Emerson's cordiality won for him the honor which prophets rarely enjoy in their own country; the objects and places once associated with him here are still esteemed sacred by his old neighbors. We find among them at this day many who can know nothing of his books, but who, for memory of his simple kindness, go far from their furrow or swath to show us spots he loved and frequented in woodland or meadow, on swelling hill-side or by winding river.
To his home here Emerson brought his bride sixty years ago; here he lived his fruitful life and accomplished his work; here he rose to the zenith of poesy and prophecy; to him here came the "great and grave transition which may not king or priest or conqueror spare;" from here his wife, lingering behind him in the eternal march, went a year or two ago to rejoin him on the piny hill-top; and here his unmarried daughter--of "saint-like face and nun-like garb"--inhabits his home and cherishes its treasures.
Emerson's son and biographer some time ago relinquished his medical practice in Concord, and has since devoted himself to art. He has a residence a mile or so out of the village, but spends much of his time abroad. Last year he lectured in London upon the lives and writings of some of the Concord authors.
_Ellery Channing--Margaret Fuller--The Alcotts--Professor Harris--Summer School of Philosophy--Where Little Women was written and Robert Hagburn lived--Where Cyril Norton was slain._
A plain little cottage by the road, not far from Emerson's home, was for some time the abode of the companion of many of his rambles through the countryside,--the poet Ellery Channing. It was to this simple dwelling, as the author of "Little Women" once told the writer, that Channing brought his young wife--sister of Margaret Fuller--before the Alcotts had come to live in their hill-side home under the wooded ridge, and it was here he commenced the sequestered life so suited to his nature and tastes.
Some of his descriptive poems of Concord landscapes were written in this little cottage. The scenes of one of his earlier winters in the neighborhood--when he chopped wood in a rude clearing--are portrayed in the exquisite lines of his "Woodman." In those days he thought his poems "too sacred to be sold for money," and they were kept for his circle of friends. Of the poet's modest home Miss Fuller--that "dazzling woman with the flame in her heart"--was a frequent inmate; it was from Concord that she went to live in the family of Horace Greeley in New York. At the time of her visits at Channing's cottage Thoreau was sojourning with Emerson, and we may be sure that the quartette of starry souls, thus _juxtaposé_, held much soulful and edifying converse. But those of us who deplore our lack of the supreme transcendental spirit which we ascribe to the Concord circle may find consolation in reflecting that some of this gifted company had also earthly tastes, and found even discourse concerning the "over-soul" sometimes tiresome. The "strained pitch of intellectual intensity" was, upon occasion, gladly relaxed; thus we discover the exalted Channing sometime profanely inviting Hawthorne--"the gentlest man that kindly Nature ever drew"--to visit him in Concord, alluring the novelist with prospects of strong-waters, pipes and tobacco without end, and urging, as the utmost inducement, "Emerson is gone and there is nobody here to bore you."