ence upon
the town was very great for the first fifteen or twenty years
of his life there. Indeed, I think he would have said that
the town had more influence upon him than he had upon it.
The Concord people, like the general public, were slow in
coming to know his great genius. He was highly respected
always. But the people were at first puzzled by him. His
life was somewhat secluded. He spent his days in study and
in solitary walks. Until Mrs. Ripley came to the old manse,
about 1846, Emerson had, I think, no intimate friend outside
of his own household, except my sister Elizabeth, who had
been betrothed to his brother Charles, and was as a sister
to Emerson until her death in 1878. A good many allusions
to her will be found in his life and in his letters to Carlyle.
After she died and shortly before his own death he appeared
at my brother's house one day with a manuscript which he had
handed to the Judge. He had gone over his diary for a great
many years and extracted and copied everything in it which
related to her.

He used to read lectures to the Lyceum, and in reading his
books now I find a great many passages which I remember to
have heard him read in my youthful days. In one of his lectures
upon Plato, he said that he turned everything to the use of
his philosophy, that "wife, children and friends were all
ground into paint"--alluding to Washington Allston's story
of the Paint King who married a lovely maiden that he might
make paint of the beautiful color of her cheeks.

A worthy farmer's wife in the audience took this literally,
and left the room in high dudgeon. She said she thought
Waldo Emerson might be in better business than holding up
to the people of Concord the example of a wicked man who ground
his wife and children into paint.

In Emerson's later days he was undoubtedly a powerful educational
influence in the town. He was a man of much public spirit.
In his philosophy his "soul was like a star and dwelt apart."

But he had a heart full of human affections. He loved the
town. He loved his country. He loved his family. He loved
his neighbors and friends. He could be stirred deeply on
fit occasions by righteous indignation. Some of the men
who frequented the tavern, posted in the barroom a scurrilous
libel upon old Dr. Bartlett, the venerable physician, who
had incurred their hostility by his zeal in enforcing the
prohibitory laws. Emerson heard of it and repaired to the
spo