in an immortal life, and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they were matched by the sweet elevation of character, and the spiritual charm of our gracious friend.  Years afterwards, on that memorable day of his funeral at Concord, I found that a sentence from his own Essay on Immortality haunted my mind, and kept repeating itself all the day long; it seemed to point to the sources of his power:  ’Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse, and Nature also, and gave grandeur to the passing hour.’”

This extract will be appropriately followed by another alluding to the same subject.

“The next evening, Sunday, the twenty-third, Mr. Emerson read his address on ‘Immortality,’ at Dr. Stebbins’s church.  It was the first time that he had spoken on the Western coast; never did he speak better.  It was, in the main, the same noble Essay that has since been printed.

“At breakfast the next morning we had the newspaper, the ’Alta California.’  It gave a meagre outline of the address, but praised it warmly, and closed with the following observations:  ’All left the church feeling that an elegant tribute had been paid to the creative genius of the Great First Cause, and that a masterly use of the English language had contributed to that end.’”

The story used to be told that after the Reverend Horace Holley had delivered a prayer on some public occasion, Major Ben.  Russell, of ruddy face and ruffled shirt memory, Editor of “The Columbian Centinel,” spoke of it in his paper the next day as “the most eloquent prayer ever addressed to a Boston audience.”

The “Alta California’s” “elegant tribute” is not quite up to this rhetorical altitude.

“‘The minister,’ said he, ’is in no danger of losing his position; he represents the moral sense and the humanities.’  He spoke of his own reasons for leaving the pulpit, and added that ’some one had lately come to him whose conscience troubled him about retaining the name of Christian; he had replied that he himself had no difficulty about it.  When he was called a Platonist, or a Christian, or a Republican, he welcomed it.  It did not bind him to what he did not like.  What is the use of going about and setting up a flag of negation?’”

“I made bold to ask him what he had in mind in naming his recent course of lectures at Cambridge, ’The Natural History of the Intellect.’  This opened a very interesting conversation; but, alas!  I could recall but little of it,—­little more than the mere hintings of what he said.  He cared very little for metaphysics.  But he thought that as a man grows he observes certain facts about his own mind,—­about memory, for example.  These he had set down from time to time.  As for making any methodical history,