Emerson | Page 4

he has told the world how these illustrious men in their several fashions
and degrees impressed him.[2] It was Carlyle who struck him most.
'Many a time upon the sea, in my homeward voyage, I remembered
with joy the favoured condition of my lonely philosopher,' cherishing
visions more than divine 'in his stern and blessed solitude.' So Carlyle,
with no less cordiality, declares that among the figures that he could
recollect as visiting his Nithsdale hermitage--'all like Apparitions now,

bringing with them airs from Heaven, or the blasts from the other
region, there is not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than
yourself; so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing
too so soon into the azure Inane, as an Apparition should.'
[Footnote 2: English Traits, 7-18. Ireland, 143-152. Froude's Carlyle, ii.
355-359.]
* * * * *
In external incident Emerson's life was uneventful. Nothing could be
simpler, of more perfect unity, or more free from disturbing episodes
that leaves scars on men. In 1834 he settled in old Concord, the home
of his ancestors, then in its third century. 'Concord is very bare,' wrote
Clough, who made some sojourn there in 1852, 'and so is the country in
general; it is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses,
painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two white
wooden churches. There are some American elms of a weeping kind,
and sycamores, i.e. planes; but the wood is mostly pine--white pine and
yellow pine--somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks,
and marshy hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook runs
through to the Concord River.'[3] The brook flowed across the few
acres that were Emerson's first modest homestead. 'The whole external
appearance of the place,' says one who visited him, 'suggests
old-fashioned comfort and hospitality. Within the house the flavour of
antiquity is still more noticeable. Old pictures look down from the
walls; quaint blue-and-white china holds the simple dinner; old
furniture brings to mind the generations of the past. At the right as you
enter is Mr. Emerson's library, a large square room, plainly furnished,
but made pleasant by pictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that
line the walls are well filled with books. There is a lack of showy
covers or rich bindings, and each volume seems to have soberly grown
old in constant service. Mr. Emerson's study is a quiet room upstairs.'
[Footnote 3: Clough's Life and Letters, i. 185.]
Fate did not spare him the strokes of the common lot. His first wife
died after three short years of wedded happiness. He lost a little son,

who was the light of his eyes. But others were born to him, and in all
the relations and circumstances of domestic life he was one of the best
and most beloved of men. He long carried in his mind the picture of
Carlyle's life at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his own
choice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly in the busy world, nor
quite beyond it.'
'Besides my house,' he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I have, I believe, 22,000
dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other
tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last
winter 800 dollars. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich
man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance, I have food,
warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no
longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I
suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend, because of the
inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home I
am rich--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation
of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and keeps my philosophy from
Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of
ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things
is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my
watching from morning to night;--these, and three domestic women,
who cook and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit
and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards
composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs
incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.
'In summer, with the aid of a neighbour, I manage my garden; and a
week ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees
to protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the
place is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good
and