158 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 



&quot; 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.&quot; 



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

 lecture of the present course, in which Mr. Emerson gave 

 some delightful reminiscences of the intellectual influences 

 in whose movement he had shared. It was like hearing 

 Goethe read some passages of the &quot; Wahrheit aus seinem 

 Leben.&quot; 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 mast-head 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. Emerson 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 D wight : 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 j^Sneas to babble the quorum magna 

 parsfui, and, as one of his listeners, I cannot help wishing 

 to say how each of them was commenting the story as 

 it went along, and filling up the necessary gaps in it from 

 his own private store of memories. His younger hearers 

 could not know how much they owed to the benign 

 impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything ignoble, the 

 never-sated hunger of self-culture, that was personified in 

 the man before them. But the older knew how much the 



