“Men and mind are my studies.  I need no observatory high in air to aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect.  I do not want a costly apparatus to give pomp to my pursuit or to disguise its inutility.  I do not desire to travel and see foreign lands and learn all knowledge and speak with all tongues, before I am prepared for my employment.  I have merely to go out of my door; nay, I may stay at home at my chambers, and I shall have enough to do and enjoy.”

The feeling of this sentence shows itself constantly in Emerson’s poems.  He finds his inspiration in the objects about him, the forest in which he walks; the sheet of water which the hermit of a couple of seasons made famous; the lazy Musketaquid; the titmouse that mocked his weakness in the bitter cold winter’s day; the mountain that rose in the horizon; the lofty pines; the lowly flowers.  All talked with him as brothers and sisters, and he with them as of his own household.

The same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his maturity, we recognize in one of the Essays of the youth.

“All men of gifted intellect and fine genius,” says Charles Emerson, “must entertain a noble idea of friendship.  Our reverence we are constrained to yield where it is due,—­to rank, merit, talents.  But our affections we give not thus easily.

      ‘The hand of Douglas is his own.’”

—­“I am willing to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good men hold cheap.  All this I will do out of regard to the decent conventions of polite life.  But my friends I must know, and, knowing, I must love.  There must be a daily beauty in their life that shall secure my constant attachment.  I cannot stand upon the footing of ordinary acquaintance.  Friendship is aristocratical—­the affections which are prostituted to every suitor I will not accept.”

Here are glimpses of what the youth was to be, of what the man who long outlived him became.  Here is the dignity which commands reverence,—­a dignity which, with all Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sweetness of manner and expression, rose almost to majesty in his serene presence.  There was something about Charles Emerson which lifted those he was with into a lofty and pure region of thought and feeling.  A vulgar soul stood abashed in his presence.  I could never think of him in the presence of such, listening to a paltry sentiment or witnessing a mean action without recalling Milton’s line,

  “Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed,”

and thinking how he might well have been taken for a celestial messenger.