waxed greater with years and experience. wherever she found a fellow-mortal suffering trouble or dishonor, in spite of hindrance her feet were turned that way. the genius of george eliot and the contrasting elements of her life and character drew mrs. stowe to her side in sisterly solicitude. her attitude, her sweetness, her sincerity, could not fail to win the heart of george eliot. they became loving friends. it was the same inborn sense of fraternity which led her, when a child, on hearing of the death of lord byron, to go out into the fields and fling herself, weeping, on the mounded hay, where she might pray alone for his forgiveness and salvation. it is wonderful to observe the influence of byron upon that generation. it is on record that when tennyson, a boy of fifteen, heard some one say, "byron is dead," he thought the whole world at an end. "i thought," he said one day, "everything was over and finished for every one; that nothing else mattered. i remember that i went out alone and carved 'byron is dead' into the sandstone." from this time forward mrs. stowe was chiefly bound up in her life and labors at the south. in 1870, speaking of some literary work she was proposing to herself, she said: "i am writing as a pure recreative movement of mind, to divert myself from the stormy, unrestful present.... i am being _chã¢telaine_ of a florida farm. i have on my mind the creation of a town on the banks of the st. john. the three years since we came this side of the river have called into life and growth a thousand peach-trees, a thousand orange-trees, about five hundred lemons, and seven or eight hundred grapevines. a peach orchard, a vineyard, a lemon grove, will carry my name to posterity. i am founding a place which, thirty or forty years hence, will be called the old stowe place.... you can have no idea of this queer country, this sort of strange, sandy, half-tropical dreamland, unless you come to it. here i sit with open windows, the orange buds just opening and filling the air with sweetness, the hens drowsily cackling, the men planting in the field, and callas and wild roses blossoming out of doors. we keep a little fire morning and night. we are flooded with birds; and by the bye, it is st. valentine's day.... i think a uniform edition of dr. holmes's works would be a good thing. next to hawthorne he is our most exquisite writer, and in many passages he goes far beyond him. what is the dear doctor doing? if you know any book good to inspire dreams and visions, put it into my box. my husband chews endlessly a german cud. i must have english. has the french book on spiritualism come yet? if it has, put it in.... i wish i could give you a plateful of our oranges.... we had seventy-five thousand of these same on our trees this year, and if you will start off quick, they are not all picked yet. florida wants one thing,--grass. if it had grass, it would be paradise. but nobody knows what grass is till had grass, it would be paradise. but nobody knows what grass is till they try to do without it." three months later she wrote: "i hate to leave my calm isle of patmos, where the world is not, and i have such quiet long hours for writing. emerson could _insulate_ himself here and keep his electricity. hawthorne ought to have lived in an orange grove in florida.... you have no idea how small you all look, you folks in the world, from this distance. all your fusses and your fumings, your red-hot hurrying newspapers, your clamor of rival magazines,--why, we see it as we see steamboats fifteen miles off, a mere speck and smoke." again she writes: "you ought to see us riding out in our mule-cart. poor 'fly!' the last of pea-time, who looks like an animated hairtrunk and the wagon and harness to match! it is too funny, but we enjoy it hugely. there are now in our solitude five northern families, and we manage to have quite pleasant society. "but think of our church and school-house being burned down just as we were ready to do something with it. i feel it most for the colored people, who were so anxious to have their school and now have no place to have it in. we have all been trying to raise what we can for a new building and intend to get one up by march. "if i were north now i would try giving some readings for this and perhaps raise something." it was a strange contrast and one at variance with her natural taste, which brought her before the public as a reader of her own stories in the autumn and winter of 1872-73. she was no longer able to venture on the effort of a long story, and yet it was manifestly unwise for her to forego the income which was extended to her through this channel. she wrote: "i have had a very urgent business letter, saying that the lyceums of different towns were making up their engagements, and that if i were going into it i must make my engagements now. it seems to me that i cannot do this. the thing will depend so much on my health and ability to do. you know i could not go round in cold weather.... i feel entirely uncertain, and, as the yankees say, 'didn't know what to do nor to don't. my state in regard to it may be described by the phrase 'kind o' love to--hate to--wish i didn't--want ter.' i suppose the result will be i shall not work into their lecture system." in april she wrote from mandarin: "i am painting a _magnolia grandiflora,_ which i will show you.... i am appalled by finding myself booked to read. but i am getting well and strong, and trust to be equal to the emergency. but i shrink from tremont temple, and--does not think i can fill it. on the whole i should like to begin in boston." and in august she said: "i am to begin in boston in september.... it seems to me that is a little too early for boston, isn't it? will there be anybody in town then? i don't know as it's my business, which is simply to speak my piece and take my money." her first reading actually took place in springfield, not boston, and the next day she unexpectedly arrived at our cottage at manchester-bythe-sea. she had read the previous evening in a large public hall, had risen at five o'clock that morning, and found her way to us. her next readings were given in boston, the first, in the afternoon, at the tremont temple. she was conscious that her effort at springfield had not been altogether successful,--she had not held her large audience; and she was determined to put the whole force of her nature into this afternoon reading at the tremont temple. she called me into her bedroom, where she stood before the mirror, with her short gray hair, which usually lay in soft curls around her brow, brushed erect and standing stiffly. "look here, my dear," she said; "now i am exactly like my father, dr. lyman beecher, when he was going to preach," and she held up her forefinger warningly. it was easy to see that the spirit of the old preacher was revived in her veins, and the afternoon would show something of his power. an hour later, when i sat with her in the anteroom waiting for the moment of her appearance to arrive, i could feel the power surging up within her. i knew she was armed for a good fight. that reading was a great success. she was alive in every fibre of her being: she was to read portions of "uncle tom's cabin" to men, women, and children many of whom had taken no part in the crisis which inspired it, and she determined to effect the difficult task of making them feel as well as hear. with her presence and inspiration they could not fail to understand what her words had signified to the generation that had passed through the struggle of our war. when her voice was not sufficient to make the audience hear, the people rose from their seats and crowded round her, standing gladly, that no word might be lost. it was the last leap of the flame which had burned out a great wrong. from this period, although she continued to write, she lived chiefly for several winters in the retirement of the florida orange grove, which she always enjoyed. her sympathy was strong with the new impetus benevolent work in cities had received, and she helped it from her "grotto" in more ways than one. sometimes she would write soothing or inspiriting letters, as the case might demand, to individuals. the following note, written at the time of the boston fire in 1872, will show how alive she was to the need of that period. "i send inclosed one hundred dollars to the fund for the firemen. i could wish it a hundred times as much, and then it would be inadequate to express how much i honor those brave, devoted men who put their own lives between boston and mine. no soldiers that fell in battle for our common country ever deserved of us all greater honor than the noble men whose charred and blackened remains have been borne from the ruins of boston; they are worthy to be inscribed on imperishable monuments. "i would that some such honorary memorial might commemorate their heroism." meanwhile, the comfort she drew in from the beauty of nature and the calm around her seemed yearly to nourish and renew her power of existence. questions which were difficult to others were often solved to her mind by practical observation. it amused her to hear persons agitating the question as to where they should look to supply labor for the south. "why," she remarked once, "there was a negro, one of those fearfully hot days in the spring, who was digging muck from a swamp just in front of our house, and carrying it in a wheelbarrow up a steep slope, where he dumped it down, and then went back for more. he kept this up when it was so hot that we thought either one of us would die to be five minutes in the sun. we carried a thermometer to the spot where he was working, to see how great the heat was, and it rose at once to one hundred and thirty-five degrees. the man, however, kept cheerfully at his work, and when he went to his dinner sat with the other negroes out in the white sand without a bit of shade. afterward they all lay down for a nap in the same unsheltered locality. toward evening, when the sun was sufficiently low to enable me to go out, i went to speak to this man. 'martin,' said i, 'you've had a warm day's work. how do you stand it? why, i couldn't endure such heat for five minutes.' 'hoh! hoh! no, i s'pose you couldn't. ladies can't, missus.' 'but, martin, aren't you very tired?' 'bress your heart, no, missus.' so martin goes home to his supper, and after supper will be found dancing all the evening on the wharf near by! after this, when people talk of bringing germans and swedes to do such work, i am much entertained." many were the pleasant descriptions of her home sent forth to tempt her friends away from the busy north. "here is where we read books," she said in one of her letters, written in the month of march. "up north nobody does,--they don't have time; so if ---will mail his book to mandarin, i will 'read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.' we are having a carnival of flowers. i hope you read my 'palmetto leaves,' for then you will see all about us.... our home is like a martin-box.... i cannot tell you the quaint odd peace we have here in living under the oak. 'behold, she dwelleth under the oak at mamre.' all that we want is friends, to whom we may say that solitude is sweet. we have some neighbors, however, who have made pretty places near us. mr. stowe keeps up a german class of three young ladies, with whom he is reading faust for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time, and in the evening i read aloud to a small party of the neighbors. we have made up our home as we went along, throwing out a chamber here and there, like twigs out of the old oak.... the orange blossoms have come like showers of pearl, and the yellow jessamine like golden fleeces, and the violets and the lilies, and azaleas. this is glorious, budding, blossoming spring, and we have days when merely to breathe and be is to be blessed. i love to have a day of mere existence. life itself is a pleasure when the sun shines warm, and the lizards dart from all the shingles of the roof, and the birds sing in so many notes and tones the yard reverberates; and i sit and dream and am happy, and never want to go back north, nor do anything with the toiling, snarling world again. i do wish i could gather you both in my little nest." she was like her father, dr. lyman beecher, in many things. the scorching fire of the brain seemed to devour its essence, and she endured, as he did before her, some years of existence when the motive power almost ceased to act. she became "like a little child," wandering about, pleased with flowers, fresh air, the sound of a piano, or a voice singing hymns, but the busy, inspiring spirit was asleep. gradually she faded away, shrouded in this strange mystery, hovered over by the untiring affection of her children, sweet and tender in her decadence, but "absent." at the moment when this brief memorial was receiving a final revision before going to the press, the news reached me of the unloosing of the last threads of consciousness which bound mrs. stowe to this world. the sweetness and patience of her waiting years can only be perfectly told by the daughters who hung over her. she knew her condition, but there was never a word of complaint, and so long as her husband lived she performed the office of nurse and attendant upon his lightest wishes as if she felt herself strong. her near friends were sometimes invited to dine or to have supper with her at that period, but they could see even then how prostrated she became after the slightest mental effort. it was upon occasion of such a visit that she told me, with a twinkle of the eye, that "mr. stowe was sometimes inclined to be a little fretful during the long period of his illness, and said to her one day that he believed the lord had forgotten him." "oh, no, he hasn't," she answered; "cheer up! your turn will come soon." she was always fond of music, especially of the one kind she had known best; and the singing of hymns never failed to soothe her at the last; therefore when the little group stood round her open grave on a lovely july day and sang quite simply the hymns she loved, it seemed in its simplicity and broken harmony a fitting farewell to the faded body she had already left so far behind. a great spirit has performed its mission and has been released. the world moves on unconscious; but the world's children have been blessed by her coming, and they who know and understand should praise god reverently in her going. "as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves: so the holy seed shall be the substance thereof." in the words of the prophet we can almost hear her glad cry:- "my sword shall be bathed in heaven." celia thaxter. born june, 1835; died august, 1894. if it were ever intended that a desolate island in the deep sea should be inhabited by one solitary family, then indeed celia thaxter was the fitting daughter of such a house. in her history of the group of islands, which she calls "among the isles of shoals," she portrays, in a prose which for beauty and wealth of diction has few rivals, the unfolding of her own nature under influences of sky and sea and solitude and untrammeled freedom, such as have been almost unknown to civilized humanity in any age of the world. she speaks also of the effect produced, as she fancied, upon the minds of men by the eternal sound of the sea: a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception. but this was far from being the case with regard to herself. her eyesight was keener, her speech more distinct, the lines of her thoughts more clearly defined, her verse more strongly marked in its form, and the accuracy of her memory more to be relied upon than was the case with almost any one of her contemporaries. her painting, too, upon porcelain possessed the same character. her knowledge of the flowers, and especially of the seaweeds, with which she decorated it, was so exact that she did not require the originals before her vision. they were painted upon her mind's eye, where every filament and every shade seemed to be recorded. these green "growing things" had been the beloved companions of her childhood, as they continued to be of her womanhood, and even to reproduce their forms in painting was a delight to her. the written descriptions of natural objects give her history a place among the pages which possess a perennial existence. while white's "selborne," and the pictures of bewick, and thoreau's "walden," and the "autobiography of richard jefferies" endure, so long will "among the isles of shoals" hold its place with all lovers of nature. she says in one place, "all the pictures over which i dream are set in this framework of the sea, that sparkled and sang, or frowned and threatened, in the ages that are gone as it does to-day." the solitude of celia thaxter's childhood, which was not solitude, surrounded as she was with the love of a father and a mother, all tenderness, and brothers dear to her as her own life, developed in the child strange faculties. she was five years old when the family left portsmouth,--old enough, given her inborn power of enjoyment of nature, to delight in the free air and the wonderful sights around her. she gives in her book a pretty picture of the child watching the birds that flew against the lighthouse lantern, when they lived at white island. the birds would strike it with such force as to kill themselves. "many a may morning," she says, "have i wandered about the rock at the foot of the tower, mourning over a little apron brimful of sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged blackbirds, manycolored warblers and flycatchers, beautifully clothed yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch and scarlet tanager and golden oriole, and many more beside,--enough to break the heart of a small child to think of! once a great eagle flew against the lantern and shivered the glass." her father seems to have been a man of awful energy of will. some disappointment in his hope of a public career, it has been said, decided him to take the step of withdrawing himself forever from the world of the mainland, and this attitude he appears to have sustained unflinchingly to the end. her mother, with a heart stayed as unflinchingly upon love and obedience, seems to have followed him without a murmur, leaving every dear association of the past as though it had not been. from this moment she became, not the slave, but the queen of her affections; and when she died, in 1877, the sun appeared to set upon her daughter's life. on the morning after mrs. thaxter's sudden death, seventeen years later, a friend asked her eldest son where his mother was, with the intent to discover if she had been well enough to leave her room. "oh," he replied, "her mother came in the night and took her away." this reply showed how deeply all who were near to celia thaxter were impressed with the fact that to see her mother again was one of the deepest desires of her heart. the development wrought in her eager character by those early days of exceptional experience gives a new sense of what our poor humanity may achieve, left face to face with the vast powers of nature. in speaking of the energy of samuel haley, one of the early settlers of the islands, she says he learned to live as independently as possible of his fellow-men; "for that is one of the first things a settler on the isles of shoals finds it necessary to learn." her own lesson was learned perfectly. the sunrise was as familiar to her eyes as the sunset, and early and late the activity of her mind was rivaled by the ceaseless industry of her hands. she pays a tribute to the memory of miss peabody, of newburyport, who went to star island in 1823 and "did wonders for the people during the three years of her stay. she taught the school, visited the families, and on sundays read to such audiences as she could collect, took seven of the poor female children to live with her at the parsonage, instructed all who would learn in the arts of carding, spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, braiding mats, etc. truly she remembered what 'satan finds for idle hands to do,' and kept all her charges busy, and consequently happy. all honor to her memory! she was a wise and faithful servant. there is still an affectionate remembrance of her among the present inhabitants, whose mothers she helped out of their degradation into a better life." if it was not in celia thaxter's nature to teach in this direct way herself, she did not fail to appreciate and to stimulate excellence of every kind in others. appledore was too far away in winter from the village at star island for any regular or frequent communication between them. even so late as in the month of may she records watching a little fleet beating up for shelter under the lee of appledore to ride out a storm. "they were in continual peril.... it was not pleasant to watch them as the early twilight shut down over the vast weltering desolation of the sea, to see the slender masts waving helplessly from one side to another.... some of the men had wives and children watching them from lighted windows at star. what a fearful night for them! they could not tell from hour to hour, through the thick darkness, if yet the cables held; they could not see till daybreak whether the sea had swallowed up their treasures. i wonder the wives were not white haired when the sun rose and showed them those little specks yet rolling in the breakers!" how clearly these scenes were photographed on the sensitive plate of her mind! she never forgot nor really lost sight of her island people. her sympathy drew them to her as if they were her own, and the little colony of norwegians was always especially dear to her. "how pathetic," she says, "the gathering of women on the headlands, when out of the sky swept the squall that sent the small boat staggering before it, and blinded the eyes, already drowned in tears, with sudden rain that hid sky and sea and boats from their eager gaze!" what she was, what her sympathy was, to those people, no one can ever quite express. the deep devotion of their service to her brothers and to herself, through the long solitude of winter and the storm of summer visitors, alone could testify. such service cannot be bought: it is the devotion born of affection and gratitude and admiration. speaking of one of the young women who grew up under her eye, she often said: "what could i do in this world without mine burntssen? i hope she will be with me when i die." and there indeed, at the last, was mine, to receive the latest word and to perform the few sad offices. to tell of the services mrs. thaxter rendered to some of the more helpless people about her, in the dark season, when no assistance from the mainland could be hoped for, would make a long and noble story in itself. her good sense made her an excellent doctor; the remedies she understood she was always on hand to apply at the right moment. sometimes she was unexpectedly called to assist in the birth of a child, when knowledge and strength she was hardly aware of seemed to be suddenly developed. but the truth was she could do almost anything; and only those who knew her in these humbler human relations could understand how joyous she was in the exercise of such duties, or how well able to perform them. writing to mine from the shoals once in march, she says: "this is the time to be here; this is what i enjoy! to wear my old clothes every day, grub in the ground, dig dandelions and eat them too, plant my seeds and watch them, fly on the tricycle, row in a boat, get into my dressing-gown right after tea, and make lovely rag rugs all the evening, and nobody to disturb us,-_this_ is fun!" in the house and out of it she was capable of everything. how beautiful her skill was as a dressmaker, the exquisite lines in her own black or gray or white dresses testified to every one who ever saw her. she never wore any other colors, nor was anything like "trimming" ever seen about her; there were only the fine, free outlines, and a white handkerchief folded carefully about her neck and shoulders. in her young days it was the same, with a difference! she was slighter in figure then, and overflowing with laughter, the really beautiful but noisy laughter which died away as the repose of manner of later years fell upon her. i can remember her as i first saw her, with the seashells which she always wore then around her neck and wrists, and a gray poplin dress defining her lovely form. she talked simply and fearlessly, while her keen eyes took in everything around her; she paid the tribute of her instantaneous laughter to the wit of others, --never too eager to speak, and never unwilling. her sense of beauty, not vanity, caused her to make the most of the good physical points she possessed; therefore, although she grew old early, the same general features of her appearance were preserved. she was almost too well known even to strangers, in these later years at the shoals, to make it worth while to describe the white hair carefully put up to preserve the shape of the head, and the small silver crescent which she wore above her forehead; but her manner had become very quiet and tender, more and more affectionate to her friends, and appreciative of all men. one of those who knew her latterly wrote me: "many of her letters show her boundless sympathy, her keen appreciation of the best in those whom she loved, and her wonderful growth in beauty and roundness of character. and how delightful her enthusiasms were,--as pure and clear as those of a child! she was utterly unlike any one in the world, so that few people really understood her. but it seems to me that her trials softened and mellowed her, until she became like one of her own beautiful flowers, perfect in her full development; then in a night the petals fell, and she was gone." the capabilities which were developed in her by the necessities of the situation, during her life at the shoals in winter, were more various and remarkable than can be fitly told. the glimpses which we get in her letters of the many occupations show what energy she brought to bear upon the difficulties of the place. in "among the isles of shoals" she says: "after winter has fairly set in, the lonely dwellers at the isles of shoals find life quite as much as they can manage, being so entirely thrown upon their own resources that it requires all the philosophy at their disposal to answer the demand.... one goes to sleep in the muffled roar of the storm, and wakes to find it still raging with senseless fury.... the weather becomes of the first importance to the dwellers on the rock; the changes of the sky and sea, the flitting of the coasters to and fro, the visits of the sea-fowl, sunrise and sunset, the changing moon, the northern lights, the constellations that wheel in splendor through the winter night,--all are noted with a love and careful scrutiny that is seldom given by people living in populous places.... for these things make our world: there are no lectures, operas, concerts, theatres, no music of any kind, except what the waves may whisper in rarely gentle moods; no galleries of wonders like the natural history rooms, in which it is so fascinating to wander; no streets, shops, carriages; no postman, no neighbors, not a door-bell within the compass of the place!... the best balanced human mind is prone to lose its elasticity and stagnate, in this isolation. one learns immediately the value of work to keep one's wits clear, cheerful, and steady; just as much real work of the body as it can bear without weariness being always beneficent, but here indispensable.... no one can dream what a charm there is in taking care of pets, singing birds, plants, etc., with such advantages of solitude; how every leaf and bud and flower is pored over, and admired, and loved! a whole conservatory, flushed with azaleas and brilliant with forests of camellias and every precious exotic that blooms, could not impart so much delight as i have known a single rose to give, unfolding in the bleak bitterness of a day in february, when this side of the planet seemed to have arrived at its culmination of hopelessness, with the isles of shoals the most hopeless spot upon its surface. one gets close to the heart of these things; they are almost as precious as picciola to the prisoner, and yield a fresh and constant joy such as the pleasure-seeking inhabitants of cities could not find in their whole round of shifting diversions. with a bright and cheerful interior, open fires, books and pictures, windows full of thrifty blossoming plants and climbing vines, a family of singing birds, plenty of work, and a clear head and quiet conscience, it would go hard if one could not be happy even in such loneliness. books, of course, are inestimable. nowhere does one follow a play of shakespeare's with greater zest, for it brings the whole world, which you need, about you; doubly precious the deep thoughts which wise men have given to help us, doubly sweet the songs of all the poets; for nothing comes between to distract you." it was not extraordinary that the joy of human intercourse, after such estrangement, became a rapture to so loving a nature as celia laighton's; nor that, very early, before the period of fully ripened womanhood, she should have been borne away from her island by a husband, a man of birth and education, who went to preach to the wild fisher folk on the adjacent island called star. the exuberant joy of her unformed maidenhood, with its power of selfdirection, attracted the reserved, intellectual nature of mr. thaxter. he could not dream that this careless, happy creature possessed the strength and sweep of wing which belonged to her own sea-gull. in good hope of teaching and developing her, of adding much in which she was uninstructed to the wisdom which the influences of nature and the natural affections had bred in her, he carried his wife to a quiet inland home, where three children were very soon born to them. under the circumstances, it was not extraordinary that his ideas of education were not altogether successfully applied; she required more strength than she could summon, more adaptability than many a grown woman could have found, to face the situation, and life became difficult and full of problems to them both. their natures were strongly contrasted, but perhaps not too strongly to complement each other, if he had fallen in love with her as a woman, and not as a child. his retiring, scholarly nature and habits drew him away from the world; her overflowing, sun-loving being, like a solar system in itself, reached out on every side, rejoicing in all created things. her introduction to the world of letters was by means of her first poem, "land-locked," which, by the hand of a friend, was brought to the notice of james russell lowell, at that time editor of the "atlantic." he printed it at once, without exchanging a word with the author. she knew nothing about it until the magazine was laid before her. this recognition of her talent was a delight indeed, and it was one of the happiest incidents in a life which was already overclouded with difficulties and sorrow. it will not be out of place to reprint this poem here, because it must assure every reader of the pure poetic gift which was in her. in form, in movement, and in thought it is as beautiful as her latest work. land-locked black lie the hills; swiftly doth daylight flee; and, catching gleams of sunset's dying smile, through the dusk land for many a changing mile the river runneth softly to the sea. o happy river, could i follow thee! o yearning heart, that never can be still! o wistful eyes, that watch the steadfast hill, longing for level line of solemn sea! have patience; here are flowers and songs of birds, beauty and fragrance, wealth of sound and sight, all summer's glory thine from morn till night, and life too full of joy for uttered words. neither am i ungrateful; but i dream deliciously how twilight falls to-night over the glimmering water, how the light dies blissfully away, until i seem to feel the wind, sea-scented, on my cheek, to catch the sound of dusky, flapping sail, and dip of oars, and voices on the gale afar off, calling low,--my name they speak! o earth! thy summer song of joy may soar ringing to heaven in triumph. i but crave the sad, caressing murmur of the wave that breaks in tender music on the shore. with the growth of mrs. thaxter's children and the death of her father, the love and duty she owed her mother caused her to return in winter to the shoals, although a portion of every summer was passed there. this was her husband's wish; his sense of loyalty to age and his deep attachment to his own parents made such a step appear necessary to him under the circumstances. but she had already tasted of the tree of knowledge, and the world outside beckoned to her with as fascinating a face as it ever presented to any human creature. it was during one of these returning visits to the shoals that much of the delightful book from which i have quoted was written; a period when she had already learned something of the charms of society,--sufficient to accentuate her appreciation of her own past, and to rejoice in what a larger life now held in store for her. lectures, operas, concerts, theatres, pictures, music above all,--what were they not to her! did artists ever before find such an eye and such an ear? she brought to them a spirit prepared for harmony, but utterly ignorant of the science of painting or music until the light of art suddenly broke upon her womanhood. of what this new world was to her we find some hint, of course, in her letters; but no human lips, not even her own exuberant power of expression, could ever say how her existence was enriched and made beautiful through music. artists who sang to her, or those who rehearsed the finest music on the piano or violin or flute, or those who brought their pictures and put them before her while she listened,--they alone, in a measure, understood what these things signified, and how she was lifted quite away by them from the ordinary level of life. they were inspired to do for her what they could seldom do for any other creature; and her generous response, overflowing, almost extravagant in expression, was never half enough to begin to tell the new life they brought to her. the following lines from a sonnet addressed to the tenor singer william j. winch, a singer who has given much pleasure to many persons by his beautiful voice, will convey some idea of the deep feeling which his ardent rendering of great songs stirred in her:- "carry us captive, thou with the strong heart and the clear head, and nature sweet and sound! most willing captives we to thy great art. * * * * * sing, and we ask no greater joy than this, only to listen, thrilling to the song, * * * * * borne skyward where the wingã¨d hosts rejoice." mrs. thaxter found herself, as the years went on, the centre of a company who rather selected themselves than were selected from the vast number of persons who frequented her brothers' "house of entertainment" at the islands. her "parlor," as it was called, was a _milieu_ quite as interesting as any of the "salons" of the past. her pronounced individuality forbade the intrusion even of a fancy of comparison with anything else, and equally forbade the possibility of rivalry. there was only one thought in the mind of the frequenters of her parlor,--that of gratitude for the pleasure and opportunity she gave them, and a genuine wish to please her and to become her friends. she possessed the keen instincts of a child with regard to people. if they were unlovable to her, if they were for any reason unsympathetic, nothing could bring her to overcome her dislike. she was in this particular more like some wild thing than a creature of the nineteenth century; indeed, one of her marked traits was a curious intractability of nature. i believe that no worldly motive ever influenced her relation with any human creature. of course these native qualities made her more ardently devoted in her friendships; but it went hardly with her to ingratiate those persons for whom she felt a natural repulsion, or even sometimes to be gentle with them. later in life she learned to call no man "common or unclean;" but coming into the world, as she did, full grown, like minerva in the legend, with keen eyes, and every sense alive to discern pretension, untruth, ungodliness in guise of the church, and all the uncleanness of the earth, these things were as much a surprise to her as it was, on the other hand, to find the wondrous world of art and the lives of the saints. perhaps no large social success was ever achieved upon such unworldly conditions; she swung as free as possible of the world of society and its opinions, forming a centre of her own, built up on the sure foundations of love and loyalty. she saw as much as any woman of the time of large numbers of people, and she was able to give them the best kind of social enjoyment: music, pictures, poetry, and conversation; the latter sometimes poor and sometimes good, according to the drift which swept through her beautiful room. mrs. thaxter was generous in giving invitations to her parlor, but to its frequenters she said, "if people do not enjoy what they find, they must go their way; my work and the music will not cease." the study of nature and art was always going forward either on or around her work-table. the keynote of conversation was struck there for those who were able to hear it. we were reminded of william blake's verse:- "i give you the end of a golden string, only wind it into a ball, it will lead you in at heaven's gate, built in jerusalem wall." here it was that whittier could be heard at his best, sympathetic, stimulating, uplifting, as he alone could be, and yet as he, with his quaker training to silence, was so seldom moved to prove himself. here he would sit near her hour after hour; sometimes mending her aeolian harp while they talked together, sometimes reading aloud to the assembled company. here was rose lamb, artist and dear friend; and here mrs. mary hemenway was a most beloved presence, with her eager enthusiasm for reform, yet with a modesty of bearing which made young and old press to her side. she loved celia thaxter, who in her turn was deeply and reverently attached to mrs. hemenway. the early affection of both mr. thaxter and his wife for william morris hunt grew to be the love of a lifetime. hunt's grace, versatility, and charm, not to speak of his undoubted genius, exerted their combined fascination over these appreciative friends in common with the rest of his art-loving contemporaries; but to these two, each in their several ways, hunt felt himself equally attracted, and the last sad summer of his life he gladly turned to celia thaxter in her island home as a sure refuge in time of trouble. it was she who watched him day by day, listening to his words, which came clothed with a kind of inspiration. "whatever genius may be," said tom appleton, "we all feel that william hunt had it. his going is the extinction of a great light; a fervent hand is cold; and the warmth which glowed through so many friends and disciples is like a trodden ember, extinguished." it was celia thaxter's hurrying footsteps which traced her friend to the spot where, in extreme weakness, he fell in death. she wrote, "it was that pretty lake where my wild roses had been blooming all summer, and where the birds dipped and sang at sunrise." her gratitude to the men and women who brought music to her door knew no limit; it was strong, deep, and unforgetting. "what can i ever do for them," she would say, "when i remember the joy they bring me!" julius eichberg was one of the earliest friends who ministered in this way to her happiness. her letters of the time overflow with the descriptions of programmes for the day, when mr. paine and mr. eichberg would play, together or alone, during long mornings and afternoons. "i am lost in bliss," she wrote; "every morning, afternoon, and evening, beethoven! i am emerging out of all my clouds by help of it; it is divine!" and again, writing of mr. paine in his own house, she said: "i am in the midst of the awful and thrilling music of the oedipus tyrannus, and it curdles my blood; we are all steeped in it, for j. k. p. goes on and on composing it all the time, and the tremendous chords thrill the very timbers of the house. it is _most_ interesting!" of arthur whiting, too, and his wife, whose musical gifts she placed among the first, she frequently wrote and spoke with loving appreciation. these friendships were a never failing source of gladness to her. later in life came mr. william mason, who was the chief minister to her joy in music, her enlightener, her consoler, to the end. those who loved her best must always give him the tribute of their admiration and grateful regard. mr. mason must have known her keen gratitude, for who understood better than he the feeling by which she was lifted away from the things of this world by the power of music. "the dignity of labor" is a phrase we have often heard repeated in modern life, but it was one unnecessary to be spoken by celia thaxter. it may easily be said of her that one of the finest lessons she unconsciously taught was not only the value of labor, but the joy of doing things well. the necessities of her position, as i have already indicated, demanded a great deal, but she responded to the need with a readiness and generosity great enough to extort admiration from those who knew her. how much she contributed to the comfort of the lives of those she loved at the shoals we have endeavored to show; how beautiful her garden was there, in the summer, all the world could see; but at one period there was also a farm at kittery point, to be made beautiful and comfortable by her industry, where one of her sons still lives; and a _pied ã  terre_ in boston or in portsmouth, whither she came in the winter with her eldest son, who was especially dependent upon her love and care: and all these changes demanded much of her time and strength. she was certainly one of the busiest women in the world. writing from kittery point september 6, 1880, she says: "it is divinely lovely here, and the house is charming. i have brought a servant over from the hotel, and it is a blessing to be able to make them all comfortable; to set them down in the charming dining-room overlooking the smooth, curved crescent of sandy beach, with the long rollers breaking white, and the shoals looming on the far sea-line.... but oh, how tired we all get! i shall be quite ready for my rest!" this note gives a picture of her life. she was always seeking to make a bright spot around her; to give of herself in some way. there is a bit in her book which illustrates this instinct. the incident occurred during a long, dreary storm at the shoals. two men had come in a boat asking for help. "a little child had died at star island, and they could not sail to the mainland, and had no means to construct a coffin among themselves. all day i watched the making of that little chrysalis; and at night the last nail was driven in, and it lay across a bench, in the midst of the litter of the workshop, and a curious stillness seemed to emanate from the senseless boards. i went back to the house and gathered a handful of scarlet geranium, and returned with it through the rain. the brilliant blossoms were sprinkled with glittering drops. i laid them in the little coffin, while the wind wailed so sorrowfully outside, and the rain poured against the windows. two men came through the mist and storm, and one swung the light little shell to his shoulder, and they carried it away, and the gathering darkness shut down and hid them as they tossed among the waves. i never saw the little girl, but where they buried her i know; the lighthouse shines close by, and every night the quiet, constant ray steals to her grave and softly touches it, as if to say, with a caress, 'sleep well! be thankful you are spared so much that i see humanity endure, fixed here forever where i stand.'" we have seen the profound love she felt for, and the companionship she found in, nature and natural objects; but combined with these sentiments, or developed simply by her love to speak more directly, was a very uncommon power of observation. this power grew day by day, and the delightful correspondence which existed between bradford torrey and herself, although they had never met face to face, bears witness to her constant mental record and memory respecting the habits of birds and woodland manners. every year we find her longing for larger knowledge; books and men of science attracted her; and if her life had been less intensely laborious, in order to make those who belonged to her comfortable and happy, what might she not have achieved! her nature was replete with boundless possibilities, and we find ourselves asking the old, old question, must the artist forever crush the wings by which he flies against such terrible limitations?-a question never to be answered in this world. her observations began with her earliest breath at the islands. "i remember," she says, "in the spring, kneeling on the ground to seek the first blades of grass that pricked through the soil, and bringing them into the house to study and wonder over. better than a shopful of toys they were to me! whence came their color? how did they draw their sweet, refreshing tint from the brown earth, or the limpid air, or the white light? chemistry was not at hand to answer me, and all her wisdom would not have dispelled the wonder. later, the little scarlet pimpernel charmed me. it seemed more than a flower; it was like a human thing. i knew it by its homely name of 'poor man's weather glass.' it was so much wiser than i; for when the sky was yet without a cloud, softly it clasped its small red petals together, folding its golden heart in safety from the shower that was sure to come. how could it know so much?" whatever sorrows life brought to her, and they were many and of the heaviest, this exquisite enjoyment of nature, the tender love and care for every created thing within her reach, always stayed her heart. to see her lift a flower in her fingers,--fingers which gave one a sense of supporting everything which she touched, expressive, too, of fineness in every fibre, although strong and worn with labor,--to see her handle these wonderful creatures which she worshiped, was something not to be forgotten. the lines of keats,- "open afresh your rounds of starry folds, ye ardent marigolds!" were probably oftener flitting through her mind or from her lips than through the mind or from the lips of any since keats wrote them. she remembered that he said he thought his "intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the growth of flowers," but she was sure he never felt their beauty more devoutly "than the little half-savage being who knelt, like a fire-worshiper, to watch the unfolding of those golden disks." the time came at last, as it comes to every human being, for asking the reason of the faith that was in her. it was difficult for her to reply. her heart had often questioned whether she believed, and what; and yet, as she has said, she could not keep her faith out of her poems if she would. we find the following passage in "among the isles of shoals," which throws a light beyond that of her own lantern. "when the boat was out late," she says, "in soft, moonless summer nights, i used to light a lantern, and going down to the water's edge take my station between the timbers of the slip, and with the lantern at my feet sit waiting in the darkness, quite content, knowing my little star was watched for, and that the safety of the boat depended in a great measure upon it.... i felt so much a part of the lord's universe, i was no more afraid of the dark than the waves or winds; but i was glad to hear at last the creaking of the mast and the rattling of the rowlocks as the boat approached." "a part of the lord's universe,"--that celia thaxter always felt herself to be, and for many years she was impatient of other teaching than what nature brought to her. as life went on, and the mingled mysteries of human pain and grief were unfolded, she longed for a closer knowledge. at first she sought it everywhere, and patiently, save in or through the churches; with them she was long _im_patient. at last, after ardent search through the religious books and by means of the teachers of the orient, the bible was born anew for her, and the new testament became her stay and refreshment. at this period she wrote to her friend, mrs. h. m. rogers: "k. and i read the bhagavad gã®tã¢ every day of our lives, and when we get to the end we begin again! it is a great thing to keep one's mind full of it, permeated as it were; and i think mohini's own words are a great help and inspiration everywhere, all through it as well as in the beautiful introduction. i have written out clearly on the margin of my copy every text which he has quoted from the scriptures, and find it most interesting. 'truth is one.'" nothing was ever "born anew" in celia thaxter which she did not strive to share with others. she could keep nothing but secrets to herself. joys, experiences of every kind, sorrows and misfortunes, except when they could darken the lives of others, were all brought open handed and open hearted, to those she loved. her generosity knew no limits. there is a description by her of the flood which swept over her being, and seemed to carry her away from the earth, when she once saw the great glory of the lord in a rainbow at the island. she hid her face from the wonder; it was more than she could bear. "i felt then," she said, "how i longed to speak these things which made life so sweet, --to speak the wind, the cloud, the bird's flight, the sea's murmur, --and ever the wish grew;" and so it was she became, growing from and with this wish, a poet the world will remember. dr. holmes said once in conversation that he thought the value of a poet to the world was not so much the pleasure that this or that poem might give to certain readers, or even perchance to posterity, as the fact that a poet was known to be one who was sometimes rapt out of himself into the region of the divine; that the spirit had descended upon him and taught him what he should speak. this is especially true of celia thaxter, whose life was divorced from worldliness, while it was instinct with the keenest enjoyment of life and of god's world. she liked to read her poems aloud when people asked for them; and if there was ever a genuine reputation from doing a thing well, such a reputation was hers. from the first person who heard her the wish began to spread, until, summer after summer, in her parlor, listeners would gather if she would promise to read to them. night after night she has held her sway, with tears and smiles from her responsive little audiences, which seemed to gain new courage and light from what she gave them. her unspeakably interesting nature was always betraying itself and shining out between the lines. occasionally she yielded to the urgent claims brought to bear upon her by her friend mrs. johnson, of the woman's prison, and would go to read to the sad-eyed audience at sherborn. even those hearts dulled by wrong and misery awakened at the sound of her voice. it was not altogether this or that verse or ballad that made the tears flow, or brought a laugh from her hearers; it was the deep sympathy which she carried in her heart and which poured out in her voice; a hope, too, for them, and for what they might yet become. she could not go frequently,--she was too deeply laden with responsibilities nearer home; but it was always a holiday when she was known to be coming, and a season of light-heartedness to mrs. johnson as well as to the prisoners. it is a strange fallacy that a poet may not read his own verses well. who besides the writer should comprehend every shade of meaning which made the cloud or sunshine of his poem? mrs. thaxter certainly read her own verse with a fullness of suggestion which no other reader could have given it; and her voice was sufficient, too, although not loud or striking, to fill and satisfy the ear of the listener. but at the risk of repetition we recall that it was her own generous, beautiful nature, unlike that of any other, which made her reading helpful to all who heard her. she speaks somewhere of the birds on her island as "so tame, knowing how well they are beloved, that they gather on the window-sills, twittering and fluttering gay and graceful, turning their heads this way and that, eying you askance without a trace of fear." and so it was with the human beings who came to know her. they were attracted, they came near, they flew under her protection, and were not disappointed of their rest. four years before mrs. thaxter left this world, when she was still only fifty-five years old, she was stricken with a shaft of death. her overworked body was prostrated in sudden agony, and she, well, young, vigorous beyond the ordinary lot of mortals, found herself weak and unable to rise. "i do so hate figuring as an interesting invalid," she wrote. "perhaps i have been doing too much, getting settled. but oh, i used to be able to do _any_thing! where is my old energy and vigor and power gone! it should not ebb away quite so soon!" she recovered her wonted tone and sufficient strength for every-day needs, and still found "life so interesting." but her keen observation had been brought to bear upon her own condition, and she suspected that she might flit away from us quickly some day. except for one who was especially dependent upon her she was quite ready. the surprises of this life were so wonderful, it was easy for her to believe in the surprises of the unseen; but her letters were full as usual of the things which feed the springs of joy around us in this world. one summer it was the first volume of poems of richard watson gilder which gave her great happiness. she talked of them, recited them, sent them to her friends, and finally wrote to mr. gilder himself. since her death he has said, "i never saw mrs. thaxter but once, and that lately; but her immediate and surprising and continuous appreciation and encouragement i can never forget." how many other contemporaneous writers and artists could say the same! the transparent simplicity of her character and manners, her love and capacity for labor, were combined with equal capacities for enjoying the complex in others and a pure appetite for pleasure. it would be impossible to find a more childlike power of enjoyment. a perfect happiness came to her, during the last eight years of her life, with the birth of her grandchildren. the little boy who surprised her into bliss one day by crying out "i 'dore you, i 'dore you, granna! i love you every breff!" was the creature perhaps dearest to her heart; but she loved them all, and talked and wrote of them with abandonment of rejoicing. writing to her friend mrs. rogers, she says: "little e. stayed with his 'granna,' who worships the ground he walks on, and counted every beat of his quick-fluttering little heart. oh, i never meant, in my old age, to become subject to the thrall of a love like this; it is almost dreadful, so absorbing, so stirring down to the deeps. for the tiny creature is so old and wise and sweet, and so fascinating in his sturdy common sense and clear intelligence; and his affection for me is a wonderful, exquisite thing, the sweetest flower that has bloomed for me in all my life through." her enjoyment of art could not fade nor lose its keenness. her life had been shut, as we have seen, into very narrow limits. she never had seen the city of new york, and life outside the circle we have described was an unknown world to her. she went to europe once with her eldest brother, when he was ill, for three months, and she has left in her letters some striking descriptions of what she saw there; but her days were closely bounded by the necessities we have suggested. nevertheless the great world of art was more to celia thaxter than to others; perhaps for the very reason that her mind was open and unjaded. her rapture over the great players from england; her absolute agony, after seeing "the cup" played by them in london, lest she could never, never tell the happiness it was to her, with tennyson's words on her own tongue, as it were, to follow miss terry's perfect enunciation of the lines,--these enjoyments, true pleasures as indeed they are, did not lose their power over her. gilbert and sullivan, too, could not have found a more amused admirer. "pinafore" never grew stale for her, and her brothers yielded to her fancy, or pleased it, by naming their little steamer pinafore. she went to the theatre again and again to see this, and all the succeeding comedies by the same hands. she never seemed to weary of their fun. but the poets were her great fountain of refreshment; "siloa's brook" was her chief resort. tennyson was her chosen master, and there were few of his lines she did not know by heart. her feeling for nature was satisfied by the incomparable verses in which he portrays the divine light shining behind the life of natural things. how often have we heard her murmuring to herself,- "the wind sounds like a silver wire," or, "to watch the emerald-colored water falling," or, "black as ash-buds on the front of march." whatever it might be she was observing, there was some line of this great interpreter of nature ready to make the moment melodious. shakespeare's sonnets were also her close companions; indeed, she seized and retained a cloud of beautiful things in her trustworthy memory. they fed and cheered her on her singing way. in the quiet loveliness of early summer, and before the tide of humanity swept down upon appledore, she went for the last time, in june, 1894, with a small company of intimate friends, to revisit the different islands and the well-known haunts most dear to her. the days were still and sweet, and she lingered lovingly over the old places, telling the local incidents which occurred to her, and touching the whole with a fresh light. perhaps she knew that it was a farewell; but if it had been revealed to her, she could not have been more tender and loving in her spirit to the life around her. how suddenly it seemed at last that her days with us were ended! she had been listening to music, had been reading to her little company, had been delighting in one of appleton brown's new pictures, and then she laid her down to sleep for the last time, and flitted away from her mortality. the burial was at her island, on a quiet afternoon in the late summer. her parlor, in which the body lay, was again made radiant, after her own custom, with the flowers from her garden, and a bed of sweet bay was prepared by her friends appleton brown and childe hassam, on which her form was laid. william mason once more played the music from schumann which she chiefly loved, and an old friend, james de normandie, paid a brief tribute of affection, spoken for all those who surrounded her. she was borne by her brothers and those nearest to her up to the silent spot where her body was left. the day was still and soft, and the veiled sun was declining as the solemn procession, bearing flowers, followed to the sacred place. at a respectful distance above stood a wide ring of interested observers, but only those who knew her and loved her best drew near. after all was done, and the body was at rest upon the fragrant bed prepared for it, the young flower-bearers brought their burdens to cover her. the bright, tear-stained faces of those who held up their arms full of flowers to be heaped upon the spot until it became a mound of blossoms, allied the scene, in beauty and simplicity, to the solemn rites of antiquity. it was indeed a poet's burial, but it was far more than that: it was the celebration of the passing of a large and beneficent soul. whittier. notes of his life and his friendships born december 17, 1807; died september 7, 1892 the figure of the quaker poet, as he stood before the world, was unlike that of any other prominent figure which has walked across the stage of life. this may be said, of course, of every individual; yet the likenesses between men of a given era, or between modern men of strong character and those of the ancient world, cause us sometimes to exclaim with wonder at the evident repetitions in development. one can hardly walk through the galleries of antique statues, nor read the passages of plutarch or thucydides, without finding this idea thrust upon the mind. but with regard to whittier, such comparisons were never made, even in fancy. his lithe, upright form, full of quick movement, his burning eye, his keen wit, bore witness to a contrast in himself with the staid, controlled manner and the habit of the sect into which he was born. the love and devotion with which he adhered to the quaker church and doctrines served to accentuate his unlikeness to the men of his time, because he early became also one of the most determined contestants in one of the sternest combats which the world has witnessed. neither in the ranks of poets nor divines nor philosophers do we find his counterpart. he felt a certain brotherhood with robert burns, and early loved his genius; but where were two more unlike? a kind of solitude of life and experience, greater than that which usually throws its shadow on the human soul, invested him in his passage through the world. the refinement of his education, the calm of nature by which, in youth, he was surrounded, the few books which he made his own, nearly all serious in their character, and the religious atmosphere in which he was nurtured, all tended to form an environment in which knowledge developed into wisdom, and the fiery soul formed a power to restrain or to express its force for the good of humanity. but as surely as he was a quaker, so surely also did he feel himself a part of the life of new england. he believed in the ideals of his time; the simple ways of living; the eager nourishing of all good things by the sacrifice of many private wishes; in short, he made one cause with garrison and phillips, emerson and lowell, longfellow and holmes. his standards were often different from those of his friends, but their ideals were on the whole made in common. his friends were to whittier, more than to most men, an unfailing source of daily happiness and gratitude. with the advance of years, and the death of his unmarried sister, his friends became all in all to him. they were his mother, his sister, and his brother; but in a certain sense they were always friends of the imagination. he saw some of them only at rare intervals, and sustained his relations with them chiefly in his hurried correspondence. he never suffered himself to complain of what they were not; but what they were, in loyalty to chosen aims, and in their affection for him, was an unending source of pleasure. with the shortcomings of others he dealt gently, having too many shortcomings of his own, as he was accustomed to say, with true humility. he did not, however, look upon the failings of his friends with indifferent eyes. "how strange it is!" he once said. "we see those whom we love going to the very verge of the precipice of self-destruction, yet it is not in our power to hold them back!" a life of invalidism made consecutive labor of any kind an impossibility. for years he was only able to write for half an hour or less, without stopping to rest, and these precious moments were devoted to some poem or other work for the press, which was almost his only source of income. his correspondence suffered, from a literary point of view; but his letters were none the less delightful to his friends. to the world of literature they are perhaps less important than those of most men who have achieved a high place. whittier was between twenty and thirty years of age when his family left the little farm near haverhill, where he was born, and moved into the town of amesbury, eight miles distant. long before that period he had identified himself with the antislavery cause, and had visited, in the course of his ceaseless labors for the slaves, new york, philadelphia, and washington. these brief journeys bounded his travels in this world. in the year 1843 he wrote anxiously to his publisher, mr. fields, "i send with this 'the exiles,' a kind of john gilpin legend. i am in doubt about it. read it, and decide for thyself whether it is worth printing." he began at this rather late period (he was then thirty-six years old) to feel a touch of satisfaction in his comparatively new occupation of writing poetry, and to speak of it without reserve to his chosen friends. his poems were then beginning to bring him into personal relation with the reading world. many years later, when speaking of the newspaper writing which absorbed his earlier life, he said that he had written a vast amount for the press; he thought that his work would fill nearly ten octavo volumes; but he had grown utterly weary of throwing so much out into space from which no response ever came back to him. at length he decided to put it all aside, discovering that a power lay in him for more congenial labors. from the moment of the publication of his second volume of poems, whittier felt himself fairly launched upon a new career, and seemed to stand with a responsive audience before him. the poems "toussaint l'ouverture," "the slave-ships," and others belonging to the same period, followed in quick succession. sometimes they took the form of appeal, sometimes of sympathy, and again they are prophetic or dramatic. he hears the slave mother weep:- "gone--gone--sold and gone to the rice-swamp dank and lone, from virginia's hills and waters- woe is me, my stolen daughters!" such voices could not be silenced. though men might turn away and refuse to read or to listen, the music once uttered rang out into the common air, and would not die. a homely native wit pointed whittier's familiar correspondence. writing in 1849, while revising his volume for publication, he speaks of one of his poems as "that rascally old ballad 'kathleen,'" and adds that it "wants something, though it is already too long." he adds: "the weather this morning is cold enough for an esquimau purgatory-terrible. what did the old pilgrims mean by coming here?" with the years his friendship with his publisher became more intimate. in writing him he often indulged his humor for fun and banter: "bachelor as i am, i congratulate thee on thy escape from single (misery!) blessedness. it is the very wisest thing thee ever did. were i autocrat, i would see to it that every young man over twenty-five and every young woman over twenty was married without delay. perhaps, on second thought, it might be well to keep one old maid and one old bachelor in each town, by way of warning, just as the spartans did their drunken helots." discussing the question of some of his "bad rhymes," and what to do about them, he wrote once: "i heartily thank thee for thy suggestions. let me have more of them. i had a hearty laugh at thy hint of the 'carnal' bearing of one of my lines. it is now simply _rural._ i might have made some other needful changes had i not been suffering with headache all day." occasionally the fire which burned in him would flame out, as when he writes in 1851: "so your union-tinkers have really caught a 'nigger' at last! a very pretty and refreshing sight it must have been to sabbath-going christians yesterday--that _chained_ court-house of yours. and bunker hill monument looking down upon all! but the matter is too sad for irony. god forgive the miserable politicians who gamble for office with dice loaded with human hearts!" from time to time, also, we find him expressing his literary opinions eagerly and simply as friend may talk with friend, and without aspiring to literary judgment. "thoreau's 'walden' is capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish. the practical moral of it seems to be that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can live as cheaply as that quadruped; but after all, for me, i prefer walking on two legs." it would be unjust to whittier to quote this talk on paper as his final opinion upon thoreau, for he afterwards read everything he wrote, and was a warm appreciator of his work. his enthusiasm for books and for the writers of books never faded. "what do we not all owe you," he writes mr. fields, "for your edition of de tocqueville! it is one of the best books of the century. thanks, too, for allingham's poems. after tennyson, he is my favorite among modern british poets." and again: "i have just read longfellow's introduction to his 'tales of the inn'--a splendid piece of painting! neither boccaccio nor chaucer has done better. who wrote 'a loyal woman's no?' was it lucy larcom? i thought it might be." in 1866 he says: "i am glad to see 'hosea biglow' in book form. it is a grand book--the best of its kind for the last half-century or more. it has wit enough to make the reputation of a dozen english satirists." this appreciation of his contemporaries was a strong feature of his character. his sympathy with the difficulties of a literary life, particularly for women, was very keen. there seem to be few women writers of his time who have failed to receive from his pen some token of recognition. of edith thomas he once said in one of his notelets, "she has a divine gift, and her first book is more than a promise--an assurance." of sarah orne jewett he was fond as of a daughter, and from their earliest acquaintance his letters are filled with appreciation of her stories. "i do not wonder," he wrote one day, "that 'the luck of the bogans' is attractive to the irish folks, and to everybody else. it is a very successful departure from new england life and scenery, and shows that sarah is as much at home in ireland and on the carolina sea islands as in maine or massachusetts. i am very proud that i was one of the first to discover her." this predisposition to think well of the work of others gave him the happy opportunity in more than one instance of bringing authors of real talent before the public who might otherwise have waited long for general recognition. this was especially the case with one of our best beloved new england writers, lucy larcom. as early as 1853 he wrote a letter to his publisher introducing her work to his notice. "i inclose," he says, "what i regard as a very unique and beautiful little book in ms. i don't wish thee to take my opinion, but the first leisure hour thee have, read it, and i am sure thee will decide that it is exactly the thing for publication.... the little prose poems are unlike anything in our literature, and remind me of the german writer lessing. they are equally adapted to young and old.... the author, lucy larcom, of beverly, is a novice in writing and book-making, and with no ambition to appear in print; and were i not perfectly certain that her little collection is worthy of type, i would be the last to encourage her to take even this small step to publicity. read 'the impression of rain-drops,' 'the steamboat and niagara,' 'the laughing water,' 'my father's house,' etc." he thus early became the foster-father of lucy larcom's children of the brain, and, what was far more to her, a life-long friend, adviser, and supporter. one of his most intimate personal friends for many years was lydia maria child. beginning in the earliest days of the anti-slavery struggle, their friendship lasted into the late and peaceful sunset of their days. as mrs. child advanced in years, it was her custom in the winter to leave her cottage at wayland for a few months, and to take lodgings in boston. the dignity and independence of mrs. child's character were so great that she knew her friends would find her wherever she might live, and her desire to help on the good work of the world led her to practice the most austere economies. therefore, instead of finding a comfortable boarding-place, which she might well have excused herself for doing at her advanced age of eighty years, she took rooms in a very plain little house in a remote quarter of the city, and went by the street cars daily to the north end, to get her dinner at a restaurant which she had discovered as being clean, and having wholesome food at the very lowest prices. this enabled her to give away sums which were surprisingly large to those who knew her income. wendell phillips, who had always taken charge of her affairs, said to me at the time of her death that when the negroes made their flight into kansas, mrs. child came in as soon as the news arrived and asked him to forward fifty dollars for their assistance. "i am afraid you cannot afford to send that sum just now," said mr. phillips. "perhaps you will do well to think it over." "so i will," said mrs. child, and departed. in the course of the day he received a note from her, saying she had made a mistake. it was one hundred dollars that she wished to send. mrs. child's chief pleasure in coming to town was the opportunity she found of seeing her friends. whittier always sought her out, and their meetings at the houses of their mutual cronies were festivals indeed. they would sit side by side, while memories crowded up and filled their faces with a tenderness they could not express in words. as they told their tales and made merry, they would sit with their hands on each other's knees, and with glances in which tears and laughter were closely intermingled. "it was good to see mrs. child," some one remarked, after one of those interviews. "yes," said whittier, "lyddy's bunnets aren't always in the fashion" (with a quaint look, as much as to say, "i wonder what you think of anything so bad"), "but we don't like her any the worse for that." shortly after mrs. child's death he wrote from amesbury: "my heart has been heavy ever since i heard of dear maria child's death. the true, noble, loving soul! _where_ is she? _what_ is she? _how_ is she? the moral and spiritual economy of god will not suffer such light and love to be lost in blank annihilation. she was herself an evidence of immortality. in a letter written to me at seventy years of age she said: 'the older i grow the more i am awe-struck (not frightened, but awed) by the great mystery of an existence here and hereafter. no thinking can solve the problem. infinite wisdom has purposely sealed it from our eyes.'" there was never a moment of whittier's life when, prostrated by illness, or overwhelmed by private sorrows, or removed from the haunts of men, he forgot to take a living interest in public affairs, and to study closely the characteristics and works of the men who were our governors. he understood the characters of our public officers as if he had lived with them continually, and his quick apprehension with regard to their movements was something most unusual. de quincey, we remember, surprised his american friends by taking their hands, as it were, and showing them about boston, so familiar was he with our localities. whittier could sit down with politicians and easily prove himself the better man on contested questions. in 1861 he wrote:-"our government needs more wisdom than it has thus far had credit for to sustain the national honor and avert a war with england. what a pity that welles _indorsed_ the act of wilkes in his report! why couldn't we have been satisfied with the thing without making such a cackling over it? apologies are cheap, and we could afford to make a very handsome one in this case. a war with england would ruin us. it is too monstrous to think of. may god in his mercy save us from it!" in 1862 and 1863 whittier was in frequent correspondence with mr. fields. poems suggested by the stirring times were crowding thick upon his mind. "it is a great thing to live in these days. i am thankful for what i have lived to see and hear," he says. "there is nothing for us but the old methodist ejaculation, 'glory to god!'" the volume entitled "in war-time" appeared at this period, though, as usual, he seems to have had little strength and spirit for the revision of his poems. for this, however unwillingly, he would often throw himself upon the kindness of his friend and publisher. in writing to ask some consideration for the manuscript of an unknown lady during this year, he adds: "i ought to have sent to you about this lady's ms. long ago, but the fact is, i hate to bother you with such matters. i am more and more impressed with the christian tolerance and patience of publishers, beset as you are with legions of clamorous authors, male and female. i should think you would hate the very sight of one of these importunates. after all, fields, let us own the truth: writing folks are bores. how few of us (let them say what they will of our genius) have any common sense! i take it that it is the providential business of authors and publishers to torment each other." these little friendly touches in his correspondence show us the man far more distinctly than many pages of writing about him. some one has said that whittier's epistolary style was perfect. doubtless he could write as good a letter on occasion as any man who ever lived, but he sustained no such correspondence. his notes and letters were homely and affectionate, with the delightful carelessness possible in the talk of intimate friends. they present no ordinary picture of human tenderness, devotion, and charity, and these qualities gain a wonderful beauty when we remember that they come from the same spirit which cried out with ezekiel:- "the burden of a prophet's power fell on me in that fearful hour; from off unutterable woes the curtain of the future rose; i saw far down the coming time the fiery chastisement of crime; with noise of mingling hosts, and jar of falling towers and shouts of war, i saw the nations rise and fall like fire-gleams on my tent's white wall." "the fire and fury of the brain" were his indeed; a spirit was in him to redeem the land; he was one of god's interpreters; but there was also the tenderness of divine humanity, the love and patience of those who dwell in the courts of the lord. whittier's sister elizabeth was a sensitive woman, whose delicate health was a constant source of anxiety to her brother, especially after the death of their mother, when they were left alone together in the home at amesbury. as one of their intimate friends said, no one could tell which would die first, but they were each so anxious about the other's health that it was a question which would wear away into the grave first, for the other's sake. it was whittier's sad experience to be deprived of the companionship of all those most dear to him, and for over twenty years to live without that intimate household communion for the loss of which the world holds no recompense. for several years, before and after his sister elizabeth's death, whittier wore the look of one who was very ill. his large dark eyes burned with peculiar fire, and contrasted with his pale brow and attenuated figure. he had a sorrowful, stricken look, and found it hard enough to reconstruct his life, missing the companionship and care of his sister, and her great sympathy with his own literary work. there was a likeness between the two; the same speaking eyes marked the line from which they sprang, and their kinship and inheritance. old new england people were quick to recognize "the bachiler eyes," not only in the whittiers, but in daniel webster, caleb cushing, nathaniel hawthorne, and william bachiler greene, a man less widely known than these distinguished compatriots. mr. greene was, however, a man of mark in his own time, a daring thinker, and one who was possessed of much brave originality, whose own deep thoughtfulness was always planting seeds of thought in others, and who can certainly never be forgotten by those who were fortunate enough to be his friends. these men of the grand eyes were all descended from a gifted old preacher of great fame in early colonial days, a man of true distinction and devoted service, in spite of the dishonor with which he let his name be shadowed in his latest years. it would be most interesting to trace the line still further back into the past; but when the bachiler eyes were by any chance referred to in whittier's presence, he would look shyly askance, and sometimes speak, half with pride, half with a sort of humorous compassion, of his hampton ancestor. the connection of the whittiers of haverhill with the greenes was somewhat closer than with other branches of the bachiler line. one of the poet's most entertaining reminiscences of his boyhood was the story of his first visit to boston. mr. william greene's mother was an interesting woman of strong, independent character and wide interests, wonted to the life of cities, and one of the first, in spite of his boyish shyness, to appreciate her young relative. her kind eagerness, during one of her occasional visits to the whittiers, that greenleaf should come to see her when he came to boston, fell in with his own dreams, and a high desire to see the sights of the great town. one can easily see how his imagination glorified the natural expectations of a country boy, and when the time arrived how the whole household lent itself to furthering so great an expedition. he was not only to have a new suit of clothes, but they were, for the first time, to be trimmed with "boughten buttons," to the lad's complete satisfaction, his mind being fixed upon those as marking the difference between town and country fashions. when the preparations were made, his fresh homespun costume, cut after the best usage of the society of friends, seemed to him all that heart could desire, and he started away bravely by the coach to pass a week in boston. his mother had not forgotten to warn him of possible dangers and snares; it was then that he made her a promise which, at first from principle and later from sentiment, he always most sacredly kept--that he would not enter a playhouse. as he told the story, it was easy for a listener to comprehend how many good wishes flew after the adventurer, and how much wild beating of the heart he himself experienced as the coach rolled away; how bewildering the city streets appeared when he found himself at the brief journey's end. after he had reported himself to mrs. greene, and been received with most affectionate hospitality, and had promised to reappear at tea-time, he sallied forth to the great business of sight-seeing. "i wandered up and down the streets," he used to say. "somehow it wasn't just what i expected, and the crowd was worse and worse after i got into washington street; and when i got tired of being jostled, it seemed to me as if the folks might get by if i waited a little while. some of them looked at me, and so i stepped into an alleyway and waited and looked out. sometimes there didn't seem to be so many passing, and i thought of starting, and then they'd begin again. 'twas a terrible stream of people to me. i began to think my new clothes and the buttons were all thrown away. i stayed there a good while." (this was said with great amusement.) "i began to be homesick. i thought it made no difference at all about my having those boughten buttons." how long he waited, or what thoughts were stirred by this first glimpse at the ceaseless procession of humanity, who can say? but there was a sequel to the tale. he was invited to return to mrs. greene's to drink tea and meet a company of her guests. among them were some ladies who were very gay and friendly; we can imagine that they were attracted by the handsome eyes and quaint garb of the young friend, and by his quick wit and homely turns of speech, all the more amusing for a rustic flavor. they tried to tease him a little, but they must have quickly found their match in drollery, while the lad was already a citizen of the commonwealth of books. no doubt the stimulus of such a social occasion brought him, as well as the strangers, into new acquaintance with his growing gifts. but presently one of the ladies, evidently the favorite until this shocking moment, began to speak of the theatre, and asked for the pleasure of his presence at the play that very night, she herself being the leading player. at this disclosure, and the frank talk of the rest of the company, their evident interest in the stage, and regard for a young person who had chosen such a profession, the young quaker lad was stricken with horror. in after years he could only remember it with amusement, but that night his mother's anxious warnings rang in his ears, and he hastened to escape from such a snare. somehow this pleasant young companion of the tea party hardly represented the wickedness of playhouses as puritan new england loved to picture them; but between a sense of disappointment and homesickness and general insecurity, he could not sleep, and next morning when the early stage-coach started forth, it carried him as passenger. he said nothing to his amazed family of the alarming episode of the playing-woman, nor of his deep consciousness of the home-made clothes, but he no doubt reflected much upon this boston visit in the leisure of the silent fields and hills. it is impossible to convey to those who never saw mr. whittier the charm of his gift of story telling; the exactness and simplicity of his reminiscences were flavored by his poetical insight and dramatic representation. it was a wonderful thing to hear him rehearse in the twilight the scenes of his youth, and the figures that came and went in that small world; the pathos and humor of his speech can never be exceeded; and there can never be again so complete a linking of the ancient provincial lore and the new life and thought of new england as there was in him. while he was with us, his poems seemed hardly to give sufficient witness of that rich store of thought and knowledge; he was always making his horizon wider, at the same time that he came into closer sympathy with things near at hand. for him the ancient customs of a country neighborhood, the simple characters, the loves and hates and losses of a rural household, stood for a type of human life in every age, and were never trivial or narrow. as he grew older, these became less and less personal. he sometimes appeared to think of death rather than the person who had died, and of love and grief rather than of those who felt their influence. his was the life of the poet first of all, and yet the tale of his sympathetic friendliness, and his generosities and care-taking for others will never be fully told. the dark eyes had great powers of insight; they could flash scorn as well as shine with the soft light of encouragement. he accustomed himself, of course, to more frequent visits to boston after his sister's death, but he was seldom, if ever, persuaded to go to the saturday club, to which so many of his friends belonged. sometimes he would bring a new poem for a private first reading, and for that purpose would stay to breakfast or luncheon; but late dinners were contrary to the habit of his life, and he seldom sat down to one. "i take the liberty," he wrote one day, "of inclosing a little poem of mine which has beguiled some weary hours. i hope thee will like it. how strange it seems not to read it to my sister! if thee have read schoolcraft, thee will remember what he says of the 'little vanishers.' the legend is very beautiful, and i hope i have done it justice in some sort." in the spring of 1865 he came to campton, on the pemigewasset river, in new hampshire, a delightful place for those who love green hills and the mystery of rivers. we were passing a few weeks there by ourselves, and it was a great surprise and pleasure to see our friend. he drove up to the door one afternoon just as the sun was slanting to the west, too late to drive away again that day. in our desire to show him all the glories of the spot, we carried him out at once, up the hillside, leaping across the brook, gathering pennyroyal and indian posy as we went, past the sheep and on and up, until he, laughing, said: "look here, i can't follow thee; besides, i think i've seen more of this life than thee have, and it isn't all so new to me! come and sit down here; i'm tired." we sat a while overlooking the wonderful panorama, the winding river, the hills and fields all green and radiant, listening at times to a mountain stream which came with wild and solitary roar from its solemn home among the farther heights. presently we returned to supper; and afterwards, sitting in the little parlor which looked towards the sunset on the high hills far away, his mind seemed to rise into a higher atmosphere. he began by quoting the last verse of emerson's "sphinx:"- "uprose the merry sphinx, and couched 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 monadnock's head." he talked long and earnestly upon the subject of our spiritual existence independent of the body. i have often heard him dwell upon this subject since; but the awful glory of the hills, the dark and silence of our little parlor, the assured speech touching the unseen, of one who had thought much and suffered much, and found a refuge in the tabernacle not made with hands, were very impressive. we felt that "it was good for us to be there." speaking of his faith in the visions of others--though he did not have these visions himself, and believed they were not vouchsafed to all-he told us of a prophecy that was written down twenty-five years before by an old man in sandwich (a village among the hills, about fifteen miles from campton), predicting the terrible civil war which had just been raging between the north and the south. this man was in the fields at noonday, when a darkness fell upon his sight and covered the earth. he beheld the divided nation and the freed people and the final deliverance from the terrors of war. the whole series of events were clearly detailed, and whittier had stored them away in his memory. he said that only one thing was wrong. he foretold foreign intervention, from which we were happily spared. the daughter of this prophet was living; he knew her well,--an excellent woman and a friend who was often impressed to speak in meeting. "she is good," said whittier, "and speaks from her experience, and for that reason i like to hear her." spiritualism, as it is called in our day, was a subject which earnestly and steadily held his attention. having lived very near to the salem witchcraft experience in early times, the topic was one that came more closely home to his mind than to almost any one else in our century. there are many passages in his letters on this question which state his own mental position very clearly. "i have had as good a chance to see a ghost," he once said, "as anybody ever had, but not the slightest sign ever came to me. i do not doubt what others tell me, but i sometimes wonder over my own incapacity. i should like to see some dear ghost walk in and sit down by me when i am here alone. the doings of the old witch days have never been explained; and as we are so soon to be transferred to another state, how natural it appears that some of us should have glimpses of it here! we all feel the help we receive from the divine spirit. why deny, then, that some men have it more directly and more visibly than others?" in his memories of new england country life when he was a child, this subject was closely interwoven with every association. he had an uncle, who made one of the family, a man by no means devoid of the old-fashioned faith in witches, and who was always ready to give his testimony. he remembered an old woman in the neighborhood who was accused of being a witch, and that when his uncle's opinion was asked about her, he replied that he _knew she was a witch._ "how do you know?" they said. "oh," he replied, "i've seen her!" whittier recalled this uncle's returning one night from a long drive through the woods; and when he came in and sat down by the fire after supper, he told them that he had seen three old women in a clearing around a kettle, "a-stirrin'of it." when they saw him, they moved off behind the trees, but he distinctly saw the smoke from the kettle, and he recognized the old woman in question as one of the three beyond the shadow of a doubt. no doubt some curious rustic remedy or charm was being brewed in the dark of the moon. nothing escaped his observation that was printed or circulated upon this topic. in the summer of 1882 he discovered that old orchard beach had been made a theatre of new wonders. dr. ---had been there, "working protestant miracles, and the lame walk and the deaf hear under his manipulation and holy oil. there seems no doubt that cures of nervous diseases are really sometimes effected, and i believe in the efficacy of prayer. the nearer we are drawn to him who is the source of all life, the better it must be for soul and body." in robert dale owen he always took a strong and friendly interest; and when, late in life, reverses fell upon mr. owen in the shape of humiliating revelations of his own credulity, whittier's relations to him were unchanged. "i have read with renewed interest," he wrote, "the paper of r. d. owen. i had a long talk with him years ago on the subject. he was a very noble and good man, and i was terribly indignant when he was so deceived by the pretended materialized 'katie king.' i could never quite believe in 'materialization,' as i had reason to know that much of it was fraudulent. it surely argues a fathomless depth of depravity to trifle with the yearning love of those who have lost dear ones, and 'long for the touch of a vanished hand.'" in the year 1866 a very fine portrait of abraham lincoln was engraved by marshall. a copy of it was presented to whittier, who wrote concerning it: "it was never my privilege to know abraham lincoln personally, and the various pictures have more or less failed to satisfy my conception of him. they might be, and probably were, what are called 'good likenesses,' so far as outline and detail were concerned; but to me they always seemed to lack one great essential of a true portrait,--the informing spirit of the man within. this i find in marshall's portrait. the old harsh lines and unmistakable mouth are there, without flattery or compromise; but over all and through all the pathetic sadness, the wise simplicity and tender humanity of the man are visible. it is the face of the speaker at gettysburg, and the writer of the second inaugural." it was during this year, also, that the "tent on the beach" was written. he had said again and again in his notes that he had this work in hand, but always declared he was far too ill to finish it during the year. nevertheless, in the last days of december the package was forwarded to his publisher. "tell me," he wrote, "if thee object to the personal character of it. i have represented thee and bayard taylor and myself living a wild tent life for a few summer days on the beach, where, for lack of something better, i read my stories to the others. my original plan was the old 'decameron' one, each personage to read his own poems; but the thing has been so hackneyed by repetition that i abandoned it in disgust, and began anew. the result is before thee. put it in type or the fire. i am content--like eugene aram, 'prepared for either fortune.'" he had intended also to accomplish some work in prose at this period, but the painful condition of his health forbade it. "i am forbidden to use my poor head," he said, "so i have to get along as i can without it. the catholic st. leon, thee knows, walked alert as usual after his head was cut off." i am tempted to quote still further from a letter of this period: "i inclose a poem of mine which has never seen the light, although it was partly in print from my first draft to spare me the trouble of copying. it presents my view of christ as the special manifestation of the love of god to humanity.... let me thank the publisher of milton's prose for the compliment of the dedication. milton's prose has long been my favorite reading. my whole life has felt the influence of his writings." there is a delightful note on the subject of the popularity of the "tent on the beach," which shows his natural pleasure in success. "think," he says, "of bagging in this tent of ours an unsuspecting public at the rate of a thousand a day! this will never do. the swindle is awful. barnum is a saint to us. i am bowed with a sense of guilt, ashamed to look an honest man in the face. but nemesis is on our track; somebody will puncture our tent yet, and it will collapse like a torn balloon. i know i shall have to catch it; my back tingles in anticipation." it was perhaps in this same year, 1866, that we made an autumn visit to whittier which is still a well-remembered pleasure. the weather was warm and the fruit was ripening in the little amesbury garden. we loitered about for a while, i remember, in the afternoon, among the falling pear leaves and in the sweet air, but he soon led the way into his garden-room, and fell into talk. he was an adept in the art of conversation, having trained himself in the difficult school of a new england farmhouse, fit ground for such athletics, being typically bare of suggestion and of relief from outside resources. the unbroken afternoons and the long evenings, when the only hope of entertainment is in such fire as one brain can strike from another, produce a situation as difficult to the unskilled as that of an untaught swimmer when first cast into the sea. persons long habituated to these contests could face the position calmly, and see the early "tea-things" disappear and the contestants draw their chairs around the fire with a kind of zeal; but to one new to such experience there was room for heart-sinkings when preparations were made, by putting fresh sticks on the fire, for sitting from gloaming to vespers, and sometimes on again unwearied till midnight. mrs. stowe and whittier were the invincible lancelots of these tourneys, and any one who has had the privilege of sitting by the new england hearthstone with either of them will be ready to confess that no playhouse, or game, or any of the distractions the city may afford, can compare with the satisfaction of such an experience. upon the visit in question whittier talked of the days of his anti-slavery life in 1835 or 1836, when the english agitator, george thompson, first came to this country. the latter was suffering from the attack of many a mob, and was fatigued by frequent speaking and as frequent abuse. whittier invited him to his home in the neighborhood of haverhill, where he could find quiet and rest during the warm weather. thompson accepted the invitation, and remained with him a fortnight. they used to rake hay together, and go about the farm unmolested. at length, however, a pressing invitation came for thompson to go to concord, new hampshire, to speak in the cause of freedom, and afterwards to continue on to the village of plymouth and visit a friend in that place. whittier was included in the invitation, and it was settled that they should accept the call. they traveled peaceably enough in their own chaise as far as concord, where the speech was delivered without interruption; but when they attempted to leave the hall after the address was ended, they found it almost impossible. a crowd followed them with the apparent intention of stoning and killing them. "i understood how st. paul felt when he was thrice stoned," said whittier. the missiles fell around them and upon them like hail, not touching their heads, providentially, although he could still remember the sound of the stones when they missed their aim and struck the wooden fence behind them. they were made very lame by the blows, but they managed to reach their friend's house, where they sprang up the steps three at a time, before the crowd knew where they were going. their host was certainly a brave man, for he took them in at the door, and then throwing it open, exclaimed, "whoever comes in here must come over my dead body." the door was then barricaded, and the crowd rushed round to the back of the house, thinking that their victims intended to go out that way; but the travelers waited until it was dark, when whittier exchanged his friend's hat for that of his host, and, everything else peculiar about his dress being well disguised, the two managed to pass out unperceived by the crowd, and go on their way to plymouth. they stopped one night on their journey at a small inn, where the landlord asked if they had heard anything of the riot in concord. two men had been there, he said, one an englishman by the name of thompson, who had been making abominable and seditious speeches, stirring up people about "the niggers;" the other was a young quaker by the name of whittier, who was always making speeches. he heard him lecture once himself, he said (a base lie, whittier told us, because he had never "lectured" in his life), and it was well that active measures had been taken against them. "we heard him all through," said whittier; "and then, just as i had my foot on the step of the chaise, ready to drive away from the door, i remarked to him, 'wouldn't you like to see that thompson of whom you have been speaking?' i took good care not to use 'plain' language (that is, the quaker form). 'i rather think i should,' said the man. 'well, this is mr. thompson,' i said, as i jumped into the chaise. and this is the quaker, whittier,' said thompson, driving away as fast as he could. i looked back, and saw him standing, mouth wide open, gazing after us in the greatest astonishment." the two kept on to plymouth, where they were nearly mobbed a second time. years after, whittier said that once when he was passing through portland, a man, seeing him go by, stepped out of his shop and asked if his name were whittier, and if he were not the man who was stoned, years before, by a mob at concord. the answer being in the affirmative, he said he believed a devil possessed him that night; for he had no reason to wish evil either to whittier or thompson, yet he was filled with a desire to kill them, and he thought he should have done so if they had not escaped. he added that the mob was like a crowd of demons, and he knew one man who had mixed a black dye to dip them in, which would be almost impossible to get off. he could not explain to himself or to another the state of mind he was in. the next morning we walked with whittier again in his little garden, and saw his grapes, which were a source of pride and pleasure. one vine, he told us, came up from a tiny rootlet sent to him by charles sumner, in a letter from washington. later we strolled forth into the village street as far as the friends' meeting-house, and sat down upon the steps while he told us something of his neighbors. he himself, he said, had planted the trees about the church: they were then good-sized trees. he spoke very earnestly about the worship of the friends. all the associations of his youth and all the canons of his education and development were grounded on the friends' faith and doctrine, and he was anxious that they should show a growth commensurate with the age. he disliked many of the innovations, but his affectionate spirit clung to his people, and he longed to see them drawing to themselves a larger measure of spiritual life, day by day. he loved the old custom of sitting in silence, and hoped they would not stray away into habits of much speaking. the old habits of the meeting-house were very dear to him. one cold, clear morning in january i heard his early ring at the door. he had been ill, but was so much better that he was absolutely gay. he insisted upon blowing the fire, which, as sometimes happens, will struggle to do its worst on the coldest days; and as the flames at last began to roar, his spirits rose with them. he was rejoicing over garibaldi's victory. the sufferings of italy had been so terrible that even one small victory in their behalf seemed a great gain. he said that he had been trying to arouse the interest of the friends, but it usually took about two years to awaken them thoroughly on any great topic! he remained several hours that morning talking over his hopes for the country,--of politics, of charles sumner, of whom he said, "sumner is always fundamentally right;" and of john bright, for whose great gifts he had sincere admiration. soon afterwards, at the time of this great man's death, whittier wrote to us: "spring is here to-day, warm, birdfull.... it seems strange that i am alive to welcome her when so many have passed away with the winter, and among them that stalwartest of englishmen, john bright, sleeping now in the daisied grounds of rochdale, never more to move the world with his surpassing eloquence. how i regret that i have never seen him! we had much in common in our religious faith, our hatred of war and oppression. his great genius seemed to me to be always held firmly in hand by a sense of duty, and by the practical common sense of a shrewd man of business. he fought through life like an old knight-errant, but without enthusiasm. he had no personal ideals. i remember once how he remonstrated with me for my admiration for general gordon. he looked upon that wonderful personality as a wild fighter, a rash adventurer, doing evil that good might come. he could not see him as i saw him, giving his life for humanity, alone and unfriended, in that dreadful soudan. he did not like the idea of fighting satan with satan's weapons. lord salisbury said truly that john bright was the greatest orator england had produced, and his eloquence was only called out by what he regarded as the voice of god in his soul." when at length whittier rose to go that winter morning, with the feeling that he had already taken too large a piece out of the day, we pressed him to stay longer, since it was already late. "why can't you stay?" urged his host. "because, i tell you, i don't want to," which set us all laughing, and settled the question. our first knowledge of his arrival in town was usually that early and punctual ring at the door to which i have referred. he would come in looking pale and thin, but full of fire, and, as we would soon find, of a certain vigor. he became interested one morning in a plan proposed to him for making a collection of poems for young people, one which he finally completed with the aid of miss lucy larcom. we got down from the shelf longfellow's "poets and poetry of europe," and looked it over together. "annie of tharaw" was a great favorite of his, and the poem by dirk smit, on "the death of an infant," found his ready appreciation. whittier easily fell from these into talk of burns, who was his master and ideal. "he lives, next to shakespeare," he said, "in the heart of humanity." in speaking of rossetti and of his ballad of "sister helen," he confessed to being strangely attracted to this poem because he could remember seeing his mother, "who was as good a woman as ever lived," and his aunt performing the same strange act of melting a waxen figure of a clergyman of their time. the solemnity of the affair made a deep impression on his mind, as a child, for the death of the clergyman in question was confidently expected. his "heresies" had led him to experience this cabalistic treatment. there was some talk, also, that morning of the advantages, in these restless days, accruing to those who "stay put" in this world, instead of to those who are forever beating about, searching for greater opportunities from position or circumstance. he laughed heartily over the tale, which had just then reached us, of carlyle going to hunt up a new residence in london with a map of the world in his pocket. we asked whittier if he never felt tempted to go to quebec from his well-beloved haunts in the white mountains. "oh no," he replied. "i know it all by books and pictures just as well as if i had seen it." this talk of traveling reminded him of a circus which came one season to amesbury. "i was in my garden," he said, "when i saw an arab wander down the street, and by and by stop and lean against my gate. he held a small book in his hand, which he was reading from time to time when he was not occupied with gazing about him. presently i went to talk with him, and found he had lived all his life on the edge of the desert until he had started for america. he was very homesick, and longed for the time of his return. he had hired himself for a term of years to the master of the circus. he held the koran in his hand, and was delighted to find a friend who had also read his sacred book. he opened his heart still further then, and said how he longed for his old, wild life in the desert, for a sight of the palms and the sands, but, above all, for its freedom." this interview made a deep impression, naturally, upon whittier's mind, he, who was no traveler himself, having thus sung:- "he who wanders widest, lifts no more of beauty's jealous veil than he who from his doorway sees the miracle of flowers and trees." the memory of a visit to amesbury, made once in september, vividly remains with me. it was early in the month, when the lingering heat of summer seems sometimes to gather fresh intensity from the fact that we are so soon to hear the winds of autumn. amesbury had greatly altered of late years; large enough to be a city," our friend declared; "but i am not fat enough to be an alderman." to us it was still a small village, though somewhat dustier and less attractive than when we first knew it. as we approached the house, we saw him from a distance characteristically gazing down the road for us, from his front yard, and then at the first glimpse suddenly disappearing, to come forth again to meet us, quite fresh and quiet, from his front door. it had been a very hot, dry summer, and everything about that place, as about every other, was parched and covered with dust. there had been no rain for weeks, and the village street was then quite innocent of watering carts. the fruit hung heavily from the nearly leafless trees, and the soft thud of the pears and apples as they fell to the ground could be heard on every side in the quiet house-yards. the sun struggled feebly through the mists during the noontide hours, when a still heat pervaded rather than struck the earth; and then in the early afternoon, and late into the next morning, a stirless cloud seemed to cover the face of the world. these mists were much increased by the burning of peat and brush, and, alas! of the very woods themselves in every direction. altogether, as whittier said, quaintly, "it was very encouraging weather for the millerites." his niece, who bears the name of his beloved sister, was then the mistress of his house, and we were soon made heartily welcome. everything was plain and neat as became a friend's household; but as the village had grown to be a stirring place, and the house stood close upon the dusty road, such charming neatness must sometimes have been a difficult achievement. the noonday meal was soon served and soon ended, and then we sat down behind the half-closed blinds, looking out upon the garden, the faded vines, and almost leafless trees. it was a cosy room, with its franklin stove, at this season surmounted by a bouquet, and a table between the windows, where was a larger bouquet, which whittier himself had gathered that morning in anticipation of our arrival. he seemed brighter and better than we had dared to hope, and was in excellent mood for talking. referring again to the millerites, who had been so reanimated by the forest fires, he said he had been deeply impressed lately with their deplorable doctrines. "continually disappointed because we don't all burn up on a sudden, they forget to be thankful for their preservation from the dire fate they predict with so much complacency." he had just received a proof of his poem "miriam," with the introduction, and he could not be content until they had both been read aloud to him. after the reading they were duly commented upon, and revised until he thought he could do no more; yet twice before our departure the proofs were taken out of the hand-bag where they were safely stowed away, and again more or less altered. whittier's ever-growing fame was not taken by him as a matter of course. "i cannot think very well of my own things," he used to say; "and what is mere fame worth when thee is at home, alone, and sick with headaches, unable either to read or to write?" nevertheless, he derived very great pleasure and consolation from the letters and tributes which poured in upon him from hearts he had touched or lives he had quickened. "that i like," he would say sometimes; "that is worth having." but he must often have known the deeps of sadness in winter evenings when he was too ill to touch book or pen, and when he could do nothing during the long hours but sit and think over the fire. we slept in elizabeth's chamber. the portrait of their mother, framed in autumn leaves gathered in the last autumn of her life, hung upon the wall. here, too, as in our bedroom at dickens's, the diary of pepys lay on the table. dickens had read his copy faithfully, and written notes therein. of this copy the leaves had not been cut; but with it lay the "prayers of the ages," and volumes of poems, which had all been well read, and "pickwick" upon the top. in the year 1867 charles dickens came to america to give his famous readings. whittier, as we have seen, was seldom tempted out of his country home and habitual ways, but dickens was for one moment too much for him. to our surprise, he wrote to ask if he could possibly get a seat to hear him. "i see there is a crazy rush for tickets." a favorable answer was dispatched to him as soon as practicable, but he had already repented of the indiscretion. "my dear fields," he wrote, "up to the last moment i have hoped to occupy the seat so kindly promised me for this evening. but i find i must give it up. gladden with it the heart of some poor wretch who dangled and shivered all in vain in your long _queue_ the other morning. i must read my 'pickwick' alone, as the marchioness played cribbage. i should so like, nevertheless, to see dickens and shake that creative hand of his! it is as well, doubtless, so far as he is concerned, that i cannot do it; he will have enough and too much of that, i fear. i dreamed last night i saw him surrounded by a mob of ladies, each with her scissors snipping at his hair, and he seemed in a fair way to be 'shaven and shorn,' like the priest in 'the house that jack built.'" the large events of humanity were to whittier a portion of his own experience, his personal life being, in the ordinary sense, devoid of incident. the death of charles dickens, in 1871, was a personal loss, just as his life had been a living gain to this remote and invalid man. one long quiet summer afternoon shortly after, whittier joined us for the sake of talking about dickens. he told us what sunshine came from him into his own solemn and silent country life, and what grateful love he must ever bear to him. he wished to hear all that could be told of him as a man. tea came, and the sun went down, and still he talked and questioned, and then, after a long silence, he said suddenly: "what's he doing now? sometimes i say, in shakespeare's phrase, o for some 'courteous ghost,' but nothing ever comes to me. he was so human i should think thee must see him sometimes. it seems as if he were the very person to manifest himself and give us a glimpse beyond. i believe i have faith; i sometimes think i have; but this desire to see just a little way is terribly strong in me. i have expressed something of it in my verses to mrs. child about loring." he spoke also of the significance of our prayers; of their deep value to our spirit in constantly renewing the sense of dependence; and further, since we "surely find that our prayers are answered, what blindness and fatuity there is in neglect or abuse of our privilege!" he was thinking of editing a new edition of john woolman. he hoped to induce certain people who would read his own books to read that, by writing a preface for it. the death of henry ward beecher was also a loss and a sadness to him in his solitary life. "i am saddened by the death of beecher," he wrote; "he was so strong, so generous, so warm hearted, and so brave and stalwart in so many good causes. it is a mighty loss. he had faults, like all of us, and needed forgiveness; but i think he could say, with david of old, that he would rather fall into the lord's hands than into the hands of man." it is anticipating the years and interrupting the narrative to mention here a few of the men who gladdened his later life by their friendship, but the subject demands a brief space before we return to the current story of his days. matthew arnold went to see him upon his arrival in this country, and it is needless to say that whittier derived sincere pleasure from the visit; but arnold's delightful recognition of whittier's "in school days" as one of the perfect poems which must live, gave him fresh assurance of fulfilled purpose in existence. he had followed arnold with appreciation from his earliest appearance in the world of letters, and knew him, as it were, "by heart" long before a personal interview was possible. in a letter written after arnold's return to england, he says: "i share thy indignation at the way our people have spoken of him--one of the foremost men of our time, a true poet, a wise critic, and a brave, upright man, to whom all the english-speaking people owe a debt of gratitude. i am sorry i could not see him again." when the end came, a few years later, he was among the first to say, "what a loss english literature has sustained in the death of matthew arnold!" as i have already suggested, he kept the run of all the noteworthy persons who came to boston quite as surely as they kept in pursuit of him. "i hope thee will see the wonderful prophet of the bramo somaj, mozoomdar, before he leaves the country. i should have seen him in boston but for illness last week. that movement in india is the greatest event in the history of christianity since the days of paul. "so the author of 'christie johnstone' is dead. i have read and re-read that charming little story with ever-increasing admiration. i am sorry for the coarseness of some of his later writings; but he was, after all, a great novelist, second only in our times to george eliot, dickens, and thackeray.... i shall be glad to hear more about mr. wood's and mrs. ----'s talks. any hint or sign or token from the unseen and spiritual world is full of solemn interest, standing as i do on the shore of 'that vast ocean i must sail so soon.'... "you will soon have amelia edwards again with you. i am sorry that i have not been able to call on her. pray assure her of my sincere respect and admiration." and again: "have thee seen and heard the hindoo mohini? he seems to have really converted some people. i hear that one of them has got a bible!" the phrase that he is "beset by pilgrims" occurs frequently in his letters, contrasted with pleased expressions, and descriptions of visits from phillips brooks, canon farrar, governor and mrs. claflin, and other friends whose faces were always a joy to him. i have turned aside from the narrative of every-day life to mention these friends; but it is interesting to return and recall the earlier years, when he came one day to dine in charles street with mr. emerson. as usual, his coming had been very uncertain. he was never to be counted upon as a visitor, but at length the moment came when he was in better health than ordinary, and the stars were in conjunction. i can recall his saying to emerson: "i had to choose between hearing thee at thy lecture and coming here to see thee. i chose to see thee. i could not do both." emerson was heard to say to him solicitously: "i hope you are pretty well, sir! i believe you formerly bragged of bad health." it was whittier's custom, however, to make quite sure that all "lions" and other disturbing elements were well out of the way before he turned his steps to the library in charles street. i recall his coming one sunday morning when we were at church, and waiting until our return. he thought that would be a safe moment! he was full, as madame de sã©vignã© says, "_de conversations infinies_" being especially interested just then in the question of schools for the freedmen, and eagerly discussed ways and means for starting and supporting them. we were much amused by his ingenuity in getting contributions from his own town. it appears he had taken into consideration the many carriage-makers in amesbury. he suggested that each one of these men should give some part of a carriage--one the wheels, one the body, one the furnishings, thus dividing it in all among twenty workmen. when it was put together, there stood a carriage which was sold for two hundred dollars, exactly the sum requisite for amesbury to give. he had just parted from his niece, who had gone to teach the freed people in a small southern village. he could not help feeling anxious for her welfare. she and her young co-workers would be the only northerners in the place. of course, such new comers would be regarded with no friendly eye by the "mean whites," and their long distance from home and from any protection would make their position a very forlorn one indeed if the natives should turn against them. he was fearful lest they should be half starved. however, they had departed in excellent spirits, which went a long way to cheer everybody concerned. he was also full of sympathy and anxiety regarding the well being of a young colored girl here at the north, whose sad situation he had been called upon to relieve; and after discussing ways and laying plans for her comfort (which he afterwards adhered to, until in later years she was placed in a happy home of her own), he went on to discuss the needs of yet a third young person, another victim of the war, who was then teaching in amesbury. he was almost as remarkable as mrs. child in his power of making his own small provision into a broad mantle to cover many shoulders. he was undaunted, too, in his efforts, where his own resources failed, to get what was needed by the help of others. his common sense was so great and his own habits so frugal, that no one could imagine a dollar wasted or misapplied that was confided to his stewardship. his benefactions were ceaseless, and they were one of the chief joys of his later life. the subject of what may be done for this or that person or cause is continually recurring in his letters. once i find this plea in verse after the manner of burns:- "o well-paid author, fat-fed scholar, whose pockets jingle with the dollar, no sheriff's hand upon your collar, no duns to bother, think on 't, a tithe of what ye swallow would save your brother!" and again and again there are passages in his letters like the following: "i hope the industrial home may be saved, and wish i was a rich man just long enough to help save it. as it is, if the subscription needs $30 to fill it up, i shall be glad to give the mite." "i have long followed maurice," he says again, "in his work as a religious and social reformer--a true apostle of the gospel of humanity. he saw clearly, and in advance of his clerical brethren, the necessity of wise and righteous dealing with the momentous and appalling questions of labor and poverty." he wrote one day: "if you go to richmond, why don't you visit hampton and old point comfort, where that christian knight and latter-day galahad, general armstrong, is making his holy experiment? i think it would be worth your while." general armstrong and his brave work in founding and maintaining the hampton school for the education, at first, of the colored people alone, and finally for the indians also, was one of the near and living interests of whittier's life. often and often in his letters do we find references to the subject; either he regrets having to miss seeing the general, upon one of his northern trips, or he rejoices in falling in with some of the teachers at asquam lake or elsewhere, or his note is jubilant over some new gift which will make the general's work for the year less difficult. once he writes: "i am grieved to hear of general armstrong's illness. i am not surprised at it. he has been working in his noble cause beyond any mortal man's strength. he must have a rest if it is possible for him, and his friends must now keep up the school by redoubled efforts. ah me! there is so much to be done in this world! i wish i were younger, or a millionaire." and yet again: "i had the pleasure of sending general armstrong at christmas, with my annual subscription, one thousand dollars which a friend placed in my hand. i wish our friend could be relieved from the task of raising money by a hundred such donations." the choice of the early breakfast hour for his visits was his own idea. he was glad to hit upon a moment which was not subject to interruptions, one when he could talk at his ease of books and men. these visits were always a surprise. he liked to be abroad in good season, and had rarely missed seeing the sun rise in forty years. he knew, too, that we were not late people, and that his visits could never be untimely. occasionally, with the various evening engagements of a city, we were not altogether fit to receive him, but it was a pleasure to hear his footstep in the morning, and to know that we should find him in the library by the fire. he was himself a bad sleeper, seldom, as he said, putting a solid bar of sleep between day and day, and therefore often early abroad to question the secrets of the dawn. we owe much of the intimate friendship of our life to these morning hours spent in private, uninterrupted talk. "i have lately felt great sympathy with ----," he said one morning, "for i have been kept awake one hundred and twenty hours--an experience i should not care to try again." one of whittier's summer pleasures, in which he occasionally indulged himself, was a visit to the isles of shoals. he loved to see his friend celia thaxter in her island home, and he loved the freedom of a large hotel. he liked to make arrangements with a group of his more particular friends to meet him there; and when he was well enough to leave his room, he might be seen in some carefully chosen corner of the great piazzas, shady or sunny, as the day invited him, enjoying the keenest happiness in the voluntary society and conversation of those dear to him. occasionally he would pass whole days in celia thaxter's parlor, watching her at her painting in the window, and listening to the talk around him. he wished to hear and know what interested others. he liked nothing better, he once said, than going into the "store" in the old days at amesbury, when it was a common centre, almost serving the purpose of what a club may be in these later days, and sitting upon a barrel to hear "folks talk." the men there did not know much about his poetry, but they understood his politics, and he was able to put in many a word to turn the vote of the town. in celia thaxter's parlor he found a different company, but his relations to the people who frequented that delightful place were practically the same. he wished to understand their point of view, if possible, and then, if he could find opportunity, he would help them to a higher standpoint. i remember one season in particular, when the idle talk of idle persons had been drifting in and out during the day, while he sat patiently on in the corner of the pretty room. mrs. thaxter was steadily at work at her table, yet always hospitable, losing sight of no cloud or shadow or sudden gleam of glory in the landscape, and pointing the talk often with keen wit. nevertheless, the idleness of it all palled upon him. it was sunday, too, and he longed for something which would move us to "higher levels." suddenly, as if the idea struck him like an inspiration, he rose, and taking a volume of emerson from the little library he opened to one of the discourses, and handing it to celia thaxter said: "read that aloud, will thee? i think we should all like to hear it." she read it through at his bidding; then he took up the thread of the discourse, and talked long and earnestly upon the beauty and necessity of worship--a necessity consequent upon the nature of man, upon his own weakness, and his consciousness of the divine spirit within him. his whole heart was stirred, and he poured himself out towards us as if he longed, like the prophet of old, to breathe a new life into us. i could see that he reproached himself for not having spoken out in this way before, but his enfranchised spirit took only a stronger flight for the delay. i have never heard of whittier's speaking in the meeting-house, although he was doubtless often "moved" to do so; but to us who heard him on that day he became more than ever a light unto our feet. it was not an easy thing to do to stem the accustomed current of life in this way, and it is a deed only possible to those who, in the bible phrase, "walk with god." such an unusual effort was not without its consequences. it was followed by a severe headache, and he was hardly seen abroad again during his stay. we heard from him again, shortly after, under the shadow of the great hills where he always passed a part of every year. he loved them, and wrote eloquently of the loveliness of nature at ossipee: "the bearcamp winding down," the long green valley close by the door, the long sandwich and waterville ranges, and chocorua filling up the horizon from west to northeast. the frequent loneliness of his life often found expression. once he says:-"i wish i could feel that i deserved a tithe even of the kind things said of me by my personal friends. if one could but _be_ as easily as preach! the confession of poor burns might, i fear, be made of the best of us:- "'god knows i'm no the thing i would be, nor am i even the thing i could be.' and yet i am thankful every day of my life that god has put it into the hearts of so many whom i love and honor and reverence to send me so many messages of good will and kindness. it is an unspeakable comfort in the lonely and darkening afternoon of life. indeed, i can never feel quite alone so long as i know that all about me are those who turn to me with friendly interest, and, strange to say, with gratitude. a sense of lack of desert on my part is a drawback, of course; but then, i say to myself, if my friends judge me by my aim and desire, and not by my poor performance, it may be all right and just." the painful solitude of his life after his dear niece's marriage was softened when he went to live with his cousins at oak knoll, in danvers, a pleasant country seat, sheltered and suited to his needs. of this place mrs. spofford says, in a delightful biographical paper: "the estate of oak knoll is one of some historical associations, as here once lived the rev. george burroughs, the only clergyman in the annals of salem witchcraft who was hung for dark dealings, danvers having originally been a part of the town of salem, where witchcraft came to a blaze, and was stamped out of existence.... the only relic on the place of its tragedy is the well of the burroughs' house, which is still in the hay-field, and over which is the resting-place of the sounding-board of the pulpit in the church where the witches were tried." at danvers he was able to enjoy the free open air. he loved to sit under the fine trees which distinguished the lawn, to play with the dogs, and wander about unmolested until he was tired. the ladies of the house exerted themselves to give him perfect freedom and the tenderest care. the daughter became his playmate, and she never quite grew up, in his estimation. she was his lively and loving companion. writing from danvers, one december, he says, "what with the child, and the dogs, and rip van winkle the cat, and a tame gray squirrel who hunts our pockets for nuts, we contrive to get through the short dark days." again: "i am thankful that february has come, and that the sun is getting high on his northern journey. the past month has been trying to flesh and spirit.... i am afraid my letter has a complaining tone, and i am rather ashamed of it, and shall be more so when my head is less out of order.... there are two gray squirrels playing in my room. phoebe calls them deacon josiah and his wife philury, after rose terry cooke's story of the minister's 'week of works' in the place of a 'week of prayer.'" he showed more physical vitality after he went to danvers, and his notes evince a wide interest in matters private and public outside his own library life. he still went to portland to see his niece and her husband whenever he was able, and now and then to boston also. but philadelphia at the time of the centennial was not to be thought of. "i sent my hymn," he wrote from amesbury in 1876, "with many misgivings, and am glad it was so well received. i think i should like to have heard the music, but probably i should not have understood. the gods have made me most unmusical. "i have just got j. t. f.'s charming little book of 'barry cornwall and his friends.' it is a most companionable volume, and will give rare pleasure to thousands.... i write in the midst of our quaker quarterly meeting, and our house has been overrun for three days. we had twelve to dine to-day; they have now gone to meeting, but i am too tired for preaching. "i don't expect to visit philadelphia. the very thought of that ezekiel's vision of machinery and the nightmare confusion of the world's curiosity shop appalls me. i shall not venture." he was full of excellent resolutions about going often to boston, but he never could make a home there. "i see a great many more things in the city than thee does," he would say, "because i go to town so seldom. the shop windows are a delight to me, and everything and everybody is novel and interesting. i don't need to go to the theatre. i have more theatre than i can take in every time i walk out." no sketch of whittier, however slight, should omit to mention his friendship for bayard taylor. their quaker parentage helped to bring the two poets into communion; and although taylor was so much the younger and more vigorous man, whittier was also to see him pass, and to mourn his loss. he took a deep interest in his literary advancement, and considered "lars" his finest poem. certainly no one knew taylor's work better, or brought a deeper sympathy into his reading of it. "i love him too well to be a critic of his verse," he says in one of his letters. "but what a brave worker he was!" the reading of good books was, very late in life, as it had been very early, his chief pleasure. his travels, his romance, his friendships, were indulged in chiefly by proxy of the printed page. "i felt very near dr. mulford through his writings," he said. "he was the strongest thinker of our time, and he thought in the right direction. 'the republic of god' is intellectually greater than st. augustine's 'city of god,' and infinitely nearer the christian ideal." "that must be a shrewd zephyr," charles lamb used to say, speaking of his gentle giantess, "that can escape her." and so we may say of whittier and a book. "has thee seen the new book by the author of 'mr. isaacs'?" he asked (having sent me "mr. isaacs" as soon as it appeared, lest i should miss reading so novel and good a story). in the same breath he adds: "i have been reading 'the freedom of faith,' by the author of 'on the threshold,' just published by houghton & co. it is refreshing and tonic as the northwest wind. the writer is one of the leaders of the new departure from the ultra-calvinism. thank thee just here for the pleasure of reading annie keary's biography. what a white, beautiful soul! her views of the mission of spiritualism seem very much like ----'s. i do not know when i have read a more restful, helpful book. "how good longfellow's poem is! a little sad, but full of 'sweetness and light.' emerson, longfellow, holmes, and myself are all getting to be old fellows, and that swan-song might serve for us all. 'we who are about to die.' god help us all! i don't care for fame, and have no solicitude about the verdicts of posterity. "'when the grass is green above us and they who know us and who love us are sleeping by our side, will it avail us aught that men tell the world with lip and pen that we have lived and died?' "what we _are_ will then be more important than what we have done or said in prose or rhyme, or what folks that we never saw or heard of think of us." the following hitherto unpublished poem was written about this period upon the marriage of the daughter of his friend mrs. leonowens:-to a. l. with the congratulations of her mother's friend the years are many, the years are old, my dreams are over, my songs are sung, but, out of a heart that has not grown cold, i bid god-speed to the fair and young. would that my prayer were even such as the righteous pray availing much, but nothing save good can love befall, and naught is lacking since love is all, thy one great blessing of life the best, like the rod of moses swallows the rest! (signed) john g. whittier. oak knoll, 6th mo. 7, 1878. later he describes himself as listening to the "life of mrs. stowe." "it is a satisfying book, a model biography, or, rather, autobiography for dear mrs. stowe speaks all through it. dr. holmes's letters reveal him as he is--wise, generous, chivalrous. witness the kindliness and delicate sympathy of his letters during the lord byron trouble.... miss w. has read us some of howells's 'hazard of new fortunes.' it strikes me that it is a strong book. that indomitable old german, linden--that saint of the rather godless sect of dynamiters and anarchists--is a grand figure; one can't help loving him." the poet's notes and letters are full of passages showing how closely he followed public affairs. "if i were not sick, and to-morrow were not election day," he says, "i should go to boston. i hope to be there in a few days, at any rate. you must 'vote early and often,' and elect hooper. here we are having marryat's triangular duel acted over by our three candidates. i wish they were all carpet-bagging among the kukluxes. it wouldn't hurt us to go without a representative until we can raise one of our own." ... and again: "i am somewhat disappointed by the vote on the suffrage question. it should be a lesson to us not to trust to political platforms. a great many republicans declined to vote for it or against it. they thought the leaders of the suffrage movement had thrown themselves into the hands of butler and the democrats. however, it is only one of those set-backs which all reforms must have--temporary, but rather discouraging. "i worked hard in our town, and we made a gain of nearly one hundred votes over last year." "i am happy," he says later, "in the result of the election--thankful that the state has sat down heavily on ----. i never thought of taking an active interest in politics this year, but i could not help it when the fight began." and still later in life: "i am glad of the grand overturn in boston, and the courage of the women voters. how did it seem to elbow thy way to the polls through throngs of men folk?" whittier never relinquished his house at amesbury, where his kind friends, judge cate and his wife, always made him feel at home. as the end of his life drew near, it was easy to see that the village home where his mother and his sister lived and died was the place he chiefly loved; but he was more inaccessible to his friends in amesbury, and the interruptions of a fast-growing factory town were sometimes less agreeable to him than the country life at oak knoll. he was a great disbeliever in too much solitude, however, and used to say, "the necessary solitude of the human soul is enough; it is surprising how great that is." once only he expresses this preference for the dear old village home in his letters. "i have been at amesbury for a fortnight. somehow i seem nearer to my mother and sister; the very walls of the rooms seem to have become sensitive to the photographs of unseen presences." as the end drew near, he passed more and more time with his beloved cousins gertrude and joseph cartland in newburyport, whose interests and aims in life were so close to his own. the habit of going to the white mountains in their company for a few weeks during the heat of summer was a fixed one. he grew to love asquam, with its hills and lakes, almost better than any other place for this sojourn. it was there he loved to beckon his friends to join him. "do come, if possible," he would write. "the years speed on; it will soon be too late. i long to look on your dear faces once more." his deafness began to preclude general conversation; but he delighted in getting off under the pine-trees in the warm afternoons, or into a quiet room upstairs at twilight, and talking until bedtime. he described to us, during one visit, his first stay among the hills. his parents took him where he could see the great wooded slope of agamenticus. as he looked up and gazed with awe at the solemn sight, a cloud drooped, and hung suspended as it were from one point, and filled his soul with astonishment. he had never forgotten it. he said nothing at the time, but this cloud hanging from the breast of the hill filled his boyish mind with a mighty wonder, which had never faded away. notwithstanding his strong feeling for amesbury, and his presence there always at "quarterly meeting," he found himself increasingly comfortable in the companionship of his devoted relatives. something nearer "picturesqueness" and "the beautiful" came to please the sense and to soothe the spirit at oak knoll. he did not often make record in his letters of these things; but once he speaks charmingly of the young girl in a red cloak, on horseback, with the dog at her side, scampering over the lawn and brushing under the sloping branches of the trees. the sunset of his life burned slowly down; and in spite of illness and loss of power, he possessed his soul in patience. after a period when he usually felt unable to write, he revived and wrote a letter, in which he spoke as follows of a poem which had been sent for his revision: "the poem is solemn and tender; it is as if a wind from the unseen world blew over it, in which the voice of sorrow is sweeter than that of gladness--a holy fear mingled with holier hope. for myself, my hope is always associated with dread, like the shining of a star through mist. i feel, indeed, that love is victorious, that there is no dark it cannot light, no depth it cannot reach; but i imagine that between the seen and the unseen there is a sort of neutral ground, a land of shadow and mystery, of strange voices and undistinguished forms. there are some, as charles lamb says, 'who stalk into futurity on stilts,' without awe or self-distrust. but i can only repeat the words of the poem before me.".... one of the last, perhaps the very last visit he made to his friends in boston was in the beautiful autumn weather. the familiar faces he hoped to find were absent. he arrived without warning, and the very loveliness of the atmosphere which made it possible for him to travel had tempted younger people out among the falling leaves. he was disappointed, and soon after sent these verses to rehearse his experience:- "i stood within the vestibule whose granite steps i knew so well, while through the empty rooms the bell responded to my eager pull. "i listened while the bell once more rang through the void, deserted hall; i heard no voice, nor light foot-fall, and turned me sadly from the door. "though fair was autumn's dreamy day, and fair the wood-paths carpeted with fallen leaves of gold and red, i missed a dearer sight than they. "i missed the love-transfigured face, the glad, sweet smile so dear to me, the clasp of greeting warm and free; what had the round world in their place? "o friend, whose generous love has made my last days best, my good intent accept, and let the call i meant be with your coming doubly paid." but even this journey was beyond his strength. he wrote: "coming back from boston in a crowded car, a window was opened just behind me and another directly opposite, and in consequence i took a bad cold, and am losing much of this goodly autumnal spectacle. but oak knoll woods were never, i think, so beautiful before." in future his friends were to seek him; he could go no more to them: the autumn had indeed set in. now began a series of birthday celebrations, which were blessings not unmixed in his cup of life. he was in the habit of writing a brief note of remembrance on these anniversaries; in one of which, after confessing to "a feeling of sadness and loneliness," he turns to the emerson calendar, and says, "i found for the day some lines from his 'world soul:'- "'love wakes anew this throbbing heart, and we are never old; over the winter glaciers i see the summer glow, and through the wild piled snow-drift the warm rose-buds blow.' reading them, i took heart." on another occasion he says: "in the intervals of visitation on that day my thoughts were with dear friends who have passed from us; among whom, i need not say, was thy dearest friend. how vividly the beautiful mornings with you were recalled! then i wondered at my age, and if it was possible that i was the little boy on the old haverhill farm, unknown, and knowing nobody beyond my home horizon. i could not quite make the connection of the white-haired man with the blacklocked boy. i could not help a feeling of loneliness, thinking of having outlived many of my life-companions; but i was still grateful to god that i had not outlived my love for them and for those still living. among the many tokens of good will from all parts of the country and beyond the sea, there were some curious and amazing missives. one southern woman took the occasion to include me in her curse of the 'mean, hateful yankees.' to offset this, i had a telegram from the southern forestry congress assembled in florida, signed by president and secretary, informing me that 'in remembrance of your birthday, we have planted a live-oak tree to your memory, which, like the leaves of the tree, will be forever green.'" birthdays, on the whole, in the face of much sadness, brought him also much that was agreeable and delightful in remembrance. one old friend always gave him great pleasure by sending a huge basket of gilded wicker, in which were placed fruits of every variety from all quarters of the globe, and covered with rare flowers and ferns. in this way he visited the gardens of the orient, and could see in his imagination the valleys of napa and of shiraz. on the occasion of a dinner given him at the brunswick hotel, on his seventieth birthday, he wrote: "i missed my friend. in the midst of so much congratulation, i do not forget his earlier appreciation and encouragement, and every kind word which assured and cheered me when the great public failed to recognize me. i dare not tell thee, for fear of seeming to exaggerate, how much his words have been to me." thus the long years and the long days passed on with scarcely perceptible diminution of interest in the affairs of this world. "i am sorry to find that the hard winter has destroyed some handsome spruces i planted eight years ago," he wrote one may day; "they had grown to be fine trees. though rather late for me, i shall plant others in their places; for i remember the advice of the old laird of dumbiedikes to his son jock: 'when ye hae naething better to do, ye can be aye sticking in a tree; it'll aye be growin' when ye are sleeping.' there is an ash-tree growing here that my mother planted with her own hands at threescore and ten. what agnostic folly to think that tree has outlived her who planted it!" the lines of whittier's life stretched "between heaven and home" during the long period of eighty-four years. a host of friends, friends of the spirit, were, as we have seen, forever clustering around him; and what a glorious company it was! follen, shipley, chalkley, lucy hooper, joseph sturge, channing, lydia maria child, his sister elizabeth--a shining cloud too numerous to mention; the inciters of his poems and the companions of his fireside. in the silence of his country home their memories clustered about him and filled his heart with joy. "he loved the good and wise, but found his human heart to all akin who met him on the common ground of suffering and of sin." his "home ballads" grew out of this very power of clinging to the same places and the old loves, and what an incomparable group they make! "telling the bees," "skipper ireson's ride," "my playmate," "in school days," are sufficient in themselves to set the seal to his great fame. as a traveler, too, he is unrivaled, giving us, without leaving his own garden, the fine fruit of foreign lands. in reading his poems of the east, it is difficult to believe that he never saw palestine, nor ceylon, nor india; and the wonder is no less when he writes of our own wide country. indeed, the vividness of his poems about the slaves at st. helena's island and elsewhere make them among the finest of all his local poems. one called "the pass of the sierra" may easily bear the palm among much descriptive writing. he watched over his last remaining brother during a long illness and death, during the autumn and winter of 1882 and 1883 in boston. the family all left oak knoll and came to be with him at a hotel, whence he could make frequent visits to his brother's bedside; but the unwonted experience of passing several months in town, and the wearing mission which brought him there, told seriously upon his health, and caused well-grounded anxiety as to the result. the day after the last services had been performed he wrote to a friend: "indeed, it was a great comfort to sit beside you and to feel that if another beloved one had passed into the new life beyond sight and hearing, the warm hearts of loved friends were beating close to my own. you do not know how grateful it was to me. dr. clarke's presence and words were full of comfort. my brother did not approve of a display of flowers, but he loved violets, and your simple flowers were laid in his hand.... give my love to s., and kiss the dear child for me." it was not, however, until 1890 that we could really feel he had left the years of active service and of intellectual achievement as things of the past. he was shut out from much that gave him pleasure, but the spirit which animated the still breathing frame, though waiting and at times longing for larger opportunity, seemed to us like a loving sentinel, covering his dear ones as with a shield, and watching over the needs of humanity. the advance of the colored people, the claims of the indians and their wrongs, opportunities for women, statesmen, and politicians, the private joys and sorrows of those dear to him, were all present and kept alive, though in the silence of his breast. the end came, the door opened, while he was staying with the daughter of an old friend at hampton falls, in new hampshire--that saintly woman whom we associate with one of the most spiritual and beautiful of his poems, "a friend's burial." after a serious illness in the winter of 1892 he was almost too frail for any summer journeying; but with his usual wisdom and instinctive turning of the heart towards old familiar places, he thought of this hospitable house where he seemed to gain strength, and where he found much happiness and the quietness that he loved. his last illness was brief; he was ministered to by those who stood nearest him. and thus the waves of time passed over him and swept him from our sight. it is a pleasure now to recall many a beautiful scene in summer afternoons, under the trees at danvers, when his spirit animated the air and made the landscape shine with a radiance not its own. such memories serve to keep the whole world beautiful wherein he moved, and add to his poetry a sense of presence and a living light. old age appears in comparison to every other stage of human existence as a most undesirable state. we look upon its approaches and its ravages with alarm. death itself is far less dreadful, and "the low door," if it will only open quickly, brings little fear to the thoughtful mind. but the mystery of decadence, the long sunsetting, the loss of power--what do they mean? the latin word _saga_, from which the french get _la sagesse_, and we "the sage," gives us a hint of what we do not always understand--the spiritual beauty and the significance even of loss in age. whittier, wearing his silver crown, brought the antique word into use again, and filled it with fresh meaning for modern men. tennyson it is difficult at the present time, when tennyson's poetry has become a part of the air we breathe, to look back into the world of literature as it existed before he came. there is a keen remembrance, lingering ineradicably with the writer, of a little girl coming to school once upon recitation day, with a "piece" of her own selection safely stored away in her childish memory. it was a new poem to the school, and when her turn came to recite her soul was full of the gleam and glory of camelot. she felt as if she were unlocking a treasure-house, and it was with unspeakable pleasure to herself that she gave, verse after verse, the entire poem of "the lady of shalott." doubtless the child's voice drifted away into sing-song, as her whole little self seemed to drift away into the land of faery, and doubtless also the busy teacher, who was more familiar with jane taylor and cowper, was sadly puzzled. when the child at length sat down, scarcely knowing where she was in her sudden descent from the land of marvel, she heard the teacher say, to her amazement and discouragement, after an ominous pause, "i wonder if any young lady can tell me what this poem means?" there was no reply. "can _you_ tell us?" was the next question, pointed at the poor little girl who had just dropped out of cloudland. "i thought it explained itself," was the plaintive reply. with a slight air of depreciation, in another moment the next recitation was called for, and the dull clouds of routine shut down over the sudden glory. "shades of the prison-house" then and there began to close over the growing child. one joy had for the present faded from her life, that of a sure sympathy and understanding. not even her teacher could see what she saw, nor could feel what lay deep down in her own glowing heart. nevertheless tennyson was henceforth a seer and a prophet to this child and to the growing world; but for some, who could never learn his language, he was born too late. the picturesqueness of scott and byron, the simple piety of cowper, had satisfied the poetic and religious nature of the world up to that time. shelley and keats had indeed lived, but men had scarcely then learned generally to read them. tennyson may be looked upon as their interpreter, in a measure, to the common world. even wordsworth, the mountain-top of poetry, the leader, whom tennyson called his master-even he failed to give the common mind, which looks for drama, any long poem which he who runs may read. this humanity in poetry is distinctly, first of all, shakespearian; but if this quality should seem to any reader not also tennysonian, let him re-read "guinevere," in the "idylls of the king," and reverse his decision. the hearts of men were largely attuned by tennyson, and taught to understand the affinities and symbolisms of nature. this new era in literature opened about the year 1830, when tennyson gave a few poems to the world, which were chiefly canceled by his later judgment. a small book in green paper covers lies before me as i write, "privately printed" in 1862, containing his poems printed between 1830 and 1833, and giving the first readings of some which have been sanctioned in his later editions. the volume "privately printed" has been most privately treasured lest anything should appear from it to "vex the poet's mind." for thirty years it has lain in a secret drawer, with these words inscribed upon the cover: "not to be lent; not to be stolen; not to be given away." some of these poems have been wrought over until we are reminded of his own line, "laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere," and incorporated in his later editions; others seem to have been gathered up and published without permission by an american publisher, who in some way gained possession of the book. the present perfected edition, however, published by macmillan, evidently contains all the poems tennyson wished to have remembered. the chief interest in the small green book is in the early readings, which are a good study for those who pursue the art of poetry. we see in them the sure integrity of the master-hand. "isabel" was not, perhaps, one of the very earliest poems, although it stands among the early poems of character in the perfected edition. it does not appear in the green book, yet the title already stands in the table of contents. in his own revised editions it has always appeared unchanged from the first. there is a flawless loveliness in this poem which makes it especially worthy of admiration. "isabel" possesses a peculiar interest, because it is understood to be the poet's tribute to his wife, and indeed even his imaginative eye could hardly elsewhere have found another to whom this description would so properly fit:- "the intuitive decision of a bright and thorough-edged intellect to part error from crime; a prudence to withhold the laws of marriage character'd in gold upon the blanched tablets of her heart; a love still burning upward, giving light to read those laws; an accent very low in blandishment, but a most silver flow of subtle-paced counsel in distress, right to the heart and brain, tho' undescried, winning its way with extreme gentleness thro' all the outworks of suspicious pride a courage to endure and to obey; a hate of gossip parlance and of sway,- crown'd isabel, thro' all her placid life, the queen of marriage, a most perfect wife." the relation of tennyson's life to that of other men has been but imperfectly understood. there was indeed a natural sublimity in his character which gave him, as he has himself said of the poet's mind, a power for scorn of things fit to be scorned; but his capacity for friendship has been proved again and again. the tree, as of old, is known by its fruits, and we need only recall the poems to james spedding, to f. d. maurice, to mary boyle, to lord dufferin, his correspondence with edward fitzgerald, and the great note of grief and consolation in "in memoriam," to know a man capable of friendship, and one who has drawn to himself the noble lovers of his time. there was an unconsciousness of outward things, of the furniture of life, which left him freer than most men to face the individual soul that approached him. there was also a fine consistency in his personality,--no tampering with the world; no trying to serve two masters. the greatness of his presence was felt, we believe, by all who approached him; he seemed to be invested by a strange remoteness from the affairs of the world. yet it was easy for the spirits to draw near to him who really wanted what he could give. his hospitality was large and sincere. in his own words of the "great duke" we read his perfect likeness:- "as the greatest only are, in his simplicity sublime." a friend who knew him wrote once: "tennyson found out in the golden season of his life, his youth, just what kind of work he was fitted to do, and he never squandered an hour in search of his primary bearings.... there is always a gravity about him, a becoming nobleness, which reminds one of what st. simon said of fã©nã©lon, 'when he is present it requires an effort to cease looking at him.'" when this friend returned after his first interview with tennyson, many years ago, we can well recall the eagerness with which we listened. his excitement as he described the hours they had passed together was hardly less than that of his hearer. every minute detail of the interview was impatiently demanded. "how did he look?" was asked immediately in the first pause, and "what did he say?" followed before there was quite time to speak. in reply came a full description of the tall figure, clad in a long gray dressing-gown, presenting itself in the half-opened doorway of his chambers in the temple, and looking cautiously out at the new comer. "'oh! it is you,' he said, drawing his visitor in through the narrow space with a most cordial welcome. he was sitting before the fire, with his books about him, which he put aside, and while he talked he began to toast sundry slices of bread for our repast. as for his looks, his head is a very grand one, and his voice has a deep swelling richness in it. he had just received from the printers some proof sheets of the 'idylls of the king,' and then and there he chanted the story of enid and elaine: chanted is the true word to apply to his recitations. he had a theory that poetry should always be given out with the rhythm accentuated, and the music of the verse strongly emphasized, and he did it with a power that was marvelous." the next recollection, and one that sweeps vividly across my memory, is that of going to farringford for the first time, and seeing tennyson among the surroundings so admirably suited to his tastes and necessities. the place was much more retired than at present; indeed, there was neither sight nor sound of any intrusion during those summer days. the island might have been prospero's own, it seemed so still and far away. beyond the gardens and the lawn the great downs sloped to the sea, and in the distance on either hand could be seen the cliffs and shores as they wound away and were lost in the dim haze that lay between us and the horizon. we found ourselves suddenly walking as in a dream, surrounded with the scenery of his poems. it is still easy to distinguish with perfect clearness to the "inward eye" two figures rambling along the downs that lovely day, and pausing at a rude summer-house, a kind of forgotten shelter, a relic of some other life. the great world was still as only the noon of summer knows how to be; the air blew freshly up from the sea, and the figures stopped a moment to look and rest. the door of the shelter hung idly on rusted hinges, and the two entered to enjoy the shade. turning, they saw the whole delicious scene framed in the rude doorway. "ah," the lady said, "i have found one of your haunts. i think you must sometimes write here." tennyson looked at her with a smile which said, "i can trust my friends;" and putting his hand up high over the door, he took from the tiny ledge a bit of pencil and paper secreted there, held them out to her for one moment, and then carefully put them back again. there was not much said, but it was an immediate revelation, and a cherished bit of confidence. perhaps on that sheet was already inscribed, "ask me no more; the moon may draw the sea, the cloud may stoop from heaven and lake the shape, with fold on fold, of mountain or of cape;" or perhaps the page was waiting for "the sailor-boy," or glimpses of the great "tyntagel," or "lyonesse." i could not know, nor did he, what he was yet to do. i only felt--all who knew him felt--that he knew his work demanded from him the sacrifice of what the world calls pleasure. he endeavored to hold his spirit ready, and his mind trained and responsive. his constant preoccupation with the business of his life rendered him often impatient of wasting hours in mere "personal talk." he was always eager and ready to hear of large matters of church or state from those who were competent to inform him; but it was his chief joy, when his friends were gathered about him, to read from other poets or from his own books. in this same visit there was much talk of milton, of whom he spoke as "the great organist of verse, who always married sound to sense when he wrote." surely no one ever gave the lines of that great poet as he did. it was wonderful to hear. it would be impossible to forget that grand voice as he repeated:- "the imperial ensign which full high advanced shone like a meteor streaming to the wind, with gems and golden lustre rich emblazed, seraphic arms and trophies; all the while sonorous metal blowing martial sounds." tennyson's chanting of his own "boã¤dicea" was very remarkable. "thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be celebrated, thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable." but nothing could excel the effect of his rendering of "guinevere," his voice at times tremulous with emotion, and his face turned from the light as he read, "let no man dream but that i love thee still," and all the noble context glowing with a white heat. it was easy then to find that his own ideal, "flos regum arthuris," was not a legend to him alone, but a vision of the holy grail toward which he aspired. it were easy, indeed it is a temptation, to record every detail, stamped as they all are on the memory after several visits at farringford and at aldworth; but the beautiful paper printed only a few years ago by mrs. anne thackeray ritchie, now given to the world in a volume, where tennyson stands as one of "the light-bearers," would make any repetition of the history of his family life worse than unnecessary. mrs. ritchie's friendship with the members of that household, and her familiarity with the houses and scenery which surrounded them, have given her the opportunity to do what her genius has executed. summer was again here, with a touch of autumn in the air--this autumn in which we write--when we last saw lord tennyson at aldworth. he was already unwell and suffering from a cold. he sat, however, on his couch, which was drawn across the great window, where he could look off, when he turned his head, and see the broad green valley and the hills beyond, or, near at hand, could watch the terrace and his own trees, and catch a glimpse of the garden. the great frame had lost its look of giant strength; the hands were thinner; but the habit of his mind and spirit was the same. again we heard the voice; again we felt the uplift of his presence. he was aware that he was not to stay here much longer, and when we bent over him to say good-by, we knew and he knew it was indeed "farewell." he was surrounded with deep love and tenderness and the delightful presence of his little grandchildren, and when, shortly after, his weakness increased, he doubtless heard the words sounding in his mind:- "fear no more the heat o' the sun, nor the furious winter's rages, thou thy worldly task hast done, home art gone, and ta'en thy wages." he asked for "cymbeline" that he might carry the noble lines clearly in remembrance. later the moon shone full into the room, and in that dim splendor, and to the music of the autumn wind, his spirit passed. emily, lady tennyson when i first saw lady tennyson she was in the prime of life. her two sons, boys of eight and ten years of age perhaps, were by her side. farringford was at that time almost the same beautiful solitude the lovers had found it years before, when it was first their home. occasionally a curious sight-seer, or a poet-worshiper, had been known to stray across the grounds or to climb a tree in order to view the green retired spot; but as a rule tennyson could still wander unwatched and unseen through the garden, over the downs, and stand alone on the shore of the great sea. it was already afternoon when we arrived dusty and travel-stained at the hospitable door, which was wide open, shaded by vines, showing the interior dark and cool. mrs. tennyson, in her habitual and simple costume of a long gray dress and lace kerchief over her head, met us with her true and customary cordiality, leading us to the low drawingroom, where a large oriel window opening on the lawn and the halflife-size statue of wordsworth were the two points which caught my attention as we entered. her step as she preceded us was long and free. something in her bearing and trailing dress, perhaps, gave her a mediaeval aspect which suited with the house. the latter, i have been told, was formerly a baronial holding, and the fair enid and the young elaine appeared to be at one with her own childhood. they were no longer centuries apart from the slender fair-haired lady who now lay on a couch by our side,--they were a portion of her own existence, of a nature obedient to tradition, obedient to home, obedient to love. the world has made large advance, and the sound of the wheels of progress were not unheard in the lady's room at farringford. she was ready to sympathize with every form of emancipation; but for herself, her poet's life was her life, and his necessity was her great opportunity. i recall mrs. browning once saying to me, "ah, tennyson is too much indulged. his wife is too much his second self; she does not criticise enough." but tennyson was not a second browning. the delicate framework of his imagination, filled in by elemental harmonies, was not to be carelessly touched. she understood his work and his nature, and he stood firm where he had early planted himself by her side in worshiping affection and devotion. "alfred carried the sheets of his new poem up to london," she said one day, "and showed them to mr. monckton milnes, who persuaded him to leave out one of the best lines; but i persuaded him to replace it when he came home. it is a mistake in general for him to listen to the suggestions of others about his poems." all this was long ago, and the finger of memory has left faint tracings for me to follow; but i recall her figure at dinner as she sat in her soft white muslin dress, tied with blue, at that time hardly whiter than her face or bluer than her eyes, and how the boys stood sometimes one on either side of her in their black velvet dresses, like millais' picture of the princes in the tower, and sometimes helped to serve the guests. by and by we adjourned to another room, where there was a fire and a shining dark table with fruit and wine after her own picturesque fashion, and where later the poet read to us, while she, being always delicate in health, took her accustomed couch. i remember the quaint apartment for the night, on different levels, and the faded tapestry,--recalling "the faded mantle and the faded veil," her tender personal care, and her friendly goodnight, the silence, the sweetness, and the calm. she sometimes joined our out-door expeditions, but could not walk with us. for years she used a wheeled chair, as mrs. ritchie has charmingly described in her truthful and sympathetic sketch of the life at aldworth. i only associated her with the interior, where her influence was perfect. the social atmosphere of farringford, which depended upon its mistress, was warm and simple. a pleasant company of neighbors and friends was gathered when "maud" was read aloud to us, a wide group, grateful and appreciative, and one to which he liked to read. after this the mists of time close over! i can recall her again in the gray dress and kerchief following our footsteps to the door. i can see her graceful movement of the head as she waved her adieux; i can see the poet's dusky figure standing by her side, and that is all. sometimes she lives confusedly to the world of imagination as the abbess at almesbury; and sometimes, as one who knew her has said, she was like the first of the three queens, "the tallest of them all, and fairest," who bore away the body of arthur. she was no less than these, being a living inspiration at the heart of the poet's every-day life. it would seem to be upon another visit that we were talking in the drawing-room about browning. "we should like to see him oftener," she said, "he is delightful company, but we cannot get him to come here; we are too quiet for him!" i found food for thought in this little speech when i remembered the fatuous talk at dinner-tables where i had sometimes met browning, and thought of tennyson's great talk and the lofty serenity of his lady's presence. my last interview with lady tennyson was scarcely two months before tennyson's death. the great grief of their life in the loss of their son lionel had fallen upon them meanwhile. they were then at aldworth, which, although a house of their own building, was far more mediaeval in appearance than farringford. she was alone, and still on the couch in the large drawing-room, and there she spoke with the same youth of heart, the same deep tenderness, the same simple affection which had never failed through years of intercourse. when she rose to say farewell and to follow me as far as possible, she stepped with the same spirited sweep i had first seen. the happiness of welcoming her lovely face, which wore to those who knew her an indescribable heavenliness, is mine no more; but the memory cannot be effaced of one lady who held the traditions of high womanhood safe above the possible deteriorations of human existence. the correspondence of thomas carlyle and ralph waldo emerson 1834-1872 volume ii "to my friend i write a letter, and from him i receive a letter. it is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give, and of me to receive."--emerson "what the writer did actually mean, the thing he then thought of, the thing he then was."--carlyle contents of volume ii lxxvi. emerson. concord, 1 july, 1842. remittance of l51.-alcott.--editorship of the _dial._--projected essay on poetry.-stearns wheeler. lxxvii. carlyle. chelsea, 19 july, 1842. acknowledgment of remittance.--change of publishers.--work on _cromwell._-sterling.--alcott. lxxviii. carlyle. chelsea, 29 august, 1842. impotence of speech.--heart-sick for his own generation.--transcendentalism of the _dial._ lxxix. emerson. concord, 15 october, 1842. the coming book on cromwell.--alcott.--the _dial_ and its sins.--booksellers' accounts. lxxx. carlyle. chelsea, 17 november, 1842. accounts.--alcott.-sect-founders.--man the reformer.--james stephen.--gambardella. lxxxi. carlyle. chelsea, 11 march, 1843. _past and present._-how to prevent pirated republication.--the _dial._--alcott's english tail. lxxxii. carlyle. chelsea, 1 april, 1843. copy of _past and present_ forwarded.--prospect of pirated edition. lxxxiii. emerson. concord, 29 april, 1843. carlyle's star.-lectures on "new england" at baltimore, philadelphia, and new york.--politics in washington.--_past and present._--effect of cheap press in america.--reprint of the book.--the _dial_ does not pay expenses. extract from emerson's diary concerning _past and present._ lxxxiv. carlyle. 27 august, 1843. introduction of mr. macready. lxxxv. emerson. concord, 30 october, 1843. remittance of l25.-piratical reprint of _past and present._--e.p. clark, a carlylese, to be asked to take charge of accounts.--henry james. --ellery channing's poems. lxxxvi. carlyle. chelsea, 31 october, 1843. summer wanderings. --the _dial_ at the london library.--growth of emerson's public in england.--piratical reprint of his essays in london.--of _past and present_ in america.--criticism of carlyle in the dial.--dr. russell.--theodore parker.--book about cromwell.-_commons journals._ lxxxvii. carlyle. chelsea, 17 november, 1843. receipt of l25.-e.p. clark.--henry james.--channing's poems.--reverend w.h. channing.--"progress of the species."--emerson.--the cromwell business. lxxxviii. emerson. concord, 31 december, 1843. macready.-railroad to concord.--margaret fuller's review of sterling's poems in the _dial._--remittance of l32. lxxxix. carlyle. chelsea, 31 january, 1844. remittance received and made.--criticism of emerson by gilfillan.--john sterling.-cromwell book.--hexameters from voss. xc. emerson. concord, 29 february, 1844. acknowledgment of remittance.--a new collection of essays.--faith in writers as a class.--remittance of l36.--proposal concerning publication in america of _cromwell._ xci. carlyle. chelsea, 3 april, 1844. acknowledgment of remittance.--piratical reprints.--professor ferrier. xcii. carlyle. chelsea, 5 august, 1844. fear for sterling.-tennyson.--work on _cromwell_ frightful. xciii. emerson. concord, 1 september, 1844. sends proof sheets of new book of essays.--sterling. xciv. carlyle. chelsea, 29 september, 1844. death of sterling. xcv. emerson. concord, 30 september, 1844. remittance of l30-sterling.--tennyson.--regrets having troubled carlyle about proof-sheets.--birth of edward emerson.--purchase of land on walden pond. xcvi. carlyle. chelsea, 3 november, 1844. thanks for remittance.--london edition of _essays,_ second series.-criticism on them. xcvii. emerson. concord, 31 december, 1844. sterling's death.-london edition of _essays._--carlyle's preface and strictures. xcviii. emerson. concord, 31 january, 1845. bargain about _miscellanies_ with carey and hart.--portrait of carlyle desired.--e.p. clark's "illustrations of carlyle". xcix. carlyle. chelsea, 16 february, 1845. bargain with carey & co.--portrait.--emerson's public in england.--work on cromwell. c. emerson. concord, 29 june, 1845. death of mr. carey.-portrait.--his own occupations.--preparing to print _poems._-lectures in prospect. ci. carlyle. chelsea, 29 august, 1845. _cromwell's letters and speeches_ finished.--nature of the book.--new book from emerson welcome.--imperfection of all modes of utterance.--forbids further plague with booksellers. cii. emerson. concord, 15 september, 1845. payment sure from carey and hart.--lectures on "representative men". ciii. emerson. concord, 30 september, 1845. congratulations on completion of _cromwell_ book.--clark. civ. carlyle. chelsea, 11 november, 1845. cromwell book sent.-visit to scotland.--changes there.--his mother.--impatience with the times.--weariness with the cromwell book.--visit to the ashburtons. cv. carlyle. chelsea, 3 january, 1846. thanks to mr. hart, mr. furness, and others.--_cromwell proves popular.--new letters of cromwell. cvi. carlyle. chelsea, 3 february, 1846. second edition of cromwell.--emerson to do what he will concerning republication.-anti-corn-law.--aristocracy and millocracy. cvii. carlyle. chelsea, 3 march, 1846. cromwell lumber.--sheets of new edition sent.-essay on emerson in an edinburgh magazine.-mr. everett.--jargon in newspapers and parliament. cviii. carlyle. chelsea, 18 april, 1846. arrangements concerning reprint of _cromwell._--promise of daguerrotype likeness.--fifty years old.--rides.--emerson's voice wholly human.--blessedness in work. cix. carlyle. chelsea, 30 april, 1846. photograph sent.-arrangements with wiley and putnam for republication of _cromwell_ and other books.--photographs of emerson and himself. --remembrance of craigenputtock. cx. emerson. concord, 14 may, 1846. daguerrotype likeness.-wood-lot on walden pond. cxi. emerson. concord, 31 may, 1846. photograph of carlyle received.--one of himself sent in return.--bargain with wiley and putnam. cxii. carlyle. chelsea, 18 june, 1846. bargain with wiley and putnam.--emerson's photograph expected. cxiii. emerson. concord, 15 july, 1846. wiley and putnam.-dealings with booksellers.--accounts.--e.p. clark and his illustrations of carlyle's writings.--margaret fuller going to europe. cxiv. carlyle. chelsea, 17 july, 1846. photograph of emerson unsatisfactory.--revision of his own books.--spleen against books.--going to scotland.--reading in american history.-marshall and sparks.--michelet.--beriah green. cxv. emerson. concord, 31 july, 1846. thanks for copy of new edition of cromwell.--margaret fuller.--desires carlyle to see her. cxvi. carlyle. chelsea, 18 december, 1846. long silence.-disconsolate two months in scotland.--visit to ireland.--a country cast into the melting-pot.--o'connell.--young ireland.-returned home sad.--miss fuller; estimate of her.--what she thought of carlyle.--emerson's poems. cxvii. emerson. concord, 31 january, 1847. margaret fuller's visit to chelsea.--speculates on going to england to lecture.-his _poems._ cxviii. carlyle. chelsea, 2 march, 1847. visit to hampshire.-emerson's _poems._--prospect of emerson's lectures in england.-miss fuller. cxix. carlyle. chelsea, 18 march, 1847. remittance received.-alexander ireland.--advice concerning lectures. cxx. emerson. concord, 30 april, 1847. prospect of lecturing in england.--works in garden and orchard. cxxi. carlyle. chelsea, 18 may, 1847. thoreau's lecture on carlyle.--visit from e.r. hoar.--emerson's visit to england. cxxii. emerson. concord, 4 june, 1847. prospect of visit to england.--f.h. hedge. cxxiii. emerson. concord, 31 july, 1847. visit to england decided upon.--portrait of sterling. cxxiv. carlyle. rawdon, yorkshire, 31 august, 1847. journeyings.--emerson's expected visit.--hedge.--dr. jacobson.-quaker hosts. cxxv. emerson. concord, 30 september, 1847. plans for england. cxxvi. carlyle. chelsea, 15 october, 1847. delay of emerson's letter announcing his coming.--welcome to chelsea. emerson--extracts from his diary concerning carlyle. cxxvil. emerson. manchester, 5 november, 1847. his reception and occupations. cxxviii. carlyle. chelsea, 13 november, 1847. messages.-occupations.--bancroft. cxxix. carlyle. chelsea., 30 november, 1847. messages.--mr. forster, &c. cxxx. emerson. manchester, 28 december, 1847. message from miss fuller.--hospitality shown him.--the english. cxxxi. carlyle. chelsea, 30 december, 1847. the pepolis.-milnes.--tennyson.--idleness.--visit to hampshire.--massachusetts review. cxxxii. emerson. ambleside, 26 february, 1848. at miss martineau's.--wordsworth.--proposed return to chelsea. cxxxiii. carlyle. chelsea, 28 february, 1848. welcome ready at chelsea.--his own conditions.--the new french republic. cxxxiv. emerson. manchester, 2 march, 1848. return to london. cxxxv. emerson. [london,] 19 june, 1848. proposed call with mrs. crowe. cxxxvi. carlyle. chelsea, 20 june, 1848. mrs. crowe.--luncheon with the duchess. cxxxvii. carlyle. chelsea, 23 june, 1848. invitation to dinner. cxxxviii. carlyle. chelsea, 6 december, 1848. long silence.-questions concerning indian meal.--death of charles buller, and of lord ashburton's mother.--neuberg and others. cxxxix. emerson. boston, 23 january, 1849. john carlyle's translation of the inferno.--indian corn.--clough's bothie. cxl. carlyle. chelsea, 19 april, 1849. indian corn from concord; trial of it, reflections upon it.--no writing at present.--macaulay's _history._--political outlook.--clough.-sterling club. cxli. carlyle. scotsbrig, 13 august, 1849. indian corn again.-tour in ireland.--letter from miss fuller.--message to thoreau. cxlii. carlyle. chelsea, 19 july, 1850. a year's silence.-latter day pamphlets.--divergence from emerson.--_representative men._--prescott lionized. cxliii. carlyle. chelsea, 14 november, 1850. "eighteen million bores."--emerson on latter day pamphlets.--autumn journey.-disordered nerves. cxliv. carlyle. chelsea, 8 july, 1851. appeal for news.--_life of sterling._--crystal palace.--bossu's _journal,_ bartram's _travels._--margaret fuller.--mazzini.--dr. carlyle. cxlv. emerson. concord, 28 july, 1851. story of the year.-journey in the west.--memoir of margaret fuller.--_life of sterling._--english friends. cxlvi. carlyle. great malvern, 25 august, 1851. _life of sterling._--bossu's _journal._--water-cure.--twisleton.--milnes married.--tennyson.--browning on miss fuller. cxlvii. emerson. concord, 14 april, 1852. browning's reminiscences of margaret fuller.--books on the indians.--_life of sterling._ cxlviii. carlyle. chelsea, 7 may, 1852. correspondence must be revived.--margaret fuller.--memoirs of her. cxlix. emerson. concord, may, 1852. relations with carlyle.-carlyle's genius and his own.--margaret fuller. cl. carlyle. chelsea, 25 june, 1852. emerson and himself.-reading about frederick the great. cli. emerson. concord, 19 april, 1853. excuses for not writing.--chapter on fate.--visit to the west.--conditions of american life.--clough. clii. carlyle. chelsea, 13 may, 1853. blessing of letters from emerson.--coming on of old age.--modern democracy.--visit to germany.--still reading about fritz. cliia. emerson. concord, 10 august, 1853. slowness to write.-regret at clough's return to england.--miss bacon.--carlyle's visit to germany.--thackeray in america.--new york and its society. cliii. carlyle. chelsea, 9 september, 1853. regrets for old days.--not left town.--a new top story.--miss bacon, her quixotic enterprise.--clough.--thackeray.--to concord? cliv. emerson. concord, 11 march, 1854. laurence, the artist.-reading latter day pamphlets.--death of carlyle's, and of emerson's mother.--miss bacon.--his english notes.--lecturing tour in the west.--speed _frederick!_ clv. carlyle. chelsea, 8 april, 1854. thankful for emerson's letter.--death of his mother.--makes no way in prussian history. --the insuperable difficulty with _frederick._--literature in these days.--emerson's picture of america.--battle of freedom and slavery.--emerson's book on england desired.--miss bacon. clvi. emerson. concord, 17 april, 1855. excuses for not writing.--unchanged feeling for carlyle.--the american.--true measure of life.--musings of indolence. clvii. carlyle. chelsea, 13 may, 1855. emerson's letters indispensable; his complete understanding of carlyle.--a grim and lonely year.--never had such a business as _frederick._-frederick himself.--"balaklava."--persistence of the english.-urges emerson to print his book on england. clviii. emerson. concord, 6 may, 1856. letter-writing.--leaves of grass.--mrs. ---. clix. carlyle. chelsea, 20 july, 1856. emerson's letter welcome.--life a burden.--going to scotland.--_life of frederick_ to go to press.--mrs. ---.--miss bacon.--browning. clx. carlyle. the gill, cummertrees, annan, 28 august, 1856. the debt of america to emerson.--_english traits_ will be welcome.--grateful for whatever emerson may have said of himself.--in retreat in annan. clxi. carlyle. chelsea, 2 december, 1856. close of negotiations for printing a complete edition of his works in america.-_english traits._--its excellence. clxii. emerson. concord, 17 may, 1858. mr. and mrs. joseph longworth.--inquires for the _frederick._--desires a _liber veritatis._--friendship of old gentlemen. clxiii. carlyle. chelsea, 2 june, 1858. emerson's letter and friends welcome.--first two volumes of frederick just ready.-ugliness of the job.--occasional tone of emerson in the magazines.--health.--separation of dickens from his wife. clxiii.* carlyle. chelsea, 9 april, 1859. copy of _frederick_ sent to emerson.--nearly choked by the job.--self-pity.-emerson's speech on burns. clxiv. emerson. concord, i may, 1859. arrival of first volumes of _frederick._--illusion of children.--his own children.--a correspondent of twenty-five years not to be disused. extracts from emerson's diary respecting the _frederick._ clxv. emerson. concord, 16 april, 1860. mr. o.w. wight's new edition of the _miscellanies._--sight at toronto of two nephews of carlyle.--carlyle commended to the gods. clxvi. carlyle. chelsea, 30 april, 1860. encouragement from emerson's words about _frederick._--message to mr. wight. clxvii. carlyle. chelsea, 29 january, 1861. emerson's _conduct of life._--still twelve months from end of his task; nearly worn out. clxviii. emerson. concord, 16 april, 1861. thanks for last note.--_frederick._ clxix. emerson. concord, 8 december, 1862. the third volume of _frederick._--the manner of it.--the war in america--death of clough. clxx. carlyle. chelsea, 8 march, 1864. introduction of the hon. lyulph stanley.--mrs. carlyle's ill-health. clxxi. emerson. concord, 26 september, 1864. sympathy.--fourth volume of frederick.--nature of the war in america--mr. stanley. clxxii. carlyle. annandale, scotland, 14 june, 1865. completion of _frederick._--saunterings.--stay in annandale.--mrs. carlyle. --photographs.--mr. m.d. conway.--the american peacock. clxxiii. emerson. concord, 7 january, 1866. the last volumes of friedrich.--america.--conduct of americans in war and in peace.-photographs.--little to tell of himself. clxxiv. emerson. concord, 16 may, 1866. mrs. carlyle's death. clxxv. carlyle. mentone, 27 january, 1867. sad interval since last writing.--his condition.--mrs. carlye's death.--solace in writing reminiscences.--visit in kent during summer.--tennyson's _idyls._--emerson's _english traits._--mentone. clxxvi. carlyle. chelsea, 18 november, 1869. long abeyance of correspondence.--plan of bequeathing books to new england.-emerson's counsel desired.--his own condition. clxxvii. carlyle. chelsea, 4 january, 1870. arrangements respecting bequest of books to harvard college. clxxviii. emerson. concord, 23 january, 1870. apologies for delay.--writing new book.--delight in proposed bequest.--advice concerning. clxxix. carlyle. melchet court, romsey, 14 february, 1870. acknowledgment of letter. clxxx. carlyle. chelsea, 24 february, 1870. ending of the harvard business. clxxxi. emerson. concord, 21 march, 1870. visit to president eliot concerning the bequest to harvard.--reflections on the gift.--speech about it to others.--must renew correspondence.-his own children. clxxxii. carlyle. chelsea, 24 march, 1870. possible delay of his last letter.--society and solitude not received. clxxxiii. carlyle. chelsea, 6 april, 1870. emerson's letter received.--thankful for the conclusion of the little transaction.--reflections on it.--regrets that it has been spoken of.--_society and solitude._--news from concord.--the night cometh. clxxxiv. emerson. concord, 17 june, 1870. excuses for delay in writing.--lectures on philosophy.--steps taken to secure privacy in regard to bequest.--chapman's homer.--error in address of books.--report of carlyle's coming to america. clxxxv. carlyle. chelsea, 28 september, 1870. delay in receiving emerson's last letter.--correction of error in address of books.--emerson's lectures.--philosophies.--too late for him to come to america. clxxxvi. emerson. concord, 15 october, 1870. the victim of miscellany.--library edition of carlyle's works received.-invitation.--the privilege of genius.--e.r. hoar.--j.m. forbes.-the growing youth.--the lowell race. clxxxvia. emerson. concord, 10 april, 1871. account of himself and his work.--introduction to plutarch's _morals._--oration before the new england society in new york.--lectures at cambridge.--reprint of early writings.--about to go to california. clxxxvii. carlyle. chelsea, 4 june, 1871. gap in correspondence.--unfriendly winter.--completion of library edition of his works.--significance of piracy of emerson.-conditions in america.--anti-anarchy.--j. lee bliss.--finis of the copper captaincy. clxxxviii. emerson. concord, 30 june, 1871. return from california.--california.--the plains.--brigham young.--lucy garbett.--carlyle's ill-health. clxxxix. emerson. concord, 4 september, 1871. introduction of his son edward. cxc. emerson. baltimore, 5 january, 1872. last instalment of library edition of carlyle's works received.--felicitations on this completion.--happiness in having been carlyle's contemporary and friend.--carlyle's perversities.--proposes to "retire and read the authors."--carlyle's talk. cxci. carlyle. chelsea, 2 april, 1872. excuses for silence.-ill-health.--emerson's letter about the west.--aspect and meaning of that western world.--ruskin.--froude.--write. ----------correspondence of carlyle and emerson lxxvi. emerson to carlyle concord, 1 july, 1842 my dear carlyle,--i have lately received from our slow friends, james munroe & co., $246 on account of their sales of the _miscellanies,_--and i enclose a bill of exchange for l51, which cost $246.50. it is a long time since i sent you any sketch of the account itself, and indeed a long time since it was posted, as the booksellers say; but i will find a time and a clerk also for this. i have had no word from you for a long space. you wrote me a letter from scotland after the death of your wife's mother, and full of pity for me also; and since, i have heard nothing. i confide that all has gone well and prosperously with you; that the iron puritan is emerging from the past, in shape and stature as he lived; and you are recruited by sympathy and content with your picture; and that the sure repairs of time and love and active duty have brought peace to the orphan daughter's heart. my friend alcott must also have visited you before this, and you have seen whether any relation could subsist betwixt men so differently excellent. his wife here has heard of his arrival on your coast,--no more. i submitted to what seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism,--i know not what else to call it,--and took charge of our thankless little _dial,_ here, without subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any laborer; it has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be transcribed and circulated; and always we are waiting when somebody shall come and make it good. but i took it, as i said, and it took me, and a great deal of good time, to a small purpose. i am ashamed to compute how many hours and days these chores consume for me. i had it fully in my heart to write at large leisure in noble mornings opened by prayer or by readings of plato or whomsoever else is dearest to the morning muse, a chapter on poetry, for which all readings, all studies, are but preparation; but now it is july, and my chapter is rudest beginnings. yet when i go out of doors in the summer night, and see how high the stars are, i am persuaded that there is time enough, here or somewhere, for all that i must do; and the good world manifests very little impatience. stearns wheeler, the cambridge tutor, a good grecian, and the editor, you will remember, of your american editions, is going to london in august probably, and on to heidelberg, &c. he means, i believe, to spend two years in germany, and will come to see you on his way; a man whose too facile and good-natured manners do some injustice to his virtues, to his great industry and real knowledge. he has been corresponding with your tennyson, and editing his poems here. my mother, my wife, my two little girls, are well; the youngest, edith, is the comfort of my days. peace and love be with you, with you both, and all that is yours. --r. w. emerson in our present ignorance of mr. alcott's address i advised his wife to write to your care, as he was also charged to keep you informed of his place. you may therefore receive letters for him with this. lxxvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 19 july, 1842 my dear emerson,--lest opportunity again escape me, i will take her, this time, by the forelock, and write while the matter is still hot. you have been too long without hearing of me; far longer, at least, than i meant. here is a second letter from you, besides various intermediate notes by the hands of friends, since that templand letter of mine: the letter arrived yesterday; my answer shall get under way today. first under the head of business let it be authenticated that the letter enclosed a draft for l51; a new, unexpected munificence out of america; which is ever and anon dropping gifts upon me,-to be received, as indeed they partly are, like manna dropped out of the sky; the gift of unseen divinities! the last money i got from you changed itself in the usual soft manner from dollars into sovereigns, and was what they call "all right,"--all except the little bill (of eight pounds and odds, i think) drawn on fraser's executors by brown (little and brown?); which bill the said executors having refused for i know not what reason, i returned it to brown with note of the dishonor done it, and so the sum still stands on his books in our favor. fraser's people are not now my booksellers, except in the matter of your _essays_ and a second edition of _sartor;_ the other books i got transferred to a certain pair of people named "chapman and hall, 186 strand"; which operation, though (i understand) it was transacted with great and vehement reluctance on the part of the fraser people, yet produced no _quarrel_ between them and me, and they still forward parcels, &c., and are full of civility when i see them:--so that whether this had any effect or none in their treatment of brown and his bill i never knew; nor indeed, having as you explained it no concern with brown's and their affairs, did i ever happen to inquire. i avoid all booksellers; see them rarely, the blockheads; study never to think of them at all. book-sales, reputation, profit, &c., &c.; all this at present is really of the nature of an encumbrance to me; which i study, not without success, to sweep almost altogether out of my head. one good is still possible to me in life, one only: to screw a little more work out of myself, my miserable, despicable, yet living, acting, and so far imperial and celestial _self;_ and this, god knows, is difficulty enough without any foreign one! you ask after _cromwell:_ ask not of him; he is like to drive me mad. there he lies, shining clear enough to me, nay glowing, or painfully burning; but far down; sunk under two hundred years of cant, oblivion, unbelief, and triviality of every kind: through all which, and to the top of all which, what mortal industry or energy will avail to raise him! a thousand times i have rued that my poor activity ever took that direction. the likelihood still is that i may abandon the task undone. i have bored through the dreariest mountains of rubbish; i have visited naseby field, and how many other unintelligible fields and places; i have &c., &c.:--alas, what a talent have i for getting into the impossible! meanwhile my studies still proceed; i even take a ghoulish kind of pleasure in raking through these old bone-houses and burial-aisles now; i have the strangest fellowship with that huge genius of death (universal president there), and catch sometimes, through some chink or other, glimpses into blessed _ulterior_ regions,--blessed, but as yet altogether _silent._ there is no use of writing of things past, unless they can be made in fact things present: not yesterday at all, but simply today and what it holds of fulfilment and of promises is _ours:_ the dead ought to bury their dead, ought they not? in short, i am very unfortunate, and deserve your prayers,--in a quiet kind of way! if you lose tidings of me altogether, and never hear of me more,--consider simply that i have gone to my natal element, that the mud nymphs have sucked me in; as they have done several in their time! sterling was here about the time your letters to him came: your american reprint of his pieces was naturally gratifying him much.* he seems getting yearly more restless; necessitated to find an outlet for himself, unable as yet to do it well. i think he will now write review articles for a while; which craft is really, perhaps, the one he is fittest for hitherto. i love sterling: a radiant creature; but very restless;--incapable either of rest or of effectual motion: aurora borealis and sheet lightning; which if it could but _concentrate_ itself, as i [say] always--!--we had much talk; but, on the whole, even his talk is not much better for me than silence at present. _me miserum!_ -------* "the poetical works of john sterling," philadelphia, 1842. -------directly about the time of sterling's departure came alcott, some two weeks after i had heard of his arrival on these shores. he has been twice here, at considerable length; the second time, all night. he is a genial, innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to one. the good alcott: with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a kind of venerable don quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving!.... my poor wife is still weak, overshadowed with sorrow: her loss is great, the loss almost as of the widow's mite; for except her good mother she had almost no kindred left; and as for friends-they are not rife in this world.--god be thanked withal they are not entirely non-extant! have i not a friend, and friends, though they too are in sorrow? good be with you all. --t. carlyle. by far the valuablest thing that alcott brought me was the newspaper report of emerson's last lectures in new york. really a right wholesome thing; radiant, fresh as the _morning;_ a thing _worth_ reading; which accordingly i clipped from the newspaper, and have in a state of assiduous circulation to the comfort of many.--i cannot bid you quit the _dial,_ though it, too, alas, is antinomian somewhat! _perge, perge,_ nevertheless. --and so now an end. --t. c. lxxviii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 29 august, 1842 my dear. emerson,--this, morning your new letter, of the 15th august, has arrived;* exactly one fortnight old: thanks to the gods and steam-demons! i already, perhaps six weeks ago, answered your former letter,--acknowledging the manna-gift of the l51, and other things; nor do i think the letter can have been lost, for i remember putting it into the post-office myself. today i am on the eve of an expedition into suffolk, and full of petty business: however, i will throw you one word, were it only to lighten my own heart a little. you are a kind friend to me, and a precious;--and when i mourn over the impotence of human speech, and how each of us, speak or write as he will, has to stand _dumb,_ cased up in his own unutterabilities, before his unutterable brother, i feel always as if emerson were the man i could soonest _try_ to speak with,--were i within reach of him! well; we must be content. a pen is a pen, and worth something; though it expresses about as much of a _man's_ meaning perhaps as the stamping of a hoof will express of a horse's meaning; a very poor expression indeed! --------* this letter of 15th august is missing. --------your bibliopolic advice about cromwell or my next book shall be carefully attended, if i live ever to write another book! but i have again got down into primeval night; and live alone and mute with the _manes,_ as you say; uncertain whether i shall ever more see day. i am partly ashamed of myself; but cannot help it. one of my grand difficulties i suspect to be that i cannot write _two books at once;_ cannot be in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment; a feat which excels even that of the irishman's bird: "nobody but a bird can be in two places at once!" for my heart is sick and sore in behalf of my own poor generation; nay, i feel withal as if the one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new cromwells and new puritans: thus do the two centuries stand related to me, the seventeenth _worthless_ except precisely in so far as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try that enterprise! heaven help me.--i believe at least that i ought _to hold my tongue;_ more especially at present. thanks for asking me to write you a word in the _dial._ had such a purpose struck me long ago, there have been many things passing through my head,--march-marching as they ever do, in long drawn, scandalous falstaff-regiments (a man ashamed to be seen passing through coventry with such a set!)--some one of which, snatched out of the ragged rank, and dressed and drilled a little, might perhaps fitly have been saved from chaos, and sent to the _dial._ in future we shall be on the outlook. i love your _dial,_ and yet it is with a kind of shudder. you seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the fact of this present universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can i find any anchorage, and soaring away after ideas, beliefs, revelations, and such like,--into perilous altitudes, as i think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing! i know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof. surely i could wish you _returned_ into your own poor nineteenth century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and trying to evolve in some measure the hidden godlike that lies in it;--that seems to me the kind of feat for literary men. alas, it is so easy to screw one's self up into high and ever higher altitudes of transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of himmalayah, the earth shrinking to a planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for _you,_ for me: but whither does it lead? i dread always, to inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!--"stamp, stamp, stamp!"-well, i do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, "be damned!" it is the whole past and the whole future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. come back into it, i tell you;--and so for the present will "stamp" no more.... adieu, my friend; i must not add a word more. my wife is out on a visit; it is to bring her back that i am now setting forth for suffolk. i hope to see ely too, and st. ives, and huntingdon, and various _cromwelliana._ my blessings on the concord household now and always. commend me expressly to your wife and your mother. farewell, dear friend. --t. carlyle lxxix. emerson to carlyle concord, 15 october, 1842 my dear carlyle,--i am in your debt for at least two letters since i sent you any word. i should be well content to receive one of these stringent epistles of bark and steel and mellow wine with every day's post, but as there is no hope that more will be sent without my writing to signify that these have come, i hereby certify that i love you well and prize all your messages. i read with special interest what you say of these english studies, and i doubt not the book is in steady progress again. we shall see what change the changed position of the author will make in the book. the first _history_ expected its public; the second is written to an expecting people. the tone of the first was proud,--to defiance; we will see if applauses have mitigated the master's temper. this time he has a hero, and we shall have a sort of standard to try, by the hero who fights, the hero who writes. well; may grand and friendly spirits assist the work in all hours; may impulses and presences from that profound world which makes and embraces the whole of humanity, keep your feet on the mount of vision which commands the centuries, and the book shall be an indispensable benefit to men, which is the surest fame. let me know all that can be told of your progress in it. you shall see in the last _dial_ a certain shadow or mask of yours, "another richmond," who has read your lectures and profited thereby.* alcott sent me the paper from london, but i do not know the name of the writer. as for alcott, you have discharged your conscience of him manfully and knightly; i absolve you well... he is a great man and was made for what is greatest, but i now fear that he has already touched what best he can, and through his more than a prophet's egotism, and the absence of all useful reconciling talents, will bring nothing to pass, and be but a voice in the wilderness. as you do not seem to have seen in him his pure and noble intellect, i fear that it lies under some new and denser clouds. -------* an article on cromwell, in the _dial_ for october, 1842. -------for the _dial_ and its sins, i have no defence to set up. we write as we can, and we know very little about it. if the direction of these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary history, that all the bright boys and girls in new england, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys that they do not wish to go into trade, the girls that they do not like morning calls and evening parties. they are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead. perhaps, one of these days, a great yankee shall come, who will easily do the unknown deed. the booksellers have sent me accounts lately, but--i know not why--no money. little and brown from january to july had sold very few books. i inquired of them concerning the bill of exchange on fraser's estate, which you mention, and they said it had not been returned to them, but only some information, as i think, demanded by fraser's administrator, which they had sent, and, as they heard nothing again, they suppose that it is allowed and paid to you. inform me on this matter. munroe & co. allow some credits, but charge more debits for binding, &c., and also allege few sales in the hard times. i have got a good friend of yours, a banking man, to promise that he will sift all the account and see if the booksellers have kept their promises. but i have never yet got all the papers in readiness for him. i am looking to see if i have matter for new lectures, having left behind me last spring some half-promises in new york. if you can remember it, tell me who writes about loyola and xavier in the _edinburgh._ sterling's papers--if he is near you--are all in mr. russell's hands.* i played my part of fadladeen with great rigor, and sent my results to russell, but have not now written to j. s. yours, r.w.e. ---------* mr. a.l. russell, who had been instrumental in procuring the american edition of sterling's _poetical works._ --------lxxx. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 19 november, 1842 my dear emerson,--your letter finds me here today; busied with many things, but not likely to be soon more at leisure; wherefore i may as well give myself the pleasure of answering it on the spot. the fraser bill by brown and little has come all right; the dumfries banker apprises me lately that he has got the cash into his hands. pray do not pester yourself with these bookseller unintelligibilities: i suppose their accounts are all reasonably correct, the cheating, such as it is, done according to rule: what signifies it at any rate? i am no longer in any vital want of money; alas, the want that presses far heavier on me is a want of faculty, a want of _sense;_ and the feeling of that renders one comparatively very indifferent to money! i reflect many times that the wealth of the indies, the fame of ten shakespeares or ten mahomets, would at bottom do me no good at all. let us leave these poor slaves of the ingot and slaves of the lamp to their own courses,--within a _certain_ extent of halter! what you say of alcott seems to me altogether just. he is a man who has got into the highest intellectual region,--if that be the highest (though in that too there are many stages) wherein a man can believe and discern for himself, without need of help from any other, and even in opposition to all others: but i consider him entirely unlikely to accomplish anything considerable, except some kind of crabbed, semi-perverse, though still manful existence of his own; which indeed is no despicable thing. his "more than prophetic egoism,"--alas, yes! it is of such material that thebaid eremites, sect-founders, and all manner of cross-grained fanatical monstrosities have fashioned themselves, --in very _high,_ and in the highest regions, for that matter. sect-founders withal are a class i do not like. no truly great man, from jesus christ downwards, as i often say, ever founded a sect,--i mean wilfully intended founding one. what a view must a man have of this universe, who thinks "_he_ can swallow it all," who is not doubly and trebly happy that he can keep it from swallowing him! on the whole, i sometimes hope we have now done with fanatics and agonistic posture-makers in this poor world: it will be an immense improvement on the past; and the "new ideas," as alcott calls them, will prosper greatly the better on that account! the old gloomy gothic cathedrals were good; but the great blue dome that hangs over all is better than any cologne one.--on the whole, do not tell the good alcott a word of all this; but let him love me as he can, and live on vegetables in peace; as i, living _partly_ on vegetables, will continue to love him! the best thing alcott did while he staid among us was to circulate some copies of your _man the reformer._* i did not get a copy; i applied for one, so soon as i knew the right fountain; but alcott, i think, was already gone. and now mark,--for this i think is a novelty, if you do not already know it: certain radicals have reprinted your essay in lancashire, and it is freely circulating there, and here, as a cheap pamphlet, with excellent acceptance so far as i discern. various newspaper reviews of it have come athwart me: all favorable, but all too shallow for sending to you. i myself consider it a _truly excellent_ utterance; one of the best words you have ever spoken. speak many more such. and whosoever will distort them into any "vegetable" or other crotchet,--let it be at his own peril; for the word itself is _true;_ and will have to make itself a _fact_ therefore; though not a distracted _abortive_ fact, i hope! _words_ of that kind are not born into facts in the _seventh month;_ well if they see the light full-grown (they and their adjuncts) in the _second century;_ for old time is a most deliberate breeder!--but to speak without figure, i have been very much delighted with the clearness, simplicity, quiet energy and veracity of this discourse; and also with the fact of its spontaneous appearance here among us. the prime mover of the printing, i find, is one thomas ballantyne, editor of a manchester newspaper, a very good, cheery little fellow, once a paisley weaver as he informs me,--a great admirer of all worthy things. ---------* "a lecture read before the mechanics' apprentices' library association, boston, january 25, 1841." ---------my paper is so fast failing, let me tell you of the writer on loyola. he is a james stephen, head under-secretary of the colonial office,--that is to say, i believe, real governor of the british colonies, so far as they have any governing. he is of wilberforce's creed, of wilberforce's kin; a man past middle age, yet still in full vigor; reckoned an enormous fellow for "despatch of business," &c., especially by taylor (_van artevelde_) and others who are with him or under him in downing street.... i regard the man as standing on the confines of genius and dilettantism,--a man of many really good qualities, and excellent at the despatch of business. there we will leave him. --a mrs. lee of brookline near you has made a pleasant book about jean paul, chiefly by excerpting.* i am sorry to find gunderode & co. a decided weariness!** cromwell--cromwell? do not mention such a word, if you love me! and yet--farewell, my friend, tonight! yours ever, t. carlyle i will apprise sterling before long: he is at falmouth, and well; urging me much to start a periodical here! gambardella promises to become a real painter; there is a glow of real fire in the wild southern man: next to no _articulate_ intellect or the like, but of inarticulate much, or i mistake. he has tried to paint _me_ for you; but cannot, he says! --------* "life of jean paul frederic richter. compiled from various sources. together with his autobiography. translated from the german." in two volumes. boston, 1842. this book, which is one of the best in english concerning jean paul, was the work of the late mrs. thomas (eliza buckminster) lee. ** in the _dial,_ for january, 1842, is an article by miss fuller on "bettine brentano and gunderode,"--a decided weariness. the canoness gunderode was a friend of bettine's, older and not much wiser than herself. --------lxxxi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 11 march, 1848 dear emerson,--i know not whose turn it is to write; though a suspicion has long attended me that it was yours, and above all an indisputable wish that you would do it: but this present is a cursory line, all on business,--and as usual all on business of my own. i have finished a book, and just set the printer to it; one solid volume (rather bigger than one of the _french revolution_ volumes, as i compute); it is a somewhat fiery and questionable "tract for the times," _not_ by a puseyite, which the terrible aspect of things here has forced from me,--i know not whether as preliminary to _oliver_ or not; but it had gradually grown to be the preliminary of anything possible for me: so there it is written; and i am a very sick, but withal a comparatively very free man. the title of the thing is to be _past and present:_ it is divided into four books, "book i. proem," "book ii. the ancient monk," "book iii. the modern worker," and "book iv. horoscope" (or some such thing):--the size of it i guessed at above. the practical business, accordingly, is: how to cut out that new york scoundrel, who fancies that because there is no gallows it is permitted to steal? i have a distinct desire to do that;-altogether apart from the money to be gained thereby. a friend's goodness ought not to be frustrated by a scoundrel destitute of gallows.--you told me long since how to do the operation; and here, according to the best way i had of fitting your scheme into my materials, is my way of attempting it. the book will not be out here for six good weeks from this date; it could be kept back for a week or two longer, if that were indispensable: but i hope it may not. in three weeks, half of it will be printed; i, in the meanwhile, get a correct manuscript copy of the latter half made ready: joining the printed sheets and this manuscript, your bookseller will have a three weeks' start of any rival, if i instantly despatch the parcel to him. will this do? this with the announcement of the title as given above? pray write to me straightway, and say. your answer will be here before we can publish; and the packet of proof-sheets and manuscript may go off whether there be word from you or none.--and so enough of _past and present._ and indeed enough of all things, for my haste is excessive in these hours. the last _dial_ came to me about three weeks ago _as a post-letter,_ charged something like a guinea of postage, if i remember; so it had to be rejected, and i have not yet seen that number; but will when my leeway is once brought up a little again. the two preceding numbers were, to a marked extent, more like life than anything i had seen before of the _dial._ there was not indeed anything, except the emersonian papers alone, which i know by the first ring of them on the tympanum of the mind, that i properly speaking _liked;_ but there was much that i did not dislike, and did half like; and i say, "_i fausto pede;_ that will decidedly do better!" by the bye, it were as well if you kept rather a strict outlook on alcott and his english _tail,_--i mean so far as we here have any business with it. bottomless imbeciles ought not to be seen in company with ralph waldo emerson, who has already men listening to him on this side of the water. the "tail" has an individual or two of that genus,--and the rest is mainly yet undecided. for example, i knew old --myself; and can testify, if you will believe me, that few greater blockheads (if "blockhead" may mean "exasperated imbecile" and the ninth part of a thinker) broke the world's bread in his day. have a care of such! i say always to myself, --and to you, which you forgive me. adieu, my dear emerson. may a good genius guide you; for you are _alone, alone;_ and have a steep pilgrimage to make,-leading _high,_ if you do not slip or stumble! ever your affectionate, t. carlyle lxxxii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 1 april, 1843 my dear carlyle,--along with this letter there will go from liverpool, on the 4th instant, the promised parcel, complete copy of the book called _past and present,_ of which you already had two simultaneous announcements.* the name of the steam packet, i understand, is the "britannia." i have addressed the parcel to the care of "messrs. little and brown, booksellers, boston," with your name atop: i calculate it will arrive safe enough. --------* the letter making the second announcement, being very similar to the preceding, is omitted. --------about one hundred pages of the manuscript copy have proved superfluous, the text being there also in a printed shape; i had misestimated the printer's velocity; i was anxious too that there should be no failure as to time. the manuscript is very indifferent in that section of it; the damage therefore is smaller: your press-corrector can acquaint himself with the _hand,_ &c. by means of it. a poor young governess, confined to a horizontal posture, and many sad thoughts, by a disease of the spine, was our artist in that part of the business: her writing is none of the distinctest; but it was a work of charity to give it her. i hope the thing is all as correct as i could make it. i do not bethink me of anything farther i have to add in the way of explanation. in fact, my prophecy rather is at present that the gibbetless thief at new york, will beat us after all! never mind if be do. to say truth, i myself shall almost be glad: there has been a botheration in this anxious arrangement of parts correcting of scrawly manuscript copies of what you never wished to read more, and insane terror withal of having your own manuscript burnt or lost,--that has exceeded my computation. not to speak of this trouble in which i involve you, my friend; which, i truly declare, makes me ashamed! true one _is_ bound to resist the devil in all shapes; if a man come to steal from you, you will put on what locks and padlocks are at hand, and not on the whole say, "steal, then!" but if the locks prove insufficient, and the thief do break through,--that side of the alternative also will suit you very well; and, with perhaps a faint prayer for gibbets when they are necessary, you will say to him, next time, "_macte virtute,_ my man." all is in a whirl with me here today; no other topic but this very poor one can be entered upon. i hope for a letter from your own hand soon, and some news about still more interesting matters. adieu, my friend; i feel still as if, in several senses, you stood alone with me under the sky at present!* ----------* the signature to this letter has been cut off. ----------lxxxiii. emerson to carlyle concord, 29 april, 1843 my dear carlyle,--it is a pleasure to set your name once more at the head of a sheet. it signifies how much gladness, how much wealth of being, that the good, wise, man-cheering, man-helping friend, though unseen, lives there yonder, just out of sight. your star burns there just below our eastern horizon, and fills the lower and upper air with splendid and splendescent auroras. by some refraction which new lenses or else steamships shall operate, shall i not yet one day see again the disk of benign phosphorus? it is a solid joy to me, that whilst you work for all, you work for me and with me, even if i have little to write, and seldom write your name. since i last wrote to you, i found it needful, if only for the household's sake, to set some new lectures in order, and go to new congregations of men. i live so much alone, shrinking almost cowardly from the contact of worldly and public men, that i need more than others to quit home sometimes, and roll with the river of travelers, and live in hotels. i went to baltimore, where i had an invitation, and read two lectures on new england. on my return, i stopped at philadelphia, and, my course being now grown to four lectures, read them there. at new york, my snowball was larger, and i read five lectures on new england. 1. religion; 2. trade; 3. genius, manners and customs; 4. recent literary and spiritual influences from abroad; 5. domestic spiritual history.--perhaps i have not quite done with them yet, but may make them the block of a new and somewhat larger structure for boston, next winter. the newspaper reports of them in new york were such offensive misstatements, that i could not send you, as i wished, a sketch. between my two speeches at baltimore, i went to washington, thirty-seven miles, and spent four days. the two poles of an enormous political battery, galvanic coil on coil, self-increased by series on series of plates from mexico to canada, and from the sea westward to the rocky mountains, here meet and play, and make the air electric and violent. yet one feels how little, more than how much, man is represented there. i think, in the higher societies of the universe, it will turn out that the angels are molecules, as the devils were always titans, since the dulness of the world needs such mountainous demonstration, and the virtue is so modest and concentrating. but i must not delay to acknowledge the arrival of your book. it came ten or eleven days ago, in the "britannia," with the three letters of different dates announcing it.--i have read the superfluous hundred pages of manuscript, and find it only too popular. beside its abundance of brilliant points and proverbs, there is a deep, steady tide taking in, either by hope or by fear, all the great classes of society,--and the philosophic minority also, by the powerful lights which are shed on the phenomenon. it is true contemporary history, which other books are not, and you have fairly set solid london city aloft, afloat in bright mirage in the air. i quarrel only with the popular assumption, which is perhaps a condition of the humor itself, that the state of society is a new state, and was not the same thing in the days of rabelais and of aristophanes, as of carlyle. orators always allow something to masses, out of love to their own art, whilst austere philosophy will only know the particles. this were of no importance, if the historian did not so come to mix himself in some manner with his erring and grieving nations, and so saddens the picture; for health is always private and original, and its essence is in its unmixableness.--but this book, with all its affluence of wit, of insight, and of daring hints, is born for a longevity which i will not now compute.--in one respect, as i hinted above, it is only too good, so sure of success, i mean, that you are no longer secure of any respect to your property in our freebooting america. you must know that the cheap press has, within a few months, made a total change in our book markets. every english book of any name or credit is instantly converted into a newspaper or coarse pamphlet, and hawked by a hundred boys in the streets of all of our cities for 25, 18, or 12 cents; dickens's notes for 12 cents, _blackwood's magazine_ for 18 cents, and so on. three or four great new york and philadelphia printing-houses do this work, with hot competition. one prints bulwer's novel yesterday, for 35 cents; and already, in twenty-four hours, another has a coarser edition of it for 18 cents, in all thoroughfares.--what to do with my sealed parcel of manuscripts and proofs? no bookseller would in these perilous circumstances offer a dollar for my precious parcel. i inquired of the lawyers whether i could not by a copyright protect my edition from piracy until an english copy arrived, and so secure a sale of a few weeks. they said, no; yet advised the taking a certificate of copyright, that we might try the case if we wished. after much consulting and balancing for a few hours, i decided to print, as heretofore, on our own account, an edition, but cheap, to make the temptation less, to retail at seventy-five cents. i print fifteen hundred copies, and announce to the public that it is your edition, and all good men must buy this. i have written to the great reprinters, namely to park benjamin, and to the harpers, of new york, to request their forbearance; and have engaged little and brown to publish, because, i think, they have something more of weight with booksellers, and are a little less likely to be invaded than munroe. if we sell a thousand copies at seventy-five cents, it will only yield you about two hundred dollars; if we should be invaded, we can then afford to sell the other five hundred copies at twenty-five cents, without loss. in thus doing, i involve you in some risk; but it was the best course that occurred.--hitherto, the _miscellanies_ have not been reprinted in the cheap forms; and in the last year, james munroe & co. have sold few copies; all books but the cheapest being unsold in the hard times; something has however accrued to your credit there. j.m. & co. fear that, if the new book is pirated at new york and the pirate prospers, instantly the _miscellanies_ will be plundered. we will hope better, or at least exult in that which remains, to wit, a worth unplunderable, yet infinitely communicable. i have hardly space left to say what i would concerning the _dial._ i heartily hoped i had done with it, when lately our poor, good, publishing miss peabody,... wrote me that its subscription would not pay its expenses (we all writing for love). but certain friends are very unwilling it should die, and i a little unwilling, though very unwilling to be the life of it, as editor. and now that you are safely through your book, and before the greater sequel rushes to its conclusion, send me, i pray you, that short chapter which hovers yet in the limbo of contingency, in solid letters and points. let it be, if that is readiest, a criticism on the _dial,_ and this too elysian race, not blood, and yet not ichor.--let jane carlyle be on my part, and, watchful of his hours, urge the poet in the golden one. i think to send you a duplicate of the last number of the _dial_ by mr. mann,* who with his bride (sister of the above-mentioned miss peabody) is going to london and so to prussia. he is little known to me, but greatly valued as a philanthropist in this state. i must go to work a little more methodically this summer, and let something grow to a tree in my wide straggling shrubbery. with your letters came a letter from sterling, who was too noble to allude to his books and manuscript sent hither, and which russell all this time has delayed to print; i know not why, but discouraged, i suppose, in these times by booksellers. i must know precisely, and write presently to j.s. farewell. r.w. emerson** ----------* the late horace mann. ** the following passages from emerson's diary relating to _past and present_ seem to have been written a few days after the preceding letter:--"how many things this book of carlyle gives us to think! it is a brave grappling with the problem of the times, no luxurious holding aloof, as is the custom of men of letters, who are usually bachelors and not husbands in the state, but literature here has thrown off his gown and descended into the open lists. the gods are come among us in the likeness of men. an honest iliad of english woes. who is he that can trust himself in the fray? only such as cannot be familiarized, but nearest seen and touched is not seen and touched, but remains inviolate, inaccessible, because a higher interest, the politics of a higher sphere, bring him here and environ him, as the ambassador carries his country with him. love protects him from profanation. what a book this in its relation to english privileged estates! how shall queen victoria read this? how the primate and bishops of england? how the lords? how the colleges? how the rich? and how the poor? here is a book as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lord and lordship and high form and ceremony of english conservatism tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air with merciless rebounds and kicks, and yet not a word in the book is punishable by statute. the wit has eluded all official zeal, and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts,--this flaming sword of cherubim waved high in air illuminates the whole horizon and shows to the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts. worst of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all sympathy by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservation and impressing the reader with the conviction that carlyle himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent, and a genuine respect for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes. gulliver among the lilliputians... "carlyle must write thus or nohow, like a drunken man who can run, but cannot walk. what a man's book is that! no prudences, no compromises, but a thorough independence. a masterly criticism on the times. fault perhaps the excess of importance given to the circumstance of today. the poet is here for this, to dwarf and destroy all merely temporary circumstance, and to glorify the perpetual circumstance of men, e.g. dwarf british debt and raise nature and social life. "but everything must be done well once; even bulletins and almanacs must have one excellent and immortal bulletin and almanac. so let carlyle's be the immortal newspaper." ---------lxxxiv. carlyle to emerson 27 august, 1843 dear emerson,--the bearer of this is mr. macready, our celebrated actor, now on a journey to america, who wishes to know you. in the pauses of a feverish occupation which he strives honestly to make a noble one, this artist, become once more a man, would like well to meet here and there a true american man. he loves heroes as few do; and can recognize them, you will find, whether they have on the _cothurnus_ or not. i recommend him to you; bid you forward him as you have opportunity, in this department of his pilgrimage. mr. macready's deserts to the english drama are notable here to all the world; but his dignified, generous, and every-way honorable deportment in private life is known fully, i believe, only to a few friends. i have often said, looking at him as a manager of great london theatres, "this man, presiding over the unstablest, most chaotic province of english things, is the one public man among us who has dared to take his stand on what he understood to be _the truth,_ and expect victory from that: he puts to shame our bishops and archbishops." it is literally so. with continued kind wishes, yours as of old. t. carlyle lxxxv. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 october, 1843 my dear friend,--i seize the occasion of having this morsel of paper for twenty-five pounds sterling from the booksellers to send you, (and which fail not to find enclosed, as clerks say,) to inquire whether you still exist in chelsea, london, and what is the reason that my generous correspondent has become dumb for weary months. i must go far back to resume my thread. i think in april last i received your manuscript, &c. of the book, which i forthwith proceeded to print, after some perplexing debate with the booksellers, as i fully informed you in my letter of april or beginning of may. since that time i have had no line or word from you. i must think that my letter did not reach you, or that you have written what has never come to me. i assure myself that no harm has befallen you, not only because you do not live in a corner, and what chances in your dwelling will come at least to my ears, but because i have read with great pleasure the story of dr. francia,* which gave the best report of your health and vivacity. ---------* carlyle's article on dr. francia in the _foreign quarterly review,_ no. 62. reprinted in his _miscellanies._ ---------i wrote you in april or may an account of the new state of things which the cheap press has wrought in our book market, and specially what difficulties it put in the way of our edition of _past and present._ for a few weeks i believed that the letters i had written to the principal new york and philadelphia booksellers, and the preface, had succeeded in repelling the pirates. but in the fourth or fifth week appeared a mean edition in new york, published by one collyer (an unknown person and supposed to be a mask of some other bookseller), sold for twelve and one half cents, and of this wretched copy several thousands were sold, whilst our seventy-five cents edition went off slower. there was no remedy, and we must be content that there was no expense from our edition, which before september had paid all its cost, and since that time has been earning a little, i believe. i am not fairly entitled to an account of the book from the publishers until the 1st of january.... i have never yet done what i have thought this other last week seriously to do, namely, to charge the good and faithful e.p. clark, a man of accounts as he is a cashier in a bank, with the total auditing and analyzing of these accounts of yours. my hesitation has grown from the imperfect materials which i have to offer him to make up so long a story. but he is a good man, and, do you know it? a carlylese of that intensity that i have often heard he has collected a sort of album of several volumes, containing illustrations of every kind, historical, critical, &c., to the _sartor._ i must go to boston and challenge him. once when i asked him, he seemed willing to assume it. no more of accounts tonight. i send you by this ship a volume of translations from dante, by doctor parsons of boston, a practising dentist and the son of a dentist. it is his gift to you. lately went henry james to you with a letter from me. he is a fine companion from his intelligence, valor, and worth, and is and has been a very beneficent person as i learn. he carried a volume of poems from my friend and nearest neighbor, w. ellery channing, whereof give me, i pray you, the best opinion you can. i am determined he shall be a poet, and you must find him such.* i have too many things to tell you to begin at the end of this sheet, which after all this waiting i have been compelled to scribble in a corner, with company waiting for me. send me instant word of yourself if you love me, and of those whom you love, and so god keep you and yours. --r. waldo emerson ---------* in the second number of the _dial,_ in october, 1840, emerson had published, under the title of "new poetry," an article warmly commending mr. channing's then unpublished poems. ---------lxxxvi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 31 october, 1843 my dear emerson,--it is a long weary time since i have had the satisfaction of the smallest dialogue with you. the blame is all my own; the reasons would be difficult to give,--alas, they are properly no-reasons, children not of _something,_ but of mere idleness, confusion, inaction, inarticulation, of _nothing_ in short! let us leave them there, and profit by the hour which yet is. i ran away from london into bristol and, south wales, when the heats grew violent, at the end of june. south wales, north wales, lancashire, scotland: i roved about everywhere seeking some jacob's-pillow on which to lay my head, and dream of things heavenly;--yes, that at bottom was my modest prayer, though i disguised it from myself and the result was, i could find no pillow at all; but sank into ever meaner restlessness, blacker and blacker biliary gloom, and returned in the beginning of september thoroughly eclipsed and worn out, probably the weariest of all men living under the sky. sure enough i have a fatal talent of converting all nature into preternaturalism for myself: a truly horrible phantasm-reality it is to me; what of heavenly radiances it has, blended in close neighborhood, in intimate union, with the hideousness of death and chaos;--a very ghastly business indeed! on the whole, it is better to hold one's peace about it. i flung myself down on sofas here,--for my little wife had trimmed up our little dwelling-place into quite glorious order in my absence, and i had only to lie down: there, in reading books, and other make-believe employments, i could at least keep silence, which was an infinite relief. nay, gradually, as indeed i anticipated, the black vortexes and deluges have subsided; and now that it is past, i begin to feel myself better for my travels after all. for one thing, articulate speech having returned to me,--you see what use i make of it. on the table of the london library, voted in by some unknown benefactor whom i found afterwards to be richard milnes, there lay one thing highly gratifying to me: the last two numbers of the _dial._ it is to be one of our periodicals henceforth; the current number lies on the table till the next arrive; then the former goes to the binder; we have already, in a bound volume, all of it that emerson has had the editing of. this is right. nay, in edinburgh, and indeed wherever ingenuous inquisitive minds were met with, i have to report that the said emerson could number a select and most loving public; select, and i should say fast growing: for good and indifferent reasons it may behove the man to assure himself of this. farther, to the horror of poor nickerson (bookseller fraser's successor), a certain scoundrel interloper here has reprinted _emerson's essays_ on grayish paper, to be sold at two shillings,--distracting nickerson with the fear of change! i was glad at this, if also angry: it indicates several things. nickerson has taken his measures, will reduce the price of his remaining copies; indeed, he informs me the best part of his edition was already sold, and he has even some color of money due from england to emerson through me! with pride enough will i transmit this mournful, noble peculium: and after that, as i perceive, such chivalrous international doings must cease between us. _past and present,_ some one told me, was, in spite of all your precautions, straightway sent forth in modest gray, and your benevolent speculation ruined. here too, you see, it is the same. such chivalries, therefore, are now impossible; for myself i say, "well, let them cease; thank god they once were, the memory of that can never cease with us!" in this last number of the _dial_ which by the bye your bookseller never forwarded to me, i found one little essay, a criticism on myself,* which, if it should do me mischief, may the gods forgive you for! it is considerably the most dangerous thing i have read for some years. a decided likeness of myself recognizable in it, as in the celestial mirror of a friend's heart; but so enlarged, exaggerated, all _transfigured,_--the most delicious, the most dangerous thing! well, i suppose i must try to assimilate it also, to turn it also to good, if i be able. eulogies, dyslogies, in which one finds no features of one's own natural face, are easily dealt with; easily left unread, as stuff for lighting fires, such is the insipidity, the wearisome _non_entity of pabulum like that: but here is another sort of matter! "the beautifulest piece of criticism i have read for many a day," says every one that speaks of it. may the gods forgive you!--i have purchased a copy for three shillings, and sent it to my mother: one of the _indubitablest_ benefits i could think of in regard to it. --------* a criticism by emerson of _past and present,_ in the _dial_ for july, 1843. it embodies a great part of the extract from emerson's diary given in a preceding note, and is well worth reading in full for its appreciation of carlyle's powers and defects. --------there have been two friends of yours here in these very days: dr. russell, just returning from paris; mr. parker, just bound thither.* we have seen them rather oftener than common, sterling being in town withal. they are the best figures of strangers we have had for a long time; possessions, both of them, to fall in with in this pilgrimage of life. russell carries friendliness in his eyes, a most courteous, modest, intelligent man; an english intelligence too, as i read, the best of it lying unspoken, not as a logic but as an instinct. parker is a most hardy, compact, clever little fellow, full of decisive utterance, with humor and good humor; whom i like much. they shine like suns, these two, amid multitudes of watery comets and tenebrific constellations, too sorrowful without such admixture on occasion! -----------* dr. le baron russell; theodore parker. -----------as for myself, dear emerson, you must ask me no questions till-alas, till i know not when! after four weary years of the most unreadable reading, the painfulest poking and delving, i have come at last to the conclusion--that i must write a book on cromwell; that there is no rest for me till i do it. this point fixed, another is not less fixed hitherto, that a book on cromwell is _impossible._ literally so: you would weep for me if you saw how, between these two adamantine certainties, i am whirled and tumbled. god only knows what will become of me in the business. patience, patience! by the bye, do you know a "massachusetts historical society," and a james bowdoin, seemingly of boston? in "vol. ii. third series" of their _collections,_ lately i met with a disappointment almost ludicrous. bowdoin, in a kind of dancing, embarrassed style, gives long-winded, painfully minute account of certain precious volumes, containing "notes of the long parliament," which now stand in the new york library; poises them in his assaying balance, speculates, prophesies, inquires concerning them: to me it was like news of the lost decades of livy. good heavens, it soon became manifest that these precious volumes are nothing whatever but a wretched broken old dead manuscript copy of part of our printed _commons journals!_ printed since 1745, and known to all barbers! if the historical society desired it, any member of parliament could procure them the whole stock, _lords and commons,_ a wheelbarrowful or more, with no cost but the carriage. every member has the right to demand a copy, and few do it, few will let such a mass cross their door-threshold! this of bowdoin's is a platitude of some magnitude.--adieu, dear emerson. rest not, haste not; you have work to do. --t. carlyle lxxxvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 17 november, 1843 dear emerson,--about this time probably you will be reading a letter i hurried off for you by dr. russell in the last steamer; and your friendly anxieties will partly be set at rest. had i kept silence so very long? i knew it was a long while; but my vague remorse had kept no date! it behoves me now to write again without delay; to certify with all distinctness that i have safely received your letter of the 30th october, safely the bill for l25 it contained;--that you are a brave, friendly man, of most serene, beneficient way of life; and that i--god help me!-by all means appoint this mr. clark to the honorary office of account-keeper--if he will accept it! by parker's list of questions from him, and by earlier reminiscences recalled on that occasion, i can discern that he is a man of lynx eyesight, of an all-investigating curiosity: if he will accept this sublime appointment, it will be the clearest case of elective affinity. accounts to you must be horrible; as they are to me: indeed, i seldom read beyond the _last_ line of them, if i can find the last; and one of the insupportabilities of bookseller accounts is that nobody but a wizard, or regular adept in such matters, can tell where the last line, and final net result of the whole accursed babblement, is to be found! by all means solicit clark;--at all events, do you give it up, i pray you, and let the booksellers do their own wise way. it really is not material; let the poor fellows have length of halter. every new bill from america comes to me like a kind of heavenly miracle; a reaping where i never sowed, and did not expect to reap: the quantity of it is a thing i can never bring in question.--for your english account with nickerson i can yet say nothing more; perhaps about newyear's-day the poor man will enable me to say something. i hear however that the pirate has sold off, or nearly so, his two-shillings edition of the _essays,_ and is preparing to print another; this, directly in the teeth of cash and double-entry book-keeping, i take to be good news. james is a very good fellow, better and better as we see him more. something shy and skittish in the man; but a brave heart intrinsically, with sound, earnest sense, with plenty of insight and even humor. he confirms an observation of mine, which indeed i find is hundreds of years old, that a stammering man is never a worthless one. physiology can tell you why. it is an excess of delicacy, excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow-creature, that makes him stammer. hammond l'estrange says, "who ever heard of a stammering man that was a fool?" really there is something in that.--james is now off to the isle of wight; will see sterling at ventnor there; see whether such an isle or france will suit better for a winter residence. w.e. channing's _poems_ are also a kind gift from you. i have read the pieces _you had cut up for me:_ worthy indeed of reading! that poem _on death_ is the utterance of a valiant, noble heart, which in rhyme or prose i shall expect more news of by and by. but at bottom "poetry" is a most suspicious affair for me at present! you cannot fancy the oceans of twaddle that human creatures emit upon me, in these times; as if, when the lines had a jingle in them, a nothing could be something, and the point were gained! it is becoming a horror to me,--as all speech without meaning more and more is. i said to richard milnes, "now in honesty what is the use of putting your accusative _before_ the verb, and otherwise entangling the syntax; if there really is an image of any object, thought, or thing within you, for god's sake let me have it the _shortest_ way, and i will so cheerfully excuse the _omission_ of the jingle at the end: cannot i do without that!"--milnes answered, "ah, my dear fellow, it is because we have no thought, or almost none; a little thought goes a great way when you put it into rhyme!" let a man try to the very uttermost to _speak_ what he means, before _singing_ is had recourse to. singing, in our curt english speech, contrived expressly and almost exclusively for "despatch of business," is terribly difficult. alfred tennyson, alone of our time, has proved it to be possible in some measure. if channing will persist in melting such obdurate speech into music he shall have my true wishes,--my augury that it will take an enormous _heat_ from him!--another channing,* whom i once saw here, sends me a progress-of-the-species periodical from new york. _ach gott!_ these people and their affairs seem all "melting" rapidly enough, into thaw-slush or one knows not what. considerable madness is visible in them. _stare super antiquas vias:_ "no," they say, "we cannot stand, or walk, or do any good whatever there; by god's blessing, we will fly,--will not you!-here goes!" and their _flight,_ it is as the flight of the unwinged,--of oxen endeavoring to fly with the "wings" of an ox! by such flying, universally practised, the "ancient ways" are really like to become very deep before long. in short, i am terribly sick of all that;--and wish it would stay at home at fruitland, or where there is good pasture for it. friend emerson, alone of all voices, out of america, has sphere-music in him for me,--alone of them all hitherto; and is a prophecy and sure dayspring in the east; immeasurably cheering to me. god long prosper him; keep him duly apart from that bottomless hubbub which is not, at all cheering! and so ends my litany for this day. -------* the reverend william henry channing. -------the cromwell business, though i punch daily at it with all manner of levers, remains immovable as ailsa crag. heaven alone knows what i shall do with it. i see and say to myself, it is heroical; troy town was probably not a more heroic business; and this belongs to thee, to thy own people,--must it be dead forever?--perhaps yes,--and kill me too into the bargain. really i think it very shocking that we run to greece, to italy, to &c., &c., and leave all at home lying buried as a nonentity. were i absolute sovereign and chief pontiff here, there should be a study of the old _english_ ages first of all. i will pit odin against any jupiter of them; find sea-kings that would have given jason a roland for his oliver! we are, as you sometimes say, a book-ridden people,--a phantom-ridden people.--all this small household is well; salutes you and yours with love old and new. accept this hasty messenger; accept my friendliest farewell, dear emerson. yours ever, t. carlyle lxxxviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 31 december, 1843 my dear friend,--i have had two good letters from you, and it is fully my turn to write, so you shall have a token on this latest day of the year. i rejoice in this good will you bear to so many friends of mine,--if they will go to you, you must thank yourself. best when you are mutually contented. i wished lately i might serve mr. macready, who sent me your letter.--i called on him and introduced him to sam g. ward, my friend and the best man in the city, and, besides all his personal merits, a master of all the offices of hospitality. ward was to keep himself informed of macready's times, and bring me to him when there was opportunity. but he stayed but a few days in boston, and, ward said, was in very good hands, and promised to see us when he returns by and by. i saw him in hamlet, but should much prefer to see him as macready. i must try to entice mr. macready out here into my pines and alder bushes. just now the moon is shining on snow-drifts, four, five, and six feet high, but, before his return, they will melt; and already this my not native but ancestral village, which i came to live in nearly ten years ago because it was the quietest of farming towns, and off the road, is found to lie on the directest line of road from boston to montreal, a railroad is a-building through our secretest woodlands, and, tomorrow morning, our people go to boston in two hours instead of three, and, next june, in one. this petty revolution in our country matters was very odious to me when it began, but it is hard to resist the joy of all one's neighbors, and i must be contented to be carted like a chattel in the cars and be glad to see the forest fall. this rushing on your journey is plainly a capital invention for our spacious america, but it is more dignified and man-like to walk barefoot.--but do you not see that we are getting to be neighbors? a day from london to liverpool; twelve or eleven to boston; and an hour to concord; and you have owed me a visit these ten years. i mean to send with your january _dial_ a copy of the number for sterling, as it contains a review of his tragedy and poems, by margaret fuller. i have not yet seen the article, and the lady affirms that it is very bad, as she was ill all the time she was writing; but i hope and believe better. she, margaret fuller, is an admirable person, whose writing gives feeble account of her. but i was to say that i shall send this _dial_ for j.s. to your care, as i know not the way to the isle of wight. enclosed in this letter i send a bill of exchange for l32 8s. 2d. payable by baring & co. it happens to represent an exact balance on munroe's books, and that slow mortal should have paid it before. i have not yet got to clark, i who am a slow mortal, but have my eye fixed on him. remember me and mine with kindest salutations to your wife and brother. ever yours, r.w. emerson lxxxix. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 31 january, 1844 dear emerson, some ten days ago came your letter with a new draft of l32 and odd money in it: all safe; the draft now gone into the city to ripen into gold and silver, the letter to be acknowledged by some hasty response now and here. america, i say to myself looking at these money drafts, is a strange place; the highest comes out of it and the lowest! sydney smith is singing dolefully about doleful american repudiation, "_dis_owning of the soft impeachment"; and here on the other hand is an american man, in virtue of whom america has become definable withal as a place from which fall heavenly manna-showers upon certain men, at certain seasons of history, when perhaps manna-showers were not the unneedfulest things!--we will take the good and the evil, here as elsewhere, and heartily bless heaven. but now for the draft at the top of this leaf. one colman,* a kind of agricultural missionary, much in vogue here at present, has given it me; it is emerson's, the net produce hitherto (all but two cents) of _emerson's essays._ i enclose farther the bookseller's hieroglyph papers; unintelligible as all such are; but sent over to you for scrutiny by the expert. i gather only that there are some five hundred and odd of the dear-priced edition sold, some two hundred and odd still to sell, which the bookseller says are (in spite of pirates) slowly selling; and that the half profit upon the whole adventure up to this date has been l24 15s. 11d. sterling,--equal, as i am taught, at $4.88 per pound sterling, to $121.02, for which, all but the cents, here is a draft on boston, payable at sight. pray have yourself straightway _paid;_ that if there be any mistake or delay i may rectify it while time yet is.--i add, for the intelligence of the bookseller-papers, that fraser, with whom the bargain originally stood, was succeeded by nickerson; these are the names of the parties. and so, dear friend; accept this munificent sum of money; and expect a blessing with it if good wishes from the heart of man can give one. so much for that. --------* the reverend henry colman. --------did you receive a dumfries newspaper with a criticism in it? the author is one gilfillan, a young dissenting minister in dundee; a person of great talent, ingenuousness, enthusiasm, and other virtues; whose position as a preacher of bare old calvinism under penalty of death sometimes makes me tremble for him. he has written in that same newspaper about all the notablest men of his time; godwin, corn-law elliott and i know not all whom: if he publish the book, i will take care to send it you.* i saw the man for the first time last autumn, at dumfries; as i said, his being a calvinist dissenting minister, economically fixed, and spiritually with such germinations in him, forces me to be very reserved to him. ----------* the sketches were published the next year in a volume under the title of _the gallery of literary portraits._ ----------john sterling's _dial_ shall be forwarded to ventnor in the isle of wight, whenever it arrives. he was here, as probably i told you, about two months ago, the old unresting brilliantly radiating man. he is now much richer in money than he was, and poorer by the loss of a good mother and good wife: i understand he is building himself a brave house, and also busy writing a poem. he flings too much "sheet-lightning" and unrest into me when we meet in these low moods of mine; and yet one always longs for him back again: "no doing with him or without him," the dog! my thrice unfortunate book on cromwell,--it is a real descent to hades, to golgotha and chaos! i feel oftenest as if it were possibler to die one's self than to bring it into life. besides, my health is in general altogether despicable, my "spirits" equal to those of the ninth part of a dyspeptic tailor! one needs to be able to go on in all kinds of spirits, in climate sunny or sunless, or it will never do. the planet earth, says voss,--take four hexameters from voss: journeys this earth, her eye on a sun, through the heavenly spaces; joyous in radiance, or joyless by fits and swallowed in tempests; falters not, alters not, equal advancing, home at the due hour: so thou, weather-proof, constant, may, equal with day, march! i have not a moment more tonight;--and besides am inclined to write unprofitables if i persist. adieu, my friend; all blessings be with you always. yours ever truly, t. carlyle xc. emerson to carlyle concord, 29 february, 1844 my dear carlyle,--i received by the last steamer your letter, and its prefixed order for one hundred and twenty-one dollars, which order i sent to ward, who turned it at once into money. thanks, dear friend, for your care and activity, which have brought me this pleasing and most unlooked for result. and i beg you, if you know any family representative of mr. fraser, to express my sense of obligation to that departed man. i feel a kindness not without some wonder for those good-natured five hundred englishmen who could buy and read my miscellany. i shall not fail to send them a new collection, which i hope they will like better. my faith in the writers, as an organic class, increases daily, and in the possibility to a faithful man of arriving at statements for which he shall not feel responsible, but which shall be parallel with nature. yet without any effort i fancy i make progress also in the doctrine of indifferency, and am certain and content that the truth can very well spare me, and have itself spoken by another without leaving it or me the worse. enough if we have learned that music exists, that it is proper to us, and that we cannot go forth of it. our pipes, however shrill and squeaking, certify this our faith in tune, and the eternal amelioration may one day reach our ears and instruments. it is a poor second thought, this literary activity. perhaps i am not made obnoxious to much suffering, but i have had happy hours enough in gazing from afar at the splendors of the intellectual law, to overpay me for any pains i know. existence may go on to be better, and, if it have such insights, it never can be bad. you sometimes charge me with i know not what skyblue, sky-void idealism. as far as it is a partiality, i fear i may be more deeply infected than you think me. i have very joyful dreams which i cannot bring to paper, much less to any approach to practice, and i blame myself not at all for my reveries, but that they have not yet got possession of my house and barn. but i shall not lose my love for books. i only worship eternal buddh in the retirements and intermissions of brahma.--but i must not egotize and generalize to the end of my sheet, as i have a message or two to declare. i enclose a bill of exchange on the barings for thirty-six pounds; which is the sum of two recent payments of munroe and of little and brown, whereof i do not despair you shall yet have some account in booksellers' figures. i have got so far with clark as to have his consent to audit the accounts when i shall get energy and time enough to compile them out of my ridiculous journal. munroe begs me to say what possibly i have already asked for him, that, when the _history of cromwell_ is ready to be seen of men, you will have an entire copy of the manuscript taken, and sent over to us. then will he print a cheap edition such as no one will undersell, and secure such a share of profit to the author as the cheap press allows. perhaps only thirty or forty pounds would make it worth while to take the trouble. a valued friend of mine wishes to know who wrote (perhaps three years ago) a series of metaphysical articles in _blackwood_ on consciousness. can you remember and tell me? and now i commend you to the good god, you and your history, and the true kind wife who is always good to the eager yankees, and am yours heartily, --r.w. emerson xci. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 8 april, 1844 dear emerson,--till within five minutes of the limit of my time, i had forgotten that this was the 3d of the month; that i had a letter to write acknowledging even money! take the acknowledgment, given in all haste, not without a gratitude that will last longer: the thirty-six pounds and odd shillings came safe in your letter, a new unlooked-for gift. america, i think, is like an amiable family teapot; you think it is all out long since, and lo, the valuable implement yields you another cup, and another! many thanks to you, who are the heart of america to me. republishing for one's friend's sake, i find on consulting my bookseller, is out here; we have pirates waiting for every american thing of mark, as you have for every british; to the tender mercies of these, on both sides, i fancy the business must be committed. they do good too; as all does, even carrion: they send you _faster_ abroad, if the world have any use for you;--oftenest it only thinks it has. your _essays,_ the pirated _essays,_ make an ugly yellow tatter of a pamphlet, price 1s. 6d.; but the edition is all sold, i understand: and even nickerson has not entirely ceased to sell. the same pirate who pounced upon you made an attempt the other day on my poor _life of schiller,_ but i put the due spoke in his wheel. they have sent me lowell's _poems;_ they are bringing out jean paul's life, &c., &c.; the hungry _canaille._ it is strange that men should feel themselves so entirely at liberty to steal, simply because there is no gallows to hang them for doing it. your new book will be eagerly waited for by that class of persons; and also by another class which is daily increasing here. the only other thing i am "not to forget" is that of the _essay on consciousness_ in _blackwood._ the writer of those papers is one ferrier, a nephew of the edinburgh miss ferrier who wrote _marriage_ and some other novels; nephew also of professor wilson (christopher north), and married to one of his daughters. a man of perhaps five-and-thirty; i remember him in boyhood, while he was boarded with an annandale clergyman; i have seen him since manhood, and liked him well: a solid, square-visaged, dark kind of man, more like your theodore parker than any mutual specimen i can recollect. he got the usual education of an edinburgh advocate; but found no practice at the bar, nor sought any with due anxiety, i believe; addicted himself to logical meditations;--became, the other year, professor of universal history, or some such thing, in the edinburgh university, and lectures with hardly any audience: a certain _young_ public wanted me to be that professor there, but i knew better,--is this enough about ferrier? i will not add another word; the time being _past,_ irretrievable except by half-running! write us your book; and be well and happy always!* ------* the signature has been cut off. ------xcii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 5 august, 1844 dear emerson,--there had been a long time without direct news from you, till four days ago your letter arrived. this day i understand to be the ultimate limit of the american mail; yesterday, had it not been sunday, would have been the limit: i write a line, therefore, though in very great haste. poor sterling, even i now begin to fear, is in a very bad way. he had two successive attacks of spitting of blood, some three months ago or more; the second attack of such violence, and his previous condition then so weak, that the doctor as good as gave up hope,--the poor patient himself had from the first given it up. our poor friend has had so many attacks of that nature, and so rapidly always rallied from them, i gave no ear to these sinister prognostics; but now that i see the summer influences passing over him without visible improvement, and our good weather looking towards a close without so much strength added as will authorize even a new voyage to madeira;--i too am at last joining in the general discouragement; all the sadder to me that i shut it out so long. sir james clark, our best-accredited physician for such diseases, declares that life, for certain months, may linger, with great pain; but that recovery is not to be expected. great part of the lungs, it appears, is totally unserviceable for respiration; from the remainder, especially in times of coughing, it is with the greatest difficulty that breath enough is obtained. our poor patient passes the night in a sitting posture; cannot lie down: that fact sticks with me ever since i heard it! he is very weak, very pale; still "writes a great deal daily"; but does not wish to see anybody; declines to "see even carlyle," who offered to go to him. his only brother, anthony sterling, a hardy soldier, lately withdrawn from the army, and settled in this quarter, whom we often communicate with, is about going down to the isle of wight this week: he saw john four days ago, and brings nothing but bad news,--of which indeed this removal of his to the neighborhood of the scene is a practical testimony. the old father, a widower for the last two years, and very lonely and dispirited, seems getting feebler and feebler: he was here yesterday: a pathetic kind of spectacle to us. alas, alas! but what can be said? i say nothing; i have written only one note to sterling: i feel it probable that i shall never see him more,--nor his like again in this world. his disease, as i have from of old construed it, is a burning of him up by his own fire. the restless vehemence of the man, struggling in all ways these many years to find a legitimate outlet, and finding, except for transitory, unsatisfactory coruscations, none, has undermined its clay prison in the weakest point (which proves to be the lungs), and will make outlet _there._ my poor sterling! it is an old tragedy; and very stern whenever it repeats itself of new. today i get answer about alfred tennyson: all is right on that side. moxon informs me that the russell books and letter arrived duly, and were duly forwarded and safely received; nay, farther, that tennyson is now in town, and means to come and see me. of this latter result i shall be very glad: alfred is one of the few british or foreign figures (a not increasing number i think!) who are and remain beautiful to me;--a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, brother!--however, i doubt he will not come; he often skips me, in these brief visits to town; skips everybody indeed; being a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom,--carrying a bit of chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into cosmos! alfred is the son of a lincolnshire gentleman farmer, i think; indeed, you see in his verses that he is a native of "moated granges," and green, fat pastures, not of mountains and their torrents and storms. he had his breeding at cambridge, as if for the law or church; being master of a small annuity on his father's decease, he preferred clubbing with his mother and some sisters, to live unpromoted and write poems. in this way he lives still, now here, now there; the family always within reach of london, never in it; he himself making rare and brief visits, lodging in some old comrade's rooms. i think he must be under forty, not much under it. one of the finest-looking men in the world. a great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, almost indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy;--smokes infinite tobacco. his voice is musical metallic,--fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech, and speculation free and plenteous: i do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe!--we shall see what he will grow to. he is often unwell; very chaotic,--his way is through chaos and the bottomless and pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon. (o paper!) i trust there is now joy in place of pain in the house at concord, and a certain mother grateful again to the supreme powers! we are all in our customary health here, or nearly so; my wife has been in lancashire, among her kindred there, for a month lately: our swollen city is getting empty and still; we think of trying an autumn _here_ this time.--get your book ready; there are readers ready for it! and be busy and victorious! ever yours, t. carlyle my _history_ is frightful! if i live, it is like to be completed; but whether i shall live, and not rather be buried alive, broken-hearted, in the serbonian quagmires of english stupidity, and so sleep beside cromwell, often seems uncertain. erebus has no uglier, brutaler element. let us say nothing of it. let us do it, or leave it to the devils. _ay de mi!_ xciii. emerson to carlyle boston, 1 september, 1844 my dear carlyle,--i have just learned that in an hour mr. wilmer's mail-bag for london, by the "acadia," closes, and i will not lose the occasion of sending you a hasty line: though i had designed to write you from home on sundry matters, which now must wait. i send by this steamer some sheets, to the bookseller john chapman,--proofsheets of my new book of essays. chapman wrote to me by the last steamer, urging me to send him some manuscript that had not yet been published in america, and he thought he could make an advantage from printing it, and even, in some conditions, procure a copyright, and he would publish for me on the plan of half-profits. the request was so timely, since i was not only printing a book, but also a pamphlet (an address to citizens of some thirteen towns who celebrated in concord the negro emancipation on 1st august last), that i came to town yesterday, and hastened the printers, and have now sent him proofs of all the address, and of more than half the book. if you can give chapman any counsel, or save me from any nonsense by enjoining on him careful correction, you shall. i looked eagerly for a letter from you by the last steamer, to give me exact tidings of sterling. none came; but i received a short note from sterling himself, which intimated that he had but a few more days to live. it is gloomy news. i beg you will write me everything you can relate of him, by the next mail. if you can learn from his friends whether the packet of his manuscripts and printed papers, returned by russell and sent by me through harnden's express to ventnor, arrived safely, it would be a satisfaction. yours affectionately, r.w. emerson xciv. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 29 september, 1844 dear emerson,--there should a letter have come for you by that steamer; for i wrote one duly, and posted it in good time myself: i will hope therefore it was but some delay of some subaltern official, such as i am told occasionally chances, and that you got the letter after all in a day or two. it would give you notice, more or less, up to its date, of all the points you had inquired about there is now little to be added; except concerning the main point, that the catastrophe has arrived there as we foresaw, and all is ended. john sterling died at his house in ventnor on the night of wednesday, 18th september, about eleven o'clock; unexpectedly at last, and to appearance without pain. his sister-in-law, mrs. maurice; had gone down to him from this place about a week before; other friends were waiting as it were in view of him; but he wished generally to be alone, to continue to the last setting his house and his heart more and more in order for the great journey. for about a fortnight back he had ceased to have himself formally dressed; had sat only in his dressing-gown, but i believe was still daily wheeled into his library, and sat very calmly sorting and working there. he sent me two notes, and various messages, and gifts of little keepsakes to my wife and myself: the notes were brief, stern and loving; altogether noble; never to be forgotten in this world. his brother anthony, who had been in the isle of wight within call for several weeks, had now come up to town again; but, after about a week, decided that he would run down again, and look. he arrived on the wednesday night, about nine o'clock; found no visible change; the brave patient calm as ever, ready to speak as ever, --to say, in direct words which he would often do, or indirectly as his whole speech and conduct did, "god is great." anthony and he talked for a while, then took leave for the night; in few minutes more, anthony was summoned to the bedside, and at eleven o'clock, as i said, the curtain dropt, and it was all ended.--_euge!_ whether the american _manuscripts_ had arrived i do not yet know, but probably shall before this letter goes; for anthony is to return hither on tuesday, and i will inquire. our friend is buried in ventnor churchyard; four big elms overshadow the little spot; it is situated on the southeast side of that green island, on the slope of steep hills (as i understand it) that look toward the sun, and are close within sight and hearing of the sea. there shall he rest, and have fit lullaby, this brave one. he has died as a man should; like an old roman, yet with the christian bibles and all newest revelations present to him. he refused to see friends; men whom i think he loved as well as any,--me for one when i obliquely proposed it, he refused. he was even a little stern on his nearest relatives when they came to him: do i need your help to die? phocion-like he seemed to feel degraded by physical decay; to feel that he ought to wrap his mantle round him, and say, "i come, persephoneia; it is not i that linger!"--his sister-in-law, anthony's wife, probably about a month ago, while they were still in wight, had begged that she might see him yet once; her husband would be there too, she engaged not to speak. anthony had not yet persuaded him, when she, finding the door half open, went in: his pale changed countenance almost made her shriek; she stept forward silently, kissed his brow in silence; he burst into tears. let us speak no more of this.--a great quantity of papers, i understand, are left for my determination; what is to be done with them i will sacredly endeavor to do. i have visited your bookseller chapman; seen the proof-sheets lying on his table; taken order that the reprint shall be well corrected,--indeed, i am to read every sheet myself, and in that way get acquainted with it, before it go into stereotype. chapman is a tall, lank youth of five-and-twenty; full of good will, but of what other equipment time must yet try. by a little book of his, which i looked at some months ago, he seemed to me sunk very deep in the dust-hole of extinct socinianism; a painful predicament for a man! he is not sure of saving much copyright for you; but he will do honestly what in that respect is doable; and he will print the book correctly, and publish it decently, i saying _imprimatur_ if occasion be,--and your everincreasing little congregation here will do with the new word what they can. i add no more today; reserving a little nook for the answer i hope to get two days hence. adieu, my friend: it is silent sunday; the populace not yet admitted to their beershops, till the respectabilities conclude their rubricmummeries,--a much more audacious feat than beer! we have wet wind at northeast, and a sky somewhat of the dreariest:-courage! a _little_ way above it reigns mere blue, and sunshine eternally!--t.c. _wednesday, october 2d._--the letter had to wait till today, and is still in time. anthony sterling, who is yet at ventnor, apprises me this morning that according to his and the governess's belief the russell manuscripts arrived duly, and were spoken of more than once by our friend.--on monday i received from this same anthony a big packet by post; it contains among other things all your letters to john, wrapt up carefully, and addressed in his hand, "emerson's letters, to be returned through the hands of carlyle": they shall go towards you next week, by mr. james, who is about returning. among the other papers was one containing seven stanzas of verse addressed to t. carlyle, 14th september; full of love and enthusiasm;--the friday before his death: i was visiting the old city of winchester that day, among the tombs of canutes and eldest noble ones: you may judge how sacred the memory of those hours now is! i have read your slavery address; this morning the first _half_sheet, in proof, of the _essays_ has come: perfectly correct, and right good reading. yours ever, t. carlyle xcv. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 september, 1844 my dear friend,--i enclose a bill of exchange for thirty pounds sterling which i procured in town today at $5 each pound, or $150; so high, it seems, is the rate at present, higher, they said, than for years. it is good booksellers' money from little and brown, and james munroe & co., in unequal proportions. if you wish for more accurate information and have a great deal of patience, there is still hope that you may obtain it before death; for i this day met e.p. clark in washington street, and he reported some progress in auditing of accounts, and said that when presently his family should return to town for the winter, he would see to the end of them, i.e. the accounts. i received with great satisfaction your letter of july, which came by a later steamer than it was written for, but gave me exact and solid information on what i most wished to know. may you live forever, and may your reports of men and things be accessible to me whilst i live! even if, as now in sterling's case, the news are the worst, or nearly so, yet let whatever comes for knowledge be precise, for the direst tragedy that is accurately true must share the blessing of the universe. i have no later tidings from sterling, and i must still look to you to tell me what you can. i dread that the story should be short. may you have much good to tell of him, and for many a day to come! the sketch you drew of tennyson was right welcome, for he is an old favorite of mine,--i owned his book before i saw your face;--though i love him with allowance. o cherish him with love and praise, and draw from him whole books full of new verses yet. the only point on which you never give precise intelligence is your own book; but you shall have your will in that; so only you arrive on the shores of light at last, with your mystic freight fished partly out of the seas of time, and partly out of the empyrean deeps. i have much regretted a sudden note i wrote you just before the steamer of 1 september sailed, entreating you to cumber yourself about my proofsheets sent to the london bookseller. i heartily absolve you from all such vexations. nothing could be more inconsiderate. mr. chapman is undoubtedly amply competent to ordinary correction, and i much prefer to send you my little book in decent trim than in rags and stains and deformities more than its own. i have just corrected and sent to the steamer the last sheets for mr. chapman, who is to find english readers if he can. i shall ask mr. chapman to send you a copy, for his edition will be more correct than mine. what can i tell you better? why even this, that this house rejoices in a brave boy, now near three months old. edward we call him, and my wife calls him edward waldo. when shall i show him to you? and when shall i show you a pretty pasture and wood-lot which i bought last week on the borders of a lake which is the chief ornament of this town, called walden pond? one of these days, if i should have any money, i may build me a cabin or a turret there high as the treetops, and spend my nights as well as days in the midst of a beauty which never fades for me. yours with love, r.w. emerson xcvi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 3 november, 1844 dear emerson,--by the clearest law i am bound to write you a word today, were my haste even greater than it is. the last american fleet or ship, about the middle of last month, brought me a draft for thirty pounds; which i converted into ready cash, and have here,--and am now your grateful debtor for, as of old. there seems to be no end to those boston booksellers! i think the well is dry; and straightway it begins to run again. thanks to you: --it is, i dare say, a thing you too are grateful for. we will recognize it among the good things of this rather indifferent world.--by the way, if that good clark _like_ his business, let him go on with it; but if not, stop him, poor fellow! it is to me a matter of really small moment whether those booksellers' accounts be ever audited in this world, or left over to the general day of audit. i myself shudder at the sight of such things; and make my bargain here so always as to have no trade with them, but to be _netto_ from the first. why should i plague poor clark with them, if it be any plague to him? the booksellers will never _know_ but we examine them! the very terror of clark's name will be as the bark of chained mastiff,-and no need for actual biting! have due pity on the man. your english volume of _essays,_ as chapman probably informs you by this post, was advertised yesterday, "with a preface from me." that is hardly accurate, that latter clause. my "preface" consists only of a certificate that the book is correctly printed, and sent forth by a publisher of your appointment, whom therefore all readers of yours ought to regard accordingly. nothing more. there proves, i believe, no visible real vestige of a copyright obtainable here; only chapman asserts that he _has_ obtained one, and that he will take all contraveners into chancery,--which has a terrible sound; and indeed the act he founds on is of so distracted, inextricable a character, it may mean anything and all things, and no sergeant talfourd whom we could consult durst take upon him to say that it meant almost anything whatever. the sound of "chancery," the stereotype character of this volume, and its cheap price, may perhaps deter pirates,--who are but a weak body in this country as yet. i judged it right to help in that; and impertinent, at this stage of affairs, to go any farther. the book is very fairly printed, onward. at least to the essay _new england politics,_ where my "perfect-copy" of the sheets as yet stops. i did not read any of the proofs except two; finding it quite superfluous, and a sad waste of time to the hurried chapman himself. i have found yet but one error, and that a very correctable one, "narvest" for "harvest";--no other that i recollect at present. the work itself falling on me by driblets has not the right chance yet--not till i get it in the bound state, and read it all at once--to produce its due impression on me. but i will say already of it, it is a _sermon_ to me, as all your other deliberate utterances are; a real _word,_ which i feel to be such,--alas, almost or altogether the one such, in a world all full of jargons, hearsays, echoes, and vain noises, which cannot pass with me for _words!_ this is a praise far beyond any "literary" one; literary praises are not worth repeating in comparison. for the rest, i have to object still (what you will call objecting against the law of nature) that we find you a speaker indeed, but as it were a _soliloquizer_ on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness; and only the man and the stars and the earth are visible,--whom, so fine a fellow seems he, we could perpetually punch into, and say, "why won't you come and help us then? we have terrible need of one man like you down among us! it is cold and vacant up there; nothing paintable but rainbows and emotions; come down, and you shall do life-pictures, passions, facts,--which _transcend_ all thought, and leave it stuttering and stammering! to which he answers that he won't, can't, and doesn't want to (as the cockneys have it): and so i leave him, and say, "you western gymnosophist! well, we can afford one man for that too. but--!--by the bye, i ought to say, the sentences are very _brief;_ and did not, in my sheet reading, always entirely cohere for me. pure genuine saxon; strong and simple; of a clearness, of a beauty--but they did not, sometimes, rightly stick to their foregoers and their followers: the paragraph not as a beaten ingot, but as a beautiful square _bag of duck-shot_ held together by canvas! i will try them again, with the book deliberately before me.--there are also one or two utterances about "jesus," "immortality," and so forth, which will produce wide-eyes here and there. i do not say it was wrong to utter them; a man obeys his own daemon in these cases as his supreme law. i dare say you are a little bored occasionally with "jesus," &c.,--as i confess i myself am, when i discern what a beggarly twaddle they have made of all that, what a greasy cataplasm to lay to their own poltrooneries;-and an impatient person may exclaim with voltaire, in serious moments: "_au nom de dieu, ne me parlez plus de cet homme-la!_ i have had enough of him;--i tell you i am alive too!" well, i have scribbled at a great rate; regardless of time's flight!--my wife thanks many times for m. fuller's book. i sent by mr. james a small packet of _your_ letters--which will make you sad to look at them! adieu, dear friend. --t. carlyle xcvii. emerson to carlyle concord, 31 december, 1844 my dear friend,--i have long owed you a letter and have much to acknowledge. your two letters containing tidings, the first of the mortal illness, and the second of the death of sterling, i had no heart to answer. i had nothing to say. alas! as in so many instances heretofore, i knew not what to think. life is somewhat customary and usual; and death is the unusual and astonishing; it kills in so far the survivor also, when it ravishes from him friendship and the most noble and admirable qualities. that which we call faith seems somewhat stoical and selfish, if we use it as a retreat from the pangs this ravishment inflicts. i had never seen him, but i held him fast; now i see him not, but i can no longer hold him. who can say what he yet is and will be to me? the most just and generous can best divine that. i have written in vain to james to visit me, or to send me tidings. he sent me, without any note, the parcel you confided to him, and has gone to albany, or i know not whither. i have your notes of the progress of my london printing, and, at last, the book itself. it was thoughtless in me to ask your attention to the book at all in the proof state; the printer might have been fully trusted with corrected printed pages before him. nor should chapman have taxed you for an advertisement; only, i doubt not he was glad of a chance to have business with you; and, of course, was too thankful for any preface. thanks to you for the kind thought of a "notice," and for its friendly wit. you shall not do this thing again, if i should send you any more books. a preface from you is a sort of banner or oriflamme, a little too splendid for my occasion, and misleads. i fancy my readers to be a very quiet, plain, even obscure class,--men and women of some religious culture and aspirations, young, or else mystical, and by no means including the great literary and fashionable army, which no man can count, who now read your books. if you introduce me, your readers and the literary papers try to read me, and with false expectations. i had rather have fewer readers and only such as belong to me. i doubt not your stricture on the book as sometimes unconnected and inconsecutive is just. your words are very gentle. i should describe it much more harshly. my knowledge of the defects of these things i write is all but sufficient to hinder me from writing at all. i am only a sort of lieutenant here in the deplorable absence of captains, and write the laws ill as thinking it a better homage than universal silence. you londoners know little of the dignities and duties of country lyceums. but of what you say now and heretofore respecting the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though i hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, i do not know what it means. if i can at any time express the law and the ideal right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it of the last act of congress. and though i sometimes accept a popular call, and preach on temperance or the abolition of slavery, as lately on the 1st of august, i am sure to feel, before i have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own. since i am not to see you from year to year, is there never an englishman who knows you well, who comes to america, and whom you can send to me to answer all my questions? health and love and joy to you and yours. --r.w. emerson xcviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 31 january, 1845 my dear carlyle,--carey and hart of philadelphia, booksellers, have lately proposed to buy the remainder of our boston edition of your _miscellanies,_ or to give you a bonus for sanctioning an edition of the same, which they propose to publish. on inquiry, i have found that only thirteen entire sets of four volumes remain to us unsold; whilst we have 226 copies of volume iii., and 243 copies of volume iv., remaining. in replying to mr. carey, i proposed that, besides the proposed bonus, he should buy of me these old volumes, which are not bound but folded, at 25 cents a volume, (monroe having roughly computed the cost at 40 cents a volume,) but this he declines to do, and offers fifty pounds sterling for his bonus. i decided at once to accept his offer, thinking it a more favorable winding up of our account than i could otherwise look for; as mr. carey knows much better how to defend himself from pirates than i do. so i am to publish that his edition is edited with your concurrence. our own remaining copies of entire sets i shall sell at once to monroe, at a reduced price, and the odd volumes i think to dispose of by giving them a new and independent title-page. in the circumstances of the trade here, i think mr. carey's offer a very liberal one, and he is reputed in his dealings eminently just and generous. my friend william furness, who has corresponded with me on carey's behalf, has added now another letter to say that mr. carey wishes to procure a picture of mr. carlyle to be engraved for this edition. "he understands there is a good head by laurence, and he wishes to employ some london artist to make a copy of it in oil or water colors, or in any way that will suffice for the engraver; and he proposes to apply to mr. carlyle for permission through inman the american artist who is now in england." furness goes on to ask for my "good word" with you in furtherance of this design. well, i heartily hope you will not resist so much good nature and true love; for mr. furness and mr. griswold, and others who compose a sort of advising committee to mr. carey, are sincere lovers of yours. one more opportunity this crisis in our accounts will give to that truest of all carlylians, e.p. clark, to make his report. i called at his house two nights ago, in boston; he promised immediate attention, but quickly drew me aside to his "illustrations of carlyle," an endless train of books, and portfolios, and boxes of prints, in which every precious word of that master is explained or confirmed. affectionately yours, r.w. emerson xcix. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 16 february, 1845 dear emerson,--by the last packet, which sailed on the 3d of the month, i forgot to write to you, though already in your debt one letter; and there now has another letter arrived, which on the footing of mere business demands to be answered. i write straightway; not knowing how the post-office people will contrive the conveyance, or whether it can be sooner than by the next steam ship, but willing to give them a chance. you have made another brave bargain for me with the philadelphia people; to all of which i can say nothing but _"euge! papae!"_ it seems to me strange, in the present state of copyright, how my sanction or the contrary can be worth l50 to any american bookseller; but so it is, to all appearance; let it be so, therefore, with thanks and surprise. the messrs. carey and lea distinguish themselves by the beauty of their editions; a poor author does not go abroad among his friends in dirty paper, full of misprints, under their guidance; this is as handsome an item of the business as any. as to the portrait too, i will be as "amiable" as heart could wish; truly it will be worth my while to take a little pains that the kind philadelphia editors do once for all get a faithful portrait of me, since they are about it, and so prevent counterfeits from getting into circulation. i will endeavor to do in that matter whatsoever they require of me; to the extent even of sitting two days for a crayon sketch such as may be engraved,--though this new sacrifice of patience will not be needed as matters are. it stands thus: there is no painter, of the numbers who have wasted my time and their own with trying, that has indicated any capability of catching a true likeness, but one samuel lawrence; a young painter of real talent, not quite so young now, but still only struggling for complete mastership in the management of colors. he does crayon sketches in a way to please almost himself; but his oil paintings, at least till within a year or two, have indicated only a great faculty still crude in that particular. his oil portrait of me, which you speak of, is almost terrible to behold! it has the look of a jotun, of a scandinavian demon, grim, sad, as the angel of death;--and the coloring is so _brick_ish, the finishing so coarse, it reminds you withal of a flayed horse's head! _"dinna speak o't."_ but the preparatory crayon-sketch of this, still in existence, is admired by some judges; poor john sterling bought it from the painter, and it is now here in the hands of his brother, who will readily allow any authorized person to take a drawing of it. lawrence himself, i imagine, would be the fittest man to employ; or your mr. ingham [inman], if he be here and a capable person: one or both of these might superintend the engraving of it here, and not part with the plate till it were pronounced satisfactory. in short, i am willing to do "anything in reason"! only if a portrait is to be, i confess i should rather avoid going abroad under the hands of bunglers, at least of bunglers sanctioned by myself. there is a portrait of me in some miserable farrago called _spirit of the age;_* a farrago unknown to me, but a portrait known, for poor lawrence brought it down to me with sorrow in his face; it professes to be from his painting; is a "lais _without_ the beauty" (as charles lamb used to say); a flayed horse's head without the spiritualism, good or bad,--and simply figures on my mind as a detestability; which i had much rather never have seen. these poor _spirit of the age_ people applied to me; i described myself as "busy," &c.; shoved them off me; and this monster of iniquity, resembling nothing in the earth or under it, is the result. in short, i am willing, i am willing; and so let us not waste another drop of ink on it at present!--on the whole, are not you a strange fellow? you apologize as if with real pain for "trouble" i had, or indeed am falsely supposed to have had, with chapman here; and forthwith engage again in correspondences, in speculations, and negotiations, and i know not what, on my behalf! for shame, for shame! nay, you have done one very ingenious thing; to set clark upon the boston booksellers' accounts: it is excellent; michael scott setting the devil to twist ropes of sand, "there, my brave one; see if you don't find work there for a while!" i never think of this clark without love and laughter. once more, _euge!_ chapman is fast selling your books here; striking off a new five hundred from his stereotypes. you are wrong as to your public in this country; it is a very pretty public; extends pretty much, i believe, through all ranks, and is a growing one,--and a truly _aristocratic,_ being of the bravest inquiring minds we have. all things are breaking up here, like swedish frost in the end of march; _gachis epouvantable._ deep, very serious eternal instincts, are at work; but as yet no serious word at all that i hear, except what reaches me from concord at intervals. forward, forward! and you do not know what i mean by calling you "unpractical," "theoretic." _0 caeca corda!_ but i have no room for such a theme at present. ---------* "a new spirit of the age. edited by r.h. horne." in two volumes. london, 1844. ---------the reason i tell you nothing about cromwell is, alas, that there is nothing to be told. i am day and night, these long months and years, very miserable about it,--nigh broken-hearted often. such a scandalous accumulation of human stupidity in every form never lay before on such a subject. no history of it can be written to this wretched, fleering, sneering, canting, twaddling, godforgetting generation. how can you explain men to apes by the dead sea?* and i am very sickly too, and my wife is ill all this cold weather,--and i am sunk in the bowels of chaos, and scarce once in the three months or so see so much as a possibility of ever getting out! cromwell's own _letters and speeches_ i have gathered together, and washed clean from a thousand ordures: these i do sometimes think of bringing out in a legible shape;-perhaps soon. adieu, dear friend, with blessings always. --t. carlyle poor sydney smith is understood to be dying; water on the chest; past hope of doctors. alas! --------* the dwellers by the dead sea who were changed to apes are referred to in various places by carlyle. he tells the story of the metamorphosis, which he got from the introduction to sale's koran, in _past and present,_ book iii. ch. 3. --------c. emerson to carlyle* concord, june 29, 1845 my dear friend,--i grieve to think of my slackness in writing, which suffers steamer after steamer to go without a letter. but i have still hoped, before each of the late packets sailed, that i should have a message to send that would enforce a letter. i wrote you some time ago of mr. carey's liberal proposition in relation to your _miscellanies._ i wrote, of course, to furness, through whom it was made to me, accepting the proposition; and i forwarded to mr. carey a letter from me to be printed at the beginning of the book, signifying your good-will to the edition, and acknowledging the justice and liberality of the publishers. i have heard no more from them, and now, a fortnight since, the newspaper announces the death of mr. carey. he died very suddenly, though always an invalid and extremely crippled. his death is very much regretted in the philadelphia papers, where he bore the reputation of a most liberal patron of good and fine arts. i have not heard from mr. furness, and have thought i should still expect a letter from him. i hope our correspondence will stand as a contract which mr. carey's representatives will feel bound to execute. they had sent me a little earlier a copy of mr. sartain's engraving from their water-color copy of laurence's head of you. they were eager to have the engraving pronounced a good likeness. i showed it to sumner, and russell, and theodore parker, who have seen you long since i had, and they shook their heads unanimously and declared that d'orsay's profile was much more like. --------** from the rough draft. --------i creep along the roads and fields of this town as i have done from year to year. when my garden is shamefully overgrown with weeds, i pull up some of them. i prune my apples and pears. i have a few friends who gild many hours of the year. i sometimes write verses. i tell you with some unwillingness, as knowing your distaste for such things, that i have received so many applications from readers and printers for a volume of poems that i have seriously taken in hand the collection, transcription, or scription of such a volume, and may do the enormity before new year's day. fear not, dear friend, you shall not have to read one line. perhaps i shall send you an official copy, but i shall appeal to the tenderness of jane carlyle, and excuse your formidable self, for the benefit of us both. where all writing is such a caricature of the subject, what signifies whether the form is a little more or less ornate and luxurious? meantime, i think to set a few heads before me, as good texts for winter evening entertainments. i wrote a deal about napoleon a few months ago, after reading a library of memoirs. now i have plato, montaigne, and swedenborg, and more in the clouds behind. what news of naseby and worcester? ci. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 29 august, 1845 dear emerson,--your letter, which had been very long expected, has been in my hand above a month now; and still no answer sent to it. i thought of answering straightway; but the day went by, days went by;--and at length i decided to wait till my insupportable burden (the "stupidity of two centuries" as i call it, which is a heavy load for one man!) were rolled off my shoulders, and i could resume the habit of writing letters, which has almost left me for many months. by the unspeakable blessing of heaven that consummation has now arrived, about four days ago i wrote my last word on _cromwell's letters and speeches;_ and one of the earliest uses i make of my recovered freedom is to salute you again. the book is nearly printed: two big volumes; about a half of it, i think, my own; the real utterances of the man oliver cromwell once more legible to earnest men. legible really to an unexpected extent: for the book took quite an unexpected figure in my hands; and is now a kind of life of oliver, the best that circumstances would permit me to do:-whether either i or england shall be, in my time, fit for a better, remains submitted to the destinies at present. i have tied up the whole puritan paper-litter (considerable masses of it still unburnt) with tight strings, and hidden it at the bottom of my deepest repositories: there shall _it,_ if heaven please, lie dormant for a time and times. such an element as i have been in, no human tongue can give account of. the disgust of my soul has been great; a really _pious_ labor: worth very little when i have done it; but the best i could do; and that is quite enough. i feel the liveliest gratitude to the gods that i have got out of it alive. the book is very dull, but it is actually legible: all the ingenious faculty i had, and ten times as much would have been useful there, has been employed in elucidation; in saying, and chiefly in forbearing to say,--in annihilating continents of brutal wreck and dung: _ach gott!_--but in fact you will see it by and by; and then form your own conclusions about it. they are going to publish it in october, i find: i tried hard to get you a complete copy of the sheets by this steamer; but it proves to be flatly impossible;--perhaps luckily; for i think you would have been bothering yourself with some new bookseller negotiation about it; and that, as copyright and other matters now stand, is a thing i cannot recommend. --enough of it now: only let all my silences and other shortcomings be explained thereby. i am now off for the north country, for a snatch still at the small remnants of summer, and a little free air and sunshine. i am really far from well, though i have been riding diligently for three months back, and doing what i could to help myself. very glad shall i be, my friend, to have some new utterances from you either in verse or in prose! what you say about the vast _imperfection_ of all modes of utterance is most true indeed. let a man speak and sing, and do, and sputter and gesticulate as he may,--the meaning of him is most ineffectually shown forth, poor fellow; rather _indicated_ as if by straggling symbols, than _spoken_ or visually expressed! poor fellow! so the great rule is, that he _have_ a good manful meaning, and then that he take what "mode of utterance" is honestly the readiest for him.-i wish you would take an american hero, one whom you really love; and give us a history of him,--make an artistic bronze statue (in good _words_) of his life and him! i do indeed.--but speak of what you will, you are welcome to me. once more i say, no other voice in this wide waste world seems to my sad ear to be _speaking_ at all at present. the more is the pity for us. i forbid you to plague yourself any farther with those philadelphia or other booksellers. if you could hinder them to promulgate any copy of that frightful picture by lawrence, or indeed any picture at all, i had rather stand as a shadow than as a falsity in the minds of my american friends: but this too we are prepared to encounter. and as for the money of these men,-if they will pay it, good and welcome; if they will not pay it, let them keep it with what blessing there may be in it! i have your noble offices in that and in other such matters already unforgetably sure to me; and, in real fact, that is almost exactly the whole of valuable that could exist for me in the affair. adieu, dear friend. write to me again; i will write again at more leisure. yours always, t. carlyle cii. emerson to carlyle concord, 15 september, 1845 my dear friend,--i have seen furness of philadelphia, who was, last week, in boston, and inquired of him what account i should send you of the new philadelphia edition. "has not mr. carey paid you?" he said.--no. "then has he not paid carlyle directly?" no, as i believe, or i should have heard of it.-furness replied, that the promised fifty pounds were sure, and that the debt would have been settled before this time, if mr. carey had lived. so as this is no longer a three blind callenders' business of arabian nights, i shall rest secure. i have doubted whether the bad name which philadelphia has gotten in these times would not have disquieted you in this long delay. if you have ever heard directly from carey and hart, you will inform me. i am to read to a society in boston presently some lectures, --on plato, or the philosopher; swedenborg, or the mystic; montaigne, or the sceptic; shakespeare, or the poet; napoleon, or the man of the world;--if i dare, and much lecturing makes us incorrigibly rash. perhaps, before i end it, my list will be longer, and the measure of presumption overflowed. i may take names less reverend than some of these,--but six lectures i have promised. i find this obligation usually a good spur to the sides of that dull horse i have charge of. but many of its advantages must be regarded at a long distance. i have heard nothing from you for a long time,--so may your writing prosper the more. i wish to hear, however, concerning you, and your house, and your studies, when there is little to tell. the steamers come so fast--to exchange cards would not be nothing. my wife and children and my mother are well. peace and love to your household. --r.w. emerson ciii. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 september, 1845 my dear friend,--i had hardly sent away my letter by the last steamer, when yours full of good news arrived. i greet you heartily on the achievement of your task, and the new days of freedom obtained and deserved. happiest, first, that you can work, which seems the privilege of the great, and then, also, that thereby you can come at the sweetness of victory and rest. yes, flee to the country, ride, run, leap, sit, spread yourself at large; and in all ways celebrate the immense benevolence of the universe towards you; and never complain again of dyspepsia, crosses, or the folly of men; for in giving you this potent concentration, what has been withholden? i am glad with all men that a new book is made, that the gentle creation as well as the grosser goes ever on. another month will bring it to me, and i shall know the secrets of these late silent years. welcome the child of my friend! why should i regret that i see you not, when you are forced thus intimately to discover yourself beyond the intimacy of conversation? but you should have sent me out the sheets by the last steamer, or a manuscript copy of the book. i do not know but munroe would have printed it at once, and defied the penny press. and slow time might have brought in his hands a most modest reward. i wrote you the other day the little i had to say on affairs. clark, the financial conscience, has never yet made any report, though often he promised. half the year he lives out of boston, and unless i go to his bank i never see his face. i think he will not die till he have disburdened himself of this piece of arithmetic. i pray you to send me my copy of this book at the earliest hour, and to offer my glad congratulations to jane carlyle, on an occasion, i am sure, of great peace and relief to her spirit. and so farewell. --r.w. emerson civ. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 11 november, 1846 my dear emerson,--i have had two letters from you since i wrote any; the latest of them was lying here for me when i returned, about three weeks ago; the other i had received in scotland: it was only the last that demanded a special answer;--which, alas, i meant faithfully to give it, but did not succeed! with meet despatch i made the bookseller get ready for you a copy of the unpublished _cromwell_ book; hardly complete as yet, it was nevertheless put together, and even some kind of odious rudiments of a _portrait_ were bound up with it; and the packet inscribed with your address was put into wiley and putnam's hands in time for the mail steamer;--and i hope has duly arrived? if it have not, pray set the booksellers a-hunting. wiley and putnam was the carrier's name; this is all the indication i can give, but this, i hope, if indeed any prove needful, will be enough. one may hope you have the book already in your hands, a fortnight before this reaches you, a month before any other copy can reach america. in which case the parcel, _without_ any letter, must have seemed a little enigmatic to you! the reason was this: i miscounted the day of the month, unlucky that i was. sitting down one morning with full purpose to write at large, and all my tools round me, i discover that it is no longer the third of november; that it is already the _fourth,_ and the american mail-packet has already lifted anchor! irrevocable, irremediable! nothing remained but to wait for the 18th;--and now, as you see, to take time by the forelock,-_queue,_ as we all know, he has none. my visit to scotland was wholesome for me, tho' full of sadness, as the like always is. thirty years mow away a generation of men. the old hills, the old brooks and houses, are still there; but the population has marched away, almost all; it is not there any more. i cannot enter into light talk with the survivors and successors; i withdraw into silence, and converse with the old dumb crags rather, in a melancholy and abstruse manner.--thank god, my good old mother is still there; old and frail, but still young of heart; as young and strong _there,_ i think, as ever. it is beautiful to see affection survive where all else is submitting to decay; the altar with its sacred fire still burning when the outer walls are all slowly crumbling; material fate saying, "_they_ are mine!"--i read some insignificant books; smoked a great deal of tobacco; and went moping about among the hills and hollow water-courses, somewhat like a shade in hades. the gospel which this world of fact does preach to one differs considerably from the sugary twaddle one gets the offer of in exeter-hall and other spouting-places! of which, in fact, i am getting more and more weary; sometimes really impatient. it seems to me the reign of cant and spoonyism has about lasted long enough. alas, in many respects, in this england i too often feel myself sorrowfully in a "minority of one";--if in the whole world, it amount to a minority of two, that is something! these words of goethe often come into my mind, _"verachtung ja nichtachtung."_ lancashire, with its titanic industries, with its smoke and dirt, and brutal stupor to all but money and the five mechanical powers, did not excite much admiration in me; considerably less, i think, than ever! patience, and shuffle the cards! the book on cromwell is not to come out till the 22d of this month. for many weeks it has been a real weariness to me; my hope, always disappointed, that now is the last time i shall have any trade with it. even since i began writing, there has been an engraver here, requiring new indoctrination,--poor fellow! nay, in about ten days it _must_ be over: let us not complain. i feel it well to be worth _nothing,_ except for the little fractions or intermittent fits of pious industry there really were in it; and my one wish is that the human species would be pleased to take it off my hands, and honestly let me hear no more about it! if it please heaven, i will rest awhile still, and then try something better. in three days hence, my wife and i are off to the hampshire coast for a winter visit to kind friends there, if in such a place it will prosper long with us. the climate there is greatly better than ours; they are excellent people, well affected to us; and can be lived with, though of high temper and ways! they are the lord ashburtons, in fact; more properly the younger stratum of that house; partly a kind of american people,--who know waldo emerson, among other fine things, very well! i think we are to stay some three weeks: the bustle of moving is already begun. you promise us a new book soon? let it be soon, then. there are many persons here that will welcome it now. to one man here it is ever as an _articulate voice_ amid the infinite cackling and cawing. that remains my best definition of the effect it has on me. adieu, my friend. good be with you and your household always. _vale._ --t.c. cv. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 3 january, 1846 dear emerson,--i received your letter* by the last packet three or four days ago: this is the last day of answering, the monthly packet sails towards you again from liverpool tomorrow morning; and i am in great pressure with many writings, elsewhither and thither: therefore i must be very brief. i have just written to mr. hart of philadelphia; his draft (as i judge clearly by the banker's speech and silence) is accepted, all right; and in fact, means _money_ at this time: for which i have written to thank him heartily. do you very heartily thank mr. furness for me;--furness and various friends, as transatlantic matters now are, must accept a _silent_ gratitude from me. the speech of men and american hero-worshipers is grown such a babblement: in very truth, _silence_ is the thing that chiefly has meaning,--there or here.... --------* missing --------to my very great astonishment, the book _cromwell_ proves popular here; and there is to be another edition very soon. edition with improvements--for some fifty or so of new (not _all_ insignificant) letters have turned up, and i must try to do something rational with them;--with which painful operation i am again busy. it will make the two volumes about _equal_ perhaps, --which will be one benefit! if any american possibility lie in this, i will take better care of it.--alas, i have not got one word with you yet! tell me of your lectures;--of all things. ever yours, t. carlyle we returned from hampshire exactly a week ago; never passed six so totally idle weeks in our lives.--better in health a little? perhaps. cvi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 3 february, 1848 dear emerson,--one word to you before the packet sail;--on business of my own, once more; in such a state of _haste_ as could hardly be greater. the printers are upon me, and i have not a moment. contrary to all human expectation, this book on cromwell proves salable to mankind here, and a second edition is now going forward with all speed. the publication of the first has brought out from their recesses a _new_ heap of cromwell letters;--which have been a huge embarrassment to me; for they are highly unimportant for most part, and do not tend to alter or materially modify anything. some fifty or sixty new letters in all (many of them from printed books that had escaped me) the great majority, with others yet that may come in future time, i determine to print simply as an appendix; but several too, i think about twenty in all, are to be fitted into the text, chiefly in the early part of the first volume, as tending to bring some matters into greater clearness there. i am busy with that even now; sunk deep into the dust-abysses again!--of course i have made what provision i could for printing a supplement, &c. to the possessors of the first edition: but i find this second will be the _final_ standing edition of the book; decidedly preferable to the first; not to be touched by me _again,_ except on very good cause indeed. new letters, except they expressly contradict me, shall go at once into the back apartment, or appendix, in future. the printers have sent me some five or six sheets, they send me hitherto a sheet daily; but perhaps there are not above three or two in a perfect state: so i trouble you with none of them by this packet. but by next packet (3d of march), unless i hear to the contrary, i will send you all the sheets that are ready; and so by the following packets, till we are out of it;--that you, on the scene there, may do with them once for all whatsoever you like. if _nothing_ can be done with them, believe me i shall be very glad of that result. but if you can so much as oblige any honest bookseller of your or my acquaintance by the gift of them, let it be done; let pirates and ravenous bipeds of prey be excluded from participating: that of itself will be a comfortable and a proper thing!--you are hereby authorized to promulgate in any way you please, that the second edition will be augmented, corrected, as aforesaid; and that mr. (any son of adam you please to name) is, so far as i have any voice in the matter, appointed by me, to the exclusion of all and sundry others on what pretext soever, to print and vend the same to my american friends. and so it stands; and the sheets (probably near thirty in number) will be out with the march packet:-and if nothing can come of it, i for one shall be very glad! the book is to be in three volumes now; the first ends at p. 403, vol. i.; the third begins at p. 155, vol. ii., of the present edition. what are you doing? write to me: how the lectures went, how all things went and go! we are over head and ears in anti-corn-law here; the aristocracy struck almost with a kind of horror at sight of that terrible millocracy, rising like a huge hideous frankenstein up in lancashire,--seemingly with boundless readymoney in its pocket, and a very fierce humor in its stomach! to me it is as yet almost uglier than the aristocracy; and i will not fire guns when this small victory is gained; i will recommend a day of fasting rather, that such a victory required such gaining. adieu, my friend. is it likely we shall meet in "oregon," think you? that would be a beautiful affair, on the part of the most enlightened nation! yours ever, t. carlyle cvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 3 march, 1846 dear emerson,--i must write you a word before this packet go, tho' my haste is very great. i received your two newspapers (price only twopence); by the same ship there came, and reached me some days later, a letter from mr. everett enclosing the _cromwell_ portions of the same printed-matter, clipt out by scissors; written, it appeared, by mr. everett's nephew; some of whose remarks, especially his wish that i might once be in new england, and see people "praying," amused me much! the cotton letter, &c., i have now got to the bottom of; birch's copy is in the museum here,--a better edition than i had. of "levered" and the other small american documents--alas, i get cartloads of the like or better tumbled down at my door, and my chief duty is to front them resolutely with a _shovel._ "ten thousand tons" is but a small estimate for the quantity of loose and indurated lumber i have had to send sounding, on each hand of me, down, down to the eternal deeps, never to trouble _me_ more! the jingle of it, as it did at last get under way, and go down, was almost my one consolation in those unutterable operations.--i am again over head and ears; but shall be out soon: never to return more. by this packet, according to volunteer contract, there goes out by the favor of your chapman a number of sheets, how many i do not exactly know, of the new edition: chapman first and chapman second (yours and mine) have undertaken to manage the affair for this month and for the following months;--many thanks to them both for taking it out of my hands. what you are to do with the article you already know. if no other customer present himself, can you signify to mr. hart of philadelphia that the sheets are much at his service,--his conduct on another occasion having given him right to such an acknowledgment from me? or at any rate, _you_ will want a new copy of this book; and can retain the sheets for that object.--enough of them. from mr. everett i learn that your boston lectures have been attended with renown enough: when are the lectures themselves to get to print? i read, last night, an essay on you, by a kind of "young scotland," as we might call it, in an edinburgh magazine; very fond of you, but shocked that you were antichristian:-really not so bad. the stupidities of men go crossing one another; and miles down, at the bottom of all, there is a little veinlet of sense found running at last! if you see mr. everett, will you thank him for his kind remembrance of me, till i find leisure (as i have vainly hoped today to do) to thank him more in form. a dignified, compact kind of man; whom i remember with real pleasure. jargon abounds in our newspapers and parliament houses at present;--with which "the present editor," and indeed i think the public at large, takes little concern, beyond the regret of being _bored_ by it. the corn-laws are going very quietly the way of all deliriums; and then there will at least be one delirium less, and we shall start upon new ones. not a word more today, but my blessings and regards. god be with you and yours always. ever your affectionate, t. carlyle cviii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 18 april, 1846 dear emerson,--your two letters* have both come to hand, the last of them only three days ago. one word in answer before the packet sail; one very hasty word, rather than none. ----------* missing. ---------you have made the best of bargains for me; once again, with the freest contempt of trouble on my behalf; which i cannot sufficiently wonder at! apparently it is a fixed-idea of yours that the bibliopolic genus shall not cheat me; and you are decided to make it good. very well: let it be so, in as far as the fates will. certainly i will conform in all points to this wiley-and-putnam treaty, and faithfully observe the same. the london wileys have not yet sent me any tidings; but when they do, i will say your terms on the other side of the sea are the law to us, and it is a finished thing.--no sheets, i think, will go by this mid-month packet, the printer and bookseller were bidden not mind that: but by the packet of may 3d, i hope the second volume will go complete; and, if the printers make speed, almost the whole remainder may go by the june one. there is to be a "supplement to the first edition," containing all the new matter that is _separable:_ of this too the wileys shall have their due copy to reprint: it is what i could do to keep my faith with purchasers of the first edition here; but, on the whole, there will be no emulating of the second edition except by a reprint of the whole of it; changes great and small have had to introduce themselves everywhere, as these new letters were woven in.--i hope before may 3d i shall have ascertained whether it will not be the simplest way (as with my present light it clearly appears) to give the sheets direct to the wiley and putnam here, and let _them_ send them? in any case, the cargo shall come one way or other. furthermore,--yes, you shall have that sun-shadow, a daguerreotype likeness, as the sun shall please to paint it: there has often been talk of getting me to that establishment, but i never yet could go. if it be possible, we will have this also ready for the 3d of may. _provided_ you, as you promise, go and do likewise! a strange moment that, when i look upon your dead shadow again; instead of the living face, which remains unchanged within me, enveloped in beautiful clouds, and emerging now and then into strange clearness! has your head grown grayish? on me are "gray hairs here and there,"--and i do "know it." i have lived half a century in this world, fifty years complete on the 4th of december last: that is a solemn fact for me! few and evil have been the days of the years of thy servant,--few for any good that was ever done in them. _ay de mi!_ within late weeks i have got my horse again; go riding through the loud torrent of vehiculatory discords, till i get into the fields, into the green lanes; which is intrinsically a great medicine to me. most comfortless riding it is, with a horse of such _kangaroo_ disposition, till i do get to the sight of my old ever-young green-mantled mother again; but for an hour there, it is a real blessing to me. i have company sometimes, but generally prefer solitude, and a dialogue with the trees and clouds. alas, the speech of men, especially the witty-speech of men, is oftentimes afflictive to me: "in the wide earth," i say sometimes with a sigh, "there is none but emerson that responds to me with a voice wholly human!" all "literature" too is become i cannot tell you how contemptible to me. on the whole, one's blessedness is to do as oliver: work while the sun is up; work _well_ as if eternities depended on it; and then sleep,--if under the guano-mountains of human stupor, if handsomely _forgotten_ all at once, that latter is the handsome thing! i have often thought what w. shakespeare would say, were he to sit one night in a "shakespeare society," and listen to the empty twaddle and other long-eared melody about him there!--adieu, my friend. i fear i have forgotten many things: at all events, i have forgotten the inexorable flight of the minutes, which are numbered out to me at present. ever yours, t. carlyle i think i recognize the inspector of wild-beasts, in the little boston newspaper you send!* a small hatchet-faced, grayeyed, good-humored inspector, who came with a translated lafontaine; and took his survey not without satisfaction? comfortable too how rapidly he fathomed the animal, having just poked him up a little. _ach gott!_ man is forever interesting to men;--and all men, even hatchet-faces, are globular and complete! --------* this probably refers to a letter of mr. elizur wright's, describing a visit to carlyle. --------cix. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 30 april, 1846 dear emerson,--here is the _photograph_ going off for you by bookseller munroe of boston; the sheets of _cromwell,_ all the second and part of the last volume, are to go direct to new york: both parcels by the putnam conveyance. for putnam has been here since i wrote, making large confirmations of what you conveyed to me; and large proposals of an ulterior scope,--which will involve you in new trouble for me. but it is trouble you will not grudge, inasmuch as it promises to have some issue of moment; at all events the negotiation is laid entirely into your hands: therefore i must with all despatch explain to you the essentials of it, that you may know what wiley says when he writes to you from new york. mr. putnam, really a very intelligent, modest, and reputablelooking little fellow, got at last to sight of me about a week ago;--explained with much earnestness how the whole origin of the mistake about the first edition of _cromwell_ had lain with chapman, my own bookseller (which in fact i had already perceived to be the case); and farther set forth, what was much more important, that he and his partner were, and had been, ready and desirous to _make good_ said mistake, in the amplest, most satisfactory manner,--by the ready method of paying me _now_ ten percent on the selling-price of all the copies of _cromwell_ sent into the market by them; and had (as i knew already) covenanted with you to do so, in a clear, _bona-fide,_ and to you satisfactory manner, in regard to that first edition: in consequence of which you had made a bargain with them of like tenor in regard to the second. to all which i could only answer, that such conduct was that of men of honor, and would, in all manner of respects, be satisfactory to me. wherefore the new sheets of _cromwell_ should now go by _his_ package direct to new york, and the other little parcel for you he could send to munroe:--that as one consequence? "yes, surely," intimated he; but there were other consequences, of more moment, behind that. namely, that they wanted (the wiley & putnam house did) to publish certain other books of mine, the list of which i do not now recollect; under similar conditions: viz. that i was to certify, in a line or two prefixable to each book, that i had read it over in preparation for their printer, and did authorize them to print and sell it;--in return for which ten percent on the sale-price (and all manner of facilities, volunteered to convince even clark of boston, the lynx-eyed friend now busy for me looking through millstones, that all was straight, and said ten percent actually paid on every copy sold); this was putnam's offer, stated with all transparency, and in a way not to be misunderstood by either of us. to which i answered that the terms seemed clear and square and every way good, and such as i could comply with heartily,--so far as i was at liberty, but not farther. not farther: for example, there was hart of philadelphia (i think the wileys do not want the _miscellanies_), there were munroe, little and brown, &c.;-in short, there was r.w. emerson, who knew in all ways how far i was free and not free, and who would take care of my integrity and interest at once, and do what was just and prudent; and to _him_ i would refer the whole question, and whatever he engaged for, that and no other than that i would do. so that you see how it is, and what a coil you have again got into! mr. putnam would have had some "letter," some "exchange of letters," to the effect above-stated: but i answered, "it was better we did not write at all till the matter was clear and liquid with you, and then we could very swiftly write,--and act. i would apprise you how the matter stood, and expect your answer, and bid you covenant with mr. wiley what you found good, prompt i to fulfil whatever _you_ undertook for me."--this _is_ a true picture of the affair, the very truest i can write in haste; and so i leave it with you-_ach gott!_ if your photograph succeed as well as mine, i shall be almost _tragically_ glad of it. this of me is far beyond all pictures; really very like: i got laurence the painter to go with me, and he would not let the people off till they had actually made a likeness. my wife has got another, which she asserts to be much "more amiable-looking," and even liker!* o my friend, it is a strange phantasmagory of a fact, this huge, tremendous world of ours, life of ours! do you bethink you of craigenputtock, and the still evening there? i could burst into tears, if i had that habit: but it is of no use. the cromwell business will be ended about the end of may,--i do hope! you say not a word of your own affairs: i have vaguely been taught to look for some book shortly;--what of it? we are well, or tolerably well, and the summer is come: adieu. blessings on you and yours. --t.c. ---------* the engraved portrait in the first volume of this correspondence is from a photograph taken from this daguerrotype. ---------cx. emerson to carlyle concord, 14 may, 1846 dear friend,--i daily expect the picture, and wonder--so long as i have wished it--i had never asked it before. i was in boston the other day, and went to the best reputed daguerreotypist, but though i brought home three transcripts of my face, the housemates voted them rueful, supremely ridiculous. i must sit again; or, as true elizabeth hoar said, i must not sit again, not being of the right complexion which daguerre and iodine delight in. i am minded to try once more, and if the sun will not take me, i must sit to a good crayon sketcher, mr. cheney, and send you his draught.... good rides to you and the longest escapes from london streets. i too have a new plaything, the best i ever had,--a wood-lot. last fall i bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called walden pond,--a place to which my feet have for years been accustomed to bring me once or twice a week at all seasons. my lot to be sure is on the further side of the water, not so familiar to me as the nearer shore. some of the wood is an old growth, but most of it has been cut off within twenty years and is growing thriftily. in these may days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, and pine are in their spring glory, i go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures. my two little girls know the road now, though it is nearly two miles from my house, and find their way to the spring at the foot of a pine grove, and with some awe to the ruins of a village of shanties, all overgrown with mullein, which the irish who built the railroad left behind them. at a good distance in from the shore the land rises to a rocky head, perhaps sixty feet above the water. thereon i think to place a hut; perhaps it will have two stories and be a petty tower, looking out to monadnoc and other new hampshire mountains. there i hope to go with book and pen when good hours come. i shall think there, a fortnight might bring you from london to walden pond.--life wears on, and do you say the gray hairs appear? few can so well afford them. the black have not hung over a vacant brain, as england and america know; nor, white or black, will it give itself any sabbath for many a day henceforward, as i believe. what have we to do with old age? our existence looks to me more than ever initial. we have come to see the ground and look up materials and tools. the men who have any positive quality are a flying advance party for reconnoitring. we shall yet have a right work, and kings for competitors. with ever affectionate remembrance to your wife, your friend, --r.w. emerson cxi. emerson to carlyle concord, 31 may, 1846 my dear friend,--it is late at night and i have postponed writing not knowing but that my parcel would be ready to go,--and now a public meeting and the speech of a rarely honest and eloquent man have left me but a span of time for the morning's messenger. the photograph came safely, to my thorough content. i have what i have wished. this head is to me out of comparison more satisfying than any picture. i confirm my recollections and i make new observations; it is life to life. thanks to the sun. this artist remembers what every other forgets to report, and what i wish to know, the true sculpture of the features, the angles, the special organism, the rooting of the hair, the form and the placing of the head. i am accustomed to expect of the english a securing of the essentials in their work, and the sun does that, and you have done it in this portrait, which gives me much to think and feel.* i was instantly stirred to an emulation of your love and punctuality, and, last monday, which was my forty-third birthday, i went to a new daguerreotypist, who took much pains to make his picture right. i brought home three shadows not agreeable to my own eyes. the machine has a bad effect on me. my wife protests against the imprints as slanderous. my friends say they look ten years older, and, as i think, with the air of a decayed gentleman touched with his first paralysis. however i got yesterday a trusty vote or two for sending one of them to you, on the ground that i am not likely to get a better. but it now seems probable that it will not get cased and into the hands of harnden in time for the steamer tomorrow. it will then go by that of the 16th. --------* from emerson's diary, may 23, 1846:--"in carlyle's head (photograph), which came last night, how much appears! how unattainable this truth to any painter! here have i the inevitable traits which the sun forgets not to copy, and which i thirst to see, but which no painter remembers to give me. here have i the exact sculpture, the form of the head, the rooting of the hair, thickness of the lips, the man that god made. and all the laurences and d'orsays now serve me well as illustration. i have the form and organism, and can better spare the expression and color. what would i not give for a head of shakespeare by the same artist? of plato? of demosthenes? here i have the jutting brow, and the excellent shape of the head. and here the organism of the eye full of england, the valid eye, in which i see the strong executive talent which has made his thought available to the nations, whilst others as intellectual as he are pale and powerless. the photograph comes dated 25 april, 1846, and he writes, 'i am fifty years old."' --------i am heartily glad that you are in direct communication with these really energetic booksellers, wiley and putnam. i understood from wiley's letter to me, weeks ago, that their ambition was not less than to have a monopoly of your books. i answered, it is very desirable for us too; saving always the rights of mr. hart in philadelphia.--i told him you had no interest in munroe's _sartor,_ which from the first was his own adventure, and little and brown had never reprinted _past and present_ or _chartism._ the _french revolution, past and present, chartism,_ and the _sartor,_ i see no reason why they should not have. munroe and l. & b. have no real claims, and i will speak to them. but there is one good particular in putnam's proffer to you, which wiley has not established in his (first and last) agreement with me, namely, that you shall have an interest in what is already sold of their first edition of _cromwell._ by all means close with putnam of the good mind, exempting only hart's interest. i have no recent correspondence with wiley and putnam. and i greatly prefer that they should deal directly with you. yet it were best to leave an american reference open for audit and umpirage to the stanch e.p. clark of the new england bank. ever yours, r.w. emerson cxii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 18 june, 1846 dear emerson,--i have had two letters of yours, the last of them (31st may) only two days, and have seen a third written to wiley of new york. yesterday putnam was here, and we made our bargain,--and are to have it signed this day at his shop: two copies, one of which i mean to insert along with this, and give up to your or e.p. clark's keeping. for, as you will see, i have appointed clark my representative, economic plenipotentiary and factotum, if he will consent to act in that sublime capacity,-subject always to your advice, to your control in all _ultra_economic respects, of which you alone are cognizant of the circumstances or competent to give a judgment. pray explain this with all lucidity to mr. clark: and endeavor to impress upon him that it is (to all appearance) a real affair of business we are now engaged in; that i would have him satisfy his own sharp eyes (by such methods as he finds convenient and sufficient, by examination at new york or how he can) that the conditions of this bargain _are_ fairly complied with by the new york booksellers,--who promise "every facility for ascertaining _how many_ copies are printed," &c., &c.; and profess to be of the integrity of israelites indeed, in all respects whatever! if so, it may be really useful to us. and i would have mr. clark, if he will allow me to look upon him as my _man of business_ in this affair, take reasonable pains, be at any reasonable expense, &c. (by himself or by deputy) to ascertain that it is so in very fact! in that case, if something come of it, we shall get the something and be thankful; if nothing come of it, we shall have the pleasure of caring nothing about it.--i have given putnam two books (_heroes_ and _sartor_) ready, corrected; the others i think will follow in the course of next month;--f. _revolution_ waits only for an index which my man is now busy with. the _cromwell,_ supplement and all, he has now got,--published two days ago, after sorrowful delays. your copy will be ready _this afternoon,_--too late, i fear, by just one day: it will lie, in that case, for a fortnight, and then come. wiley will find that he has no resource but to reprint the book; he will reprint the supplement too, in justice to former purchasers; but this is the _final_ form of the book, this second edition; and to this all readers of it will come at last. we expect the daguerreotype by next steamer; but you take good care not to prepossess us on its behalf! in fact, i believe, the only satisfactory course will be to get a sketch done too; if you have any painter that can manage it tolerably, pray set about that, as the true solution of the business--out of the two together we shall make a likeness for ourselves that will do. let the lady wife be satisfied with it; then we shall pronounce it genuine!-i envy you your forest-work, your summer umbrages, and clear silent lakes. the weather here is getting insupportable to us for heat. indeed, if rain do not come within two weeks, i believe we must wind up our affairs, and make for some shady place direct:--scotland is perhaps likeliest; but nothing yet is fixed: you shall duly hear.--directly after this, i set off for putnam's in waterloo place; sign his paper there; stick one copy under a cover for you, and despatch.--send me word about all that you are doing and thinking. be busy, be still and happy. yours ever, t. carlyle cxiii. emerson to carlyle concord, 15 july, 1846 my dear carlyle,--i received by the last steamer your letter with the copy of the covenant with wiley and putnam, which seems unexceptionable. i like the english side of those men very well; that is, putnam seems eager to stand well and rightly with his fellow-men. wiley at new york it was who provoked me, last winter, to write him an angry letter when he declared his intention to reprint our new matter without paying for it. when he thought better of it, and came to terms, i had not got so far as to be affectionate, and have never yet resumed the correspondence i had with him a year ago, about my own books. i hope you found my letter to them, though i do not remember which, properly cross. i believe i only enumerated difficulties. i have talked with little and brown about their editions of _chartism,_ and _past and present;_ they have made no new sales of the books since they were printed on by the pirates, and say that the books lie still on their shelves, as also do a few copies of the london and boston edition of _french revolution._ i prayed them immediately to dispose of these things by auction, or at their trade sales, at whatever prices would sell them, and leave the market open for w. & p.; which they promise to do. to munroe i went, and learn that he has bought the stereotypeplates of the new york pirate edition of _sartor,_ and means to print it immediately. he is willing to stop if w. & p. will buy of him his plates at their cost. i wrote so to them, but they say no. and i have not spoken again with munroe. i was in town yesterday, and carried the copy of the covenant to e.p. clark, and read him your message. his bank occupies him entirely just now, for his president is gone to europe, and clark's duties are the more onerous. but finding that the new responsibilities delegated to him are light and tolerable, and, at any rate, involve no retrospection, he very cheerfully signified his readiness to serve you, and i graciously forbore all allusions to my heap of booksellers' accounts which he has had in keeping now --for years, i believe. he told me that he hopes at no distant day to have a house of his own,--he and his wife are always at board,--and, whenever that happens, he intends to devote a chamber in it to his "illustrations of mr. carlyle's writings," which, i believe, i have told you before, are a very large and extraordinary collection of prints, pictures, books, and manuscripts. i sent you the promised daguerrotype with all unwillingness, by the steamer, i think of 16 june. on 1 august, margaret fuller goes to england and the continent; and i shall not fail to write to you by her, and you must not fail to give a good and faithful interview to this wise, sincere, accomplished, and most entertaining of women. i wish to bespeak jane carlyle's friendliest ear to one of the noblest of women. we shall send you no other such. i was lately inquired of again by an agent of a huge boston society of young men, whether mr. carlyle would not come to america and read lectures, on some terms which they could propose. i advised them to make him an offer, and a better one than they had in view. joy and peace to you in your new freedom. --r.w.e. cxiv. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 17 july, 1846 dear emerson,--since i wrote last to you, i think, with the wiley-and-putnam covenant enclosed,--the photograph, after some days of loitering at the liverpool custom-house, came safe to hand. many thanks to you for this punctuality: this poor shadow, it is all you could do at present in that matter! but it must not rest there, no. this image is altogether unsatisfactory, illusive, and even in some measure tragical to me! first of all, it is a bad photograph; no _eyes_ discernible, at least one of the eyes not, except in rare favorable lights then, alas, time itself and oblivion must have been busy. i could not at first, nor can i yet with perfect decisiveness, bring out any feature completely recalling to me the old emerson, that lighted on us from the blue, at craigenputtock, long ago,--_eheu!_ here is a genial, smiling, energetic face, full of sunny strength, intelligence, integrity, good humor; but it lies imprisoned in baleful shades, as of the valley of death; seems smiling on me as if in mockery. "dost know me, friend? i am dead, thou seest, and distant, and forever hidden from thee;--i belong already to the eternities, and thou recognizest me not!" on the whole, it is the strangest feeling i have:--and practically the thing will be, that you get us by the earliest opportunity some _living_ pictorial sketch, chalkdrawing or the like, from a trustworthy hand; and send _it_ hither to represent you. out of the two i shall compile for myself a likeness by degrees: but as for this present, we cannot put up with it at all; to my wife and me, and to sundry other parties far and near that have interest in it, there is no satisfaction in this. so there will be nothing for you but compliance, by the first fair chance you have: furthermore, i bargain that the _lady_ emerson have, within reasonable limits, a royal veto in the business (not absolute, if that threaten extinction to the enterprise, but absolute within the limits of possibility); and that she take our case in hand, and graciously consider what can and shall be done. that will answer, i think. of late weeks i have been either idle, or sunk in the sorrowfulest cobbling of old shoes again; sorrowfully reading over old books for the putnams and chapmans, namely. it is really painful, looking in one's own old face; said "old face" no longer a thing extant now!--happily i have at last finished it; the whole lumber-troop with clothes duly brushed (_french revolution_ has even got an index too) travels to new york in the steamer that brings you this. _quod faustum sit:_--or indeed i do not much care whether it be faustum or not; i grow to care about an astonishingly small number of things as times turn with me! man, all men seem radically _dumb;_ jabbering mere jargons and noises from the teeth outwards; the inner meaning of them,-of them and of me, poor devils,--remaining shut, buried forever. if almost all books were burnt (my own laid next the coal), i sometimes in my spleen feel as if it really would be better with us! certainly could one generation of men be forced to live without rhetoric, babblement, hearsay, in short with the tongue well cut out of them altogether,--their fortunate successors would find a most improved world to start upon! for cant does lie piled on us, high as the zenith; an augean stable with the poisonous confusion piled so high: which, simply if there once could be nothing said, would mostly dwindle like summer snow gradually about its business, and leave us free to use our eyes again! when i see painful professors of greek, poring in their sumptuous oxfords over dead _greek_ for a thousand years or more, and leaving live _english_ all the while to develop itself under charge of pickwicks and sam wellers, as if it were nothing and the other were all things: this, and the like of it everywhere, fills me with reflections! good heavens, will the people not come out of their wretched old-clothes monmouth-streets, hebrew and other; but lie there dying of the basest pestilence,--dying and as good as dead! on the whole, i am very weary of most "literature":--and indeed, in very sorrowful, abstruse humor otherwise at present. for remedy to which i am, in these very hours, preparing for a sally into the green country and deep silence; i know not altogether how or whitherward as yet; only that i must tend towards lancashire; towards scotland at last. my wife already waits me in lancashire; went off, in rather poor case, much burnt by the hot town, some ten days ago; and does not yet report much improvement. i will write to you somewhere in my wanderings. the address, "scotsbrig, ecclefechan, n.b.," if you chance to write directly or soon after this arrives, will, likely, be the shortest: at any rate, that, or "cheyne row" either, is always sure enough to find me in a day or two after trying. by a kind of accident i have fallen considerably into american history in these days; and am even looking out for american geography to help me. jared sparks, marshall, &c. are hickory and buckskin; but i do catch a credible trait of human life from them here and there; michelet's genial champagne _froth,_--alas, i could find no fact in it that would stand handling; and so have broken down in the middle of _la france,_ and run over to hickory and jared for shelter! do you know beriah green?* a body of albany newspapers represent to me the people quarreling in my name, in a very vague manner, as to the propriety of being "governed," and beriah's is the only rational voice among them. farewell, dear friend. speedy news of you! --t. carlyle --------* the reverend beriah green, president for some years of oneida institute, a manual-labor school at whitesboro, n.y. he was an active reformer, and a leading member of the national convention which met in philadelphia, december 4th, 1833, to form the american antislavery society. he died in 1874, seventy-nine years old. --------cxv. emerson to carlyle concord, 31 july, 1846 my dear friend,--the new edition of _cromwell_ in its perfect form and in excellent dress, and the copy of the appendix, came munificently safe by the last steamer. when thought is best, then is there most,--is a faith of which you alone among writing men at this day will give me experience. if it is the right frankincense and sandal-wood, it is so good and heavenly to give me a basketful and not a pinch. i read proudly, a little at a time, and have not yet got through the new matter. but i think neither the new letters nor the commentary could be spared. wiley and putnam shall do what they can, and we will see if new england will not come to reckon this the best chapter in her pentateuch. i send this letter by margaret fuller, of whose approach i believe i wrote you some word. there is no foretelling how you visited and crowded english will like our few educated men or women, and in your learned populace my luminaries may easily be overlooked. but of all the travelers whom you have so kindly received from me, i think of none, since alcott went to england, whom i so much desired that you should see and like, as this dear old friend of mine. for two years now i have scarcely seen her, as she has been at new york, engaged by horace greeley as a literary editor of his _tribune_ newspaper. this employment was made acceptable to her by good pay, great local and personal conveniences of all kinds, and unbounded confidence and respect from greeley himself, and all other parties connected with this influential journal (of 30,000 subscribers, i believe). and margaret fuller's work as critic of all new books, critic of the drama, of music, and good arts in new york, has been honorable to her. still this employment is not satisfactory to me. she is full of all nobleness, and with the generosity native to her mind and character appears to me an exotic in new england, a foreigner from some more sultry and expansive climate. she is, i suppose, the earliest reader and lover of goethe in this country, and nobody here knows him so well. her love too of whatever is good in french, and specially in italian genius, give her the best title to travel. in short, she is our citizen of the world by quite special diploma. and i am heartily glad that she has an opportunity of going abroad that pleases her. mr. spring, a merchant of great moral merits, (and, as i am informed, an assiduous reader of your books,) has grown rich, and resolves to see the world with his wife and son, and has wisely invited miss fuller to show it to him. now, in the first place, i wish you to see margaret when you are in special good humor, and have an hour of boundless leisure. and i entreat jane carlyle to abet and exalt and secure this satisfaction to me. i need not, and yet perhaps i need say, that m.f. is the safest of all possible persons who ever took pen in hand. prince metternich's closet not closer or half so honorable. in the next place, i should be glad if you can easily manage to show her the faces of tennyson and of browning. she has a sort of right to them both, not only because she likes their poetry, but because she has made their merits widely known among our young people. and be it known to my friend jane carlyle, whom, if i cannot see, i delight to name, that her visitor is an immense favorite in the parlor, as well as in the library, in all good houses where she is known. and so i commend her to you. yours affectionately, r.w. emerson cxvi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 18 december, 1846 dear emerson,--this is the 18th of the month, and it is a frightful length of time, i know not how long, since i wrote to you,--sinner that i am! truly we are in no case for paying debts at present, being all sick more or less, from the hard cold weather, and in a state of great temporary puddle but, as the adage says, "one should own debt, and crave days";--therefore accept a word from me, such as it may be. i went, as usual, to the north country in the autumn; passed some two extremely disconsolate months,--for all things distress a wretched thin-skinned creature like me,--in that old region, which is at once an earth and a hades to me, an unutterable place, now that i have become mostly a _ghost_ there! i saw ireland too on my return, saw black potato-fields, a ragged noisy population, that has long in a headlong baleful manner followed the _devil's_ leading, listened namely to blustering shallowviolent impostors and children of darkness, saying, "yes, we know _you,_ you are children of light!"--and so has fallen all out at elbows in body and in soul; and now having lost its _potatoes_ is come as it were to a crisis; all its windy nonsense cracking suddenly to pieces under its feet: a very pregnant crisis indeed! a country cast suddenly into the melting-pot,--say into the medea's-caldron; to be boiled into horrid _dissolution;_ whether into new _youth,_ into sound healthy life, or into eternal death and annihilation, one does not yet know! daniel o'connell stood bodily before me, in his green mullaghmart cap; haranguing his retinue of dupables: certainly the most _sordid_ humbug i have ever seen in this world; the emblem to me, he and his talk and the worship and credence it found, of all the miseries that can befall a nation. i also conversed with young ireland in a confidential manner; for young ireland, really meaning what it says, is worth a little talk: the heroism and patriotism of a new generation; welling fresh and new from the breasts of nature; and already poisoned by o'connellism and the _old_ irish atmosphere of bluster, falsity, fatuity, into one knows not what. very sad to see. on the whole, no man ought, for any cause, to speak lies, or have anything to do with _lies;_ but either hold his tongue, or speak a bit of the truth: that is the meaning of a _tongue,_ people used to know!--ireland was not the place to console my sorrows. i returned home very sad out of ireland;--and indeed have remained one of the saddest, idlest, most useless of adam's sons ever since; and do still remain so. i care not to _write_ anything more,--so it seems to me at present. i am in my vacant interlunar cave (i suppose that is the truth);--and i ought to wrap my mantle round me, and lie, if dark, _silent_ also. but, alas, i have wasted almost all your poor sheet first!-miss fuller came duly as you announced; was welcomed for your sake and her own. a high-soaring, clear, enthusiast soul; in whose speech there is much of all that one wants to find in speech. a sharp, subtle intellect too; and less of that shoreless asiatic dreaminess than i have sometimes met with in her writings. we liked one another very well, i think, and the springs too were favorites. but, on the whole, it could not be concealed, least of all from the sharp female intellect, that this carlyle was a dreadfully heterodox, not to say a dreadfully savage fellow, at heart; believing no syllable of all that gospel of fraternity, benevolence, and _new_ heaven-on-earth, preached forth by all manner of "advanced" creatures, from george sand to elihu burritt, in these days; that in fact the said carlyle not only disbelieved all that, but treated it as poisonous cant,--_sweetness_ of sugar-of-lead,--a detestable _phosphorescence_ from the dead body of a christianity, that would not admit itself to be dead, and lie buried with all its unspeakable putrescences, as a venerable dead one ought!--surely detestable enough.--to all which margaret listened with much good nature; though of course with sad reflections not a few.*--she is coming back to us, she promises. her dialect is very vernacular,--extremely exotic in the london climate. if she do not gravitate too irresistibly towards that class of new-era people (which includes whatsoever we have of prurient, esurient, morbid, flimsy, and in fact pitiable and unprofitable, and is at a sad discount among men of sense), she may get into good tracks of inquiry and connection here, and be very useful to herself and others. i could not show her alfred (he has been here since) nor landor: but surely if i can i will,--that or a hundred times as much as that,--when she returns.--they tell me you are about collecting your poems. well, though i do not approve of rhyme at all, yet it is impossible emerson in rhyme or prose can put down any thought that was in his heart but i should wish to get into mine. so let me have the book as fast as may be. and do others like it if you will take circumbendibuses for sound's sake! and excuse the critic who seems to you so unmusical; and say, it is the nature of beast! adieu, dear friend: write to me, write to me. yours ever, t. carlyle -------* miss fullers impressions of carlyle, much to this effect, may be found in the "memoirs of margaret fuller ossoli," boston, 1852, vol. ii. pp. 184-190. --------cxvii. emerson to carlyle concord, 31 january, 1847 my dear carlyle,--your letter came with a blessing last week. i had already learned from margaret fuller, at paris, that you had been very good and gentle to her;--brilliant and prevailing, of course, but, i inferred, had actually restrained the volleys and modulated the thunder, out of true courtesy and goodness of nature, which was worthy of all praise in a spoiled conqueror at this time of day. especially, too, she expressed a true recognition and love of jane carlyle; and thus her visit proved a solid satisfaction; to me, also, who think that few people have so well earned their pleasures as she. she wrote me a long letter; she has been very happy in england, and her time and strength fully employed. her description of you and your discourse (which i read with lively curiosity also) was the best i have had on that subject. i tried hard to write you by the december steamer, to tell you how forward was my book of poems; but a little affair makes me much writing. i chanced to have three or four items of business to despatch, when the steamer was ready to go, and you escaped hearing of them. i am the trustee of charles lane, who came out here with alcott and bought land, which, though sold, is not paid for. somebody or somebodies in liverpool and manchester* have proposed once or twice, with more or less specification, that i should come to those cities to lecture. and who knows but i may come one day? steam is strong, and liverpool is near. i should find my account in the strong inducement of a new audience to finish pieces which have lain waiting with little hope for months or years. ---------* mr. alexander ireland, who had made the acquaintance of emerson at edinburgh, in 1833, was his manchester correspondent. his memorial volume on emerson contains an interesting record of their relations. ---------ah then, if i dared, i should be well content to add some golden hours to my life in seeing you, now all full-grown and acknowledged amidst your own people,--to hear and to speak is so little yet so much. but life is dangerous and delicate. i should like to see your solid england. the map of britain is good reading for me. then i have a very ignorant love of pictures, and a curiosity about the greek statues and stumps in the british museum. so beware of me, for on that distant day when i get ready i shall come. long before this time you ought to have received from john chapman a copy of emerson's poems, so called, which he was directed to send you. poor man, you need not open them. i know all you can say. i printed them, not because i was deceived into a belief that they were poems, but because of the softness or hardness of heart of many friends here who have made it a point to have them circulated.* once having set out to print, i obeyed the solicitations of john chapman, of an ill-omened street in london, to send him the book in manuscript, for the better securing of copyright. in printing them here i have corrected the most unpardonable negligences, which negligences must be all stereotyped under his fair london covers and gilt paper to the eyes of any curious london reader; from which recollection i strive to turn away. --------* in the rough draft the following sentence comes in here "i reckon myself a good beginning of a poet, very urgent and decided in my bent, and in some coming millennium i shall yet sing." --------little and brown have just rendered me an account, by which it appears that we are not quite so well off as was thought last summer, when they said they had sold at auction the balance of your books which had been lying unsold. it seems now that the books supposed to be sold were not all taken, and are returned to them; one hundred _chartism,_ sixty-three _past and present._ yet we are to have some eighty-three dollars ($83.68), which you shall probably have by the next steamer. yours affectionately, r.w. emerson cxviii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 2 march, 1847 dear emerson,--the steamer goes tomorrow; i must, though in a very dim condition, have a little word for you conveyed by it. in the miscellaneous maw of that strange steamer shall lie, among other things, a friendly _word!_ your very kind letter lay waiting me here, some ten days ago; doubly welcome, after so long a silence. we had been in hampshire, with the barings, where we were last year;--some four weeks or more; totally idle: our winter had been, and indeed still is, unusually severe; my wife's health in consequence was sadly deranged; but this idleness, these isle-of-wight seabreezes, have brought matters well round again; so we cannot grudge the visit or the idleness, which otherwise too might have its uses. alas, at this time my normal state is to be altogether _idle,_ to look out upon a very lonely universe, full of grim sorrow, full of splendor too; and not to know at all, for the moment, on what side i am to attack it again!--i read your book of poems all faithfully, at bay house (our hampshire quarters); where the obstinate people,--with whom you are otherwise, in prose, a first favorite,--foolishly _refused_ to let me read aloud; foolishly, for i would have made it mostly all plain by commentary:--so i had to read for myself; and can say, in spite of my hard-heartedness, i did gain, though under impediments, a real satisfaction and some tone of the eternal melodies sounding, afar off, ever and anon, in my ear! this is fact; a truth in natural history; from which you are welcome to draw inferences. a grand view of the universe, everywhere the sound (unhappily _far of,_ as it were) of a valiant, genuine human soul: this, even under rhyme, is a satisfaction worth some struggling for. but indeed you are very perverse; and through this perplexed undiaphanous element, you do not fall on me like radiant summer rainbows, like floods of sunlight, but with thin piercing radiances which affect me like the light of the _stars._ it is so: i wish you would become _concrete,_ and write in prose the straightest way; but under any form i must put up with you; that is my lot.--chapman's edition, as you probably know, is very beautiful. i believe there are enough of ardent silent seekers in england to buy up this edition from him, and resolutely study the same: as for the review multitude, they dare not exactly call it "unintelligible moonshine," and so will probably hold their tongue. it is my fixed opinion that we are all at sea as to what is called poetry, art, &c., in these times; laboring under a dreadful incubus of _tradition,_ and mere "cant heaped balefully on us up to the very zenith," as men, in nearly all other provinces of their life, except perhaps the railway province, do now labor and stagger;--in a word, that goethe-andschiller's _"kunst"_ has far more brotherhood with pusey-andnewman's _shovelhattery,_ and other the like deplorable phenomena, than it is in the least aware of! i beg you take warning: i am more serious in this than you suppose. but no, you will not; you whistle lightly over my prophecies, and go your own stiff-necked road. unfortunate man!-i had read in the newspapers, and even heard in speech from manchester people, that you were certainly coming this very summer to lecture among us: but now it seems, in your letter, all postponed into the vague again. i do not personally know your manchester negotiators, but i know in general that they are men of respectability, insight, and activity; much connected with the lecturing department, which is a very growing one, especially in lancashire, at present;--men likely, for the rest, to _fulfil_ whatsoever they may become engaged for to you. my own ignorant though confident guess, moreover, is, that you would, in all senses of the word, _succeed_ there; i think, also rather confidently, we could promise you an audience of british aristocracy in london here,--and of british commonalty all manner of audiences that you liked to stoop to. i heard an ignorant blockhead (or mainly so) called --bow-wowing here, some months ago, to an audience of several thousands, in the city, one evening,--upon universal peace, or some other field of balderdash; which the poor people seemed very patient of. in a word, i do not see what is to hinder you to come whenever you can resolve upon it. the adventure is perfectly promising: an adventure familiar to you withal; for lecturing is with us fundamentally just what it is with you: much prurient curiosity, with some ingenuous love of wisdom, an element of real reverence for the same: everywhere a perfect openness to any man speaking in any measure things manful. come, therefore; gird yourself together, and come. with little or no peradventure, you will realize what your modest hope is, and more;--and i, for my share of it, shall see you once again under this sun! o heavens, there _might_ be some good in that! nay, if you will travel like a private quiet person, who knows but i, the most unlocomotive of mortals, might be able to escort you up and down a little; to look at many a thing along with you, and even to open my longclosed heart and speak about the same?--there is a spare-room always in this house for you,--in this heart, in these two hearts, the like: bid me hope in this enterprise, in all manner of ways where i can; and on the whole, get it rightly put together, and embark on it, and arrive! the good miss fuller has painted us all _en beau,_ and your smiling imagination has added new colors. we have not a triumphant life here; very far indeed from that, _ach gott!_--as you shall see. but margaret is an excellent soul: in real regard with both of us here. since she went, i have been reading some of her papers in a new book we have got: greatly superior to all i knew before; in fact the undeniable utterances (now first undeniable to me) of a true heroic mind;--altogether unique, so far as i know, among the writing women of this generation; rare enough too, god knows, among the writing men. she is very narrow, sometimes; but she is truly high: honor to margaret, and more and more good-speed to her.--adieu dear emerson. i am ever yours, --t.c. cxix. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 18 march, 1847 dear emerson,--yesterday morning, setting out to breakfast with richard milnes (milnes's breakfast is a thing you will yet have to experience) i met, by the sunny shore of the thames, a benevolent son of adam in blue coat and red collar, who thrust into my hand a letter from you. a truly miraculous son of adam in red collar, in the sunny spring morning!--the bill of seventeen pounds is already far on its way to dumfries, there to be kneaded into gold by the due artists: today is american postday; and already in huge hurry about many things, i am scribbling you some word of answer.... the night _before_ milnes's morning, i had furthermore seen your manchester correspondent, ireland,--an old edinborough acquaintance too, as i found. a solid, dark, broad, rather heavy man; full of energy, and broad sagacity and practicality;--infinitely well affected to the man emerson too. it was our clear opinion that you might come at any time with ample assurance of "succeeding," so far as wages went, and otherwise; that you ought to come, and must, and would,--as he, ireland, would farther write to you. there is only one thing i have to add of my own, and beg you to bear in mind,--a date merely. _videlicet,_ that the time for lecturing to the london west-end, i was given everywhere to understand, is _from the latter end of april_ (or say april altogether) _to the end of may:_ this is a fixed statistic fact, all men told me: of this you are in all arrangements to keep mind. for it will actually do your heart good to look into the faces, and speak into minds, of really aristocratic persons,-being one yourself, you sinner,--and perhaps indeed this will be the greatest of all the _novelties_ that await you in your voyage. not to be seen, i believe, at least never seen by me in any perfection, except in london only. from april to the end of may; during those weeks you must be _here,_ and free: remember that date. will you come in winter then, next winter,--or when? ireland professed to know you by the photograph too; which i never yet can.--i wrote by last packet: enough here. your friend cunningham has not presented himself; shall be right welcome when he does,--as all that in the least belong to you may well hope to be. adieu. our love to you all. ever yours, t. carlyle cxx. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 april, 1847 my dear carlyle,--i have two good letters from you, and until now you have had no acknowledgment. especially i ought to have told you how much pleasure your noble invitation in march gave me. this pleasing dream of going to england dances before me sometimes. it would be, i then fancy, that stimulation which my capricious, languid, and languescent study needs. at home, no man makes any proper demand on me, and the audience i address is a handful of men and women too widely scattered than that they can dictate to me that which they are justly entitled to say. whether supercilious or respectful, they do not say anything that can be heard. of course, i have only myself to please, and my work is slighted as soon as it has lost its first attraction. it is to be hoped, if one should cross the sea, that the terror of your english culture would scare the most desultory of yankees into precision and fidelity; and perhaps i am not yet too old to be animated by what would have seemed to my youth a proud privilege. if you shall fright me into labor and concentration, i shall win my game; for i can well afford to pay any price to get my work well done. for the rest, i hesitate, of course, to rush rudely on persons that have been so long invisible angels to me. no reasonable man but must hold these bounds in awe:--i-much more,--who am of a solitary habit, from my childhood until now.--i hear nothing again from mr. ireland. so i will let the english voyage hang as an afternoon rainbow in the east, and mind my apples and pears for the present. you are to know that in these days i lay out a patch of orchard near my house, very much to the improvement, as all the household affirm, of our homestead. though i have little skill in these things, and must borrow that of my neighbors, yet the works of the garden and orchard at this season are fascinating, and will eat up days and weeks, and a brave scholar should shun it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious enchantments. for the present, i stay in the new orchard. duyckinck, a literary man in new york, who advises wiley and putnam in their publishing enterprises, wrote me lately, that they had $600 for you, from _cromwell._ so may it be. yours, r.w.e. cxxi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 18 may, 1847 dear emerson,--....my time is nearly up today; but i write a word to acknowledge your last letter (30 april), and various other things. for example, you must tell mr. thoreau (is that the exact name? for i have lent away the printed pages) that his philadelphia magazine with the _lecture_* in two pieces was faithfully delivered here, about a fortnight ago; and carefully read, as beseemed, with due entertainment and recognition. a vigorous mr. thoreau,--who has formed himself a good deal upon one emerson, but does not want abundant fire and stamina of his own;--recognizes us, and various other things, in a most admiring great-hearted manner; for which, as for _part_ of the confused voice from the jury bog (not yet summed into a verdict, nor likely to be summed till doomsday, nor needful to sum), the poor prisoner at the bar may justly express himself thankful! in plain prose, i like mr. thoreau very well; and hope yet to hear good and better news of him:--only let him not "turn to foolishness"; which seems to me to be terribly easy, at present, both in new england and old! may the lord deliver us all from _cant;_ may the lord, whatever else he do or forbear, teach us to look facts honestly in the face, and to beware (with a kind of shudder) of smearing _them_ over with our despicable and damnable palaver, into irrecognizability, and so _falsifying_ the lord's own gospels to his unhappy blockheads of children, all staggering down to gehenna and the everlasting swine's-trough for _want_ of gospels.--o heaven, it is the most accursed sin of man; and done everywhere, at present, on the streets and high places, at noonday! very seriously i say, and pray as my chief orison, may the lord deliver us from it.----------* on carlyle, published in _graham's magazine_ in march and april, 1847. ---------about a week ago there came your neighbor hoar; a solid, sensible, effectual-looking man, of whom i hope to see much more. so soon as possible i got him under way for oxford, where i suppose he was, last week;--_both_ universities was too much for the limits of his time; so he preferred oxford;--and now, this very day, i think, he was to set out for the continent; not to return till the beginning of july, when he promises to call here again. there was something really pleasant to me in this mr. hoar: and i had innumerable things to ask him about concord, concerning which topic we had hardly got a word said when our first interview had to end. i sincerely hope he will not fail to keep his time in returning. you do very well, my friend, to plant orchards; and fair fruit shall they grow (if it please heaven) for your grandchildren to pluck;--a beautiful occupation for the son of man, in all patriarchal and paternal times (which latter are patriarchal too)! but you are to understand withal that your coming hither to lecture is taken as a settled point by all your friends here; and for my share i do not reckon upon the smallest doubt about the _essential_ fact of it, simply on some calculation and adjustment about the circumstantials. of ireland, who i surmise is busy in the problem even now, you will hear by and by, probably in more definite terms: i did not see him again after my first notice of him to you; but there is no doubt concerning his determinations (for all manner of reasons) to get you to lancashire, to england;--and in fact it is an adventure which i think you ought to contemplate as _fixed,_--say for this year and the beginning of next? ireland will help you to fix the dates; and there is nothing else, i think, which should need fixing.-unquestionably you would get an immense quantity of food for ideas, though perhaps not at all in the way you anticipate, in looking about among us: nay, if you even thought us _stupid,_ there is something in the godlike indifference with which london will accept and sanction even that verdict,--something highly instructive at least! and in short, for the truth must be told, london is properly your mother city too,--verily you have about as much to do with it, in spite of polk and q. victory, as i had! and you ought to come and look at it, beyond doubt; and say to this land, "old mother, how are you getting on at all?" to which the mother will answer, "thankee, young son, and you?"--in a way useful to both parties! that is truth. adieu, dear emerson; good be with you always. hoar gave me your _american_ poems: thanks. _vale et me ama._ --t. carlyle cxxii. emerson to carlyle concord, 4 june, 1847 dear carlyle,--i have just got your friendliest letter of may 18, with its varied news and new invitations. really you are a dangerous correspondent with your solid and urgent ways of speaking. no affairs and no studies of mine, i fear, will be able to make any head against these bribes. well, i will adorn the brow of the coming months with this fine hope; then if the rich god at last refuses the jewel, no doubt he will give something better--to both of us. but thinking on this project lately, i see one thing plainly, that i must not come to london as a lecturer. if the plan proceed, i will come and see you,-thankful to heaven for that mercy, should such a romance looking reality come to pass,--i will come and see you and jane carlyle, and will hear what you have to say. you shall even show me, if you will, such other men and women as will suffer themselves to be seen and heard, asking for nothing again. then i will depart in peace, as i came. at mr. ireland's "institutes," i will read lectures; and possibly in london too, if, when there, you looking with your clear eyes shall say that it is desired by persons who ought to be gratified. but i wish such lecturing to be a mere contingency, and nowise a settled purpose. i had rather stay at home, and forego the happiness of seeing you, and the excitement of england, than to have the smallest pains taken to collect an audience for me. so now we will leave this egg in the desert for the ostrich time to hatch it or not. it seems you are not tired of pale americans, or will not own it. you have sent our country-senator* where he wanted to go, and to the best hospitalities as we learn today directly from him. i cannot avoid sending you another of a different stamp. henry hedge is a recluse but catholic scholar in our remote bangor, who reads german and smokes in his solitary study through nearly eight months of snow in the year, and deals out, every sunday, his witty apothegms to the lumber-merchants and township-owners of penobscot river, who have actually grown intelligent interpreters of his riddles by long hearkening after them. they have shown themselves very loving and generous lately, in making a quite munificent provision for his traveling. hedge has a true and mellow heart,... and i hope you will like him. -------* the hon. e. rockwood hoar. -------i have seen lately a texan, ardent and vigorous, who assured me that carlyle's writings were read with eagerness on the banks of the colorado. there was more to tell, but it is too late. ever yours, r.w. emerson cxxiii. emerson to carlyle concord, 31 july, 1847 dear carlyle,--in my old age i am coming to see you. i have written this day, in answer to sundry letters brought me by the last steamer, from mr. ireland and mr. hudson of leeds, that i mean in good earnest to sail for liverpool or for london about the first of october; and i am disposing my astonished household--astonished at such a somerset of the sedentary master --with that view. my brother william was here this week from new york, and will come again to carry my mother home with him for the winter; my wife and children three are combining for and against me; at all events, i am to have my visit. i pray you to cherish your good nature, your mercy. let your wife cherish it,--that i may see, i indolent, this incredible worker, whose toil has been long since my pride and wonder,--that i may see him benign and unexacting,-he shall not be at the crisis of some over-labor. i shall not stay but an hour. what do i care for his fame? ah! how gladly i hoped once to see sterling as mediator and amalgam, when my turn should come to see the saxon gods at home: sterling, who had certain american qualities in his genius;--and now you send me his shade. i found at munroe's shop the effigy, which, he said, cunningham, whom i have not seen or heard from, had left there for me; a front face, and a profile, both--especially the first --a very welcome satisfaction to my sad curiosity, the face very national, certainly, but how thoughtful and how friendly! what more belongs to this print--whether you are editing his books, or yourself drawing his lineaments--i know not. i find my friends have laid out much work for me in yorkshire and lancashire. what part of it i shall do, i cannot yet tell. as soon as i know how to arrange my journey best, i shall write you again. yours affectionately, r.w. emerson cxxiv. carlyle to emerson rawdon, near leeds, yorkshire 31 august, 1847 dear emerson,--almost ever since your last letter reached me, i have been wandering over the country, enveloped either in a restless whirl of locomotives, view-hunting, &c., or sunk in the deepest torpor of total idleness and laziness, forgetting, and striving to forget, that there was any world but that of dreams; --and though at intervals the reproachful remembrance has arisen sharply enough on me, that i ought, on all accounts high and low, to have written you an answer, never till today have i been able to take pen in hand, and actually begin that operation! such is the naked fact. my wife is with me; we leave no household behind us but a servant; the face of england, with its mad electioneerings, vacant tourist dilettantings, with its shady woods, green yellow harvest-fields and dingy mill-chimneys, so new and old, so beautiful and ugly, every way so _abstruse_ and _un_speakable, invites to silence; the whole world, fruitful yet disgusting to this human soul of mine, invites me to silence; to sleep, and dreams, and stagnant indifference, as if for the time one had _got_ into the country of the lotos-eaters, and it made no matter what became of anything and all things. in good truth, it is a wearied man, at least a dreadfully slothful and slumberous man, eager for _sleep_ in any quantity, that now addresses you! be thankful for a few half-dreaming words, till we awake again. as to your visit to us, there is but one thing to be said and repeated: that a prophet's chamber is ready for you in chelsea, and a brotherly and sisterly welcome, on whatever day at whatever hour you arrive: this, which is all of the practical that i can properly take charge of, is to be considered a given quantity always. with regard to lecturing, &c., ireland, with whom i suppose you to be in correspondence, seems to have awakened all this north country into the fixed hope of hearing you,--and god knows they have need enough to hear a man with sense in his head;--it was but the other day i read in one of their newspapers, "we understand that mr. emerson the distinguished &c. is certainly &c. this winter," all in due newspaper phrase, and i think they settled your arrival for "october" next. may it prove so! but on the whole there _is_ no doubt of your coming; that is a great fact. and if so, i should say, why not come at once, even as the editor surmises? you will evidently do no other considerable enterprise till this voyage to england is achieved. come therefore;--and we shall see; we shall hear and speak! i do not know another man in all the world to whom i can _speak_ with clear hope of getting adequate response from him: if i speak to you, it will be a breaking of my silence for the last time perhaps,--perhaps for the first time, on some points! _allons._ i shall not always be so roadweary, lifeweary, sleepy, and stony as at present. i even think there is yet another book in me; "exodus from houndsditch" (i think it might be called), a peeling off of fetid _jewhood_ in every sense from myself and my poor bewildered brethren: one other book; and, if it were a right one, rest after that, the deeper the better, forevermore. _ach gott!_-hedge is one of the sturdiest little fellows i have come across for many a day. a face like a rock; a voice like a howitzer; only his honest kind gray eyes reassure you a little. we have met only once; but hope (mutually, i flatter myself) it may be often by and by. that hardy little fellow too, what has he to do with "semitic tradition" and the "dust-hole of extinct socinianism," george-sandism, and the twaddle of a thousand magazines? thor and his hammer, even, seem to me a little more respectable; at least, "my dear sir, endeavor to clear your mind of cant." oh, we are all sunk, much deeper than any of us imagines. and our worship of "beautiful sentiments," &c., &c. is as contemptible a form of long-ears as any other, perhaps the most so of any. it is in fact damnable.--we will say no more of it at present. hedge came to me with tall lank chapman at his side,--an innocent flail of a creature, with considerable impetus in him: the two when they stood up together looked like a circle and tangent,--in more senses than one. jacobson, the oxford doctor, who welcomed your concord senator in that city, writes to me that he has received (with blushes, &c.) some grand "gift for his child" from that traveler; whom i am accordingly to thank, and blush to,--jacobson not knowing his address at present. the "address" of course is still more unknown to _me_ at present: but we shall know it, and the man it indicates, i hope, again before long. so, much for that. and now, dear emerson, adieu. will your next letter tell us the _when?_ o my friend! we are here with quakers, or ex-quakers rather; a very curious people, "like water from the crystal well"; in a very curious country too, most beautiful and very ugly: but why write of it, or of anything more, while half asleep and lotos-eating! adieu, my friend; come soon, and let us meet again under this sun. yours, t. carlyle cxxv. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 september, 1847 my dear carlyle,--the last steamer brought, as ever, good tidings from you, though certainly from a new habitat, at leeds, or near it. if leeds will only keep you a little in its precinct, i will search for you there; for it is one of the parishes in the diocese which mr. ireland and his friends have carved out for me on the map of england. i have taken a berth in the packet-ship "washington irving," which leaves boston for liverpool next week, 5 october; having decided, after a little demurring and advising, to follow my inclination in shunning the steamer. the owners will almost take oath that their ship cannot be out of a port twenty days. at liverpool and manchester i shall take advice of ireland and his officers of the "institutes," and perhaps shall remain for some time in that region, if my courage and my head are equal to the work they offer me. i will write you what befalls me in the strange city. who knows but i may have adventures--i who had never one, as i have just had occasion to write to mrs. howitt, who inquired what mine were? well, if i survive liverpool, and manchester, and leeds, or rather my errands thither, i shall come some fine day to see you in your burly city, you in the centre of the world, and sun me a little in your british heart. it seems a lively passage that i am entering in the old dream world, and perhaps the slumbers are lighter and the morning is near. softly, dear shadows, do not scatter yet. knit your panorama close and well, till these rare figures just before me draw near, and are greeted and known. but there is no more time in this late night--and what need? since i shall see you and yours soon. ever yours, r.w.e. cxxvi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 15 october, 1847 my dear emerson,--your letter from concord, of the 31st of july, had arrived duly in london; been duly forwarded to my transient address at buxton in derbyshire,--and there, by the faithless postmaster, _retained_ among his lumber, instead of given to me when i called on him! we staid in buxton only one day and night; two newspapers, as i recollect, the postmaster did deliver to me on my demand; but your letter he, with scandalous carelessness, kept back, and left me to travel forwards without: there accordingly it lay, week after week, for a month or more; and only by half-accident and the extraordinary diligence and accuracy of our chelsea postman, was it recovered at all, not many days ago, after my wife's return hither. consider what kind of fact this was and has been for us! for now, if all have gone right, you are approaching the coast of england; chelsea and your fraternal house _hidden_ under a disastrous cloud to you; and i know not so much as whitherward to write, and send you a word of solution. it is one of the most unpleasant mistakes that ever befell me; i have no resource but to enclose this note to mr. ireland, and charge him by the strongest adjurations to have it ready for you the first thing when you set foot upon our shores.* -----------* mr. ireland, in his recollections of emerson's visit to england, p. 59, prints carlyle's note to himself, enclosing this letter, and adds: "the ship reached liverpool on the 22d of october, and mr. emerson at once proceeded to manchester. after spending a few hours in friendly talk, he was 'shot up,' as carlyle had desired, to chelsea, and at the end of a week returned to manchester, to begin his lectures." --------know then, my friend, that in verity your home while in england is _here;_ and all other places, whither work or amusement may call you, are but inns and temporary lodgings. i have returned hither a day or two ago, and free from any urgent calls or businesses of any kind; my wife has your room all ready;--and here surely, if anywhere in the wide earth, there ought to be a brother's welcome and kind home waiting you! yes, by allah!--an "express train" leaves liverpool every afternoon; and in some six hours will set you down here. i know not what your engagements are; but i say to myself, why not come at once, and rest a little from your sea-changes, before going farther? in six hours you can be out of the unstable waters, and sitting in your own room here. you shall not be bothered with talk till you repose; and you shall have plenty of it, hot and hot, when the appetite does arise in you. "no. 5 great cheyne row, chelsea": come to the "london terminus," from any side; say these magic words to any cabman, and by night or by day you are a welcome apparition here,--foul befall us otherwise! this is the fact: what more can i say? i make my affidavit of the same; and require you in the name of all lares and penates, and household gods ancient and modern which are sacred to men, to consider it and take brotherly account of it!-shall we hear of you, then, in a day or two: shall we not perhaps see you in a day or two! that depends on the winds and the chances; but our affection is independent of such. adieu; _au revoir,_ it now is! come soon; come at once. ever yours, t. carlyle extracts from emerson's diary october, 1847 "i found at liverpool, after a couple of days, a letter which had been seeking me, from carlyle, addressed to 'r.w.e. on the instant when he lands in england,' conveying the heartiest welcome and urgent invitation to house and hearth. and finding that i should not be wanted for a week in the lecture-rooms i came down to london on monday, and, at ten at night, the door was opened by jane carlyle, and the man himself was behind her with a lamp in the hall. they were very little changed from their old selves of fourteen years ago (in august), when i left them at craigenputtock. 'well,' said carlyle, 'here we are shoveled together again.' the floodgates of his talk are quickly opened, and the river is a plentiful stream. we had a wide talk that night until nearly one o'clock, and at breakfast next morning again. at noon or later we walked forth to hyde park and the palaces, about two miles from here, to the national gallery, and to the strand, carlyle melting all westminster and london into his talk and laughter, as he goes. here, in his house, we breakfast about nine, and carlyle is very prone, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. an immense talker, and altogether as extraordinary in that as in his writing; i think, even more so; you will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might do than he has ever done, without seeing him. my few hours discourse with him, long ago, in scotland, gave me not enough knowledge of him; and i have now at last been taken by surprise by him." "c. and his wife live on beautiful terms. their ways are very engaging, and, in her bookcase, all his books are inscribed to her, as they came from year to year, each with some significant lines." "i had a good talk with c. last night. he says over and over, for months, for years, the same thing. yet his guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice; and he, too, says that there is properly no religion in england. he is quite contemptuous about _'kunst,'_ also, in germans, or english, or americans;* and has a huge respect for the duke of wellington, as the only englishman, or the only one in the aristocracy, who will have nothing to do with any manner of lie." ---------* see _english traits,_ ch. xvi.; and _life of sterling,_ part ii. ch. vii. "among the windy gospels addressed to our poor century there are few louder than this of art." ---------the following sentences are of later date than the preceding:-"carlyle had all the _kleinstadtlich_ traits of an islander and a scotsman, and reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a vast continent which made light of the british islands." "carlyle has a hairy strength which makes his literary vocation a mere chance, and what seems very contemptible to him. i could think only of an enormous trip-hammer with an 'aeolian attachment."' "in carlyle as in byron, one is more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. he has manly superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits all the time. there is more character than intellect in every sentence, herein strongly resembling samuel johnson." "england makes what a step from dr. johnson to carlyle! what wealth of thought and science, what expansion of views and profounder resources does the genius and performance of this last imply! if she can make another step as large, what new ages open!" cxxvii. emerson to carlyle mrs. massey's, manchester, 2 fenny place, fenny st. november 5, 1847 ah! my dear friend, all these days have gone, and you have had no word from me, when the shuttles fly so swiftly in your english loom, and in so few hours we may have tidings of the best that live. at last, and only this day for the first day, i am stablished in my own lodgings on english ground, and have a fair parlor and chamber, into both of which the sun and moon shine, into which friendly people have already entered. hitherto i have been the victim of trifles,--which is the fate and the chief objection to traveling. days are absorbed in precious nothings. but now that i am in some sort a citizen, of manchester, and also of liverpool (for there also i am to enter on lodgings tomorrow, at 56 stafford street, islington), perhaps the social heart of this english world will include me also in its strong and healthful circulations. i get the best letters from home by the last steamers, and was much occupied in liverpool yesterday in seeing dr. nichol of glasgow, who was to sail in the "acadia," and in giving him credentials to some americans. i find here a very kind reception from your friends, as they emphatically are,--ireland, espinasse, miss jewsbury, dr. hodgson, and a circle expanding on all sides outward,--and mrs. paulet at liverpool. i am learning there also to know friendly faces, and a certain roscoe club has complimented me with its privileges. the oddest part of my new position is my alarming penny correspondence, which, what with welcomes, invitations to lecture, proffers of hospitality, suggestions from good swedenborgists and others for my better guidance touching the titles of my discourses, &c., &c., all requiring answers, threaten to eat up a day like a cherry. in this fog and miscellany, and until the heavenly sun shall give me one beam, will not you, friend and joy of so many years, send me a quiet line or two now and then to say that you still smoke your pipe in peace, side by side with wife and brother also well and smoking, or able to smoke? now that i have in some measure calmed down the astonishment and consternation of seeing your dreams change into realities, i mean, at my next approximation or perihelion, to behold you with the most serene and sceptical calmness. so give my thanks and true affectionate remembrance to jane carlyle, and my regards also to dr. carlyle, whose precise address please also to send me. ever your loving r.w.e. the address at the top of this note is the best for the present, as i mean to make this my centre. cxxviii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 13 november, 1847 dear emerson,--your book-parcels were faithfully sent off, directly after your departure: in regard to one of them i had a pleasant visit from the proprietor in person,--the young swedenborgian doctor, whom to my surprise i found quite an agreeable, accomplished secular young gentleman, much given to "progress of the species," &c., &c.; from whom i suppose you have yourself heard. the wandering umbrella, still short of an owner, hangs upon its peg here, without definite outlook. of yourself there have come news, by your own letter, and by various excerpts from manchester newspapers. _gluck zu!_-this morning i received the enclosed, and send it off to you without farther response. mudie, if i mistake not, is some small bookseller in the russell-square region; pray answer him, if you think him worthy of answer. a dim suspicion haunts me that perhaps he was the republisher (or pirate) of your first set of _essays:_ but probably he regards this as a mere office of untutored friendship on his part. or possibly i do the poor man wrong by misremembrance? chapman could tell. i am sunk deep here, in effete manuscripts, in abstruse meditations, in confusions old and new; sinking, as i may describe myself, through stratum after stratum of the inane,-down to one knows not what depth! i unfortunately belong to the opposition party in many points, and am in a minority of one. to keep silence, therefore, is among the principal duties at present. we had a call from bancroft, the other evening. a tough yankee man; of many worthy qualities more tough than musical; among which it gratified me to find a certain small under-current of genial _humor,_ or as it were _hidden laughter,_ not noticed heretofore. my wife and all the rest of us are well; and do all salute you with our true wishes, and the hope to have you here again before long. do not bother yourself with other than voluntary writing to me, while there is so much otherwise that you are obliged to write. if on any point you want advice, information, or other help that lies within the limits of my strength, command me, now and always. and so good be with you; and a happy meeting to us soon again. yours ever truly, t. carlyle cxxix. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 30 november, 1847 dear emerson,--here is a word for you from miss fuller; i send you the cover also, though i think there is little or nothing in that. it contained another little note for mazzini; who is wandering in foreign parts, on paths unknown to me at present. pray send my regards to miss fuller, when you write. we hear of you pretty often, and of your successes with the northern populations. we hope for you in london again before long.--i am busy, if at all, altogether _inarticulately_ in these days. my respect for _silence,_ my distrust of _speech,_ seem to grow upon me. there is a time for both, says solomon; but we, in our poor generation, have forgotten one of the "times." here is a mr. forster* of rawdon, or bradford, in yorkshire; our late host in the autumn time; who expects and longs to be yours when you come into those parts. i am busy with william conqueror's _domesday book_ and with the commentaries of various blockheads on it:--ah me! all good be with you, and happy news from those dear to you. yours ever, t. carlyle ----------* now the rt. hon. w e. forster, m.p. ----------cxxx. emerson to carlyle 2 fenny street, higher broughton, manchester 28 december, 1847 dear carlyle,--i am concerned to discover that margaret fuller in the letter which you forwarded prays me to ask you and mrs. carlyle respecting the count and countess pepoli, who are in rome for the winter, whether they would be good for her to know?--that is pretty nearly the form of her question. as one third of the winter is gone, and one half will be, before her question can be answered, i fear, it will have lost some of its pertinence. well, it will serve as a token to pass between us, which will please me if it do not margaret.--i have had nothing to send you tidings of. yet i get the best accounts from home of wife and babes and friends. i am seeing this england more thoroughly than i had thought was possible to me. i find this lecturing a key which opens all doors. i have received everywhere the kindest hospitality from a great variety of persons. i see many intelligent and well-informed persons, and some fine geniuses. i have every day a better opinion of the english, who are a very handsome and satisfactory race of men, and, in the point of material performance, altogether incomparable. i have made some vain attempts to end my lectures, but must go on a little longer. with kindest regards to the lady jane, your friend, r.w.e. margaret fuller's address, if anything is to be written, is, care of maquay, pakenham & co., rome. cxxxi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 30 december, 1847 my dear emerson,--we are very glad to see your handwriting again, and learn that you are well, and doing well. our news of you hitherto, from the dim lecture-element, had been satisfactory indeed, but vague. go on and prosper. i do not much think miss fuller would do any great good with the pepolis,--even if they are still in rome, and not at bologna as our advices here seemed to indicate. madam pepoli is an elderly scotch lady, of excellent commonplace vernacular qualities, hardly of more; the count, some years younger, and a much airier man, is on all sides a beautiful _dilettante,_--little suitable, i fear, to the serious mind that can recognize him as such! however, if the people are still in rome, miss fuller can easily try: bid miss fuller present my wife's compliments, or mine, or even _yours_ (for they know all our domesticities here, and are very intimate, especially madam with _my_ dame); upon which the acquaintance is at once made, and can be continued if useful. this morning richard milnes writes to me for your address; which i have sent. he is just returned out of spain; home swiftly to "vote for the jew bill"; is doing hospitalities at woburn abbey; and i suppose will be in yorkshire (home, near pontefract) before long. see him if you have opportunity: a man very easy to _see_ and get into flowing talk with; a man of much sharpness of faculty, well tempered by several inches of "christian _fat_" he has upon his ribs for covering. one of the idlest, cheeriest, most gifted of fat little men. tennyson has been here for three weeks; dining daily till he is near dead;--setting out a poem withal. he came in to us on sunday evening last, and on the preceding sunday: a truly interesting son of earth, and son of heaven,--who has almost lost his way, among the will-o'-wisps, i doubt; and may flounder ever deeper, over neck and nose at last, among the quagmires that abound! i like him well; but can do next to nothing for him. milnes, with general co-operation, got him a pension; and he has bread and tobacco: but that is a poor outfit for such a soul. he wants a _task;_ and, alas, that of spinning rhymes, and naming it "art" and "high art," in a time like ours, will never furnish him. for myself i have been entirely _idle,_--i dare not even say, too abstrusely _occupied;_ for i have merely been _looking_ at the chaos even, not by any means working in it. i have not even read a book,--that i liked. all "literature" has grown inexpressibly unsatisfactory to me. better be silent than talk farther in this mood. we are going off, on saturday come a week, into hampshire, to certain friends you have heard me speak of. our address, till the beginning of february, is "hon. w.b. baring, alverstoke, gosport, hants." my wife sends you many kind regards; remember us across the ocean too;--and be well and busy till we meet. yours ever, t. carlyle last night there arrived no. 1 of the _massachusetts review:_ beautiful paper and print; and very promising otherwise. in the introduction i well recognized the hand; in the first article too,--not in any of the others. _faustum sit._ cxxxii. emerson to carlyle ambleside, 26 february, 1848 my dear carlyle,--i am here in miss martineau's house, and having seen a good deal of england, and lately a good deal of scotland too, i am tomorrow to set forth again for manchester, and presently for london. yesterday, i saw wordsworth for a good hour and a half, which he did not seem to grudge, for he talked freely and fast, and--bating his cramping toryism and what belongs to it--wisely enough. he is in rude health, and, though seventy-seven years old, says he does not feel his age in any particular. miss martineau is in excellent health and spirits, though just now annoyed by the hesitations of murray to publish her book;* but she confides infinitely in her book, which is the best fortune. but i please myself not a little that i shall in a few days see you again, and i will give you an account of my journey. i have heard almost nothing of your late weeks,--but that is my fault,--only i heard with sorrow that your wife had been ill, and could not go with you on your christmas holidays. now may her good days have come again! i say i have heard nothing of your late days; of your early days, of your genius, of your influence, i cease not to hear and to see continually, yea, often am called upon to resist the same with might and main. but i will not pester you with it now.--miss martineau, who is most happily placed here, and a model of housekeeping, sends kindest remembrances to you both. yours ever, r. w. emerson. --------* "eastern life, past and present." --------cxxxiii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 28 february, 1848 dear emerson,--we are delighted to hear of you again at first hand: our last traditions represented you at edinburgh, and left the prospect of your return hither very vague. i have only time for one word tonight: to say that your room is standing vacant ever since you quitted it,--ready to be lighted up with all manner of physical and moral _fires_ that the place will yield; and is in fact _your_ room, and expects to be accounted such.--i know not specially what your operations in this quarter are to be; but whatever they are, or the arrangements necessary for them, surely it is here that you must alight again in the big babel, and deliberately adjust what farther is to be done. write to us what day you are to arrive; and the rest is all already managed. jane has never yet got out since the cold took her; but she has at no time been so ill as is frequent with her in these winter disorders; she is now steadily improving, and we expect will come out with the sun and the green leaves,--as she usually does. i too caught an ugly cold, and, what is very uncommon with me, a kind of cough, while down in hampshire; which, with other inarticulate matters, has kept me in a very mute abstruse condition all this while; so that, for many weeks past, i have properly had no history,--except such as trees in winter, and other merely passive objects may have. that is not an agreeable side of the page; but i find it indissolubly attached to the other: no historical leaf with me but has them _both!_ reading does next to nothing for me at present, neither will thinking or even dreaming rightly prosper; of no province can i be quite master except of the _silent_ one, in such a case. one feels there, at last, as if quite annihilated; and takes up arms again (the poor goose-quill is no great things of a weapon to arm with!) as if in a kind of sacred despair. all people are in a sort of joy-dom over the new french republic, which has descended suddenly (or shall we say, _ascended_ alas?) out of the immensities upon us; showing once again that the righteous gods do yet live and reign! it is long years since i have felt any such deep-seated pious satisfaction at a public event. adieu: come soon; and warn us when. yours ever, t. carlyle cxxxiv. emerson to carlyle 2 fenny st., manchester, 2 march, thursday [1848] dear friend,--i hope to set forward today for london, and to arrive there some time tonight. i am to go first to chapman's house, where i shall lodge for a time. if it is too noisy, i shall move westward. but i hope you are to be at home tomorrow, for if i prosper, i shall come and beg a dinner with you,--is it not at five o'clock? i am sorry you have no better news to tell me of your health,--your own and your wife's. tell her i shall surely report you to alcott, who will have his revenge. thanks that you keep the door so wide open for me still. i shall always come in. ever yours, r.w.e. cxxxv. emerson to carlyle monday, p.m., 19 june, 1848 dear carlyle,--mrs. crowe of edinburgh, an excellent lady, known to you and to many good people, wishes me to go to you with her. i tell her that i believe you relax the reins of labor as early as one hour after noon, and i propose one o'clock on thursday for the invasion. if you are otherwise engaged, you must send me word. otherwise, we shall come. it was sad to hear no good news last evening from jane carlyle. i heartily hope the night brought sleep, and the morning better health to her. yours always, r.w. emerson cxxxvi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 20 june, 1848 dear emerson,--we shall be very glad to become acquainted with mrs. crowe, of whom already by report we know many favorable things. brown (of portobello, edinburgh) had given us intimation of her kind purposes towards chelsea; and now on thursday you (please the pigs) shall see the adventure achieved. two o'clock, not one, is the hour when labor ceases here,--if, alas, there be any "labor" so much as got begun; which latter is often enough the sad case. but at either hour we shall be ready for you. i hope you penetrated the armida palace, and did your devoir to the sublime duchess and her luncheon yesterday! i cannot without a certain internal amusement (foreign enough to my present humor) represent to myself such a conjunction of opposite stars! but you carry a new image off with you, and are a gainer, you. _allons._ my papers here are in a state of distraction, state of despair! i see not what is to become of them and me. yours ever truly, t. carlyle my wife arose without headache on monday morning; but feels still a good deal beaten;--has not had "such a headache" for several years. cxxxvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, friday [23 june, 1848] dear emerson,--i forgot to say, last night, that you are to dine with us on sunday; that after our call on the lady harriet* we will take a stroll through the park, look at the sunday population, and find ourselves here at five o'clock for the above important object. pray remember, therefore, and no excuse! in haste. yours ever truly, t. carlyle ------------* lady ashburton ------------cxxxviii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 6 december, 1848 dear emerson,--we received your letter* duly, some time ago, with many welcomes; and have as you see been too remiss in answering it. not from forgetfulness, if you will take my word; no, but from many causes, too complicated to articulate, and justly producing an indisposition to put pen to paper at all! never was i more silent than in these very months; and, with reason too, for the world at large, and my own share of it in small, are both getting more and more unspeakable with any convenience! in health we of this household are about as well as usual;--and look across to the woods of concord with more light than we had, realizing for ourselves a most mild and friendly picture there. perhaps it is quite as well that you are left alone of foreign interference, even of a letter from chelsea, till you get your huge bale of english reminiscences assorted a little. nobody except me seems to have heard from you; at least the rest, in these parts, all plead destitution when i ask for news. what you saw and suffered and enjoyed here will, if you had once got it properly warehoused, be new wealth to you for many years. of one impression we fail not here: admiration of your pacific virtues, of gentle and noble tolerance, often sorely tried in this place! forgive me my ferocities; you do not quite know what i suffer in these latitudes, or perhaps it would be even easier for you. peace for me, in a mother of dead dogs like this, there is not, was not, will not be,--till the battle itself end; which, however, is a sure outlook, and daily growing a nearer one. ---------* the letter is missing, but a fragment of the rough draft of it exists, dated concord, 2 october, 1848. emerson had returned home in july, and he begins: "'t is high time, no doubt, long since, that you heard from me, and if there were good news in america for you, you would be sure to hear. all goes at heavy trot with us... i fell again quickly into my obscure habits, more fit for me than the fine things i had seen. i made my best endeavor to praise the rich country i had seen, and its excellent, energetic, polished people. and it is very easy for me to do so. england is the country of success, and success has a great charm for me, more than for those i talk with at home. but they were obstinate to know if the english were superior to their possessions, and if the old religion warmed their hearts, and lifted a little the mountain of wealth. so i enumerated the list of brilliant persons i had seen, and the [break in ms.]. but the question returned. did you find kings and priests? did you find sanctities and beauties that took away your memory, and sent you home a changed man with new aims, and with a discontent of your old pastures?" here the fragment ends. emerson's answer to these questions may be found in the chapter entitled "results," in his _english traits._ ---------nay, there is another practical question,--but it is from the female side of the house to the female side,--and in fact concerns indian meal, upon which mrs. emerson, or you, or the miller of concord (if he have any tincture of philosophy) are now to instruct us! the fact is, potatoes having vanished here, we are again, with motives large and small, trying to learn the use of indian meal; and indeed do eat it daily to meat at dinner, though hitherto with considerable despair. question _first,_ therefore: is there by nature a _bitter_ final taste, which makes the throat smart, and disheartens much the apprentice in indian meal;--or is it accidental, and to be avoided? we surely anticipate the latter answer; but do not yet see how. at first we were taught the meal, all ground on your side of the water, had got fusty, _raw;_ an effect we are well used to in oaten and other meals but, last year, we had a bushel of it ground _here,_ and the bitter taste was there as before (with the addition of much dirt and sand, our millstones i suppose being too soft);-whereupon we incline to surmise that there is, perhaps, as in the case of oats, some pellicle or hull that ought to be _rejected_ in making the meal? pray ask some philosophic miller, if mrs. emerson or you do not know;--and as a corollary this _second_ question: what is the essential difference between _white_ (or brown-gray-white) indian meal and _yellow_ (the kind we now have; beautiful as new guineas, but with an ineffaceable tastekin of _soot_ in it)?--and question _third,_ which includes all: how to cook _mush_ rightly, at least without bitter? _long_-continued boiling seems to help the bitterness, but does not cure it. let some oracle speak! i tell all people, our staff of life is in the mississippi valley henceforth;--and one of the truest benefactors were an american minerva who could teach us to cook this meal; which our people at present (i included) are unanimous in finding nigh uneatable, and loudly exclaimable against! elihu burritt had a string of recipes that went through all newspapers three years ago; but never sang there oracle of longer ears than that,--totally destitute of practical significance to any creature here! and now enough of questioning. alas, alas, i have a quite other batch of sad and saddest considerations,--on which i must not so much as enter at present! death has been very busy in this little circle of ours within these few days. you remember charles buller, to whom i brought you over that night at the barings' in stanhope street? he died this day week, almost quite unexpectedly; a sore loss to all that knew him personally, and his gladdening sunny presence in many circles here; a sore loss to the political people too, for he was far the cleverest of all whig men, and indeed the only genial soul one can remember in that department of things.* we buried him yesterday; and now see what new thing has come. lord ashburton, who had left his mother well in hampshire ten hours before, is summoned from poor buller's funeral by telegraph; hurries back, finds his mother, whom he loved much, already dead! she was a miss bingham, i think, from pennsylvania, perhaps from philadelphia itself. you saw her; but the first sight by no means told one all or the best worth that was in that good lady. we are quite bewildered by our own regrets, and by the far painfuler sorrow of those closely related to these sudden sorrows. of which let me be silent for the present;--and indeed of all things else, for _speech,_ inadequate mockery of one's poor meaning, is quite a burden to me just now! --------* the reader of carlyle's _reminiscences,_ and of froude's volumes of his biography, is familiar with the close relations that had existed between buller and carlyle. ---------neuberg* comes hither sometimes; a welcome, wise kind of man. poor little espinasse still toils cheerily at the oar, and various friends of yours are about us. brother john did send through chapman all the _dante,_ which we calculate you have received long ago: he is now come to town; doing a preface, &c., which also will be sent to you, and just about publishing.-helps, who has been alarmingly ill, and touring on the rhine since we were his guests, writes to me yesterday from hampshire about sending you a new book of his. i instructed him how. adieu, dear emerson; do not forget us, or forget to think as kindly as you can of us, while we continue in this world together. yours ever affectionately, t. carlyle --------* mr. ireland, in his _recollections,_ p. 62, gives an interesting account of mr. neuberg,--a highly cultivated german, who assisted carlyle in some of the later literary labors of his life. neuberg died in 1867, and in a letter to his sister of that year carlyle says: "no kinder friend had i in this world; no man of my day, i believe, had so faithful, loyal, and willing a helper as he generously was to me for the last twenty or more years." ----------cxxxix. emerson to carlyle boston, 28 january, 1849 my dear carlyle,--here in boston for the day, though in no fit place for writing, you shall have, since the steamer goes tomorrow, a hasty answer to at least one of your questions.... you tell me heavy news of your friends, and of those who were friendly to me for your sake. and i have found farther particulars concerning them in the newspapers. buller i have known by name ever since he was in america with lord durham, and i well remember his face and figure at mr. baring's. even england cannot spare an accomplished man. since i had your letter, and, i believe, by the same steamer, your brother's _dante,_* complete within and without, has come to me, most welcome. i heartily thank him. 't is a most workmanlike book, bearing every mark of honest value. i thank him for myself, and i thank him, in advance, for our people, who are sure to learn their debt to him, in the coming months and years. i sent the book, after short examination, the same day, to new york, to the harpers, lest their edition should come out without prolegomena. but they answered, the next day, that they had already received directly the same matter;--yet have not up to this time returned my book. for the indian corn,--i have been to see dr. charles t. jackson (my wife's brother, and our best chemist, inventor of etherization), who tells me that the reason your meal is bitter is, that all the corn sent to you from us is kiln-dried here, usually at a heat of three hundred degrees, which effectually kills the starch or diastase (?) which would otherwise become sugar. this drying is thought necessary to prevent the corn from becoming musty in the contingency of a long voyage. he says, if it should go in the steamer, it would arrive sound without previous drying. i think i will try that experiment, shortly on a box or a barrel of our concord maize, as lidian emerson confidently engages to send you accurate recipes for johnny-cake, mush, and hominy. --------* the _inferno_ of dante, a translation in prose by john carlyle; an excellent piece of work, still in demand. --------why did you not send me word of clough's hexameter poem, which i have now received and read with much joy.* but no, you will never forgive him his metres. he is a stout, solid, reliable man and friend,--i knew well; but this fine poem has taken me by surprise. i cannot find that your journals have yet discovered its existence. with kindest remembrances to jane carlyle, and new thanks to john carlyle, your friend, --r.w. emerson ---------* "the bothie of tober-na-vuolich." ---------cxl. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 19 april, 1849 my dear emerson,--today is american postday; and by every rule and law,--even if all laws but those of cocker were abolished from this universe,--a word from me is due to you! twice i have heard since i spoke last: prompt response about the philadelphia bill; exact performance of your voluntary promise,--indian corn itself is now here for a week past.... still more interesting is the barrel of genuine corn ears,-indian cobs of edible grain, from the barn of emerson himself! it came all safe and right, according to your charitable program; without cost or trouble to us of any kind; not without curious interest and satisfaction! the recipes contained in the precedent letter, duly weighed by the competent jury of housewives (at least by my own wife and lady ashburton), were judged to be of decided promise, reasonable-looking every one of them; and now that the stuff itself is come, i am happy to assure you that it forms a new epoch for us all in the maize department: we find the grain _sweet,_ among the sweetest, with a touch even of the taste of _nuts_ in it, and profess with contrition that properly we have never tasted indian corn before. millers of due faculty (with millstones of _iron_) being scarce in the cockney region, and even cooks liable to err, the ashburtons have on their resources undertaken the brunt of the problem one of their own surrey or hampshire millers is to grind the stuff, and their own cook, a frenchman commander of a whole squadron, is to undertake the dressing according to the rules. yesterday the barrel went off to their country place in surrey,-a small bag of select ears being retained here, for our own private experimenting;--and so by and by we shall see what comes of it.--i on my side have already drawn up a fit proclamation of the excellences of this invaluable corn, and admonitions as to the benighted state of english eaters in regard to it;--to appear in _fraser's magazine,_ or i know not where, very soon. it is really a small contribution towards world-history, this small act of yours and ours: there is no doubt to me, now that i taste the real grain, but all europe will henceforth have to rely more and more upon your western valleys and this article. how beautiful to think of lean tough yankee settlers, tough as gutta-percha, with most occult unsubduable fire in their belly, steering over the western mountains, to annihilate the jungle, and bring bacon and corn out of it for the posterity of adam! the pigs in about a year eat up all the rattlesnakes for miles round: a most judicious function on the part of the pigs. behind the pigs comes jonathan with his all-conquering ploughshare,--glory to him too! oh, if we were not a set of cant-ridden blockheads, there is no _myth_ of athene or herakles equal to this _fact;_--which i suppose _will_ find its real "poets" some day or other; when once the greek, semitic, and multifarious other cobwebs are swept away a little! well, we must wait.--for the rest, if this skillful naturalist and you will make any more experiments on indian corn for us, might i not ask that you would try for a method of preserving _the meal_ in a sound state for us? oatmeal, which would spoil directly too, is preserved all year by kiln-drying the grain before it is ground,--parching it till it is almost _brown,_ sometimes the scotch highlanders, by intense parching, can keep their oatmeal good for a series of years. no miller here at present is likely to produce such beautiful meal as some of the american specimens i have seen:--if possible, we must learn to get the grain over in the shape of proper durable meal. at all events, let your friend charitably make some inquiry into the process of millerage, the possibilities of it for meeting our case;--and send us the result some day, on a separate bit of paper. with which let us end, for the present. alas, i have yet written nothing; am yet a long way off writing, i fear! not for want of matter, perhaps, but for redundance of it; i feel as if i had the whole world to write yet, with the day fast bending downwards on me, and did not know where to begin,--in what manner to address the deep-sunk populations of the theban land. any way my life is very _grim,_ on these terms, and is like to be; god only knows what farther quantity of braying in the mortar this foolish clay of mine may yet need!-they are printing a third edition of _cromwell;_ that bothered me for some weeks, but now i am over with that, and the printer wholly has it: a sorrowful, not now or ever a joyful thing to me, that. the _stupor_ of my fellow blockheads, for centuries back, presses too heavy upon that,--as upon many things, o heavens! people are about setting up some _statue of cromwell,_ at st. ives, or elsewhere: the king-hudson statue is never yet set up; and the king himself (as you may have heard) has been _discovered_ swindling. i advise all men not to erect a statue for cromwell just now. macaulay's _history_ is also out, running through the fourth edition: did i tell you last time that i had read it,--with wonder and amazement? finally, it seems likely lord john russell will shortly walk out (forever, it is hoped), and sir r. peel come in; to make what effort is in him towards delivering us from the _pedant_ method of treating ireland. the _beginning,_ as i think, of salvation (if he can prosper a little) to england, and to all europe as well. for they will all have to learn that man does need government, and that an ablebodied starving beggar is and remains (whatever exeter hall may say to it) a _slave_ destitute of a _master;_ of which facts england, and convulsed europe, are fallen foundly ignorant in these bad ages, and will plunge ever deeper till they rediscover the same. alas, alas, the future for us is not to be made of _butter,_ as the platforms prophesy; i think it will be harder than steel for some ages! no noble age was ever a soft one, nor ever will or can be.--your beautiful curious little discourse (report of a discourse) about the english was sent me by neuberg; i thought it, in my private heart, one of the best words (for _hidden_ genius lodged in it) i had ever heard; so sent it to the _examiner,_ from which it went to the _times_ and all the other papers: an excellent sly little word. clough has gone to italy; i have seen him twice,--could not manage his hexameters, though i like the man himself, and hope much of him. "infidelity" has broken out in oxford itself,--immense emotion in certain quarters in consequence, virulent outcries about a certain "sterling club," altogether a secular society! adieu, dear emerson; i had much more to say, but there is no room. o, forgive me, forgive me all trespasses,--and love me what you can! yours ever, t. carlyle cxli. carlyle to emerson scotsbrig, ecclefechan, n.b., 13 august, 1849 dear emerson,--by all laws of human computation, i owe you a letter, and have owed, any time these seven weeks: let me now pay a little, and explain. your _second_ barrel of indian corn arrived also perfectly fresh, and of admirable taste and quality; the very bag of new-ground meal was perfect; and the "popped corn" ditto, when it came to be discovered: with the whole of which admirable materials such order was taken as promised to secure "the greatest happiness to the greatest number"; and due silent thanks were tendered to the beneficence of the unwearied sender:--but all this, you shall observe, had to be done in the thick of a universal packing and household bustle; i just on the wing for a "tour in ireland," my wife too contemplating a run to scotland shortly after, there to meet me on my return. all this was seven good weeks ago: i hoped somewhere in my irish wayfarings to fling you off a letter; but alas, i reckoned there quite without my host (strict "host," called _time_), finding nowhere half a minute left to me; and so now, having got home to my mother, not to see my wife yet for some days, it is my _earliest_ leisure, after all, that i employ in this purpose. i have been terribly knocked about too,--jolted in irish cars, bothered almost to madness with irish balderdash, above all kept on dreadfully short allowance of sleep;--so that now first, when fairly down to rest, all aches and bruises begin to be fairly sensible; and my clearest feeling at this present is the uncomfortable one, "that i am not caliban, but a cramp": terribly cramped indeed, if i could tell you everything! what the other results of this irish tour are to be for me i cannot in the least specify. for one thing, i seem to be farther from _speech_ on any subject than ever: such masses of chaotic ruin everywhere fronted me, the general fruit of long-continued universal falsity and folly; and such mountains of delusion yet possessing all hearts and tongues i could do little that was not even _noxious,_ except _admire_ in silence the general "bankruptcy of imposture" as one there finds and sees it come to pass, and think with infinite sorrow of the tribulations, futile wrestlings, tumults, and disasters which yet await that unfortunate section of adam's posterity before any real improvement can take place among them. alas, alas! the gospels of political economy, of _laissez-faire,_ no-government, paradise to all comers, and so many fatal gospels,--generally, one may say, all the gospels of this blessed "new era,"--will first have to be tried, and found wanting. with a quantity of written and uttered nonsense, and of suffered and inflicted misery, which one sinks fairly dumb to estimate! a kind of comfort it is, however, to see that "imposture" _has_ fallen openly "bankrupt," here as everywhere else in our old world; that no dexterity of human tinkering, with all the parliamentary eloquence and elective franchises in nature, will ever set it on its feet again, to go many yards more; but that _its_ goings and currencies in this earth have as good as ceased for ever and ever! god is great; all lies do now, as from the first, travel incessantly towards chaos, and there at length lodge! in some parts of ireland (the western "insolvent unions," some twenty-seven of them in all), within a trifle of _one half_ of the whole population are on poor-law rations (furnished by the british government, l1,100 a week furnished here, l1,300 there, l800 there); the houses stand roofless, the lands unstocked, uncultivated, the landlords hidden from bailiffs, living sometimes "on the hares of their domain": such a state of things was never witnessed under this sky before; and, one would humbly expect, cannot last long!--what is to be done? asks every one; incapable of _hearing_ any answer, were there even one ready for imparting to him. "_blacklead_ these two million idle beggars," i sometimes advised, "and sell them in brazil as niggers,--perhaps parliament, on sweet constraint, will allow you to advance them to be niggers!" in fact, the emancipation societies should send over a deputation or two to look at _these_ immortal irish "freemen," the _ne plus ultra_ of their class it would perhaps moderate the windpipe of much eloquence one hears on that subject! is not this the most illustrious of all "ages"; making progress of the species at a grand rate indeed? peace be with it. waiting for me here, there was a letter from miss fuller in rome, written about a month ago; a dignified and interesting letter; requesting help with booksellers for some "history of the late italian revolution" she is about writing; and elegiacally recognizing the worth of mazzini and other cognate persons and things. i instantly set about doing what little seemed in my power towards this object,--with what result is yet hidden, and have written to the heroic margaret: "more power to her elbow!" as the irish say. she has a beautiful enthusiasm; and is perhaps in the right stage of insight for doing that piece of business well.--of other persons or interests i will say nothing till a calmer opportunity; which surely cannot be very long in coming. in four days i am to rejoin my wife; after which some bits of visits are to be paid in this north country; necessary most of them, not likely to be profitable almost any. in perhaps a month i expect to be back in chelsea; whither direct a word if you are still beneficent enough to think of such a castaway! yours ever, t. carlyle i got thoreau's book; and meant well to read it, but have not yet succeeded, though it went with me through all ireland: tell him so, please. too jean-paulish, i found it hitherto. cxlii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 19 july, 1850 my dear emerson, my friend, my friend,--you behold before you a remorseful man! it is well-nigh a year now since i despatched some hurried rag of paper to you out of scotland, indicating doubtless that i would speedily follow it with a longer letter; and here, when gray autumn is at hand again, i have still written nothing to you, heard nothing from you! it is miserable to think of:--and yet it is a fact, and there is no denying of it; and so we must let it lie. if it please heaven, the like shall not occur again. "ohone arooh!" as the irish taught me to say, "ohone arooh!" the fact is, my life has been black with care and toil,--labor above board and far worse labor below;--i have hardly had a heavier year (overloaded too with a kind of "health" which may be called frightful): to "burn my own smoke" in some measure, has really been all i was up to; and except on sheer immediate compulsion i have not written a word to any creature.-yesternight i finished the last of these extraordinary _pamphlets;_ am about running off somewhither into the deserts, of wales or scotland, scandinavia or still remoter deserts;--and my first signal of revived reminiscence is to you. nay i have not at any time forgotten you, be that justice done the unfortunate: and though i see well enough what a great deep cleft divides us, in our ways of practically looking at this world,--i see also (as probably you do yourself) where the rockstrata, miles deep, unite again; and the two poor souls are at one. poor devils!--nay if there were no point of agreement at all, and i were more intolerant "of ways of thinking" than i even am,--yet has not the man emerson, from old years, been a human friend to me? can i ever forget, or think otherwise than lovingly of the man emerson? no more of this. write to me in your first good hour; and say that there is still a brother-soul left to me alive in this world, and a kind thought surviving far over the sea!--chapman, with due punctuality at the time of publication, sent me the _representative men;_ which i read in the becoming manner: you now get the book offered you for a shilling, at all railway stations; and indeed i perceive the word "representative man"' (as applied to the late tragic loss we have had in sir robert peel) has been adopted by the ableeditors, and circulates through newspapers as an appropriate household word, which is some compensation to you for the piracy you suffer from the typographic letter-of-marque men here. i found the book a most finished clear and perfect set of _engravings in the line manner;_ portraitures full of _likeness,_ and abounding in instruction and materials for reflection to me: thanks always for such a book; and heaven send us many more of them. _plato,_ i think, though it is the most admired by many, did least for me: little save socrates with his clogs and big ears remains alive with me from it. _swedenborg_ is excellent in _likeness;_ excellent in many respects;--yet i said to myself, on reaching your general conclusion about the man and his struggles: "_missed_ the consummate flower and divine ultimate elixir of philosophy, say you? by heaven, in clutching at _it,_ and almost getting it, he has tumbled into bedlam,--which is a terrible _miss,_ if it were never so _near!_ a miss fully as good as a mile, i should say!" --in fact, i generally dissented a little about the _end_ of all these essays; which was notable, and not without instructive interest to me, as i had so lustily shouted "hear, hear!" all the way from the beginning up to that stage.--on the whole, let us have another book with your earliest convenience: that is the modest request one makes of you on shutting this. i know not what i am now going to set about: the horrible barking of the universal dog-kennel (awakened by these _pamphlets_) must still itself again; my poor nerves must recover themselves a little:--i have much more to say; and by heaven's blessing must try to get it said in some way if i live.-bostonian prescott is here, infinitely _lionized_ by a mob of gentlemen; i have seen him in two places or three (but forbore speech): the johnny-cake is good, the twopence worth of currants in it too are good; but if you offer it as a bit of baked ambrosia, _ach gott!_-adieu, dear emerson, forgive, and love me a little. yours ever, t. carlyle cxliii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 14 november, 1850 dear emerson,--you are often enough present to my thoughts; but yesterday there came a little incident which has brought you rather vividly upon the scene for me. a certain "mr. ---" from boston sends us, yesterday morning by post, a note of yours addressed to mazzini, whom he cannot find; and indicates that he retains a similar one addressed to myself, and (in the most courteous, kindly, and dignified manner, if mercy prevent not) is about carrying it off with him again to america! to give mercy a chance, i by the first opportunity get under way for morley's hotel, the address of mr. ---; find there that mr.--, since morning, _has been_ on the road towards liverpool and america, and that the function of mercy is quite extinct in this instance! my reflections as i wandered home again were none of the pleasantest. of this mr. --i had heard some tradition, as of an intelligent, accomplished, and superior man; such a man's acquaintance, of whatever complexion he be, is and was always a precious thing to me, well worth acquiring where possible; not to say that any friend of yours, whatever his qualities otherwise, carries with him an imperative key to all bolts and locks of mine, real or imaginary. in fact i felt punished;--and who knows, if the case were seen into, whether i deserve it? what "business" it was that deprived me of a call from mr. ---, or of the possibility of calling on him, i know very well,--and ---, the little dog, and others know! but the fact in that matter is very far different indeed from the superficial semblance; and i appeal to all the _gentlemen_ that are in america for a candid interpretation of the same. "eighteen million bores,"--good heavens don't i know how many of that species we also have; and how with us, as with you, the difference between them and the eighteen thousand noble-men and non-bores is immeasurable and inconceivable; and how, with us as with you, the _latter_ small company, sons of the empyrean, will have to fling the former huge one, sons of mammon and mud, into some kind of chains again, reduce them to some kind of silence again,--unless the old mud-demons are to rise and devour us all? truly it is so i construe it: and if --and the eighteen millions are well justified in their anger at me, and the eighteen thousand owe me thanks and new love. that is my decided opinion, in spite of you all! and so, along with ---, probably in the same ship with him, there shall go my protest against the conduct of ---; and the declaration that to the last i will protest! which will wind up the matter (without any word of yours on it) at this time.--for the rest, though --sent me his pamphlet, it is a fact i have not read a word of it, nor shall ever read. my wife read it; but i was away, with far other things in my head; and it was "lent to various persons" till it died!--enough and ten times more than enough of all that. let me on this last slip of paper give you some response to the letter* i got in scotland, under the silence of the bright autumn sun, in my mother's house, and read there. -------* this letter is missing. -------you are bountiful abundantly in your reception of those _latter day pamphlets;_ and right in all you say of them;--and yet withal you are not right, my friend, but i am! truly it does behove a man to know the inmost resources of this universe, and, for the sake both of his peace and of his dignity, to possess his soul in patience, and look nothing doubting (nothing wincing even, if that be his humor) upon all things. for it is most indubitable there is good in all;--and if you even see an oliver cromwell assassinated, it is certain you may get a cartload of turnips from his carcass. ah me, and i suppose we had too much forgotten all this, or there had not been a man like you sent to show it us so emphatically! let us well remember it; and yet remember too that it is _not_ good always, or ever, to be "at ease in zion"; good often to be in fierce rage in zion; and that the vile pythons of this mud-world do verily require to have sun-arrows shot into them and red-hot pokers struck through them, according to occasion: woe to the man that carries either of these weapons, and does not use it in their presence! here, at this moment, a miserable italian organ-grinder has struck up the _marseillaise_ under my window, for example: was the _marseillaise_ fought out on a bed of down, or is it worth nothing when fought? on those wretched _pamphlets_ i set no value at all, or even less than none: to me their one benefit is, my own heart is clear of them (a benefit not to be despised, i assure you!)--and in the public, athwart this storm of curses, and emptyings of vessels of dishonor, i can already perceive that it is all well enough there too in reference to them; and the controversy of the eighteen millions _versus_ the eighteen thousands, or eighteen units, is going on very handsomely in that quarter of it, for aught i can see! and so, peace to the brave that are departed; and, tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new!-i was in wales, as well as scotland, during autumn time; lived three weeks within wind of st. germanus's old "college" (fourteen hundred years of age or so) and also not far from _merthyr tydvil,_ cyclops' hell, sootiest and horridest avatar of the industrial mammon i had ever anywhere seen; went through the severn valley; at bath stayed a night with landor (a proud and high old man, who charged me with express remembrances for you); saw tennyson too, in cumberland, with his new wife; and other beautiful recommendable and 'questionable things;--and was dreadfully tossed about, and torn almost to tatters by the manifold brambles of my way: and so at length am here, a muchlamed man indeed! oh my friend, have tolerance for me, have sympathy with me; you know not quite (i imagine) what a burden mine is, or perhaps you would find this duty, which you always do, a little easier done! be happy, be busy beside your still waters, and think kindly of me there. my nerves, health i call them, are in a sad state of disorder: alas, that is nine tenths of all the battle in this world. courage, courage!--my wife sends salutations to you and yours. good be with you all always. your affectionate, t. carlyle cxliv. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 8 july, 1851 dear emerson,--don't you still remember very well that there is such a man? i know you do, and will do. but it is a ruinously long while since we have heard a word from each other;--a state of matters that ought immediately to _cease._ it was your turn, i think, to write? it was somebody's turn! nay i heard lately you complained of bad eyes; and were grown abstinent of writing. pray contradict me this. i cannot do without some regard from you while we are both here. spite of your many sins, you are among the most human of all the beings i now know in the world;-who are a very select set, and are growing ever more so, i can inform you! in late months, feeling greatly broken and without heart for anything weighty, i have been upon a _life of john sterling;_ which will not be good for much, but will as usual gratify me by taking itself off my hands: it was one of the things i felt a kind of obligation to do, and so am thankful to have done. here is a patch of it lying by me, if you will look at a specimen. there are four hundred or more pages (prophesies the printer), a good many _letters_ and excerpts in the latter portion of the volume. already half printed, wholly written; but not to come out for a couple of months yet,--all trade being at a stand till this sublime "crystal palace" go its ways again.--and now since we are upon the business, i wish you would mention it to e.p. clark (is not that the name?) next time you go to boston: if that friendly clear-eyed man have anything to say in reference to it and american booksellers, let him say and do; he may have a copy for anybody in about a month: if _he_ have nothing to say, then let there be nothing anywhere said. for, mark o philosopher, i expressly and with emphasis prohibit _you_ at this stage of our history, and henceforth, unless i grow poor again. indeed, indeed, the commercial mandate of the thing (nature's little order on that behalf) being once fulfilled (by speaking to clark), i do not care a snuff of tobacco how it goes, and will prefer, here as elsewhere, my night's rest to any amount of superfluous money. this summer, as you may conjecture, has been very noisy with us, and productive of little,--the "wind-dust-ry of all nations" involving everything in one inane tornado. the very shopkeepers complain that there is no trade. such a sanhedrim of windy fools from all countries of the globe were surely never gathered in one city before. but they will go their ways again, they surely will! one sits quiet in that faith;--nay, looks abroad with a kind of pathetic grandfatherly feeling over this universal children's ball which the british nation in these extraordinary circumstances is giving it self! silence above all, silence is very behoveful! i read lately a small old brown french duodecimo, which i mean to send you by the first chance there is. the writer is a capitaine bossu; the production, a journal of his experiences in "la louisiane," "oyo" (_ohio_), and those regions, which looks very genuine, and has a strange interest to me, like some fractional odyssey or letter.* only a hundred years ago, and the mississippi has changed as never valley did: in 1751 older and stranger, looked at from its present date, than balbec or nineveh! say what we will, jonathan is doing miracles (of a sort) under the sun in these times now passing.--do you know _bartram's travels?_ this is of the seventies (1770) or so; treats of _florida_ chiefly, has a wondrous kind of floundering eloquence in it; and has also grown immeasurably _old._ all american libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a kind of future _biblical_ article.-finally on this head, can you tell me of any _good_ book on california? good: i have read several bad. but that too is worthy of some wonder; that too, like the old bucaniers, hungers and thirsts (in ingenuous minds) to have some true record and description given of it. ---------* bossu wrote two books which are known to the student of the history of the settlement of america; one, "nouveaux voyages aux indes occidentales," paris, 1768; the other, "nouveaux voyages dans l'amerique septentrionale," amsterdam (paris), 1777. ---------and poor miss fuller, was there any _life_ ever published of her? or is any competent hand engaged on it? poor margaret, i often remember her; and think how she is asleep now under the surges of the sea. mazzini, as you perhaps know, is with us this summer; comes across once in the week or so, and tells me, or at least my wife, all his news. the roman revolution has made a man of him,--quite brightened up ever since;--and the best friend _he_ ever saw, i believe, was that same quack-president of france, who relieved him while it was still time. my brother is in annandale, working hard over _dante_ at last; talks of coming up hither shortly; i am myself very ill and miserable in the _liver_ regions; very tough otherwise,--though i have now got spectacles for small print in the twilight. _eheu fugaces,_--and yet why _eheu?_ in fact it is better to be silent.--adieu, dear emerson; i expect to get a great deal brisker by and by,--and in the first place to have a missive from boston again. my wife sends you many regards. i am as ever,-affectionately yours, --t. carlyle cxlv. emerson to carlyle concord, 28 july, 1851 my dear carlyle,--you must always thank me for silence, be it never so long, and must put on it the most generous interpretations. for i am too sure of your genius and goodness, and too glad that they shine steadily for all, to importune you to make assurance sure by a private beam very often. there is very little in this village to be said to you, and, with all my love of your letters, i think it the kind part to defend you from our imbecilities,--my own, and other men's. besides, my eyes are bad, and prone to mutiny at any hint of white paper. and yet i owe you all my story, if story i have. i have been something of a traveler the last year, and went down the ohio river to its mouth; walked nine miles into, and nine miles out of the mammoth cave, in kentucky,--walked or sailed, for we crossed small underground streams,--and lost one day's light; then steamed up the mississippi, five days, to galena. in the upper mississippi, you are always in a lake with many islands. "the far west" is the right name for these verdant deserts. on all the shores, interminable silent forest. if you land, there is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of nations, no nations. the raw bullion of nature; what we call "moral" value not yet stamped on it. but in a thousand miles the immense material values will show twenty or fifty californias; that a good ciphering head will make one where he is. thus at pittsburg, on the ohio, the "iron" city, whither, from want of railroads, few yankees have penetrated, every acre of land has three or four bottoms; first of rich soil; then nine feet of bituminous coal; a little lower, fourteen feet of coal; then iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called petroleum floating on their surface. yet this acre sells for the price of any tillage acre in massachusetts; and, in a year, the railroads will reach it, east and west.--i came home by the great northern lakes and niagara. no books, a few lectures, each winter, i write and read. in the spring, the abomination of our fugitive slave bill drove me to some writing and speech-making, without hope of effect, but to clear my own skirts. i am sorry i did not print whilst it was yet time. i am now told that the time will come again, more's the pity. now i am trying to make a sort of memoir of margaret fuller, or my part in one;--for channing and ward are to do theirs. without either beauty or genius, she had a certain wealth and generosity of nature which have left a kind of claim on our consciences to build her a cairn. and this reminds me that i am to write a note to mazzini on this matter; and, as you say you see him, you must charge yourself with delivering it. what we do must be ended by october. you too are working for sterling. it is right and kind. i learned so much from the new york _tribune,_ and, a few days after, was on the point of writing to you, provoked by a foolish paragraph which appeared in rufus griswold's journal, (new york,) purporting that r.w.e. possessed important letters of sterling, without which thomas carlyle could not write the life. what scrap of hearsay about contents of sterling's letters to me, or that i had letters, this paltry journalist swelled into this puff-ball, i know not. he once came to my house, and, since that time, may have known margaret fuller in new york; but probably never saw any letter of sterling's or heard the contents of any. i have not read again sterling's letters, which i keep as good lares in a special niche, but i have no recollection of anything that would be valuable to you. for the american public for the book, i think it important that you should take the precise step of sending phillips and sampson the early copy, and at the earliest. i saw them, and also e.p. clark, and put them in communication, and clark is to write you at once. having got so far in my writing to you, i do not know but i shall gain heart, and write more letters over sea. you will think my sloth suicidal enough. so many men as i learned to value in your country,--so many as offered me opportunities of intercourse,-and i lose them all by silence. arthur helps is a chief benefactor of mine. i wrote him a letter by ward,--who brought the letter back. i ought to thank john carlyle, not only for me, but for a multitude of good men and women here who read his _inferno_ duly. w.e. forster sent me his penn pamphlet; i sent it to bancroft, who liked it well, only he thought forster might have made a still stronger case. clough i prize at a high rate, the man and his poetry, but write not. wilkinson i thought a man of prodigious talent, who somehow held it and so taught others to hold it cheap, as we do one of those bushel-basket memories which school-boys and school-girls often show,--and we stop their mouths lest they be troublesome with their alarming profusion. but there is no need of beginning to count the long catalogue. kindest, kindest remembrance to my benefactress, also in your house, and health and strength and victory to you. your affectionate, waldo emerson cxlvi. carlyle to emerson great malvern, worcestershire, 25 august, 1851 dear emerson,--many thanks for your letter, which found me here about a week ago, and gave a full solution to my bibliopolic difficulties. however sore your eyes, or however taciturn your mood, there is no delay of writing when any service is to be done by it! in fact you are very good to me, and always were, in all manner of ways; for which i do, as i ought, thank the upper powers and you. that truly has been and is one of the possessions of my life in this perverse epoch of the world.... i have sent off by john chapman a copy of the _life of sterling,_ which is all printed and ready, but is not to appear till the first week of october.... along with the _sheets_ was a poor little french book for you,--book of a poor naval _mississippi_ frenchman, one "bossu," i think; written only a century ago, yet which already seemed old as the pyramids in reference to those strange fast-growing countries. i read it as a kind of defaced _romance;_ very thin and lean, but all _true,_ and very marvelous as such. it is above three weeks since my wife and i left london, (the printer having done,) and came hither with the purpose of a month of what is called "water cure"; for which this place, otherwise extremely pleasant and wholesome, has become celebrated of late years. dr. gully, the pontiff of the business in our island, warmly encouraged my purpose so soon as he heard of it; nay, urgently offered at once that both of us should become his own guests till the experiment were tried: and here accordingly we are; i water-curing, assiduously walking on the sunny mountains, drinking of the clear wells, not to speak of wet wrappages, solitary sad _steepages,_ and other singular procedures; my wife not meddling for her own behoof, but only seeing me do it. these have been three of the idlest weeks i ever spent, and there is still one to come: after which we go northward to lancashire, and across the border where my good old mother still expects me; and so, after some little visiting and dawdling, hope to find ourselves home again before september end, and the inexpressible glass palace with its noisy inanity have taken itself quite away again. it was no increase of ill-health that drove me hither, rather the reverse; but i have long been minded to try this thing: and now i think the result will be,--_zero_ pretty nearly, and one imagination the less. my long walks, my strenuous idleness, have certainly done me good; nor has the "water" done me any _ill,_ which perhaps is much to say of it. for the rest, it is a strange quasi-monastic--godless and yet _devotional_--way of life which human creatures have here, and useful to them beyond doubt. i foresee, this "water cure," under better forms, will become the _ramadhan_ of the overworked unbelieving english in time coming; an institution they were dreadfully in want of, this long while!--we had twisleton* here (often speaking of you), who is off to america again; will sail, i think, along with this letter; a semi-articulate but solidminded worthy man. we have other officials and other _litterateurs_ (t.b. macaulay in his hired villa for one): but the mind rather shuns than seeks them, one finds solitary quasidevotion preferable, and [greek], as pindar had it! ----------* the late hon. edward twisleton, a man of high character and large attainments, and with a personal disposition that won the respect and affection of a wide circle of friends on both sides of the atlantic. he was the author of a curious and learned treatise entitled "the tongue not essential to speech," and his remarkable volume on "the handwriting of junius" seems to have effectually closed a long controversy. --------richard milnes is married, about two weeks ago, and gone to vienna for a jaunt. his wife, a miss crewe (lord crewe's sister), about forty, pleasant, intelligent, and rather rich: that is the end of richard's long first act. alfred tennyson, perhaps you heard, is gone to italy with his wife: their baby died or was dead-born; they found england wearisome: alfred has been taken up on the top of the wave, and a good deal jumbled about since you were here. item thackeray; who is coming over to lecture to you: a mad world, my masters! your letter to mazzini was duly despatched; and we hear from him that he will write to you, on the subject required, without delay. browning and his wife, home from florence, are both in london at present; mean to live in paris henceforth for some time. they had seen something both of margaret and her d'ossoli, and appeared to have a true and lively interest in them; browning spoke a long while to me, with emphasis, on the subject: i think it was i that had introduced poor margaret to them. i said he ought to send these reminiscences to america,--that was the night before we left london, three weeks ago; his answer gave me the impression there had been some hindrance somewhere. accordingly, when your letter and mazzini's reached me here, i wrote to browning urgently on the subject: but he informs me that they _have_ sent all their reminiscences, at the request of mr. story; so that it is already all well.--dear emerson, you see i am at the bottom of my paper. i will write to you again before long; we cannot let you lie fallow in that manner altogether. have you got proper _spectacles_ for your eyes? i have adopted that beautiful symbol of old age, and feel myself very venerable: take care of your eyes! yours ever, t. carlyle cxlvii. emerson to carlyle concord, 14 april, 1852 my dear carlyle,--i have not grown so callous by my sulky habit, but that i know where my friends are, and who can help me, in time of need. and i have to crave your good offices today, and in a matter relating once more to margaret fuller.... you were so kind as to interest yourself, many months ago, to set mazzini and browning on writing their reminiscences for us. but we never heard from either of them. lately i have learned, by way of sam longfellow, in paris, brother of our poet longfellow, that browning assured him that he did write and send a memoir to this country,--to whom, i know not. it never arrived at the hands of the fullers, nor of story, channing, or me;--though the book was delayed in the hope of such help. i hate that his paper should be lost. the little french _voyage,_ &c. of bossu, i got safely, and compared its pictures with my own, at the mississippi, the illinois, and chicago. it is curious and true enough, no doubt, though its indians are rather dim and vague, and "messieurs sauvages" good indians we have in alexander henry's _travels in canada,_ and in our modern catlin, and the best western america, perhaps, in f.a. michaux, _voyage a l'ouest des monts alleghanis,_ and in fremont. but it was california i believe you asked about, and, after looking at taylor, parkman, and the rest, i saw that the only course is to read them all, and every private letter that gets into the newspapers. so there was nothing to say. i rejoiced with the rest of mankind in the _life of sterling,_ and now peace will be to his manes, down in this lower sphere. yet i see well that i should have held to his opinion, in all those conferences where you have so quietly assumed the palms. it is said: here, that you work upon frederick the great?? however that be, health, strength, love, joy, and victory to you. --r.w. emerson cxlviii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 7 may, 1852 dear emerson,--i was delighted at the sight of your hand again. my manifold sins against you, involuntary all of them i may well say, are often enough present to my sad thoughts; and a kind of remorse is mixed with the other sorrow,--as if i could have _helped_ growing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the grim ishmaelite i am, and so shocking your serenity by my ferocities! i admit you were like an angel to me, and absorbed in the beautifulest manner all thunder-clouds into the depths of your immeasurable a ether;--and it is indubitable i love you very well, and have long done, and mean to do. and on the whole you will have to rally yourself into some kind of correspondence with me again; i believe you will find that also to be a commanded duty by and by! to me at any rate, i can say, it is a great want, and adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years: deep as is my dissent from your gymnosophist view of heaven and earth, i find an agreement that swallows up all conceivable dissents; in the whole world i hardly get, to my spoken human word, any other word of response which is authentically _human._ god help us, this is growing a very lonely place, this distracted dogkennel of a world! and it is no joy to me to see it about to have its throat cut for its immeasurable devilries; that is not a pleasant process to be concerned in either more or less,-considering above all how many centuries, base and dismal all of them, it is like to take! nevertheless _marchons,_--and swift too, if we have any speed, for the sun is sinking.... poor margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers; and has many traits of the heroic in it, though it is wild as the prophecy of a sibyl. such a predetermination to _eat_ this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, i have not before seen in any human soul. her "mountain me" indeed:-but her courage too is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in its deepest sense, _a toute epreuve._--your copy of the book* came to me at last (to my joy): i had already read it; there was considerable notice taken of it here; and one half-volume of it (and i grieve to say only one, written by a man called emerson) was completely approved by me and innumerable judges. the rest of the book is not without considerable geniality and merits; but one wanted a clear concise narrative beyond all other merits; and if you ask here (except in that half-volume) about any fact, you are answered (so to speak) not in words, but by a symbolic tune on the bagpipe, symbolic burst of wind-music from the brass band;--which is not the plan at all!--what can have become of mazzini's letter, which he certainly did write and despatched to you, is not easily conceivable. still less in the case of browning: for browning and his wife did also write; i myself in the end of last july, having heard him talk kindly and well of poor margaret and her husband, took the liberty on your behalf of asking him to put something down on paper; and he informed me, then and repeatedly since, he had already done it,--at the request of mrs. story, i think. his address at present is, "no. 138 avenue des champs elysees, a paris," if your american travelers still thought of inquiring.--adieu, dear emerson, till next week. yours ever, t. carlyle -------* "the memoirs of margaret fuller ossoli." -------cxlix. emerson to carlyle* concord, may [?], 1852 you make me happy with your loving thoughts and meanings towards me. i have always thanked the good star which made us early neighbors, in some sort, in time and space. and the beam is twice warmed by your vigorous good-will, which has steadily kept clear, kind eyes on me. -------* from an imperfect rough draft. -------it is good to be born in good air and outlook, and not less with a civilization, that is, with one poet still living in the world. o yes, and i feel all the solemnity and vital cheer of the benefit.--if only the mountains of water and of land and the steeper mountains of blighted and apathized moods would permit a word to pass now and then. it is very fine for you to tax yourself with all those incompatibilities. i like that thor should make comets and thunder, as well as iduna apples, or heimdal his rainbow bridge, and your wrath and satire has all too much realism in it, than that we can flatter ourselves by disposing of you as partial and heated. nor is it your fault that you do a hero's work, nor do we love you less if we cannot help you in it. pity me, o strong man! i am of a puny constitution half made up, and as i from childhood knew,--not a poet but a lover of poetry, and poets, and merely serving as writer, &c. in this empty america, before the arrival of the poets. you must not misconstrue my silences, but thank me for them all, as a true homage to your diligence which i love to defend... she* had such reverence and love for landor that i do not know but at any moment in her natural life she would have sunk in the sea, for an ode from him; and now this most propitious cake is offered to her manes. the loss of the notes of browning and of mazzini, which you confirm, astonishes me. --------* margaret fuller. the break in continuity is in the rough draft. --------cl. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 25 june, 1852 dear emerson...... you are a born _enthusiast,_ as quiet as you are; and it will continue so, at intervals, to the end. i admire your sly low-voiced sarcasm too;--in short, i love the sternly-gentle close-buttoned man very well, as i have always done, and intend to continue doing!--pray observe therefore, and lay it to heart as a practical fact, that you are bound to persevere in writing to me from time to time; and will never get it given up, how sulky soever you grow, while we both remain in this world. do not i very well understand all that you say about "apathized moods," &c.? the gloom of approaching old age (approaching, nay arriving with some of us) is very considerable upon a man; and on the whole one contrives to take the very ugliest view, now and then, of all beautifulest things; and to shut one's lips with a kind of grim defiance, a kind of imperial sorrow which is almost like felicity,--so completely and composedly wretched, one is equal to the very gods! these too are necessary, moods to a man. but the earth withal is verdant, sun-beshone; and the son of adam has his place on it, and his tasks and recompenses in it, to the close;--as one remembers by and by, too. on the whole, i am infinitely solitary; but not more heavy laden than i have all along been, perhaps rather less so; i could fancy even old age to be beautiful, and to have a real divineness: for the rest, i say always, i cannot part with you, however it go; and so, in brief, you must get into the way of holding yourself obliged as formerly to a kind of _dialogue_ with me; and speak, on paper since not otherwise, the oftenest you can. let that be a point settled. i am not _writing_ on frederic the great; nor at all practically contemplating to do so. but, being in a reading mood after those furious _pamphlets_ (which have procured me showers of abuse from all the extensive genus stupid in this country, and not done me any other mischief, but perhaps good), and not being capable of reading except in a train and _about_ some object of interest to me,--i took to reading, near a year ago, about frederick, as i had twice in my life done before; and have, in a loose way, tumbled up an immense quantity of shot rubbish on that field, and still continue. not with much decisive approach to frederick's _self,_ i am still afraid! the man looks brilliant and noble to me; but how _love_ him, or the sad wreck he lived and worked in? i do not even yet _see_ him clearly; and to try making others see him--?--yet voltaire and he _are_ the celestial element of the poor eighteenth century; poor souls. i confess also to a real love for frederick's dumb followers: the prussian _soldiery._--i often say to myself, "were not _here_ the real priests and virtuous martyrs of that loud-babbling rotten generation!" and so it goes on; when to end, or in what to end, god knows. adieu, dear emerson. a blockhead (by mistake) has been let in, and has consumed all my time. good be ever with you and yours. --t. carlyle cli. emerson to carlyle concord, 19 april, 1853 my dear friend,--as i find i never write a letter except at the dunning of the penny post,--which is the pest of the century,--i have thought lately of crossing to england to excuse to you my negligence of your injunction, which so flattered me by its affectionateness a year ago. i was to write once a month. my own disobedience is wonderful, and explains to me all the sins of omission of the whole world. the levity with which we can let fall into disuse such a sacrament as the exchange of greeting at short periods, is a kind of magnanimity, and should be an astonishing argument of the "immortality"; and i wonder how it has escaped the notice of philosophers. but what had i, dear wise man, to tell you? what, but that life was still tolerable; still absurdly sweet; still promising, promising, to credulous idleness;--but step of mine taken in a true direction, or clear solution of any the least secret,--none whatever. i scribble always a little,--much less than formerly,--and i did within a year or eighteen months write a chapter on fate, which--if we all live long enough, that is, you, and i, and the chapter--i hope to send you in fair print. comfort yourself--as you will--you will survive the reading, and will be a sure proof that the nut is not cracked. for when we find out what fate is, i suppose, the sphinx and we are done for; and sphinx, oedipus, and world ought, by good rights, to roll down the steep into the sea. but i was going to say, my neglect of your request will show you how little saliency is in my weeks and months. they are hardly distinguished in memory other than as a running web out of a loom, a bright stripe for day, a dark stripe for night, and, when it goes faster, even these run together into endless gray... i went lately to st. louis and saw the mississippi again. the powers of the river, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes,--for it yields to no engineering,--are interesting enough. the prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. for corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat four legs. workingmen, ability to do the work of the river, abounded. nothing higher was to be thought of. america is incomplete. room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. 't is a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish italies and englands, where an age sublimates into a genius, and the whole population is made into paddies to feed his porcelain veins, by transfusion from their brick arteries. our few fine persons are apt to die. horatio greenough, a sculptor, whose tongue was far cunninger in talk than his chisel to carve, and who inspired great hopes, died two months ago at forty-seven years. nature has only so much vital force, and must dilute it, if it is to be multiplied into millions. "the beautiful is never plentiful." on the whole, i say to myself, that our conditions in america are not easier or less expensive than the european. for the poor scholar everywhere must be compromise or alternation, and, after many remorses, the consoling himself that there has been pecuniary honesty, and that things might have been worse. but no; we must think much better things than these. let lazarus believe that heaven does not corrupt into maggots, and that heroes do not succumb. clough is here, and comes to spend a sunday with me, now and then. he begins to have pupils, and, if his courage holds out, will have as many as he wants.... i have written hundreds of pages about england and america, and may send them to you in print. and now be good and write me once more, and i think i will never cease to write again. and give my homage to jane carlyle. ever yours, r.w. emerson clii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 13 may, 1853 dear emerson,--the sight of your handwriting was a real blessing to me, after so long an abstinence. you shall not know all the sad reflections i have made upon your silence within the last year. i never doubted your fidelity of heart; your genial deep and friendly recognition of my bits of merits, and my bits of sufferings, difficulties and obstructions; your forgiveness of my faults; or in fact that you ever would forget me, or cease to think kindly of me: but it seemed as if practically _old age_ had come upon the scene here too; and as if upon the whole one must make up one's mind to know that all this likewise had fallen silent, and could be possessed henceforth only on those new terms. alas, there goes much over, year after year, into the regions of the immortals; inexpressibly beautiful, but also inexpressibly sad. i have not many voices to commune with in the world. in fact i have properly no voice at all; and yours, i have often said, was the _unique_ among my fellow-creatures, from which came full response, and discourse of reason: the _solitude_ one lives in, if one has any spiritual thought at all, is very great in these epochs!--the truth is, moreover, i bought spectacles to myself about two years ago (bad print in candlelight having fairly become troublesome to me); much may lie in that! "the buying of your first pair of spectacles," i said to an old scotch gentleman, "is an important epoch; like the buying of your first razor."--"yes," answered he, "but not quite so joyful perhaps!"--well, well, i have heard from you again; and you promise to be again constant in writing. shall i believe you, this time? do it, and shame the devil! i really am persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me i know right well, and have always known, what it will do. the gaunt lonesomeness of this midnight hour, in the ugly universal _snoring_ hum of the overfilled deep-sunk posterity of adam, renders an articulate speaker precious indeed! watchman, what sayest thou, then? watchman, what of the night?-your glimpses of the huge unmanageable mississippi, of the huge ditto model republic, have here and there something of the _epic_ in them,--_ganz nach meinem sinne._ i see you do not dissent from me in regard to that latter enormous phenomenon, except on the outer surface, and in the way of peaceably instead of _un_peaceably accepting the same. alas, all the world is a "republic of the mediocrities," and always was;--you may see what _its_ "universal suffrage" is and has been, by looking into all the ugly mud-ocean (with some old weathercocks atop) that now _is:_ the world wholly (if we think of it) is the exact stamp of men wholly, and of the _sincerest_ heart-tongue-and-hand "suffrage" they could give about it, poor devils!--i was much struck with plato, last year, and his notions about democracy: mere latter-day pamphlet _saxa et faces_ (read _faeces,_ if you like) refined into empyrean radiance and lightning of the gods!-i, for my own part, perceive the use of all this too, the inevitability of all this; but perceive it (at the present height it has attained) to be disastrous withal, to be horrible and even damnable. that judas iscariot should come and slap jesus christ on the shoulder in a familiar manner; that all heavenliest nobleness should be flung out into the muddy streets there to jostle elbows with all thickest-skinned denizens of chaos, and get itself at every turn trampled into the gutters and annihilated:--alas, the _reverse_ of all this was, is, and ever will be, the strenuous effort and most solemn heart-purpose of every good citizen in every country of the world,--and will _reappear_ conspicuously as such (in new england and in old, first of all, as i calculate), when once this malodorous melancholy "uncle tommery" is got all well put by! which will take some time yet, i think.--and so we will leave it. i went to germany last autumn; not _seeking_ anything very definite; rather merely flying from certain troops of carpenters, painters, bricklayers, &c., &c., who had made a lodgment in this poor house; and have not even yet got their incalculable riot quite concluded. sorrow on them,--and no return to these poor premises of mine till i have quite left!--in germany i found but little; and suffered, from six weeks of sleeplessness in german beds, &c., &c., a great deal. indeed i seem to myself never yet to have quite recovered. the rhine which i honestly ascended from rotterdam to frankfort was, as i now find, my chief conquest the beautifulest river in the earth, i do believe; and my first idea of a world-river. it is many fathoms deep, broader twice over than the thames here at high water; and rolls along, mirror-smooth (except that, in looking close, you will find ten thousand little eddies in it), voiceless, swift, with trim banks, through the heart of europe, and of the middle ages wedded to the present age: such an image of calm _power_ (to say nothing of its other properties) i find i had never seen before. the old cities too are a little beautiful to me, in spite of my state of nerves; honest, kindly people too, but sadly short of our and your _despatch-of-business_ talents,--a really painful defect in the long run. i was on two of fritz's battle-fields, moreover: lobositz in bohemia, and kunersdorf by frankfurt on the oder; but did not, especially in the latter case, make much of that. schiller's death-chamber, goethe's sad court-environment; above all, luther's little room in the _wartburg_ (i believe i actually had tears in my eyes there, and kissed the old oak-table, being in a very flurried state of nerves), my belief was that under the canopy there was not at present so _holy_ a spot as that same. of human souls i found none specially beautiful to me at all, at all,--such my sad fate! of learned professors, i saw little, and that little was more than enough. tieck at berlin, an old man, lame on a sofa, i did love, and do; he is an exception, could i have seen much of him. but on the whole _universal puseyism_ seemed to me the humor of german, especially of berlin thinkers;--and i had some quite portentous specimens of that kind,--unconscious specimens of four hundred quack power! truly and really the prussian soldiers, with their intelligent _silence,_ with the touches of effective spartanism i saw or fancied in them, were the class of people that pleased me best. but see, my sheet is out! i am still reading, reading, most nightmare books about fritz; but as to writing,--_ach gott!_ never, never.--clough is coming home, i hope.--write soon, if you be not enchanted! yours ever, t. carlyle cliia. emerson to carlyle concord, 10 august, 1853 my dear carlyle,--your kindest letter, whose date i dare not count back to,--perhaps it was may,--i have just read again, to be deeply touched by its noble tragic tone of goodness to me, not without new wonder at my perversity, and terror at what both may be a-forging to strike me. my slowness to write is a distemper that reaches all my correspondence, and not that with you only, though the circumstance is not worth stating, because, if i ceased to write to all the rest, there would yet be good reason for writing to you. i believe the reason of this recusancy is the fear of disgusting my friends, as with a book open always at the same page. for i have some experiences, that my interest in thoughts--and to an end, perhaps, only of new thoughts and thinking--outlasts that of all my reasonable neighbors, and offends, no doubt, by unhealthy pertinacity. but though rebuked by a daily reduction to an absurd solitude, and by a score of disappointments with intellectual people, and in the face of a special hell provided for me in the swedenborg universe, i am yet confirmed in my madness by the scope and satisfaction i find in a conversation once or twice in five years, if so often; and so we find or pick what we call our proper path, though it be only from stone to stone, or from island to island, in a very rude, stilted, and violent fashion. with such solitariness and frigidities, you may judge i was glad to see clough here, with whom i had established some kind of robust working-friendship, and who had some great permanent values for me. had he not taken me by surprise and fled in a night, i should have done what i could to block his way. i am too sure he will not return. the first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a new-comer. the sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture--rare enough here--with the sureness of chemistry. the giraffe entering paris wore the label, "eh bien, messieurs, il n'y a qu'une bete de plus!" and oxonians are cheap in london; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they are wanted makes a commanding claim. do not suffer him to relapse into london. he had made himself already cordially welcome to many good people, and would have soon made his own place. he had just established his valise at my house, and was to come--the gay deceiver--once a fortnight for his sunday; and his individualities and his nationalities are alike valuable to me. i beseech you not to commend his unheroic retreat. i have lately made, one or two drafts on your goodness,--which i hate to do, both because you meet them so generously, and because you never give me an opportunity of revenge,--and mainly in the case of miss bacon, who has a private history that entitles her to high respect, and who could be helped only by facilitating her shakespeare studies, in which she has the faith and ardor of a discoverer. bancroft was to have given her letters to hallam, but gave one to sir h. ellis. everett, i believe, gave her one to mr. grote; and when i told her what i remembered hearing of spedding, she was eager to see him; which access i knew not how to secure, except through you. she wrote me that she prospers in all things, and had just received at once a summons to meet spedding at your house. but do not fancy that i send any one to you heedlessly; for i value your time at its rate to nations, and refuse many more letters than i give. i shall not send you any more people without good reason. your visit to germany will stand you in stead, when the annoyances of the journey are forgotten, and, in spite of your disclaimers, i am preparing to read your history of frederic. you are an inveterate european, and rightfully stand for your polity and antiquities and culture: and i have long since forborne to importune you with america, as if it were a humorous repetition of johnson's visit to scotland. and yet since thackeray's adventure, i have often thought how you would bear the pains and penalties; and have painted out your march triumphal. i was at new york, lately, for a few days, and fell into some traces of thackeray, who has made a good mark in this country by a certain manly blurting out of his opinion in various companies, where so much honesty was rare and useful. i am sorry never once to have been in the same town with him whilst he was here. i hope to see him, if he comes again. new york would interest you, as i am told it did him; you both less and more. the "society" there is at least self-pleased, and its own; it has a contempt of boston, and a very modest opinion of london. there is already all the play and fury that belong to great wealth. a new fortune drops into the city every day; no end is to palaces, none to diamonds, none to dinners and suppers. all spanish america discovers that only in the u. states, of all the continent, is safe investment; and money gravitates therefore to new york. the southern naphtha, too, comes in as an ingredient, and lubricates manners and tastes to that degree, that boston is hated for stiffness, and excellence in luxury is rapidly attained. of course, dining, dancing, equipaging, etc. are the exclusive beatitudes,--and thackeray will not cure us of this distemper. have you a physician that can? are you a physician, and will you come? if you will come, cities will go out to meet you. and now i see i have so much to say to you that i ought to write once a month, and i must begin at this point again incontinently. ever yours, r.w. emerson cliii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 9 september, 1853 dear emerson,--your letter came ten days ago; very kind, and however late, surely right welcome! you ought to stir yourself up a little, and actually begin to speak to me again. if we are getting old, that is no reason why we should fall silent, and entirely abstruse to one another. alas, i do not find as i grow older that the number of articulate-speaking human souls increases around me, in proportion to the inarticulate and palavering species! i am often abundantly solitary in heart; and regret the old days when we used to speak oftener together. i have not quitted town this year at all; have resisted calls to scotland both of a gay and a sad description (for the ashburtons are gone to john of groat's house, or the scottish _thule,_ to rusticate and hunt; and, alas, in poor old annandale a tragedy seems preparing for me, and the thing i have dreaded all my days is perhaps now drawing nigh, ah me!)--i felt so utterly broken and disgusted with the jangle of last year's locomotion, i judged it would be better to sit obstinately still, and let my thoughts _settle_ (into sediment and into clearness, as it might be); and so, in spite of great and peculiar noises moreover, here i am and remain. london is not a bad place at all in these months,--with its long clean streets, green parks, and nobody in them, or nobody one has ever seen before. out of la trappe, which does not suit a protestant man, there is perhaps no place where one can be so perfectly alone. i might study even but, as i said, there are noises going on; a _last_ desperate spasmodic effort of building,--a new top-story to the house, out of which is to be made one "spacious room" (so they call it, though it is under twenty feet square) where there shall be air _ad libitum,_ light from the sky, and no _sound,_ not even that of the cremorne cannons, shall find access to me any more! such is the prophecy; may the gods grant it! we shall see now in about a month;--then adieu to mortar-tubs to all eternity:--i endure the thing, meanwhile, as well as i can; might run to a certain rural retreat near by, if i liked at any time; but do not yet: the worst uproar here is but a trifle to that of german inns, and horrible squeaking, choking railway trains; and one does not go to seek this, _this_ is here of its own will, and for a purpose! seriously, i had for twelve years had such a sound-proof inaccessible apartment schemed out in my head; and last year, under a poor, helpless builder, had finally given it up: but chelsea, as london generally, swelling out as if it were mad, grows every year noisier; a _good_ builder turned up, and with a last paroxysm of enthusiasm i set him to. my notion is, he will succeed; in which case, it will be a great possession to me for the rest of my life. alas, this is not the kind of _silence_ i could have coveted, and could once get,--with green fields and clear skies to accompany it! but one must take such as can be had,--and thank the gods. even so, my friend. in the course of about a year of that garret sanctuary, i hope to have swept away much litter from my existence: in fact i am already, by dint of mere obstinate quiescence in such circumstances as there are, intrinsically growing fairly sounder in nerves. what a business a poor human being has with those nerves of his, with that crazy clay tabernacle of his! enough, enough; there will be all eternity to rest in, as arnauld said: "why in such a fuss, little sir?" you "apologize" for sending people to me: o you of little faith! never dream of such a thing nay, whom _did_ you send? the cincinnati lecturer* i had provided for with owen; they would have been glad to hear him, on the cedar forests, on the pigs making rattlesnakes into bacon, and the general adipocere question, under any form, at the albemarle street rooms;--and he never came to hand. as for miss bacon, we find her, with her modest shy dignity, with her solid character and strange enterprise, a real acquisition; and hope we shall now see more of her, now that she has come nearer to us to lodge. i have not in my life seen anything so tragically _quixotic_ as her shakespeare enterprise: alas, alas, there can be nothing but sorrow, toil, and utter disappointment in it for her! i do cheerfully what i can;--which is far more than she _asks_ of me (for i have not seen a prouder silent soul);--but there is not the least possibility of truth in the notion she has taken up: and the hope of ever proving it, or finding the least document that countenances it, is equal to that of vanquishing the windmills by stroke of lance. i am often truly sorry about the poor lady: but she troubles nobody with her difficulties, with her theories; she must try the matter to the end, and charitable souls must further her so far. --------* mr. o.m. mitchell, the astronomer. --------clough is settled in his office; gets familiarized to it rapidly (he says), and seems to be doing well. i see little of him hitherto; i did not, and will not, try to influence him in his choice of countries; but i think he is now likely to continue here, and here too he may do us some good. of america, at least of new england, i can perceive he has brought away an altogether kindly, almost filial impression,--especially of a certain man who lives in that section of the earth. more power to his elbow!--thackeray has very rarely come athwart me since his return: he is a big fellow, soul and body; of many gifts and qualities (particularly in the hogarth line, with a dash of sterne superadded), of enormous _appetite_ withal, and very uncertain and chaotic in all points except his _outer breeding,_ which is fixed enough, and _perfect_ according to the modern english style. i rather dread explosions in his history. a _big,_ fierce, weeping, hungry man; not a strong one. _ay de mi!_ but i must end, i must end. your letter awakened in me, while reading it, one mad notion. i said to myself: well, if i live to finish this frederic impossibility, or even to fling it fairly into the fire, why should not i go, in my old days, and see concord, yankeeland, and that man again, after all!--adieu, dear friend; all good be with you and yours always. --t. carlyle cliv. emerson to carlyle concord, 11 march, 1854 my dear carlyle,--the sight of mr. samuel laurence, the day before yesterday, in new york, and of your head among his sketches, set me on thinking which had some pain where should be only cheer. for mr. laurence i hailed his arrival, on every account. i wish to see a good man whom you prize; and i like to have good englishmen come to america, which, of all countries, after their own, has the best claim to them. he promises to come and see me, and has begun most propitiously in new york. for you,--i have too much constitutional regard and ---, not to feel remorse for my short-comings and slow-comings, and i remember the maxim which the french stole from our indians,--and it was worth stealing,--"let not the grass grow on the path of friendship." ah! my brave giant, you can never understand the silence and forbearances of such as are not giants. to those to whom we owe affection, let us be dumb until we are strong, though we should never be strong. i hate mumped and measled lovers. i hate cramp in all men,--most in myself. and yet i should have been pushed to write without samuel laurence; for i lately looked into _jesuitism,_ a latter-day pamphlet, and found why you like those papers so well. i think you have cleared your skirts; it is a pretty good minority of one, enunciating with brilliant malice what shall be the universal opinion of the next edition of mankind. and the sanity was so manifest, that i felt that the over-gods had cleared their skirts also to this generation, in not leaving themselves without witness, though without this single voice perhaps i should not acquit them. also i pardon the world that reads the book as though it read it not, when i see your inveterated humors. it required courage and required conditions that feuilletonists are not the persons to name or qualify, this writing rabelais in 1850. and to do this alone.--you must even pitch your tune to suit yourself. we must let arctic navigators and deepsea divers wear what astonishing coats, and eat what meats--wheat or whale-they like, without criticism. i read further, sidewise and backwards, in these pamphlets, without exhausting them. i have not ceased to think of the great warm heart that sends them forth, and which i, with others, sometimes tag with satire, and with not being warm enough for this poor world;--i too,--though i know its meltings to-me-ward. then i learned that the newspapers had announced the death of your mother (which i heard of casually on the rock river, illinois), and that you and your brother john had been with her in scotland. i remembered what you had once and again said of her to me, and your apprehensions of the event which has come. i can well believe you were grieved. the best son is not enough a son. my mother died in my house in november, who had lived with me all my life, and kept her heart and mind clear, and her own, until the end. it is very necessary that we should have mothers,--we that read and write,--to keep us from becoming paper. i had found that age did not make that she should die without causing me pain. in my journeying lately, when i think of home the heart is taken out. miss bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife's; and i have never thanked you, and much less acknowledged her copious letter,--copious with desired details. clough, too, wrote about you, and i have not written to him since his return to england. you will see how total is my ossification. meantime i have nothing to tell you that can explain this mild palsy. i worked for a time on my english notes with a view of printing, but was forced to leave them to go read some lectures in philadelphia and some western towns. i went out northwest to great countries which i had not visited before; rode one day, fault of broken railroads, in a sleigh, sixty-five miles through the snow, by lake michigan, (seeing how prairies and oak-openings look in winter,) to reach milwaukee; "the world there was done up in large lots," as a settler told me. the farmer, as he is now a colonist and has drawn from his local necessities great doses of energy, is interesting, and makes the heroic age for wisconsin. he lives on venison and quails. i was made much of, as the only man of the pen within five hundred miles, and by rarity worth more than venison and quails. greeley of the _new york tribune_ is the right spiritual father of all this region; he prints and disperses one hundred and ten thousand newspapers in one day,--multitudes of them in these very parts. he had preceded me, by a few days, and people had flocked together, coming thirty and forty miles to hear him speak; as was right, for he does all their thinking and theory for them, for two dollars a year. other than colonists, i saw no man. "there are no singing birds in the prairie," i truly heard. all the life of the land and water had distilled no thought. younger and better, i had no doubt been tormented to read and speak their sense for them. now i only gazed at them and their boundless land. one good word closed your letter in september, which ought to have had an instant reply, namely, that you might come westward when frederic was disposed of. speed frederic, then, for all reasons and for this! america is growing furiously, town and state; new kansas, new nebraska looming up in these days, vicious politicians seething a wretched destiny for them already at washington. the politicians shall be sodden, the states escape, please god! the fight of slave and freeman drawing nearer, the question is sharply, whether slavery or whether freedom shall be abolished. come and see. wealth, which is always interesting, for from wealth power refuses to be divorced, is on a new scale. californian quartz mountains dumped down in new york to be repiled architecturally along shore from canada to cuba, and thence west to california again. john bull interests you at home, and is all your subject. come and see the jonathanization of john. what, you scorn all this? well, then, come and see a few good people, impossible to be seen on any other shore, who heartily and always greet you. there is a very serious welcome for you here. and i too shall wake from sleep. my wife entreats that an invitation shall go from her to you. faithfully yours, r.w. emerson clv. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 8 april, 1854 dear emerson,--it was a morning not like any other which lay round it, a morning to be marked white, that one, about a week ago, when your letter came to me; a word from you yet again, after so long a silence! on the whole, i perceive you will not utterly give up answering me, but will rouse yourself now and then to a word of human brotherhood on my behalf, so long as we both continue in this planet. and i declare, the heavens will reward you; and as to me, i will be thankful for what i get, and submissive to delays and to all things: all things are good compared with flat want in that respect. it remains true, and will remain, what i have often told you, that properly there is no voice in this world which is completely human to me, which fully understands all i say and with clear sympathy and sense answers to me, but your voice only. that is a curious fact, and not quite a joyful one to me. the solitude, the silence of my poor soul, in the centre of this roaring whirlpool called universe, is great, always, and sometimes strange and almost awful. i have two million talking bipeds without feathers, close at my elbow, too; and of these it is often hard for me to say whether the so-called "wise" or the almost professedly foolish are the more inexpressibly unproductive to me. "silence, silence!" i often say to myself: "be silent, thou poor fool; and prepare for that divine silence which is now not far!"--on the whole, write to me whenever you can; and be not weary of well-doing. i have had sad things to do and see since i wrote to you: the loss of my dear and good old mother, which could not be spared me forever, has come more like a kind of total bankruptcy upon me than might have been expected, considering her age and mine. oh those last two days, that last christmas sunday! she was a true, pious, brave, and noble mother to me; and it is now all over; and the past has all become pale and sad and sacred;--and the all-devouring potency of death, what we call death, has never looked so strange, cruel and unspeakable to me. nay not _cruel_ altogether, let me say: huge, profound, _unspeakable,_ that is the word.--you too have lost your good old mother, who stayed with you like mine, clear to the last: alas, alas, it is the oldest law of nature; and it comes on every one of us with a strange originality, as if it had never happened before.-forward, however; and no more lamenting; no more than cannot be helped. "paradise is under the shadow of our swords," said the emir: "forward!"-i make no way in my prussian history; i bore and dig toilsomely through the unutterablest mass of dead rubbish, which is not even english, which is german and inhuman; and hardly from ten tons of learned inanity is there to be riddled one old rusty nail. for i have been back as far as pytheas who, first of speaking creatures, beheld the teutonic countries; and have questioned all manner of extinct german shadows,--who answer nothing but mumblings. and on the whole fritz himself is not sufficiently divine to me, far from it; and i am getting old, and heavy of heart;--and in short, it oftenest seems to me i shall never write any word about that matter; and have again fairly got into the element of the impossible. very well: could i help it? i can at least be honestly silent; and "bear my indigence with dignity," as you once said. the insuperable difficulty of _frederic_ is, that he, the genuine little ray of veritable and eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid eighteenth century, such an ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and scandalous hypocrisies, as never weltered in the world before; and that in everything i can find yet written or recorded of him, he still, to all intents and purposes, most tragically _lies_ there;--and ought not to lie there, if any use is ever to be had of him, or at least of _writing_ about him; for as to him, he with his work is safe enough to us, far elsewhere.--pity me, pity me; i know not on what hand to turn; and have such a chaos filling all my earth and heaven as was seldom seen in british or foreign literature! add to which, the sacred entity, literature itself, is not growing more venerable to me, but less and ever less: good heavens, i feel often as if there were no madder set of bladders tumbling on the billows of the general bedlam at this moment than even the literary ones,--dear at twopence a gross, i should say, unless one could _annihilate_ them by purchase on those easy terms! but do not tell this in gath; let it be a sad family secret. i smile, with a kind of grave joy, over your american speculations, and wild dashing portraitures of things as they are with you; and recognize well, under your light caricature, the outlines of a right true picture, which has often made me sad and grim in late years. yes, i consider that the "battle of freedom and slavery" is very far from ended; and that the fate of poor "freedom" in the quarrel is very questionable indeed! alas, there is but one _slavery,_ as i wrote somewhere; and that, i think, is mounting towards a height, which may bring strokes to bear upon it again! meanwhile, patience; for us there is nothing else appointed.--tell me, however, what has become of your book on england? we shall really be obliged to you for that. a piece of it went through all the newspapers, some years ago; which was really unique for its quaint kindly insight, humor, and other qualities; like an etching by hollar or durer, amid the continents of vile smearing which are called "pictures" at present. come on, come on; give us the book, and don't loiter!-miss bacon has fled away to _st. alban's_ (the _great_ bacon's place) five or six months ago; and is there working out her shakespeare problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of all _evidence_ from museums or archives; i have not had an answer from her since before christmas, and have now lost her address. poor lady: i sometimes silently wish she were safe home again; for truly there can no madder enterprise than her present one be well figured. adieu, my friend; i must stop short here. write soon, if you have any charity. good be with you ever. --t. carlyle clvi. emerson to carlyle concord, 17 april, 1855 my dear friend,--on this delicious spring day, i will obey the beautiful voices of the winds, long disobeyed, and address you; nor cloud the hour by looking at the letters in my drawer to know if a twelvemonth has been allowed to elapse since this tardy writing was due. mr. everett sent me one day a letter he had received from you, containing a kind message to me, which gave me pleasure and pain. i returned the letter with thanks, and with promises i would sin no more. instantly, i was whisked, by "the stormy wing of fate," out of my chain, and whirled, like a dry leaf, through the state of new york. now at home again, i read english newspapers, with all the world, and claim an imaginary privilege over my compatriots, that i revolve therein my friend's large part. ward said to me yesterday, that carlyle's star was daily rising. for c. had said years ago, when all men thought him mad, that which the rest of mortals, including the times newspaper, have at last got near enough to see with eyes, and therefore to believe. and one day, in philadelphia, you should have heard the wise young philip randolph defend you against objections of mine. but when i have such testimony, i say to myself, the high-seeing austerely exigent friend whom i elected, and who elected me, twenty years and more ago, finds me heavy and silent, when all the world elects and loves him. yet i have not changed. i have the same pride in his genius, the same sympathy with the genius that governs his, the old love with the old limitations, though love and limitation be all untold. and i see well what a piece of providence he is, how material he is to the times, which must always have a solo soprano to balance the roar of the orchestra. the solo sings the theme; the orchestra roars antagonistically but follows.--and have i not put him into my chapter of "english spiritual tendencies," with all thankfulness to the eternal creator,--though the chapter lie unborn in a trunk? 't is fine for us to excuse ourselves, and patch with promises. we shall do as before, and science is a fatalist. i follow, i find, the fortunes of my country, in my privatest ways. an american is pioneer and man of all work, and reads up his newspaper on saturday night, as farmers and foresters do. we admire the [greek], and mean to give our boys the grand habit; but we only sketch what they may do. no leisure except for the strong, the nimble have none.--i ought to tell you what i do, or i ought to have to tell you what i have done. but what can i? the same concession to the levity of the times, the noise of america comes again. i have even run on wrong topics for my parsimonious muse, and waste my time from my true studies. england i see as a roaring volcano of fate, which threatens to roast or smother the poor literary plinys that come too near for mere purpose of reporting. i have even fancied you did me a harm by the valued gift of antony wood;--which, and the like of which, i take a lotophagous pleasure in eating. yet this is measuring after appearance, measuring on hours and days; the true measure is quite other, for life takes its color and quality not from the days, but the dawns. the lucid intervals are like drowning men's moments, equivalent to the foregoing years. besides, nature uses us. we live but little for ourselves, a good deal for our children, and strangers. each man is one more lump of clay to hold the world together. it is in the power of the spirit meantime to make him rich reprisals,--which he confides will somewhere be done.--ah, my friend, you have better things to send me word of, than these musings of indolence. is frederic recreated? is frederic the great? forget my short-comings and write to me. miss bacon sends me word, again and again, of your goodness. against hope and sight she must be making a remarkable book. i have a letter from her, a few days ago, written in perfect assurance of success! kindest remembrances to your wife and to your brother. yours faithfully, r.w. emerson clvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 18 may, 1855 dear emerson,--last sunday, clough was here; and we were speaking about you, (much to your discredit, you need not doubt,) and how stingy in the way of letters you were grown; when, next morning, your letter itself made its appearance. thanks, thanks. you know not in the least, i perceive, nor can be made to understand at all, how indispensable your letters are to me. how you are, and have for a long time been, the one of all the sons of adam who, i felt, completely understood what i was saying; and answered with a truly _human_ voice,--inexpressibly consolatory to a poor man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the evening of the day! so many voices are not human; but more or less bovine, porcine, canine; and one's soul dies away in sorrow in the sound of them, and is reduced to a dialogue with the "silences," which is of a very abstruse nature!--well, whether you write to me or not, i reserve to myself the privilege of writing to you, so long as we both continue in this world! as the beneficent presences vanish from me, one after the other, those that remain are the more precious, and i will not part with them, not with the chief of them, beyond all. this last year has been a grimmer lonelier one with me than any i can recollect for a long time. i did not go to the country at all in summer or winter; refused even my christmas at the grange with the ashburtons,--it was too sad an anniversary for me;--i have sat here in my garret, wriggling and wrestling on the worst terms with a task that i cannot do, that generally seems to me not worth doing, and yet _must_ be _done._ these are truly the terms. i never had such a business in my life before. frederick himself is a pretty little man to me, veracious, courageous, invincible in his small sphere; but he does not rise into the empyrean regions, or kindle my heart round him at all; and his history, upon which there are wagon-loads of dull bad books, is the most dislocated, unmanageably incoherent, altogether dusty, barren and beggarly production of the modern muses as given hitherto. no man of _genius_ ever saw him with eyes, except twice mirabeau, for half an hour each time. and the wretched books have no _indexes,_ no precision of detail; and i am far away from berlin and the seat of information;--and, in brief, shall be beaten miserably with this unwise enterprise in my old days; _and_ (in fine) will consent to be so, and get through it if i can before i die. this of obstinacy is the one quality i still show; all my other qualities (hope, among them) often seem to have pretty much taken leave of me; but it is necessary to hold by this last. pray for me; i will complain no more at present. general washington gained the freedom of america-chiefly by this respectable quality i talk of; nor can a history of frederick be written, in chelsea in the year 1855, except as _against_ hope, and by planting yourself upon it in an extremely dogged manner. we are all wool-gathering here, with wide eyes and astonished minds, at a singular rate, since you heard last from me! "balaklava," i can perceive, is likely to be a substantive in the english language henceforth: it in truth expresses compendiously what an earnest mind will experience everywhere in english life; if his soul rise at all above cotton and scrip, a man has to pronounce it all a _balaklava_ these many years. a balaklava now _yielding,_ under the pressure of rains and unexpected transit of heavy wagons; champing itself down into mere mud-gulfs,--towards the bottomless pool, if some flooring be not found. to me it is not intrinsically a new phenomenon, only an extremely hideous one. _altum silentium,_ what else can i reply to it at present? the turk war, undertaken under pressure of the mere mobility, seemed to me an enterprise worthy of bedlam from the first; and this method of carrying it on, _without_ any general, or with a mere sash and cocked-hat for one, is of the same block of stuff. _ach gott!_ is not anarchy, and parliamentary eloquence instead of work, continued for half a century everywhere, a beautiful piece of business? we are in alliance with louis napoleon (a gentleman who has shown only _housebreaker_ qualities hitherto, and is required now to show heroic ones, _or_ go to the devil); and under marechal saint-arnaud (who was once a dancing-master in this city, and continued a _thief_ in all cities), a commander of the playactor-pirate description, resembling a _general_ as alexander dumas does dante alighieri,--we have got into a very strange problem indeed!--but there is something almost grand in the stubborn thickside patience and persistence of this english people; and i do not question but they will work themselves through in one fashion or another; nay probably, get a great deal of benefit out of this astonishing slap on the nose to their self-complacency before all the world. they have not _done_ yet, i calculate, by any manner of means: they are, however, admonished in an ignominious and convincing manner, amid the laughter of nations, that they are altogether on the wrong road this great while (two hundred years, as i have been calculating often),--and i shudder to think of the plunging and struggle they will have to get into the approximately right one again. pray for them also, poor stupid overfed heavy-laden souls!--before my paper quite end, i must in my own name, and that of a select company of others, inquire rigorously of r.w.e. why he does not _give_ us that little book on england he has promised so long? i am very serious in saying, i myself want much to see it;--and that i can see no reason why we all should not, without delay. bring it out, i say, and print it, _tale quale._ you will never get it in the least like what _you_ wish it, clearly no! but i venture to warrant, it is good enough,--far too good for the readers that are to get it. such a pack of blockheads, and disloyal and bewildered unfortunates who know not their right hand from their left, as fill me with astonishment, and are more and more forfeiting all respect from me. publish the book, i say; let us have it and so have done! adieu, my dear friend, for this time. i had a thousand things more to write, but have wasted my sheet, and must end. i will take another before long, whatever you do. in my lonely thoughts you are never long absent: _valete_ all of you at concord! --t. carlyle clviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 6 may, 1856 dear carlyle,--there is no escape from the forces of time and life, and we do not write letters to the gods or to our friends, but only to attorneys, landlords, and tenants. but the planes and platforms on which all stand remain the same, and we are ever expecting the descent of the heavens, which is to put us into familiarity with the first named. when i ceased to write to you for a long time, i said to myself,--if anything really good should happen here,--any stroke of good sense or virtue in our politics, or of great sense in a book,--i will send it on the instant to the formidable man; but i will not repeat to him every month, that there are no news. thank me for my resolution, and for keeping it through the long night.--one book, last summer, came out in new york, a nondescript monster which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably american,--which i thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom i showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that i never did. yet i believe now again, i shall. it is called _leaves of grass,_--was written and printed by a journeyman printer in brooklyn, new york, named walter whitman; and after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe with it. by tomorrow's steamer goes mrs. --to liverpool, and to switzerland and germany, by the advice of physicians, and i cannot let her go without praying you to drop your pen, and shut up german history for an hour, and extend your walk to her chambers, wherever they may be. _there's_ a piece of republicanism for you to see and hear! that person was, ten or fifteen years ago, the loveliest of women, and her speech and manners may still give you some report of the same. she has always lived with good people, and in her position is a centre of what is called good society, wherein her large heart makes a certain glory and refinement. she is one of nature's ladies, and when i hear her tell i know not what stories of her friends, or her children, or her pensioners, i find a pathetic eloquence which i know not where to match. but i suppose you shall never hear it. every american is a little displaced in london, and, no doubt, her company has grown to her. her husband is a banker connected in business with your ---, and is a man of elegant genius and tastes, and his house is a resort for fine people. thorwaldsen distinguished mrs. --in rome, formerly, by his attentions. powers the sculptor made an admirable bust of her; clough and thackeray will tell you of her. jenny lind, like the rest, was captivated by her, and was married at her house. is not henry james in london? he knows her well. if tennyson comes to london, whilst she is there, he should see her for his "lays of good women." now please to read these things to the wise and kind ears of jane carlyle, and ask her if i have done wrong in giving my friend a letter to her? i could not ask more than that each of those ladies might appear to the other what each has appeared to me. i saw thackeray, in the winter, and he said he would come and see me here, in april or may; but he is still, i believe, in the south and west. do not believe me for my reticency less hungry for letters. i grieve at the want and loss, and am about writing again, that i may hear from you. ever affectionately yours, r.w. emerson clix. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 20 july, 1856 dear emerson;--welcome was your letter to me, after the long interval; as welcome as any human letter could now well be. these many months and years i have been sunk in what disastrous vortexes of foreign wreck you know, till i am fallen sick and almost broken-hearted, and my life (if it were not this one interest, of doing a problem which i see to be impossible, and of smallish value if found doable!) is burdensome and without meaning to me. it is so rarely i hear the voice of a magnanimous brother man addressing any word to me: ninety-nine hundredths of the letters i get are impertinent clutchings of me by the button, concerning which the one business is, how to get handsomely loose again; what to say that shall soonest _end_ the intrusion,--if saying nothing will not be the best way. which last i often in my sorrow have recourse to, at what ever known risks. "we must pay our tribute to time": ah yes, yes;--and yet i will believe, so long as we continue together in this sphere of things there will always be a _potential_ letter coming out of new england for me, and the world not fallen irretrievably dumb.--the best is, i am about going into scotland, in two days, into deep solitude, for a couple of months beside the solway sea: i absolutely need to have the dust blown out of me, and my mad nerves rested (there is nothing else quite gone wrong): this unblest _life of frederick_ is now actually to get along into the printer's hand; --a good book being impossible upon it, there shall a bad one be done, and one's poor existence rid of it:--for which great object two months of voluntary torpor are considered the fair preliminary. in another year's time, (if the fates allow me to live,) i expect to have got a great deal of rubbish swept into chaos again. unlucky it should ever have been dug up, much of it!-your mrs. --should have had our best welcome, for the sake of him who sent her, had there been nothing more: but the lady never showed face at all; nor could i for a long time get any trace--and then it was a most faint and distant one as if by _double_ reflex--of her whereabout: too distant, too difficult for me, who do not make a call once in the six months lately. i did mean to go in quest (never had an _address_); but had not yet rallied for the enterprise, when mrs. --herself wrote that she had been unwell, that she was going directly for paris, and would see us on her return. so be it:--pray only i may not be absent next! i have not seen or distinctly heard of miss bacon for a year and half past: i often ask myself, what has become of that poor lady, and wish i knew of her being safe among her friends again. i have even lost the address (which at any rate was probably not a lasting one); perhaps i could find it by the eye,--but it is five miles away; and my _non-plus-ultra_ for years past is not above half that distance. heigho! my time is all up and more; and chaos come again is lying round me, in the shape of "packing," in a thousand shapes!--browning is coming tonight to take leave. do you know browning at all? he is abstruse, but worth knowing.--and what of the _discourse on england_ by a certain man? shame! we always hear of it again as "out"; and it continues obstinately _in._ adieu, my friend. ever yours, t. carlyle clx. carlyle to emerson the gill, cummertrees, annan, n.b. 28 august, 1856 dear emerson,--your letter alighted here yesterday;* like a winged mercury, bringing "airs from heaven" (in a sense) along with his news. i understand very well your indisposition to write; we must conform to it, as to the law of _chronos_ (oldest of the gods); but i will murmur always, "it is such a pity as of almost no other man!"--you are citizen of a "republic," and perhaps fancy yourself republican in an eminent degree: nevertheless i have remarked there is no man of whom i am so certain always to get something _kingly:_--and whenever your huge inarticulate america gets settled into _kingdoms,_ of the new model, fit for these ages which are all upon the _moult_ just now, and dreadfully like going to the devil in the interim,--then will america, and all nations through her, owe the man emerson a _debt,_ far greater than either they or he are in the least aware of at present! that i consider (for myself) to be an ascertained fact. for which i myself at least am thankful and have long been. --------* it is missing now. --------it pleases me much to know that this english [book], so long twinkling in our expectations and always drawn back again, is at last verily to appear: i wish i could get hold of my copy: there is no book that would suit me better just now. but we must wait for four weeks till we get back to chelsea,--unless i call find some trusty hand to extract it from the rubbish that will have accumulated there, and forward it by post. you speak as if there were something dreadful said of my own sacred self in that book: courage, my friend, it will be a most miraculous occurrence to meet with anything said by you that does me _ill;_ whether the immediate taste of it be sweet or bitter, i will take it with gratitude, you may depend,--nay even with pleasure, what perhaps is still more incredible. but an old man deluged for half a century with the brutally nonsensical vocables of his fellow-creatures (which he grows to regard soon as _rain,_ "rain of frogs" or the like, and lifts his umbrella against with indifference),--such an old gentleman, i assure you, is grateful for a word that he can recognize perennial sense in; as in this case is his sure hope. and so be the little book thrice welcome; and let all england understand (as some choice portion of england will) that there has not been a man talking about us these very many years whose words are worth the least attention in comparison. "post passing!" i must end, in mid-course; so much still untouched upon. thanks for sampson & co., and let them go their course upon me. if i can see mrs. --about the end of september or after, i shall be right glad:--but i fear she will have fled before that?-i am here in my native country, riding, seabathing, living on country diet,--uttering no word,--now into the fifth week; have had such a "retreat" as no la trappe hardly could have offered me. a "retreat" _without cilices,_ thistle-mattresses; and with _silent_ devotions (if any) instead of blockhead spoken ones to the virgin and others! there is still an excursion to the highlands ahead, which cannot be avoided;--then home again to _peine forte et dure._ good be with you always, dear friend. --t. carlyle clxi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 2 december, 1856 dear emerson,--i am really grieved to have hurt the feelings of mr. phillips;* a gentleman to whom i, on my side, had no feelings but those of respect and good will! i pray you smooth him down again, by all wise methods, into at least good-natured indifference to me. he may depend upon it i could not mean to irritate him; there lay no gain for me in that! nor is there anything of business left now between us. it is doubly and trebly evident those stereotype plates are not to him worth their prime cost here, still less, their prime cost plus any vestige of definite motive for me to concern myself in them:--whereupon the project falls on its face, and vanishes forever, with apologies all round. for as to that other method, that is a game i never thought, and never should think of playing at! you may also tell him this little biographical fact, if you think it will any way help. some ten or more years ago, i made a similar bargain with a new york house (known to you, and now i believe extinct): "10" or something "percent," of selling price on the copies printed, was to be my return--not for four or five hundred pounds money laid out, but for various things i did, which gratis would by no means have been done; in fine, it was their own offer, made and accepted in due form; "10 percent on the copies printed." --------* this refers to a proposed arrangement, which fell through, for the publication in america by messrs. phillips and sampson, of boston, of a complete edition of carlyle's works, to be printed from the stereotype plates of the english edition then in course of issue by messrs. chapman and hall. --------and how many were "printed," thinks mr. phillips? i saw one set; dreadfully ugly books, errors in every page;--and to this hour i have never heard of any other! the amount remains zero net; and it would appear there was simply one copy "printed," the ugly one sent to myself, which i instantly despatched again somewhither! on second thought perhaps you had better _not_ tell mr. phillips this story, at least not in this way. _his_ integrity i would not even question by insinuation, nor need i, at the point where we now are. i perceive he sees in extraordinary brilliancy of illumination his own side of the bargain; and thinks me ignorant of several things which i am well enough informed about. in brief, make a perfect peace between us, o friend, and man of peace; and let the wampums be all wrapped up, and especially the tomahawks entirely buried, and the thing end forever! to you also i owe apologies; but not to you do i pay them, knowing from of old what you are to me. enough, enough! i got your book by post in the highlands; and had such a day over it as falls rarely to my lot! not for seven years and more have i got hold of such a book;--book by a real man, with eyes in his head; nobleness, wisdom, humor, and many other things, in the heart of him. such books do not turn up often in the decade, in the century. in fact i believe it to be worth all the books ever written by new england upon old. franklin might have written such a thing (in his own way); no other since! we do very well with it here, and the wise part of us _best._ that chapter on the church is inimitable; "the bishop asking a troublesome gentleman to take wine,"--you should see the kind of grin it awakens here on our best kind of faces. excellent the manner of that, and the matter too dreadfully _true_ in every part. i do not much seize your idea in regard to "literature," though i do details of it, and will try again. glad of that too, even in its half state; not "sorry" at _any_ part of it,--you sceptic! on the whole, write _again,_ and ever again at greater length: there lies your only fault to me. and yet i know, that also is a right noble one, and rare in our day. o my friend, save always for me some corner in your memory; i am very lonely in these months and years,--sunk to the centre of the earth, like to be throttled by the pythons and mudgods in my old days;--but shall get out again, too; and be a better boy! no "hurry" equals mine, and it is in permanence. yours ever, t. carlyle clxii. emerson to carlyle concord, 17 may, 1858 my dear carlyle,--i see no way for you to avoid the americans but to come to america. for, first or last, we are all embarking, and all steering straight to your door. mr. and mrs. joseph longworth of cincinnati are going abroad on their travels. possibly, the name is not quite unknown to you. their father, nicholas longworth, is one of the founders of the city of cincinnati, a bigger town than boston, where he is a huge land lord and planter, and patron of sculptors and painters. and his family are most favorably known to all dwellers and strangers, in the ohio valley, as people who have well used their great wealth. his chief merit is to have introduced a systematic culture of the wine-grape and wine manufacture, by the importing and settlement of german planters in that region, and the trade is thriving to the general benefit. his son joseph is a well-bred gentleman of literary tastes, whose position and good heart make him largely hospitable. his wife is a very attractive and excellent woman, and they are good friends of mine. it seems i have at some former time told her that, when she went to england, she should see you. and they are going abroad, soon, for the first time. if you are in london, you must be seen of them. but i hailed even this need of taxing once more your often taxed courtesy, as a means to break up my long contumacy to-you-ward. please let not the wires be rusted out, so that we cannot weld them again, and let me feel the subtle fluid streaming strong. tell me what is become of _frederic,_ for whose appearance i have watched every week for months? i am better ready for him, since one or two books about voltaire, maupertuis, and company, fell in my way. yet that book will not come which i most wish to read, namely, the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a _liber veritatis,_ a few sentences, hints of the final moral you drew from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men. all writing is necessitated to be exoteric, and written to a human should instead of to the terrible is. and i say this to you, because you are the truest and bravest of writers. every writer is a skater, who must go partly where he would, and partly, where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where sails can be safely blown. the variations to be allowed for in the surveyor's compass are nothing like so large as those that must be allowed for in every book. and a friendship of old gentlemen who have got rid of many illusions, survived their ambition, and blushes, and passion for euphony, and surface harmonies, and tenderness for their accidental literary stores, but have kept all their curiosity and awe touching the problems of man and fate and the cause of causes,--a friendship of old gentlemen of this fortune is looking more comely and profitable than anything i have read of love. such a dream flatters my incapacities for conversation, for we can all play at monosyllables, who cannot attempt the gay pictorial panoramic styles. so, if ever i hear that you have betrayed the first symptom of age, that your back is bent a twentieth of an inch from the perpendicular, i shall hasten to believe you are shearing your prodigal overgrowths, and are calling in your troops to the citadel, and i may come in the first steamer to drop in of evenings and hear the central monosyllables. be good now again, and send me quickly--though it be the shortest autograph certificate of....* -------* the end of this letter is lost. -------clxiii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 2 june, 1858 dear emerson,--glad indeed i am to hear of you on any terms, on any subject. for the last eighteen months i have pretty much ceased all human correspondence,--writing no note that was not in a sense wrung from me; my one society the _nightmares_ (prussian and other) all that while:--but often and often the image of you, and the thoughts of old days between us, has risen sad upon me; and i have waited to get loose from the nightmares to appeal to you again,--to edacious time and you. most likely in a couple of weeks you would have heard from me again at any rate.--your friends shall be welcome to me; no friend of yours can be other at any time. nor in fact did anybody ever sent by you prove other than pleasant in this house, so pray no apologies on that small score.--if only these cincinnati patricians can find me here when they come? for i am off to the deepest solitudes discoverable (native scotland probably) so soon as i can shake the final tag rags of printer people off me;--"surely within three weeks now!" i say to myself. but i shall be back, too, if all prosper; and your longworths will be back; and madam will stand to her point, i hope. that book on friedrich of prussia--first half of it, two swoln unlovely volumes, which treat mainly of his father, &c., and leave him at his accession--is just getting out of my hands. one packet more of proofs, and i have done with it,--thanks to all the gods! no job approaching in ugliness to it was ever cut out for me; nor had i any motive to go on, except the sad negative one, "shall we be beaten in our old days, then?"--but it has thoroughly humbled me,--trampled me down into the _mud,_ there to wrestle with the accumulated stupidities of mankind, german, english, french, and other, for _all_ have borne a hand in these sad centuries;--and here i emerge at last, not _killed,_ but almost as good. seek not to look at the book,--nay in fact it is "not to be _published_ till september" (so the man of affairs settles with me yesterday, "owing to the political &c., to the season," &c.); my only stipulation was that in ten days i should be utterly out of it,--not to hear of it again till the day of judgment, and if possible not even then! in fact it is a bad book, poor, misshapen, feeble, _nearly_ worthless (thanks to _past_ generations and to me); and my one excuse is, i could not make it better, all the world having played such a game with it. well, well!--how true is that you say about the skater; and the rider too depending on his vehicles, on his roads, on his et ceteras! dismally true have i a thousand times felt it, in these late operations; never in any so much. and in short the business of writing has altogether become contemptible to me; and i am become confirmed in the notion that nobody ought to write,--unless sheer fate force him to do it;--and then he ought (if _not_ of the mountebank genus) to beg to be shot rather. that is deliberately my opinion,--or far nearer it than you will believe. once or twice i caught some tone of you in some american magazine; utterances highly noteworthy to me; in a sense, the only thing that is _speech_ at all among my fellow-creatures in this time. for the years that remain, i suppose we must continue to grumble out some occasional utterance of that kind: what can we do, at this late stage? but in the _real_ "model republic," it would have been different with two good boys of this kind!-though shattered and trampled down to an immense degree, i do not think any bones are broken yet,--though age truly is here, and you may engage your berth in the steamer whenever you like. in a few months i expect to be sensibly improved; but my poor wife suffers sadly the last two winters; and i am much distressed by that item of our affairs. adieu, dear emerson: i have lost many things; let me not lose you till i must in some way! yours ever, t. carlyle p.s. if you read the newspapers (which i carefully abstain from doing) they will babble to you about dickens's "separation from wife," &c., &c.; fact of separation i believe is true; but all the rest is mere lies and nonsense. no crime or misdemeanor specifiable on either side; _unhappy_ together, these good many years past, and they at length end it.--sulzer said, "men are by nature _good._" "ach, mein lieber sulzer, er kennt nicht diese verdammte race," ejaculated fritz, at hearing such an axiom. clxiii.* carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 9 april, 1859 dear emerson,--long months ago there was sent off for you a copy of _friedrich_ of prussia, two big red volumes (for which chapman the publisher had found some "safe, swift" vehicle); and _now_ i have reason to fear they are still loitering somewhere, or at least have long loitered sorrow on them! this is to say: if you have not _yet_ got them, address a line to "saml. f. flower, esq, librarian of antiquarian society, _worcester,_ mass." (forty miles from you, they say), and that will at once bring them. in the devil's name! i never in my life was so near choked; swimming in this mother of dead dogs, and a long spell of it still ahead! i profoundly _pity myself_ (if no one else does). you shall hear of me again if i survive,--but really that is getting beyond a joke with me, and i ought to hold my peace (even to you), and swim what i can. your little touch of human speech on _burns'_* was charming; had got into the papers here (and been clipt out by me) before your copy came, and has gone far and wide since. newberg was to give it me in german, from the _allgemeine zeitung,_ but lost the leaf. adieu, my friend; very dear to me, tho' dumb. --t. carlyle (in such haste as seldom was).** --------* emerson's fine speech was made at the celebration of the burns centenary, boston, january 25, 1859. see his _miscellanies_ (works, vol. xi.), p. 363. ** the preceding letter was discovered in 1893, in a little package of letters put aside by mr. emerson and marked "autographs." --------clxiv. emerson to carlyle* concord, 1 may, 1859 dear carlyle,--some three weeks ago came to me a note from mr. haven of worcester, announcing the arrival there of "king friedrich," and, after a fortnight, the good book came to my door. a week later, your letter arrived. i was heartily glad to get the crimson book itself. i had looked for it with the first ships. as it came not, i had made up my mind to that hap also. it was quite fair: i had disentitled myself. he, the true friend, had every right to punish me for my sluggish contumacy,-backsliding, too, after penitence. so i read with resignation our blue american reprint, and i enclose to you a leaf from my journal at the time, which leaf i read afterwards in one of my lectures at the music hall in boston. but the book came from the man himself. he did not punish me. he is loyal, but royal as well, and, i have always noted, has a whim for dealing _en grand monarque._ the book came, with its irresistible inscription, so that i am all tenderness and all but tears. the book too is sovereignly written. i think you the true inventor of the stereoscope, as having exhibited that art in style, long before we had heard of it in drawing. ------* this letter and the extract from the diary are printed from a copy of the original supplied to me by the kindness of mr. alexander ireland, who first printed a portion of the letter in his "ralph waldo emerson, a biographical sketch," london, 1882. one or two words missing in the copy are inserted from the rough draft, which, as usual, varies in minor points from the letter as sent. -------the letter came also. every child of mine knows from far that handwriting, and brings it home with speed. i read without alarm the pathetical hints of your sad plight in the german labyrinth. i know too well what invitations and assurance brought you in there, to fear any lack of guides to bring you out. more presence of mind and easy change from the microscopic to the telescopic view does not exist. i await peacefully your issue from your pretended afflictions. what to tell you of my coop and byre? ah! you are a very poor fellow, and must be left with your glory. you hug yourself on missing the illusion of children, and must be pitied as having one glittering toy the less. i am a victim all my days to certain graces of form and behavior, and can never come into equilibrium. now i am fooled by my own young people, and grow old contented. the heedless children suddenly take the keenest hold on life, and foolish papas cling to the world on their account, as never on their own. out of sympathy, we _make believe_ to value the prizes of their ambition and hope. my, two girls, pupils once or now of agassiz, are good, healthy, apprehensive, decided young people, who love life. my boy divides his time between cicero and cricket, knows his boat, the birds, and walter scott--verse and prose, through and through,-and will go to college next year. sam ward and i tickled each other the other day, in looking over a very good company of young people, by finding in the new comers a marked improvement on their parents. there, i flatter myself, i see some emerging of our people from the prison of their politics. the insolvency of slavery shows and stares, and we shall perhaps live to see that putrid black-vomit extirpated by mere dying and planting. i am so glad to find myself speaking once more to you, that i mean to persist in the practice. be as glad as you have been. you and i shall not know each other on this platform as long as we have known. a correspondence even of twenty-five years should not be disused unless through some fatal event. life is too short, and, with all our poetry and morals, too indigent to allow such sacrifices. eyes so old and wary, and which have learned to look on so much, are gathering an hourly harvest,--and i cannot spare what on noble terms is offered me. with congratulations to jane carlyle on the grandeur of the book, yours affectionately, r.w. emerson extract from diary* here has come into the country, three or four months ago, a _history of frederick,_ infinitely the wittiest book that ever was written,--a book that one would think the english people would rise up in mass and thank the author for, by cordial acclamation, and signify, by crowning him with oakleaves, their joy that such a head existed among them, and sympathizing and much-reading america would make a new treaty or send a minister extraordinary to offer congratulation of honoring delight to england, in acknowledgment of this donation,--a book holding so many memorable and heroic facts, working directly on practice; with new heroes, things unvoiced before;--the german plutarch (now that we have exhausted the greek and roman and british plutarchs), with a range, too, of thought and wisdom so large and so elastic, not so much applying as inosculating to every need and sensibility of man, that we do not read a stereotype page, rather we see the eyes of the writer looking into ours, mark his behavior, humming, chuckling, with under-tones and trumpet-tones and shrugs, and long-commanding glances, stereoscoping every figure that passes, and every hill, river, road, hummock, and pebble in the long perspective. with its wonderful new system of mnemonics, whereby great and insignificant men are ineffaceably ticketed and marked and modeled in memory by what they were, had, and did; and withal a book that is a judgment day, for its moral verdict on the men and nations and manners of modern times. --------* in the first edition, this extract was printed from the original diary; it is now printed according to the copy sent abroad. -------and this book makes no noise; i have hardly seen a notice of it in any newspaper or journal, and you would think there was no such book. i am not aware that mr. buchanan has sent a special messenger to great cheyne row, chelsea, or that mr. dallas has been instructed to assure mr. carlyle of his distinguished consideration. but the secret wits and hearts of men take note of it, not the less surely. they have said nothing lately in praise of the air, or of fire, or of the blessing of love, and yet, i suppose, they are sensible of these, and not less of this book, which is like these. clxv. emerson to carlyle concord, 16 april, 1860 my dear carlyle,--can booksellers break the seal which the gods do not, and put me in communication again with the loyalest of men? on the ground of mr. wight's honest proposal to give you a benefit from his edition,* i, though unwilling, allowed him to copy the daguerre of your head. the publishers ask also some expression of your good will to their work.... -------* mr. o.w. wight of new york, an upright "able editor," who, had just made arrangements for the publication of a very satisfactory edition of carlyle's _miscellaneous essays._ -------i commend you to the gods who love and uphold you, and who do not like to make their great gifts vain, but teach us that the best life-insurance is a great task. i hold you to be one of those to whom all is permitted, and who carry the laws in their hand. continue to be good to your old friends. 't is no matter whether they write to you or not. if not, they save your time. when _friedrich_ is once despatched to gods and men, there was once some talk that you should come to america! you shall have an ovation such, and on such sincerity, as none have had. ever affectionately yours, r.w. emerson i do not know mr. wight, but he sends his open letter, which i fear is already old, for me to write in: and i will not keep it, lest it lose another steamer. clxvi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 30 april, 1860 dear emerson,--it is a special favor of heaven to me that i hear of you again by this accident; and am made to answer a word _de profundis._ it is constantly among the fairest of the few hopes that remain for me on the other side of this stygian abyss of a _friedrich_ (should i ever get through it alive) that i _shall then_ begin writing to you again, who knows if not see you in the body before quite taking wing! for i feel always, what i have some times written, that there is (in a sense) but one completely human voice to me in the world; and that you are it, and have been,--thanks to you, whether you speak or not! let me say also, while i am at it, that the few words you sent me about those first two volumes are present with me in the far more frightful darknesses of these last two; and indeed are often almost my one encouragement. that is a fact, and not exaggerated, though you think it is. i read some criticisms of my wretched book, and hundreds of others i in the gross refused to read; they were in praise, they were in blame; but not one of them looked into the eyes of the object, and in genuine human fashion responded to its human strivings, and recognized it,--completely right, though with generous exaggeration! that was well done, i can tell you: a human voice, far out in the waste deeps, among the inarticulate sea-krakens and obscene monsters, loud-roaring, inexpressibly ugly, dooming you as if to eternal solitude by way of wages,-"hath exceeding much refreshment in it," as my friend oliver used to say. having not one spare moment at present, i will answer to _you_ only the whole contents of that letter; you in your charity will convey to mr. wight what portion belongs to him. wight, if you have a chance of him, is worth knowing; a genuine bit of metal, too thin and ringing for my tastes (hammered, in fact, upon the yankee anvils), but recognizably of steel and with a keen fireedge. pray signify to him that he has done a thing agreeable to me, and that it will be pleasant if i find it will not hurt _him._ profit to me out of it, except to keep his own soul clear and sound (to his own sense, as it always will be to mine), is perfectly indifferent; and on the whole i thank him heartily for showing me a chivalrous human brother, instead of the usual vulturous, malodorous, and much avoidable phenomenon, in transatlantic bibliopoly! this is accurately true; and so far as his publisher and he can extract encouragement from this, in the face of vested interests which i cannot judge of, it is theirs without reserve.... adieu, my friend; i have not written so much in the letter way, not, i think, since you last heard of me. in my despair it often seems as if i should never write more; but be sunk here, and perish miserably in the most undoable, least worthy, most disgusting and heart breaking of all the labors i ever had. but perhaps also not, not quite. in which case-yours ever truly at any rate, t. carlyle no time to re-read. i suppose you can decipher. clxvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 29 january, 1861 dear emerson,--the sight of my hand-writing will, i know, be welcome again. though i literally do not write the smallest note once in a month, or converse with anything but prussian nightmares of a hideous [nature], and with my horse (who is human in comparison), and with my poor wife (who is altogether human, and heroically cheerful to me, in her poor weak state),--i must use the five minutes, which have fallen to me today, in acknowledgment, _du_e by all laws terrestrial and celestial, of the last book* that has come from you. -------* "the conduct of life." -------i read it a great while ago, mostly in sheets, and again read it in the finely printed form,--i can tell you, if you do not already guess, with a satisfaction given me by the books of no other living mortal. i predicted to your english bookseller a great sale even, reckoning it the best of all your books. what the sale was or is i nowhere learned; but the basis of my prophecy remains like the rocks, and will remain. indeed, except from my brother john, i have heard no criticism that had much rationality,--some of them incredibly irrational (if that matter had not altogether become a barking of dogs among us);--but i always believe there are in the mute state a great number of thinking english souls, who can recognize a thinker and a sayer, of perennially human type and welcome him as the rarest of miracles, in "such a spread of knowledge" as there now is:--one english soul of that kind there indubitably is; and i certify hereby, notarially if you like, that such is emphatically his view of the matter. you have grown older, more pungent, piercing;--i never read from you before such lightning-gleams of meaning as are to be found here. 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! _well done,_ i say; and so let that matter rest. i am still twelve months or so from the end of my task; very uncertain often whether i can, even at this snail's pace, hold out so long. in my life i was never worn nearly so low, and seem to get _weaker_ monthly. courage! if i do get through, you shall hear of me, again. yours forever, t. carlyle clxviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 16 april, 1861 my dear carlyle,--...i have to thank you for the cordial note which brought me joy, many weeks ago. it was noble and welcome in all but its boding account of yourself and your task. but i have had experience of your labors, and these deplorations i have long since learned to distrust. we have settled it in america, as i doubt not it is settled in england, that _frederick_ is a history which a beneficent providence is not very likely to interrupt. and may every kind and tender influence near you and over you keep the best head in england from all harm. affectionately, r.w. emerson clxix. emerson to carlyle* concord, 8 december, 1862 my dear friend,--long ago, as soon as swift steamers could bring the new book across the sea, i received the third volume of _friedrich,_ with your autograph inscription, and read it with joy. not a word went to the beloved author, for i do not write or think. i would wait perhaps for happier days, as our president lincoln will not even emancipate slaves, until on the heels of a victory, or the semblance of such. but he waited in vain for his triumph, nor dare i in my heavy months expect bright days. the book was heartily grateful, and square to the author's imperial scale. you have lighted the glooms, and engineered away the pits, whereof you poetically pleased yourself with complaining, in your sometime letter to me, clean out of it, according to the high italian rule, and have let sunshine and pure air enfold the scene. first, i read it honestly through for the history; then i pause and speculate on the muse that inspires, and the friend that reports it. 't is sovereignly written, above all literature, dictating to all mortals what they shall accept as fated and final for their salvation. it is mankind's bill of rights and duties, the royal proclamation of intellect ascending the throne, announcing its good pleasure, that, hereafter, _as heretofore,_ and now once for all, the world shall be governed by common sense and law of morals, or shall go to ruin. --------* portions of this and of the following letter of emerson have been printed by mr. alexander ireland in his "ralph waldo emerson: recollections of his visits to england," &c. london, 1882. ---------but the manner of it!--the author sitting as demiurgus, trotting out his manikins, coaxing and bantering them, amused with their good performance, patting them on the back, and rating the naughty dolls when they misbehave; and communicating his mind ever in measure, just as much as the young public can understand; hinting the future, when it would be useful; recalling now and then illustrative antecedents of the actor, impressing, the reader that he is in possession of the entire history centrally seen, that his investigation has been exhaustive, and that he descends too on the petty plot of prussia from higher and cosmical surveys. better i like the sound sense and the absolute independence of the tone, which may put kings in fear. and, as the reader shares, according to his intelligence, the haughty _coup d'oeil_ of this genius, and shares it with delight, i recommend to all governors, english, french, austrian, and other, to double their guards, and look carefully to the censorship of the press. i find, as ever in your books, that one man has deserved well of mankind for restoring the scholar's profession to its highest use and dignity.* i find also that you are very wilful, and have made a covenant with your eyes that they shall not see anything you do not wish they should. but i was heartily glad to read somewhere that your book was nearly finished in the manuscript, for i could wish you to sit and taste your fame, if that were not contrary to law of olympus. my joints ache to think of your rugged labor. now that you have conquered to yourself such a huge kingdom among men, can you not give yourself breath, and chat a little, an emeritus in the eternal university, and write a gossiping letter to an old american friend or so? alas, i own that i have no right to say this last,--i who write never. -------* as long before as 1843 emerson wrote in his diary: "carlyle in his new book" (_past and present_), "as everywhere, is a continuer of the great line of scholars in the world, of horace, varro, pliny, erasmus, scaliger, milton, and well sustains their office in ample credit and honor." --------here we read no books. the war is our sole and doleful instructor. all our bright young men go into it, to be misused and sacrificed hitherto by incapable leaders. one lesson they all learn,--to hate slavery, _teterrima causa._ but the issue does not yet appear. we must get ourselves morally right. nobody can help us. 't is of no account what england or france may do. unless backed by our profligate parties, their action would be nugatory, and, if so backed, the worst. but even the war is better than the degrading and descending politics that preceded it for decades of years, and our legislation has made great strides, and if we can stave off that fury of trade which rushes to peace at the cost of replacing the south in the _status ante bellum,_ we can, with something more of courage, leave the problem to another score of years,--free labor to fight with the beast, and see if bales and barrels and baskets cannot find out that they pass more commodiously and surely to their ports through free hands, than through barbarians. i grieved that the good clough, the generous, susceptible scholar, should die. i read over his _bothie_ again, full of the wine of youth at oxford. i delight in matthew arnold's fine criticism in two little books. give affectionate remembrances from me to jane carlyle, whom ---'s happiness and accurate reporting restored to me in brightest image. always faithfully yours, r.w. emerson clxx. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 8 march, 1864 dear emerson,--this will be delivered to you by the hon. lyulph stanley, an excellent, intelligent young gentleman whom i have known ever since his infancy,--his father and mother being among my very oldest friends in london; "lord and lady stanley of alderley" (not of knowesley, but a cadet branch of it), whom perhaps you did not meet while here. my young friend is coming to look with his own eyes at your huge and hugely travailing country;--and i think will agree with you, better than he does with me, in regard to that latest phenomenon. at all events, he regards "emerson" as intelligent englishmen all do; and you will please me much by giving him your friendliest reception and furtherance,--which i can certify that he deserves for his own sake, not counting mine at all. probably _he_ may deliver you the vol. iv. of _frederic;_ he will tell you our news (part of which, what regards my poor wife, is very bad, though god be thanked not yet the worst);--and, in some six months, he may bring me back some human tidings from concord, a place which always inhabits my memory,--though it is so dumb latterly! yours ever, t. carlyle clxxi. emerson to carlyle concord, 26 september, 1864 dear carlyle,--your friend, young stanley, brought me your letter now too many days ago. it contained heavy news of your household,--yet such as in these our autumnal days we must await with what firmness we can. i hear with pain that your wife, whom i have only seen beaming goodness and intelligence, has suffered and suffers so severely. i recall my first visit to your house, when i pronounced you wise and fortunate in relations wherein best men are often neither wise nor fortunate. i had already heard rumors of her serious illness. send me word, i pray you, that there is better health and hope. for the rest, the colonna motto would fit your letter, "though sad, i am strong." i had received in july, forwarded by stanley, on his flight through boston, the fourth volume of _friedrich,_ and it was my best reading in the summer, and for weeks my only reading: one fact was paramount in all the good i drew from it, that whomsoever many years had used and worn, they had not yet broken any fibre of your force:--a pure joy to me, who abhor the inroads which time makes on me and on my friends. to live too long is the capital misfortune, and i sometimes think, if we shall not parry it by better art of living, we shall learn to include in our morals some bolder control of the facts. i read once, that jacobi declared that he had some thoughts which--if he should entertain them--would put him to death: and perhaps we have weapons in our intellectual armory that are to save us from disgrace and impertinent relation to the world we live in. but this book will excuse you from any unseemly haste to make up your accounts, nay, holds you to fulfil your career with all amplitude and calmness. i found joy and pride in it, and discerned a golden chain of continuity not often seen in the works of men, apprising me that one good head and great heart remained in england,--immovable, superior to his own eccentricities and perversities, nay, wearing these, i can well believe, as a jaunty coat or red cockade to defy or mislead idlers, for the better securing his own peace, and the very ends which the idlers fancy he resists. england's lease of power is good during his days. i have in these last years lamented that you had not made the visit to america, which in earlier years you projected or favored. it would have made it impossible that your name should be cited for one moment on the side of the enemies of mankind. ten days' residence in this country would have made you the organ of the sanity of england and of europe to us and to them, and have shown you the necessities and aspirations which struggle up in our free states, which, as yet, have no organ to others, and are ill and unsteadily articulated here. in our today's division of republican and democrat, it is certain that the american nationality lies in the republican party (mixed and multiform though that party be); and i hold it not less certain, that, viewing all the nationalities of the world, the battle for humanity is, at this hour, in america. a few days here would show you the disgusting composition of the party which within the union resists the national action. take from it the wild irish element, imported in the last twenty-five year's into this country, and led by romish priests, who sympathize, of course, with despotism, and you would bereave it of all its numerical strength. a man intelligent and virtuous is not to be found on that side. ah! how gladly i would enlist you, with your thunderbolt, on our part! how gladly enlist the wise, thoughtful, efficient pens and voices of england! we want england and europe to hold our people stanch to their best tendency. are english of this day incapable of a great sentiment? can they not leave caviling at petty failures, and bad manners, and at the dunce part (always the largest part in human affairs), and leap to the suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men? this war has been conducted over the heads of all the actors in it; and the foolish terrors, "what shall we do with the negro?" "the entire black population is coming north to be fed," &c., have strangely ended in the fact that the black refuses to leave his climate; gets his living and the living of his employers there, as he has always done; is the natural ally and soldier of the republic, in that climate; now takes the place of two hundred thousand white soldiers; and will be, as the conquest of the country proceeds, its garrison, till peace, without slavery, returns. slaveholders in london have filled english ears with their wishes and perhaps beliefs; and our people, generals, and politicians have carried the like, at first, to the war, until corrected by irresistible experience. i shall always respect war hereafter. the cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of eternal life, eternal law, reconstructing and uplifting society, --breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider. the dismal malthus, the dismal debow, have had their night. our census of 1860, and the war, are poems, which will, in the next age, inspire a genius like your own. i hate to write you a newspaper, but, in these times, 't is wonderful what sublime lessons i have once and again read on the bulletin-boards in the streets. everybody has been wrong in his guess, except good women, who never despair of an ideal right. i thank you for sending to me so gracious a gentleman as mr. stanley, who interested us in every manner, by his elegance, his accurate information of that we wished to know, and his surprising acquaintance with the camp and military politics on our frontier. i regretted that i could see him so little. he has used his time to the best purpose, and i should gladly have learned all his adventures from so competent a witness. forgive this long writing, and keep the old kindness which i prize above words. my kindest salutations to the dear invalid! --r.w. emerson clxxii. carlyle to emerson cummertrees, annan, scotland, 14 june, 1865 dear emerson,--though my hand is shaking (as you sadly notice) i determine to write you a little note today. what a severance there has been these many sad years past!--in the first days of february i ended my weary book; a totally worn-out man, got to shore again after far the ugliest sea he had ever swam in. in april or the end of march, when the book was published, i duly handed out a copy for concord and you; it was to be sent by mail; but, as my publisher (a _new_ chapman, very unlike the _old_) discloses to me lately an incredible negligence on such points, it is quite possible the dog may _not,_ for a long while, have put it in the post-office (though he faithfully charged me the postage of it, and was paid), and that the poor waif may never yet have reached you! patience: it will come soon enough,--there are two thick volumes, and they will stand you a great deal of reading; stiff rather than "light." since february last, i have been sauntering about in devonshire, in chelsea, hither, thither; idle as a dry bone, in fact, a creature sinking into deeper and deeper _collapse,_ after twelve years of such mulish pulling and pushing; creature now good for nothing seemingly, and much indifferent to being so in permanence, if that be the arrangement come upon by the powers that made us. some three or four weeks ago, i came rolling down hither, into this old nook of my birthland, to see poor old annandale again with eyes, and the poor remnants of kindred and loved ones still left me there; i was not at first very lucky (lost sleep, &c.); but am now doing better, pretty much got adjusted to my new element, new to me since about six years past,--the longest absence i ever had from it before. my work was getting desperate at that time; and i silently said to myself, "we won't return till _it_ is done, or _you_ are done, my man!" this is my eldest living sister's house; one of the most rustic farmhouses in the world, but abounding in all that is needful to me, especially in the truest, _silently_-active affection, the humble generosity of which is itself medicine and balm. the place is airy, on dry waving knolls cheerfully (with such _water_ as i never drank elsewhere, except at malvern) all round me are the mountains, cheviot and galloway (three to fifteen miles off), cumberland and yorkshire (say forty and fifty, with the solway brine and sands intervening). i live in total solitude, sauntering moodily in thin checkered woods, galloping about, once daily, by old lanes and roads, oftenest latterly on the wide expanses of solway shore (when the tide is _out!_) where i see bright busy cottages far off, houses over even in cumberland, and the beautifulest amphitheatre of eternal hills,--but meet no living creature; and have endless thoughts as loving and as sad and sombre as i like. my youngest brother (whom on the whole i like best, a rustic man, the express image of my father in his ways of living and thinking) is within ten miles of me; brother john "the doctor" has come down to dumfries to a sister (twelve miles off), and runs over to me by rail now and then in few minutes. i have books; but can hardly be troubled with them. pitiful temporary babble and balderdash, in comparison to what the silences can say to one. enough of all that: you perceive me sufficiently at this point of my pilgrimage, as withdrawn to _hades_ for the time being; intending a month's walk there, till the muddy semi-solutions settle into sediment according to what laws they have, and there be perhaps a partial restoration of clearness. i have to go deeper into scotland by and by, perhaps to try _sailing,_ which generally agrees with me; but till the end of september i hope there will be no london farther. my poor wife, who is again poorly since i left (and has had frightful sufferings, last year especially) will probably join me in this region before i leave it. and see here, this is authentically the way we figure in the eye of the sun; and something like what your spectacles, could they reach across the ocean into these nooks, would teach you of us. there are three photographs which i reckon fairly _like;_ _these_ are properly what i had to send you today,--little thinking that so much surplusage would accumulate about them; to which i now at once put an end. your friend conway,* who is a boundless admirer of yours, used to come our way regularly now and then; and we always liked him well. a man of most gentlemanly, ingenious ways; turn of thought always loyal and manly, though tending to be rather _winged_ than solidly ambulatory. he talked of coming to scotland too; but it seems uncertain whether we shall meet. he is clearly rather a favorite among the london people,--and tries to explain america to them; i know not if with any success. as for me, i have entirely lost count and reckoning of your enormous element, and its enormous affairs and procedures for some time past; and can only wish (which no man more heartily does) that all may issue in as blessed a way as you hope. fat--(if you know and his fat commonplace at all) amused me much by a thing he had heard of yours in some lecture a year or two ago. "the american eagle is a mighty bird; but what is he to the american peacock." at which all the audience had exploded into laughter. very good. adieu, old friend. yours ever, t. carlyle --------* mr. moncure d. conway. --------clxxiii. emerson to carlyle concord, 7 january, 1866 dear carlyle,--is it too late to send a letter to your door to claim an old right to enter, and to scatter all your convictions that i had passed under the earth? you had not to learn what a sluggish pen mine is. of course, the sluggishness grows on me, and even such a trumpet at my gate as a letter from you heralding-in noble books, whilst it gives me joy, cannot heal the paralysis. yet your letter deeply interested me, with the account of your rest so well earned. you had fought your great battle, and might roll in the grass, or ride your pony, or shout to the cumberland or scotland echoes, with largest leave of men and gods. my lethargies have not dulled my delight in good books. i read these in the bright days of our new peace, which added a lustre to every genial work. now first we had a right to read, for the very bookworms were driven out of doors whilst the war lasted. i found in the book no trace of age, which your letter so impressively claimed. in the book, the hand does not shake, the mind is ubiquitous. the treatment is so spontaneous, self-respecting, defiant,--liberties with your hero as if he were your client, or your son, and you were proud of him, and yet can check and chide him, and even put him in the corner when he is not a good boy, freedoms with kings, and reputations, and nations, yes, and with principles too,--that each reader, i suppose, feels complimented by the confidences with which he is honored by this free-tongued, masterful hermes.--who knows what the [greek] will say next? this humor of telling the story in a gale,--bantering, scoffing, at the hero, at the enemy, at the learned reporters,--is a perpetual flattery to the admiring student,--the author abusing the whole world as mad dunces,--all but you and i, reader! ellery channing borrowed my volumes v. and vi., worked slowly through them,--midway came to me for volumes i., ii., iii., iv., which he had long already read, and at last returned all with this word, "if you write to mr. carlyle, you may say to him, that i _have_ read these books, and they have made it impossible for me to read any other books but his." 't is a good proof of their penetrative force, the influence on the new stirling, who writes "the secret of hegel." he is quite as much a student of carlyle to learn treatment, as of hegel for his matter, and plays the same game on his essence-dividing german, which he has learned of you on _friedrich._ i have read a good deal in this book of stirling's, and have not done with it. one or two errata i noticed in the last volumes of _friedrich,_ though the books are now lent, and i cannot indicate the pages. fort pulaski, which is near savannah, is set down as near charleston. charleston, south carolina, your printer has twice called charlestown, which is the name of the town in massachusetts in which bunker hill stands.--bancroft told me that the letters of montcalm are spurious. we always write and say ticonderoga. i am sorry that jonathan looks so unamiable seen from your island. yet i have too much respect for the writing profession to complain of it. it is a necessity of rhetoric that there should be shades, and, i suppose, geography and government always determine, even for the greatest wits, where they shall lay their shadows. but i have always 'the belief that a trip across the sea would have abated your despair of us. the world is laid out here in large lots, and the swing of natural laws is shared by the population, as it is not--or not as much--in your feudal europe. my countrymen do not content me, but they are susceptible of inspirations. in the war it was humanity that showed itself to advantage,--the leaders were prompted and corrected by the intuitions of the people, they still demanding the more generous and decisive measure, and giving their sons and their estates as we had no example before. in this heat, they had sharper perceptions of policy, of the ways and means and the life of nations, and on every side we read or heard fate-words, in private letters, in railway cars, or in the journals. we were proud of the people and believed they would not go down from this height. but peace came, and every one ran back into his shop again, and can hardly be won to patriotism more, even to the point of chasing away the thieves that are stealing not only the public gold, but the newly won rights of the slave, and the new muzzles we had contrived to keep the planter from sucking his blood. very welcome to me were the photographs,--your own, and jane carlyle's. hers, now seen here for the first time, was closely scanned, and confirmed the better accounts that had come of her improved health. your earlier tidings of her had not been encouraging. i recognized still erect the wise, friendly presence first seen at craigenputtock. of your own--the hatted head is good, but more can be read in the head leaning on the hand, and the one in a cloak. at the end of much writing, i have little to tell you of myself. i am a bad subject for autobiography. as i adjourn letters, so i adjourn my best tasks.... my wife joins me in very kind regards to mrs. carlyle. use your old magnanimity to me, and punish my stony ingratitudes by new letters from time to time. ever affectionately and gratefully yours, r.w. emerson clxxiv. emerson to carlyle concord, 16 may, 1866 my dear carlyle,--i have just been shown a private letter from moncure conway to one of his friends here, giving some tidings of your sad return to an empty home. we had the first news last week. and so it is. the stroke long threatened has fallen at last, in the mildest form to its victim, and relieved to you by long and repeated reprieves. i must think her fortunate also in this gentle departure, as she had been in her serene and honored career. we would not for ourselves count covetously the descending steps after we have passed the top of the mount, or grudge to spare some of the days of decay. and you will have the peace of knowing her safe, and no longer a victim. i have found myself recalling an old verse which one utters to the parting soul,- "for thou hast passed all chance of human life, and not again to thee shall beauty die." it is thirty-three years in july, i believe, since i first saw her, and her conversation and faultless manners gave assurance of a good and happy future. as i have not witnessed any decline, i can hardly believe in any, and still recall vividly the youthful wife, and her blithe account of her letters and homages from goethe, and the details she gave of her intended visit to weimar, and its disappointment. her goodness to me and to my friends was ever perfect, and all americans have agreed in her praise. elizabeth hoar remembers her with entire sympathy and regard. i could heartily wish to see you for an hour in these lonely days. your friends, i know, will approach you as tenderly as friends can; and i can believe that labor--all whose precious secrets you know--will prove a consoler,--though it cannot quite avail, for she was the rest that rewarded labor. it is good that you are strong, and built for endurance. nor will you shun to consult the awful oracles which in these hours of tenderness are sometimes vouchsafed. if to any, to you. i rejoice that she stayed to enjoy the knowledge of your good day at edinburgh, which is a leaf we would not spare from your book of life. it was a right manly speech to be so made, and is a voucher of unbroken strength,--and the surroundings, as i learn, were all the happiest,--with no hint of change. i pray you bear in mind your own counsels. long years you must still achieve, and, i hope, neither grief nor weariness will let you "join the dim choir of the bards that have been," until you have written the book i wish and wait for,--the sincerest confessions of your best hours. my wife prays to be remembered to you with sympathy and affection. ever yours faithfully, r.w. emerson clxxv. carlyle to emerson mentone, france, alpes maritimes 27 january, 1867 my dear emerson,--it is along time since i last wrote to you; and a long distance in space and in fortune,--from the shores of the solway in summer 1865, to this niche of the alps and mediterranean today, after what has befallen me in the interim. a longer interval, i think, and surely by far a sadder, than ever occurred between us before, since we first met in the scotch moors, some five and thirty years ago. you have written me various notes, too, and letters, all good and cheering to me,-almost the only truly human speech i have heard from anybody living;--and still my stony silence could not be broken; not till now, though often looking forward to it, could i resolve on such a thing. you will think me far gone, and much bankrupt in hope and heart;--and indeed i am; as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man; gazing into the final chasm of things, in mute dialogue with "death, judgment, and eternity" (dialogue _mute_ on _both_ sides!), not caring to discourse with poor articulate-speaking fellow creatures on their sorts of topics. it is right of me; and yet also it is not right. i often feel that i had better be dead than thus indifferent, contemptuous, disgusted with the world and its roaring nonsense, which i have no thought farther of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my door against. but the truth is, i was nearly killed by that hideous book on friedrich,--twelve years in continuous wrestle with the nightmares and the subterranean hydras;--nearly _killed,_ and had often thought i should be altogether, and must die leaving the monster not so much as finished! this is one truth, not so evident to any friend or onlooker as it is to myself: and then there is another, known to myself alone, as it were; and of which i am best not to speak to others, or to speak to them no farther. by the calamity of april last, i lost my little all in this world; and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a _home_ for me any more. bright, heroic, tender, true and noble was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings; and i am forever poor without her. she was snatched from me in a moment,--as by a death from the gods. very beautiful her death was; radiantly beautiful (to those who understand it) had all her life been _quid plura?_ i should be among the dullest and stupidest, if i were not among the saddest of all men. but not a word more on all this. all summer last, my one solacement in the form of work was writing, and sorting of old documents and recollections; summoning out again into clearness old scenes that had now closed on me without return. sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a kind of _worship;_ the only _devout_ time i had had for a great while past. these things i have half or wholly the intention to burn out of the way before i myself die:--but such continues still mainly my employment,--so many hours every forenoon; what i call the "work" of my day;--to me, if to no other, it is useful; to reduce matters to writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins and sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before. to set about writing my own _life_ would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done. the common impious vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me? let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant azure of eternity swallow _me;_ for my share of it, that, verily, is the handsomest, or one handsome way, of settling my poor account with the _canaille_ of mankind extant and to come. "immortal glory," is not that a beautiful thing, in the shakespeare clubs and literary gazettes of our improved epoch?--i did not leave london, except for fourteen days in august, to a fine and high old ladyfriend's in kent; where, riding about the woods and by the seabeaches and chalk cliffs, in utter silence, i felt sadder than ever, though a little less _miserably_ so, than in the intrusive babblements of london, which i could not quite lock out of doors. we read, at first, tennyson's _idyls,_ with profound recognition of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the inward perfection of _vacancy,_--and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants, though the lollipops were so superlative. we gladly changed for one emerson's _english traits;_ and read that, with increasing and ever increasing satisfaction every evening; blessing heaven that there were still books for grown-up people too! that truly is a book all full of thoughts like winged arrows (thanks to the bowyer from us both):--my lady-friend's name is miss davenport bromley; it was at wooton, in her grandfather's house, in staffordshire, that rousseau took shelter in 1760; and one hundred and six years later she was reading emerson to me with a recognition that would have pleased the man, had he seen it. about that same time my health and humors being evidently so, the dowager lady ashburton (not the high lady you saw, but a successor of mackenzie-highland type), who wanders mostly about the continent since her widowhood, for the sake of a child's health, began pressing and inviting me to spend the blade months of winter here in her villa with her;--all friends warmly seconding and urging; by one of whom i was at last snatched off, as if by the hair of the head, (in spite of my violent no, no!) on the eve of christmas last, and have been here ever since,-really with improved omens. the place is beautiful as a very picture, the climate superlative (today a sun and sky like very june); the _hospitality_ of usage beyond example. it is likely i shall be here another six weeks, or longer. if you please to write me, the address is on the margin; and i will answer. adieu. --t. carlyle clxxvi. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, 18 november, 1869 dear emerson,--it is near three years since i last wrote to you; from mentone, under the ligurian olive and orange trees, and their sombre foreign shadows, and still more sombre suggestings and promptings; the saddest, probably, of all living men. that you made no answer i know right well means only, "alas, what can i say to him of consolatory that he does not himself know!" far from a fault, or perhaps even a mistake on your part;--nor have i felt it otherwise. sure enough, among the lights that have gone out for me, and are still going, one after one, under the inexorable decree, in this now dusky and lonely world, i count with frequent regret that our correspondence (not by absolute hest of fate) should have fallen extinct, or into such abeyance: but i interpret it as you see; and my love and brotherhood to you remain alive, and will while i myself do. enough of this. by lucky chance, as you perceive, you are again to get one written letter from me, and i a reply from you, before the final silence come. the case is this. for many years back, a thought, which i used to check again as fond and silly, has been occasionally present to me,--of testifying my gratitude to new england (new england, acting mainly through one of her sons called waldo emerson), _by bequeathing to it my poor falstaf regiment, latterly two falstaf regiments of books,_ those i purchased and used in writing _cromwell,_ and ditto those on _friedrich the great._ "this could be done," i often said to myself; "this _could_ perhaps; and this would be a real satisfaction to me. but who then would march through coventry with such a set!" the extreme insignificance of the gift, this and nothing else, always gave me pause. last summer, i was lucky enough to meet with your friend c.e. norton, and renew many old massachusetts recollections, in free talk with [him]....; to him i spoke of the affair; candidly describing it, especially the above questionable feature of it, so far as i could; and his answer, then, and more deliberately afterwards, was so hopeful, hearty, and decisive, that--in effect it has decided me; and i am this day writing to him that such is the poor fact, and that i need farther instructions on it so soon as you two have taken counsel together. to say more about the infinitesimally small value of the books would be superfluous: nay, in truth, many or most of them are not without intrinsic value, one or two are even excellent as books; and all of them, it may perhaps be said, have a kind of _symbolic_ or _biographic_ value; and testify (a thing not useless) _on what slender commissariat stores_ considerable campaigns, twelve years long or so, may be carried on in this world. perhaps you already knew of me, what the _cromwell_ and _friedrich_ collection might itself intimate, that much _buying_ of books was never a habit of mine,--far the reverse, even to this day! well, my friend, you will have a meeting with norton so soon as handy; and let me know what is next to be done. and that, in your official capacity, is all i have to say to you at present. unofficially there were much,--much that is mournful, but perhaps also something that is good and blessed, and though the saddest, also the highest, the lovingest and best; as beseems time's sunset, now coming nigh. at present i will say only that, in bodily health, i am not to be called ill, for a man who will be seventy-four next month; nor, on the spiritual side, has anything been laid upon me that is quite beyond my strength. more miserable i have often been; though as solitary, soft of heart, and sad, of course never. publisher chapman, when i question him whether you for certain _get_ your monthly volume of what they call "the library edition," assures me that "it is beyond doubt":--i confess i should still like to be _better_ assured. if all is _right,_ you should, by the time this letter arrives, be receiving or have received your thirteenth volume, last of the _miscellanies._ adieu, my friend. ever truly yours, t. carlyle clxxvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 4 january, 1870 dear emerson,--a month ago or more i wrote, by the same post, to you and to norton about those books for harvard college; and in late days have been expecting your joint answer. from norton yesternight i receive what is here copied for your perusal; it has come round by florence as you see, and given me real pleasure and instruction. from you, who are possibly also away from home, i have yet nothing; but expect now soon to have a few words. there did arrive, one evening lately, your two pretty _volumes_ of _collected works,_ a pleasant salutation from you--which set me upon reading again what i thought i knew well before:--but the letter is still to come. norton's hints are such a complete instruction to me that i see my way straight through the business, and might, by note of "bequest" and memorandum for the barings, finish it in half an hour: nevertheless i will wait for your letter, and punctually do nothing till your directions too are before me. pray write, therefore; all is lying ready here. since you heard last, i have got two catalogues made out, approximately correct; one is to lie here till the bequest be executed; the other i thought of sending to you against the day? this is my own invention in regard to the affair since i wrote last. approve of it, and you shall have your copy by book-post at once. "_approximately_ correct"; absolutely i cannot get it to be. but i need not doubt the pious purpose will be piously and even sacredly fulfilled;--and your catalogue will be a kind of evidence that it is. adieu, dear emerson, till your letter come. yours ever, thomas carlyle clxxviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 23 january, 1870* my dear carlyle,--'t is a sad apology that i have to offer for delays which no apology can retrieve. i received your first letter with pure joy, but in the midst of extreme inefficiency. i had suddenly yielded to a proposition of fields & co. to manufacture a book for a given day. the book was planned, and going on passably, when it was found better to divide the matter, and separate, and postpone the purely literary portion (criticism chiefly), and therefore to modify and swell the elected part. the attempt proved more difficult than i had believed, for i only write by spasms, and these ever more rare,--and daemons that have no ears. meantime the publication day was announced, and the printer at the door. then came your letter in the shortening days. when i drudged to keep my word, _invita minerva._ --------* this letter is printed from an imperfect rough draft. --------i could not write in my book, and i could not write a letter. tomorrow and many morrows made things worse, for we have indifferent health in the house, and, as it chanced, unusual strain of affairs,--which always come when they should not. for one thing--i have just sold a house which i once built opposite my own. but i will leave the bad month, which i hope will not match itself in my lifetime. only 't is pathetic and remorseful to me that any purpose of yours, especially, a purpose so inspired, should find me imbecile. heartily i delight in your proposed disposition of the books. it has every charm of surprise, and nobleness, and large affection. the act will deeply gratify a multitude of good men, who will see in it your real sympathy with the welfare of the country. i hate that there should be a moment of delay in the completing of your provisions,--and that i of all men should be the cause! norton's letter is perfect on his part, and needs no addition, i believe, from me. you had not in your first letter named _cambridge,_ and i had been meditating that he would probably have divided your attention between harvard and the boston public library,--now the richest in the country, at first founded by the gifts of joshua bates (of london), and since enriched by the city and private donors, theodore parker among them. but after conversation with two or three friends, i had decided that harvard college was the right beneficiary, as being the mother real or adoptive of a great number of your lovers and readers in america, and because a college is a seat of sentiment and cosmical relations. the library is outgrown by other libraries in the country, counts only 119,000 bound volumes in 1868; the several departments of divinity, law, medicine, and natural science in the university having special libraries, that together add some 40,000 more. the college is newly active (with its new president eliot, a cousin of norton's) and expansive in all directions. and the library will be relieved through subscriptions now being collected among the alumni with the special purpose of securing to it an adequate fund for annual increase. i shall then write to norton at once that i concur with him in the destination of the books to harvard college, and approve entirely his advices in regard to details. and so soon as you send me the catalogue i shall, if you permit, communicate your design to president eliot and the corporation. one thing i shall add to the catalogue now or later (perhaps only by bequest), your own prized gift to me, in 1848, of wood's _athenae oxonienses,_ which i have lately had rebound, and in which every pen and pencil mark of yours is notable. the stately books of the new edition have duly come from the unforgetting friend. i have _sartor, schiller, french revolution,_ 3 vols., _miscellanies,_ numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,--ten volumes in all, excellently printed and dressed, and full of memories and electricity. i have much to say, but of things not opportune at this moment, and in spite of my long contumacy dare believe that i shall quickly write again my proper letter to my friend, whose every word i watchfully read and remember. clxxix. carlyle to emerson melchet court, romsey, 14 february, 1870 dear emerson,--three days ago i at last received your letter; with very great pleasure and thankfulness, as you may suppose. indeed, it is quite strangely interesting to see face to face my old emerson again, not a feature of him changed, whom i have known all the best part of my life. i am very glad, withal, to find that you agree completely with norton and myself in regard to that small harvard matter. this is not chelsea, as you perceive, this is a hospitable mansion in hampshire; but i expect to be in chelsea within about a week; once there, i shall immediately despatch to you one of the three catalogues i have, with a more deliberate letter than i at present have the means of writing or dictating. yours ever truly, t. carlyle clxxx. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 24 february, 1870 dear emerson,--at length i have got home from those sumptuous tumults ("melchet court" is the dowager lady ashburton's house, whose late husband, an estimable friend of mine, and _half american,_ you may remember here); and i devote to ending of our small harvard business, small enough, but true and kindly,--the first quiet hour i have. your copy of the catalogue, which accompanies by book-post of today, is the correctest i could manage to get done; all the books mentioned in it i believe to be now here (and indeed, except five or six _tiny_ articles, have _seen_ them all, in one or other of the three rooms where my books now stand, and where i believe the insignificant trifle of "tinies" to be): all these i can expect will be punctually attended to when the time comes, and proceeded with according to norton's scheme and yours;--and if any more "tinies," which i could not even remember, should turn up (which i hardly think there will), these also will _class_ themselves (as _cromwelliana_ or _fredericana_), and be faith fully sent on with the others. for benefit of my _survivors_ and _representatives_ here, i retain an exact _copy_ of the catalogue now put into your keeping; so that everything may fall out square between them and you when the time shall arrive. i mean to conform in every particular to the plan sketched out by norton and you,--unless, in your next letter, you have something other or farther to advise:--and so soon as i hear from you that harvard accepts my poor widow's mite of a _bequest,_ i will proceed to put it down in due form, and so finish this small matter, which for long years has hovered in my thoughts as a thing i should like to do. and so enough for this time. i meant to write a longish letter, touching on many other points,--though you see i am reduced to _pencil,_ and "write" with such difficulty (never yet could learn to "dictate," though my little niece here is promptitude itself, and is so swift and legible,--useful here as a cheerful rushlight in this now sombre element, sombre, sad, but also beautiful and tenderly solemn more and more, in which she bears me company, good little "mary"!). but, in bar of all such purposes, publisher chapman has come in, with cromwell engravings and their hindrances, with money accounts, &c., &c.; and has not even left me a moment of time, were nothing else needed! vol. xiv. (_cromwell,_ i.) ought to be at concord about as soon as this. in our newspapers i notice your book announced, "half of the essays new,"--which i hope to get _quam primum,_ and illuminate some evenings with,--_so_ as nothing else can, in my present common mood. adieu, dear old friend. i am and remain yours always, --t. carlyle clxxxi. emerson to carlyle concord, 21 march, 1870 my dear carlyle,--on receiving your letter and catalogue i wrote out a little history of the benefaction and carried it last tuesday to president eliot at cambridge, who was heartily gratified, and saw everything rightly, and expressed an anxiety (most becoming in my eyes after my odious shortcomings) that there should be no moment of delay on our part. "the corporation would not meet again for a fortnight:--but he would not wait,-would call a special meeting this week to make the communication to them." he did so: the meeting was held on saturday and i have received this (monday) morning from him enclosed letter and record. it is very amiable and noble in you to have kept this surprise for us in your older days. did you mean to show us that you could not be old, but immortally young? and having kept us all murmuring at your satires and sharp homilies, will now melt us with this manly and heart-warming embrace? nobody could predict and none could better it. and you shall even go your own gait henceforward with a blessing from us all, and a trust exceptional and unique. i do not longer hesitate to talk to such good men as i see of this gift, and it has in every ear a gladdening effect. people like to see character in a gift, and from rare character the gift is more precious. i wish it may be twice blest in continuing to give you the comfort it will give us. i think i must mend myself by reclaiming my old right to send you letters. i doubt not i shall have much to tell you, could i overcome the hesitation to attempt a reasonable letter when one is driven to write so many sheets of mere routine as sixty-six (nearly sixty-seven) years enforce. i shall have to prate of my daughters;--edith forbes, with her two children at milton; ellen emerson at home, herself a godsend to this house day by day; and my son edward studying medicine in boston,--whom i have ever meant and still mean to send that he may see your face when that professional curriculum winds up. i manage to read a few books and look into more. herman grimm sent me lately a good one, goethe's _unterhaltungen_ with muller,--which set me on varnhagen and others. my wife sends old regards, and her joy in this occasion. yours ever, r.w. emerson p.s. mr. eliot took my rough counting of volumes as correct. when he sends me back the catalogue, i will make it exact.--i sent you last week a little book by book-post. clxxxii. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, 24 march, 1870 my dear emerson,--the day before yesterday, i heard incidentally of an unfortunate mail steamer, bound for america, which had lost its screw or some essential part of it; and so had, instead of carrying its letters forward to america, been drifting about like a helpless log on the shores of ireland till some three days ago, when its letters and passengers were taken out, and actually forwarded, thither. by industrious calculation, it appears probable to us here that my letter to you may have been tumbling about in that helpless steamer, instead of getting to concord; where, if so, said letter cannot now arrive till the lingering of it have created some astonishment there. i hastily write this, however, to say that a letter was duly forwarded a few days after yours [of january 23] arrived,-enclosing the _harvard catalogue,_ with all necessary _et ceteras;_ indorsing all your proposals; and signifying that the matter should be authentically completed the instant i should hear from you again. i may add now that the thing is essentially completed,--all signed and put on paper, or all but a word or two, which, for form's sake, waits the actual arrival of your letter. i have never yet received your book;* and, if it linger only a few days more, mean to provide myself with a copy such as the sampson and low people have on sale everywhere. i had from norton, the other day, a very kind and friendly letter. this is all of essential that i had to say. i write in utmost haste. but am always, dear emerson, yours sincerely, t. carlyle -------* "society and solitude." -------clxxxiii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 6 april, 1870 dear emerson,--the day before yesterday your welcome letter came to hand, with the welcome news in it; yesterday i put into my poor document here the few words still needed; locked everything into its still repository (your letter, president eliot's, norton's, &c., &c.); and walked out into the sunshine, piously thankful that a poor little whim, which had long lain fondly in my heart, had realized itself with an emphasis i could never hope, and was become (thanks to generous enthusiasm on new england's part) a beautiful little fact, lying done there, so far as i had to do with it. truly your account of matters threw a glow of _life_ into my thoughts which is very rare there now; altogether a gratifying little transaction to me,--and i must add a surprising, for the enthusiasm of good-will is evidently great, and the occasion is almost infinitesimally small! well, well; it is all finished off and completed,--(you can tell mr. eliot, with many thanks from me, that i did introduce the proper style, "president and fellows," &c., and have forgotten nothing of what he said, or of what he _did_);--and so we will say only, _faustum sit,_ as our last word on the subject;--and to me it will be, for some days yet, under these vernal skies, something that is itself connected with the spring in a still higher sense; a little white and red-lipped bit of _daisy_ pure and poor, scattered into time's seedfield, and struggling above ground there, uttering _its_ bit of prophecy withal, among the ox-hoofs and big jungles that are everywhere about and not prophetic of much!-one thing only i regret, that you _have_ spoken of the affair! for god's sake don't; and those kindly people to whom you have,-swear them to silence for love of me! the poor little _daisy_kin will get into the newspapers, and become the nastiest of cabbages:--silence, silence, i beg of you to the utmost stretch of your power! or is the case already irremediable? i will hope not. talk about such things, especially penny editor's talk, is like vile coal-smoke filling your poor little world; silence alone is azure, and has a _sky_ to it.--but, enough now. the "little book" never came; and, i doubt, never will: it is a fate that seems to await three fourths of the books that attempt to reach me by the american post; owing to some _informality in wrapping_ (i have heard);--it never gave me any notable _regret_ till now. however, i had already bought myself an english copy, rather gaudy little volume (probably intended for the _railways,_ as if _it_ were a book to be read there), but perfectly printed, ready to be read anywhere by the open eye and earnest mind;-which i read here, accordingly, with great attention, clear assent for most part, and admiring recognition. it seems to me you are all your old self here, and something _more._ a calm insight, piercing to the very centre; a beautiful sympathy, a beautiful _epic_ humor; a soul peaceably irrefragable in this loud-jangling world, of which it sees the ugliness, but _notices_ only the huge new _opulences_ (still so anarchic); knows the electric telegraph, with all its vulgar botherations and impertinences, accurately for what it is, and ditto ditto the oldest eternal theologies of men. all this belongs to the highest class of thought (you may depend upon it); and again seemed to me as, in several respects, the one perfectly human voice i had heard among my fellow-creatures for a long time. and then the "style," the treatment and expression,--yes, it is inimitable, best--emersonian throughout. such brevity, simplicity, softness, homely grace; with such a penetrating meaning, _soft_ enough, but irresistible, going down to the depths and up to the heights, as _silent electricity_ goes. you have done _very well;_ and many will know it ever better by degrees.--only one thing farther i will note: how you go as if altogether on the "over-soul," the ideal, the perfect or universal 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. ah me, ah me; what a vista it is, mournful, beautiful, _unfathomable_ as eternity itself, these last fifty years of time to me.-let me not forget to thank you for that _fourth_ page of your note; i should say it was almost the most interesting of all. news from yourself at first hand; a momentary glimpse into the actual household at concord, face to face, as in years of old! true, i get vague news of you from time to time; but what are these in comparison?--if you _will,_ at the eleventh hour, turn over a new leaf, and write me letters again,--but i doubt _you won't._ and yet were it not worth while, think you? [greek]-will be here _anon._--my kindest regards to your wife. adieu, my ever-kind old friend. yours faithfully always, t. carlyle clxxxiv. emerson to carlyle concord, 17 june, 1870 my dear carlyle,--two* unanswered letters filled and fragrant and potent with goodness will not let me procrastinate another minute, or i shall sink and deserve to sink into my dormouse condition. you are of the anakim, and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution. well, if you shame us by your reservoir inexhaustible of force, you indemnify and cheer some of us, or one of us, by charges of electricity. -------* one seems to be missing. -------your letter of april came, as ever-more than ever, if possible-full of kindness, and making much of our small doings and writings, and seemed to drive me to instant acknowledgment; but the oppressive engagement of writing and reading eighteen lectures on philosophy to a class of graduates in the college, and these in six successive weeks, was a task a little more formidable in prospect and in practice than any foregoing one. of course, 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. well, it is now ended, and has no shining side but this one, that materials are collected and a possibility shown me how a repetition of the course next year--which is appointed--will enable me partly out of these materials, and partly by large rejection of these, and by large addition to them, to construct a fair report of what i have read and thought on the subject. i doubt the experts in philosophy will not praise my discourses;-but the topics give me room for my guesses, criticism, admirations and experiences with the accepted masters, and also the lessons i have learned from the hidden great. i have the fancy that a realist is a good corrector of formalism, no matter how incapable of syllogism or continuous linked statement. to great results of thought and morals the steps are not many, and it is not the masters who spin the ostentatious continuity. i am glad to hear that the last sent book from me arrived safely. you were too tender and generous in your first notice of it, i fear. but with whatever deductions for your partiality, i know well the unique value of carlyle's praise. many things crowd to be said on this little paper. though i could see no harm in the making known the bequest of books to cambridge,--no harm, but sincere pleasure, and honor of the donor from all good men,--yet on receipt of your letter touching that, i went back to president eliot, and told him your opinion on newspapers. he said it was necessarily communicated to the seven persons composing the corporation, but otherwise he had been very cautious, and it would not go into print. you are sending me a book, and chapman's homer it is? are you bound by your arabian bounty to a largess whenever you think of your friend? and you decry the book too. 't-is long since i read it, or in it, but the apotheosis of homer, in the dedication to prince henry, "thousands of years attending," &c., is one of my lasting inspirations. the book has not arrived yet, as the letter always travels faster, but shall be watched and received and announced. but since you are all bounty and care for me, where are the new volumes of the library edition of carlyle? i received duly, as i wrote you in a former letter, nine volumes,--_sartor; life of schiller;_ five vols. of _miscellanies; french revolution;_ these books oddly addressed to my name, but at _cincinnati,_ massachusetts. whether they went to ohio, and came back to boston, i know not. two volumes came later, duplicates of two already received, and were returned at my request by fields & co. with an explanation. but no following volume has come. i write all this because you said in one letter that mr. chapman assured you that every month a book was despatched to my address. but what do i read in our boston newspapers twice in the last three days? that "thomas carlyle is coming to america," and the tidings cordially greeted by the editors; though i had just received your letter silent to any such point. make that story true, though it had never a verisimilitude since thirty odd years ago, and you shall make many souls happy and perhaps show you so many needs and opportunities for beneficent power that you cannot be allowed to grow old or withdraw. was i not once promised a visit? this house entreats you earnestly and lovingly to come and dwell in it. my wife and ellen and edward e. are thoroughly acquainted with your greatness and your loveliness. and it is but ten days of healthy sea to pass. so wishes heartily and affectionately, r.w. emerson clxxxv. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, 28 september, 1870 dear emerson,--your letter, dated 15 june, never got to me till about ten days ago; when my little niece and i returned out of scotland, and a long, rather empty visit there! it had missed me here only by two or three days; and my highly _in_felicitous selectress of letters to be forwarded had left _it_ carefully aside as undeserving that honor,--good faithful old woman, one hopes she is greatly stronger on some sides than in this literary-selective one. certainly no letter was forwarded that had the hundredth part of the right to be so; certainly, of all the letters that came to me, or were left waiting here, this was, in comparison, the one which might _not_ with propriety have been left to lie stranded forever, or to wander on the winds forever!-one of my first journeys was to chapman, with vehement _rebuke_ of this inconceivable "cincinnati-massachusetts" business. _stupiditas stupiditatum;_ i never in my life, not even in that unpunctual house, fell in with anything that equaled it. instant amendment was at once undertaken for, nay it seems had been already in part performed: "ten volumes, following the nine you already had, were despatched in field & co.'s box above two months ago," so chapman solemnly said and asseverated to me; so that by this time you ought actually to have in hand nineteen volumes; and the twentieth (first of _friedrich_), which came out ten days ago, is to go in field & co.'s box this week, and ought, not many days after the arrival of this letter, to be in boston waiting for you there. the _chapman's homer_ (two volumes) had gone with that first field packet; and would be handed to you along with the ten volumes which were overdue. all this was solemnly declared to me as on affidavit; chapman also took extract of the massachusetts passage in your letter, in order to pour it like ice-cold water on the head of his stupid old chief-clerk, the instant the poor creature got back from his rustication: alas, i am by no means certain that it will make a new man of him, nor, in fact, that the whole of this amendatory programme will get itself performed to equal satisfaction! but you must write to me at once if it is not so; and done it shall be in spite of human stupidity itself. note, withal, these things: chapman sends no books to america _except_ through field & co.; he does not regularly send a box at the middle of the month; but he does "almost monthly send one bog"; so that if your monthly volume do not start from london about the 15th, it is due by the very _next_ chapman-field box; and if it at any time don't come, i beg of you very much to make instant complaint through field & co., or what would be still more effectual, direct to myself. my malison on all blockheadisms and torpid stupidities and infidelities; of which this world is full!-your letter had been anxiously enough waited for, a month before my departure; but we will not mention the delay in presence of what you were engaged with then. _faustum sit;_ that truly was and will be a work worth doing your best upon; and i, if alive, can promise you at least one reader that will do his best upon your work. i myself, often think of the philosophies precisely in that manner. to say truth, they do not otherwise rise in esteem with me at all, but rather sink. the last thing i read of that kind was a piece by hegel, in an excellent translation by stirling, right well translated, i could see, for every bit of it was intelligible to me; but my feeling at the end of it was, "good heavens, i have walked this road before many a good time; but never with a cannon-ball at each ankle before!" science also, science falsely so called, is--but i will not enter upon that with you just now. the visit to america, alas, alas, is pure moonshine. never had i, in late years, the least shadow of intention to undertake that adventure; and i am quite at a loss to understand how the rumor originated. one boston gentleman (a kind of universal undertaker, or lion's provider of lecturers i think) informed me that _"the cable"_ had told him; and i had to remark, "and who the devil told the cable?" alas, no, i fear i shall never dare to undertake that big voyage; which has so much of romance and of reality behind it to me; _zu spat, zu spat._ i do sometimes talk dreamily of a long sea-voyage, and the good the sea has often done me,--in times when good was still possible. it may have been some vague folly of that kind that originated this rumor; for rumors are like dandelion-seeds; and _the cable_ i dare say welcomes them all that have a guinea in their pocket. thank you for blocking up that harvard matter; provided it don't go into the newspapers, all is right. thank you a thousand times for that thrice-kind potential welcome, and flinging wide open your doors and your hearts to me at concord. the gleam of it is like sunshine in a subterranean place. ah me, ah me! may god be with you all, dear emerson. yours ever, t. carlyle clxxxvi. emerson to carlyle concord, 15 october, 1870 my dear carlyle,--i am the ignoblest of all men in my perpetual short-comings to you. there is no example of constancy like yours, and it always stings my stupor into temporary recovery and wonderful resolution to accept the noble challenge. but "the strong hours conquer us," and i am the victim of miscellany,-miscellany of designs, vast debility, and procrastination. already many days before your letter came, fields sent me a package from you, which he said he had found a little late, because they were covered up in a box of printed sheets of other character, and this treasure was not at first discovered. they are,--_life of sterling; latter day pamphlets; past and present; heroes;_ 5 vols. _cromwell's letters and speeches._ unhappily, vol. ii. of _cromwell_ is wanting, and there is a duplicate of vol. v. instead of it. now, two days ago came your letter, and tells me that the good old gods have also inspired you to send me chapman's homer! and that it came--heroes with heroes--in the same enchanted box. i went to fields yesterday and demanded the book. he ignored all,--even to the books he had already sent me; called osgood to council, and they agreed that it must be that all these came in a bog of sheets of dickens from chapman, which was sent to the stereotypers at cambridge; and the box shall be instantly explored. we will see what tomorrow shall find. as to the duplicates, i will say here, that i have received two: first, the above-mentioned vol. ii. of _cromwell;_ and, second, long before, a second copy of _sartor resartus,_ apparently instead of the vol. i. of the _french revolution,_ which did not come. i proposed to fields to send back to chapman these two duplicates. but he said, "no, it will cost as much as the price of the books." i shall try to find in new york who represents chapman and sells these books, and put them to his credit there, in exchange for the volumes i lack. meantime, my serious thanks for all these treasures go to you,--steadily good to my youth and my age. your letter was most welcome, and most in that i thought i read, in what you say of not making the long-promised visit hither, a little willingness to come. think again, i pray you, of that ocean voyage, which is probably the best medicine and restorative which remains to us at your age and mine. nine or ten days will bring you (and commonly with unexpected comfort and easements on the way) to boston. every reading person in america holds you in exceptional regard, and will rejoice in your arrival. they have forgotten your scarlet sins before or during the war. i have long ceased to apologize for or explain your savage sayings about american or other republics or publics, and am willing that anointed men bearing with them authentic charters shall be laws to themselves as plato willed. genius is but a large infusion of deity, and so brings a prerogative all its own. it has a right and duty to affront and amaze men by carrying out its perceptions defiantly, knowing well that time and fate will verify and explain what time and fate have through them said. we must not suggest to michel angelo, or machiavel, or rabelais, or voltaire, or john brown of osawatomie (a great man), or carlyle, how they shall suppress their paradoxes and check their huge gait to keep accurate step with the procession on the street sidewalk. they are privileged persons, and may have their own swing for me. i did not mean to chatter so much, but i wish you would come out hither and read our possibilities now being daily disclosed, and our actualities which are not nothing. i shall like to show you my near neighbors, topographically or practically. a near neighbor and friend, e. rockwood hoar, whom you saw in his youth, is now an inestimable citizen in this state, and lately, in president grant's cabinet, attorney-general of the united states. he lives in this town and carries it in his hand. another is john m. forbes, a strictly private citizen, of great executive ability, and noblest affections, a motive power and regulator essential to our city, refusing all office, but impossible to spare; and these are men whom to name the voice breaks and the eye is wet. a multitude of young men are growing up here of high promise, and i compare gladly the social poverty of my youth with the power on which these draw. the lowell race, again, in our war yielded three or four martyrs so able and tender and true, that james russell lowell cannot allude to them in verse or prose but the public is melted anew. well, all these know you well, have read and will read you, yes, and will prize and use your benefaction to the college; and i believe it would add hope, health, and strength to you to come and see them. in my much writing i believe i have left the chief things unsaid. but come! i and my house wait for you. affectionately, r.w. emerson clxxxvia. emerson to carlyle concord, 10 april, 1871 my dear friend,--i fear there is no pardon from you, none from myself, for this immense new gap in our correspondence. yet no hour came from month to month to write a letter, since whatever deliverance i got from one web in the last year served only to throw me into another web as pitiless. yet what gossamer these tasks of mine must appear to your might! believe that the american climate is unmanning, or that one american whom you know is severely taxed by lilliput labors. the last hot summer enfeebled me till my young people coaxed me to go with edward to the white hills, and we climbed or were dragged up agiocochook, in august, and its sleet and snowy air nerved me again for the time. but the booksellers, whom i had long ago urged to reprint plutarch's _morals,_ claimed some forgotten promise, and set me on reading the old patriarch again, and writing a few pages about him, which no doubt cost me as much time and pottering as it would cost you to write a history. then an "oration" was due to the new england society in new york, on the 250th anniversary of the plymouth landing,--as i thought myself familiar with the story, and holding also some opinions thereupon. but in the libraries i found alcoves full of books and documents reckoned essential; and, at new york, after reading for an hour to the great assembly out of my massy manuscript, i refused to print a line until i could revise and complete my papers;--risking, of course, the nonsense of their newspaper reporters. this pill swallowed and forgotten, it was already time for my second "course on philosophy" at cambridge,--which i had accepted again that i might repair the faults of the last year. but here were eighteen lectures, each to be read sixteen miles away from my house, to go and come,--and the same work and journey twice in each week,--and i have just got through the doleful ordeal. i have abundance of good readings and some honest writing on the leading topics,--but in haste and confusion they are misplaced and spoiled. i hope the ruin of no young man's soul will here or hereafter be charged to me as having wasted his time or confounded his reason. now i come to the raid of a london bookseller, hotten, (of whom i believe i never told you,) on my forgotten papers in the old _dials,_ and other pamphlets here. conway wrote me that he could not be resisted,--would certainly steal good and bad,--but might be guided in the selection. i replied that the act was odious to me, and i promised to denounce the man and his theft to any friends i might have in england; but if, instead of printing then, he would wait a year, i would make my own selection, with the addition of some later critical papers, and permit the book. mr. ireland in manchester, and conway in london, took the affair kindly in hand, and hotten acceded to my change. and that is the next task that threatens my imbecility. but now, ten days ago or less, my friend john m. forbes has come to me with a proposition to carry me off to california, the yosemite, the mammoth trees, and the pacific, and, after much resistance, i have surrendered for six weeks, and we set out tomorrow. and hence this sheet of confession,--that i may not drag a lengthening chain. meantime, you have been monthly loading me with good for evil. i have just counted twenty-three volumes of carlyle's library edition, in order on my shelves, besides two, or perhaps three, which ellery channing has borrowed. add, that the precious chapman's _homer_ came safely, though not till months after you had told me of its departure, and shall be guarded henceforward with joy. _wednesday, 13, chicago._--arrived here and can bring this little sheet to the post-office here. my daughter edith forbes, and her husband william h. forbes, and three other friends, accompany me, and we shall overtake mr. forbes senior tomorrow at burlington, iowa. the widow of one of the noblest of our young martyrs in the war, col. lowell,* cousin [nephew] of james russell lowell, sends me word that she wishes me to give her a note of introduction to you, confiding to me that she has once written a letter to you which procured her the happiest reply from you, and i shall obey her, and you will see her and own her rights. still continue to be magnanimous to your friend, --r.w. emerson --------* charles russell lowell, to be remembered always with honor in company with his brother james jackson lowell and his cousin william lowell putnam,--a shining group among the youths who have died for their country. --------clxxxvii. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, 4 june, 1871 dear emerson,--your letter gave me great pleasure. a gleam of sunshine after a long tract of lowering weather. it is not you that are to blame for this sad gap in our correspondence; it is i, or rather it is my misfortunes, and miserable inabilities, broken resolutions, etc., etc. the truth is, the winter here was very unfriendly to me; broke ruinously into my sleep; and through that into every other department of my businesses, spiritual and temporal; so that from about new-year's day last i have been, in a manner, good for nothing,--nor am yet, though i do again feel as if the beautiful summer weather might perhaps do something for me. this it was that choked every enterprise; and postponed your letter, week after week, through so many months. let us not speak of it farther! note, meanwhile, i have no disease about me; nothing but the gradual decay of any poor digestive faculty i latterly had,--or indeed ever had since i was three and twenty years of age. let us be quiet with it; accept it as a mode of exit, of which always there must be _some_ mode. i have got done with all my press-correctings, editionings, and paltry bother of that kind: vol. 30 will embark for you about the middle of this month; there are then to follow ("uniform," as the printers call it, though in smaller type) a little volume called _general index;_ and three more volumes of _translations from the german;_ after which we two will reckon and count; and if there is any _lacuna_ on the concord shelf, at once make it good. enough, enough on that score. the hotten who has got hold of you here is a dirty little pirate, who snatches at everybody grown fat enough to yield him a bite (paltry, unhanged creature); so that in fact he is a symbol to you of your visible rise in the world here; and, with conway's vigilance to help, will do you good and not evil. glad am i, in any case, to see so much new spiritual produce still ripening around you; and you ought to be glad, too. pray heaven you may long _keep your right hand_ steady: you, too, i can perceive, will never, any more than myself, learn to "write by dictation" in a manner that will be supportable to you. i rejoice, also, to hear of such a magnificent adventure as that you are now upon. climbing the backbone of america; looking into the pacific ocean too, and the gigantic wonders going on there. i fear you won't see brigham young, however? he also to me is one of the products out there;--and indeed i may confess to you that the doings in that region are not only of a big character, but of a great;--and that in my occasional explosions against "anarchy," and my inextinguishable hatred of _it,_ i privately whisper to myself, "could any friedrich wilhelm, now, or friedrich, or most perfect governor you could hope to realize, guide forward what is america's essential task at present faster or more completely than 'anarchic america' herself is now doing?" _such_ "anarchy" has a great deal to say for itself,--(would to heaven ours of england had as much!)--and points towards grand _anti_-anarchies in the future; in fact, i can already discern in it huge quantities of anti-anarchy in the "impalpable-powder" condition; and hope, with the aid of centuries, immense things from it, in my private mind! good mrs. --has never yet made her appearance; but shall be welcome whenever she does. did you ever hear the name of an aged, or elderly, fantastic fellow-citizen of yours, called j. lee bliss, who designates himself o.f. and a.k., i.e. "old fogey" and "amiable kuss"? he sent me, the other night, a wonderful miscellany of symbolical shreds and patches; which considerably amused me; and withal indicated good-will on the man's part; who is not without humor, in sight, and serious intention or disposition. if you ever did hear of him, say a word on the subject next time you write. and above all things _write._ the instant you get home from california, or see this, let me hear from you what your adventures have been and what the next are to be. adieu, dear emerson. yours ever affectionately, t. carlyle mrs. --sends a note from piccadilly this new morning (june 5th); _call_ to be made there today by niece mary, card left, etc., etc. promises to be an agreeable lady. did you ever hear of such a thing as this suicidal finis of the french "copper captaincy"; gratuitous attack on germany, and ditto blowing-up of paris by its own hand! an event with meanings unspeakable,--deep as the. _abyss._-if you ever write to c. norton in italy, send him my kind remembrances. --t. c. (with about the velocity of engraving--on lead!)* --------* the letter was dictated, but the postscript, from the first signature, was written in a tremulous hand by carlyle himself. --------clxxxviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 june, 1871 my dear carlyle,--'t is more than time that you should hear from me whose debts to you always accumulate. but my long journey to california ended in many distractions on my return home. i found varioloid in my house... and i was not permitted to enter it for many days, and could only talk with wife, son, and daughter from the yard.... i had crowded and closed my cambridge lectures in haste, and went to the land of flowers invited by john m. forbes, one of my most valued friends, father of my daughter edith's husband. with him and his family and one or two chosen guests, the trip was made under the best conditions of safety, comfort, and company, i measuring for the first time one entire line of the country. california surprises with a geography, climate, vegetation, beasts, birds, fishes even, unlike ours; the land immense; the pacific sea; steam brings the near neighborhood of asia; and south america at your feet; the mountains reaching the altitude of mont blanc; the state in its six hundred miles of latitude producing all our northern fruits, and also the fig, orange, and banana. but the climate chiefly surprised me. the almanac said april; but the day said june;--and day after day for six weeks uninterrupted sunshine. november and december are the rainy months. the whole country, was covered with flowers, and all of them unknown to us except in greenhouses. every bird that i know at home is represented here, but in gayer plumes. on the plains we saw multitudes of antelopes, hares, gophers,-even elks, and one pair of wolves on the plains; the grizzly bear only in a cage. we crossed one region of the buffalo, but only saw one captive. we found indians at every railroad station,--the squaws and papooses begging, and the "bucks," as they wickedly call them, lounging. on our way out, we left the pacific railroad for twenty-four hours to visit salt lake; called on brigham young--just seventy years old--who received us with quiet uncommitting courtesy, at first,--a strong-built, self-possessed, sufficient man with plain manners. he took early occasion to remark that "the one-man-power really meant allmen's-power." our interview was peaceable enough, and rather mended my impression of the man; and, after our visit, i read in the descret newspaper his speech to his people on the previous sunday. it avoided religion, but was full of franklinian good sense. in one point, he says: "your fear of the indians is nonsense. the indians like the white men's food. feed them well, and they will surely die." he is clearly a sufficient ruler, and perhaps civilizer of his kingdom of blockheads ad interim; but i found that the san franciscans believe that this exceptional power cannot survive brigham. i have been surprised--but it is months ago--by a letter from lacy garbett, the architect, whom i do not know, but one of whose books, about "design in architecture," i have always valued. this letter, asking of me that americans shall join englishmen in a petition to parliament against pulling down ancient saxon buildings, is written in a way so wild as to suggest insanity, and i have not known how to answer it. at my "saturday club" in boston i sat at dinner by an english lord,--whose name i have forgotten,--from whom i tried to learn what laws parliament had passed for the repairs of old religious foundations, that could make them the victims of covetous architects. but he assured me there were none such, and that he himself was president of a society in his own county for the protection of such buildings. so that i am left entirely in the dark in regard to the fact and garbett's letter. he claims to speak both for ruskin and himself. i grieve to hear no better account of your health than your last letter gives. the only contradiction of it, namely, the power of your pen in this reproduction of thirty books,--and such books,-is very important and very consoling to me. a great work to be done is the best insurance, and i sleep quietly, notwithstanding these sad bulletins,--believing that you cannot be spared. fare well, dear friend, r.w. emerson clxxxix. emerson to carlyle concord, 4 september, 1871 my dear carlyle,--i hope you will have returned safely from the orkneys in time to let my son edward w.e. see your face on his way through london to germany, whither he goes to finish his medical studies,--no, not finish, but prosecute. give him your blessing, and tell him what he should look for in his few days in london, and what in your prussia. he is a good youth, and we can spare him only for this necessity. i should like well to accompany him as far as to your hearthstone, if only so i could persuade you that it is but a ten-days ride for you thence to mine,--a little farther than the orkneys, and the outskirts of land as good, and bigger. i read gladly in your letters some relentings toward america,--deeper ones in your dealing with harvard college; and i know you could not see without interest the immense and varied blossoming of our possibilities here,--of all nationalities, too, besides our own. i have heard from mrs. --twice lately, who exults in your kindness to her. always affectionately, yours, r.w. emerson cxc. emerson to carlyle baltimore, md., 5 january, 1872 my dear carlyle,--i received from you through mr. chapman, just before christmas, the last rich instalment of your library edition; viz. vols. iv.-x. _life of friedrich;_ vols. l-iii. _translations from german;_ one volume general index; eleven volumes in all,--and now my stately collection is perfect. perfect too is your victory. but i clatter my chains with joy, as i did forty years ago, at your earliest gifts. happy man you should be, to whom the heaven has allowed such masterly completion. you shall wear your crown at the pan-saxon games with no equal or approaching competitor in sight,--well earned by genius and exhaustive labor, and with nations for your pupils and praisers. i count it my eminent happiness to have been so nearly your contemporary, and your friend,--permitted to detect by its rare light the new star almost before the easterners had seen it, and to have found no disappointment, but joyful confirmation rather, in coming close to its orb. rest, rest, now for a time; i pray you, and be thankful. meantime, i know well all your perversities, and give them a wide berth. they seriously annoy a great many worthy readers, nations of readers sometimes,--but i heap them all as style, and read them as i read rabelais's gigantic humors which astonish in order to force attention, and by and by are seen to be the rhetoric of a highly virtuous gentleman who _swears._ i have been quite too busy with fast succeeding _jobs_ (i may well call them), in the last year, to have read much in these proud books; but i begin to see daylight coming through my fogs, and i have not lost in the least my appetite for reading,--resolve, with my old harvard professor, "to retire and read the authors." i am impatient to deserve your grand volumes by reading in them with all the haughty airs that belong to seventy years which i shall count if i live till may, 1873. meantime i see well that you have lost none of your power, and i wish that you would let in some good eckermann to dine with you day by day, and competent to report your opinions,--for you can speak as well as you can write, and what the world to come should know... affectionately, r.w. emerson cxci. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, 2 april, 1872 dear emerson,--i am covered with confusion, astonishment, and shame to think of my long silence. you wrote me two beautiful letters; none friendlier, brighter, wiser could come to me from any quarter of the world; and i have not answered even by a sign. promptly and punctually my poor heart did answer; but to do it outwardly,--as if there had lain some enchantment on me,-was beyond my power. the one thing i can say in excuse or explanation is, that ever since summer last, i have been in an unusually dyspeptic, peaking, pining, and dispirited condition; and have no right hand of my own for writing, nor, for several months, had any other that was altogether agreeable to me. but in fine i don't believe you lay any blame or anger on me at all; and i will say no more about it, but only try to repent and do better next time. your letter from the far west was charmingly vivid and free; one seemed to attend you personally, and see with one's own eyes the _notabilia,_ human and other, of those huge regions, in your swift flight through them to and from. i retain your little etching of brigham young as a bit of real likeness; i have often thought of your transit through chicago since poor chicago itself vanished out of the world on wings of fire. there is something huge, painful, and almost appalling to me in that wild western world of yours;--and especially i wonder at the gold-nuggeting there, while plainly every gold-nuggeter is no other than a criminal to human society, and has to _steal_ the exact value of his gold nugget from the pockets of all the posterity of adam, now and for some time to come, in this world. i conclude it is a bait used by all-wise providence to attract your people out thither, there to build towns, make roads, fell forests (or plant forests), and make ready a dwelling-place for new nations, who will find themselves called to quite other than nugget-hunting. in the hideous stew of anarchy, in which all english populations present themselves to my dismal contemplation at this day, it is a solid consolation that there will verily, in another fifty years, be above a hundred million men and women on this planet who can all read shakespeare and the english bible and the (also for a long time biblical and noble) history of their mother country,--and proceed again to do, unless the devil be in them, as their forebears did, or better, if they have the heart!-except that you are a thousand times too kind to me, your second letter also was altogether charming.... do you read ruskin's _fors clavigera,_ which he cheerily tells me gets itself reprinted in america? if you don't, _do,_ i advise you. also his _munera pulveris,_ oxford-_lectures_ on art, and whatever else he is now writing,--if you can manage to get them (which is difficult here, owing to the ways he has towards the bibliopolic world!). there is nothing going on among us as notable to me as those fierce lightning-bolts ruskin is copiously and desperately pouring into the black world of anarchy all around him. no other man in england that i meet has in him the divine rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness that ruskin has, and that every man ought to have. unhappily he is not a strong man; one might say a weak man rather; and has not the least prudence of management; though if he can hold out for another fifteen years or so, he may produce, even in this way, a great effect. god grant it, say i. froude is coming to you in october. you will find him a most clear, friendly, ingenious, solid, and excellent man; and i am very glad to find you among those who are to take care of him when he comes to your new country. do your best and wisest towards him, for my sake, withal. he is the valuablest friend i now have in england, nearly though not quite altogether the one man in talking with whom i can get any real profit or comfort. alas, alas, here is the end of the paper, dear emerson; and i had still a whole wilderness of things to say. write to me, or even do not write, and i will surely write again. i remain as ever your affectionate friend, t. carlyle in november, 1872, emerson went to england, and the two friends met again. after a short stay he proceeded to the continent and egypt, returning to london in the spring of 1873. for the last time carlyle and he saw each other. in may, emerson returned home. after this time no letters passed between him and carlyle. they were both old men. writing had become difficult to them; and little was left to say. carlyle died, eighty-five years old, on the 5th of february, 1881. emerson died, seventy-nine years old, on the 27th of april, 1882. ------------the correspondence of thomas carlyle and ralph waldo emerson 1834-1872 volume i. "to my friend i write a letter, and from him i receive a letter. it is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give, and of me to receive."--emerson "what the writer did actually mean, the thing he then thought of, the thing he then was."--carlyle editorial note the trust of editing the following correspondence, committed to me several years since by the writers, has been of easy fulfilment. the whole correspondence, so far as it is known to exist, is here printed, with the exception of a few notes of introduction, and one or two essentially duplicate letters. i cannot but hope that some of the letters now missing may hereafter come to light. in printing, a dash has been substituted here and there for a proper name, and some passages, mostly relating to details of business transactions, have been omitted. these omissions are distinctly designated. the punctuation and orthography of the original letters have been in the main exactly followed. i have thought best to print much concerning dealings with publishers, as illustrative of the material conditions of literature during the middle of the century, as well as of the relations of the two friends. the notes in the two volumes are mine. my best thanks and those of the readers of this correspondence are due to mr. moncure d. conway, for his energetic and successful effort to recover some of emerson's early letters which had fallen into strange hands. --charles eliot norton cambridge, massachusetts january 29, 1883 --------note to revised edition the hope that some of the letters missing from it when this correspondence was first published might come to light, has been fulfilled by the recovery of thirteen letters of carlyle, and of four of emerson. besides these, the rough drafts of one or two of emerson's letters, of which the copies sent have gone astray, have been found. comparatively few gaps in the correspondence remain to be filled. the letters and drafts of letters now first printed are those numbered as follows:-vol. i. xxxvi. carlyle xli. emerson xlii. carlyle xlvi. " xlvii. " lxviii. " vol. ii. c. emerson civ. carlyle cv. " cvi. " cvii. " cviii. " cix. " cxii. " cxvi. " cxlix. emerson clii. " clxv. " clxxxvi. " emerson's letter of 1 may, 1859 (clxiv.), of which only fragments were printed in the former edition, is now printed complete, and the extract from his diary accompanying it appears in the form in which it seems to have been sent to carlyle. --c.e.n. december 31, 1884 ----------contents of volume i. introduction. emerson's early recognition of carlyle's genius. --his visit at craigenputtock, in 1833.--extracts concerning it from letter of carlyle, from letter of emerson, and from english traits. i. emerson. boston, 14 may, 1834. first acquaintance with carlyle's writings.--visit to craigenputtock.--_sartor resartus,_ its contents, its diction.--gift of webster's _speeches_ and sampson reed's _growth of the mind._ ii. carlyle. chelsea, 12 august, 1834. significance of emerson's gift and visit.--sampson reed.--webster.-teufelsdrockh, its sorry reception.--removal to london.--article on the diamond necklace.--preparation for book on the french revolution.--death of coleridge. iii. emerson. concord, 20 november, 1834. death of his brother edward.--consolation in carlyle's friendship.--pleasure in receiving stitched copy of teufelsdrockh.--goethe.-swedenborgianism.--of himself.--hope of carlyle's coming to america.--gift of various publications. iv. carlyle. chelsea, 3 february, 1835. acknowledgments and inquiries.--sympathy for death of edward emerson.--unitarianism. --emerson's position and pursuits.--goethe.-volume of french revolution finished.--condition of literature.--lecturing in america.--mrs. austin. v. emerson. concord, 12 march, 1835. appreciation of sartor. --dr. channing.--prospect of carlyle's visit to america.--his own approaching marriage.--plan of a journal of philosophy in boston.--encouragement of carlyle. vi. emerson. concord, 30 april, 1835. apathy of english public toward carlyle.--hope of his visit to america.--lectures and lecturers in boston.--estimate of receipts and expenses.--esteem of carlyle in america. vii. carlyle. chelsea, 13 may, 1835. emerson's marriage. --astonishing reception of teufelsdrockh in new england. --boston transcendentalism.--destruction of manuscript of first volume of _french revolution._--result of a year's life in london.--wordsworth.--southey. viii. carlyle. chelsea, 27 june, 1835. visit to america questionable.--john carlyle.--tired out with rewriting _french revolution._--a london rout.--o'connell.--longfellow.--emerson and unitarianism. ix. emerson. concord, 7 october, 1835. mrs. child.--public addresses.--marriage.--destruction of manuscript of _french revolution._--notice of _sartor_ in _north american review._ --politics.--charles emerson. x. emerson. concord, 8 april, 1836. concern at carlyle's silence.--american reprint of _sartor._--carlyle's projected visit.--lecturing in new england. xi. carlyle. chelsea, 29 april, 1836. weariness over _french revolution._--visit to scotland.--charm of london.--letter from james freeman clarke.--article on _sartor_ in _north american review._--quatrain from voss. xii. emerson. concord, 17 september,1836. death of charles emerson.--solicitude concerning carlyle.--urgency to him to come to concord.--sends _nature_ to him.--reflections. xiii. carlyle. chelsea, 5 november, 1836. charles emerson's death.--concord.--his own condition.--_french revolution_ almost ended.--character of the book.--weariness.--london and its people.--plans for rest.--john sterling.--articles on mirabeau and the _diamond necklace._--mill's _london_ review.--thanks for american teufelsdrockh.--mrs. carlyle.--might and right, canst and shalt.--books about goethe. xiv. carlyle. chelsea, 13 february, 1837. teufelsdrockh in america and england.--_nature._--miss martineau on emerson. --mammon.--completion of _french revolution._--scheme of lecturing in london.--america fading into the background. xv. emerson. concord, 31 march, 1837. receipt of the mirabeau and diamond necklace.--their substance and style.--proof-sheet of _french revolution._--society in america.--renewed invitation. --mrs. carlyle.--his son waldo.--bronson alcott.--second edition of _sartor._ xvi. carlyle. chelsea, 1 june, 1837. lectures on german literature.--copy of _french revolution_ sent.--review of himself in _christian examiner._--george ripley.--miss martineau and her book on america.--plans. xvii. emerson. concord, 13 september, 1837. _the french revolution._--sale of carlyle's books.--lectures. xviii. emerson. concord, 2 november, 1837. introduction given to charles sumner.--reprint of _french revolution._--lectures. xix. carlyle. chelsea, 8 december, 1837. visit to scotland. --mrs. carlyle's ill-health.--his own need of rest.--john sterling; his regard for emerson.--emerson's oration on the american scholar.--proposed collection of his own miscellanies. xx. emerson. concord, 9 february, 1838. lectures on human culture.--carlyle's praise of his oration.--john sterling. --reprint of _french revolution._--profits from it.--american selection and edition of carlyle's _miscellanies._ xxi. emerson. boston, 12 march, 1838. sale of _french revolution._--arrangements concerning american edition of _miscellanies._ xxii. carlyle. chelsea, 16 march, 1838. prospect of cash from yankee-land.--poverty.--american and english reprints of _miscellanies._--sterling's _crystals from a cavern._--miss martineau on emerson.--lectures.--plans. xxiii. emerson. concord, 10 may, 1838. american edition of _miscellanies._--invitation to concord.--his means and mode of life.--sterling.--miss martineau.--carlyle's poverty. xxiv. carlyle. chelsea, 15 june, 1838. american _french revolution._--london edition of teufelsdrockh.--miscellanies. --lectures, their money result.--plans.--emerson's oration. --mrs. child's _philothea._ xxv. emerson. boston, 30 july, 1838. encloses bill for l50. --_miscellanies_ published. xxvi. emerson. concord, 6 august, 1838. publication of _miscellanies._--two more volumes proposed.--orations at theological school, cambridge, and at dartmouth college.--carlyle desired in america. xxvii. carlyle. scotsbrig, ecclefechan, 25 september, 1838. visit to his mother.--remittance from emerson of l50.-_miscellanies_ again.--another course of lectures.--sterling.-miss martineau. xxviii. emerson. concord, 17 october, 1838. business.--outcry against address to divinity college.--injury to carlyle's repute in america from association with him.--article in _quarterly_ on german religious writers.--sterling. xxix. carlyle. chelsea, 7 november, 1838. emerson's letters.-dyspepsia.--use of money from america.--arrangements concerning publication of _miscellanies._--emerson's orations.--tempest in a washbowl concerning divinity school address.--john carlyle-postscript by mrs. carlyle. xxx. carlyle. chelsea, 15 november, 1838. arrangements concerning miscellanies.--employments, outlooks.--concord not forgotten, but emerson to come first to england.--john carlyle. --miss martineau and her books. xxxi. carlyle. chelsea, 2 december, 1838. arrival of american reprint of _miscellanies._--english and american bookselling.-proposed second edition of _french revolution._--reading horace walpole.--sumner.--dartmouth oration.--sterling.--dwight's german translations. xxxii. emerson. concord, 13 january, 1839. business.-remittance of l100.--lectures on human life.--dr. carlyle. xxxiii. carlyle. chelsea, 8 february, 1839. acknowledgment of remittance.--arrangements for new edition of _french revolution._--london.--wish for quiet.--ill-health.--suggestion of writing on cromwell.--mr. joseph coolidge.--divinity school address.--mrs. carlyle.--gladstone cites from emerson in his church and state. xxxiv. emerson. concord, 15 march, 1839. account of sales.-second series of _miscellanies._--ill wind raised by address blown over.--lectures.--birth of daughter.--_the onyx ring._ --alcott. xxxv. emerson. concord, 19 march, 1839. need of copy to fill out second series of _miscellanies._--john s. dwight. xxxvi. carlyle. chelsea, 13 april, 1839. solicitude on account of emerson's silence.--gift to mrs. emerson.--book business. --new edition of _french revolution._--new lectures.--better circumstances, better health.--arthur buller urges a visit to america.--milnes.--emerson's growing popularity. xxxvii. carlyle. chelsea, 17 april, 1839. nothing in manuscript fit for _miscellanies._--essay on varnhagen.--translation of goethe's _mahrchen._--cruthers and jonson.--dwight's book. --lectures.--discontent among working people. xxxviii. emerson. boston, 20 april, 1839. proposals of publishers concerning _french revolution._--introduction of miss sedgwick. xxxix. emerson. concord, 25 april, 1839. account.--sales of books. xl. emerson. concord, 28 april, 1839. proposals of publishers and accounts. xli. emerson. concord, 15 may, 1839. arrangements with publishers.--matter for completion of fourth volume of _miscellanies._--stearns wheelers faithful labor.--arthur buller's good witnessing.--plans for carlyle's visit to america. --milnes.--copy of _nature_ for him. xlii. carlyle. chelsea, 29 may, 1839. lectures happily over.-sansculottism.--horse must be had.--extempore speaking an art.-must lecture in america or write a book.--wordsworth.--sterling. --messages. xliii. carlyle. chelsea, 24 june, 1839. delay in arrival of _miscellanies._--custom-house rapacities.--accounts..--no longer poor.--emerson's work.--miss sedgwick.--daniel webster.--proposed visit to scotland.--sinking of the vengeur. xliv. emerson. concord, 4 july, 1839. proof-sheet of new edition of _french revolution_ received.--gift to mrs. emerson of engraving of guido's aurora.--publishers' accounts.--sterling.-occupations.--margaret fuller. xlv. emerson. concord, 8 august, 1839. _miscellanies_ sent. --daniel webster.--alcott.--thoreau. xlvi. carlyle. scotsbrig, ecclefechan, 4 september, 1839. rusticating.--arrival of _miscellanies._--errata.--reprint of _wilhelm meister._--estimate of the book.--copies of _french revolution_ sent.--eager expectation of emerson's book.-sterling.--plans. xlvii. carlyle. chelsea, 8 december, 1839. long silence.--stay in scotland.--chartism.--reprint of _miscellanies._--stearns wheeler.--_wilhelm meister._--boston steamers.--speculations about hegira into new england.--visitor from america who had never seen emerson.--miss martineau.--silence and speech.-sterling.--southey.--no longer desperately poor. xlviii. emerson. concord, 12 december, 1839. copies of _french revolution_ arrived.--lectures on the present age.--letter from sterling, his paper on carlyle.--friends. xlix. carlyle. chelsea, 6 january, 1840. _chartism._-sterling.--monckton milnes, paper by him on emerson. l. carlyle. chelsea, 17 january, 1840. export and import of books.--new editions.--books sent to emerson.--cromwell as a subject for writing.--no appetite for lecturing.--madame necker on emerson. li. emerson. new york, 18 march, 1840. new york.--loss of faith on entering cities.--margaret fuller to edit a journal.--lectures on the present age.--his children.--renewed invitation. lii. carlyle. chelsea, 1 april, 1840. count d'orsay, his portrait of carlyle.--wages for books, due to emerson.--milnes's review.--heraud.--landor.--lectures in prospect on heroes and hero-worship. liii. emerson. concord, 21 april, 1840. introduction of mr. grinnell.--chartism.--reprint of it.--at work on a book.-booksellers' accounts.--_the dial._--alcott. liv. emerson. concord, 30 june, 1840. _wilhelm meister_ received.--landor.--letter to milnes.--lithograph of concord. --_the dial,_ no. 1. lv. carlyle. chelsea, 2 july, 1840. bibliopoliana.--lectures about great men.--lecturing in america.--milnes and his _poems._ --controversial volume from ripley. lvi. emerson. concord, 30 august, 1840. booksellers' accounts. --faith cold concerning carlyle's coming to america.-transcendentalism and _the dial._--social problems.--character of his writing.--charles sumner. lvii. carlyle. chelsea, 26 september, 1840. not to go to america for the present.--_heroes and hero-worship._--journey on horseback.--reading on cromwell.--_dial_ no. 1.--puseyism.--dr. sewell on carlyle.--landor.--sterling. lviii. emerson. concord, 30 october, 1840. booksellers' accounts.--projects of social reform.--studies unproductive. --hopes to print a book of essays. lix. carlyle. chelsea, 9 december, 1840. booksellers' carelessness and accounts.--puseyism.--dial no. 2.--goethe. --miss martineau's _hour and man._--working in cromwellism. lx. carlyle. chelsea, 21 february, 1841. to mrs. emerson.-london transmuted by her alchemy.--hope of seeing concord. --miss martineau.--toussaint l'ouverture.--sheets of _heroes and hero-worship_ sent to emerson. lxi. emerson. concord, 28 february, 1841. accounts.--essays soon to appear.--lecture on reform. lxii. emerson. boston, 30 april, 1841. remittance of l100.-accounts.--piratical reprint of _heroes and hero-worship._-_dial_ no. 4. lxiii. carlyle. chelsea, 8 may, 1841. visit to milnes.--to his mother.--emerson's _essays._--his own condition. lxiv. carlyle. chelsea, 21 may, 1841. acknowledgment of remittance of l100.--unauthorized american reprint of _heroes and hero-worship._--improvement in circumstances.--desire for solitude.--article on emerson in _fraser's magazine._ lxv. emerson. concord, 30 may, 1841. accounts.--book by jones very.--_heroes and hero-worship._--thoreau. lxvi. carlyle. chelsea, 25 june, 1841. proposed stay at annan. --motives for it.--london reprint of emerson's essays.--rio. lxvii. emerson. concord, 31 july, 1841. london reprint of _essays._--carlyle in his own land.--writing an oration. lxviii. carlyle. newby, annan, scotland, 18 august, 1841. speedy receipt of letter.--stay in scotland.--seclusion and sadness.--reprint of emerson's _essays._--shipwreck. lxix. emerson. concord, 30 october, 1841. pleasure in english reprint of _essays._--lectures on the times.--opportunities of the lecture-room.--accounts. lxx. emerson. concord, 14 november, 1841. remittance of l40.-his banker.--gambardella.--preparation for lectures on the times. lxxi. carlyle. chelsea, 19 november, 1841. gambardella.-lawrence's portrait.--emerson's essays in england.--address at waterville college.--_the dial._--emerson's criticism on landor. lxxii. carlyle. chelsea, 6 december, 1841. acknowledgment of remittance of l40.--american funds.--landor.--emerson's lectures. lxxiii. emerson. new york, 28 february, 1842. remittance of l48.--american investments.--death of his son.--alcott going to england. lxxiv. carlyle. templand, 28 march, 1842. sympathy, with emerson.--death of mrs. carlyle's mother.--at templand to settle affairs.--life there.--a book on cromwell begun. lxxv. emerson. concord, 31 march, 1842. bereavement.--alcott going to england.--editorship of _dial._--mr. henry lee.-lectures in new york. --------------------correspondence of carlyle and emerson at the beginning of his "english traits," mr. emerson, writing of his visit to england in 1833, when he was thirty years old, says that it was mainly the attraction of three or four writers, of whom carlyle was one, that had led him to europe. carlyle's name was not then generally known, and it illustrates emerson's mental attitude that he should have thus early recognized his genius, and felt sympathy with it. the decade from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in english thought and imagination. all the great literary reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, byron, scott, wordsworth, coleridge, shelley, keats, had said their say. the intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found expression. but toward the end of this time a series of articles, mostly on german literature, appearing in the edinburgh and in the foreign quarterly review, an essay on burns, another on voltaire, still more a paper entitled "characteristics," displayed the hand of a master, and a spirit in full sympathy with the hitherto unexpressed tendencies and aspirations of its time, and capable of giving them expression. here was a writer whose convictions were based upon principles, and whose words stood for realities. his power was slowly acknowledged. as yet carlyle had received hardly a token of recognition from his contemporaries. he was living solitary, poor, independent, in "desperate hope," at craigenputtock. on august 24,1833, he makes entry in his journal as follows: "i am left here the solitariest, stranded, most helpless creature that i have been for many years..... nobody asks me to work at articles. the thing i want to write is quite other than an article... in _all_ times there is a word which spoken to men; to the actual generation of men, would thrill their inmost soul. but the way to find that word? the way to speak it when found?" the next entry in his journal shows that carlyle had found the word. it is the name "ralph waldo emerson," the record of emerson's unexpected visit. "i shall never forget the visitor," wrote mrs. carlyle, long afterwards, "who years ago, in the desert, descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only one day." at the time of this memorable visit emerson was morally not less solitary than carlyle; he was still less known; his name had been unheard by his host in the desert. but his voice was soon to become also the voice of a leader. with temperaments sharply contrasted, with traditions, inheritances, and circumstances radically different, with views of life and of the universe widely at variance, the souls of these two young men were yet in sympathy, for their characters were based upon the same foundation of principle. in their independence and their sincerity they were alike; they were united in their faith in spiritual truth, and their reverence for it. their modes of thought of expression were not merely dissimilar, but divergent, and yet, though parted by an ever widening cleft of difference, they knew, as carlyle said, that beneath it "the rock-strata, miles deep, united again, and their two souls were at one" two days after emerson's visit carlyle wrote to his mother:-"three little happinesses have befallen us: first, a piano-tuner, procured for five shillings and sixpence, has been here, entirely reforming the piano, so that i can hear a little music now, which does me no little good. secondly, major irving, of gribton, who used at this season of the year to live and shoot at craigenvey, came in one day to us, and after some clatter offered us a rent of five pounds for the right to shoot here, and even tabled the cash that moment, and would not pocket it again. money easilier won never sat in my pocket; money for delivering us from a great nuisance, for now i will tell every gunner applicant, 'i cannot, sir; it is let.' our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named emerson, from boston, in the united states, who turned aside so far from his british, french, and italian travels to see me here! he had an introduction from mill, and a frenchman (baron d'eichthal's nephew) whom john knew at rome. of course we could do no other than welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. he stayed till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart's content, and left us all really sad to part with him. jane says it is the first journey since noah's deluge undertaken to craigenputtock for such a purpose. in any case, we had a cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful." on the next sunday, a week after his visit, emerson wrote the following account of it to his friend, mr. alexander ireland. "i found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became acquainted with him at once. we walked over several miles of hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interest us most. the comfort of meeting a man is that he speaks sincerely; that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and carlyle does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world. i asked him at what religious development the concluding passage in his piece in the edinburgh review upon german literature (say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called 'characteristics,' pointed. he replied that he was not competent to state even to himself,--he waited rather to see. my own feeling was that i had met with men of far less power who had got greater insight into religious truth. he is, as you might guess from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own place and arrive at his own ends. but his respect for eminent men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the reverse of the popular scale. scott, mackintosh, jeffrey, gibbon,--even bacon, --are no heroes of his; stranger yet, he hardly admires socrates, the glory of the greek world; but burns, and samuel johnson, and mirabeau, he said interested him, and i suppose whoever else has given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and has not calculated too much. but i cannot think of sketching even his opinions, or repeating his conversations here. i will cheerfully do it when you visit me here in america. he talks finely, seems to love the broad scotch, and i loved him very much at once. i am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but i could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife, and i hope he will not leave the moors; 't is so much better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of city society." * ------------* _ralph waldo emerson. recollections of his visits to england_ by alexander ireland. london, 1882, p. 58. -----------twenty-three years later, in his "english traits," emerson once more describes his visit, and tells of his impressions of carlyle. "from edinburgh i went to the highlands. on my return i came from glasgow to dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which i had brought from rome, inquired for craigenputtock. it was a farm in nithsdale, in the parish of dunscore, sixteen miles distant. no public coach passed near it, so i took a private carriage from the inn. i found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in london. he was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor which floated everything he looked upon. his talk, playfully exalting the most familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his lars and lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. few were the objects and lonely the man, 'not a person to speak to within sixteen miles, except the minister of dunscore'; so that books inevitably made his topics. "he had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse. blackwood's was the 'sand magazine'; fraser's nearer approach to possibility of life was the 'mud magazine'; a piece of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was 'the grave of the last sixpence.' when too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. he had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen; but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. for all that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked nero's death, _qualis artifex pereo!_ better than most history. he worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. at one time he had inquired and read a good deal about america. landor's principle was mere rebellion, and _that,_ he feared, was the american principle. the best thing he knew of that country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor. he had read in stewart's book, that when he inquired in a new york hotel for the boots, he had been shown across the street, and had found mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey. "we talked of books. plato he does not read, and he disparaged socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making mirabeau a hero. gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. his own reading had been multifarious. tristram shandy was one of his first books after robinson crusoe and robertson's america, an early favorite. rousseau's confessions had discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned german, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted. "he took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing. hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy. "he still returned to english pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform. 'government should direct poor men what to do. poor irish folk come wandering over these moors; my dame makes it a rule to give to every son of adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. but here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor irish go to the moor and till it. they burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.' "we went out to walk over long hills, and looked at criffel, then without his cap, and down into wordsworth's country. there we sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul. it was not carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for he has the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken. but he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future. 'christ died on the tree that built dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. time has only a relative existence.' "he was already turning his eyes towards london with a scholar's appreciation. london is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of human beings. he liked the huge machine. each keeps its own round. the baker's boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. but it turned out good men. he named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom london had well served." such is the record of the beginnings of the friendship between carlyle and emerson. what place this friendship held in the lives of both, the following correspondence shows. --------i. emerson to carlyle boston, massachusetts, 14 may, 1884 my dear sir,--there are some purposes we delay long to execute simply because we have them more at heart than others, and such an one has been for many weeks, i may say months, my design of writing you an epistle. some chance wind of fame blew your name to me, perhaps two years ago, as the author of papers which i had already distinguished (as indeed it was very easy to do) from the mass of english periodical criticism as by far the most original and profound essays of the day,--the works of a man of faith as well as intellect, sportive as well as learned, and who, belonging to the despairing and deriding class of philosophers, was not ashamed to hope and to speak sincerely. like somebody in _wilhelm meister_, i said: this person has come under obligations to me and to all whom he has enlightened. he knows not how deeply i should grieve at his fall, if, in that exposed england where genius always hears the devil's whisper, "all these kingdoms will i give thee," his virtue also should be an initial growth put off with age. when therefore i found myself in europe, i went to your house only to say, "faint not,--the word you utter is heard, though in the ends of the earth and by humblest men; it works, prevails." drawn by strong regard to one of my teachers i went to see his person, and as he might say his environment at craigenputtock. yet it was to fulfil my duty, finish my mission, not with much hope of gratifying him,--in the spirit of "if i love you, what is that to you?" well, it happened to me that i was delighted with my visit, justified to myself in my respect, and many a time upon the sea in my homeward voyage i remembered with joy the favored condition of my lonely philosopher, his happiest wedlock, his fortunate temper, his steadfast simplicity, his all means of happiness;--not that i had the remotest hope that he should so far depart from his theories as to expect happiness. on my arrival at home i rehearsed to several attentive ears what i had seen and heard, and they with joy received it. in liverpool i wrote to mr. fraser to send me magazine, and i have now received four numbers of the _sartor resartus,_ for whose light thanks evermore. i am glad that one living scholar is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever were before; who, as montaigne says, "puts his ear close by himself, and holds his breath and listens." and none can be offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund. and 't is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms, our politics, and schools, and religion. i say _our,_ for it cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics written for england may be read to america. evermore thanks for the brave stand you have made for spiritualism in these writings. but has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? i delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, i leave to your merry discretion. and yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction? as if society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it beforehand with an objection to the form. can it be that this humor proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience, and so the prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll sounds. did you not tell me, mr. thomas carlyle, sitting upon one of your broad hills, that it was jesus christ built dunscore kirk yonder? if you love such sequences, then admit, as you will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way; that (at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond graver. believe then that harp and ear are formed by one revolution of the wheel; that men are waiting to hear your epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of variations. at least in some of your prefaces you should give us the theory of your rhetoric. i comprehend not why you should lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths. bacon and plato have something too solid to say than that they can afford to be humorists. you are dispensing that which is rarest, namely, the simplest truths,--truths which lie next to consciousness, and which only the platos and goethes perceive. i look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy of the spirit,--when the word will be as simple, and so as resistless, as the thought,--and, in short, when your words will be one with things. i have no hope that you will find suddenly a large audience. says not the sarcasm, "truth hath the plague in his house"? yet all men are _potentially_ (as mr. coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not in very mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;* and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it. -----------* this year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition of _sartor resartus_ have been sold. ------------i venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more than hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is wisdom in this grotesque teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't is hence hindered in its effect. and though with all my heart i would stand well with my poet, yet if i offend i shall quietly retreat into my universal relations, wherefrom i affectionately espy you as a man, myself as another. and yet before i come to the end of my letter i may repent of my temerity and unsay my charge. for are not all our circlets of will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great circle of necessity, and _could_ the truth-speaker, perhaps now the best thinker of the saxon race, have written otherwise? and must not we say that drunkenness is a virtue rather than that cato has erred? i wish i could gratify you with any pleasing news of the regeneration, education, prospects, of man in this continent. but your philanthropy is so patient, so far-sighted, that present evils give you less solicitude. in the last six years government in the united states has been fast becoming a job, like great charities. a most unfit person in the presidency has been doing the worst things; and the worse he grew, the more popular. now things seem to mend. webster, a good man and as strong as if he were a sinner, begins to find himself the centre of a great and enlarging party and his eloquence incarnated and enacted by them; yet men dare not hope that the majority shall be suddenly unseated. i send herewith a volume of webster's that you may see his speech on foot's resolutions, a speech which the americans have never done praising. i have great doubts whether the book reaches you, as i know not my agents. i shall put with it the little book of my swedenborgian druggist,* of whom i told you. and if, which is hardly to be hoped, any good book should be thrown out of our vortex of trade and politics, i shall not fail to give it the same direction. -------------* _observations on the growth of the mind,_ by sampson reed, first published in 1825. a fifth edition of this thoughtful little treatise was published in 1865. mr. reed was a graduate of harvard college in 1818; he died in 1880, at the age of eighty. --------------i need not tell you, my dear sir, what pleasure a letter from you would give me when you have a few moments to spare to so remote a friend. if any word in my letter should provoke you to a reply, i shall rejoice in my sauciness. i am spending the summer in the country, but my address is boston, care of barnard, adams, & co. care of o. rich, london. please do make my affectionate respects to mrs. carlyle, whose kindness i shall always gratefully remember. i depend upon her intercession to insure your writing to me. may god grant you both his best blessing. your friend, r. waldo emerson ii. carlyle to emerson 5 great cheyne row, chelsea, london 12 august, 1834 my dear sir,--some two weeks ago i received your kind gift from fraser. to say that it was welcome would be saying little: is it not as a voice of affectionate remembrance, coming from beyond the ocean waters, first decisively announcing for me that a whole new continent _exists,_--that i too have part and lot there! "not till we can think that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste earth become a peopled garden." among the figures i can recollect as visiting our nithsdale hermitage,--all like _apparitions_ now, bringing with them airs from heaven or else blasts from the other region,--there is perhaps not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself: so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into the azure inane, as an apparition should! never has your address in my notebook met my eye but with a friendly influence. judge if i am glad to know that there, in infinite space, you still hold by me. i have read in both your books at leisure times, and now nearly finished the smaller one. he is a faithful thinker, that swedenborgian druggist of yours, with really deep ideas, who makes me too pause and think, were it only to consider what manner of man he must be, and what manner of thing, after all, swedenborgianism must be. "through the smallest window look well, and you can look out into the infinite." webster also i can recognize a sufficient, effectual man, whom one must wish well to, and prophesy well of. the sound of him is nowise poetic-rhythmic; it is clear, one-toned, you might say metallic, yet distinct, significant, not without melody. in his face, above all, i discern that "indignation" which, if it do not make "verses," makes _useful_ way in the world. the higher such a man rises, the better pleased i shall be. and so here, looking over the water, let me repeat once more what i believe is already dimly the sentiment of all englishmen, cisoceanic and transoceanic, that we and you are not two countries, and cannot for the life of us be; but only two _parishes_ of one country, with such wholesome parish hospitalities, and dirty temporary parish feuds, as we see; both of which brave parishes _vivant! vivant!_ and among the glories of _both_ be yankee-doodle-doo, and the felling of the western forest, proudly remembered; and for the rest, by way of parish constable, let each cheerfully take such george washington or george guelph as it can get, and bless heaven! i am weary of hearing it said, "we love the americans," "we wish well," &c., &c. what in god's name should we do else? you thank me for _teufelsdrockh;_ how much more ought i to thank you for your hearty, genuine, though extravagant acknowledgment of it! blessed is the voice that amid dispiritment, stupidity, and contradiction proclaims to us, _euge!_ nothing ever was more ungenial than the soil this poor teufelsdrockhish seed-corn has been thrown on here; none cries, good speed to it; the sorriest nettle or hemlock seed, one would think, had been more welcome. for indeed our british periodical critics, and especially the public of _fraser's_ magazine (which i believe i have now done with), exceed all speech; require not even contempt, only oblivion. poor teufelsdrockh!--creature of mischance, miscalculation, and thousand-fold obstruction! here nevertheless he is, as you see; has struggled across the stygian marshes, and now, as a stitched pamphlet "for friends," cannot be _burnt_ or lost before his time. i send you one copy for your own behoof; three others you yourself can perhaps find fit readers for: as you spoke in the plural number, i thought there might be three; more would rather surprise me. from the british side of the water i have met simply one intelligent response,--clear, true, though almost enthusiastic as your own. my british friend too is utterly a stranger, whose very name i know not, who did not print, but only write, and to an unknown third party.* shall i say then, "in the mouth of two witnesses"? in any case, god be thanked, i am done with it; can wash my hands of it, and send it forth; sure that the devil will get his full share of it, and not a whit more, clutch as he may. but as for you, my transoceanic brothers, read this earnestly, for it _was_ earnestly meant and written, and contains no _voluntary_ falsehood of mine. for the rest, if you dislike it, say that i wrote it four years ago, and could not now so write it, and on the whole (as fritz the only said) "will do better another time." with regard to style and so forth, what you call your "saucy" objections are not only most intelligible to me, but welcome and instructive. you say well that i take up that attitude because i have no known public, am alone under the heavens, speaking into friendly or unfriendly space; add only, that i will not defend such attitude, that i call it questionable, tentative, and only the best that i, in these mad times, could conveniently hit upon. for you are to know, my view is that now at last we have lived to see all manner of poetics and rhetorics and sermonics, and one may say generally all manner of _pulpits_ for addressing mankind from, as good as broken and abolished: alas, yes! if you have any earnest meaning which demands to be not only listened to, but _believed_ and _done,_ you cannot (at least i cannot) utter it _there,_ but the sound sticks in my throat, as when a solemnity were _felt_ to have become a mummery; and so one leaves the pasteboard coulisses, and three unities, and blair's lectures, quite behind; and feels only that there is _nothing sacred,_ then, but the _speech of man_ to believing men! this, come what will, was, is, and forever must be _sacred;_ and will one day, doubtless, anew environ itself with fit modes; with solemnities that are _not_ mummeries. meanwhile, however, is it not pitiable? for though teufelsdrockh exclaims, "pulpit! canst thou not make a pulpit by simply _inverting the nearest tub?_" yet, alas! he does not sufficiently reflect that it is still only a tub, that the most inspired utterance will come from _it,_ inconceivable, misconceivable, to the million; questionable (not of _ascertained_ significance) even to the few. pity us therefore; and with your just shake of the head join a sympathetic, even a hopeful smile. since i saw you i have been trying, am still trying, other methods, and shall surely get nearer the truth, as i honestly strive for it. meanwhile, i know no method of much consequence, except that of _believing,_ of being _sincere:_ from homer and the bible down to the poorest burns's song, i find no other art that promises to be perennial. --------* in his diary, july 26, 1834, carlyle writes--"in the midst of innumerable discouragements, all men indifferent or finding fault, let me mention two small circumstances that are comfortable. the first is a letter from some nameless irishman in cork to another here, (fraser read it to me without names,) actually containing a _true_ and one of the friendliest possible recognitions of me. one mortal, then, says i am _not_ utterly wrong. blessings on him for it! the second is a letter i got today from emerson, of boston in america; sincere, not baseless, of most exaggerated estimation. precious is man to man." fifteen years later, in his _reminiscences of my irish journey,_ he enters, under date of july 16, 1849: "near eleven o'clock [at night] announces himself 'father o'shea'! (who i thought had been _dead_); to my astonishment enter a little gray-haired, intelligent-and-bred-looking man, with much gesticulation, boundless loyal welcome, red with dinner and some wine, engages that we are to meet tomorrow,--and again with explosions of welcomes goes his way. this father o'shea, some fifteen years ago, had been, with emerson of america, one of the _two_ sons of adam who encouraged poor bookseller fraser, and didn't discourage him, to go on with teufelsdrockh. i had often remembered him since; had not long before _re_-inquired his name, but understood somehow that he was dead--and now." --------------but now quitting theoretics, let me explain what you long to know, how it is that i date from london. yes, my friend, it is even so: craigenputtock now stands solitary in the wilderness, with none but an old woman and foolish grouse-destroyers in it; and we for the last ten weeks, after a fierce universal disruption, are here with our household gods. censure not; i came to london for the best of all reasons,--to seek bread and work. so it literally stands; and so do i literally stand with the hugest, gloomiest future before me, which in all sane moments i good-humoredly defy. a strange element this, and i as good as an alien in it. i care not for radicalism, for toryism, for church, tithes, or the "confusion" of useful knowledge. much as i can speak and hear, i am alone, alone. my brave father, now victorious from his toil, was wont to pray in evening worship: "might we say, we are not alone, for god is with us!" amen! amen! i brought a manuscript with me of another curious sort, entitled _the diamond necklace._ perhaps it will be printed soon as an article, or even as a separate booklet,--a _queer_ production, which you shall see. finally, i am busy, constantly studying with my whole might for a book on the french revolution. it is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right. this truth (if it prove one) i have not yet got to the limitations of; and shall in no way except by _trying_ it in practice. the story of the necklace was the first attempt at an experiment. my sheet is nearly done; and i have still to complain of you for telling me nothing of yourself except that you are in the country. believe that i want to know much and all. my wife too remembers you with unmixed friendliness; bids me send you her kindest wishes. understand too that your old bed stands in a new room here, and the old welcome at the door. surely we shall see you in london one day. or who knows but mahomet may go to the mountain? it occasionally rises like a mad prophetic dream in me, that i might end in the western woods! from germany i get letters, messages, and even visits; but now no tidings, no influences, of moment. goethe's posthumous works are all published; and radicalism (poor hungry, yet inevitable radicalism!) is the order of the day. the like, and even more, from france. gustave d'eichthal (did you hear?) has gone over to greece, and become some kind of manager under king otho.* ----------* gustave d'eichthal, whose acquaintance emerson had made at rome, and who had given him an introduction to carlyle, was one of a family of rich jewish bankers at paris. he was an ardent follower of saint-simon, and an associate of enfantin. after the dispersion of the saint-simonians in 1832, he traveled much, and continued to devote himself to the improvement of society. ---------continue to love me, you and my other friends; and as packets sail so swiftly, let me know it frequently. all good be with you! most faithfully, t. carlyle coleridge, as you doubtless hear, is gone. how great a possibility, how small a realized result! they are delivering orations about him, and emitting other kinds of froth, _ut mos est._ what hurt can it do? iii. emerson to carlyle * concord, mass., 20 november, 1834 my dear sir,--your letter, which i received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened place. i had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother** in the island of porto rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong sorrow. as he passes out of sight, come to me visible as well as spiritual tokens of a fraternal friendliness which, by its own law, transcends the tedious barriers of custom and nation; and opens its way to the heart. this is a true consolation, and i thanked my jealous [greek] for the godsend so significantly timed. it, for the moment, realizes the hope to which i have clung with both hands, through each disappointment, that i might converse with a man whose ear of faith was not stopped, and whose argument i could not predict. may i use the word, "i thank my god whenever i call you to remembrance." ---------* this letter was printed in the _athenaeum,_ london, june 24, 1882. it, as well as three others which appeared in the same journal, is now reprinted, through the courtesy of its editor, from the original. ** edward bliss emerson, his next younger brother, "brother of the brief but blazing star," of whom emerson wrote _in memoriam:_- "there is no record left on earth, save in tablets of the heart, of the rich, inherent worth, of the grace that on him shone, of eloquent lips, of joyful wit; he could not frame a word unfit, an act unworthy to be done. on his young promise beauty smiled, drew his free homage unbeguiled, and prosperous age held out his hand, and richly his large future planned, and troops of friends enjoyed the tide,- all, all was given, and only health denied." ---------i receive with great pleasure the wonderful professor now that first the decent limbs of osiris are collected.* we greet him well to cape cod and boston bay. the rigid laws of matter prohibit that the soul imprisoned within the strait edges of these types should add one syllable thereto, or we had adjured the sage by every name of veneration to take possession by so much as a salve! of his western world, but he remained inexorable for any new communications. ------------* the four copies of _sartor_ which carlyle had sent were a "stitched pamphlet," with a title-page bearing the words: "sartor resartus: in three books. reprinted for friends, from fraser's magazine. london, 1834." ------------i feel like congratulating you upon the cold welcome which you say teufelsdrockh* has met. as it is not earthly happy, it is marked of a high sacred sort. i like it a great deal better than ever, and before it was all published i had eaten nearly all my words of objection. but do not think it shall lack a present popularity. that it should not be known seems possible, for if a memoir of laplace had been thrown into that muck-heap of fraser's magazine, who would be the wiser? but this has too much wit and imagination not to strike a class who would not care for it as a faithful mirror of this very hour. but you know the proverb, "to be fortunate, be not too wise." the great men of the day are on a plane so low as to be thoroughly intelligible to the vulgar. nevertheless, as god maketh the world forevermore, whatever the devils may seem to do, so the thoughts of the best minds always become the last opinion of society. truth is ever born in a manger, but is compensated by living till it has all souls for its kingdom. far, far better seems to me the unpopularity of this philosophical poem (shall i call it?) than the adulation that followed your eminent friend goethe. with him i am becoming better acquainted, but mine must be a qualified admiration. it is a singular piece of good-nature in you to apotheosize him. i cannot but regard it as his misfortune, with conspicuous bad influence on his genius, that velvet life he led. what incongruity for genius, whose fit ornaments and reliefs are poverty and hatred, to repose fifty years on chairs of state and what pity that his duke did not cut off his head to save him from the mean end (forgive) of retiring from the municipal incense "to arrange tastefully his gifts and medals"! then the puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he. we can tolerate vice in a splendid nature whilst that nature is battling with the brute majority in defence of some human principle. the sympathy his manhood and his misfortunes call out adopts even his faults; but genius pampered, acknowledged, crowned, can only retain our sympathy by turning the same force once expended against outward enemies now against inward, and carrying forward and planting the standard of oromasdes so many leagues farther on into the envious dark. failing this, it loses its nature and becomes talent, according to the definition,--mere skill in attaining vulgar ends. a certain wonderful friend of mine said that "a false priest is the falsest of false things." but what makes the priest? a cassock? o diogenes! or the power (and thence the call) to teach man's duties as they flow from the superhuman? is not he who perceives and proclaims the superhumanities, he who has once intelligently pronounced the words "self-renouncement," "invisible leader," "heavenly powers of sorrow," and so on, forever the liege of the same? -----------* emerson uniformly spells this name "teufelsdroch." -----------then to write luxuriously is not the same thing as to live so, but a new and worse offence. it implies an intellectual defect also, the not perceiving that the present corrupt condition of human nature (which condition this harlot muse helps to perpetuate) is a temporary or superficial state. the good word lasts forever: the impure word can only buoy itself in the gross gas that now envelops us, and will sink altogether to ground as that works itself clear in the everlasting effort of god. may i not call it temporary? for when i ascend into the pure region of truth (or under my undermost garment, as epictetus and teufelsdrockh would say), i see that to abide inviolate, although all men fall away from it; yea, though the whole generation of adam should be healed as a sore off the face of the creation. so, my friend, live socrates and milton, those starch puritans, for evermore! strange is it to me that you should not sympathize (yet so you said) with socrates, so ironical, so true, and who "tramped in the mire with wooden shoes whenever they would force him into the clouds." i seem to see him offering the hand to you across the ages which some time you will grasp. i am glad you like sampson reed, and that he has inspired some curiosity respecting his church. swedenborgianism, if you should be fortunate in your first meetings, has many points of attraction for you: for instance, this article, "the poetry of the old church is the reality of the new," which is to be literally understood, for they esteem, in common with all the trismegisti, the natural world as strictly the symbol or exponent of the spiritual, and part for part; the animals to be the incarnations of certain affections; and scarce a popular expression esteemed figurative, but they affirm to be the simplest statement of fact. then is their whole theory of social relations--both in and out of the body--most philosophical, and, though at variance with the popular theology, self-evident. it is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if i may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic not moral decrees of god, that the mythus loses me. in general, too, they receive the fable instead of the moral of their aesop. they are to me, however, deeply interesting, as a sect which i think must contribute more than all other sects to the new faith which must arise out of all. you express a desire to know something of myself. account me "a drop in the ocean seeking another drop," or god-ward, striving to keep so true a sphericity as to receive the due ray from every point of the concave heaven. since my return home, i have been left very much at leisure. it were long to tell all my speculations on my profession and my doings thereon; but, possessing my liberty, i am determined to keep it, at the risk of uselessness (which risk god can very well abide), until such duties offer themselves as i can with integrity discharge. one thing i believe,--that utterance is place enough: and should i attain through any inward revelation to a more clear perception of my assigned task, i shall embrace it with joy and praise. i shall not esteem it a low place, for instance, if i could strengthen your hands by true expressions of the hope and pleasure which your writings communicate to me and to some of my countrymen. yet the best poem of the poet is his own mind, and more even than in any of the works i rejoice in the promise of the workman. now i am only reading and musing, and when i have any news to tell of myself, you shall hear them. now as to the welcome hint that you might come to america, it shall be to me a joyful hope. come and found a new academy that shall be church and school and parnassus, as a true poet's house should be. i dare not say that wit has better chance here than in england of winning world-wages, but it can always live, and it can scarce find competition. indeed, indeed, you shall have the continent to yourself were it only as crusoe was king. if you cared to read literary lectures, our people have vast curiosity, and the apparatus is very easy to set agoing. such 'pulpit' as you pleased to erect would at least find no hindrance in the building. a friend of mine and of yours remarked, when i expressed the wish that you would come here, "that people were not here, as in england, sacramented to organized schools of opinion, but were a far more convertible audience." if at all you can think of coming here, i would send you any and all particulars of information with cheerfulest speed. i have written a very long letter, yet have said nothing of much that i would say upon chapters of the _sartor._ i must keep that, and the thoughts i had upon 'poetry in history',' for another letter, or (might it be!) for a dialogue face to face. let me not fail of _the diamond necklace._ i found three greedy receivers of teufelsdrockh, who also radiate its light. for the sake of your knowing what manner of men you move, i send you two pieces writ by one of them, frederic henry hedge, the article on swedenborg and that on phrenology. and as you like sampson reed, here are one or two more of his papers. do read them. and since you study french history do not fail to look at our yankee portrait of lafayette. present my best remembrances to mrs. carlyle, whom that stern and blessed solitude has armed and sublimed out of all reach of the littleness and unreason of london. if i thought we could win her to the american shore, i would send her the story of those godly women, the contemporaries of john knox's daughter, who came out hither to enjoy the worship of god amidst wild men and wild beasts. your friend and servant, r. waldo emerson iv. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, london 3 february, 1835 my dear sir,--i owe you a speedy answer as well as a grateful one; for, in spite of the swift ships of the americans, our communings pass too slowly. your letter, written in november, did not reach me till a few days ago; your books or papers have not yet come,--though the ever-punctual rich, i can hope, will now soon get them for me. he showed me his _way-bill_ or invoice, and the consignment of these friendly effects "to another gentleman," and undertook with an air of great fidelity to bring all to a right bearing. on the whole, as the atlantic is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions, and come at last, in the hand of the twopenny postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of noah's dove? let us be grateful for mercies; let us use them while they are granted us. time was when "they that feared the lord spake _often_ one to another." a friendly thought is the purest gift that man can afford to man. "speech" also, they say, "is cheerfuler than light itself." the date of your letter gives me unhappily no idea but that of space and time. as you know my whereabout, will you throw a little light on your own? i can imagine boston, and have often seen the musket volleys on bunker hill; but in this new spot there is nothing for me save sky and earth, the chance of retirement, peace, and winter seclusion. alas! i can too well fancy one other thing: the bereavement you allude to, the sorrow that will so long be painful before it can become merely sad and sacred. brothers, especially in these days, are much to us: had one no brother, one could hardly understand what it was to have a friend; they are the friends whom nature chose for us; society and fortune, as things now go, are scarcely compatible with friendship, and contrive to get along, miserably enough, without it. yet sorrow not above measure for him that is gone. he is, in very deed and truth, with god,--_where_ you and i both are. what a thin film it is that divides the living from the dead! in still nights, as jean paul says, "the limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin." let us turn back into life. that you sit there bethinking yourself, and have yet taken no course of activity, and can without inward or outward hurt so sit, is on the whole rather pleasing news to me. it is a great truth which you say, that providence can well afford to have one sit: another great truth which you feel without saying it is that a course wherein clear faith cannot go with you may be worse than none; if clear faith go never so slightly against it, then it is certainly worse than none. to speak with perhaps ill-bred candor, i like as well to fancy you _not_ preaching to unitarians a gospel after their heart. i will say farther, that you are the only man i ever met with of that persuasion whom i could unobstructedly like. the others that i have seen were all a kind of halfway-house characters, who, i thought, should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief; in "faint possible theism," which i like considerably worse than atheism. such, i could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat.... nay, who knows but it is doubts of the like kind in your own mind that keep you for a time inactive even now? for the rest, that you have liberty to choose by your own will merely, is a great blessing: too rare for those that could use it so well; nay, often it is difficult to use. but till _ill health_ of body or of mind warns you that the moving, not the sitting, position is essential, _sit_ still, contented in conscience; understanding well that no man, that god only knows _what_ we are working, and will show it one day; that such and such a one, who filled the whole earth with his hammering and troweling, and would not let men pass for his rubbish, turns out to have built of mere coagulated froth, and vanishes with his edifice, traceless, silently, or amid hootings illimitable; while again that other still man, by the word of his mouth, by the very look of his face, was scattering influences, as _seeds_ are scattered, "to be found flourishing as a banyan grove after a thousand years." i beg your pardon for all this preaching, if it be superfluous impute it to no miserable motive. your objections to goethe are very natural, and even bring you nearer me: nevertheless, i am by no means sure that it were not your wisdom, at this moment, to set about learning the german language, with a view towards studying _him_ mainly! i do not assert this; but the truth of it would not surprise me. believe me, it is impossible you can be more a puritan than i; nay, i often feel as if i were far too much so: but john knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also duty was _infinite,_--knox would have passed on, wondering not reproaching. but i will tell you in a word why i like goethe: his is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, that i have discovered in europe for long generations; it was he that first convincingly proclaimed to me (convincingly, for i saw it _done_): behold, even in this scandalous sceptico-epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that man be a man! for which last evangel, the confirmation and rehabilitation of all other evangels whatsoever, how can i be too grateful? on the whole, i suspect you yet know only goethe the heathen (ethnic); but you will know goethe the christian by and by, and like that one far better. rich showed me a compilation* in green cloth boards that you had beckoned across the water: pray read the fourth volume of that, and let a man of your clearness of feeling say whether that was a parasite or a prophet.--and then as to "misery" and the other dark ground on which you love to see genius paint itself,--alas! consider whether misery is not _ill health_ too; also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than bad; and on the whole whether the glorious serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane,--as light, the naturalists say, is stronger a thousand times than lightning. and so i appeal to philip sober;--and indeed have hardly said as much about goethe since i saw you, for nothing reigns here but twilight delusion (falser for the time than midnight darkness) on that subject, and i feel that the most suffer nothing thereby, having properly nothing or little to do with such a matter but with you, who are not "seeking recipes for happiness," but something far higher, it is not so, and _therefore_ i have spoken and appealed; and hope the new curiosity, if i have awakened any, will do you no mischief. -----------* obviously carlyle's _specimens of german romance,_ of which the fourth volume was devoted to goethe. -----------but now as to myself; for you will grumble at a sheet of speculation sent so far: i am here still, as rob roy was on glasgow bridge, _biding tryste;_ busy extremely, with work that will not profit me at all in some senses; suffering rather in health and nerves; and still with nothing like dawn on any quarter of my horizon. _the diamond necklace_ has not been printed, but will be, were this _french revolution_ out; which latter, however, drags itself along in a way that would fill your benevolent heart with pity. i am for three small volumes now, and have one done. it is the dreadfulest labor (with these nerves, this liver) i ever undertook; all is so inaccurate, superficial, vague, in the numberless books i consult; and without accuracy at least, what other good is possible? add to this that i have no hope about the thing, except only that i _shall be done with it:_ i can reasonably expect nothing from any considerable class here, but at _best_ to be scolded and reproached; perhaps to be left standing "on my own basis," without note or comment of any kind, save from the bookseller, who will lose his printing. the hope i have however is sure: if life is lent me, i shall be _done with_ the business; i will write this "history of sansculottism," the notablest phenomenon i meet with since the time of the crusades or earlier; after which my part is played. as for the future, i heed it little when so busy; but it often seems to me as if one thing were becoming indisputable: that i must seek another craft than literature for these years that may remain to me. surely, i often say, if ever man had a finger-of-providence shown him, thou hast it; literature will neither yield thee bread, nor a stomach to digest bread with: quit it in god's name, shouldst thou take spade and mattock instead. the truth is, i believe literature to be as good as dead and gone in all parts of europe at this moment, and nothing but hungry revolt and radicalism appointed us for perhaps three generations; i do not see how a man can honestly live by writing in another dialect than that, in england at least; so that if you determine on not living dishonestly, it will behove you to look several things full in the face, and ascertain what is what with some distinctness. i suffer also terribly from the solitary existence i have all along had; it is becoming a kind of passion with me, to feel myself among my brothers. and then, how? alas! i care not a doit for radicalism, nay i feel it to be a wretched necessity, unfit for me; conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet these two are the grand categories under which all english spiritual activity that so much as thinks remuneration possible must range itself. i look around accordingly on a most wonderful vortex of things; and pray to god only, that as my day, is so my strength may be. what will come out of it is wholly uncertain: for i have possibilities too; the possibilities of london are far from exhausted yet: i have a brave brother, who invites me to come and be quiet with him in rome; a brave friend (known to you) who opens the door of a new western world,--and so we will stand considering and consulting, at least till the book be over. are all these things interesting to you? i know they are. as for america and lecturing, it is a thing i do sometimes turn over, but never yet with any seriousness. what your friend says of the people being more persuadable, so far, as having no tithe-controversy, &c., &c. will go, i can most readily understand it. but apart from that, i should rather fancy america mainly a new commercial england, with a fuller pantry,--little more or little less. the same unquenchable, almost frightfully unresting spirit of endeavor, directed (woe is me!) to the making of money, or money's worth; namely, food finer and finer, and gigmanic renown higher and higher: nay, must not your gigmanity be a _purse_-gigmanity, some half-shade worse than a purse-and-pedigree one? or perhaps it is not a whit worse; only rougher, more substantial; on the whole better? at all events ours is fast becoming identical with it; for the pedigree ingredient is as near as may be gone: _gagnez de l'argent, et ne vous faites pas pendre,_ this is very nearly the whole law, first table and second. so that you see, when i set foot on american land, it will be on no utopia; but on a _conditional_ piece of ground where some things are to be expected and other things not. i may say, on the other hand, that lecturing (or i would rather it were _speaking_) is a thing i have always had some hankering after: it seems to me i could really _swim_ in that element, were i once thrown into it; that in fact it would develop several things in me which struggle violently for development. the great want i have towards such an enterprise is one you may guess at: want of a _rubric,_ of a title to name my speech by. could any one but appoint me lecturing professor of teufelsdrockh's science,-"things in general"! to discourse of poets and poetry in the hazlitt style, or talk stuff about the spirit of the age, were most unedifying: one knows not what to call himself. however, there is no doubt that were the child born it _might_ be christened; wherefore i will really request you to take the business into your consideration, and give me in the most rigorous sober manner you can some scheme of it. how many discourses; what towns; the probable expenses, the probable net income, the time, &c., &c.: all that you can suppose a man wholly ignorant might want to know about it. america i should like well enough to visit, much as i should another part of my native country: it is, as you see, distinctly possible that such a thing might be; we will keep it hanging, to solace ourselves with it, till the time decide. have i involved you in double postage by this loquacity? or what is your american rule? i did not intend it when i began; but today my confusion of head is very great and words must be multiplied with only a given quantity of meaning. my wife, who is just gone out to spend the day with a certain "celebrated mrs. austin," (called also the "celebrated translatress of puckler-muskau,") charged me very specially to send you her love, her good wishes and thanks: i assure you there is no hypocrisy in that. she votes often for taking the transatlantic scheme into contemplation; declares farther that my book and books must and will indisputably prosper (at some future era), and takes the world beside me--as a good wife and daughter of john knox should. speaking of "celebrated" persons here, let me mention that i have learned by stern experience, as children do with fire, to keep in general quite out of the way of celebrated persons, more especially celebrated women. this mrs. austin, who is half ruined by celebrity (of a kind), is the only woman i have seen not wholly ruined by it. men, strong men, i have seen die of it, or go mad by it. _good_ fortune is far worse than bad! will you write with all despatch, my dear sir; fancy me a fellow-wayfarer, who cordially bids you god-speed, and would fain keep in sight of you, within sound of you. yours with great sincerity, t. carlyle v. emerson to carlyle concord, 12 march, 1838 my dear sir,--i am glad of the opportunity of mr. barnard's* visit to say health and peace be with you. i esteem it the best sign that has shone in my little section of space for many days, that some thirty or more intelligent persons understand and highly appreciate the _sartor._ dr. channing sent to me for it the other day, and i have since heard that he had read it with great interest. as soon as i go into town i shall see him and measure his love. i know his genius does not and cannot engage your attention much. he possesses the mysterious endowment of natural eloquence, whose effect, however intense, is limited, of course, to personal communication. i can see myself that his writings, without his voice, may be meagre and feeble. but please love his catholicism, that at his age can relish the _sartor,_ born and inveterated as he is in old books. moreover, he lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called _the transcendentalist,_ as the organ of a spiritual philosophy. so much for our gossip of today. --------* mr. henry barnard, of hartford, connecticut, to whom emerson had given a note of introduction to carlyle. --------but my errand is yet to tell. some friends here are very desirous that mr. fraser should send out to a bookseller here fifty or a hundred copies of the _sartor._ so many we want very much; they would be sold at once. if we knew that two or three hundred would be taken up, we should reprint it now. but we think it better to satisfy the known inquirers for the book first, and when they have extended the demand for it, then to reproduce it, a naturalized yankee. the lovers of teufelsdrockh here are sufficiently enthusiastic. i am an icicle to them. they think england must be blind and deaf if the professor makes no more impression there than yet appears. i, with the most affectionate wishes for thomas carlyle's fame, am mainly bent on securing the medicinal virtues of his book for my young neighbors. the good people think he overpraises goethe. there i give him up to their wrath. but i bid them mark his unsleeping moral sentiment; that every other moralist occasionally nods, becomes complaisant and traditional; but this man is without interval on the side of equity and humanity! i am grieved for you, o wise friend, that you cannot put in your own contemptuous disclaimer of such puritanical pleas as are set up for you; but each creature and levite must do after his kind. yet do not imagine that i will hurt you in this unseen domain of yours by any boswellism. every suffrage you get here is fairly your own. nobody is coaxed to admire you, and you have won friends whom i should be proud to show you, and honorable women not a few. and cannot you renew and confirm your suggestion touching your appearance in this continent? ah, if i could give your intimation the binding force of an oracular word!--in a few months, please god, at most, i shall have wife, house, and home wherewith and wherein to return your former hospitality. and if i could draw my prophet and his prophetess to brighten and immortalize my lodge, and make it the window through which for a summer you should look out on a field which columbus and berkeley and lafayette did not scorn to sow, my sun should shine clearer and life would promise something better than peace. there is a part of ethics, or in schleiermacher's distribution it might be physics, which possesses all attraction for me; to wit, the compensations of the universe, the equality and the coexistence of action and reaction, that all prayers are granted, that every debt is paid. and the skill with which the great all maketh clean work as it goes along, leaves no rag, consumes its smoke,-will i hope make a chapter in your thesis. i intimated above that we aspire to have a work on the first philosophy in boston. i hope, or wish rather. those that are forward in it debate upon the name. i doubt not in the least its reception if the material that should fill it existed. through the thickest understanding will the reason throw itself instantly into relation with the truth that is its object, whenever that appears. but how seldom is the pure loadstone produced! faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds: men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never enter, and with their hand on the door-latch they die outside. always excepting my wonderful professor, who among the living has thrown any memorable truths into circulation? so live and rejoice and work, my friend, and god you aid, for the profit of many more than your mortal eyes shall see. especially seek with recruited and never-tired vision to bring back yet higher and truer report from your mount of communion of the spirit that dwells there and creates all. have you received a letter from me with a pamphlet sent in december? fail not, i beg of you, to remember me to mrs. carlyle. can you not have some _sartors_ sent? hilliard, gray, & co. are the best publishers in boston. or mr. rich has connections with burdett in boston. yours with respect and affection, r. waldo emerson vi. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 april, 1835 my dear sir,--i received your letter of the 3d of february on the 20th instant, and am sorry that hitherto we have not been able to command a more mercantile promptitude in the transmission of these light sheets. if desire of a letter before it arrived, or gladness when it came, could speed its journey, i should have it the day it was written. but, being come, it makes me sad and glad by turns. i admire at the alleged state of your english reading public without comprehending it, and with a hoping scepticism touching the facts. i hear my prophet deplore, as his predecessors did, the deaf ear and the gross heart of his people, and threaten to shut his lips; but, happily, this he cannot do, any more than could they. the word of the lord _will_ be spoken. but i shall not much grieve that the english people and you are not of the same mind if that apathy or antipathy can by any means be the occasion of your visiting america. the hope of this is so pleasant to me, that i have thought of little else for the week past, and having conferred with some friends on the matter, i shall try, in obedience to your request, to give you a statement of our capabilities, without indulging my penchant for the favorable side. your picture of america is faithful enough: yet boston contains some genuine taste for literature, and a good deal of traditional reverence for it. for a few years past, we have had, every winter, several courses of lectures, scientific, political, miscellaneous, and even some purely literary, which were well attended. some lectures on shakespeare were crowded; and even i found much indulgence in reading, last winter, some biographical lectures, which were meant for theories or portraits of luther, michelangelo, milton, george fox, burke. these courses are really given under the auspices of societies, as "natural history society," "mechanics' institutes," "diffusion of useful knowledge," &c., &c., and the fee to the lecturer is inconsiderable, usually $20 for each lecture. but in a few instances individuals have undertaken courses of lectures, and have been well paid. dr. spurzheim* received probably $3,000 in the few months that he lived here. mr. silliman, a professor of yale college, has lately received something more than that for a course of fifteen or sixteen lectures on geology. private projects of this sort are, however, always attended with a degree of uncertainty. the favor of my townsmen is often sudden and spasmodic, and mr. silliman, who has had more success than ever any before him, might not find a handful of hearers another winter. but it is the opinion of many friends whose judgment i value, that a person of so many claims upon the ear and imagination of our fashionable populace as the "author of the _life of schiller,_" "the reviewer of _burns's life,_" the live "contributor to the _edinburgh_ and _foreign_ reviews," nay, the "worshipful teufelsdrockh," the "personal friend of goethe," would, for at least one season, batter down opposition, and command all ears on whatever topic pleased him, and that, quite independently of the merit of his lectures, merely for so many names' sake. ----------* the memory of dr. spurzheim has faded, but his name is still known to men of science on both sides of the atlantic as that of the most ardent and accomplished advocate of the doctrine of phrenology. he came to the united states in 1832 to advance the cause he had at heart, but he had been only a short time in the country when he died at boston of a fever. ------------but the subject, you say, does not yet define itself. whilst it is "gathering to a god," we who wait will only say, that we know enough here of goethe and schiller to have some interest in german literature. a respectable german here, dr. follen, has given lectures to a good class upon schiller. i am quite sure that goethe's name would now stimulate the curiosity of scores of persons. on english literature, a much larger class would have some preparedness. but whatever topics you might choose, i need not say you must leave under them scope for your narrative and pictorial powers; yes, and space to let out all the length of all the reins of your eloquence of moral sentiment. what "lay sermons" might you not preach! or methinks "lectures on europe" were a sea big enough for you to swim in. the only condition our adolescent ear insists upon is, that the english as it is spoken by the unlearned shall be the bridge between our teacher and our tympanum. _income and expenses._--all our lectures are usually delivered in the same hall, built for the purpose. it will hold 1,200 persons; 900 are thought a large assembly. the expenses of rent, lights, doorkeeper, &c. for this hall, would be $12 each lecture. the price of $3 is the least that might be demanded for a single ticket of admission to the course,--perhaps $4; $5 for a ticket admitting a gentleman and lady. so let us suppose we have 900 persons paying $3 each, or $2,700. if it should happen, as did in prof. silliman's case, that many more than 900 tickets were sold, it would be easy to give the course in the day and in the evening, an expedient sometimes practised to divide an audience, and because it is a great convenience to many to choose their time. if the lectures succeed in boston, their success is insured at salem, a town thirteen miles off, with a population of 15,000. they might, perhaps, be repeated at cambridge, three miles from boston, and probably at philadelphia, thirty-six hours distant. at new york anything literary has hitherto had no favor. the lectures might be fifteen or sixteen in number, of about an hour each. they might be delivered, one or two in each week. and if they met with sudden success, it would be easy to carry on the course simultaneously at salem, and cambridge, and in the city. they must be delivered in the winter. another plan suggested in addition to this. a gentleman here is giving a course of lectures on english literature to a private class of ladies, at $10 to each subscriber. there is no doubt, were you so disposed, you might turn to account any writings in the bottom of your portfolio, by reading lectures to such a class, or, still better, by speaking. _expense of living._--you may travel in this country for $4 to $4.50 a day. you may board in boston in a "gigmanic" style for $8 per week, including all domestic expenses. eight dollars per week is the board paid by the permanent residents at the tremont house,--probably the best hotel in north america. there, and at the best hotels in new york, the lodger for a few days pays at the rate of $1.50 per day. twice eight dollars would provide a gentleman and lady with board, chamber, and private parlor, at a fashionable boardinghouse. in the country, of course, the expenses are two thirds less. these are rates of expense where economy is not studied. i think the liverpool and new york packets demand $150 of the passenger, and their accommodations are perfect. (n.b.--i set down all sums in dollars. you may commonly reckon a pound sterling worth $4.80.) "the man is certain of success," say those i talk with, "for one winter, but not afterwards." that supposes no extraordinary merit in the lectures, and only regards you in your leonine aspect. however, it was suggested that, if mr. c. would undertake a journal of which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be made to secure him a support. it is that project which i mentioned to you in a letter by mr. barnard,--a book to be called _the transcendentalist,_ or _the spiritual inquirer,_ or the like, and of which f.h. hedge* was to be editor. those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous contributions to its pages, until its success could be assured. hedge is just leaving our neighborhood to be settled as a minister two hundred and fifty miles off, in maine, and entreats that you will edit the journal. he will write, and i please myself with thinking i shall be able to write under such auspices. then you might (though i know not the laws respecting literary property) collect some of your own writings and reprint them here. i think the _sartor_ would now be sure of a sale. your _life of schiller,_ and _wilhelm meister,_ have been long reprinted here. at worst, if you wholly disliked us, and preferred old england to new, you can judge of the suggestion of a knowing man, that you might see niagara, get a new stock of health, and pay all your expenses by printing in england a book of travels in america. ---------*now the rev. dr. hedge, late professor of german and of ecclesiastical history in harvard college. -----------i wish you to know that we do not depend for your _eclat_ on your being already known to rich men here. you are not. nothing has ever been published here designating you by name. but dr. channing reads and respects you. that is a fact of importance to our project. several clergymen, messrs. frothingham, ripley, francis, all of them scholars and spiritualists, (some of them, unluckily, called unitarian,) love you dearly, and will work heartily in your behalf. mr. frothing ham, a worthy and accomplished man, more like erasmus than luther, said to me on parting, the other day, "you cannot express in terms too extravagant my desire that he should come." george ripley, having heard, through your letter to me, that nobody in england had responded to the _sartor,_ had secretly written you a most reverential letter, which, by dint of coaxing, be read to me, though he said there was but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. i prayed him, though i thought the letter did him no justice, save to his heart, to send you it or another; and he says he will. he is a very able young man, even if his letter should not show it.* he said he could, and would, bring many persons to hear you, and you should be sure of his utmost aid. dr. bradford, a medical man, is of good courage. mr. loring,** a lawyer, said,"--invite mr. and mrs. carlyle to spend a couple of months at my house," (i assured him i was too selfish for that,) "and if our people," he said, "cannot find out his worth, i will subscribe, with, others, to make him whole of any expense he shall incur in coming." hedge promised more than he ought. there are several persons beside, known to me, who feel a warm interest in this thing. mr. furness, a popular and excellent minister in philadelphia, at whose house harriet martineau was spending a few days, i learned the other day "was feeding miss martineau with the _sartor._" and here some of the best women i know are warm friends of yours, and are much of mrs. carlyle's opinion when she says, your books shall prosper. ----------* emerson's estimate of mr. ripley was justified as the years went on. his _life,_ by mr. octavius frothingham,--like his father, "a worthy and accomplished, man," but more like luther than erasmus,--forms one of the most attractive volumes of the series of _lives of american men of letters._ ** the late ellis gray loring, a man of high character, well esteemed in his profession, and widely respected. ---------on the other hand, i make no doubt you shall be sure of some opposition. andrews norton, one of our best heads, once a theological professor, and a destroying critic, lives upon a rich estate at cambridge, and frigidly excludes the diderot paper from a _select journal_ edited by him, with the remark, "another paper of the teufelsdrockh school." the university perhaps, and much that is conservative in literature and religion, i apprehend, will give you its cordial opposition, and what eccentricity can be collected from the obituary notice on goethe, or from the _sartor,_ shall be mustered to demolish you. nor yet do i feel quite certain of this. if we get a good tide with us, we shall sweep away the whole inertia, which is the whole force of these gentlemen, except norton. that you do not like the unitarians will never hurt you at all, if possibly you do like the calvinists. if you have any friendly relations to your native church, fail not to bring a letter from a scottish calvinist to a calvinist here, and your fortune is made. but that were too good to happen. since things are so, can you not, my dear sir, finish your new work and cross the great water in september or october, and try the experiment of a winter in america? i cannot but think that if we do not make out a case strong enough to make you build your house, at least you should pitch your tent among us. the country is, as you say, worth visiting, and to give much pleasure to a few persons will be some inducement to you. i am afraid to press this matter. to me, as you can divine, it would be an unspeakable comfort; and the more, that i hope before that time so far to settle my own affairs as to have a wife and a house to receive you. tell mrs. carlyle, with my affectionate regards, that some friends whom she does not yet know do hope with me to have her company for the next winter at our house, and shall not cease to hope it until you come. i have many things to say upon the topics of your letter, but my letter is already so immeasurably long, it must stop. long as it is, i regret i have not more facts. dr. channing is in new york, or i think, despite your negligence of him, i should have visited him on account of his interest in you. could you see him you would like him. i shall write you immediately on learning anything new bearing on this business. i intended to have despatched this letter a day or two sooner, that it might go by the packet of the 1st of may from new york. now it will go by that of the 8th, and ought to reach you in thirty days. send me your thoughts upon it as soon as you can. i _jalouse_ of that new book. i fear its success may mar my project. yours affectionately, r. waldo emerson vii. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, london 13 may, 1835 thanks, my kind friend, for the news you again send me. good news, good new friends; nothing that is not good comes to me across these waters. as if the "golden west" seen by poets were no longer a mere optical phenomenon, but growing a reality, and coining itself into solid blessings! to me it seems very strange; as indeed generally this whole existence here below more and more does. we have seen your barnard: a most modest, intelligent, compact, hopeful-looking man, who will not revisit you without conquests from his expedition hither. we expect to see much more of him; to instruct him, to learn of him: especially about that real-imaginary locality of "concord," where a kindly-speaking voice lives incarnated, there is much to learn. that you will take to yourself a wife is the cheerfulest tidings you could send us. it is in no wise meet for man to be alone; and indeed the beneficent heavens, in creating eve, did mercifully guard against that. may it prove blessed, this new arrangement! i delight to prophesy for you peaceful days in it; peaceful, not idle; filled rather with that best activity which is the stillest. to the future, or perhaps at this hour actual mrs. emerson, will you offer true wishes from two british friends; who have not seen her with their eyes, but whose thoughts need not be strangers to the home she will make for you. nay, you add the most chivalrous summons: which who knows but one day we may actually stir ourselves to obey! it may hover for the present among the gentlest of our day-dreams; mild-lustrous; an impossible possibility. may all go well with you, my worthy countryman, kinsman, and brother man! this so astonishing reception of teufelsdrockh in your new england circle seems to me not only astonishing, but questionable; not, however, to be quarreled with. i may say: if the new. england cup is dangerously sweet, there are here in old england whole antiseptic floods of good _hop_-decoction; therein let it mingle; work wholesomely towards what clear benefit it can. your young ones too, as all exaggeration is transient, and exaggerated love almost itself a blessing, will get through it without damage. as for fraser, however, the idea of a new edition is frightful to him; or rather ludicrous, unimaginable. of him no man has inquired for a _sartor:_ in his whole wonderful world of tory pamphleteers, conservative younger-brothers, regent-street loungers, crockford gamblers, irish jesuits, drunken reporters, and miscellaneous unclean persons (whom nitre and much soap will not wash clean), not a soul has expressed the smallest wish that way. he shrieks at the idea. accordingly i realized these four copies from [him,] all he will surrender; and can do no more. take them with my blessing. i beg you will present one to the honorablest of those "honorable women"; say to her that her (unknown) image as she reads shall be to me a bright faultless vision, textured out of mere sunbeams; to be loved and worshiped; the best of all transatlantic women! do at any rate, in a more business like style, offer my respectful regards to dr. channing, whom certainly i could not count on for a reader, or other than a grieved condemnatory one; for i reckoned tolerance had its limits. his own faithful, long-continued striving towards what is best, i knew and honored; that he will let me go my own way thitherward, with a god-speed from him, is surely a new honor to us both. finally, on behalf of the british world (which is not all contained in fraser's shop) i should tell you that various persons, some of them in a dialect not to be doubted of, have privately expressed their recognition of this poor rhapsody, the best the poor clothes-professor could produce in the circumstances; nay, i have scottish presbyterian elders who read, and thank. so true is what you say about the aptitude of all natural hearts for receiving what is from the heart spoken to them. as face answereth to face! brother, if thou wish me to believe, do thou thyself believe first: this is as true as that of the _flere_ and _dolendum;_ perhaps truer. wherefore, putting all things together, cannot i feel that i have washed my hands of this business in a quite tolerable manner? let a man be thankful; and on the whole go along, while he has strength left to go. this boston _transcendentalist,_ whatever the fate or merit of it prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. there must be things not dreamt of, over in that transoceanic parish! i shall cordially wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better. the visible becomes the bestial when it rests not on the invisible. innumerable tumults of metaphysic must be struggled through (whole generations perishing by the way), and at last transcendentalism evolve itself (if i construe aright), as the _euthanasia_ of metaphysic altogether. may it be sure, may it be speedy! thou shalt open thy _eyes,_ o son of adam; thou shalt _look,_ and not forever jargon about _laws_ of optics and the making of spectacles! for myself, i rejoice very much that i seem to be flinging aside innumerable sets of spectacles (could i but _lay_ them aside,--with gentleness!) and hope one day actually to see a thing or two. man _lives_ by belief (as it was well written of old); by logic he can only at best long to live. oh, i am dreadfully, afflicted with logic here, and wish often (in my haste) that i had the besom of destruction to lay to it for a little! "why? and wherefore? god wot, simply therefore! ask not why; 't is sith thou hast to care for." since i wrote last to you, (which seems some three months ago,) there has a great mischance befallen me: the saddest, i think, of the kind called accidents i ever had to front. by dint of continual endeavor for many weary weeks, i had got the first volume of that miserable _french revolution_ rather handsomely finished: from amid infinite contradictions i felt as if my head were fairly above water, and i could go on writing my poor book, defying the devil and the world, with a certain degree of assurance, and even of joy. a friend borrowed this volume of manuscript,--a kind friend but a careless one,--to write notes on it, which he was well qualified to do. one evening about two months ago he came in on us, "distraction (literally) in his aspect"; the manuscript, left carelessly out, had been torn up as waste paper, and all but three or four tatters was clean gone! i could not complain, or the poor man seemed as if he would have shot himself: we had to gather ourselves together, and show a smooth front to it; which happily, though difficult, was not impossible to do. i began again at the beginning; to such a wretched paralyzing torpedo of a task as my hand never found to do: at which i have worn myself these two months to the hue of saffron, to the humor of incipient desperation; and now, four days ago, perceiving well that i was like a man swimming in an element that grew ever rarer, till at last it became vacuum (think of that!) i with a new effort of self-denial sealed up all the paper fragments, and said to myself: in this mood thou makest no way, writest _nothing_ that requires not to be erased again; lay it by for one complete week! and so it lies, under lock and key. i have digested the whole misery; i say, if thou canst _never_ write this thing, why then never do write it: god's universe will go along _better_--without it. my belief in a special providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable: however, you see all the mad increase of entanglement i have got to strive with, and will pity me in it. bodily exhaustion (and "diana in the shape of bile")* i will at least try to exclude from the controversy. by god's blessing, perhaps the book shall yet be written; but i find it will not do, by sheer direct force; only by gentler side-methods. i have much else to write too: i feel often as if with one year of health and peace i could write something considerable;--the image of which sails dim and great through my head. which year of health and peace, god, if he see meet, will give me yet; or withhold from me, as shall be for the best. --------* this allusion to diana as an obstruction was a favorite one with carlyle. "sir hudibras, according to butler, was about to do a dreadful homicide,--an all-important catastrophe,--and had drawn his pistol with that full intent, and would decidedly have done it, had not, says butler, 'diana in the shape of rust' imperatively intervened. a miracle she has occasionally wrought upon me in other shapes." so wrote carlyle in a letter in 1874. --------i have dwelt and swum now for about a year in this world-maelstrom of london; with much pain, which however has given me many thoughts, more than a counterbalance for that. hitherto there is no outlook, but confusion, darkness, innumerable things against which a man must "set his face like a flint." madness rules the world, as it has generally done: one cannot, unhappily, without loss, say to it, rule then; and yet must say it.--however, in two months more i expect my good brother from italy (a brave fellow, who is a great comfort to me); we are then for scotland to gather a little health, to consider ourselves a little. i must have this book done before anything else will prosper with me. your american pamphlets got to hand only a few days ago; worthy old rich had them not originally; seemed since to have been oblivious, out of town, perhaps unwell. i called one day, and unearthed them. those papers you marked i have read. genuine endeavor; which may the heavens forward!--in this poor country all is swallowed up in the barren chaos of politics: ministries tumbled out, ministries tumbled in; all things (a fearful substratum of "ignorance and hunger" weltering and heaving under them) apparently in rapid progress towards--the melting-pot. there will be news from england by and by: many things have reached their term; destiny "with lame foot" has overtaken them, and there will be a reckoning. o blessed are you where, what jargoning soever there be at washington, the poor man (_un_governed can govern himself) shoulders his age, and walks into the western woods, sure of a nourishing earth and an overarching sky! it is verily the door of hope to distracted europe; which otherwise i should see crumbling down into blackness of darkness.--that too shall be for good. i wish i had anything to send you besides these four poor pamphlets; but i fear there is nothing going. our ex-chancellor has been promulgating triticalities (significant as novelties, when _he_ with his wig and lordhood utters them) against the aristocracy; whereat the upper circles are terribly scandalized. in literature, except a promised or obtained (but to me still unknown) volume of wordsworth, nothing nameworthy doing.--did i tell you that i _saw_ wordsworth this winter? twice, at considerable length; with almost no disappointment. he is a _natural_ man (which means whole immensities here and now); flows like a natural well yielding mere wholesomeness,--though, as it would not but seem to me, in _small_ quantity, and astonishingly _diluted._ franker utterance of mere garrulities and even platitudes i never heard from any man; at least never, whom i could _honor_ for uttering them. i am thankful for wordsworth; as in great darkness and perpetual _sky-rockets_ and _coruscations,_ one were for the smallest clear-burning farthing candle. southey also i saw; a far _cleverer_ man in speech, yet a considerably smaller man. shovel-hatted; the shovel-hat is _grown_ to him: one must take him as he is. the second leaf is done; i must not venture on another. god bless you, my worthy friend; you and her who is to be yours! my wife bids me send heartiest wishes and regards from her too across the sea. perhaps we shall all meet one another some day, --if not here, then yonder! faithfully always, t. carlyle viii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 27 june, 1835 my dear friend,--your very kind letter has been in my hand these four weeks,--the subject of much meditation, which has not yet cleared itself into anything like a definite practical issue. indeed, the conditions of the case are still not wholly before me: for if the american side of it, thanks to your perspicuous minuteness, is now tolerably plain, the european side continues dubious, too dim for a decision. so much in my own position here is vague, not to be measured; then there is a brother, coming home to me from italy, almost daily expected now; whose ulterior resolutions cannot but be influential on mine; for we are brothers in the old good sense, and have one heart and one interest and object, and even one purse; and jack is a _good man,_ for whom i daily thank heaven, as for one of its principal mercies. he is traveling physician to the countess of clare, well entreated by her and hers; but, i think, weary of that inane element of "the english abroad," and as good as determined to have done with it; to seek _work_ (he sees not well how), if possible, with wages; but even almost _without,_ or with the lowest endurable, if need be. work and wages: the two prime necessities of man! it is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one _must,_ in this mad earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, be it the wages then. this brother (if the heavens have been kind to me) must be in paris one of these days; then here speedily; and "the house must resolve itself into a committee"--of ways and means. add to all this, that i myself have been and am one of the stupidest of living men; in one of my vacant, interlunar conditions, unfit for deciding on anything: were i to give you my actual _view_ of this case, it were a view such as satan had from the pavilion of the anarch old. alas! it is all too like chaos: confusion of dense and rare: i also know what it is to drop _plumb,_ fluttering my pennons vain,--for a series of weeks. one point only is clear: that you, my friend, are very friendly to me; that new england is as much my country and home as old england. very singular and very pleasant it is to me to feel as if i had a _house of my own_ in that far country: so many leagues and geographical degrees of wild-weltering "unfruitful brine"; and then the hospitable hearth and the smiles of brethren awaiting one there! what with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most _monstrous_ "tissue," this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how: and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from "that roaring loom of time,"--miraculous ever as of old! to ralph waldo emerson, however, and those that love me as he, be thanks always, and a sure place in the sanctuary of the mind. long shall we remember that autumn sunday that landed him (out of infinite space) on the craigenputtock wilderness, not to leave us as he found us. my wife says, whatever i decide on, i cannot thank you too heartily;--which really is very sound doctrine. i write to tell you so much; and that you shall hear from me again when there is more to tell. it does seem next to certain to me that i could preach a very considerable quantity of things from that boston pulpit, such as it is,--were i once fairly started. if so, what an unspeakable relief were it too! of the whole mountain of miseries one grumbles at in this life, the central and parent one, as i often say, is that you cannot utter yourself. the poor soul sits struggling, impatient, longing vehemently out towards all corners of the universe, and cannot get its hest delivered, not even so far as the voice might do it. imprisoned, enchanted, like the arabian prince with half his body marble: it is really bad work. then comes bodily sickness; to act and react, and double the imbroglio. till at last, i suppose, one does rise, like eliphaz the temanite; states that his inner man is bursting (as if filled with carbonic acid and new wine), that by the favor of heaven he will speak a word or two. would it were come so far,-if it be ever to come! on the whole i think the odds are that i shall some time or other get over to you; but that for this winter i ought not to go. my london expedition is not decided hitherto; i have begun various relations and arrangements, which it were questionable to cut short so soon. that beggarly book, were there nothing else, hampers me every way. to fling it once for all into the fire were perhaps the best; yet i grudge to do that. to finish it, on the other hand, is denied me for the present, or even so much as to work at it. what am i to do? when my brother arrives, we go all back to scotland for some weeks: there, in seclusion, with such calmness as i can find or create, the plan for the winter must be settled. you shall hear from me then; let us hope something more reasonable than i can write at present. for about a month i have gone to and fro utterly _idle:_ understand that, and i need explain no more. the wearied machine refused to be urged any farther; after long spasmodic struggling comes collapse. the burning of that wretched manuscript has really been a sore business for me. nevertheless that too shall clear itself, and prove a _favor_ of the upper powers: _tomorrow_ to fresh fields and pastures new! this monstrous london has taught me several things during the past year; for if its wisdom be of the most uninstructive ever heard of by that name of wisdom, its folly abounds with lessons,--which one ought to learn. i feel (with my burnt manuscript) as if defeated in this campaign; defeated, yet not altogether disgraced. as the great fritz said, when the battle had gone against him, "another time we will do better." as to literature, politics, and the whole multiplex aspect of existence here, expect me not to say one word. we are a singular people, in a singular condition. not many nights ago, in one of those phenomenal assemblages named routs, whither we had gone to see the countenance of o'connell and company (the tail was a peacock's tail, with blonde muslin women and heroic parliamentary men), one of the company, a "distinguished female" (as we call them), informed my wife "o'connell was the master-spirit of this age." if so, then for what we have received let us be thankful, --and enjoy it _without_ criticism.--it often painfully seems to me as if much were coming fast to a crisis here; as if the crown-wheel had given way, and the whole horologe were rushing rapidly down, down, to its end! wreckage is swift; rebuilding is slow and distant. happily another than we has charge of it. my new american friends have come and gone. barnard went off northward some fortnight ago, furnished with such guidance and furtherance as i could give him. professor longfellow went about the same time; to sweden, then to berlin and germany: we saw him twice or thrice, and his ladies, with great pleasure; as one sees worthy souls from a far country, who cannot abide with you, who throw you a kind greeting as they pass. i inquired considerably about concord, and a certain man there; one of the fair pilgrims told me several comfortable things. by the bye, how very good you are, in regard to this of unitarianism! i declare, i am ashamed of my intolerance:--and yet you have ceased to be a teacher of theirs, have you not? i mean to address you this time by the secular title of esquire; as if i liked you better so. but truly, in black clothes or in white, by this style or by that, the man himself can never be other than welcome to me. you will further allow me to fancy that you are now wedded; and offer our united congratulations and kindest good wishes to that new fair friend of ours, whom one day we shall surely know more of,--if the fates smile. my sheet is ending, and i must not burden you with double postage for such stuff as this. by dint of some inquiry i have learnt the law of the american letter-carrying; and i now mention it for our mutual benefit. there are from new york to london three packets monthly (on the 1st, on the 10th, on the 20th); the masters of these carry letters gratis for all men; and put the same into the post-office; there are some pence charged on the score of "ship-letter" there, and after that, the regular postage of the country, if the letter has to go farther. i put this, for example, into a place called north and south american coffee-house in the city here, and pay twopence for it, and it flies. doubtless there is some similar receiving-house with its "leather bag" somewhere in new york, and fixed days (probably the same as our days) for emptying, or rather for tying and despatching, said leather bag: if you deal with the london packets (so long as i am here) in preference to the liverpool ones, it will all be well. as for the next letter, (if you write as i hope you may before hearing from me again,) pray direct it, "care of john mill, esq., india house, london"; and he will forward it directly, should i even be still absent in the north.--now will you write? and pray write something about yourself. we both love you here, and send you all good prayers. _vale faveque!_ yours ever, t. carlyle ix. emerson to carlyle* concord, 7 october, 1835 my dear friend,--please god i will never again sit six weeks of this short human life over a letter of yours without answering it. ----------* the original of this letter is missing; what is printed here is from the rough draft. ----------i received in august your letter of june, and just then hearing that a lady, a little lady with a mighty heart, mrs. child,* whom i scarcely know but do much respect, was about to visit england (invited thither for work's sake by the african or abolition society) and that she begged an introduction to you, i used the occasion to say the godsend was come, and that i would acknowledge it as soon as three then impending tasks were ended. i have now learned that mrs. child was detained for weeks in new york and did not sail. only last night i received your letter written in may, with the four copies of the _sartor,_ which by a strange oversight have been lying weeks, probably months, in the custom-house. on such provocation i can sit still no longer. -----------* the excellent mrs. lydia maria child, whose romance of _philothea_ was published in this year, 1835. "if her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then, 't is but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen." says lowell, in his _fable for critics._ ----------the three tasks were, a literary address; a historical discourse on the two-hundredth anniversary of our little town of concord* (my first adventure in print, which i shall send you); the third, my marriage, now happily consummated. all three, from the least to the greatest, trod so fast upon each other's heel as to leave me, who am a slow and awkward workman, no interstice big enough for a letter that should hope to convey any information. again i waited that the discourse might go in his new jacket to show how busy i had been, but the creeping country press has not dressed it yet. now congratulate me, my friend, as indeed you have already done, that i live with my wife in my own house, waiting on the good future. the house is not large, but convenient and very elastic. the more hearts (specially great hearts) it holds, the better it looks and feels. i have not had so much leisure yet but that the fact of having ample space to spread my books and blotted paper is still gratifying. so know now that your rooms in america wait for you, and that my wife is making ready a closet for mrs. carlyle. ---------* "a historical discourse, delivered before the citizens of concord, 12th september, 1835, on the second centennial anniversary of the incorporation of the town. by ralph waldo emerson. published by request. concord: g.f. bemis, printer. 1835." 8vo, pp. 52.--a discourse worthy of the author and of the town. it is reprinted in the eleventh volume of emerson's works, boston, 1883. ----------i could cry at the disaster that has befallen you in the loss of the book. my brother charles says the only thing the friend could do on such an occasion was to shoot himself, and wishes to know if he have done so. such mischance might well quicken one's curiosity to know what oversight there is of us, and i greet you well upon your faith and the resolution issuing out of it. you have certainly found a right manly consolation, and can afford to faint and rest a month or two on the laurels of such endeavor. i trust ere this you have re-collected the entire creation out of the secret cells where, under the smiles of every muse, it first took life. believe, when you are weary, that you who stimulate and rejoice virtuous young men do not write a line in vain. and whatever betide us in the inexorable future, what is better than to have awaked in many men the sweet sense of beauty, and to double the courage of virtue. so do not, as you will not, let the imps from all the fens of weariness and apathy have a minute too much. to die of feeding the fires of others were sweet, since it were not death but multiplication. and yet i hold to a more orthodox immortality too. this morning in happiest time i have a letter from george ripley, who tells me you have written him, and that you say pretty confidently you will come next summer. _io paean!_ he tells me also that alexander everett (brother of edward) has sent you the friendly notice that has just appeared in the _north american review,_ with a letter.* all which i hope you have received. i am delighted, for this man represents a clique to which i am a stranger, and which i supposed might not love you. it must be you shall succeed when saul prophesies. indeed, i have heard that you may hear the _sartor_ preached from some of our best pulpits and lecture-rooms. don't think i speak of myself, for i cherish carefully a salutary horror at the german style, and hold off my admiration as long as ever i can. but all my importance is quite at an end. for now that doctors of divinity and the solemn review itself have broke silence to praise you, i have quite lost my plume as your harbinger. ----------* mr. a.h. everett's paper on _sartor resartus_ was published in the _north american review_ for october, 1835. ----------i read with interest what you say of the political omens in england. i could wish our country a better comprehension of its felicity. but government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. a man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his day. we have had in different parts of the country mobs and moblike legislation, and even moblike judicature, which have betrayed an almost godless state of society; so that i begin to think even here it behoves every man to quit his dependency on society as much as he can, as he would learn to go without crutches that will be soon plucked away from him, and settle with himself the principles he can stand upon, happen what may. there is reading, and public lecturing too, in this country, that i could recommend as medicine to any gentleman who finds the love of life too strong in him. if virtue and friendship have not yet become fables, do believe we keep your face for the living type. i was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for i have one too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. charles chauncy emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as i believe, no better lord hamlet was ever. he is our doctor on all questions of taste, manners, or action. and one of the pure pleasures i promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen know each other. x. emerson to carlyle concord, mass., 8 april, 1856 my dear friend,--i am concerned at not hearing from you. i have written you two letters, one in october, one in november, i believe, since i had any tidings of you.* your last letter is dated 27 june, 1835. i have counted all the chances of delay and miscarriage, and still am anxious lest you are ill, or have forgotten us. i have looked at the advertising sheet of the booksellers, but it promised nothing of the _history._ i thought i had made the happiest truce with sorrow in having the promise of your coming,--i was to take possession of a new kingdom of virtue and friendship. let not the new wine mourn. speak to me out of the wide silence. many friends inquire of me concerning you, and you must write some word immediately on receipt of this sheet. -----------* one in august by mrs. child, apparently not delivered, and one, the preceding, in october. ----------with it goes an american reprint of the _sartor._ five hundred copies only make the edition, at one dollar a copy. about one hundred and fifty copies are subscribed for. how it will be received i know not. i am not very sanguine, for i often hear and read somewhat concerning its repulsive style. certainly, i tell them, it is very odd. yet i read a chapter lately with great pleasure. i send you also, with dr. channing's regards and good wishes, a copy of his little work, lately published, on our great local question of slavery. you must have written me since july. i have reckoned upon your projected visit the ensuing summer or autumn, and have conjectured the starlike influences of a new spiritual element. especially lectures. my own experiments for one or two winters, and the readiness with which you embrace the work, have led me to think much and to expect much from this mode of addressing men. in new england the lyceum, as we call it, is already a great institution. beside the more elaborate courses of lectures in the cities, every country town has its weekly evening meeting, called a lyceum, and every professional man in the place is called upon, in the course of the winter, to entertain his fellow-citizens with a discourse on whatever topic. the topics are miscellaneous as heart can wish. but in boston, lowell, salem, courses are given by individuals. i see not why this is not the most flexible of all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of prescription. the pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain sound, and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much from that of those under it, as to embarrass the conscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from the fact of standing there. in the lyceum nothing is presupposed. the orator is only responsible for what his lips articulate. then what scope it allows! you may handle every member and relation of humanity. what could homer, socrates, or st. paul say that cannot be said here? the audience is of all classes, and its character will be determined always by the name of the lecturer. why may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, your philosophy, and become that good despot which the virtuous orator is? another thing. i am persuaded that, if a man speak well, he shall find this a well-rewarded work in new england. i have written this year ten lectures; i had written as many last year. and for reading both these and those at places whither i was invited, i have received this last winter about three hundred and fifty dollars. had i, in lieu of receiving a lecturer's fee, myself advertised that i would deliver these in certain places, these receipts would have been greatly increased. i insert all this because my prayers for you in this country are quite of a commercial spirit. if you lose no dollar by us, i shall joyfully trust your genius and virtue for your satisfaction on all other points. i cannot remember that there are any other mouthpieces that are specially vital at this time except criticism and parliamentary debate. i think this of ours would possess in the hands of a great genius great advantages over both. but what avail any commendations of the form, until i know that the man is alive and well? if you love them that love you, write me straightway of your welfare. my wife desires to add to mine her friendliest greetings to mrs. carlyle and to yourself. yours affectionately, r. waldo emerson i ought to say that le-baron russell, a worthy young man who studies engineering, did cause the republication of teufelsdrockh.* i trust you shall yet see a better american review of it than the _north american._ -----------* this first edition of _sartor_ as an independent volume was published by james munroe and company, boston. emerson, at mr. (now dr.) russell's request, wrote a preface for the book. he told dr. russell that his brother charles was not pleased with the preface, thinking it "too commonplace, too much like all prefaces." ----------xi. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, london 29 april, 1836 my dear emerson,--barnard is returning across the water, and must not go back without a flying salutation for you. these many weeks i have had your letter by me; these many weeks i have felt always that it deserved and demanded a grateful answer; and, alas! also that i could give it none. it is impossible for you to figure what mood i am in. one sole thought, that book! that weary book! occupies me continually: wreck and confusion of all kinds go tumbling and falling around me, within me; but to wreck and growth, to confusion and order, to the world at large, i turn a deaf ear; and have life only for this one thing,--which also in general i feel to be one of the pitifulest that ever man went about possessed with. have compassion for me! it is really very miserable: but it will end. some months more, and it is _ended;_ and i am done with _french revolution,_ and with revolution and revolt in general; and look once more with free eyes over this earth, where are other things than mean internecine work of that kind: things fitter for me, under the bright sun, on this green mother's-bosom (though the devil does dwell in it)! for the present, really, it is like a nessus' shirt, burning you into madness, this wretched enterprise; nay, it is also like a kind of panoply, rendering you invulnerable, insensible, to all _other_ mischiefs. i got the fatal first volume finished (in the miserablest way, after great efforts) in october last; my head was all in a whirl; i fled to scotland and my mother for a month of rest. rest is nowhere for the son of adam: all looked so "spectral" to me in my old-familiar birthland; hades itself could not have seemed stranger; annandale also was part of the kingdom of time. since november i have worked again as i could; a second volume got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three days. there is but a third now: one pull more, and then! it seems to me, i will fly into some obscurest cranny of the world, and lie silent there for a twelvemonth. the mind is weary, the body is very sick; a little black speck dances to and fro in the left eye (part of the retina protesting against the liver, and striking work): i cannot help it; it must flutter and dance there, like a signal of distress, unanswered till i be done. my familiar friends tell me farther that the book is all wrong, style cramp, &c., &c.: my friends, i answer, you are very right; but this also, heaven be my witness, i cannot help.--in such sort do i live here; all this i had to write you, if i wrote at all. for the rest i cannot say that this huge blind monster of a city is without some sort of charm for me. it leaves one alone, to go his own road unmolested. deep in your soul you take up your protest against it, defy it, and even despise it; but need not divide yourself from it for that. worthy individuals are glad to hear your thought, if it have any sincerity; they do not exasperate themselves or you about it; they have not even time for such a thing. nay, in stupidity itself on a scale of this magnitude, there is an impressiveness, almost a sublimity; one thinks how, in the words of schiller, "the very gods fight against it in vain"; how it lies on its unfathomable foundations there, inert yet peptic; nay, eupeptic; and is a _fact_ in the world, let theory object as it will. brown-stout, in quantities that would float a seventy-four, goes down the throats of men; and the roaring flood of life pours on;--over which philosophy and theory are but a poor shriek of remonstrance, which oftenest were wiser, perhaps, to hold its peace. i grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less. a fact, it seems to me, is a great thing: a sentence printed if not by god, then at least by the devil;--neither jeremy bentham nor lytton bulwer had a hand in _that._ there are two or three of the best souls here i have known for long: i feel less alone with them; and yet one is alone,--a stranger and a pilgrim. these friends expect mainly that the church of england is not dead but asleep; that the leather coaches, with their gilt panels, can be peopled again with a living aristocracy, instead of the simulacra of such. i must altogether hold my peace to this, as i do to much. coleridge is the father of all these. _ay de mi!_ but to look across the "divine salt-sea." a letter reached me, some two months ago, from mobile, alabama; the writer, a kind friend of mine, signs himself james freeman clarke.* i have mislaid, not lost his letter; and do not at present know his permanent address (for he seemed to be only on a visit at mobile); but you, doubtless, do know it. will you therefore take or even find an opportunity to tell this good friend that it is not the wreckage of the liverpool ship he wrote by, nor insensibility on my part, that prevents his hearing direct from me; that i see him, and love him in this letter; and hope we shall meet one day under the sun, shall live under it, at any rate, with many a kind thought towards one another. ---------* now the rev. dr. clarke, of boston. ---------the _north american review_ you spoke of never came (i mean that copy of it with the note in it); but another copy became rather public here, to the amusement of some. i read the article myself: surely this reviewer, who does not want in [sense]* otherwise, is an original: either a _thrice_-plied quiz (_sartor's_ "editor" a twice-plied one); or else opening on you a grandeur of still dulness, rarely to be met with on earth. ------------* the words supplied here were lost under the seal of the letter. ------------my friend! i must end here. forgive me till i get done with this book. can you have the generosity to write, _without_ an answer? well, if you can_not,_ i will answer. do not forget me. my love and my wife's to your good lady, to your brother, and all friends. tell me what you do; what your world does. as for my world, take this (which i rendered from the german voss, a tough old-teutonic fellow) for the best i can say of it:- "as journeys this earth, her eye on a sun, through the heavenly spaces, and, radiant in azure, or sunless, swallowed in tempests, falters not, alters not; journeying equal, sunlit or stormgirt so thou, son of earth, who hast force, goal, and time, go still onwards." adieu, my dear friend! believe me ever yours, thomas carlyle xii. emerson to carlyle concord, massachusetts, 17 september, 1836 my dear friend,--i hope you do not measure my love by the tardiness of my messages. i have few pleasures like that of receiving your kind and eloquent letters. i should be most impatient of the long interval between one and another, but that they savor always of eternity, and promise me a friendship and friendly inspiration not reckoned or ended by days or years. your last letter, dated in april, found me a mourner, as did your first. i have lost out of this world my brother charles,* of whom i have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. i have put so much dependence on his gifts that we made but one man together; for i needed never to do what he could do by noble nature much better than i. he was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death i was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation. i wish that you could have known him. at twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation. he built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. he postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. but some time i shall see you and speak of him. --------* charles chauncy emerson,--died may 9, 1836,--whose memory still survives fresh and beautiful in the hearts of the few who remain who knew him in life. a few papers of his published in the _dial_ show to others what he was and what he might have become. ----------we want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think. i find now i must hold faster the remaining jewels of my social belt. and of you i think much and anxiously since mrs. channing, amidst her delight at what she calls the happiest hour of her absence, in her acquaintance with you and your family, expresses much uneasiness respecting your untempered devotion to study. i am the more disturbed by her fears, because your letters avow a self-devotion to your work, and i know there is no gentle dulness in your temperament to counteract the mischief. i fear nature has not inlaid fat earth enough into your texture to keep the ethereal blade from whetting it through. i write to implore you to be careful of your health. you are the property of all whom you rejoice in art and soul, and you must not deal with your body as your own. o my friend, if you would come here and let me nurse you and pasture you in my nook of this long continent, i will thank god and you therefor morning and evening, and doubt not to give you, in a quarter of a year, sound eyes, round cheeks, and joyful spirits. my wife has been lately an invalid, but she loves you thoroughly, and hardly stores a barrel of flour or lays her new carpet without some hopeful reference to mrs. carlyle. and in good earnest, why cannot you come here forthwith, and deliver in lectures to the solid men of boston the _history of the french revolution_ before it is published,--or at least whilst it is publishing in england, and before it is published here. there is no doubt of the perfect success of such a course now that the _five hundred copies of the sartor are all sold,_ and read with great delight by many persons. this i suggest if you too must feel the vulgar necessity of _doing;_ but if you will be governed by your friend, you shall come into the meadows, and rest and talk with your friend in my country pasture. if you will come here like a noble brother, you shall have your solid day undisturbed, except at the hours of eating and walking; and as i will abstain from you myself, so i will defend you from others. i entreat mrs. carlyle, with my affectionate remembrances, to second me in this proposition, and not suffer the wayward man to think that in these space-destroying days a prayer from boston, massachusetts, is any less worthy of serious and prompt granting than one from edinburgh or oxford. i send you a little book i have just now published, as an entering wedge, i hope, for something more worthy and significant.* this is only a naming of topics on which i would gladly speak and gladlier hear. i am mortified to learn the ill fate of my former packet containing the _sartor_ and dr. channing's work. my mercantile friend is vexed, for he says accurate orders were given to send it as a packet, not as a letter. i shall endeavor before despatching this sheet to obtain another copy of our american edition. ----------* this was _nature,_ the first clear manifesto of emerson's genius. ----------i wish i could come to you instead of sending this sheet of paper. i think i should persuade you to get into a ship this autumn, quit all study for a time, and follow the setting sun. i have many, many things to learn of you. how melancholy to think how much we need confession!...* yet the great truths are always at hand, and all the tragedy of individual life is separated how thinly from that universal nature which obliterates all ranks, all evils, all individualities. how little of you is in your _will!_ above your will how intimately are you related to all of us! in god we meet. therein we _are,_ thence we descend upon time and these infinitesimal facts of christendom, and trade, and england old and new. wake the soul now drunk with a sleep, and we overleap at a bound the obstructions, the griefs, the mistakes, of years, and the air we breathe is so vital that the past serves to contribute nothing to the result. ----------** some words appear to be lost here. ----------i read goethe, and now lately the posthumous volumes, with a great interest. a friend of mine who studies his life with care would gladly know what records there are of his first ten years after his settlement at weimar, and what books there are in germany about him beside what mrs. austin has collected and heine. can you tell me? write me of your health, or else come. yours ever, r.w. emerson. p.s.--i learn that an acquaintance is going to england, so send the packet by him. xiii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 5 november, 1836 my dear friend,--you are very good to write to me in my silence, in the mood you must be in. my silence you may well judge is not forgetfulness; it is a forced silence; which this kind letter enforces into words. i write the day after your letter comes, lest the morrow bring forth something new to hinder me. what a bereavement, my friend, is this that has overtaken you! such a brother, with such a life opening around him, like a blooming garden where he was to labor and gather, all vanished suddenly like frostwork, and hidden from your eye! it is a loss, a sore loss; which god had appointed you. i do not tell you not to mourn: i mourn with you, and could wish all mourners the spirit you have in this sorrow. oh, i know it well! often enough in this noisy inanity of a vision where _we_ still linger, i say to myself, perhaps thy buried ones are not far from thee, are with thee; they are in eternity, which is a now and here! and yet nature will have her right; memory would feel desecrated if she could forget. many times in the crowded din of the living, some sight, some feature of a face, will recall to you the loved face; and in these turmoiling streets you see the little silent churchyard, the green grave that lies there so silent, inexpressibly _wae._ o, perhaps we _shall_ all meet yonder, and the tears be wiped from all eyes! one thing is no perhaps: surely we _shall_ all meet, if it be the will of the maker of us. if it be not his will,--then is it not better so? silence,--since in these days we have no speech! eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, in any day. you inquire so earnestly about my welfare; hold open still the hospitable door for me. truly concord, which i have sought out on the map, seems worthy of its name: no dissonance comes to me from that side; but grief itself has acquired a harmony: in joy or grief a voice says to me, behold there is one that loves thee; in thy loneliness, in thy darkness, see how a hospitable candle shines from far over seas, how a friendly heart watches! it is very good, and precious for me. as for my health, be under no apprehension. i am always sick; i am sicker and worse in body and mind, a little, for the present; but it has no deep significance: it is _weariness_ merely; and now, by the bounty of heaven, i am as it were within sight of land. in two months more, this unblessed book will be _finished;_ at newyearday we begin printing: before the end of march, the thing is out; and i am a free man! few happinesses i have ever known will equal that, as it seems to me. and yet i ought not to call the poor book unblessed: no, it has girdled me round like a panoply these two years; kept me invulnerable, indifferent, to innumerable things. the poorest man in london has perhaps been one of the freest: the roaring press of gigs and gigmen, with their gold blazonry and fierce gig-wheels, have little incommoded him; they going their way, he going his.--as for the results of the book, i can rationally promise myself, on the economical, pecuniary, or otherwise worldly side, simply _zero._ it is a book contradicting all rules of formalism, that have not a reality within them, which so few have;--testifying, the more quietly the worse, internecine war with quacks high and low. my good brother, who was with me out of italy in summer, declared himself shocked, and almost terror-struck: "jack," i answered, "innumerable men give their lives cheerfully to defend falsehoods and half-falsehoods; why should not one writer give his life cheerfully to say, in plain scotch-english, in the hearing of god and man, to me they seem false and half-false? at all events, thou seest, i cannot help it. it is the nature of the beast." so that, on the whole, i suppose there is no more unpromotable, unappointable man now living in england than i. literature also, the miscellaneous place of refuge, seems done here, unless you will take the devil's wages for it; which one does not incline to do. a _disjectum membrum;_ cut off from relations with men? verily so; and now forty years of age; and extremely dyspeptical: a hopeless-looking man. yet full of what i call desperate-hope! one does verily stand on the earth, a star-dome encompassing one; seemingly accoutred and enlisted and sent to battle, with rations good, indifferent, or bad,--what can one do but in the name of odin, tuisco, hertha, horsa, and all saxon and hebrew gods, fight it out?--this surely is very idle talk. as to the book, i do say seriously that it is a wild, savage, ruleless, very bad book; which even you will not be able to like; much less any other man. yet it contains strange things; sincerities drawn out of the heart of a man very strangely situated; reverent of nothing but what is reverable in all ages and places: so we will print it, and be done with it;--and try a new turn next time. what i am to do, were the thing done, you see therefore, is most uncertain. how gladly would i run to concord! and if i were there, be sure the do-nothing arrangement is the only conceivable one for me. that my sick existence subside again, this is the first condition; that quiet vision be restored me. it is frightful what an impatience i have got for many kinds of fellow-creatures. their jargon really hurts me like the shrieking of inarticulate creatures that ought to articulate. there is no resource but to say: brother, thou surely art not hateful; thou art lovable, at lowest pitiable;-alas! in my case, thou art dreadfully wearisome, unedifying: go thy ways, with my blessing. there are hardly three people among these two millions, whom i care much to exchange words with, in the humor i have. nevertheless, at bottom, it is not my purpose to quit london finally till i have as it were _seen it out._ in the very hugeness of the monstrous city, contradiction cancelling contradiction, one finds a sort of composure for one's self that is not to be met with elsewhere perhaps in the world: people tolerate you, were it only that they have not time to trouble themselves with you. some individuals even love me here; there are one or two whom i have even learned to love,--though, for the present, cross circumstances have snatched them out of my orbit again mostly. wherefore, if you ask me, what i am to do?--the answer is clear so far, "rest myself awhile"; and all farther is as dark as chaos. now for resting, taking that by itself, my brother, who has gone back to rome with some thoughts of settling as a physician there, presses me to come thither, and rest in rome. on the other hand, a certain john sterling (the best man i have found in these regions) has been driven to bordeaux lately for his health; he will have it that i must come to him, and walk through the south of france to dauphine, avignon, and over the alps next spring!* thirdly, my mother will have me return to annandale, and lie quiet in her little habitation;--which i incline to think were the wisest course of all. and lastly from over the atlantic comes my good emerson's voice. we will settle nothing, except that all shall remain unsettled. _die zukunft decket schmerzen and glucke._ -----------* in his _life of sterling,_ carlyle prints a letter from sterling to himself, dated bordeaux, october 26, 1836, in which sterling urges him to come "in the first fine days of spring." it must have reached him a few days before he wrote this letter to emerson. --------i ought to say, however, that about new-year's-day i will send you an article on _mirabeau,_ which they have printed here (for a thing called the _london review_), and some kind of note to escort it. i think pamphlets travel as letters in new england, provided you leave the ends of them open: if i be mistaken, pray instruct messrs. barnard to _refuse_ the thing, for it has small value. _the diamond necklace_ is to be printed also, in _fraser;_ inconceivable hawking that poor paper has had; till now fraser takes it--for l50: not being able to get it for nothing. the _mirabeau_ was written at the passionate request of john mill; and likewise for needful lucre. i think it is the first shilling of money i have earned by my craft these four years: where the money i have lived on has come from while i sat here scribbling gratis, amazes me to think; yet surely it has come (for i am still here), and heaven only to thank for it, which is a great fact. as for mill's _london review_ (for he is quasi-editor), i do not recommend it to you. hide-bound radicalism; a to me well-nigh insupportable thing! open it not: a breath as of sahara and the infinite sterile comes from every page of it. a young radical baronet* has laid out l3,000 on getting the world instructed in that manner: it is very curious to see.--alas! the bottom of the sheet! take my hurried but kindest thanks for the prospect of your second teufelsdrockh: the _first_ too is now in my possession; brother john went to the post-office, and worked it out for a ten shillings. it is a beautiful little book; and a preface to it such as no kindest friend could have improved. thank my kind editor** very heartily from me. --------* sir william molesworth. in his _autobiography_ mill gives an interesting account of the founding of this _review,_ and his quasi-editorial relations to it. "in the beginning," he says, "it did not, as a whole, by any means represent my opinion." ** dr. le-baron russell --------my wife was in scotland in summer, driven thither by ill health; she is stronger since her return, though not yet strong; she sends over to concord her kindest wishes. if i fly to the alps or the ocean, her mother and she must keep one another company, we think, till there be better news of me. you are to thank dr. channing also for his valued gift. i read the discourse, and other friends of his read it, with great estimation; but the _end_ of that black question lies beyond my ken. i suppose, as usual, might and right will have to make themselves synonymous in some way. canst and shalt, if they are _very_ well understood, mean the same thing under this sun of ours. adieu, my dear emerson. _gehab' dich wohl!_ many affectionate regards to the lady wife: it is far within the verge of probabilities that i shall see her face, and eat of her bread, one day. but she must not get sick! it is a dreadful thing, sickness; really a thing which i begin frequently to think _criminal_--at least in myself. nay, in myself it really is criminal; wherefore i determine to be well one day. good be with you and yours. t. carlyle as to goethe and your friend: i know not anything out of goethe's own works (which have many notices in them) that treats specially of those ten years. doubtless your friend knows jordens's _lexicon_ (which dates all the writings, for one thing), the _conversations-lexicon supplement,_ and such like. there is an essay by one schubarth which has reputation; but it is critical and ethical mainly. the letters to zelter, and the letters to schiller, will do nothing for those years, but are essential to see. perhaps in some late number of the _zeitgenossen_ there may be something? blackguard heine is worth very little; mentzel is duller, decenter, not much wiser. a very curious book is eckermann's _conversations with goethe,_ just published. no room more!* ----------* concerning this letter emerson wrote in his diary: "january 7, 1837. received day before yesterday a letter from thomas carlyle, dated 5 november;--as ever, a cordial influence. strong he is, upright, noble, and sweet, and makes good how much of our human nature. quite in consonance with my delight in his eloquent letters i read in bacon this afternoon this sentence (of letters): 'and such as are written from wise men are of all the words of men, in my judgment, the best; for they are more natural than orations, public speeches, and more advised than conferences or present speeches.'" ------------xiv. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, london, 13 february, 1837 my dear emerson,--you had promise of a letter to be despatched you about new-year's-day; which promise i was myself in a condition to fulfil at the time set, but delayed it, owing to delays of printers and certain "articles" that were to go with it. six weeks have not yet entirely brought up these laggard animals: however, i will delay no longer for them. nay, it seems the articles, were they never so ready, cannot go with the letter; but must fare round by liverpool or portsmouth, in a separate conveyance. we will leave them to the bounty of time. your little book and the copy of _teufelsdrockh_ came safely; soon after i had written. the _teufelsdrockh_ i instantaneously despatched to hamburg, to a scottish merchant there, to whom there is an allusion in the book; who used to be my _speditor_ (one of the politest extant though totally a stranger) in my missions and packages to and from weimar.* the other, former copy, more specially yours, had already been, as i think i told you, delivered out of durance; and got itself placed in the bookshelf, as _the_ teufelsdrockh. george ripley tells me you are printing another edition; much good may it do you! there is now also a kind of whisper and whimper rising _here_ about printing one. i said to myself once, when bookseller fraser shrieked so loud at a certain message you sent him: "perhaps after all they will print this poor rag of a thing into a book, after i am dead it may be,--if so seem good to them. _either_ way!" as it is, we leave the poor orphan to its destiny, all the more cheerfully. ripley says farther he has sent me a critique of it by a better hand than the _north american:_ i expect it, but have not got it yet.** the _north american_ seems to say that he too sent me one. it never came to hand, nor any hint of it,--except i think once before through you. it was not at all an unfriendly review; but had an opacity, of matter-of-fact in it that filled one with amazement. since the irish bishop who said there were some things in _gulliver_ on which he for one would keep his belief _suspended,_ nothing equal to it, on that side, has come athwart me. however, he _has_ made out that teufelsdrockh is, in all human probability, a fictitious character; which is always something, for an inquirer into truth.--will you, finally, thank friend ripley in my name, till i have time to write to him and thank him. ----------* the allusion referred to is the following: "by the kindness of a scottish hamburg merchant, whose name, known to the whole mercantile world, he must not mention; but whose honorable courtesy, now and before spontaneously manifested to him, a mere literary stranger, he cannot soon forget,--the bulky weissnichtwo packet, with all its custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, and miscellaneous tokens of travel, arrived here in perfect safety, and free of cost."--_sartor resartus,_ book i. ch. xi. ** an article by the rev. n.l. frothingham in the _christian examiner._ ---------your little azure-colored nature gave me true satisfaction. i read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintance that had a sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back. you say it is the first chapter of something greater. i call it rather the foundation and ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. it is the true apocalypse, this when the "open secret" becomes revealed to a man. i rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous dwelling-place of yours and mine--with an ear for the _ewigen melodien,_ which pipe in the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things: not to be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down. you will see what the years will bring you. it is not one of your smallest qualities in my mind, that you can wait so quietly and let the years do their best. he that cannot keep himself quiet is of a morbid nature; and the thing he yields us will be like him in that, whatever else it be. miss martineau (for i have seen her since i wrote) tells me you "are the only man in america" who has quietly set himself down on a competency to follow his own path, and do the work his own will prescribes for him. pity that you were the only one! but be one, nevertheless; be the first, and there will come a second and a third. it is a poor country where all men are _sold_ to mammon, and can make nothing but railways and bursts of parliamentary eloquence! and yet your new england here too has the upper hand of our old england, of our old europe: we too are sold to mammon, soul, body, and spirit; but (mark that, i pray you, with double pity) mammon will not _pay_ us,--we, are "two million three hundred thousand in ireland that have not potatoes enough"! i declare, in history i find nothing more tragical. i find also that it will alter; that for me as one it has altered. me mammon will _pay_ or not as he finds convenient; buy me he will not.--in fine, i say, sit still at concord, with such spirit as you are of; under the blessed skyey influences, with an open sense, with the great book of existence open round you: we shall see whether you too get not something blessed to read us from it. the paper is declining fast, and all is yet speculation. along with these two "articles" (to be sent by liverpool; there are two of them, _diamond necklace_ and _mirabeau_), you will very probably get some stray proofsheet--of the unutterable _french revolution!_ it is actually at press; two printers working at separate volumes of it,--though still too slow. in not many weeks, my hands will be washed of it! you, i hope, can have little conception of the feeling with which i wrote the last word of it, one night in early january, when the clock was striking ten, and our frugal scotch supper coming in! i did not cry; nor i did not pray but could have done both. no such _spell_ shall get itself fixed on me for some while to come! a beggarly distortion; that will please no mortal, not even myself; of which i know not whether the fire were not after all the due place! and yet i ought not to say so: there is a great blessing in a man's doing what he utterly can, in the case he is in. perhaps great quantities of dross are burnt out of me by this calcination i have had; perhaps i shall be far quieter and healthier of mind and body than i have ever been since boyhood. the world, though no man had ever less empire in it, seems to me a thing lying _under_ my feet; a mean imbroglio, which i never more shall fear, or court, or disturb myself with: welcome and welcome to go wholly _its own way;_ i wholly clear for going mine. through the summer months i am, somewhere or other, to rest myself, in the deepest possible sleep. the residue is vague as the wind,--unheeded as the wind. some way it will turn out that a poor, well-meaning son of adam has bread growing for him too, better or worse: _any_ way,--or even _no_ way, if that be it,--i shall be content. there is a scheme here among friends for my lecturing in a thing they call royal institution; but it will not do there, i think. the instant two or three are gathered together under any terms, who want to learn something i can teach them,--then we will, most readily, as burns says, "loose our tinkler jaw"; but not i think till then; were the institution even imperial. america has faded considerably into the background of late: indeed, to say truth, whenever i think of myself in america, it is as in the backwoods, with a rifle in my hand, god's sky over my head, and this accursed lazar-house of quacks and blockheads, 'and sin and misery (now near a head) lying all behind me forevermore. a thing, you see, which is and can be at bottom but a daydream! to rest through the summer: that is my only fixed wisdom; a resolution taken; only the place where uncertain.-what a pity this poor sheet is done! i had innumerable things to tell you about people whom i have seen, about books,--miss harriet martineau, mrs. butler, southey, influenza, parliament, literature and the life of man,--the whole of which must lie over till next time. write to me; do not forget me. my wife, who is sitting by me, in very poor health (this long while), sends "kindest remembrances," "compliments" she expressly does not send. good be with you always, my dear friend! --t. carlyle we send our felicitation to the mother and little boy; which latter you had better tell us the name of. xv. emerson to carlyle concord, mass., 31 march, 1837 my dear friend,--last night, i said i would write to you forthwith. this morning i received your letter of february 13th, and _with it_ the _diamond necklace,_ the _mirabeau,_ and the olive leaf of a proof-sheet. i write out the sum of my debt as the best acknowledgment i can make. i had already received, about new-year's-day, the preceding letter. it came in the midst of my washbowl-storm of a course of lectures on the philosophy of history. for all these gifts and pledges,--thanks. over the finished _history,_ joy and evergreen laurels. i embrace you with all my heart. i solace myself with the noble nature god has given you, and in you to me, and to all. i had read the _diamond necklace_ three weeks ago at the boston athenaeum, and the _mirabeau_ i had just read when my copy came. but the proof-sheet was virgin gold. the _mirabeau_ i forebode is to establish your kingdom in england. that is genuine thunder, which nobody that wears ears can affect to mistake for the rumbling of cart-wheels. i please myself with thinking that my angelo has blocked a colossus which may stand in the public square to defy all competitors. to be sure, that is its least merit,--that nobody can do the like,--yet is it a gag to cerberus. its better merit is that it inspires self-trust, by teaching the immense resources that are in human nature; so i sent it to be read by a brave man who is poor and decried. the doctrine is indeed true and grand which you preach as by cannonade, that god made a man, and it were as well to stand by and see what is in him, and, if he act ever from his impulses, believe that he has his own checks, and, however extravagant, will keep his orbit, and return from far; a faith that draws confirmation from the sempiternal ignorance and stationariness of society, and the sempiternal growth of all the individuals. the _diamond necklace_ i read with joy, whilst i read with my own eyes. when i read with english or new-english eyes, my joy is marred by the roaring of the opposition. i doubt not the exact story is there told as it fell out, and told for the first time; but the eye of your readers, as you will easily guess, will be bewildered by the multitude of brilliant-colored hieroglyphics whereby the meaning is conveyed. and for the gig,--the gig,--it is fairly worn out, and such a cloud-compeller must mock that particular symbol no more. i thought as i read this piece that your strange genius was the instant fruit of your london. it is the aroma of babylon. such as the great metropolis, such is this style: so vast, enormous, related to all the world, and so endless in details. i think you see as pictures every street, church, parliament-house, barrack, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabouts, and make all your own. hence your encyclopediacal allusion to all knowables, and the virtues and vices of your panoramic pages. well, it is your own; and it is english; and every word stands for somewhat; and it cheers and fortifies me. and what more can a man ask of his writing fellow-man? why, all things; inasmuch as a good mind creates wants at every stroke. the proof-sheet rhymes well with _mirabeau,_ and has abated my fears from your own and your brother's account of the new book. i greet it well. auspicious babe, be born! the first good of the book is that it makes you free, and as i anxiously hope makes your body sound. a possible good is that it will cause me to see your face. but i seemed to read in _mirabeau_ what you intimate in your letter, that you will not come westward. old england is to find you out, and then the new will have no charm. for me it will be the worst; for you, not. a man, a few men, cannot be to you (with your ministering eyes) that which you should travel far to find. moreover, i observe that america looks, to those who come hither, as unromantic and unexciting as the dutch canals. i see plainly that our society, for the most part, is as bigoted to the _respectabilities_ of religion and education as yours; that there is no more appetite for a revelation here than elsewhere; and the educated class are, of course, less fair-minded than others. yet, in the moments when my eyes are open, i see that here are rich materials for the philosopher and poet, and, what is more to your purpose as an artist, that we have had in these parts no one philosopher or poet to put a sickle to the prairie wheat. i have really never believed that you would do us that crowning grace of coming hither, yet if god should be kinder to us than our belief, i meant and mean to hold you fast in my little meadows on the musketaquid (now concord) river, and show you (as in this country we can anywhere) an america in miniature in the april or november town meeting. therein should you conveniently study and master the whole of our hemispherical politics reduced to a nutshell, and have a new version of oxenstiern's little wit; and yet be consoled by seeing that here the farmers patient as their bulls of head-boards--provided for them in relation to distant national objects, by kind editors of newspapers--do yet their will, and a good will, in their own parish. if a wise man would pass by new york, and be content to sit still in this village a few months, he should get a thorough native knowledge which no foreigner has yet acquired. so i leave you with god, and if any oracle in the great delphos should say "go," why fly to us instantly. come and spend a year with me, and see if i cannot respect your retirements. i must love you for your interest in me and my way of life, and the more that we only look for good-nature in the creative class. they pay the tag of grandeur, and, attracted irresistibly to make, their living is usually weak and hapless. but you are so companionable--god has made you man as well as poet--that i lament the three thousand miles of mountainous water. burns might have added a better verse to his poem, importing that one might write iliads or hamlets, and yet come short of truth by infinity, as every written word must; but "the man's the gowd for a' that." and i heartily thank the lady for her good-will. please god she may be already well. we all grieve to know of her ill health. people who have seen her never stop with _mr._ carlyle, but count him thrice blest in her. my wife believes in nothing for her but the american voyage. i shall never cease to expect you both until you come. my boy is five months old, he is called waldo,--a lovely wonder that made the universe look friendlier to me. my wife, one of your best lovers, sends her affectionate regards to mrs. carlyle, and says that she takes exception in your letters only to that sentence that she would go to scotland if you came here. my wife beseeches her to come and possess her new-dressed chamber. do not cease to write whenever you can spare me an hour. a man named bronson alcott is great, and one of the jewels we have to show you. good bye. --r.w. emerson the second edition of _sartor_ is out and sells well. i learned the other day that twenty-five copies of it were ordered for england. it was very amiable of you, that word about it in _mirabeau._* ---------* this refers to carlyle's introducing, in his paper on _mirabeau,_ a citation from _sartor,_ with the words, "we quote from a new england book." ---------xvi. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, london, 1 june, 1857 my dear friend,--a word must go to concord in answer to your last kind word. it reached me, that word of yours, on the morning of a most unspeakable day; the day when i, half dead with fret, agitation, and exasperation, was to address extempore an audience of london quality people on the subject of german literature! the heart's wish of me was that i might be left in deepest oblivion, wrapped in blankets and silence, not speaking, not spoken to, for a twelvemonth to come. my printers had only let me go, out of their treadmill, the day before. however, all that is over now; and i am still here alive to write to you, and hope for better days. almost a month ago there went a copy of a book called _french revolution,_ with your address on it, over to red-lion square, and thence, as old rich declared, himself now _emeritus,_ back to one kennet (i think) near covent garden; who professes to correspond with hilliard and company, boston, and undertook the service. the book is not gone yet, i understand; but kennet engages that it shall leave liverpool infallibly on the 5th of june. i wish you a happy reading of it, therefore: it is the only copy of my sending that has crossed the water. ill printed (there are many errors, one or two gross ones), ill written, ill thought! but in fine it _is_ off my hands: that is a fact worth all others. as to its reception here or elsewhere, i anticipate nothing or little. gabble, gabble, the astonishment of the dull public brain is likely to be considerable, and its ejaculations unedifying. we will let it go its way. beat this thing, i say always, under thy dull hoofs, o dull public! trample it and tumble it into all sinks and kennels; if thou canst kill it, kill it in god's name: if thou canst not kill it, why then thou wilt not. by the by, speaking of dull publics, i ought to say that i have seen a review of myself in the _christian examiner_ (i think that is it) of boston; the author of which, if you know him, i desire you to thank on my part. for if a dull million is good, then withal a seeing unit or two is also good. this man images back a beautiful idealized clothes-philosopher, very satisfactory to look upon; in whose beatified features i did verily detect more similitude to what i myself meant to be, than in any or all the other criticisms i have yet seen written of me. that a man see himself reflected from the soul of his brother-man in this brotherly improved way: there surely is one of the most legitimate joys of existence. friend ripley took the trouble to send me this review, in which i detected an article of his own; there came also some discourses of his much to be approved of; a newspaper passage-of-fence with a philistine of yours; and a set of essays on progress-of-the-species and such like by a man whom i grieved to see confusing himself with that. progress of the species is a thing i can get no good of at all. these books, which miss martineau has borrowed from me, did not arrive till three weeks ago or less. i pray you to thank ripley for them very kindly; which at present i still have not time to do. he seems to me a good man, with good aims; with considerable natural health of mind, wherein all goodness is likely to grow better, all clearness to grow clearer. miss martineau laments that he does not fling himself, or not with the due impetuosity, into the black controversy; a thing lamentable in the extreme, when one considers what a world this is, and how perfect it would be could mungo once get his stupid case rectified, and eat his squash as a stupid _apprentice_ instead of stupid _slave!_ miss martineau's book on america is out, here and with you. i have read it for the good authoress's sake, whom i love much. she is one of the strangest phenomena to me. a genuine little poetess, buckramed, swathed like a mummy into socinian and political-economy formulas; and yet verily alive in the inside of that! "god has given a prophet to every people in its own speech," say the arabs. even the english unitarians were one day to have their poet, and the best that could be said for them too was to be said. i admire this good lady's integrity, sincerity; her quick, sharp discernment to the depth it goes: her love also is great; nay, in fact it is too great: the host of illustrious obscure mortals whom she produces on you, of preachers, pamphleteers, antislavers, able editors, and other atlases bearing (unknown to us) the world on their shoulder, is absolutely more than enough. what they say to her book here i do not well know. i fancy the general reception will be good, and even brilliant. i saw mrs. butler* last night, "in an ocean of blonde and broadcloth," one of those oceans common at present. ach gott! they are not of persons, these soirdes, but of cloth figures. ---------* mrs fanny kemble butler. ---------i mean to retreat into scotland very soon, to repose myself as i intended. my wife continues here with her mother; here at least till the weather grow too hot, or a journey to join me seem otherwise advisable for her. she is gathering strength, but continues still weak enough. i rest myself "on the sunny side of hedges" in native annandale, one of the obscurest regions; no man shall speak to me, i will speak to no man; but have dialogues yonder with the old dumb crags, of the most unfathomable sort. once rested, i think of returning to london for another season. several things are beginning which i ought to see end before taking up my staff again. in this enormous chaos the very multitude of conflicting perversions produces something more like a _calm_ than you can elsewhere meet with. men let you alone, which is an immense thing: they do it even because they have no time to meddle with you. london, or else the backwoods of america, or craigenputtock! we shall see. i still beg the comfort of hearing from you. i am sick of soul and body, but not incurable; the loving word of a waldo emerson is as balm to me, medicinal now more than ever. my wife earnestly joins me in love to the concord household. may a blessing be in it, on one and all! i do nowise give up the idea of sojourning there one time yet. on the contrary, it seems almost certain that i shall. good be with you. yours always, t. carlyle* ----------* emerson wrote in his diary, july 27, 1837: "a letter today from carlyle rejoiced me. pleasant would life be with such companions. but if you cannot have them on good mutual terms you cannot have them. if not the deity but our wilfulness hews and shapes the new relations, their sweetness escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor by cultivation." ---------xvii. emerson to carlyle concord, 13 september, 1837 my dear friend,--such a gift as the _french revolution_ demanded a speedier acknowledgment. but you mountaineers that can scale andes before breakfast for an airing have no measures for the performance of lowlanders and valetudinarians. i am ashamed to think, and will not tell, what little things have kept me silent. the _french revolution_ did not reach me until three weeks ago, having had at least two long pauses by the way, as i find, since landing. between many visits received, and some literary haranguing done, i have read two volumes and half the third and i think you a very good giant; disporting yourself with an original and vast ambition of fun: pleasure and peace not being strong enough for you, you choose to suck pain also, and teach fever and famine to dance and sing. i think you have written a wonderful book, which will last a very long time. i see that you have created a history, which the world will own to be such. you have recognized the existence of other persons than officers, and of other relations than civism. you have broken away from all books, and written a mind. it is a brave experiment, and the success is great. we have men in your story and not names merely; always men, though i may doubt sometimes whether i have the historic men. we have great facts--and selected facts--truly set down. we have always the co-presence of humanity along with the imperfect damaged individuals. the soul's right of wonder is still left to us; and we have righteous praise and doom awarded, assuredly without cant. yes, comfort yourself on that particular, o ungodliest divine man! thou cantest never. finally we have not--a dull word. never was there a style so rapid as yours,--which no reader can outrun; and so it is for the most intelligent. i suppose nothing will astonish more than the audacious wit and cheerfulness which no tragedy and no magnitude of events can overpower or daunt. henry viii loved a man, and i see with joy my bard always equal to the crisis he represents. and so i thank you for your labor, and feel that your contemporaries ought to say, all hail, brother! live forever: not only in the great soul which thou largely inhalest, but also as a named, person in this thy definite deed. i will tell you more of the book when i have once got it at focal distance,--if that can ever be, and muster my objections when i am sure of their ground. i insist, of course, that it might be more simple, less gothically efflorescent. you will say no rules for the illumination of windows can apply to the aurora borealis. however, i find refreshment when every now and then a special fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp and businesslike terms. this character-drawing in the book is certainly admirable; the lines are ploughed furrows; but there was cake and ale before, though thou be virtuous. clarendon surely drew sharp outlines for me in falkland, hampden, and the rest, without defiance or sky-vaulting. i wish i could talk with you face to face for one day, and know what your uttermost frankness would say concerning the book. i feel assured of its good reception in this country. i learned last saturday that in all eleven hundred and sixty-six copies of _sartor_ have been sold. i have told the publisher of that book that he must not print the _history_ until some space has been given to people to import british copies. i have ordered hilliard, gray, & co. to import twenty copies as an experiment. at the present very high rate of exchange, which makes a shilling worth thirty cents, they think, with freight and duties, the book would be too costly here for sale, but we confide in a speedy fall of exchange; then my books shall come. i am ashamed that you should educate our young men, and that we should pirate your books. one day we will have a better law, or perhaps you will make our law yours. i had your letter long before your book. very good work you have done in your lifetime, and very generously you adorn and cheer this pilgrimage of mine by your love. i find my highest prayer granted in calling a just and wise man my friend. your profuse benefaction of genius in so few years makes me feel very poor and useless. i see that i must go on trust to you and to all the brave for some longer time, hoping yet to prove one day my truth and love. there are in this country so few scholars, that the services of each studious person are needed to do what he can for the circulation of thoughts, to the end of making some counterweight to the money force, and to give such food as he may to the nigh starving youth. so i religiously read lectures every winter, and at other times whenever summoned. last year, "the philosophy of history," twelve lectures; and now i meditate a course on what i call "ethics." i peddle out all the wit i can gather from time or from nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received. write to me, good friend, tell me if you went to scotland,--what you do, and will do,--tell me that your wife is strong and well again as when i saw her at craigenputtock. i desire to be affectionately remembered to her. tell me when you will come hither. i called together a little club a week ago, who spent a day with me,--counting fifteen souls,--each one of whom warmly loves you. so if the _french revolution_ does not convert the "dull public" of your native nineveh, i see not but you must shake their dust from your shoes and cross the atlantic to a new england. yours in love and honor. --r. waldo emerson may i trouble you with a commission when you are in the city? you mention being at the shop of rich in red-lion square. will you say to him that he sent me some books two or three years ago without any account of prices annexed? i wrote him once myself, once through s. burdett, bookseller, and since through c.p. curtis, esq., who professes to be his attorney in boston,--three times,--to ask for this account. no answer has ever come. i wish he would send me the account, that i may settle it. if he persist in his self-denying contumacy, i think you may immortalize him as a bookseller of the gods. i shall send you an oration presently, delivered before a literary society here, which is now being printed.* gladly i hear of the carlylet--so they say--in the new westminster. --------* this was emerson's famous oration before the phi beta kappa society, at cambridge, august 31, 1837, on "the american scholar." in his admirable essay on thoreau,--an essay which might serve as introduction and comment to the letters of carlyle and emerson during these years,--lowell speaks of the impression made by this remarkable discourse. it "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. what crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! it was our yankee version of a lecture by abelard, our harvard parallel to the last public appearances of schelling."--_my study windows,_ p. 197 --------xviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 2 november, 1837 my dear friend,--mr. charles sumner, a lawyer of high standing for his age, and editor or one editor of a journal called _the jurist,_ and withal a lover of your writings, tells me he is going to paris and thence to london, and sets out in a few days. i cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor let pass the occasion of a greeting. health, joy, and peace be with you! i hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate new labors. phidias need not be always tinkering. sit still like an egyptian. somebody told me the other day that your friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing _sartor_ themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. instantly i wondered why i had never such a thought before, and went straight to boston, and have made a bargain with a bookseller to print the _french revolution._ it is to be printed in two volumes of the size of our american _sartor,_ one thousand copies, the estimate making the cost of the book say (in dollars and cents) $1.18 a copy, and the price $2.50. the bookseller contracts with me to sell the book at a commission of twenty percent on that selling price, allowing me however to take at cost as many copies as i can find subscribers for. there is yet, i believe, no other copy in the country than mine: so i gave him the first volume, and the printing is begun. i shall take care that your friends here shall know my contract with the bookseller, and so shall give me their names. then, if so good a book can have a tolerable sale, (almost contrary to the nature of a good book, i know,) i shall sustain with great glee the new relation of being your banker and attorney. they have had the wit in the london _examiner,_ i find, to praise at last; and i mean that our public shall have the entire benefit of that page. the _westminster_ they can read themselves. the printers think they can get the book out by christmas. so it must be long before i can tell you what cheer. meantime do you tell me, i entreat you, what speed it has had at home. the best, i hope, with the wise and good withal. i have nothing to tell you and no thoughts. i have promised a course of lectures for december, and am far from knowing what i am to say; but the way to make sure of fighting into the new continent is to burn your ships. the "tender ears," as george fox said, of young men are always an effectual call to me ignorant to speak. i find myself so much more and freer on the platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit, that i shall not much more use the last; and do now only in a little country chapel at the request of simple men to whom i sustain no other relation than that of preacher. but i preach in the lecture-room and then it tells, for there is no prescription. you may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius. it is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern countrymen. this winter, in boston, we shall have more than ever: two or three every night of the week. when will you come and redeem your pledge? the day before yesterday my little boy was a year old,--no, the day before that,--and i cannot tell you what delight and what study i find in this little bud of god, which i heartily desire you also should see. good, wise, kind friend, i shall see you one day. let me hear, when you can write, that mrs. carlyle is well again. --r. waldo emerson xix. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 8 december, 1837 my dear emerson,--how long it is since you last heard of me i do not very accurately know; but it is too long. a very long, ugly, inert, and unproductive chapter of my own history seems to have passed since then. whenever i delay writing, be sure matters go not well with me; and do you in that case write to me, were it again and over again,--unweariable in pity. i did go to scotland, for almost three months; leaving my wife here with her mother. the poor wife had fallen so weak that she gave me real terror in the spring-time, and made the doctor look very grave indeed: she continued too weak for traveling: i was worn out as i had never in my life been. so, on the longest day of june, i got back to my mother's cottage; threw myself down, i may say, into what we may call the "frightfulest _magnetic sleep,_" and lay there avoiding the intercourse of men. most wearisome had their gabble become; almost unearthly. but indeed all was unearthly in that humor. the gushing of my native brooks, the _sough_ of the old solitary woods, the great roar of old native solway (billowing fresh out of your atlantic, drawn by the moon): all this was a kind of unearthly music to me; i cannot tell you how unearthly. it did not bring me to rest; yet _towards_ rest i do think at all events, the time had come when i behoved to quit it again. i have been here since september evidently another little "chapter" or paragraph, _not_ altogether inert, is getting forward. but i must not speak of these things. how can i speak of them on a miserable scrap of blue paper? looking into your kind-eyes with my eyes, i could speak: not here. pity me, my friend, my brother; yet hope well of me: if i can (in all senses) _rightly hold my peace,_ i think much will yet be well with me. silence is the great thing i worship at present; almost the sole tenant of my pantheon. let a man know rightly how to hold his peace. i love to repeat to myself, "silence is of eternity." ah me, i think how i could rejoice to quit these jarring discords and jargonings of babel, and go far, far away! i do believe, if i had the smallest competence of money to get "food and warmth" with, i would shake the mud of london from my feet, and go and bury myself in some green place, and never print any syllable more. perhaps it is better as it is. but quitting this, we will actually speak (under favor of "silence") one very small thing; a pleasant piece of news. there is a man here called john sterling (_reverend_ john of the church of england too), whom i love better than anybody i have met with, since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me at craigenputtock, and vanished in the blue again. this sterling has written; but what is far better, he has lived, he is alive. across several unsuitable wrappages, of church-of-englandism and others, my heart loves the man. he is one, and the best, of a small class extant here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of infidelity (lighted up by some glare of radicalism only, now growing _dim_ too) and about to perish, saved themselves into a coleridgian shovel-hattedness, or determination to _preach,_ to preach peace, were it only the spent _echo_ of a peace once preached. he is still only about thirty; young; and i think will shed the shovel-hat yet perhaps. do you ever read _blackwood?_ this john sterling is the "new contributor" whom wilson makes such a rout about, in the november and prior month "crystals from a cavern," &c., which it is well worth your while to see. well, and what then, cry you?--why then, this john sterling has fallen overhead in love with a certain waldo emerson; that is all. he saw the little book _nature_ lying here; and, across a whole _silva silvarum_ of prejudices, discerned what was in it; took it to his heart,--and indeed into his pocket; and has carried it off to madeira with him; whither unhappily (though now with good hope and expectation) the doctors have ordered him. this is the small piece of pleasant news, that two sky-messengers (such they were both of them to me) have met and recognized each other; and by god's blessing there shall one day be a trio of us: call you that nothing? and so now by a direct transition i am got to the _oration._ my friend! you know not what you have done for me there. it was long decades of years that i had heard nothing but the infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate twittering and screeching, and my soul had sunk down sorrowful, and said there is no articulate speaking then any more, and thou art solitary among stranger-creatures? and lo, out of the west comes a clear utterance, clearly recognizable as a _man's_ voice, and i _have_ a kinsman and brother: god be thanked for it! i could have _wept_ to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart;--i said to my wife, "there, woman!" she read; and returned, and charges me to return for answer, "that there had been nothing met with like it since schiller went silent." my brave emerson! and all this has been lying silent, quite tranquil in him, these seven years, and the "vociferous platitude" dinning his ears on all sides, and he quietly answering no word; and a whole world of thought has silently built itself in these calm depths, and, the day being come, says quite softly, as if it were a common thing, "yes, i _am_ here too." miss martineau tells me, "some say it is inspired, some say it is mad." exactly so; no say could be suitabler. but for you, my dear friend, i say and pray heartily: may god grant you strength; for you have a _fearful_ work to do! fearful i call it; and yet it is great, and the greatest. o for god's sake _keep yourself still quiet!_ do not hasten to write; you cannot be too slow about it. give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that that is _not_ it: on the one side is as heaven if you have strength to keep silent, and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right-hand and one's left, is the frightfulest abyss and pandemonium! see fenimore cooper;--poor cooper, he is _down in it;_ and had a climbing faculty too. be steady, be quiet, be in no haste; and god speed you well! my space is done. and so adieu, for this time. you must write soon again. my copy of the _oration_ has never come: how is this? i could dispose of a dozen well.--they say i am to lecture again in spring, _ay de mi!_ the "book" is babbled about sufficiently in several dialects: fraser wants to print my scattered reviews and articles; a pregnant sign. teufelsdrockh to precede. the man "screamed" once at the name of it in a very musical manner. he shall not print a line; unless he give me money for it, more or less. i have had enough of printing for one while,--thrown into "magnetic sleep" by it! farewell my brother. --t. carlyle o. rich, it seems, is in spain. his representative assured me, some weeks since, that the account was now sent. there is an article on sir w. scott: shocking; invitissima minerva!* ---------*carlyle's article on scott published in the _london and westminster review,_ no. 12. reprinted in his _critical and miscellaneous essays._ ---------miss martineau charges me to send kind remembrances to you and your lady: her words were kinder than i have room for here.--can you not, in defect or delay of letter, send me a massachusetts newspaper? i think it costs little or almost nothing now; and i shall know your hand. xx. emerson to carlyle concord, 9 february, 1838 my dear friend,--it is ten days now--ten cold days--that your last letter has kept my heart warm, and i have not been able to write before. i have just finished--wednesday evening--a course of lectures which i ambitiously baptized "human culture," and read once a week to the curious in boston. i could write nothing else the while, for weariness of the week's stated scribbling. now i am free as a wood-bird, and can take up the pen without fretting or fear. your letter should, and nearly did, make me jump for joy,--fine things about our poor speech at cambridge,-fine things from carlyle. scarcely could we maintain a decorous gravity on the occasion. and then news of a friend, who is also carlyle's friend. what has life better to offer than such tidings? you may suppose i went directly and got me _blackwood,_ and read the prose and the verse of john sterling, and saw that my man had a head and a heart, and spent an hour or two very happily in spelling his biography out of his own hand;--a species of palmistry in which i have a perfect reliance. i found many incidents grave and gay and beautiful, and have determined to love him very much. in this romancing of the gentle affections we are children evermore. we forget the age of life, the barriers so thin yet so adamantean of space and circumstance; and i have had the rarest poems self-singing in my head of brave men that work and conspire in a perfect intelligence across seas and conditions--and meet at last. i heartily pray that the sea and its vineyards may cheer with warm medicinal breath a voyager so kind and noble. for the _oration,_ i am so elated with your goodwill that i begin to fear your heart has betrayed your head this time, and so the praise is not good on parnassus but only in friendship. i sent it diffidently (i did send it through bookselling munroe) to you, and was not a little surprised by your generous commendations. yet here it interested young men a good deal for an academical performance, and an edition of five hundred was disposed of in a month. a new edition is now printing, and i will send you some copies presently to give to anybody who you think will read. i have a little budget of news myself. i hope you had my letter --sent by young sumner--saying that we meant to print the _french revolution_ here for the author's benefit. it was published on the 25th of december. it is published at my risk, the booksellers agreeing to let me have at cost all the copies i can get subscriptions for. all the rest they are to sell and to have twenty percent on the retail price for their commission. the selling price of the book is $2.50; the cost of a copy, $1.26; the bookseller's commission, 50 cts.; so that t.c. only gains 74 cts. on each copy they sell. but we have two hundred subscribers, and on each copy they buy you have $1.26, except in cases where the distant residence of subscribers makes a cost of freight. you ought to have three or four quarters of a dollar more on each copy, but we put the lowest price on the book in terror of the philistines, and to secure its accessibleness to the economical public. we printed one thousand copies: of these, five hundred are already sold, in six weeks; and brown the bookseller talks, as i think, much too modestly, of getting rid of the whole edition in one year. i say six months. the printing, &c. is to be paid and a settlement made in six months from the day of publication; and i hope the settlement will be the final one. and i confide in sending you seven hundred dollars at least, as a certificate that you have so many readers in the west. yet, i own, i shake a little at the thought of the bookseller's account. whenever i have seen that species of document, it was strange how the hopefulest ideal dwindled away to a dwarfish actual. but you may be assured i shall on this occasion summon to the bargain all the yankee in my constitution, and multiply and divide like a lion. the book has the best success with the best. young men say it is the only history they have ever read. the middle-aged and the old shake their heads, and cannot make anything of it. in short, it has the success of a book which, as people have not fashioned, has to fashion the people. it will take some time to win all, but it wins and will win. i sent a notice of it to the _christian examiner,_ but the editor sent it all back to me except the first and last paragraphs; those he printed. and the editor of the _north american_ declined giving a place to a paper from another friend of yours. but we shall see. i am glad you are to print your _miscellanies;_ but--forgive our transatlantic effrontery--we are beforehand of you, and we are already selecting a couple of volumes from the same, and shall print them on the same plan as the _history,_ and hope so to turn a penny for our friend again. i surely should not do this thing without consulting you as to the selection but that i had no choice. if i waited, the bookseller would have done it himself, and carried off the profit. i sent you (to kennet) a copy of the _french revolution._ i regret exceedingly the printer's blunder about the numbering the books in the volumes, but he had warranted me in a literal, punctual reprint of the copy without its leaving his office, and i trusted him. i am told there are many errors. i am going to see for myself. i have filled my paper, and not yet said a word of how many things. you tell me how ill was mrs. c., and you do not tell me that she is well again. but i see plainly that i must take speedily another sheet. i love you always. --r.w. emerson xxi. emerson to carlyle boston, 12 march, 1838 my dear friend,--here in a bookseller's shop i have secured a stool and corner to say a swift benison. mr. bancroft told me that the presence of english lord gosford in town would give me a safe conveyance of pamphlets to you, so i send some _orations_ of which you said so kind and cheering words. give them to any one who will read them. i have written names in three. you have, i hope, got the letter sent nearly a month ago, giving account of our reprint of the _french revolution,_ and have received a copy of the same. i learn from the bookseller today that six hundred and fifty copies are sold, and the book continues to sell. so i hope that our settlement at the end of six months will be final, or nearly so. i had nearly closed my agreement the other day with a publisher for the emission of _carlyle's miscellanies,_ when just in the last hour comes word from e.g. loring that he has an authentic catalogue from the bard himself. now i have that, and could wish loring had communicated his plan to me at first, or that i had bad wit enough to have undertaken this matter long ago and conferred with you. i designed nothing for you or your friends; but merely a lucrative book for our daily market that would have yielded a pecuniary compensation to you, such as we are all bound to make, and have bought our socrates a cloak. loring contemplated something quite different,--a "complete works," etc.,--and now clamors for the same thing, and i do not know but i shall have to gratify him and others at the risk of injury to this my vulgar hope of dollars,--that innate idea of the american mind. this i shall settle in a few days. no copyright can be secured here for an english book unless it contain original matter: but my moments are going, and i can only promise to write you quickly, at home and at leisure, for i have just been reading the _history_ again with many, many thoughts, and i revere, wonder at, and love you. --r. waldo emerson xxii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 16 march, 1838 my dear emerson,--your letter through sumner was sent by him from paris about a month ago; the man himself has not yet made his appearance, or been heard of in these parts: he shall be very welcome to me, arrive when he will. the february letter came yesterday, by direct conveyance from dartmouth. i answer it today rather than tomorrow; i may not for long have a day freer than this. _fronte capillata, post est occasio calva:_ true either in latin or english! you send me good news, as usual. you have been very brisk and helpful in this business of the _revolution_ book, and i give you many thanks and commendations. it will be a very brave day when cash actually reaches me, no matter what the _number_ of the coins, whether seven or seven hundred, out of yankee-land; and strange enough, what is not unlikely, if it be the _first_ cash i realize for that piece of work,--angle-land continuing still _in_solvent to me! well, it is a wide motherland we have here, or are getting to have, from bass's straits all round to columbia river, already almost circling the globe: it must be hard with a man if somewhere or other he find not some one or other to take his part, and stand by him a little! blessings on you, my brother: nay, your work is already twice blessed.--i believe after all, with the aid of my scotch thrift, i shall not be absolutely thrown into the streets here, or reduced to borrow, and become the slave of somebody, for a morsel of bread. thank god, no! nay, of late i begin entirely to despise that whole matter, so as i never hitherto despised it: "thou beggarliest spectre of beggary that hast chased me ever since i was man, come on then, in the devil's name, let us see what is in thee! will the soul of a man, with eternity within a few years of it, quail before _thee?_" better, however, is my good pious mother's version of it: "they cannot take god's providence from thee; thou hast never wanted yet."* ---------* in his diary, may 9, 1838, emerson wrote: "a letter this morning from t. carlyle. how should he be so poor? it is the most creditable poverty i know of." ---------but to go on with business; and the republication of books in that transoceanic england, new and improved edition of england. in january last, if i recollect right, miss martineau, in the name of a certain mr. loring, applied to me for a correct list of all my fugitive papers; the said mr. loring meaning to publish them for my behoof. this list she, though not without solicitation, for i had small hope in it, did at last obtain, and send, coupled with a request from me that you should be consulted in the matter. now it appears you had of yourself previously determined on something of the same sort, and probably are far on with the printing of your two select volumes. i confess myself greatly better pleased with it on that footing than on another. who mr. loring may be i know not, with any certainty, at first hand; but who waldo emerson is i do know; and more than one god from the machine is not necessary. i pray you, thank mr. loring for his goodness towards me (his intents are evidently charitable and not wicked); but consider yourself as in nowise bound at all by that blotted paper he has, but do the best you can for me, consulting with him or not taking any counsel just as you see to be fittest on the spot. and so heaven prosper you, both in your "aroused yankee" state, and in all others;--and let us for the present consider that we have enough about books and guineas. i must add, however, that fraser and i have yet made no bargain. we found, on computing, that there would be five good volumes, including _teufelsdrockh._ for an edition of seven hundred and fifty i demanded l50 a volume, and fraser refused: the poor man then fell dangerously ill, and there could not be a word farther said on the subject; till very lately, when it again became possible, but has not yet been put in practice. all the world cries out, why _do you_ publish with fraser? "because my soul is sick of booksellers, and of trade, and deception, and 'need and greed' altogether; and this poor fraser, not worse than the rest of them, has in some sort grown less hideous to me by custom." i fancy, however, either fraser will publish these things before long; or some samaritan here will take me to some bolder brother of the trade that will. great samuel johnson assisted at the beginning of bibliopoly; small thomas carlyle assists at the ending of it: both are sorrowful seasons for a man. for the rest, people here continue to receive that _revolution_ very much as you say they do _there:_ i am right well quit of it; and the elderly gentlemen on both sides of the water may take comfort, they will not soon have to suffer the like again. but really england is wonderfully changed within these ten years; the old gentlemen all shrunk into nooks, some of them even voting with the young.--the american ill-printed two and-a-half-dollars copy shall, for emerson's sake, be welcomest to me of all. kennet will send it when it comes. the _oration_ did arrive, with my name on it, one snowy night in january. it is off to madeira; probably there now. i can dispose of a score of copies to good advantage. friend sterling has done the best of all his things in the current _blackwood,_-"crystals from a cavern,"--which see. he writes kind things of you from madeira, in expectation of the speech. i will gratify him with your message; he is to be here in may; better, we hope, and in the way towards safety. miss martineau has given you a luminous section in her new book about america; you are one of the american "originals,"--the good harriet! and now i have but one thing to add and to repeat: be quiet, be quiet! the fire that is in one's own stomach is enough, without foreign bellows to blow it ever and anon. my whole heart shudders at the thrice-wretched self-combustion into which i see all manner of poor paper-lanterns go up, the wind of "popularity" puffing at them, and nothing left erelong but ashes and sooty wreck. it is sad, most sad. i shun all such persons and circles, as much as possible; and pray the gods to make me a brick layer's hodbearer rather. o the "cabriolets, neatflies," and blue twaddlers of both sexes therein, that drive many a poor mrs. rigmarole to the devil!*--as for me, i continue doing as nearly nothing as i can manage. i decline all invitations of society that are declinable: a london rout is one of the maddest things under the moon; a london dinner makes me sicker for a week, and i say often, it is better to be even dull than to be witty, better to be silent than to speak. -------* this sentence is a variation on one at the beginning of the article on scott. -------curious: your course of lectures "on human culture" seems to be on the very subject i am to discourse upon here in may coming; but i am to call it "on the history of literature," and _speak_ it, not write it. while you read this, i shall be in the agonies! ah me! often when i think of the matter, how my one sole wish is to be left to hold my tongue, and by what bayonets of necessity clapt to my back i am driven into that lecture-room, and in what mood, and ordered to speak or die, i feel as if my only utterance should be a flood of tears and blubbering! but that, clearly, will not do. then again i think it is perhaps better so; who knows? at all events, we will try what is in this lecturing in london. if something, well; if nothing, why also well. but i do want to get out of these coils for a tune. my brother is to be home again in may; if he go back to italy, if our lecturing proved productive, why might we not all set off thitherward for the winter coming? there is a dream to that effect. it would suit my wife, too: she was alarmingly weak this time twelvemonth; and i can only yet tell you that she is stronger, not strong: she has not ventured out except at midday, and rarely then, since autumn last; she sits here patiently waiting summer, and charges me to send you her love.--america also always lies in the background: i do believe, if i live long, i shall get to concord one day. your wife must love me. if the little boy be a well-behaved fellow, he shall ride on my back yet: if not, tell him i will have nothing to do with him, the riotous little imp that he is. and so god bless you always, my dear friend! your affectionate, --t. carlyle xxiii. emerson to carlyle* concord, 10 may, 1838 my dear friend,--yesterday i had your letter of march. it quickens my purpose (always all but ripe) to write to you. if it had come earlier i should have been confirmed in my original purpose of publishing _select miscellanies of t.c._ as it is, we are far on in the printing of the first two volumes (to make 900 pages) of the papers as they stand in your list. and now i find we shall only get as far as the seventeenth or eighteenth article. i regret it, because this book will not embrace those papers i chiefly desire to provide people with, and it may be some time, in these years of bankruptcy and famine, before we shall think it prudent to publish two volumes more. but loring is a good man, and thinks that many desire to see the sources of nile. i, for my part, fancy that to meet the taste of the readers we should publish _from the last_ backwards, beginning with the paper on scott, which has had the best reception ever known. carlyleism is becoming so fashionable that the most austere seniors are glad to qualify their reprobation by applauding this review. i have agreed with the bookseller publishing the _miscellanies_ that he is to guarantee to you one dollar on every copy he sells; and you are to have the total profit on every copy subscribed for. the retail price [is] to be $2.50. the cost of the work is not yet precisely ascertained. the work will probably appear in six or seven weeks. we print one thousand copies. so whenever it is sold you shall have one thousand dollars. ---------* printed in the _athenaeum,_ july 8, 1882. ---------the _french revolution_ continues to find friends and purchasers. it has gone to new orleans, to nashville, to vicksburg. i have not been in boston lately, but have determined that nearly or quite eight hundred copies should be gone. on the 1st of july i shall make up accounts with the booksellers, and i hope to make you the most favorable returns. i shall use the advice of barnard, adams, & co. in regard to remittances. when you publish your next book i think you must send it out to me in sheets, and let us print it here contemporaneously with the english edition. the _eclat_ of so new a book would help the sale very much. but a better device would be, that you should embark in the "victoria" steamer, and come in a fortnight to new york, and in twenty-four hours more to concord. your study arm-chair, fireplace, and bed, long vacant, auguring expect you. then you shall revise your proofs and dictate wit and learning to the new world. think of it in good earnest. in aid of your friendliest purpose, i will set down some of the facts. i occupy, or _improve,_ as we yankees say, two acres only of god's earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. my house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. besides my house, i have, i believe, $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six percent. i have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter $800. well, with this income, here at home, i am a rich man. i stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. i have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. go away from home, i am rich no longer. i never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. as no wise man, i suppose, ever was rich in the sense of _freedom to spend,_ because of the inundation of claims, so neither am i, who am not wise. but at home, i am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. my wife lidian is an incarnation of christianity,--i call her asia,--and keeps my philosophy from antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and run for us, make all my household. here i sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle. in summer, with the aid of a neighbor, i manage my garden; and a week ago i set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to protect me or my son from the wind of january. the ornament of the place is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the year.--but my story is too long already. god grant that you will come and bring that blessed wife, whose protracted illness we heartily grieve to learn, and whom a voyage and my wife's and my mother's nursing would in less than a twelvemonth restore to blooming health. my wife sends to her this message: "come, and i will be to you a sister." what have you to do with italy? your genius tendeth to the new, to the west. come and live with me a year, and if you do not like new england well enough to stay, one of these years (when the _history_ has passed its ten editions, and been translated into as many languages) i will come and dwell with you. i gladly hear what you say of sterling. i am foolish enough to be delighted with being an object of kindness to a man i have never seen, and who has not seen me. i have not yet got the _blackwood_ for march, which i long to see, but the other three papers i have read with great satisfaction. they lie here on my table. but he must get well. as to miss martineau, i know not well what to say. meaning to do me a signal kindness (and a kindness quite out of all measure of justice) she does me a great annoyance,--to take away from me my privacy and thrust me before my time (if ever there be a time) into the arena of the gladiators to be stared at. i was ashamed to read, and am ashamed to remember. yet, as you see her, i would not be wanting in gratitude to a gifted and generous lady who so liberally transfigures our demerits. so you shall tell her, if you please, that i read all her book with pleasure but that part, and if ever i shall travel west or south, i think she has furnished me with the eyes. farewell, dear wise man. i think your poverty honorable above the common brightness of that thorn-crown of the great. it earns you the love of men and the praise of a thousand years. yet i hope the angelical beldame, all-helping, all-hated, has given you her last lessons, and, finding you so striding a proficient, will dismiss you to a hundred editions and the adoration of the booksellers. --r.w. emerson i have never heard from rich, who, you wrote, had sent his account to me. let him direct to me at concord. a young engineer in cambridge, by name mckean,* volunteers his services in correcting the proofs of the _miscellanies,_--and he has your errata,--for the love of the reading. shall we have anthracite coal or wood in your chamber? my old mother is glad you are coming. ----------* the late mr. henry s. mckean, a son of professor mckean, and a graduate of harvard college in 1828. ----------xxiv. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 15 june, 1838 my dear emerson,--our correspondence has fallen into a raveled state; which would doubtless clear itself could i afford to wait for your next letter, probably tumbling over the atlantic brine about this very moment: but i cannot afford to wait; i must write straightway. your answer to this will bring matters round again. i have had two irregular notes of your writing, or perhaps three; two dated march, one by mr. bancroft's parcel,-bringing twelve _orations_ withal; then some ten days later, just in this very time, another note by mr. sumner, whom i have not yet succeeded in seeing, though i have attempted it, and hope soon to do it. the letter he forwarded me from paris was acknowledged already, i think. and now if the atlantic will but float me in safe that other promised letter! i got your american _french revolution_ a good while ago. it seems to me a very pretty book indeed, wonderfully so for the money; neither does it seem what we can call _incorrectly_ printed so far as i have seen; compared with the last _sartor_ it is correctness itself. many thanks to you, my friend, and much good may it do us all! should there be any more reprinting, i will request you to rectify at least the three following errors, copied out of the english text indeed; nay, mark them in your own new-english copy, whether there be reprinting or not: vol. i. p. 81, last paragraph, _for_ september _read_ august; vol. ii. p. 344, first line, _for_ book of prayer _read_ look of prayer; p. 357, _for_ blank _read_ black (2d paragraph, "all black "). and so _basta._ and let us be well content about this f.r. on both sides of the water, yours as well as mine. "too many cooks"! the proverb says: it is pity if this new apparition of a mr. loring should spoil the broth. but i calculate you will adjust it well and smoothly between you, some way or other. how you shall adjust it, or have adjusted it, is what i am practically anxious now to learn. for you are to understand that our english edition has come to depend partly on yours. after long higgling with the foolish fraser, i have quitted him, quite quietly, and given "saunders and ottley, conduit street," the privilege of printing a small edition of _teufelsdrockh_ (five hundred copies), with a prospect of the "miscellaneous writings" soon following. saunders and ottley are at least more reputable persons, they are useful to me also in the business of lecturing. _teufelsdrockh_ is at press, to be out very soon; i will send you a correct copy, the only one in america i fancy. the enterprise here too is on the "half-profits" plan, which i compute generally to mean equal partition of the oyster-shells and a net result of zero. but the thing will be economically useful to me otherwise; as a publication of the "miscellaneous" also would be; which latter, however, i confess myself extremely unwilling to undertake the trouble of for _nothing._ to me they are grown or fast growing _obsolete,_ these miscellanies, for most part; if money lie not in them, what does lie for me? now it strikes me you will infallibly edit these things, at least as well as i, and are doing it at any rate; your printing too would seem to be cheaper than ours: i said to saunders and ottley, why not have two hundred or three hundred of this american edition struck off with "london: saunders and ottley, conduit street," on the title-page, and sent over hither in sheets at what price they have cost my friends yonder? saunders of course threw cold water on this project, but was obliged to admit that there would be some profit in it, and that for me it would be far easier. the grand profit for me is that people would understand better what i mean, and come better about me if i lectured again, which seems the only way of getting any wages at all for me here at present. pray meditate my project, if it be not already too late, hear what your booksellers say about it, and understand that i will not in any case set to printing till i hear from you in answer to this. how my sheet is filling with dull talk about mere economics! i must still add that the _lecturing_ i talked of, last time, is verily over now; and well over. the superfine people listened to the rough utterance with patience, with favor, increasing to the last. i sent you a newspaper once, to indicate that it was in progress. i know not yet what the money result is; but i suppose it will enable us to exist here thriftily another year; not without hope of at worst doing the like again when the time comes. it is a great novelty in my lot; felt as a very considerable blessing; and really it has arrived, if it have arrived, in _due_ time, for i had begun to get quite impatient of the other method. poverty and youth may do; poverty and age go badly together.--for the rest, i feel fretted to fiddle-strings; my head and heart all heated, sick,--ah me! the question as ever is: rest. but then where? my brother invites us to come to rome for the winter; my poor sick wife might perhaps profit by it; as for me, natty leatherstocking's lodge in the western wood, i think, were welcomer still. i have a great mind, too, to run off and see my mother, by the new railways. what we shall do, whether not stay quietly here, must remain uncertain for a week or two. write you always hither, till you hear otherwise. the _orations_ were right welcome; my _madeira_ one, returned thence with sterling, was circulating over the west of england. sterling and harriet stretched out the right hand with wreathed smiles. i have read, a second or third time. robert southey has got a copy, for his own behoof and that of _lake_land: if he keep his word as to _me,_ he may do as much for you, or more. copies are at cambridge; among the oxonians too; i have with stingy discretion distributed all my copies but two. old rogers, a grim old dilettante, full of sardonic sense, was heard saying, "it is german poetry given out in american prose." friend emerson ought to be content;--and has now above all things, as i said, to _be in no haste._ slow fire does make sweet malt: how true, how true! also his next work ought to be a _concrete_ thing; not _theory_ any longer, but _deed._ let him "live it," as he says; that is the way to come to "painting of it." geometry and the art of design being once well over, take the brush, and _andar con dios!_ mrs. child has sent me a book, _philothea,_ and a most magnanimous epistle. i have answered as i could. the book is beautiful, but of a _hectic_ beauty; to me not pleasant, even fatal looking. such things grow not in the ground, on mother earth's honest bosom, but in hothouses,--sentimental-calvinist fire traceable underneath! bancroft also is of the hothouse partly: i have a note to send him by sumner; do you thank him meanwhile, and say nothing about _hothouses!_ but, on the whole, men ought in new england, too to "swallow their formulas";* there is no freedom till then: yet hitherto i find only one man there who seems fairly on the way towards that, or arrived at that. good speed to _him._ i had to send my wife's love: she is not dangerously ill; but always feeble, and has to _struggle_ to keep erect; the summer always improves her, and this summer too. adieu, dear friend; may good always be with you and yours. --t. carlyle ----------* this was the saying of the old marquis de mirabeau concerning his son, _il a hume toutes les formules,_ and is used as a text by carlyle in his article on mirabeau. "of inexpressible advantage is it that a man have 'an eye instead of a pair of spectacles merely'; that, seeing through the formulas of things and even 'making away' with many a formula, he see into the thing itself, and so know it and be master of it!" ---------xxv. emerson to carlyle boston, 30 july, 1838 my dear sir,--i am in town today to get what money the booksellers will relinquish from their faithful gripe, and have succeeded now in obtaining a first instalment, however small. i enclose to you a bill of exchange for fifty pounds sterling, which costs here exactly $242.22, the rate of exchange being nine percent. i shall not today trouble you with any account, for my letter must be quickly ready to go by the steam-packet. an exact account has been rendered to me, which, though its present balance in our favor is less than i expected, yet, as far as i understand it, agrees well with all that has been promised: at least the balance in our favor when the edition is sold, which the booksellers assure me will assuredly be done within a year from the publication, must be seven hundred and sixty dollars, and what more heaven and the subscribers may grant. i shall follow this letter and bill by a duplicate of the bill in the next packet. the _miscellanies_ is published in two volumes, a copy of which goes to you immediately. munroe tells me that two hundred and fifty copies of it are already sold. writing in a bookshop, my dear friend, i have no power to say aught than that i am heartily and always, yours, r. waldo emerson xxvi. emerson to carlyle concord, 6 august, 1838 my dear friend,--the swift ships are slow when they carry our letters. your letter dated the 15th of june arrived here last friday, the 3d of august. that day i was in boston, and i have only now got the information necessary to answer it. you have probably already learned from my letter sent by the "royal william" (enclosing a bill of exchange for l50), that our first two volumes of the _miscellanies_ are published. i have sent you a copy. the edition consists of one thousand copies. of these five hundred are bound, five hundred remain in sheets. the title-pages, of course, are all printed alike; but the publishers assure me that new title-pages can be struck off at a trifling expense, with the imprint of saunders and ottley. the cost of a copy in sheets or "folded" (if that means somewhat more?) is eighty-nine cents; and bound is $1.15. the retail price is $2.50 a copy; and the author's profit, $1; and the bookseller's, 35 cents per copy; according to my understanding of the written contract. here i believe you have all the material facts. i think there is no doubt that the book will sell very well here. but if, for the reasons you suggest, you wish any part of it, you can have it as soon as ships can bring your will. when you see your copy, you will perceive that we have printed half the matter. i should presently begin to print the remainder, inclusive of the article on lockhart's scott, in two more volumes; but now i think i shall wait until i hear from you. of those books we will print a larger edition, say twelve hundred and fifty or fifteen hundred, if you want a part of it in london. for i feel confident now that our public here is one thousand strong. write me therefore _by the steam packet_ your wishes. i am sure you will like our edition. it has been most carefully corrected by two young gentlemen who successively volunteered their services, (the second when the first was called away,) and who, residing in cambridge, where the book was printed, could easilier oversee it. they are henry s. mcbean, an engineer, and charles stearns wheeler, a divinity student,--working both for love of you. to one other gentleman i have brought you in debt, --rev. convers francis* (brother of mrs. child), who supplied from his library all the numbers of the _foreign review_ from which we printed the work. we could not have done without his books, and he is a noble-hearted man, who rejoices in you. i have sent to all three copies of the work as from you, and i shall be glad if you will remember to sanction this expressly in your next letter. ---------* this worthy man and lover of good books was, from 1842 till his death in 1863, professor in the divinity school of harvard university. ---------thanks for the letter: thanks for your friendliest seeking of friends for the poor _oration._ poor little pamphlet, to have gone so far and so high! i am ashamed. i shall however send you a couple more of the thin gentry presently, maugre all your hopes and cautions. i have written and read a kind of sermon to the senior class of our cambridge theological school a fortnight ago; and an address to the literary societies of dartmouth college;* for though i hate american pleniloquence, i cannot easily say no to young men who bid me speak also. and both these are now in press. the first i hear is very offensive. i will now try to hold my tongue until next winter. but i am asked continually when you will come to boston. your lectures are boldly and joyfully expected by brave young men. so do not forget us: and if ever the scale-beam trembles, i beseech you, let the love of me decide for america. i will not dare to tease you on a matter of so many relations, and so important, and especially as i have written out, i believe, my requests in a letter sent two or three months ago,--but i must see you somewhere, somehow, may it please god! i grieve to hear no better news of your wife. i hoped she was sound and strong ere this, and can only hope still. my wife and i send her our hearty love. yours affectionately, r.w. emerson ----------* the address at the cambridge divinity school was delivered on the 15th of july, and that at dartmouth college on the 24th of the same month. the title of the latter was "literary ethics." both are reprinted in emerson's _miscellanies._ these remarkable discourses excited deep interest and wide attention. they established emerson's position as the leader of what was known as the transcendental movement. they were the expressions of his inmost convictions and his matured thought. the address at the divinity school gave rise to a storm of controversy which did not disturb the serenity of its author. "it was," said theodore parker, "the noblest, the most inspiring strain i ever listened to." to others it seemed "neither good divinity nor good sense." the address at dartmouth college set forth the high ideals of intellectual life with an eloquence made irresistible by the character of the speaker. from this time emerson's influence upon thought in america was acknowledged. ---------xxvii. carlyle to emerson scotsbrig, ecclefechan, (annandale, scotland) 25 september, 1838 my dear emerson,--there cannot any right answer be written you here and now; yet i must write such answer as i can. you said, "by steamship"; and it strikes me with a kind of remorse, on this my first day of leisure and composure, that i have delayed so long. for you must know, this is my mother's house,--a place to me unutterable as hades and the land of spectres were; likewise that my brother is just home from italy, and on the wing thitherward or somewhither swiftly again; in a word, that all is confusion and flutter with me here,--fit only for _silence!_ my wife sent me off hitherward, very sickly and unhappy, out of the london dust, several weeks ago; i lingered in fifeshire, i was in edinburgh, in roxburghshire; have some calls to cumberland, which i believe i must refuse; and prepare to creep homeward again, refreshed in health, but with a head and heart all seething and tumbling (as the wont is, in such cases), and averse to pens beyond all earthly implements. but my brother is off for dumfries this morning; you before all others deserve an hour of my solitude. i will abide by business; one must write about that. your bill and duplicate of a bill for l50, with the two letters that accompanied them, you are to know then, did duly arrive at chelsea; and the larger letter (of the 6th of august) was forwarded to me hither some two weeks ago. i had also, long before that, one of the friendliest of letters from you, with a clear and most inviting description of the concord household, its inmates and appurtenances; and the announcement, evidently authentic, that an apartment and heart's welcome was ready there for my wife and me; that we were to come quickly, and stay for a twelvemonth. surely no man has such friends as i. we ought to say, may the heavens give us thankful hearts! for, in truth, there are blessings which do, like sun-gleams in wild weather, make this rough life beautiful with rainbows here and there. indicating, i suppose, that there is a sun, and general heart of goodness, behind all that;--for which, as i say again, let us be thankful evermore. my wife says she received your american bill of so many pounds sterling for the revolution book, with a "pathetic feeling" which brought "tears" to her eyes. from beyond the waters there is a hand held out; beyond the waters too live brothers. i would only the book were an epic, a _dante,_ or undying thing, that new england might boast in after times of this feat of hers; and put stupid, poundless, and penniless old england to the blush about it! but after all, that is no matter; the feebler the wellmeant book is, the more "pathetic" is the whole transaction: and so we will go on, fuller than ever of "desperate hope" (if you know what that is), with a feeling one would not give and could not get for several money-bags; and say or think, long live true friends and emersons, and (in scotch phrase) "may ne'er waur be amang us!"--i will buy something permanent, i think, out of this l50, and call it either _ebenezer_ or _yankee-doodle-doo._ may good be repaid you manifold, my kind brother! may good be ever with you, my kind friends all! but now as to this edition of the _miscellanies_ (poor things), i really think my wife is wisest, who says i ought to leave you altogether to your own resources with it, america having an art of making money out of my books which england is unfortunately altogether without. besides, till i once see the two volumes now under way, and can let a bookseller see them, there could no bargain be made on the subject. we will let it rest there, therefore. go on with your second two volumes, as if there were no england extant, according to your own good judgment. when i get to london, i will consult some of the blockheads with the book in my hand: if we do want two hundred copies, you can give us them with a trifling loss. it is possible they may make some better proposal about an edition here: that depends on the fate of _sartor_ here, at present trying itself; which i have not in the least ascertained. for the present, thank as is meet all friends in your world that have interested themselves for me. alas! i have nothing to give them but thanks. henry mckean, charles wheeler, convers francis; these names shall, if it please heaven, become persons for me, one day. well!--but i will say nothing more. that too is of the things on which all words are poor to silence. good to the good and kind! a letter from me must have crossed that _descriptive_ concord one, on the ocean, i think. our correspondence is now standing on its feet. i will write to you again, whether i hear from you or not, so soon as my hand finds its cunning again in london,--so soon as i can see there what is to be done or said. all goes decidedly better, i think. my wife was and is much healthier than last year, than in any late year. i myself get visibly quieter my preternatural _meditations in hades,_ apropos of this annandale of mine, are calm compared with those of last year. by another course of lectures i have a fair prospect of living for another season; nay, people call it a "new profession" i have devised for myself, and say i may live by it as many years as i like. this too is partly the fruit of my poor book; one should not say that it was worth nothing to me even in money. last year i fancied my audience mainly the readers of it; drawn round me, in spite of many things, by force of it. let us be content. i have jesuits, swedenborgians, old quakeresses, _omne cum proteus,_ --god help me, no man ever had so confused a public!--i salute you, my dear friend, and your hospitable circle. may blessings be on your kind household, on your kind hearts! --t. carlyle a copy of the english _teufelsdrockh_ has lain with your name on it these two months in chelsea; waiting an opportunity. it is worth nothing to you: a dingy, ill-managed edition; but correct or nearly correct as to printing; it is right that such should be in your hands in case of need. the new england pamphlets will be greedily expected. more than one inquires of me, has that emerson of yours written nothing else? and i have lent them the little book _nature,_ till it is nearly thumbed to pieces. sterling is gone to italy for the winter since i left town; swift as a flash! i cannot teach him the great art of _sitting still;_ his fine qualities are really like to waste for want of that. i read your paragraph to miss martineau; she received it, as she was bound, with a good grace. but i doubt, i doubt, o ralph waldo emerson, thou hast not been sufficiently ecstatic about her,--thou graceless exception, confirmatory of a rule! in truth there _are_ bores, of the first and of all lower magnitudes. patience and shuffle the cards. xxviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 17 october, 1838 my dear friend,--i am quite uneasy that i do not hear from you. on the 21st of july i wrote to you and enclosed a remittance of l50 by a bill of exchange on baring brothers, drawn by chandler, howard, & co., which was sent in the steamer "royal william." on the 2d of august i received your letter of inquiry respecting our edition of the _miscellanies,_ and wrote a few days later in reply, that we could send you out two or three hundred copies of our first two volumes, in sheets, at eighty-nine cents per copy of two volumes, and the small additional price of the new titlepage. i said also that i would wait until i heard from you before commencing the printing of the last two volumes of the _miscellanies,_ and, if you desired it, would print any number of copies with a title-page for london. this letter went in a steamer--he "great western" probably--about the 10th or 12th of august. (perhaps i misremember the names [of the steamers], and the first should be last.) i have heard nothing from you since. i trust my letters have not miscarried. (a third was sent also by another channel inclosing a duplicate of the bill of exchange.) with more fervency, i trust that all goes well in the house of my friend,--and i suppose that you are absent on some salutary errand of repairs and recreation. _use, i pray you, your earliest_ hour in certifying me of the facts. one word more in regard to business. i believe i expressed some surprise, in the july letter, that the booksellers should have no greater balance for us at this settlement. i have since studied the account better, and see that we shall not be disappointed in the year of obtaining at least the sum first promised,--seven hundred and sixty dollars; but the whole expense of the edition is paid out of the copies first sold, and our profits depend on the last sales. the edition is almost gone, and you shall have an account at the end of the year. in a letter within a twelvemonth i have urged you to pay us a visit in america, and in concord. i have believed that you would come one day, and do believe it. but if, on your part, you have been generous and affectionate enough to your friends here--or curious enough concerning our society--to wish to come, i think you must postpone, for the present, the satisfaction of your friendship and your curiosity. at this moment i would not have you here, on any account. the publication of my _address to the divinity college_ (copies of which i sent you) has been the occasion of an outcry in all our leading local newspapers against my "infidelity," "pantheism," and "atheism." the writers warn all and sundry against me, and against whatever is supposed to be related to my connection of opinion, &c.; against transcendentalism, goethe, and _carlyle._ i am heartily sorry to see this last aspect of the storm in our washbowl. for, as carlyle is nowise guilty, and has unpopularities of his own, i do not wish to embroil him in my parish differences. you were getting to be a great favorite with us all here, and are daily a greater with the american public, but just now, _in boston,_ where i am known as your editor, i fear you lose by the association. now it is indispensable to your right influence here, that you should never come before our people as one of a clique, but as a detached, that is, universally associated man; so i am happy, as i could not have thought, that you have not yielded yourself to my entreaties. let us wait a little until this foolish clamor be overblown. my position is fortunately such as to put me quite out of the reach of any real inconvenience from the panic-strikers or the panic-struck; and, indeed, so far as this uneasiness is a necessary result of mere inaction of mind, it seems very clear to me that, if i live, my neighbors must look for a great many more shocks, and perhaps harder to bear. the article on german religious writers in the last _foreign quarterly review_ suits our meridian as well as yours; as is plainly signified by the circumstance that our newspapers copy into their columns the opening tirade and _no more._ who wrote that paper? and who wrote the paper on montaigne in the _westminster?_ i read with great satisfaction the poems and thoughts of archaeus in _blackwood._ "the sexton's daughter" is a beautiful poem: and i recognize in them all _the_ soul, with joy and love. tell me of the author's health and welfare; or, will not he love me so much as to write me a letter with his own hand? and tell me of yourself, what task of love and wisdom the muses impose; and what happiness the good god sends to you and yours. i hope your wife has not forgotten me. yours affectionately, r.w. emerson the _miscellanies,_ vols. i. and ii., are a popular book. about five hundred copies have been sold. the second article on jean paul works with might on the inner man of young men. i hate to write you letters on business and facts like this. there are so few friends that i think some time i shall meet you nearer, for i love you more than is fit to say. w.h. channing has written a critique on you, which i suppose he has sent you, in the _boston review._ xxix. carlyle to emerson 5 cheyne row, chelsea, london 7 november, 1838 my dear friend,--it is all right; all your letters with their inclosures have arrived in due succession: the last, inquiring after the fate of the others, came this morning. i was in scotland, as you partly conjecture; i wrote to you already (though not without blamable delay), from my mother's house in annandale, a confused scrawl, which i hope has already got to hand, and quieted your kind anxieties. i am as well as usual in health, my wife better than usual; nothing is amiss, except my negligence and indolence, which has put you to this superfluous solicitude on my account. however, i have an additional letter by it; you must pardon me, you must not grudge me that undeserved pleasure, the reward of evil-doing. i may well say, you are a blessing to me on this earth; no letter comes from you with other than good tidings,--or can come while you live there to love me. the bill was thrust duly into baring's brass slit "for acceptance," on my return hither some three weeks ago; and will, no doubt, were the days of grace run, come out in the shape of fifty pounds sterling; a very curious product indeed. do you know what i think of doing with it? _dyspepsia,_ my constant attendant in london, is incapable of help in my case by any medicine or appliance except one only, riding on horseback. with a good horse to whirl me over the world for two hours daily, i used to keep myself supportably well. here, the maintenance of a horse far transcends my means; yet it seems hard i should not for a little while be in a kind of approximate health in this babylon where i have my bread to seek it is like swimming with a millstone round your neck,--ah me! in brief, i am about half resolved to buy myself a sharp little nag with twenty of these transatlantic pounds, and ride him till the other thirty be eaten: i will call the creature "yankee," and kind thoughts of those far away shall be with me every time i mount him. will not that do? my wife says it is the best plan i have had for years, and strongly urges it on. my kind friends! as to those copies of the carlyle miscellanies, i unfortunately still can say nothing, except what was said in the former (scotch) letter, that you must proceed in the business with an eye to america and not to us. my booksellers, saunders and ottley, have no money for me, no definite offer in money to make for those two hundred copies, of which you seem likely to make money if we simply leave them alone. i have asked these booksellers, i have asked fraser too: what will you _give me in ready money_ for two hundred and fifty copies of that work, sell it afterwards as you can? they answer always, we must see it first. now the copy long ago sent me has never come to hand; i have asked for it of kennet, but without success; i have nothing for it but to wait the winds and chances. meanwhile saunders and ottley want forsooth a _sketches of german literature_ in three volumes: then a _miscellanies_ in three volumes: that is their plan of publishing an english edition; and the outlook they hold out for me is certain trouble in this matter, and recompense entirely uncertain. i think on the whole it is extremely likely i shall apply to you for two hundred and fifty copies (that is their favorite number) of these four volumes, (nay, if it be of any moment, you can bind me down to it _now,_ and take it for sure,) but i cannot yet send you the title-page; no bookseller purchasing till "we see it first." but after all, will it suit america to print an _unequal_ number of your two pairs of volumes? do not the two together make one work? on the whole, consider that i shall in all likelihood want two hundred and fifty copies, and consider it certain if that will serve the enterprise: we must leave it here today. i will stir in it now, however, and take no rest till in one way or other you do get a title-page from me, or some definite deliverance on the matter. o athenians, what a trouble i _give,_ having _got_ your applauses! kennet the bookseller gave me yesterday (on my way to "the city" with that brother of mine, the italian doctor who is here at present and a great lover of yours) ten copies of your dartmouth oration: we read it over dinner in a chop-house in bucklersbury, amid the clatter of some fifty stand of knives and forks; and a second time more leisurely at chelsea here. a right brave speech; announcing, in its own way, with emphasis of full conviction, to all whom it may concern, that great forgotten truth, _man is still man._ may it awaken a pulsation under the ribs of death! i believe the time is come for such a gospel. they must speak it out who have it,--with what audience there may be. i have given away two copies this morning; i will take care of the rest. go on, and speed.--and now where is the heterodox divinity one, which awakens such "tempest in a washbowl," brings goethe, transcendentalism, and carlyle into question, and on the whole evinces "what [difference] new england also makes between _pan_-theism and _pot_-theism"? i long to see that; i expect to congratulate you on that too. meanwhile we will let the washbowl storm itself out; and emerson at concord shall recognize it for a washbowl storming, and hold on his way. as to my share in it, grieve not for half an instant. pantheism, pottheism, mydoxy, thydoxy, are nothing at all to me; a weariness the whole jargon, which i avoid speaking of, decline listening to: _live,_ for god's sake, with what faith thou couldst get; leave off _speaking_ about faith! thou knowest it not. be _silent,_ do not speak.--as to you, my friend, you are even to go on, giving still harder shocks if need be; and should i come into censure by means of you, there or here, think that i am proud of my company; that, as the boy hazlitt said after hearing coleridge, "i will go with that man"; or, as our wild burns has it, "wi' sic as he, where'er he be, may i be saved or damned!" oime! what a foolish goose of a world this is! if it were not [for] here and there an articulate-speaking man, one would be all-too lonely. this is nothing at all like the letter i meant to write you; but i will write again, i trust, in few days, and the first paragraph shall, if possible, hold all the business. i have much to tell you, which perhaps is as well not written. o that i did see you face to face! but the time shall come, if heaven will. why not you come over, since i cannot? there is a room here, there is welcome here, and two friends always. it must be done one way or the other. i will take, care of your messages to sterling. he is in florence; he was the author of _montaigne._* the _foreign quarterly_ reviewer of _strauss_ i take to be one blackie, an advocate in edinburgh, a frothy, semi-confused disciple of mine and other men's; i guess this, but i have not read the article: the man blackie is from aberdeen, has been roaming over europe, and carries more sail than ballast. brother john, spoken of above, is knocking at the door even now; he is for italy again, we expect, in few days, on a better appointment: know that you have a third friend in him under this roof,--a man who quarrels with me all day in a small way, and loves me with the whole soul of him. my wife demanded to have "room for one line." what she is to write i know not, except it be what she has said, holding up the pamphlet, "is it not a noble thing? none of them all but he," &c., &c. i will write again without delay when the stray volumes arrive; before that if they linger. commend me to all the kind household of concord: wife, mother, and son. ever yours, t. carlyle --------* see _ante,_ p. 184. sterling's essay on montaigne was his first contribution, in 1837, to the _london and westminster review._ it is reprinted in "essays and tales, by john sterling, collected and edited, with a memoir of his life, by julius charles hare," london, 1848, vol. i. p. 129. ---------_"forgotten you?"_ o, no indeed! if there were nothing else to remember you by, i should never forget the visitor, who years ago in the desert descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only _one_ day. when i think of america, it is of you,--neither harriet martineau nor any one else succeeds in giving me a more extended idea of it. when i wish to see america it is still you, and those that are yours. i read all that you write with an interest which i feel in no other writing but my husband's,--or it were nearer the truth to say there is no other writing of living men but yours and his that i _can_ read. god bless you and weib and kind. surely i shall some day see you all. your affectionate jane carlyle xxx. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 15 november, 1835 dear emerson,--hardly above a week ago, i wrote you in immediate answer to some friendly inquiries produced by negligence of mine: the letter is probably tumbling on the salt waves at this hour, in the belly of the "great western"; or perhaps it may be still on firm land waiting, in which case this will go along with it. i had written before out of scotland a letter of mere acknowledgment and postponement; you must have received that before now, i imagine. our small piece of business is now become articulate, and i will despatch it in a paragraph. pity my stupidity that i did not put the thing on this footing long ago! it never struck me till the other day that though no copy of our _miscellanies_ would turn up for inspection here, and no bookseller would bargain for a thing unseen, i myself might bargain, and leave their hesitations resting on their own basis. in fine, i have rejected all their schemes of printing _miscellaneous works_ here, printing _sketches of german literature,_ or printing anything whatever on the "half-profits system," which is like toilsomely scattering seed into the sea: and i settled yesterday with fraser to give him the american sheets, and let them sell _themselves,_ on clear principles, or remain unsold if they like. i find it infinitely the best plan, and to all appearance the profitablest as to money that could have been devised for me. what you have to do therefore is to get two hundred and fifty copies (_in sheets_) of the whole four volumes, so soon as the second two are printed, and have them, with the proper titlepage, sent off hither to fraser's address; the sooner the better. the american title-page, instead of "boston," &c. at the bottom, will require to bear, in three lines "london: / james fraser, 215 regent street, / 1839." fraser is anxious that you should not spell him with a z; your man can look on the magazine and beware. i suppose also you should print _labels_ for the backs of the four volumes, to be used by the _half_-binder; they do the books in that way here now: but if it occasion any difficulty, never mind this; it was not spoken of to fraser, and is my own conjecture merely; the thing can be managed in various other ways. two hundred and fifty copies, then, of the entire book: there is nothing else to be attended to that you do not understand as well as i. fraser will announce it in his magazine: the eager, select public will wait. probably, there is no chance before the middle of march or so? do not hurry yourselves, or at all change your rate for _us:_ but so soon as the work is ready in the course of nature, the earliest conveyance to the port of london will bring a little cargo which one will welcome with a strange feeling! i declare myself delighted with the plan; an altogether romantic kind of plan, of romance and reality: fancy me riding on _yankee_ withal, at the time, and considering what a curious world this is, that bakes bread for one beyond the great ocean-stream, and how a poor man is not left after all to be trodden into the gutters, though the fight went sore against him, and he saw no backing anywhere. _allah akbar!_ god is great; no saying truer than that.--and so now, by the blessing of heaven, we will talk no more of business this day. my employments, my outlooks, condition, and history here, were a long chapter; on which i could like so well to talk with you face to face; but as for writing of them, it is a mere mockery. in these four years, so full of pain and toil, i seem to have lived four decades. by degrees, the creature gets accustomed to its element; the salamander learns to live in fire, and be of the same temperature with it. ah me! i feel as if grown old innumerable things are become weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable. and yet perhaps i am not old, only wearied, and there is a stroke or two of work in me yet. for the rest, the fret and agitation of this babylon wears me down: it is the most unspeakable life; of sunbeams and miry clay; a contradiction which no head can reconcile. pain and poverty are not wholesome; but praise and flattery along with them are poison: god deliver us from that; it carries madness in the very breath of it! on the whole, i say to myself, what thing is there so good as _rest?_ a sad case it is and a frequent one in my circle, to be entirely cherubic, _all_ face and wings. "mes enfans," said a french gentleman to the cherubs in the picture, "mes enfans, asseyez-vous?"--"monseigneur," answer they, "il n'y a pas de quoi!" i rejoice rather in my laziness; proving that i _can_ sit.--but, after all, ought i not to be thankful? i positively can, in some sort, exist here for the while; a thing i had been for many years ambitious of to no purpose. i shall have to lecture again in spring, heaven knows on what; it will be a wretched fever for me; but once through it there will be board wages for another year. the wild ishmael can hunt in _this_ desert too, it would seem. i say, i will be thankful; and wait quietly what farther is to come, or whether anything farther. but indeed, to speak candidly, i do feel sometimes as if another book were growing in me,--though i almost tremble to think of it. not for this winter, o no! i will write an article merely, or some such thing, and read trash if better be not. this, i do believe, is my horoscope for the next season: an article on something about new-year's-day (the westminster editor, a goodnatured, admiring swan-goose from the north country, will not let me rest); then lectures; then--what? i am for some practical subject too; none of your pictures in the air, or _aesthetisches zeug_ (as mullner's wife called it, mullner of the _midnight blade_): nay, i cannot get up the steam on any such best; it is extremely irksome as well as fruitless at present. in the next _westminster review,_ therefore, if you see a small scrub of a paper signed "s.p." on one varnhagen a german, say that it is by "simon pure," or by "scissars and paste," or even by "soaped pig"--whom no man shall _catch!_ truly it is a secret which you must not mention: i was driven to it by the swan-goose above mentioned, not mill but another. let this suffice for my winter's history: may the summer be more productive. as for concord and new england, alas! my friend, i should but deface your idyllion with an ugly contradiction, did i come in such mood as mine is. i am older in years than you; but in humor i am older by centuries. what a hope is in that ever young heart, cheerful, healthful as the morning! and as for me, you have no conception what a crabbed, sulky piece of sorrow and dyspepsia i am grown; and growing, if i do not draw bridle. let me gather heart a little! i have not forgotten concord or the west; no, it lies always beautiful in the blue of the horizon, afar off and yet attainable; it is a great possession to me; should it even never be attained. but i have got to consider lately that it is you who are coming hither first. that is the right way, is it not? new england is becoming more than ever part of old england; why, you are nearer to us now than yorkshire was a hundred years ago; this is literally a fact: you can come _without_ making your will. it is one of my calculations that all englishmen from all zones and hemispheres will, for a good while yet, resort occasionally to the motherbabel, and see a thing or two there. come if you dare; i said there was a room, house-room and heart-room, constantly waiting you here, and you shall see blockheads by the million. _pickwick_ himself shall be visible; innocent young dickens reserved for a questionable fate. the great wordsworth shall talk till you yourself pronounce him to be a bore. southey's complexion is still healthy mahogany-brown, with a fleece of white hair, and eyes that seem running at full gallop. leigh hunt, "man of genius in the shape of a cockney," is my near neighbor, full of quips and cranks, with good humor and no common sense. old rogers with his pale head, white, bare, and cold as snow, will work on you with those large blue eyes, cruel, sorrowful, and that sardonic shelf-chin:--this is the man, o rogers, that wrote the german poetry in american prose; consider him well!--but whither am i running? my sheet is done! my brother john returns again almost immediately to italy. he has got appointed traveling doctor to a certain duke of buccleuch, the chief of our scotch dukes: an excellent position for him as far as externals go. his departure will leave me lonelier; but i must reckon it for the best: especially i must begin working. harriet martineau is coming hither this evening; with beautiful enthusiasm for the blacks and others. she is writing a novel. the first american book proved generally rather wearisome, the second not so; we have since been taught (not i) "how to observe." suppose you and i promulgate a treatise next, "how to see"? the old plan was, to have a pair of _eyes _first of all, and then to open them: and endeavor with your whole strength to _look._ the good harriet! but "god," as the arabs say, "has given to every people a prophet (or poet) in its own speech": and behold now unitarian mechanical formalism was to have its poetess too; and stragglings of genius were to spring up even through that like grass through a macadam highway!--adieu, my friend, i wait still for your heterodox speech; and love you always. --t. carlyle an english _sartor_ goes off to you this day; through kennet, to c.c. little and j. brown of boston; the likeliest conveyance. it is correctly printed, and that is all. its fate here (the fate of the publication, i mean) remains unknown; "unknown and unimportant." xxxi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 2 december, 1838 my dear emerson,--almost the very day after my last letter went off, the long-expected two volumes of _miscellanies_ arrived. the heterodox pamphlet has never yet come to hand. i am now to write you again about that _miscellany_ concern the fourth letter, i do believe; but it is confirmatory of the foregoing three, and will be the last, we may hope. fraser is charmed with the look of your two volumes; declares them unsurpassable by art of his; and wishes (what is the main part of this message) that you would send his cargo in the _bound_ state, bound and lettered as these are, with the sole difference that the leaves be _not_ cut, or shaved on the sides, our english fashion being to have them _rough._ he is impatient that the book were here; desires further that it be sent to the port of london rather than another port, and that it be packed in _boxes_ "to keep the covers of the volumes safe,"--all which i doubt not the packers and the shippers of new england have dexterity enough to manage for the best, without desire of his. if you have printed off nothing yet, i will desire for my own behoof that two hundred and _sixty_ be the number sent; i find i shall need some ten to give away: if your first sheet is printed off, let the number stand as it was. it would be an improvement if you could print our title-pages on paper a little stronger; that would stand ink, i mean: the fly leaves in the same, if you have such paper convenient; if not, not. farther as to the matter of the title-page, it seems to me your printer might give a bolder and a broader type to the words "critical and miscellaneous," and add after "essays" with a colon (:), the line "collected and republished," with a colon also; then the "by," &c. "in four volumes, vol. i.," &c. i mean that we want, in general, a little more ink and decisiveness: show your man the title-page of the english _french revolution,_ or look at it your self, and you will know. r.w.e.'s "advertisement," friendly and good, as all his dealings are to me ward, will of course be suppressed in the english copies. i see not that with propriety i can say anything by way of substitute: silence and the new england _imprint_ will tell the story as eloquently as there is need. for the rest you must tell mr. loring, and all men who had a hand in it along with you, that i am altogether right well pleased with this edition, and find it far beyond my expectation. to my two young friends, henry s. mckean (be so good as write these names more indisputably for me) and charles stearns wheeler, in particular, i will beg you to express emphatically my gratitude; they have stood by me with right faithfulness, and made the correctest printing; a _great_ service had i known that there were such eyes and heads acting in behalf of me there, i would have scraped out the editorial blotches too (notes of admiration, dashes, "we think"s, &c., &c., common in jeffrey's time in the _edinburgh review_) and london misprints; which are almost the only deformities that remain now. it is _extremely_ correct printing wherever i have looked, and many things are silently amended; it is the most fundamental service of all. i have not the other _articles_ by me at present; i think they are of themselves a little more correct; at all events there are nothing but _misprints_ to deal with;--the editors, by this time, had got bound up to let me alone. in the _life of scott,_ fourth page of it (p. 296 of our edition), there is a sentence to be deleted. "it will tell us, say they, little new and nothing pleasing to know": out with this, for it is nonsense, and was marked for erasure in the manuscript, i dare say. i know with certainty no more at present. fraser is to sell the four volumes at two guineas here. on studying accurately your program of the american mercantile method, i stood amazed to contrast it with our english one. the bookseller here admits that he could, by diligent bargaining, get up such a book for something like the same cost or a _little_ more; but the "laws of the trade" deduct from the very front of the selling price--how much think you--_forty percent_ and odd, when your man has only _fifteen;_ for the mere act of vending! to cover all, they charge that enormous price. (a man, while i stood consulting with fraser, came in and asked for carlyle's _revolution;_ they showed it him, he asked the price; and exclaimed, "guinea and a half! i can get it from america for nine shillings!" and indignantly went his way; not without reason.) there are "laws of the trade" which ought to be _repealed;_ which i will take the liberty of contravening to all lengths by all opportunities--if i had but the power! but if this joint-stock american plan prosper, it will answer rarely. fraser's first _french revolution,_ for instance, will be done, he calculates, about new-year's-day; and a second edition wanted; mine to do with what i like. if you in america wanted more also--? i leave you to think of this.--and now enough, enough! my brother went from us last tuesday; ought to be in paris yesterday. i am yet writing nothing; feel forsaken, sad, sick, --not unhappy. in general death seems beautiful to me; sweet and great. but life also is beautiful, is great and divine, were it never to be joyful any more. i read books, my wife sewing by me, with the light of a sinumbra, in a little apartment made snug against the winter; and am happiest when all men leave me alone, or nearly all,--though many men love me rather, ungrateful that i am. my present book is _horace walpole;_ i get endless stuff out of it; epic, tragic, lyrical, didactic: all inarticulate indeed. an old blind schoolmaster in annan used to ask with endless anxiety when a new scholar was offered him, "but are ye sure _he's not a dunce?_" it is really the one thing needful in a man; for indeed (if we will candidly understand it) all else is presupposed in that. horace walpole is no dunce, not a fibre of him is duncish. your friend sumner was here yesterday, a good while, for the first time: an ingenious, cultivated, courteous man; a little sensitive or so, and with no other fault that i discerned. he borrowed my copy of your dartmouth business, and bound himself over to return with it soon. some approve of that here, some condemn: my wife and another lady call it better even than the former, i not so good. and now the heterodox, the heterodox, where is that? adieu, my dear friend. commend me to the concord household; to the little boy, to his grandmother, and mother, and father; we must all meet some day,--or _some no-day_ then (as it shall please god)! my wife heartily greets you all. ever yours, t. carlyle i sent your book, message, and address to sterling; he is in florence or rome. read the article _simonides_ by him in the _london and westminster_--brilliant prose, translations--wooden? his signature is l (pounds sterling!).--_now_ you are to write _soon?_ i always forgot to tell you, there came long since two packages evidently in your hand, marked "one printed sheet," and "one newspaper," for which the postman demanded about fifteen shillings: _rejected._ after considerable correspondence the newspaper was again offered me at _ten pence;_ the _sheet_ unattainable altogether: "no," even at tenpence. the fact is, it was wrong wrapped, that newspaper. leave it open at the ends, and try me again, once; i think it will come almost gratis. steam and iron are making all the planet into one village.--a mr. dwight wrote to me about the dedicating of some german translations: _yes._ what are they or he?*--your _sartor_ is off through kennet. could you send me two copies of the american _life of schiller,_ if the thing is fit for making a present of, and easy to be got? if not, do not mind it at all.--addio! ------------* mr. john s. dwight, whose volume of _select minor poems from the german of goethe and schiller,_ published in 1839, was dedicated to carlyle. it was the third volume of _specimens of foreign standard literature, edited by george ripley. beside mr. dwight's own excellent versions, it contained translations by mr. bancroft, dr. hedge, dr. frothingham, and others. for many years mr. dwight rendered a notable public service as the editor of _dwight's journal of music,_--a publication which did more than any other to raise and to maintain high the standard of musical taste and culture in america. --------xxxii. emerson to carlyle concord, 13 january, 1839 my dear friend,--i am not now in any condition to write a letter, having neither the facts from the booksellers which you would know touching our future plans, nor yet a satisfactory account balanced and settled of our past dealings; and lastly, no time to write what i would say,--as my poor lectures are in full course, and absorb all my wits; but as the "royal william" will not wait, and as i have a hundred pounds to send on account of the sales of the _french revolution,_ i must steal a few minutes to send my salutation. i have received all your four good letters: and you are a good and generous man to write so many. two came on the 2d and 3d of january, and the last on the 9th. if the bookselling munroe had answered me yesterday, as he ought, i should be able to satisfy you as to the time when to expect our cargo of _miscellanies._ the third and fourth volumes are now printing: 't is a fortnight since we began. you shall have two hundred and fifty copies,--i am not quite sure you can have more,--bound, and _entitled,_ and directed as you desire, at least according to the best ability of our printer as far as the typography is concerned, and we will speed the work as fast as we can; but as we have but a single copy of _fraser's magazine_--we do not get on rapidly. the _french revolution_ was all sold more than a month since. we should be glad of more copies, but the bookseller thinks not of enough copies to justify a new edition yet. i should not be surprised, however, to see that some bold brother of the trade had undertaken it. now, what does your question point at in reference to your new edition, asking "if we want more"? could you send us out a part of your edition at american prices, and at the same time to your advantage? i wish i knew the precise answer to this question, then perhaps i could keep all pirates out of our bay. i shall convey in two days your message to stearns wheeler, who is now busy in correcting the new volumes. he is now greek tutor in harvard college.*--kindest thanks to jane carlyle for her generous remembrances, which i will study to deserve. has the heterodoxy arrived in chelsea, and quite destroyed us even in the charity of our friend? i am sorry to have worried you so often about the summer letter. now am i your debtor four times. the parish commotion, too, has long ago subsided here, and my course of lectures on "human life" finds a full attendance. i wait for the coming of the _westminster,_ which has not quite yet arrived here, though i have seen the london advertisement. it sounds prosperously in my ear what you say of dr. carlyle's appointments. i was once very near the man in rome, but did not see him. i will atone as soon as i can for this truncated epistle. you must answer it immediately, so far as to acknowledge the receipt of the enclosed bill of exchange, and soon i will send you the long promised _account_ of the _french revolution,_ and also such moral account of the same as is over due. yours affectionately, r.w. emerson --------* this promising young scholar edited with english notes the first american edition of herodotus. he went to europe to pursue his studies, and died, greatly regretted, at rome, of a fever, in 1848. --------xxxiii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 8 february, 1859 my dear friend,--your welcome little letter, with the astonishing inclosure, arrived safe four days ago; right welcome, as all your letters are, and bringing as these usually do the best news i get here. the miraculous draught of paper i have just sent to a sure hand in liverpool, there to lie till in due time it have ripened into a crop of a hundred gold sovereigns! on this subject, which gives room for so many thoughts, there is little that can be said, that were not an impertinence more or less. the matter grows serious to me, enjoins me to be silent and reflect. i will say, at any rate, there never came money into my hands i was so proud of; the promise of a blessing looks from the face of it; nay, it _will_ be _twice_ blessed. so i will ejaculate, with the arabs, _allah akbar!_ and walk silent by the shore of the many-sounding babel-tumult, meditating on much. thanks to the mysterious all-bounteous guide of men, and to you my true brother, far over the sea!--for the rest, i showed fraser this nehemiah document, and said i hoped he would blush very deep;--which indeed the poor creature did, till i was absolutely sorry for him. but now first as to this question, what i mean? you must know poor fraser, a punctual but most pusillanimous mortal, has been talking louder and louder lately of a "second edition" here; whereupon, as labor-wages are not higher here than with you, and printing-work, if well bargained for, ought to be about the same price, it struck me that, as in the case of the _miscellanies,_ so here inversely the supply of both the new and the old england might be profitably combined. whether aught can come of this, now that it is got close upon us, i yet know not. fraser has only seventy-five copies left; but when these will be done his prophecy comprehends not,--"surely within the year"! for the present i have set him to ascertain, and will otherwise ascertain for myself, what the exact cost of _stereotyping_ the book were, in the same letter and style as yours; it is not so much more than printing, they tell me: i should then have done with it forever and a day. you on your side, and we on ours, might have as many copies as were wanted for all time coming. this is, in these very days, under inquisition; but there are many points to be settled before the issue. i have not yet succeeded in finding a bookseller of any fitness, but am waiting for one always. and even had i found such a one, i mean an energetic seller that would sell on other terms than forty percent for his trouble, it were still a question whether one ought to venture on such a speculation: "quitting the old highways," as i say, "in indignation at the excessive tolls, with hope that you will arrive cheaper in the steeple-chase way!" it is clear, however, that said highways are of the corduroy sort, said tolls an anomaly that must be remedied soon; and also that in all england there is no book in a likelier case to adventure it with than this same,--which did not sell at all for two months, as i hear, which all booksellers got terrified for, and which has crept along mainly by its own gravitation ever since. we will consider well, we shall see. you can understand that such a thing, for your market too, is in agitation; if any pirate step in before us in the meanwhile, we cannot help it. thanks again for your swift attention to the _miscellanies;_ poor fraser is in great haste to see them; hoping for his fortyper-cent division of the spoil. if you have not yet got to the very end with your printing, i will add a few errata; if they come too late, never mind; they are of small moment.... this foggy babylon tumbles along as it was wont; and, as for my particular case, uses me not worse, but better, than of old. nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for me. for example, the other night, a massive portmanteau of books, sent according to my written list, from the cambridge university library, from certain friends there whom i have never seen; a gratifying arrival. for we have no library here, from which we can borrow books home; and are only in these weeks striving to get one:* think of that! the worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge roaring niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of nerves as mine. the velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressing as for quiet. ah me! i often swear i will be buried at least in free breezy scotland, out of this insane hubbub, where fate tethers me in life! if fate always tether me;--but if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, i will fly this whirlpool as i would the lake of _malebolge,_ and only visit it now and then! yet perhaps it is the proper place after all, seeing all places are improper: who knows? meanwhile i lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life: consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of pain; glad when any strength is left in me for working, which is the only use i can see in myself,--too rare a case of late. the ground of my existence is black as death; too black, when all void too but at times there paint themselves on it pictures of gold and rainbow and lightning; all the brighter for the black ground, i suppose. withal i am very much of a fool.--some people will have me write on _cromwell,_ which i have been talking about. i do read on that and english subjects, finding that i know nothing and that nobody knows anything of that: but whether anything will come of it remains to be seen. mill, the _westminster_ friend, is gone in bad health to the continent, and has left a rude aberdeen longear, a great admirer of mine too, with whom i conjecture i cannot act at all: so good-bye to that. the wisest of all, i do believe, were that i bought my nag _yankee_ and set to galloping about the elevated places here! a certain mr. coolidge,** a boston man of clear iron visage and character, came down to me the other day with sumner; he left a newspaper fragment, containing "the socinian pope's denunciation of emerson." --------* the beginning of the london library, a most useful institution, from which books may be borrowed. it served carlyle well in later years, and for a long time he was president of it. ** the late mr. joseph coolidge. --------the thing denounced had not then arrived, though often asked for at kennet's; it did not arrive till yesterday, but had lain buried in bales of i know not what. we have read it only once, and are not yet at the bottom of it. meanwhile, as i judge, the socinian "tempest in a washbowl" is all according to nature, and will be profitable to you, not hurtful. a man is called to let his light shine before men; but he ought to understand better and better what medium it is through, what retinas it falls on: wherefore look _there._ i find in this, as in the two other speeches, that noblest self-assertion, and believing originality, which is like sacred fire, the _beginning_ of whatsoever is to flame and work; and for young men especially one sees not what could be more vivifying. speak, therefore, while you feel called to do it; and when you feel called. but for yourself, my friend, i prophesy it will not do always: a faculty is in you for a _sort_ of speech which is itself _action,_ an artistic sort. you _tell_ us with piercing emphasis that man's soul is great; _show_ us a great soul of a man, in some work symbolic of such: this is the seal of such a message, and you will feel by and by that you are called to this. i long to see some concrete thing, some event, man's life, american forest, or piece of creation, which this emerson loves and wonders at, well _emersonized,_ depictured by emerson, filled with the life of emerson, and cast forth from him then to live by itself. if these orations balk me of this, how profitable soever they be for others. i will not love them.--and yet, what am i saying? how do i know what is good for _you,_ what authentically makes your own heart glad to work in it? i speak from _without,_ the friendliest voice must speak from without; and a man's ultimate monition comes only from _within._ forgive me, and love me, and write soon. _a dieu!_ --t. carlyle my wife, very proud of your salutation, sends a sick return of greeting. after a winter of unusual strength, she took cold the other day, and coughs again; though she will not call it serious yet. one likes none of these things. she has a brisk heart and a stout, but too weak a frame for this rough life of mine. i will not get sad about it. one of the strangest things about these new england orations is a fact i have heard, but not yet seen, that a certain w. gladstone, an oxford crack scholar, tory m.p., and devout churchman of great talent and hope, has contrived to insert a piece of you (_first_ oration it must be) in a work of his on _church and state,_ which makes some figure at present! i know him for a solid, serious, silent-minded man; but how with his coleridge shovel-hattism he has contrived to relate himself to _you,_ there is the mystery. true men of all creeds, it _would_ seem, are brothers. to write soon! xxxiv. emerson to carlyle* concord, 15 march, 1839 my dear friend,--i will spare you my apologies for not writing, they are so many. you have been very generous, i very promising and dilatory. i desired to send you an account of the sales of the _history,_ thinking that the details might be more intelligible to you than to me, and might give you some insight into literary and social, as well as bibliopolical relations. but many details of this account will not yet settle themselves into sure facts, but do dance and mystify me as one green in ledgers. bookseller says nine hundred and ninety-one copies came from binder, nine remaining imperfect, and so not bound. but in all my reckonings of the particulars of distribution i make either more or less than nine hundred and ninety-one copies. and some of my accounts are with private individuals at a distance, and they have their uncertainties and misrememberings also. but the facts will soon show themselves, and i count confidently on a small balance against the world to your credit. ---------* this letter appeared in the _athenaeum,_ july 22, 1882. ---------the _miscellanies_ go forward too slowly, at about the rate of seventy-two pages a week, as i understand. of the _fraser_ articles and of some others we have but a single copy, (such are the tough limits of some english immortalities and editorial renowns,) but we expect the end of the printing in six weeks. the first two volumes, with title-pages, are gone to the binder-two hundred and sixty copies--with strait directions; and i presume will go to sea very soon. we shall send the last two volumes by a later ship. you will pay nothing for the books we send except freight. we shall deduct the cost of the books from the credit side of your account here. we print of the second series twelve hundred and fifty copies, with the intention of printing a second edition of the first series of five hundred, if we see fit hereafter to supply the place of the emigrating portion of the first. you express some surprise at the cheapness of our work. the publishers, i believe, generally get more profits. they grumbled a little at the face of the account on the 1st of january; so in the new contract for the new volumes i have allowed them nine cents more on each copy sold by them. so that you should receive ninety-one cents on a copy instead of one dollar. when the two hundred and fifty copies of our first two volumes are gone to you, i think they will have but about one hundred copies more to sell. your books are read. i hear, i think, more gratitude expressed for the _miscellanies_ than for the _history._ young men at all our colleges study them in closets, and the copernican is eradicating the ptolemaic lore. i have frequent and cordial testimonies to the good working of the leaven, and continual inquiry whether the man will come hither. _speriamo._ i was a fool to tell you once you must not come if i did tell you so. i knew better at the time, and did steadily believe, as far as i was concerned, that no polemical mud, however much was thrown, could by any possibility stick to me; for i was purely an observer; had not the smallest personal or _partial_ interest; and merely spoke to the question as a historian; and i knew whoever could see me must see that. but, at the moment, the little pamphlet made much stir and excitement in the newspapers; and the whole thousand copies were bought up. the ill wind has blown over. i advertised, as usual, my winter course of lectures, and it prospered very well. ten lectures: i. doctrine of the soul; ii. home; iii. the school; iv. love; v. genius; vi. the protest; vii. tragedy; viii. comedy; ix. duty; x. demonology. i designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so i discoursed no more on "human life." now i am well again.--but, as i said, as i could not hurt myself, it was foolish to flatter myself that i could mix your cause with mine and hurt you. nothing is more certain than that you shall have all our ears, whenever you wish for them, and free from that partial position which i deprecated. yet i cannot regret my letter, which procured me so affectionate and magnanimous a reply. thanks, too, for your friendliest invitation. but i have a new reason why i should not come to england,--a blessed babe, named ellen, almost three weeks old,--a little, fair, soft lump of contented humanity, incessantly sleeping, and with an air of incurious security that says she has come to stay, has come to be loved, which has nothing mean, and quite piques me. yet how gladly should i be near you for a time. the months and years make me more desirous of an unlimited conversation with you; and one day, i think, the god will grant it, after whatever way is best. i am lately taken with _the onyx ring,_ which seemed to me full of knowledge, and good, bold, true drawing. very saucy, was it not? in john sterling to paint collins; and what intrepid iconoclasm in this new alcibiades to break in among your lares and disfigure your sacred hermes himself in walsingham.* to me, a profane man, it was good sport to see the olympic lover of frederica, lili, and so forth, lampooned. and by alcibiades too, over whom the wrath of pericles must pause and brood ere it falls. i delight in this sterling, but now that i know him better i shall no longer expect him to write to me. i wish i could talk to you on the grave questions, graver than all literature, which the trifles of each day open. our doing seems to be a gaudy screen or popinjay to divert the eye from our nondoing. i wish, too, you could know my friends here. a man named bronson alcott is a majestic soul, with whom conversation is possible. he is capable of truth, and gives me the same glad astonishment that he should exist which the world does. -------* collins and walsingham, two characters in _the onyx ring,_ are partly drawn, not very felicitously, from carlyle and goethe. in his _life of sterling,_ carlyle says of the story: "a tale still worth reading, in which, among the imaginary characters, various friends of sterling's are shadowed forth not always in the truest manner." it is reprinted in the second volume of sterling's essays and tales, edited by julius hare. --------as i hear not yet of your reception of the bill of exchange, which went by the "royal william" in january, i enclose the duplicate. and now all success to the lectures of april or may! a new kingdom with new extravagances of power and splendor i know. unless you can keep your own secret better in _rahel,_ &c., you must not give it me to keep. the london _sartor_ arrived in my hands march 5th, dated the 15th of november, so long is the way from kennet to little & co. the book is welcome, and awakens a sort of nepotism in me,--my brother's child. --r.w. emerson i rejoice in the good accounts you give me of your household; in your wife's health; in your brother's position. my wife wishes to be affectionately remembered to you and yours. and the lady must continue to love her _old_ transatlantic friend. xxxv. emerson to carlyle concord, 19 march, 1839 my dear friend,--only last saturday i despatched a letter to you containing a duplicate of the bill of exchange sent in january, and all the facts i knew of our books; and now comes to me a note from wheeler, at cambridge, saying that the printers, on reckoning up their amount of copy, find that nowise can they make 450 pages per volume, as they have promised, for these two last of the _miscellanies._ they end the third volume with page 390, and they have not but 350 or less pages for the fourth. they ask, what shall be done? nothing is known to me but to give them _rahel,_ though i grudge it, for i vastly prefer to end with _scott._ _rahel,_ i fancy, cost you no night and no morning, but was writ in that gentle after-dinner hour so friendly to good digestion. stearns wheeler dreams that it is possible to draw at this eleventh hour some possible manuscript out of the unedited treasures of teufelsdrockh's cabinets. if the manuscripts were ready, all fairly copied out by foreseeing scribes in your sanctuary at chelsea, the good goblin of steam would--with the least waiting, perhaps a few days--bring the packet to our types in time. i have little hope, almost none, from a sally so desperate on possible portfolios; but neither will i be wanting to my sanguine co-editor, your good friend. so i told him i would give you as instant notice as mr. rogers at the merchants' exchange bar can contrive, and tell you plainly that we shall proceed to print _rahel_ when we come so far on; and with that paper end; unless we shall receive some contrary word from you. and if we can obtain any manuscript from you before we have actually bound our book, we will cancel our last sheets and insert it. and so may the friendly heaven grant a speedy passage to my letter and to yours! i fear the possibility of our success is still further reduced by the season of the year, as the lectures must shortly be on foot. well, the best speed to them also. when i think of you as speaking and not writing them, i remember luther's words, "he that can speak well, the same is a man." i hope you liked john dwight's translations of goethe, and his notes. he is a good, susceptible, yearning soul, not so apt to create as to receive with the freest allowance, but i like his books very much. do think to say in a letter whether you received _from me_ a copy of our edition of your _french revolution._ i ordered a copy sent to you,--probably wrote your name in it,--but it does not appear in the bookseller's account. farewell. --r.w. emerson xxxvi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 13 april, 1839 my dear emerson,--has anything gone wrong with you? how is it that you do not write to me? these three or four weeks, i know not whether _duly_ or not so long, i have been in daily hope of some sign from you; but none comes; not even a newspaper,--open at the ends. the german translator, mr. dwight, mentioned, at the end of a letter i had not long ago, that you had given a brilliant course of lectures at boston, but had been obliged to _intermit it on account of illness._ bad news indeed, that latter clause; at the same time, it was thrown in so cursorily i would not let myself be much alarmed; and since that, various new england friends have assured me here that there was nothing of great moment in it, that the business was all well over now, and you safe at concord again. yet how is it that i do not hear? i will tell you my guess is that those boston carlylean _miscellanies_ are to blame. the printer is slack and lazy as printers are; and you do not wish to write till you can send some news of him? i will hope and believe that only this is it, till i hear worse. i sent you a dumfries newspaper the other week, for a sign of my existence and anxiety. a certain mr. ellis of boston is this day packing up a very small memorial of me to your wife; a poor print rolled about a bit of wood: let her receive it graciously in defect of better. it comes under your address. nay, properly it is my wife's memorial to your wife. it is to be hung up in the concord drawing-room. the two households, divided by wide seas, are to understand always that they are united nevertheless. my special cause for writing this day rather than another is the old story, book business. you have brought that upon yourself, my friend; and must do the best you can with it. after all, why should not letters be on business too? many a kind thought, uniting man with man, in gratitude and helpfulness, is founded on business. the speaker at dartmouth college seems to think it ought to be so. nor do i dissent.--but the case is this, fraser and i are just about bargaining for a second edition of the _revolution._ he will print fifteen hundred for the english market, in a somewhat closer style, and sell them here at twentyfour shillings a copy. his first edition is all gone but some handful; and the man is in haste, and has taken into a mood of hope,--for he is weak and aguish, alternating from hot to cold; otherwise, i find, a very accurate creature, and deals in his unjust trade as justly as any other will. he has settled with me; his half-profits amount to some l130, which by charging me for every presentation copy he cuts down to somewhere about l110; _not_ the lion's share in the gross produce, yet a great share compared with an expectancy no higher than _zero!_ we continue on the same system for this second adventure; i cannot go hawking about in search of new terms; i might go farther and fare worse. and now comes your part of the affair; in which i would fain have had your counsel; but must ask your help, proceeding with my own light alone. after fraser's fifteen hundred are printed off, the types remain standing, and i for my own behoof throw off five hundred more, designed for your market. whether five hundred are too many or too few, i can only guess; if too many, we can retain them here and turn them to account; if too few, there is no remedy. at all events, costing me only the paper and press-work, there is surely no pirate in the union that can _undersell_ us! nay, it seems they have a drawback on our taxed paper, sufficient or nearly so to land the cargo at boston without more charge. you see, therefore, how it is. can you find me a bookseller, as for yourself; he and you can fix what price the ware will carry when you see it. meanwhile i must have his title-page; i must have his directions (if any be needed); nay, for that matter, you might write a preface if you liked,--though i see not what you have to say, and recommend silence rather! the book is to be in three volumes duodecimo, and we will take care it be fit to show its face in your market. a few errors of the press; and one correction (about the sinking of the _vengeur,_ which i find lately to be an indisputable falsehood); these are all the changes. we are to have done printing, fraser predicts, "in two months";--say two and a half! i suppose you decipher the matter out of this plastering and smearing; and will do what is needful in it. "great inquiry" is made for the _miscellanies,_ fraser says; though he suspects it may perhaps be but one or two men inquiring _often,_--the dog! i am again upon the threshold of extempore lecturing: on "the revolutions of modern europe"; protestantism, 2 lectures; puritanism, 2; french revolution, 2. i almost regret that i had undertaken the thing this year at all, for i am no longer driven by poverty as heretofore. nay, i am richer than i have been for ten years; and have a kind of prospect, for the first time this great while, of being allowed to subsist in this world for the future: a great blessing, perhaps the greatest, when it comes as a novelty! however, i thought it right to keep this lecture business open, come what might. i care less about it than i did; it is not agony and wretched trembling to the marrow of the bone, as it was the last two times. i believe, in spite of all my perpetual indigestions and nervous woes, i am actually getting into better health; the weary heart of me is quieter; i wait in silence for the new chapter,--feeling truly that we are at the end of one period here. i count it _two_ in my autobiography: we shall see what the _third_ is; [if] third there be. but i am in small haste for a third. how true is that of the old prophets, "the _word of the lord_ came unto" such and such a one! when it does not come, both prophet and prosaist ought to be thankful (after a sort), and rigorously hold their tongue.--lord durham's people have come over with golden reports of the americans, and their brotherly feelings. one arthur buller preaches to me, with emphasis, on a quite personal topic till one explodes in laughter to hear him, the good soul: that i, namely, am the most esteemed, &c., and ought to go over and lecture in all great towns of the union, and make, &c., &c.! i really do begin to think of it in this interregnum that i am in. but then my lectures must be written; but then i must become a _hawker, --ach gott!_ the people are beginning to quote you here: _tant pis pour eux!_ i have found you in two cambridge books. a certain mr. richard m. milnes, m.p., a beautiful little tory dilettante poet and politician whom i love much, applied to me for _nature_ (the others he has) that he might write upon it. somebody has stolen _nature_ from me, or many have thumbed it to pieces; i could not find a copy. send me one, the first chance you have. and see miss martineau in the last _westminster review:_--these things you are old enough to stand? they are even of benefit? emerson is not without a select public, the root of a select public on this side of the water too.--popular sumner is off to italy, the most popular of men,--inoffensive, like a worn sixpence that has no physiognomy left. we preferred coolidge to him in this circle; a square-cut iron man, yet with clear symptoms of a heart in him. your people will come more and more to their maternal babylon, will they not, by the steamers?-adieu, my dear friend. my wife joins me in all good prayers for you and yours. --thomas carlyle xxxvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 17 april, 1839 dear friend,--some four days ago i wrote you a long letter, rather expressive of anxiety about you; it will probably come to hand along with this. i had heard vaguely that you were unwell, and wondered why you did not write. happily, that point is as good as settled now, even by your silence about it. i have, half an hour ago, received your concord letter of the 19th of march. the letter you speak of there as "written last saturday" has not yet made its appearance, but may be looked for now shortly: as there is no mention here of any mischance, except the shortcoming of printers' copy, i infer that all else is in a tolerably correct state; i wait patiently for the "last saturday" tidings, and will answer as to the matters of copy, in good heart, without loss of a moment. there is nothing of the manuscript sort in teufelsdrockh's repositories that would suit you well; nothing at all in a completed state, except a long rigmarole dissertation (in a crabbed sardonic vein) about the early history of the teutonic kindred, wriggling itself along not in the best style through proverb lore, and i know not what, till it end (if my memory serve) in a kind of essay on the _minnesingers._ it was written almost ten years ago, and never contented me well. it formed part of a lucklessly projected _history of german literature,_ subsequent portions of which, the _nibelungen_ and _reinecke fox,_ you have already printed. the unfortunate "_cabinet library_ editor," or whatever his title was, broke down; and i let him off,--without paying me; and this alone remains of the misventure; a thing not fit for you, nor indeed at bottom for anybody, though i have never burnt it yet. my other manuscripts are scratchings and scrawlings;--children's _infant_ souls weeping because they never could be born, but were left there whimpering _in limine primo!_ on this side, therefore, is no help. nevertheless, it seems to me, otherwise there is. _varnhagen_ may be printed i think without offence, since there is need of it: if that will make up your fourth volume to a due size, why not? it is the last faint murmur one gives in periodical literature, and may indicate the approach of silence and slumber. i know no errors of the press in _varnhagen:_ there is one thing about jean paul f. richter's _want_ of humor in his _speech,_ which somehow i could like to have the opportunity of uttering a word on, though _what_ word i see not very well. my notion is partly that v. overstates the thing, taking a berlin _propos de salon_ for a scientifically accurate record; and partly farther that the defect (if any) was _creditable_ to jean paul, indicating that he talked from the abundance of the heart, not burning himself off in miserable perpetual sputter like a town-wit, but speaking what he had to say, were it dull, were it not dull,--for his own satisfaction first of all! if you in a line or two could express at the right point something of that sort, it were well; yet on the whole, if not, then is almost no matter. let the whole stand then as the commencement of slumber and stertorous breathing! varnhagen himself will not bring up your fourth volume to the right size; hardly beyond 380 pages, i should think; yet what more can be done? do you remember fraser's magazine for october, 1832, and a translation there, with notes, of a thing called goethe's mahrchen? it is by me; i regard it as a most remarkable piece, well worthy of perusal, especially by all readers of mine. the printing of your third volume will of course be finished before this letter arrive; nevertheless i have a plan: that you (as might be done, i suppose, by cancelling and reprinting the concluding leaf or leaves) append the said translated tale, in a smaller type, to that volume. it is 21 or 22 pages of _fraser,_ and will perhaps bring yours up to the mark. nay, indeed there are two other little translations from goethe which i reckon good, though of far less interest than the _mahrchen;_ i think they are in the frasers almost immediately preceding; one of them is called _fragment from goethe_ (if i remember); in his _works,_ it is _novelle;_ it treats of a visit by some princely household to a strange mountain ruin or castle, and the catastrophe is the escape of a show-lion from its booth in the neighboring market-town. i have not the thing here,--alas, sinner that i am, it now strikes me that the "two other things" are this one thing, which my treacherous memory is making into two! this however you will find in the number immediately, or not far from immediately, preceding that of the _mahrchen;_ along with which, in the same type with which, it would give us letter-press enough. it ought to stand _before_ the _mahrchen:_ read it, and say whether it is worthy or not worthy. will this _appendix_ do, then? i should really rather like the _mahrchen_ to be printed, and had thoughts of putting [it] at the end of the english _sartor._ the other i care not for, intrinsically, but think it very beautiful in its kind.--some rubbish of my own, in small quantity, exists here and there in _fraser;_ one story, entitled _cruthers and jonson,_* was written sixteen years ago, and printed somewhere early (probably the second year) in that rubbish heap, with several gross errors of the press (mares for maces was one!): it is the first thing i wrote, or among the very first;--otherwise a thing to be kept rather secret, except from the like of you! this or any other of the "original" immaturities i will _not_ recommend as an appendix; i hope the _mahrchen,_ or the _novelle_ and _mahrchen,_ will suffice. but on the whole, to thee, o friend, and thy judgment and decision, without appeal, i leave it altogether. say yes, say no; do what seemeth good to thee.--nay now, writing with the speed of light, another consideration strikes me: why should volume third be interfered with if it is finished? why will not this _appendix_ do, these _appendixes,_ to hang to the skirts of volume four as well? perhaps better! the _mahrchen_ in any case closing the rear. i leave it all to emerson and stearns wheeler, my more than kind editors: e. knows it better than i; be his decision irrevocable. ----------* "cruthers and jonson; or, the outskirts of life. a true story." _fraser's magazine,_ january, 1831. -----------this letter is far too long, but i had not time to make it shorter.--i got your _french revolution,_ and have seen no other: my name is on it in your hand. i received dwight's book, liked it, and have answered him: a good youth, of the kind you describe; no englishman, to my knowledge, has yet uttered as much sense about goethe and german things. i go this day to settle with fraser about printers and a second edition of the _revolution_ book,--as specified in the other letter: five hundred copies for america, which are to cost he computes about 2/7, and _your_ bookseller will bind them, and defy piracy. my lectures come on, this day two weeks: o heaven! i cannot "speak"; i can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by want of money. in five weeks i shall be free, and then--! shall it be switzerland, shall it be scotland, nay, shall it be america and concord? ever your affectionate t. carlyle all love from both of us to the mother and boy. my wife is better than usual; rejoices in the promise of summer now at last visible after a spring like greenland. scarcity, discontent, fast ripening towards desperation, extends far and wide among our working people. god help them! in man as yet is small help. there will be work yet, before that account is liquidated; a generation or two of work! miss martineau is gone to switzerland, after emitting _deerwood_ [sic], a novel.* how do you like it? people ask. to which there are serious answers returnable, but few so good as none. ah me! lady bulwer too has written a novel, in satire of her husband. i saw the husband not long since; one of the wretchedest phantasms, it seemed to me, i had yet fallen in with,--many, many, as they are here. the l100 sterling bill came, in due time, in perfect order; and will be payable one of these days. i forget dates; but had well calculated that before the 19th of march this piece of news and my gratitude for it had reached you. -------* _deerbrook_ -------xxxviii. emerson to carlyle boston, 20 april, 1839 my dear friend,--learning here in town that letters may go today to the "great western," i seize the hour to communicate a bookseller's message. i told brown, of c.c. little & co., that you think of stereotyping the _history._ he says that he can make it profitable to himself and to you to use your plates here in this manner (which he desires may be kept secret here, and i suppose with you also). you are to get your plates made and proved, then you are to send them out here to him, having first insured them in london, and he is to pay you a price for every copy he prints from them. as soon as he has printed a supply for our market,--and we want, he says, five hundred copies now,--he will send them back to you. i told him i thought he had better fix the price per copy to be paid by him, and i would send it to you as his offer. he is willing to do so, but not today. it was only this morning i informed him of your plan. i think in a fortnight i shall need to write again,--probably to introduce to you my countrywoman, miss sedgwick, the writer of affectionate new england tales and the like, who is about to go to europe for a year or more. i will then get somewhat definite from brown as to rates and prices. brown thought you might better send the plates here first, as we are in immediate want of copies; and afterwards print with them in london. he is quite sure that it would be more profitable to print them in this manner than to try to import and sell here the books after being manufactured in london. on the 30th of april we shall ship at new york the first two volumes of the _miscellanies,_ two hundred and sixty copies. in four weeks, the second two volumes will be finished, unless we wait for something to be added by yourself, agreeably to a suggestion of wheeler's and mine. two copies of _schiller's life_ will go in the same box. we send them to the port of london. when these are gone, only one hundred copies remain unsold of the first two volumes (_miscellanies_). brown said it was important that the plates should be proved correct at london by striking off impressions before they were sent hither. this is the whole of my present message. i shall have somewhat presently to reply to your last letter, received three weeks since. and may health and peace dwell with you and yours! --r.w. emerson xxxix. emerson to carlyle concord, 25 april, 1839 my dear friend,--behold my account! a very simple thing, is it not! a very mouse, after such months, almost years, of promise! despise it not, however; for such is my extreme dulness at figures and statements that this nothing has been a fear to me, a long time, how to extract it from the bookseller's promiscuous account with me, and from obscure records of my own. you see that it promises yet to pay you between $60 and $70 more, if mr. fuller (a gentleman of providence, who procured many _subscribers_ for us there) and mr. owen (who owes us also for copies subscribed for) will pay us our demand. they have both been lately reminded of their delinquency. herrick and noyes, you will see credited for eight copies, $18. they are booksellers who supplied eight subscribers, and charged us $2 for their trouble and some alleged damage to a copy. one copy you will see is sold to ann pomeroy for $3. this lady bought the copy of me, and preferred sending me $3 to sending $2.50 for so good a book. you will notice one or two other variations in the prices, in each of which i aimed to use a friend's discretion. add lastly, that you must revise all my figures, as i am a hopeless blunderer, and quite lately made a brilliant mistake in regard to the amount of 9 multiplied by 12. have i asked you whether you received from me a copy of the _history?_ i designated a copy to go, and the bookseller's boy thinks he sent one, but there is none charged in their account. the account of the _miscellanies_ does not prosper quite so well.... thanks for your too friendly and generous expectations from my wit. alas! my friend, i can do no such gay thing as you say. i do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of literature, the reporters; suburban men. but in god we are all great, all rich, each entitled to say, all is mine. i hope the advancing season has restored health to your wife, and, if benedictions will help her, tell her we send them on every west wind. my wife and babes are well. --r.w.e. xl. emerson to carlyle concord, 28 april, 1839 my dear friend,--i received last night c.c. little & co.'s proposition in reference to the stereotyping the _history._ their offer is based on my statement that you proposed to print the book in two volumes similar to ours. they say, "we should be willing to pay three hundred dollars for the use of plates for striking off five hundred copies of the two volumes, with the farther agreement that, if we wished to strike off another five hundred in nine months after the publication of the first five hundred, we should have the liberty to do so, paying the same again; that is, another three hundred dollars for the privilege of printing another five hundred copies;--the plates to be furnished us ready for use and free of expense." they add, "should mr. carlyle send the plates to this country, he should be particular to ship them to _this port direct._" i am no judge of the liberality of this offer, as i know nothing of the expense of the plates. the men, little and brown, are fair in their dealings, and the most respectable book-selling firm in boston. when you have considered the matter, i hope you will send me as early an answer as you can. for as we have no protection from pirates we must use speed. i ought to have added to my account and statement sent by miss sedgwick one explanation. you will find in the account a credit of $13.75, agreed on with little & co., as compensation for lost subscribers. we had a little book, kept in the bookshop, into which were transferred the names of subscribers from all lists which were returned from various places. these names amounted to two hundred, more or less. when we came to settle the account, this book could not be found. they expressed much regret, and made much vain searching. their account with me recorded only one hundred and thirty-four copies delivered to subscribers. thus, a large number, say sixty-six, had been sold by them to our subscribers, and our half-dollar on each copy put in their pocket as commission, expressly contrary to treaty! with some ado, i mustered fifty-five names of subscribers known to me as such, not recorded on their books as having received copies, and demanded $27.50. they replied that they also had claims; that they had sent the books to distant subscribers in various states, and had charged no freight (with one or two exceptions, when the books went alone); that other booksellers had, no doubt, in many cases, sold the copies to subscribers for which i claimed the half-dollar; and lastly, which is indeed the moving reason, that they had sent twenty copies up the mississippi to a bookseller (in vicksburg, i think), who had made them no return. on these grounds they proposed that they should pay half my demand, and so compromise. they said, however, that, if i insisted, they would pay the whole. i was so glad to close the affair with mutual goodwill that i said with the unjust steward, write $13.75. so are we all pleased at your expense. [greek] i think i will not give you any more historiettes,--they take too much room; but as i write this time only on business, you are welcome to this from your friend, --r.w. emerson xli. emerson to carlyle* concord, 15 may, 1839. my dear friend,--last saturday, 11th instant, i had your two letters of 13th and 17th april. before now, you must have one or two notes of mine touching the stereotype plates: a proposition superseded by your new plan. i have also despatched one or two sheets lately containing accounts. now for the new matter. i was in boston yesterday, and saw brown, the bookseller. he accedes gladly, to the project of five hundred american copies of the _history._ he says, that the duty is the same on books in sheets and books in boards; and desires, therefore, that the books may come out _bound._ you bind yours in cloth? put up his in the same style as those for your market, only a little more strongly than is the custom with london books, as it will only cost a little more. he would be glad also to have his name added in the titlepage (london: published by j. fraser; and boston: by c.c. little and james brown, 112 washington st.), or is not this the right way? he only said he should like to have his name added. he threatens to charge me 20 percent commission. if, as he computes from your hint of 2/7, the work costs you, say, 70 cents per copy, unbound; he reckons it at a dollar, when bound; then 75 cents duty in boston, $1.75. he thinks we cannot set a higher price on it than $3.50, _because_ we sold our former edition for $2.50. on that price, his commissions would be 70 cents; and $1.05 per copy will to you. if when we see the book, we venture to put a higher price on it, your remainder shall be more. i confess, when i set this forth on paper, it looks as bad as your english trade,--this barefaced 20 percent; but their plea is, we guarantee the sales; we advertise; we pay you when it is sold, though we give our customers six months' credit. i have made no final bargain with the man, and perhaps before the books arrive i shall be better advised, and may get better terms from him. meantime, give me the best advice you can; and despatch the books with all speed, and if you send six hundred, i think, we will sell them. -----------* in the first edition of this correspondence a portion of this letter was printed from a rough draft, such as emerson was accustomed to make of his letters to carlyle. i owe the original to the kindness of the editor of the _athenaeum,_ in the pages of which it was printed. ----------i went to the _athenaeum,_ and procured the _frasers'_ and will print the _novelle_ and the _mahrchen_ at the end of the fourth volume, which has been loitering under one workman for a week or two past, awaiting this arrival. now we will finish at once. _cruthers and jonson_ i read gladly. it is indispensable to such as would see the fountains of nile: but i incline to what seems your opinion, that it will be better in the final edition of your works than in this present first collection of them. i believe i could find more matter now of yours if we should be pinched again. the cat-raphael? and _mirabeau_ and _macaulay?_ stearns wheeler is very faithful in his loving labor,--has taken a world of pains with the sweetest smile. we are very fortunate in having him to friend.--for the _miscellanies_ once more, the two boxes containing two hundred and sixty copies of the first series went to sea in the "st. james," captain sebor, addressed to mr. fraser. (i hope rightly addressed; yet i saw a memorandum at munroe's in which he was named _john_ fraser.) arthur buller has my hearty thanks for his good and true witnessing. and now that our old advice is indorsed by john bull himself, you will believe and come. nothing can be better. as soon as the lectures are over, let the trunks be packed. only my wife and my blessed sister dear--elizabeth hoar, betrothed in better times to my brother charles,--my wife and this lovely nun do say that mrs. carlyle must come hither also; that it will make her strong, and lengthen her days on the earth, and cheer theirs also. come, and make a home with me; and let us make a truth that is better than dreams. from this farm-house of mine you shall sally forth as god shall invite you, and "lecture in the great cities." you shall do it by proclamation of your own, or by the mediation of a committee, which will readily be found. wife, mother, and sister shall nurse thy wife meantime, and you shall bring your republican laurels home so fast that she shall not sigh for the old england. eyes here do sparkle at the very thought. and my little placid musketaquid river looked gayer today in the sun. in very sooth and love, my friend, i shall look for you in august. if aught that we know not must forbid your wife at present, you will still come. in october, you shall lecture in boston; in november, in new york; in december, in philadelphia; in january, in washington. i can show you three or four great natures, as yet unsung by harriet martineau or anna jameson, that content the heart and provoke the mind. and for yourself, you shall be as cynical and headstrong and fantastical as you can be. i rejoice in what you say of better health and better prospects. i was glad to hear of milnes, whose _poems_ already lay on my table when your letter came. since the little _nature_ book is not quite dead, i have sent you a few copies, and wish you would offer one to mr. milnes with my respects. i hope before a great while i may have somewhat better to send him. i am ashamed that my little books should be "quoted" as you say. my affectionate salutations to mrs. carlyle, who is to sanction and enforce all i have written on the migration. in the prospect of your coming i feel it to be foolish to write. i have very much to say to you. but now only good bye. --r.w. emerson xlii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 29 may, 1839 my dear emerson,--your letter, dated boston, 20th april, has been here for some two weeks. miss sedgwick, whom it taught us to expect in "about a fortnight," has yet given no note of herself, but shall be right welcome whenever she appears. miss martineau's absence (she is in switzerland this summer) will probably be a loss to the fair pilgrim;--which of course the rest of us ought to exert ourselves to make good.... my lectures are happily over ten days ago; with "success" enough, as it is called; the only _valuable_ part of which is some l200, gained with great pain, but also with great brevity:--economical respite for another solar year! the people were boundlessly tolerant; my agitation beforehand was less this year, my remorse afterwards proportionally greater. there was but one moderately good lecture, the last,--on sausculottism, to an audience mostly tory, and rustling with the beautifulest quality silks! two things i find: first that _i ought to have had a horse;_ i had only three incidental rides or gallops, hired rides; my horse _yankee_ is never yet purchased, but it shall be, for i cannot live, except in great pain, without a horse. it was sweet beyond measure to escape out of the dustwhirlpool here, and _fly,_ in solitude, through the ocean of verdure and splendor, as far as harrow and back again; and one's nerves were _clear_ next day, and words lying in one like water in a well. but the _second_ thing i found was, that extempore speaking, especially in the way of lecture, is an _art_ or craft, and requires an apprenticeship, which i have never served. repeatedly it has come into my head that i should go to america, this very fall, and belecture you from north to south till i learn it! such a thing does lie in the bottom-scenes, should hard come to hard; and looks pleasant enough.--on the whole, i say sometimes, i must either begin a book, or do it. books are the lasting thing; lectures are like corn ground into flour; there are loaves for today, but no wheat harvests for next year. rudiments of a new book (thank heaven!) do sometimes disclose themselves in me. _festina lente._ it ought to be better than the _french revolution;_ i mean better written. the greater part of that book, as i read proof-sheets of it in these weeks, does nothing but _disgust_ me. and yet it was, as nearly as was good, the utmost that lay in me. i should not like to be nearer killed with any other book!--books too are a triviality. life alone is great; with its infinite spaces, its everlasting times, with its death, with its heaven and its hell. ah me! wordsworth is here at present; a garrulous, rather watery, not wearisome old man. there is a freshness as of brooks and mountain breezes in him; one says of him: thou art not great, but thou art genuine; well speed _thou._ sterling is home from italy, recovered in health, indeed very well could he but _sit still._ he is for clifton, near bristol, for the next three months. i hear him speak of some sonnet or other he means to address to you: as for me he knows well that i call his verses timber toned, without true melody either in thought, phrase or sound. the good john! did you ever see such a vacant turnip-lantern as that walsingham goethe? iconoclast collins strikes his wooden shoe through him, and passes on, saying almost nothing.--my space is done! i greet the little _maidkin,_ and bid her welcome to this unutterable world. commend her, poor little thing, to her little brother, to her mother and father;-nature, i suppose, has sent her strong letters of recommendation, without our help, to them all. where i shall be in six weeks is not very certain; likeliest in scotland, whither our whole household, servant and all, is pressingly invited, where they have provided horses and gigs. letters sent hither will still find me, or lie waiting for me, safe: but perhaps the _speediest_ address will be "care of fraser, 215 regent street." my brother wants me to the tyrol and vienna; but i think i shall not go. adieu, dear friend. it is a great treasure to me that i have you in this world. my wife salutes you all.-yours ever and ever, t. carlyle xliii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 24 june, 1833 dear friend,--two letters from you were brought hither by miss sedgwick last week. the series of post letters is a little embroiled in my head; but i have a conviction that all hitherto due have arrived; that up to the date of my last despatch (a _proof-sheet_ and a letter), which ought to be getting into your hands in these very days, our correspondence is clear. that letter and proof-sheet, two separate pieces, were sent to liverpool some three weeks ago, to be despatched by the first conveyance thence; as i say, they are probably in boston about this time. the proof-sheet was one of the forty-seven such which the new _french revolution_ is to consist of: with this, as with a correct sample, you were to act upon some boston bookseller, and make a bargain for me,--or at least report that none was to be made. a bad bargain will content me now, my hopes are not at all high. for the present, i am to announce on the part of bookseller fraser that the first portion of our celebrated _miscellanies_ have been hovering about on these coasts for several weeks, have lain safe "in the river" for some two weeks, and ought at last to be safe in fraser's shop today or else to morrow. i will ask there, and verify, before this letter go. the reason of these "two weeks in the river" is that the packages were addressed "_john_ fraser, london," and the people had tried all the frasers in london before they attempted the right individual, james, of 215 regent street. of course, the like mistake in the second case will be avoided. a letter, put ashore at falmouth, and properly addressed, but without any _signature,_ had first of all announced that the thing was at the door, and so with this "john fraser," it has been knocking ever since, finding difficult admission. in the present instance, such delay has done no ill, for fraser will not sell till the second portion come; and with this the mistake will be avoided. what has shocked poor james much more is a circumstance which your boston booksellers have no power to avoid: the "enormousness" of the charges in our port here! he sends me the account of them last saturday, with eyes-such as drew priam's curtains: l31 and odd silver, whereof l28 as duty on books at l5 per cwt. is charged by the rapacious custom-house alone! what help, o james? i answer: we cannot bombard the british custom-house, and sack it, and explode it; we must yield, and pay it the money; thankful for what is still left.--on the whole, one has to learn by trying. this notable finance-expedient, of printing in the one country what is to be sold in the other, did not take vandalic custom-houses into view, which nevertheless do seem to exist. we must persist in it for the present reciprocal pair of times, having started in it for these: but on future occasions always, we can ask the past; and _see_ whether it be not better to let each side of the water stand on its own basis. as for your "accounts," my friend, i find them clear as day, verifiable to the uttermost farthing. you are a good man to conquer your horror of arithmetic; and, like hydrophobic peter of russia making himself a sailor, become an accountant for my sake. but now will you forgive me if i never do verify this same account, or look at it more in this world except as a memento of affection, its arithmetical ciphers so many hierograms, really _sacred_ to me! a reflection i cannot but make is that at bottom this money was all yours; not a penny of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful friendship. i feel as if i could not examine it without a kind of crime. for the rest, you may rejoice to think that, thanks to you and the books, and to heaven over all, i am for the present no longer poor; but have a reasonable prospect of existing, which, as i calculate, is literally the most that money can do for a man. not for these twelve years, never since i had a house to maintain with money, have i had as much money in my possession as even now. _allah kerim!_ we will hope all that is good on that side. and herewith enough of _it._ you tell me you are but "a reporter": i like you for thinking so. and you will never know that it is _not true,_ till you have tried. meanwhile, far be it from me to urge you to a trial before your time come. ah, it will come, and soon enough; much better, perhaps, if it never came!--a man has "_such_ a baptism to be baptized withal," no easy baptism; and is "straitened till it be accomplished." as for me i honor peace before all things; the silence of a great soul is to me greater than anything it will ever say, it ever can say. be tranquil, my friend; utter no word till you cannot help it;--and think yourself a "reporter," till you find (not with any great joy) that you are not altogether that! we have not yet seen miss sedgwick: your letters with her card were sent hither by post we went up next day, but she was out; no meeting could be arranged earlier than tomorrow evening, when we look for her here. her reception, i have no doubt, will be abundantly flattering in this england. american notabilities are daily becoming notabler among us; the ties of the two parishes, mother and daughter, getting closer and closer knit. indissoluble ties:--i reckon that this huge smoky wen may, for some centuries yet, be the best mycale for our saxon _panionium,_ a yearly meeting-place of "all the saxons," from beyond the atlantic, from the antipodes, or wherever the restless wanderers dwell and toil. after centuries, if boston, if new york, have become the most convenient _"all-saxondom,"_ we will right cheerfully go thither to hold such festival, and leave the wen.-not many days ago i saw at breakfast the notabest of all your notabilities, daniel webster. he is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, this is your yankee englishman, such limbs _we_ make in yankeeland! as a logic-fencer, advocate, or parliamentary hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. the tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown;_ the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:--i have not traced as much of _silent berserkir-rage,_ that i remember of, in any other man. "i guess i should not like to be your nigger!"-webster is not loquacious, but he is pertinent, conclusive; a dignified, perfectly bred man, though not english in breeding: a man worthy of the best reception from us; and meeting such, i understand. he did not speak much with me that morning, but seemed not at all to dislike me: i meditate whether it is fit or not fit that i should seek out his residence, and leave _my_ card too, before i go? probably not; for the man is political, seemingly altogether; has been at the queen's levee, &c., &c.: it is simply as a mastiff-mouthed _man_ that he is interesting to me, and not otherwise at all. in about seven days hence we go to scotland till the july heats be over. that is our resolution after all. our address there, probably till the end of august, is "templand, thornhill, dumfries, n. b.,"--the residence of my mother-in-law, within a day's drive of my mother's. any letter of yours sent by the old constant address (cheyne row, chelsea) will still find me there; but the other, for that time, will be a day or two shorter. we all go, servant and all. i am bent on writing _something;_ but have no faith that i shall be able. i _must_ try. there is a thing of mine in _fraser_ for july, of no account, about the "sinking of the _vengeur_" as you will see. the _french revolution_ printing is not to stop; two thirds of it are done; at this present rate, it ought to finish, and the whole be ready, within three weeks hence. a letter will be here from you about that time, i think: i will print no title-page for the five hundred till it do come. "published by _fraser and_ little" would, i suppose, be unobjectionable, though fraser is the most nervous of creatures: but why put _him_ in at all, since these five hundred copies are wholly little's and yours? adieu, my friend. our blessings are with you and your house. my wife grows better with the hot weather; i, always worse. yours ever, t. carlyle i say not a word about america or lecturing at present; because i mean to consider it intently in scotland, and there to decide. my brother is to be at ischl (not far from salzburg) during summer: he was anxious to have me there, and i to have gone; but--but--adieu. _fraser's shop._ books not yet come, but known to be safe, and expected soon. nay, the dexterous fraser has argued away l15 of the duty, he says! all is right therefore. n.b. he says you are to send the second portion _in sheets,_ the weight will be less. this if it be still time.--_basta._ --t.c. xliv. emerson to carlyle concord, 4 july, 1839 i hear tonight, o excellent man! that, unless i send a letter to boston tomorrow with the peep of day, it will miss the liverpool steamer, which sails earlier than i dreamed of. o foolish steamer! i am not ready to write. the facts are not yet ripe, though on the turn of the blush. couldst not wait a little? hurry is for slaves;--and aristotle, if i rightly remember only that little from my college lesson, affirmed that the high-minded man never walked fast. o foolish steamer! wait but a week, and we will style thee megalopsyche, and hang thee by the argo in the stars. meantime i will not deny the dear and admirable man the fragments of intelligence i have. be it known unto you then, thomas carlyle, that i received yesterday morning your letter by the "liverpool" with great contentment of heart and mind, in all respects, saving that the american hegira, so often predicted on your side and prayed on ours, is treated with a most unbecoming levity and oblivion; and, moreover, that you do not seem to have received all the letters i seem to have sent. with the letter came the proof-sheet safe, and shall be presently exhibited to little and brown. you must have already the result of our first colloquy on that matter. i can now bring the thing nearer to certainty. but you must print their names as before advised on the title-page. nearly four weeks ago ellis sent me the noble italian print for my wife.* she is in boston at this time, and i believe will be glad that i have written without her aid or word this time, for she was so deeply pleased with the gift that she said she never could write to you. it came timely to me at least. it is a right morning thought, full of health and flowing genius, and i rejoice in it. it is fitly framed and tomorrow is to be hung in the parlor. -------* morghen's engraving of guido's aurora. -------our munroe's press, you must believe, was of aristotle's category of the high-minded and slow. chiding would do no good. they still said, "we have but one copy, and so but one hand at work"! at last, on the 1st of july, the book appeared in the market, but does not come from the binder fast enough to supply the instant demand; and therefore your two hundred and sixty copies cannot part from new york until the 20th of july. they will be on board the london packet which sails on that day. the publisher has his instructions to bind the volumes to match the old ones. our year since the publication of the vols. i. and ii. is just complete, and i have set the man on the account, but doubt if i get it before twelve or fourteen days. all the edition is gone except forty copies, he told me; and asked me if i would not begin to print a small edition of this first series, five hundred, as we have five hundred of the new series too many, with that view. but i am now so old a fox that i suspend majestically my answer until i have his account. for on the 21st of july i am to pay $462 for the paper of this new book: and by and by the printer's bill,--whose amount i do not yet know; and it is better to be "slow and high-minded" a little more, since we have been so much, and not go deeper into these men's debt until we have tasted somewhat of their credit. we are to get, as you know, by contract, near a thousand dollars from these first two volumes; yet a month ago i was forced to borrow two hundred dollars for you on interest, such advances had the account required. but the coming account will enlighten us all. i am very happy in the "success" of the london lectures. i have no word to add tonight, only that sterling is not timber-toned, that i love his poetry, that i admire his prose with reservations here and there. what he knows he writes manly and well. now and then he puts in a pasteboard man; but all our readers here take _blackwood_ for his sake, and lately seek him in vain. i am getting on with some studies of mine prosperously for me, have got three essays nearly done, and who knows but in the autumn i shall have a book? meantime my little boy and maid, my mother and wife, are well, and the two ladies send to you and yours affectionate regards,--they would fain say urgent invitations. my mother sends tonight, my wife always. i shall send you presently a copy of a translation published here of eckermann, by margaret fuller, a friend of mine and of yours, for the sake of its preface mainly. she is a most accomplished lady, and her culture belongs rather to europe than to america. good bye. --r.w. emerson xlv. emerson to carlyle concord, 8 august, 1839 dear friend,--this day came the letter dated 24 june, with "steam packet" written by you on the outside, but no paddles wheeled it through the sea. it is forty-five days old, and too old to do its errand even had it come twenty days sooner--so far as printer and bookbinder are concerned. i am truly grieved for the mischance of the _john_ fraser, and will duly lecture the sinning bookseller. i noticed the misnomer in a letter of his new york correspondent, and, i believe, mentioned to you in a letter my fear of such a mischance. i am more sorry for the costliness of this adventure to you, though in a gracious note to me you cut down the fine one half. the new books, tardily printed, were tardily bound and tardily put to sea on the packet ship "ontario," which left new york for london on the 1st of august. at least this was the promise of munroe & co. i stood over the boxes in which they were packing them in the latter days of july. i hope they have not gone to john again, but you must keep an eye to both names.... i cannot tell you how glad i am that you have seen my brave senator, and seen him as i see him. all my days i have wished that he should go to england, and never more than when i listened two or three times to debates in the house of commons. we send out usually mean persons as public agents, mere partisans, for whom i can only hope that no man with eyes will meet them; and now those thirsty eyes, those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine, those fatal perceptions, have fallen full on the great forehead which i followed about all my young days, from court-house to senate-chamber, from caucus to street. he has his own sins no doubt, is no saint, is a prodigal. he has drunk this rum of party too so long, that his strong head is soaked, sometimes even like the soft sponges, but the "man's a man for a' that." better, he is a great boy,--as wilful, as nonchalant and good-humored. but you must hear him speak, not a show speech which he never does well, but _with cause_ he can strike a stroke like a smith. i owe to him a hundred fine hours and two or three moments of eloquence. his voice in a great house is admirable. i am sorry if you decided not to visit him. he loves a _man,_ too. i do not know him, but my brother edward read law with him, and loved him, and afterwards in sick and unfortunate days received the steadiest kindness from him. well, i am glad you are to think in earnest in scotland of our cisatlantic claims. we shall have more rights over the wise and brave, i believe before many years or months. we shall have more men and a better cause than has yet moved on our stagnant waters. i think our church, so called, must presently vanish. there is a universal timidity, conformity, and rage; and on the other hand the most resolute realism in the young. the man alcott bides his time. i have a young poet in this village named thoreau, who writes the truest verses. i pine to show you my treasures; and tell your wife, we have women who deserve to know her. --r.w. emerson the yankees read and study the new volumes of _miscellanies_ even more than the old. the "sam johnson" and "scott" are great favorites. stearns wheeler corrected proofs affectionately to the last. truth and health be with you alway! xlvi. carlyle to emerson scotsbrig, ecclefechan, 4 september, 1839 dear emerson,--a cheerful and right welcome letter of yours, dated 4th july, reached me here, duly forwarded, some three weeks ago; i delayed answering till there could some definite statement, as to bales of literature shipped or landed, or other matter of business forwarded a stage, be made. i am here, with my wife, rusticating again, these two months; amid diluvian rains, chartism, teetotalism, deficient harvest, and general complaint and confusion; which not being able to mend, all that i can do is to heed them as little as possible. "what care i for the house? i am only a lodger." on the whole, i have sat under the wing of saint swithin; uncheery, sluggish, murky, as the wettest of his days;--hoping always, nevertheless, that blue sky, figurative and real, does exist, and will demonstrate itself by and by. i have been the stupidest and laziest of men. i could not write even to you, till some palpable call told me i must. yesternight, however, there arrives a despatch from fraser, apprising me that the american _miscellanies,_ second cargo, are announced from portsmouth, and "will probably be in the river tomorrow"; where accordingly they in all likelihood now are, a fair landing and good welcome to them! fraser "knows not whether they are bound or not"; but will soon know. the first cargo, of which i have a specimen here, contented him extremely; only there was one fatality, the cloth of the binding was multiplex, party-colored, some sets done in green, others in red, blue, perhaps skyblue! now if the second cargo were not multiplex, party-colored, nay multiplex, _in exact concordance with the first,_ as seemed almost impossible--?--alas, in that case, one could not well predict the issue!--seriously, it is a most handsome book you have made; and i have nothing to return but thanks and again thanks. by the bye, if you do print a small second edition of the first portion, i might have had a small set of errata ready: but _where are they?_ the book only came into my hand here a few days ago; and i have been whipt from post to pillar without will of my own, without energy to form a will! the only glaring error i recollect at this moment is one somewhere in the second article on _jean paul:_ "osion" (i think, or some such thing) instead of "orson": it is not an original american error, but copied from the english; if the printer get his eye upon it, let him rectify; if not, not, i _deserve_ to have it stand against me there. fraser's joy, should the books prove either unbound or multiplex in the right way, will be great and unalloyed; he calculates on selling all the copies very soon. he has begun reprinting goethe's _wilhelm meister_ too, the _apprenticeship_ and _travels_ under one; and hopes to remunerate himself for that by and by: whether there will then remain any small peculium for me is but uncertain; meanwhile i correct the press, nothing doubting. one of these i call my best translation, the other my worst; i have read that latter, the _apprenticeship,_ again in these weeks; not without surprise, disappointment, nay, aversion here and there, yet on the whole with ever new esteem. i find i can pardon _all_ things in a man except purblindness, falseness of vision,--for, indeed, does not that presuppose every other kind of falseness? but let me hasten to say that the _french revolution,_ five hundred strong for the new england market, is also, as fraser advises, "to go to sea in three days." it is bound in red cloth, gilt; a pretty book, james says; which he will sell for twenty-five shillings here;--nay, the london brotherhood have "subscribed" for one hundred and eighty at once, which he considers great work. i directed him to consign to little and brown in boston, the _property_ of the thing _yours,_ with such phraseology and formalities as they use in those cases. i paid him for it yesterday (to save discount) l95; that is the whole cost to me, twenty or thirty pounds more than was once calculated on. do the best with it you can, my friend; and never mind the result. if the thing fail, as is likely enough, we will simply quit that transport trade, and my experience must be _paid for._ the title-page was "boston: charles c. little and james brown," then in a second line and smaller type, "london james fraser"; to which arrangement james made not the slightest objection, or indeed rather seemed to like it.--so much for trade matters: is it not _enough?_ i declare i blush sometimes, and wonder where the good emerson gets all his patience. we shall be through the affair one day, and find something better to speak about than dollars and pounds. and yet, as you will say, why not even of dollars? ah, there are leaden-worded [bills] of exchange i have seen which have had an almost sacred character to me! _pauca verba._ doubt not your new utterances are eagerly waited for here; above all things the "book" is what i want to see. you might have told me what it was about. we shall see by and by. a man that has discerned somewhat, and knows it for himself, let him speak it out, and thank heaven. i pray that they do not confuse you by praises; their blame will do no harm at all. praise is sweet to all men; and yet alas, alas, if the light of one's own heart go out, bedimmed with poor vapors and sickly false glitterings and flashings, what profit is it! happier in darkness, in all manner of mere outward darkness, misfortune and neglect, "so that _thou canst endure,_"--which however one cannot to all lengths. god speed you, my brother! i hope all good things of you; and wonder whether like phoebus apollo you are destined to be a youth forever.--sterling will be right glad to hear your praises; not unmerited, for he is a man among millions that john of mine, though his perpetual mobility wears me out at times. did he ever write to you? his latest speculation was that he should and would; but i fancy it is among the clouds again. i hear from him the other day, out of welsh villages where he passed his boyhood, &c., all in a flow of "lyrical recognition," hope, faith, and sanguine unrest; i have even some thoughts of returning by bristol (in a week or so, that must be), and seeing him. the dog has been reviewing me, he says, and it is coming out in the next _westminster!_ he hates terribly my doctrine of _"silence."_ as to america and lecturing, i cannot in this torpid condition venture to say one word. really it is not impossible; and yet lecturing is a thing i shall never grow to like; still less lionizing, martineau-ing: _ach gott!_ my wife sends a thousand regards; _she_ will never get across the ocean, you must come to her; she was almost _dead_ crossing from liverpool hither, and declares she will never go to sea for any purpose whatsoever again. never till next time! my good old mother is here, my brother john (home with his duke from italy); all send blessings and affection to you and yours. adieu till i get to london. yours ever, t. carlyle xlvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 8 december, 1839 my dear emerson,--what a time since we have written to one another! was it you that defalcated? alas, i fear it was myself; i have had a feeling these nine or ten weeks that you were expecting to hear from me; that i absolutely could not write. your kind gift of fuller's _eckermann_* was handed in to our hackney coach, in regent street, as we wended homewards from the railway and scotland, on perhaps the 8th of september last; a welcome memorial of distant friends and doings: nay, perhaps there was a letter two weeks prior to that:--i am a great sinner! but the truth is, i could not write; and now i can and do it! ---------* "conversations with goethe. translated from the german of eckermann. by s.m. fuller." boston, 1839. this was the fourth volume in the series of "specimens of foreign standard literature," edited by george ripley. the book has a characteristic preface by miss fuller, in which she speaks of carlyle as "the only competent english critic" of goethe. ---------our sojourn in scotland was stagnant, sad; but tranquil, _well let alone,_--an indispensable blessing to a poor creature fretted to fiddle-strings, as i grow to be in this babylon, take it as i will. we had eight weeks of desolate rain; with about eight days bright as diamonds intercalated in that black monotony of bad weather. the old hills are the same; the old streams go gushing along as in past years, in past ages; but he that looks on them is no longer the same: and the old friends, where are they? i walk silent through my old haunts in that country; sunk usually in inexpressible reflections, in an immeasurable chaos of musings and mopings that cannot be reflected or articulated. the only work i had on hand was one that would not prosper with me: an article for the _quarterly review_ on the state of the working classes here. the thoughts were familiar to me, old, many years old; but the utterance of them, in what spoken dialect to utter them! the _quarterly review_ was not an eligible vehicle, and yet the eligiblest; of whigs, abandoned to dilettantism and withered sceptical conventionality, there was no hope at all; the _london-and-westminster_ radicals, wedded to their benthamee formulas, and tremulous at their own shadows, expressly rejected my proposal many months ago: tories alone remained; tories i often think have more stuff in them, in spite of their blindness, than any other class we have;--walter scott's _sympathy_ with his fellow creatures, what is it compared with sydney smith's, with a poor law commissioner's! well: this thing would not prosper with me in scotland at all; nor here at all, where nevertheless i had to persist writing; writing and burning, and cursing my destiny, and then again writing. finally the thing came out, as an essay on _chartism;_ was shown to lockhart, according to agreement; was praised by him, but was also found unsuitable by him; suitable to _explode_ a whole fleet of quarterlies into sky-rockets in these times! and now fraser publishes it himself, with some additions, as a little volume; and it will go forth in a week or two on its own footing; and england will see what she has to say to it, whether something or nothing; and one man, as usual, is right glad that he has nothing more to do with it. this is the reason why i could not write. i mean to send you the proof-sheets of this thing, to do with as you see cause; there will be but some five or six, i think. it is probable my new england brothers may approve some portions of it; may be curious to see it reprinted; you ought to say yes or no in regard to that. i think i will send all the sheets together; or at farthest, at two times. fraser, when we returned hither, had already received his _miscellanies;_ had about despatched his five hundred _french revolutions,_ insured and so, forth, consigned, i suppose, to your protection and the proper booksellers; probably they have got over from new york into your neighborhood before now. much good may they do you! the _miscellanies,_ with their variegated binding, proved to be in perfect order; and are now all sold; with much regret from poor james that we had not a thousand more of them! this thousand he now sets about providing by his own industry, poor man; i am revising the american copy in these days; the printer is to proceed forthwith. i admire the good stearns wheeler as i proceed; i write to him my thanks by this post, and send him by kennet a copy of goethe's _meister,_ for symbol of acknowledgment. another copy goes off for you, to the care of little and company. fraser has got it out two weeks ago; a respectable enough book, now that the version is corrected somewhat. tell me whether you dislike it less; what you do think of it? by the by, have you not learned to read german now? i rather think you have. it is three months spent well, if ever months were, for a thinking englishman of this age.--i hope kennet will use more despatch than he sometimes does. thank heaven for these boston steamers they project! may the nereids and poseidon favor them! they will bring us a thousand miles nearer, at one step; by and by we shall be of one parish after all. during autumn i speculated often about a hegira into new england this very year: but alas! my horror of _lecturing_ continues great; and what else is there for me to do there? these several years i have had no wish so pressing as to hold my peace. i begin again to feel some use in articulate speech; perhaps i shall one day have something that i want to utter even in your side of the water. we shall see. patience, and shuffle the cards.--i saw no more of webster; did not even learn well where he was, till lately i noticed in the newspapers that he had gone home again. a certain mr. brown (i think) brought me a letter from you, not long since; i forwarded him to cambridge and scotland: a modest inoffensive man. he said he had never personally met with emerson. my wife recalled to him the story of the scotch traveler on the top of vesuvius: "never saw so beautiful a scene in the world!"--"nor i," replied a stranger standing there, "except once; on the top of dunmiot, in the ochil hills in scotland."--"good heavens! that is a part of my estate, and i was never there! i will go thither." yes, do!--we have seen no other transoceanic that i remember. we expect your _book_ soon! we know the subject of your winter lectures too; at least miss martineau thinks she does, and makes us think so. heaven speed the work! heaven send my good emerson a clear utterance, in all right ways, of the nobleness that dwells in him! he knows what silence means; let him know speech also, in its season the two are like canvas and pigment, like darkness and light-image painted thereon; the one is essential to the other, not possible without the other. poor miss martineau is in newcastle-on-tyne this winter; sick, painfully not dangerously; with a surgical brother-in-law. her meagre didacticalities afflict me no more; but also her blithe friendly presence cheers me no more. we wish she were back. this silence, i calculate, forced silence, will do her much good. if i were a legislator, i would order every man, once a week or so, to lock his lips together, and utter no vocable at all for four-and-twenty hours: it would do him an immense benefit, poor fellow. such racket, and cackle of mere hearsay and sincere-cant, grows at last entirely deafening, enough to drive one mad, --like the voice of mere infinite rookeries answering your voice! silence, silence! sterling sent you a letter from clifton, which i set under way here, having added the address. he is not well again, the good sterling; talks of madeira this season again: but i hope otherwise. you of course read his sublime "article"? i tell him it was--a thing untellable! mr. southey has fallen, it seems, into a mournful condition: oblivion, mute hebetation, loss of all faculty. he suffered greatly, nursing his former wife in her insanity, for years till her relief by death; suffered, worked, and made no moan; the brunt of the task over, he sank into collapse in the hands of a new wife he had just wedded. what a lot for him; for her especially! the most excitable but most methodic man i have ever seen. [greek] that is a word that awaits us all.--i have my brother here at present; though talking of lisbon with his buccleuchs. my wife seems better than of late winters. i actually had a horse, nay actually have it, though it has gone to the country till the mud abate again! it did me perceptible good; i mean to try it farther. i am no longer so desperately poor as i have been for twelve years back; sentence of starvation or beggary seems revoked at last, a blessedness really very considerable. thanks, thanks! we send a thousand regards to the two little ones, to the two mothers. _valete nostrum memores._ --t. carlyle xlviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 12 december, 1839 my dear friend,--not until the 29th of november did the five hundred copies of the _french revolution_ arrive in boston. fraser unhappily sent them to new york, whence they came not without long delays. they came in perfectly good order, not in the pretty red you told us of, but in a sober green;--not so handsome and salable a back, our booksellers said, as their own; but in every other respect a good book. the duties at the new york custom house on these and a quantity of other books sent by fraser amounted to $400.36, whereof, i understand, the _french revolution_ pays for its share $243. no bill has been brought us for freight, so we conclude that you have paid it. i confided the book very much to the conscience and discretion of little and brown, and after some ciphering they settle to sell it at $3.75 per copy, wherefrom you are to get the cost of the book, and (say) $1.10 per copy profit, and no more. the booksellers eat the rest. the book is rather too dear for our market of cheap manufactures, and therefore we are obliged to give the booksellers a good percentage to get it off at all: for we stand in daily danger of a cheap edition from some rival neighbor. i hope to give you good news of its sale soon, although i have been assured today that no book sells, the times are so bad. brown had disposed of fifty or sixty copies to the trade, and twelve at retail. he doubted not to sell them all in six months.... several persons have asked me to get some copies of the _german romance_ sent over here for sale. last week a gentleman desired me to say he wanted four copies, and today i have been charged to procure another. i think, if you will send me by little and brown, through longman, six copies, we can find an immediate market. it gives me great joy to write to my friend once more, slow as you may think me to use the privilege. for a good while i dared believe you were coming hither, and why should i write?--and now for weeks i have been absorbed in my foolish lectures, of which only two are yet delivered and ended. there should be eight more; subject, "the present age." out of these follies i remember you with glad heart. lately i had sterling's letter, which, since i have read his article on you, i am determined to answer speedily. i delighted in the spirit of that paper, loving you so well and accusing you so conscientiously. what does he at clifton? if you communicate with him, tell him i thank him for his letter, and hold him dear. i am very happy lately in adding one or two new friends to my little circle, and you may be sure every friend of mine is a friend of yours. so when you come here you shall not be lonely. a new person is always to me a great event, and will not let me sleep.--i believe i was not wise to volunteer myself to this fever fit of lecturing again. i ought to have written instead in silence and serenity. yet i work better under this base necessity, and then i have a certain delight (base also?) in speaking to a multitude. but my joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation for the mishaps of the adventure, and they for the most part come to me from this _publication_ of myself.--after ten or twelve weeks i think i shall address myself earnestly to writing, and give some form to my formless scripture. i beg you will write to me and tell me what you do, and give me good news of your wife and your brother. can they not see the necessity of your coming to look after your american interests? my wife and mother love both you and them. a young man of new york told me the other day he was about getting you an invitation from an association in that city to give them a course of lectures on such terms as would at least make you whole in the expenses of coming thither. we could easily do that in boston. --r.w. emerson what manner of person is heraud? do you read landor, or know him, o seeing man? farewell! xlix. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 6 january, 1840 my dear emerson,--it is you, i surely think, that are in my debt now;* nevertheless i must fling you another word: may it cross one from you coming hither--as near the _lizard point_ as it likes! --------* the preceding letter had not yet arrived. --------some four sheets making a pamphlet called _chartism_ addressed to you at concord are, i suppose, snorting along through the waters this morning, part of the cargo of the "british queen." at least i gave them to mr. brown (your unseen friend) about ten days ago, who promised to dispose of them; the "british queen," he said, was the earliest chance. the pamphlet itself (or rather booklet, for fraser has gilt it, &c., and asks five shillings for it as a book) is out since then; radicals and others yelping considerably in a discordant manner about it; i have nothing other to say to _you_ about it than what i said last time, that the sheets were _yours_ to do with as you saw good,--to burn if you reckoned that fittest. it is not entirely a political pamphlet; nay, there are one or two things in it which my american friends specially may like: but the interests discussed are altogether english, and cannot be considered as likely to concern new-englishmen very much. however, it will probably be itself in your hand before this sheet, and you will have determined what is fit. a copy of _wilhelm meister,_ two copies, one for stearns wheeler, are probably in some of the "line ships" at this time too: good voyage to them! the _french revolutions_ were all shipped, invoiced, &c.; they have, i will suppose, arrived safe, as we shall hear by and by. what freightages, landings, and embarkments! for only two days ago i sent you off, through kennet, another book: john sterling's _poems,_ which he has collected into a volume. poor john has overworked himself again, or the climate without fault on his side has proved too hard for him: he sails for madeira again next week! his doctors tell me there is no intrinsic danger; but they judge the measure safe as one of precaution. it is very mortifying he had nestled himself down at clifton, thinking he might now hope to continue there; and lo! he has to fly again.--did you get his letter? the address to him now will be, for three months to come, "_edward_ sterling, esq., south place, knightsbridge, london," his father's designation. farther i must not omit to say that richard monckton milnes purposes, through the strength of heaven, to _review_ you! in the next number of the _london and westminster,_ the courageous youth will do this feat, if they let him. nay, he has already done it, the paper being actually written he employed me last week in negotiating with the editors about it; and their answer was, "send us the paper, it promises very well." we shall see whether it comes out or not; keeping silence till then. milnes is a _tory_ member of parliament; think of that! for the rest, he describes his religion in these terms: "i profess to be a crypto-catholic." conceive the man! a most bland-smiling, semiquizzical, affectionate, high-bred, italianized little man, who has long olive-blond hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society! let us hear now what he will say, of the american _vates._* --------* the end of this letter has been cut off. --------l. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 17 january, 1840 dear emerson,--your letter of the 12th of december, greatly, to my satisfaction, has arrived; the struggling steamship, in spite of all hurricanes, has brought it safe across the waters to me. i find it good to write you a word in return straightway; though i think there are already two, or perhaps even three, messages of mine to you flying about unacknowledged somewhere under the moon; nay, the last of them perhaps may go by the same packet as this, --having been forwarded, as this will be, to _liverpool,_ after the "british queen" sailed from london. your account of the _french revolution_ packages, and prognosis of what little and brown will do with them, is altogether as it should be. i apprised fraser instantly of his invoiceless books, &c.; he answers, that order has been taken in that long since, "instructions" sent, and, i conclude, arrangements for _bills_ least of all forgotten. i mentioned what share of the duty was his; and that your men meant to draw on him for it. that is all right. as to the _french revolution,_ i agree with your booksellers altogether about it; the american edition actually pleases myself better for looking at; nor do i know that this new english one has much superiority for use: it is despicably printed, i fear, so far as false spellings and other slovenlinesses can go. fraser "finds the people like it"; _credat judaeus;_--as for me, i have told him i will _not print any more_ with that man, but with some other man. curious enough, the price little and brown have fixed upon was the price i remember guessing at beforehand, and the result they propose to realize for me corresponds closely with my prophecy too. thanks, a thousand thanks, for all the trouble you never grudge to take. we shall get ourselves handsomely out of this export and import speculation; and know, taught at a rather _cheap_ rate, not to embark in the like again. there went off a _wilhelm meister_ for you, and a letter to announce it, several weeks ago; that was message first. your traveling neighbor, brown, took charge of a pamphlet named _chartism,_ to be put into the "british queen's" letter-bag (where i hope, and doubt not, he did put it, though i have seen nothing of him since); that and a letter in reference to it was message second. thirdly, i sent off a volume of _poems_ by sterling, likewise announced in that letter. and now this that i actually write is the fourth (it turns out to be) and last of all the messages. let us take arithmetic along with us in all things.--of _chartism_ i have nothing farther to say, except that fraser is striking off another one thousand copies to be called second edition; and that the people accuse me, not of being an incendiary and speculative sansculotte threatening to become practical, but of being a tory,--thank heaven. the _miscellanies_ are at press; at _two_ presses; to be out, as hope asseverates, in march: five volumes, without _chartism;_ with hoffmann and tieck from german romance, stuck in somewhere as appendix; with some other trifles stuck in elsewhere, chiefly as appendix; and no essential change from the boston edition. fraser, "overwhelmed with business," does not yet send me his net result of those two hundred and fifty copies sold off some time ago; so soon as he does, you shall hear of it for your satisfaction.--as to _german romance,_ tell my friends that it has been out of print these ten years; procurable, of late not without difficulty, only in the old-bookshops. the comfort is that the best part of it stands in the new _wilhelm meister:_ fraser and i had some thought of adding tieck's and richter's parts, had they suited for a volume; the rest may without detriment to anybody perish. such press-correctings and arrangings waste my time here, not in the agreeablest way. i begin, though in as sulky a state of health as ever, to look again towards some new kind of work. i have often thought of cromwell and puritans; but do not see how the subject can be presented still alive. a subject dead is not worth presenting. meanwhile i read rubbish of books; eichhorn, grimm, &c.; very considerable rubbish; one grain in the cart load worth pocketing. it is pity i have no appetite for lecturing! many applications have been made to me here;--none more touching to me than one, the day before yesterday, by a fine, innocent-looking scotch lad, in the name of himself and certain other booksellers' shopmen eastward in the city! i cannot get them out of my head. poor fellows! they have nobody to say an honest word to them, in this articulate-speaking world, and they apply to _me._--for you, good friend, i account you luckier; i do verily: lecture there what innumerable things you have got to say on "the present age";--yet withal do not forget to _write_ either, for that is the lasting plan after all. i have a curious note, sent me for inspection the other day; it is addressed to a scotch mr. erskine (famed among the saints here) by a madame necker, madame de stael's kinswoman, to whom he, the said mr. erskine, had lent your first pamphlet at geneva. she regards you with a certain love, yet a _shuddering_ love. she says, "cela sent l'americain qui apres avoir abattu les forets a coup de hache, croit qu'on doit de meme conquerir le monde intellectuel"! what r.m. milnes will say of you we hope also to see.--i know both heraud and landor; but alas, what room is here! another sheet with less of "arithmetic" in it will soon be allowed me. adieu, dear friend. yours, ever and ever, t. carlyle li. emerson to carlyle* new york, 18 march, 1840 my dear friend,--i have just seen the steamer "british queen" enter the harbor from sea, and here lies the "great western," to sail tomorrow. i will not resist hints so broad upon my long procrastinations. you shall have at least a tardy acknowledgment that i received in january your letter of december, which i should have answered at once had it not found me absorbed in writing foolish lectures which were then in high tide. i had written you, a little earlier, tidings of the receipt of your _french revolution._ your letter was very welcome, as all your letters are. i have since seen tidings of the _essay on chartism_ in an english periodical, but have not yet got my proof-sheets. they are probably still rolling somewhere outside of this port, for all our packetships have had the longest passages: only one has come in for many a week. we will be as patient as we can. -------* this letter appeared in the _athenaeum,_ for july 22, 1882 -------i am here on a visit to my brother, who is a lawyer in this city, and lives at staten island, at a distance of half an hour's sail. the city has such immense natural advantages and such capabilities of boundless growth, and such varied and ever increasing accommodations and appliances for eye and ear, for memory and wit, for locomotion and lavation, and all manner of delectation, that i see that the poor fellows that live here do get some compensation for the sale of their souls. and how they multiply! they estimate the population today at 350,000, and forty years ago, it is said, there were but 20,000. but i always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. they are great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers, who have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other's secret and each to keep the other's madness in countenance. you can scarce drive any craft here that does not seem a subornation of the treason. i believe in the spade and an acre of good ground. whoso cuts a straight path to his own bread, by the help of god in the sun and rain and sprouting of the grain, seems to me an _universal_ workman. he solves the problem of life, not for one, but for all men of sound body. i wish i may one day send you word, or, better, show you the fact, that i live by my hands without loss of memory or of hope. and yet i am of such a puny constitution, as far as concerns bodily labor, that perhaps i never shall. we will see. did i tell you that we hope shortly to send you some american verses and prose of good intent? my vivacious friend margaret fuller is to edit a journal whose first number she promises for the 1st of july next, which i think will be written with a good will if written at all. i saw some poetical fragments which charmed me,--if only the writer consents to give them to the public. i believe i have yet little to tell you of myself. i ended in the middle of february my ten lectures on the present age. they are attended by four hundred and fifty to five hundred people, and the young people are so attentive; and out of the hall ask me so many questions, that i assume all the airs of age and sapience. i am very happy in the sympathy and society of from six to a dozen persons, who teach me to hope and expect everything from my countrymen. we shall have many richmonds in the field presently. i turn my face homeward to-morrow, and this summer i mean to resume my endeavor to make some presentable book of essays out of my mountain of manuscript, were it only for the sake of clearance. i left my wife, and boy, and girl,--the softest, gracefulest little maiden alive, creeping like a turtle with head erect all about the house,--well at home a week ago. the boy has two deep blue wells for eyes, into which i gladly peer when i am tired. ellen, they say, has no such depth of orb, but i believe i love her better than ever i did the boy. i brought my mother with me here to spend the summer with william emerson and his wife and ruddy boy of four years. all these persons love and honour you in proportion to their knowledge and years. my letter will find you, i suppose, meditating new lectures for your london disciples. may love and truth inspire them! i can see easily that my predictions are coming to pass, and that. having waited until your fame wag in the floodtide, we shall not now see you at all on western shores. our saintly dr. t---, i am told, had a letter within a year from lord byron's daughter, _informing_ the good man of the appearance of a certain wonderful genius in london named thomas carlyle, and all his astonishing workings on her own and her friends' brains, and him the very monster whom the doctor had been honoring with his best dread and consternation these five years. but do come in one of mr. cunard's ships as soon as the booksellers have made you rich. if they fail to do so, come and read lectures which the yankees will pay for. give my love and hope and perpetual remembrance to your wife, and my wife's also, who bears her in her kindest heart, and who resolves every now and then to write to her, that she may thank her for the beautiful guido. you told me to send you no more accounts. but i certainly shall, as our financial relations are grown more complex, and i wish at least to relieve myself of this unwonted burden of booksellers' accounts and long delays, by sharing them. i have had one of their estimates by me a year, waiting to send. farewell. --r.w.e. lii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 1 april, 1840 my dear emerson,--a letter has been due to you from me, if not by palpable law of reciprocity, yet by other law and right, for some week or two. i meant to write, so soon as fraser and i had got a settlement effected. the traveling sumner being about to return into your neighborhood, i gladly accept his offer to take a message to you. i wish i had anything beyond a dull letter to send! but unless, as my wife suggests, i go and get you a d'orsay _portrait_ of myself, i see not what there is! do you read german or not? i now and then fall in with a curious german volume, not perhaps so easily accessible in the western world. tell me. or do you ever mean to learn it? i decidedly wish you would.--as to the d'orsay portrait, it is a real curiosity: count d'orsay the emperor of european dandies portraying the prophet of spiritual sansculottism! he came rolling down hither one day, many months ago, in his sun-chariot, to the bedazzlement of all bystanders; found me in dusty gray-plaid dressing-gown, grim as the spirit of presbyterianism (my wife said), and contrived to get along well enough with me. i found him a man worth talking to, once and away; a man of decided natural gifts; every utterance of his containing in it a wild caricature _likeness_ of some object or other; a dashing man, who might, some twenty years sooner born, have become one of bonaparte's marshals, and _is,_ alas,--count d'orsay! the portrait he dashed off in some twenty minutes (i was dining there, to meet landor); we have not chanced to meet together since, and i refuse to undergo any more eight-o'clock dinners for such an object.--now if i do not send you the portrait, after all? fraser's account of the _miscellanies_ stood legibly extended over large spaces of paper, and was in several senses amazing to look upon. i trouble _you_ only with the result. two hundred and forty-eight copies (for there were some one or two "imperfect"): all these he had sold, at two guineas each; and sold swiftly, for i recollect in december, or perhaps november, he told me he was "holding back," not to run entirely out. well, of the l500 and odd so realized for these books, the portion that belonged to me was l239,--the l261 had been the expense of handing the ware to emerson over the counter, and drawing in the coin for it! "rules of the trade";--it is a trade, one would surmise, in which the devil has a large interest. however,--not to spend an instant polluting one's eyesight with that side of it,--let me feel joyfully, with thanks to heaven and america, that i do receive such a sum in the shape of wages, by decidedly the noblest method in which wages could come to a man. without friendship, without ralph waldo emerson, there had been no sixpence of that money here. thanks, and again thanks. this earth is not an unmingled ball of mud, after all. sunbeams visit it;--mud _and_ sunbeams are the stuff it has from of old consisted of.--i hasten away from the ledger, with the mere goodnews that james is altogether content with the "progress" of all these books, including even the well-abused _chartism_ book. we are just on the point of finishing our english reprint of the _miscellanies;_ of which i hope to send you a copy before long. and now why do not _you_ write to me? your lectures must be done long ago. or are you perhaps writing a book? i shall be right glad to hear of that; and withal to hear that you do not hurry yourself, but strive with deliberate energy to produce what in you is best. certainly, i think, a right book does lie in the man! it is to be remembered also always that the true value is determined by what we _do not_ write! there is nothing truer than that now all but forgotten truth; it is eternally true. he whom it concerns can consider it.--you have doubtless seen milnes's review of you. i know not that you will find it to strike direct upon the secret of _emerson,_ to hit the nail on the head, anywhere at all; i rather think not. but it is gently, not unlovingly done;--and lays the first plank of a kind of pulpit for you here and throughout all saxondom: a thing rather to be thankful for. it on the whole surpassed my expectations. milnes tells me he is sending you a copy and a note, by sumner. he is really a pretty little robin-redbreast of a man. you asked me about landor and heraud. before my paper entirely vanish, let me put down a word about them. heraud is a loquacious scribacious little man, of middle age, of parboiled greasy aspect, whom leigh hunt describes as "wavering in the most astonishing manner between being something and nothing." to me he is chiefly remarkable as being still--with his entirely enormous vanity and very small stock of faculty--out of bedlam. he picked up a notion or two from coleridge many years ago; and has ever since been rattling them in his head, like peas in an empty bladder, and calling on the world to "list the music of the spheres." he escapes _assassination,_ as i calculate, chiefly by being the cheerfulest best-natured little creature extant.--you cannot kill him he laughs so softly, even when he is like killing you. john mill said, "i forgive him freely for interpreting the universe, now when i find he cannot pronounce the _h's!_" really this is no caricature; you have not seen the match of heraud in your days. i mentioned to him once that novalis had said, "the highest problem of authorship is the writing of a bible."-"that is precisely what i am doing!" answered the aspiring, unaspirating.*--of landor i have not got much benefit either. we met first, some four years ago, on cheyne walk here: a tall, broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large, fierce-rolling eyes; of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by the most perfect breeding,--expressing itself in high-colored superlatives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a dry sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery; a wild man, whom no extent of culture had been able to tame! his intellectual faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or the other of the object; and _sides_ of an object are all that he sees. he is not an original man; in most cases one but sighs over the spectacle of common place torn to rags. i find him painful as a writer; like a soul ever promising to take wing into the aether, yet never doing it, ever splashing webfooted in the terrene mud, and only splashing the worse the more he strives! two new tragedies of his that i read lately are the fatalest stuff i have seen for long: not an ingot; ah no, a distracted coil of wire-drawings salable in no market. poor landor has left his wife (who is said to be a fool) in italy, with his children, who would not quit her; but it seems he has honestly surrendered all his money to her, except a bare annuity for furnished lodgings; and now lives at bath, a solitary sexagenarian, in that manner. he visits london in may; but says always it would kill him soon: alas, i can well believe that! they say he has a kind heart; nor does it seem unlikely: a perfectly honest heart, free and fearless, dwelling amid such hallucinations, excitations, tempestuous confusions, i can see he has. enough of him! me he likes well enough, more thanks to him; but two hours of such speech as his leave me giddy and undone. i have seen some other lions, and lion's-_providers;_ but consider them a worthless species.--when will you write, then? consider my frightful outlook with a course of lectures to give "on heroes and hero-worship,"--from odin to robert burns! my wife salutes you all. good be in the concord household! yours ever, t. carlyle -------* there is an account of heraud by an admirer in the _dial_ for october, 1842, p. 241. it contrasts curiously and instructively with carlyle's sketch. -------liii. emerson to carlyle concord, 21 april, 1840 my dear friend,--three weeks ago i received a letter from you following another in the week before, which i should have immediately acknowledged but that i was promised a private opportunity for the 25th of april, by which time i promised myself to send you sheets of accounts. i had also written you from new york about the middle of march. but now i suppose mr. grinnell--a hospitable, humane, modest gentleman in providence, r.i., a merchant, much beloved by all his townspeople, and, though no scholar, yet very fond of silently listening to such-is packing his trunk to go to england. he offered to carry any letters for me, and as at his house during my visit to providence i was eagerly catechised by all comers concerning thomas carlyle, i thought it behoved me to offer him for his brethren, sisters, and companions' sake, the joy of seeing the living face of that wonderful man. let him see thy face and pass on his way. i who cannot see it, nor hear the voice that comes forth of it, must even betake me to this paper to repay the best i can the love of the scottish man, and in the hope to deserve more. your letter announces _wilhelm meister,_ sterling's _poems,_ and _chartism._ i am very rich, or am to be. but kennet is no mercury. _wilhelm_ and _sterling_ have not yet made their appearance, though diligently inquired after by stearns wheeler and me. little and brown now correspond with longman, not with kennet. but they will come soon, perhaps are already arrived. _chartism_ arrived at concord by mail not until one of the last days of march, though dated by you, i think, the 21st of december. i returned home on the 3d of april, and found it waiting. all that is therein said is well and strongly said, and as the words are barbed and feathered the memory of men cannot choose but carry them whithersoever men go. and yet i thought the book itself instructed me to look for more. we seemed to have a right to an answer less concise to a question so grave and humane, and put with energy and eloquence. i mean that whatever probabilities or possibilities of solution occurred should have been opened to us in some detail. but now it stands as a preliminary word, and you will one day, when the fact itself is riper; write the second lesson; or those whom you have influenced will. i read the book twice hastily through, and sent it directly to press, fearing to be forestalled, for the london book was in boston already. little and brown are to print it. their estimate is:- printing page for page with copy ....... $63.35 paper .....................................44.00 binding .................................. 90.00 total .................................... $197.35 costing say twenty cents per copy for one thousand copies bound. the book to sell for fifty cents: the bookseller's commission twenty percent on the retail price. the author's profit fifteen cents per copy. they intend, if a cheap edition is published,-no unlikely event,--to stitch the book as pamphlet, and sell it at thirty-eight cents. i expect it from the press in a few days. i shall not on this sheet break into the other accounts, as i am expecting hourly from munroe's clerk an entire account of r.w.e. with t.c., of which i have furnished him with all the facts i had, and he is to write it out in the manner of his craft. i did not give it to him until i had made some unsuccessful experiments myself. i am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture that lie raveled around me in old snarls. we need to be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find what that is. but no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. i shall work with the more diligence on this book to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. i am like scholasticus of the greek primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better, certainly a bigger.--i am sad to hear that sterling sails again for his health. i am ungrateful not to have written to him, as his letter was very welcome to me. i will not promise again until i do it. i received a note last week forwarded by mr. hume from new york, and instantly replied to greet the good messenger to our babylonian city, and sent him letters to a few friends of mine there. but my brother writes me that he had left new york for washington when he went to seek him at his lodgings. i hope he will come northward presently, and let us see his face. _22 april._--last evening came true the promised account drawn up by munroe's clerk, chapman. i have studied it with more zeal than success. an account seems an ingenious way of burying facts: it asks wit equal to his who hid them to find them. i am far as yet from being master of this statement, yet, as i have promised it so long, i will send it now, and study a copy of it at my leisure. it is intended to begin where the last account i sent you, viz. of _french revolution,_ ended, with a balance of $9.53 in your favor.... i send you also a paper which munroe drew up a long time ago by way of satisfying me that, so far as the first and second volumes [of the _miscellanies_] were concerned, the result had accorded with the promise that you should have $1,000 profit from the edition. we prosper marvelously on paper, but the realized benefit loiters. will you now set some friend of yours in fraser's shop at work on this paper, and see if this statement is true and transparent. i trust the munroe firm,-chiefly nichols, the clerical partner,--and yet it is a duty to understand one's own affair. when i ask, at each six months' reckoning, why we should always be in debt to them, they still remind me of new and newer printing, and promise correspondent profits at last. by sending you this account i make it entirely an affair between you and them. you will have all the facts which any of us know. i am only concerned as having advanced the sums which are charged in the account for the payment of paper and printing, and which promise to liquidate themselves soon, for munroe declares he shall have $550 to pay me in a few days. for the benefit of all parties bid your clerk sift them. one word more and i have done with this matter, which shall not be weary if it comes to good,--the account of the london five hundred _french revolution_ is not yet six months old, and so does not come in. neither does that of the second edition of the first and second volumes of the _miscellanies,_ for the same reason. they will come in due time. i have very good hope that my friend margaret fuller's journal--after many false baptisms now saying it will be called _the dial,_ and which is to appear in july-will give you a better knowledge of our young people than any you have had. i will see that it goes to you when the sun first shines on its face. you asked me if i read german, and i forget if i have answered. i have contrived to read almost every volume of goethe, and i have fifty-five, but i have read nothing else: but i have not now looked even into goethe for a long time. there is no great need that i should discourse to you on books, least of all on _his_ books; but in a lecture on literature, in my course last winter, i blurted all my nonsense on that subject, and who knows but margaret fuller may be glad to print it and send it to you? i know not. a bronson alcott, who is a great man if he cannot write well, has come to concord with his wife and three children and taken a cottage and an acre of ground to get his living by the help of god and his own spade. i see that some of the education people in england have a school called "alcott house" after my friend. at home here he is despised and rejected of men as much as was ever pestalozzi. but the creature thinks and talks, and i am glad and proud of my neighbor. he is interested more than need is in the editor heraud. so do not fail to tell me of him. of landor i would gladly know your knowledge. and now i think i will release your eyes. yours always, r.w. emerson liv. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 june, 1840 my dear carlyle,--since i wrote a couple of letters to you,--i know not exactly when, but in near succession many weeks ago,-there has come to me _wilhelm meister_ in three volumes, goodly to see, good to read,--indeed quite irresistible;--for though i thought i knew it all, i began at the beginning and read to the end of the _apprenticeship,_ and no doubt shall despatch the _travels,_ on the earliest holiday. my conclusions and inferences therefrom i will spare you now, since i appended them to a piece i had been copying fairly for margaret fuller's _dial,_--"thoughts on modern literature," and which is the substance of a lecture in my last winter's course. but i learn that my paper is crowded out of the first number, and is not to appear until october. i will not reckon the accidents that threaten the ghost of an article through three months of preexistence! meantime, i rest your glad debtor for the good book. with it came sterling's _poems,_ which, in the interim, i have acknowledged in a letter to him. sumner has since brought me a gay letter from yourself, concerning, in part, landor and heraud; in which as i know justice is not done to the one i suppose it is not done to the other. but heraud i give up freely to your tender mercies: i have no wish to save him. landor can be shorn of all that is false and foolish, and yet leave a great deal for me to admire. many years ago i have read a hundred fine memorable things in the _imaginary conversations,_ though i know well the faults of that book, and the _pericles_ and _aspasia_ within two years has given me delight. i was introduced to the man landor when i was in florence, and he was very kind to me in answering a multitude of questions. his speech, i remember, was below his writing. i love the rich variety of his mind, his proud taste, his penetrating glances, and the poetic loftiness of his sentiment, which rises now and then to the meridian, though with the flight, i own, rather of a rocket than an orb, and terminated sometimes by a sudden tumble. i suspect you of very short and dashing reading in his books; and yet i should think you would like him,--both of you such glorious haters of cant. forgive me, i have put you two together twenty times in my thought as the only writers who have the old briskness and vivacity. but you must leave me to my bad taste and my perverse and whimsical combinations. i have written to mr. milnes who sent me by sumner a copy of his article with a note. i addressed my letter to him at "london,"-no more. will it ever reach him? i told him that if i should print more he would find me worse than ever with my rash, unwhipped generalization. for my journals, which i dot here at home day by day, are full of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, and all manner of rambling reveries, the poor drupes and berries i find in my basket after endless and aimless rambles in woods and pastures. i ask constantly of all men whether life may not be poetic as well as stupid? i shall try and persuade mr. calvert, who has sent to me for a letter to you, to find room in his trunk for a poor lithograph portrait of our concord "battle-field," so called, and village, that you may see the faint effigy of the fields and houses in which we walk and love you. the view includes my grandfather's house (under the trees near the monument), in which i lived for a time until i married and bought my present house, which is not in the scope of this drawing. i will roll up two of them, and, as sterling seems to be more nomadic than you, i beg you will send him also this particle of foreign parts. with this, or presently after it, i shall send a copy of the _dial._ it is not yet much; indeed, though no copy has come to me, i know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages; but it is better than anything we had; and i have some poetry communicated to me for the next number which i wish sterling and milnes to see. in this number what say you to the _elegy_ written by a youth who grew up in this town and lives near me,--henry thoreau? a criticism on persius is his also. from the papers of my brother charles, i gave them the fragments on homer, shakespeare, burke: and my brother edward wrote the little _farewell,_ when last he left his home. the address of the editors to the readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me i do not know. i am daily expecting an account for you from little and brown. they promised it at this time. it will speedily follow this sheet, if it do not accompany it. but i am determined, if i can, to send one letter which is not on business. send me some word of the lectures. i have yet seen only the initial notices. surely you will send me some time the d'orsay portrait. sumner thinks mrs. carlyle was very well when he saw her last, which makes me glad.--i wish you both to love me, as i am affectionately yours, --r.w. emerson lv. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 2 july, 1840 my dear emerson,--surely i am a sinful man to neglect so long making any acknowledgment of the benevolent and beneficent arithmetic you sent me! it is many weeks, perhaps it is months, since the worthy citizen--your host as i understood you in some of your northern states--stept in here, one mild evening, with his mild honest face and manners; presented me your bookseller accounts; talked for half an hour, and then went his way into france. much has come and gone since then; letters of yours, beautiful disciples of yours:--i pray you forgive me! i have been lecturing; i have been sick; i have been beaten about in all ways. nay, at bottom, it was only three days ago that i got the _bibliopoliana_ back from fraser; to whom, as you recommended, i, totally inadequate like yourself to understand such things, had straightway handed them for examination. i always put off writing till fraser should have spoken. i did not urge him, or he would have spoken any day: there is my sin. fraser declares the accounts to be made out in the most beautiful manner; intelligible to any human capacity; correct so far as he sees, and promising to yield by and by a beautiful return of money. a precious crop, which we must not cut in the blade; mere time will ripen it into yellow nutritive ears yet. so he thinks. the only point on which i heard him make any criticism was on what he called, if i remember, "the number of copies _delivered,_"--that is to say, delivered by the printer and binder as actually available for sale. the edition being of a thousand, there have only 984 come bodily forth; 16 are "waste." our printers, it appears, are in the habit of _adding_ one for every fifty beforehand, whereby the _waste_ is usually made good, and more; so that in one thousand there will usually be some dozen called "author's copies" over and above. fraser supposes your printers have a different custom. that is all. the rest is apparently every-way _right;_ is to be received with faith; with faith, charity, and even hope,--and packed into the bottom of one's drawer, never to be looked at more except on the outside, as a memorial of one of the best and helpfulest of men! in that capacity it shall lie there. my lectures were in may, about _great men._ the misery of it was hardly equal to that of former years, yet still was very hateful. i had got to a certain feeling of superiority over my audience; as if i had something to tell them, and would tell it them. at times i felt as if i could, in the end, learn to speak. the beautiful people listened with boundless tolerance, eager attention. i meant to tell them, among other things, that man was still alive, nature not dead or like to die; that all true men continued true to this hour,--odin himself true, and the grand lama of thibet himself not wholly a lie. the lecture on mahomet ("the hero as prophet") astonished my worthy friends beyond measure. it seems then this mahomet was not a quack? not a bit of him! that he is a better christian, with his "bastard christianity," than the most of us shovel-hatted? i guess than almost any of you!--not so much as oliver cromwell ("the hero as king") would i allow to have been a quack. all quacks i asserted to be and to have been nothing, _chaff_ that would not grow: my poor mahomet "was _wheat_ with barn sweepings"; nature had tolerantly hidden the barn sweepings; and as to the _wheat,_ behold she had said yes to it, and it was growing!--on the whole, i fear i did little but confuse my esteemed audience: i was amazed, after all their reading of me, to be understood so ill;-gratified nevertheless to see how the rudest _speech_ of a man's heart goes into men's hearts, and is the welcomest thing there. withal i regretted that i had not six months of preaching, whereby to learn to preach, and explain things fully! in the fire of the moment i had all but decided on setting out for america this autumn, and preaching far and wide like a very lion there. quit your paper formulas, my brethren,--equivalent to old wooden idols, _un_divine as they: in the name of god, understand that you are alive, and that god is alive! did the upholsterer make this universe? were you created by the tailor? i tell you, and conjure you to believe me literally, no, a thousand times no! thus did i mean to preach, on "heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic"; in america too. alas! the fire of determination died away again: all that i did resolve upon was to write these lectures down, and in some way promulgate them farther. two of them accordingly are actually written; the third to be begun on monday: it is my chief work here, ever since the end of may. whether i go to preach them a second time extempore in america rests once more with the destinies. it is a shame to talk so much about a thing, and have it still hang _in nubibus:_ but i was, and perhaps am, really nearer doing it than i had ever before been. a month or two now, i suppose, will bring us back to the old nonentity again. is there, at bottom, in the world or out of it, anything one would like so well, with one's whole heart _well,_ as peace? is lecturing and noise the way to get at that? popular lecturer! popular writer! if they would undertake in chancery, or heaven's chancery, to make a wise man mahomet second and greater, "mahomet of saxondom," not reviewed only, but worshiped for twelve centuries by all bulldom, yankeedoodle-doodom, felondom new zealand, under the tropics and in part of flanders,--would he not rather answer: thank you; but in a few years i shall be dead, twelve centuries will have become eternity; part of flanders immensity: we will sit still here if you please, and consider what quieter thing we can do! enough of this. richard milnes had a letter from you, one morning lately, when i met him at old rogers's. he is brisk as ever; his kindly _dilettantism_ looking sometimes as if it would grow a sort of earnest by and by. he has a new volume of poems out: i advised him to try prose; he admitted that poetry would not be generally read again in these ages,--but pleaded, "it was so convenient for veiling commonplace!" the honest little heart!--we did not know what to make of the bright miss --here; she fell in love with my wife;--the _contrary,_ i doubt, with me: my hard realism jarred upon her beautiful rose-pink dreams. is not all that very morbid,--unworthy the children of odin, not to speak of luther, knox, and the other brave? i can do nothing with vapors, but wish them _condensed._ kennet had a copy of the english _miscellanies_ for you a good many weeks ago: indeed, it was just a day or two _before_ your advice to try green henceforth. has the _meister_ ever arrived? i received a controversial volume from mr. ripley: pray thank him very kindly. somebody borrowed the book from me; i have not yet read it. i did read a pamphlet which seems now to have been made part of it. norton* surely is a chimera; but what has the whole business they are jarring about become? as healthy _worshiping_ paganism is to seneca and company, so is healthy worshiping christianity to--i had rather not work the sum!--send me some swift news of yourself, dear emerson. we salute you and yours, in all heartiness of brotherhood. yours ever and always- t. carlyle --------* professor andrews norton. the controversy was that occasioned by professor norton's discourse on "the latest form of infidelity." --------lvi. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 august, 1840 my dear carlyle,--i fear, nay i know, that when i wrote last to you, about the 1st of july, i promised to follow my sheet immediately with a bookseller's account. the bookseller did presently after render his account, but on its face appeared the fact--which with many and by me unanswerable reasons they supported--that the balance thereon credited to you was not payable until the 1st of october. the account is footed "net sales of _french revolution_ to 1 july, 1840, due october 1, $249.77." let us hope then that we shall get, not only a new page of statement, but also some small payment in money a month hence. having no better story to tell, i told nothing. but i will not let the second of the cunard boats leave boston without a word to you. since i wrote by calvert came your letter describing your lectures and their success: very welcome news, for a good london newspaper, which i consulted, promised reports, but gave none. i have heard so oft of your projected trip to america, that my ear would now be dull, and my faith cold, but that i wish it so much. my friend, your audience still waits for you here willing and eager, and greatly larger no doubt than it would have been when the matter was first debated. our community begin to stand in some terror of transcendentalism, and the _dial,_ poor little thing, whose first number contains scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public. but they would hardly be able to fasten on so huge a man as you are any party badge. we must all hear you for ourselves. but beside my own hunger to see and know you, and to hear you speak at ease and at large under my own roof, i have a growing desire to present you to three or four friends, and them to you. almost all my life has been passed alone. within three or four years i have been drawing nearer to a few men and women whose love gives me in these days more happiness than i can write of. how gladly i would bring your jovial light upon this friendly constellation, and make you too know my distant riches! we have our own problems to solve also, and a good deal of movement and tendency emerging into sight every day in church and state, in social modes and in letters. i sometimes fancy our cipher is larger and easier to read than that of your english society. you will naturally ask me if i try my hand at the history of all this,--i who have leisure, and write. no, not in the near and practical way in which they seem to invite. i incline to write philosophy, poetry, possibility,--anything but history. and yet this phantom of the next age limns himself sometimes so large and plain that every feature is apprehensible, and challenges a painter. i can brag little of my diligence or achievement this summer. i dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and i get a brick kiln instead of a house.--consider, however, that all summer i see a good deal of company,--so near as my fields are to the city. but next winter i think to omit lectures, and write more faithfully. hope for me that i shall get a book ready to send you by new-year's-day. sumner came to see me the other day. i was glad to learn all the little that he knew of you and yours. i do not wonder you set so lightly by my talkative countryman. he has brought nothing home but names, dates, and prefaces. at cambridge last week i saw brown for the first time. i had little opportunity to learn what he knew. mr. hume has never yet shown his face here. he sent me his poems from new york, and then went south, and i know no more of him. my mother and wife send you kind regards and best wishes,--to you and all your house. tell your wife that i hate to hear that she cannot sail the seas. perhaps now she is stronger she will be a better sailor. for the sake of america will she not try the trip to leith again? it is only twelve days from liverpool to boston. love, truth, and power abide with you always! --r.w.e. lvii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 26 september, 1840 my dear emerson,--two letters of yours are here, the latest of them for above a week: i am a great sinner not to have answered sooner. my way of life has been a thing of petty confusions, uncertainties; i did not till a short while ago see any definite highway, through the multitude of byelanes that opened out on me, even for the next few months. partly i was busy; partly too, as my wont is, i was half asleep:--perhaps you do not know the _combination_ of these two predicables in one and the same unfortunate human subject! seeing my course now for a little, i must speak. according to your prognosis, it becomes at length manifest that i do _not_ go to america for the present. alas, no! it was but a dream of the fancy; projected, like the french shoemaker's fairy shoes, "in a moment of enthusiasm." the nervous flutter of may lecturing has subsided into stagnancy; into the feeling that, of all things in the world, public speaking is the hatefulest for me; that i ought devoutly to thank heaven there is no absolute compulsion laid on me at present to speak! my notion in general was but an absurd one: i fancied i might go across the sea, open my lips wide; go raging and lecturing over the union like a very lion (too like a frothy mountebank) for several months;--till i had gained, say a thousand pounds; therewith to retire to some small, quiet cottage by the shore of the sea, at least three hundred miles from this, and sit silent there for ten years to come, or forever and a day perhaps! that was my poor little day dream;--incapable of being realized. it appears, i have to stay here, in this brick babylon; tugging at my chains, which will not break for me: the less i tug, the better. ah me! on the whole, i have written down my last course of lectures, and shall probably print them; and you, with the aid of proof-sheets, may again print them; that will be the easiest way of lecturing to america! it is truly very weak to speak about that matter so often and long, that matter of coming to you; and never to come. _frey ist das herz,_ as goethe says, _doch ist der fuss gebunden._ after innumerable projects, and invitations towards all the four winds, for this summer, i have ended about a week ago by--simply going nowhither, not even to see my dear aged mother, but sitting still here under the autumn sky such as i have it; in these vacant streets i am lonelier than elsewhere, have more chance for composure than elsewhere! with sterne's starling i repeat to myself, "i can't get out."--well, hang it, stay in then; and let people alone of it! i have parted with my horse; after an experiment of seven or eight months, most assiduously prosecuted, i came to the conclusion that, though it did me some good, there was not _enough_ of good to warrant such equestrianism: so i plunged out, into green england, in the end of july, for a whole week of riding, an _explosion_ of riding, therewith to end the business, and send off my poor quadruped for sale. i rode over surrey,-with a leather valise behind me and a mackintosh before; very singular to see: over sussex, down to pevensey where the norman bastard landed; i saw julius hare (whose _guesses at truth_ you perhaps know), saw saint dunstan's stithy and hammer, at mayfield, and the very tongs with which he took the devil by the nose;--finally i got home again, a right wearied man; sent my horse off to be sold, as i say; and finished the writing of my lectures on heroes. this is all the rustication i have had, or am like to have. i am now over head and ears in _cromwellian_ books; studying, for perhaps the fourth time in my life, to see if it be possible to get any credible face-to-face acquaintance with our english puritan period; or whether it must be left forever a mere hearsay and echo to one. books equal in dulness were at no epoch of the world penned by unassisted man. nevertheless, courage! i have got, within the last twelve months, actually, as it were, to _see_ that this cromwell was one of the greatest souls ever born of the english kin; a great amorphous semi-articulate _baresark;_ very interesting to me. i grope in the dark vacuity of baxters, neales; thankful for here a glimpse and there a glimpse. this is to be my reading for some time. the _dial_ no. 1 came duly: of course i read it with interest; it is an utterance of what is purest, youngest in your land; pure, ethereal, as the voices of the morning! and yet--you know me--for me it is _too_ ethereal, speculative, theoretic: all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me! i will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy. i have a _body_ myself; in the brown leaf, sport of the autumn winds, i find what mocks all prophesyings, even hebrew ones,--royal societies, and scientific associations eating venison at glasgow, not once reckoned in! nevertheless go on with this, my brothers. the world has many most strange utterances of a prophetic nature in it at the present time; and this surely is worth listening to among the rest. do you know english puseyism? good heavens! in the whole circle of history is there the parallel of that,--a true worship rising at this hour of the day for bands and the shovel-hat? distraction surely, incipience of the "final deliration" enters upon the poor old english formulism that has called itself for some two centuries a church. no likelier symptom of its being soon about to leave the world has come to light in my time. as if king macready should quit covent-garden, go down to st. stephen's, and insist on saying, _le roi le veut!_--i read last night the wonderfulest article to that effect, in the shape of a criticism on myself, in the _quarterly review._ it seems to be by one sewell, an oxford doctor of note, one of the chief men among the pusey-and-newman corporation. a good man, and with good notions, whom i have noted for some years back. he finds me a very worthy fellow; "true, most true,"--except where i part from puseyism, and reckon the shovel-hat to be an old bit of felt; then i am false, most false. as the turks say, _allah akbar!_ i forget altogether what i said of landor; but i hope i did not put him in the heraud category: a cockney windbag is one thing; a scholar and bred man, though incontinent, explosive, half-true, is another. he has not been in town, this year; milnes describes him as _eating_ greatly at bath, and perhaps even cooking! milnes did get your letter: i told you? sterling has the concord landscape; mine is to go upon the wall here, and remind me of many things. sterling is busy writing; he is to make falmouth do, this winter, and try to dispense with italy. he cannot away with my doctrine of _silence;_ the good john. my wife has been better than usual all summer; she begins to shiver again as winter draws nigh. adieu, dear emerson. good be with you and yours. i must be far gone when i cease to love you. "the stars are above us, the graves are under us." adieu. --t. carlyle lviii. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 october, 1840 my dear friend,--my hope is that you may live until this creeping bookseller's balance shall incline at last to your side. my rude ciphering, based on the last account of this kind which i sent you in april from j. munroe & co., had convinced me that i was to be in debt to you at this time l40 or more; so that i actually bought l40 the day before the "caledonia" sailed to send you; but on giving my new accounts to j.m. & co., to bring the statement up to this time, they astonished me with the above written result. i professed absolute incredulity, but nichols* labored to show me the rise and progress of all my blunders. please to send the account with the last to your fraser, and have it sifted. that i paid, a few weeks since, $481.34, and again, $28.12, for printing and paper respectively, is true.--c.c. little & co. acknowledge the sale of 82 more copies of the london edition _french revolution_ since the 187 copies of july 1; but these they do not get paid for until january 1, and we it seems must wait as long. we will see if the new-year's-day will bring us more pence. --------* partner in the firm of j. munroe & co. --------i received by the "acadia" a letter from you, which i acknowledge now, lest i should not answer it more at large on another sheet, which i think to do. if you do not despair of american booksellers send the new proofs of the lectures when they are in type to me by john green, 121 newgate street (i believe), to the care of j. munroe & co. he sends a box to munroe by every steamer. i sent a _dial,_ no. 2, for you, to green. kennet, i hear, has failed. i hope he did not give his creditors my _miscellanies,_ which you told me were there. i shall be glad if you will draw cromwell, though if i should choose it would be carlyle. you will not feel that you have done your work until those devouring eyes and that portraying hand have achieved england in the nineteenth century. perhaps you cannot do it until you have made your american visit. i assure you the view of britain is excellent from new england. we are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket. i am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. george ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.* one man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope. ----------* preliminary to the experiment of brook farm, in 1841. ----------i am ashamed to tell you, though it seems most due, anything of my own studies, they seem so desultory, idle, and unproductive. i still hope to print a book of essays this winter, but it cannot be very large. i write myself into letters, the last few months, to three or four dear and beautiful persons, my country-men and women here. i lit my candle at both ends, but will now be colder and scholastic. i mean to write no lectures this winter. i hear gladly of your wife's better health; and a letter of jane tuckerman's, which i saw, gave the happiest tidings of her. we do not despair of seeing her yet in concord, since it is now but twelve and a half days to you. i had a letter from sterling, which i will answer. in all love and good hope for you and yours, your affectionate --r.w. emerson lix. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 9 december, 1840 dear emerson,--my answer on this occasion has been delayed above two weeks by a rigorous, searching investigation into the procedure of the hapless book-conveyer, kennet, in reference to that copy of the _miscellanies._ i was deceived by hopes of a conclusive response from day to day; not till yesterday did any come. my first step, taken long ago, was to address a new copy of the book, not to you, luckless man, but to _lydia_ emerson, the fortunate wife; this copy green now has lying by him, waiting for the january steamer (we sail only once a month in this season); before the new year has got out of infancy the lady will be graciously pleased to make a few inches of room on her bookshelves for this celebrated performance. and now as to kennet, take the brief outcome of some dozen visitations, judicial interrogatories, searches of documents, and other piercing work on the part of methodic fraser, attended with demurrers, pleadings, false denials, false affirmings, on the part of innocent chaotic kennet: namely, that the said kennet, so urged, did in the end of the last week, fish up from his repositories your very identical book directed to munroe's care, duly booked and engaged for, in may last, but left to repose itself in the covent-garden crypts ever since without disturbance from gods or men! fraser has brought back the book, and you have lost it;--and the library of my native village in scotland is to get it; and not kennet any more in this world, but green ever henceforth is to be our book carrier. there is a history. green, it seems, addresses also to munroe; but the thing, i suppose, will now shift for itself without watching. as to the bibliopolic accounts, my friend! we will trust them, with a faith known only in the purer ages of roman catholicism,-when papacy had indeed become a dubiety, but was not yet a quackery and falsehood, was a thing _as_ true as it could manage to be! that really may be the fact of this too. in any case what signifies it much? money were still useful; but it is not now so indispensable. booksellers by their knavery or their fidelity cannot kill us or cure us. of the truth of waldo emerson's heart to me, there is, god be thanked for it, no doubt at all. my hero-lectures lie still in manuscript. fraser offers no amount of cash adequate to be an outward motive; and inwardly there is as yet none altogether clear, though i rather feel of late as if it were clearing. to fly in the teeth of english puseyism, and risk such shrill welcome as i am pretty sure of, is questionable: yet at bottom why not? dost thou not as entirely reject this new distraction of a puseyism as man can reject a thing,--and couldst utterly abjure it, and even abhor it,--were the shadow of a cobweb ever likely to become momentous, the cobweb itself being _beheaded,_ with axe and block on tower hill, two centuries ago? i think it were as well to _tell_ puseyism that it has something of good, but also much of bad and even worst. we shall see. if i print the thing, we shall surely take in america again; either by stereotype or in some other way. fear not that!--do you attend at all to this new _laudism_ of ours? it spreads far and wide among our clergy in these days; a most notable symptom, very cheering to me many ways; whether or not one of the fatalest our poor church of england has ever exhibited, and betokening swifter ruin to it than any other, i do not inquire. thank god, men do discover at last that there is still a god present in their affairs, and must be, or their affairs are of the devil, naught, and worthy of being sent to the devil! this once given, i find that all is given; daily history, in kingdom and in parish, is an _experimentum crucis_ to show what is the devil's and what not. but on the whole are we not the _formalest_ people ever created under this sun? cased and overgrown with formulas, like very lobsters with their shells, from birth upwards; so that in the man we see only his breeches, and believe and swear that wherever a pair of old breeches are there is a man! i declare i could both laugh and cry. these poor good men, merciful, zealous, with many sympathies and thoughts, there do they vehemently appeal to me, _et tu, brute?_ brother, wilt thou too insist on the breeches being old,--not ply a needle among us here?--to the naked caliban, gigantic, for whom such breeches would not be a glove, who is stalking and groping there in search of new breeches and accoutrements, sure to get them, and to tread into nonentity whoever hinders him in the search,--they are blind as if they had no eyes. sartorial men; ninth-parts of a man:--enough of them. the second number of the _dial_ has also arrived some days ago. i like it decidedly better than the first; in fact, it is right well worth being put on paper, and sent circulating;--i find only, as before that it is still too much of a soul for circulating as it should. i wish you could in future contrive to mark at the end of each article who writes it, or give me some general key for knowing. i recognize emerson readily; the rest are of [greek] for most part. but it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only a body, which want means a great deal! your paper on literature is incomparably the worthiest thing hitherto; a thing i read with delight. speak out, my brave emerson; there are many good men that listen! even what you say of goethe gratifies me; it is one of the few things yet spoken of him from personal insight, the sole kind of things that should be spoken! you call him _actual,_ not _ideal;_ there is truth in that too; and yet at bottom is not the whole truth rather this: the actual well-seen _is_ the ideal? the _actual,_ what really is and exists: the past, the present, the future no less, do all lie there! ah yes! one day you will find that this sunny-looking, courtly goethe held veiled in him a prophetic sorrow deep as dante's,--all the nobler to me and to you, that he _could_ so hold it. i believe this; no man can _see_ as he sees, that has not suffered and striven as man seldom did.-apropos of _this,_ have you got miss martineau's _hour and man?_ how curious it were to have the real history of the negro toussaint, and his _black_ sansculottism in saint domingo,--the most atrocious form sansculottism could or can assume! this of a "black wilberforce-washington," as sterling calls it, is decidedly something. adieu, dear emerson: time presses, paper is done. commend me to your good wife, your good mother, and love me as well as you can. peace and health under clear winter skies be with you all. --t. carlyle my wife rebukes me sharply that i have "forgot her love." she is much better this winter than of old. having mentioned sterling i should say that he is at torquay (devonshire) for the winter, meditating new publication of poems. i work still in cromwellism; all but desperate of any feasible issue worth naming. i "enjoy bad health" too, considerably! lx. carlyle to mrs. emerson chelsea, london, 21 february, 1841 dear mrs. emerson,--your husband's letter shall have answer when some moment of leisure is granted me; he will wait till then, and must. but the beautiful utterance which you send over to me; melodious as the voice of flutes, of aeolian harps borne on the rude winds so _far,_--this must have answer, some word or growl of answer, be there leisure or none! the "acadia," it seems, is to return from liverpool the day after tomorrow. i shove my paper-whirlpools aside for a little, and grumble in pleased response. you are an enthusiast; make arabian nights out of dull foggy london days; with your beautiful female imagination, shape burnished copper castles out of london fog! it is very beautiful of you;--nay, it is not foolish either, it is wise. i have a guess what of truth there may be in that; and you the fair alchemist, are you not all the richer and better that you know the _essential_ gold, and will not have it called pewter or spelter, though in the shops it is only such? i honor such alchemy, and love it; and have myself done something in that kind. long may the talent abide with you; long may i abide to have it exercised on me! except the annandale farm where my good mother still lives, there is no house in all this world which i should be gladder to see than the one at concord. it seems to stand as only over the hill, in the next parish to me, familiar from boyhood. alas! and wide-waste atlantics roll between; and i cannot walk over of an evening!--i never give up the hope of getting thither some time. were i a little richer, were i a little healthier; were i this and that--!--one has no fortunatus' "time-annihilating" or even "space-annihilating hat": it were a thing worth having in this world. my wife unites with me in all kindest acknowledgments: she is getting stronger these last two years; but is still such a _sailor_ as the island hardly parallels: had she the _spaceannihilating hat,_ she too were soon with you. your message shall reach miss martineau; my dame will send it in her first letter. the good harriet is not well; but keeps a very courageous heart. she lives by the shore of the beautiful blue northumbrian sea; a "many-sounding" solitude which i often envy her. she writes unweariedly, has many friends visiting her. you saw her _toussaint l'ouverture:_ how she has made such a beautiful "black washington," or "washington-christ-macready," as i have heard some call it, of a rough-handed, hard-headed, semiarticulate gabbling negro; and of the horriblest phasis that "sansculottism" _can_ exhibit, of a black sansculottism, a musical opera or oratorio in pink stockings! it is very beautiful. beautiful as a child's heart,--and in so shrewd a head as that. she is now writing express children's-tales, which i calculate i shall find more perfect. some ten days ago there went from me to liverpool, perhaps there will arrive at concord by this very "acadia," a bundle of printed sheets directed to your husband: pray apprise the man of that. they are sheets of a volume called _lectures on heroes;_ the concord hero gets them without direction or advice of any kind. i have got some four sheets more ready for him here; shall perhaps send them too, along with this. some four again more will complete the thing. i know not what he will make of it;-perhaps wry faces at it? adieu, dear mrs. emerson. we salute you from this house. may all good which the heavens grant to a kind heart, and the good which they never _refuse_ to one such, abide with you always. i commend myself to your and emerson's good mother, to the mischievous boys and--all the household. peace and fair springweather be there! yours with great regard, t. carlyle lxi. emerson to carlyle concord, 28 february, 1841 my dear carlyle,--behold mr. george nichols's new digest and exegesis of his october accounts. the letter seems to me the most intelligible of the two papers, but i have long been that man's victim, semi-annually, and never dare to make head against his figures. you are a brave man, and out of the ring of his enchantments, and withal have magicians of your own who can give spell for spell, and read his incantations backward. i entreat you to set them on the work, and convict his figures if you can. he has really taken pains, and is quite proud of his establishment of his accounts. in a month it will be april, and be will have a new one to fender. little and brown also in april promise a payment on _french revolution,_--and i suppose something is due from _chartism._ we will hope that a bill of exchange will yet cross from us to you, before our booksellers fail. i hoped before this to have reached my last proofsheet, but shall have two or three more yet. in a fortnight or three weeks my little raft will be afloat.* expect nothing more of my powers of construction,--no shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together. i read to some mechanics' apprentices a long lecture on reform, one evening, a little while ago. they asked me to print it, but margaret fuller asked it also, and i preferred the _dial,_ which shall have the dubious sermon, and i will send it to you in that.--you see the bookseller reverendizes me notwithstanding your laudable perseverance to adorn me with profane titles, on the one hand, and the growing habit of the majority of my correspondents to clip my name of all titles on the other. i desire that you and your wife will keep your kindness for --r. w. emerson ---------* the first series of _essays._ ---------lxii. emerson to carlyle boston, 30 april, 1841 my dear carlyle,--above you have a bill of exchange for one hundred pounds sterling drawn by t.w. ward & co. on the messrs. barings, payable at sight. let us hope it is but the first of a long series. i have vainly endeavored to get your account to be rendered by munroe & co. to the date of the 1st of april. it was conditionally promised for the day of the last steamer (15 april). it is not ready for that which sails tomorrow and carries this. little & co. acknowledge a debt of $607.90 due to you 1st of april, and just now paid me; and regret that their sales have been so slow, which they attribute to the dulness of all trade among us for the last two years. you shall have the particulars of their account from munroe's statement of the account between you and me. munroe & co. have a long apology for not rendering their own account; their book keeper left them at a critical moment, they were without one six weeks, &c.;--but they add, if we could give you it, to what use, since we should be utterly unable to make you any payment at this time? to what use, surely? i am too much used to similar statements from our booksellers and others in the last few years to be much surprised; nor do i doubt their readiness or their power to pay all their debts at last; but a great deal of mutual concession and accommodation has been the familiar resort of our tradesmen now for a good while, a vice which they are all fain to lay at the doors of the government, whilst it belongs in the first instance, no doubt, to the rashness of the individual traders. these men i believe to be prudent, honest, and solvent, and that we shall get all our debt from them at last. they are not reckoned as rich as little and brown. by the next steamer they think they can promise to have their account ready. i am sorry to find that we have been driven from the market by the new york pirates in the affair of the six lectures.* the book was received from london and for sale in new york and boston before my last sheets arrived by the "columbia." appleton in new york braved us and printed it, and furthermore told us that he intends to print in future everything of yours that shall be printed in london,--complaining in rude terms of the monopoly your publishers here exercise, and the small commissions they allow to the trade, &c., &c. munroe showed me the letter, which certainly was not an amiable one. in this distress, then, i beg you, when you have more histories and lectures to print, to have the manuscript copied by a scrivener before you print at home, and send it out to me, and i will keep all appletons and corsairs whatsoever out of the lists. not only these men made a book (of which, by the by, munroe sends you by this steamer a copy, which you will find at john green's, newgate street), but the new york newspapers print the book in chapters, and you circulate for six cents per newspaper at the corners of all streets in new york and boston; gaining in fame what you lose in coin.--the book is a good book, and goes to make men brave and happy. i bear glad witness to its cheering and arming quality. --------* "heroes and hero-worship." --------i have put into munroe's box which goes to green a _dial_ no. 4 also, which i could heartily wish were a better book. but margaret fuller, who is a noble woman, is not in sufficiently vigorous health to do this editing work as she would and should, and there is no other who can and will. yours affectionately, r.w. emerson lxiii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 8 may, 1841 my dear emerson,--your last letter found me on the southern border of yorkshire, whither richard milnes had persuaded me with him, for the time they call "easter holidays" here. i was to shake off the remnants of an ugly _influenza_ which still hung about me; my little portmanteau, unexpectedly driven in again by perverse accidents, had stood packed, its cowardly owner, the worst of all travelers, standing dubious the while, for two weeks or more; milnes offering to take me as under his cloak, i went with milnes. the mild, cordial, though something dilettante nature of the man distinguishes him for me among men, as men go. for ten days i rode or sauntered among yorkshire fields and knolls; the sight of the young spring, new to me these seven years, was beautiful, or better than beauty. solitude itself, the great silence of the earth, was as balm to this weary, sick heart of mine; not dragons of wantley (so they call lord wharncliffe, the wooden tory man), not babbling itinerant barrister people, fox-hunting aristocracy, nor yeomanry captains cultivating milk-white mustachios, nor the perpetual racket, and "dinner at eight o'clock," could altogether countervail the fact that green earth was around one and unadulterated sky overhead, and the voice of waters and birds,--not the foolish speech of cockneys at _all_ times!--on the last morning, as richard and i drove off towards the railway, your letter came in, just in time; and richard, who loves you well, hearing from whom it was, asked with such an air to see it that i could not refuse him. we parted at the "station," flying each his several way on the wings of steam; and have not yet met again. i went over to leeds, staid two days with its steeple-chimneys and smoke-volcano still in view; then hurried over to native annandale, to see my aged excellent mother yet again in this world while she is spared to me. my birth-land is always as the cave of trophonius to me; i return from it with a haste to which the speed of steam is slow, --with no smile on my face; avoiding all speech with men! it is not yet eight-and-forty hours since i got back; your letter is among the first i answer, even with a line; your new book--but we will not yet speak of that.... my friend, i _thank_ you for this volume of yours; not for the copy alone which you send to me, but for writing and printing such a book. _euge!_ say i, from afar. the voice of one crying in the desert;--it is once more the voice of a _man._ ah me! i feel as if in the wide world there were still but this one voice that responded intelligently to my own; as if the rest were all hearsays, melodious or unmelodious echoes; as if this alone were true and alive. my blessing on you, good ralph waldo! i read the book all yesterday; my wife scarcely yet done with telling me her news. it has rebuked me, it has aroused and comforted me. objections of all kinds i might make, how many objections to superficies and detail, to a dialect of thought and speech as yet imperfect enough, a hundred-fold too narrow for the infinitude it strives to speak: but what were all that? it is an infinitude, the real vision and belief of one, seen face to face: a "voice of the heart of nature" is here once more. this is the one fact for me, which absorbs all others whatsoever. persist, persist; you have much to say and to do. these voices of yours which i likened to unembodied souls, and censure sometimes for having no body,--how can they have a body? they are light-rays darting upwards in the east; they will yet make much and much to have a body! you are a new era, my man, in your new huge country: god give you strength, and speaking and silent faculty, to do such a work as seems possible now for you! and if the devil will be pleased to set all the popularities _against_ you and evermore against you,--perhaps that is of all things the very kindest any _angel_ could do. of myself i have nothing good to report. years of sick idleness and barrenness have grown wearisome to me. i do nothing. i waver and hover, and painfully speculate even now as to health, and where i shall spend the summer out of london! i am a very poor fellow;--but hope to grow better by and by. then this _alluvies_ of foul lazy stuff that has long swum over me may perhaps yield the better harvest. _esperons!_--hail to all of you from both of us. yours ever, t. carlyle lxiv. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 21 may, 1841 my dear emerson,--about a week ago i wrote to you, after too long a silence. since that there has another letter come, with a draft of l100 in it, and other comfortable items not pecuniary; a line in acknowledgment of the money is again very clearly among my duties. yesterday, on my first expedition up to town, i gave the paper to fraser; who is to present the result to me in the shape of cash tomorrow. thanks, and again thanks. this l100, i think, nearly clears off for me the outlay of the second _french revolution;_ an ill-printed, ill-conditioned publication, the prime cost of which, once all lying saved from the atlantic whirlpools and hard and fast in my own hand, it was not perhaps well done to venture thitherward again. to the new trouble of my friends withal! we will now let the rest of the game play itself out as it can; and my friends, and my one friend, must not take more trouble than their own kind feelings towards me will reward. the books, the _dial_ no. 4, and appleton's pirated _lectures,_ are still expected from green. in a day or two he will send them: if not, we will jog him into wakefulness, and remind him of the _parcels delivery company,_ which carries luggage of all kinds, like mere letters, many times a day, over all corners of our babylon. in this, in the universal british _penny post,_ and a thing or two of that sort, men begin to take advantage of their crowded ever-whirling condition in these days, which brings such enormous disadvantages along with it _un_sought for.-bibliopolist appleton does not seem to be a "hero,"--except after his own fashion. he is one of those of whom the scotch say, "thou wouldst do little for god if the devil were dead!" the devil is unhappily dead, in that international bibliopolic province, and little hope of his reviving for some time; whereupon this is what squire appleton does. my respects to him even in the bedouin department, i like to see a complete man, a clear decisive bedouin. for the rest, there is one man who ought to be apprised that i can now stand robbery a little better; that i am no longer so very poor as i once was. in fraser himself there do now lie vestiges of money! i feel it a great relief to see, for a year or two at least, the despicable bugbear of beggary driven out of my sight; for _which_ small mercy, at any rate, be the heavens thanked. fraser himself, for these two editions, one thousand copies each, of the lectures and _sartor,_ pays me down on the nail l150; consider that miracle! of the other books which he is selling on a joint-stock basis, the poor man likewise promises something, though as yet, ever since new-year's-day, i cannot learn what, owing to a grievous sickness of his,--for which otherwise i cannot but be sorry, poor fraser within the cockney limits being really a worthy, accurate, and rather friendly creature. so you see me here provided with bread and water for a season,--it is but for a season one needs either water or bread, --and rejoice with me accordingly. it is the one useful, nay, i will say the one _innoxious,_ result of all this trumpeting, reviewing, and dinner-invitationing; from which i feel it indispensable to withdraw myself more and more resolutely, and altogether count it as a thing not there. solitude is what i long and pray for. in the babble of men my own soul goes all to babble: like soil you were forever _screening,_ tumbling over with shovels and riddles; in _which_ soil no fruit can grow! my trust in heaven is, i shall yet get away "to some cottage by the sea-shore"; far enough from all the mad and mad making things that dance round me here, which i shall then look on only as a theatrical phantasmagory, with an eye only to the _meaning_ that lies hidden in it. you, friend emerson, are to be a farmer, you say, and dig earth for your living? well; i envy you that as much as any other of your blessednesses. meanwhile, i sit shrunk together here in a small _dressing-closet,_ aloft in the back part of the house, excluding all cackle and cockneys; and, looking out over the similitude of a may grove (with little brick in it, and only the minarets of westminster and gilt cross of st. paul's visible in the distance, and the enormous roar of london softened into an enormous hum), endeavor to await what will betide. i am busy with luther in one marheinecke's very longwinded book. i think of innumerable things; steal out westward at sunset among the kensington lanes; would this _may_ weather last, i might be as well here as in any attainable place. but june comes; the rabid dogs get muzzles; all is brown-parched, dusty, suffocating, desperate, and i shall have to run! enough of all that. on my paper there comes, or promises to come, as yet simply nothing at all. patience;--and yet who can be patient? had you the happiness to see yourself not long ago, in _fraser's magazine,_ classed _nominatim_ by an emphatic earnest man, not without a kind of splay-footed strength and sincerity,--among the chief heresiarchs of the--world? perfectly right. fraser was very anxious to know what i thought of the paper,--"by an entirely unknown man in the country." i counseled "that there was something in him, which he ought to improve by holding his peace for the next five years." adieu, dear emerson; there is not a scrap more of paper. all copies of your _essays_ are out at use; with what result we shall perhaps see. as for me i love the book and man, and their noble rustic herohood and manhood:--one voice as of a living man amid such jabberings of galvanized corpses: _ach gott!_ yours evermore, t. carlyle lxv. emerson to carlyle concord, 80 may, 1841 my dear friend,--in my letter written to you on the 1st of may (enclosing a bill of exchange of l100 sterling, which, i hope, arrived safely) i believe i promised to send you by the next steamer an account for april. but the false tardy munroe & co. did not send it to me until one day too late. here it is, as they render it, compiled from little and brown's statement and their own. i have never yet heard whether you have received their _analysis_ or explanation of the last abstract they drew up of the mutual claims between the great houses of t.c. and r.w.e., and i am impatient to know whether you have caused it to be examined, and whether it was satisfactory. this new one is based on that, and if that was incorrect, this must be also. i am daily looking for some letter from you, which is perhaps near at hand. if you have not written, write me exactly and immediately on this subject, i entreat you. you will see that in this sheet i am charged with a debt to you of $184.29. i shall tomorrow morning pay to mr. james brown (of little and brown), who should be the bearer of this letter, $185.00, which sum he will pay you in its equivalent of english coin. i give mr. brown an introductory letter to you, and you must not let slip the opportunity to make the man explain his own accounts, if any darkness hang on them. in due time, perhaps, we can send you munroe, and nichols also, and so all your factors shall render direct account of themselves to you. i believe i shall also make brown the bearer of a little book written some time since by a young friend of mine in a very peculiar frame of mind,--thought by most persons to be mad,--and of the publication of which i took the charge.* mr. very requested me to send you a copy.--i had a letter from sterling, lately, which rejoiced me in all but the dark picture it gave of his health. i earnestly wish good news of him. when you see him, show him these poems, and ask him if they have not a grandeur. --------* _essays and poems,_ by jones very,--a little volume, the work of an exquisite spirit. some of the poems it contains are as if written by a george herbert who had studied shakespeare, read wordsworth, and lived in america. --------when i wrote last, i believe all the sheets of the six lectures had not come to me. they all arrived safely, although the last package not until our american pirated copy was just out of press in new york. my private reading was not less happy for this robbery whereby the eager public were supplied. odin was all new to me; and mahomet, for the most part; and it was all good to read, abounding in truth and nobleness. yet, as i read these pages, i dream that your audience in london are less prepared to hear, than is our new england one. i judge only from the tone. i think i know many persons here who accept thoughts of this vein so readily now, that, if you were speaking on this shore, you would not feel that emphasis you use to be necessary. i have been feeble and almost sick during all the spring, and have been in boston but once or twice, and know nothing of the reception the book meets from the catholic carlylian church. one reader and friend of yours dwells now in my house, and, as i hope, for a twelvemonth to come,--henry thoreau,--a poet whom you may one day be proud of;--a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions. we work together day by day in my garden, and i grow well and strong. my mother, my wife, my boy and girl, are all in usual health, and according to their several ability salute you and yours. do not cease to tell me of the health of your wife and of the learned and friendly physician. yours, r.w. emerson lxvi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 25 june, 1841 dear emerson,--now that there begins again to be some program possible of my future motions for some time, i hastily despatch you some needful outline of the same. after infinite confused uncertainty, i learn yesternight that there has been a kind of country-house got for us, at a place called annan, on the north shore of the solway frith, in my native county of dumfries. you passed through the little burgh, i suppose, in your way homeward from craigenputtock: it stands about midway, on the great road, between dumfries and carlisle. it is the place where i got my schooling;--consider what a _preter_natural significance such a scene has now got for me! it is within eight miles of my aged mother's dwelling-place; within riding distance, in fact, of almost all the kindred i have in the world.--the house, which is built since my time, and was never yet seen by me, is said to be a reasonable kind of house. we get it for a small sum in proportion to its value (thanks to kind accident); the three hundred miles of travel, very hateful to me, will at least entirely obliterate all traces of _this_ dustbabel; the place too being naturally almost ugly, as far as a green leafy place in sight of sea and mountains can be so nicknamed, the whole gang of picturesque tourists, cockney friends of nature, &c., &c., who penetrate now by steam, in shoals every autumn, into the very centre of the scotch highlands, will be safe over the horizon! in short, we are all bound thitherward in few days; must cobble up some kind of gypsy establishment; and bless heaven for solitude, for the sight of green fields, heathy moors; for a silent sky over one's head, and air to breathe which does not consist of coal-smoke, finely powdered flint, and other beautiful _etceteras_ of that kind among others! god knows i have need enough to be left altogether alone for some considerable while (_forever,_ as it at present seems to me), to get my inner world, and my poor bodily nerves, both all torn to pieces, set in order a little again! after much vain reluctance therefore; disregarding many considerations,-disregarding _finance_ in the front of these,--i am off; and calculate on staying till i am heartily _sated_ with country, till at least the last gleam of summer weather has departed. my way of life has all along hitherto been a resolute _staying at home:_ i find now, however, that i must alter my habits, cost what it may; that i cannot live all the year round in london, under pain of dying or going rabid;--that i must, in fact, learn to travel, as others do, and be hanged to me! wherefore, in brief, my friend, our address for the next two or three months is "newington lodge, annan, scotland,"--where a letter from emerson will be a right pleasant visitor! _faustum sit._ my second piece of news, not less interesting i hope, is that _emerson's essays,_ the book so called, is to be reprinted here; nay, i think, is even now at press,--in the hands of that invaluable printer, robson, who did the _miscellanies._ fraser undertakes it, "on _half-profits_";--t. carlyle writing a preface,*--which accordingly he did (in rather sullen humor,--not with you!) last night and the foregoing days. robson will stand by the text to the very utmost; and i also am to read the proof sheets. the edition is of seven hundred and fifty; which fraser thinks he will sell. with what joy shall i then sack up the small ten pounds sterling perhaps of "half-profits," and remit them to the man emerson; saying: there, man! tit for tat, the reciprocity _not_ all on one side!--i ought to say, moreover, that this was a volunteer scheme of fraser's; the risk is all his, the origin of it was with him: i advised him to have it reviewed, as being a really noteworthy book; "write you a preface," said he, "and i will reprint it";--to which, after due delay and meditation; i consented. let me add only, on this subject, the story of a certain rio,** a french breton, with long, distracted, black hair. he found your book at richard milnes's, a borrowed copy, and could not borrow it; whereupon he appeals passionately to me; carries off my wife's copy, this distracted rio; and is to "read it _four_ times" during this current autumn, at quimperle, in his native celtdom! the man withal is a _catholic,_ eats fish on friday;--a great lion here when he visits us; one of the _naivest_ men in the world: concerning whom nevertheless, among fashionables, there is a controversy, "whether he is an angel, or partially a windbag and _humbug?_" such is the lot of loveliness in the world! a truer man i never saw; how _wind_less, how windy, i will not compute at present. me he likes greatly (in spite of my unspeakable contempt for his fish on friday); likes,--but withal is apt to bore. ---------* the greater part of this interesting preface is reprinted in mr. george willis cooke's excellent book on the _life, writings, and philosophy of emerson,_ boston, 1881, p. 109. ** the author of a book once much admired, _de 'l'art chretien._ in a later work entitled _epilogue a l'art chretien,_ but actually a sort of autobiography, written in the naivest spirit of personal conceit and pious sentimentalism, m. rio gives an exceedingly entertaining account of his intercourse with carlyle. ---------enough, dear emerson; and more than enough for a day so hurried. our island is all in a ferment electioneering: tories to come in;--perhaps not to come in; at all events not to stay long, without altering their figure much! i sometimes ask myself rather earnestly, what is the duty of a citizen? to be as i have been hitherto, a pacific _alien?_ that is the _easiest,_ with my humor!--our brave dame here, just rallying for the _remove,_ sends loving salutations. good be with you all always. adieu, dear emerson. --t. carlyle appleton's book of _hero-worship_ has come; for which pray thank mr. munroe for me: it is smart on the surface; but printed altogether scandalously! lxvii. emerson to carlyle concord, 31 july, 1841 my dear carlyle,--eight days ago--when i had gone to nantasket beach, to sit by the sea and inhale its air and refresh this puny body of mine--came to me your letter, all bounteous as all your letters are, generous to a fault, generous to the shaming of me, cold, fastidious, ebbing person that i am. already in a former letter you had said too much good of my poor little arid book,-which is as sand to my eyes,--and now in this you tell me it shall be printed in london, and graced with a preface from the man of men. i can only say that i heartily wish the book were better, and i must try and deserve so much favor from the kind gods by a bolder and truer living in the months to come; such as may perchance one day relax and invigorate this cramp hand of mine, and teach it to draw some grand and adequate strokes, which other men may find their own account and not their good-nature in repeating. yet i think i shall never be killed by my ambition. i behold my failures and shortcomings there in writing, wherein it would give me much joy to thrive, with an equanimity which my worst enemy might be glad to see. and yet it is not that i am occupied with better things. one could well leave to others the record, who was absorbed in the life. but i have done nothing. i think the branch of the "tree of life" which headed to a bud in me, curtailed me somehow of a drop or two of sap, and so dwarfed all my florets and drupes. yet as i tell you i am very easy in my mind, and never dream of suicide. my whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches acquiescence and optimism. only when i see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious america, i lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue. i have sometimes fancied i was to catch sympathetic activity from contact with noble persons; that you would come and see me; that i should form stricter habits of love and conversation with some men and women here who are already dear to me,--and at some rate get off the numb palsy, and feel the new blood sting and tingle in my fingers' ends. well, sure i am that the right word will be spoken though i cut out my tongue. thanks, too, to your munificent fraser for his liberal intention to divide the profits of the _essays._ i wish, for the encouragement of such a bookseller, there were to be profits to divide. but i have no faith in your public for their heed to a mere book like mine. there are things i should like to say to them, in a lecture-room or in a "steeple house," if i were there. seven hundred and fifty copies! ah no! and so my dear brother has quitted the roaring city, and gone back in peace to his own land,--not the man he left it, but richer every way, chiefly in the sense of having done something valiantly and well, which the land, and the lands, and all that wide elastic english race in all their dispersion, will know and thank him for. the holy gifts of nature and solitude be showered upon you! do you not believe that the fields and woods have their proper virtue, and that there are good and great things which will not be spoken in the city? i give you joy in your new and rightful home, and the same greetings to jane carlyle! with thanks and hopes and loves to you both. --r.w. emerson as usual at this season of the year, i, incorrigible spouting yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges, nine days hence.* you will say i do not deserve the aid of any muse. o but if you knew how natural it is to me to run to these places! besides, i always am lured on by the hope of saying something which shall stick by the good boys. i hope brown did not fail to find you, with thirty-eight sovereigns (i believe) which he should carry you. ---------* "the method of nature. an address to the society of the adelphi, in waterville college, maine, august 11, 1841." ---------lxviii. carlyle to emerson newby, annan, scotland, 18 august, 1841 my dear emerson,--two days ago your letter, direct from liverpool, reached me here; only fifteen days after date on the other side of the ocean: one of the swiftest messengers that have yet come from you. steamers have been known to come, they say, in nine days. by and by we shall visibly be, what i always say we virtually are, members of neighboring parishes; paying continual visits to one another. what is to hinder huge london from being to universal saxondom what small mycale was to the tribes of greece,--a place to hold your [greek] in? a meeting of _all the english_ ought to be as good as one of all the ionians; --and as homeric "equal ships" are to bristol steamers, so, or somewhat so, may new york and new holland be to ephesus and crete, with their distances, relations, and etceteras!--few things on this earth look to me greater than the future of that family of men. it is some two months since i got into this region; my wife followed me with her maid and equipments some five weeks ago. newington lodge, when i came to inspect it with eyes, proved to be too rough an undertaking: upholsterers, expense and confusion,--the cynic snarled, "give me a whole tub rather! i want nothing but shelter from the elements, and to be let alone of all men." after a little groping, this little furnished cottage, close by the beach of the solway frith, was got hold of: here we have been, in absolute seclusion, for a month,--no company but the corn-fields and the everlasting sands and brine; mountains, and thousand-voiced memories on all hands, sending their regards to one, from the distance. daily (sometimes even nightly!) i have swashed about in the sea; i have been perfectly idle, at least inarticulate; i fancy i feel myself considerably sounder of body and of mind. deeply do i agree with you in the great unfathomable meaning of a colloquy with the dumb ocean, with the dumb earth, and their eloquence! a legislator would prescribe some weeks of that annually as a religious duty for all mortals, if he could. a legislator will prescribe it for himself, since he can! you too have been at nantasket; my friend, this great rough purple sea-flood that roars under my little garret-window here, this too comes from nantasket and farther,--swung hitherward by the moon and the sun. it cannot be said that i feel "happy" here, which means joyful;-as far as possible from that. the cave of trophonius could not be grimmer for one than this old land of graves. but it is a sadness worth any hundred "happinesses." _n'en parlons plus._ by the way, have you ever clearly remarked withal what a despicable function "view-hunting" is. analogous to "philanthropy," "pleasures of virtue," &c., &c. i for my part, in these singular circumstances, often find an honestly ugly country the preferable one. black eternal peat-bog, or these waste-howling sands with mews and seagulls: you meet at least no cockney to exclaim, "how charming it is!" one of the last things i did in london was to pocket bookseller brown's l38: a very honest-looking man, that brown; whom i was sorry i could not manage to welcome better. you asked in that letter about some other item of business,--munroe's or brown's account to acknowledge?--something or other that i was to _do:_ i only remember vaguely that it seemed to me i had as good as done it. your letter is not here now, but at chelsea. three sheets of the _essays_ lay waiting me at my mother's, for correction; needing as good as none. the type and shape is the same as that of late _lectures on heroes._ robson the printer, who is a very punctual intelligent man, a scholar withal, undertook to be himself the corrector of the other sheets. i hope you will find them "exactly conformable to the text, _minus_ mere typographical blunders and the more salient american spellings (labor for labour, &c.)." the book is perhaps just getting itself subscribed in these very days. it should have been out before now: but poor fraser is in the country, dangerously ill, which perhaps retards it a little; and the season, at any rate, is at the very dullest. by the first conveyance i will send a certain lady two copies of it. little danger but the edition will sell; fraser knows his own trade well enough, and is as much a "desperado" as poor attila schmelzle was! poor james, i wish he were well again; but really at times i am very anxious about him.--the book will sell; will be liked and disliked. harriet martineau, whom i saw in passing hitherward, writes with her accustomed enthusiasm about it. richard milnes too is very warm. john sterling scolds and kisses it (as the manner of the man is), and concludes by inquiring, whether there is any procurable likeness of emerson? emerson himself can answer. there ought to be. --good heavens! here came my wife, all in tears, pointing out to me a poor ship, just tumbled over on a sand-bank on the cumberland coast; men still said to be alive on it,--a belfast steamer doing all it can to get in contact with it! moments are precious (say the people on the beach), the flood runs ten miles an hour. thank god, the steamer's boat is out: "eleven men," says a person with a glass, "are saved: it is an american timber-ship, coming up without a pilot." and now--in ten minutes more--there lies the melancholy mass alone among the waters, wreck-boats all hastening towards it, like birds of prey; the poor canadians all up and away towards annan. what an end for my letter, which nevertheless must end! adieu, dear emerson. address to chelsea next time. i can say no more. yours ever, t.c. lxix. emerson to carlyle concord, 30 october, 1841 my dear carlyle,--i was in boston yesterday, and found at munroe's your promised packet of the two london books. they are very handsome,--that for my wife is beautiful,--and i am not so old or so cold but that i can feel the hope and the pleasure that lie in this gift. it seems i am to speak in england--great england--fortified by the good word of one whose word is fame. well, it is a lasting joy to be indebted to the wise and generous; and i am well contented that my little boat should swim, whilst it can, beside your great galleys, nor will i allow my discontent with the great faults of the book, which the rich english dress cannot hide, to spoil my joy in this fine little romance of friendship and hope. i am determined--so help me all muses--to send you something better another day. but no more printing for me at present. i have just decided to go to boston once more, with a course of lectures, which i will perhaps baptize "on the times," by way of making once again the experiment whether i cannot, not only speak the truth, but speak it truly, or in proportion. i fancy i need more than another to speak, with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. i build my house of boulders; somebody asked me "if i built of medals." besides, i am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a delos not yet made fast. i imagine an eloquence of infinite variety,--rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confession. i should love myself wonderfully better if i could arm myself to go, as you go, with the word in the heart and not in a paper. when i was in boston i saw the booksellers, the children of tantalus,--no, but they who trust in them are. this time, little and brown render us their credit account to t.c. $366 (i think it was), payable in three months from 1 october. they had sold all the london _french revolutions_ but fifteen copies. may we all live until 1 january. j. munroe & co. acknowledge about $180 due and now rightfully payable to t.c., but, unhappily, not yet paid. by the help of brokers, i will send that sum more or less in some english currency, by the next steamship, which sails in about a fortnight, and will address it, as you last bade me, to chelsea. what news, my dear friend, from your study? what designs ripened or executed? what thoughts? what hopes? you can say nothing of yourself that will not greatly interest us all. harriet martineau, whose sicknesses may it please god to heal! wrote me a kind, cheerful letter, and the most agreeable notice of your health and spirit on a visit at her house. my little boy is five years old today, and almost old enough to send you his love. with kindest greetings to jane carlyle, i am her and your friend, --r.w.e. lxx. emerson to carlyle concord, 14 november, 1841 my dear carlyle,--above, you have a bill of exchange for forty pounds sterling, with which sum you must credit the munroe account. the bill, i must not fail to notice, is drawn by a lover of yours who expresses great satisfaction in doing us this courtesy; and courtesy i must think it when he gives me a bill at sight, whilst of all other merchants i have got only one payable at some remote day. ---is a beautiful and noble youth, of a most subtle and magnetic nature, made for an artist, a painter, and in his art has made admirable sketches, but his criticism, i fancy, was too keen for his poetry (shall i say?); he sacrificed to despair, and threw away his pencil. for the present, he buys and sells. i wrote you some sort of letter a fortnight ago, promising to send a paper like this. the hour when this should be despatched finds me by chance very busy with little affairs. i sent you by an italian, signor gambardella,*-who took a letter to you with good intent to persuade you to sit to him for your portrait,--a _dial,_ and some copies of an oration i printed lately. if you should have any opportunity to send one of them to harriet martineau, my debts to her are great, and i wish to acknowledge her abounding kindness by a letter, as i must. i am now in the rage of preparation for my lectures "on the times;" which begin in a fortnight. there shall be eight, but i cannot yet accurately divide the topics. if it were eighty, i could better. in fear lest this sheet should not safely and timely reach its man, i must now write some duplicate. farewell, dear friend. r.w. emerson -------* spiridione gambardella was born at naples. he was a refugee from italy, having escaped, the story was, on board an american man-of-war. he had been educated as a public singer, but he had a facile genius, and turned readily to painting as a means of livelihood. he painted some excellent portraits in boston, between 1835 and 1840, among them one of dr. channing, and one of dr. follen; both of these were engraved. he had some success for a time as a portrait-painter in london. ---------lxxi. carlyle to emerson chelsea, london, 19 november, 1841 dear emerson,--since that going down of the american timber-ship on one of the banks of the solway under my window, i do not remember that you have heard a word of me. i only added that the men were all saved, and the beach all in agitation, certain women not far from hysterics;--and there ended. i did design to send you some announcement of our return hither; but fear there is no chance that i did it! about ten days ago the signor gambardella arrived, with a note and books from you: and here now is your letter of october 30th; which, arriving at a moment when i have a little leisure, draws forth an answer almost instantly. the signor gambardella, whom we are to see a second time tonight or tomorrow, amuses and interests us not a little. his face is the very image of the classic god pan's; with horns, and cloven feet, we feel that he would make a perfect wood-god;--really, some of poussin's satyrs are almost portraits of this brave gambardella. i will warrant him a right glowing mass of southern-italian vitality,--full of laughter, wild insight, caricature, and every sort of energy and joyous savagery: a most profitable element to get introduced (in moderate quantity), i should say, into the general current of your puritan blood over in new england there! gambardella has behaved with magnanimity in that matter of the portrait: i have already sat, to men in the like case, some four times, and gambardella knows it is a dreadful weariness; i directed him, accordingly, to my last painter, one laurence, a man of real parts, whom i wished gambardella to know,--and whom i wished to know gambardella withal, that he might tell me whether there was any probability of a _good_ picture by him in case one did decide on encountering the weariness. well: gambardella returns with a magnanimous report that laurence's picture far transcends any capability of his; that whoever in america or elsewhere will have a likeness of the said individual must apply to laurence, not to gambardella,--which latter artist heroically throws down his brush, and says, be it far from me! the brave gambardella! if i can get him this night to dilate a little farther on his visit to the _community of shakers,_ and the things he saw and felt there, it will be a most true benefit to me. inextinguishable laughter seemed to me to lie in gambardella's vision of that phenomenon,-the sight and the seer, but we broke out too loud all at once, and he was afraid to continue.--alas! there is almost no laughter going in the world at present. true laughter is as rare as any other truth,--the sham of it frequent and detestable, like all other shams. i know nothing wholesomer; but it is rarer even than christmas, which comes but once a year, and does always come once. your satisfactions and reflections at sight of your english book are such as i too am very thankful for. i understand them well. may worse guest never visit the drawing-room at concord than that bound book. tell the good wife to rejoice in it: she has all the pleasure;--to her poor husband it will be increase of pain withal: nay, let us call it increase of valiant labor and endeavor; no evil for a man, if he be fit for it! a man must learn to digest praise too, and not be poisoned with it: some of it _is_ wholesome to the system under certain circumstances; the most of it a healthy system will learn by and by to throw into the slop-basin, harmlessly, without any _trial_ to digest it. a thinker, i take it, in the long run finds that essentially he must ever be and continue _alone;--alone:_ "silent, rest over him the stars, and under him the graves"! the clatter of the world, be it a friendly, be it a hostile world, shall not intermeddle with him much. the book of _essays,_ however, does decidedly "speak to england," in its way, in these months; and even makes what one may call a kind of appropriate "sensation" here. reviews of it are many, in all notes of the gamut;--of small value mostly; as you might see by the two newspaper specimens i sent you. (did you get those two newspapers?) the worst enemy admits that there are piercing radiances of perverse insight in it; the highest friends, some few, go to a very high point indeed. newspapers are busy with extracts;--much complaining that it is "abstruse," neological, hard to get the meaning of. all which is very proper. still better,--though poor fraser, alas, is dead, (poor fraser!), and no help could come from industries of the bookshop, and books indeed it seems were never selling worse than of late months,--i learn that the "sale of the essays goes very steadily forward," and will wind itself handsomely up in due time, we may believe! so emerson henceforth has a real public in old england as well as new. and finally, my friend, do _not_ disturb yourself about turning better, &c., &c.; write as it is given you, and not till it be given you, and never mind it a whit. the new _adelphi_ piece seems to me, as a piece of composition, the best _written_ of them all. people cry over it: "whitherward? what, what?" in fact, i do again desiderate some _concretion_ of these beautiful _abstracta._ it seems to me they will never be _right_ otherwise; that otherwise they are but as prophecies yet, not fulfilments. the dial too, it is all spirit-like, aeriform, aurora-borealis like. will no _angel_ body himself out of that; no stalwart yankee _man,_ with color in the cheeks of him, and a coat on his back! these things i _say:_ and yet, very true, you alone can decide what practical meaning is in them. write you always _as_ it is given you,_ be it in the solid, in the aeriform, or whatsoever way. there is no other rule given among men.--i have sent the criticism on landor* to an editorial friend of l.'s, by whom i expect it will be put into the newspapers here, for the benefit of walter savage; he is not often so well praised among us, and deserves a little good praise. -------* from the dial for october, 1841. -------you propose again to send me moneys,--surprising man! i am glad also to hear that that beggarly misprinted _french revolution_ is nearly out among you. i only hope farther your booksellers will have an eye on that rascal appleton, and not let _him_ reprint and deface, if more copies of the book turn out to be wanted. adieu, dear emerson! good speed to you at boston, and in all true things. i hope to write soon again. yours ever, t. carlyle lxxii. carlyle to emerson chelsea, 6 december, 1841 dear emerson,--though i wrote to you very lately, and am in great haste today, i must lose no time in announcing that the letter with the l40 draught came to hand some mornings ago; and now, this same morning, a second letter round by dumfriesshire, which had been sent as a duplicate, or substitute in case of accident, for the former. it is all right, my friend ----'s paper has got itself changed into forty gold sovereigns, and lies here waiting use; thanks, many thanks! sums of that kind come always upon me like manna out of the sky; surely they, more emphatically than any others, are the gift of heaven. let us receive, use, and be thankful. i am not so poor now at all; heaven be praised: indeed, i do not know, now and then when i reflect on it, whether being rich were not a considerably harder problem. with the wealth of rothschild what farther good thing could one get,--if not perhaps some but to live in, under free skies, in the country, with a horse to ride and have a little less pain on? _angulus ille ridet!_--i will add, for practical purposes in the future, that it is in general of little or no moment whether an american bill be at sight or after a great many days; that the paper can wait as conveniently here as the cash can,--if your new england house and baring of old england will forbear bankruptcy in the mean while. by the bye, will you tell me some time or other in _what_ american funds it is that your funded money, you once gave me note of, now lies? i too am creditor to america,-state of illinois or some such state: one thousand dollars of mine, which some years ago i had no use for, now lies there, paying i suppose for canals, in a very obstructed condition! my brother here is continually telling me that i shall lose it all, --which is not so bad; but lose it all by my own unreason,--which is very bad. it struck me i would ask where emerson's money lies, and lay mine there too, let it live or perish as it likes! your _adelphi_ went straightway off to miss martineau with a message. richard milnes has another; john sterling is to have a third,--had certain other parties seen it first. for the man emerson is become a person to be _seen_ in these times. i also gave a _morning-chronicle_ editor your brave eulogy on landor, with instructions that it were well worth publishing there, for landor's and others' sake. landor deserves more praise than he gets at present; the world too, what is far more, should hear of him oftener than it does. a brave man after his kind,--though considerably "flamed on from the hell beneath." he speaks notable things; and at lowest and worst has the faculty too of holding his peace. the "lectures on the times" are even now in progress? good speed to the speaker, to the speech. your country is luckier than most at this time; it has still real preaching; the tongue of man is not, whensoever it begins wagging, entirely sure to emit babblement, twaddlement, sincere--cant, and other noises which awaken the passionate wish for silence! that must alter everywhere the human tongue is no wooden watchman's-rattle or other _obsolete_ implement; it continues forever new and useful, nay indispensable. as for me and my doings--_ay de mi!_* ------* the signature has been cut off. ------lxxiii. emerson to carlyle new york, 28 february, 1842 my dear friend,--i enclose a bill of exchange for forty-eight pounds sterling, payable by baring brothers & co. after sixty days from the 25th of february. this sum is part of a payment from little and brown on account of sales of your london _french revolution and of chartism._ as another part of their payment they asked me if they might not draw on the estate of james fraser for a balance due from his house to them, and pay you so. i, perhaps unwisely, consented to make the proffer to you, with the distinct stipulation, however, that if it should not prove perfectly agreeable to you, and exactly as available as another form of money, you should instantly return it to me, and they shall pay me the amount, $41.57, or l8 12s. 5d. in cash. my mercantile friend, abel adams, did not admire my wisdom in accepting this bill of little and brown; so i told them i should probably bring it back to them, and if there is a shadow of inconvenience in it you will send it back to me by the next steamer. for they have no claims on us. i decide not to enclose the little and brown bill in this sheet,--but to let it accompany this letter in the same packet. i grieve to hear that you have bought any of our wretched southern stocks. in new england all southern and southwestern debt is usually regarded as hopeless, unless the debtor is personally known. massachusetts stock is in the best credit of any public stock. ward told me that it would be safest for you to keep your illinois stock, although he could say nothing very good of it. our city banks in boston are in better credit than the banks in any other city here, yet one in which a large part of my own property is invested has failed, for the two last half-years, to pay any dividend, and i am a poor man until next april, when, i hope, it will not fail me again. if you wish to invest money here, my friend abel adams, who is the principal partner in one of our best houses, barnard, adams, & co., will know how to give you the best assistance and action the case admits. my dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life.* you can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. a few weeks ago i accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. what would it avail to tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? from a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by scarlatina.--we have two babes yet,--one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that boy's i shall never see. how often i have pleased myself that one day i should send to you this morning star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. i dare not fathom the invisible and untold to inquire what relations to my departed ones i yet sustain. lidian, the poor lidian, moans at home by day and by night. you too will grieve for us, afar. i believe i have two letters from you since i wrote last. i shall write again soon, for bronson alcott will probably go to london in about a month, and him i shall surely send to you, hoping to atone by his great nature for many smaller one, that have craved to see you. give me early advice of receiving these bills of exchange. --------* the memory of this boy, "born for the future, to the future lost;" is enshrined in the heart of every lover of childhood and of poetry by his father's impassioned _threnody._ ----------tell jane carlyle our sorrowing story with much love, and with all good hope for her health and happiness. tell us when you write, with as much particularity as you can, how it stands with you, and all your household; with the doctor, and the friends; what you do, and propose to do, and whether you will yet come to america, one good day? yours with love, r. waldo emerson lxxiv. carlyle to emerson templand, thornhill, dumfries, scotland 28 march, 1842 my dear friend,--this is heavy news that you send me; the heaviest outward bereavement that can befall a man has overtaken you. your calm tone of deep, quiet sorrow, coming in on the rear of poor trivial worldly businesses, all punctually despatched and recorded too, as if the higher and highest had not been busy with you, tells me a sad tale. what can we say in these cases? there is nothing to be said,--nothing but what the wild son of ishmael, and every thinking heart, from of old have learned to say: god is great! he is terrible and stern; but we know also he is good. "though he slay me, yet will i trust in him." your bright little boy, chief of your possessions here below, is rapt away from you; but of very truth he is with god, even as we that yet live are,--and surely in the way that was best for him, and for you, and for all of us.--poor lidian emerson, poor mother! to her i have no word. such poignant unspeakable grief, i believe, visits no creature as that of a mother bereft of her child. the poor sparrow in the bush affects one with pity, mourning for its young; how much more the human soul of one's friend! i cannot bid her be of comfort; for there is as yet no comfort. may good influences watch over her, bring her some assuagement. as the hebrew david said, "we shall go to him, he will not return to us." i also am here in a house rendered vacant and sacred by death. a sore calamity has fallen on us, or rather has fallen on my poor wife (for what am i but like a spectator in comparison?): she has lost unexpectedly her good mother, her sole surviving parent, and almost only relative of much value that was left to her. the manner too was almost tragic. we had heard of illness here, but only of commonplace illness, and had no alarm. the doctor himself, specially applied to, made answer as if there was no danger: his poor patient, in whose character the like of that intimately lay, had rigorously charged him to do so: her poor daughter was far off, confined to her room by illness of her own; why alarm her, make her wretched? the danger itself did seem over; the doctor accordingly obeyed. our first intimation of alarm was despatched on the very day which proved the final one. my poor wife, casting sickness behind her, got instantly ready, set off by the first railway train: traveling all night, on the morrow morning at her uncle's door in liverpool she is met by tidings that all is already ended. she broke down there; she is now home again at chelsea, a cheery, amiable younger jane welsh to nurse her: the tone of her letters is still full of disconsolateness. i had to proceed hither, and have to stay here till this establishment can be abolished, and all the sad wrecks of it in some seemly manner swept away. it is above three weeks that i have been here; not till eight days ago could i so much as manage to command solitude, to be left altogether alone. i lead a strange life; full of sadness, of solemnity, not without a kind of blessedness. i say it is right and fitting that one be left entirely alone now and then, alone with one's own griefs and sins, with the mysterious ancient earth round one, the everlasting heaven over one, and what one can make of these. poor rustic businesses, subletting of farms, disposal of houses, household goods: these strangely intervene, like matter upon spirit, every day;--wholesome this too perhaps. it is many years since i have stood so in close contact face to face with the reality of earth, with its haggard ugliness, its divine beauty, its depths of death and of life. yesterday, one of, the stillest sundays, i sat long by the side of the swift river nith; sauntered among woods all vocal only with rooks and pairing birds.* the hills are often white with snow-powder, black brief spring-tempests rush fiercely down from them, and then again the sky looks forth with a pale pure brightness,--like eternity from behind time. the _sky,_ when one thinks of it, is _always_ blue, pure changeless azure; rains and tempests are only for the little dwellings where men abide. let us think of this too. think of this, thou sorrowing mother! thy boy has escaped many showers. --------* "templand has a very fine situation; old walter's walk, at the south end of the house, was one of the most picturesque and pretty to be found in the world. nith valley (river half a mile off, winding through green holms, now in its border of clean shingle, now lost in pleasant woods and rushes) lay patent to the south. "carlyle's reminiscences," vol. ii. p. 137. --------in some three weeks i shall probably be back at chelsea. write thitherward so soon as you have opportunity; i will write again before long, even if i do not hear from you. the moneys, &c. are all safe here as you describe: if fraser's' executors make any demur, your bookseller shall soon hear of it. i had begun to write some book on cromwell: i have often begun, but know not how to set about it; the most unutterable of all subjects i ever felt much meaning to lie in. there is risk yet that, with the loss of still farther labor, i may have to abandon it;--and then the great dumb oliver may lie unspoken forever; gathered to the mighty _silent_ of the earth; for, i think, there will hardly ever live another man that will believe in him and his puritanism as i do. to _him_ small matter. adieu, my good kind friend, ever dear to me, dearer now in sorrow. my wife when she hears of your affliction will send a true thought over to you also. the poor lidian!--john sterling is driven off again, setting out i think this very day for gibraltar, malta, and naples. farewell, and better days to us. your affectionate t. carlyle lxxv. emerson to carlyle concord, 81 march, 1842 my dear carlyle,--i wrote you a letter from my brother's office in new york nearly a month ago to tell you how hardly it had fared with me here at home, that the eye of my home was plucked out when that little innocent boy departed in his beauty and perfection from my sight. well, i have come back hither to my work and my play, but he comes not back, and i must simply suffer it. doubtless the day will come which will resolve this, as everything gets resolved, into light, but not yet. i write now to tell you of a piece of life. i wish you to know that there is shortly coming to you a man by the name of bronson alcott. if you have heard his name before, forget what you have heard. especially if you have ever read anything to which this name was attached, be sure to forget that; and, inasmuch as in you lies, permit this stranger when he arrives at your gate to make a new and primary impression. i do not wish to bespeak any courtesies or good or bad opinion concerning him. you may love him, or hate him, or apathetically pass by him, as your genius shall dictate; only i entreat this, that you do not let him go quite out of your reach until you are sure you have seen him and know for certain the nature of the man. and so i leave contentedly my pilgrim to his fate. i should tell you that my friend margaret fuller, who has edited our little _dial_ with such dubious approbation on the part of you and other men, has suddenly decided a few days ago that she will edit it no more. the second volume was just closing; shall it live for a third year? you should know that, if its interior and spiritual life has been ill fed, its outward and bibliopolic existence has been worse managed. its publishers failed, its short list of subscribers became shorter, and it has never paid its laborious editor, who has been very generous of her time and labor, the smallest remuneration. unhappily, to me alone could the question be put whether the little aspiring starveling should be reprieved for another year. i had not the cruelty to kill it, and so must answer with my own proper care and nursing for its new life. perhaps it is a great folly in me who have little adroitness in turning off work to assume this sure vexation, but the _dial_ has certain charms to me as an opportunity, which i grudge to destroy. lately at new york i found it to be to a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion. you cannot believe it? mr. lee,* who brings you this letter, is the son of one of the best men in massachusetts, a man whose name is a proverb among merchants for his probity, for his sense and his information. the son, who bears his father's name, is a favorite among all the young people for his sense and spirit, and has lived always with good people. --------* mr. henry lee. -------i have read at new york six out of eight lectures on the times which i read this winter in boston. i found a very intelligent and friendly audience. the penny papers reported my lectures, somewhat to my chagrin when i tried to read them; many persons came and talked with me, and i felt when i came away that new york is open to me henceforward whenever my boston parish is not large enough. this summer, i must try to set in order a few more chapters from these rambling lectures, one on "the poet" and one on "character" at least. and now will you not tell me what you read and write? is it cromwell still? for i supposed from the _westminster_ piece that the laborer must be in that quarter. i send herewith a new _dial,_ no. 8, and the last of this dispensation. i hope you have received every number. they have been sent in order. i have written no line in this number. i send a letter for sterling, as i do not know whether his address is still at falmouth. is he now a preacher? by the "acadia" you should have received a letter of exchange on the barings, and another on james fraser's estate. with constant good hope for yourself and for your wife, i am your friend, --r.w. emerson end of vol. i. american men of letters edited by charles dudley warner. "_thou wert the morning star among the living, ere thy fair light had fled: now, having died, thou art as hesperus, giving new splendor to the dead._" american men of letters * * * * * ralph waldo emerson. by oliver wendell holmes. 1891 note. my thanks are due to the members of mr. emerson's family, and the other friends who kindly assisted me by lending interesting letters and furnishing valuable information. the index, carefully made by mr. j.h. wiggin, was revised and somewhat abridged by myself. oliver wendell holmes. boston, november 25, 1884. contents. * * * * * introduction chapter i. 1803-1823. to aet. 20. birthplace.--boyhood.--college life. chapter ii. 1823-1828. aet. 20-25. extract from a letter to a classmate.--school-teaching.--study of divinity.--"approbated" to preach.--visit to the south.--preaching in various places. chapter iii. 1828-1833. aet. 25-30. settled as colleague of rev. henry ware.--married to ellen louisa tucker.--sermon at the ordination of rev. h.b. goodwin.--his pastoral and other labors.--emerson and father taylor.--death of mrs. emerson.--difference of opinion with some of his parishioners.--sermon explaining his views.--resignation of his pastorate. chapter iv. 1833-1838. aet. 30-35. section i. visit to europe.--on his return preaches in different places.--emerson in the pulpit.--at newton.--fixes his residence at concord.--the old manse.--lectures in boston.--lectures on michael angelo and on milton published in the "north american review."--beginning of the correspondence with carlyle.--letters to the rev. james freeman clarke.--republication of "sartor resartus." section 2. emerson's second marriage.--his new residence in concord.--historical address.--course of ten lectures on english literature delivered in boston.--the concord battle hymn.--preaching in concord and east lexington.--accounts of his preaching by several hearers.--a course of lectures on the nature and ends of history.--address on war.--death of edward bliss emerson.--death of charles chauncy emerson. section 3. publication of "nature."--outline of this essay.--its reception.--address before the phi beta kappa society chapter v. 1838-1843. aet. 35-40. section 1. divinity school address.--correspondence.--lectures on human life.--letters to james freeman clarke.--dartmouth college address: literary ethics.--waterville college address: the method of nature.--other addresses: man the reformer.--lecture on the times.--the conservative.--the transcendentalist.--boston "transcendentalism."--"the dial."--brook farm. section 2. first series of essays published.--contents: history, self-reliance, compensation, spiritual laws, love, friendship, prudence, heroism, the over-soul, circles, intellect, art.--emerson's account of his mode of life in a letter to carlyle.--death of emerson's son.--threnody chapter vi. 1843-1848. aet. 40-45. "the young american."--address on the anniversary of the emancipation of the negroes in the british west indies.--publication of the second series of essays.--contents: the poet.--experience. --character.--manners.--gifts.--nature.--politics.--nominalist and realist.--new england reformers.--publication of poems.--second visit to england chapter vii. 1848-1853. aet. 45-50. the "massachusetts quarterly review."--visit to europe.--england.--scotland.--france.--"representative men" published. i. lives of great men. ii. plato; or, the philosopher; plato; new readings. iii. swedenborg; or, the mystic. iv. montaigne; or, the skeptic. v. shakespeare; or, the poet. vi. napoleon; or, the man of the world. vii. goethe; or, the writer.--contribution to the "memoirs of margaret fuller ossoli" chapter viii. 1853-1858. aet. 50-55. lectures in various places.--anti-slavery addresses.--woman. a lecture read before the woman's rights convention.--samuel hoar. speech at concord.--publication of "english traits."--the "atlantic monthly."--the "saturday club" chapter ix 1858-1863. aet. 55-60. essay on persian poetry.--speech at the burns centennial festival.--letter from emerson to a lady.--tributes to theodore parker and to thoreau.--address on the emancipation proclamation.--publication of "the conduct of life." contents: fate; power; wealth; culture; behavior; considerations by the way; beauty; illusions chapter x. 1863-1868. aet. 60-65. "boston hymn."--"voluntaries."--other poems.--"may-day and other pieces."--"remarks at the funeral services of president lincoln."--essay on persian poetry.--address at a meeting of the free religious association.--"progress of culture." address before the phi beta kappa society of harvard university.--course of lectures in philadelphia.--the degree of ll.d. conferred upon emerson by harvard university.--"terminus". chapter xi. 1868-1873. aet. 65-70. lectures on the natural history of the intellect.--publication of "society and solitude." contents: society and solitude. --civilization.--art.--eloquence.--domestic life.--farming. --works and days.--books.--clubs.--courage.--success.--old age.--other literary labors.--visit to california.--burning of his house, and the story of its rebuilding.--third visit to europe.--his reception at concord on his return chapter xii 1873-1878. aet. 70-75. publication of "parnassus."--emerson nominated as candidate for the office of lord rector of glasgow university.--publication of "letters and social aims." contents: poetry and imagination.--social aims.--eloquence.--resources.--the comic.--quotation and originality. --progress of culture.--persian poetry.--inspiration.--greatness. --immortality.--address at the unveiling of the statue of "the minute-man" at concord.--publication of collected poems chapter xiii. 1878-1882. aet. 75-79. last literary labors.--addresses and essays.--"lectures and biographical sketches."--"miscellanies" chapter xiv. emerson's poems chapter xv. recollections of emerson's last years.--mr. conway's visits.--extracts from mr. whitman's journal.--dr. le baron russell's visit.--dr. edward emerson's account.--illness and death.--funeral services chapter xvi. emerson.---a retrospect. personality and habits of life.--his commission and errand.--as a lecturer.--his use of authorities.--resemblance to other writers.--as influenced by others.--his place as a thinker.--idealism and intuition.--mysticism.--his attitude respecting science.--as an american.--his fondness for solitary study.--his patience and amiability.--feeling with which he was regarded.--emerson and burns.--his religious belief.--his relations with clergymen.--future of his reputation.--his life judged by the ideal standard introduction. "i have the feeling that every man's biography is at his own expense. he furnishes not only the facts, but the report. i mean that all biography is autobiography. it is only what he tells of himself that comes to be known and believed." so writes the man whose life we are to pass in review, and it is certainly as true of him as of any author we could name. he delineates himself so perfectly in his various writings that the careful reader sees his nature just as it was in all its essentials, and has little more to learn than those human accidents which individualize him in space and time. about all these accidents we have a natural and pardonable curiosity. we wish to know of what race he came, what were the conditions into which he was born, what educational and social influences helped to mould his character, and what new elements nature added to make him ralph waldo emerson. he himself believes in the hereditary transmission of certain characteristics. though nature appears capricious, he says, "some qualities she carefully fixes and transmits, but some, and those the finer, she exhales with the breath of the individual, as too costly to perpetuate. but i notice also that they may become fixed and permanent in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until at last nature adopts them and bakes them in her porcelain." * * * * * we have in new england a certain number of families who constitute what may be called the academic races. their names have been on college catalogues for generation after generation. they have filled the learned professions, more especially the ministry, from the old colonial days to our own time. if aptitudes for the acquisition of knowledge can be bred into a family as the qualities the sportsman wants in his dog are developed in pointers and setters, we know what we may expect of a descendant of one of the academic races. other things being equal, he will take more naturally, more easily, to his books. his features will be more pliable, his voice will be more flexible, his whole nature more plastic than those of the youth with less favoring antecedents. the gift of genius is never to be reckoned upon beforehand, any more than a choice new variety of pear or peach in a seedling; it is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has been long under cultivation. these thoughts suggest themselves in looking back at the striking record of the family made historic by the birth of ralph waldo emerson. it was remarkable for the long succession of clergymen in its genealogy, and for the large number of college graduates it counted on its rolls. a genealogical table is very apt to illustrate the "survival of the fittest,"--in the estimate of the descendants. it is inclined to remember and record those ancestors who do most honor to the living heirs of the family name and traditions. as every man may count two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, and so on, a few generations give him a good chance for selection. if he adds his distinguished grandmothers, he may double the number of personages to choose from. the great-grandfathers of mr. emerson at the sixth remove were thirty-two in number, unless the list was shortened by intermarriage of relatives. one of these, from whom the name descended, was thomas emerson of ipswich, who furnished the staff of life to the people of that wonderfully interesting old town and its neighborhood. his son, the reverend joseph emerson, minister of the town of mendon, massachusetts, married elizabeth, daughter of the reverend edward bulkeley, who succeeded his father, the reverend peter bulkeley, as minister of concord, massachusetts. peter bulkeley was therefore one of emerson's sixty-four grandfathers at the seventh remove. we know the tenacity of certain family characteristics through long lines of descent, and it is not impossible that any one of a hundred and twenty-eight grandparents, if indeed the full number existed in spite of family admixtures, may have transmitted his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover more than two centuries, to our own contemporary. inherited qualities move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of chess. sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that of the father or of the mother, as the pawn's move carries him from one square to the next. sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or white bishop sweeps the board on his own color. sometimes the distinguishing characters pass from one sex to the other indifferently, as the castle strides over the black and white squares. sometimes an uncle or aunt lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight's move were repeated on the squares of human individuality. it is not impossible, then, that some of the qualities we mark in emerson may have come from the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early history of new england. the reverend peter bulkeley is honorably commemorated among the worthies consigned to immortality in that precious and entertaining medley of fact and fancy, enlivened by a wilderness of quotations at first or second hand, the _magnolia christi americana_, of the reverend cotton mather. the old chronicler tells his story so much better than any one can tell it for him that he must be allowed to speak for himself in a few extracts, transferred with all their typographical idiosyncrasies from the london-printed, folio of 1702. "he was descended of an honourable family in _bedfordshire_.--he was born at _woodhil_ (or _odel_) in _bedfordshire_, _january_ 31st, 1582. "his _education_ was answerable unto his _original_; it was _learned_, it was _genteel_, and, which was the top of all, it was very _pious_: at length it made him a _batchellor_ of _divinity_, and a fellow of saint _john's_ colledge in cambridge.- "when he came abroad into the world, a good benefice befel him, added unto the estate of a gentleman, left him by his father; whom he succeeded in his ministry, at the place of his nativity: which one would imagine _temptations_ enough to keep him out of a _wilderness_." but he could not conscientiously conform to the ceremonies of the english church, and so,- "when sir _nathaniel brent_ was arch-bishop _laud's_ general, as arch-bishop _laud_ was _another's_, complaints were made against mr. _bulkly_, for his non-conformity, and he was therefore silenced. "to _new-england_ he therefore came, in the year 1635; and there having been for a while, at _cambridge_, he carried a good number of planters with him, up further into the _woods_, where they gathered the _twelfth church_, then formed in the colony, and call'd the town by the name of _concord_. "here he _buried_ a great estate, while he _raised_ one still, for almost every person whom he employed in the affairs of his husbandry.- "he was a most excellent _scholar_, a very-_well read_ person, and one, who in his advice to young students, gave demonstrations, that he knew what would go to make a _scholar_. but it being essential unto a _scholar_ to love a _scholar_, so did he; and in token thereof, endowed the library of _harvard_-colledge with no small part of his own. "and he was therewithal a most exalted _christian_--in his ministry he was another _farel, quo nemo tonuit fortius_--and the observance which his own people had for him, was also paid him from all sorts of people throughout the land; but especially from the ministers of the country, who would still address him as a _father_, a _prophet_, a _counsellor_, on all occasions." these extracts may not quite satisfy the exacting reader, who must be referred to the old folio from which they were taken, where he will receive the following counsel:-"if then any person would know what mr. _peter bulkly_ was, let him read his judicious and savory treatise of the _gospel covenant_, which has passed through several editions, with much acceptance among the people of god." it must be added that "he had a competently good stroke at latin poetry; and even in his old age, affected sometimes to improve it. many of his composure are yet in our hands." it is pleasant to believe that some of the qualities of this distinguished scholar and christian were reproduced in the descendant whose life we are studying. at his death in 1659 he was succeeded, as was mentioned, by his son edward, whose daughter became the wife of the reverend joseph emerson, the minister of mendon who, when that village was destroyed by the indians, removed to concord, where he died in the year 1680. this is the first connection of the name of emerson with concord, with which it has since been so long associated. edward emerson, son of the first and father of the second reverend joseph emerson, though not a minister, was the next thing to being one, for on his gravestone he is thus recorded: "mr. edward emerson, sometime deacon of the first church in newbury." he was noted for the virtue of patience, and it is a family tradition that he never complained but once, when he said mildly to his daughter that her dumplings were somewhat harder than needful,--"_but not often_." this same edward was the only break in the line of ministers who descended from thomas of ipswich. he is remembered in the family as having been "a merchant in charlestown." their son, the second reverend joseph emerson, minister of malden for nearly half a century, married mary, the daughter of the reverend samuel moody,--father moody,--of york, maine. three of his sons were ministers, and one of these, william, was pastor of the church at concord at the period of the outbreak of the revolutionary war. as the successive generations narrow down towards the individual whose life we are recalling, the character of his progenitors becomes more and more important and interesting to the biographer. the reverend william emerson, grandfather of ralph waldo, was an excellent and popular preacher and an ardent and devoted patriot. he preached resistance to tyrants from the pulpit, he encouraged his townsmen and their allies to make a stand against the soldiers who had marched upon their peaceful village, and would have taken a part in the fight at the bridge, which he saw from his own house, had not the friends around him prevented his quitting his doorstep. he left concord in 1776 to join the army at ticonderoga, was taken with fever, was advised to return to concord and set out on the journey, but died on his way. his wife was the daughter of the reverend daniel bliss, his predecessor in the pulpit at concord. this was another very noticeable personage in the line of emerson's ancestors. his merits and abilities are described at great length on his tombstone in the concord burial-ground. there is no reason to doubt that his epitaph was composed by one who knew him well. but the slabs which record the excellences of our new england clergymen of the past generations are so crowded with virtues that the reader can hardly help inquiring whether a sharp bargain was not driven with the stonecutter, like that which the good vicar of wakefield arranged with the portrait-painter. he was to represent sophia as a shepherdess, it will be remembered, with as many sheep as he could afford to put in for nothing. william emerson left four children, a son bearing the same name, and three daughters, one of whom, mary moody emerson, is well remembered as pictured for us by her nephew, ralph waldo. his widow became the wife of the reverend ezra ripley, doctor of divinity, and his successor as minister at concord. the reverend william emerson, the second of that name and profession, and the father of ralph waldo emerson, was born in the year 1769, and graduated at harvard college in 1789. he was settled as minister in the town of harvard in the year 1792, and in 1799 became minister of the first church in boston. in 1796 he married ruth haskins of boston. he died in 1811, leaving five sons, of whom ralph waldo was the second. the interest which attaches itself to the immediate parentage of a man like emerson leads us to inquire particularly about the characteristics of the reverend william emerson so far as we can learn them from his own writings and from the record of his contemporaries. the reverend dr. sprague's valuable and well-known work, "annals of the american pulpit," contains three letters from which we learn some of his leading characteristics. dr. pierce of brookline, the faithful chronicler of his time, speaks of his pulpit talents as extraordinary, but thinks there was not a perfect sympathy between him and the people of the quiet little town of harvard, while he was highly acceptable in the pulpits of the metropolis. in personal appearance he was attractive; his voice was melodious, his utterance distinct, his manner agreeable. "he was a faithful and generous friend and knew how to forgive an enemy.--in his theological views perhaps he went farther on the liberal side than most of his brethren with whom he was associated.--he was, however, perfectly tolerant towards those who differed from him most widely." dr. charles lowell, another brother minister, says of him, "mr. emerson was a handsome man, rather tall, with a fair complexion, his cheeks slightly tinted, his motions easy, graceful, and gentlemanlike, his manners bland and pleasant. he was an honest man, and expressed himself decidedly and emphatically, but never bluntly or vulgarly.--mr. emerson was a man of good sense. his conversation was edifying and useful; never foolish or undignified.--in his theological opinions he was, to say the least, far from having any sympathy with calvinism. i have not supposed that he was, like dr. freeman, a humanitarian, though he may have been so." there was no honester chronicler than our clerical pepys, good, hearty, sweet-souled, fact-loving dr. john pierce of brookline, who knew the dates of birth and death of the graduates of harvard, starred and unstarred, better, one is tempted to say (_hibernice_), than they did themselves. there was not a nobler gentleman in charge of any boston parish than dr. charles lowell. but after the pulpit has said what it thinks of the pulpit, it is well to listen to what the pews have to say about it. this is what the late mr. george ticknor said in an article in the "christian examiner" for september, 1849. "mr. emerson, transplanted to the first church in boston six years before mr. buckminster's settlement, possessed, on the contrary, a graceful and dignified style of speaking, which was by no means without its attraction, but he lacked the fervor that could rouse the masses, and the original resources that could command the few." as to his religious beliefs, emerson writes to dr. sprague as follows: "i did not find in any manuscript or printed sermons that i looked at, any very explicit statement of opinion on the question between calvinists and socinians. he inclines obviously to what is ethical and universal in christianity; very little to the personal and historical.--i think i observe in his writings, as in the writings of unitarians down to a recent date, a studied reserve on the subject of the nature and offices of jesus. they had not made up their own minds on it. it was a mystery to them, and they let it remain so." mr. william emerson left, published, fifteen sermons and discourses, an oration pronounced at boston on the fourth of july, 1802, a collection of psalms and hymns, an historical sketch of the first church in boston, besides his contributions to the "monthly anthology," of which he was the editor. ruth haskins, the wife of william and the mother of ralph waldo emerson, is spoken of by the late dr. frothingham, in an article in the "christian examiner," as a woman "of great patience and fortitude, of the serenest trust in god, of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous bearing, one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority, and knew how to give the least trouble and the greatest happiness after that authority was resigned. both her mind and her character were of a superior order, and they set their stamp upon manners of peculiar softness and natural grace and quiet dignity. her sensible and kindly speech was always as good as the best instruction; her smile, though it was ever ready, was a reward." the reverend dr. furness of philadelphia, who grew up with her son, says, "waldo bore a strong resemblance to his father; the other children resembled their mother." such was the descent of ralph waldo emerson. if the ideas of parents survive as impressions or tendencies in their descendants, no man had a better right to an inheritance of theological instincts than this representative of a long line of ministers. the same trains of thought and feeling might naturally gain in force from another association of near family relationship, though not of blood. after the death of the first william emerson, the concord minister, his widow, mr. emerson's grandmother, married, as has been mentioned, his successor, dr. ezra ripley. the grandson spent much time in the family of dr. ripley, whose character he has drawn with exquisite felicity in a sketch read before the social circle of concord, and published in the "atlantic monthly" for november, 1883. mr. emerson says of him: "he was identified with the ideas and forms of the new england church, which expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the great camp and army of the puritans, which, however in its last days declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and liberated america.... the same faith made what was strong and what was weak in dr. ripley." it would be hard to find a more perfect sketch of character than mr. emerson's living picture of dr. ripley. i myself remember him as a comely little old gentleman, but he was not so communicative in a strange household as his clerical brethren, smiling john foster of brighton and chatty jonathan homer of newton. mr. emerson says, "he was a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable, manly, and public-spirited; his nature social, his house open to all men.--his brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. his friends were his study, and to see them loosened his talents and his tongue. in his house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. there was no waste and no stint. he was open-handed and just and generous. ingratitude and meanness in his beneficiaries did not wear out his compassion; he bore the insult, and the next day his basket for the beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were at their door." how like goldsmith's good dr. primrose! i do not know any writing of mr. emerson which brings out more fully his sense of humor,--of the picturesque in character,--and as a piece of composition, continuous, fluid, transparent, with a playful ripple here and there, it is admirable and delightful. another of his early companionships must have exercised a still more powerful influence on his character,--that of his aunt, mary moody emerson. he gave an account of her in a paper read before the woman's club several years ago, and published in the "atlantic monthly" for december, 1883. far more of mr. emerson is to be found in this aunt of his than in any other of his relations in the ascending series, with whose history we are acquainted. her story is an interesting one, but for that i must refer the reader to the article mentioned. her character and intellectual traits are what we are most concerned with. "her early reading was milton, young, akenside, samuel clarke, jonathan edwards, and always the bible. later, plato, plotinus, marcus antoninus, stewart, coleridge, herder, locke, madam de staã«l, channing, mackintosh, byron. nobody can read in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of old-school people, without seeing that milton and young had a religious authority in their minds, and nowise the slight merely entertaining quality of modern bards. and plato, aristotle, plotinus,--how venerable and organic as nature they are in her mind!" there are many sentences cited by mr. emerson which remind us very strongly of his own writings. such a passage as the following might have come from his essay, "nature," but it was written when her nephew was only four years old. "malden, 1807, september.--the rapture of feeling i would part from for days devoted to higher discipline. but when nature beams with such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its author,--feels it is related to him more than by any ties of creation,--it exults, too fondly, perhaps, for a state of trial. but in dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow, or appear to glow, with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which penetrates the spirits with wonder and curiosity,--then, however awed, who can fear?"--"a few pulsations of created beings, a few successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament, enable us to talk of time, make epochs, write histories,--to do more,--to date the revelations of god to man. but these lamps are held to measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history of god's operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. it is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying, acting. we personify it. we call it by every name of fleeting, dreaming, vaporing imagery. yet it is nothing. we exist in eternity. dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the approval of god." miss mary emerson showed something of the same feeling towards natural science which may be noted in her nephews waldo and charles. after speaking of "the poor old earth's chaotic state, brought so near in its long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist," she says:- "yet its youthful charms, as decked by the hand of moses' cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while poetry succumbs to science."--"and the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give the idea of the infinite, far, far better than when dignified with arts and industry; its oceans, when beating the symbols of countless ages, than when covered with cargoes of war and oppression. how grand its preparation for souls, souls who were to feel the divinity, before science had dissected the emotions and applied its steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither psychology nor element."--"usefulness, if it requires action, seems less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in god, retaining consciousness.... scorn trifles, lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do. sublimity of character must come from sublimity of motive." so far as hereditary and family influences can account for the character and intellect of ralph waldo emerson, we could hardly ask for a better inborn inheritance, or better counsels and examples. * * * * * having traced some of the distinguishing traits which belong by descent to mr. emerson to those who were before him, it is interesting to note how far they showed themselves in those of his own generation, his brothers. of these i will mention two, one of whom i knew personally. edward bliss emerson, who graduated at harvard college in 1824, three years after ralph waldo, held the first place in his class. he began the study of the law with daniel webster, but overworked himself and suffered a temporary disturbance of his reason. after this he made another attempt, but found his health unequal to the task and exiled himself to porto rico, where, in 1834, he died. two poems preserve his memory, one that of ralph waldo, in which he addresses his memory,- "ah, brother of the brief but blazing star," the other his own "last farewell," written in 1832, whilst sailing out of boston harbor. the lines are unaffected and very touching, full of that deep affection which united the brothers in the closest intimacy, and of the tenderest love for the mother whom he was leaving to see no more. i had in my early youth a key furnished me to some of the leading traits which were in due time to develop themselves in emerson's character and intelligence. as on the wall of some great artist's studio one may find unfinished sketches which he recognizes as the first growing conceptions of pictures painted in after years, so we see that nature often sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. the sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life is not rich enough to carry out the divine idea. such an unfinished but unmatched outline is that which i find in the long portrait-gallery of memory, recalled by the name of charles chauncy emerson. save for a few brief glimpses of another, almost lost among my life's early shadows, this youth was the most angelic adolescent my eyes ever beheld. remembering what well-filtered blood it was that ran in the veins of the race from which he was descended, those who knew him in life might well say with dryden,- "if by traduction came thy mind our wonder is the less to find a soul so charming from a stock so good." his image is with me in its immortal youth as when, almost fifty years ago, i spoke of him in these lines, which i may venture to quote from myself, since others have quoted them before me. thou calm, chaste scholar! i can see thee now, the first young laurels on thy pallid brow, o'er thy slight figure floating lightly down in graceful folds the academic gown, on thy curled lip the classic lines that taught how nice the mind that sculptured them with thought, and triumph glistening in the clear blue eye, too bright to live,--but o, too fair to die. being about seven years younger than waldo, he must have received much of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother's hands. i told the story at a meeting of our historical society of charles emerson's coming into my study,--this was probably in 1826 or 1827,--taking up hazlitt's "british poets" and turning at once to a poem of marvell's, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner. the influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of emerson's poems, and charles' liking for him was very probably caught from waldo. when charles was nearly through college, a periodical called "the harvard register" was published by students and recent graduates. three articles were contributed by him to this periodical. two of them have the titles "conversation," "friendship." his quotations are from horace and juvenal, plato, plutarch, bacon, jeremy taylor, shakespeare, and scott. there are passages in these essays which remind one strongly of his brother, the lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later. take this as an example:- "men and mind are my studies. i need no observatory high in air to aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect. i do not want a costly apparatus to give pomp to my pursuit or to disguise its inutility. i do not desire to travel and see foreign lands and learn all knowledge and speak with all tongues, before i am prepared for my employment. i have merely to go out of my door; nay, i may stay at home at my chambers, and i shall have enough to do and enjoy." the feeling of this sentence shows itself constantly in emerson's poems. he finds his inspiration in the objects about him, the forest in which he walks; the sheet of water which the hermit of a couple of seasons made famous; the lazy musketaquid; the titmouse that mocked his weakness in the bitter cold winter's day; the mountain that rose in the horizon; the lofty pines; the lowly flowers. all talked with him as brothers and sisters, and he with them as of his own household. the same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his maturity, we recognize in one of the essays of the youth. "all men of gifted intellect and fine genius," says charles emerson, "must entertain a noble idea of friendship. our reverence we are constrained to yield where it is due,--to rank, merit, talents. but our affections we give not thus easily. 'the hand of douglas is his own.'" --"i am willing to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good men hold cheap. all this i will do out of regard to the decent conventions of polite life. but my friends i must know, and, knowing, i must love. there must be a daily beauty in their life that shall secure my constant attachment. i cannot stand upon the footing of ordinary acquaintance. friendship is aristocratical--the affections which are prostituted to every suitor i will not accept." here are glimpses of what the youth was to be, of what the man who long outlived him became. here is the dignity which commands reverence,--a dignity which, with all ralph waldo emerson's sweetness of manner and expression, rose almost to majesty in his serene presence. there was something about charles emerson which lifted those he was with into a lofty and pure region of thought and feeling. a vulgar soul stood abashed in his presence. i could never think of him in the presence of such, listening to a paltry sentiment or witnessing a mean action without recalling milton's line, "back stepped those two fair angels half amazed," and thinking how he might well have been taken for a celestial messenger. no doubt there is something of idealization in all these reminiscences, and of that exaggeration which belongs to the _laudator temporis acti_. but charles emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college and out of college. george stillman hillard was his rival. neck and neck they ran the race for the enviable position of first scholar in the class of 1828, and when hillard was announced as having the first part assigned to him, the excitement within the college walls, and to some extent outside of them, was like that when the telegraph proclaims the result of a presidential election,--or the winner of the derby. but hillard honestly admired his brilliant rival. "who has a part with **** at this next exhibition?" i asked him one day, as i met him in the college yard. "***** the post," answered hillard. "why call him _the post_?" said i. "he is a wooden creature," said hillard. "hear him and charles emerson translating from the latin _domus tota inflammata erat_. the post will render the words, 'the whole house was on fire.' charles emerson will translate the sentence 'the entire edifice was wrapped in flames.'" it was natural enough that a young admirer should prefer the bernini drapery of charles emerson's version to the simple nudity of "the post's" rendering. * * * * * the nest is made ready long beforehand for the bird which is to be bred in it and to fly from it. the intellectual atmosphere into which a scholar is born, and from which he draws the breath of his early mental life, must be studied if we would hope to understand him thoroughly. when the present century began, the elements, thrown into confusion by the long struggle for independence, had not had time to arrange themselves in new combinations. the active intellects of the country had found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of political and social life. whatever purely literary talent existed was as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and there, waiting to form centres of condensation. such a nebular spot had been brightening in and about boston for a number of years, when, in the year 1804, a small cluster of names became visible as representing a modest constellation of literary luminaries: john thornton kirkland, afterwards president of harvard university; joseph stevens buckminster; john sylvester john gardiner; william tudor; samuel cooper thacher; william emerson. these were the chief stars of the new cluster, and their light reached the world, or a small part of it, as reflected from the pages of "the monthly anthology," which very soon came under the editorship of the reverend william emerson. the father of ralph waldo emerson may be judged of in good measure by the associates with whom he was thus connected. a brief sketch of these friends and fellow-workers of his may not be out of place, for these men made the local sphere of thought into which ralph waldo emerson was born. john thornton kirkland should have been seen and heard as he is remembered by old graduates of harvard, sitting in the ancient presidential chair, on commencement day, and calling in his penetrating but musical accents: "_expectatur oratio in lingua latina_" or "_vernacula_," if the "first scholar" was about to deliver the english oration. it was a presence not to be forgotten. his "shining morning face" was round as a baby's, and talked as pleasantly as his voice did, with smiles for accents and dimples for punctuation. mr. ticknor speaks of his sermons as "full of intellectual wealth and practical wisdom, with sometimes a quaintness that bordered on humor." it was of him that the story was always told,--it may be as old as the invention of printing,--that he threw his sermons into a barrel, where they went to pieces and got mixed up, and that when he was going to preach he fished out what he thought would be about enough for a sermon, and patched the leaves together as he best might. the reverend dr. lowell says: "he always found the right piece, and that was better than almost any of his brethren could have found in what they had written with twice the labor." mr. cabot, who knew all emerson's literary habits, says he used to fish out the number of leaves he wanted for a lecture in somewhat the same way. emerson's father, however, was very methodical, according to dr. lowell, and had "a place for everything, and everything in its place." dr. kirkland left little to be remembered by, and like many of the most interesting personalities we have met with, has become a very thin ghost to the grandchildren of his contemporaries. joseph stevens buckminster was the pulpit darling of his day, in boston. the beauty of his person, the perfection of his oratory, the finish of his style, added to the sweetness of his character, made him one of those living idols which seem to be as necessary to protestantism as images and pictures are to romanism. john sylvester john gardiner, once a pupil of the famous dr. parr, was then the leading episcopal clergyman of boston. him i reconstruct from scattered hints i have met with as a scholarly, social man, with a sanguine temperament and the cheerful ways of a wholesome english parson, blest with a good constitution and a comfortable benefice. mild orthodoxy, ripened in unitarian sunshine, is a very agreeable aspect of christianity, and none was readier than dr. gardiner, if the voice of tradition may be trusted, to fraternize with his brothers of the liberal persuasion, and to make common cause with them in all that related to the interests of learning. william tudor was a chief connecting link between the period of the "monthly anthology," and that of the "north american review," for he was a frequent contributor to the first of these periodicals, and he was the founder of the second. edward everett characterizes him, in speaking of his "letters on the eastern states," as a scholar and a gentleman, an impartial observer, a temperate champion, a liberal opponent, and a correct writer. daniel webster bore similar testimony to his talents and character. samuel cooper thacher was hardly twenty years old when the "anthology" was founded, and died when he was only a little more than thirty. he contributed largely to that periodical, besides publishing various controversial sermons, and writing the "memoir of buckminster." there was no more brilliant circle than this in any of our cities. there was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much scholarship. the "anthology" was the literary precursor of the "north american review," and the theological herald of the "christian examiner." like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity. it mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine, with all manner of literary chips and shavings. it had magazine ways that smacked of sylvanus urban; leading articles with balanced paragraphs which recalled the marching tramp of johnson; translations that might have been signed with the name of creech, and odes to sensibility, and the like, which recalled the syrupy sweetness and languid trickle of laura matilda's sentimentalities. it talked about "the london reviewers" with a kind of provincial deference. it printed articles with quite too much of the license of swift and prior for the magazines of to-day. but it had opinions of its own, and would compare well enough with the "gentleman's magazine," to say nothing of "my grandmother's review, the british." a writer in the third volume (1806) says: "a taste for the belles lettres is rapidly spreading in our country. i believe that, fifty years ago, england had never seen a miscellany or a review so well conducted as our 'anthology,' however superior such publications may now be in that kingdom." it is well worth one's while to look over the volumes of the "anthology" to see what our fathers and grandfathers were thinking about, and how they expressed themselves. the stiffness of puritanism was pretty well relaxed when a magazine conducted by clergymen could say that "the child,"--meaning the new periodical,--"shall not be destitute of the manners of a gentleman, nor a stranger to genteel amusements. he shall attend theatres, museums, balls, and whatever polite diversions the town shall furnish." the reader of the "anthology" will find for his reward an improving discourse on "ambition," and a commendable schoolboy's "theme" on "inebriation." he will learn something which may be for his advantage about the "anjou cabbage," and may profit by a "remedy for asthma." a controversy respecting the merits of sir richard blackmore may prove too little exciting at the present time, and he can turn for relief to the epistle "studiosus" addresses to "alcander." if the lines of "the minstrel" who hails, like longfellow in later years, from "the district of main," fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse "r.t. paine, jr., esq.," of tameness when he exclaims:- "rise columbia, brave and free, poise the globe and bound the sea!" but the writers did not confine themselves to native or even to english literature, for there is a distinct mention of "mr. goethe's new novel," and an explicit reference to "dante aligheri, an italian bard." but let the smiling reader go a little farther and he will find mr. buckminster's most interesting account of the destruction of goldau. and in one of these same volumes he will find the article, by dr. jacob bigelow, doubtless, which was the first hint of our rural cemeteries, and foreshadowed that new era in our underground civilization which is sweetening our atmospheric existence. the late president josiah quincy, in his "history of the boston athenaeum," pays a high tribute of respect to the memory and the labors of the gentlemen who founded that institution and conducted the "anthology." a literary journal had already been published in boston, but very soon failed for want of patronage. an enterprising firm of publishers, "being desirous that the work should be continued, applied to the reverend william emerson, a clergyman of the place, distinguished for energy and literary taste; and by his exertions several gentlemen of boston and its vicinity, conspicuous for talent and zealous for literature, were induced to engage in conducting the work, and for this purpose they formed themselves into a society. this society was not completely organized until the year 1805, when dr. gardiner was elected president, and william emerson vice-president. the society thus formed maintained its existence with reputation for about six years, and issued ten octavo volumes from the press, constituting one of the most lasting and honorable monuments of the literature of the period, and may be considered as a true revival of polite learning in this country after that decay and neglect which resulted from the distractions of the revolutionary war, and as forming an epoch in the intellectual history of the united states. its records yet remain, an evidence that it was a pleasant, active, high-principled association of literary men, laboring harmoniously to elevate the literary standard of the time, and with a success which may well be regarded as remarkable, considering the little sympathy they received from the community, and the many difficulties with which they had to struggle." the publication of the "anthology" began in 1804, when mr. william emerson was thirty-four years of age, and it ceased to be published in the year of his death, 1811. ralph waldo emerson was eight years old at that time. his intellectual life began, we may say, while the somewhat obscure afterglow of the "anthology" was in the western horizon of the new england sky. the nebula which was to form a cluster about the "north american review" did not take definite shape until 1815. there is no such memorial of the growth of american literature as is to be found in the first half century of that periodical. it is easy to find fault with it for uniform respectability and occasional dulness. but take the names of its contributors during its first fifty years from the literary record of that period, and we should have but a meagre list of mediocrities, saved from absolute poverty by the genius of two or three writers like irving and cooper. strike out the names of webster, everett, story, sumner, and cushing; of bryant, dana, longfellow, and lowell; of prescott, ticknor, motley, sparks, and bancroft; of verplanck, hillard, and whipple; of stuart and robinson; of norton, palfrey, peabody, and bowen; and, lastly, that of emerson himself, and how much american classic literature would be left for a new edition of "miller's retrospect"? these were the writers who helped to make the "north american review" what it was during the period of emerson's youth and early manhood. these, and men like them, gave boston its intellectual character. we may count as symbols the three hills of "this darling town of ours," as emerson called it, and say that each had its beacon. civil liberty lighted the torch on one summit, religious freedom caught the flame and shone from the second, and the lamp of the scholar has burned steadily on the third from the days when john cotton preached his first sermon to those in which we are living. the social religious influences of the first part of the century must not be forgotten. the two high-caste religions of that day were white-handed unitarianism and ruffled-shirt episcopalianism. what called itself "society" was chiefly distributed between them. within less than fifty years a social revolution has taken place which has somewhat changed the relation between these and other worshipping bodies. this movement is the general withdrawal of the native new englanders of both sexes from domestic service. a large part of the "hired help,"--for the word servant was commonly repudiated,--worshipped, not with their employers, but at churches where few or no well-appointed carriages stood at the doors. the congregations that went chiefly from the drawing-room and those which were largely made up of dwellers in the culinary studio were naturally separated by a very distinct line of social cleavage. a certain exclusiveness and fastidiousness, not reminding us exactly of primitive christianity, was the inevitable result. this must always be remembered in judging the men and women of that day and their immediate descendants, as much as the surviving prejudices of those whose parents were born subjects of king george in the days when loyalty to the crown was a virtue. the line of social separation was more marked, probably, in boston, the headquarters of unitarianism, than in the other large cities; and even at the present day our jerusalem and samaria, though they by no means refuse dealing with each other, do not exchange so many cards as they do checks and dollars. the exodus of those children of israel from the house of bondage, as they chose to consider it, and their fusion with the mass of independent citizens, got rid of a class distinction which was felt even in the sanctuary. true religious equality is harder to establish than civil liberty. no man has done more for spiritual republicanism than emerson, though he came from the daintiest sectarian circle of the time in the whole country. such were emerson's intellectual and moral parentage, nurture, and environment; such was the atmosphere in which he grew up from youth to manhood. chapter i. birthplace.--boyhood.--college life. 1803-1823. to _aet_. 20. ralph waldo emerson was born in boston, massachusetts, on the 25th of may, 1803. he was the second of five sons; william, r.w., edward bliss, robert bulkeley, and charles chauncy. his birthplace and that of our other illustrious bostonian, benjamin franklin, were within a kite-string's distance of each other. when the baby philosopher of the last century was carried from milk street through the narrow passage long known as bishop's alley, now hawley street, he came out in summer street, very nearly opposite the spot where, at the beginning of this century, stood the parsonage of the first church, the home of the reverend william emerson, its pastor, and the birthplace of his son, ralph waldo. the oblong quadrangle between newbury, now washington street, pond, now bedford street, summer street, and the open space called church green, where the new south church was afterwards erected, is represented on bonner's maps of 1722 and 1769 as an almost blank area, not crossed or penetrated by a single passageway. even so late as less than half a century ago this region was still a most attractive little _rus in urbe_. the sunny gardens of the late judge charles jackson and the late mr. s.p. gardner opened their flowers and ripened their fruits in the places now occupied by great warehouses and other massive edifices. the most aristocratic pears, the "saint michael," the "brown bury," found their natural homes in these sheltered enclosures. the fine old mansion of judge william prescott looked out upon these gardens. some of us can well remember the window of his son's, the historian's, study, the light from which used every evening to glimmer through the leaves of the pear-trees while "the conquest of mexico" was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less formidable than those encountered by cortes. it was a charmed region in which emerson first drew his breath, and i am fortunate in having a communication from one who knew it and him longer than almost any other living person. mr. john lowell gardner, a college classmate and life-long friend of mr. emerson, has favored me with a letter which contains matters of interest concerning him never before given to the public. with his kind permission i have made some extracts and borrowed such facts as seemed especially worthy of note from his letter. "i may be said to have known emerson from the very beginning. a very low fence divided my father's estate in summer street from the field in which i remember the old wooden parsonage to have existed,--but this field, when we were very young, was to be covered by chauncy place church and by the brick houses on summer street. where the family removed to i do not remember, but i always knew the boys, william, ralph, and perhaps edward, and i again associated with ralph at the latin school, where we were instructed by master gould from 1815 to 1817, entering college in the latter year. "... i have no recollection of his relative rank as a scholar, but it was undoubtedly high, though not the highest. he never was idle or a lounger, nor did he ever engage in frivolous pursuits. i should say that his conduct was absolutely faultless. it was impossible that there should be any feeling about him but of regard and affection. he had then the same manner and courtly hesitation in addressing you that you have known in him since. still, he was not prominent in the class, and, but for what all the world has since known of him, his would not have been a conspicuous figure to his classmates in recalling college days. "the fact that we were almost the only latin school fellows in the class, and the circumstance that he was slow during the freshman year to form new acquaintances, brought us much together, and an intimacy arose which continued through our college life. we were in the habit of taking long strolls together, often stopping for repose at distant points, as at mount auburn, etc.... emerson was not talkative; he never spoke for effect; his utterances were well weighed and very deliberately made, but there was a certain flash when he uttered anything that was more than usually worthy to be remembered. he was so universally amiable and complying that my evil spirit would sometimes instigate me to take advantage of his gentleness and forbearance, but nothing could disturb his equanimity. all that was wanting to render him an almost perfect character was a few harsher traits and perhaps more masculine vigor. "on leaving college our paths in life were so remote from each other that we met very infrequently. he soon became, as it were, public property, and i was engrossed for many years in my commercial undertakings. all his course of life is known to many survivors. i am inclined to believe he had a most liberal spirit. i remember that some years since, when it was known that our classmate ---was reduced almost to absolute want by the war, in which he lost his two sons, emerson exerted himself to raise a fund among his classmates for his relief, and, there being very few possible subscribers, made what i considered a noble contribution, and this you may be sure was not from any southern sentiment on the part of emerson. i send you herewith the two youthful productions of emerson of which i spoke to you some time since." the first of these is a prose essay of four pages, written for a discussion in which the professions of divinity, medicine, and law were to be weighed against each other. emerson had the lawyer's side to advocate. it is a fair and sensible paper, not of special originality or brilliancy. his opening paragraph is worth citing, as showing the same instinct for truth which displayed itself in all his after writings and the conduct of his life. "it is usual in advocating a favorite subject to appropriate all possible excellence, and endeavor to concentrate every doubtful auxiliary, that we may fortify to the utmost the theme of our attention. such a design should be utterly disdained, except as far as is consistent with fairness; and the sophistry of weak arguments being abandoned, a bold appeal should be made to the heart, for the tribute of honest conviction, with regard to the merits of the subject." from many boys this might sound like well-meaning commonplace, but in the history of mr. emerson's life that "bold appeal to the heart," that "tribute of honest conviction," were made eloquent and real. the boy meant it when he said it. to carry out his law of sincerity and self-trust the man had to sacrifice much that was dear to him, but he did not flinch from his early principles. it must not be supposed that the blameless youth was an ascetic in his college days. the other old manuscript mr. gardner sends me is marked "'song for knights of square table,' r.w.e." there are twelve verses of this song, with a chorus of two lines. the muses and all the deities, not forgetting bacchus, were duly invited to the festival. "let the doors of olympus be open for all to descend and make merry in chivalry's hall." * * * * * mr. sanborn has kindly related to me several circumstances told him by emerson about his early years. the parsonage was situated at the corner of summer and what is now chauncy streets. it had a yard, and an orchard which emerson said was as large as dr. ripley's, which might have been some two or three acres. afterwards there was a brick house looking on summer street, in which emerson the father lived. it was separated, emerson said, by a brick wall from a garden in which _pears grew_ (a fact a boy is likely to remember). master ralph waldo used to _sit on this wall_,--but we cannot believe he ever got off it on the wrong side, unless politely asked to do so. on the occasion of some alarm the little boy was carried in his nightgown to a neighboring house. after reverend william emerson's death mrs. emerson removed to a house in beacon street, where the athenaeum building now stands. she kept some boarders,--among them lemuel shaw, afterwards chief justice of the state of massachusetts. it was but a short distance to the common, and waldo and charles used to drive their mother's cow there to pasture. * * * * * the reverend doctor rufus ellis, the much respected living successor of william emerson as minister of the first church, says that r.w. emerson must have been born in the old parsonage, as his father (who died when he was eight years old) lived but a very short time in "the new parsonage," which was, doubtless, the "brick house" above referred to. * * * * * we get a few glimpses of the boy from other sources. mr. cooke tells us that he entered the public grammar school at the age of eight years, and soon afterwards the latin school. at the age of eleven he was turning virgil into very readable english heroics. he loved the study of greek; was fond of reading history and given to the frequent writing of verses. but he thinks "the idle books under the bench at the latin school" were as profitable to him as his regular studies. another glimpse of him is that given us by mr. ireland from the "boyhood memories" of rufus dawes. his old schoolmate speaks of him as "a spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be about ten years old,--whose image more than any other is still deeply stamped upon my mind, as i then saw him and loved him, i knew not why, and thought him so angelic and remarkable." that "blue nankeen" sounds strangely, it may be, to the readers of this later generation, but in the first quarter of the century blue and yellow or buff-colored cotton from china were a common summer clothing of children. the places where the factories and streets of the cities of lowell and lawrence were to rise were then open fields and farms. my recollection is that we did not think very highly of ourselves when we were in blue nankeen,--a dull-colored fabric, too nearly of the complexion of the slates on which we did our ciphering. emerson was not particularly distinguished in college. having a near connection in the same class as he, and being, as a cambridge boy, generally familiar with the names of the more noted young men in college from the year when george bancroft, caleb cushing, and francis william winthrop graduated until after i myself left college, i might have expected to hear something of a young man who afterwards became one of the great writers of his time. i do not recollect hearing of him except as keeping school for a short time in cambridge, before he settled as a minister. his classmate, mr. josiah quincy, writes thus of his college days:- "two only of my classmates can be fairly said to have got into history, although one of them, charles w. upham [the connection of mine referred to above] has written history very acceptably. ralph waldo emerson and robert w. barnwell, for widely different reasons, have caused their names to be known to well-informed americans. of emerson, i regret to say, there are few notices in my journals. here is the sort of way in which i speak of the man who was to make so profound an impression upon the thought of his time. 'i went to the chapel to hear emerson's dissertation: a very good one, but rather too long to give much pleasure to the hearers.' the fault, i suspect, was in the hearers; and another fact which i have mentioned goes to confirm this belief. it seems that emerson accepted the duty of delivering the poem on class day, after seven others had been asked who positively, refused. so it appears that, in the opinion of this critical class, the author of the 'woodnotes' and the 'humble bee' ranked about eighth in poetical ability. it can only be because the works of the other five [seven] have been 'heroically unwritten' that a different impression has come to prevail in the outside world. but if, according to the measurement of undergraduates, emerson's ability as a poet was not conspicuous, it must also be admitted that, in the judgment of persons old enough to know better, he was not credited with that mastery of weighty prose which the world has since accorded him. in our senior year the higher classes competed for the boylston prizes for english composition. emerson and i sent in our essays with the rest and were fortunate enough to take the two prizes; but--alas for the infallibility of academic decisions! emerson received the second prize. i was of course much pleased with the award of this intelligent committee, and should have been still more gratified had they mentioned that the man who was to be the most original and influential writer born in america was my unsuccessful competitor. but emerson, incubating over deeper matters than were dreamt of in the established philosophy of elegant letters, seems to have given no sign of the power that was fashioning itself for leadership in a new time. he was quiet, unobtrusive, and only a fair scholar according to the standard of the college authorities. and this is really all i have to say about my most distinguished classmate." barnwell, the first scholar in the class, delivered the valedictory oration, and emerson the poem. neither of these performances was highly spoken of by mr. quincy. i was surprised to find by one of the old catalogues that emerson roomed during a part of his college course with a young man whom i well remember, j.g.k. gourdin. the two gourdins, robert and john gaillard keith, were dashing young fellows as i recollect them, belonging to charleston, south carolina. the "southerners" were the reigning college _elegans_ of that time, the _merveilleux_, the _mirliflores_, of their day. their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the prints of their little delicate calfskin boots in the snow were objects of great admiration to the village boys of the period. i cannot help wondering what brought emerson and the showy, fascinating john gourdin together as room-mates. chapter ii. 1823-1828. aet. 20-25. extract from a letter to a classmate.--school-teaching.--study of divinity.--"approbated" to preach.--visit to the south.--preaching in various places. we get a few brief glimpses of emerson during the years following his graduation. he writes in 1823 to a classmate who had gone from harvard to andover:- "i am delighted to hear there is such a profound studying of german and hebrew, parkhurst and jahn, and such other names as the memory aches to think of, on foot at andover. meantime, unitarianism will not hide her honors; as many hard names are taken, and as much theological mischief is planned, at cambridge as at andover. by the time this generation gets upon the stage, if the controversy will not have ceased, it will run such a tide that we shall hardly he able to speak to one another, and there will be a guelf and ghibelline quarrel, which cannot tell where the differences lie." "you can form no conception how much one grovelling in the city needs the excitement and impulse of literary example. the sight of broad vellum-bound quartos, the very mention of greek and german names, the glimpse of a dusty, tugging scholar, will wake you up to emulation for a month." after leaving college, and while studying divinity, emerson employed a part of his time in giving instruction in several places successively. emerson's older brother william was teaching in boston, and ralph waldo, after graduating, joined him in that occupation. in the year 1825 or 1826, he taught school also in chelmsford, a town of middlesex county, massachusetts, a part of which helped to constitute the city of lowell. one of his pupils in that school, the honorable josiah gardiner abbott, has favored me with the following account of his recollections:-the school of which mr. emerson had the charge was an old-fashioned country "academy." mr. emerson was probably studying for the ministry while teaching there. judge abbott remembers the impression he made on the boys. he was very grave, quiet, and very impressive in his appearance. there was something engaging, almost fascinating, about him; he was never harsh or severe, always perfectly self-controlled, never punished except with words, but exercised complete command over the boys. his old pupil recalls the stately, measured way in which, for some offence the little boy had committed, he turned on him, saying only these two words: "oh, sad!" that was enough, for he had the faculty of making the boys love him. one of his modes of instruction was to give the boys a piece of reading to carry home with them,--from some book like plutarch's lives,--and the next day to examine them and find out how much they retained from their reading. judge abbott remembers a peculiar look in his eyes, as if he saw something beyond what seemed to be in the field of vision. the whole impression left on this pupil's mind was such as no other teacher had ever produced upon him. mr. emerson also kept a school for a short time at cambridge, and among his pupils was mr. john holmes. his impressions seem to be very much like those of judge abbott. my brother speaks of mr. emerson thus:- "calm, as not doubting the virtue residing in his sceptre. 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. looking back, he seems to me rather like a captive philosopher set to tending flocks; resigned to his destiny, but not amused with its incongruities. he once recommended the use of rhyme as a cohesive for historical items." in 1823, two years after graduating, emerson began studying for the ministry. he studied under the direction of dr. charming, attending some of the lectures in the divinity school at cambridge, though not enrolled as one of its regular students. the teachings of that day were such as would now be called "old-fashioned unitarianism." but no creed can be held to be a finality. from edwards to mayhew, from mayhew to channing, from channing to emerson, the passage is like that which leads from the highest lock of a canal to the ocean level. it is impossible for human nature to remain permanently shut up in the highest lock of calvinism. if the gates are not opened, the mere leakage of belief or unbelief will before long fill the next compartment, and the freight of doctrine finds itself on the lower level of arminianism, or pelagianism, or even subsides to arianism. from this level to that of unitarianism the outlet is freer, and the subsidence more rapid. and from unitarianism to christian theism, the passage is largely open for such as cannot accept the evidence of the supernatural in the history of the church. there were many shades of belief in the liberal churches. if de tocqueville's account of unitarian preaching in boston at the time of his visit is true, the savoyard vicar of rousseau would have preached acceptably in some of our pulpits. in fact, the good vicar might have been thought too conservative by some of our unharnessed theologians. at the period when emerson reached manhood, unitarianism was the dominating form of belief in the more highly educated classes of both of the two great new england centres, the town of boston and the university at cambridge. president kirkland was at the head of the college, henry ware was professor of theology, andrews norton of sacred literature, followed in 1830 by john gorham palfrey in the same office. james freeman, charles lowell, and william ellery channing were preaching in boston. i have mentioned already as a simple fact of local history, that the more exclusive social circles of boston and cambridge were chiefly connected with the unitarian or episcopalian churches. a cambridge graduate of ambition and ability found an opening far from undesirable in a worldly point of view, in a profession which he was led to choose by higher motives. it was in the unitarian pulpit that the brilliant talents of buckminster and everett had found a noble eminence from which their light could shine before men. descended from a long line of ministers, a man of spiritual nature, a reader of plato, of augustine, of jeremy taylor, full of hope for his fellow-men, and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly, of a growing power of thought, it was natural that emerson should turn from the task of a school-master to the higher office of a preacher. it is hard to conceive of emerson in either of the other so-called learned professions. his devotion to truth for its own sake and his feeling about science would have kept him out of both those dusty highways. his brother william had previously begun the study of divinity, but found his mind beset with doubts and difficulties, and had taken to the profession of law. it is not unlikely that mr. emerson was more or less exercised with the same questionings. he has said, speaking of his instructors: "if they had examined me, they probably would not have let me preach at all." his eyes had given him trouble, so that he had not taken notes of the lectures which he heard in the divinity school, which accounted for his being excused from examination. in 1826, after three years' study, he was "approbated to preach" by the middlesex association of ministers. his health obliging him to seek a southern climate, he went in the following winter to south carolina and florida. during this absence he preached several times in charleston and other places. on his return from the south he preached in new bedford, in northampton, in concord, and in boston. his attractiveness as a preacher, of which we shall have sufficient evidence in a following chapter, led to his being invited to share the duties of a much esteemed and honored city clergyman, and the next position in which we find him is that of a settled minister in boston. chapter iii. 1828-1833. aet. 25-30. settled as colleague of rev. henry ware.--married to ellen louisa tucker.--sermon at the ordination of rev. h.b. goodwin.--his pastoral and other labors.--emerson and father taylor.--death of mrs. emerson.--difference of opinion with some of his parishioners.--sermon explaining his views.--resignation of his pastorate. on the 11th of march, 1829, emerson was ordained as colleague with the reverend henry ware, minister of the second church in boston. in september of the same year he was married to miss ellen louisa tucker. the resignation of his colleague soon after his settlement threw all the pastoral duties upon the young minister, who seems to have performed them diligently and acceptably. mr. conway gives the following brief account of his labors, and tells in the same connection a story of father taylor too good not to be repeated:- "emerson took an active interest in the public affairs of boston. he was on its school board, and was chosen chaplain of the state senate. he invited the anti-slavery lecturers into his church, and helped philanthropists of other denominations in their work. father taylor [the methodist preacher to the sailors], to whom dickens gave an english fame, found in him his most important supporter when establishing the seaman's mission in boston. this was told me by father taylor himself in his old age. i happened to be in his company once, when he spoke rather sternly about my leaving the methodist church; but when i spoke of the part emerson had in it, he softened at once, and spoke with emotion of his great friend. i have no doubt that if the good father of boston seamen was proud of any personal thing, it was of the excellent answer he is said to have given to some methodists who objected to his friendship for emerson. being a unitarian, they insisted that he must go to"--[the place which a divine of charles the second's day said it was not good manners to mention in church].--"'it does look so,' said father taylor, 'but i am sure of one thing: if emerson goes to'"--[that place]--"'he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.'" in 1830, emerson took part in the services at the ordination of the reverend h.b. goodwin as dr. ripley's colleague. his address on giving the right hand of fellowship was printed, but is not included among his collected works. the fair prospects with which emerson began his life as a settled minister were too soon darkened. in february, 1832, the wife of his youth, who had been for some time in failing health, died of consumption. he had become troubled with doubts respecting a portion of his duties, and it was not in his nature to conceal these doubts from his people. on the 9th of september, 1832, he preached a sermon on the lord's supper, in which he announced unreservedly his conscientious scruples against administering that ordinance, and the grounds upon which those scruples were founded. this discourse, as his only printed sermon, and as one which heralded a movement in new england theology which has never stopped from that day to this, deserves some special notice. the sermon is in no sense "emersonian" except in its directness, its sweet temper, and outspoken honesty. he argues from his comparison of texts in a perfectly sober, old-fashioned way, as his ancestor peter bulkeley might have done. it happened to that worthy forefather of emerson that upon his "pressing a piece of _charity_ disagreeable to the will of the _ruling elder_, there was occasioned an unhappy _discord_ in the church of _concord_; which yet was at last healed, by their calling in the help of a _council_ and the _ruling elder's_ abdication." so says cotton mather. whether zeal had grown cooler or charity grown warmer in emerson's days we need not try to determine. the sermon was only a more formal declaration of views respecting the lord's supper, which he had previously made known in a conference with some of the most active members of his church. as a committee of the parish reported resolutions radically differing from his opinion on the subject, he preached this sermon and at the same time resigned his office. there was no "discord," there was no need of a "council." nothing could be more friendly, more truly christian, than the manner in which mr. emerson expressed himself in this parting discourse. all the kindness of his nature warms it throughout. he details the differences of opinion which have existed in the church with regard to the ordinance. he then argues from the language of the evangelists that it was not intended to be a permanent institution. he takes up the statement of paul in the epistle to the corinthians, which he thinks, all things considered, ought not to alter our opinion derived from the evangelists. he does not think that we are to rely upon the opinions and practices of the primitive church. if that church believed the institution to be permanent, their belief does not settle the question for us. on every other subject, succeeding times have learned to form a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of christianity than was the practice of the early ages. "but, it is said, 'admit that the rite was not designed to be perpetual.' what harm doth it?" he proceeds to give reasons which show it to be inexpedient to continue the observance of the rite. it was treating that as authoritative which, as he believed that he had shown from scripture, was not so. it confused the idea of god by transferring the worship of him to christ. christ is the mediator only as the instructor of man. in the least petition to god "the soul stands alone with god, and jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or child." again:- "the use of the elements, however suitable to the people and the modes of thought in the east, where it originated, is foreign and unsuited to affect us. the day of formal religion is past, and we are to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. the jewish was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no life, and the almighty god was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke and forms were shadows. this man lived and died true to that purpose; and with his blessed word and life before us, christians must contend that it is a matter of vital importance,--really a duty to commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be acceptable to their understanding or not. is not this to make vain the gift of god? is not this to turn back the hand on the dial?" to these objections he adds the practical consideration that it brings those who do not partake of the communion service into an unfavorable relation with those who do. the beautiful spirit of the man shows itself in all its noble sincerity in these words at the close of his argument:- "having said this, i have said all. i have no hostility to this institution; i am only stating my want of sympathy with it. neither should i ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people, had i not been called by my office to administer it. that is the end of my opposition, that i am not interested in it. i am content that it stand to the end of the world if it please men and please heaven, and i shall rejoice in all the good it produces." he then announces that, as it is the prevailing opinion and feeling in our religious community that it is a part of a pastor's duties to administer this rite, he is about to resign the office which had been confided to him. this is the only sermon of mr. emerson's ever published. it was impossible to hear or to read it without honoring the preacher for his truthfulness, and recognizing the force of his statement and reasoning. it was equally impossible that he could continue his ministrations over a congregation which held to the ordinance he wished to give up entirely. and thus it was, that with the most friendly feelings on both sides, mr. emerson left the pulpit of the second church and found himself obliged to make a beginning in a new career. chapter iv. 1833-1838. aet. 30-35. section 1. visit to europe.--on his return preaches in different places.--emerson in the pulpit.--at newton.--fixes his residence at concord.--the old manse.--lectures in boston.--lectures on michael angelo and on milton published in the "north american review."--beginning of the correspondence with carlyle.--letters to the rev. james freeman clarke.--republication of "sartor resartus." section 2. emerson's second marriage.--his new residence in concord.--historical address.--course of ten lectures on english literature delivered in boston.--the concord battle hymn.--preaching in concord and east lexington.--accounts of his preaching by several hearers.--a course of lectures on the nature and ends of history.--address on war.--death of edward bliss emerson.--death of charles chauncy emerson. section 3. publication of "nature."--outline of this essay.--its reception.--address before the phi beta kappa society. section 1. in the year 1833 mr. emerson visited europe for the first time. a great change had come over his life, and he needed the relief which a corresponding change of outward circumstances might afford him. a brief account of this visit is prefixed to the volume entitled "english traits." he took a short tour, in which he visited sicily, italy, and france, and, crossing from boulogne, landed at the tower stairs in london. he finds nothing in his diary to publish concerning visits to places. but he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the rough caricatures in which carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together, or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was explosive. horatio greenough and walter savage landor are the chief persons he speaks of as having met upon the continent. of these he reports various opinions as delivered in conversation. he mentions incidentally that he visited professor amici, who showed him his microscopes "magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters." emerson hardly knew his privilege; he may have been the first american to look through an immersion lens with the famous modena professor. mr. emerson says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, coleridge, wordsworth, landor, de quincey, carlyle. his accounts of his interviews with these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further abbreviation. goethe and scott, whom he would have liked to look upon, were dead; wellington he saw at westminster abbey, at the funeral of wilberforce. his impressions of each of the distinguished persons whom he visited should be looked at in the light of the general remark which, follows:- "the young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves to yours. the conditions of literary success are almost destructive of the best social power, as they do not have that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best terms. it is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. i have, however, found writers superior to their books, and i cling to my first belief that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these impediments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of having been met, and a larger horizon." emerson carried a letter of introduction to a gentleman in edinburgh, who, being unable to pay him all the desired attention, handed him over to mr. alexander ireland, who has given a most interesting account of him as he appeared during that first visit to europe. mr. ireland's presentation of emerson as he heard him in the scotch pulpit shows that he was not less impressive and attractive before an audience of strangers than among his own countrymen and countrywomen:-"on sunday, the 18th of august, 1833, i heard him deliver a discourse in the unitarian chapel, young street, edinburgh, and i remember distinctly the effect which it produced on his hearers. it is almost needless to say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, and many of them did not know what to make of it. the originality of his thoughts, 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 simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. not long before this i had listened to a wonderful sermon by dr. chalmers, whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence carried, for the moment, all before them,--his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. but i must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors of chalmers. his voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any i ever heard; nothing like it have i listened to since. 'that music in our hearts we bore long after it was heard no more.'" mr. george gilfillan speaks of "the solemnity of his manner, and the earnest thought pervading his discourse." as to the effect of his preaching on his american audiences, i find the following evidence in mr. cooke's diligently gathered collections. mr. sanborn says:- "his pulpit eloquence was singularly attractive, though by no means equally so to all persons. in 1829, before the two friends had met, bronson alcott heard him preach in dr. channing's church on 'the universality of the moral sentiment,' and was struck, as he said, with the youth of the preacher, the beauty of his elocution and the direct and sincere manner in which he addressed his hearers." mr. charles congdon, of new bedford, well known as a popular writer, gives the following account of emerson's preaching in his "reminiscences." i borrow the quotation from mr. conway:- "one day there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals, with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. our choir was a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after emerson's voice. i remember of the sermon only that it had an indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and dainty things of the kind which i had ever heard. i could understand them, if not the fresh philosophical novelties of the discourse." everywhere emerson seems to have pleased his audiences. the reverend dr. morison, formerly the much respected unitarian minister of new bedford, writes to me as follows:- "after dr. dewey left new bedford, mr. emerson preached there several months, greatly to the satisfaction and delight of those who heard him. the society would have been glad to settle him as their minister, and he would have accepted a call, had it not been for some difference of opinion, i think, in regard to the communion service. judge warren, who was particularly his friend, and had at that time a leading influence in the parish, with all his admiration for mr. emerson, did not think he could well be the pastor of a christian church, and so the matter was settled between him and his friend, without any action by the society." all this shows well enough that his preaching was eminently acceptable. but every one who has heard him lecture can form an idea of what he must have been as a preacher. in fact, we have all listened, probably, to many a passage from old sermons of his,--for he tells us he borrowed from those old sermons for his lectures,--without ever thinking of the pulpit from which they were first heard. among the stray glimpses we get of emerson between the time when he quitted the pulpit of his church and that when he came before the public as a lecturer is this, which i owe to the kindness of hon. alexander h. rice. in 1832 or 1833, probably the latter year, he, then a boy, with another boy, thomas r. gould, afterwards well known as a sculptor, being at the episcopal church in newton, found that mr. emerson was sitting in the pew behind them. gould knew mr. emerson, and introduced young rice to him, and they walked down the street together. as they went along, emerson burst into a rhapsody over the psalms of david, the sublimity of thought, and the poetic beauty of expression of which they are full, and spoke also with enthusiasm of the te deum as that grand old hymn which had come down through the ages, voicing the praises of generation after generation. when they parted at the house of young rice's father, emerson invited the boys to come and see him at the allen farm, in the afternoon. they came to a piece of woods, and, as they entered it, took their hats off. "boys," said emerson, "here we recognize the presence of the universal spirit. the breeze says to us in its own language, how d' ye do? how d' ye do? and we have already taken our hats off and are answering it with our own how d' ye do? how d' ye do? and all the waving branches of the trees, and all the flowers, and the field of corn yonder, and the singing brook, and the insect and the bird,--every living thing and things we call inanimate feel the same divine universal impulse while they join with us, and we with them, in the greeting which is the salutation of the universal spirit." we perceive the same feeling which pervades many of emerson's earlier essays and much of his verse, in these long-treasured reminiscences of the poetical improvisation with which the two boys were thus unexpectedly favored. governor rice continues:- "you know what a captivating charm there always was in emerson's presence, but i can never tell you how this line of thought then impressed a country boy. i do not remember anything about the remainder of that walk, nor of the after-incidents of that day,--i only remember that i went home wondering about that mystical dream of the universal spirit, and about what manner of man he was under whose influence i had for the first time come.... "the interview left impressions that led me into new channels of thought which have been a life-long pleasure to me, and, i doubt not, taught me somewhat how to distinguish between mere theological dogma and genuine religion in the soul." in the summer of 1834 emerson became a resident of concord, massachusetts, the town of his forefathers, and the place destined to be his home for life. he first lived with his venerable connection, dr. ripley, in the dwelling made famous by hawthorne as the "old manse." it is an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, standing close to the scene of the fight on the banks of the river. it was built for the reverend william emerson, his grandfather. in one of the rooms of this house emerson wrote "nature," and in the same room, some years later, hawthorne wrote "mosses from an old manse." the place in which emerson passed the greater part of his life well deserves a special notice. concord might sit for its portrait as an ideal new england town. if wanting in the variety of surface which many other towns can boast of, it has at least a vision of the distant summits of monadnock and wachusett. it has fine old woods, and noble elms to give dignity to its open spaces. beautiful ponds, as they modestly call themselves,--one of which, walden, is as well known in our literature as windermere in that of old england,--lie quietly in their clean basins. and through the green meadows runs, or rather lounges, a gentle, unsalted stream, like an english river, licking its grassy margin with a sort of bovine placidity and contentment. this is the musketaquid, or meadow river, which, after being joined by the more restless assabet, still keeps its temper and flows peacefully along by and through other towns, to lose itself in the broad merrimac. the names of these rivers tell us that concord has an indian history, and there is evidence that it was a favorite residence of the race which preceded our own. the native tribes knew as well as the white settlers where were pleasant streams and sweet springs, where corn grew tall in the meadows and fish bred fast in the unpolluted waters. the place thus favored by nature can show a record worthy of its physical attractions. its settlement under the lead of emerson's ancestor, peter bulkeley, was effected in the midst of many difficulties, which the enterprise and self-sacrifice of that noble leader were successful in overcoming. on the banks of the musketaquid was fired the first fatal shot of the "rebel" farmers. emerson appeals to the records of the town for two hundred years as illustrating the working of our american institutions and the character of the men of concord:- "if the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a fair field. and so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government." what names that plain new england town reckons in the roll of its inhabitants! stout major buttrick and his fellow-soldiers in the war of independence, and their worthy successors in the war of freedom; lawyers and statesmen like samuel hoar and his descendants; ministers like peter bulkeley, daniel bliss, and william emerson; and men of genius such as the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our stern new england; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and half algonquin, the robinson crusoe of walden pond, who carried out a school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. i need not lengthen the catalogue by speaking of the living, or mentioning the women whose names have added to its distinction. it has long been an intellectual centre such as no other country town of our own land, if of any other, could boast. its groves, its streams, its houses, are haunted by undying memories, and its hillsides and hollows are made holy by the dust that is covered by their turf. such was the place which the advent of emerson made the delphi of new england and the resort of many pilgrims from far-off regions. on his return from europe in the winter of 1833-4, mr. emerson began to appear before the public as a lecturer. his first subjects, "water," and the "relation of man to the globe," were hardly such as we should have expected from a scholar who had but a limited acquaintance with physical and physiological science. they were probably chosen as of a popular character, easily treated in such a way as to be intelligible and entertaining, and thus answering the purpose of introducing him pleasantly to the new career he was contemplating. these lectures are not included in his published works, nor were they ever published, so far as i know. he gave three lectures during the same winter, relating the experiences of his recent tour in europe. having made himself at home on the platform, he ventured upon subjects more congenial to his taste and habits of thought than some of those earlier topics. in 1834 he lectured on michael angelo, milton, luther, george fox, and edmund burke. the first two of these lectures, though not included in his collected works, may be found in the "north american review" for 1837 and 1838. the germ of many of the thoughts which he has expanded in prose and verse may be found in these essays. the _cosmos_ of the ancient greeks, the _piu nel' uno_, "the many in one," appear in the essay on michael angelo as they also appear in his "nature." the last thought takes wings to itself and rises in the little poem entitled "each and all." the "rhodora," another brief poem, finds itself foreshadowed in the inquiry, "what is beauty?" and its answer, "this great whole the understanding cannot embrace. beauty may be felt. it may be produced. but it cannot be defined." and throughout this essay the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that nature is the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment. _noscitur a sociis_ applies as well to a man's dead as to his living companions. a young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on plato. when he mentioned his subject to mr. emerson, he got the caution, long remembered, "when you strike at a _king_, you must kill him." he himself knew well with what kings of thought to measure his own intelligence. what was grandest, loftiest, purest, in human character chiefly interested him. he rarely meddles with what is petty or ignoble. like his "humble bee," the "yellow-breeched philosopher," whom he speaks of as "wiser far than human seer," and says of him, "aught unsavory or unclean hath my insect never seen," he goes through the world where coarser minds find so much that is repulsive to dwell upon, "seeing only what is fair, sipping only what is sweet." why emerson selected michael angelo as the subject of one of his earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as printed in the essay. "he was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness." consciously or unconsciously men describe themselves in the characters they draw. one must have the mordant in his own personality or he will not take the color of his subject. he may force himself to picture that which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he delineates, it is his own, in some measure, at least, or one of which he feels that its possibilities and tendencies belong to himself. let us try emerson by this test in his "essay on milton:"- "it is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?) of all men, in the power to _inspire_. virtue goes out of him into others." ... "he is identified in the mind with all select and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race."--"better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity,--to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not described nor hero lived. human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait. many philosophers in england, france, and germany, have formally dedicated their study to this problem; and we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of milton awakes." emerson had the same lofty aim as milton, "to raise the idea of man;" he had "the power _to inspire_" in a preã«minent degree. if ever a man communicated those _vibrations_ he speaks of as characteristic of milton, it was emerson. in elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for its walls the horizons of every region where english is spoken. the similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into their fortunes. both were turned away from the clerical office by a revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them in tender and mellifluous threnodies. it would be easy to trace many parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer of the nativity and of paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of audacity. it is hard to conceive of emerson as "an expert swordsman" like milton. it is impossible to think of him as an abusive controversialist as milton was in his controversy with salmasius. but though emerson never betrayed it to the offence of others, he must have been conscious, like milton, of "a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness," which was as a shield about his inner nature. charles emerson, the younger brother, who was of the same type, expresses the feeling in his college essay on friendship, where it is all summed up in the line he quotes:- "the hand of douglas is his own." it must be that in writing this essay on milton emerson felt that he was listening in his own soul to whispers that seemed like echoes from that of the divine singer. * * * * * my friend, the rev. james freeman clarke, a life-long friend of emerson, who understood him from the first, and was himself a great part in the movement of which emerson, more than any other man, was the leader, has kindly allowed me to make use of the following letters:- to rev. james f. clarke, louisville, ky. plymouth, mass., march 12, 1834. my dear sir,--as the day approaches when mr. lewis should leave boston, i seize a few moments in a friendly house in the first of towns, to thank you heartily for your kindness in lending me the valued manuscripts which i return. the translations excited me much, and who can estimate the value of a good thought? i trust i am to learn much more from you hereafter of your german studies, and much i hope of your own. you asked in your note concerning carlyle. my recollections of him are most pleasant, and i feel great confidence in his character. he understands and recognizes his mission. he is perfectly simple and affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he can well afford to be, in his communications. he expressed some impatience of his total solitude, and talked of paris as a residence. i told him i hoped not; for i should always remember him with respect, meditating in the mountains of nithsdale. he was cheered, as he ought to be, by learning that his papers were read with interest by young men unknown to him in this continent; and when i specified a piece which had attracted warm commendation from the new jerusalem people here, his wife said that is always the way; whatever he has writ that he thinks has fallen dead, he hears of two or three years afterward.--he has many, many tokens of goethe's regard, miniatures, medals, and many letters. if you should go to scotland one day, you would gratify him, yourself, and me, by your visit to craigenputtock, in the parish of dunscore, near dumfries. he told me he had a book which he thought to publish, but was in the purpose of dividing into a series of articles for "fraser's magazine." i therefore subscribed for that book, which he calls the "mud magazine," but have seen nothing of his workmanship in the two last numbers. the mail is going, so i shall finish my letter another time. your obliged friend and servant, r. waldo emerson. concord, mass., november 25, 1834. my dear sir,--miss peabody has kindly sent me your manuscript piece on goethe and carlyle. i have read it with great pleasure and a feeling of gratitude, at the same time with a serious regret that it was not published. i have forgotten what reason you assigned for not printing it; i cannot think of any sufficient one. is it too late now? why not change its form a little and annex to it some account of carlyle's later pieces, to wit: "diderot," and "sartor resartus." the last is complete, and he has sent it to me in a stitched pamphlet. whilst i see its vices (relatively to the reading public) of style, i cannot but esteem it a noble philosophical poem, reflecting the ideas, institutions, men of this very hour. and it seems to me that it has so much wit and other secondary graces as must strike a class who would not care for its primary merit, that of being a sincere exhortation to seekers of truth. if you still retain your interest in his genius (as i see not how you can avoid, having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be glad to know that he values his american readers very highly; that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about publishing a historical piece called "the diamond necklace," as a part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the french revolution. he says it is part of his creed that history is poetry, could we tell it right. he adds, moreover, in a letter i have recently received from him, that it has been an odd dream that he might end in the western woods. shall we not bid him come, and be poet and teacher of a most scattered flock wanting a shepherd? or, as i sometimes think, would it not be a new and worse chagrin to become acquainted with the extreme deadness of our community to spiritual influences of the higher kind? have you read sampson reed's "growth of the mind"? i rejoice to be contemporary with that man, and cannot wholly despair of the society in which he lives; there must be some oxygen yet, and la fayette is only just dead. your friend, r. waldo emerson. it occurs to me that 't is unfit to send any white paper so far as to your house, so you shall have a sentence from carlyle's letter. [this may be found in carlyle's first letter, dated 12th august, 1834.] dr. le baron russell, an intimate friend of emerson for the greater part of his life, gives me some particulars with reference to the publication of "sartor resartus," which i will repeat in his own words:- "it was just before the time of which i am speaking [that of emerson's marriage] that the 'sartor resartus' appeared in 'fraser.' emerson lent the numbers, or the collected sheets of 'fraser,' to miss jackson, and we all had the reading of them. the excitement which the book caused among young persons interested in the literature of the day at that time you probably remember. i was quite carried away by it, and so anxious to own a copy, that i determined to publish an american edition. i consulted james munroe & co. on the subject. munroe advised me to obtain a subscription to a sufficient number of copies to secure the cost of the publication. this, with the aid of some friends, particularly of my classmate, william silsbee, i readily succeeded in doing. when this was accomplished, i wrote to emerson, who up to this time had taken no part in the enterprise, asking him to write a preface. (this is the preface which appears in the american edition, james munroe & co., 1836. it was omitted in the third american from the second london edition,[1] by the same publishers, 1840.) before the first edition appeared, and after the subscription had been secured, munroe & co. offered to assume the whole responsibility of the publication, and to this i assented. [footnote 1: revised and corrected by the author.] "this american edition of 1836 was the first appearance of the 'sartor' in either country, as a distinct edition. some copies of the sheets from 'fraser,' it appears, were stitched together and sent to a few persons, but carlyle could find no english publisher willing to take the responsibility of printing the book. this shows, i think, how much more interest was taken in carlyle's writings in this country than in england." on the 14th of may, 1834, emerson wrote to carlyle the first letter of that correspondence which has since been given to the world under the careful editorship of mr. charles norton. this correspondence lasted from the date mentioned to the 2d of april, 1872, when carlyle wrote his last letter to emerson. the two writers reveal themselves as being in strong sympathy with each other, in spite of a radical difference of temperament and entirely opposite views of life. the hatred of unreality was uppermost with carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with emerson. those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers, find their counterparts in every thinking community. carlyle did not weep, but he scolded; emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead. the duet they chanted was a miserere with a te deum for its antiphon; a _de_ _profundis_ answered by a _sursum corda_. "the ground of my existence is black as death," says carlyle. "come and live with me a year," says emerson, "and if you do not like new england well enough to stay, one of these years; (when the 'history' has passed its ten editions, and been translated into as many languages) i will come and dwell with you." section 2. in september, 1835, emerson was married to miss lydia jackson, of plymouth, massachusetts. the wedding took place in the fine old mansion known as the winslow house, dr. le baron russell and his sister standing up with the bridegroom and his bride. after their marriage, mr. and mrs. emerson went to reside in the house in which he passed the rest of his life, and in which mrs. emerson and their daughter still reside. this is the "plain, square, wooden house," with horse-chestnut trees in the front yard, and evergreens around it, which has been so often described and figured. it is without pretensions, but not without an air of quiet dignity. a full and well-illustrated account of it and its arrangements and surroundings is given in "poets' homes," by arthur gilman and others, published by d. lothrop & company in 1879. on the 12th of september, 1835, emerson delivered an "historical discourse, at concord, on the second centennial anniversary of the incorporation of the town." there is no "mysticism," no "transcendentalism" in this plain, straightforward address. the facts are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became the writer as one of the dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful, very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative massachusetts historical society. it looks unlike anything else emerson ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix. one would almost as soon have expected to see emerson equipped with a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged with annotations, and trailing a supplement after it. oracles are brief and final in their utterances. delphi and cumae are not expected to explain what they say. it is the habit of our new england towns to celebrate their own worthies and their own deeds on occasions like this, with more or less of rhetorical gratitude and self-felicitation. the discourses delivered on these occasions are commonly worth reading, for there was never a clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and heroines. concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland towns of new england. emerson has told its story in as painstaking, faithful a way as if he had been by nature an annalist. but with this fidelity, we find also those bold generalizations and sharp picturesque touches which reveal the poetic philosopher. "i have read with care," he says, "the town records themselves. they exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of a manifest love of justice. i find our annals marked with a uniform good sense.--the tone of the record rises with the dignity of the event. these soiled and musty books are luminous and electric within. the old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they contrive to make intelligible the will of a free and just community." ... "the matters there debated (in town meetings) are such as to invite very small consideration. the ill-spelled pages of the town records contain the result. i shall be excused for confessing that i have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and private pique which i have met with in these antique books, as proof that justice was done; that if the results of our history are approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife; if the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a fair field. and so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government." there was nothing in this address which the plainest of concord's citizens could not read understandingly and with pleasure. in fact mr. emerson himself, besides being a poet and a philosopher, was also a plain concord citizen. his son tells me that he was a faithful attendant upon town meetings, and, though he never spoke, was an interested and careful listener to the debates on town matters. that respect for "mother-wit" and for all the wholesome human qualities which reveals itself all through his writings was bred from this kind of intercourse with men of sense who had no pretensions to learning, and in whom, for that very reason, the native qualities came out with less disguise in their expression. he was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their idiosyncrasies; alcott in speculations, which often led him into the fourth dimension of mental space; hawthorne, who brooded himself into a dream--peopled solitude; thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end, to say nothing of idolaters and echoes. he kept his balance among them all. it would be hard to find a more candid and sober record of the result of self-government in a small community than is contained in this simple discourse, patient in detail, large in treatment, more effective than any unsupported generalities about the natural rights of man, which amount to very little unless men earn the right of asserting them by attending fairly to their natural duties. so admirably is the working of a town government, as it goes on in a well-disposed community, displayed in the history of concord's two hundred years of village life, that one of its wisest citizens had portions of the address printed for distribution, as an illustration of the american principle of self-government. after settling in concord, emerson delivered courses of lectures in boston during several successive winters; in 1835, ten lectures on english literature; in 1836, twelve lectures on the philosophy of history; in 1837, ten lectures on human culture. some of these lectures may have appeared in print under their original titles; all of them probably contributed to the essays and discourses which we find in his published volumes. on the 19th of april, 1836, a meeting was held to celebrate the completion of the monument raised in commemoration of the concord fight. for this occasion emerson wrote the hymn made ever memorable by the lines:- here once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world. the last line of this hymn quickens the heartbeats of every american, and the whole hymn is admirable in thought and expression. until the autumn of 1838, emerson preached twice on sundays to the church at east lexington, which desired him to become its pastor. mr. cooke says that when a lady of the society was asked why they did not settle a friend of emerson's whom he had urged them to invite to their pulpit, she replied: "we are a very simple people, and can understand no one but mr. emerson." he said of himself: "my pulpit is the lyceum platform." knowing that he made his sermons contribute to his lectures, we need not mourn over their not being reported. in march, 1837, emerson delivered in boston a lecture on war, afterwards published in miss peabody's "aesthetic papers." he recognizes war as one of the temporary necessities of a developing civilization, to disappear with the advance of mankind:- "at a certain stage of his progress the man fights, if he be of a sound body and mind. at a certain high stage he makes no offensive demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable heart. at a still higher stage he comes into the region of holiness; passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity; but being attacked, he bears it, and turns the other cheek, as one engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an individual, but to the common good of all men." in 1834 emerson's brother edward died, as already mentioned, in the west india island where he had gone for his health. in his letter to carlyle, of november 12th of the same year, emerson says: "your letter, which i received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened place. i had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother in the island of porto rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong sorrow." it was of him that emerson wrote the lines "in memoriam," in which he says,- "there is no record left on earth save on tablets of the heart, of the rich, inherent worth, of the grace that on him shone of eloquent lips, of joyful wit; he could not frame a word unfit, an act unworthy to be done." another bereavement was too soon to be recorded. on the 7th of october, 1835, he says in a letter to carlyle:- "i was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for i have one too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. charles chauncy emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as i believe, no better lord hamlet was ever. he is our doctor on all questions of taste, manners, or action. and one of the pure pleasures i promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen know each other." alas for human hopes and prospects! in less than a year from the date of that letter, on the 17th of september, 1836, he writes to carlyle:- "your last letter, dated in april, found me a mourner, as did your first. i have lost out of this world my brother charles, of whom i have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. i have put so much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for i needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better than i. he was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death, i was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation. i wish that you could have known him. at twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation. he built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. he postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. but some time i shall see you and speak of him." section 3. in the year 1836 there was published in boston a little book of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "nature." it bore no name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author, ralph waldo emerson. the emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful essay with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him. for it has proved for many,--i will not say a _pons asinorum_,--but a very narrow bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they must cross it, or one domain of emerson's intellect will not be reached. it differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written. it talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry. beginning simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until, as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words which "a certain poet sang" to him. this little book met with a very unemotional reception. its style was peculiar,--almost as unlike that of his essays as that of carlyle's "sartor resartus" was unlike the style of his "life of schiller." it was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. but the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as mr. higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies. it was a good deal like keats's "doubtful tale from fairy-land hard for the non-elect to understand." the same experience had been gone through by wordsworth. "whatever is too original," says de quincey, "will be hated at the first. it must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering against the first. forty and seven years it is since william wordsworth first appeared as an author. twenty of these years he was the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. since then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the echo of his name." no writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of wordsworth than emerson, as we cannot fail to see in turning the pages of "nature," his first thoroughly characteristic essay. there is the same thought in the preface to "the excursion" that we find in the introduction to "nature." "the foregoing generations beheld god and nature face to face; we through their eyes. why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" "paradise and groves elysian, fortunate fields--like those of old sought in the atlantic main, why should they be a history only of departed things, or a mere fiction of what never was?" "nature" is a reflective prose poem. it is divided into eight chapters, which might almost as well have been called cantos. never before had mr. emerson given free utterance to the passion with which the aspects of nature inspired him. he had recently for the first time been at once master of himself and in free communion with all the planetary influences above, beneath, around him. the air of the country intoxicated him. there are sentences in "nature" which are as exalted as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been etherized. some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of his early readers like the vagaries of delirium. yet underlying these excited outbursts there was a general tone of serenity which reassured the anxious. the gust passed over, the ripples smoothed themselves, and the stars shone again in quiet reflection. after a passionate outbreak, in which he sees all, is nothing, loses himself in nature, in universal being, becomes "part or particle of god," he considers briefly, in the chapter entitled _commodity_, the ministry of nature to the senses. a few picturesque glimpses in pleasing and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of hamlet and jeremy taylor, "the shakspeare of divines," as he has called him, are what we find in this chapter on commodity, or natural conveniences. but "a nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of _beauty_" which is his next subject. there are some touches of description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and impressions for pictures. many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be found here. analogy is seen everywhere in the works of nature. "what is common to them all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty."--"nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole."--"no reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty." how easily these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the poems, "each and all," and "the rhodora." a good deal of his philosophy comes out in these concluding sentences of the chapter:- "beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for the universe; god is the all-fair. truth and goodness and beauty are but different faces of the same all. but beauty in nature is not ultimate. it is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. it must therefore stand as a part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of nature.". in the "rhodora" the flower is made to answer that "beauty is its own excuse for being." in this essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper than itself. he passes next to a consideration of _language_. words are signs of natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts, and nature is the symbol of spirit. without going very profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in which languages are formed,--whence words are derived, how they become transformed and worn out. but they come at first fresh from nature. "a man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. hence good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories." from this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material images. they cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves when great exigencies call for them. "the poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. long hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,--in the hour of revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the passing events shall awaken. at the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. and with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of power, are put into his hands." it is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of wordsworth:- "these beauteous forms, through a long absence, have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man's eye; but oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din of towns and cities, i have owed to them in hours of weariness sensations sweet felt in the blood and felt along the heart." it is needless to quote the whole passage. the poetry of wordsworth may have suggested the prose of emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the comparison. in _discipline_, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence of nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will. man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp, because "time and space relations vanish as laws are known."--"the moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference."--"all things with which we deal preach to us. what is a farm but a mute gospel?"--"from the child's successive possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, 'thy will be done!' he is learning the secret that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay, the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character." the unity in variety which meets us everywhere is again referred to. he alludes to the ministry of our friendships to our education. when a friend has done for our education in the way of filling our minds with sweet and solid wisdom "it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time." this thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother charles, which occurred a few months before "nature" was published. he had already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement. "to a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. the sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population." this was the first effect of the loss; but after a time he recognizes a superintending power which orders events for us in wisdom which we could not see at first. the chapter on _idealism_ must be read by all who believe themselves capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment of turgot, which emerson quotes: "he that has never doubted the existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." the most essential statement is this:- "it is a sufficient account of that appearance we call the world, that god will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. in my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" we need not follow the thought through the argument from illusions, like that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which cheat the senses by false appearances. the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities between nature and the soul, with beauty as his main end. the philosopher pursues truth, but, "not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought." religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit. "the devotee flouts nature."--"plotinus was ashamed of his body."--"michael angelo said of external beauty, 'it is the frail and weary weed, in which god dresses the soul, which he has called into time.'" emerson would not undervalue nature as looked at through the senses and "the unrenewed understanding." "i have no hostility to nature," he says, "but a child's love of it. i expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons."--but, "seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. idealism sees the world in god,"--as one vast picture, which god paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. the unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the next chapter, which has for its title _spirit_. idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. "it leaves god out of me."--of these three questions, what is matter? whence is it? where to? the ideal theory answers the first only. the reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. "but when we come to inquire whence is matter? and whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. we learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves."--"as a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of god; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power." man may have access to the entire mind of the creator, himself become a "creator in the finite." "as we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. we are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from god. we do not understand the notes of birds. the fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us." all this has an old testament sound as of a lost paradise. in the next chapter he dreams of paradise regained. this next and last chapter is entitled _prospects_. he begins with a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction, undervaluing the "half sight of science" as against the "untaught sallies of the spirit," the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,--the "imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth." in a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for the sibyl's cave and its tripod. we can all--or most of us, certainly--recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more of danger in speculations of this sort. they belong to visionaries and to poets. emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the realm of poetry. he quotes five beautiful verses from george herbert's "poem on man." presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air of song, and finishes his essay with "some traditions of man and nature which a certain poet sang to me."--"a man is a god in ruins."--"man is the dwarf of himself. once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. he filled nature with his overflowing currents. out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon."--but he no longer fills the mere shell he had made for himself; "he is shrunk to a drop." still something of elemental power remains to him. "it is instinct." such teachings he got from his "poet." it is a kind of new england genesis in place of the old testament one. we read in the sermon on the mount: "be ye therefore perfect as your father in heaven is perfect." the discourse which comes to us from the trimount oracle commands us, "build, therefore, your own world. as fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions." the seer of patmos foretells a heavenly jerusalem, of which he says, "there shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth." the sage of concord foresees a new heaven on earth. "a correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. so fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen." * * * * * it may be remembered that calvin, in his commentary on the new testament, stopped when he came to the book of the "revelation." he found it full of difficulties which he did not care to encounter. yet, considered only as a poem, the vision of st. john is full of noble imagery and wonderful beauty. "nature" is the book of revelation of our saint radulphus. it has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a poem it is noble and inspiring. it was objected to on the score of its pantheistic character, as wordsworth's "lines composed near tintern abbey" had been long before. but here and there it found devout readers who were captivated by its spiritual elevation and great poetical beauty, among them one who wrote of it in the "democratic review" in terms of enthusiastic admiration. mr. bowen, the professor of natural theology and moral philosophy in harvard university, treated this singular semi-philosophical, semi-poetical little book in a long article in the "christian examiner," headed "transcendentalism," and published in the january number for 1837. the acute and learned professor meant to deal fairly with his subject. but if one has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article. the professor turns the book over and over,--inspects it from plastron to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain. he finds good writing and sound philosophy, passages of great force and beauty of expression, marred by obscurity, under assumptions and faults of style. he was not, any more than the rest of us, acclimated to the emersonian atmosphere, and after some not unjust or unkind comments with which many readers will heartily agree, confesses his bewilderment, saying:- "on reviewing what we have already said of this singular work, the criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only allege in excuse the fact that the book is a contradiction in itself." carlyle says in his letter of february 13, 1837:- "your little azure-colored 'nature' gave me true satisfaction. i read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that had a sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back. you say it is the first chapter of something greater. i call it rather the foundation and ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. it is the true apocalypse, this when the 'open secret' becomes revealed to a man. i rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous dwelling-place of yours and mine,--with an ear for the _ewigen melodien_, which pipe in the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things; _not_ to be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down." the first edition of "nature" had prefixed to it the following words from plotinus: "nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know." this is omitted in after editions, and in its place we read:- "a subtle chain of countless rings the next unto the farthest brings; the eye reads omens where it goes, and speaks all languages the rose; and striving to be man, the worm mounts through all the spires of form." the copy of "nature" from which i take these lines, his own, of course, like so many others which he prefixed to his different essays, was printed in the year 1849, ten years before the publication of darwin's "origin of species," twenty years and more before the publication of "the descent of man." but the "vestiges of creation," published in 1844, had already popularized the resuscitated theories of lamarck. it seems as if emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to catch the hint of its discoveries. there is nothing more audacious in the poet's conception of the worm looking up towards humanity, than the naturalist's theory that the progenitor of the human race was an acephalous mollusk. "i will not be sworn," says benedick, "but love may transform me to an oyster." for "love" read science. unity in variety, "_il piu nell uno_" symbolism of nature and its teachings, generation of phenomena,--appearances,--from spirit, to which they correspond and which they obey; evolution of the best and elimination of the worst as the law of being; all this and much more may be found in the poetic utterances of this slender essay. it fell like an aerolite, unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, almost unwelcome,--a stumbling-block to be got out of the well-trodden highway of new england scholastic intelligence. but here and there it found a reader to whom it was, to borrow, with slight changes, its own quotation,- "the golden key which opes the palace of eternity," inasmuch as it carried upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animated them to create a new world for themselves through the purification of their own souls. next to "nature" in the series of his collected publications comes "the american scholar. an oration delivered before the phi beta kappa society at cambridge, august 31, 1837." the society known by these three letters, long a mystery to the uninitiated, but which, filled out and interpreted, signify that philosophy is the guide of life, is one of long standing, the annual meetings of which have called forth the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers. rarely has any one of the annual addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest. mr. lowell says of it, that its delivery "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. what crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" mr. cooke says truly of this oration, that nearly all his leading ideas found expression in it. this was to be expected in an address delivered before such an audience. every real thinker's world of thought has its centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle round the sun which cast them off. but those who lost themselves now and then in the pages of "nature" will find their way clearly enough through those of "the american scholar." it is a plea for generous culture; for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. it begins with a note like a trumpet call. "thus far," he says, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. as such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. the millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?" emerson finds his text in the old fable which tells that man, as he was in the beginning, was divided into men, as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer the end of his being. the fable covers the doctrine that there is one man; present to individuals only in a partial manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole man. unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many faculties are practically lost for want of use. "the state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.... man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.... the priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship." this complaint is by no means a new one. scaliger says, as quoted by omnivorous old burton: "_nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes hominis_." the old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making. it took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. each expert, skilled in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a fraction of humanity. if the complaint was legitimate in scaliger's time, it was better founded half a century ago when mr. emerson found cause for it. it has still more serious significance to-day, when in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of men's thoughts and working faculties. "in this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. in the right state he is _man thinking_. in the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. in this view of him, as man thinking, the theory of his office is continued. him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites." emerson proceeds to describe and illustrate the influences of nature upon the mind, returning to the strain of thought with which his previous essay has made us familiar. he next considers the influence of the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence. "books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." it is hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is just as good as the product of our labor. a sentence or two may serve to give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of his counsel. "each age must write its own books, or, rather, each generation for the next succeeding. the books of an older period will not fit this." when a book has gained a certain hold on the mind, it is liable to become an object of idolatrous regard. "instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. the sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of reason, having once so opened, having received this book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. colleges are built on it. books are written on it by thinkers, not by man thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle. meek young men 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.--one must he an inventor to read well. as the proverb says, 'he that would bring home the wealth of the indies must carry out the wealth of the indies.'--when the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world." it is not enough that the scholar should be a student of nature and of books. he must take a part in the affairs of the world about him. "action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. without it he is not yet man. without it thought can never ripen into truth.--the true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. it is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. a strange process, too, this by which experience is converted into thought as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. the manufacture goes forward at all hours." emerson does not use the words "unconscious cerebration," but these last words describe the process in an unmistakable way. the beautiful paragraph in which he pictures the transformation, the transfiguration of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so emersonially emersonian, that i fear some readers who thought they were his disciples when they came to it went back and walked no more with him, at least through the pages of this discourse. the reader shall have the preceding sentence to prepare him for the one referred to. "there is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. "cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, professions and party, town and country, nation and world must also soar and sing." having spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, by action, he speaks of the scholar's duties. "they may all," he says, "be comprised in self-trust." we have to remember that the _self_ he means is the highest self, that consciousness which he looks upon as open to the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he sings in "the sphinx ":- "the heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold, once found,--for new heavens he spurneth the old." "first one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. the man has never lived that can feed us ever. the human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side of this unbounded, unboundable empire. it is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of etna, lightens the capes of sicily, and now out of the throat of vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of naples. it is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. it is one soul which animates all men." and so he comes to the special application of the principles he has laid down to the american scholar of to-day. he does not spare his censure; he is full of noble trust and manly courage. very refreshing it is to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:- "the scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. he must he a university of knowledges.... we have listened too long to the courtly muses of europe. the spirit of the american freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.--the scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.--the mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. there is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant." the young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted. "what is the remedy? they did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him." each man must be a unit,--must yield that peculiar fruit which he was created to bear. "we will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.--a nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the divine soul which also inspires all men." this grand oration was our intellectual declaration of independence. nothing like it had been heard in the halls of harvard since samuel adams supported the affirmative of the question, "whether it be lawful to resist the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved." it was easy to find fault with an expression here and there. the dignity, not to say the formality of an academic assembly was startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in "the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan." they could understand the deep thoughts suggested by "the meanest flower that blows," but these domestic illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so stately an occasion. but the young men went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them "thus saith the lord." no listener ever forgot that address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more like that of immediate inspiration. chapter v. 1838-1843. aet. 35-40. section 1. divinity school address.--correspondence.--lectures on human life.--letters to james freeman clarke.--dartmouth college address: literary ethics.--waterville college address: the method of nature.--other addresses: man the reformer.--lecture on the times.--the conservative.--the transcendentalist.--boston "transcendentalism."--"the dial."--brook farm. section 2. first series of essays published.--contents: history, self-reliance, compensation, spiritual laws, love, friendship, prudence, heroism, the oversoul, circles, intellect, art.--emerson's account of his mode of life in a letter to carlyle.--death of emerson's son.--threnody. section 1. on sunday evening, july 15, 1838, emerson delivered an address before the senior class in divinity college, cambridge, which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a controversy, in which emerson had little more than the part of patroclus when the greeks and trojans fought over his body. in its simplest and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters. he begins with a beautiful picture which must be transferred without the change of an expression:- "in this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. the grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. the air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of gilead, and the new hay. night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. the cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn." how softly the phrases of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear, and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased attention! the "song of songs, which is solomon's," could not have wooed the listener more sweetly. "thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of lebanon." and this was the prelude of a discourse which, when it came to be printed, fared at the hands of many a theologian, who did not think himself a bigot, as the roll which baruch wrote with ink from the words of jeremiah fared at the hands of jehoiakim, the king of judah. he listened while jehudi read the opening passages. but "when jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth." such was probably the fate of many a copy of this famous discourse. it is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. the file-leaders of unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had often been applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this alarming manifesto. and yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the theological world since the time when that discourse was delivered that it is read as calmly to-day as a common "election sermon," if such are ever read at all. a few extracts, abstracts, and comments may give the reader who has not the address before him some idea of its contents and its tendencies. the material universe, which he has just pictured in its summer beauty, deserves our admiration. but when the mind opens and reveals the laws which govern the world of phenomena, it shrinks into a mere fable and illustration of this mind. what am i? what is?--are questions always asked, never fully answered. we would study and admire forever. but above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. man is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. "the sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws.--these laws refuse to be adequately stated.--they elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.--the intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. these laws execute themselves.--as we are, so we associate. the good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell." these facts, emerson says, have always suggested to man that the world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind,--that one mind is everywhere active.--"all things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." while a man seeks good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death."--"when he says 'i ought;' when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme wisdom." "this sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively creates all forms of worship.--this thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative east; not alone in palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in egypt, in persia, in india, in china. europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses. what these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true. and the unique impression of jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion." but this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition. what another announces, i must find true in myself, or i must reject it. if the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,--"the doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul." the following extract will show the view that he takes of christianity and its founder, and sufficiently explain the antagonism called forth by the discourse:- "jesus christ belonged to the true race of prophets. he saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. one man was true to what is in you and me. he saw that god incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. he said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'i am divine. through me god acts; through me, speaks. would you see god, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as i now think.' but what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! there is no doctrine of the reason which will bear to be taught by the understanding. the understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'this was jehovah come down out of heaven. i will kill you if you say he was a man.' the idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. christianity became a mythus, as the poetic teaching of greece and of egypt, before. he spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the character ascends. but the word miracle, as pronounced by christian churches, gives a false impression; it is monster. it is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain." he proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of historical christianity. it has exaggerated the personal, the positive, the ritual. it has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the christian name. it is only by his holy thoughts that jesus serves us. "to aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." the preachers do a wrong to jesus by removing him from our human sympathies; they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and peculiarity. another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of christ is that the moral nature--the law of laws--is not explored as the fountain of the established teaching in society. "men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if god were dead."--"the soul is not preached. the church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct.--the stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. it is the office of a true teacher to show us that god is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake. the true christianity--a faith like christ's in the infinitude of man--is lost." when emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the "practical application," some of his young hearers must have been startled at the style of his address. "yourself a new--born bard of the holy ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with deity. look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind." emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of christianity; first the sabbath,--hardly a christian institution,--and secondly the institution of preaching. he spoke not only eloquently, but with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. he had sacrificed an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. but he was assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of christendom generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity, rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with whatever truth was in their messages. he might be wrong, but his words carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the spirit of all truth was with him. some of his audience, at least, must have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, "he speaks 'as one having authority, and not as the scribes.'" such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. its doctrines were repudiated in the "christian examiner," the leading organ of the unitarian denomination. the rev. henry ware, greatly esteemed and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of emerson's discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of christianity. to this note emerson returned the following answer:- "what you say about the discourse at divinity college is just what i might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known opinions. i am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time, and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and presence which i supposed would meet with dissent, i may say, of dear friends and benefactors of mine. yet, as my conviction is perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse, and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very important that it be spoken; and i thought i could not pay the nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. i would rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise. let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as it surely will, judge between us. either of us would, i doubt not, be willingly apprised of his error. meantime, i shall be admonished by this expression of your thought, to revise with greater care the 'address,' before it is printed (for the use of the class): and i heartily thank you for this expression of your tried toleration and love." dr. ware followed up his note with a sermon, preached on the 23d of september, in which he dwells especially on the necessity of adding the idea of personality to the abstractions of emerson's philosophy, and sent it to him with a letter, the kindness and true christian spirit of which were only what were inseparable from all the thoughts and feelings of that most excellent and truly apostolic man. to this letter emerson sent the following reply:- concord, october 8, 1838. "my dear sir,--i ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. the letter was right manly and noble. the sermon, too, i have read with attention. if it assails any doctrine of mine,--perhaps i am not so quick to see it as writers generally,--certainly i did not feel any disposition to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your thought, whilst i say mine. i believe i must tell you what i think of my new position. it strikes me very oddly that good and wise men at cambridge and boston should think of raising me into an object of criticism. i have always been--from my very incapacity of methodical writing--a 'chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to rail,--lucky when i could make myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the notice of the masters of literature and religion. i have appreciated fully the advantages of my position, for i well know there is no scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a polemic. i could not give an account of myself, if challenged. i could not possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands; for i do not know what arguments are in reference to any expression of a thought. i delight in telling what i think; but if you ask me how i dare say so, or why it is so, i am the most helpless of mortal men. i do not even see that either of these questions admits of an answer. so that in the present droll posture of my affairs, when i see myself suddenly raised to the importance of a heretic, i am very uneasy when i advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make good his thesis against all comers. i certainly shall do no such thing. i shall read what you and other good men write, as i have always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the page that has nothing for me. i shall go on just as before, seeing whatever i can, and telling what i see; and, i suppose, with the same fortune that has hitherto attended me,--the joy of finding that my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society, loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my conceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in motley,--and so i am your affectionate servant," etc. the controversy which followed is a thing of the past; emerson took no part in it, and we need not return to the discussion. he knew his office and has defined it in the clearest manner in the letter just given,--"seeing whatever i can, and telling what i see." but among his listeners and readers was a man of very different mental constitution, not more independent or fearless, but louder and more combative, whose voice soon became heard and whose strength soon began to be felt in the long battle between the traditional and immanent inspiration,--theodore parker. if emerson was the moving spirit, he was the right arm in the conflict, which in one form or another has been waged up to the present day. in the winter of 1838-39 emerson delivered his usual winter course of lectures. he names them in a letter to carlyle as follows: "ten lectures: i. the doctrine of the soul; ii. home; iii. the school; iv. love; v. genius; vi. the protest; vii. tragedy; viii. comedy; ix. duty; x. demonology. i designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so i discoursed no more on human life." two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published lectures or essays; love, in the first volume of essays; demonology in "lectures and biographical sketches;" and "the comic" in "letters and social aims." * * * * * i owe the privilege of making use of the two following letters to my kind and honored friend, james freeman clarke. the first letter was accompanied by the poem "the humble-bee," which was first published by mr. clarke in the "western messenger," from the autograph copy, which begins "fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee!" and has a number of other variations from the poem as printed in his collected works. concord, december 7, 1838. my dear sir,--here are the verses. they have pleased some of my friends, and so may please some of your readers, and you asked me in the spring if i hadn't somewhat to contribute to your journal. i remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of yours that the verses, "take, o take those lips away," were not shakspeare's; i think they are. beaumont, nor fletcher, nor both together were ever, i think, visited by such a starry gleam as that stanza. i know it is in "rollo," but it is in "measure for measure" also; and i remember noticing that the malones, and stevens, and critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for shakspeare, and those for beaumont and fletcher. but the internal evidence is all for one, none for the other. if he did not write it, they did not, and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. what care we _who_ sung this or that. it is we at last who sing. your friend and servant, r.w. emerson. to james freeman clarke. concord, february 27, 1839. my dear sir,--i am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an answer to your flattering request for two such little poems. you are quite welcome to the lines "to the rhodora;" but i think they need the superscription ["lines on being asked 'whence is the flower?'"]. of the other verses ["good-by proud world," etc] i send you a corrected copy, but i wonder so much at your wishing to print them that i think you must read them once again with your critical spectacles before they go further. they were written sixteen years ago, when i kept school in boston, and lived in a corner of roxbury called canterbury. they have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays i am a philosopher and am grown to have opinions, i think they must have an apologetic date, though i well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry, and so you will wiselier suppress them. i heartily wish i had any verses which with a clear mind i could send you in lieu of these juvenilities. it is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses, that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to music. i have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. i believe i have in april or may an annual poetic _conatus_ rather than _afflatus_, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if i may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps i detect among my mss. i look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily treasures, and i can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. in regard to the providence discourse, i have no copy of it; and as far as i remember its contents, i have since used whatever is striking in it; but i will get the ms., if margaret fuller has it, and you shall have it if it will pass muster. i shall certainly avail myself of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the "carlyle miscellanies," so soon as they appear. he, t.c., writes in excellent spirits of his american friends and readers.... a new book, he writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring lectures are over (which begin in may). your sister sarah was kind enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done by stuart newton when in the insane hospital. they seemed to me to betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any line since you can draw all? genius has given you the freedom of the universe, why then come within any walls? and this seems to be the old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous. i heartily thank you for the good wishes you send me to open the year, and i say them back again to you. your field is a world, and all men are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted service you render. and yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that concerns either you or me. the whole world is sick of that very ail, of being seen, and of seemliness. it belongs to the brave now to trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone. i am glad to see william channing is one of your coadjutors. mrs. jameson's new book, i should think, would bring a caravan of travellers, aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along the lakes to mackinaw. as i read i almost vowed an exploration, but i doubt if i ever get beyond the hudson. your affectionate servant, r.w. emerson. on the 24th of july, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery of the address before the divinity school, mr. emerson delivered an oration before the literary societies of dartmouth college. if any rumor of the former discourse had reached dartmouth, the audience must have been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to which they listened. the bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious old tenants of the hanover aviary. if there were any drops of false or questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy old dogmatists as dry as ever. those who remember the dartmouth college of that day cannot help smiling at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his audience. president lord was well known as the scriptural defender of the institution of slavery. not long before a controversy had arisen, provoked by the setting up of the episcopal form of worship by one of the professors, the most estimable and scholarly dr. daniel oliver. perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental conceptions of mr. emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. there is a kind of harmony between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary colors. it is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side that comparison makes them odious to each other. mr. emerson could go anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief from the views he held. such was his simplicity of speech and manner, such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to quarrel with the gentle image-breaker. the subject of mr. emerson's address is _literary ethics._ it is on the same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence as the phi beta kappa address. the word impassioned would seem misplaced, if applied to any of mr. emerson's orations. but these discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his complete manhood. they were produced at a time when his mind had learned its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and all peremptory external authority. it is not strange, therefore, to find some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative illustration. "neither years nor books," he says, "have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." and yet, he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled the reasonable expectation of mankind. "men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought." for all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie all his teachings. "the resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the intellect." new lessons of spiritual independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history and biography. there is a passage here so true to nature that it permits a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment:- "an intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their possible progress. we resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance. say to the man of letters, that he cannot paint a transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. but deny to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is piqued. concede to him genius, which is a sort of stoical _plenum_ annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved." but it ought to be added that if the pleasure of denying the genius of their betters were denied to the mediocrities, their happiness would be forever blighted. from the resources of the american scholar mr. emerson passes to his tasks. nature, as it seems to him, has never yet been truly studied. "poetry has scarcely chanted its first song. the perpetual admonition of nature to us is, 'the world is new, untried. do not believe the past. i give you the universe a virgin to-day.'" and in the same way he would have the scholar look at history, at philosophy. the world belongs to the student, but he must put himself into harmony with the constitution of things. "he must embrace solitude as a bride." not superstitiously, but after having found out, as a little experience will teach him, all that society can do for him with its foolish routine. i have spoken of the exalted strain into which mr. emerson sometimes rises in the midst of his general serenity. here is an instance of it:- "you will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. you will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'what is this truth you seek? what is this beauty?' men will ask, with derision. if, nevertheless, god have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. when you shall say, 'as others do, so will i: i renounce, i am sorry for it, my early visions: i must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;'--then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men.--bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom. why should you renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? truth also has its roof and house and board. make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope." the next address emerson delivered was "the method of nature," before the society of the adelphi, in waterville college, maine, august 11, 1841. in writing to carlyle on the 31st of july, he says: "as usual at this season of the year, i, incorrigible spouting yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges nine days hence.... my whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches acquiescence and optimism. only when i see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious america, i lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue." it may be remembered that mr. matthew arnold quoted the expression about america, which sounded more harshly as pronounced in a public lecture than as read in a private letter. the oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter. its title is "the method of nature." he begins with congratulations on the enjoyments and promises of this literary anniversary. "the scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations of the castle."--"we hear too much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. we are a puny and a fickle folk. avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. the rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man."--"while the multitude of men degrade each other, and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself." i think we may detect more of the manner of carlyle in this address than in any of those which preceded it. "why then goest thou as some boswell or literary worshipper to this saint or to that? that is the only lese-majesty. here art thou with whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think meanly of thyself whom the stalwart fate brought forth to unite his ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?" that there is an "intimate divinity" which is the source of all true wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it, that "the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force," that the rule is "do what you know, and perception is converted into character,"--all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in this oration. just how easily it was followed by the audience, just how far they were satisfied with its large principles wrought into a few broad precepts, it would be easier at this time to ask than to learn. we notice not so much the novelty of the ideas to be found in this discourse on "the method of nature," as the pictorial beauty of their expression. the deep reverence which underlies all emerson's speculations is well shown in this paragraph:- "we ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. not thanks nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our communication with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring reception,--reception that becomes giving in its turn as the receiver is only the all-giver in part and in infancy."--"it is god in us which checks the language of petition by grander thought. in the bottom of the heart it is said: 'i am, and by me, o child! this fair body and world of thine stands and grows. i am, all things are mine; and all mine are thine.'" we must not quarrel with his peculiar expressions. he says, in this same paragraph, "i cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of things so sublime; but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of god. it is beyond explanation." "we can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in july; is becoming something else; is in rapid metamorphosis. the embryo does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "in short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that it does not exist to any one, or to any number of particular ends, but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life which in conscious beings we call ecstasy." here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme. "the great pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of stars, was but the representative of thee, o rich and various man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of god; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong." his feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:- "we cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. i cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing i know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the universe: before the world was, they were." it is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent deity recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the "pantheism" which is the object of dread to many of the faithful. but there are many expressions in this address which must have sounded strangely and vaguely to his christian audience. "are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the influenced; was god in distribution, god rushing into manifold benefit?" it might be feared that the practical philanthropists would feel that they lost by his counsels. "the reform whose fame now fills the land with temperance, anti-slavery, non-resistance, no government, equal labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for themselves as an end."--"i say to you plainly there is no end to which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to the nostril. the imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal. your end should be one inapprehensible to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,--never touched; always giving health." nothing is plainer than that it was emerson's calling to supply impulses and not methods. he was not an organizer, but a power behind many organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their special objects. the oration we have been examining was delivered in the interval between the delivery of two addresses, one called "man the reformer," and another called "lecture on the times." in the first he preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that "a man should have a farm, or a mechanical craft for his culture."--that he cannot give up labor without suffering some loss of power. "how can the man who has learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? shall we say all we think?--perhaps with his own hands.--let us learn the meaning of economy.--parched corn eaten to-day that i may have roast fowl to my dinner on sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one apartment, that i may be free of all perturbation, that i may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is frugality for gods and heroes." this was what emerson wrote in january, 1841. this "house with one apartment" was what thoreau built with his own hands in 1845. in april of the former year, he went to live with mr. emerson, but had been on intimate terms with him previously to that time. whether it was from him that thoreau got the hint of the walden cabin and the parched corn, or whether this idea was working in thoreau's mind and was suggested to emerson by him, is of no great consequence. emerson, to whom he owed so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which thoreau entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice. he was at the philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common sense for a moment. it would never have occurred to him to leave all the conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends "teague and his jade," as he called the man and brother and sister, more commonly known nowadays as pat, or patrick, and his old woman. "the americans have many virtues," he says in this address, "but they have not faith and hope." faith and hope, enthusiasm and love, are the burden of this address. but he would regulate these qualities by "a great prospective prudence," which shall mediate between the spiritual and the actual world. in the "lecture on the times" he shows very clearly the effect which a nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves reformers had upon him. "the reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea. they are quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they reprobated. they mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. those who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as the insane do. they bite us, and we run mad also. i think the work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him; but when i have seen it near!--i do not like it better. it is done in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management, by tactics and clamor." all this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but mr. emerson had said it. he undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser and better one. he attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in view of some larger and loftier principle. the charm of his imagination and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. sometimes it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who sat before him. he knew the force of _felix audacia_ as well as any rhetorician could have taught him. he addresses the reformer with one of those daring images which defy the critics. "as the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds." he said hard things to the reformer, especially to the abolitionist, in his "lecture on the times." it would have taken a long while to get rid of slavery if some of emerson's teachings in this lecture had been accepted as the true gospel of liberty. but how much its last sentence covers with its soothing tribute! "all the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment man ever receives from heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels." the lecture called "the transcendentalist" will naturally be looked at with peculiar interest, inasmuch as this term has been very commonly applied to emerson, and to many who were considered his disciples. it has a proper philosophical meaning, and it has also a local and accidental application to the individuals of a group which came together very much as any literary club might collect about a teacher. all this comes out clearly enough in the lecture. in the first place, emerson explains that the "_new views_," as they are called, are the oldest of thoughts cast in a new mould. "what is popularly called transcendentalism among us is idealism: idealism as it appears in 1842. as thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, materialists and idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. the materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of thought and of will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture." "the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. the idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance.--his thought, that is the universe." the association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of "transcendentalists" was applied, and which made itself an organ in the periodical known as "the dial," has been written about by many who were in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of it at second hand. emerson was closely associated with these "same transcendentalists," and a leading contributor to "the dial," which was their organ. the movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any other writer. so far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best witness. in his "historic notes of life and letters in new england," he sketches in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the development of the "new views" above mentioned. "there are always two parties," he says, "the party of the past and the party of the future; the establishment and the movement." about 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in literature. in our own community the influence of swedenborg and of the genius and character of dr. channing were among the more immediate early causes of the mental agitation. emerson attributes a great importance to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of edward everett, who returned to boston in 1820, after five years of study in europe. edward everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as rufus choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great orator. these wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life in a few old men's memories. it is therefore with delight that one who remembers everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant, grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the harmonies of utterance,--it is with delight that such a one reads the glowing words of emerson whenever he refers to edward everett. it is enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great master of academic oratory. emerson follows out the train of influences which added themselves to the impulse given by mr. everett. german scholarship, the growth of science, the generalizations of goethe, the idealism of schelling, the influence of wordsworth, of coleridge, of carlyle, and in our immediate community, the writings of channing,--he left it to others to say of emerson,--all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it so, spiritual revival. he describes with that exquisite sense of the ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. they came together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at dr. john collins warren's,--dr. channing, the great dr. channing, among the rest, full of the great thoughts he wished to impart. the preliminaries went on smoothly enough with the usual small talk,- "when a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster supper, crowned by excellent wines [this must have been before dr. warren's temperance epoch], and so ended the first attempt to establish aesthetic society in boston. "some time afterwards dr. channing opened his mind to mr. and mrs. ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies and gentlemen. i had the honor to be present.--margaret fuller, george ripley, dr. convers francis, theodore parker, dr. hedge, mr. brownson, james freeman clarke, william h. channing, and many others gradually drew together, and from time to time spent an afternoon at each other's houses in a serious conversation." with them was another, "a pure idealist,--who read plato as an equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were intellectual." he refers, of course to mr. alcott. emerson goes on to say:- "i think there prevailed at that time a general belief in boston that there was some concert of _doctrinaires_ to establish certain opinions, and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy, and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or three men and women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual vivacity. perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon coleridge and wordsworth and goethe, then on carlyle, with pleasure and sympathy. otherwise their education and reading were not marked, but had the american superficialness, and their studies were solitary. i suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or sect, and certainly at the name of transcendentalism, given, nobody knows by whom, or when it was applied." emerson's picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments. "in like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. the oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. buddhism is an expression of it. the buddhist, who thanks no man, who says, 'do not flatter your benefactors,' but who in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a transcendentalist. "these exacting children advertise us of our wants. there is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man." the person who adopts "any presentiment, any extravagance as most in nature," is not commonly called a transcendentalist, but is known colloquially as a "crank." the person who does not thank, by word or look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a churl. nothing was farther from emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity. but there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. they claimed more for each other than was reasonable,--so much occasionally that their pretensions became ridiculous. one was tempted to ask: "what forlorn hope have you led? what immortal book have you written? what great discovery have you made? what heroic task of any kind have you performed?" there was too much talk about earnestness and too little real work done. aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled no arduous summit. in short, there was a kind of "transcendentalist" dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as that of the della cruscans of an earlier time. in reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious persons" who belonged to the "transcendentalist" communion, the reader must remember that it is emerson who draws the portrait,--a friend and not a scoffer:- "they are not good citizens, not good members of society: unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions, foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. they do not even like to vote." after arraigning the representatives of transcendental or spiritual beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this is what they have to say:- "'new, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. we are miserable with inaction. we perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.' 'then,' says the world, 'show me your own.' 'we have none.' 'what will you do, then?' cries the world. 'we will wait.' 'how long?' 'until the universe beckons and calls us to work.' 'but whilst you wait you grow old and useless.' 'be it so: i can sit in a corner and _perish_ (as you call it), but i will not move until i have the highest command.'" and so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his reasons for doing nothing. it is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings. it is easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the subscription paper go by us to the next door. the common duties of life and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of themselves while we contemplate the infinite. there is no safer fortress for indolence than "the everlasting no." the chimney-corner is the true arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their all-sufficient panoply. emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among his disciples. his wise counsel did not always find listeners in a fitting condition to receive it. he was a sower who went forth to sow. some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism. some fell on the rocks of hardened conservatism. some fell by the wayside and was picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of themselves. but when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives. emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them. but he makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go. "society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must behold them with what charity it can. possibly some benefit may yet accrue from them to the state. besides our coarse implements, there must be some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the by-stander. perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the electricity to others. or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks the frigate or "line-packet" to learn its longitude, so it may not be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers." it must be confessed that it is not a very captivating picture which emerson draws of some of his transcendental friends. their faults were naturally still more obvious to those outside of their charmed circle, and some prejudice, very possibly, mingled with their critical judgments. on the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him:- "there has sprung up in boston," says dickens, in his "american notes," "a sect of philosophers known as transcendentalists. on inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, i was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental. not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, i pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the transcendentalists are followers of my friend mr. carlyle, or, i should rather say, of a follower of his, mr. ralph waldo emerson. this gentleman has written a volume of essays, in which, among much that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold. transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not least among the number a hearty disgust of cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe. and therefore, if i were a bostonian, i think i would be a transcendentalist." in december, 1841, emerson delivered a lecture entitled "the conservative." it was a time of great excitement among the members of that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. never did emerson show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more beautifully than in this lecture and in his whole course with reference to the intellectual agitation of the period. he is as fair to the conservative as to the reformer. he sees the fanaticism of the one as well as that of the other. "conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery; believes in a negative fate; believes that men's tempers govern them; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they will fail me, i must bend a little; it distrusts nature; it thinks there is a general law without a particular application,--law for all that does not include any one. reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction. and so, whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists that each is a good half, but an impossible whole." he has his beliefs, and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair play, and though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be unjust to the present or the past. we read in a letter from emerson to carlyle, dated march 12, 1835, that dr. charming "lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called 'the transcendentalist,' as the organ of a spiritual philosophy." again on the 30th of april of the same year, in a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of carlyle to this country, emerson says:- "it was suggested that if mr. c. would undertake a journal of which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be made to secure him a support. it is that project which i mentioned to you in a letter by mr. barnard,--a book to be called 'the transcendentalist;' or, 'the spiritual inquirer,' or the like.... those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured." the idea of the grim scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to know as "the dial!" a concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra! it was much safer to be content with carlyle's purring from his own side of the water, as thus:- "'the boston transcendentalist,' whatever the fate or merit of it may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. there must be things not dreamt of over in that _transoceanic_ parish! i shall certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better." there were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the close connection which emerson had with one of them and the interest which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more deeply concerned. these were the periodical just spoken of as a possibility realized, and the industrial community known as brook farm. they were to a certain extent synchronous,--the magazine beginning in july, 1840, and expiring in april, 1844; brook farm being organized in 1841, and breaking up in 1847. "the dial" was edited at first by margaret fuller, afterwards by emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse, among them "the conservative," "the transcendentalist," "chardon street and bible convention," and some of his best and best known poems, "the problem," "woodnotes," "the sphinx," "fate." the other principal writers were margaret fuller, a. bronson alcott, george ripley, james freeman clarke, theodore parker, william h. channing, henry thoreau, eliot cabot, john s. dwight, c.p. cranch, william ellery channing, mrs. ellen hooper, and her sister mrs. caroline tappan. unequal as the contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest. it was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and enthusiasm. time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond the reach of the receding waves. thoreau wrote for nearly every number. margaret fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her part as a contributor as well as editor. theodore parker came down with his "trip-hammer" in its pages. mrs. ellen hooper published a few poems in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories. others, whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent contributions. it is a pleasure to turn back to "the dial," with all its crudities. it should be looked through by the side of the "anthology." both were april buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the pledge of a better season. we get various hints touching the new magazine in the correspondence between emerson and carlyle. emerson tells carlyle, a few months before the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge of our _young people_ than any he has had. it is true that unfledged writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more interesting. this was the time above all others when out of the mouth of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength. the feeling that intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the inspiration of these "young people" to whom emerson refers. he has to apologize for the first number. "it is not yet much," he says; "indeed, though no copy has come to me, i know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had.--the address of the editors to the readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me i do not know." they did print "the problem." there were also some fragments of criticism from the writings of his brother charles, and the poem called "the last farewell," by his brother edward, which is to be found in emerson's "may-day and other pieces." on the 30th of august, after the periodical had been published a couple of months, emerson writes:- "our community begin to stand in some terror of transcendentalism; and the _dial_, poor little thing, whose first number contains scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public." carlyle finds the second number of "the dial" better than the first, and tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with his usual air of superiority. he distinguishes what is emerson's readily,--the rest he speaks of as the work of [greek: oi polloi] for the most part. "but it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only a body, which want means a great deal." and again, "'the dial,' too, it is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like. will no _angel_ body himself out of that; no stalwart yankee _man_, with color in the cheeks of him and a coat on his back?" emerson, writing to carlyle in march, 1842, speaks of the "dubious approbation on the part of you and other men," notwithstanding which he found it with "a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion." so, when margaret fuller gave it up, at the end of the second volume, emerson consented to become its editor. "i cannot bid you quit 'the dial,'" says carlyle, "though it, too, alas, is antinomian somewhat! _perge, perge_, nevertheless." in the next letter he says:- "i love your 'dial,' and yet it is with a kind of shudder. you seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the fact of this present universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can i find any anchorage, and soaring away after ideas, beliefs, revelations and such like,--into perilous altitudes, as i think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing. i know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof." a curious way of characterizing himself as a critic,--but he was not always as well-mannered as the houyhnhnms. to all carlyle's complaints of "the dial's" short-comings emerson did not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty, with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite. "for the _dial_ and its sins, i have no defence to set up. we write as we can, and we know very little about it. if the direction of these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary history that all the bright boys and girls in new england, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys, that they do not wish to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and evening parties. they are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead. perhaps one of these days a great yankee shall come, who will easily do the unknown deed." "all the bright boys and girls in new england," and "'the dial' dying of inanition!" in october, 1840, emerson writes to carlyle:- "we are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket. i am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. george ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book. one man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope." mr. ripley's project took shape in the west roxbury association, better known under the name of brook farm. emerson was not involved in this undertaking. he looked upon it with curiosity and interest, as he would have looked at a chemical experiment, but he seems to have had only a moderate degree of faith in its practical working. "it was a noble and generous movement in the projectors to try an experiment of better living. one would say that impulse was the rule in the society, without centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal routinary character of our educational, religious, social, and economical life in massachusetts." the reader will find a full detailed account of the brook farm experiment in mr. frothingham's "life of george ripley," its founder, and the first president of the association. emerson had only tangential relations with the experiment, and tells its story in his "historic notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the sagacious common-sense side of his nature. the married women, he says, were against the community. "it was to them like the brassy and lacquered life in hotels. the common school was well enough, but to the common nursery they had grave objections. eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. a hen without her chickens was but half a hen." is not the inaudible, inward laughter of emerson more refreshing than the explosions of our noisiest humorists? this is his benevolent summing up:- "the founders of brook farm should have this praise, that they made what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. all comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of residences. it is certain, that freedom from household routine, variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade, did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine. there is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the associates, education; to many, the most important period of their life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. the art of letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. letters were always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room. it was a perpetual picnic, a french revolution in small, an age of reason in a patty-pan." the public edifice called the "phalanstery" was destroyed by fire in 1846. the association never recovered from this blow, and soon afterwards it was dissolved. section 2. emerson's first volume of his collected essays was published in 1841. in the reprint it contains the following essays: history; self-reliance; compensation; spiritual laws; love; friendship; prudence; heroism; the over-soul; circles; intellect; art. "the young american," which is now included in the volume, was not delivered until 1844. once accustomed to emerson's larger formulae we can to a certain extent project from our own minds his treatment of special subjects. but we cannot anticipate the daring imagination, the subtle wit, the curious illustrations, the felicitous language, which make the lecture or the essay captivating as read, and almost entrancing as listened to by the teachable disciple. the reader must be prepared for occasional extravagances. take the essay on history, in the first series of essays, for instance. "let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is one, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written." when we come to the application, in the same essay, almost on the same page, what can we make of such discourse as this? the sentences i quote do not follow immediately, one upon the other, but their sense is continuous. "i hold an actual knowledge very cheap. hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. what do i know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life?--how many times we must say rome and paris, and constantinople! what does rome know of rat and lizard? what are olympiads and consulates to these neighboring systems of being? nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the esquimau seal-hunter, for the kamchatcan in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?" the connection of ideas is not obvious. one can hardly help being reminded of a certain great man's rochester speech as commonly reported by the story-teller. "rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! greece in her palmiest days never had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! men of rochester, go on! no people ever lost their liberty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high!" we cannot help smiling, perhaps laughing, at the odd mixture of rome and rats, of olympiads and esquimaux. but the underlying idea of the interdependence of all that exists in nature is far from ridiculous. emerson says, not absurdly or extravagantly, that "every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols." we have become familiar with his doctrine of "self-reliance," which is the subject of the second lecture of the series. we know that he always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom. it is a man's true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme self-reliance is the law of his being. but see how he guards his proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind. "truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a task-master. high be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!" "compensation" might be preached in a synagogue, and the rabbi would be praised for his performance. emerson had been listening to a sermon from a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful, and the good are miserable. this last proposition agrees with john bunyan's view:- "a christian man is never long at ease, when one fright's gone, another doth him seize." emerson shows up the "success" of the bad man and the failures and trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble scorn of the preacher's low standard of happiness and misery, which would have made him throw his sermon into the fire. the essay on "spiritual laws" is full of pithy sayings:- "as much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands. all the devils respect virtue.--a man passes for that he is worth.--the ancestor of every action is a thought.--to think is to act.--let a man believe in god, and not in names and places and persons. let the great soul incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some dolly or joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature." this is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud of george herbert's. the essay on "love" is poetical, but the three poems, "initial," "daemonic," and "celestial love" are more nearly equal to his subject than his prose. there is a passage in the lecture on "friendship" which suggests some personal relation of emerson's about which we cannot help being inquisitive:- "it has seemed to me lately more possible than i knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. why should i cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? it never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.... yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. the essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. it must not surmise or provide for infirmity. it treats its object as a god that it may deify both." was he thinking of his relations with carlyle? it is a curious subject of speculation what would have been the issue if carlyle had come to concord and taken up his abode under emerson's most hospitable roof. "you shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house." how could they have got on together? emerson was well-bred, and carlyle was wanting in the social graces. "come rest in this bosom" is a sweet air, heard in the distance, too apt to be followed, after a protracted season of close proximity, by that other strain,- "no, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole! rise alps between us and whole oceans roll!" but emerson may have been thinking of some very different person, perhaps some "crude and cold companion" among his disciples, who was not equal to the demands of friendly intercourse. he discourses wisely on "prudence," a virtue which he does not claim for himself, and nobly on "heroism," which was a shining part of his own moral and intellectual being. the points which will be most likely to draw the reader's attention are the remarks on the literature of heroism; the claim for our own america, for massachusetts and connecticut river and boston bay, in spite of our love for the names of foreign and classic topography; and most of all one sentence which, coming from an optimist like emerson, has a sound of sad sincerity painful to recognize. "who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him. who does not sometimes envy the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? and yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being." in the following essay, "the over-soul," emerson has attempted the impossible. he is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his rhapsody,--nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his readers. in speaking of the exalted condition the soul is capable of reaching, he says,- "every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. i dare not speak for it. my words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. yet i desire, even by profane words, if i may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints i have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the highest law." "the over-soul" might almost be called the over-_flow_ of a spiritual imagination. we cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous, god-intoxicated" spinoza. when one talks of the infinite in terms borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those applied to the objects of experience, but the shadows of symbols, varying with the position and intensity of the light of the individual intelligence. it is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts and expressions to plato, or plotinus, or proclus, or porphyry, to spinoza or schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according to the instrument on which it is played. there are songs without words, and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving in endless procession with ever-varying figures along the highway of consciousness, the soul is possessed by a single all-absorbing idea, which, in the highest state of spiritual exaltation, becomes a vision. both plotinus and porphyry believed they were privileged to look upon him whom "no man can see and live." but emerson states his own position so frankly in his essay entitled "circles," that the reader cannot take issue with him as against utterances which he will not defend. there can be no doubt that he would have confessed as much with reference to "the over-soul" as he has confessed with regard to "circles," the essay which follows "the over-soul." "i am not careful to justify myself.... but lest i should mislead any when i have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that i am only an experimenter. do not set the least value on what i do, or the least discredit on what i do not, as if i pretended to settle anything as true or false. 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." perhaps, after reading these transcendental essays of emerson, we might borrow goethe's language about spinoza, as expressing the feeling with which we are left. "i am reading spinoza with frau von stein. i feel myself very near to him, though his soul is much deeper and purer than mine. "i cannot say that i ever read spinoza straight through, that at any time the complete architecture of his intellectual system has stood clear in view before me. but when i look into him i seem to understand him,--that is, he always appears to me consistent with himself, and i can always gather from him very salutary influences for my own way of feeling and acting." emerson would not have pretended that he was always "consistent with himself," but these "salutary influences," restoring, enkindling, vivifying, are felt by many of his readers who would have to confess, like dr. walter channing, that these thoughts, or thoughts like these, as he listened to them in a lecture, "made his head ache." the three essays which follow "the over-soul," "circles," "intellect," "art," would furnish us a harvest of good sayings, some of which we should recognize as parts of our own (borrowed) axiomatic wisdom. "beware when the great god lets loose a thinker on this planet. then all things are at risk." "god enters by a private door into every individual." "god offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. take which you please,--you can never have both." "though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not." but we cannot reconstruct the hanging gardens with a few bricks from babylon. emerson describes his mode of life in these years in a letter to carlyle, dated may 10, 1838. "i occupy, or improve, as we yankees say, two acres only of god's earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. my house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. besides my house, i have, i believe, $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. i have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter $800. well, with this income, here at home, i am a rich man. i stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. i have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. go away from home, i am rich no longer. i never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. as no wise man, i suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend, because of the inundation of claims, so neither am i, who am not wise. but at home, i am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. my wife lidian is an incarnation of christianity,--i call her asia,--and keeps my philosophy from antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my household. here i sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." a great sorrow visited emerson and his household at this period of his life. on the 30th of october, 1841, he wrote to carlyle: "my little boy is five years old to-day, and almost old enough to send you his love." three months later, on the 28th of february, 1842, he writes once more:- "my dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. you can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. a few weeks ago i accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. what would it avail to tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? from a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by scarlatina. we have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that boy's i shall never see. how often i have pleased myself that one day i should send to you this morning star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. i dare not fathom the invisible and untold to inquire what relations to my departed ones i yet sustain." this was the boy whose memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic of emerson's poems, the "threnody,"--a lament not unworthy of comparison with lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of cowper's well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother's picture, in the place of milton's sonorous academic phrases. chapter vi. 1843-1848. aet. 40-45. "the young american."--address on the anniversary of the emancipation of the negroes in the british west indies.[1]--publication of the second series of essays.--contents: the poet.--experience.--character. --manners.--gifts.--nature.--politics.--nominalist and realist.--new england reformers.--publication of poems.--second visit to england. [footnote 1: these two addresses are to be found in the first and eleventh volumes, respectively, of the last collective edition of emerson's works, namely, "nature, addresses, and lectures," and "miscellanies."] emerson was american in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and feeling; american, with an atmosphere of oriental idealism; american, so far as he belonged to any limited part of the universe. he believed in american institutions, he trusted the future of the american race. in the address first mentioned in the contents, of this chapter, delivered february 7, 1844, he claims for this country all that the most ardent patriot could ask. not a few of his fellow-countrymen will feel the significance of the following contrast. "the english have many virtues, many advantages, and the proudest history in the world; but they need all and more than all the resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that country for the mortifications prepared for him by the system of society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to avoid it.... it is for englishmen to consider, not for us; we only say, let us live in america, too thankful for our want of feudal institutions.... if only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of the spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of others' censures, out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded." thirty years have passed since the lecture from which these passages are taken was delivered. the "young american" of that day is the more than middle-aged american of the present. the intellectual independence of our country is far more solidly established than when this lecture was written. but the social alliance between certain classes of americans and english is more and more closely cemented from year to year, as the wealth of the new world burrows its way among the privileged classes of the old world. it is a poor ambition for the possessor of suddenly acquired wealth to have it appropriated as a feeder of the impaired fortunes of a deteriorated household, with a family record of which its representatives are unworthy. the plain and wholesome language of emerson is on the whole more needed now than it was when spoken. his words have often been extolled for their stimulating quality; following the same analogy, they are, as in this address, in a high degree tonic, bracing, strengthening to the american, who requires to be reminded of his privileges that he may know and find himself equal to his duties. on the first day of august, 1844, emerson delivered in concord an address on the anniversary of the emancipation of the negroes in the british west india islands. this discourse would not have satisfied the abolitionists. it was too general in its propositions, full of humane and generous sentiments, but not looking to their extreme and immediate method of action. * * * * * emerson's second series of essays was published in 1844. there are many sayings in the essay called "the poet," which are meant for the initiated, rather than for him who runs, to read:- "all that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology." does this sound wild and extravagant? what were the political ups and downs of the hebrews,--what were the squabbles of the tribes with each other, or with their neighbors, compared to the birth of that poet to whom we owe the psalms,--the sweet singer whose voice is still the dearest of all that ever sang to the heart of mankind? the poet finds his materials everywhere, as emerson tells him in this eloquent apostrophe:- "thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird! wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should'st walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble." "experience" is, as he says himself, but a fragment. it bears marks of having been written in a less tranquil state of mind than the other essays. his most important confession is this:- "all writing comes by the grace of god, and all doing and having. i would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which i dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man; but i have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and i can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the eternal." the essay on "character" requires no difficult study, but is well worth the trouble of reading. a few sentences from it show the prevailing tone and doctrine. "character is nature in the highest form. it is of no use to ape it, or to contend with it. somewhat is possible of resistance and of persistence and of creation to this power, which will foil all emulation." "there is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they have been unanimously saluted as _divine_, and who seem to be an accumulation of that power we consider. "the history of those gods and saints which the world has written, and then worshipped, are documents of character. the ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. this great defeat is hitherto our highest fact." in his essay on "manners," emerson gives us his ideas of a gentleman:- "the gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons or opinions or possessions. beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then gentleness.--power first, or no leading class.--god knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door: but whenever used in strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy.--the famous gentlemen of europe have been of this strong type: saladin, sapor, the cid, julius caesar, scipio, alexander, pericles, and the lordliest personages. they sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to value any condition at a high rate.--i could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person.--the person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight.--i esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it excels in woman." so writes emerson, and proceeds to speak of woman in language which seems almost to pant for rhythm and rhyme. this essay is plain enough for the least "transcendental" reader. franklin would have approved it, and was himself a happy illustration of many of the qualities which go to the emersonian ideal of good manners, a typical american, equal to his position, always as much so in the palaces and salons of paris as in the continental congress, or the society of philadelphia. "gifts" is a dainty little essay with some nice distinctions and some hints which may help to give form to a generous impulse:- "the only gift is a portion of thyself. thou must bleed for me. therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing." "flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.--fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being attached to them." "it is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. it is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap." emerson hates the superlative, but he does unquestionably love the tingling effect of a witty over-statement. we have recognized most of the thoughts in the essay entitled "nature," in the previous essay by the same name, and others which we have passed in review. but there are poetical passages which will give new pleasure. here is a variation of the formula with which we are familiar:- "nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. the world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought." and here is a quaint sentence with which we may take leave of this essay:- "they say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects; but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow." this is pretty and pleasant, but as to the literal value of the prediction, m. jules verne would be the best authority to consult. poets are fond of that branch of science which, if the imaginative frenchman gave it a name, he would probably call _onditologie_. it is not to be supposed that the most sanguine optimist could be satisfied with the condition of the american political world at the present time, or when the essay on "politics" was written, some years before the great war which changed the aspects of the country in so many respects, still leaving the same party names, and many of the characters of the old parties unchanged. this is emerson's view of them as they then were:- "of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share the nation between them, i should say that one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men. the philosopher, the poet, or the religious man, 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 liberties. they have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. the spirit of our american radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. 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 property. it indicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the indian, or the immigrant. from neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation." the metaphysician who looks for a closely reasoned argument on the famous old question which so divided the schoolmen of old will find a very moderate satisfaction in the essay entitled "nominalism and realism." but there are many discursive remarks in it worth gathering and considering. we have the complaint of the cambridge "phi beta kappa oration," reiterated, that there is no complete man, but only a collection of fragmentary men. as a platonist and a poet there could not be any doubt on which side were all his prejudices; but he takes his ground cautiously. "in the famous dispute with the nominalists, the realists had a good deal of reason. general ideas are essences. they are our gods: they round and ennoble the most practical and sordid way of living. "though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the water. but this is flat rebellion. nature will not be buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh particulars." _new england reformers_.--would any one venture to guess how emerson would treat this subject? with his unsparing, though amiable radicalism, his excellent common sense, his delicate appreciation of the ridiculous, too deep for laughter, as wordsworth's thoughts were too deep for tears, in the midst of a band of enthusiasts and not very remote from a throng of fanatics, what are we to look for from our philosopher who unites many characteristics of berkeley and of franklin? we must remember when this lecture was written, for it was delivered on a sunday in the year 1844. the brook farm experiment was an index of the state of mind among one section of the reformers of whom he was writing. to remodel society and the world into a "happy family" was the aim of these enthusiasts. some attacked one part of the old system, some another; some would build a new temple, some would rebuild the old church, some would worship in the fields and woods, if at all; one was for a phalanstery, where all should live in common, and another was meditating the plan and place of the wigwam where he was to dwell apart in the proud independence of the woodchuck and the musquash. emerson had the largest and kindliest sympathy with their ideals and aims, but he was too clear-eyed not to see through the whims and extravagances of the unpractical experimenters who would construct a working world with the lay figures they had put together, instead of flesh and blood men and women and children with all their congenital and acquired perversities. he describes these reformers in his own good-naturedly half-satirical way:- "they defied each other like a congress of kings; each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable. what a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! one apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another that no man should buy or sell; that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. these made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. it was in vain urged by the housewife that god made yeast as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he does vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. no, they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment. stop, dear nature, these innocent advances of thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. the ox must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. even the insect world was to be defended,--that had been too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes was to be incorporated without delay. with these appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their wonderful theories of the christian miracles!" we have already seen the issue of the famous brook farm experiment, which was a practical outcome of the reforming agitation. emerson has had the name of being a leader in many movements in which he had very limited confidence, this among others to which the idealizing impulse derived from him lent its force, but for the organization of which he was in no sense responsible. he says in the lecture we are considering:- "these new associations are composed of men and women of superior talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good; whether these who have energy will not prefer their choice of superiority and power in the world to the humble certainties of the association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and failed rather than a field to the strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot enter into it without some compromise." his sympathies were not allowed to mislead him; he knew human nature too well to believe in a noah's ark full of idealists. all this time he was lecturing for his support, giving courses of lectures in boston and other cities, and before the country lyceums in and out of new england. his letters to carlyle show how painstaking, how methodical, how punctual he was in the business which interested his distant friend. he was not fond of figures, and it must have cost him a great effort to play the part of an accountant. he speaks also of receiving a good deal of company in the summer, and that some of this company exacted much time and attention,--more than he could spare,--is made evident by his gentle complaints, especially in his poems, which sometimes let out a truth he would hardly have uttered in prose. in 1846 emerson's first volume of poems was published. many of the poems had been long before the public--some of the best, as we have seen, having been printed in "the dial." it is only their being brought together for the first time which belongs especially to this period, and we can leave them for the present, to be looked over by and by in connection with a second volume of poems published in 1867, under the title, "may-day and other pieces." in october, 1847, he left concord on a second visit to england, which will be spoken of in the following chapter. chapter vii. 1848-1853. aet. 45-50. the "massachusetts quarterly review;" visit to europe.--england. --scotland.--france.--"representative men" published. i. uses of great men. ii. plato; or, the philosopher; plato; new readings. iii. swedenborg; or, the mystic. iv. montaigne; or, the skeptic. v. shakespeare; or, the poet. vi. napoleon; or, the man of the world. vii. goethe; or, the writer.--contribution to the "memoirs of margaret fuller ossoli." a new periodical publication was begun in boston in 1847, under the name of the "massachusetts quarterly review." emerson wrote the "editor's address," but took no further active part in it, theodore parker being the real editor. the last line of this address is characteristic: "we rely on the truth for aid against ourselves." on the 5th of october, 1847, emerson sailed for europe on his second visit, reaching liverpool on the 22d of that month. many of his admirers were desirous that he should visit england and deliver some courses of lectures. mr. alexander ireland, who had paid him friendly attentions during his earlier visit, and whose impressions of him in the pulpit have been given on a previous page, urged his coming. mr. conway quotes passages from a letter of emerson's which show that he had some hesitation in accepting the invitation, not unmingled with a wish to be heard by the english audiences favorably disposed towards him. "i feel no call," he said, "to make a visit of literary propagandism in england. all my impulses to work of that kind would rather employ me at home." he does not like the idea of "coaxing" or advertising to get him an audience. he would like to read lectures before institutions or friendly persons who sympathize with his studies. he has had a good many decisive tokens of interest from british men and women, but he doubts whether he is much and favorably known in any one city, except perhaps in london. it proved, however, that there was a very widespread desire to hear him, and applications for lectures flowed in from all parts of the kingdom. from liverpool he proceeded immediately to manchester, where mr. ireland received him at the victoria station. after spending a few hours with him, he went to chelsea to visit carlyle, and at the end of a week returned to manchester to begin the series of lecturing engagements which had been arranged for him. mr. ireland's account of emerson's visits and the interviews between him and many distinguished persons is full of interest, but the interest largely relates to the persons visited by emerson. he lectured at edinburgh, where his liberal way of thinking and talking made a great sensation in orthodox circles. but he did not fail to find enthusiastic listeners. a young student, mr. george cupples, wrote an article on these lectures from which, as quoted by mr. ireland, i borrow a single sentence,--one only, but what could a critic say more? speaking of his personal character, as revealed through his writings, he says: "in this respect, i take leave to think that emerson is the most mark-worthy, the loftiest, and most heroic mere man that ever appeared." emerson has a lecture on the superlative, to which he himself was never addicted. but what would youth be without its extravagances,--its preterpluperfect in the shape of adjectives, its unmeasured and unstinted admiration? i need not enumerate the celebrated literary personages and other notabilities whom emerson met in england and scotland. he thought "the two finest mannered literary men he met in england were leigh hunt and de quincey." his diary might tell us more of the impressions made upon him by the distinguished people he met, but it is impossible to believe that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of his new acquaintances as his friend carlyle has left as a bitter legacy behind him. carlyle's merciless discourse about coleridge and charles lamb, and swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. emerson never forgot that he was dealing with human beings. he could not have long endured the asperities of carlyle, and that "loud shout of laughter," which mr. ireland speaks of as one of his customary explosions, would have been discordant to emerson's ears, which were offended by such noisy manifestations. during this visit emerson made an excursion to paris, which furnished him materials for a lecture on france delivered in boston, in 1856, but never printed. from the lectures delivered in england he selected a certain number for publication. these make up the volume entitled "representative men," which was published in 1850. i will give very briefly an account of its contents. the title was a happy one, and has passed into literature and conversation as an accepted and convenient phrase. it would teach us a good deal merely to consider the names he has selected as typical, and the ground of their selection. we get his classification of men considered as leaders in thought and in action. he shows his own affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography, no matter about whom or what he is talking. there is hardly any book of his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not plato, not plutarch, not napoleon, but emerson himself. all his great men interest us for their own sake; but we know a good deal about most of them, and emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally, unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first to recognize. emerson swears by no master. he admires, but always with a reservation. plato comes nearest to being his idol, shakespeare next. but he says of all great men: "the power which they communicate is not theirs. when we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to plato, but to the idea, to which also plato was debtor." emerson loves power as much as carlyle does; he likes "rough and smooth," "scourges of god," and "darlings of the human race." he likes julius caesar, charles the fifth, of spain, charles the twelfth, of sweden, richard plantagenet, and bonaparte. "i applaud," he says, "a sufficient man, an officer equal to his office; captains, ministers, senators. i like a master standing firm on legs of iron, well born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and supporters of his power. sword and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the world. but i find him greater when he can abolish himself and all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the potentate is nothing.- "the genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. the qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow.--all that respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a catholic existence." no man can be an idol for one who looks in this way at all men. but plato takes the first place in emerson's gallery of six great personages whose portraits he has sketched. and of him he says:- "among secular books plato only is entitled to omar's fanatical compliment to the koran, when he said, 'burn the libraries; for their value is in this book.' out of plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought."- "in proportion to the culture of men they become his scholars."--"how many great men nature is incessantly sending up out of night to be _his men_!--his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism.--but the inventor only knows how to borrow. when we are praising plato, it seems we are praising quotations from solon and sophron and philolaus. be it so. every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors." the reader will, i hope, remember this last general statement when he learns from what wide fields of authorship emerson filled his storehouses. a few sentences from emerson will show us the probable source of some of the deepest thought of plato and his disciples. the conception of the fundamental unity, he says, finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the east, especially in the indian scriptures. "'the whole world is but a manifestation of vishnu, who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as not differing from but as the same as themselves. i neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am i, i.' as if he had said, 'all is for the soul, and the soul is vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings; and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.'" all of which we see reproduced in emerson's poem "brahma."--"the country of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is asia; and it realizes this faith in the social institution of caste. on the other side, the genius of europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom."--"plato came to join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of each." but emerson says,--and some will smile at hearing him say it of another,--"the acutest german, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question from him." the transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "euclid of holiness," as emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform soul,"--the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of cudworth,--are fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called "plato: new readings." few readers will be satisfied with the essay entitled "swedenborg; or, the mystic." the believers in his special communion as a revealer of divine truth will find him reduced to the level of other seers. the believers of the different creeds of christianity will take offence at the statement that "swedenborg and behmen both failed by attaching themselves to the christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in its bosom." the men of science will smile at the exorbitant claims put forward in behalf of swedenborg as a scientific discoverer. "philosophers" will not be pleased to be reminded that swedenborg called them "cockatrices," "asps," or "flying serpents;" "literary men" will not agree that they are "conjurers and charlatans," and will not listen with patience to the praises of a man who so called them. as for the poets, they can take their choice of emerson's poetical or prose estimate of the great mystic, but they cannot very well accept both. in "the test," the muse says:- "i hung my verses in the wind, time and tide their faults may find; all were winnowed through and through, five lines lasted good and true ... sunshine cannot bleach the snow, nor time unmake what poets know. have you eyes to find the five which five hundred did survive?" in the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets referred to are homer, dante, shakespeare, _swedenborg_, and goethe. and now, in the essay we have just been looking at, i find that "his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. we wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. no bird ever sang in these gardens of the dead. the entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning." yet emerson says of him that "he lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. he elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature." emerson seems to have admired swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer, he liked jacob behmen a great deal better. "montaigne; or, the skeptic," is easier reading than the last-mentioned essay. emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him. but no other reason was needed than that montaigne was just what emerson describes him as being. "there have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thought: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for. "the sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. i know not anywhere the book that seems less written. it is the language of conversation transferred to a book. cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.- "montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. he keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath. his writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road. there is but one exception,--in his love for socrates. in speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion." the writer who draws this portrait must have many of the same characteristics. much as emerson loved his dreams and his dreamers, he must have found a great relief in getting into "the middle of the road" with montaigne, after wandering in difficult by-paths which too often led him round to the point from which he started. as to his exposition of the true relations of skepticism to affirmative and negative belief, the philosophical reader must be referred to the essay itself. in writing of "shakespeare; or, the poet," emerson naturally gives expression to his leading ideas about the office of the poet and of poetry. "great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality." a poet has "a heart in unison with his time and country."--"there is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times." when shakespeare was in his youth the drama was the popular means of amusement. it was "ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the same time. the best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field." shakespeare found a great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time to time on the stage. he borrowed in all directions: "a great poet who appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating." homer, chaucer, saadi, felt that all wit was their wit. "chaucer is a huge borrower." emerson gives a list of authors from whom he drew. this list is in many particulars erroneous, as i have learned from a letter of professor lounsbury's which i have had the privilege of reading, but this is a detail which need not delay us. the reason why emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing, especially when treating of plato and of shakespeare, is obvious enough. he was arguing in his own cause,--not defending himself, as if there were some charge of plagiarism to be met, but making the proud claim of eminent domain in behalf of the masters who knew how to use their acquisitions. "shakespeare is the only biographer of shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing except to the shakespeare in us."--"shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the crowd. a good reader can in a sort nestle into plato's brain and think from thence; but not into shakespeare's. we are still out of doors." after all the homage which emerson pays to the intellect of shakespeare, he weighs him with the rest of mankind, and finds that he shares "the halfness and imperfection of humanity." "he converted the elements which waited on his command into entertainment. he was master of the revels to mankind." and so, after this solemn verdict on shakespeare, after looking at the forlorn conclusions of our old and modern oracles, priest and prophet, israelite, german, and swede, he says: "it must be conceded that these are half views of half men. the world still wants its poet-priest, who shall not trifle with shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with equal inspiration." it is not to be expected that emerson should have much that is new to say about "napoleon; or, the man of the world." the stepping-stones of this essay are easy to find:- "the instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed out napoleon as the incarnate democrat.- "napoleon is thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers." as plato borrowed, as shakespeare borrowed, as mirabeau "plagiarized every good thought, every good word that was spoken in france," so napoleon is not merely "representative, but a monopolizer and usurper of other minds." he was "a man of stone and iron,"--equipped for his work by nature as sallust describes catiline as being. "he had a directness of action never before combined with such comprehension. here was a man who in each moment and emergency knew what to do next. he saw only the object; the obstacle must give way." "when a natural king becomes a titular king everybody is pleased and satisfied."-"i call napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.--he was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse." but he was without generous sentiments, "a boundless liar," and finishing in high colors the outline of his moral deformities, emerson gives us a climax in two sentences which render further condemnation superfluous:- "in short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but with an impostor and rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of jupiter scapin, or a sort of scamp jupiter. "so this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of france and of europe in 1814 was, enough of him; '_assez de bonaparte_.'" it was to this feeling that the french poet barbier, whose death we have but lately seen announced, gave expression in the terrible satire in which he pictured france as a fiery courser bestridden by her spurred rider, who drove her in a mad career over heaps of rocks and ruins. but after all, carlyle's "_carriã¨re ouverte aux talens_" is the expression for napoleon's great message to mankind. "goethe; or, the writer," is the last of the representative men who are the subjects of this book of essays. emerson says he had read the fifty-five volumes of goethe, but no other german writers, at least in the original. it must have been in fulfilment of some pious vow that he did this. after all that carlyle had written about goethe, he could hardly help studying him. but this essay looks to me as if he had found the reading of goethe hard work. it flows rather languidly, toys with side issues as a stream loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds an excuse for play in every pebble. still, he has praise enough for his author. "he has clothed our modern existence with poetry."--"he has said the best things about nature that ever were said.--he flung into literature in his mephistopheles the first organic figure that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the prometheus.--he is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist.--i join napoleon with him, as being both representatives of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions,--two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for this time and for all time." this must serve as an _ex pede_ guide to reconstruct the essay which finishes the volume. in 1852 there was published a memoir of margaret fuller ossoli, in which emerson, james freeman clarke, and william henry channing each took a part. emerson's account of her conversation and extracts from her letters and diaries, with his running commentaries and his interpretation of her mind and character, are a most faithful and vivid portraiture of a woman who is likely to live longer by what is written of her than by anything she ever wrote herself. chapter viii. 1858-1858. aet. 50-55. lectures in various places.--anti-slavery addresses.--woman. a lecture read before the woman's rights convention.--samuel hoar. speech at concord.--publication of "english traits."--the "atlantic monthly."--the "saturday club." after emerson's return from europe he delivered lectures to different audiences,--one on poetry, afterwards published in "letters and social aims," a course of lectures in freeman place chapel, boston, some of which have been published, one on the anglo-saxon race, and many others. in january, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of anti-slavery addresses delivered in tremont temple, boston. in the same year he delivered an address before the anti-slavery party of new york. his plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the planters, not conceding their right to ownership, but because "it is the only practical course, and is innocent." it would cost two thousand millions, he says, according to the present estimate, but "was there ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this would be?" his optimism flowers out in all its innocent luxuriance in the paragraph from which this is quoted. of course with notions like these he could not be hand in hand with the abolitionists. he was classed with the free soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project for buying up the negroes. he looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in 1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency,--in steel and not in gold:- "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." his sympathies were all and always with freedom. he spoke with indignation of the outrage on sumner; he took part in the meeting at concord expressive of sympathy with john brown. but he was never in the front rank of the aggressive anti-slavery men. in his singular "ode inscribed to w.h. channing" there is a hint of a possible solution of the slavery problem which implies a doubt as to the permanence of the cause of all the trouble. "the over-god who marries right to might, who peoples, unpeoples,- he who exterminates races by stronger races, black by white faces,- knows to bring honey out of the lion." some doubts of this kind helped emerson to justify himself when he refused to leave his "honeyed thought" for the busy world where "things are of the snake." the time came when he could no longer sit quietly in his study, and, to borrow mr. cooke's words, "as the agitation proceeded, and brave men took part in it, and it rose to a spirit of moral grandeur, he gave a heartier assent to the outward methods adopted." * * * * * no woman could doubt the reverence of emerson for womanhood. in a lecture read to the "woman's rights convention" in 1855, he takes bold, and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground in the controversy then and since dividing the community. this is the way in which he expresses himself: "i do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in public affairs. but it is they and not we that are to determine it. let the laws he purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous impediment to women. let the public donations for education be equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do theirs;--and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. if you do refuse them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them,--according to our teutonic principle, no representation, no tax.--the new movement is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish." emerson was fortunate enough to have had for many years as a neighbor, that true new england roman, samuel hoar. he spoke of him in concord before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. he afterwards prepared a sketch of mr. hoar for "putnam's magazine," from which i take one prose sentence and the verse with which the sketch concluded:- "he was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an impression that the style is passing away, but which, i suppose, is an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are native." the single verse i quote is compendious enough and descriptive enough for an elizabethan monumental inscription. "with beams december planets dart his cold eye truth and conduct scanned; july was in his sunny heart, october in his liberal hand." emerson's "english traits," forming one volume of his works, was published in 1856. it is a thoroughly fresh and original book. it is not a tourist's guide, not a detailed description of sights which tired the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the wearying pages in which they are recorded. shrewd observation there is indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic characterizations. they are not to be received as in any sense final; they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded, sharp-witted, kind-hearted, open-souled philosopher, whose presence made every one well-disposed towards him, and consequently left him well-disposed to all the world. a glance at the table of contents will give an idea of the objects which emerson proposed to himself in his tour, and which take up the principal portion of his record. only one _place_ is given as the heading of a chapter,--_stonehenge_. the other eighteen chapters have general titles, _land, race, ability, manners_, and others of similar character. he uses plain english in introducing us to the pilgrim fathers of the british aristocracy:- "twenty thousand thieves landed at hastings. these founders of the house of lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. they were all alike, they took everything they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything english was brought to the verge of ruin. such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled." the race preserves some of its better characteristics. "they have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age. the old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. a clear skin, a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the island." english "manners" are characterized, according to emerson, by pluck, vigor, independence. "every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable." they are positive, methodical, cleanly, and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form. "they keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and mace, sceptre and crown. a severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. they hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use a studied plainness." "in an aristocratical country like england, not the trial by jury, but the dinner is the capital institution." "they confide in each other,--english believes in english."--"they require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in public men." "as compared with the american, i think them cheerful and contented. young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy." emerson's observation is in accordance with that of cotton mather nearly two hundred years ago. "_new england_, a country where splenetic maladies are prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those _melancholy indispositions_, which have unhinged them from all service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby to lay _violent hands_ upon themselves at the last. these are among the _unsearchable judgments_ of god." if there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout briton. "they drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run into absurd follies with the gravity of the eumenides. they stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. they chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock in the boughs of the bohon upas, taste every poison, buy every secret; at naples, they put st. januarius's blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why she winks; measure with an english foot-rule every cell of the inquisition, every turkish caaba, every holy of holies; translate and send to bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from shuddering bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror they cause." this last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to marvell's poetical description of holland and the dutch. "a saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the curtain of the eagle's eye. our swifter americans, when they first deal with english, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.--high and low, they are of an unctuous texture.--their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body.--half their strength they put not forth. the stability of england is the security of the modern world." perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than the suggestion that "if hereafter the war of races often predicted, and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty coming from eastern europe), should menace the english civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their colonies." in reading some of emerson's pages it seems as if another arcadia, or the new atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of great britain, or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,--or if they do, never think of denying that they have done it. but this was a generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not grown such familiar terms to english ears as they are to-day. emerson saw the country on its best side. each traveller makes his own england. a quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a field of mushrooms. the transplanted church of england is rich and prosperous and fashionable enough not to be disturbed by emerson's flashes of light that have not come through its stained windows. "the religion of england is part of good-breeding. when you see on the continent the well-dressed englishman come into his ambassador's chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman. "the church at this moment is much to be pitied. she has nothing left but possession. if a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him." sydney smith had a great reverence for a bishop,--so great that he told a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table,--and if next an archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,---but sydney smith would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a _banderillero_ leaves his little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose unwieldy bulk he is playing. emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the established church very freely, but he closes his chapter on religion with soft-spoken words. "yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le monde, et ne faire souffrir personne,_ that divine secret has existed in england from the days of alfred to those of romilly, of clarkson, and of florence nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame." "english traits" closes with emerson's speech at manchester, at the annual banquet of the "free trade athenaeum." this was merely an occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had sentences in it which, if we can imagine milton to have been called up in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in their utterance. * * * * * the total impression left by the book is that emerson was fascinated by the charm of english society, filled with admiration of the people, tempted to contrast his new englanders in many respects unfavorably with old englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations of the phlegmatic islander. he alternates between a turn of genuine admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its playthings. this is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. an american need not be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. he cannot help it. madame tussaud's exhibition, the lord-mayor's gilt coach, and a coronation, if one happens to be in season, are all sights to be seen by an american traveller, but the reverence which is born with the british subject went up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the little bridge over the sleepy river which works its way along through the wide-awake town of concord. in november, 1857, a new magazine was established in boston, bearing the name of "the atlantic monthly." professor james russell lowell was editor-in-chief, and messrs. phillips and sampson, who were the originators of the enterprise, were the publishers. many of the old contributors to "the dial" wrote for the new magazine, among them emerson. he contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of them verse, to different numbers, from the first to the thirty-seventh volume. among them are several of his best known poems, such as "the romany girl," "days," "brahma," "waldeinsamkeit," "the titmouse," "boston hymn," "saadi," and "terminus." at about the same time there grew up in boston a literary association, which became at last well known as the "saturday club," the members dining together on the last saturday of every month. the magazine and the club have existed and flourished to the present day. they have often been erroneously thought to have some organic connection, and the "atlantic club" has been spoken of as if there was or had been such an institution, but it never existed. emerson was a member of the saturday club from the first; in reality before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a platonic idea. the club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the habit of meeting him at dinner at "parker's," the "will's coffee-house" of boston. this little group gathered others to itself and grew into a club as rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. during its first decade the saturday club brought together, as members or as visitors, many distinguished persons. at one end of the table sat longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always pleasant to look,--whose silence was better than many another man's conversation. at the other end of the table sat agassiz, robust, sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. the stranger who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the table would have heard in answer the names of hawthorne, motley, dana, lowell, whipple, peirce, the distinguished mathematician, judge hoar, eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, dwight, the leading musical critic of boston for a whole generation, sumner, the academic champion of freedom, andrew, "the great war governor" of massachusetts, dr. howe, the philanthropist, william hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy of such company. and with these, generally near the longfellow end of the table, sat emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording on his mental phonograph any stray word worth remembering. emerson was a very regular attendant at the meetings of the saturday club, and continued to dine at its table, until within a year or two of his death. unfortunately the club had no boswell, and its golden hours passed unrecorded. chapter ix. 1858-1863: aet. 55-60. essay on persian poetry.--speech at the burns centennial festival--letter from emerson to a lady.--tributes to theodore parker and to thoreau.--address on the emancipation proclamation.--publication of "the conduct of life." contents: fate; power; wealth; culture; behavior; worship; considerations by the way; beauty; illusions. the essay on persian poetry, published in the "atlantic monthly" in 1858, should be studied by all readers who are curious in tracing the influence of oriental poetry on emerson's verse. in many of the shorter poems and fragments published since "may-day," as well as in the "quatrains" and others of the later poems in that volume, it is sometimes hard to tell what is from the persian from what is original. on the 25th of january, 1859, emerson attended the burns festival, held at the parker house in boston, on the centennial anniversary of the poet's birth. he spoke after the dinner to the great audience with such beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. among his hearers was mr. lowell, who says of it that "every word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds." judge hoar, who was another of his hearers, says, that though he has heard many of the chief orators of his time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. i was myself present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. his words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with, but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel. i am allowed the privilege of printing the following letter addressed to a lady of high intellectual gifts, who was one of the earliest, most devoted, and most faithful of his intimate friends:-concord, may 13, 1859. please, dear c., not to embark for home until i have despatched these lines, which i will hasten to finish. louis napoleon will not bayonet you the while,--keep him at the door. so long i have promised to write! so long i have thanked your long suffering! i have let pass the unreturning opportunity your visit to germany gave to acquaint you with gisela von arnim (bettina's daughter), and joachim the violinist, and hermann grimm the scholar, her friends. neither has e.,--wandering in europe with hope of meeting you,--yet met. this contumacy of mine i shall regret as long as i live. how palsy creeps over us, with gossamer first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are drawn.--yet i and all my little company watch every token from you, and coax mrs. h. to read us letters. i learned with satisfaction that you did not like germany. where then did goethe find his lovers? do all the women have bad noses and bad mouths? and will you stop in england, and bring home the author of "counterparts" with you? or did----write the novels and send them to london, as i fancied when i read them? how strange that you and i alone to this day should have his secret! i think our people will never allow genius, without it is alloyed by talent. but----is paralyzed by his whims, that i have ceased to hope from him. i could wish your experience of your friends were more animating than mine, and that there were any horoscope you could not cast from the first day. the faults of youth are never shed, no, nor the merits, and creeping time convinces ever the more of our impotence, and of the irresistibility of our bias. still this is only science, and must remain science. our _praxis_ is never altered for that. we must forever hold our companions responsible, or they are not companions but stall-fed. i think, as we grow older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus. we volunteer no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in our perception that nature is all right, and that we have a good understanding with it. we must shine to a few brothers, as palms or pines or roses among common weeds, not from greater absolute value, but from a more convenient nature. but 'tis almost chemistry at last, though a meta-chemistry. i remember you were such an impatient blasphemer, however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth, that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of peace. but there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in the most passive acceptance,--if of an intellectual turn. here comes out around me at this moment the new june,--the leaves say june, though the calendar says may,--and we must needs hail our young relatives again, though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters receiving a late-born brother or sister. nature herself seems a little ashamed of a law so monstrous, billions of summers, and now the old game again without a new bract or sepal. but you will think me incorrigible with my generalities, and you so near, and will be here again this summer; perhaps with a.w. and the other travellers. my children scan curiously your e.'s drawings, as they have seen them. the happiest winds fill the sails of you and yours! r.w. emerson. in the year 1860, theodore parker died, and emerson spoke of his life and labors at the meeting held at the music hall to do honor to his memory. emerson delivered discourses on sundays and week-days in the music hall to mr. parker's society after his death. in 1862, he lost his friend thoreau, at whose funeral he delivered an address which was published in the "atlantic monthly" for august of the same year. thoreau had many rare and admirable qualities, and thoreau pictured by emerson is a more living personage than white of selborne would have been on the canvas of sir joshua reynolds. the address on the emancipation proclamation was delivered in boston in september, 1862. the feeling that inspired it may be judged by the following extract:- "happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the earth, leaving open to them an honest career. happy the old, who see nature purified before they depart. do not let the dying die; hold them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the melioration of our planet:- "'incertainties now crown themselves assured, and peace proclaims olives of endless age.'" the "conduct of life" was published in 1860. the chapter on "fate" might leave the reader with a feeling that what he is to do, as well as what he is to be and to suffer, is so largely predetermined for him, that his will, though formally asserted, has but a questionable fraction in adjusting him to his conditions as a portion of the universe. but let him hold fast to this reassuring statement:- "if we must accept fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.--we are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times." but the value of the essay is not so much in any light it throws on the mystery of volition, as on the striking and brilliant way in which the limitations of the individual and the inexplicable rule of law are illustrated. "nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. we must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.--the way of providence is a little rude. the habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. you have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,--expensive races,--race living at the expense of race.--let us not deny it up and down. providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity." emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he believed in so fully:- "they who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear." but certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no calvinistic predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than emerson, who dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words, which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:- "people are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine brothers with this diverging destination: and i suppose, with high magnifiers, mr. fraunhofer or dr. carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that a free-soiler." let us see what emerson has to say of "power:"- "all successful men have agreed in one thing--they were _causationists_. they believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and the last of things. "the key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe;--the key to all ages is,--imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear. this gives force to the strong,--that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.- "we say that success is constitutional; depends on a _plus_ condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the supernatural or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive, yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge." the "two economies which are the best _succedanea"_ for deficiency of temperament are concentration and drill. this he illustrates by example, and he also lays down some good, plain, practical rules which "poor richard" would have cheerfully approved. he might have accepted also the essay on "wealth" as having a good sense so like his own that he could hardly tell the difference between them. "wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so as to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp, and three meals; in a horse or locomotive to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge and good will. wealth begins with these articles of necessity.- "to be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race.- "the pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone." who can give better counsels on "culture" than emerson? but we must borrow only a few sentences from his essay on that subject. all kinds of secrets come out as we read these essays of emerson's. we know something of his friends and disciples who gathered round him and sat at his feet. it is not hard to believe that he was drawing one of those composite portraits mr. galton has given us specimens of when he wrote as follows:- "the pest of society is egotism. this goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction. the preservation of the species was a point of such necessity that nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder. so egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is. "the antidotes against this organic egotism are, the range and variety of attraction, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel, society, solitude." "we can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be used; yet cautiously and haughtily,--and will yield their best values to him who can best do without them. keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars." we must remember, too, that "the calamities are our friends. try the rough water as well as the smooth. rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then. he who aims high, must dread an easy home and popular manners." emerson cannot have had many enemies, if any, in his calm and noble career. he can have cherished no enmity, on personal grounds at least. but he refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of a friend whom he respected. it was "the hand of douglas" again,--the same feeling that charles emerson expressed in the youthful essay mentioned in the introduction to this volume. here are a few good sayings about "behavior." "there is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage." thus it is that mr. emerson speaks of "manners" in his essay under the above title. "the basis of good manners is self-reliance.--manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.- "men take each other's measure, when they meet for the first time,--and every time they meet.- "it is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. the man that stands by himself, the universe stands by him also." in his essay on "worship," emerson ventures the following prediction:- "the religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. the scientific mind must have a faith which is science.--there will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry." it is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the established facts of science and history when these last reach it in their onward movement? it may be remarked that he now speaks of science more respectfully than of old. i suppose this essay was of later date than "beauty," or "illusions." but accidental circumstances made such confusion in the strata of emerson's published thought that one is often at a loss to know whether a sentence came from the older or the newer layer. we come to "considerations by the way." the common-sense side of emerson's mind has so much in common with the plain practical intelligence of franklin that it is a pleasure to find the philosopher of the nineteenth century quoting the philosopher of the eighteenth. "franklin said, 'mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged; but they have the means if they would employ them.'" "shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? by the minority, surely." here we have the doctrine of the "saving remnant," which we have since recognized in mr. matthew arnold's well-remembered lecture. our republican philosopher is clearly enough outspoken on this matter of the _vox populi_. "leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. i wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them." pã¨re bouhours asked a question about the germans which found its answer in due time. after reading what emerson says about "the masses," one is tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have "a constituency" and be elected to congress? certainly the essay just quoted from would not make a very promising campaign document. perhaps there was no great necessity for emerson's returning to the subject of "beauty," to which he had devoted a chapter of "nature," and of which he had so often discoursed incidentally. but he says so many things worth reading in the essay thus entitled in the "conduct of life" that we need not trouble ourselves about repetitions. the essay is satirical and poetical rather than philosophical. satirical when he speaks of science with something of that old feeling betrayed by his brother charles when he was writing in 1828; poetical in the flight of imagination with which he enlivens, entertains, stimulates, inspires,--or as some may prefer to say,--amuses his listeners and readers. the reader must decide which of these effects is produced by the following passage:- "the feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of everything into every other thing. facts which had never before left their stark common sense suddenly figure as eleusinian mysteries. my boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors, and constellations. all the facts in nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. what! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? i cry you mercy, good shoe-box! i did not know you were a jewel-case. chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. and there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no base fact or event can ever give. there are no days so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination." one is reminded of various things in reading this sentence. an ounce of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. a coarser satirist than emerson indulged his fancy in "meditations on a broomstick," which my lady berkeley heard seriously and to edification. meditations on a "shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something could be made of it. a poet must select, and if he stoops too low he cannot lift the object he would fain idealize. the habitual readers of emerson do not mind an occasional over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them amusing and not misleading. but the accountants, for whom two and two always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up as wanting in sanity. without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no one should venture upon emerson. if he had seen the lecturer's smile as he delivered one of his playful statements of a runaway truth, fact unhorsed by imagination, sometimes by wit, or humor, he would have found a meaning in his words which the featureless printed page could never show him. the essay on "illusions" has little which we have not met with, or shall not find repeating itself in the poems. during this period emerson contributed many articles in prose and verse to the "atlantic monthly," and several to "the dial," a second periodical of that name published in cincinnati. some of these have been, or will be, elsewhere referred to. chapter x. 1863-1868. aet. 60-65. "boston hymn."--"voluntaries."--other poems.--"may-day and other pieces."--"remarks at the funeral services of abraham lincoln."--essay on persian poetry.--address at a meeting of the free religious association.--"progress of culture." address before the phi beta kappa society of harvard university.--course of lectures in philadelphia.--the degree of ll.d. conferred upon emerson by harvard university.--"terminus." the "boston hymn" was read by emerson in the music hall, on the first day of january, 1863. it is a rough piece of verse, but noble from beginning to end. one verse of it, beginning "pay ransom to the owner," has been already quoted; these are the three that precede it:- "i cause from every creature his proper good to flow: as much as he is and doeth so much shall he bestow. "but laying hands on another to coin his labor and sweat, he goes in pawn to his victim for eternal years in debt. "to-day unbind the captive, so only are ye unbound: lift up a people from the dust, trump of their rescue, sound!" "voluntaries," published in the same year in the "atlantic monthly," is more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more pindaric elevation than the plain song of the "boston hymn." "but best befriended of the god he who, in evil times, warned by an inward voice, heeds not the darkness and the dread, biding by his rule and choice, feeling only the fiery thread leading over heroic ground, walled with mortal terror round, to the aim which him allures, and the sweet heaven his deed secures. peril around, all else appalling, cannon in front and leaden rain him duly through the clarion calling to the van called not in vain." it is in this poem that we find the lines which, a moment after they were written, seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand years:- "so nigh is grandeur to our dust, so near is god to man, when duty whispers low, _thou must_, the youth replies, _i can_." "saadi" was published in the "atlantic monthly" in 1864, "my garden" in 1866, "terminus" in 1867. in the same year these last poems with many others were collected in a small volume, entitled "may-day, and other pieces." the general headings of these poems are as follows: may-day.--the adirondacs.--occasional and miscellaneous pieces.--nature and life.--elements.--quatrains.--translations.--some of these poems, which were written at long intervals, have been referred to in previous pages. "the adirondacs" is a pleasant narrative, but not to be compared for its poetical character with "may-day," one passage from which, beginning, "i saw the bud-crowned spring go forth," is surpassingly imaginative and beautiful. in this volume will be found "brahma," "days," and others which are well known to all readers of poetry. emerson's delineations of character are remarkable for high-relief and sharp-cut lines. in his remarks at the funeral services for abraham lincoln, held in concord, april 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the homespun-robed chief of the republic with equal breadth and delicacy:- "here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair weather sailor; the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. in four years,--four years of battle-days,--his endurance, his fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting. there, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epoch. he is the true history of the american people in his time. step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of his country; the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue." in his "remarks at the organization of the free religious association," emerson stated his leading thought about religion in a very succinct and sufficiently "transcendental" way: intelligibly for those who wish to understand him; mystically to those who do not accept or wish to accept the doctrine shadowed forth in his poem, "the sphinx." --"as soon as every man is apprised of the divine presence within his own mind,--is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste, all draw their essence from this moral sentiment; then we have a religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the private action." nothing could be more wholesome in a meeting of creed-killers than the suggestive remark,- --"what i expected to find here was, some practical suggestions by which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true church, the pure worship. pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure benefits. it is only by good works, it is only on the basis of active duty, that worship finds expression.--the interests that grow out of a meeting like this, should bind us with new strength to the old eternal duties." in a later address before the same association, emerson says:- "i object, of course, to the claim of miraculous dispensation,--certainly not to the _doctrine_ of christianity.--if you are childish and exhibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a thaumaturgist, i am repelled. that claim takes his teachings out of nature, and permits official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on the teachings." the "progress of culture" was delivered as a phi beta kappa oration just thirty years after his first address before the same society. it is very instructive to compare the two orations written at the interval of a whole generation: one in 1837, at the age of thirty-four; the other in 1867, at the age of sixty-four. both are hopeful, but the second is more sanguine than the first. he recounts what he considers the recent gains of the reforming movement:- "observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or adopted. the new claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in history. now that by the increased humanity of law she controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power." he enumerates many other gains, from the war or from the growth of intelligence,--"all, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary, teaching nations the taking of governments into their own hands, and superseding kings." he repeats some of his fundamental formulae. "the foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment. "great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. "periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter." and most encouraging it is to read in 1884 what was written in 1867,--especially in the view of future possibilities. "bad kings and governors help us, if only they are bad enough." _non tali auxilio_, we exclaim, with a shudder of remembrance, and are very glad to read these concluding words: "i read the promise of better times and of greater men." in the year 1866, emerson reached the age which used to be spoken of as the "grand climacteric." in that year harvard university conferred upon him the degree of doctor of laws, the highest honor in its gift. in that same year, having left home on one of his last lecturing trips, he met his son, dr. edward waldo emerson, at the brevoort house, in new york. then, and in that place, he read to his son the poem afterwards published in the "atlantic monthly," and in his second volume, under the title "terminus." this was the first time that dr. emerson recognized the fact that his father felt himself growing old. the thought, which must have been long shaping itself in the father's mind, had been so far from betraying itself that it was a shock to the son to hear it plainly avowed. the poem is one of his noblest; he could not fold his robes about him with more of serene dignity than in these solemn lines. the reader may remember that one passage from it has been quoted for a particular purpose, but here is the whole poem:- terminus. it is time to be old, to take in sail:- 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. there's not enough for this and that, make thy option which of two; economize the failing river, not the less revere the giver, leave the many and hold the few, timely wise accept the terms, soften the fall with wary foot; a little while still plan and smile, and,--fault of novel germs,- mature the unfallen fruit. curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, bad husbands of their fires, who when they gave thee breath, failed to bequeath the needful sinew stark as once, the baresark marrow to thy bones, but left a legacy of ebbing veins, inconstant heat and nerveless reins,- amid the muses, left thee deaf and dumb, amid the gladiators, halt and numb. "as the bird trims her to the gale i trim myself to the storm of time, i man the rudder, reef the sail, obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: 'lowly faithful, banish fear, right onward drive unharmed; the port, well worth the cruise, is near, and every wave is charmed.'" chapter xi. 1868-1873. aet. 65-70. lectures on the natural history of the intellect.--publication of "society and solitude." contents: society and solitude. --civilization.--art.--eloquence.--domestic life.--farming. --works and days.--books.--clubs.--courage.--success.--old age.--other literary labors.--visit to california.--burning of his house, and the story of its rebuilding.--third visit to europe.--his reception at concord on his return. during three successive years, 1868, 1869, 1870, emerson delivered a series of lectures at harvard university on the "natural history of the intellect." these lectures, as i am told by dr. emerson, cost him a great deal of labor, but i am not aware that they have been collected or reported. they will be referred to in the course of this chapter, in an extract from prof. thayer's "western journey with mr. emerson." he is there reported as saying that he cared very little for metaphysics. it is very certain that he makes hardly any use of the ordinary terms employed by metaphysicians. if he does not hold the words "subject and object" with their adjectives, in the same contempt that mr. ruskin shows for them, he very rarely employs either of these expressions. once he ventures on the _not me_, but in the main he uses plain english handles for the few metaphysical tools he has occasion to employ. "society and solitude" was published in 1870. the first essay in the volume bears the same name as the volume itself. in this first essay emerson is very fair to the antagonistic claims of solitary and social life. he recognizes the organic necessity of solitude. we are driven "as with whips into the desert." but there is danger in this seclusion. "now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.--here again, as so often, nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line.--the conditions are met, if we keep our independence yet do not lose our sympathy." the essay on "civilization" is pleasing, putting familiar facts in a very agreeable way. the framed or stone-house in place of the cave or the camp, the building of roads, the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to agriculture, the division of labor, the skilful combinations of civil government, the diffusion of knowledge through the press, are well worn subjects which he treats agreeably, if not with special brilliancy:- "right position of woman in the state is another index.--place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality gives that essential charm to a woman which educates all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate, so that i have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women." my attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader will readily understand, and i trust look upon good-naturedly:- "the ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart, longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer, driven by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from home,- "'the pulses of her iron heart go beating through the storm.'" i cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be an incorrect version of these two from a poem of my own called "the steamboat:" "the beating of her restless heart still sounding through the storm." it is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer lives, for he is ready to "cavil on the ninth part of a hair" where his verses are concerned. but extreme accuracy was not one of emerson's special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that 'tis better to be quoted wrong than to be quoted not at all. this essay of emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy to stand by the side of that which juvenal says came from heaven. how could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? it is not strange that he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. not having any golden letters to print it in, i will underscore it for italics, and doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals:- "now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to _hitch his wagon to a star_, and see his chore done by the gods themselves."- "'it was a great instruction,' said a saint in cromwell's war, 'that the best courages are but beams of the almighty.' hitch your wagon to a star. let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. let us not lie and steal. no god will help. we shall find all their teams going the other way,--charles's wain, great bear, orion, leo, hercules: every god will leave us. work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility."-charles's wain and the great bear, he should have been reminded, are the same constellation; the _dipper_ is what our people often call it, and the country folk all know "the pinters," which guide their eyes to the north star. i find in the essay on "art" many of the thoughts with which we are familiar in emerson's poem, "the problem." it will be enough to cite these passages:- "we feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in the divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. and so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.- --"the iliad of homer, the songs of david, the odes of pindar, the tragedies of aeschylus, the doric temples, the gothic cathedrals, the plays of shakspeare, all and each were made not for sport, but in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.- --"the gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest and the people were overpowered by their faith. love and fear laid every stone.- "our arts are happy hits. we are like the musician on the lake, whose melody is sweeter than he knows." the discourse on "eloquence" is more systematic, more professorial, than many of the others. a few brief extracts will give the key to its general purport:- "eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.- "he who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character and insight.- --"the highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.- --"its great masters ... were grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world and themselves also." "domestic life" begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of the goblet which holds some tonic draught:- "welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which chatham and pericles in manhood had not. his unaffected lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous compassion. the small despot asks so little that all reason and all nature are on his side. his ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue. his flesh is angels' flesh, all alive.--all day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he fasts, the little pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him." emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about "farming." dr. emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an address before the "middlesex agricultural society," and printed in the "transactions" of that association. he soon found out that the hoe and the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some general ideas about farming which he expressed very happily:- "the farmer's office is precise and important, but you must not try to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to fate and gravitation, whose minister he is.--this hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of tennyson; but by men of endurance, deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and timely." emerson's chemistry and physiology are not profound, but they are correct enough to make a fine richly colored poetical picture in his imaginative presentation. he tells the commonest facts so as to make them almost a surprise:- "by drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have found there is a concord under old concord, which we are now getting the best crops from; a middlesex under middlesex; and, in fine, that massachusetts has a basement story more valuable and that promises to pay a better rent than all the superstructure." in "works and days" there is much good reading, but i will call attention to one or two points only, as having a slight special interest of their own. the first is the boldness of emerson's assertions and predictions in matters belonging to science and art. thus, he speaks of "the transfusion of the blood,--which, in paris, it was claimed, enables a man to change his blood as often as his linen!" and once more, "we are to have the balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the air." possibly; but it is perhaps as safe to predict that it will be fought on wheels; the soldiers on bicycles, the officers on tricycles. the other point i have marked is that we find in this essay a prose version of the fine poem, printed in "may-day" under the title "days." i shall refer to this more particularly hereafter. it is wronging the essay on "books" to make extracts from it. it is all an extract, taken from years of thought in the lonely study and the public libraries. if i commit the wrong i have spoken of, it is under protest against myself. every word of this essay deserves careful reading. but here are a few sentences i have selected for the reader's consideration:- "there are books; and it is practicable to read them because they are so few.- "i visit occasionally the cambridge library, and i can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home.- "the three practical rules which i have to offer are, 1. never read any book that is not a year old. 2. never read any but famed books. 3. never read any but what you like, or, in shakspeare's phrase,- "'no profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en; in brief, sir, study what you most affect.'" emerson has a good deal to say about conversation in his essay on "clubs," but nothing very notable on the special subject of the essay. perhaps his diary would have something of interest with reference to the "saturday club," of which he was a member, which, in fact, formed itself around him as a nucleus, and which he attended very regularly. but he was not given to personalities, and among the men of genius and of talent whom he met there no one was quieter, but none saw and heard and remembered more. he was hardly what dr. johnson would have called a "clubable" man, yet he enjoyed the meetings in his still way, or he would never have come from concord so regularly to attend them. he gives two good reasons for the existence of a club like that of which i have been speaking:- "i need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to an understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion shall have its just influence on public questions of education and politics." "a principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage." i do not think "public questions of education and politics" were very prominent at the social meetings of the "saturday club," but "worthy foreigners," and now and then one not so worthy, added variety to the meetings of the company, which included a wide range of talents and callings. all that emerson has to say about "courage" is worth listening to, for he was a truly brave man in that sphere of action where there are more cowards than are found in the battle-field. he spoke his convictions fearlessly; he carried the spear of ithuriel, but he wore no breastplate save that which protects him "whose armor is his honest thought, and simple truth his utmost skill." he mentions three qualities as attracting the wonder and reverence of mankind: 1. disinterestedness; 2. practical power; 3. courage. "i need not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank. they forgive everything to it. and any man who puts his life in peril in a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men."--there are good and inspiriting lessons for young and old in this essay or lecture, which closes with the spirited ballad of "george nidiver," written "by a lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known." men will read any essay or listen to any lecture which has for its subject, like the one now before me, "success." emerson complains of the same things in america which carlyle groaned over in england:- "we countenance each other in this life of show, puffing advertisement, and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.- "now, though i am by no means sure that the reader will assent to all my propositions, yet i think we shall agree in my first rule for success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement and take michael angelo's course, 'to confide in one's self and be something of worth and value.'" reading about "success" is after all very much like reading in old books of alchemy. "how not to do it," is the lesson of all the books and treatises. geber and albertus magnus, roger bacon and raymond lully, and the whole crew of "pauperes alcumistae," all give the most elaborate directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting saturn into luna and sol and making a billionaire of himself. "success" in its vulgar sense,--the gaining of money and position,--is not to be reached by following the rules of an instructor. our "self-made men," who govern the country by their wealth and influence, have found their place by adapting themselves to the particular circumstances in which they were placed, and not by studying the broad maxims of "poor richard," or any other moralist or economist.--for such as these is meant the cheap cynical saying quoted by emerson, "_rien ne rã©ussit mieux que le succã¨s_." but this is not the aim and end of emerson's teaching:- "i fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. one adores public opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly, and the other hospitality of mind." and so, though there is no alchemy in this lecture, it is profitable reading, assigning its true value to the sterling gold of character, the gaining of which is true success, as against the brazen idol of the market-place. the essay on "old age" has a special value from its containing two personal reminiscences: one of the venerable josiah quincy, a brief mention; the other the detailed record of a visit in the year 1825, emerson being then twenty-two years old, to ex-president john adams, soon after the election of his son to the presidency. it is enough to allude to these, which every reader will naturally turn to first of all. but many thoughts worth gathering are dropped along these pages. he recounts the benefits of age; the perilous capes and shoals it has weathered; the fact that a success more or less signifies little, so that the old man may go below his own mark with impunity; the feeling that he has found expression,--that his condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind; the pleasure of completing his secular affairs, leaving all in the best posture for the future:- "when life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare, muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. but the central wisdom which was old in infancy is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. i have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. i have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. the mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. but the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment." other literary labors of emerson during this period were the introduction to "plutarch's morals" in 1870, and a preface to william ellery channing's poem, "the wanderer," in 1871. he made a speech at howard university, washington, in 1872. in the year 1871 emerson made a visit to california with a very pleasant company, concerning which mr. john m. forbes, one of whose sons married emerson's daughter edith, writes to me as follows. professor james b. thayer, to whom he refers, has more recently written and published an account of this trip, from which some extracts will follow mr. forbes's letter:- boston, february 6, 1884. my dear dr.,--what little i can give will be of a very rambling character. one of the first memories of emerson which comes up is my meeting him on the steamboat at returning from detroit east. i persuaded him to stop over at niagara, which he had never seen. we took a carriage and drove around the circuit. it was in early summer, perhaps in 1848 or 1849. when we came to table rock on the british side, our driver took us down on the outer part of the rock in the carriage. we passed on by rail, and the next day's papers brought us the telegraphic news that table rock had fallen over; perhaps we were among the last persons on it! about 1871 i made up a party for california, including mr. emerson, his daughter edith, and a number of gay young people. we drove with b----, the famous vermont coachman, up to the geysers, and then made the journey to the yosemite valley by wagon and on horseback. i wish i could give you more than a mere outline picture of the sage at this time. with the thermometer at 100 degrees he would sometimes drive with the buffalo robes drawn up over his knees, apparently indifferent to the weather, gazing on the new and grand scenes of mountain and valley through which we journeyed. i especially remember once, when riding down the steep side of a mountain, his reins hanging loose, the bit entirely out of the horse's mouth, without his being aware that this was an unusual method of riding pegasus, so fixed was his gaze into space, and so unconscious was he, at the moment, of his surroundings. in san francisco he visited with us the dens of the opium smokers, in damp cellars, with rows of shelves around, on which were deposited the stupefied mongolians; perhaps the lowest haunts of humanity to be found in the world. the contrast between them and the serene eye and undisturbed brow of the sage was a sight for all beholders. when we reached salt lake city on our way home he made a point of calling on brigham young, then at the summit of his power. the prophet, or whatever he was called, was a burly, bull-necked man of hard sense, really leading a great industrial army. he did not seem to appreciate who his visitor was, at any rate gave no sign of so doing, and the chief interest of the scene was the wide contrast between these leaders of spiritual and of material forces. i regret not having kept any notes of what was said on this and other occasions, but if by chance you could get hold of professor j.b. thayer, who was one of our party, he could no doubt give you some notes that would be valuable. perhaps the latest picture that remains in my mind of our friend is his wandering along the beaches and under the trees at naushon, no doubt carrying home large stealings from my domain there, which lost none of their value from being transferred to his pages. next to his private readings which he gave us there, the most notable recollection is that of his intense amusement at some comical songs which our young people used to sing, developing a sense of humor which a superficial observer would hardly have discovered, but which you and i know he possessed in a marked degree. yours always, j.m. forbes. professor james b. thayer's little book, "a western journey with mr. emerson," is a very entertaining account of the same trip concerning which mr. forbes wrote the letter just given. professor thayer kindly read many of his notes to me before his account was published, and allows me to make such use of the book as i see fit. such liberty must not be abused, and i will content myself with a few passages in which emerson has a part. no extract will interest the reader more than the following:- "'how _can_ mr. emerson,' said one of the younger members of the party to me that day, 'be so agreeable, all the time, without getting tired!' it was the _naive_ expression of what we all had felt. there was never a more agreeable travelling companion; he was always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant; and there was always that same respectful interest in those with whom he talked, even the humblest, which raised them in their own estimation. one thing particularly impressed me,--the sense that he seemed to have of a certain great amplitude of time and leisure. it was the behavior of one who really _believed_ in an immortal life, and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they were matched by the sweet elevation of character, and the spiritual charm of our gracious friend. years afterwards, on that memorable day of his funeral at concord, i found that a sentence from his own essay on immortality haunted my mind, and kept repeating itself all the day long; it seemed to point to the sources of his power: 'meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse, and nature also, and gave grandeur to the passing hour.'" this extract will be appropriately followed by another alluding to the same subject. "the next evening, sunday, the twenty-third, mr. emerson read his address on 'immortality,' at dr. stebbins's church. it was the first time that he had spoken on the western coast; never did he speak better. it was, in the main, the same noble essay that has since been printed. "at breakfast the next morning we had the newspaper, the 'alta california.' it gave a meagre outline of the address, but praised it warmly, and closed with the following observations: 'all left the church feeling that an elegant tribute had been paid to the creative genius of the great first cause, and that a masterly use of the english language had contributed to that end.'" the story used to be told that after the reverend horace holley had delivered a prayer on some public occasion, major ben. russell, of ruddy face and ruffled shirt memory, editor of "the columbian centinel," spoke of it in his paper the next day as "the most eloquent prayer ever addressed to a boston audience." the "alta california's" "elegant tribute" is not quite up to this rhetorical altitude. "'the minister,' said he, 'is in no danger of losing his position; he represents the moral sense and the humanities.' he spoke of his own reasons for leaving the pulpit, and added that 'some one had lately come to him whose conscience troubled him about retaining the name of christian; he had replied that he himself had no difficulty about it. when he was called a platonist, or a christian, or a republican, he welcomed it. it did not bind him to what he did not like. what is the use of going about and setting up a flag of negation?'" "i made bold to ask him what he had in mind in naming his recent course of lectures at cambridge, 'the natural history of the intellect.' this opened a very interesting conversation; but, alas! i could recall but little of it,--little more than the mere hintings of what he said. he cared very little for metaphysics. but he thought that as a man grows he observes certain facts about his own mind,--about memory, for example. these he had set down from time to time. as for making any methodical history, he did not undertake it." emerson met brigham young at salt lake city, as has been mentioned, but neither seems to have made much impression upon the other. emerson spoke of the mormons. some one had said, "they impress the common people, through their imagination, by bible-names and imagery." "yes," he said, "it is an after-clap of puritanism. but one would think that after this father abraham could go no further." the charm of boswell's life of johnson is that it not merely records his admirable conversation, but also gives us many of those lesser peculiarities which are as necessary to a true biography as lights and shades to a portrait on canvas. we are much obliged to professor thayer therefore for the two following pleasant recollections which he has been good-natured enough to preserve for us, and with which we will take leave of his agreeable little volume:- "at breakfast we had, among other things, pie. this article at breakfast was one of mr. emerson's weaknesses. a pie stood before him now. he offered to help somebody from it, who declined; and then one or two others, who also declined; and then mr.----; he too declined. 'but mr.----!' mr. emerson remonstrated, with humorous emphasis, thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting the entire weight of his character into his manner,--'but mr.----, _what is pie for_?'" a near friend of mine, a lady, was once in the cars with emerson, and when they stopped for the refreshment of the passengers he was very desirous of procuring something at the station for her solace. presently he advanced upon her with a cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of pie in the other,--such a wedge! she could hardly have been more dismayed if one of caesar's _cunei_, or wedges of soldiers, had made a charge against her. yet let me say here that pie, often foolishly abused, is a good creature, at the right time and in angles of thirty or forty degrees. in semicircles and quadrants it may sometimes prove too much for delicate stomachs. but here was emerson, a hopelessly confirmed pie-eater, never, so far as i remember, complaining of dyspepsia; and there, on the other side, was carlyle, feeding largely on wholesome oatmeal, groaning with indigestion all his days, and living with half his self-consciousness habitually centred beneath his diaphragm. like his friend carlyle and like tennyson, emerson had a liking for a whiff of tobacco-smoke:- "when alone," he said, "he rarely cared to finish a whole cigar. but in company it was singular to see how different it was. 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. and so hawthorne used to say that he found it. on this journey mr. emerson generally smoked a single cigar after our mid-day dinner, or after tea, and occasionally after both. this was multiplying, several times over, anything that was usual with him at home." professor thayer adds in a note:- "like milton, mr. emerson 'was extraordinary temperate in his diet,' and he used even less tobacco. milton's quiet day seems to have closed regularly with a pipe; he 'supped,' we are told, 'upon ... some light thing; and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water went to bed.'" as emerson's name has been connected with that of milton in its nobler aspects, it can do no harm to contemplate him, like milton, indulging in this semi-philosophical luxury. one morning in july, 1872, mr. and mrs. emerson woke to find their room filled with smoke and fire coming through the floor of a closet in the room over them. the alarm was given, and the neighbors gathered and did their best to put out the flames, but the upper part of the house was destroyed, and with it were burned many papers of value to emerson, including his father's sermons. emerson got wet and chilled, and it seems too probable that the shock hastened that gradual loss of memory which came over his declining years. his kind neighbors did all they could to save his property and relieve his temporary needs. a study was made ready for him in the old court house, and the "old manse," which had sheltered his grandfather, and others nearest to him, received him once more as its tenant. on the 15th of october he spoke at a dinner given in new york in honor of james anthony froude, the historian, and in the course of this same month he set out on his third visit to europe, accompanied by his daughter ellen. we have little to record of this visit, which was suggested as a relief and recreation while his home was being refitted for him. he went to egypt, but so far as i have learned the sphinx had no message for him, and in the state of mind in which he found himself upon the mysterious and dream-compelling nile it may be suspected that the landscape with its palms and pyramids was an unreal vision,--that, as to his humble-bee, "all was picture as he passed." but while he was voyaging his friends had not forgotten him. the sympathy with him in his misfortune was general and profound. it did not confine itself to expressions of feeling, but a spontaneous movement organized itself almost without effort. if any such had been needed, the attached friend whose name is appended to the address to the subscribers to the fund for rebuilding mr. emerson's house would have been as energetic in this new cause as he had been in the matter of procuring the reprint of "sartor resartus." i have his kind permission to publish the whole correspondence relating to the friendly project so happily carried out. _to the subscribers to the fund for the rebuilding of mr. emerson's house, after the fire of july_ 24, 1872: the death of mr. emerson has removed any objection which may have before existed to the printing of the following correspondence. i have now caused this to be done, that each subscriber may have the satisfaction of possessing a copy of the touching and affectionate letters in which he expressed his delight in this, to him, most unexpected demonstration of personal regard and attachment, in the offer to restore for him his ruined home. no enterprise of the kind was ever more fortunate and successful in its purpose and in its results. the prompt and cordial response to the proposed subscription was most gratifying. no contribution was solicited from any one. the simple suggestion to a few friends of mr. emerson that an opportunity was now offered to be of service to him was all that was needed. from the first day on which it was made, the day after the fire, letters began to come in, with cheques for large and small amounts, so that in less than three weeks i was enabled to send to judge hoar the sum named in his letter as received by him on the 13th of august, and presented by him to mr. emerson the next morning, at the old manse, with fitting words. other subscriptions were afterwards received, increasing the amount on my book to eleven thousand six hundred and twenty dollars. a part of this was handed directly to the builder at concord. the balance was sent to mr. emerson october 7, and acknowledged by him in his letter of october 8, 1872. all the friends of mr. emerson who knew of the plan which was proposed to rebuild his house, seemed to feel that it was a privilege to be allowed to express in this way the love and veneration with which he was regarded, and the deep debt of gratitude which they owed to him, and there is no doubt that a much larger amount would have been readily and gladly offered, if it had been required, for the object in view. those who have had the happiness to join in this friendly "conspiracy" may well take pleasure in the thought that what they have done has had the effect to lighten the load of care and anxiety which the calamity of the fire brought with it to mr. emerson, and thus perhaps to prolong for some precious years the serene and noble life that was so dear to all of us. my thanks are due to the friends who have made me the bearer of this message of good-will. le baron russell. boston, may 8, 1882. boston, august 13, 1872. dear mr. emerson: it seems to have been the spontaneous desire of your friends, on hearing of the burning of your house, to be allowed the pleasure of rebuilding it. a few of them have united for this object, and now request your acceptance of the amount which i have to-day deposited to your order at the concord bank, through the kindness of our friend, judge hoar. they trust that you will receive it as an expression of sincere regard and affection from friends, who will, one and all, esteem it a great privilege to be permitted to assist in the restoration of your home. and if, in their eagerness to participate in so grateful a work, they may have exceeded the estimate of your architect as to what is required for that purpose, they beg that you will devote the remainder to such other objects as may be most convenient to you. very sincerely yours, le baron russell. concord, august 14, 1872. dr. le b. russell: _dear sir_,--i received your letters, with the check for ten thousand dollars inclosed, from mr. barrett last evening. this morning i deposited it to mr. emerson's credit in the concord national bank, and took a bank book for him, with his little balance entered at the top, and this following, and carried it to him with your letter. i told him, by way of prelude, that some of his friends had made him treasurer of an association who wished him to go to england and examine warwick castle and other noted houses that had been recently injured by fire, in order to get the best ideas possible for restoration, and then to apply them to a house which the association was formed to restore in this neighborhood. when he understood the thing and had read your letter, he seemed very deeply moved. he said that he had been allowed so far in life to stand on his own feet, and that he hardly knew what to say,--that the kindness of his friends was very great. i said what i thought was best in reply, and told him that this was the spontaneous act of friends, who wished the privilege of expressing in this way their respect and affection, and was done only by those who thought it a privilege to do so. i mentioned hillard as you desired, and also mrs. tappan, who, it seems, had written to him and offered any assistance he might need, to the extent of five thousand dollars, personally. i think it is all right, but he said he must see the list of contributors, and would then say what he had to say about it. he told me that mr. f.c. lowell, who was his classmate and old friend, mr. bangs, mrs. gurney, and a few other friends, had already sent him five thousand dollars, which he seemed to think was as much as he could bear. this makes the whole a very gratifying result, and perhaps explains the absence of some names on your book. i am glad that mr. emerson, who is feeble and ill, can learn what a debt of obligation his friends feel to him, and thank you heartily for what you have done about it. very truly yours, e.r. hoar. concord, august 16, 1872. my dear le baron: i have wondered and melted over your letter and its accompaniments till it is high time that i should reply to it, if i can. my misfortunes, as i have lived along so far in this world, have been so few that i have never needed to ask direct aid of the host of good men and women who have cheered my life, though many a gift has come to me. and this late calamity, however rude and devastating, soon began to look more wonderful in its salvages than in its ruins, so that i can hardly feel any right to this munificent endowment with which you, and my other friends through you, have astonished me. but i cannot read your letter or think of its message without delight, that my companions and friends bear me so noble a good-will, nor without some new aspirations in the old heart toward a better deserving. judge hoar has, up to this time, withheld from me the names of my benefactors, but you may be sure that i shall not rest till i have learned them, every one, to repeat to myself at night and at morning. your affectionate friend and debtor, r.w. emerson. dr. le baron russell concord, october 8, 1872. my dear doctor le baron: i received last night your two notes, and the cheque, enclosed in one of them, for one thousand and twenty dollars. are my friends bent on killing me with kindness? no, you will say, but to make me live longer. i thought myself sufficiently loaded with benefits already, and you add more and more. it appears that you all will rebuild my house and rejuvenate me by sending me in my old days abroad on a young man's excursion. i am a lover of men, but this recent wonderful experience of their tenderness surprises and occupies my thoughts day by day. now that i have all or almost all the names of the men and women who have conspired in this kindness to me (some of whom i have never personally known), i please myself with the thought of meeting each and asking, why have we not met before? why have you not told me that we thought alike? life is not so long, nor sympathy of thought so common, that we can spare the society of those with whom we best agree. well, 'tis probably my own fault by sticking ever to my solitude. perhaps it is not too late to learn of these friends a better lesson. thank them for me whenever you meet them, and say to them that i am not wood or stone, if i have not yet trusted myself so far as to go to each one of them directly. my wife insists that i shall also send her acknowledgments to them and you. yours and theirs affectionately, r.w. emerson. dr. le baron kussell. the following are the names of the subscribers to the fund for rebuilding mr. emerson's house:-mrs. anne s. hooper. miss alice s. hooper. mrs. caroline tappan. miss ellen s. tappan. miss mary a. tappan. mr. t.g. appleton. mrs. henry edwards. miss susan e. dorr. misses wigglesworth. mr. edward wigglesworth. mr. j. elliot cabot. mrs. sarah s. russell. friends in new york and philadelphia, through mr. williams. mr. william whiting. mr. frederick beck. mr. h.p. kidder. mrs. abel adams. mrs. george faulkner. hon. e.r. hoar. mr. james b. thayer. mr. john m. forbes. mr. james h. beal. mrs. anna c. lodge. mr. t. jefferson coolidge. mr. h.h. hunnewell. mrs. s. cabot. mr. james a. dupee. mrs. anna c. lowell. mrs. m.f. sayles. miss helen l. appleton. j.r. osgood & co. mr. richard soule. mr. francis geo. shaw. dr. r.w. hooper. mr. william p. mason. mr. william gray. mr. sam'l g. ward. mr. j.i. bowditch. mr. geo. c. ward. mrs. luicia j. briggs. mr. john e. williams. dr. le baron russell. in may, 1873, emerson returned to concord. his friends and fellow-citizens received him with every token of affection and reverence. a set of signals was arranged to announce his arrival. carriages were in readiness for him and his family, a band greeted him with music, and passing under a triumphal arch, he was driven to his renewed old home amidst the welcomes and the blessings of his loving and admiring friends and neighbors. chapter xii. 1873-1878. aet. 70-75. publication of "parnassus."--emerson nominated as candidate for the office of lord rector of glasgow university.--publication of "letters and social aims." contents: poetry and imagination.--social aims.--eloquence.--resources.--the comic.--quotation and originality.--progress of culture.--persian poetry.--inspiration.-greatness.--immortality.--address at the unveiling of the statue of "the minute-man" at concord.--publication of collected poems. in december, 1874, emerson published "parnassus," a collection of poems by british and american authors. many readers may like to see his subdivisions and arrangement of the pieces he has brought together. they are as follows: "nature."--"human life."--"intellectual." --"contemplation."--"moral and religious."--"heroic."--"personal." --"pictures."--"narrative poems and ballads."--"songs."--"dirges and pathetic poems."--"comic and humorous."--"poetry of terror."--"oracles and counsels." i have borrowed so sparingly from the rich mine of mr. george willis cooke's "ralph waldo emerson, his life, writings, and philosophy," that i am pleased to pay him the respectful tribute of taking a leaf from his excellent work. "this collection," he says, "was the result of his habit, pursued for many years, of copying into his commonplace book any poem which specially pleased him. many of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on the english poets. the book has no worthless selections, almost everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth. yet emerson's personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections. with two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional poems which have attracted devout souls.--his poetical sympathies are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the seventeenth century. shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any other, no less than eighty-eight selections being made from him. the names of george herbert, herrick, ben jonson, and milton frequently appear. wordsworth appears forty-three times, and stands next to shakespeare; while burns, byron, scott, tennyson, and chaucer make up the list of favorites. many little known pieces are included, and some whose merit is other than poetical.--this selection of poems is eminently that of a poet of keen intellectual tastes. i not popular in character, omitting many public favorites, and introducing very much which can never be acceptable to the general reader. the preface is full of interest for its comments on many of the poems and poets appearing in these selections." i will only add to mr. cooke's criticism these two remarks: first, that i have found it impossible to know under which of his divisions to look for many of the poems i was in search of; and as, in the earlier copies at least, there was no paged index where each author's pieces were collected together, one had to hunt up his fragments with no little loss of time and patience, under various heads, "imitating the careful search that isis made for the mangled body of osiris." the other remark is that each one of emerson's american fellow-poets from whom he has quoted would gladly have spared almost any of the extracts from the poems of his brother-bards, if the editor would only have favored us with some specimens of his own poetry, with a single line of which he has not seen fit to indulge us. in 1874 emerson received the nomination by the independent party among the students of glasgow university for the office of lord rector. he received five hundred votes against seven hundred for disraeli, who was elected. he says in a letter to dr. j. hutchinson sterling:- "i count that vote as quite the fairest laurel that has ever fallen on me; and i cannot but feel deeply grateful to my young friends in the university, and to yourself, who have been my counsellor and my too partial advocate." mr. cabot informs us in his prefatory note to "letters and social aims," that the proof sheets of this volume, now forming the eighth of the collected works, showed even before the burning of his house and the illness which followed from the shock, that his loss of memory and of mental grasp was such as to make it unlikely that he would in any case have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken. sentences, even whole pages, were repeated, and there was a want of order beyond what even he would have tolerated:- "there is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and arrangement; but i cannot say that he applied his mind very closely to the matter." this volume contains eleven essays, the subjects of which, as just enumerated, are very various. the longest and most elaborate paper is that entitled "poetry and imagination." i have room for little more than the enumeration of the different headings of this long essay. by these it will be seen how wide a ground it covers. they are "introductory;" "poetry;" "imagination;" "veracity;" "creation;" "melody, rhythm, form;" "bards and trouveurs;" "morals;" "transcendency." many thoughts with which we are familiar are reproduced, expanded, and illustrated in this essay. unity in multiplicity, the symbolism of nature, and others of his leading ideas appear in new phrases, not unwelcome, for they look fresh in every restatement. it would be easy to select a score of pointed sayings, striking images, large generalizations. some of these we find repeated in his verse. thus:- "michael angelo is largely filled with the creator that made and makes men. how much of the original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man!" and so in the well remembered lines of "the problem":- "himself from god he could not free." "he knows that he did not make his thought,--no, his thought made him, and made the sun and stars." "art might obey but not surpass. the passive master lent his hand to the vast soul that o'er him planned." hope is at the bottom of every essay of emerson's as it was at the bottom of pandora's box:- "i never doubt the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the immense wealth of the mind. o yes, poets we shall have, mythology, symbols, religion of our own. --"sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song." under the title "social aims" he gives some wise counsel concerning manners and conversation. one of these precepts will serve as a specimen--if we have met with it before it is none the worse for wear:- "shun the negative side. never worry people with; your contritions, nor with dismal views of politics or society. never name sickness; even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will give you enough of it." we have had one essay on "eloquence" already. one extract from this new discourse on the same subject must serve our turn:- "these are ascending stairs,--a good voice, winning manners, plain speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,--know your fact; hug your fact. for the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity. speak what you know and believe; and are personally in it; and are answerable for every word. eloquence is _the power to_ _translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak_." the italics are emerson's. if our learned and excellent john cotton used to sweeten his mouth before going to bed with a bit of calvin, we may as wisely sweeten and strengthen our sense of existence with a morsel or two from emerson's essay on "resources":- "a schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching pessimism,--teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,--all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. but if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives; if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has experimented on things,--i am invigorated, put into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and gratitude to the cause of causes." the essay or lecture on "the comic" may have formed a part of a series he had contemplated on the intellectual processes. two or three sayings in it will show his view sufficiently:- "the essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. "if the essence of the comic be the contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be affected by the exposure. we have no deeper interest than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke of any lie we entertain. besides, a perception of the comic seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. it appears to be an essential element in a fine character.--a rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. if that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him." these and other sayings of like purport are illustrated by well-preserved stories and anecdotes not for the most part of very recent date. "quotation and originality" furnishes the key to emerson's workshop. he believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. not in any stealthy or shame-faced way, but proudly, royally, as a king borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and superscription. "all minds quote. old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. there is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.--we quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.- "the borrowing is often honest enough and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. a great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. "next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."---"the progress of culture," his second phi beta kappa oration, has already been mentioned. --the lesson of self-reliance, which he is never tired of inculcating, is repeated and enforced in the essay on "greatness." "there are certain points of identity in which these masters agree. self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.--stick to your own; don't inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven for you to walk in. "every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind.--we call this specialty the _bias_ of each individual. and none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone." if to follow this native bias is the first rule, the second is concentration.--to the bias of the individual mind must be added the most catholic receptivity for the genius of others. "shall i tell you the secret of the true scholar? it is this: every man i meet is my master in some point, and in that i learn of him."- "the man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded the adorer of the laws,--who by governing himself governed others; sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;--he it is whom we seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall he found." what has emerson to tell us of "inspiration?" "i believe that nothing great or lasting can be done except by inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury.- "how many sources of inspiration can we count? as many as our affinities. but to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of these." i will enumerate them briefly as he gives them, but not attempting to reproduce his comments on each:-1. health. 2. the experience of writing letters. 3. the renewed sensibility which comes after seasons of decay or eclipse of the faculties. 4. the power of the will. 5. atmospheric causes, especially the influence of morning. 6. solitary converse with nature. 7. solitude of itself, like that of a country inn in summer, and of a city hotel in winter. 8. conversation. 9. new poetry; by which, he says, he means chiefly old poetry that is new to the reader. "every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood." what can promise more than an essay by emerson on "immortality"? it is to be feared that many readers will transfer this note of interrogation to the essay itself. what is the definite belief of emerson as expressed in this discourse,--what does it mean? we must tack together such sentences as we can find that will stand for an answer:- "i think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so." this is laying the table for a barmecide feast of nonentity, with the possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. but he continues:- "schiller said, 'what is so universal as death must be benefit.'" he tells us what michael angelo said, how plutarch felt, how montesquieu thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of years he holds to be a better affirmative evidence than their failure to find a confirmation was negative. he argues from our delight in permanence, from the delicate contrivances and adjustments of created things, that the contriver cannot be forever hidden, and says at last plainly:- "everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. that the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma." but turn over a few pages and we may read:- "i confess that everything connected with our personality fails. nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a complete success; no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. we have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to which we aspire. that is immortal, and we only through that. the soul stipulates for no private good. that which is private i see not to be good. 'if truth live, i live; if justice live, i live,' said one of the old saints, 'and these by any man's suffering are enlarged and enthroned.'" once more we get a dissolving view of emerson's creed, if such a word applies to a statement like the following:- --"i mean that i am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers in the immortality than we can give grounds for. the real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions, and therefore wordsworth's 'ode' is the best modern essay on the subject." wordsworth's "ode" is a noble and beautiful dream; is it anything more? the reader who would finish this essay, which i suspect to belong to an early period of emerson's development, must be prepared to plunge into mysticism and lose himself at last in an oriental apologue. the eschatology which rests upon an english poem and an indian fable belongs to the realm of reverie and of imagination rather than the domain of reason. on the 19th of april, 1875, the hundredth anniversary of the "fight at the bridge," emerson delivered a short address at the unveiling of the statue of "the minute-man," erected at the place of the conflict, to commemorate the event. this is the last address he ever wrote, though he delivered one or more after this date. from the manuscript which lies before me i extract a single passage:- "in the year 1775 we had many enemies and many friends in england, but our one benefactor was king george the third. the time had arrived for the political severance of america, that it might play its part in the history of this globe, and the inscrutable divine providence gave an insane king to england. in the resistance of the colonies, he alone was immovable on the question of force. england was so dear to us that the colonies could only be absolutely disunited by violence from england, and only one man could compel the resort to violence. parliament wavered, lord north wavered, all the ministers wavered, but the king had the insanity of one idea; he was immovable, he insisted on the impossible, so the army was sent, america was instantly united, and the nation born." there is certainly no mark of mental failure in this paragraph, written at a period when he had long ceased almost entirely from his literary labors. emerson's collected "poems" constitute the ninth volume of the recent collected edition of his works. they will be considered in a following chapter. chapter xiii. 1878-1882. aet. 75-79. last literary labors.--addresses and essays.--"lectures and biographical sketches."--"miscellanies." the decline of emerson's working faculties went on gently and gradually, but he was not condemned to entire inactivity. his faithful daughter, ellen, followed him with assiduous, quiet, ever watchful care, aiding his failing memory, bringing order into the chaos of his manuscript, an echo before the voice whose words it was to shape for him when his mind faltered and needed a momentary impulse. with her helpful presence and support he ventured from time to time to read a paper before a select audience. thus, march 30, 1878, he delivered a lecture in the old south church,--"fortune of the republic." on the 5th of may, 1879, he read a lecture in the chapel of divinity college, harvard university,--"the preacher." in 1881 he read a paper on carlyle before the massachusetts historical society.--he also published a paper in the "north american review," in 1878,--"the sovereignty of ethics," and one on "superlatives," in "the century" for february, 1882. but in these years he was writing little or nothing. all these papers were taken from among his manuscripts of different dates. the same thing is true of the volumes published since his death; they were only compilations from his stores of unpublished matter, and their arrangement was the work of mr. emerson's friend and literary executor, mr. cabot. these volumes cannot be considered as belonging to any single period of his literary life. mr. cabot prefixes to the tenth volume of emerson's collected works, which bears the title, "lectures and biographical sketches," the following:-"note. "of the pieces included in this volume the following, namely, those from 'the dial,' 'character,' 'plutarch,' and the biographical sketches of dr. ripley, of mr. hoar, and of henry thoreau, were printed by mr. emerson before i took any part in the arrangement of his papers. the rest, except the sketch of miss mary emerson, i got ready for his use in readings to his friends, or to a limited public. he had given up the regular practice of lecturing, but would sometimes, upon special request, read a paper that had been prepared for him from his manuscripts, in the manner described in the preface to 'letters and social aims,'--some former lecture serving as a nucleus for the new. some of these papers he afterwards allowed to be printed; others, namely, 'aristocracy,' 'education,' 'the man of letters,' 'the scholar,' 'historic notes of life and letters in new england,' 'mary moody emerson,' are now published for the first time." some of these papers i have already had occasion to refer to. from several of the others i will make one or two extracts,--a difficult task, so closely are the thoughts packed together. from "demonology":- "i say to the table-rappers 'i will believe thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,' and so far will i trust thee, gentle kate!" "meantime far be from me the impatience which cannot brook the supernatural, the vast; far be from me the lust of explaining away all which appeals to the imagination, and the great presentiments which haunt us. willingly i too say hail! to the unknown, awful powers which transcend the ken of the understanding." i will not quote anything from the essay called "aristocracy." but let him who wishes to know what the word means to an american whose life has come from new england soil, whose ancestors have breathed new england air for many generations, read it, and he will find a new interpretation of a very old and often greatly wronged appellation. "perpetual forces" is one of those prose poems,--of his earlier epoch, i have no doubt,--in which he plays with the facts of science with singular grace and freedom. what man could speak more fitly, with more authority of "character," than emerson? when he says, "if all things are taken away, i have still all things in my relation to the eternal," we feel that such an utterance is as natural to his pure spirit as breathing to the frame in which it was imprisoned. we have had a glimpse of emerson as a school-master, but behind and far above the teaching drill-master's desk is the chair from which he speaks to us of "education." compare the short and easy method of the wise man of old,--"he that spareth his rod hateth his son," with this other, "be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue,--but no kinsman of his sin." "the superlative" will prove light and pleasant reading after these graver essays. [greek: maedhen agan]--_ne quid nimis_,--nothing in excess, was his precept as to adjectives. two sentences from "the sovereignty of ethics" will go far towards reconciling elderly readers who have not forgotten the westminster assembly's catechism with this sweet-souled dealer in spiritual dynamite:- "luther would cut his hand off sooner than write theses against the pope if he suspected that he was bringing on with all his might the pale negations of boston unitarianism.- "if i miss the inspiration of the saints of calvinism, or of platonism, or of buddhism, our times are not up to theirs, or, more truly, have not yet their own legitimate force." so, too, this from "the preacher":- "all civil mankind have agreed in leaving one day for contemplation against six for practice. i hope that day will keep its honor and its use.--the sabbath changes its forms from age to age, but the substantial benefit endures." the special interest of the address called "the man of letters" is, that it was delivered during the war. he was no advocate for peace where great principles were at the bottom of the conflict:- "war, seeking for the roots of strength, comes upon the moral aspects at once.--war ennobles the age.--battle, with the sword, has cut many a gordian knot in twain which all the wit of east and west, of northern and border statesmen could not untie." "the scholar" was delivered before two societies at the university of virginia so late as the year 1876. if i must select any of its wise words, i will choose the questions which he has himself italicized to show his sense of their importance:- "for all men, all women, time, your country, your condition, the invisible world are the interrogators: _who are you? what do you? can you obtain what you wish? is there method in your consciousness? can you see tendency in your life? can you help any soul_? "can he answer these questions? can he dispose of them? happy if you can answer them mutely in the order and disposition of your life! happy for more than yourself, a benefactor of men, if you can answer them in works of wisdom, art, or poetry; bestowing on the general mind of men organic creations, to be the guidance and delight of all who know them." the essay on "plutarch" has a peculiar value from the fact that emerson owes more to him than to any other author except plato, who is one of the only two writers quoted oftener than plutarch. _mutato nomine_, the portrait which emerson draws of the greek moralist might stand for his own:- "whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction, in opinion, in character, in institutions, in science--natural, moral, or metaphysical, or in memorable sayings drew his attention and came to his pen with more or less fulness of record. "a poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an intellectual co-perception. plutarch's memory is full and his horizon wide. nothing touches man but he feels to be his. "plutarch had a religion which montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and though plutarch is as plain spoken, his moral sentiment is always pure.- "i do not know where to find a book--to borrow a phrase of ben jonson's--'so rammed with life,' and this in chapters chiefly ethical, which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental.--his vivacity and abundance never leave him to loiter or pound on an incident.- "in his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents.--'tis all plutarch, by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this emperor. "it is in consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that i confess that, in reading him, i embrace the particulars, and carry a faint memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but he is not less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a necessity for completing his studies. "he is a pronounced idealist, who does not hesitate to say, like another berkeley, 'matter is itself privation.'- "of philosophy he is more interested in the results than in the method. he has a just instinct of the presence of a master, and prefers to sit as a scholar with plato than as a disputant. "his natural history is that of a lover and poet, and not of a physicist. "but though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature and genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of character, and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to morals, to the study of the beautiful and good. hence his love of heroes, his rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the soul. la harpe said that 'plutarch is the genius the most naturally moral that ever existed.' "plutarch thought 'truth to be the greatest good that man can receive, and the goodliest blessing that god can give.' "all his judgments are noble. he thought with epicurus that it is more delightful to do than to receive a kindness. "plutarch was well-born, well-conditioned--eminently social, he was a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select friends, and knew the high value of good conversation.- "he had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. but what specially marks him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the intellect by the force of morals." how much, of all this would have been recognized as just and true if it had been set down in an obituary notice of emerson! i have already made use of several of the other papers contained in this volume, and will merely enumerate all that follow the "plutarch." some of the titles will be sure to attract the reader. they are "historic notes of life and letters in new england;" "the chardon street convention;" "ezra ripley, d.d.;" "mary moody emerson;" "samuel hoar;" "thoreau;" "carlyle."-mr. cabot prefaces the eleventh and last volume of emerson's writings with the following "note":- "the first five pieces in this volume, and the 'editorial address' from the 'massachusetts quarterly review,' were published by mr. emerson long ago. the speeches at the john brown, the walter scott, and the free religious association meetings were published at the time, no doubt with his consent, but without any active co-operation on his part. the 'fortune of the republic' appeared separately in 1879; the rest have never been published. in none was any change from the original form made by me, except in the 'fortune of the republic,' which was made up of several lectures for the occasion upon which it was read." the volume of "miscellanies" contains no less than twenty-three pieces of very various lengths and relating to many different subjects. the five referred to as having been previously published are, "the lord's supper," the "historical discourse in concord," the "address at the dedication of the soldiers' monument in concord," the "address on emancipation in the british west indies," and the lecture or essay on "war,"--all of which have been already spoken of. next in order comes a lecture on the "fugitive slave law." emerson says, "i do not often speak on public questions.--my own habitual view is to the well-being of scholars." but he leaves his studies to attack the institution of slavery, from which he says he himself has never suffered any inconvenience, and the "law," which the abolitionists would always call the "fugitive slave _bill_." emerson had a great admiration for mr. webster, but he did not spare him as he recalled his speech of the seventh of march, just four years before the delivery of this lecture. he warns against false leadership:- "to make good the cause of freedom, you must draw off from all foolish trust in others.--he only who is able to stand alone is qualified for society. and that i understand to be the end for which a soul exists in this world,--to be himself the counter-balance of all falsehood and all wrong.--the anglo-saxon race is proud and strong and selfish.--england maintains trade, not liberty." cowper had said long before this:- "doing good, disinterested good, is not our trade." and america found that england had not learned that trade when, fifteen years after this discourse was delivered, the conflict between the free and slave states threatened the ruin of the great republic, and england forgot her anti-slavery in the prospect of the downfall of "a great empire which threatens to overshadow the whole earth." it must be remembered that emerson had never been identified with the abolitionists. but an individual act of wrong sometimes gives a sharp point to a blunt dagger which has been kept in its sheath too long:- "the events of the last few years and months and days have taught us the lessons of centuries. i do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state. i think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom." these were his words on the 26th of may, 1856, in his speech on "the assault upon mr. sumner." a few months later, in his "speech on the affairs of kansas," delivered almost five years before the first gun was fired at fort sumter, he spoke the following fatally prophetic and commanding words:- "the hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough. a harder task will the new revolution of the nineteenth century be than was the revolution of the eighteenth century. i think the american revolution bought its glory cheap. if the problem was new, it was simple. if there were few people, they were united, and the enemy three thousand miles off. but now, vast property, gigantic interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a net-work that immensely multiplies the dangers of war. "fellow-citizens, in these times full of the fate of the republic, i think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves into committees of safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning from week to week, from month to month. i wish we could send the sergeant-at-arms to stop every american who is about to leave the country. send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no country to return to. come home and stay at home while there is a country to save. when it is lost it will be time enough then for any who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes and depart to some land where freedom exists." two short speeches follow, one delivered at a meeting for the relief of the family of john brown, on the 18th of november, 1859, the other after his execution:- "our blind statesmen," he says, "go up and down, with committees of vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy. they will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. for the arch-abolitionist, older than brown, and older than the shenandoah mountains, is love, whose other name is justice, which was before alfred, before lycurgus, before slavery, and will be after it." from his "discourse on theodore parker" i take the following vigorous sentence:- "his commanding merit as a reformer is this, that he insisted beyond all men in pulpits,--i cannot think of one rival,--that the essence of christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or it is nothing; and if you combine it with sharp trading, or with ordinary city ambitions to gloze over municipal corruptions, or private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or unjust wars, or the cheating of indians, or the robbery of frontier nations, or leaving your principles at home to follow on the high seas or in europe a supple complaisance to tyrants,--it is hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no love of religious music, or of dreams of swedenborg, or praise of john wesley, or of jeremy taylor, can save you from the satan which you are." the lecture on "american civilization," made up from two addresses, one of which was delivered at washington on the 31st of january, 1862, is, as might be expected, full of anti-slavery. that on the "emancipation proclamation," delivered in boston in september, 1862, is as full of "silent joy" at the advent of "a day which most of us dared not hope to see,--an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs and uncertainties." from the "remarks" at the funeral services for abraham lincoln, held in concord on the 19th of april, 1865, i extract this admirably drawn character of the man:- "he is the true history of the american people in his time. step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue." the following are the titles of the remaining contents of this volume: "harvard commemoration speech;" "editor's address: massachusetts quarterly review;" "woman;" "address to kossuth;" "robert burns;" "walter scott;" "remarks at the organization of the free religious association;" "speech at the annual meeting of the free religious association;" "the fortune of the republic." in treating of the "woman question," emerson speaks temperately, delicately, with perfect fairness, but leaves it in the hands of the women themselves to determine whether they shall have an equal part in public affairs. "the new movement," he says, "is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish." it is hard to turn a leaf in any book of emerson's writing without finding some pithy remark or some striking image or witty comment which illuminates the page where we find it and tempts us to seize upon it for an extract. but i must content myself with these few sentences from "the fortune of the republic," the last address he ever delivered, in which his belief in america and her institutions, and his trust in the providence which overrules all nations and all worlds, have found fitting utterance:- "let the passion for america cast out the passion for europe. here let there be what the earth waits for,--exalted manhood. what this country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its materialities. for it is the rule of the universe that corn shall serve man, and not man corn. "they who find america insipid,--they for whom london and paris have spoiled their own homes, can be spared to return to those cities. i not only see a career at home for more genius than we have, but for more than there is in the world. "our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own; the course of events is quite too strong for any helmsman, and our little wherry is taken in tow by the ship of the great admiral which knows the way, and has the force to draw men and states and planets to their good." with this expression of love and respect for his country and trust in his country's god, we may take leave of emerson's prose writings. chapter xiv. emerson's poems. the following "prefatory note" by mr. cabot introduces the ninth volume of the series of emerson's collected works:- "this volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the poems and may-day of former editions. in 1876 mr. emerson published a selection from his poems, adding six new ones, and omitting many. of those omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the expressed wishes of many readers and lovers of them. also some pieces never before published are here given in an appendix, on various grounds. some of them appear to have had emerson's approval, but to have been withheld because they were unfinished. these it seemed best not to suppress, now that they can never receive their completion. others, mostly of an early date, remained unpublished doubtless because of their personal and private nature. some of these seem to have an autobiographic interest sufficient to justify their publication. others again, often mere fragments, have been admitted as characteristic, or as expressing in poetic form thoughts found in the essays. "in coming to a decision in these cases, it seemed on the whole preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of time. "as was stated in the preface to the first volume of this edition of mr. emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the "selected poems" have not always been followed here, but in some cases preference has been given to corrections made by him when he was in fuller strength than at the time of the last revision. "a change in the arrangement of the stanzas of "may-day," in the part representative of the march of spring, received his sanction as bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in nature." emerson's verse has been a fertile source of discussion. some have called him a poet and nothing but a poet, and some have made so much of the palpable defects of his verse that they have forgotten to recognize its true claims. his prose is often highly poetical, but his verse is something more than the most imaginative and rhetorical passages of his prose. an illustration presently to be given will make this point clear. poetry is to prose what the so-called full dress of the ball-room is to the plainer garments of the household and the street. full dress, as we call it, is so full of beauty that it cannot hold it all, and the redundancy of nature overflows the narrowed margin of satin or velvet. it reconciles us to its approach to nudity by the richness of its drapery and ornaments. a pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. we expect from the fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we should reprimand with the virtuous severity of tartuffe if ventured upon by the waiting-maid in her calicoes. so the poet reveals himself under the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases,--the flowers and jewels of his vocabulary. here is a prose sentence from emerson's "works and days:"- "the days are ever divine as to the first aryans. they come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away." now see this thought in full dress, and then ask what is the difference between prose and poetry:- "days. "daughters of time, the hypocritic days, muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, and marching single in an endless file, bring diadems and fagots in their hands. to each they offer gifts after his will, bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all. i, in my pleachã©d garden watched the pomp, forgot my morning wishes, hastily took a few herbs and apples, and the day turned and departed silent. i too late under her solemn fillet saw the scorn." --cinderella at the fireside, and cinderella at the prince's ball! the full dress version of the thought is glittering with new images like bracelets and brooches and ear-rings, and fringed with fresh adjectives like edges of embroidery. that one word _pleachã©d,_ an heir-loom from queen elizabeth's day, gives to the noble sonnet an antique dignity and charm like the effect of an ancestral jewel. but mark that now the poet reveals himself as he could not in the prosaic form of the first extract. it is his own neglect of his great opportunity of which he now speaks, and not merely the indolent indifference of others. it is himself who is the object of scorn. self-revelation of beauty embellished by ornaments is the privilege of full dress; self-revelation in the florid costume of verse is the divine right of the poet. passion that must express itself longs always for the freedom of rhythmic utterance. and in spite of the exaggeration and extravagance which shield themselves under the claim of poetic license, i venture to affirm that "_in_ vino _veritas_" is not truer than _in_ carmine _veritas_. as a further illustration of what has just been said of the self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in emerson's verse more especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily presence and infirmities in his poetry,--subjects he never referred to in prose, except incidentally, in private letters. emerson is so essentially a poet that whole pages of his are like so many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. his thoughts slip on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was shown in the passage i have quoted in prose and in verse. many of the metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract of the leading doctrine of the discourse. they are a curious instance of survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds his scriptural motto in his own rhythmic inspiration. shall we rank emerson among the great poets or not? "the great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce; and to them, of all men, the severest criticism is due." these are emerson's words in the preface to "parnassus." his own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language. they lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling. this seems to me a better test to apply to them than the one which mr. arnold cited from milton. the passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but with the context. milton had been speaking of "logic" and of "rhetoric," and spoke of poetry "as being less subtile and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate." this relative statement, it must not be forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. if the terms are used absolutely, and not comparatively, as milton used them, they must be very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some of the best of milton's own. in spite of what he said about himself in his letter to carlyle, emerson was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one. whether a great poet or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the term. the heat at eighty degrees of fahrenheit is one thing and the heat at eighty degrees of rã©aumur is a very different matter. the rank of poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium. from the days of homer to our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to this or that member of the poetic hierarchy. it is not the most popular poet who is necessarily the greatest; wordsworth never had half the popularity of scott or moore. it is not the multitude of remembered passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry. gray's "elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that length. but what shall we say to the "ars poetica" of horace? it is crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation. and yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in the full sense of that word. and what shall we do with pope's "essay on man," which has furnished more familiar lines than "paradise lost" and "paradise regained" both together? for all that, we know there is a school of writers who will not allow that pope deserves the name of poet. it takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in a great writer which are to become commonplaces in literature and conversation. it is to be remembered that emerson is one of those authors whose popularity must diffuse itself from above downwards. and after all, few will dare assert that "the vanity of human wishes" is greater as a poem than shelley's "ode to the west wind," or keats's "ode to a nightingale," because no line in either of these poems is half so often quoted as "to point a moral or adorn a tale." we cannot do better than begin our consideration of emerson's poetry with emerson's own self-estimate. he says in a fit of humility, writing to carlyle:- "i do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of literature, the reporters, suburban men." but miss peabody writes to mr. ireland:- "he once said to me, 'i am not a great poet--but whatever is of me _is a poet_.'" these opposite feelings were the offspring of different moods and different periods. here is a fragment, written at the age of twenty-eight, in which his self-distrust and his consciousness of the "vision," if not "the faculty, divine," are revealed with the brave nudity of the rhythmic confessional:- "a dull uncertain brain, but gifted yet to know that god has cherubim who go singing an immortal strain, immortal here below. i know the mighty bards, i listen while they sing, and now i know the secret store which these explore when they with torch of genius pierce the tenfold clouds that cover the riches of the universe from god's adoring lover. and if to me it is not given to fetch one ingot thence of that unfading gold of heaven his merchants may dispense, yet well i know the royal mine and know the sparkle of its ore, know heaven's truth from lies that shine,- explored, they teach us to explore." these lines are from "the poet," a series of fragments given in the "appendix," which, with his first volume, "poems," his second, "may-day, and other pieces," form the complete ninth volume of the new series. these fragments contain some of the loftiest and noblest passages to be found in his poetical works, and if the reader should doubt which of emerson's self-estimates in his two different moods spoken of above had most truth in it, he could question no longer after reading "the poet." emerson has the most exalted ideas of the true poetic function, as this passage from "merlin" sufficiently shows:- "thy trivial harp will never please or fill my craving ear; its chords should ring as blows the breeze, free, peremptory, clear. no jingling serenader's art nor tinkling of piano-strings can make the wild blood start in its mystic springs; the kingly bard must smite the chords rudely and hard, as with hammer or with mace; that they may render back artful thunder, which conveys secrets of the solar track, sparks of the supersolar blaze. * * * * * great is the art, great be the manners of the bard. he shall not his brain encumber with the coil of rhythm and number; but leaving rule and pale forethought he shall aye climb for his rhyme. 'pass in, pass in,' the angels say, 'in to the upper doors, nor count compartments of the floors, but mount to paradise by the stairway of surprise.'" and here is another passage from "the poet," mentioned in the quotation before the last, in which the bard is spoken of as performing greater miracles than those ascribed to orpheus:- "a brother of the world, his song sounded like a tempest strong which tore from oaks their branches broad, and stars from the ecliptic road. time wore he as his clothing-weeds, he sowed the sun and moon for seeds. as melts the iceberg in the seas, as clouds give rain to the eastern breeze, as snow-banks thaw in april's beam, the solid kingdoms like a dream resist in vain his motive strain, they totter now and float amain. for the muse gave special charge his learning should be deep and large, and his training should not scant the deepest lore of wealth or want: his flesh should feel, his eyes should read every maxim of dreadful need; in its fulness he should taste life's honeycomb, but not too fast; full fed, but not intoxicated; he should be loved; he should be hated; a blooming child to children dear, his heart should palpitate with fear." we look naturally to see what poets were emerson's chief favorites. in his poems "the test" and "the solution," we find that the five whom he recognizes as defying the powers of destruction are homer, dante, shakespeare, swedenborg, goethe. here are a few of his poetical characterizations from "the harp:"- "and this at least i dare affirm, since genius too has bound and term, there is no bard in all the choir, not homer's self, the poet-sire, wise milton's odes of pensive pleasure, or shakespeare whom no mind can measure, nor collins' verse of tender pain, nor byron's clarion of disdain, scott, the delight of generous boys, or wordsworth, pan's recording voice,- not one of all can put in verse, or to this presence could rehearse the sights and voices ravishing the boy knew on the hills in spring."-in the notice of "parnassus" some of his preferences have been already mentioned. comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of criticism. no lover of art will clash a venetian goblet against a roman amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a violet because it is not a rose. but comparisons used in the way of description are not odious. the difference between emerson's poetry and that of the contemporaries with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and arithmetic. he deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and infinite series. he is always seeing the universal in the particular. the great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something definite, a fixed quantity, than for _a_ + _b's_ and _x^{2's}_,--symbols used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities. emerson is a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that hang out the signs of venus and mars. this little planet could not provincialize such a man. the multiplication-table is for the every day use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence. one cannot help feeling that he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us. not that he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the hidden spiritual meaning of things as professor cayley or professor sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae. without using the rosetta-stone of swedenborg, emerson finds in every phenomenon of nature a hieroglyphic. others measure and describe the monuments,--he reads the sacred inscriptions. how alive he makes monadnoc! dinocrates undertook to "hew mount athos to the shape of man" in the likeness of alexander the great. without the help of tools or workmen, emerson makes "cheshire's haughty hill" stand before us an impersonation of kingly humanity, and talk with us as a god from olympus might have talked. this is the fascination of emerson's poetry; it moves in a world of universal symbolism. the sense of the infinite fills it with its majestic presence. it shows, also, that he has a keen delight in the every-day aspects of nature. but he looks always with the eye of a poet, never with that of the man of science. the law of association of ideas is wholly different in the two. the scientific man connects objects in sequences and series, and in so doing is guided by their collective resemblances. his aim is to classify and index all that he sees and contemplates so as to show the relations which unite, and learn the laws that govern, the subjects of his study. the poet links the most remote objects together by the slender filament of wit, the flowery chain of fancy, or the living, pulsating cord of imagination, always guided by his instinct for the beautiful. the man of science clings to his object, as the marsupial embryo to its teat, until he has filled himself as full as he can hold; the poet takes a sip of his dew-drop, throws his head up like a chick, rolls his eyes around in contemplation of the heavens above him and the universe in general, and never thinks of asking a linnaean question as to the flower that furnished him his dew-drop. the poetical and scientific natures rarely coexist; haller and goethe are examples which show that such a union may occur, but as a rule the poet is contented with the colors of the rainbow and leaves the study of fraunhofer's lines to the man of science. though far from being a man of science, emerson was a realist in the best sense of that word. but his realities reached to the highest heavens: like milton,- "he passed the flaming bounds of place and time; the living throne, the sapphire blaze where angels tremble while they gaze, he saw"-everywhere his poetry abounds in celestial imagery. if galileo had been a poet as well as an astronomer, he would hardly have sowed his verse thicker with stars than we find them in the poems of emerson. not less did emerson clothe the common aspects of life with the colors of his imagination. he was ready to see beauty everywhere:- "thou can'st not wave thy staff in air, or dip thy paddle in the lake, but it carves the bow of beauty there, and the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake." he called upon the poet to "tell men what they knew before; paint the prospect from their door." and his practice was like his counsel. he saw our plain new england life with as honest new england eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or into a milking-pail. this noble quality of his had its dangerous side. in one of his exalted moods he would have us "give to barrows, trays and pans grace and glimmer of romance." but in his lecture on "poetry and imagination," he says:- "what we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. perhaps homer and milton will be tin pans yet." the "grace and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. he himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists" have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. mr. whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of selection. it is only giving him the same liberty that lord timothy dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and exclamation, with which the reader was expected to "pepper" the pages as he might see fit. french realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that "in the mud and scum of things there alway, alway something sings." happy were it for the world if m. zola and his tribe would stop even there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too wretchedly familiar. the true realist is such a man as parent du chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the sentiments, and reporting all truthfully, but soberly, chastely, without needless circumstance, or picturesque embellishment, for a useful end, and not for a mere sensational effect. what a range of subjects from "the problem" and "uriel" and "forerunners" to "the humble-bee" and "the titmouse!" nor let the reader who thinks the poet must go far to find a fitting theme fail to read the singularly impressive home-poem, "hamatreya," beginning with the names of the successive owners of a piece of land in concord,--probably the same he owned after the last of them:- "bulkeley, hunt, willard, hosmer, meriam, flint," and ending with the austere and solemn "earth-song." full of poetical feeling, and with a strong desire for poetical expression, emerson experienced a difficulty in the mechanical part of metrical composition. his muse picked her way as his speech did in conversation and in lecturing. he made desperate work now and then with rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born singer. think of making "feeble" rhyme with "people," "abroad" with "lord," and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make rhyme without actual verbicide:- "where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear, and up the tall mast runs the woodpeck"-are! and how could prose go on all-fours more unmetrically than this? "in adirondac lakes at morn or noon the guide rows bare-headed." it was surely not difficult to say- "at morn or noon bare-headed rows the guide." and yet while we note these blemishes, many of us will confess that we like his uncombed verse better, oftentimes, than if it were trimmed more neatly and disposed more nicely. when he is at his best, his lines flow with careless ease, as a mountain stream tumbles, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth, but all the more interesting for the rocks it runs against and the grating of the pebbles it rolls over. there is one trick of verse which emerson occasionally, not very often, indulges in. this is the crowding of a redundant syllable into a line. it is a liberty which is not to be abused by the poet. shakespeare, the supreme artist, and milton, the "mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies," knew how to use it effectively. shelley employed it freely. bryant indulged in it occasionally, and wrote an article in an early number of the "north american review" in defence of its use. willis was fond of it. as a relief to monotony it may be now and then allowed,--may even have an agreeable effect in breaking the monotony of too formal verse. but it may easily become a deformity and a cause of aversion. a humpback may add picturesqueness to a procession, but if there are too many humpbacks in line we turn away from the sight of them. can any ear reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of emerson's? "oh, what is heaven but the fellowship of minds that each can stand against the world by its own meek and incorruptible will?" these lines that lift their backs up in the middle--span-worm lines, we may call them--are not to be commended for common use because some great poets have now and then admitted them. they have invaded some of our recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in june. emerson has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his leaves so as to frighten us away from their neighborhood. as for the violently artificial rhythms and rhymes which have reappeared of late in english and american literature, emerson would as soon have tried to ride three horses at once in a circus as to shut himself up in triolets, or attempt any cat's-cradle tricks of rhyming sleight of hand. if we allow that emerson is not a born singer, that he is a careless versifier and rhymer, we must still recognize that there is something in his verse which belongs, indissolubly, sacredly, to his thought. who would decant the wine of his poetry from its quaint and antique-looking _lagena_?--read his poem to the aeolian harp ("the harp") and his model betrays itself:- "these syllables that nature spoke, and the thoughts that in him woke can adequately utter none save to his ear the wind-harp lone. therein i hear the parcae reel the threads of man at their humming wheel, the threads of life and power and pain, so sweet and mournful falls the strain. and best can teach its delphian chord how nature to the soul is moored, if once again that silent string, as erst it wont, would thrill and ring." there is no need of quoting any of the poems which have become familiar to most true lovers of poetry. emerson saw fit to imitate the egyptians by placing "the sphinx" at the entrance of his temple of song. this poem was not fitted to attract worshippers. it is not easy of comprehension, not pleasing in movement. as at first written it had one verse in it which sounded so much like a nursery rhyme that emerson was prevailed upon to omit it in the later versions. there are noble passages in it, but they are for the adept and not for the beginner. a commonplace young person taking up the volume and puzzling his or her way along will come by and by to the verse:- "have i a lover who is noble and free?- i would he were nobler than to love me." the commonplace young person will be apt to say or think _c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas_--_l'amour_. the third poem in the volume, "the problem," should have stood first in order. this ranks among the finest of emerson's poems. all his earlier verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst of song in a poetic nature. "each and all," "the humble-bee," "the snow-storm," should be read before "uriel," "the world-soul," or "mithridates." "monadnoc" will be a good test of the reader's taste for emerson's poetry, and after this "woodnotes." in studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their descriptive portions. if in the flights of his imagination he is like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of descriptive epithets he reminds me of the _tenui-rostrals._ his subtle selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants, as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for its drop of honey. here is a passage showing admirably the two different conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. follow the pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines. the passage is from the poem called "destiny":- "alas! that one is born in blight, victim of perpetual slight: when thou lookest on his face, thy heart saith 'brother, go thy ways! none shall ask thee what thou doest, or care a rush for what thou knowest. or listen when thou repliest, or remember where thou liest, or how thy supper is sodden;' and another is born to make the sun forgotten." of all emerson's poems the "concord hymn" is the most nearly complete and faultless,--but it is not distinctively emersonian. it is such a poem as collins might have written,--it has the very movement and melody of the "ode on the death of mr. thomson," and of the "dirge in cymbeline," with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling. its one conspicuous line, "and fired the shot heard round the world," must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little poem, a model for all of its kind. compact, expressive, serene, solemn, musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher power that governs the future to protect the memorial-stone sacred to freedom and her martyrs. these poems of emerson's find the readers that must listen to them and delight in them, as the "ancient mariner" fastened upon the man who must hear him. if any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them, and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the question, let him read the paragraph of "may-day," beginning,- "i saw the bud-crowned spring go forth," "sea-shore," the fine fragments in the "appendix" to his published works, called, collectively, "the poet," blocks bearing the mark of poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct, and last of all, that which is, in many respects, first of all, the "threnody," a lament over the death of his first-born son. this poem has the dignity of "lycidas" without its refrigerating classicism, and with all the tenderness of cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's picture. it may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in the language,--with shelley's "adonais," and matthew arnold's "thyrsis," leaving out of view tennyson's "in memoriam" as of wider scope and larger pattern. many critics will concede that there is much truth in mr. arnold's remark on the want of "evolution" in emerson's poems. one is struck with the fact that a great number of fragments lie about his poetical workshop: poems begun and never finished; scraps of poems, chips of poems, paving the floor with intentions never carried out. one cannot help remembering coleridge with his incomplete "christabel," and his "abyssinian maid," and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of. we all know there was good reason why coleridge should have been infirm of purpose. but when we look at that great unfinished picture over which allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of sisyphus; when we go through a whole gallery of pictures by an american artist in which the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away half the artist's life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of sketches, impressions, effects, symphonies, invisibilities, and other apologies for honest work, it would not be strange if it should suggest a painful course of reflections as to the possibility that there may be something in our climatic or other conditions which tends to scholastic and artistic anaemia and insufficiency,--the opposite of what we find showing itself in the full-blooded verse of poets like browning and on the flaming canvas of painters like henri regnault. life seemed lustier in old england than in new england to emerson, to hawthorne, and to that admirable observer, mr. john burroughs. perhaps we require another century or two of acclimation. emerson never grappled with any considerable metrical difficulties. he wrote by preference in what i have ventured to call the normal respiratory measure,--octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. the "fatal facility" for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and labor. i doubt if emerson would have written a verse of poetry if he had been obliged to use the spenserian stanza. in the simple measures he habitually employed he found least hindrance to his thought. every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter. the golden sunshine of claude and the pearly mist of corot belonged to their way of looking at nature as much as the color of their eyes and hair belonged to their personalities. so with the poets; for wordsworth the air is always serene and clear, for byron the sky is uncertain between storm and sunshine. emerson sees all nature in the same pearly mist that wraps the willows and the streams of corot. without its own characteristic atmosphere, illuminated by "the light that never was on sea or land," we may have good verse but no true poem. in his poetry there is not merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon. emerson's poetry is eminently subjective,--if mr. ruskin, who hates the word, will pardon me for using it in connection with a reference to two of his own chapters in his "modern painters." these are the chapter on "the pathetic fallacy," and the one which follows it "on classical landscape." in these he treats of the transfer of a writer's mental or emotional conditions to the external nature which he contemplates. he asks his readers to follow him in a long examination of what he calls by the singular name mentioned, "the pathetic fallacy," because, he says, "he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern painter endeavoring to express something which he, as a living creature, imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual qualities of the object itself." illustrations of mr. ruskin's "pathetic fallacy" may be found almost anywhere in emerson's poems. here is one which offers itself without search:- "daily the bending skies solicit man, the seasons chariot him from this exile, the rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels, the storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along, suns haste to set, that so remoter lights beckon the wanderer to his vaster home." the expression employed by ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with a defect. if he had called the state of mind to which he refers the _sympathetic illusion_, his readers might have looked upon it more justly. it would be a pleasant and not a difficult task to trace the resemblances between emerson's poetry and that of other poets. two or three such resemblances have been incidentally referred to, a few others may be mentioned. in his contemplative study of nature he reminds us of wordsworth, at least in certain brief passages, but he has not the staying power of that long-breathed, not to say long-winded, lover of landscapes. both are on the most intimate terms with nature, but emerson contemplates himself as belonging to her, while wordsworth feels as if she belonged to him. "good-by, proud world," recalls spenser and raleigh. "the humble-bee" is strongly marked by the manner and thought of marvell. marvell's "annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade," may well have suggested emerson's "the green silence dost displace with thy mellow, breezy bass." "the snow-storm" naturally enough brings to mind the descriptions of thomson and of cowper, and fragment as it is, it will not suffer by comparison with either. "woodnotes," one of his best poems, has passages that might have been found in milton's "comus;" this, for instance:- "all constellations of the sky shed their virtue through his eye. him nature giveth for defence his formidable innocence." of course his persian and indian models betray themselves in many of his poems, some of which, called translations, sound as if they were original. so we follow him from page to page and find him passing through many moods, but with one pervading spirit:- "melting matter into dreams, panoramas which i saw, and whatever glows or seems into substance, into law." we think in reading his "poems" of these words of sainte-beuve:- "the greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study; much to complete in your turn." just what he shows himself in his prose, emerson shows himself in his verse. only when he gets into rhythm and rhyme he lets us see more of his personality, he ventures upon more audacious imagery, his flight is higher and swifter, his brief crystalline sentences have dissolved and pour in continuous streams. where they came from, or whither they flow to empty themselves, we cannot always say,--it is enough to enjoy them as they flow by us. incompleteness--want of beginning, middle, and end,--is their too common fault. his pages are too much like those artists' studios all hung round with sketches and "bits" of scenery. "the snow-storm" and "sea-shore" are "bits" out of a landscape that was never painted, admirable, so far as they go, but forcing us to ask, "where is the painting for which these scraps are studies?" or "out of what great picture have these pieces been cut?" we do not want his fragments to be made wholes,--if we did, what hand could be found equal to the task? we do not want his rhythms and rhymes smoothed and made more melodious. they are as honest as chaucer's, and we like them as they are, not modernized or manipulated by any versifying drill-sergeant,--if we wanted them reshaped whom could we trust to meddle with them? his poetry is elemental; it has the rock beneath it in the eternal laws on which it rests; the roll of deep waters in its grander harmonies; its air is full of aeolian strains that waken and die away as the breeze wanders over them; and through it shines the white starlight, and from time to time flashes a meteor that startles us with its sudden brilliancy. after all our criticisms, our selections, our analyses, our comparisons, we have to recognize that there is a charm in emerson's poems which cannot be defined any more than the fragrance of a rose or a hyacinth,--any more than the tone of a voice which we should know from all others if all mankind were to pass before us, and each of its articulating representatives should call us by name. all our crucibles and alembics leave unaccounted for the great mystery of _style_. "the style is of [a part of] the man himself," said buffon, and this saying has passed into the stronger phrase, "the style is the man." the "personal equation" which differentiates two observers is not confined to the tower of the astronomer. every human being is individualized by a new arrangement of elements. his mind is a safe with a lock to which only certain letters are the key. his ideas follow in an order of their own. his words group themselves together in special sequences, in peculiar rhythms, in unlooked-for combinations, the total effect of which is to stamp all that he says or writes with his individuality. we may not be able to assign the reason of the fascination the poet we have been considering exercises over us. but this we can say, that he lives in the highest atmosphere of thought; that he is always in the presence of the infinite, and ennobles the accidents of human existence so that they partake of the absolute and eternal while he is looking at them; that he unites a royal dignity of manner with the simplicity of primitive nature; that his words and phrases arrange themselves, as if by an elective affinity of their own, with a _curiosa felicitas_ which captivates and enthrals the reader who comes fully under its influence, and that through all he sings as in all he says for us we recognize the same serene, high, pure intelligence and moral nature, infinitely precious to us, not only in themselves, but as a promise of what the transplanted life, the air and soil and breeding of this western world may yet educe from their potential virtues, shaping themselves, at length, in a literature as much its own as the rocky mountains and the mississippi. chapter xv. recollections of emerson's last years.--mr. conway's visits.--extracts from mr. whitman's journal.--dr. le baron russell's visit.--dr. edward emerson's account.--illness and death.--funeral services. mr. conway gives the following account of two visits to emerson after the decline of his faculties had begun to make itself obvious:- "in 1875, when i stayed at his house in concord for a little time, it was sad enough to find him sitting as a listener before those who used to sit at his feet in silence. but when alone with him he conversed in the old way, and his faults of memory seemed at times to disappear. there was something striking in the kind of forgetfulness by which he suffered. he remembered the realities and uses of things when he could not recall their names. he would describe what he wanted or thought of; when he could not recall 'chair' he could speak of that which supports the human frame, and 'the implement that cultivates the soil' must do for plough.- "in 1880, when i was last in concord, the trouble had made heavy strides. the intensity of his silent attention to every word that was said was painful, suggesting a concentration of his powers to break through the invisible walls closing around them. yet his face was serene; he was even cheerful, and joined in our laughter at some letters his eldest daughter had preserved, from young girls, trying to coax autograph letters, and in one case asking for what price he would write a valedictory address she had to deliver at college. he was still able to joke about his 'naughty memory;' and no complaint came from him when he once rallied himself on living too long. emerson appeared to me strangely beautiful at this time, and the sweetness of his voice, when he spoke of the love and providence at his side, is quite indescribable."-one of the later glimpses we have of emerson is that preserved in the journal of mr. whitman, who visited concord in the autumn of 1881. mr. ireland gives a long extract from this journal, from which i take the following:- "on entering he had spoken very briefly, easily and politely to several of the company, then settled himself in his chair, a trifle pushed back, and, though a listener and apparently an alert one, remained silent through the whole talk and discussion. and so, there emerson sat, and i looking at him. a good color in his face, eyes clear, with the well-known expression of sweetness, and the old clear-peering aspect quite the same." mr. whitman met him again the next day, sunday, september 18th, and records:- "as just said, a healthy color in the cheeks, and good light in the eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount of talking that best suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where needed, and almost always with a smile." dr. le baron russell writes to me of emerson at a still later period:- "one incident i will mention which occurred at my last visit to emerson, only a few months before his death. i went by mrs. emerson's request to pass a sunday at their house at concord towards the end of june. his memory had been failing for some time, and his mind as you know was clouded, but the old charm of his voice and manner had never left him. on the morning after my arrival mrs. emerson took us into the garden to see the beautiful roses in which she took great delight. one red rose of most brilliant color she called our attention to especially; its 'hue' was so truly 'angry and brave' that i involuntarily repeated herbert's line,- 'bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,'- from the verses which emerson had first repeated to me so long ago. emerson looked at the rose admiringly, and then as if by a sudden impulse lifted his hat gently, and said with a low bow, 'i take off my hat to it.'" once a poet, always a poet. it was the same reverence for the beautiful that he had shown in the same way in his younger days on entering the wood, as governor rice has told us the story, given in an earlier chapter. i do not remember emerson's last time of attendance at the "saturday club," but i recollect that he came after the trouble in finding words had become well marked. "my memory hides itself," he said. the last time i saw him, living, was at longfellow's funeral. i was sitting opposite to him when he rose, and going to the side of the coffin, looked intently upon the face of the dead poet. a few minutes later he rose again and looked once more on the familiar features, not apparently remembering that he had just done so. mr. conway reports that he said to a friend near him, "that gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but i have entirely forgotten his name." dr. edward emerson has very kindly furnished me, in reply to my request, with information regarding his father's last years which will interest every one who has followed his life through its morning and midday to the hour of evening shadows. "may-day," which was published in 1867, was made up of the poems written since his first volume appeared. after this he wrote no poems, but with some difficulty fitted the refrain to the poem "boston," which had remained unfinished since the old anti-slavery days. "greatness," and the "phi beta kappa oration" of 1867, were among his last pieces of work. his college lectures, "the natural history of the intellect," were merely notes recorded years before, and now gathered and welded together. in 1876 he revised his poems, and made the selections from them for the "little classic" edition of his works, then called "selected poems." in that year he gave his "address to the students of the university of virginia." this was a paper written long before, and its revision, with the aid of his daughter ellen, was accomplished with much difficulty. the year 1867 was about the limit of his working life. during the last five years he hardly answered a letter. before this time it had become increasingly hard for him to do so, and he always postponed and thought he should feel more able the next day, until his daughter ellen was compelled to assume the correspondence. he did, however, write some letters in 1876, as, for instance, the answer to the invitation of the virginia students. emerson left off going regularly to the "saturday club" probably in 1875. he used to depend on meeting mr. cabot there, but after mr. cabot began to come regularly to work on "letters and social aims," emerson, who relied on his friendly assistance, ceased attending the meetings. the trouble he had in finding the word he wanted was a reason for his staying away from all gatherings where he was called upon to take a part in conversation, though he the more willingly went to lectures and readings and to church. his hearing was very slightly impaired, and his sight remained pretty good, though he sometimes said letters doubled, and that "m's" and "n's" troubled him to read. he recognized the members of his own family and his _old_ friends; but, as i infer from this statement, he found a difficulty in remembering the faces of new acquaintances, as is common with old persons. he continued the habit of reading,--read through all his printed works with much interest and surprise, went through all his manuscripts, and endeavored, unsuccessfully, to index them. in these dr. emerson found written "examined 1877 or 1878," but he found no later date. in the last year or two he read anything which he picked up on his table, but he read the same things over, and whispered the words like a child. he liked to look over the "advertiser," and was interested in the "nation." he enjoyed pictures in books and showed them with delight to guests. all this with slight changes and omissions is from the letter of dr. emerson in answer to my questions. the twilight of a long, bright day of life may be saddening, but when the shadow falls so gently and gradually, with so little that is painful and so much that is soothing and comforting, we do not shrink from following the imprisoned spirit to the very verge of its earthly existence. but darker hours were in the order of nature very near at hand. from these he was saved by his not untimely release from the imprisonment of the worn-out bodily frame. in april, 1882, emerson took a severe cold, and became so hoarse that he could hardly speak. when his son, dr. edward emerson, called to see him, he found him on the sofa, feverish, with more difficulty of expression than usual, dull, but not uncomfortable. as he lay on his couch he pointed out various objects, among others a portrait of carlyle "the good man,--my friend." his son told him that he had seen carlyle, which seemed to please him much. on the following day the unequivocal signs of pneumonia showed themselves, and he failed rapidly. he still recognized those around him, among the rest judge hoar, to whom he held out his arms for a last embrace. a sharp pain coming on, ether was administered with relief. and in a little time, surrounded by those who loved him and whom he loved, he passed quietly away. he lived very nearly to the completion of his seventy-ninth year, having been born may 25, 1803, and his death occurring on the 27th of april, 1882. mr. ireland has given a full account of the funeral, from which are, for the most part, taken the following extracts:- "the last rites over the remains of ralph waldo emerson took place at concord on the 30th of april. a special train from boston carried a large number of people. many persons were on the street, attracted by the services, but were unable to gain admission to the church where the public ceremonies were held. almost every building in town bore over its entrance-door a large black and white rosette with other sombre draperies. the public buildings were heavily draped, and even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief at the loss of their friend and fellow-townsman. "the services at the house, which were strictly private, occurred at 2.30, and were conducted by rev. w.h. furness of philadelphia, a kindred spirit and an almost life-long friend. they were simple in character, and only dr. furness took part in them. the body lay in the front northeast room, in which were gathered the family and close friends of the deceased. the only flowers were contained in three vases on the mantel, and were lilies of the valley, red and white roses, and arbutus. the adjoining room and hall were filled with friends and neighbors. "at the church many hundreds of persons were awaiting the arrival of the procession, and all the space, except the reserved pews, was packed. in front of the pulpit were simple decorations, boughs of pine covered the desk, and in their centre was a harp of yellow jonquils, the gift of miss louisa m. alcott. among the floral tributes was one from the teachers and scholars in the emerson school. by the sides of the pulpit were white and scarlet geraniums and pine boughs, and high upon the wall a laurel wreath. "before 3.30 the pall-bearers brought in the plain black walnut coffin, which was placed before the pulpit. the lid was turned back, and upon it was put a cluster of richly colored pansies and a small bouquet of roses. while the coffin was being carried in, 'pleyel's hymn' was rendered on the organ by request of the family of the deceased. dr. james freeman clarke then entered the pulpit. judge e. rockwood hoar remained by the coffin below, and when the congregation became quiet, made a brief and pathetic address, his voice many times trembling with emotion." i subjoin this most impressive "address" entire, from the manuscript with which judge hoar has kindly favored me:- "the beauty of israel is fallen in its high place! mr. emerson has died; and we, his friends and neighbors, with this sorrowing company, have turned aside the procession from his home to his grave,--to this temple of his fathers, that we may here unite in our parting tribute of memory and love. "there is nothing to mourn for him. that brave and manly life was rounded out to the full length of days. that dying pillow was softened by the sweetest domestic affection; and as he lay down to the sleep which the lord giveth his beloved, his face was as the face of an angel, and his smile seemed to give a glimpse of the opening heavens. "wherever the english language is spoken throughout the world his fame is established and secure. throughout this great land and from beyond the sea will come innumerable voices of sorrow for this great public loss. but we, his neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was _ours_. he was descended from the founders of the town. he chose our village as the place where his lifelong work was to be done. it was to our fields and orchards that his presence gave such value; it was our streets in which the children looked up to him with love, and the elders with reverence. he was our ornament and pride. "'he is gone--is dust,- he the more fortunate! yea, he hath finished! for him there is no longer any future. his life is bright--bright without spot it was and cannot cease to be. no ominous hour knocks at his door with tidings of mishap. far off is he, above desire and fear; no more submitted to the change and chance of the uncertain planets.- "'the bloom is vanished from my life, for, oh! he stood beside me like my youth; transformed for me the real to a dream, clothing the palpable and the familiar with golden exhalations of the dawn. whatever fortunes wait my future toils, the _beautiful_ is vanished and returns not.' "that lofty brow, the home of all wise thoughts and high aspirations,--those lips of eloquent music,--that great soul, which trusted in god and never let go its hope of immortality,--that large heart, to which everything that belonged to man was welcome,--that hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness,--oh, friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide! is there no more that we can do now than to give thee this our hail and farewell!" judge hoar's remarks were followed by the congregation singing the hymns, "thy will be done," "i will not fear the fate provided by thy love." the rev. dr. furness then read selections from the scriptures. the rev. james freeman clarke then delivered an "address," from which i extract two eloquent and inspiring passages, regretting to omit any that fell from lips so used to noble utterances and warmed by their subject,--for there is hardly a living person more competent to speak or write of emerson than this high-minded and brave-souled man, who did not wait until he was famous to be his admirer and champion. "the saying of the liturgy is true and wise, that 'in the midst of life we are in death.' but it is still more true that in the midst of death we are in life. do we ever believe so much in immortality as when we look on such a dear and noble face, now so still, which a few hours ago was radiant with thought and love? 'he is not here: he is risen.' that power which we knew,--that soaring intelligence, that soul of fire, that ever-advancing spirit,--_that_ cannot have been suddenly annihilated with the decay of these earthly organs. it has left its darkened dust behind. it has outsoared the shadow of our night. god does not trifle with his creatures by bringing to nothing the ripe fruit of the ages by the lesion of a cerebral cell, or some bodily tissue. life does not die, but matter dies off from it. the highest energy we know, the soul of man, the unit in which meet intelligence, imagination, memory, hope, love, purpose, insight,--this agent of immense resource and boundless power,--this has not been subdued by its instrument. when we think of such an one as he, we can only think of life, never of death. "such was his own faith, as expressed in his paper on 'immortality.' but he himself was the best argument for immortality. like the greatest thinkers, he did not rely on logical proof, but on the higher evidence of universal instincts,--the vast streams of belief which flow through human thought like currents in the ocean; those shoreless rivers which forever roll along their paths in the atlantic and pacific, not restrained by banks, but guided by the revolutions of the globe and the attractions of the sun." * * * * * "let us then ponder his words:- 'wilt thou not ope thy heart to know what rainbows teach and sunsets show? voice of earth to earth returned, prayers of saints that inly burned, saying, _what is excellent as god lives, is permanent; hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; hearts' love will meet thee again._ * * * * house and tenant go to ground lost in god, in godhead found.'" after the above address a feeling prayer was offered by rev. howard m. brown, of brookline, and the benediction closed the exercises in the church. immediately before the benediction, mr. alcott recited the following sonnet, which he had written for the occasion:-- "his harp is silent: shall successors rise, touching with venturous hand the trembling string, kindle glad raptures, visions of surprise, and wake to ecstasy each slumbering thing? shall life and thought flash new in wondering eyes, as when the seer transcendent, sweet, and wise, world-wide his native melodies did sing, flushed with fair hopes and ancient memories? ah, no! that matchless lyre shall silent lie: none hath the vanished minstrel's wondrous skill to touch that instrument with art and will. with him, winged poesy doth droop and die; while our dull age, left voiceless, must lament the bard high heaven had for its service sent." "over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neighbors, friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the dead poet. the body was robed completely in white, and the face bore a natural and peaceful expression. from the church the procession took its way to the cemetery. the grave was made beneath a tall pine-tree upon the hill-top of sleepy hollow, where lie the bodies of his friends thoreau and hawthorne, the upturned sod being concealed by strewings of pine boughs. a border of hemlock spray surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides. the services here were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final resting-place. "the rev. dr. haskins, a cousin of the family, an episcopal clergyman, read the episcopal burial service, and closed with the lord's prayer, ending at the words, 'and deliver us from evil.' in this all the people joined. dr. haskins then pronounced the benediction. after it was over the grandchildren passed the open grave and threw flowers into it." so vanished from human eyes the bodily presence of ralph waldo emerson, and his finished record belongs henceforth to memory. chapter xvi. emerson.--a retrospect. personality and habits of life.--his commission and errand.--as a lecturer.--his use of authorities.--resemblance to other writers.--as influenced by others.--his place as a thinker.--idealism and intuition.--mysticism.--his attitude respecting science.--as an american.--his fondness for solitary study.--his patience and amiability.--feeling with which he was regarded.--emerson and burns.--his religious belief.--his relations with clergymen.--future of his reputation.--his life judged by the ideal standard. emerson's earthly existence was in the estimate of his own philosophy so slight an occurrence in his career of being that his relations to the accidents of time and space seem quite secondary matters to one who has been long living in the companionship of his thought. still, he had to be born, to take in his share of the atmosphere in which we are all immersed, to have dealings with the world of phenomena, and at length to let them all "soar and sing" as he left his earthly half-way house. it is natural and pardonable that we should like to know the details of the daily life which the men whom we admire have shared with common mortals, ourselves among the rest. but emerson has said truly "great geniuses have the shortest biographies. their cousins can tell you nothing about them. they lived in their writings, and so their home and street life was trivial and commonplace." the reader has had many extracts from emerson's writings laid before him. it was no easy task to choose them, for his paragraphs are so condensed, so much in the nature of abstracts, that it is like distilling absolute alcohol to attempt separating the spirit of what he says from his undiluted thought. his books are all so full of his life to their last syllable that we might letter every volume _emersoniana_, by ralph waldo emerson. from the numerous extracts i have given from emerson's writings it may be hoped that the reader will have formed an idea for himself of the man and of the life which have been the subjects of these pages. but he may probably expect something like a portrait of the poet and moralist from the hand of his biographer, if the author of this memoir may borrow the name which will belong to a future and better equipped laborer in the same field. he may not unreasonably look for some general estimate of the life work of the scholar and thinker of whom he has been reading. he will not be disposed to find fault with the writer of the memoir if he mentions many things which would seem very trivial but for the interest they borrow from the individual to whom they relate. emerson's personal appearance was that of a scholar, the descendant of scholars. he was tall and slender, with the complexion which is bred in the alcove and not in the open air. he used to tell his son edward that he measured six feet in his shoes, but his son thinks he could hardly have straightened himself to that height in his later years. he was very light for a man of his stature. he got on the scales at cheyenne, on his trip to california, comparing his weight with that of a lady of the party. a little while afterwards he asked of his fellow-traveller, professor thayer, "how much did i weigh? a hundred and forty?" "a hundred and forty and a half," was the answer. "yes, yes, a hundred and forty and a half! that _half_ i prize; it is an index of better things!" emerson's head was not such as schopenhauer insists upon for a philosopher. he wore a hat measuring six and seven eighths on the _cephalometer_ used by hatters, which is equivalent to twenty-one inches and a quarter of circumference. the average size is from seven to seven and an eighth, so that his head was quite small in that dimension. it was long and narrow, but lofty, almost symmetrical, and of more nearly equal breadth in its anterior and posterior regions than many or most heads. his shoulders sloped so much as to be commented upon for this peculiarity by mr. gilfillan, and like "ammon's great son," he carried one shoulder a little higher than the other. his face was thin, his nose somewhat accipitrine, casting a broad shadow; his mouth rather wide, well formed and well closed, carrying a question and an assertion in its finely finished curves; the lower lip a little prominent, the chin shapely and firm, as becomes the corner-stone of the countenance. his expression was calm, sedate, kindly, with that look of refinement, centring about the lips, which is rarely found in the male new englander, unless the family features have been for two or three cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied thoughts and complex emotions as well as the sensuous and nutritive port of entry. his whole look was irradiated by an ever active inquiring intelligence. his manner was noble and gracious. few of our fellow-countrymen have had larger opportunities of seeing distinguished personages than our present minister at the court of st. james. in a recent letter to myself, which i trust mr. lowell will pardon my quoting, he says of emerson:-"there was a majesty about him beyond all other men i have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts." from members of his own immediate family i have derived some particulars relating to his personality and habits which are deserving of record. his hair was brown, quite fine, and, till he was fifty, very thick. his eyes were of the "strongest and brightest blue." the member of the family who tells me this says:-"my sister and i have looked for many years to see whether any one else had such absolutely blue eyes, and have never found them except in sea-captains. i have seen three sea-captains who had them." he was not insensible to music, but his gift in that direction was very limited, if we may judge from this family story. when he was in college, and the singing-master was gathering his pupils, emerson presented himself, intending to learn to sing. the master received him, and when his turn came, said to him, "chord!" "what?" said emerson. "chord! chord! i tell you," repeated the master. "i don't know what you mean," said emerson. "why, sing! sing a note." "so i made some kind of a noise, and the singing-master said, 'that will do, sir. you need not come again.'" emerson's mode of living was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with others using it, but always _pie_ at breakfast. "it stood before him and was the first thing eaten." ten o'clock was his bed-time, six his hour of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven. work or company sometimes led him to sit up late, and this he could do night after night. he never was hungry,--could go any time from breakfast to tea without food and not know it, but was always ready for food when it was set before him. he always walked from about four in the afternoon till tea-time, and often longer when the day was fine, or he felt that he should work the better. it is plain from his writings that emerson was possessed all his life long with the idea of his constitutional infirmity and insufficiency. he hated invalidism, and had little patience with complaints about ill-health, but in his poems, and once or twice in his letters to carlyle, he expresses himself with freedom about his own bodily inheritance. in 1827, being then but twenty-four years old, he writes:- "i bear in youth the sad infirmities that use to undo the limb and sense of age." four years later:- "has god on thee conferred a bodily presence mean as paul's, yet made thee bearer of a word which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?" and again, in the same year:- "leave me, fear, thy throbs are base, trembling for the body's sake."-almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing in "terminus" his inherited weakness of organization. and in writing to carlyle, he says:-"you are of the anakirn and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution." again, "i am the victim of miscellany--miscellany of designs, vast debility and procrastination." he thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry. his presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough to make him a rapid and enduring walker. emerson's voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the lecture-room. it was never loud, never shrill, but singularly penetrating. he was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite sidewalk. it was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him. he never laughed loudly. when he laughed it was under protest, as it were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the "ground swell," as professor thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed convulsion. he was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to margaret fuller that she made him laugh too much. emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered the birthright of the new englander. he had not the mechanical turn of the whittling yankee. i once questioned him about his manual dexterity, and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail, --which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it to the roof of a house or elsewhere, i took to be a confession of inaptitude for mechanical works. he does not seem to have been very accomplished in the handling of agricultural implements either, for it is told in the family that his little son, waldo, seeing him at work with a spade, cried out, "take care, papa,--you will dig your leg." he used to regret that he had no ear for music. i have said enough about his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the words. there are stories which show that emerson had a retentive memory in the earlier part of his life. it is hard to say from his books whether he had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen. lover and admirer of plato as emerson was, the doors of the academy, over which was the inscription [greek: maedeis hageometraetos eseito]--let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here,--would have been closed to him. all the exact sciences found him an unwilling learner. he says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with impunity. in an unpublished manuscript kindly submitted to me by mr. frothingham, emerson is reported as saying, "god has given me the seeing eye, but not the working hand." his gift was insight: he saw the germ through its envelop; the particular in the light of the universal; the fact in connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. he had neither the patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left no footprints. this mode of intellectual action when found united with natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its various forms of manifestation. without that gift of natural sagacity (_odoratio quaedam venatica_),--a good scent for truth and beauty,--it appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity, according to its degree of aberration. emerson was eminently sane for an idealist. he carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that franklin showed in the affairs of common life. he was constitutionally fastidious, and had to school himself to become able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships. we must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. the clown of the first edition of "monadnoc" "with heart of cat and eyes of bug," disappears in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were there still. what must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-minded worshippers who fastened upon him for the interminable period between the incoming and the outgoing railroad train! he was a model of patience and good temper. we might have feared that he lacked the sensibility to make such intrusions and offences an annoyance. but when mr. frothingham gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections which i have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed, and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree. of emerson's affections his home-life, and those tender poems in memory of his brothers and his son, give all the evidence that could be asked or wished for. his friends were all who knew him, for none could be his enemy; and his simple graciousness of manner, with the sincerity apparent in every look and tone, hardly admitted indifference on the part of any who met him were it but for a single hour. even the little children knew and loved him, and babes in arms returned his angelic smile. of the friends who were longest and most intimately associated with him, it is needless to say much in this place. of those who are living, it is hardly time to speak; of those who are dead, much has already been written. margaret fuller,--i must call my early schoolmate as i best remember her,--leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of five artists,--emerson himself among the number; thoreau is faithfully commemorated in the loving memoir by mr. sanborn; theodore parker lives in the story of his life told by the eloquent mr. weiss; hawthorne awaits his portrait from the master-hand of mr. lowell. how nearly any friend, other than his brothers edward and charles, came to him, i cannot say, indeed i can hardly guess. that "majesty" mr. lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that doth hedge a king. what man was he who would lay his hand familiarly upon his shoulder and call him waldo? no disciple of father mathew would be likely to do such a thing. there may have been such irreverent persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "saturday club," it would have produced a sensation like brummel's "george, ring the bell," to the prince regent. his ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many others of his characteristics, that the spirit which animated his mortal frame had missed its way on the shining path to some brighter and better sphere of being. not so did emerson appear among the plain working farmers of the village in which he lived. he was a good, unpretending fellow-citizen who put on no airs, who attended town-meetings, took his part in useful measures, was no great hand at farming, but was esteemed and respected, and felt to be a principal source of attraction to concord, for strangers came flocking to the place as if it held the tomb of washington. * * * * * what was the errand on which he visited our earth,--the message with which he came commissioned from the infinite source of all life? every human soul leaves its port with sealed orders. these may be opened earlier or later on its voyage, but until they are opened no one can tell what is to be his course or to what harbor he is bound. emerson inherited the traditions of the boston pulpit, such as they were, damaged, in the view of the prevailing sects of the country, perhaps by too long contact with the "sons of liberty," and their revolutionary notions. but the most "liberal" boston pulpit still held to many doctrines, forms, and phrases open to the challenge of any independent thinker. in the year 1832 this young priest, then a settled minister, "began," as was said of another,--"to be about thirty years of age." he had opened his sealed orders and had read therein: thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe. thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice of god in thine own soul. thou shalt study and obey the laws of the universe and they will be thy fellow-servants. thou shalt speak the truth as thou seest it, without fear, in the spirit of kindness to all thy fellow-creatures, dealing with the manifold interests of life and the typical characters of history. nature shall be to thee as a symbol. the life of the soul, in conscious union with the infinite, shall be for thee the only real existence. this pleasing show of an external world through which thou art passing is given thee to interpret by the light which is in thee. its least appearance is not unworthy of thy study. let thy soul be open and thine eyes will reveal to thee beauty everywhere. go forth with thy message among thy fellow-creatures; teach them they must trust themselves as guided by that inner light which dwells with the pure in heart, to whom it was promised of old that they shall see god. teach them that each generation begins the world afresh, in perfect freedom; that the present is not the prisoner of the past, but that today holds captive all yesterdays, to compare, to judge, to accept, to reject their teachings, as these are shown by its own morning's sun. to thy fellow-countrymen thou shalt preach the gospel of the new world, that here, here in our america, is the home of man; that here is the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded. thy life shall be as thy teachings, brave, pure, truthful, beneficent, hopeful, cheerful, hospitable to all honest belief, all sincere thinkers, and active according to thy gifts and opportunities. * * * * * he was true to the orders he had received. through doubts, troubles, privations, opposition, he would not "bate a jot of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer right onward." all through the writings of emerson the spirit of these orders manifests itself. his range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane" where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners, and all his work was done, not so much "as ever in his great taskmaster's eye," as in the ever-present sense of divine companionship. he was called to sacrifice his living, his position, his intimacies, to a doubt, and he gave them all up without a murmur. he might have been an idol, and he broke his own pedestal to attack the idolatry which he saw all about him. he gave up a comparatively easy life for a toilsome and trying one; he accepted a precarious employment, which hardly kept him above poverty, rather than wear the golden padlock on his lips which has held fast the conscience of so many pulpit chrysostoms. instead of a volume or two of sermons, bridled with a text and harnessed with a confession of faith, he bequeathed us a long series of discourses and essays in which we know we have his honest thoughts, free from that professional bias which tends to make the pulpit teaching of the fairest-minded preacher follow a diagonal of two forces,--the promptings of his personal and his ecclesiastical opinions. without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation. it was largely made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought. to them, in the words of his friend and neighbor mr. alcott, he "sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer." nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout listeners around him. another poet, his concord neighbor, mr. sanborn, who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners. "his was the task and his the lordly gift our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift." this was his power,--to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier, calmer, brighter. optimism is what the young want, and he could no more help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than claude could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine. "nature," published in 1836, "the first clear manifestation of his genius," as mr. norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a poet, with a tendency to mysticism. if he had been independent in circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these directions. but he had his living to get and a family to support, and he must look about him for some paying occupation. the lecture-room naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from the pulpit. this medium of communicating thought was not as yet very popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate. emerson was of a very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities. --"i am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a delos not yet made fast. i imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confession." so writes emerson to carlyle in 1841. it would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which emerson gave most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view the calling of shakespeare in judging his literary character. emerson was an essayist and a lecturer, as shakespeare was a dramatist and a play-actor. the exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were, accidental in the writings of shakespeare. the demands of the lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of emerson as an author. the play must be in five acts, each of a given length. the lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it. both play and lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience would tire before the allotted time was over. both writers had this in common: they were poets and moralists. they reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen portraits of character. the particular form in which they wrote makes little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an elevated sentiment. it was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer in what direction they should turn their special gifts. the actor had learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his apprenticeship in the pulpit. each had his bread to earn, and he must work, and work hard, in the way open before him. for twenty years the playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good estate to his native town. for forty years emerson lectured and published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. he never became rich, as shakespeare did. he was never in easy circumstances until he was nearly seventy years old. lecturing was hard work, but he was under the "base necessity," as he called it, of constant labor, writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and dangerous winter season. he spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed plain people whose classics were the bible and the "farmer's almanac." wherever he appeared in the lecture-room, he fascinated his listeners by his voice and manner; the music of his speech pleased those who found his thought too subtle for their dull wits to follow. when the lecture had served its purpose, it came before the public in the shape of an essay. but the essay never lost the character it borrowed from the conditions under which it was delivered; it was a lay sermon,--_concio ad populum_. we must always remember what we are dealing with. "expect nothing more of my power of construction,--no ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together."--"here i sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." we have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a lecturer and an essayist, and now and then writing in verse. he liked the freedom of the platform. "i preach in the lecture-room," he says, "and there it tells, for there is no prescription. you may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius." in england, he says, "i find this lecturing a key which opens all doors." but he did not tend to overvalue the calling which from "base necessity" he followed so diligently. "incorrigible spouting yankee," he calls himself; and again, "i peddle out all the wit i can gather from time or from nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received." lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the earlier part of the time when emerson was carrying his precious wares about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments. but one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations enough. i remember emerson's coming to my house to know if i could fill his place at a certain lyceum so that he might accept a very advantageous invitation in another direction. i told him that i was unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned. he smiled serenely, saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that season. no man would accuse emerson of parsimony of ideas. he crams his pages with the very marrow of his thought. but in weighing out a lecture he was as punctilious as portia about the pound of flesh. his utterance was deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. exactly at the end of the hour the lecture stopped. suddenly, abruptly, but quietly, without peroration of any sort, always with "a gentle shock of mild surprise" to the unprepared listener. he had weighed out the full measure to his audience with perfect fairness. [greek: oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,] or, in bryant's version, "as the scales are held by some just woman, who maintains by spinning wool her household,--carefully she poises both the wool and weights, to make the balance even, that she may provide a pittance for her babes."-as to the charm of his lectures all are agreed. it is needless to handle this subject, for mr. lowell has written upon it. of their effect on his younger listeners he says, "to some of us that long past experience remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. emerson awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. it is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless of what breath may fill it. sidney heard it in the ballad of 'chevy chase,' and we in emerson. nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of victory." there was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in emerson's voice that was infinitely soothing. so might "peace, be still," have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm. i remember that in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror, i fell in with governor andrew, on his way to a lecture of emerson's, where he was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon his mind. an hour passed in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the diamond drops that distil from a mountain rock, was a true nepenthe for a careworn soul. an author whose writings are like mosaics must have borrowed from many quarries. emerson had read more or less thoroughly through a very wide range of authors. i shall presently show how extensive was his reading. no doubt he had studied certain authors diligently, a few, it would seem, thoroughly. but let no one be frightened away from his pages by the terrible names of plotinus and proclus and porphyry, of behmen or spinoza, or of those modern german philosophers with whom it is not pretended that he had any intimate acquaintance. mr. george ripley, a man of erudition, a keen critic, a lover and admirer of emerson, speaks very plainly of his limitations as a scholar. "as he confesses in the essay on 'books,' his learning is second hand; but everything sticks which his mind can appropriate. he defends the use of translations, and i doubt whether he has ever read ten pages of his great authorities, plato, plutarch, montaigne, or goethe, in the original. he is certainly no friend of profound study any more than of philosophical speculation. give him a few brilliant and suggestive glimpses, and he is content." one correction i must make to this statement. emerson says he has "contrived to read" almost every volume of goethe, and that he has fifty-five of them, but that he has read nothing else in german, and has not looked into him for a long time. this was in 1840, in a letter to carlyle. it was up-hill work, it may be suspected, but he could not well be ignorant of his friend's great idol, and his references to goethe are very frequent. emerson's quotations are like the miraculous draught of fishes. i hardly know his rivals except burton and cotton mather. but no one would accuse him of pedantry. burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; mather quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; emerson quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because another writer's way of thinking falls in with his own,--never with a trivial purpose. reading as he did, he must have unconsciously appropriated a great number of thoughts from others. but he was profuse in his references to those from whom he borrowed,--more profuse than many of his readers would believe without taking the pains to count his authorities. this i thought it worth while to have done, once for all, and i will briefly present the results of the examination. the named references, chiefly to authors, as given in the table before me, are three thousand three hundred and ninety-three, relating to eight hundred and sixty-eight different individuals. of these, four hundred and eleven are mentioned more than once; one hundred and fifty-five, five times or more; sixty-nine, ten times or more; thirty-eight, fifteen times or more; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. these twenty-seven names alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no less than one thousand and sixty-five references. authorities. number of times mentioned. shakespeare.....112 napoleon.........84 plato............81 plutarch.........70 goethe...........62 swift............49 bacon............47 milton...........46 newton...........43 homer............42 socrates.........42 swedenborg.......40 montaigne........30 saadi............30 luther...........30 webster..........27 aristotle........25 hafiz............25 wordsworth.......25 burke............24 saint paul.......24 dante............22 shattuck (hist. of concord).......21 chaucer..........20 coleridge........20 michael angelo...20 the name of jesus occurs fifty-four times. it is interesting to observe that montaigne, franklin, and emerson all show the same fondness for plutarch. montaigne says, "i never settled myself to the reading of any book of solid learning but plutarch and seneca." franklin says, speaking of the books in his father's library, "there was among them plutarch's lives, which i read abundantly, and i still think that time spent to great advantage." emerson says, "i must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers." studies of life and character were the delight of all these four moralists. as a judge of character, dr. hedge, who knew emerson well, has spoken to me of his extraordinary gift, and no reader of "english traits" can have failed to mark the formidable penetration of the intellect which looked through those calm cerulean eyes. _noscitur a sociis_ is as applicable to the books a man most affects as well as to the companions he chooses. it is with the kings of thought that emerson most associates. as to borrowing from his royal acquaintances his ideas are very simple and expressed without reserve. "all minds quote. old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. there is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. by necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote." what emerson says of plutarch applies very nearly to himself. "in his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents. we sail on his memory into the ports of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not stop to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all." mr. ruskin and lord tennyson have thought it worth their while to defend themselves from the charge of plagiarism. emerson would never have taken the trouble to do such a thing. his mind was overflowing with thought as a river in the season of flood, and was full of floating fragments from an endless variety of sources. he drew ashore whatever he wanted that would serve his purpose. he makes no secret of his mode of writing. "i dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and i get a brick-kiln instead of a house." his journal is "full of disjointed dreams and audacities." writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of his "lapidary style" and say "i build my house of boulders." "it is to be remembered," says mr. ruskin, "that all men who have sense and feeling are continually helped: they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. the greatest is he who has been oftenest aided; and if the attainments of all human minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original powers, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it." the reader may like to see a few coincidences between emerson's words and thoughts and those of others. some sayings seem to be a kind of family property. "scorn trifles" comes from aunt mary moody emerson, and reappears in her nephew, ralph waldo.--"what right have you, sir, to your virtue? is virtue piecemeal? this is a jewel among the rags of a beggar." so writes ralph waldo emerson in his lecture "new england reformers."--"hiding the badges of royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem from under their rags." thus wrote charles chauncy emerson in the "harvard register" nearly twenty years before. "the hero is not fed on sweets, daily his own heart he eats." the image comes from pythagoras _via_ plutarch. now and then, but not with any questionable frequency, we find a sentence which recalls carlyle. "the national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling. the slow, deep english mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all its borders in flame. the wrath of london is not french wrath, but has a long memory, and in hottest heat a register and rule." compare this passage from "english traits" with the following one from carlyle's "french revolution":-"so long this gallic fire, through its successive changes of color and character, will blaze over the face of europe, and afflict and scorch all men:--till it provoke all men, till it kindle another kind of fire, the teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day! for there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry jungle and grass; most sudden, high-blazing: and another fire which we liken to the burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal, but which no known thing will put out." "o what are heroes, prophets, men but pipes through which the breath of man doth blow a momentary music." the reader will find a similar image in one of burns's letters, again in one of coleridge's poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a letter of leibnitz. "he builded better than he knew" is the most frequently quoted line of emerson. the thought is constantly recurring in our literature. it helps out the minister's sermon; and a fourth of july oration which does not borrow it is like the "address without a phoenix" among the drury lane mock poems. can we find any trace of this idea elsewhere? in a little poem of coleridge's, "william tell," are these two lines: "on wind and wave the boy would toss was great, nor knew how great he was." the thought is fully worked out in the celebrated essay of carlyle called "characteristics." it reappears in emerson's poem "fate." "unknown to cromwell as to me was cromwell's measure and degree; unknown to him as to his horse, if he than his groom is better or worse." it is unnecessary to illustrate this point any further in this connection. in dealing with his poetry other resemblances will suggest themselves. all the best poetry the world has known is full of such resemblances. if we find emerson's wonderful picture, "initial love" prefigured in the "symposium" of plato, we have only to look in the "phaedrus" and we we shall find an earlier sketch of shakespeare's famous group,- "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet." sometimes these resemblances are nothing more than accidental coincidences; sometimes the similar passages are unconsciously borrowed from another; sometimes they are paraphrases, variations, embellished copies, _ã©ditions de luxe_ of sayings that all the world knows are old, but which it seems to the writer worth his while to say over again. the more improved versions of the world's great thoughts we have, the better, and we look to the great minds for them. the larger the river the more streams flow into it. the wide flood of emerson's discourse has a hundred rivers and thousands of streamlets for its tributaries. it was not from books only that he gathered food for thought and for his lectures and essays. he was always on the lookout in conversation for things to be remembered. he picked up facts one would not have expected him to care for. he once corrected me in giving flora temple's time at kalamazoo. i made a mistake of a quarter of a second, and he set me right. he was not always so exact in his memory, as i have already shown in several instances. another example is where he speaks of quintus curtius, the historian, when he is thinking of mettus curtius, the self-sacrificing equestrian. little inaccuracies of this kind did not concern him much; he was a wholesale dealer in illustrations, and could not trouble himself about a trifling defect in this or that particular article. emerson was a man who influenced others more than others influenced him. outside of his family connections, the personalities which can be most easily traced in his own are those of carlyle, mr. alcott, and thoreau. carlyle's harsh virility could not be without its effect on his valid, but sensitive nature. alcott's psychological and physiological speculations interested him as an idealist. thoreau lent him a new set of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy. emerson looked at nature as a poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as vague as that of polonius. but thoreau had a pair of eyes which, like those of the indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest stone in the darkest night,--or come nearer to seeing it than those of most mortals. emerson's long intimacy with him taught him to give an outline to many natural objects which would have been poetic nebulae to him but for this companionship. a nicer analysis would detect many alien elements mixed with his individuality, but the family traits predominated over all the external influences, and the personality stood out distinct from the common family qualities. mr. whipple has well said: "some traits of his mind and character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of heredity can give us the genesis of his genius? indeed the safest course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess that it is the nature of genius 'to spring, like the rainbow daughter of wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and refuse all history.'" * * * * * emerson's place as a thinker is somewhat difficult to fix. he cannot properly be called a psychologist. he made notes and even delivered lectures on the natural history of the intellect; but they seem to have been made up, according to his own statement, of hints and fragments rather than of the results of systematic study. he was a man of intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism. this tendency renders him sometimes obscure, and once in a while almost, if not quite, unintelligible. we can, for this reason, understand why the great lawyer turned him over to his daughters, and dr. walter channing complained that his lecture made his head ache. but it is not always a writer's fault that he is not understood. many persons have poor heads for abstractions; and as for mystics, if they understand themselves it is quite as much as can be expected. but that which is mysticism to a dull listener may be the highest and most inspiring imaginative clairvoyance to a brighter one. it is to be hoped that no reader will take offence at the following anecdote, which may be found under the title "diogenes," in the work of his namesake, diogenes laertius. i translate from the latin version. "plato was talking about ideas, and spoke of _mensality_ and _cyathity_ [_tableity_, and _gobletity_]. 'i can see a table and a goblet,' said the cynic, 'but i can see no such things as tableity and gobletity.' 'quite so,' answered plato, 'because you have the eyes to see a goblet and a table with, but you have not the brains to understand tableity and gobletity.'" this anecdote may be profitably borne in mind in following emerson into the spheres of intuition and mystical contemplation. emerson was an idealist in the platonic sense of the word, a spiritualist as opposed to a materialist. he believes, he says, "as the wise spenser teaches," that the soul makes its own body. this, of course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than spenser, older than plato or pythagoras, having its cradle in india, fighting its way down through greek philosophers and christian fathers and german professors, to our own time, when it has found pierre leroux, edward beecher, and brigham young among its numerous advocates. each has his fancies on the subject. the geography of an undiscovered country and the soundings of an ocean that has never been sailed over may belong to romance and poetry, but they do not belong to the realm of knowledge. that the organ of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a simple matter of observation. that it inherits truths is a different proposition. the eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its retina,--why should the brain bring thoughts? poetry settles such questions very simply by saying it is so. the poet in emerson never accurately differentiated itself from the philosopher. he speaks of wordsworth's ode on the intimations of immortality as the high-water mark of the poetry of this century. it sometimes seems as if he had accepted the lofty rhapsodies of this noble ode as working truths. "not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from god, who is our home." in accordance with this statement of a divine inheritance from a preexisting state, the poet addresses the infant:- "mighty prophet! seer blest! on whom those truths do rest which we are toiling all our lives to find."-these are beautiful fancies, but the philosopher will naturally ask the poet what are the truths which the child has lost between its cradle and the age of eight years, at which wordsworth finds the little girl of whom he speaks in the lines,- "a simple child- that lightly draws its breath and feels its life in every limb,- what should it know of death?" what should it, sure enough, or of any other of those great truths which time with its lessons, and the hardening of the pulpy brain can alone render appreciable to the consciousness? undoubtedly every brain has its own set of moulds ready to shape all material of thought into its own individual set of patterns. if the mind comes into consciousness with a good set of moulds derived by "traduction," as dryden called it, from a good ancestry, it may be all very well to give the counsel to the youth to plant himself on his instincts. but the individual to whom this counsel is given probably has dangerous as well as wholesome instincts. he has also a great deal besides the instincts to be considered. his instincts are mixed up with innumerable acquired prejudices, erroneous conclusions, deceptive experiences, partial truths, one-sided tendencies. the clearest insight will often find it hard to decide what is the real instinct, and whether the instinct itself is, in theological language, from god or the devil. that which was a safe guide for emerson might not work well with lacenaire or jesse pomeroy. the cloud of glory which the babe brings with it into the world is a good set of instincts, which dispose it to accept moral and intellectual truths,--not the truths themselves. and too many children come into life trailing after them clouds which are anything but clouds of glory. it may well be imagined that when emerson proclaimed the new doctrine,--new to his young disciples,--of planting themselves on their instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance,--trusting to intuition,--without reference to any other authority, he opened the door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which listened to his teachings. too much was expected out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. the children shut up by psammetichus got as far as one word in their evolution of an original language, but _bekkos_ was a very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary. "the dial" was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness, incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation. the gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less than this: a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence. it was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we cannot prove. but it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or institutions. all this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of emancipation. for the fay _ce que voudras_ of the revellers of medmenham abbey, was substituted the new motto, pense _ce que voudras_. there was an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally of the bedlam sort. emerson's disciples were never accused of falling into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign influences. extravagances of opinion cure themselves. time wore off the effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates. such were some of the incidental effects of the emersonian declaration of independence. it was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not yet ended or at present like to be. a local outbreak, if you will, but so was throwing the tea overboard. a provincial affair, if the bohemian press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over the world. * * * * * too much has been made of emerson's mysticism. he was an intellectual rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. he never let go the string of his balloon. he never threw over all his ballast of common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being could breathe. i found in his library william law's edition of jacob behmen. there were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader may have grown dizzy,--just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic asylums,--evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the contrivers of them. emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to insanity he knew and has spoken of. he played with the incommunicable, the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played with a bundle of jack-straws. "brahma," the poem which so mystified the readers of the "atlantic monthly," was one of his spiritual divertisements. to the average western mind it is the nearest approach to a torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out of itself. if "rejected addresses" had not been written half a century before emerson's poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant to ridicule and parody it. "the song of braham is an irish howl; thinking is but an idle waste of thought, and nought is everything and everything is nought." braham, hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of brahma that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended. of course no one can hold emerson responsible for the "yoga" doctrine of brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. the oriental side of emerson's nature delighted itself in these narcotic dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. they lend a peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them. the knowledge, if knowledge it be, of the mystic is not transmissible. it is not cumulative; it begins and ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a human soul had ever constructed. some passages of "nature," "the over-soul," "the sphinx," "uriel," illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. emerson's calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes refers to,--that of ecstasy. the passage in "nature" where he says "i become a transparent eyeball" is about as near it as he ever came. this was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers. one of his most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels. emerson's reflections in the "transcendental" mood do beyond question sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to the ridiculous. but very near that precipitous border line there is a charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have a peculiar and mysterious beauty. "uriel" is a poem which finds itself perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, i doubt not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment, it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest imaginative conceptions. human personality presented itself to emerson as a passing phase of universal being. born of the infinite, to the infinite it was to return. sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects in nature,--he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the landscape. here is a curious extract from "the adirondacs," in which the reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with byron's- "the sky is changed,--and such a change! o night and storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong."-now emerson:- "and presently the sky is changed; o world! what pictures and what harmonies are thine! the clouds are rich and dark, the air serene, _so like the soul of me, what if't were me_?" we find this idea of confused personal identity also in a brief poem printed among the "translations" in the appendix to emerson's poems. these are the last two lines of "the flute, from hilali":- "saying, sweetheart! the old mystery remains, if i am i; thou, thou, or thou art i?" the same transfer of personality is hinted in the line of shelley's "ode to the west wind": "be thou, spirit fierce, my spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!" once more, how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous! a few drops of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical metempsychosis. the laird of balnamoon had been at a dinner where they gave him cherry-brandy instead of port wine. in driving home over a wild tract of land called munrimmon moor his hat and wig blew off, and his servant got out of the gig and brought them to him. the hat he recognized, but not the wig. "it's no my wig, hairy [harry], lad; it's no my wig," and he would not touch it. at last harry lost his patience: "ye'd better tak' it, sir, for there's nae waile [choice] o' wigs on munrimmon moor." and in our earlier days we used to read of the bewildered market-woman, whose _ego_ was so obscured when she awoke from her slumbers that she had to leave the question of her personal identity to the instinct of her four-footed companion:- "if it be i, he'll wag his little tail; and if it be not i, he'll loudly bark and wail." i have not lost my reverence for emerson in showing one of his fancies for a moment in the distorting mirror of the ridiculous. he would doubtless have smiled with me at the reflection, for he had a keen sense of humor. but i take the opportunity to disclaim a jesting remark about "a foresmell of the infinite" which mr. conway has attributed to me, who am innocent of all connection with it. the mystic appeals to those only who have an ear for the celestial concords, as the musician only appeals to those who have the special endowment which enables them to understand his compositions. it is not for organizations untuned to earthly music to criticise the great composers, or for those who are deaf to spiritual harmonies to criticise the higher natures which lose themselves in the strains of divine contemplation. the bewildered reader must not forget that passage of arms, previously mentioned, between plato and diogenes. * * * * * emerson looked rather askance at science in his early days. i remember that his brother charles had something to say in the "harvard register" (1828) about its disenchantments. i suspect the prejudice may have come partly from wordsworth. compare this verse of his with the lines of emerson's which follow it. "physician art thou, one all eyes; philosopher, a fingering slave, one that would peep and botanize upon his mother's grave?" emerson's lines are to be found near the end of the appendix in the new edition of his works. "philosophers are lined with eyes within, and, being so, the sage unmakes the man. in love he cannot therefore cease his trade; scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek, he feels it, introverts his learned eye to catch the unconscious heart in the very act. his mother died,--the only friend he had,- some tears escaped, but his philosophy couched like a cat, sat watching close behind and throttled all his passion. is't not like that devil-spider that devours her mate scarce freed from her embraces?" the same feeling comes out in the poem "blight," where he says the "young scholars who invade our hills" "love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, and all their botany is latin names;" and in "the walk," where the "learned men" with their glasses are contrasted with the sons of nature,--the poets are no doubt meant,--much to the disadvantage of the microscopic observers. emerson's mind was very far from being of the scientific pattern. science is quantitative,--loves the foot-rule and the balance,--methodical, exhaustive, indifferent to the beautiful as such. the poet is curious, asks all manner of questions, and never thinks of waiting for the answer, still less of torturing nature to get at it. emerson wonders, for instance,- "why nature loves the number five," but leaves his note of interrogation without troubling himself any farther. he must have picked up some wood-craft and a little botany from thoreau, and a few chemical notions from his brother-in-law, dr. jackson, whose name is associated with the discovery of artificial anaesthesia. it seems probable that the genial companionship of agassiz, who united with his scientific genius, learning, and renown, most delightful social qualities, gave him a kinder feeling to men of science and their pursuits than he had entertained before that great master came among us. at any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn. but he loves the poet always better than the scientific student of nature. in his preface to the poems of mr. w.e. channing, he says:-"here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud with a poet's curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection they awake."-this was emerson's own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of nature. emerson's style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects. his paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. his imagery is frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the special to the general and universal, and _vice versa_, with a bound that is like a flight. here are a few specimens of his pleasing _audacities_:-"there is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup."-"he arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for him the stormy atlantic."-"if we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were time and nature."-"tapping the tempest for a little side wind."-"the locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment and bind them fast in one web."-he is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases. he likes the expression "mother-wit," which he finds in spenser, marlowe, shakespeare, and other old writers. he often uses the word "husband" in its earlier sense of economist. his use of the word "haughty" is so fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it. but his special, constitutional, word is "fine," meaning something like dainty, as shakespeare uses it,--"my dainty ariel,"--"fine ariel." it belongs to his habit of mind and body as "faint" and "swoon" belong to keats. this word is one of the ear-marks by which emerson's imitators are easily recognized. "melioration" is another favorite word of emerson's. a clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word "haughty;" his exquisite delicacy by his fondness for the word "fine," with a certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the word "melioration." we must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel with solomon and criticise the sermon on the mount. the "point and surprise" which he speaks of as characterizing the style of plutarch belong eminently to his own. his fertility of illustrative imagery is very great. his images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects, ennobled by his handling. he throws his royal robe over a milking-stool and it becomes a throne. but chiefly he chooses objects of comparison grand in themselves. he deals with the elements at first hand. such delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight. it is as when the slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling the stained windows of a great cathedral. we have seen him as an unpretending lecturer. we follow him round as he "peddles out all the wit he can gather from time or from nature," and we find that "he has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun," and is carrying about the morning light as merchandise. * * * * * emerson was as loyal an american, as thorough a new englander, as home-loving a citizen, as ever lived. he arraigned his countrymen sharply for their faults. mr. arnold made one string of his epithets familiar to all of us,--"this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious america." this was from a private letter to carlyle. in his essay, "works and days," he is quite as outspoken: "this mendicant america, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative america." "i see plainly," he says, "that our society is as bigoted to the respectabilities of religion and education as yours." "the war," he says, "gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation." all his life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization. all his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them. to the dark prophecies of carlyle, which came wailing to him across the ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations. "here," he said, in words i have already borrowed, "is the home of man--here is the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded." such a man as emerson belongs to no one town or province or continent; he is the common property of mankind; and yet we love to think of him as breathing the same air and treading the same soil that we and our fathers and our children have breathed and trodden. so it pleases us to think how fondly he remembered his birthplace; and by the side of franklin's bequest to his native city we treasure that golden verse of emerson's:- "a blessing through the ages thus shield all thy roofs and towers, god with the fathers, so with us, thou darling town of ours!" emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend their meetings as a listener and looker-on. his study was his workshop, and he preferred to labor in solitude. when he became famous he paid the penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those "devastators of the day" who sought him in his quiet retreat. his courtesy and kindness to his visitors were uniform and remarkable. poets who come to recite their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are among the most formidable of earthly visitations. emerson accepted his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. except in that one phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far as i remember, in his writings. his perfect amiability was one of his most striking characteristics, and in a nature fastidious as was his in its whole organization, it implied a self-command worthy of admiration. * * * * * the natural purity and elevation of emerson's character show themselves in all that he writes. his life corresponded to the ideal we form of him from his writings. this it was which made him invulnerable amidst all the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited. his white shield was so spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave their defacing marks upon it. one would think he was protected by some superstition like that which voltaire refers to as existing about boileau,- "ne disons pas mal de nicolas,--cela porte malheur." (don't let us abuse nicolas,--it brings ill luck.) the cooped-up dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him, and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy, sprinkled him with rose-water. his position in our puritan new england was in some respects like that of burns in presbyterian scotland. the _dour_ scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven's gate, until he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and find his perch on "the big ha' bible," if he would,--and as he did. so did the music of emerson's words and life steal into the hearts of our stern new england theologians, and soften them to a temper which would have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers. when a man lives a life commended by all the christian virtues, enlightened persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs as in former generations. we do, however, wish to know what are the convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep and anxious and devout religious scepticism. it was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his ideas about the deity. he begged for a day to consider the question, but when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the end of these, four days. in short, the more he thought about it, the more he found himself perplexed. the name most frequently applied to emerson's form of belief is pantheism. how many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief in the omnipresence of the deity? theodore parker explained emerson's position, as he understood it, in an article in the "massachusetts quarterly review." i borrow this quotation from mr. cooke:-"he has an absolute confidence in god. he has been foolishly accused of pantheism, which sinks god in nature, but no man is further from it. he never sinks god in man; he does not stop with the law, in matter or morals, but goes to the law-giver; yet probably it would not be so easy for him to give his definition of god, as it would be for most graduates at andover or cambridge." we read in his essay, "self-reliance ": "this is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed one. self-existence is the attribute of the supreme cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms." the "ever-blessed one" of emerson corresponds to the father in the doctrine of the trinity. the "over-soul" of emerson is that aspect of deity which is known to theology as the holy spirit. jesus was for him a divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in all ages and are to-day. he was willing to be called a christian just as he was willing to be called a platonist. explanations are apt not to explain much in dealing with subjects like this. "canst thou by searching find out god? canst thou find out the almighty unto perfection?" but on certain great points nothing could be clearer than the teaching of emerson. he believed in the doctrine of spiritual influx as sincerely as any calvinist or swedenborgian. his views as to fate, or the determining conditions of the character, brought him near enough to the doctrine of predestination to make him afraid of its consequences, and led him to enter a caveat against any denial of the self-governing power of the will. his creed was a brief one, but he carried it everywhere with him. in all he did, in all he said, and so far as all outward signs could show, in all his thoughts, the indwelling spirit was his light and guide; through all nature he looked up to nature's god; and if he did not worship the "man christ jesus" as the churches of christendom have done, he followed his footsteps so nearly that our good methodist, father taylor, spoke of him as more like christ than any man he had known. emerson was in friendly relations with many clergymen of the church from which he had parted. since he left the pulpit, the lesson, not of tolerance, for that word is an insult as applied by one set of well-behaved people to another, not of charity, for that implies an impertinent assumption, but of good feeling on the part of divergent sects and their ministers has been taught and learned as never before. their official confessions of faith make far less difference in their human sentiments and relations than they did even half a century ago. these ancient creeds are handed along down, to be kept in their phials with their stoppers fast, as attar of rose is kept in its little bottles; they are not to be opened and exposed to the atmosphere so long as their perfume,--the odor of sanctity,--is diffused from the carefully treasured receptacles,--perhaps even longer than that. out of the endless opinions as to the significance and final outcome of emerson's religious teachings i will select two as typical. dr. william hague, long the honored minister of a baptist church in boston, where i had the pleasure of friendly acquaintance with him, has written a thoughtful, amiable paper on emerson, which he read before the new york genealogical and biographical society. this essay closes with the following sentence:-"thus, to-day, while musing, as at the beginning, over the works of ralph waldo emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life work, as a whole, tested by its supreme ideal, its method and its fruitage, shows also a great waste of power, verifying the saying of jesus touching the harvest of human life: 'he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.'" "but when dean stanley returned from america, it was to report," says mr. conway "('macmillan,' june, 1879), that religion had there passed through an evolution from edwards to emerson, and that 'the genial atmosphere which emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all the churches equally.'" what is this "genial atmosphere" but the very spirit of christianity? the good baptist minister's essay is full of it. he comes asking what has become of emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of "fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him. the close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if he were the nursing mother of a new infant messiah. a few generations ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals. it is not within our best-fenced churches and creeds that the self-governing american is like to find the religious freedom which the concord prophet asserted with the strength of luther and the sweetness of melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shirt-sleeves will surely claim. milton was only the precursor of emerson when he wrote:-"neither is god appointed and confined, where and out of what place these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our faith one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the chapel at westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be there canonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanest christian who desires to walk in the spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of voices that can be there made; no, though harry the seventh himself there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from the dead, to swell their number." the best evidence of the effect produced by emerson's writings and life is to be found in the attention he has received from biographers and critics. the ground upon which i have ventured was already occupied by three considerable memoirs. mr. george willis cooke's elaborate work is remarkable for its careful and thorough analysis of emerson's teachings. mr. moncure daniel conway's "emerson at home and abroad" is a lively picture of its subject by one long and well acquainted with him. mr. alexander ireland's "biographical sketch" brings together, from a great variety of sources, as well as from his own recollections, the facts of emerson's history and the comments of those whose opinions were best worth reproducing. i must refer to this volume for a bibliography of the various works and essays of which emerson furnished the subject. from the days when mr. whipple attracted the attention of our intelligent, but unawakened reading community, by his discriminating and appreciative criticisms of emerson's lectures, and mr. lowell drew the portrait of the new england "plotinus-montaigne" in his brilliant "fable for critics," to the recent essays of mr. matthew arnold, mr. john morley, mr. henry norman, and mr. edmund clarence stedman, emerson's writings have furnished one of the most enduring _piã¨ces de rã©sistance_ at the critical tables of the old and the new world. he early won the admiration of distinguished european thinkers and writers: carlyle accepted his friendship and his disinterested services; miss martineau fully recognized his genius and sounded his praises; miss bremer fixed her sharp eyes on him and pronounced him "a noble man." professor tyndall found the inspiration of his life in emerson's fresh thought; and mr. arnold, who clipped his medals reverently but unsparingly, confessed them to be of pure gold, even while he questioned whether they would pass current with posterity. he found discerning critics in france, germany, and holland. better than all is the testimony of those who knew him best. they who repeat the saying that "a prophet is not without honor save in his own country," will find an exception to its truth in the case of emerson. read the impressive words spoken at his funeral by his fellow-townsman, judge hoar; read the glowing tributes of three of concord's poets,--mr. alcott, mr. channing, and mr. sanborn,--and it will appear plainly enough that he, whose fame had gone out into all the earth, was most of all believed in, honored, beloved, lamented, in the little village circle that centred about his own fireside. it is a not uninteresting question whether emerson has bequeathed to the language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like "the adamant of shakespeare," and remain a classic like the essays of addison or gray's elegy. it is a far more important question whether his thought entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. _corpora non agunt nisi soluta_, and ideas must be dissolved and taken up as well as material substances before they can act. "that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die," or rather lose the form with which it was sown. eight stanzas of four lines each have made the author of "the burial of sir john moore" an immortal, and endowed the language with a classic, perfect as the most finished cameo. but what is the gift of a mourning ring to the bequest of a perpetual annuity? how many lives have melted into the history of their time, as the gold was lost in corinthian brass, leaving no separate monumental trace of their influence, but adding weight and color and worth to the age of which they formed a part and the generations that came after them! we can dare to predict of emerson, in the words of his old friend and disciple, mr. cranch:- "the wise will know thee and the good will love, the age to come will feel thy impress given in all that lifts the race a step above itself, and stamps it with the seal of heaven." it seems to us, to-day, that emerson's best literary work in prose and verse must live as long as the language lasts; but whether it live or fade from memory, the influence of his great and noble life and the spoken and written words which were its exponents, blends, indestructible, with the enduring elements of civilization. * * * * * it is not irreverent, but eminently fitting, to compare any singularly pure and virtuous life with that of the great exemplar in whose footsteps christendom professes to follow. the time was when the divine authority of his gospel rested chiefly upon the miracles he is reported to have wrought. as the faith in these exceptions to the general laws of the universe diminished, the teachings of the master, of whom it was said that he spoke as never man spoke, were more largely relied upon as evidence of his divine mission. now, when a comparison of these teachings with those of other religious leaders is thought by many to have somewhat lessened the force of this argument, the life of the sinless and self-devoted servant of god and friend of man is appealed to as the last and convincing proof that he was an immediate manifestation of the divinity. judged by his life emerson comes very near our best ideal of humanity. he was born too late for the trial of the cross or the stake, or even the jail. but the penalty of having an opinion of his own and expressing it was a serious one, and he accepted it as cheerfully as any of queen mary's martyrs accepted his fiery baptism. his faith was too large and too deep for the formulae he found built into the pulpit, and he was too honest to cover up his doubts under the flowing vestments of a sacred calling. his writings, whether in prose or verse, are worthy of admiration, but his manhood was the underlying quality which gave them their true value. it was in virtue of this that his rare genius acted on so many minds as a trumpet call to awaken them to the meaning and the privileges of this earthly existence with all its infinite promise. no matter of what he wrote or spoke, his words, his tones, his looks, carried the evidence of a sincerity which pervaded them all and was to his eloquence and poetry like the water of crystallization; without which they would effloresce into mere rhetoric. he shaped an ideal for the commonest life, he proposed an object to the humblest seeker after truth. look for beauty in the world around you, he said, and you shall see it everywhere. look within, with pure eyes and simple trust, and you shall find the deity mirrored in your own soul. trust yourself because you trust the voice of god in your inmost consciousness. there are living organisms so transparent that we can see their hearts beating and their blood flowing through their glassy tissues. so transparent was the life of emerson; so clearly did the true nature of the man show through it. what he taught others to be, he was himself. his deep and sweet humanity won him love and reverence everywhere among those whose natures were capable of responding to the highest manifestations of character. here and there a narrow-eyed sectary may have avoided or spoken ill of him; but if he who knew what was in man had wandered from door to door in new england as of old in palestine, we can well believe that one of the thresholds which "those blessed feet" would have crossed, to hallow and receive its welcome, would have been that of the lovely and quiet home of emerson. index. [for many references, not found elsewhere, see under the general headings of _emerson's books, essays, poems_.] abbott, josiah gardiner, a pupil of emerson, 49, 50. academic races, 2, 3. (see _heredity_.) action, subordinate, 112. adams, john, old age, 261. adams, samuel, harvard debate, 115. addison, joseph, classic, 416. advertiser, the, emerson's interest in, 348. aeolian harp, his model, 329, 340. (see _emerson's poems_,--harp.) aeschylus, tragedies, 253. (see _greek_.) agassiz, louis: saturday club, 222; companionship, 403. agriculture: in anthology, 30; attacked, 190; not emerson's field, 255, 256, 365. akenside, mark, allusion, 16. alchemy, adepts, 260, 261. alcott, a. bronson: hearing emerson, 66; speculations, 86; an idealist, 150; the dial, 159; sonnet, 355; quoted, 373; personality traceable, 389. alcott, louisa m., funeral bouquet, 351. alexander the great: allusion, 184; mountain likeness, 322. alfred the great, 220, 306. allston, washington, unfinished picture, 334. (see _pictures_.) ambition, treated in anthology, 30. america: room for a poet, 136, 137; virtues and defects, 143; faith in, 179; people compared with english, 216; things awry, 260; _aristocracy_, 296; in the civil war, 304; revolution, 305; lincoln, the true history of his time, 307; passion for, 308, 309; artificial rhythm, 329; its own literary style, 342; home of man, 371; loyalty to, 406; epithets, 406, 407. (see _england, new england_, etc.) amici, meeting emerson, 63. (see _italy_.) amusements, in new england, 30. anaemia, artistic, 334. ancestry: in general, 1-3; emerson's, 3 _et seq._ (see _heredity_.) andover, mass.: theological school, 48; graduates, 411. andrew, john albion: war governor, 223; hearing emerson, 379. (see _south_.) angelo. (see _michael angelo_.) antinomianism: in the dial, 162; kept from, 177. (see _god, religion_, etc.) anti-slavery: in emerson's pulpit, 57; the reform, 141, 145, 152; emancipation address, 181; boston and new york addresses, 210-212; emancipation proclamation, 228; fugitive slave law, and other matters, 303-307. (see _south_.) antoninus, marcus, allusion, 16. architecture, illustrations, 253. arianism, 51. (see _unitarianism_.) aristotle: influence over mary emerson, 17; times mentioned, 382. arminianism, 51. (see _methodism, religion_, etc.) arnim, gisela von, 225. arnold, matthew: quotation about america, 137: lecture, 236; on milton, 315; his thyrsis, 333; criticism, 334; string of emerson's epithets, 406. aryans, comparison, 312. asia: a pet name, 176; immovable, 200. assabet river, 70, 71. astronomy: harp illustration, 108; stars against wrong, 252, 253. (see _galileo, stars, venus_, etc.) atlantic monthly: sketch of dr. ripley, 14, 15; of mary moody emerson, 16; established, 221; supposititious club, 222; on persian poetry, 224; on thoreau, 228; emerson's contributions, 239, 241; brahma, 296. atmosphere: effect on inspiration, 290; spiritual, 413, 414. augustine, emerson's study of, 52. authors, quoted by emerson, 381-383. (see _plutarch_, etc.) bacon, francis: allusion, 22, 111; times quoted, 382. bancroft, george: literary rank, 33; in college, 45. barbier, henri auguste, on napoleon, 208. barnwell, robert w.: in history, 45; in college, 47. beaumont and fletcher, disputed, line, 128, 129. beauty: its nature, 74, 94, 95; an end, 99, 135, 182; study, 301. beecher, edward, on preexistence, 391. (see _preexistence_.) behmen, jacob: mysticism, 201, 202, 396; citation, 380. berkeley, bishop: characteristics, 189; matter, 300. bible: mary emerson's study, 16; mosaic cosmogony, 18; the exodus, 35; the lord's supper, 58; psalms, 68, 181, 182, 253; lost paradise, 101; genesis, sermon on the mount, 102; seer of patmos, 102, 103; apocalypse, 105; song of songs, 117; baruch's roll, 117, 118; not closed, 122; the sower, 154; noah's ark, 191; pharisee's trumpets, 255; names and imagery, 268; sparing the rod, 297; rhythmic mottoes, 314; beauty of israel, 351; face of an angel, 352; barren fig-tree, 367; a classic, 376; body of death, "peace be still!" 379; draught of fishes, 381; its semi-detached sentences, 405; job quoted, 411; "the man christ jesus," 412; scattering abroad, 414. (see _christ, god, religion,_ etc.) bigelow, jacob, on rural cemeteries, 31. biography, every man writes his own, 1. blackmore, sir richard, controversy, 31. bliss family, 9. bliss, daniel, patriotism, 72. blood, transfusion of, 256. books, use and abuse, 110, 111. (see _emerson's essays_.) boston, mass.: first church, 10, 12, 13; woman's club, 16; harbor, 19; nebular spot, 25, 26; its pulpit darling, 27; episcopacy, 28; athenaeum, 31; magazines, 28-34; intellectual character, lights on its three hills, high caste religion, 34; samaria and jerusalem, 35; streets and squares, 37-39; latin school, 39, 40, 43; new buildings, 42; mrs. emerson's boarding-house, the common as a pasture, 43; unitarian preaching, 51; a new england centre, 52; emerson's settlement, 54; second church, 55-61; lectures, 87, 88, 191; trimount oracle, 102; stirred by the divinity-school address, 126; school-keeping, roxbury, 129; aesthetic society, 149; transcendentalists, 155, 156; bay, 172; freeman place chapel, 210: saturday club, 221-223; burns centennial, 224, 225; parker meeting, 228; letters, 263, 274, 275; old south lecture, 294; unitarianism, 298; emancipation proclamation, 307; special train, 350; sons of liberty, 369; birthplace, 407; baptists, 413. boswell, james: allusion, 138; one lacking, 223; life of johnson, 268. botany, 403. (see _science_.) bowen, francis: literary rank, 34; on nature, 103, 104. brook farm, 159, 164-166, 189, 191. (see _transcendentalism_, etc.) brown, howard n., prayer, 355. brown, john, sympathy with, 211. (see _anti-slavery, south_.) brownson, orestes a., at a party, 149. bryant, william cullen: his literary rank, 33; redundant syllable, 328; his translation of homer quoted, 378. buckminster, joseph stevens: minister in boston, 12, 26, 27, 52; memoir, 29; destruction of goldau, 31. buddhism: like transcendentalism, 151; buddhist nature, 188; saints 298. (see _emerson's poems_,--brahma, --_india_, etc.) buffon, on style, 341. bulkeley family, 4-7. bulkeley, peter: minister of concord, 4-7, 71; comparison of sermons, 57; patriotism, 72; landowner, 327. bunyan, john, quoted, 169. burke, edmund: essay, 73; times mentioned, 382. burns, robert: festival, 224, 225; rank, 281; image referred to, 386; religious position, 409. (see _scotland_.) burroughs, john, view of english life, 335. burton, robert, quotations, 109, 381. buttrick, major, in the revolution, 71, 72. byron, lord: allusion, 16; rank, 281; disdain, 321; uncertain sky, 335; parallelism, 399. cabot, j. elliot: on emerson's literary habits, 27; the dial, 159; prefaces, 283, 302; note, 295, 296; prefatory note, 310, 311; the last meetings, 347, 348. caesar, julius, 184,197. california, trip, 263-271, 359. (see _thayer_.) calvin, john: his commentary, 103; used by cotton, 286. calvinism: william emerson's want of sympathy with, 11, 12; outgrown, 51; predestination, 230; saints, 298; spiritual influx, 412. (see _god, puritanism, religion, unitarianism.)_ cambridge, mass.: emerson teaching there, 50; exclusive circles, 52. (see _harvard university_.) cant, disgust with, 156. carlyle, thomas: meeting emerson, 63; recollections of their relations, 78-80, 83; sartor resartus, 81, 82, 91; correspondence, 82, 83, 89, 90, 127, 176, 177, 192, 315, 317, 374, 380, 381, 406, 407; life of schiller, 91; on nature, 104, 105; miscellanies, 130; the waterville address, 136-138; influence, 149, 150; on transcendentalism, 156-158; the dial, 160-163; brook farm, 164; friendship, 171; chelsea visit, 194; bitter legacy, 196; love of power, 197; on napoleon and goethe, 208; grumblings, 260; tobacco, 270; sartor reprinted, 272; paper on, 294; emerson's dying friendship, 349; physique, 363; gallic fire, 386; on characteristics, 387; personality traceable, 389. carpenter, william b., 230. century, the, essay in, 295. cerebration, unconscious, 112, 113. chalmers, thomas, preaching, 65. channing, walter, headache, 175, 390. channing, william ellery: allusion, 16; directing emerson's studies, 51; preaching, 52; emerson in his pulpit, 66; influence, 147, 149; kept awake, 157. channing, william ellery, the poet: his wanderer, 263; poems, 403. channing, william henry: allusions, 131, 149; in the dial, 159; the fuller memoir, 209; ode inscribed to, 211, 212. charleston, s c, emerson's preaching, 53. (see _south_.) charlestown, mass., edward emerson's residence, 8. charles v., 197. charles xii., 197. chatelet, parent du, a realist, 326. chatham, lord, 255. chaucer, geoffrey: borrowings, 205; rank, 281; honest rhymes, 340; times mentioned, 382. chelmsford, mass., emerson teaching there, 49, 50. chemistry, 403. (see _science_.) cheshire, its "haughty hill," 323. choate, rufus, oratory, 148. christ: reserved expressions about, 13; mediatorship, 59; true office, 120-122; worship, 412. (see _jesus, religion_, etc.) christianity: its essentials, 13; primitive, 35; a mythus, defects, 121; the true, 122; two benefits, 123; authority, 124; incarnation of, 176; the essence, 306; fathers, 391. christian, emerson a, 267. christian examiner, the: on william emerson, 12; its literary predecessor, 29; on nature, 103, 104; repudiates divinity school address, 124. church: activity in 1820, 147; avoidance of, 153; the true, 244; music, 306. (see _god, jesus, religion_, etc.) cicero, allusion, 111. cid, the, 184. clarke, james freeman: letters, 77-80, 128-131; transcendentalism, 149; the dial, 159; fuller memoir, 209; emerson's funeral, 351, 353-355. clarke, samuel, allusion, 16. clarke, sarah, sketches, 130. clarkson, thomas, 220. clergy: among emerson's ancestry, 3-8; gravestones, 9. (see _cotton, heredity_, etc.) coleridge, samuel taylor: allusion, 16; emerson's account, 63; influence, 149, 150; carlyle's criticism, 196; ancient mariner, 333; christabel, abyssinian maid, 334; times mentioned, 382; an image quoted, 386; william tell, 387. collins, william: poetry, 321; ode and dirge, 332. commodity, essay, 94. concentration, 288. concord, mass.: bulkeley's ministry, 4-7; first association with the emerson name, 7; joseph's descendants, 8; the fight, 9; dr. ripley, 10; social club, 14; emerson's preaching, 54; goodwin's settlement, 56; discord, 57; emerson's residence begun, 69, 70; a typical town, 70; settlement, 71; a delphi, 72; emerson home, 83; second centennial, 84, 85, 303; noted citizens, 86; town government, the, monument, 87; the sage, 102; letters, 125-131, 225; supposition of carlyle's life there, 171; emancipation address, 181; leaving, 192; john brown meeting, 211; samuel hoar, 213; wide-awake, 221; lincoln obsequies, 243, 307; an _under_-concord, 256; fire, 271-279; letters, 275-279; return, 279; minute man unveiled, 292; soldiers' monument, 303; land-owners, 327; memorial stone, 333; conway's visits, 343, 344; whitman's, 344, 345; russell's, 345; funeral, 350-356; founders, 352; sleepy hollow, 356; a strong attraction, 369; neighbors, 373; prophet, 415. congdon, charles, his reminiscences, 66. conservatism, fairly treated, 156, 157. (see _reformers, religion, transcendentalism,_ etc.) conversation: c.c. emerson's essay, 22, 258; inspiration, 290. conway, moncure d.: account of emerson, 55, 56, 66, 194; two visits, 343, 344; anecdote, 346; error, 401; on stanley, 414. cooke, george willis: biography of emerson, 43, 44, 66, 88; on american scholar, 107, 108; on anti-slavery, 212; on parnassus, 280-282; on pantheism, 411. cooper, james fenimore, 33. corot, pearly mist, 335, 336. (see _pictures_, etc.) cotton, john: service to scholarship, 34; reading calvin, 286. counterparts, the story, 226. cowper, william: mother's picture, 178; disinterested good, 304; tenderness, 333; verse, 338. cranch, christopher p.: the dial, 159; poetic prediction, 416, 417. cromwell, oliver: saying by a war saint, 252; in poetry, 387. cudworth, ralph, epithets, 200. cupples, george, on emerson's lectures, 195. curtius, quintus for mettus, 388. cushing, caleb: rank, 33; in college, 45. dana, richard henry, his literary place, 33, 223. dante: allusion in anthology, 31; rank, 202, 320; times mentioned, 382. dartmouth college, oration, 131-135. darwin, charles, origin of species, 105. dawes, rufus, boyhood memories, 44. declaration of independence, intellectual, 115. (see _american_, etc.) delirium, imaginative, easily produced, 238. (see _intuition_.) delia cruscans, allusion, 152. (see _transcendentalism_.) delos, allusion, 374. delphic oracle: of new england, 72; illustration, 84. democratic review, the, on nature, 103. de profundis, illustrating carlyle's spirit, 83. de quincey, thomas: emerson's interview with, 63, 195; on originality, 92. de staã«l, mme., allusion, 16. de tocqueville, account of unitarianism, 51. dewey, orville, new bedford ministry, 67. dexter, lord timothy, punctuation, 325, 326. dial, the: established, 147, 158; editors, 159; influence, 160-163; death, 164; poems, 192; old contributors, 221; papers, 295; intuitions, 394. dial, the (second), in cincinnati, 239. dickens, charles: on father taylor, 56; american notes, 155. diderot, denis, essay, 79. diogenes, story, 401. (see _laertius_.) disinterestedness, 259. disraeli, benjamin, the rectorship, 282. dramas, their limitations, 375. (see _shakespeare_.) dress, illustration of poetry, 311, 312. dryden, john, quotation, 20, 21. dwight, john s.: in the dial, 159; musical critic, 223. east lexington, mass., the unitarian pulpit, 88. economy, its meaning, 142. edinburgh, scotland: emerson's visit and preaching, 64, 65; lecture, 195. education: through friendship, 97, 98; public questions, 258, 259. edwards, jonathan: allusions, 16, 51; the atmosphere changed, 414. (see _calvinism, puritanism, unitarianism_, etc.) egotism, a pest, 233. egypt: poetic teaching, 121; trip, 271, 272; sphinx, 330. (see _emerson's poems_,--sphinx.) election sermon, illustration, 112. elizabeth, queen, verbal heir-loom, 313. (see _raleigh_, etc.) ellis, rufus, minister of the first church, boston, 43. eloquence, defined, 285, 286. emerson family, 3 _et seq_. emerson, charles chauncy, brother of ralph waldo: feeling towards natural science, 18, 237; memories, 19-25, 37, 43; character, 77; death, 89, 90; influence, 98; the dial, 161; "the hand of douglas," 234; nearness, 368; poetry, 385; harvard register, 401. emerson, edith, daughter of ralph waldo, 263. emerson, edward, of newbury, 8. emerson, edward bliss, brother of ralph waldo: allusions, 19, 20, 37, 38; death, 89; last farewell, poem, 161; nearness, 368. emerson, edward waldo, son of ralph waldo: in new york, 246; on the farming essay, 255; father's last days, 346-349; reminiscences, 359. emerson, ellen, daughter of ralph waldo: residence, 83; trip to europe, 271; care of her father, 294; correspondence, 347. emerson, mrs. ellen louisa tucker, first wife of ralph waldo, 55. emerson, joseph, minister of mendon, 4, 7, 8. emerson, joseph, the second, minister of malden, 8. emerson, mrs. lydia jackson, second wife of ralph waldo: marriage, 83; _asia_, 176. emerson, mary moody: influence over her nephew, 16-18; quoted, 385. emerson, robert bulkeley, brother of ralph waldo, 37. emerson, ralph waldo, his life: moulding influences, 1; new england heredity, 2; ancestry, 3-10; parents, 10-16; aunt mary, 16-19; brothers, 19-25; the nest, 25; noted scholars, 26-36; birthplace, 37, 38; boyhood, 39, 40; early efforts, 41, 42; parsonages, 42; father's death, 43; boyish appearance, 44; college days, 45-47; letter, 48; teaching, 49, 50; studying theology, and preaching, 51-54; ordination, marriage, 55; benevolent efforts, wife's death, 56; withdrawal from his church, 57-61; first trip to europe, 62-65; preaching in america, 66, 67; remembered conversations, 68, 69; residence in the old manse, 69-72; lecturing, essays in the north american, 73; poems, 74; portraying himself, 75; comparison with milton, 76, 77; letters to clarke, 78-80, 128-131; interest in sartor resartus, 81; first letter to carlyle, 82; second marriage and concord home, 83; second centennial, 84-87; boston lectures, concord fight; 87; east lexington church, war, 88; death of brothers, 89, 90; nature published, 91; parallel with wordsworth, 92; free utterance, 93; beauty, poems, 94; language, 95-97; discipline, 97, 98; idealism, 98, 99; illusions, 99, 100; spirit and matter, 100; paradise regained, 101; the bible spirit, 102; revelations, 103; bowen's criticism, 104; evolution, 105, 106; phi beta kappa oration, 107, 108; fable of the one man, 109; man thinking, 110; books, 111; unconscious cerebration, 112; a scholar's duties, 113; specialists, 114; a declaration of intellectual independence, 115; address at the theological school, 116, 117; effect on unitarians, 118; sentiment of duty, 119; intuition, 120; reason, 121; the traditional jesus, 122; sabbath and preaching, 123; correspondence with ware, 124-127; ensuing controversy, 127; ten lectures, 128; dartmouth address, 131-136; waterville address, 136-140; reforms, 141-145; new views, 146; past and present, 147; on everett, 148; assembly at dr. warren's, 149; boston _doctrinaires_, 150; unwise followers, 151-156; conservatives, 156, 157; two transcendental products, 157-166; first volume of essays, 166; history, 167, 168; self-reliance, 168, 169; compensation, 169; other essays, 170; friendship, 170, 171; heroism, 172; over-soul, 172-175; house and income, 176; son's death, 177, 178; american and oriental qualities, 179; english virtues, 180; emancipation addresses in 1844, 181; second series of essays, 181-188; reformers, 188-191; carlyle's business, poems published, 192; a second trip to europe, 193-196; representative men, 196-209; lectures again, 210; abolitionism, 211, 212; woman's rights, 212, 213; a new england roman, 213, 214; english traits, 214-221; a new magazine, 221; clubs, 222, 223; more poetry, 224; burns festival, 224; letter about various literary matters, 225-227; parker's death, lincoln's proclamation, 228; conduct of life, 228-239; boston hymn, 240; "so nigh is grandeur to our dust," 241; atlantic contributions, 242; lincoln obsequies, 243; free religion, 243, 244; second phi beta kappa oration, 244-246; poem read to his son, 246-248; harvard lectures, 249-255; agriculture and science, 255, 256; predictions, 257; books, 258; conversation, 258; elements of courage, 259; success, 260, 261; on old men, 261, 262; california trip, 263-268; eating, 269; smoking, 270; conflagration, loss of memory, froude banquet, third trip abroad, 272; friendly gifts, 272-279; editing parnassus, 280-282; failing powers, 283; hope everywhere, 284; negations, 285; eloquence, pessimism, 286; comedy, plagiarism, 287; lessons repeated, 288; sources of inspiration, 289, 290; future life, 290-292; dissolving creed, 292; concord bridge, 292, 293; decline of faculties, old south lecture, 294; papers, 294, 295; quiet pen, 295; posthumous works, 295 _et seq.;_ the pedagogue, 297; university of virginia, 299; indebtedness to plutarch, 299-302; slavery questions, 303-308; woman question, 308; patriotism, 308, 309; nothing but a poet, 311; antique words, 313; self-revelation, 313, 314; a great poet? 314-316; humility, 317-319; poetic favorites, 320, 321; comparison with contemporaries, 321; citizen of the universe, 322; fascination of symbolism, 323; realism, science, imaginative coloring, 324; dangers of realistic poetry, 325; range of subjects, 326; bad rhymes, 327; a trick of verse, 328; one faultless poem, 332; spell-bound readers, 333; workshop, 334; octosyllabic verse, atmosphere, 335, 336; comparison with wordsworth, 337; and others, 338; dissolving sentences, 339; incompleteness, 339, 340; personality, 341, 342; last visits received, 343-345; the red rose, 345; forgetfulness, 346; literary work of last years, 346, 347; letters unanswered, 347; hearing and sight, subjects that interested him, 348; later hours, death, 349; last rites, 350-356; portrayal, 357-419; atmosphere, 357; books, distilled alcohol, 358; physique, 359; demeanor, 360; hair and eyes, insensibility to music, 361; daily habits, 362; bodily infirmities, 362, 363; voice, 363; quiet laughter, want of manual dexterity, 364; spade anecdote, memory, ignorance of exact science, 305; intuition and natural sagacity united, fastidiousness, 366; impatience with small-minded worshippers, frothingham's biography, 367; intimates, familiarity not invited, 368; among fellow-townsmen, errand to earth, inherited traditions, 369; sealed orders, 370, 371; conscientious work, sacrifices for truth, essays instead of sermons, 372; congregation at large, charm, optimism, 373; financially straitened, 374; lecture room limitations, 374, 375; a shakespeare parallel, 375, 376; platform fascination, 376; constructive power, 376, 377; english experiences, lecture-peddling, 377; a stove relinquished, utterance, an hour's weight, 378; trumpet-sound, sweet seriousness, diamond drops, effect on governor andrew, 379; learning at second hand, 380; the study of goethe, 380; a great quoter, no pedantry, 381; list of authors referred to, 381, 382; special indebtedness, 382; penetration, borrowing, 383; method of writing and its results, aided by others, 384; sayings that seem family property, 385; passages compared, 385-387; the tributary streams, 388; accuracy as to facts, 388; personalities traceable in him, 389; place as a thinker, 390; platonic anecdote, 391; preã«xistence, 391, 392; mind-moulds, 393; relying on instinct, 394; dangers of intuition, 395; mysticism, 396; oriental side, 397; transcendental mood, 398; personal identity confused, 399; a distorting mirror, 400; distrust of science, 401-403; style illustrated, 403, 404; favorite words, 405; royal imagery, 406; comments on america, 406, 407; common property of mankind, 407; public spirit, solitary workshop, martyrdom from visitors, 408; white shield invulnerable, 409; religious attitude, 409-411; spiritual influx, creed, 412; clerical relations, 413; dr. hague's criticism, 413, 414; ameliorating religious influence, 414; freedom, 415; enduring verse and thought, 416, 417; comparison with jesus, 417; sincere manhood, 418; transparency, 419. emerson's books:- conduct of life, 229, 237. english traits: the first european trip, 62; published, 214; analysis, 214-220; penetration, 383; teutonic fire, 386. essays: dickens's allusion, 156; collected, 166. essays, second series, 183. lectures and biographical sketches, 128, 295, 296, 347. letters and social aims, 210, 283, 284, 296. may-day and other pieces, 161, 192, 224, 242, 257, 310, 318, 346. memoir of margaret fuller, 209. miscellanies, 302, 303. nature, addresses, and lectures, 179. nature: resemblance of extracts from mary moody emerson, 17; where written, 70; the many in one, 73; first published, 91, 92, 373; analysis, 93-107; obscure, 108; beauty, 237. parnassus: collected, 280; preface, 314; allusion, 321. poems, 293, 310, 318, 339. representative men, 196-209. selected poems, 311, 347. society and solitude, 250. emerson's essays, lectures, sermons, speeches, etc.:- in general: essays, 73, 88, 91, 92, 310; income from lectures, 176, 191, 192; lectures in england, 194-196; long series, 372; lecture-room, 374; plays and lectures, 375; double duty, 376, 377; charm, 379. (see _emerson's life, lyceum_, etc.) american civilization, 307. american scholar, the, 107-115, 133, 188. anglo-saxon race, the, 210. anti-slavery address, new york, 210-212. anti-slavery lecture, boston, 210, 211. aristocracy, 296. art, 166, 175, 253, 254. beauty, 235-237. behavior, 234. books, 257, 380. brown, john, 302, 305, 306. burke, edmund, 73. burns, robert, 224, 225, 307. carlyle, thomas, 294, 302, 317. channing's poem, preface, 262, 263, 403. character, 183, 295, 297. chardon street and bible convention, 159, 302. circles, 166, 174, 175. civilization, 250-253. clubs, 258. comedy. 128. comic, the, 286, 287. commodity, 94. compensation, 166, 169. concord fight, the anniversary speech, 292, 293. concord, second centennial discourse, 84-86. conservative, the, 156, 157, 159. considerations by the way, 235. courage, 259. culture, 232, 233. demonology, 128, 296. discipline, 97, 98. divinity school address, 116-127, 131. doctrine of the soul, 127. domestic life, 254, 255. duty, 128. editorial address, mass. quarterly review, 193, 302, 307. education, 296, 297. eloquence, 254; second essay, 285, 286. emancipation in the british west indies, 181, 303. emancipation proclamation, 228, 307. emerson, mary moody, 295, 296, 302. english literature, 87. experience, 182. farming, 255, 256. fate, 228-330. fortune of the republic, 294, 302, 307-309. fox, george, 73. france, 196. free religious association, 243, 302, 307. friendship, 166, 170. froude, james anthony, after-dinner speech, 271. fugitive slave law, 303, 304. genius, 127. gifts, 184, 185. goethe, or the writer, 208, 209. greatness, 288, 346. harvard commemoration, 307. heroism, 166, 172. historical discourse, at concord, 303. historic notes of life and letters in new england, 147, 165, 296, 302. history, 166, 167. hoar, samuel, 213, 214, 295, 302. home, 127. hope, 284, 285. howard university, speech, 263. human culture, 87. idealism, 98-100. illusions, 235, 239. immortality, 266, 290-292, 354. inspiration, 289. intellect, 166, 175. kansas affairs, 305. kossuth, 307. language, 95-97. lincoln, abraham, funeral remarks, 242, 243, 307. literary ethics, 131-136. lord's supper, 57-60, 303. love, 127,128,166,170. (see _emerson's poems_.) luther, 73. manners, 183, 234. man of letters, the, 296, 298. man the reformer, 142, 143. method of nature, the, 136-141. michael angelo, 73, 75. milton, 73, 75. montaigne, or the skeptic, 202-204. napoleon, or the man of the world, 206-209. natural history of the intellect, 249, 268, 347. nature (the essay), 185, 186, 398. new england reformers, 188-191, 385. nominalism and realism, 188. old age, 261, 262. over-soul, the, 166, 172-175, 398, 411. parker, theodore, 228, 306. perpetual forces, 297. persian poetry, 224. phi beta kappa oration, 347. philosophy of history, 87. plato, 198-200; new readings, 200. plutarch, 295, 299-302. plutarch's morals, introduction, 262. poet, the, 181, 182. poetry, 210. poetry and imagination, 283; subdivisions: bards and trouveurs, creation, form, imagination, melody, morals, rhythm, poetry, transcendency, veracity, 283, 284; quoted, 325. politics, 186, 187. power, 230, 231. preacher, the, 294, 298. professions of divinity, law, and medicine, 41. progress of culture, the, 244, 288. prospects, 101-103. protest, the, 127. providence sermon, 130. prudence, 166, 171, 172. quotation and originality, 287, 288. relation of man to the globe, 73. resources, 286. right hand of fellowship, the, at concord, 56. ripley, dr. ezra, 295, 302. scholar, the, 296, 299. school, the, 127. scott, speech, 302, 307. self-reliance, 166, 168, 411. shakespeare, or the poet, 204-206. social aims, 285. soldiers' monument, at concord, 303. sovereignty of ethics, the, 295, 297, 298. spirit, 100, 101. spiritual laws, 166, 168. success, 260, 261. sumner assault, 304. superlatives, 295, 297. swedenborg, or the mystic, 201, 202, 206. thoreau, henry d., 228, 295, 302. times, the, 142-145. tragedy, 127. transcendentalist, the, 145-155, 159. universality of the moral sentiment, 66. university of virginia, address, 347. war, 88, 303. water, 73. wealth, 231, 232. what is beauty? 74, 94, 95. woman, 307, 308. woman's rights, 212, 213. work and days, 256, 312, 406, 407. worship, 235. young american, the, 166, 180, 181. emerson's poems:- in general: inspiration from nature, 22, 96; poetic rank in college, 45, 46; prose-poetry and philosophy, 91, 93; annual _afflatus_, in america, 136, 137; first volume, 192; five immortal poets, 202; ideas repeated, 239; true position, 311 _et seq.; in carmine veritas_, 313; litanies, 314; arithmetic, 321, 322; fascination, 323; celestial imagery, 324; tin pans, 325; realism, 326; metrical difficulties, 327, 335; blemishes, 328; careless rhymes, 329; delicate descriptions, 331; pathos, 332; fascination, 333; unfinished, 334, 339, 340; atmosphere, 335; subjectivity, 336; sympathetic illusion, 337; resemblances, 337, 338; rhythms, 340; own order, 341, 342; always a poet, 346. (see _emerson's life, milton, poets_, etc.) adirondacs, the, 242, 309, 327. blight, 402. boston, 346, 407, 408. boston hymn, 211, 221, 241, 242. brahma, 221, 242, 396, 397. celestial love, 170. (three loves.) class day poem, 45-47. concord hymn, 87, 332. daemonic love, 170. (three loves.) days, 221, 242, 257, 312; _pleachã©d_, 313. destiny, 332. each and all, 73, 74, 94, 331. earth-song, 327. elements, 242. fate, 159, 387. flute, the, 399. good-by, proud world, 129, 130, 338. hamatreya, 327. harp, the, 320, 321, 329, 330. (see _aeolian harp_.) hoar, samuel, 213, 214. humble bee, 46, 74, 75, 128, 272, 326, 331, 338. initial love, 170, 387. (three loves.) in memoriam, 19, 89. latin translations, 43. may day, 242; changes, 311, 333. merlin, 318, 319. (merlin's song.) mithridates, 331. monadnoc, 322, 331; alterations, 366. my garden, 242. nature and life, 242. occasional and miscellaneous pieces, 242. ode inscribed to w.h. channing, 211, 212. poet, the, 317-320, 333. preface to nature, 105. problem, the, 159, 161, 253, 284, 326, 337, 380. quatrains, 223, 242. rhodora, the, 74, 94, 95, 129. romany girl, the, 221. saadi, 221, 242. sea-shore, 333, 339. snow-storm, 331, 338, 339. solution, 320. song for knights of square table, 42. sphinx, the, 113, 159, 243, 330, 398. terminus, 221, 242; read to his son, 246-248, 363. test, the, 201, 202, 320. threnody, 178, 333. titmouse, the, 221, 326. translations, 242, 399. uriel, 326, 331, 398. voluntaries, 241. waldeinsamkeit, 221. walk, the, 402. woodnotes, 46, 159, 331, 338. world-soul, the, 331. emersoniana, 358. emerson, thomas, of ipswich, 38. emerson, waldo, child of ralph waldo: death, 177, 178; anecdote, 265. emerson, william, grandfather of ralph waldo: minister of concord, 8-10, 14; building the manse, 70; patriotism, 72. emerson, william, father of ralph waldo: minister, in harvard and boston, 10-14; editorship, 26, 32, 33; the parsonage, 37, 42; death, 43. emerson, william, brother of ralph waldo, 37, 39, 49, 53. england: first visit, 62-65; lake windermere, 70; philosophers, 76; the virtues of the people, 179, 180; a second visit, 192 _et seq.;_ notabilities 195; the lectures, 196; stonehenge, 215; the aristocracy, 215; matters wrong, 260; anglo-saxon race, trade and liberty, 304; lustier life, 335; language, 352; lecturing, a key, 377; smouldering fire, 385. (see _america, europe_, etc.) enthusiasm: need of, 143; weakness, 154. epicurus, agreement with, 301. episcopacy: in boston, 28, 34, 52; church in newton, 68; at hanover, 132; quotation from liturgy, 354; burial service, 356. (see _calvinism, church, religion_, etc.) esquimau, allusion, 167. establishment, party of the, 147. (see _puritanism, religion, unitarianism_, etc.) eternal, relations to the, 297. (see _god, jesus, religion_, etc.) europe: emerson's first visit, 62-65; return, 72; the muses, 114; debt to the east, 120; famous gentlemen, 184; second visit, 193-196; weary of napoleon, 207; return, 210; conflict possible, 218; third visit, 271-279; cast-out passion for, 308. (see _america, england, france_, etc.) everett, edward: on tudor, 28; literary rank, 33; preaching, 52; influence, 148. evolution, taught in "nature," 105, 106. eyeball, transparent, 398. faith: lacking in america, 143, building cathedrals, 253. (see _god, religion_, etc.) fine, a characteristic expression, 405. fire, illustration, 386. (see _england, france_, etc.) forbes, john m., connected with the emerson family, 263-265; his letter, 263. foster, john, minister of brighton, 15. fourth-of-july, orations, 386. (see _america_, etc.) fox, george, essay on, 73. france: emerson's first visit, 62, 63; philosophers, 76; revolution, 80; tired of napoleon, 207, 208; realism, 326; wrath, 385, 386. (see _carlyle, england, europe_, etc.) francis, convers, at a party, 149. franklin, benjamin: birthplace, 37; allusion, 184; characteristics, 189; poor richard, 231; quoted, 236; maxims, 261; fondness for plutarch, 382; bequest, 407. fraunhofer, joseph, optician, 230, 324. frazer's magazine: "the mud," 79; sartor resartus, 81. (see _carlyle_.) freeman, james, minister of king's chapel, 11, 12, 52. free trade, athenaeum banquet, 220. friendship, c.c. emerson's essay, 22, 23, 77. frothingham, nathaniel l., account of emerson's mother, 13. frothingham, octavius brooks: life of ripley, 165; an unpublished manuscript, 365-367. fuller, margaret: borrowed sermon, 130; at a party, 149; the dial, 159, 160, 162; memoir, 209; causing laughter, 364; mosaic biography, 368. furness, william henry: on the emerson family, 14; emerson's funeral, 350, 353. future, party of the, 147. galton, francis, composite portraits, 232. gardiner, john sylvester john: allusion, 26; leadership in boston, 28; anthology society, 32. (see _episcopacy_.) gardner, john lowell, recollections of emerson's boyhood, 38-42. gardner, s.p., garden, 38. genealogy, survival of the fittest, 3. (see _heredity_.) gentleman's magazine, 30. gentleman, the, 183. geography, illustration, 391. german: study of, 48, 49, 78, 380; philosophers, 76; scholarship, 148; oracles, 206; writers unread, 208; philosophers, 380; professors, 391. germany, a visit, 225, 226. (see _europe, france, goethe_, etc.) gifts, 185. gilfillan, george: on emerson's preaching, 65; emerson's physique, 360. gilman, arthur, on the concord home, 83. glasgow, the rectorship, 280. god: the universal spirit, 68, 69, 94; face to face, 92, 93; teaching the human mind, 98, 99; aliens from, 101; in us, 139-141; his thought, 146; belief, 170; seen by man, 174; divine offer, 176; writing by grace, 182; presence, 243; tribute to great first cause, 267; perplexity about, 410; ever-blessed one, 411; mirrored, 412. (see _christianity, religion_, etc.) goethe: called _mr_., 31; dead, 63; clarke's essay, 79; generalizations, 148; influence, 150; on spinoza, 174, 175; rank as a poet, 202, 320; lovers, 226; rare union, 324; his books read, 380, 381; times quoted, 382. (see _german_, etc.) goldsmith, oliver, his vicar of wakefield, 9, 10, 15. good, the study of, 301. goodwin, h.b., concord minister, 56. gould, master of latin school, 39. gould, thomas r., sculptor, 68. gourdin, john gaillard keith and robert, in college, 47. government, abolition of, 141. grandmother's review, 30. gray, thomas, elegy often quoted, 316, 317, 416. greece: poetic teaching, 121; allusion, 108. greek: emerson's love for, 43, 44; in harvard, 49; poets, 253; moralist, 299; bryant's translation, 378; philosophers, 391. (see _homer_, etc.) greenough, horatio, meeting emerson, 63. grimm, hermann, 226. guelfs and ghibellines, illustration, 47. hafiz, times mentioned, 382. (see _persia_.) hague, william, essay, 413. haller, albert von, rare union, 324. harvard, mass., william emerson's settlement, 10, 11. harvard university: the bulkeley gift, 6; william emerson's graduation, 10; list of graduates, 12; emerson's brothers, 19, 21; register, 21, 24, 385, 401; hillard, 24, 25; kirkland's presidency, 26, 27; gardner, 39-41; emerson's connection, 44-49; the boylston prizes, 46; southern students, 47; graduates at andover, 48; divinity school, 51, 53; a new england centre, 52; bowen's professorship, 103; phi beta kappa oration, 107, 115, 133, 188, 244; divinity school address, 116-132; degree conferred, 246; lectures, 249; library, 257; last divinity address, 294; commemoration, 307; singing class, 361; graduates, 411. (see _cambridge_.) haskins, david green, at emerson's funeral, 356. haskins, ruth (emerson's mother), 10, 13, 14. haughty, a characteristic expression, 405. hawthorne, nathaniel: his mosses, 70; "dream-peopled solitude," 86; at the club, 223; view of english life, 335; grave, 356; biography, 368. hazlitt, william: british poets, 21. health, inspiration, 289. hebrew language, study, 48. (see _bible_.) hedge, frederic henry: at a party, 149; quoted, 383. henry vii., tombs, 415. herbert, george: poem on man, 102; parallel, 170; poetry, 281; a line quoted, 345. herder, johann gottfried, allusion, 16. heredity: emerson's belief, 1, 2; in emerson family, 4, 19; whipple on, 389; jonson, 393. herrick, robert, poetry, 281. higginson, thomas wentworth. (see _emerson's books_,--nature.) hilali, the flute, 399. hillard, george stillman: in college, 24, 25; his literary place, 33; aid, 276. hindoo scriptures, 199, 200. (see _bible, india_, etc.) history, how it should be written, 168. hoar, ebenezer rockwood: reference to, 223; on the burns speech, 225; kindness, 273, 274, 276-279; at emerson's death-bed, 349; funeral address, 351-353. hoar, samuel: statesman, 72; tribute, 213, 214. holland, description of the dutch, 217. holley, horace, prayer, 267. holmes, john, a pupil of emerson, 50. holmes, oliver wendell: memories of dr. ripley, 15; of c.c. emerson, 20, 21; familiarity with cambridge and its college, 45; erroneous quotation from, 251, 252; jest erroneously attributed to, 400, 401. holy ghost, "a new born bard of the," 123. (see _christ, god, religion_, etc.) homer: poetic rank, 202, 320; plagiarism, 205; iliad, 253; allusion, 315; tin pans, 325; times quoted, 382. (see _greek_, etc.) homer, jonathan, minister of newton, 15. hooper, mrs. ellen, the dial, 159, 160. hope: lacking in america, 143; in every essay, 284. horace: allusion, 22; ars poetica, 316. horses, flora temple's time, 388. howard university, speech, 263. howe, samuel gridley, the philanthropist, 223. hunt, leigh, meeting emerson, 195. hunt, william, the painter, 223. idealism, 98-100, 146, 150. idealists: ark full, 191; platonic sense, 391. imagination: the faculty, 141; defined, 237, 238; essay, 283; coloring life, 324. imbecility, 231. immortality, 262. (see _god, religion_, etc.) incompleteness, in poetry, 339. india: poetic models, 338; idea of preã«xistence, 391; brahmanism, 397. (see _emerson's poems_,--brahma.) indians: in history of concord, 71; algonquins, 72. inebriation, subject in monthly anthology, 30. insects, defended, 190. inspiration: of nature, 22, 96, 141; urged, 146. instinct, from god or devil, 393. intellect, confidence in, 134. intuition, 394. ipswich, mass., 3, 4, 8. ireland, alexander: glimpses of emerson, 44, 64, 65: reception, 193,194; on carlyle, 196; letter from miss peabody, 317; quoting whitman, 344; quoted, 350. irving, washington, 33. italy: emerson's first visit, 62, 63; naples, 113. jackson, charles, garden, 38. jackson, dr. charles thomas, anaesthesia, 403. jackson, miss lydia, reading carlyle, 81. (see _mrs. emerson_.) jahn, johann, studied at andover, 48. jameson, anna, new book, 131. jesus: times mentioned, 382; a divine manifestation, 411; followers, 417; and emerson, 419. (see _bible, christ, church, religion_, etc.) joachim, the violinist, 225, 226. johnson, samuel, literary style, 29. jonson, ben: poetic rank, 281; a phrase, 300; _traduction_, 393. (see _heredity_, etc.) journals, as a method of work, 384. jupiter scapin, 207. jury trial, and dinners, 216. justice, the arch abolitionist, 306. juvenal: allusion, 22; precept from heaven, 252. kalamazoo, mich., allusion, 388. kamschatka, allusion, 167. keats, john: quoted, 92; ode to a nightingale, 316; _faint, swoon_, 405. king, the, illustration, 74. kirkland, john thornton: harvard presidency, 26, 52; memories, 27. koran, allusion, 198. (see _bible, god, religion_, etc.) labor: reform, 141; dignity, 142. lacenaire, evil instinct, 392. laertius, diogenes, 390, 391. la harpe, jean francois, on plutarch, 301. lamarck, theories, 166. lamb, charles, carlyle's criticism, 196. landor, walter savage, meeting emerson, 63. landscape, never painted, 339, 240. (see _pictures, etc_.) language: its symbolism, 95-97; an original, 394. latin: peter bulkeley's scholarship, 7; translation, 24, 25; emerson's translations, 43, 44. laud, archbishop, 6. law, william, mysticism, 396. lawrence, mass., allusion, 44. lecturing, given up, 295. (see _emerson's essays, lectures_, etc.) leibnitz, 386. leroux, pierre, preã«xistance, 391. letters, inspiration, 289. lincoln, abraham, character, 307. (see _emerson's essays_.) linnaeus, illustration, 323, 324. litanies, in emerson, 314. (see _episcopacy_.) literature: aptitude for, 2, 3; activity in 1820, 147. little classics, edition, 347. liverpool, eng., a visit, 193, 194. (see _england, europe, scotland_, etc.) locke, john, allusion, 16, 111. london, england.: tower stairs, 63; readers, 194; sights, 221; travellers, 308; wrath, 385. (see _england_, etc.) longfellow, henry wadsworth: allusions, 31, 33; saturday club, 222, 223; burial, 346. lord, nathan, president of dartmouth college, 132. lord's supper, emerson's doubts, 57-61. lothrop & co., publishers, 83. louisville, ky., dr. clarke's residence, 78-80. lounsbury, professor, chaucer letter, 205. love: in america, 143; the arch abolitionist, 306. (see _emerson's poems_.) lowell, charles: minister of the west church, 11, 12, 52; on kirkland, 27. lowell, f.c., generosity, 276. lowell, james russell: an allusion, 33; on the american scholar, 107; editorship, 221; club, 223; on the burns speech, 225; on emerson's bearing, 360, 361; hawthorne biography, 368; on lectures, 379. lowell, mass., factories, 44. luther, martin: lecture, 73; his conservatism, 298; times mentioned, 382. lyceum, the: a pulpit, 88; new england, 192; a sacrifice, 378. (see _lecturing, emerson's lectures_, etc.) lycurgus, 306. (see _greece_.) mackintosh, sir james, an allusion, 16. macmillan's magazine, 414. malden, mass.: joseph emerson's ministry, 8; diary, 17. man: a fable about, 109, 110; faith in, 122; apostrophe, 140. manchester, eng.: visit, 194, 195; banquet, 220. (see _england_, etc.) marlowe, christopher, expressions, 404. marvell, andrew: reading by c.c. emerson, 21; on the dutch, 217; verse, 338. mary, queen, her martyrs, 418. massachusetts historical society: tribute to c.c. emerson, 21; quality of its literature, 84; on carlyle, 294. massachusetts quarterly review, 193, 302, 307, 411. materialism, 146, 391. (see _religion_.) mather, cotton: his magnalia, 5-7; on concord discord, 57; on new england melancholy, 216; a borrower, 381. mathew, father, disciples, 368. mayhew, jonathan, boston minister, 51. melioration, a characteristic expression, 405. mendon, mass., joseph emerson's ministry, 4. mephistopheles, goethe's creation, 208. merrimac river, 71. metaphysics, indifference to, 249. methodism, in boston, 56. (see _father taylor_.) michael angelo: allusions, 73, 75; on external beauty, 99; course, 260; filled with god, 284; on immortality, 290; times mentioned, 382. middlesex agricultural association, 235. (see _agriculture, emerson's essays._) middlesex association, emerson admitted, 53. miller's retrospect, 34. milton, john: influence in new england, 16; quotation, 24; essay, 73, 75; compared with emerson, 76, 77; lycidas, 178; supposed speech, 220; diet, 270, 271; poetic rank, 281; arnold's citation, logic, rhetoric, 315; popularity, 316; quoted, 324; tin pans, 325; inventor of harmonies, 328; lycidas, 333; comus, 338; times mentioned, 382; precursor, quotation, 415. miracles: false impression, 121, 122; and idealism, 146; theories, 191; st. januarius, 217; objections, 244. (see _bible, christ, religion_, etc.) modena, italy, emerson's visit, 63. monadnoc, mount, 70. montaigne: want of religion, 300; great authority, 380; times quoted, 382. montesquieu, on immortality, 291. monthly anthology: wm. emerson's connection, 13, 26; precursor of north american review, 28, 29; character, 30, 31; quincy's tribute, 31; society formed, 32; career, 33; compared with the dial, 160. moody family, of york, me., 8,10. morals, in plutarch, 301. morison, john hopkins, on emerson's preaching, 67. mormons, 264, 268. mother-wit, a favorite expression, 404, 405. motley, john lothrop, 33, 223. mount auburn, strolls, 40. movement, party of the, 147. munroe & co., publishers, 81. music: church, 306; inaptitude for, 361; great composers, 401. musketaquid river, 22, 70, 71. mysticism: unintelligible, 390; emerson's, 396. napoleon: allusion, 197; times mentioned, 382. napoleon iii., 225. nation, the, emerson's interest in, 348. native bias, 288. nature: in undress, 72; solicitations, 110; not truly studied, 135; great men, 199; tortured, 402. (see _emerson's books, emerson's essays_, etc.) negations, to be shunned, 285. new bedford, mass., emerson's preaching, 52, 67. newbury, mass., edward emerson's deaconship, 8. new england: families, 2, 3, 5; peter bulkeley's coming, 6; clerical virtues, 9; church, 14; literary sky, 33; domestic service, 34, 35; two centres, 52; an ideal town, 70, 71; the delphi, 72; carlyle invited, 83; anniversaries, 84; town records, 85; genesis, 102; effect of nature, 106; boys and girls, 163; massachusetts, connecticut river, 172; lyceums, 192; melancholy, 216; new englanders and old, 220; meaning of a word, 296, 297; eyes, 325; life, 325, 335; birthright, 364; a thorough new englander, 406; puritan, 409; theologians, 410; jesus wandering in, 419. (see _america, england_, etc.) newspapers: defaming the noble, 145; in shakespeare's day, 204. newton, mass.: its minister, 15; episcopal church, 68. (see _rice_.) newton, sir isaac, times quoted, 382. newton, stuart, sketches, 130. new world, gospel, 371. (see _america_.) new york: brevoort house, 246; genealogical society, 413. niagara, visit, 263. nidiver, george, ballad, 259. nightingale, florence, 220. nithsdale, eng., mountains, 78. non-resistance, 141. north american review: its predecessor, 28, 29, 33; the writers, 34; emerson's contributions, 73; ethics, 294, 295; bryant's article, 328. northampton, mass., emerson's preaching, 53. norton, andrews: literary rank, 34; professorship, 52. norton, charles eliot: editor of correspondence, 82; on emerson's genius, 373. old manse, the: allusion, 70; fire, 271-279. (see _concord_.) oliver, daniel, in dartmouth college, 132. optimism: in philosophy, 136; "innocent luxuriance," 211; wanted by the young, 373. oriental: genius, 120; spirit in emerson, 179. orpheus, allusion, 319. paine, r.t., jr., quoted, 31. palfrey, john gorham: literary rank, 34; professorship, 52. pan, the deity, 140. pantheism: in wordsworth and nature, 103; dreaded, 141; emerson's, 410, 411. paris, trance: as a residence, 78; allusion, 167; salons, 184; visit, 196, 308. parker, theodore: a right arm of freedom, 127; at a party, 149; the dial, 159, 160; editorship, 193; death, 228; essence of christianity, 306; biography, 368; on emerson's position, 411. parkhurst, john, studied at andover, 48. parr, samuel, allusion, 28. past, party of the, 147. peabody, andrew preston, literary rank, 34. peabody, elizabeth palmer: her aesthetic papers, 88; letter to mr. ireland, 317. peirce, benjamin, mathematician, 223. pelagianisin, 51. (see _religion_.) pepys, samuel, allusion, 12. pericles, 184, 253. persia, poetic models, 338. (see _emerson's poems, saadi_). pessimism, 286. (see _optimism_). philadelphia, pa., society, 184. philanthropy, activity in 1820, 147. philolaus, 199. pie, fondness for, 269. pierce, john: the minister of brookline, 11; "our clerical pepys," 12. pindar, odes, 253. (see _greek, homer_, etc.) plagiarism, 205, 206, 287, 288, 384. (see _quotations, mather_, etc.) plato: influence on mary emerson, 16, 17; over emerson, 22, 52, 173, 188, 299, 301; youthful essay, 74; alcott's study, 150; reading, 197; borrowed thought, 205, 206; platonic idea, 222; a platonist, 267; saints of platonism, 298; academy inscription, 365; great authority, 380; times quoted, 382; symposium and phaedrus quoted, 387; _tableity_, preã«xistence, 391; diogenes dialogue, 401; a platonist, 411. (see _emerson's books_, and _essays, greek_, etc.) plotinus: influence over mary emerson, 16, 17; ashamed of his body, 99; motto, 105; opinions, 173, 174; studied, 380. plutarch: allusion, 22; his lives, 50; study, 197; on immortality, 291; influence over emerson, 299 _et seq_.; his great authority, 380; times mentioned, 382; emerson on, 383; imagery quoted, 385; style, 405. plymouth, mass.: letters written, 78, 79; marriage, 83. poetry: as an inspirer, 290; milton on, 315. (see _shakespeare_, etc.) poets: list in parnassus, 281; comparative popularity, 316, 317; consulting emerson, 408. (see _emerson's poems_). politics: activity in 1820, 147; in saturday club, 259. pomeroy, jesse, allusion, 393. pope, alexander, familiar lines, 316 porphyry: opinions, 173, 174; studied, 380. porto rico, e.b. emerson's death, 19. power, practical, 259. prayer: not enough, 138, 139; anecdotes, 267. (see _god, religion_, etc.) preaching, a christian blessing, 123. preã«xistence, 391. presbyterianism, in scotland, 409. prescott, william, the judge's mansion, 38. prescott, william hickling: rank, 33; conquest of mexico, 38. prior, matthew, 30. proclus, influence, 173, 380. prometheus, 209. prospects, for man, 101-103. (see _emerson's essays_.) protestantism, its idols, 28. (see _channing, religion, unitarianism_, etc.) psammetichus, an original language, 394. (see _heredity, language_, etc.) punch, london, 204. puritans, rear guard, 15. (see _calvinism_, etc.) puritanism: relaxation from, 30; after-clap, 268; in new england, 409. (see _unitarianism_.) putnam's magazine, on samuel hoar, 213, 214. pythagoras: imagery quoted, 385; preã«xistence, 391. quakers, seeing only broad-brims, 218. quincy, josiah: history of boston athenaeum, 31; tribute to the anthology, 32, 33; memories of emerson, 45-47; old age, 261. quotations, 381-383. (see _plagiarism_, etc.) raleigh, sir walter, verse, 338. raphael, his transfiguration, 134. (see _allston, painters_, etc.) rats, illustration, 167, 168. reed, sampson, his growth of the mind, 80. reforms, in america, 141-145. reformers, fairness towards, 156, 157, 188-192. (see _anti-slavery, john brown_.) religion: opinions of wm. emerson and others, 11-13; nature the symbol of spirit, 95; pleas for independence, 117; universal sentiment, 118-120; public rites, 152; church of england, 219; of the future, 235; relative positions towards, 409, 410; trinity, 411; emerson's belief, 412-415; bigotry modified, 414. (see _calvinism, channing, christ, emerson's life, essays_, and _poems, episcopacy, god, unitarianism_, etc.) republicanism, spiritual, 36. revolutionary war: wm. emerson's service, 8, 9; subsequent confusion, 25, 32; concord's part, 71, 72, 292, 293. (see _america, new england_, etc.) reynolds, sir joshua, 228. rhythm, 328, 329, 340. (see _emerson's poems_, etc.) rice, alexander h., anecdote, 68, 69, 346. (see _newton_.) richard plantagenet, 197. ripley, ezra: minister of concord, 10; emerson's sketch, 14-16; garden, 42; colleague, 56; residence, 70. ripley, george: a party, 149; the dial, 159; brook farm, 164-166; on emerson's limitations, 380. robinson, edward, literary rank, 34. rochester, n.y., speech, 168. rome: allusions, 167, 168; growth, 222; amphora, 321. (see _latin_.) romilly, samuel, allusion, 220. rose, anecdote, 345. (see _flowers_.) rousseau, jean jacques, his savoyard vicar, 51, 52. ruskin, john: on metaphysics, 250; certain chapters, 336; pathetic fallacy, 337; plagiarism, 384. russell, ben., quoted, 267. russell, le baron: on sartor resartus, 81, 82; groomsman, 83; aid in rebuilding the old manse, 272-279; concord visit, 345. saadi: a borrower, 205; times mentioned, 382. (see _persia_.) sabbath: a blessing of christianity, 123, 298. sainte-beuve, charles augustin, on poetry, 339. saint paul, times mentioned, 382. (see _bible_.) saladin, 184. sallust, on catiline, 207. sanborn, frank b.: facts about emerson, 42, 43, 66; thoreau memoir, 368; old neighbor, 373. sapor, 184. satan, safety from, 306. (see _mephistopheles, religion_, etc.) saturday club: establishment, 221-223, 258; last visits, 346, 347; familiarity at, 368. scaliger, quotation, 109, 110. schelling, idealism, 148; influence 173. schiller, on immortality, 290. scholarship: a priesthood, 137; docility of, 289. school-teaching, 297. (see _chelmsford_.) schopenhauer, arthur: his pessimism, 286; idea of a philosopher, 359. science: growth of, 148; emerson inaccurate in, 256; attitude toward, 401, 402. (see _c.c. emerson_.) scipio, 184. scotland: carlyle's haunts, 79; notabilities, 195, 196; presbyterian, 409. scott, sir walter: allusion, 22; quotations, 23, 77; dead, 63; "the hand of douglas," 234; as a poet, 281; popularity, 316; poetic rank, 321. self: the highest, 113; respect for, 288, 289. seneca, montaigne's study, 382. shakespeare: allusion, 22; hamlet, 90, 94; benedick and love, 106; disputed line, 128, 129; an idol, 197; poetic rank, 202, 281, 320, 321; plagiarism, 204-206; on studies, 257, 258; supremacy, 328; a comparison, 374; a playwright, 375, 376; punctiliousness of portia, 378; times mentioned, 382; lunatic, lover, poet, 387; polonius, 389; _mother-wit_, 404; _fine_ ariel, 405; adamant, 418. shattuck, lemuel, history of concord, 382. shaw, lemuel, boarding-place, 43. shelley, percy bysshe: ode to the west wind, 316, 399; redundant syllable, 328; adonais, 333. shenandoah mountain, 306. shingle, emerson's jest, 364. ships: illustration of longitude, 154; erroneous quotation, 251, 252; building illustration, 376, 377. sicily: emerson's visit, 62; etna, 113. sidney, sir philip, chevy chace, 379. silsbee, william, aid in publishing carlyle, 81. simonides, prudence, 410. sisyphus, illustration, 334. sleight-of-hand, illustration, 332. smith, james and horace, rejected addresses, 387, 397. smith, sydney, on bishops, 219. socrates: allusion, 203; times mentioned, 382. solitude, sought, 135. solomon, epigrammatic, 405. (see _bible_.) solon, 199. sophron, 199. south, the: emerson's preaching tour, 53; rebellion, 305, 407. (see _america, anti-slavery_, etc.) southerners, in college, 47. sparks, jared, literary rank, 33. spenser, edmund: stanza, 335, 338; soul making body, 391; _mother-wit_, 404. spinoza, influence, 173, 380. spirit and matter, 100, 101. (see _god, religion, spenser_, etc.) spiritualism, 296. sprague, william buel, annals of the american pulpit, 10-12. stanley, arthur penrhyn, on american religion, 414. star: "hitch your wagon to a star," 252, 253; stars in poetry, 324. sterling, j. hutchinson, letter to, 282, 283. stewart, dugald, allusion, 16. story, joseph, literary rank, 33. stuart, moses, literary rank, 33. studio, illustration, 20. summer, description, 117. sumner, charles: literary rank, 33: the outrage on, 211; saturday club, 223. swedenborg, emanuel: poetic rank, 202, 320; dreams, 306; rosetta-stone, 322; times mentioned, 382. swedenborgians: liking for a paper of carlyle's, 78; reed's essay, 80; spiritual influx, 412. swift, jonathan: allusion, 30; the houyhnhnms, 163; times mentioned, 382. synagogue, illustration, 169. tappan, mrs. caroline, the dial, 159. tartuffe, allusion, 312. taylor, father, relation to emerson, 55, 56, 413. taylor, jeremy: allusion, 22; emerson's study, 52; "the shakespeare of divines," 94; praise for, 306. teague, irish name, 143. te deum: the hymn, 68; illustration, 82. temperance, the reform, 141, 152. (see _reforms_.) tennyson, alfred: readers, 256; tobacco, 270; poetic rank, 281; in memoriam, 333; on plagiarism, 384. thacher, samuel cooper: allusion, 26; death, 29. thayer, james b.: western journey with emerson, 249, 263, 265-271, 359; _ground swell_, 364. (see _california_.) thinkers, let loose, 175. thomson, james, descriptions, 338. thoreau, henry d.: allusion, 22; a crusoe, 72; "nullifier of civilization," 86; one-apartment house, 142, 143; the dial, 159, 160; death, 228; emerson's burial-place, 356; biography, 368; personality traceable, 389; woodcraft, 403. ticknor, george: on william emerson, 12; on kirkland, 27; literary rank, 33. traduction, 393. (see _heredity, jonson_, etc.) transcendentalism: bowen's paper, 103, 104; idealism, 146; adherents, 150-152; dilettanteism, 152-155; a terror, 161. transcendentalist, the, 157-159. truth: as an end, 99; sought, 135. tudor, william: allusion, 26; connecting literary link, 28, 29. turgot, quoted, 98, 99. tyburn, allusion, 183. unitarianism: dr. freeman's, 11, 12; nature of jesus, 13; its sunshine, 28; white-handed, 34; headquarters, 35; lingual studies, 48, 49; transition, 51; domination, 52; pulpits, 53, 54; chapel in edinburgh, 65; file-leaders, 118; its organ, 124; "pale negations," 298. (see _religion, trinity_, etc.) united states, intellectual history, 32. (see _america, new england_, etc.) unity, in diversity, 73, 106, 284. upham, charles w., his history, 45. verne, jules, _onditologie_, 186. verplanck, gulian crommelin, literary rank, 33. virginia, university of, 299. volcano, illustration, 113. voltaire, 409. voting, done reluctantly, 152, 153. wachusett, mount, 70. walden pond: allusion, 22, 70, 72; cabin, 142, 143. (see _concord_.) war: outgrown, 88, 89; ennobling, 298. ware, henry, professorship, 52. (see _harvard university_.) ware, henry, jr.: boston ministry, 55; correspondence, 124-127. (see _unitarianism_, etc.) warren, john collins, transcendentalism and temperance, 149. warren, judge, of new bedford, 67. warwick castle, fire, 275. washington city, addresses, 307. (see _anti-slavery_, etc.) waterville college, adelphi society, 135-142. webster, daniel: e.b. emerson's association with, 19; on tudor, 28, 29; literary rank, 33; seventh-of-march speech, 303; times mentioned, 382. weiss, john, parker biography, 368. wellington, lord, seen by emerson, 63, 64. wesley, john, praise of, 306. (see _methodism_.) western messenger, poems in, 128. west india islands, edward b. emerson's death, 89. westminster abbey, emerson's visit, 63, 64. (see _emerson's books_,--english traits,--_england_, etc.) westminster catechism, 298. (see _calvinism, religion_, etc.) whipple, edwin percy: literary rank, 33; club, 223; on heredity, 389. white of selborne, 228. whitman, walt: his enumerations, 325, 326; journal, 344, 346. wilberforce, william, funeral, 64. will: inspiration of, 289; power of, 290. windermere, lake, 70. (see _england_.) winthrop, francis william, in college, 45. wolfe, charles, burial of moore, 416. woman: her position, 212, 213, 251; crossing a street, 364. woman's club, 16. words, emerson's favorite, 404, 405. (see _emerson's poems_,--days.) wordsworth, william: emerson's account, 63; early reception, excursion, 92, 95; quoted, 96, 97; tintern abbey, 103; influence, 148, 150; poetic rank, 281, 321; on immortality, 293, 392; popularity, 316; serenity, 335; study of nature, 337; times mentioned, 382; we are seven, 393; prejudice against science, 401. wotton, sir henry, quoted, 259. yankee: a spouting, 136; _improve_, 176; whittling, 364. (see _america, new england_, etc.) yoga, hindoo idea, 397. young, brigham: utah, 264, 268; on preã«xistence, 391. young, edward, influence in new england, 16, 17. zola, ã�mile, offensive realism, 326. 