Miss Ellen Emerson, too, was present, shielding her father in his decline like a guardian angel.  Mrs. Emerson spoke with pleasure of her old life at Plymouth.  “Ah, Plymouth,” broke in Emerson, “that town of towns.  We shall never hear the last of Plymouth!” And so he rallied his wife merrily over her patriotic love for her birthplace.  The time was coming for him to go and he went serenely, the vital cord softly and gradually disengaged.  In Sleepy Hollow lie near each other the four memorable graves, Hawthorne’s, Thoreau’s, Louisa Alcott’s, and Emerson’s.  I know the spot well, on the ridge which slopes up from the lower ground, for there my own kin lie buried.  Upon the same ridge rise the tall oracular pines and there is always a sweet murmur which the feeling heart understands as a sub-conscious requiem breathed by the “Nature” of which these fine spirits were the interpreters.

A day or two after entering college I made one of a group of freshmen, who, as the dusk fell, were working off their surplus energy by jumping over the posts along the curbstone of a quiet street.  One of our number had an unfair advantage, his length of leg being so great that as he bestrode the post, he scarcely needed to take his feet from the ground, while for the rest of us a good hop was necessary fairly to clear the top.  That is my earliest memory of Phillips Brooks.  Big as he was, he was a year, perhaps two years, younger than most of us, and had the boyishness proper to his immaturity.  He had come from his long training in the Boston Latin School, was reputed, like the rest of his class, to be able to repeat the Latin and Greek grammars from beginning to end, exceptions, examples, and all, and to have at his tongue’s end other acquirements equally wonderful in the eyes of us boys who in our distant Western homes had had a smaller chance.  He was an excellent scholar without needing to apply himself, and perhaps had more distinction in the student societies than in the class-room.  Socially he was good-natured and playful, never aggressive, too modest to be a leader, rather reticent.  It was with surprise that I heard Brooks for the first time in a college society.  The quiet fellow of a sudden poured out a torrent of words and, young though I was, I felt that they were not empty.  There was plenty of thought and well-arranged knowledge.  This pregnant fluency always characterised his public deliverances.  Of late years it has been reported that he had at first a defect of speech, and to this the extraordinary momentum of his utterance was due.  In the early time I never heard of this.  He did not stammer, nor was there other impediment; only this preternaturally rapid outpouring on occasion, from a man usually quiet.  When I heard him preach in later years the peculiarity remained.  It was the Phillips Brooks of the Institute of 1770, matured, however, into noble spiritual power.