im for the interminable period between
the incoming and the outgoing railroad train! He was a model of patience
and good temper. We might have feared that he lacked the sensibility to
make such intrusions and offences an annoyance. But when Mr. Frothingham
gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections
which I have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his
equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed,
and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed
itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree.

Of Emerson's affections his home-life, and those tender poems in memory
of his brothers and his son, give all the evidence that could be asked
or wished for. His friends were all who knew him, for none could be
his enemy; and his simple graciousness of manner, with the sincerity
apparent in every look and tone, hardly admitted indifference on the
part of any who met him were it but for a single hour. Even the little
children knew and loved him, and babes in arms returned his angelic
smile. Of the friends who were longest and most intimately associated
with him, it is needless to say much in this place. Of those who are
living, it is hardly time to speak; of those who are dead, much has
already been written. Margaret Fuller,--I must call my early schoolmate
as I best remember her,--leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of
five artists,--Emerson himself among the number; Thoreau is faithfully
commemorated in the loving memoir by Mr. Sanborn; Theodore Parker lives
in the story of his life told by the eloquent Mr. Weiss; Hawthorne
awaits his portrait from the master-hand of Mr. Lowell.

How nearly any friend, other than his brothers Edward and Charles, came
to him, I cannot say, indeed I can hardly guess. That "majesty" Mr.
Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that
doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly
upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew
would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent
persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "Saturday Club," it would
have produced a sensation like Brummel's "George, ring the bell," to
the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too
exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many
others of his characteristics, that the spirit w