With that he extended his hand and welcomed me with

a smile his smile, not to be lightly lost by one it has warmed. For me, who never before had seen a great man, who yet in my minority was cut off from every relative and had alienated every early friend, this welcoming word and smile was the break of a new day. I could not answer. Many years after I read that one in paradise was asked how he got there and replied, "One day as Buddha passed by he smiled upon me.”

Twenty-eight years later, on that spot where I first met Emerson I parted from him to see him no more. It was with the old grasp of hand, and with that smile on his face to win which would at any time have meant to me success. It is before me now, and shall not be changed to a frown by any sentence in this little book.

It is the birthday of Emerson. This twenty-fifth of May he is seventy-nine years of age. Or must I con

his funeral.

cede that he lives no more! Here are letters before me; reports of words spoken at his house, in church, at the grave. Here is a note written on the day before "The main street as well as that on which he lived are to be draped with black, and a great crowd of people is expected to-morrow. The Fitchburg railroad will run special trains, contrary to the law against Sunday travelling. We are doing our best to get what may pass for wild flowers, namely, maple and willow blossoms, to mingle with the pine and hemlock around the pulpit." Another writes on the funeral day: "The assembly of neighbours and friends thronged the church, and the village, for the church could hold but part; the ten carloads of people that went up from Boston and

elsewhere would alone have filled it." In that home where he had lived forty-six years, his family gathered around him, and with them the venerable Dr. Furness, Emerson's friend in his college days, still dearer friend by his lifelong faithfulness to every human cause. In the church founded by his fathers, freed from their creed by his larger thought, the Sage lay in state, white-robed, while around him fell the first tears he had ever caused to friend or neighbour. Above was a canopy of pine boughs. His youth sang of the embowered home he was to find

"beneath the pines,

Where the evening star so holy shines."

When the evening star was near to its setting, for a moment his mind wandered, and he asked to be taken home. Then he beheld his grandchildren, blessed them with his smile, and his words—“Good boy!” “Good little girl!"

Now again, carried from his own to the village home, he was stretched beneath the pines, and life's evening star rose before those tearful eyes around him to be a morning star. On front of the pulpit was a harp made of golden flowers. On the high wall was an open book, formed of pinks, pansies, and white roses; on its page, written in flowers, the word "Finis." His aged friend, Bronson Alcott, read touching lines. Valiant, largehearted Freeman Clarke he who surrendered his pulpit rather than exclude Theodore Parker from it said, "Our souls have been fed by him, and although he has left his dust behind, his life does not die; he himself was the best argument for immortality." Then

the grey hairs of Judge Hoar were bent over the face of his beloved friend, companion of all his life, and his voice, which had so often commanded a nation's attention, now was broken with grief. "That lofty brow, the home of all wise thoughts and noble aspirations; those lips of eloquent music; that great soul, which trusted in God, and never let go its hope of immortality; that great heart, to which everything was welcome that belonged to man; that hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness, oh! friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide, is there no more we can do now than to give thee our hail and farewell?"

Nothing more! Through the village streets, which his presence had made beautiful as pathways in Beulah for the pilgrims with whom he walked, they now bore his flower-laden body into the grove of primeval trees, and upward to the higher ground where lay the bride so early lost - "Ellen in the South" and little Waldo, enshrined in his Threnody, and Thoreau, and Hawthorne; thither they bore him. And there he was laid.

The next day was May Day. That blithe day which his Muse had celebrated dawned upon his grave. What ear was left to hear the pine wind-harps of Sleepy Hollow as he heard them? The ear made fine by grief. In many a solitude was heard that day themes caught from his "May Day," from its Æolian harp, by the boughs waving over Emerson's grave:"One musician is sure,

His wisdom will not fail;

He has not tasted wine impure,
Nor bent to passion frail.
Age cannot cloud his memory,
Nor grief untune his voice,
Ranging down the ruled scale

From tone of joy to inward wail.”

But here a heart-string breaks. I remember well the days when Emerson began writing "May Day." He told me that a single breath of spring fragrance coming into his open window and blending with strains of his Æolian harp had revived in him memories and reanimated thoughts that had perished under turmoil of the times. His voice of that happy day is audible in these lines:

"Not long ago, at eventide,

It seemed so listening, at my side
A window rose, and, to say sooth,
I looked forth on the fields of youth:
I saw fair boys bestriding steeds,
I knew their forms in fancy weeds,

Long, long concealed by sundering fates,
Mates of my youth, yet not my mates,

Stronger and bolder far than I.

With grace, with genius, well attired,

And then as now from far admired.

Followed with love

They knew not of,

With passion cold and shy.

O joy, for what recoveries rare!
Renewed, I breathe Elysian air,

See youth's glad mates in earliest bloom, -
Break not my dream, obtrusive tomb!
Or teach thou, Spring! the grand recoil
Of life resurgent from the soil

Wherein was dropped the mortal spoil."

Never were truer emblems than those flowers that formed the harp and the book beside the dead body of Emerson. Once, when he read from Swedenborg that he had observed in heaven that whenever an angel uttered a truth a twig held in his hand blossomed, it occurred to me that I had observed the same thing in Concord.

The grove where Emerson lies will spread far beyond Concord. In the Cincinnati Commercial," printed the day after his death, I found this paragraph: "It is a coincidence that on the day Ralph Waldo Emerson died at his home in Concord, a large number of the public-school children of Cincinnati, under the leadership of their superintendent, and in observance of a forestry holiday, were planting an Author's Grove, one of the most prominent objects of which is a group named in honour of Emerson. The Emerson trees are six in number, an elm, two oaks, and four rock-maples. The boys of Hughes' High School formed an inner circle to finish their setting, and the girls of the same school an outer circle. Thus arranged, they sang national songs and gave appropriate recitations. As they performed this worthy and poetic task, the worldrenowned philosopher whose name the group will bear lay dying, and as evening came on he passed away. Eden Park is likely to contain no more noted trees than those planted for Emerson on the day he died."

No noble thing in nature that grows, and is strong and beautiful, but may be fit emblem of Emerson, and find its poetic interpretation in some page of his.