I had in my early youth a key furnished me to some of the leading traits which were in due time to develop themselves in Emerson’s character and intelligence.  As on the wall of some great artist’s studio one may find unfinished sketches which he recognizes as the first growing conceptions of pictures painted in after years, so we see that Nature often sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity.  The sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life is not rich enough to carry out the Divine idea.

Such an unfinished but unmatched outline is that which I find in the long portrait-gallery of memory, recalled by the name of Charles Chauncy Emerson.  Save for a few brief glimpses of another, almost lost among my life’s early shadows, this youth was the most angelic adolescent my eyes ever beheld.  Remembering what well-filtered blood it was that ran in the veins of the race from which he was descended, those who knew him in life might well say with Dryden,—­

  “If by traduction came thy mind
  Our wonder is the less to find
  A soul so charming from a stock so good.”

His image is with me in its immortal youth as when, almost fifty years ago, I spoke of him in these lines, which I may venture to quote from myself, since others have quoted them before me.

  Thou calm, chaste scholar!  I can see thee now,
  The first young laurels on thy pallid brow,
  O’er thy slight figure floating lightly down
  In graceful folds the academic gown,
  On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught
  How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought,
  And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye,
  Too bright to live,—­but O, too fair to die.

Being about seven years younger than Waldo, he must have received much of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother’s hands.  I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles Emerson’s coming into my study,—­this was probably in 1826 or 1827,—­taking up Hazlitt’s “British Poets” and turning at once to a poem of Marvell’s, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner.  The influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of Emerson’s poems, and Charles’ liking for him was very probably caught from Waldo.  When Charles was nearly through college, a periodical called “The Harvard Register” was published by students and recent graduates.  Three articles were contributed by him to this periodical.  Two of them have the titles “Conversation,” “Friendship.”  His quotations are from Horace and Juvenal, Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Shakespeare, and Scott.  There are passages in these Essays which remind one strongly of his brother, the Lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later.  Take this as an example:—­