l
clothed in the noblest verse of which the French language is capable.
His power over that language is boundless, the wealth of an utterance
which never pauses for a word, which disregards all rules yet
glorifies them, which is ready for every suggestion, and finds nothing
too terrible, nothing too tender for the tongue which, at his bidding,
leaps into blazing eloquence, or rolls in clouds and thunder, or
murmurs with the accent of a dove. Never had there been so great a
gamut, a compass so extended.

It is not, however, upon his poetry, either in the form of drama,
lyric, or narrative, that his fame out of France, or at least in
England, is founded. There is no more usual deliverance of superficial
criticism than that which declares French poetry in general to be
either nought--which is still a not uncommon notion--or at least not
great enough to be worth the study which alone could make it
comprehensible. There are many good people who dare to say this, yet
live, audacious, and unconscious of their folly. We have, however, to
consider Victor Hugo on a ground which no one ventures to dispute. The
great romances--for which we should like to invent another name--which
we cannot call novels, and which are too majestic even for the title
of romance, though that means something more than the corresponding
word in English--are in their kind and period the greatest works
produced in his time.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

By MONCURE D. CONWAY

(1803-1882)

[Illustration: Ralph Waldo Emerson.]

On the 30th day of April, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was "gathered to
his fathers," at Concord, Mass. The simple Hebrew phrase was never
more appropriate, for his ancestors had founded the town and been
foremost at every period of its remarkable history. More than two
hundred and fifty years ago John Eliot, who had gone from the
University of Cambridge, England, to be the "Apostle of the Indians,"
found on the banks of the Musketaquid a settlement of natives, into
whose language he translated the New Testament. In 1634, the Rev.
Peter Bulkeley, of Bedfordshire, whose Puritan proclivities brought
him under the ban of Laud, migrated with a number of his parishioners
to New England; these settled themselves at Musketaquid, which they
named Concord. In the next year went, from County Durham probably,
Thomas Emerson, whose son married a Bulkeley, and his grandson Rebecca
Waldo, descendant of a family of the Waldenses. It was at Con