y
quoting, he says of Emerson:--

"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:-