Ralph Waldo Emerson | Page 8

my pursuit or to disguise its inutility. I do not desire to
travel and see foreign lands and learn all knowledge and speak with all
tongues, before I am prepared for my employment. I have merely to go
out of my door; nay, I may stay at home at my chambers, and I shall
have enough to do and enjoy."
The feeling of this sentence shows itself constantly in Emerson's poems.
He finds his inspiration in the objects about him, the forest in which he
walks; the sheet of water which the hermit of a couple of seasons made
famous; the lazy Musketaquid; the titmouse that mocked his weakness
in the bitter cold winter's day; the mountain that rose in the horizon; the
lofty pines; the lowly flowers. All talked with him as brothers and
sisters, and he with them as of his own household.
The same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his
maturity, we recognize in one of the Essays of the youth.
"All men of gifted intellect and fine genius," says Charles Emerson,
"must entertain a noble idea of friendship. Our reverence we are
constrained to yield where it is due,--to rank, merit, talents. But our
affections we give not thus easily.
'The hand of Douglas is his own.'"
--"I am willing to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good men
hold cheap. All this I will do out of regard to the decent conventions of
polite life. But my friends I must know, and, knowing, I must love.
There must be a daily beauty in their life that shall secure my constant
attachment. I cannot stand upon the footing of ordinary acquaintance.
Friendship is aristocratical--the affections which are prostituted to
every suitor I will not accept."
Here are glimpses of what the youth was to be, of what the man who
long outlived him became. Here is the dignity which commands

reverence,--a dignity which, with all Ralph Waldo Emerson's sweetness
of manner and expression, rose almost to majesty in his serene presence.
There was something about Charles Emerson which lifted those he was
with into a lofty and pure region of thought and feeling. A vulgar soul
stood abashed in his presence. I could never think of him in the
presence of such, listening to a paltry sentiment or witnessing a mean
action without recalling Milton's line,
"Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed,"
and thinking how he might well have been taken for a celestial
messenger.
No doubt there is something of idealization in all these reminiscences,
and of that exaggeration which belongs to the laudator temporis acti.
But Charles Emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college
and out of college. George Stillman Hillard was his rival. Neck and
neck they ran the race for the enviable position of first scholar in the
class of 1828, and when Hillard was announced as having the first part
assigned to him, the excitement within the college walls, and to some
extent outside of them, was like that when the telegraph proclaims the
result of a Presidential election,--or the Winner of the Derby. But
Hillard honestly admired his brilliant rival. "Who has a part with ****
at this next exhibition?" I asked him one day, as I met him in the
college yard. "***** the Post," answered Hillard. "Why call him _the
Post_?" said I. "He is a wooden creature," said Hillard. "Hear him and
Charles Emerson translating from the Latin Domus tota inflammata
erat. The Post will render the words, 'The whole house was on fire.'
Charles Emerson will translate the sentence 'The entire edifice was
wrapped in flames.'" It was natural enough that a young admirer should
prefer the Bernini drapery of Charles Emerson's version to the simple
nudity of "the Post's" rendering.
* * * * *
The nest is made ready long beforehand for the bird which is to be bred
in it and to fly from it. The intellectual atmosphere into which a scholar
is born, and from which he draws the breath of his early mental life,
must be studied if we would hope to understand him thoroughly.
When the present century began, the elements, thrown into confusion
by the long struggle for Independence, had not had time to arrange
themselves in new combinations. The active intellects of the country

had found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new
order of political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed
was as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and
there, waiting to form centres of condensation.
Such a nebular spot had been brightening in and about Boston for a
number of years, when, in the year 1804, a small cluster of names
became visible