“Like Milton, Mr. Emerson ‘was extraordinary temperate in his Diet,’ and he used even less tobacco.  Milton’s quiet day seems to have closed regularly with a pipe; he ‘supped,’ we are told, ’upon ... some light thing; and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water went to bed.’”

As Emerson’s name has been connected with that of Milton in its nobler aspects, it can do no harm to contemplate him, like Milton, indulging in this semi-philosophical luxury.

One morning in July, 1872, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson woke to find their room filled with smoke and fire coming through the floor of a closet in the room over them.  The alarm was given, and the neighbors gathered and did their best to put out the flames, but the upper part of the house was destroyed, and with it were burned many papers of value to Emerson, including his father’s sermons.  Emerson got wet and chilled, and it seems too probable that the shock hastened that gradual loss of memory which came over his declining years.

His kind neighbors did all they could to save his property and relieve his temporary needs.  A study was made ready for him in the old Court House, and the “Old Manse,” which had sheltered his grandfather, and others nearest to him, received him once more as its tenant.

On the 15th of October he spoke at a dinner given in New York in honor of James Anthony Froude, the historian, and in the course of this same month he set out on his third visit to Europe, accompanied by his daughter Ellen.  We have little to record of this visit, which was suggested as a relief and recreation while his home was being refitted for him.  He went to Egypt, but so far as I have learned the Sphinx had no message for him, and in the state of mind in which he found himself upon the mysterious and dream-compelling Nile it may be suspected that the landscape with its palms and pyramids was an unreal vision,—­that, as to his Humble-bee,

  “All was picture as he passed.”

But while he was voyaging his friends had not forgotten him.  The sympathy with him in his misfortune was general and profound.  It did not confine itself to expressions of feeling, but a spontaneous movement organized itself almost without effort.  If any such had been needed, the attached friend whose name is appended to the Address to the Subscribers to the Fund for rebuilding Mr. Emerson’s house would have been as energetic in this new cause as he had been in the matter of procuring the reprint of “Sartor Resartus.”  I have his kind permission to publish the whole correspondence relating to the friendly project so happily carried out.

    To the Subscribers to the Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson’s
    House, after the Fire of July 24, 1872: