Have you found out what that great gray old ocean that is always in your sight says? Listen. And what the withered leaves that shiver and chatter in the cold March wind? Only listen. The Wind is the poet of the World, and sometimes he sings very pretty summer ballads, and sometimes very terrible odes and dirges. But if you will not tell me the little solitary thoughts that I am asking for, what Nature says to you, and what you say to Nature, at least you can tell me about your books, what you like the least and what the best,... the new studies, ... the drawing and the music and the dancing, and fail not to write to your friend, R. WALDO EMERSON. His "immense curiosity for Plymouth news" is not surprising; for he wrote this letter shortly before his marriage with Miss Jackson, of Plymouth. The "wise and kind" sister of his little cor respondent was Miss Jackson's closest friend, and stood up with her at the wedding. Emerson was also a patriot, a man who loved his country, and longed for it to do right. "One thing," he says, "is plain for all men of common sense and common conscience, that here, here in America is the home of man." "America is a poem in our eyes;" "its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres." “For He that flung the broad blue fold One third part of the sky unrolled "For He that worketh high and wise Will take the sun out of the skies Yet his greatest patriotic poem is not the Fourth of July Ode, from which I have been quoting, ("O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire,”) and not the "Concord Hymn," never so familiar that we can read without a thrill, "Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world;" his greatest patriotic poem is "Voluntaries," which treats of slavery and the conflict between North and South. Freedom loves the North: "The snowflake is her banner's star; Her stripes the boreal streamers are." It is this poem that answers the terrible question, "Who shall nerve heroic boys To hazard all in Freedom's fight?" with that mighty quatrain,— "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' Yet Emerson is greatest, not as philo sopher, poet, or patriot, but as helper of men. He made men better by simply walking among them. I have spoken of his face as "through-shine," as transfigured with love and refinement and wisdom, with the vision that shall not fade, "And never poor beseeching glance Shamed that sculptured countenance." It is much to remember him as I do, even in his old age; to have lived with those to whom he was "Mr. Emerson," who had known him early, and who loved him as they loved no other man. Some of you may secretly wonder whether he was all that your elders have called him, just as I used to wonder whether the Parthenon, the great temple at Athens, was not Professor Norton's building rather than mine, whether it would appeal to such as I. When I saw the Parthenon, even in its ruin, I accepted it instantly and forever; and if you could have seen Emerson, even in his enfeebled old age, you would have accepted him. "No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face." Emerson's face was the highest and the loveliest and the most "through-shine," because his life was all this. "Is it so bad?" he wrote to a friend who had said that 66 no one would dare to uncover the thoughts of a single hour," "Is it so bad? I own that to a witness worse than myself and less intelligent I should not willingly put a window into my breast. But to a witness more intelligent and virtuous than I, or to one precisely as intelligent and well intentioned, I have no objection to uncover my heart." "He was right," says Mr. Cabot, "he could only have gained by it." "It was good," says Hawthorne in a passage that Mr. Cabot quotes, "to meet him in the woodpaths or sometimes in our avenue with that pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and he, so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each |