Emerson | Page 5

wise, who visit us in the course of the year.'
As time went on he was able to buy himself 'a new plaything'--a piece
of woodland, of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half
a mile wide or more, called Walden Pond. 'In these May days,' he told
Carlyle, then passionately struggling with his Cromwell, with the slums

of Chelsea at his back, 'when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut,
and pine, are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut
with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket, all along the bold
shore, and open the finest pictures' (1845).
He loved to write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer
or by readings of Plato, or whatsoever else is dearest to the Morning
Muse.' Yet he could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He
confesses that he sometimes craves 'that stimulation which every
capricious, languid, and languescent study needs.' Carlyle's potent
concentration stirs his envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he
found very fascinating, eating up days and weeks; 'nay, a brave scholar
should shun it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from
these pernicious enchantments.'
In the doings of his neighbourhood he bore his part; he took a manly
interest in civil affairs, and was sensible, shrewd, and helpful in matters
of practical judgment. Pilgrims, sane and insane, the beardless and the
gray-headed, flocked to his door, far beyond the dozen persons good
and wise whom he had mentioned to Carlyle. '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' (Hawthorne). To the most intractable of
Transcendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was never
impatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where the
case was not yet beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neighbour
(1842-45). 'It was good,' says Hawthorne, '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.'
The most remarkable of all his neighbours was Thoreau, who for a
couple of years lived in a hut which he had built for himself on the
shore of Walden Pond. If he had not written some things with a
considerable charm of style, Thoreau might have been wisely neglected

as one of the crazy. But Emerson was struck by the originality of his
life, and thought it well in time to edit the writings of one 'who was
bred to no profession; never married; lived alone; never went to Church;
never voted; refused to pay a tax to the State; ate no flesh, drank no
wine, never knew the use of tobacco; had no temptations to fight
against, no appetites, no passions, refused all invitations, preferred a
good Indian to highly cultivated people, and said he would rather go to
Oregon than to London.' The world has room for every type, so that it
be not actively noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his
place in the catalogue. He was, after all, in his life only a compendium,
on a scale large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial
notions which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to
rebuke. Yet we may agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with
Socratic force to the heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be
too purely material, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused.
Emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the hermit's trap of
banishment to the rocks and echoes. 'Solitude,' he said, 'is impracticable,
and society fatal.' He steered his way as best he could between these
two irreconcilable necessities. He had, as we have seen, the good sense
to make for himself a calling which brought him into healthy contact
with bodies of men, and made it essential that he should have his
listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they were not actually
present to the eye. As a preacher Emerson has been described as
making a deep impression on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by
'the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and
the singular simplicity and directness of a manner free from the least
trace of dogmatic assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I
had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, whose force and
energy, and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, carried for the
moment