such sympathy in joy and sorrow that very tender ties were knit between this beneficent nature and the grateful hearts he made his own. I have often seen him turn from distinguished guests to say a wise or kindly word to some humble worshipper sitting modestly in a corner, content merely to look and listen, and who went away to cherish that moment long and gratefully."

Emerson had taken a deep interest in everything relating to the village in which he had come to reside. In the month of his marriage he gave the address on the two-hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of Concord. It has been quoted in a previous chapter, but another passage may be set here. "In the eternity of Nature how recent our antiquities appear! The imagination is impatient of a cycle so short. Who can tell how many thousand years, every day, the clouds have shaded these fields with their purple awning? The river, by whose banks most of us were born, every winter for ages has spread its crust of ice over the great meadows which in ages it had formed. the little society of men who now, for a few years, fish in this river, plough the fields it washes, mow the grass, and reap the corn, shortly shall hurry from its banks, as did their forefathers. 'Man's life,' said the Druid to the Saxon king, 'is the sparrow that enters at a window, flutters round the house, and flies out at another, and none knoweth whence he came or whither he goes.' The more reason that we should give to our being what permanence we can, that we should recall the past, and expect the future."

But

Emerson's mother resided in his home until her death

in 1853.

His aunt Mary was a frequent visitor until her death in 1863. And near by, at Waltham, subsequently at the Old Manse in Concord, was Sarah Ripley, who died in 1867.

He suffered some severe bereavements; especially heavy was that of his beautiful boy Waldo. But he was invincible by any sorrow. Writing of his first visit to Europe (1833) he says, "If Goethe had been still living, I might have wandered into Germany also." But he had little need to know Goethe personally, for he had learned that great man's secret of life. There is a letter which Goethe addressed "To the youthful poets of Germany," every line of which became actual in the early years of Emerson's life at Concord. "When at our entrance into the life of action and effort, scant in pleasures, in which, be what we may, we must all feel ourselves dependent on a great whole, we ask back all our early dreams, wishes, hopes all the delicious joys and facilities of our youthful fairyland the Muse abandons us, and seeks the company of the man who can bear disappointment cheerfully, and recover from it easily; who knows how to gather something from every season; who can enjoy the glassy ice-track and the garden of roses, each in its appointed time; who understands the art of mitigating his own sufferings, and looks steadfastly and industriously around him, where he may find another's pain to soothe, another's joy to enhance. Then do no years sever him from the benign goddesses, who, if they delight in the bashfulness of innocence, also give their support to far-looking prudence; here foster the germ

of hope and promise; there rejoice in the complete accomplished man in his full development.

66 Jüngling, merke dir, in Zeiten,
Wo sich Geist und Sinn erhöht,
Das die Muse zu begleiten

Doch zu leiten nicht versteht."

H

XV.

NATURE.

ERMAN GRIMM, writing on Emerson's death (National Zeitung), says, "A picture at Assisi, by Giotto, shows St. Francis restoring to life a woman who had died without confession, long enough to confess to him. The woman raises herself on her bier, and the saint kneels before her. So, it appears to me, Emerson awakened Nature, and gave her a voice, that she might confess to him her secrets, and that he knows of these more than he has told."

With this we may remember one of Emerson's early poems Musketaquid.

"Because I was content with these poor fields,

Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams,

And found a home in haunts which others scorned,
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,

And granted me the freedom of their state."

The Indian, and the farmer who has succeeded him, are caught into the procession of natural forms passing through without interrupting his solitude.

"Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds, mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,

Here in pine houses built of new fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.
Traveller, to thee, perchance, a tedious road,
Or, it may be, a picture; to these men
The landscape is an armory of powers,

Which, one by one, they know to draw and use.

They fight the elements with elements

(That one would say, meadow and forest walked,
Transmuted in these men to rule their like),

And by the order in the field disclose

The order regnant in the yeoman's brain.

"What these strong masters wrote at large in miles,
I followed in small copy in my acre;

For there's no rood has not a star above it;
The cordial quality of pear or plum

Ascends as gladly in a single tree

As in broad orchards resonant with bees;

And every atom poises for itself,

And for the whole. The gentle deities

Showed me the lore of colours and of sounds,
The innumerable tenements of beauty,
The miracle of generative force,

Far-reaching concords of astronomy

Felt in the plants, and in the punctual birds;
Better, the linked purpose of the whole,
And, chiefest prize, found I true liberty

In the glad home plain-dealing nature gave."

In this poem there is the feeling of Wordsworth, but the presence of a new creative force is revealed in the succession of the scenes. The intellect with its prize liberty, with its rood beneath and star overhead - looks not on shifting landscapes but through vistas unfolding from the morning cloud to man, from man