Literary and Social Essays | Page 8

relaxation, as a club should be, but tension.
Society is a play, a game, a tournament; not a battle. It is the easy grace
of undress; not an intellectual full-dress parade.
I have already hinted this unbending intellectual alacrity of our author.
His sport is serious--his humor is earnest. He stands like a sentinel. His
look and manner and habit of thought cry "Who goes there?" and if he
does not hear the countersign, he brings the intruder to a halt. It is for
this surprising fidelity and integrity that his influence has been so deep
and sure and permanent upon the intellectual life of the young men of
New England; and of old England, too, where, in Manchester, there
were regular weekly meetings at which his works were read. What he
said long ago in his preface to the American edition of Carlyle's
Miscellanies, that they were papers which had spoken to the young men
of the time "with an emphasis that hindered them from sleep", is
strikingly true of his own writings. His first slim, anonymous
duodecimo, Nature, was as fair and fascinating to the royal young
minds who met it in the course of their reading, as Egeria to Numa
wandering in the grove. The essays, orations, and poems followed,
developing and elaborating the same spiritual and heroic philosophy,
applying it to life, history, and literature, with a vigor and richness so
supreme that not only do many account him our truest philosopher, but

others acknowledge him as our most characteristic poet.
It would be a curious inquiry how much and what kind of influence the
placid scenery of Concord has exercised upon his mind. "I chide
society, I embrace solitude," he says; "and yet I am not so ungrateful as
not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to
time they pass my gate." It is not difficult to understand his fondness
for the spot. He has been always familiar with it, always more or less a
resident of the village. Born in Boston upon the spot where the
Chauncey Place Church now stands, part of his youth was passed in the
Old Manse, which was built by his grandfather and in which his father
was born; and there he wrote Nature. From the magnificent admiration
of ancestral England he was glad to return two years since to quiet
Concord and to acres which will not yield a single arrowhead. The
Swiss sigh for their mountains; but the Nubians, also, pine for their
desert plains. Those who are born by the sea long annually to return
and to rest their eyes upon its living horizon. Is it because the earliest
impressions, made when the mind is most plastic, are most durable? or
because youth is that golden age bounding the confines of memory and
floating forever--an alluring mirage as we recede farther from it?
The imagination of the man who roams the solitary pastures of
Concord, or floats, dreaming, down its river, will easily see its
landscape upon Emerson's pages. "That country is fairest," he says,
"which is inhabited by the noblest minds". And although that idler upon
the river may have leaned over the Mediterranean from Genoese and
Neapolitan villas, or have glanced down the steep green valley of
Sicilian Enna, seeking "herself the fairest flower", or walked the shores
where Cleopatra and Helen walked, yet the charm of a landscape which
is felt rather than seen will be imperishable. "Travelling is a fool's
paradise," says Emerson. But he passed its gates to learn that lesson.
His writings, however, have no imported air. If there be something
Oriental in his philosophy and tropical in his imagination, they have yet
the strong flavor of his mother earth--the underived sweetness of the
open Concord sky, and the spacious breadth of the Concord horizon.

HAWTHORNE
Hawthorne has himself drawn the picture of the Old Manse in Concord.
He has given to it that quiet richness of coloring which ideally belongs

to an old country mansion. It seemed so fitting a residence for one who
loves to explore the twilight of antiquity--and the gloomier the
better--that the visitor, among the felicities of whose life was included
the freedom of the Manse, could not but fancy that our author's eyes
first saw the daylight enchanted by the slumberous orchard behind the
house, or tranquillized into twilight by the spacious avenue in front.
The character of his imagination, and the golden gloom of its
blossoming, completely harmonize with the rusty, gable-roofed old
house upon the river-side, and the reader of his books would be sure
that his boyhood and youth knew no other friends than the dreaming
river and the melancholy meadows and drooping foliage of its vicinity.
Since the reader, however, would greatly mistake if he