PERSONAL

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'Eichtal'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.-CARLYLE, THOMAS, 1833, Letter to his Mother, Aug. 26; The Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, ed. Norton, vol. 1, p. 4.

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Proceeded to Cambridge, to hear the valedictory sermon by Mr. Emerson. this he surpassed himself as much as he surpasses others in the general way. I shall give no abstract. So beautiful, so just, so true, and terribly sublime was his picture of the faults of the Church in its present position. My soul is roused, and this week I shall write the long-meditated sermons on the state of the Church and the duties of these times.-PARKER, THEODORE, 1838, Journal, July 15; Life and Correspondence, ed. Weiss, vol. I, p. 113.

I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's earth; on one 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 repellant particle. - EMERSON, RALPH WALDO, 1838, To Carlyle, May 10; Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, ed. Norton, vol. I, p. 160.

As a speaker in delivering his lectures, sermons, or discourses he is remarkable. His voice is good, his enunciation clear and distinct; his manner his own, but very striking. He is always self-possessed, and his strange fancies fall upon the ear in the most musical cadences. His voice is now low and then again high, like an Eolian harp; but this is natural, not affected, and I think anywhere before an educated audience he would be deemed a remarkable speaker. In person he is tall and graceful. Some people think him slightly mad (one of his brothers died insane, and the other brother had been insane before his death), others think him almost inspired. Old men are not prepared to receive or listen to or read his thoughts. The young of both classes think highly of him. He has a great influence over many of the young minds of my acquaintance, who always couple him with Carlyle. I think him neither mad nor inspired, but original, thoughtful, and peculiar, with his mind tinged with some habits of speculation that are less practical than beautiful, and with a fearless honesty that makes him speak what he thinks, counting little any worldly considerations. In other times he might have been a philosopher, or a reformer, but he would always have been

tolerant and gentle, and he would have gone into uncomplaining exile if the powers that were bade him.-SUMNER, CHARLES, 1839, Letter to Richard Monckton Milnes, March 2; Life of Lord Houghton, ed. Reid, vol. II, P. 238.

It is the doom of the Christian Church to be always distracted with controversy, and where religion is most in honor, there the perversity of the human heart breeds the sharpest conflicts of the brain. The sentiment of religion is at this time, perhaps, more potent and prevailing in New England than in any other portion of the Christian world. For many years since the establishment of the theological school at Andover, the Calvinists and Unitarians have been battling with each other upon the Atonement, the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and the Trinity. This has now very much subsided; but other wandering of mind takes the place of that, and equally lets the wolf into the fold. A young man, named Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of my once loved friend William Emerson, and a classmate of my lamented son George, after failing in the every-day avocations of a Unitarian preacher and school-master, starts a new doctrine of transcendentalism, declares all the old revelations superannuated and worn out, and announces the approach of new revelations and prophecies.-ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY, 1840, Diary, Aug. 2; Memoirs, ed. Adams, vol. x, p. 345.

A spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, whose image more than any other's 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.-DAWES, RUFUS, 1843, Boyhood Memories, Boston Miscallany, Feb.

Waldo Emerson called, and sat with me. a short time, expressing his wish to make me acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Ward, whom he extolled greatly. I liked him very, very much-the simplicity and kindness of his manner charmed me.-MACREADY, W. C., 1843, Diary, Nov. 16; Reminiscences, ed. Pollock, p. 535.

It was with a feeling of predetermined dislike that I had the curiosity to look at Emerson at Lord Northampton's, a fortnight ago; when, in an instant, all my dislike vanished. He has one of the most interesting countenances I ever beheld,a combination of intelligence and sweetness

that quite disarmed me. - ROBINSON, HENRY CRABB, 1848, Letter to T. R., April 22; Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspond

ence.

He came to Oxford just at the end of Lent term, and stayed three days. Everybody liked him, and as the orthodox had mostly never heard of him, they did not suspect him. He is the quietest, plainest, unobtrusivest man possible; will talk, but will rarely discourse to more than a single person, and wholly declines "roaring." He is very Yankee to look at, lank and sallow, and not quite without the twang; but his looks and voice are pleasing nevertheless, and give you the impression of perfect intellectual cultivation, as completely as would any great scientific man in England-Faraday or Owen, for instance, more in their ways perhaps than in that of Wordsworth or Carlyle. I have been with him a great deal; for he came over to Paris and was there a month, during which time we dined together daily: and since that I have seen him often in London, and finally here. One thing that struck everybody is that he is so much less Emersonian than his Essays. There is no dogmatism or arbitrariness or positiveness about him.-CLOUGH, ARTHUR HUGH, 1848; Letter to T. Arnold, July 16; Prose Remains, ed. his Wife, p. 137.

The first man I have ever seen.-ELIOT, GEORGE, 1848, To Miss Sara Hennell, July; George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals, ed. Cross, vol. I, p. 139.

The impregnator of a whole cycle of Boston mind, and the father of thousands lesser Emersons, he is the most unapproachably original and distinct monotype of our day.

Emerson's voice is up to his reputation. It has a curious contradiction, which we tried in vain to analyze satisfactorily-an outwardly repellant and inwardly reverential mingling of qualities, which a musical composer would despair of blending into one. It bespeaks a life that is half contempt, half adoring recognition, and very little between. But it is noble, altogether. And what seems strange is to hear such a voice proceeding from such a body. It is a voice with shoulders in it which he has not-with lungs in it far larger than his-with a walk in it 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-necessities-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.

The first twenty sentences, which we heard, betrayed one of the smaller levers of Emerson's power of style which we had not detected in reading him. He works with surprises. A man who should make a visit of charity, and, after expressing all proper sympathy, should bid adieu to the poor woman, leaving her very grateful for his kind feelings, but should suddenly return after shutting the door, and give her a guinea, would produce just the effect of his most electric sentences. You do not observe it in reading, because you withhold the emphasis till you come to the key-word. But, in delivery, his cadences tell you that the meaning is given, and the interest of the sentence all over, when-flash!-comes a single word or phrase, like lightning after listened-out thunder, and illuminates with astonishing vividness, the cloud you have striven to see into.-WILLIS, NATHANIEL PARKER, 1850, Home Journal.

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I went for a moment into Emerson's study, a large room, in which every thing was simple, orderly, unstudied, comfortable. No refined feeling of beauty has converted the room into a temple, in which stand the forms of heroes of science and literature. Ornament is banished from the sanctuary of the stoic philosopher; the furniture is comfortable, but of a grave character, merely as the implements of usefulness; one large picture only is in the room, but this hangs there with a commanding power; it is a large oil-painting, a copy of Michael Angelo's glorious Parcæ, the goddess of fate.-BREMER, FREDERIKA, 1853, Homes of the New World, vol. II, p.

562.

Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon entering the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not in architectural book-cases, and the room is hung with a few choice engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael Angelo's "Fates," which, properly enough, im

parted that grave serenity to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what is written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's published writings, the essays, orations, and poems, date from this room, as much as they date from any place or moment.-CURTIS, GEORGE WILLIAM, 1854, Homes of American Authors.

Last night I heard Emerson give a lecture. I pity the reporter who attempts to give it to the world. I began to listen with a determination to remember it in order, but it was without method, or order, or system. It was like a beam of light moving in the undulatory waves, meeting with occasional meteors in its path; it was exceedingly captivating. It surprised me that there was not only no commonplace thought, but there was no commonplace expression. If he quoted, he quoted from what we had not read; if he told an anecdote, it was one that had not reached us.MITCHELL, MARIA, 1855, Diary, Nov. 14; Life, Letters and Journals, ed. Kendall, P. 45.

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I have heard some great speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a longstudied artist in these things) does the deliberative utterance, that seems waiting for the fit word, appear to admit us partners in the labor of thought and make us feel as if the glance of humor were a sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying written there on the desk were as unexpected to him as to us!-LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1868-71, Emerson the Lecturer, My Study Windows, p. 383.

Emerson seems an extraordinary mixture of genius and rusticity. Everybody seems amazed at his nomination for the Rectorship at Glasgow, and I have had to explain the position of affairs over and over again.-TULLOCH, JOHN, 1874, Letter to Professor Baynes, April 26; A Memoir by Mrs. Oliphant, p. 303.

One day [1834] 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