“Over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neighbors, friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the dead poet.  The body was robed completely in white, and the face bore a natural and peaceful expression.  From the church the procession took its way to the cemetery.  The grave was made beneath a tall pine-tree upon the hill-top of Sleepy Hollow, where lie the bodies of his friends Thoreau and Hawthorne, the upturned sod being concealed by strewings of pine boughs.  A border of hemlock spray surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides.  The services here were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final resting-place.

“The Rev. Dr. Haskins, a cousin of the family, an Episcopal clergyman, read the Episcopal Burial Service, and closed with the Lord’s Prayer, ending at the words, ‘and deliver us from evil.’  In this all the people joined.  Dr. Haskins then pronounced the benediction.  After it was over the grandchildren passed the open grave and threw flowers into it.”

So vanished from human eyes the bodily presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his finished record belongs henceforth to memory.

CHAPTER XVI.

EMERSON.—­A RETROSPECT.

Personality and Habits of Life.—­His Commission and Errand.—­As a Lecturer.—­His Use of Authorities.—­Resemblance to Other Writers.—­As influenced by Others.—­His Place as a Thinker.—­Idealism and Intuition.—­Mysticism.—­His Attitude respecting Science.—­As an American.—­His Fondness for Solitary Study.—­His Patience and Amiability.—­Feeling with which he was regarded.—­Emerson and Burns.—­His Religious Belief.—­His Relations with Clergymen.—­Future of his Reputation.—­His Life judged by the Ideal Standard.

Emerson’s earthly existence was in the estimate of his own philosophy so slight an occurrence in his career of being that his relations to the accidents of time and space seem quite secondary matters to one who has been long living in the companionship of his thought.  Still, he had to be born, to take in his share of the atmosphere in which we are all immersed, to have dealings with the world of phenomena, and at length to let them all “soar and sing” as he left his earthly half-way house.  It is natural and pardonable that we should like to know the details of the daily life which the men whom we admire have shared with common mortals, ourselves among the rest.  But Emerson has said truly “Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.  Their cousins can tell you nothing about them.  They lived in their writings, and so their home and street life was trivial and commonplace.”

The reader has had many extracts from Emerson’s writings laid before him.  It was no easy task to choose them, for his paragraphs are so condensed, so much in the nature of abstracts, that it is like distilling absolute alcohol to attempt separating the spirit of what he says from his undiluted thought.  His books are all so full of his life to their last syllable that we might letter every volume Emersoniana, by Ralph Waldo Emerson.