Literary and Social Essays | Page 7

disastrous to the interest of the history. The fame of the philosopher
attracts admiring friends and enthusiasts from every quarter, and the
scholarly grace and urbane hospitality of the gentleman send them
charmed away. Friendly foes, who altogether differ from Emerson,
come to break a lance with him upon the level pastures of Concord,
with all the cheerful and appreciative zeal of those who longed
"To drink delight of battle with their peers Far on the ringing plains of
windy Troy."
It is not hazardous to say that the greatest questions of our day and of
all days have been nowhere more amply discussed, with more poetic
insight or profound conviction, than in the comely, square white house
upon the edge of the Lexington turnpike. There have even been
attempts at something more formal and club-like than the chance
conversations of occasional guests, one of which will certainly be
nowhere recorded but upon these pages.
It was in the year 1845 that a circle of persons of various ages, and
differing very much in everything but sympathy, found themselves in
Concord. Towards the end of the autumn Mr. Emerson suggested that
they should meet every Monday evening through the winter in his
library. "Monsieur Aubepine", "Miles Coverdale", and other phantoms,

since generally known as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who then occupied the
Old Manse; the inflexible Henry Thoreau, a scholastic and pastoral
Orson, then living among the blackberry pastures of Walden Pond;
Plato Skimpole, then sublimely meditating impossible summer-houses
in a little house upon the Boston road; the enthusiastic agriculturist and
Brook-Farmer already mentioned, then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's
house, who added the genial cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of
the natural gentleman; a sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely
fought his weary way through inherited embarrassments to the small
success of a New England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had
seven times merited well of her country; two city youths, ready for the
fragments from the feast of wit and wisdom; and the host himself,
composed this club. Ellery Channing, who had that winter harnessed
his Pegasus to the New York Tribune, was a kind of corresponding
member. The news of this world was to be transmitted through his
eminently practical genius, as the club deemed itself competent to take
charge of tidings from all other spheres.
I went, the first Monday evening, very much as Ixion may have gone to
his banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a
constrained but very amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a
tacit inquiry, seeming to ask, "Who will now proceed to say the finest
thing that has ever been said?" It was quite involuntary and
unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without
which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one hand,
and of curious listeners upon the other. I vaguely remember that the
Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn "saying", to
which, after due pause, the honorable member for blackberry pastures
responded by some keen and graphic observation; while the Olympian
host, anxious that so much good material should be spun into
something, beamed smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the
conversation became more and more staccato. Miles Coverdale, a
statue of night and silence, sat, a little removed, under a portrait of
Dante, gazing imperturbably upon the group; and as he sat in the
shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit of sables made him, in that
society, the black thread of mystery which he weaves into his stories,
while the shifting presence of the Brook-Farmer played like
heat-lightning around the room.

I recall little else but a grave eating of russet apples by the erect
philosophers, and a solemn disappearance into night. The club
struggled through three Monday evenings. Plato was perpetually
putting apples of gold in pictures of silver; for such was the rich ore of
his thoughts, coined by the deep melody of his voice. Orson charmed
us with the secrets won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden
woods; while Emerson, with the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild
waters, sought to bind the wide-flying embroidery of discourse into a
web of clear sweet sense. But still in vain. The oracular sayings were
the unalloyed saccharine element; and every chemist knows how much
else goes to practical food--how much coarse, rough, woody fibre is
essential. The club struggled on valiantly, discoursing celestially,
eating apples, and disappearing in the dark, until the third evening it
vanished altogether. But I have since known clubs of fifty times its
number, whose collective genius was not more than that of either one
of the Dii Majores of our Concord coterie. The fault was its too great
concentration. It was not