Literary and Social Essays | Page 5

it has a city air and could not be
mistaken for a farm-house. A quiet merchant, you would say,
unostentatious and simple, has here hidden himself from town. But a
thick grove of pine and fir trees, almost brushing the two windows
upon the right of the door, and occupying the space between them and
the road, suggests at least a peculiar taste in the retired merchant, or
hints the possibility that he may have sold his place to a poet or
philosopher--or to some old East India sea-captain, perhaps, who
cannot sleep without the sound of waves, and so plants pines to rustle,
surf-like, against his chamber window.
The fact, strangely enough, partly supports your theory. In the year

1828 Charles Coolidge, a brother of J. Templeman Coolidge, a
merchant of repute in Boston and grandson of Joseph Coolidge, a
patriarchal denizen of Bowdoin Square in that city, came to Concord
and built this house. Gratefully remembering the lofty horse-chestnuts
which shaded the city square, and which, perhaps, first inspired him
with the wish to be a nearer neighbor of woods and fields, he planted a
row of them along his lot, which this year ripen their twenty-fifth
harvest. With the liberal hospitality of a New England merchant he did
not forget the spacious cellars of the city, and, as Mr. Emerson writes,
"he built the only good cellar that had then been built in Concord".
Mr. Emerson bought the house in the year 1835. He found it a plain,
convenient, and thoroughly built country residence. An amiable
neighbor of Mr. Coolidge had placed a miserable old barn irregularly
upon the edge of that gentleman's lot, which, for the sake of comeliness,
he was forced to buy and set straight and smooth into a decent
dependence of the mansion house. The estate, upon passing into Mr.
Emerson's hands, comprised the house, barn, and two acres of land. He
has enlarged house and barn, and the two acres have grown to nine. Our
author is no farmer, except as every country gentleman is, yet the
kindly slope from the rear of the house to a little brook, which, passing
to the calm Concord beyond, washes the edge of his land, yields him at
least occasional beans and pease--or some friend, agriculturally
enthusiastic and an original Brook-Farmer, experiments with guano in
the garden, and produces melons and other vines with a success that
relieves Brook Farm from every slur of inadequate practical genius. Mr.
Emerson has shaded his originally bare land with trees, and counts near
a hundred apple and pear trees in his orchard. The whole estate is quite
level, inclining only towards the little brook, and is well watered and
convenient.
The Orphic Alcott--or Plato Skimpole, as Aspasia called him--well
known in the transcendental history of New England, designed and
with his own hands erected a summer-house, which gracefully adorns
the lawn, if I may so call the smooth grass-plot at the side of the house.
Unhappily, this edifice promises no longer duration, not being
"technically based and pointed". This is not a strange, although a
disagreeable fact, to Mr. Emerson, who has been always the most
faithful and appreciative of the lovers of Mr. Alcott. It is natural that

the Orphic Alcott should build graceful summer-houses. There are even
people who declare that he has covered the pleasant but somewhat
misty lawns of ethical speculation with a thousand such edifices, which
need only to be a little more "technically based and pointed" to be quite
perfect. At present they whisper, the wind blows clean through them,
and no figures of flesh and blood are ever seen there, but only pallid
phantoms with large, calm eyes, eating uncooked grain, out of baskets,
and discoursing in a sublime shibboleth of which mortals have no key.
But how could Plato Skimpole, who goes down to Hingham on the sea,
in a New England January, clad only in a suit of linen, hope to build
immortal summer-houses?
Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon entering
the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the
den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat of
a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not in
architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a few choice
engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael
Angelo's "Fates", which, properly enough, imparted that grave serenity
to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what is written
there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's published writings,
the essays, orations, and poems, date from this room, as much as they
date from any place or moment. The villagers, indeed, fancy their
philosophical contemporary