"What," said Bishop Janes, "not for Jeremy Taylor's hope of heaven!" So it was for a time. But, when Dean Stanley returned from America, it was to report ("Macmillan," June, 1879) that religion had there passed through an evolution from Edwards to Emerson; and that "the genial atmosphere which Emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all the churches equally." XXIII. CONCORDIA. "Herein! herein! Gesellen alle, schliesst den Reihen, Zur Eintracht, zu herzinnigen Vereine MONCORDIA its name shall be!" was the sound CONC of Schiller's Bell in my ears when I began this book about the Sage of Concord. Its name could not be that, for it would promise too much, but none would be truer for a full story of Emerson and his friends. The prophecy of Weimar was fulfilled when from a race passed through furnaces, heated by heavenly and earthly Star-chambers, refined and tempered by love and culture, fashioned in mould of a New World, this pure genius was raised aloft in its tower over the broken forms that had held it, and there, in tones melodious with all sweetness and the nobleness of human life, summoned all souls to inward and outward harmony. "The town of Concord is one of the oldest towns in this country, far on now in its third century. The selectmen have once in every five years perambulated the boundaries, and yet, in this very year, a large quantity of land has been discovered and added to the town without a murmur of complaint from any quarter. By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have found that there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are now getting the best crops from." When Emerson said this, in one of the hundred lectures he gave at Concord, some of his neighbours reflected that a much greater addition to their wealth, in a strictly economic sense, had been made by his residence among them. He was the selectman who discovered the supersoil, the Concord above Concord, from which the great crops came. The effect of Emerson's lectures on the country generally was indescribable. It was found that his voice had been heard in all the byways and hedges, and swarms of a mighty fraternity, popularly classified as "come-outers," swarmed to Concord, each to get his recipe for the millenium countersigned by the new teacher. Hawthorne, who had gone to reside in “The Old Manse," has left us a graphic description of the visitors thus attracted. "There were circumstances around me which made it difficult to view the world precisely as it exists; for, severe and sober as was the Old Manse, it was necessary to go but a little way beyond its threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles. "These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries-to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them— came to seek the clue that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Grey-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron frame-work, travelled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and, climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects unseen before-mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of a creation among the chaos – but also, as was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls, and the whole host of night-birds, which flapped their dusky wings against the gazer's eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of angelic feather. Such delusions always hover nigh whenever a beacon fire of truth is kindled. - "For myself, there had been epochs of my life when I too might have asked of this prophet the masterword that should solve me the riddle of the universe. But now, being happy, I felt as if there were no question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of deep beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a philosopher. It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and he, so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart. But it was impossible to dwell in his vicinity without inhaling, more or less, the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought." More of these were emptied at Emerson's door from the Hive of Brook Farm, and from other socialistic tabernacles, which folded their. tents like the Arabs, but did not silently pass away. There grew up a transcendental cant which threatened to deluge poor Concord, and the number of insane people that thronged the philosopher's door must have severely tried the nerves of the ladies who dwelt there. To this Mecca came pilgrims with long hair, long beard, and long collars; very many with long ears: those who believed that man was to reach the Golden Year by abstinence from meat, committees of all the "Isms," each seeking to get the new candle for its little altar, came in full chase after the millenium, which Mrs. Emerson had much reason to wish would make haste and come. Of course there was abundance of material for the humourists. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes expanded the new transcendental dialect to ennoble an already prominent feature: "And why is the nose set in the front of the face, stretching outward and upward, but that it |