copy of his
'Nature'; I read it with such delight, and I have never ceased to read
it; and if anyone can be said to have given the impulse to my mind it
is Emerson; whatever I have done the world owes him." But there is
still more significance in this matter. In 1836, when Darwin returned
from his voyage round the world, Emerson's "Nature" appeared, in which
the new world discovered by the Englishman was ideally recognized by
the American.

In 1835 Emerson was married to Lidian Jackson, sister of the late Dr.
C. T. Jackson, well known in connection with the discovery of
anaesthetics. The Concord house and farm were now purchased, and
Emerson's mother came to reside with him. The first works of Emerson
brought to his doors those strange pilgrims whom Hawthorne has
described in his "Mosses from an old Manse." Lover of solitude as he
was, the new teacher had never the heart to send empty from his door
anyone of those dejected people groping for the light who sought him
out. Mrs. Emerson, a lady of refined sensibilities and profoundly
religious nature, must often have been severely tried by these
throngs, but not even delicate health prevented her from exercising a
large and beautiful hospitality to these spiritually lame, halt, and
heart-sick who came to receive a healing touch. Though never ruffled,
Emerson was not defenceless before boorish intruders. On one occasion
a boisterous declaimer against "the conventionalities," who kept on
his hat in the drawing-room after invitation to lay it aside, was
told, "We will continue the conversation in the garden," and was
genially taken out of doors to enter them no more. Few were the sane,
as he told me, who visited him in those earlier days, but the unsane
were pretty generally those whose first instinct under any new light
is to get it into a tabernacle. Fortunately for Emerson and his
household, some of his ablest friends conceived the idea of founding a
new society on his principles at Brook Farm, near Boston; but,
unfortunately for that community, the unsane folk flocked to it, and
it was speedily brought to nought. Some able men, like George Ripley,
George Curtis, and Charles Dana, belonged to that community in their
youth, but probably Hawthorne wrote the experience of all of them
when, just after leaving it, he entered in his note-book (1841),
"Really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook
Farm.... It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was