of those who are dead, much has already been written.  Margaret Fuller,—­I must call my early schoolmate as I best remember her,—­leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of five artists,—­Emerson himself among the number; Thoreau is faithfully commemorated in the loving memoir by Mr. Sanborn; Theodore Parker lives in the story of his life told by the eloquent Mr. Weiss; Hawthorne awaits his portrait from the master-hand of Mr. Lowell.

How nearly any friend, other than his brothers Edward and Charles, came to him, I cannot say, indeed I can hardly guess.  That “majesty” Mr. Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that doth hedge a king.  What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly upon his shoulder and call him Waldo?  No disciple of Father Mathew would be likely to do such a thing.  There may have been such irreverent persons, but if any one had so ventured at the “Saturday Club,” it would have produced a sensation like Brummel’s “George, ring the bell,” to the Prince Regent.  His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many others of his characteristics, that the spirit which animated his mortal frame had missed its way on the shining path to some brighter and better sphere of being.

Not so did Emerson appear among the plain working farmers of the village in which he lived.  He was a good, unpretending fellow-citizen who put on no airs, who attended town-meetings, took his part in useful measures, was no great hand at farming, but was esteemed and respected, and felt to be a principal source of attraction to Concord, for strangers came flocking to the place as if it held the tomb of Washington.

* * * * *

What was the errand on which he visited our earth,—­the message with which he came commissioned from the Infinite source of all life?

Every human soul leaves its port with sealed orders.  These may be opened earlier or later on its voyage, but until they are opened no one can tell what is to be his course or to what harbor he is bound.

Emerson inherited the traditions of the Boston pulpit, such as they were, damaged, in the view of the prevailing sects of the country, perhaps by too long contact with the “Sons of Liberty,” and their revolutionary notions.  But the most “liberal” Boston pulpit still held to many doctrines, forms, and phrases open to the challenge of any independent thinker.

In the year 1832 this young priest, then a settled minister, “began,” as was said of another,—­“to be about thirty years of age.”  He had opened his sealed orders and had read therein: 

Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe.

Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice of God in thine own soul.

Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the Universe and they will be thy fellow-servants.