THE HOMES AND HAUNTS OF EMERSON. It was said by a friend who stood by Thoreau's grave, before Hawthorne had been buried near him on the hill-side where he sleeps in Concord, "This village is his monument, covered with suitable inscriptions by himself." In future years,-when the pilgrim shall stand on the same pinecovered hill-top, where, a little higher up, as befits his genius, will be seen the grave of Emerson,-it can be said with even greater truth, that Concord itself is, the monument of him who wrote "By the rude bridge that arched the flood," and that other song, unrivaled in the depth of its sadness, whose closing strain is "The silent organ loudest chants For Concord is not only inscribed in all its tranquil scenery-its woods and fields and waters-with memories of Emerson the poet, but is also a family monument to his ancestors, the Bulkeleys and Emersons and Blisses; pious ministers who founded it, prayed for it and preached in it, helped to rescue it from Indian ambush and English invasion, and then laid their bones there to become part of its soil, and to dignify the plain earth which had nourished them. The history of the town is indeed that of Emerson and his forefathers; and it is better known. by his fame than through any other distinction it may now enjoy. It is here that the pilgrim shall say as the Persian disciple said of his master, "The eagle of the immaterial soul of Saadi hath shaken from his plumage the dust of the body." Ralph Waldo Emerson is the eighth in descent from the Reverend Peter Bulkeley, Rector of Woodhill, in English Bedfordshire, where the Ouse, they say, pours a winding flood through green meadows, much as the Musketaquid now does in his American colony. This Puritan minister, unwilling to obey the bishops of Charles Stuart, emigrated to Massachusetts, in 1634, with several of his English flock, and, in company with Major Simon Willard, a Kentish man, planted the town of Concord in September, 1635. He was the first minister of the church which he gathered there, and, at his death in 1659, transmitted his sacred office to his son, Rev. Edward Bulkeley; whose daughter, Elizabeth, born in Concord in 1638, married Rev. Joseph Emerson in 1665, and became the mother of a long line of ministerial Emersons. Her son, Edward Emerson, born in Concord in 1670, married Rebecca Waldo of Chelmsford in 1697; from whom the present Mr. Emerson derives both his descent and his middle name, by which he has commonly been called. The Emersons and Waldos, unlike the Bulkeleys, first settled in Ipswich, and were not originally clergymen. Thomas Emerson, the first American ancestor of the poet, is supposed to be descended from the Emersons of Durham in England, and perhaps from that Ralph Emerson in the county palatine of Durham, who, in 1535, received from Henry VIII. a grant of the heraldic arms which the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson have inherited,-three lions passant, with a demi-lion holding a battle-ax for crest.* The Waldos claim descent from Peter Waldo, a leading man among those early Protestants known as Waldenses; their first American ancestor was Cornelius of Ipswich and Chelmsford, the father of Rebecca Emerson. These Waldos had been merchants in London. The Bulkeleys were of gentle blood, and related to the family of Oliver St. John, the parliamentary leader and friend of Cromwell, whom Rev. Peter Bulkeley calls his nephew. In New England, since Thomas Emerson's death in 1666, his descendants have taken to the Christian ministry as remarkably as the Cottons or the Mathers. Mr. Emerson of Concord, his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, of that name, were all ministers, and he has a clerical ancestor in every generation, on one side or the other, as far back as Fox's "Book of Martyrs," to which one of those ancestors wrote a supplement. Mr. Emerson himself was born in Boston, May 25, 1803; his father, Rev. William Emerson, being at that time and until his death in 1811, minister of the First Church congregation, which John Cotton had gathered in 1630. This church in 1803 *This escutcheon was carved on the tomb-stone of Nathaniel Emerson (brother of Rev. Joseph Emerson) at Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he died in 1712, at the age of eighty-three. In 1709, Richard Dale, a London herald, certified this as the correct escutcheon, and it has since been used by some branches of the Emerson family. assembled in the Old Brick Meeting-house | Emerson of Concord married his successor on Washington street, close by the Old in the parish, Dr. Ripley, who thus became State-house, but soon removed to a site the guardian of young William Emerson near the parsonage-house, at the corner of and his sisters. When, some thirty years Summer and Chauncy streets, in which Mr. after, Rev. William Emerson of Boston died, Emerson was born. This house has been leaving six or seven young children, of whom taken down, and so has the new parsonage- Ralph Waldo was the third in age, Dr. Rip house on the same estate, in which Mr. Emerson spent his childhood. His father, Rev. William Emerson of Boston, was born at Concord, in the parsonage-house of his father, Rev. William Emerson of Concord, famous as the Old Manse, since Hawthorne lived and wrote under its gambrel roof. It was then, a few years before the Revolution, a new and fine house, built for the young minister of Concord and his bride, Miss Phebe Bliss, the daughter of his predecessor in the parish, Rev. Daniel Bliss. The sketches given with this paper of its exterior and interior represent it as little different from what it was in 1775, when Mr. Emerson's grandfather went forth from its front door early on the morning of Concord fight, to join the farmers at their muster on his meeting-house green. It was in the same condition sixty years later when Ralph Waldo Emerson went to live in it, as he had done at intervals before. ley's parsonage at Concord became a second home to them,-their own home continuing in Boston and Cambridge until 1834, when, upon his return from England, Mr. R. W. Emerson took up his abode permanently in Concord. For a year or so he lived at the Old Manse with his grandfather, Dr. Ripley, and there his first book, "Nature," was chiefly written. In the latter part of 1835, after his marriage with Miss Lidian Jackson of Plymouth, he took possession of his own home on the Lexington road, east of the village, not far from the Walden woods, and has lived there ever since. The house was partially destroyed by fire a few years ago, but was rebuilt in its former shape and aspect. It stands among trees, with a pine grove across the street in front, and a small orchard and garden reaching to a brook in the rear. On the south-east side, from which the succeeding sketch is taken, it looks toward another orchard, on the edge of About 1780, the widow of Rev. William which formerly stood the picturesque sumVOL. XVII.-41. mer-house built for Mr. Emerson in 1847-8 by his friend Mr. Bronson Alcott, but now for some years decayed and removed. The house itself is of wood,-a modest, homelike, comfortable residence, with small outlook, narrow grounds, and at some distance from Walden pond and the river-the two features of Concord scenery best known to the world, because most fully described by Thoreau and Hawthorne. It was proposed by Thoreau that Concord should adopt for its coat-of-arms "a field verdant, with the river circling nine times round"; and he compared the slow motion of the stream to "the moccasined tread of an Indian warrior." Channing-who, since he came to reside in Concord, in 1841, has rambled over every foot of its ground with Thoreau, with Hawthorne, or with Emerson, and is one of the few persons who, as Thoreau thought, "understood the art of walking, that is, of taking walks; who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering”. Channing sings of these "Peaceful walks Mr. Emerson had dwelt in this home for O'er the low valleys, seamed with long-past thrift, But Emerson himself, the first poet of Concord, if not of America, has drawn the landscape so familiar to him with the most truthful touches: The sketch on page 500 is taken from one of these hills, and gives quite as much distinctness to the river and its meadows as to the village itself, beyond which, as this picture is drawn, lies the hill-side grave of Hawthorne and the houses of Emerson and Alcott. From the hill Nahshawtuc, on which the artist sat to sketch this view (and where the Indians used to encamp, between the two rivers, Assabet and Musketaquid, which flow under its north and south sides to form the Concord), one may see in the spring freshets that prospect which Thoreau described: "Our village shows a rural Venice, "Because I was content with these poor fields, Visits the valley;-break away the clouds,- Winds, mindful yet of sannup and of squaw, Such is the picture presented to serene and hopeful eyes; but there is a different landscape, veiled with a sadder hue, which the same eyes have sometimes seen. "In the long, sunny afternoon, "The winding Concord gleamed below, As when my brothers, long ago, "But they are gone, the holy ones, "I touch this flower of silken leaf THE EMERSON HOUSE. Those whom Emerson commemorates in these lines were his earliest companions, his brothers Edward and Charles, with whom he rambled among the Concord woods and streams in his boyhood and youth, from 1816 to 1836, when his youngest brother Charles died. A few years later-perhaps in 1838his friend Alcott began to walk the hill-tops and wood-paths with him; in 1839 he became intimate with his young townsman, Henry Thoreau, then just setting forth with his brother John to explore the rivers Concord and Merrimac; and in 1841 Ellery Channing, returning eastward from the prairies of Illinois and the banks of the Ohio, made his home in a cottage, not far from Mr. Emerson's house. Hawthorne, as before mentioned, came first in 1842; he left Concord for Salem in 1846, but returned thither twice, in 1852 and finally, in 1860, when he came back from England. Between 1836 and 1846 Margaret Fuller was a frequent visitor in Concord, and a companion of Mr. Emerson and his friends. Hawthorne's note book records that in August, 1842, while returning through the woods from Mr. Emerson's house to the Old Manse, he encountered Margaret reading under a tree in "Sleepy Hollow "-the little park that has since become a cemetery, in which Hawthorne himself is buried. As they sat talking on the hill-side, not far from his future grave, "we heard," he says, "footsteps on the high bank above us, and while the person was still hidden among the trees he called to Margaret. Then he emerged from his green shade, and behold! it was Mr. Emerson, who said there were Muses in the woods to-day, and whispers to be heard in the breezes.' It being now nearly six o'clock, we separated,-Mr. Emerson and Margaret toward his home, and I toward mine." It This anecdote may serve to call attention to a habit of Emerson, in which he agrees with Wordsworth. When a traveler asked to see the old poet's study, his servant answered-" Here is Mr. Wordsworth's library, but his study is out-of-doors." was for many years Mr. Emerson's custom to pass his mornings in his library, and his afternoons in the open air, walking alone or with a friend across the pastures and through the woods which encircle the village on all sides. Behind the first range of these woods to the southward lies the fair lake called Walden, along whose shores Mr. Emerson owns some acres of woodland, so that he may look upon Walden as his own domain. His favorite walk has been to these woods and around this pond; and on the farther shore, opposite the cove where Thoreau built his cabin in 1845, Mr. Emerson once purposed to build a lodge or summer-house, for study and for the lovely prospect. The sketch of Walden given on page 504 was drawn from a point in the Emerson wood-lot, looking south-east across the water to the Emerson wood-lot on the other side, where the lodge, had it been built, was to stand. For some years, just before Thoreau's death in 1862, Mr. Emerson kept his boat in the cove beside which his friend's cabin had stood, and from this they now and then rowed forth together. "Here sometimes gliding in his peaceful skiff Tokens of love, types of the soul. He saw man Lost on the eternal billow, still his heart As Mr. Emerson was one day walking with a young friend along the railroad track that dykes Walden on the south-west, he threw a stone into the green water and repeated his own lines, which had not then been printed: "He smote the lake to please his eye In one of his later poems, called " My Garden," he thus speaks of Walden and its wooded banks: 66 "My garden is a forest ledge The banks slope down to the blue lake edge, Waters that wash my garden side The allusion here is to the mysterious rise and fall of the water in Walden, quite regardless of rain or drought, being sometimes at its highest in a dry summer, and at its lowest when all other streams and ponds are full. It seems to be fed by secret springs, and to have a hidden outlet. When, at one period in his life, it became necessary for Mr. Emerson to decide in what town or city he would fix his abode, he said, "I am by nature a poet, and, therefore, must live in the country." His choice of Concord for a home was simple |