“I was displeased at the constant standing.  Neither as Greeks nor as Frenchmen did they sit at all; only when dying did Rachel need a chair.  They made love standing, they told long stories standing, they took snuff in that position, hat in hand, and Rachel fainted upon the breast of some friend from the same fatiguing attitude.

“The audience to hear ‘Adrienne’ was very fine.  The Unitarian clergymen and the divinity students seemed to have turned out.

“Most of the two thousand listeners followed with the book, and when the last word was uttered on the French page, over turned the two thousand leaves, sounding like a shower of rain.  The applause was never very great; it is said that Rachel feels this as a Boston peculiarity, but she ought also to feel the compliment of so large an audience in a city where foreigners are so few and the population so small compared to that of New York.

“Nov. 14, 1855.  Last night I heard Emerson give a lecture.  I pity the reporter who attempts to give it to the world.  I began to listen with a determination to remember it in order, but it was without method, or order, or system.  It was like a beam of light moving in the undulatory waves, meeting with occasional meteors in its path; it was exceedingly captivating.  It surprised me that there was not only no commonplace thought, but there was no commonplace expression.  If he quoted, he quoted from what we had not read; if he told an anecdote, it was one that had not reached us.  At the outset he was very severe upon the science of the age.  He said that inventors and discoverers helped themselves very much, but they did not help the rest of the world; that a great man was felt to the centre of the Copernican system; that a botanist dried his plants, but the plants had their revenge and dried the botanist; that a naturalist bottled up reptiles, but in return the man was bottled up.

“There was a pitiful truth in all this, but there are glorious exceptions.  Professor Peirce is anything but a formula, though he deals in formulae.

“The lecture turned at length upon beauty, and it was evident that personal beauty had made Emerson its slave many a time, and I suppose every heart in the house admitted the truth of his words....

“It was evident that Mr. Emerson was not at ease, for he declared that good manners were more than beauty of face, and good expression better than good features.  He mentioned that Sir Philip Sydney was not handsome, though the boast of English society; and he spoke of the astonishing beauty of the Duchess of Hamilton, to see whom hundreds collected when she took a ride.  I think in these cases there is something besides beauty; there was rank in that of the Duchess, in the case of Sydney there was no need of beauty at all.