cord--His
incorrigible modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common
men feel more like Emerson than he did--His personal
appearance--His favorite gesture--A glance like the reveille
of a trumpet--The creaking boots--"The muses are in the
woods"--Emerson could not read Hawthorne--Typical versus
individual--Benefit from child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--
Sounds of distant battle--Politics, sociology, and grape-
culture--The great white fence--Richard Henry Stoddard--A
country youth of genius--Whipple's Attic salt--An unwritten
romance--The consulship retires literature--Louisa's
tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good men--Nearer
than in the world--The return of the pilgrim.

My father's first look at "The Wayside" had been while snow was still
on the ground, and he had reported to his wife that it resembled a
cattle-pen.

But the family advent was effected in June, and although a heavy rain
had fallen while the domestic impedimenta were in transit, wetting the
mattresses and other exposed furniture, yet when the summer sun came out
things began to mend. My mother and Una came a day ahead of the others,
and with the help of carpenters and upholsterers, and a neighboring
Irishman and his wife for cleaning and moving purposes, they soon got
human order into the place of savage chaos. The new carpet was down in
the study, the walls had been already papered and the wood-work grained,
the pictures were hung in their places, and the books placed on their
shelves. By the time the father, the boy, the baby, and the nurse drove
up in the hot afternoon a home had been created for their reception.

Mr. Emerson was, and he always remained, the hub round which the wheel
of Concord's fortunes slowly and contentedly revolved. He was at
this time between forty-five and fifty years old, in the prime of
his beneficent powers. He had fulfilled the promise of his unique
youth--obeyed the voice at eve, obeyed at prime. The sweet austerity of
his nature had been mellowed by human sorrows--the loss of his brothers
and of his eldest son; he had the breadth and poise that are given by
knowledge of foreign lands, and friendships with the best men in them;
he had the unstained and indomitable independence of a man who has
always avowed his belief, and never failed to be true to each occasion
for truth; he had the tranquillity of faith and insight, and he was
alert with that im