Being about seven years younger than Waldo, he must have received much of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother’s hands.  I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles Emerson’s coming into my study,—­this was probably in 1826 or 1827,—­taking up Hazlitt’s “British Poets” and turning at once to a poem of Marvell’s, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner.  The influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of Emerson’s poems, and Charles’ liking for him was very probably caught from Waldo.  When Charles was nearly through college, a periodical called “The Harvard Register” was published by students and recent graduates.  Three articles were contributed by him to this periodical.  Two of them have the titles “Conversation,” “Friendship.”  His quotations are from Horace and Juvenal, Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Shakespeare, and Scott.  There are passages in these Essays which remind one strongly of his brother, the Lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later.  Take this as an example:—­

“Men and mind are my studies.  I need no observatory high in air to aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect.  I do not want a costly apparatus to give pomp to 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.”