IT

A VIGIL.

T is the vigil of Emerson. To-morrow (May 25, 1882) he will be seventy-nine years of age. I cannot bear to write " he would be." This day, gazing on a picture of Emerson's funeral, picking out from beneath their grey hairs faces of some with whom I have sat at his feet, there comes home to me the secret of that longing out of which were born myths of men that never died, of Yami and Arthur, of Enoch and Saint John. The love of a Madonna is in his own interpretation. "The fable of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to men, because they want more time and land in which to execute their thoughts. But a higher poetic use must be made of the legend. Take us as we are with our experience, and transfer us to a new planet, and let us digest for its inhabitants what we could of the wisdom of this. After we have found our depth there, and assimilated what we could of the wisdom of the new experience, transfer us to a new scene. In each transfer we shall have acquired, by seeing them at a distance, a new mastery of the old thoughts, in which we were too much immersed. In short, all our intellectual action not promises, but bestows a feeling of absolute existence. We are taken out of time and breathe a purer air."

Such duration did Emerson devise; but one source

of the longing for immortality he could not know so fully as we who cannot leave his grave. It needed this night to bring out the star of that hope.

"I send you," a friend writes, "a sprig from the evergreen that bordered Emerson's grave as his coffin was lowered into it this afternoon. I dropped a piece in after the school-children had covered the coffin with their tributes, and kept the rest, of which this is a part."

Is this bit of evergreen, already dust, all the Amen Nature can give to the faith of its greatest heart? Ye pines and oaks of Sleepy Hollow, awake! Wrestle, as Herakles for Alcestis, grapple with Death for your poet and lover! Search with every rootlet for the seed of that brain, and lift it again to upper air!

Alas! Nature has been faithless. He trusted her April smiles and she chilled him with death; and now she seems to contradict his living word, drawing those he taught to live in the present to find their paradise in the past he made so beautiful.

But the ground laurel on his grave and the whispering oaks and pines waving above it have sent abroad their message to those who with him have walked that sacred grove, saying, "What he has been to thee that shalt thou tell. Into the grave of memory shalt thou search and lift by what art thou canst every gracious word he gave thee, every thought he inspired, and all the beautiful life thou didst witness, to its resurrection and life, that he may, through love, be as immortal as a mortal can be."

Once, as I walked with John Stuart Mill alone, he questioned me concerning Emerson and his influence on