his gifted wife. Between the two men, alike in their spiritual enthusiasms though unlike in temperament, a correspondence began, after Emerson's return, which was stimulating to both. Indeed, it was through his Concord friend that the earlier works of the Scotchman were first published and extensively read in America.

Emerson now settled down at Concord and gave himself to lecturing and writing. It was the day of the "lyceum lecture course" in nearly every town and village, the predecessor of the present-day "university extension course." Beginning with lectures on natural history and his travels, he soon chose more abstract themes of ethical and literary value, and on these he prepared discourses or wrote essays. For the next thirty or forty years he supported himself in part, at least, by lecturing; some of his trips extended into the South and the West. His serene presence and the lofty idealism of his utterances, despite his somewhat awkward manner, held his audiences, who overlooked his absentmindedness, his losing of his place in the manuscript, and his hesitations, because they saw in him the embodiment of moral earnestness and in his language a rare poetic beauty. At home in Concord he was a kind and considerate neighbor in the square, old-fashioned white house, whither he brought his second wife in 1835.

Here he lived until his death. Another trip to Europe was made in 1847-'48, during which he lectured in England. In 1871 he went as far west as California, a considerable undertaking in that day. The last journey abroad followed the burning of his house in 1872, partly for relief from the shock and for the benefit of his health in general. On his return the next year his neighbors met him at the station with carriages, music, and flowers, and in a triumphal procession escorted him to the house which they had restored for him in his absence. In all these years various worldly honors had come to the philosopher: Harvard conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws in 1866; he spoke before many societies and colleges; in 1874 he was nominated for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University against the Earl of Beaconsfield, and received five hundred votes to the Englishman's seven hundred, a remarkable honor for an American. One of his last addresses was that before the literary societies of the University of Virginia in 1876.

Even before the burning of his home in 1872, Emerson's friends had noticed a weakening of his physical powers, which showed itself most perceptibly in lapses of memory. He forgot faces and names, and for ten years before his death he was fully himself only at times. At Longfellow's funeral, not a great while before his own, he looked intently at the face of the dead poet and said to a friend near him: "That gentle

man was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name.” The twilight deepened until the end came peacefully on April 27, 1882. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord; a huge granite boulder marks the tomb, and on its rough-hewn face, following Emerson's name, is the inscription, taken from his own poem, "The Problem": The passive Master lent his hand

To the vast soul that o'er him planned.

His Personality.-Emerson was tall and slender, with the face and manner of a scholar. His features, as one may see in his pictures, were refined and his expression sedate, calm, and kindly. In his countenance there was a rare serenity. "There was majesty about him," says Lowell, "beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts." Simplicity

characterized his habits of life.

He had little of the traditional

Yankee ingenuity: he said he could split a shingle four ways with one nail; his little son, seeing him handle a spade rather awkwardly, called out, "Take care, papa,-you will dig your leg." He is said to have had remarkable patience and a good temper; he endured with equanimity the visits of the curious. There is general agreement as to his gracious manner and his sincerity; children loved him and Concord farmers liked to talk with him, though they did not comprehend all he said.

There was, withal, an indefinable charm about Emerson's personality. His smile has been called angelic. And yet he was not without a touch of native shrewdness that saved him from wild schemes of reform; he had too much common sense to follow the fantastic notions of some of his fellow transcendentalists. His reserve kept him a little aloof, so that he had not many intimate friends. The admiration he excited among those who agreed with him as well as among those who did not, is an evidence of the fascination of an unworldly nature, in which there was a suggestion of the seer and the mystic. "It was good," says Hawthorne, "to meet him in the wood-paths or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one."

His Essays.-Emerson's prose works consist for the most part of essays and addresses. Even when a volume is made up of chapters and the whole called Nature, or English Traits, or The Conduct of Life, or Society and Solitude, each chaper is simply an essay on some phase of the general subject considered more or less abstractly. The earliest volume is entitled Nature, and appeared in 1836; the headings of some of the chapters are "Beauty," "Discipline," "Idealism," "Spirit." The same method is pursued in later works, such as The Conduct of Life (1860) and Society and Solitude (1870). The most concrete prose work is that called English Traits (1856), a series of chapters on the characteristics of the English people as observed by Emerson on his lecture tour in England and Scotland in 1847-'48. Representative Men (1850) is a group of estimates of the characters, teachings, and influence of great personages— Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Goethe; this volume, originally lectures in Great Britain, suggests Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship. It is evident, therefore, that the essay-form was Emerson's favorite method, whether he named his effort an "essay" or a "lecture." Indeed, his essays were mostly adaptations of his lectures.

The first notable utterance of Emerson was his Phi Beta Kappa address on "The American Scholar," delivered at Harvard in 1837. In this famous speech he pleads for a more generous and a more original culture in America. The time has come, he says, to speak and think for ourselves; what is needed in literature and in thought is the boldness to break with tradition and freely to act on our own intuitions. He exhorted young men to do their own thinking; he assured them that imitation is suicide; he summoned them as with a trumpet call to a newer freedom:

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. . . . A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

This remarkable address was epoch-making; Holmes calls it "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." Lowell has told us of the scene as one "always to be treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent." To the younger part of the audience "The American Scholar" was an inspiring message; among the conservative it aroused dissent, which was emphasized by the "Divinity School Address" the next year. One thing was clear, however a new oracle had appeared.

Far more startling to his hearers and readers was the "Divinity School Address," delivered in the summer of 1838 before the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School. In this Emerson makes a strong plea for the right of the individual soul as an interpreter of religion, without reliance on historical creeds or other outward forms. The conservative Unitarians were shocked at what seemed the destructive tendencies of the address, and a somewhat violent controversy followed, in which, however, Emerson himself took no part. The opening