treading on eggs-to strengthen my constitution. It is a long battle, this of mine, betwixt life and death, and it is wholly uncertain to whom the game belongs." This regimen proved efficacious. The result of the lounging and loitering existence that he led was that he was soon able to report that he was on the mend, and was beginning to look less like a monument and more like a man. It was at this time, during his second residence at Divinity Hall, that Dr. Hedge made Emerson's acquaintance. He describes him as being slow in his movements as in his speech. He would never, says Dr. Hedge, through eagerness interrupt any speaker with whom he conversed, however prepos

To those who go and those who come: Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home. Emerson's sojourn in his "sylvan home was of the briefest duration. In February, 1825, he went to Cambridge, and before leaving Canterbury he had, on Sunday, April 24, 1824, made the following entry in his journal: "I am beginning my professional studies. In a month I shall be legally a man; and I deliberately dedicate my time, my talents, and my hopes to the Church." Before taking so solemn a step in his existence he proceeded to make a careful examination of his past and present life. He had, he thought, a strong imagination, and consequently a keen relish for the beauties of poetry. But his reasoning faculty was proportion-sessed with a contrary opinion; and no ately weak, nor could he ever hope to write a Butler's "Analogy," or an essay of Hume. Still, for all that, he saw no reason why he should despair of thriving in divinity. "I inherit from my sire," he said, in communing with his own spirit, a formality of manner and speech, but I derive from him or his patriotic parent a passionate love for the strains of eloquence. I burn after the aliquid immensum infinitumque which Cicero desired: What we ardently love we learn to imitate. But the most prodigious genius, a seraph's eloquence, will shamefully defeat its own end if it has not first won the heart of the defender to the cause he defends."

Whatever might be his views at other periods of his life, he was now, and for some years to come, a convinced believer in the essential truths of the Christian faith. "In my frigidest moments," he writes under the date of June, 1827, "when I put behind me the subtler evidences, and set Christianity in the light of a piece of human history, much as Confucius or Solyman might regard it, I believe myself immortal. The beam of the balance trembles to be sure, but settles always on the right side, for otherwise all things look so silly."

But before this passage was written Emerson had spent a twelve-month in the Divinity School at Cambridge, Mass., and had, on October 10, 1826, been "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. Another interval, however, was destined to elapse before he became the minister of the Second Church in Boston. His health gave way, and he was obliged to visit the far South. On his return to Cambridge, he says in a letter to his brother William: "I am writing sermons. I am living cautiously—yea,

one ever saw him run. In ethics he held very positive opinions. Here his native independence of thought was manifest. "Owe no conformity to custom," he said, "against your private judgment. Have no regard to the influence of your example, but act always from the simplest motive."

Emerson's health was so far recovered that in March, 1829, he was ordained minister at Boston, and in September of the same year he was married to Ellen Louisa Tucker. She was "the fairest and best of her kind," and Emerson was now, to quote his own words, as happy as it is safe in life to be." But "happiness too swiftly flies," and death had marked Ellen for his own. She died of consumption in February, 1832.

66

Brief, also, though not quite so brief, was his connection with the church at Boston. Whilst, however, it was brief, it was not undistinguished. The style and the substance of his discourses were all his own.

He borrowed little from and he

He

owed little to other men. When he lis-
tened to other preachers and divines he
was for the most part constrained to con.
fess that the image in the pulpit was all
of clay, and not of tunable metal.
said to himself on such an occasion, if
men would avoid that general language
and general manner in which they strive
to hide all that is peculiar, and would say
only what was uppermost in their own
minds, after their own individual manner,
every man would be interesting. The
common usage in preaching, he contended,
was too straitened. It did not apply itself
to all the good and evil that is in the
human bosom. It walked in a narrɔw
round; it harped on a few and ancient
strings. It was much addicted to a few
words; it held on to phrases when the

conceived an unbounded admiration for
their author. He was determined to meet
him face to face, and after overcoming
many obstacles, he at length succeeded in
giving effect to his resolution. As Car-
lyle sat despondent, one August day, a
carriage drove to the door, and an Ameri-
can alighted. It was Emerson, looking
for a wise man; the first human being,
said Mrs. Carlyle, who had visited Dun-
score parish on such an errand since
Noah's flood. The visit was in every way
successful, and resulted in the formation
of a close and intimate friendship, which
nothing but death could destroy.
next day Emerson made the following
entry in his journal :-

The

lapse of time had changed their meaning. tions to the Edinburgh Review, and had Accordingly, he did not seek to tread in the footsteps either of his contemporaries or of his predecessors. He took no man as his model. He sought only to be true to himself and to the light that was within him; and his success was all the greater in consequence. The impression that was made by his preaching has been graphically described by Mr. Congdon in an often quoted passage of "The Reminiscences of a Journalist." "One day there came into our pulpit," he writes, "the most gracious of mortals, with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. Our choir was a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after Emerson's voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had an indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and dainty things of the kind which I had ever heard." But it was not in the pulpit any more than in the schoolhouse that Emerson was to find rest for the sole of his foot. He came to think that it was the best part of the man that revolted most against his being a minister. His good revolted from official goodness. In order to be a good minister, he said to himself, it was necessary to bear the ministry. The profession was antiquated. One seems to hear him exclaiming with Milton, in the immortal plea for the liberty of unlicensed printing: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely, according to conscience, above all liberties." The occasion of his resignation of his charge at Boston was a difference of opinion with his congregation as to the rite of the Lord's Supper, which he felt himself no longer able conscientiously to administer. He accordingly left the church, though he continued for years to preach whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself. For the most part, however, the lecture now took the place of the sermon.

The loss of his young wife and the worry connected with the resignation of his charge had told upon his health, and he determined to seek relief in travel. In the spring of 1833 he crossed the Atlantic, and made the first of his three well-known visits to Europe. At Rome he met M. Gustave d'Eichthal, who gave him a letter of introduction to Carlyle, and armed with this, as well as with a letter of introduction from John Stuart Mill, he made his famous pilgrimage to Craigenputtock. He had read some of Carlyle's contribu

CARLISLE, in Cumberland, August 26. —I fries. A white day in my years. I found the am just arrived in merry Carlisle from Dumyouth I sought in Scotland, and good and wise and pleasant he seems to me; and his wife a most accomplished, agreeable woman. Truth and peace and faith dwell with them, and beautify them. I never saw more amiableness than is in his countenance. T. C. has made up his mind to pay his taxes to William and Adelaide Guelf, with great cheerfulness, ment; and shall cease to do so the moment as long as William is able to compel the payhe ceases to compel them. T. C. prefers London to any other place to live in. John S. Mill, the best mind he knows- -more purity, more force-has worked himself clear from Benthamism. His only companion to speak to was the minister of Dunscore Kirk. And he used to go sometimes to the Kirk, and envy the poor parishioners their good faith. But he seldom went, and the minister had

grown suspicious of them, and did not come

to see him.

Carlyle, on his part, pronounced Emerson one of the most lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on; and in speaking to Lord Houghton of his visit he said: "That man came to see me : I don't know what brought him; and we kept him one night, and then he left us. I saw him go up the hill; I didn't go with him to see him descend. I preferred to watch him mount and vanish like an angel."

Emerson returned to his home across the Atlantic, reinvigorated in health and carrying with him pleasant recollections of the hours he had spent in the society of the greatest and best of men, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Carlyle. Hence forth the entire energies of his nature were devoted to that which was the real business of his life, lecturing and writing. In the winter of 1835 he married Miss Lydia Jackson, of Plymouth, and settled

man," he wrote, "vaunts disbelief, but only aims to put a real motive and law in the place of the false ones removed." As Oliver Wendell Holmes has so finely expressed it, he was "an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship." No wonder that, after hearing one of the Transcendental discources, the Methodist preacher, Father Taylor, exclaimed that "it would take as many sermons like that to convert a human soul as it would quarts of skimmed milk to make a man drunk;" whilst of Emerson himself he said: "He must go to heaven when he dies, for if he went to hell the devil would not know what to do with him. But he knows no more of the religion of the New Testament than Balaam's ass did of the principles of the Hebrew grammar."

down for the remainder of his days in a | Massachusetts. Emerson was, properly
modest little homestead of his own at Con- speaking, an iconoclast, but not of the loud,
cord. Trials of the affections were still vulgar, and brawling type.
"No good
in store for him. His highly gifted and
dearly loved brother Edward fought a
stout and a gallant battle with the all-con-
quering and inexorable foe, but "the
arrow of the angel had gone too deep,"
and he was speedily compelled to suc-
cumb.
"A soul is gone,'
wrote his
brother, so costly and so rare that few
persons were capable of knowing its price,
and I shall have my sorrow to myself; for
if I speak of him I shall be thought a fond
exaggerator. He had the fourfold perfec-
tion of good sense, of genius, of grace, and
of virtue, as I have never seen them com-
bined." "Clean and sweet was his life,
untempted almost; and his action on
others all-healing, uplifting, and fragrant.
I mourn that in losing him I have lost his
all, for he was born an orator, not a
writer." "How much I saw through his
eyes! I feel as if my own were very
dim." After Edward was gone, five years
glided smoothly and pleasantly along, and
then another blow fell upon Emerson, in
the death of a beautiful little boy, his eld-
est born. "Alas!" he exclaimed, "I
chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve. Dear
boy, too precious and unique a creation to
be huddled aside into the waste and prod-
igality of things; yet his image, so gentle,
so rich in hope, blends easily with every
happy moment, every fair remembrance,
every cherished friendship of my life."

In the mean time, during these five years of domestic happiness, the writing and the lecturing had been making sure and steady progress. His method of writing, like his modes of thought, was all his Own. He had long ago discovered that he had nothing to do with other people's facts, and it was enough for him if he could dispose of his own. "In writing my thoughts," he said, "I seek no order, or harmony, or result. I am not careful to see how they comport with other thoughts and other modes; I trust them for that." Herein in a measure lay his strength, but herein also lay his weakness, and he was himself fully conscious of the fact. "If Minerva offered me a gift and an option," he wrote in his journal, "I would say, give me continuity. I am tired of scraps. I do not wish to be a literary or intellectual chiffonnier."

His views upon religious subjects underwent a process of gradual evolution, and an address which he delivered in the Divinity School of Harvard in 1838 made him for the time the best-abused man in

Emerson, it will be seen, had thrown in his lot with the Transcendentalists, and he took an active part in the promotion of the success of their organ, the Dial. This periodical made its appearance in 1840, and continued to exist for a period of four years. For the first two years the duties of editor were discharged by Miss Margaret Fuller; for the last by Emerson himself. It was at this time that he was brought into constant communication with Miss Fuller, who sought, but sought in vain, to establish relations of close personal intimacy with him. In his journals he speaks of these " "strange, cold-warm, attractive - repelling conversations with Margaret, whom I always admire, most revere when I nearest see, and sometimes love; yet whom I freeze, and who freezes me to silence when we promise to come nearest." "Speak to me of anything but myself," he writes to his fair correspondent, "and I will endeavor to make an intelligible reply but tell me that I am cold or unkind, and in my most flowing state I become a cake of ice; I can feel the crystals shoot and the drops solidify." Miss Margaret Fuller's fate was that of all other persons, outside his own family circle and the friends of his childhood, who were brought into close relations with Emerson. It was the fate even of Hawthorne and of Thoreau.

In 1847 he paid his second visit to England, renewing personal intercourse with his old friends, and making the acquaintance of new ones. Carlyle and his wife he found living on beautiful terms. "Nothing," he said, "could be more en

gaging than their ways, and in her book- | name of a gentleman." But it was in the case all his books were inscribed to her, study, and not in the political arena, that as they came, from year to year, each with Emerson felt himself to be most at home, some significant lines." He was honored and he was glad when the occasion for his with an election into the Athenæum Club intervention in politics had gone by, and during his temporary residence in En- the cause of freedom and the North had gland. There Milnes and other good men triumphed. He survived to a green old were always to be found. Milnes was the age, retaining all his faculties, with the most good-natured man in England exception of his memory, to the last. The made of sugar; he was everywhere and burning of his house called forth the active knew everything. He told of Landor that help and sympathy of his friends, and led one day, in a towering passion, he threw him to pay one last visit to England. He his cook out of the window, and then returned to his renovated home, lingered presently exclaimed, "Good God, I never there for ten years longer, and passed thought of those poor violets!" The last away tranquilly at last on April 27, 1882. time he saw Landor he found him expa- His body rests in Sleepy Hollow, hard by tiating on our custom of eating in com- the graves of Hawthorne and of Thoreau; pany, which he esteems very barbarous. and in his books will be found "the preHe eats alone, with half-closed windows, cious life-blood of a master spirit, embecause the light interferes with the taste. balmed and treasured up on purpose to a Besides meeting constantly with Milnes life beyond life." and with Carlyle, Emerson was fortunate enough to catch occasional glimpses of other notabilities. Tennyson he met at the house of Coventry Patmore, and was contented with him at once. He found him "though cultivated, quite unaffected. Quiet, sluggish sense and thought; refined, as all English are, and good-humored." Carlyle thought him "the best man in England to smoke a pipe with."

In Paris, Emerson discovered that "his French was far from being as good as Madame de Staël's."

From Macmillan's Magazine.

A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN.
BY J. H. SHORTHOUSE.

I.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.

WHEN, in the year 1787, I entered, at the age of nineteen, the university of the kingly city of Wenigstaat, I was, no doubt, On his return once again to America a very foolish young man, but I am perthe lecturing and the writing were re- fectly certain that I was not a fool. I newed, and his reputation in the world of suffered not only from that necessary disletters at last became firmly established. ease which from the very nature of existIn 1841 the first series of essays had been ence it is impossible for a young man to published; but it was not until "The escape, the regarding of life from his own Conduct of Life" appeared, in 1860, that standpoint, as a man on first coming into his works had any very considerable sale, a brilliantly lighted and crowded room Once, and once only, in his career was he must of necessity, for a few moments, be called upon to take part in the great polit-conscious of the varied scene only as it ical movements of the day. "This is ever strikes himself; but I was also to some the test of the scholar," writes Mr. Morley, "whether he allows intellectual fastidiousness to stand between him and the great issues of his time." Emerson stood the test as few other scholars have stood it, and on the great question of negro slavery his voice was raised, and gave forth no doubtful or uncertain sound. "The last year," he said in his address to the citizens of Concord on May 3, 1851, "the last year has forced us all into politics. There is an infamy in the air. ... The Act of Congress of September 18, 1850, is a law which every one of you will break on the earliest occasion -a law which no man can obey, or abet the obeying, without loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the

extent subject to that fatuity which haunts some young men, the forming of opinions and the giving audible expression to them. Notwithstanding all this, I was, at the same time, conscious of such a crowd of ideas, actuated by such ideas, and stirred to the depths of my being by the emotions and results which these ideas wrought upon me, that looking back with the impartiality which the lapse of thirty years gives even to the review of one's self, I feel perfectly confident that I was not a fool. I shall, I fear, have to describe at some length how I came to be what I was, but I will be as short as I can. My history would be worth nothing in itself but it is interwoven closely with that of

some others whose personality seems to | rustling oaks, the sighing and moaning me well worthy of record. wind down the mountain valleys, spoke to me with distinct utterance, and with a sense of meaning and even of speech. These sounds were more even than this; they became a passion, a fascination, a haunting presence, and even a dread.