homeward by his spirit to begin the new life, he found useful diversion in these old-world sights. As the philosophy and poetry of ancient Greeks. always spoke to him, so now in Italy, seeing their sculptured deities and heroes and the contrast between these faces and those of the living throng around, he said, "These are the countenances of the first-born, the face of man in the morning of the world." The Elgin marbles, seen later in London, he always remembered with delight. Sculpture seemed nobler to him than painting, and, though greatly moved by Raphael's Transfiguration, the work of Michel Angelo-St. Peter's, his statues, and the sculpturepainting in the Sistine Chapel — was the principal gift that Rome had for him. The engravings of the Sibyls and a copy of the Fates thereafter adorned his study walls. He tarried in Florence and enjoyed acquaintance with Landor. There, he tells us, he did homage at the tomb of Galileo. But he quickly sped northward, over the Alps, made but short stay in Paris, crossed the Channel, and in the lonely moorlands of the Scottish Border sought out the man, then hardly recognized in England, whose writings had stirred him at home, and who drew him thither like a magnet. There began the friendship of Emer

son and Carlyle, a blessing to both, and lasting

through life.

"That man," wrote Carlyle to a friend, "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!"

On September 1, 1833, Emerson, in his journal at Liverpool, thanks God "that He has brought me to the shore and the ship that steers westward. He has shown me the men I wished to see, Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth: He has thereby comforted and confirmed me in my convictions. . . . I am very glad my travelling is done." His health was restored, and he was eager to begin life anew. For the thought which he expressed in "The Over-Soul" was then burning within him, -"When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the soul." In his journal at sea he wrote, "That which I cannot yet declare has been my angel from childhood until now. It has separated me from men. It has watered my pillow. . . . It has inspired me with hope. It cannot be defeated by my defeats. ... It is the 'open secret' of the Universe. . . .

I believe in this life. I believe it continues. As long as I am here, I plainly read my duties as writ with pencil of fire. They speak not of death; they are woven of immortal thread."

Thus he landed at Boston within the year in good health and hope, and joined his mother and youngest brother Charles in Newton. Frequent invitations to preach still came, and were accepted, and he even was sounded as to succeeding Dr. Dewey in the church at New Bedford; but, as he stipulated for freedom from ceremonial, this came to nothing. In his visits to New Bedford the Friends, with their doctrine of Obedience, interested him.

In the autumn of 1834 he moved to Concord, living with his kinsman, Dr. Ripley, at the Manse, but soon bought house and land on the Boston Road, on the edge of the village towards Walden woods. Thither, in the following autumn, he brought his wife, Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, and this was their home during the rest of their lives.

The new life to which he had been called opened pleasantly and increased in happiness and opportunity, except for the sadness of bereavements, for, in the first few years, his brilliant brothers Edward and Charles died, and

soon afterward Waldo, his first-born son, and later his mother. Emerson had left traditional religion, the city, the Old World, behind, and now went to Nature as his teacher, his inspiration. His first book, Nature, which he was meditating while in Europe, was finished here, and published in 1836. When, as a boy, he went with William to the Maine woods, he wrote to his Aunt Mary that he found enjoyment there, but not inspiration. "You should have gone alone," the sibyl answered. And now he went to the woods near his door to find her word true. As God liveth, he said,

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tablets still unbroken,

Still floats upon the morning wind,

Still whispers to the willing mind.

From this time on, to the last days of his life, except when on his lecturing trips, he went almost daily to the woods to listen for the thoughts, not originated by him, he held, though colored by the temperament of the individual through which these inspirations of the Universal Mind passed.

Oh what are heroes, prophets, men

But pipes through which the breath of Pan doth blow
A momentary music ?

The singing of the pine-tree, or the Æolian harp, passive to be played on by the wild wind, his favorite music,' symbolized his belief.

One

song of the pine-tree to him was of

The genesis of things,

Of tendency through endless ages,
Of star-dust and star-pilgrimages,
The rushing metamorphosis.

And in 1836, in Nature, he told how

Striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through countless spires of form.

The early recognition by Emerson of Evolution as the plan of the Universe in his first book, and everywhere in his prose and verse, has often attracted notice, first, I think, of Mr. Moncure D. Conway in his Emerson at Home and Abroad.

A question so interesting should be considered here - necessarily briefly. A study of Mr. Emerson's history and reading suggests these steps as those by which his beliefs were reached.

1. His open mind and hopeful temperament. 2. His poetic nature looked on beneficent law as universal, working alike on matter or

See his two poems "The Harp," and "Maiden Speech of the Æolian Harp."