“There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts.”

From members of his own immediate family I have derived some particulars relating to his personality and habits which are deserving of record.

His hair was brown, quite fine, and, till he was fifty, very thick.  His eyes were of the “strongest and brightest blue.”  The member of the family who tells me this says:—­

“My sister and I have looked for many years to see whether any one else had such absolutely blue eyes, and have never found them except in sea-captains.  I have seen three sea-captains who had them.”

He was not insensible to music, but his gift in that direction was very limited, if we may judge from this family story.  When he was in College, and the singing-master was gathering his pupils, Emerson presented himself, intending to learn to sing.  The master received him, and when his turn came, said to him, “Chord!” “What?” said Emerson.  “Chord!  Chord!  I tell you,” repeated the master.  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Emerson.  “Why, sing!  Sing a note.”  “So I made some kind of a noise, and the singing-master said, ’That will do, sir.  You need not come again.’”

Emerson’s mode of living was very simple:  coffee in the morning, tea in the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with others using it, but always pie at breakfast.  “It stood before him and was the first thing eaten.”  Ten o’clock was his bed-time, six his hour of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven.  Work or company sometimes led him to sit up late, and this he could do night after night.  He never was hungry,—­could go any time from breakfast to tea without food and not know it, but was always ready for food when it was set before him.

He always walked from about four in the afternoon till tea-time, and often longer when the day was fine, or he felt that he should work the better.

It is plain from his writings that Emerson was possessed all his life long with the idea of his constitutional infirmity and insufficiency.  He hated invalidism, and had little patience with complaints about ill-health, but in his poems, and once or twice in his letters to Carlyle, he expresses himself with freedom about his own bodily inheritance.  In 1827, being then but twenty-four years old, he writes:—­

  “I bear in youth the sad infirmities
  That use to undo the limb and sense of age.”

Four years later:—­

  “Has God on thee conferred
    A bodily presence mean as Paul’s,
  Yet made thee bearer of a word
    Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?”

and again, in the same year:—­

  “Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base,
  Trembling for the body’s sake.”—­

Almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing in “Terminus” his inherited weakness of organization.