“One day there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals, with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed.  Our choir was a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after Emerson’s voice.  I remember of the sermon only that it had an indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and dainty things of the kind which I had ever heard.  I could understand them, if not the fresh philosophical novelties of the discourse.”

Everywhere Emerson seems to have pleased his audiences.  The Reverend Dr. Morison, formerly the much respected Unitarian minister of New Bedford, writes to me as follows:—­

“After Dr. Dewey left New Bedford, Mr. Emerson preached there several months, greatly to the satisfaction and delight of those who heard him.  The Society would have been glad to settle him as their minister, and he would have accepted a call, had it not been for some difference of opinion, I think, in regard to the communion service.  Judge Warren, who was particularly his friend, and had at that time a leading influence in the parish, with all his admiration for Mr. Emerson, did not think he could well be the pastor of a Christian church, and so the matter was settled between him and his friend, without any action by the Society.”

All this shows well enough that his preaching was eminently acceptable.  But every one who has heard him lecture can form an idea of what he must have been as a preacher.  In fact, we have all listened, probably, to many a passage from old sermons of his,—­for he tells us he borrowed from those old sermons for his lectures,—­without ever thinking of the pulpit from which they were first heard.

Among the stray glimpses we get of Emerson between the time when he quitted the pulpit of his church and that when he came before the public as a lecturer is this, which I owe to the kindness of Hon. Alexander H. Rice.  In 1832 or 1833, probably the latter year, he, then a boy, with another boy, Thomas R. Gould, afterwards well known as a sculptor, being at the Episcopal church in Newton, found that Mr. Emerson was sitting in the pew behind them.  Gould knew Mr. Emerson, and introduced young Rice to him, and they walked down the street together.  As they went along, Emerson burst into a rhapsody over the Psalms of David, the sublimity of thought, and the poetic beauty of expression of which they are full, and spoke also with enthusiasm of the Te Deum as that grand old hymn which had come down through the ages, voicing the praises of generation after generation.