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.