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Bibles told of "Him in whom we live and move and have our being." Mr. Emerson was more troubled by the notoriety involved than by the attacks. Yet his Journal at this time shows that he thought his heresies might cut off his source of earning by lectures, and felt that he must become a more skilful gardener and rely on his planting. He mentions the discovery that "if you put one potato in the ground you found ten, the true miracle of the loaves and fishes."

For thirty years thereafter the official doors of Harvard College were shut to him. But the tempest was, as he said, "in a wash bowl," and the country colleges still bade him to speak to them, a service in which he always expressed delight, the showing them that "the Scholar had drawn the white lot in life," and that his responsibility was proportionate. At this time he prepared his two volumes of Essays.

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Although he had few close friendships and said that he had not animal spirits enough even for near friends, he was always surrounded by friends known and unknown. He was fortunate in having two noble women close by him, Miss Hoar, the betrothed of his brother Charles, and Mrs. Samuel Ripley, the wife of his uncle, a woman of eager interest in all that was good. Her

brother, Mr. Bradford, a gentle scholar, was a near friend, and Mr. Emerson took great delight in the manly sincerity and knowledge of Nature of Henry Thoreau, who for some years was a member of his household. He sometimes met the shy and interesting Hawthorne, his neighbor, and soon Mr. Alcott came also to Concord. Of him he said, "The ideal world I might have treated as cloud-land, had I not known Alcott, who is a native of that country and makes it as solid as Massachusetts for me."

Mr. Emerson's wide hospitality, to the souls as well as bodies of men, brought to his door many visitors, inspiring or exacting, inspired or possessed. His habit of imputing virtue, or of "taking people by their best handles," brought out their best, but some were hopeless " monotones," of one of whom he said: "He will not listen in company which is much, but, what is worse, when he is alone." He writes:

"When the narrow-minded and unworthy shall knock at my gate, I will say come, now will I sacrifice to the gods below; then will I entertain my guests heartily and handsomely. Besides, is it for thee to choose what shadows shall pass over thy magical mirror?"

Of one he made this humorous parable: "As for walking with Heraclitus," said Theanor, "I know nothing less interesting. I had as lief talk with my own conscience." He often had Swedenborg's statement in mind: "Angels have no idea of time." One of his nearest friends, still living, has lately published anonymously some of Emerson's letters to him showing his ideals of friendship.'

The Lyceum was Emerson's open pulpit. His main occupation through life was reading lectures to who would hear, at first in courses in Boston, but later all over the country, for the Lyceum sprang up in New England in these years in every town, and spread westward to the new settlements even beyond the Mississippi. His winters were spent in these rough, but to him interesting journeys, for he loved to watch the growth of the Republic, in which he had faith. His summers were spent in study and writing. The thoughts gathering in his journals presently found their affinities, one with another, and suggested the theme for the next course of lectures. Tested by this trial-trip, the joints looked after (but not too closely, for it was important that the spark should pass in the mind

1 Emerson's Letters to a Friend. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

of the hearer), the roughnesses smoothed, and with every superfluous passage or word cut away, the best in the lectures appeared later as the Essays, of which seven volumes of different names appeared between 1841 and 1876. The courses in Boston, which at first were given in the Masonic Temple, were always well attended by earnest and thoughtful people. The young, whether in years or in spirit, were always and to the end his audience of the spoken or written word. The freedom of the Lyceum platform pleased Emerson. He found that people would hear on Wednesday with approval and unsuspectingly doctrines from which on Sunday they felt officially obliged to dissent.

Mr. Lowell, in his essays, has spoken of these early lectures and what they were worth to him and others suffering from the generous discontent of youth with things as they were. Emerson used to say, "My strength and my doom is to be solitary "; but to a retired scholar a wholesome offset to this seclusion was the travelling and lecturing in cities and in raw frontier towns, bringing him into touch with the people, and this he knew and valued. He was everywhere a learner, expecting light from the youngest and least educated companion.

From the first he never came down to his audience." He had faith in the intelligence and ideals of Americans, and his lectures were well received, and called for again. The astonished curiosity about American audiences for such thoughts as his, expressed by both Carlyle and Sterling in their letters to him, is amusing. Herman Grimm says that Emerson preferred not to speak to those who read or had read, but to those that had ears to hear, and that he resembled Shakspeare in that he can be read without preparation.

In 1847 Emerson was invited to read lectures in England, and he went thither and remained abroad a year, seeing old friends and new. English Traits was the result. At that time he made also a short visit to France in her troublous times.

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In writing to John Sterling in 1840, in acknowledgment of his volume of poems, Mr. Emerson had expressed his faith, founded on his ardent wish," that one day I ask not where or when -- I shall attain to the speech of this splendid dialect; . . . and these pose, are ever only the buds of

wishes, I sup

power, but up to this hour I have never had a true success in

such attempts."

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