Section 2.  In September, 1835, Emerson was married to Miss Lydia Jackson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts.  The wedding took place in the fine old mansion known as the Winslow House, Dr. Le Baron Russell and his sister standing up with the bridegroom and his bride.  After their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson went to reside in the house in which he passed the rest of his life, and in which Mrs. Emerson and their daughter still reside.  This is the “plain, square, wooden house,” with horse-chestnut trees in the front yard, and evergreens around it, which has been so often described and figured.  It is without pretensions, but not without an air of quiet dignity.  A full and well-illustrated account of it and its arrangements and surroundings is given in “Poets’ Homes,” by Arthur Gilman and others, published by D. Lothrop & Company in 1879.

On the 12th of September, 1835, Emerson delivered an “Historical Discourse, at Concord, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town.”  There is no “mysticism,” no “transcendentalism” in this plain, straightforward Address.  The facts are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful, very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative Massachusetts Historical Society.  It looks unlike anything else Emerson ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix.  One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged with annotations, and trailing a supplement after it.  Oracles are brief and final in their utterances.  Delphi and Cumae are not expected to explain what they say.

It is the habit of our New England towns to celebrate their own worthies and their own deeds on occasions like this, with more or less of rhetorical gratitude and self-felicitation.  The discourses delivered on these occasions are commonly worth reading, for there was never a clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and heroines.  Concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland towns of New England.  Emerson has told its story in as painstaking, faithful a way as if he had been by nature an annalist.  But with this fidelity, we find also those bold generalizations and sharp picturesque touches which reveal the poetic philosopher.

“I have read with care,” he says, “the town records themselves.  They exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of a manifest love of justice.  I find our annals marked with a uniform good sense.—­The tone of the record rises with the dignity of the event.  These soiled and musty books are luminous and electric within.  The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they contrive to make intelligible