bare,' wrote
Clough, who made some sojourn there in 1852, 'and so is the country in
general; it is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses,
painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two white
wooden churches. There are some American elms of a weeping kind, and
sycamores, i.e. planes; but the wood is mostly pine--white pine and
yellow pine--somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, and
marshy hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook runs through to
the Concord River.'[3] The brook flowed across the few acres that were
Emerson's first modest homestead. 'The whole external appearance of the
place,' says one who visited him, 'suggests old-fashioned comfort and
hospitality. Within the house the flavour of antiquity is still more
noticeable. Old pictures look down from the walls; quaint blue-and-white
china holds the simple dinner; old furniture brings to mind the
generations of the past. At the right as you enter is Mr. Emerson's
library, a large square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant by
pictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that line the walls are well
filled with books. There is a lack of showy covers or rich bindings, and
each volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant service. Mr.
Emerson's study is a quiet room upstairs.'

[Footnote 3: Clough's _Life and Letters_, i. 185.]

Fate did not spare him the strokes of the common lot. His first wife
died after three short years of wedded happiness. He lost a little son,
who was the light of his eyes. But others were born to him, and in all
the relations and circumstances of domestic life he was one of the best
and most beloved of men. He long carried in his mind the picture of
Carlyle's life at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his own
choice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly in the busy world, nor
quite beyond it.'

'Besides my house,' he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I have, I believe, 22,000
dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other
tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last
winter 800 dollars. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich
man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance, I have food,
warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer.
I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose,
ever was rich in the sense of _freedom to spend_, because of the
inundation of cl