the Celestial City. The guests, each
and all, felt a slumbrous influence upon them; they fell asleep in
chairs, or took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen
stretched among the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily
through the boughs. They could not have paid a more acceptable
compliment to my abode, nor to my own qualities as a host. I held it
as a proof that they left their cares behind them as they passed
between the stone gate-posts at the entrance of our avenue, and that
the so powerful opiate was the abundance of peace and quiet within and
all around us....

Hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the
wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his
earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted
upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism,
and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to
face. Young visionaries, to whom just so much of insight had been
imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the
clue that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment.
Gray-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had finally
imprisoned them in an iron framework, traveled painfully to his door,
not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own
thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that
they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem
hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain,
troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of a moral world
beheld its intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and
climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding
obscurity more hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects
unseen before--mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of a creation among
the chaos; but also, as was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls
and the whole host of night birds, which flapped their dusky wings
against the gazer's eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of
angelic feather. Such delusions always hover nigh whenever a
beacon-fire of truth is kindled.

For myself, there had been epochs of my life when I too might have
asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle
of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no
question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of deep
beauty and aust