“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.

When they parted at the house of young Rice’s father, Emerson invited the boys to come and see him at the Allen farm, in the afternoon.  They came to a piece of woods, and, as they entered it, took their hats off.  “Boys,” said Emerson, “here we recognize the presence of the Universal Spirit.  The breeze says to us in its own language, How d’ ye do?  How d’ ye do? and we have already taken our hats off and are answering it with our own How d’ ye do?  How d’ ye do?  And all the waving branches of the trees, and all the flowers, and the field of corn yonder, and the singing brook, and the insect and the bird,—­every living thing and things we call inanimate feel the same divine universal impulse while they join with us, and we with them, in the greeting which is the salutation of the Universal Spirit.”

We perceive the same feeling which pervades many of Emerson’s earlier Essays and much of his verse, in these long-treasured reminiscences of the poetical improvisation with which the two boys were thus unexpectedly favored.  Governor Rice continues:—­