EMERSON THE LECTURER. 279 



that excitement, as we walked homeward with prouder stride 

 over the creaking snow. And were they not knit together by a 

 higher logic than our mere sense could master? Were we 

 enthusiasts ? I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to 

 the man who made us worth something for once in our lives. 

 If asked what was left ? what we carried home ? we should not 

 have been careful for an answer. It would have been enough if 

 we had said that something beautiful had passed that way. Or 

 we might have asked in return what one brought away from a 

 symphony of Beethoven ? Enough that he had set that ferment 

 of wholesome discontent at work in us. There is one, at least, 

 of those old hearers, so many of whom are now in the fruition 

 of that intellectual beauty of which Emerson gave them both 

 the desire and the foretaste, who will always love to repeat : 



Che in la mente m e fitta, ed or m accuora 

 La cara e buona immagine paterna 

 Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora 

 M insegnavaste come 1 uom s eterna. 



I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of the third lecture 

 of the present course, in which Mr. Emerson gave some delight 

 ful reminiscences of the intellectual influences in whose move 

 ment he had shared. It was like hearing Goethe read some 

 passages of the * Wahrheit aus seinem Leben. Not that there 

 was not a little Dichtung, too, here and there, as the lecturer 

 built up so lofty a pedestal under certain figures as to lift them 

 into a prominence of obscurity, and seem to masthead them 

 there. Everybody was asking his neighbour who this or that 

 recondite great man was, in the faint hope that somebody might 

 once have heard of him. There are those who call Mr. Emer 

 son cold. Let them revise their judgment in presence of this 

 loyalty of his that can keep warm for half a century, that never 

 forgets a friendship, or fails to pay even a fancied obligation to 

 the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of shadows was 

 but incidental, and pleasantly characteristic of the man to those 

 who know and love him. The^greater part of the lecture was 

 devoted to reminiscences of things substantial in themselves. 

 He spoke of Everett, fresh from Greece and Germany ; of 

 Channing ; of the translations of Margaret Fuller, Ripley, and 

 Dwight ; of the Dial and Brook Farm. To what he said of the 

 latter an undertone of good-humoured irony gave special zest. 

 But what every one of his hearers felt was that the protagonist 

 in the drama was left out. The lecturer was no ./Eneas to 

 babble the quorum magna pars fui, and, as one of his listeners, 

 I cannot help wishing to say how each of them was comment- 



