the dust of noble spirits; and the two, so sundered, seemed to represent a happy tale suddenly broken off, and ending with heaviness and pain. She was laid to rest by those who had known and loved her — Francis Bennoch, W. H. Channing, Robert Browning, Russell Sturgis; and not far off the face of Leigh Hunt, from the marble over his grave, seemed to beam with sympathy upon the two lonely daughters of his friends. Before the coffin was lowered, these two- Una and Rose laid upon it, the one a wreath, the other a cross, of white camelias. When the undertaker took up a handful of clay, Una held out her hand for it, and at the words "dust to dust" let the crumbled pieces fall there where lay the form of her mother. This was the end. As we turned away the birds sang gaily amid the budding trees. I remembered the old scenes amid which these bereaved children first drew breath, and where, amid the budding joys and heart-melodies of his happiest home, their father wrote, "There is a pervading blessing diffused over all the world. I look out of the window and think: O perfect day! O beautiful world! O good God! And such a day is the promise of a blissful eternity. It opens the gates of heaven and gives glimpses far inward." ✰ W XXV. THOREAU. HEN Emerson was giving a course of lectures in my church at Cincinnati, he consented to address the children on Sunday morning. Many times have I regretted that no reporter was present to preserve that address. It was given without notes, and its effect. upon the large assembly of children could have been. no less striking than that extemporaneous speech delivered by Emerson at the Burns Centenary, which so experienced a critic as Judge Hoar declares to be the grandest piece of eloquence he ever heard. Emerson, in this case as in that, held his hearers between smiles and tears. He began by telling them about his neighbour Henry Thoreau, and his marvellous knowledge of nature, his intimate friendship with flowers, and with the birds which lit on his shoulder, and with the fishes which swam into his hand. It was as if he were charming the children with a fairy-tale, or something omitted from the Gospel stories, which at the same time they felt to be true. Not very long after (1862) Thoreau died—it was at the age of forty-five-and beside his grave at Concord Emerson delivered an address in which he said, "The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great L a son it has lost." And this is still true, although few men have ever had such full and interesting memoirs. Emerson wrote a sketch of his life; Ellery Channing has written a biography and a fine poem concerning him; James Russell Lowell, Wentworth Higginson, and George W. Curtis have written excellent essays upon him; and this year Frank B. Sanborn has published a Life of Thoreau, full of interesting details and shewing his unique relation to Concord, of which he was a native. In England, a book concerning him by "H. A. Page" appeared four years ago, and there have been some articles about him. I remember an able one in the "Saturday Review," in which, however, he was described, not happily I thought, as "an American Rousseau." Notwithstanding all this, there are comparatively few in America or England who have read the works of this rare genius. It was about four years after his "Week on the Concord and the Merrimack" was published that I spoke to him about that charming book, and he told me that the entire edition of it was still on the publisher's shelf with exception of copies he had given to his friends. Although he had found himself in debt for the printing, I thought he spoke of his book's obscurity with a certain satisfaction. Thoreau's books are so physiognomical that they seem to possess his own aversion to publicity. Like the pious Yogi, so long motionless whilst gazing on the sun that knotty plants encircled his neck and the cast snake-skin his loins, and the birds built their nests on his shoulders, this poet and naturalist, by equal consecration, became a part of the field and forest; and he with his books, - to read which is like walking amid meadows and magnolias, or in woods melodious with nightingales, might naturally be undiscovered in the landscape by the great world thundering past in its train. In the annals of Tours several hundred years ago this name recurs in connection with its government, but it was from St. Heliers in Jersey that the first American of that name emigrated. I remember well the stolid, taciturn pencil-maker his father, and his simple mother, and long ago came to the conclusion that the great Thoreau was what the Buddha would call a "twice-born" man. He was born in Concord, and entered Harvard University in 1833, the year of Emerson's first visit to England. Emerson had been residing in Concord two or three years when he discovered this scholar, then twenty years of age. The family was poor, and Thoreau taught school a little and made pencils a little, but read and thought a great deal. At an early period he made up his mind that his road to wealth lay in not wanting things. If he were as satisfied not to have a coach as his neighbour was in having one, was he not quite as well off as that neighbour? "If I had the wealth of Croesus bestowed on me," he was at length able to say, 'my aims must still be the same, and my means the same." 66 Emerson took me to see Thoreau, and I remember that he asked me what we were studying at Divinity College. I answered, "The Scriptures." "Which?" he asked. I was puzzled until Emerson said, “I fear you will find our Thoreau a sad pagan." Thoreau had long been a reverent student of Oriental bibles, and, like Morgana in the story, had marked all the sacred doors with the same sign, so that Hebrew were not distinguishable from Hindu inspirations. He now shewed me his bibles, translated from various races into French and English, presented him by an English friend. Mr. Cholmondeley. In this conversation with Thoreau I perceived that he was not in the least like his parents, but closely resembled Emerson. His features, expression, tones of voice, were more like those of Emerson than any likeness I have known between brothers. This phenomenon was, no doubt, the result of the naturalist's genius. Emerson may have thought of Thoreau in his quatrain "He took the colour of his vest From rabbit's coat and grouse's breast; But meanwhile Thoreau, while he hunted the wild kinds with spyglass and microscope, and became friendly with them, was pursuing more ardently winged thoughts and mystical secrets. He cared most, as he said, to “fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars." He once said to me that he had found in Emerson a world where truths existed with the same perfection as the objects he studied in external nature, his ideas real and exact as antennæ and stamina. It was nature spiritualised. I also found that Thoreau had entered deeply Emerson's secret, and was the most complete incarnation of the earlier idealism of the Sage. But because this influence was in the least part personal, the resemblance of Thoreau to Emerson was as superficial as a |