953 
 
 M414 
 
 TRIBUTES 
 
 TO 
 
 LONGFELLOW AND EMERSON 
 
 BY 
 
 WITH PORTRAITS. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 A. WILLIAMS AND CO., PUBLISHERS, 
 
 OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE, 283 WASHINGTON ST. 
 1882. 
 
TRIBUTES 
 
 TO 
 
 LONGFELLOW AND EMERSON 
 
 BY 
 
 STjje ptassadjusette J^tstorfcal ^ 
 
COPYRIGHT BY A. WILLIAMS AND CO. 1882. 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 IN ,88-2 HY JA.MKS M.IMAN, HUSTON. 
 
TRIBUTES 
 
 TO 
 
 LONGFELLOW AND EMERSON 
 
 BY 
 
 Clje ^assacfwsetts ^fetoricai >actetp. 
 
 WITH PORTRAITS. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 A. WILLIAMS AND CO., PUBLISHERS, 
 
 OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE, 283 WASHINGTON ST. 
 1882. 
 
Printed by permission of 
 THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 
 
 UNIVERSITY PRESS: 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TRIBUTES TO LONGFELLOW 9 
 
 Remarks of Dr. Ellis 9 
 
 Remarks of Dr. Holmes 13 
 
 Remarks of Professor Norton 22 
 
 Remarks of Mr. William Everett 26 
 
 TRIBUTES TO EMERSON 31 
 
 Remarks of Dr. Ellis 31 
 
 Letter of the Hon. E. R. Hoar 37 
 
 Address of Dr. Holmes 39 
 
 EMERSON S IMPRESSIONS OF THOMAS CARLYLE IN 1848 51 
 
 SPEECH BEFORE THE BOSTON BURNS CLUB 56 
 
 SPEECH ON SIR WALTER SCOTT 59 
 
 M188274 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 
 
 BORN FEBRUARY 27, 1807. 
 DIED MARCH 24, 1882. 
 
TRIBUTES TO LONGFELLOW. 
 
 THE monthly meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society 
 was held on Thursday, April 13, 1882. In the absence of Hon. 
 Robert C. Winthrop, president of the society, who has recently 
 sailed for Europe, the senior vice-president, Dr. George E. Ellis, 
 occupied the chair. The librarian, Mayor Green, read the monthly 
 list of donors to the library. Rev. E. G. Porter read a communi 
 cation from the St. Botolph Club accepting Dr. Ellis s gift of a 
 silver-gilt loving-cup, formerly belonging to the corporation of Bos 
 ton, Lincolnshire, England, and now presented to the club upon the 
 condition "that if ever the club shall be disbanded, or its assets 
 dispersed, the cup shall revert to the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society." The corresponding secretary, Mr. Winsor, read a letter 
 from Professor J. R. Seeley of Cambridge, England, accepting the 
 position of honorary membership in the society. 
 
 Vice-President ELLIS then said : 
 
 REMARKS OF DR. ELLIS. 
 
 MUCH to our regret we miss our honored President from 
 his chair to-day, on this, the ninety-first annual meeting of 
 the Society. It is gratifying to be assured that he has 
 
io Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 safely reached the other side of the ocean, and may be 
 looked for with us again early in the autumn. It will be 
 remembered that in opening the last meeting he expressed 
 for us all the relief which he found in not being called upon, 
 as in such rapid and melancholy succession he had been at 
 so many previous meetings, to announce a loss from our 
 limited roll of associates. But again must there be stricken 
 from it the name of one who leaves upon the list no other 
 so enshrined in the affection, the grateful homage, we may 
 even say the venerating regard of the world-wide fellow 
 ship of civilized humanity. 
 
 On the announcement to our deeply-moved community 
 of the death of Mr. Longfellow, though I had taken leave of 
 Mr. Winthrop near the eve of his departure, I wrote to him 
 asking that he would commit to me, to be read here and 
 now, what he would himself have said if he were to be with 
 us to-day. In his brief note of reply he writes, " How gladly 
 would I comply with your suggestion, and send you, for the 
 next meeting of our Society, some little tribute to our 
 lamented Longfellow. But at this last hurried moment 
 before leaving home, I could do justice neither to him nor 
 to myself. I was just going out to bid him good-by, when 
 his serious illness was announced, and in a day or two more 
 all was over. The last time he was in Europe I was there 
 with him, and I was a witness to not a few of the honors 
 which he received from high and low. I remember partic 
 ularly that when we were coming away from the House of 
 Lords together, where we had been hearing a fine speech 
 from his friend the Duke of Argyll, a group of the common 
 people gathered around our carriage, calling him by name, 
 
Tributes to Longfellow. 1 1 
 
 begging to touch his hand, and at least one of them reciting 
 aloud one of his most familiar poems. No poet of our day 
 has touched the common heart like Longfellow. The sim 
 plicity and purity of his style were a part of his own char 
 acter. He had nothing of that irritability which is one of 
 the proverbial elements of the poetic temperament, but was 
 always genial, generous, lovely." ... I will not attempt to 
 add anything, as tribute, to that heart utterance from our 
 President. Indeed, it would be difficult to find variations in 
 the terms of language even, much more in the sentiments to 
 be expressed by them, in tributes of tender and appreciative 
 regard and affection for Mr. Longfellow. Full and profound 
 in depth and earnestness have been the honors to him in 
 speech and print ; richer still, because unutterable, and only 
 for the privacy of those who cherish them, are the respon 
 sive silences of the heart. 
 
 It is fitting, however, that we put on record our recogni 
 tion of Mr. Longfellow in his relations to this Society. He 
 accepted the membership to which he had been elected in 
 December, 1857. Those who were associates in it twenty- 
 five years ago will recall two signal occasions delightfully 
 associated with his presence and speech. The one was a 
 special meeting, to which he invited the Society at his own 
 residence, as Washington s headquarters, in Cambridge, on 
 June i yth, 1858. There was much of charming and instruc 
 tive interest in the scenes and associations of the occasion, 
 added to the communications made by several members full 
 of historic information freshly related from original sources. 
 The host himself was silent, save as by his genial greeting 
 and warm hospitality he welcomed his grateful guests. The 
 
12 
 
 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 other marked occasion was also at a special meeting of the 
 Society, held in December, 1859, at the house of our asso 
 ciate, Mr. Sears. The meeting was devoted to tributes of 
 respect and affection for Washington Irving, from many 
 who had shared his most intimate friendship. Mr. Long 
 fellow gave hearty and delicate expression to his regard for 
 Irving, while Everett, Felton, Colonel Aspinwall, Prescott, 
 and Dr. Holmes contributed their offerings to the memory 
 of that admired author. But few of our associates, in its 
 nearly a century of years, can have studied our local and 
 even national history more sedulously than did Mr. Long 
 fellow. And but fewer still among us can have found in its 
 stern and rugged and homely actors and annals so much 
 that could be graced and softened by rich and delicate 
 fancies, by refining sentiments, and the hues and fragrance 
 of simple poetry. He took the saddest of our New Eng 
 land tragedies, and the sweetest of its rural home scenes, 
 the wayside inn, the alarum of war, the Indian legend, and 
 the hanging of the crane in the modest household, and his 
 genius has invested them with enduring charms and morals. 
 Wise and gentle was the heart which could thus find melo 
 dies for the harp, the lyre, and the plectrum in our fields 
 and wildernesses, wreathing them as nature does the thickets 
 and stumps of the forest with flowers and mosses. While 
 all his utterances came from a pure, a tender, and a devout 
 heart, addressing themselves to what is of like in other 
 hearts, there is not in them a line of morbidness, of depres 
 sion, or melancholy, but only that which quickens and 
 cheers with robust resolve and courage, with peace and 
 aspiring trust. He has, indeed, used freely the poet s 
 
Tributes to Longfellow. 13 
 
 license in playful freedom with dates and facts. But the 
 scenes and incidents and personages which most need a 
 softening and refining touch, receive it from him without 
 prejudice to the service of sober history. 
 
 The following resolution was then offered : 
 
 Resolved, That in yielding from our roll the name of 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, we would put on our records 
 the expression of our profoundest regard, esteem, and admir 
 ing appreciation of his character and genius, and our grate 
 ful sense of the honor and satisfaction we have shared in 
 his companionship. 
 
 The resolution was seconded by Dr. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 
 who arose and addressed the Society with much feeling, as fol 
 lows : 
 
 REMARKS OF DR. HOLMES. 
 
 It is with no vain lamentations, but rather with profound 
 gratitude that we follow the soul of our much-loved and 
 long-loved poet beyond the confines of the world he helped 
 so largely to make beautiful. We could have wished to 
 keep him longer, but at least we were spared witnessing the 
 inevitable shadows of an old age protracted too far beyond 
 its natural limits. From the first notes of his fluent and 
 harmonious song to the last, which comes to us as the " voice 
 fell like a falling star," there has never been a discord. 
 The music of the mountain stream, in the poem which 
 reaches us from the other shore of being is as clear and 
 sweet as the melodies of the youthful and middle periods of 
 
14 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 his minstrelsy. It has been a fully rounded life, beginning 
 early with large promise, equalling every anticipation in its 
 maturity, fertile and beautiful to its close in the ripeness of 
 its well-filled years. 
 
 Until the silence fell upon us we did not entirely appre 
 ciate how largely his voice was repeated in the echoes of 
 our own hearts. The afHuence of his production so accus 
 tomed us to look for a poem from him at short intervals 
 that we could hardly feel how precious that was which was 
 so abundant Not, of course, that every single poem reached 
 the standard of the highest among them all. That could 
 not be in Homer s time, and mortals must occasionally nod 
 now as then. But the hand of the artist shows itself unmis- 
 
 cably in everything which left his desk. The O of Giotto 
 could not help being a perfect round, and the verse of Long 
 fellow is always perfect in const ruj 
 
 e worked in dial bfrnpTe and natural way which char 
 acterizes the master. But it is one thing to be simple 
 through poverty of intellect, and another thing to be simple 
 by repression of all redundancy and overstatement ; one 
 thing to be natural through ignorance of all rules, and 
 another to have made a second nature out of the sovereign 
 rules of art. In respect of this simplicity and naturalness, 
 his style is in strong contrast to that of many writers of our 
 time. There is no straining for effect, there is no torturing 
 of rhythm for novel patterns, no wearisome iteration of 
 petted words, no inelegant clipping of syllables to meet the 
 exigencies of a verse ; no affected archaism, rarely any lib 
 erty taken with language, unless it may be in the form of a 
 few words in the translation of Dante. I will not except 
 
 11U\ 
 
 itf 
 
 \/ cou 
 
Tributes to Longfellow. 15 
 
 from these remarks the singular and original form which he 
 gave to his poem of " Hiawatha," a poem with a curious 
 history in many respects. Suddenly and immensely popular 
 in this country, greatly admired by many foreign critics, 
 imitated with perfect ease by any clever schoolboy, serving 
 as a model for metrical advertisements, made fun of, sneered 
 at, abused, admired, but, at any rate, a picture full of pleas 
 ing fancies and melodious cadences. The very names are 
 jewels which the most fastidious muse might be proud to 
 wear. Coming from the realm of the Androscoggin and 
 of Moosetukmaguntuk, how could he have found two such 
 delicious names as Hiawatha and Minnehaha? The eight- 
 syllable trochaic verse of " Hiawatha," like the eight-syllable 
 iambic verse of " The Lady of the Lake," and others of Scott s 
 poems, has a fatal facility, which I have elsewhere endeav 
 ored to explain on physiological principles. The recital of 
 each line uses up the air of one natural expiration, so that 
 we read, as we naturally do, eighteen or twenty lines in a 
 minute, without disturbing the normal rhythm of breathing, 
 which is also eighteen or twenty breaths to the minute. 
 The standing objection to this is, that it makes the octo 
 syllabic verse too easy writing and too slipshod reading. 
 Yet in this most frequently criticised composition the poet 
 has shown a subtle sense of the requirements of his simple 
 story of a primitive race, in choosing the most fluid of 
 measures, that lets the thought run through it in easy 
 sing-song, such as oral tradition would be sure to find on 
 the lips of the story-tellers of the wigwam. Although Long 
 fellow was not fond of metrical contortions and acrobatic 
 achievements, he well knew the effects of skilful variation 
 
1 6 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 in the forms of verse and well-managed refrains or repeti 
 tions. In one of his very earliest poems, " Pleasant it 
 was when Woods were Green," the dropping a syllable 
 from the last line is an agreeable surprise to the ear, expect 
 ing only the common monotony of scrupulously balanced 
 lines. In "Excelsior" the repetition of the aspiring excla 
 mation which gives its name to the poem, lifts every stanza 
 a step higher than the one which preceded it. In the " Old 
 Clock on the Stair," the solemn words, " Forever, never, 
 never, forever," give wonderful effectiveness to that most 
 impressive poem. 
 
 All his art, all his learning, all his melody, cannot account 
 for his extraordinary popularity, not only among his own 
 countrymen and those who in other lands speak the lan 
 guage in which he wrote, but in foreign realms, where he 
 could only be read through the ground glass of a translation. 
 It was in his choice of subjects that one source of the public 
 favor with which his writings, more especially his poems, 
 were received, obviously lay. A poem, to be widely popular, 
 must deal with thoughts and emotions that belong to com 
 mon, not exceptional character, conditions, interests. The 
 most popular of all books are those which meet the spiritual 
 needs of mankind most powerfully, such works as " The 
 Imitation of Christ " and " Pilgrim s Progress." I suppose 
 if the great multitude of readers were to render a decision 
 as to which of Longfellow s poems they most valued, the 
 " Psalm of Life " would command the largest number. This 
 is a brief homily enforcing the great truths of duty, and of 
 our relation to the unseen world. Next in order would 
 very probably come "Excelsior," a poem that springs up- 
 
Tributes to Longfellow. 17 
 
 ward like a flame and carries the soul up with it in its 
 aspiration for the unattainable ideal. If this sounds like a 
 trumpet-call to the fiery energies of youth, not less does the 
 still small voice of that most sweet and tender poem, " Res 
 ignation," appeal to the sensibilities of those who have lived 
 long enough to have known the bitterness of such a be 
 reavement as that out of which grew the poem. Or take a 
 poem before referred to, " The Old Clock on the Stair," 
 and in it we find the history of innumerable households told 
 in relating the history of one, and the solemn burden of the 
 song repeats itself to thousands of listening readers, as if 
 the beat of the pendulum were throbbing at the head of 
 every staircase. Such poems as these and there are many 
 more of not unlike character are the foundation of that 
 universal acceptance his writings obtain among all classes. 
 But for these appeals to universal sentiment, his readers 
 would have been confined to a comparatively small circle of 
 educated and refined readers. There are thousands and 
 tens of thousands who are familiar with what we might call 
 his household poems, who have never read the "Spanish 
 Student," " The Golden Legend," " Hiawatha," or even 
 " Evangeline." Again, ask the first schoolboy you meet 
 which of Longfellow s poems he likes best, and he will be 
 very likely to answer, " Paul Revere s Ride." When he is a 
 few years older he might perhaps say, " The Building of the 
 Ship," that admirably constructed poem, beginning with the 
 literal description, passing into the higher region of senti 
 ment by the most natural of transitions, and ending with 
 the noble climax, 
 
 " Thou, too, sail on, O ship of state," 
 3 
 
1 8 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 which has become the classical expression of patriotic emo 
 tion. 
 
 Nothing lasts like a coin and a lyric. Long after the 
 dwellings of men have disappeared, when their temples are 
 4n ruins and all their works of art are shattered, the plough 
 man strikes an earthen vessel holding the golden and 
 silver disks, on which the features of a dead monarch, with 
 emblems it may be, betraying the beliefs or the manners, 
 the rudeness or the finish of art and all which this implies, 
 survive an extinct civilization. Pope has expressed this with 
 his usual Horatian felicity, in the letter to Addison, on the 
 publication of his little " Treatise on Coins," 
 
 " A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled, 
 And little eagles wave their wings in gold." 
 
 Conquerors and conquered sink in common oblivion ; tri 
 umphal arches, pageants the world wonders at, all that 
 trumpeted itself as destined to an earthly immortality pass 
 away ; the victor of a hundred battles is dust ; the parch 
 ments or papyrus on which his deeds were written are 
 shrivelled and decayed and gone, 
 
 "And all his triumphs shrink into a coin." 
 
 So it is with a lyric poem. One happy utterance of some 
 emotion or expression, which comes home to all, may keep 
 a name remembered when the race to which the singer 
 belonged is lost sight of. The cradle-song of Danae to her 
 infant as they tossed on the waves in the imprisoning chest, 
 has made the name of Simonides immortal. Our own Eng 
 lish literature abounds with instances which illustrate the 
 same fact so far as the experience of a few generations extends. 
 
Tributes to Longfellow. 19 
 
 And I think we may venture to say that some of the shorter 
 poems of Longfellow must surely reach a remote posterity, 
 and be considered then, as now, ornaments to English litera 
 ture. We may compare them with the best short poems 
 of the language without fearing that they will suffer. Scott, 
 cheerful, wholesome, unreflective, should be read in the 
 open air ; Byron, the poet of malcontents and cynics, in a 
 prison cell ; Burns, generous, impassioned, manly, social, in 
 the tavern hall ; Moore, elegant, fastidious, full of melody, 
 scented with the volatile perfume of the Eastern gardens, in 
 which his fancy revelled, is pre-eminently the poet of the 
 drawing-room and the piano ; Longfellow, thoughtful, musi 
 cal, home-loving, busy with the lessons of life, which he was 
 ever studying, and loved to teach others, finds his charmed 
 circle of listeners by the fireside. His songs, which we 
 might almost call sacred ones, rarely if ever get into the 
 hymn-books. They are too broadly human to suit the 
 specialized tastes of the sects, which often think more of their 
 differences from each other than of the common ground on 
 which they can agree. Shall we think less of our poet 
 because he so frequently aimed in his verse not simply to . 
 please, but also to impress some elevating thought on the 
 minds of his readers ? The Psalms of King David are burn 
 ing with religious devotion and full of weighty counsel, but 
 they are not less valued, certainly, than the poems of Omar 
 Khayam, which cannot be accused of too great a tendency 
 to find a useful lesson in their subject. Dennis, the famous 
 critic, found fault with the " Rape of the Lock " because it 
 had no moral. It is not necessary that a poem should carry 
 a moral, any more than that a picture of a Madonna should 
 
2O Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 always be an altar-piece. The poet himself is the best 
 judge of that in each particular case. In that charming 
 little poem of Wordsworth s, ending, 
 
 "And then my heart with rapture thrills 
 And dances with the daffodils," 
 
 we do not ask for anything more than the record of the 
 impression which is told so simply, and which justifies itself 
 by the way in which it is told. But who does not feel 
 with the poet that the touching story, " Hartleap Well," 
 must have its lesson brought out distinctly, to give a fitting 
 close to the narrative ? Who would omit those two lines ? 
 
 " Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
 With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives." 
 
 No poet knew better than Longfellow how to impress a 
 moral without seeming to preach. Didactic verse, as such, 
 is, no doubt, a formidable visitation, but a cathedral has its 
 lesson to teach as well as a schoolhouse. These beautiful 
 medallions of verse which Longfellow has left us might 
 possibly be found fault with as conveying too much useful 
 and elevating truth in their legends ; having the unartistic 
 aim of being serviceable as well as delighting by their 
 beauty. Let us leave such comment to the critics who 
 cannot handle a golden coin, fresh from the royal mint, 
 without clipping its edges and stamping their own initials 
 on its face. 
 
 Of the longer poems of our chief singer, I should not 
 hesitate to select " Evangeline " as the masterpiece, and I 
 think the general verdict of opinion would confirm my 
 choice. The German model which it follows in its measure 
 
Tributes to Longfellow. 21 
 
 and the character of its story was itself suggested by an 
 earlier idyl. If Dorothea was the mother of Evangeline, 
 Luise was the mother of Dorothea. And what a beautiful 
 creation is the Acadian maiden ! From the first line of the 
 poem, from its first words, we read as we would float down 
 a broad and placid river, murmuring softly against its banks, 
 heaven over it and the glory of the unspoiled wilderness all 
 around, 
 
 " This is the forest primeval." 
 
 The words are already as familiar as 
 
 or 
 
 " Arma virumque cano." 
 
 The hexameter has been often criticised, but I do not 
 believe any other measure could have told that lovely story 
 with such effect, as we feel when carried along the tranquil 
 current of these brimming, slow-moving, soul-satisfying lines. 
 Imagine for one moment a story like this minced into octo 
 syllabics. The poet knows better than his critics the length 
 of step which best befits his muse. 
 
 I will not take up your time with any further remarks 
 upon writings so well known to all. By the poem I have 
 last mentioned, and by his lyrics, or shorter poems, I think 
 the name of Longfellow will be longest remembered. What 
 ever he wrote, whether in prose or poetry, bore always the 
 marks of the finest scholarship, the purest taste, fertile im 
 agination, a sense of the music of words, and a skill in bring 
 ing it out of our English tongue, which hardly more than 
 one of his contemporaries who write in that language can 
 be said to equal. 
 
22 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 The saying of Buffon, that the style is the man himself, 
 or of the man himself, as some versions have it, was never 
 truer than in the case of our beloved poet. Let us under 
 stand by style all that gives individuality to the expression 
 of a writer; and in the subjects, the handling, the spirit and 
 aim of his poems, we see the reflex of a personal character 
 which made him worthy of that almost unparalleled homage 
 which crowned his noble life. Such a funeral procession 
 as attended him in thought to his resting-place has never 
 joined the train of mourners that followed the hearse of a 
 poet, could we not say of any private citizen ? And we 
 all feel that no tribute could be too generous, too universal, 
 to the union of a divine gift with one of the loveliest of 
 human characters. 
 
 Dr. Holmes was followed by Professor CHARLES ELIOT NORTON, 
 who arose and said, 
 
 REMARKS OF PROFESSOR NORTON. 
 
 I could wish that this were a silent meeting. There is no 
 need of formal commemorative speech to-day, for all the 
 people of the land, the whole English-speaking race, and 
 not they alone, mourn our friend and poet. Never was 
 poet so mourned, for never was poet so beloved. 
 
 There is nothing of lamentation in* our mourning. He 
 has not been untimely taken. His life was " prolonged with 
 many years, happy and famous." Death came to him in 
 good season, or ever the golden bowl was broken, or the 
 pitcher broken at the cistern. Desire had but lately failed. 
 
Tributes to Longfellow. 23 
 
 Life was fair to him almost to its end. On his seventy- 
 fourth birthday, a little more than a year ago, with his family 
 and a few friends round his dinner table, he said, " There 
 seems to me a mistake in the order of the years: I can 
 hardly believe that the four should not precede the seven." 
 But in the year that followed he experienced the pains and 
 languor and weariness of age. There was no complaint 
 the sweetness of his nature was invincible. 
 
 On one of the last times that I saw him, as I entered his 
 familiar study on a beautiful afternoon of this past winter, 
 I said to him, " I hope this is a good day for you ? " He 
 replied, with a pleasant smile, " Ah ! there are no good days 
 now." Happily, the evil days were not to be many. . . . 
 
 The accord between the character and life of Mr. Long- 
 fellow and his poems was complete. His poetry touched 
 the hearts of his readers because it was the sincere expres 
 sion of his own. The sweetness, the gentleness, the. grace, 
 the purity of his verse were the image of his own soul. But 
 beautiful and ample as this expression of himself was, it 
 fell short of the truth. The man was more and better than 
 the poet. 
 
 Intimate, however, as was the concord between the poet 
 and his poetry, there was much in him to which he never 
 gave utterance in words. He was a man of deep reserves. 
 He kept the holy of holies within himself inviolable and 
 secluded. Seldom does he admit his readers to even its 
 outward precincts. The deepest experiences of life are too 
 sacred to be shared with any one whatsoever. " There are 
 things of which I may not speak," he says in one of the 
 most personal of his poems. 
 
24 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 " Whose hand shall dare to open and explore 
 Those volumes closed and clasped forevermore ? 
 Not mine. With reverential feet I pass." 
 
 It was the felicity of Mr. Longfellow to share the senti 
 ment and emotion of his coevals, and to succeed in giving 
 to them their apt poetic expression. It was not by depth 
 of thought or by original views of nature that he won his 
 place in the world s regard ; but it was by sympathy with 
 the feelings common to good men and women everywhere, 
 and by the simple, direct, sincere, and delicate expression 
 of them, that he gained the affection of mankind. 
 
 He was fortunate in the time of his birth. He grew up 
 in the morning of our republic. He shared in the cheer 
 fulness of the early hour, in its hopefulness, its confidence. 
 The years of his youth and early manhood coincided with 
 an exceptional moment of national life, in which a pros 
 perous and unembarrassed democracy was learning its own 
 capacities, and was beginning to realize its large and novel 
 resources; in which the order of society was still simple 
 and humane. He became, more than any one else, the 
 voice of this epoch of national progress, an epoch of unex 
 ampled prosperity for the masses of mankind in our new 
 world, prosperity from which sprang a sense, more general 
 and deeper than had ever before been felt, of human kind 
 ness and brotherhood. But, even to the prosperous, life 
 brings its inevitable burden. Trial, sorrow, misfortune, are 
 not to be escaped by the happiest of men. The deepest 
 experiences of each individual are the experiences common 
 to the whole race. And it is this double aspect of American 
 life its novel and happy conditions, with the genial spirit 
 
Tributes to Longfellow. 25 
 
 resulting from them, and, at the same time, its subjection 
 to the old, absolute, universal laws of existence that finds 
 its mirror and manifestation in Longfellow s poetry. 
 
 No one can read his poetry without a conviction of the 
 simplicity, tenderness, and humanity of the poet. And we 
 who were his friends know how these qualities shone in 
 his daily conversation. Praise, applause, flattery, and no 
 man ever was exposed to more of them, never touched 
 him to harm him. He walked through their flames un 
 scathed, as Dante through the fires of purgatory. His 
 modesty was perfect. He accepted the praise as he would 
 have accepted any other pleasant gift, glad of it as an 
 expression of good will, but without personal elation. In 
 deed, he had too much of it, and often in an absurd form, 
 not to become at times weary of what his own fame and 
 virtues brought upon him. But his kindliness did not 
 permit him to show his weariness to those who did but 
 burden him with their admiration. It was the penalty of 
 his genius, and he accepted it with the pleasantest temper 
 and a humorous resignation. Bores of all nations, espe 
 cially of our own, persecuted him. His long-suffering pa 
 tience was a wonder to his friends. It was, in truth, the 
 sweetest charity. No man was ever before so kind to these 
 moral mendicants. One day I ventured to remonstrate 
 with him on his endurance of the persecutions of one of 
 the worst of the class, who to lack of modesty added lack 
 of honesty, a wretched creature, and when I had done, 
 he looked at me with a pleasant, reproving, humorous glance, 
 and said, " Charles, who would be kind to him if I were 
 not? " It was enough. He was helped by a gift of humor, 
 
26 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 which, though seldom displayed in his poems, lighted up his 
 talk and added a charm to his intercourse. He was the 
 most gracious of men in his own home; he was fond of 
 the society of his friends, and the company that gathered 
 in his study or round his table took its tone from his own 
 genial, liberal, cultivated, and refined nature. 
 
 "With loving breath of all the winds his name 
 
 Is blown about the world ; but to his friends 
 A sweeter secret hides behind his fame, 
 
 And love steals shyly through the loud acclaim 
 To murmur a God bless you! and there ends." 
 
 His verse, his fame, are henceforth the precious posses 
 sions of the people whom he loved so well. They will 
 be among the effective instruments in shaping the future 
 character of the nation. His spirit will continue to soften, 
 to refine, to elevate the hearts of men. He will be the 
 beloved friend of future generations as he has been of his 
 own. His desire will be gratified, 
 
 "And in your life let my remembrance linger, 
 As something not to trouble and disturb it, 
 But to complete it, adding life to life. 
 And if at times beside the evening fire 
 You see my face among the other faces, 
 Let it not be regarded as a ghost 
 That haunts your house, but as a guest that loves you, 
 Nay, even as one of your own family, 
 Without whose presence there were something wanting. 
 I have no more to say." 
 
 Mr. WILLIAM EVERETT spoke with much force of the pre 
 eminent gifts of Mr. Longfellow, and, although not given to 
 
Tributes to Longfellow. 27 
 
 comparisons, he could not help putting his " Ship of State " 
 alongside of Horace s passionate burst of song beginning 
 " O navis ! " After reciting the two, Mr. Everett declared 
 that our singer had encountered the greatest lyric poet of 
 Rome on his own ground, and, grappling with him, had 
 fairly thrown him. 
 
 The resolution was unanimously adopted by a standing vote. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 PHOTOGRAPHED IN 1855 HY J. J. HAWKS, BOSTON. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 
 
 BORN MAY 25, 1803. 
 DIED APRIL 27, 1882. 
 
TRIBUTES TO EMERSON. 
 
 THE regular monthly meeting of the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society was held on Thursday, May n, 1882, at three o clock, P.M. 
 In the absence of the president, the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, who 
 is spending the summer in Europe, the senior vice-president, George 
 E. Ellis, D.D., occupied the chair. The minutes of the April meet 
 ing, at which tributes were paid to Mr. Longfellow, were read by the 
 Rev. E. G. Porter, recording secretary pro tern. The librarian, 
 Mayor Green, read the monthly list of donors to the Library. The 
 corresponding secretary, Mr. Justin Winsor, made his report, after 
 which Vice- President ELLIS gave the following address : 
 
 REMARKS OF DR. ELLIS. 
 
 MANY of us who meet in this library to-day are doubtless 
 recalling vividly the memory of the impressive scene here 
 when, fifteen months ago, Mr. Emerson, appearing among 
 us for the last time, read his characteristic paper upon 
 Thomas Carlyle. It was the very hour on which the 
 remains of that remarkable man were committed to his 
 Scotch grave. There was much to give the occasion here 
 a deep and tender interest. We could not but feel that it 
 
32 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 was the last utterance to which \ve should listen from our 
 beloved and venerated associate, if not, as it proved to be, 
 the last of his presence among us. So we listened greedily 
 and fondly. The paper had been lying in manuscript more 
 than thirty years, but it had kept its freshness and fidelity. 
 The matter of it, its tone and utterance, were singularly 
 suggestive. Not the least of the crowding reflections with 
 which we listened was the puzzling wonder, to some of us, 
 as to the tie of sympathy and warm personal attachment, 
 of nearly half a century s continuance, between the serene 
 and gentle spirit of our poet-philosopher and the stormy 
 and aggressive spirit of Mr. Carlyle. 
 
 There are those immediately to follow me who, with acute 
 and appreciative minds, in closeness of intercourse and sym 
 pathy with Mr. Emerson, will interpret to you the form and 
 significance of his genius, the richness of his fine and rare 
 endowments, and account to you for the admiring and loving 
 estimate of his power and influence and world-wide fame 
 in the lofty realms of thought, with insight and vision and 
 revealings of the central mysteries of being. They must 
 share largely in those rare gifts of his who undertake to be 
 the channel of them from him to others. For it is no secret, 
 but a free confession, that the quality, methods, and fruits of 
 his genius are so peculiar, unique, obscure, and remote from 
 the appreciation of a large class of those of logical, argu 
 mentative, and prosaic minds, as to invest them with the 
 ill-understood and the inexplicable. He was signally one 
 of those, rare in our race, in the duality of our human ele 
 mentary composition, in whom the dust of the ground con 
 tributed its least proportion, while the ethereal inspiration 
 from above contributed the greatest. 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 33 
 
 The words which I would add, prompted as in keeping 
 with this place and occasion, shall be in reminiscence of 
 years long past. Those whose memories are clear and 
 strong, and who forty-five years ago in their professional, 
 literary, or social fellowships were intent upon all that 
 quickened thought and converse in this peculiar centre of 
 Boston and its neighborhoods, will recall with what can 
 hardly be other than pensive retrospects the charms and 
 fervors, the surprises, and perhaps the shocks, certainly the 
 bewilderment and the apprehension, which signalled the 
 announcement here of what was called Transcendentalism. 
 Though the word was from the first wrongfully applied, 
 there was an aptness in its use, as in keeping with the 
 mistiness and cloudiness of the dispensation to which it 
 was attached. The excitement here was adjusted to the 
 size, the composition, the tone and spirit, and the unas- 
 similated elements of this community. The movement had 
 the quickening zest of mystery. It was long before those 
 who were not a part of it could reach to any intelligible 
 idea of what it might signify, or promise, or portend. There 
 were a score, a hundred, persons craving to have explained 
 to them what it all meant, to each one who seemed ready 
 or able in volunteering to throw light upon it. And this 
 intended light was often but an adumbration. Mr. Emerson 
 gained nothing from his interpreters. Nor does he now. 
 The key which they offered did not fit the wards of the lock. 
 The vagueness of the oracle seemed to be deepened when 
 repeated by any other lips than those which gave it first 
 utterance. In most of the recent references in the news 
 papers and magazines to the opening of Mr. Emerson s 
 
 5 
 
34 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 career in high philosophy, emphatic statements are made 
 as to the ridicule and satire and banter evoked by the first 
 utterances of this transcendentalism. It is not impressed 
 upon my memory that any of this triviality was ever spent 
 upon Mr. Emerson himself. The modest, serene, unaggres- 
 sive attitude, and personal phenomena of bearing and utter 
 ance which were so winningly characteristic of his presence 
 and speech, as he dropped the sparkles and nuggets of his 
 fragmentary revelations, were his ample security against all 
 such disrespect. The fun, as I remember, was spent upon 
 the first circle of repeaters, and so-called disciples, a small 
 but lively company of both sexes, who seemed to patent 
 him as their oracle, as an inner fellowship who would be 
 the medium between him and the unillumined. Nor was 
 it strange that explanations, or demonstrative and argu 
 mentative expositions of the Emersonian philosophy prof 
 fered by its interpreters did not open it clearly to inquirers, 
 inasmuch as he himself assured us that it was not to be 
 learned or tested by old-fashioned familiar methods. I 
 know of but one piece from his pen now in print, and 
 dating from the first year of his publicity, in which he 
 appears, not in self-defence under challenge, for he never 
 did that, but in attempted and baffled self-exposition. 
 Nor have lines ever been written, by himself or by his 
 interpreters, so apt, so characteristic, so exquisitely phrased 
 and toned, so exhaustively descriptive of the style and 
 spirit of his philosophy as those which I will quote. 
 
 The younger Henry Ware, whose colleague he had been 
 during his brief pastorship of a church, disturbed by some 
 thing in a discourse which Mr. Emerson, after leaving the 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 35 
 
 pulpit, had delivered in Cambridge in 1838, had preached in 
 the College chapel a sermon dealing in part with a position 
 which had startled himself and others in his friend s address, 
 and, in part, with a breeze of excitement which it had raised 
 in a tinderish community. The sermon being printed, Mr. 
 Ware sent a copy of it to Mr. Emerson, with a letter, which 
 the latter says " was right manly and noble." The letter 
 expressed a little disturbance, puzzle, and anxiety of mind, 
 and put some questions hinting at desired explanations and 
 arguments. 
 
 In reply Mr Emerson interprets himself thus : 
 " If the sermon assails any doctrines 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 liber 
 tine/ 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 appre 
 ciated fully the advantages of my position, for I well know 
 that there is no scholar less able or willing to be a polemic. 
 I could not give accounts 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 mean, in reference to any expression 
 
36 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 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 into 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 cer 
 tainly 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 what 
 ever 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 perceptions, and find my 
 nonsense is only their own thought in motley." 
 
 No one in comment, essay, or criticism upon Mr. Emerson 
 has improved upon his own revealing of his philosophy of 
 intuition, insight, eye, and thought, as distinguished from 
 that of logic and argument. It needed some considerable 
 lapse of time, with much wondering, questioning, and de 
 bating in this community, to clear the understanding, that 
 the new and hopeful message brought to us was something 
 like this, that those who were overfed, or starved, or 
 weaned with didactic, prosaic lessons of truth for life and 
 conduct, through formal teaching, by reasoning, arguings 
 and provings, might turn to their own inner furnishings, 
 to their thinkings as processes, not results, and to the free 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 37 
 
 revealings and inspirings from without as interpreted from 
 within. 
 
 But whatever was the baffling secret of Mr. Emerson s 
 philosophy, there was no mystery save that to the charm 
 and power of which we all love to yield ourselves, in the 
 poise and repose of his placid spirit, in the grace and felicity 
 of his utterance, in the crowding of sense and suggestive- 
 ness into his short, terse sentences, in his high Teachings 
 for all truth as its disciple, and in the persuasiveness with 
 which he communicated to others what was disclosed to 
 him. He never answered to a challenge by apology or 
 controversy. 
 
 At the conclusion of his address, Dr. Ellis read the following 
 letter from Judge HOAR : 
 
 LETTER OF THE HON. E. R. HOAR. 
 
 CONCORD, May 8, 1882. 
 
 MY DEAR DR. ELLIS, I find that it will be out of my 
 power to attend the meeting of the Historical Society on 
 Thursday next, and I am sorry to lose the opportunity of 
 hearing the tributes which its members will pay to the 
 memory of Mr. Emerson, than whose name none more wor 
 thy of honor is found on its roll. His place in literature, 
 as poet, philosopher, seer, and thinker, will find much more 
 adequate statement than any which I could offer. But there 
 are two things which the Proceedings of our Society may 
 appropriately record concerning him, one of them likely to 
 be lost sight of in the lustre of his later and more famous 
 achievements, and the other of a quality so evanescent 
 
38 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 as to be preserved only by contemporary evidence and 
 tradition. 
 
 The first relates to his address in September, 1835, at 
 the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the 
 settlement of Concord; which seems to me to contain the 
 most complete and exquisite picture of the origin, history, 
 and peculiar characteristics of a New England town that 
 has ever been produced. 
 
 The second is his power as an orator, rare and peculiar, 
 and in its way unequalled among our cotemporaries. Many 
 of us can recall instances of it, and there are several promi 
 nent in my recollection ; but perhaps the most striking was 
 his address at the Burns centennial, in Boston, on the 25th 
 of January, 1859. 
 
 The company that he addressed was a queer mixture. 
 First, there were the Burns club, grave, critical, and long 
 headed Scotchmen, jealous of the fame of their countryman, 
 and doubtful of the capacity to appreciate him in men of 
 other blood. There were the scholars and poets of Boston 
 and its neighborhood, and professors and undergraduates 
 from Harvard College. Then there were state and city 
 officials, aldermen and common councilmen, brokers and 
 bank directors, ministers and deacons, doctors, lawyers, and 
 " carnal self-seekers " of every grade. 
 
 I have had the good fortune to hear many of the chief 
 orators of our time, among them Henry Clay, John Quincy 
 Adams, Ogden Hoffman, S. S. Prentiss, William H. Seward, 
 Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, 
 some of the great preachers, and Webster, Everett, Choate, 
 and Winthrop at their best. But I never witnessed such 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 39 
 
 an effort of speech upon men as Mr. Emerson apparently 
 then attained. It reached at once to his own definition of elo 
 quence. "a taking sovereign possession of the audience/ 5 
 He had uttered but a few sentences before he seemed to 
 have welded together the whole mass of discordant material 
 and lifted them to the same height of sympathy and passion. 
 He excited them to smiles, to tears, to the wildest enthu 
 siasm. His tribute to Burns is beautiful to read, perhaps 
 the best which the occasion produced on either side of the 
 ocean. But the clear articulation, the ringing emphasis, 
 the musical modulation of tone and voice, the loftiness of 
 bearing, and the radiance of his face, all made a part of 
 the consummate charm. When he closed, the company 
 could hardly tolerate any other speaker, though good ones 
 were to follow. 
 
 I am confident that every one who was present on that 
 evening would agree with me as to the splendor of that 
 eloquence. 
 
 Very truly yours, 
 
 E. R. HOAR. 
 
 Rev. GEORGE E. ELLIS, D.D., 
 
 Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 Dr. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES then arose and addressed the 
 Society as follows : 
 
 ADDRESS OF DR. HOLMES. 
 
 It is a privilege which any of us may claim, as we pass 
 each of these last and newly raised mounds, to throw our 
 pebble upon the cairn. For our own sakes we must be 
 indulged in the gratification of paying our slender tribute. 
 
4O Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 So soon, alas, after bidding farewell to our cherished poet 
 to lose the earthly presence of the loftiest, the divinest of 
 our thinkers! The language of eulogy seemed to have 
 exhausted itself in celebrating him who was the darling 
 of two English worlds, the singer of Acadian and Pilgrim 
 and Indian story, of human affections and aspirations, of 
 sweet, wholesome life from its lullaby to its requiem. And 
 now we hardly know what measure to observe in our praises 
 of him who was singularly averse to over-statement, who 
 never listened approvingly to flattery when living, and whose 
 memory asks only the white roses of truth for its funeral 
 garlands. 
 
 The work of his life is before us all, and will have full 
 justice done it by those who are worthy of the task and 
 equal to its demands. But, as out of a score of photo 
 graphs each gives us something of a friend s familiar face, 
 though all taken together do not give us the whole of it, 
 so each glimpse of reminiscence, each hint of momentary 
 impression, may help to make a portrait which shall remind 
 us of the original, though it is, at best, but an imperfect 
 resemblance. 
 
 When a life so exceptional as that which has just left our 
 earthly companionship appears in any group of our fellow- 
 creatures, we naturally ask how such a well-recognized supe 
 riority came into being. We look for the reason of such 
 an existence among its antecedents, some of which we can 
 reach, as, for instance, the characteristics of the race, the 
 tribe, the family. The forces of innumerable generations 
 are represented in the individual, more especially those of 
 the last century or two. Involved with these, inextricable, 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 41 
 
 insoluble, is the mystery of mysteries, the mechanism of 
 personality. No such personality as this which was lately- 
 present with us is the outcome of cheap paternity and 
 shallow motherhood. 
 
 I may seem to utter an Hibernian absurdity; I may 
 recall a lively couplet which has often brought a smile at 
 the expense of our good city ; I may I hope I shall not 
 offend the guardians of ancient formulae, vigilant still 
 as watch-dogs over the bones of their fleshless symbols, 
 but I must be permitted to say that I believe the second 
 birth may precede that which we consider as the first. The 
 divine renovation which changes the half-human animal, 
 the cave-dweller, the cannibal, into the servant of God, the 
 friend, the benefactor, the lawgiver of his kind, may, I 
 believe, be wrought in the race before it is incarnated in 
 the individual. It may take many generations of chosen 
 births to work the transformation, but what the old chem 
 ists called cohobation is not without its meaning for vital 
 chemistry ; life must pass through an alembic of gold or of 
 silver many times before its current can possibly run quite 
 clear. 
 
 A New Englander has a right to feel happy, if not proud, 
 if he can quarter his coat-of-arms with the bands of an 
 ancestry of clergymen. Eight generations of ministers 
 preceded the advent of this prophet of our time. There 
 is no better flint to strike fire from than the old nodule 
 of Puritanism. Strike it against the steel of self-asserting 
 civil freedom, and we get a flash and a flame such as showed 
 our three-hilled town to the lovers of liberty all over the 
 
 world. An ancestry of ministers, softened out of their old- 
 
 6 
 
42 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 world dogmas by the same influences which set free the 
 colonies, is the true Brahminism of New England. 
 
 Children of the same parentage, as we well know, do not 
 alike manifest the best qualities belonging to the race. But 
 those of the two brothers of Ralph Waldo Emerson whom 
 I can remember were of exceptional and superior natural 
 endowments. Edward, next to him in order of birth, was 
 of the highest promise, only one evidence of which was his 
 standing at the head of his college class at graduation. I 
 recall a tender and most impressive tribute of Mr. Everett s 
 to his memory, at one of our annual Phi Beta Kappa meet 
 ings. He spoke of the blow which had jarred the strings 
 of his fine intellect and made them return a sound 
 
 " Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh," 
 
 in the saddened tones of that rich sonorous voice still thrill 
 ing in the ears of many whose hearing is dulled for all the 
 music, all the eloquence of to-day. 
 
 Of Charles Chauncy, the youngest brother, I knew some 
 thing in my college days. A beautiful, high-souled, pure, 
 exquisitely delicate nature in a slight but finely wrought 
 mortal frame, he was for me the very ideal of an embodied 
 celestial intelligence. I may venture to mention a trivial 
 circumstance, because it points to the character of his 
 favorite reading, which was likely to be guided by the 
 same tastes as his brother s, and may have been specially 
 directed by him. Coming into my room one day, he took 
 up a copy of Hazlitt s British Poets. He opened it to the 
 poem of Andrew Marvell s, entitled " The Nymph Com 
 plaining for the Death of her Fawn," which he read to 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 43 
 
 me with delight irradiating his expressive features. The 
 lines remained with me, or many of them, from that hour, 
 
 " Had it lived long, it would have been 
 Lilies without, roses within." 
 
 I felt as many have felt after being with his brother, Ralph 
 Waldo, that I had entertained an angel visitant. The 
 Fawn of Marvell s imagination survives in my memory as 
 the fitting image to recall this beautiful youth; a soul glow 
 ing like the rose of morning with enthusiasm, a character 
 white as the lilies in its purity. 
 
 Such was the family nature lived out to its full develop 
 ment in Ralph Waldo Emerson. Add to this the special 
 differentiating quality, indefinable as the tone of a voice, 
 which we should know not the less, from that of every 
 other of articulately speaking mortals, and we have the 
 Emerson of our recollections. 
 
 A person who by force of natural gifts is entitled to be 
 called a personage is always a surprise in the order of appear 
 ances, sometimes, as in the case of Shakespeare, of Goethe, 
 a marvel, if not a miracle. The new phenomenon has to be 
 studied like the young growth that sprang up between the 
 stones in the story of Picciola. Is it a common weed, or a 
 plant with virtues and beauties of its own ? Is it a crypto 
 gam that can never flower, or shall we wait and see it blos 
 som by and by ? Is it an endogen or an exogen, did the 
 seed it springs from drop from a neighboring bough, or was 
 it wafted hither on the wings of the wind from some far-off 
 shore ? 
 
 Time taught us what to make of this human growth. It 
 was not an annual or a biennial, but a perennial ; not an her- 
 
44 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 baceous plant, but a towering tree ; not an oak or an elm 
 like those around it, but rather a lofty and spreading palm, 
 which acclimated itself out of its latitude, as the little group 
 of Southern magnolias has done in the woods of our north 
 ern county of Essex. For Emerson s was an Asiatic mind, 
 drawing its sustenance partly from the hard soil of our 
 New England, partly, too, from the air that has known 
 Himalaya and the Ganges. So impressed with this char 
 acter of his mind was Mr. Burlingame, as I saw him, after 
 his return from his mission, that he said to me, in a freshet 
 of hyperbole, which was the overflow of a channel with a 
 thread of truth running in it, " There are twenty thousand 
 Ralph Waldo Emersons in China." 
 
 What could we do with this unexpected, unprovided for, 
 unclassified, half unwelcome new-comer, who had been for 
 a while potted, as it were, in our Unitarian cold greenhouse, 
 but had taken to growing so fast that he was lifting off its 
 glass roof and letting in the hailstorms ? Here was a pro 
 test that outflanked the extreme left of liberalism, yet so 
 calm and serene that its radicalism had the accents of the 
 gospel of peace. Here was an iconoclast without a ham 
 mer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so ten 
 derly that it seemed like an act of worship. 
 
 The scribes and pharisees made light of his oracular 
 sayings. The lawyers could not find the witnesses to sub 
 poena and the documents to refer to when his case came 
 before them, and turned him over to their wives and daugh 
 ters. The ministers denounced his heresies, and handled 
 his writings as if they were packages of dynamite, and the 
 grandmothers were as much afraid of his new teachings as old 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 45 
 
 Mrs. Piozzi was of geology. We had had revolutionary ora 
 tors, reformers, martyrs ; it was but a few years since Abner 
 Kneeland had been sent to jail for expressing an opinion 
 about the great First Cause ; but we had had nothing like 
 this man, with his seraphic voice and countenance, his 
 choice vocabulary, his refined utterance, his gentle courage, 
 which, with a different manner, might have been called 
 audacity, his temperate statement of opinions which 
 threatened to shake the existing order of thought like an 
 earthquake. 
 
 His peculiarities of style and of thinking became fertile 
 parents of mannerisms, which were fair game for ridicule 
 as they appeared in his imitators. For one who talks like 
 Emerson or like Carlyle soon finds himself surrounded by a 
 crowd of walking phonographs, who mechanically repro 
 duce his mental and vocal accents. Emerson was before 
 long talking in the midst of a babbling Simonetta of echoes, 
 and not unnaturally was now and then himself a mark for 
 the small shot of criticism. He had soon reached that 
 height in the " cold thin atmosphere " of thought where 
 
 Vainly the fowler s eye 
 Might mark his distant flight to do him wrong. 
 
 I shall add a few words, of necessity almost epigram 
 matic, upon his work and character. He dealt with life, and 
 life with him was not merely this particular air-breathing 
 phase of being, but the spiritual existence which included it 
 like a parenthesis between the two infinities. He wanted 
 his daily draughts of oxygen like his neighbors, and was as 
 thoroughly human as the plain people he mentions who had 
 successively owned or thought they owned the house-lot on 
 
46 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 which he planted his hearthstone. But he was at home no 
 less in the interstellar spaces outside of all the atmospheres. 
 The semi-materialistic idealism of Milton was a gross and 
 clumsy medium compared to the imponderable ether of 
 " The Oversoul " and the unimaginable vacuum of " Brah 
 ma." He followed in the shining and daring track of the 
 Grains homo of Lucretius : 
 
 " Vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra 
 Processit longe flammantia mcenia mundi." 
 
 It always seemed to me as if he looked at this earth very 
 much as a visitor from another planet would look upon it. 
 He was interested, and to some extent curious about it, 
 but it was not the first spheroid he had been acquainted 
 with, by any means. I have amused myself with comparing 
 his descriptions of natural objects with those of the Angel 
 Raphael in the seventh book of Paradise Lost. Emerson 
 talks of his titmouse as Raphael talks of his emmet. An 
 gels and poets never deal with nature after the manner of 
 those whom we call naturalists. 
 
 To judge of him as a thinker, Emerson should have been 
 heard as a lecturer, for his manner 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. This went so far at times 
 that one could hardly tell whether he was putting together 
 a mosaic of colored fragments, or only turning a kaleido 
 scope where the pieces tumbled about as they best might. 
 It was as if he had been looking in at a cosmic peep-show, 
 and turning from it at brief intervals to tell us what he 
 saw. But what fragments these colored sentences were, 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 47 
 
 and what pictures they often placed before us, as if we too 
 saw them ! Never has this city known such audiences as 
 he gathered ; never was such an Olympian entertainment as 
 that which he gave them. 
 
 It is very hard to speak of Mr. Emerson s poetry ; not to 
 do it injustice, still more to do it justice. It seems to me 
 like the robe of a monarch patched by a New England 
 housewife. The royal tint and stuff are unmistakable, but 
 here and there the gray worsted from the darning-needle 
 crosses and ekes out the Tyrian purple. Few poets who 
 have written so little in verse have dropped so many of 
 those "jewels five words long" which fall from their setting 
 only to be more choicely treasured. E pluribus unum is 
 hardly more familiar to our ears than " He builded better 
 than he knew," and Keats s "thing of beauty" is little bet 
 ter known than Emerson s "beauty is its own excuse for 
 being." One may not like to read Emerson s poetry be 
 cause it is sometimes careless, almost as if carefully so, 
 though never undignified even when slipshod ; spotted with 
 quaint archaisms and strange expressions that sound like 
 the affectation of negligence, or with plain, homely phrases, 
 such as the self-made scholar is always afraid of. But if 
 one likes Emerson s poetry he will be sure to love it ; if he 
 loves it, its phrases will cling to him as hardly any others 
 do. It may not be for the multitude, but it finds its place 
 like pollen-dust and penetrates to the consciousness it is to 
 fertilize and bring to flower and fruit. 
 
 I have known something of Emerson as a talker, not 
 nearly so much as many others who can speak and write of 
 him. It is unsafe to tell how a great thinker talks, for per- 
 
48 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 haps, like a city dealer with a village customer, he has not 
 shown his best goods to the innocent reporter of his say 
 ings. However that may be in this case, let me contrast in 
 a single glance the momentary effect in conversation of the 
 two neighbors, Hawthorne and Emerson. Speech seemed 
 like a kind of travail to Hawthorne. One must harpoon 
 him like a cetacean with questions to make him talk at all. 
 Then the words came from him at last, with bashful mani 
 festations, like those of a young girl, almost, words that 
 gasped themselves forth, seeming to leave a great deal more 
 behind them than they told, and died out, discontented with 
 themselves, like the monologue of thunder in the sky, which 
 always goes off mumbling and grumbling as if it had not 
 said half it wanted to, and meant to, and ought to say. 
 
 Emerson was sparing of words, but used them with great 
 precision and nicety. If he had been followed about by a 
 short-hand writing Boswell, every sentence he ever uttered 
 might have been preserved. To hear him talk was like 
 watching one crossing a brook on stepping-stones. His 
 noun had to wait for its verb or its adjective until he was 
 ready; then his speech would come down upon the word 
 he wanted, and not Worcester and Webster could better it 
 from all the wealth of their huge vocabularies. 
 
 These are only slender rays of side-light on a personality 
 which is interesting in every aspect and will be fully illus 
 trated by those who knew him best. One glimpse of him 
 as a listener may be worth recalling. He was always cour 
 teous and bland to a remarkable degree ; his smile was the 
 well-remembered line of Terence written out in living fea 
 tures. But when anything said specially interested him he 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 49 
 
 would lean toward the speaker with a look never to be for 
 gotten, his head stretched forward, his shoulders raised like 
 the wings of an eagle, and his eye watching the flight of 
 the thought which had attracted his attention as if it were 
 his prey to be seized in mid-air and carried up to his eyry. 
 
 To sum up briefly what would, as it seems to me, be the 
 text to be unfolded in his biography, he was a man of excel 
 lent common-sense, with a genius so uncommon that he 
 seemed like an exotic transplanted from some angelic nur 
 sery. His character was so blameless, so beautiful, that it 
 was rather a standard to judge others by than to find a 
 place for on the scale of comparison. Looking at life with 
 the profoundest sense of its infinite significance, he was 
 yet a cheerful optimist, almost too hopeful, peeping into 
 every cradle to see if it did not hold a babe with the halo of 
 a new Messiah about it. He enriched the treasure-house 
 of literature, but, what was far more, he enlarged the boun 
 daries of thought for the few that followed him and the 
 many who never knew, and do not know to-day, what hand 
 it was which took down their prison walls. He was a 
 preacher who taught that the religion of humanity included 
 both those of Palestine, nor those alone, and taught it with 
 such consecrated lips that the narrowest bigot was ashamed 
 to pray for him, as from a footstool nearer to the throne. 
 " Hitch your wagon to a star; " this was his version of the 
 divine lesson taught by that holy George Herbert whose 
 words he loved. Give him whatever place belongs to him 
 in our literature, in the literature of our language, of the 
 world, but remember this : the end and aim of his being was 
 to make truth lovely and manhood valorous, and to bring 
 
50 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 our daily life nearer and nearer to the eternal, immortal, 
 invisible. 
 
 After the address of Dr. Holmes, the Rev. James Freeman 
 Clarke, D. D., spoke of his long acquaintance with Mr. Emerson and 
 read several interesting extracts from letters which he had received 
 from him at an early period of his career. At the close of his re 
 marks Dr. Clarke presented the following resolution, which was 
 adopted by a rising vote : 
 
 "Resolved, That this Society unites in the wide-spread 
 expression of esteem, gratitude, and affectionate reverence 
 paid to the memory of our late associate, Ralph Waldo 
 Emerson, and recognizes the great influence exercised by his 
 character and writings to elevate, purify, and quicken the 
 thought of our time." 
 
THE following is a reprint, from the Proceedings of the Society, of the 
 paper read by MR. EMERSON on the date and occasion above referred to : 
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF THOMAS CARLYLE IN 1848. 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE is an immense talker, as extraordinary in his 
 conversation as in his writing, I think even more so. 
 
 He is not mainly a scholar, like the most of my acquaintances, but 
 a practical Scotchman, such as you would find in any saddler s or 
 iron-dealer s shop, and then only accidentally, and by a surprising 
 addition, the admirable scholar and writer he is. If you would 
 know precisely how he talks, just suppose Hugh Whelan (the 
 gardener) had found leisure enough in addition to all his daily 
 work to read Plato and Shakespeare, Augustine and Calvin, and, 
 remaining Hugh Whelan all the time, should talk scornfully of all 
 this nonsense of books that he had been bothered with, and you 
 shall have just the tone and talk and laughter of Carlyle. 
 
 I called him a trip-hammer with "an JEoYian attachment." He 
 has, too, the strong religious tinge you sometimes find in burly peo 
 ple. That, and all his qualities, have a certain virulence, coupled 
 though it be in his case with the utmost impatience of Christen 
 dom and Jewdom and all existing presentments of the good old 
 story. He talks like a very unhappy man, profoundly solitary, 
 displeased and hindered by all men and things about him, and, 
 biding his time, meditating how to undermine and explode the 
 whole world of nonsense which torments him. He is obviously 
 greatly respected by all sorts of people, understands his own 
 
52 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 value quite as well as Webster, of whom his behavior sometimes 
 reminds me, and can see society on his own terms. 
 
 And, though no mortal in America could pretend to talk with 
 Carlyle, who is also as remarkable in England as the Tower of 
 London, yet neither would he in any manner satisfy us (Americans) or 
 begin to answer the questions which we ask. He is a very national 
 figure, and would by no means bear transplantation. They keep 
 Carlyle as a sort of portable cathedral-bell, which they like to pro 
 duce in companies where he is unknown, and set a-swinging, to the 
 surprise and consternation of all persons, bishops, courtiers, scholars, 
 writers, and, as in companies here (in England) no man is named 
 or introduced, great is the effect and great the inquiry. Forster of 
 Rawdon described to me a dinner at the table-d hote of some pro 
 vincial hotel where he carried Carlyle, and where an Irish canon had 
 uttered something ; Carlyle began to talk, first to the waiters and 
 then to the walls, and then, lastly, unmistakably to the priest, in a 
 manner that frighted the whole company. 
 
 Young men, especially those holding liberal opinions, press to see 
 him, but it strikes me like being hot to see the mathematical or 
 Greek professor before they have got their lesson. It needs some 
 thing more than a clean shirt and reading German to visit him. 
 He treats them with contempt ; they profess freedom, and he stands 
 for slavery ; they praise republics, and he likes the Russian Czar ; 
 they admire Cobden and free trade, and he is a protectionist in 
 political economy ; they will eat vegetables and drink water, and he 
 is a Scotchman who thinks English national character has a pure 
 enthusiasm for beef and mutton, describes with gusto the crowds 
 of people who gaze at the sirloins in the dealer s shop-window, and 
 even likes the Scotch nightcap ; they praise moral suasion ; he goes 
 for murder, money, capital punishment, and other pretty abomi 
 nations of English law. They wish freedom of the press, and he 
 thinks the first thing he would do, if he got into Parliament, would 
 be to turn out the reporters, and stop all manner of mischievous 
 speaking to Buncombe and wind-bags. " In the Long Parliament," 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 53 
 
 he says, " the only great Parliament, they sat secret and silent, 
 grave as an ecumenical council, and I know not what they would 
 have done to anybody that had got in there, and attempted to tell 
 out-of-doors what they did." They go for free institutions, for letting 
 things alone, and only giving opportunity and motive to every man ; 
 he for a stringent government that shows people what they must do, 
 and makes them do it. " Here," he says, " the Parliament gathers up 
 six millions of pounds every year, to give to the poor, and yet the 
 people starve. I think if they would give it to me, to provide the 
 poor with labor, and with authority to make them work, or shoot 
 them, and I to be hanged if I did not do it, I could find them 
 in plenty of Indian meal." 
 
 He throws himself readily on the other side. If you urge free 
 trade, he remembers that every laborer is a monopolist. The navi 
 gation laws of England made its commerce. " St. John was insulted 
 by the Dutch ; he came home, got the law passed that foreign vessels 
 should pay high fees, and it cut the throat of the Dutch, and made 
 the English trade." If you boast of the growth of the country, and 
 show him the wonderful results of the census, he finds nothing so 
 depressing as the sight of a great mob. He saw once, as he told 
 me, three or four miles of human beings, and fancied that " the airth 
 was some great cheese, and these were mites." If a Tory takes 
 heart at his hatred of stump oratory and model republics, he replies, 
 " Yes, the idea of a pig-headed soldier who will obey orders, and fire 
 on his own father at the command of his officer, is a great comfort 
 to the aristocratic mind." It is not so much that Carlyle cares for 
 this or that dogma, as that he likes genuineness (the source of all 
 strength) in his companions. 
 
 If a scholar goes into a camp of lumbermen or a gang of riggers, 
 those men will quickly detect any fault of character. Nothing will 
 pass with them but what is real and sound. So this man is a ham 
 mer that crushes mediocrity and pretension. He detects weakness 
 on the instant, and touches it. He has a vivacious, aggressive tem 
 perament, and unimpressionable. The literary, the fashionable, the 
 
54 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 political man, each fresh from triumphs in his own sphere, comes 
 eagerly to see this man, whose fun they have heartily enjoyed, sure 
 of a welcome, and are struck with despair at the first onset. His 
 firm, victorious, scoffing vituperation strikes them with chill and 
 hesitation. His talk often reminds you of what was said of John 
 son : " If his pistol missed fire he would knock you down with the 
 butt-end." 
 
 Mere intellectual partisanship wearies him ; he detects in an in 
 stant if a man stands for any cause to which he is not born and 
 organically committed. A natural defender of anything, a lover 
 who will live and die for that which he speaks for, and who does 
 not care for him, or for anything but his own business, he re 
 spects: and the nobler this object, of course, the better. He hates 
 a literary trifler, and if, after Guizot had been a tool of Louis Philippe 
 for years, he is now to come and write essays on the character of 
 Washington, on " The Beautiful," and on " Philosophy of History," 
 he thinks that nothing. 
 
 Great is his reverence for realities, for all such traits as spring 
 from the intrinsic nature of the actor. He humors this into the 
 idolatry of strength. A strong nature has a charm for him, previous, 
 it would seem, to all inquiry whether the force be divine or diabolic. 
 He preaches, as by cannonade, the doctrine that every noble nature 
 was made by God, and contains, if savage passions, also fit checks 
 and grand impulses, and, however extravagant, will keep its orbit 
 and return from far. 
 
 Nor can that decorum which is the idol of the Englishman, and 
 in attaining which the Englishman exceeds all nations, win from 
 him any obeisance. He is eaten up with indignation against such 
 as desire to make a fair show in the flesh. 
 
 Combined with this warfare on respectabilities, and, indeed, point 
 ing all his satire, is the severity of his moral sentiment. In propor 
 tion to the peals of laughter amid which he strips the plumes of a 
 pretender and shows the lean hypocrisy to every vantage of ridicule, 
 does he worship whatever enthusiasm, fortitude, love, or other sign 
 of a good nature is in a man. 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 55 
 
 There is nothing deeper in his constitution than his humor, than 
 the considerate, condescending good-nature with which he looks at 
 every object in existence, as a man might look at a mouse. He 
 feels that the perfection of health is sportiveness, and will not look 
 grave even at dulness or tragedy. 
 
 His guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole 
 importance of truth and justice; but that is a truth of character, 
 not of catechisms. 
 
 He says, " There is properly no religion in England. These 
 idle nobles at Tattersall s, there is no work or word of serious 
 purpose in them ; they have this great lying church ; and life is a 
 humbug." He prefers Cambridge to Oxford, but he thinks Oxford 
 and Cambridge education indurates the young men, as the Styx 
 hardened Achilles, so that when they come forth of them, they say, 
 " Now we are proof : we have gone through all the degrees, and are 
 case-hardened against the veracities of the Universe ; nor man nor 
 God can penetrate us." 
 
 Wellington he respects as real and honest, and as having made 
 up his mind, once for all, that he will not have to do with any kind 
 of a lie. 
 
 Edwin Chadwick is one of his heroes, who proposes to provide 
 every house in London with pure water, sixty gallons to every head, 
 at a penny a week ; and in the decay and downfall of all religions, 
 Carlyle thinks that the only religious act which a man nowadays can 
 securely perform is to wash himself well. 
 
 Of course the new French Revolution of 1848 was the best thing 
 he had seen, and the teaching this great swindler, Louis Philippe, 
 that there is a God s justice in the Universe, after all, was a great 
 satisfaction. Czar Nicholas was his hero : for, in the ignominy of 
 Europe, when all thrones fell like card-houses, and no man was 
 found with conscience enough to fire a gun for his crown, but every 
 one ran away in a coucou, with his head shaved, through the Barriere 
 de Passy, one man remained who believed he was put there by God 
 Almighty to govern his empire, and, by the help of God, had 
 resolved to stand there. 
 
56 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 He was very serious about the bad times ; he had seen this evil 
 coming, but thought it would not come in his time. But now t is 
 coming, and the only good he sees in it is the visible appearance of 
 the gods. He thinks it the only question for wise men, instead of 
 art, and fine fancies, and poetry, and such things, to address them 
 selves to the problem of society. This confusion is the inevitable 
 end of such falsehood and nonsense as they have been embroiled 
 with. 
 
 Carlyle has, best of all men in England, kept the manly attitude 
 in his time. He has stood for scholars, asking no scholar what he 
 should say. Holding an honored place in the best society, he has 
 stood for the people, for the Chartist, 1 for the pauper, intrepidly and 
 scornfully teaching the nobles their peremptory duties. 
 
 His errors of opinion are as nothing in comparison with this 
 merit, in my judgment. This aplomb cannot be mimicked; it is 
 the speaking to the heart of the thing. And in England, where 
 the morgue of aristocracy has very slowly admitted scholars into 
 society, a very few houses only in the high circles being ever 
 opened to them, he has carried himself erect, made himself a 
 power confessed by all men, and taught scholars their lofty duty. 
 He never feared the face of man. 
 
 The following is the Speech by MR. EMERSON at the Burns Centenary, 
 referred to by Mr. Hoar, in his letter as printed on a previous page : 
 
 SPEECH BEFORE THE BOSTON BURNS CLUB. 
 
 MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN, I do not know by what 
 untoward accident it has chanced and I forbear to inquire that, 
 in this accomplished circle, it should fall to me, the worst Scots 
 man of all, to receive your commands, and at the latest hour, too, 
 
 1 The Chartists were then preparing to go in a procession of 200,000, to carry their 
 petition, embodying the six points of Chartism, to the House of Commons, on the loth 
 of April, 1848. 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 57 
 
 to respond to the sentiment just offered, and which indeed makes 
 the occasion. But I am told there is no appeal, and I must trust 
 to the inspiration of the theme to make a fitness which does not 
 otherwise exist. 
 
 Yet, sir, I heartily feel the singular claims of the occasion. At 
 the first announcement, from I know not whence, that the 25th of 
 January was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, 
 a sudden consent warmed the great English race, in all its king 
 doms, colonies, and states, all over the world, to keep the festival. 
 
 We are here to hold our parliament with love and poesy, as men 
 were wont to do in the middle ages. Those famous parliaments 
 might or might not have had more stateliness, and better singers 
 than we though that is yet to be known but they could not 
 have better reason. 
 
 I can only explain this singular unanimity in a race which 
 rarely acts together, but rather after their watchword, each for 
 himself by the fact that Robert Burns, the poet of the middle 
 class, represents in the mind of men to-day that great uprising of 
 the middle class against the armed and privileged minorities that 
 uprising which worked politically in the American and French 
 Revolutions, and which, not in governments so much as in educa 
 tion and in social order, has changed the face of the world. 
 
 In order for this destiny, his birth, breeding, and fortune were 
 low. His organic sentiment was absolute independence, and rest 
 ing, as it should, on a life of labor. No man existed who could 
 look down on him. They that looked into his eyes saw that they 
 might look down the sky as easily. His muse and teaching was 
 common sense, joyful, aggressive, irresistible. 
 
 Not Latimer, not Luther, struck more telling blows against 
 false theology than did this brave singer. The " Confession of 
 Augsburg," the " Declaration of Independence," the French 
 " Rights of Man," and the " Marseillaise " are not more weighty 
 documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns. 
 His satire has lost none of its edge. His musical arrows yet sing 
 
 through the air. 
 
 8 
 
58 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 He is so substantially a reformer, that I find his grand plain 
 sense in close chain with the greatest masters Rabelais, Shakes 
 peare in comedy, Cervantes, Butler, and Burns. If I should add 
 another name, I find it only in a living countryman of Burns. He 
 is an exceptional genius. The people who care nothing for litera 
 ture and poetry care for Burns. It was indifferent they thought 
 who saw him whether he wrote verse or not ; he could have 
 done anything else as well. 
 
 Yet how true a poet is he ! And the poet, too, of poor men, of 
 hodden-gray, and the Guernsey-coat, and the blouse. He has given 
 voice to all the experiences of common life ; he has endeared the 
 farm-house and cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley ; 
 ale, the poor man s wine ; hardship, the fear of debt, the dear so 
 ciety of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each 
 other, knowing so few, and finding amends for want and obscurity 
 in books and thought. What a love of nature ! and, shall I say it, 
 of middle-class nature. Not great, like Goethe, in the stars, or like 
 Byron on the ocean, or Moore in the luxurious East, but in the 
 homely landscape which the poor see around them bleak leagues 
 of pasture and stubble, ice, and sleet, and rain, and snow-choked 
 brooks ; birds, hares, field-mice, thistles, and heather, which he 
 daily knew. How many "Bonny Boons," and "John Anderson 
 my joes," and "Auld Lang Synes," all around the earth, have his 
 verses been applied to ! And his love-songs still woo and melt the 
 youths and maids ; the farm work, the country holiday, the fishing 
 cobble, are still his debtors to-day. 
 
 And, as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, 
 working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew 
 up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but na 
 tives, and he has made that Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of 
 fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic 
 by the genius of a single man. But more than this. He had that 
 secret of genius to draw from the bottom of society the strength 
 of its speech, and astonish the ears of the polite with these artless 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 59 
 
 words, better than art, and filtered of all offence through his beauty. 
 It seemed odious to Luther that the devil should have all the best 
 tunes ; he would bring them into the churches ; and Burns knew 
 how to take from fairs and gypsies, blacksmiths and drovers, the 
 speech of the market and street, and clothe it with melody. 
 
 But I am detaining you too long. The memory of Burns I 
 am afraid heaven and earth have taken too good care of it, to 
 leave us anything to say. The west winds are murmuring it. 
 Open the windows behind you, and hearken for the incoming 
 tide, what the waves say of it. The doves perching always 
 on the eaves of the Stone Chapel opposite, may know something 
 about it. Every name in broad Scotland keeps his fame bright. 
 The memory of Burns every man s, and boy s, and girl s head 
 carries snatches of his songs, and can say them by heart, and, what 
 is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth 
 to mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the 
 corn, barley, and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them ; nay, the music- 
 boxes at Geneva are framed and toothed to play them ; the hand- 
 organs of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes 
 of bells ring them in the spires. They are the property and the 
 solace of mankind. 
 
 At the Commemorative recognition of Sir Walter Scott, as it was 
 noticed by this Society, i5th August, 1871, MR. EMERSON spoke as fol 
 lows : 
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT. 
 
 The memory of Sir Walter Scott is dear to this Society, of 
 which he was for ten years an honorary member. If only as an 
 eminent antiquary who has shed light on the history of Europe 
 and of the English race, he had high claims to our regard. But 
 to the rare tribute of a centennial anniversary of his birthday, 
 which we gladly join with Scotland and indeed with Europe to 
 
60 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 keep, he is not less entitled perhaps he alone among the liter 
 ary men of this century is entitled by the exceptional debt 
 which all English-speaking men have gladly owed to his character 
 and genius. I think no modern writer has inspired his readers 
 with such affection to his own personality. I can well remember 
 as far back as when " The Lord of the Isles " was first republished 
 in Boston, in 1815, my own and my schoolfellows joy in the 
 book. " Marmion " and " The Lay " had gone before, but we 
 were then learning to spell. In the face of the later novels, we 
 still claim that his poetry is the delight of boys. But this means 
 that when we reopen these old books, we all consent to be boys 
 again. We tread over our youthful grounds with joy. Critics 
 have found them to be only rhymed prose. But I believe that 
 many of those who read them in youth, when, later, they come to 
 dismiss finally their school-days library, will make some fond ex 
 ception for Scott as for Byron. 
 
 It is easy to see the origin of his poems. His own ear had been 
 charmed by old ballads crooned by Scottish dames at firesides, and 
 written down from their lips by antiquaries ; and, finding them 
 now outgrown and dishonored by the new .culture, he attempted to 
 dignify and adapt them to the times in which he lived. Just so 
 much thought, so much picturesque detail in dialogue or descrip 
 tion as the old ballad required, so much suppression of details, and 
 leaping to the event, he would keep and use, but without any am 
 bition to write a high poem after a classic model. He made no 
 pretension to the lofty style of Spenser, or Milton, or Wordsworth. 
 Compared with their purified songs, purified of all ephemeral 
 color or material, his were vers de socittd. But he had the skill 
 proper to vers de socittt, skill to fit his verse to his topic, and 
 not to write solemn pentameters alike on a hero or a spaniel. His 
 good sense probably elected the ballad, to make his audience larger. 
 He apprehended in advance the immense enlargement of the 
 reading public, which almost dates from the era of his books, an 
 event which his books and Byron s inaugurated ; and which, 
 
Tributes to Emerson. 61 
 
 though until then unheard of, has become familiar to the present 
 time. * 
 
 If the success of his poems, however large, was partial, that of 
 his novels was complete. The tone of strength in " Waverley " at 
 once announced the master, and was more than justified by the 
 superior genius of the following romances, up to the "Bride of 
 Lammermoor," which almost goes back to ^Eschylus, for a coun 
 terpart, as a painting of Fate, leaving on every reader the impres 
 sion of the highest and purest tragedy. 
 
 His power on the public mind rests on the singular union of 
 two influences. By nature, by his reading and taste, an aristocrat, 
 in a time and country which easily gave him that bias, he had the 
 virtues and graces of that class, and by his eminent humanity and 
 his love of labor escaped its harm. He saw in the English Church 
 the symbol and seal of all social order ; in the historical aristocracy, 
 the benefits to the state which Burke claimed for it ; and in his 
 own reading and research, such store of legend and renown as 
 won his imagination to their cause. Not less his eminent humanity 
 delighted in the sense and virtue and wit of the common people. 
 In his own household and neighbors he found characters and pets 
 of humble class, with whom he established the best relation, 
 small farmers and tradesmen, shepherds, fishermen, gypsies, peas 
 ant-girls, crones, and carne with these into real ties of mutual 
 help and good-will. From these originals he drew so genially his 
 Jeannie Deans, his Dinmonts and Edie Ochiltrees, Caleb Balder- 
 stone and Fairservice, Cuddie Headriggs, Dominies, Meg Merri- 
 lies and Jeannie Rintherouts, full of life and reality ; making these, 
 too, the pivots on which the plots of his stories turn ; and mean 
 time without one word of brag of this discernment, nay, this ex 
 treme sympathy reaching down to every beggar and beggar s dog, 
 and horse and cow. In the number and variety of his characters, 
 he approaches Shakespeare. Other painters in verse or prose have 
 thrown into literature a few type-figures, as Cervantes, DeFoe, 
 Richardson, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Fielding ; but Scott portrayed 
 
62 Massachusetts Historical Society. 
 
 with equal strength and success every figure in his crowded 
 company. 
 
 His strong good sense saved him from the faults and foibles in 
 cident to poets, from nervous egotism, sham modesty, or jealousy. 
 He played ever a manly part. With such a fortune and such a 
 genius, we should look to see what heavy toll the Fates took of 
 him, as of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Swift or Byron. But no : he had 
 no insanity, or vice, or blemish. He was a thoroughly upright, 
 wise, and great-hearted man, equal to whatever event or fortune 
 should try him. Disasters only drove him to immense exertion. 
 What an ornament and safeguard is humor ! Far better than wit 
 for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from 
 the insanities. 
 
 Under what rare conjunction of stars was this man born, that, 
 wherever he lived, he found superior men, passed all his life in the 
 best company, and still found himself the best of the best ! He 
 was apprenticed at Edinburgh to a Writer to the Signet, and be 
 came a Writer to the Signet, and found himself in his youth and 
 manhood and age in the society of Mackintosh, Horner, Jeffrey, 
 Playfair, Dugald Stewart, Sydney Smith, Leslie, Sir William Ham 
 ilton, Wilson, Hogg, De Quincey, to name only some of his literary 
 neighbors. 
 
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