pling philosopher.

The appetite for discussion not being fully satisfied by the stated
meetings of the School in the Orchard House, the hospitable Concord
folks opened their houses for informal symposia in the evenings. I was
privileged to make one of a company that gathered in Emerson's library.
The subject for the evening was Shakespeare, and Emerson read, by
request, that mysterious little poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle,"
attributed to Shakespeare on rather doubtful evidence, but included for
some reason in Emerson's volume of favorite selections, "Parnassus." He
began by saying that he would not himself have chosen this particular
piece, but as it had been chosen for him he would read it. And this he
did, with that clean-cut, refined enunciation and subtle distribution of
emphasis which made the charm of his delivery as a lyceum lecturer. When
he came to the couplet,

Truth may seem, but cannot be,
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she,

I thought that I detected an idealistic implication in the lines which
accounted for their presence in "Parnassus."

That shy recluse, Ellery Channing, most eccentric of the
transcendentalists, was not to be found at the School or the evening
symposia. He had married a sister of Margaret Fuller, but for years he
had lived alone and done for himself, and his oddities had increased
upon him with the years. I had read and liked many of his poems--those
poems so savagely cut up by Poe, when first published in 1843--and my
expressed interest in these foundlings of the Muse gave me the
opportunity to meet the author of "A Poet's Hope" at one hospitable
table where he was accustomed to sup on a stated evening every week.

The Concord Summer School of Philosophy went on for ten successive
years, but I never managed to attend another session. A friend from New
Haven, who was there for a few days in 1880, brought back the news that
a certain young lady who was just beginning the study of Hegel the year
before, had now got up to the second intention, and hoped in time to
attain the sixth. I never got far enough in Mr. Harris's lectures to
discover what Hegelian intentions were; but my friend spoke of them as
if they were something like degrees in Masonry. In 1905 I visited
Concord for the first and only time in twenty-six years. There is a good
deal of philosophy in Wordsworth's Yarrow poems--

For when we're there, although 'tis fair,
'Twill be another Yarrow!--