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"I bear in youth the sad infirmities
That use to undo the limb and sense of age."

Four years later:--

"Has God on thee conferred
A bodily presence mean as Paul's,
Yet made thee bearer of a word
Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?"

and again, in the same year:--

"Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base,
Trembling for the body's sake."--

Almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing
in "Terminus" his inherited weakness of organization.

And in writing to Carlyle, he says:--

"You are of the Anakirn and know nothing of the debility and
postponement of the blonde constitution."

Again, "I am the victim of miscellany--miscellany of designs, vast
debility and procrastination."

He thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be
observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that
semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry. His
presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough
to make him a rapid and enduring walker.

Emerson's voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the
lecture-room. It was never loud, never shrill, but singularly
penetrating. He was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as
to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through
his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a
well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite
sidewalk. It was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon
pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until
it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him.

He never laughed loudly. When he laughed it was under protest, as it
were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to
seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while
his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the "ground
swell," as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed
convulsion. He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to
Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much.

Emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered
the birthright of the New Englander. He had not the mechanical turn of
the whittling Yankee. I once questioned him about his manual dexterity,
and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail,
--which, as the intention is not to split it a