CONVERSATIONS IN BOSTON.

BY R.W.  EMERSON.

“Do not scold me; they are guests of my eyes.  Do not frown,—­they want no bread; they are guests of my words.”

TARTAR ECLOGUES

V.

CONVERSATIONS IN BOSTON.

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In the year 1839, Margaret removed from Groton, and, with her mother and family, took a house at Jamaica Plain, five miles from Boston.  In November of the next year the family removed to Cambridge, and rented a house there, near their old home.  In 1841, Margaret took rooms for the winter in town, retaining still the house in Cambridge.  And from the day of leaving Groton, until the autumn of 1844, when she removed to New York, she resided in Boston, or its immediate vicinity.  Boston was her social centre.  There were the libraries, galleries, and concerts which she loved; there were her pupils and her friends; and there were her tasks, and the openings of a new career.

I have vaguely designated some of the friends with whom she was on terms of intimacy at the time when I was first acquainted with her.  But the range of her talents required an equal compass in her society; and she gradually added a multitude of names to the list.  She knew already all the active minds at Cambridge; and has left a record of one good interview she had with Allston.  She now became intimate with Doctor Channing, and interested him to that point in some of her studies, that, at his request, she undertook to render some selections of German philosophy into English for him.  But I believe this attempt was soon abandoned.  She found a valuable friend in the late Miss Mary Rotch, of New Bedford, a woman of great strength of mind, connected with the Quakers not less by temperament than by birth, and possessing the best lights of that once spiritual sect.  At Newport, Margaret had made the acquaintance of an elegant scholar, in Mr. Calvert, of Maryland.  In Providence, she had won, as by conquest, such a homage of attachment, from young and old, that her arrival there, one day, on her return from a visit to Bristol, was a kind of ovation.  In Boston, she knew people of every class,—­merchants, politicians, scholars, artists, women, the migratory genius, and the rooted capitalist,—­and, amongst all, many excellent people, who were every day passing, by new opportunities, conversations, and kind offices, into the sacred circle of friends.  The late Miss Susan Burley had many points of attraction for her, not only in her elegant studies, but also in the deep interest which that lady took in securing the highest culture for women.  She was very well read, and, avoiding abstractions, knew how to help herself with examples and facts.  A friendship that proved of great importance to the next years was that established with Mr. George Ripley; an accurate