GEORGE EMERSON 



125 



us, that he was soon to die, may have had much to do with his 

 journeys to the spaces ; but this sense of the finish did not make 

 him sorrowful ; as the phrase has it, he " burned his own smoke." 

 I doubt if there was much to burn, for his was a brave soul. In 

 shape he was small, rather shrunken, for the malady clutched 

 him in his adolescence, but he had the Caesar nose, that cleav- 

 ing prow of a nose which is the only feature of the face which 

 in my experience tells of true valor. 



I talked much of high things with Emerson in our rooms in 

 Cambridge and our walks about the town. He could not range 

 far, for his breath was scant ; but I was glad to go slowly with 

 him and to rest often, for we always went far in these short 

 farings. We were most together on the occasions, rather fre- 

 quent, when he took me to his home in Greenfield, in the Con- 

 necticut valley. Here he had some property and a lot of inter- 

 esting people, his kindred and friends. My memory of those 

 good folk is now faint, save for the abiding impression that they 

 were living the quiet, deep, unsignifying life of the New Eng- 

 lander, that Puritanic life so different from the housetop-shout- 

 ing mode of living I had been accustomed to. One of these fig- 

 ures is still vivid that of an old gentleman with a soldierly 

 figure and a noble face, who had been much about the world, 

 having spent long years in India amid rich experiences. This 

 dear man was mildly insane, and because of his occasional per- 

 turbations shunned by the people of the town, even by his kin- 

 dred. I was accustomed to deal with such unfortunates, be- 

 cause in the community where I began the task of dealing with 

 neighbors, his like were allowed to go about getting what they 

 could from human intercourse, and their capers were looked 

 upon as amusing. So I took many long walks with this sturdy 

 madman, and greatly enjoyed what he gave me from his ample 

 store of memory and the simple kindly philosophy which was 

 mingled with it. When once in an hour or so he would "fly 

 off the handle," I would not notice the aberration, but steer 

 him back to himself with some question concerning his experi- 



