how they can enjoy anything. But they do enjoy what they see, and they carry away a great many photographs, not only in their albums, but in their memory also. The fact is that they generally come well prepared, and know beforehand what they want to see; and, after all, there are limits to every thing. If we have only a quarter of an hour to look at the Madonna di San Sisto, may not that short exposure give us an excellent negative in our memory, if only our brain is sensitive, and the lens of our eyes clear and strong? The Americans, knowing that their time is limited, make certainly an excellent use of it, and seem to carry away more than many travellers who stand for hours with open mouths before a Raphael, and in the end know no more of the picture than of the frame. It requires sharp eyes and a strong will to see much in a short time. Some portrait painters, for instance, catch a likeness in a few minutes; others sit and sit, and stare and stare, and alter and alter, and never perceive the really characteristic points in a face. of It is the same with the American interviewer. I do not like him, and I think he ought at all events to tell us that we are being interviewed. Even ancient statues are protected now against snap-shots in the museums of antiquities. But with all that I cannot help admiring him. His skill, in the cases where I have been under his scalpel or before his brush, has certainly been extraordinary, and several them seem to have seen in my house, in my garden, in my library, and in my face, what I myself had never detected there, and all that in about half an hour. I remember one visit, however, which was rather humiliating. An American gentleman (I did not know that he was interviewing me) had been sitting with me for a long time, asking all sorts of questions and making evidently a trignometrical survey of my .self and my surroundings. At last I had to tell him that I was sorry I had to go, as I had to deliver a lecture. As he seemed so interested in my work 1 naturally expected he would ask me to allow him to hear my lecture. Nothing of the kind! "I am sorry," he said, "but you don't mind my sitting here in your library till you come back?" And. true enough, there I found him when I came home after an hour, and he was delighted to see me again. Some months after I had my reward in a most charming account of an interview with Professor Max Müller, published in an American journal. This power of observation which these interviewers, and to a certain extent most American travellers, seem to possess, is highly valuable, and as most of us cannot hope to have more than a few hours to see such monuments as St. Peter or Santa Sophia, or such giants as Tennyson or Browning, we ought to take a leaf out of the book of our American friends, and try to acquire some of their pace and go. 7 And then, America does not send us interviewers only, but nearly all their most eminent men and their most charming women pay us the compliment of coming over to their old country. They generally cannot give us more than a few days, or it may be a few hours only; and in that short space we also have to learn how to measure them, how to appreciate and love them. It has to be done quickly, or not at all. Living at Oxford, I have had the good fortune of receiving visits from Emerson, Dr. Wendell Holmes, and Lowell, to speak of the brightest stars only. Each of them stayed at our house for several days, so that I could take them in at leisure, while others had to be taken at one gulp, often between one train and the next. Oxford has a great attraction for all Americans, and it is a pleasure to see how completely at home they feel in the memories of the place. The days when Emerson, Wendell Holmes, and Lowell were staying with us, the breakfasts and luncheons. the teas and dinners, and the delightful walks through college halls, chapels and gardens are possessions forever. Emerson, I am grieved to say, when during his last visit to England he spent some days with us, accompanied and watched over by his devoted daughter, was already on the brink of him had grappled with them. And this that misfortune which overtook him in his old age. His memory often failed him, but as through a mist the bright and warm sun of his mind was always shining, and many of his questions and answers have remained engraved in my memory, weak and shaky as that too begins to be. I had forgotten that Emerson had ceased to be an active preacher, and I told him that I rather envied him the opportunity of speaking now and then to his friends and neighbors on subjects on which we can seldom speak except in church. He then told me not only what he had told others, that "he had had enough of it," but he referred to an episode in his life, or rather in that of his brother, which struck me as very significant at the time. "There was an ecclesiastical leaven in our family," he said. "My brother and I were both meant for the ministry in the Unitarian community. My brother was sent by my father to Germany (I believe to Göttingen), and after a thorough study of theology was returning to America. On the voyage home the ship was caught in a violent gale, and all hopes of saving it and the lives of the passengers was given up. At that time my brother said his prayers, and made a vow that if his life should be spared he would never preach again, but give up theology altogether and earn an honest living in some other way. The ship weathered the storm, my brother's life was saved, and, in spite of all entreaties, he kept his vow. Something of the same kind may have influenced me," he added; "anyhow, I felt that there was better work for me to do than to preach from the pulpit." And so, no doubt, there was for this wonderfully gifted man, particularly at the time and in the place where he lived. A few years' study at Göttingen might have been useful to Emerson by showing him the track followed by other explorers of the unknown seas of religion and philosophy, but he felt in himself the force to grapple with the great problems of the world without going first to school to learn how others before was perhaps the best for him and for us. His freshness and his courage remained undamped by the failures of others, and his directness of judgment and poetical intuition had freer scope in his rhapsodies than it would have had in learned treatises. I do not wonder that philosophers by profession had nothing to say to his essays because they did not seem to advance their favorite inquiries beyond the point they had reached before. But there were many people, particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies did more good than any learned disquisitions or carefully arranged sermons. There is in them what attracts us so much in the ancients, freshness, directness, selfconfidence, unswerving loyalty to truth, as far as they could see it. He had no one to fear, no one to please. Socrates or Plato, if suddenly brought to life again in America, might have spoken like Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly like that produced by Socrates in olden times. What Emerson's personal charm must have been in earlier life we can only conjecture from the rapturous praises bestowed on him by his friends, even during his lifetime. A friend of his who had watched Emerson and his work and his ever increasing influence, declares without hesitation that "the American nation is more indebted to his teaching than to any other person who has spoken or written on his themes during the last twenty years." He calls his genius "the measure and present expansion of the American mind." And his influence was not confined to the American mind. I have watched it growing in England. I still remember the time when even experienced judges spoke of his essays as mere declamations, as poetical rhapsodies, as poor imitations of Carlyle. Then gradually one man after another found something in Emerson which was not to be found in Carlyle, partic. ularly his loving heart, his tolerant spirit, his comprehensive sympathy with all that was or was meant to be good and true, even though to his own as yet the fulness of the Divine Logoi, mind it was neither the one nor the other. After a time some more searching critics were amazed at sentences which spoke volumes, and showed that Emerson, though he had never written a systematic treatise on philosophy, stood on a firm foundation of the accumulated philosophic thought of centuries. Let us take such a sentence as "Generaliza tion is always a new influx of divinity into the mind-hence the thrill that attends." To the ordinary reader such a sentence can convey very little; it might seem, in fact, a mere exaggeration. But to those who know the long history of thought connected with the question of the origin of conceptual thought as the result of ceaseless generalization, Emerson's words convey the outcome of profound thought. They show that he had recognized in general ideas, which are to us merely the result of a never ceasing synthesis, the original thoughts or logoi underlying the immense variety of created things; that he had traced them back to their only possible source, the Divine mind, and that he saw how the human mind, by rising from particulars to the general, was in reality approaching the source of those divine thoughts, and thus be coming conscious, as it were, of the influx of divinity. Other philosophers have expressed similar thoughts by saying that induction is the light that leads us up, deduction the light that leads us down. Mill thought that generalization is a mere process of motherwit of the shrewd and untaught intelligence; and that, from one narrow point of view, it is so, has been proved since by an analysis of language. Every word is a generalization, and contains in itself a general idea, the so-called root. These first generalizations are, no doubt, at first the work of motherwit and untaught intelligence only, and hence the necessity of constantly correcting them, whether by experience or by philosophy. But these words are nevertheless the foundation of all later thought, and if they have not reached they represent at least the advancing steps by which alone the human mind could reach, and will reach at last, the ideas of the Divine Mind. or cre Thus one pregnant sentence of Emerson's shows, when we examine it more closely, that he had seen deeper into the mysteries of nature, and of the human mind, than thousands of philosophers, call them evolutionists or nominalists. Evolutionists imagine that they have explained everything that requires explanation in nature if they have shown a more or less continuous development from the moneres to man from the thrills of the moneres to the thought of man. Nominalists again think that by ascending from the single to the general, and by comprehending the single under a general name, they have solved all the questions involved in nature, that is, in our comprehension of nature. They never seem to remember that there was a time when all that we call either single or general, but particularly all that is general, had for the first time to be conceived ated. Before there was a single tree, some one must have thought the tree or treehood. Before there was a single ape, or a single man, some one must have thought that apehood or that manhood which we see realized in every ape and in every man, unless we can bring ourselves to believe in a thoughtless world. If that first thought was the concept of a mere moneres, still in that thought there must have been the distant perspective of ape or man, and it is that first thought alone which to the present day keeps the ape an ape, and a man a man. Divine is hardly a name good enough for that first thinker of thoughts. Still, it is that Divinity which Emerson meant when he said that generalization is always a new influx of divinity into the mind, because it reveals to the mind the first thoughts, the Divine Logoi, of the universe. The thrill of which he speaks is the thrill arising from the nearness of the Divine, the sense of the presence of those Divine Logoi, or that Divine Logos, which in the begin ning was with God, and without which not anything was made that was made. Evolution can never be more than the second act; the first act is the volition or the thought of the universe, unless we hold that there can be an effect without a cause, or a Kosmos without a Logos. be Such utterances, lost almost in the exuberance of Emerson's thoughts, mark the distinction between a thoughtful and a shallow writer, tween a scarred veteran and a smooth recruit. They will give permanence to Emerson's influence both at home and abroad, and place him in the ranks of those who have not lived or thought in vain. When he left my house, I knew, of course, that we should never meet again in this life, but I felt that I had gained something that could never be taken from me. Another eminent American who often honored my quiet home at Oxford was James Russell Lowell, for a time United States minister in England. He was a professor and at the same time a politician and a man of the world. Few essays are so brimful of interesting facts and original reflections as his essays entitled "Among my Books." His "Biglow Papers," which made him one of the leading men in the United States, appeal naturally to American rather than to Cosmopolitan readers. But in society he was at home in England as much as in America, in Spain as well as in Holland. I came to know him first as a sparkling correspondent, and then as a delightful friend. out with Marlowe's Tamburlaine, "How now, ye pampered jades of Asia!" One thing in the discussion has struck me a good deal, and that is, the crude notion which intelligent men have of the migration of tribes. I think most men's conception of distance is very much a creature of maps-which make Crim Tartary and England not more than a foot apart, so that the feat of the old rhyme-"to dance out of Ireland into France," looks easy. They seem to think that the shifting of habitation was accomplished like a modern journey by rail, and that the emigrants wouldn't need tools by the way or would buy them at the nearest shop after their arrival. There is nothing the ignorant and the poor cling to so tenaciously as their familiar household utensils. Incredible things are brought every day to America in the luggage of emigrantsthings often most cumbrous to carry and utterly useless in the new home. Families that went from our seaboard to the West a century ago, through an almost impenetrable wilderness, carried with them all their domestic pots and pans-even those, I should be willing to wager, that needed the tinker. I remember very well the starting of an expedition from my native town of Cambridge in 1831, for Oregon, under the lead of a captain of great energy and resource. They started in wagons ingeniously contrived so as to be taken to pieces, the body forming a boat for crossing rivers. They carried everything they could think of with them, and got safely to the other side of the continent, as hard a job, I fancy, as our Aryan ancestors had to do. There is hardly a family of English descent in New England that doesn't cherish as an heirloom, something brought over by the first ancestors two hundred and fifty years ago. And beside the motive of utility there is that also of sentiold tool. Here is the letter which began our ment-particularly strong in the case of an intimacy: heard him stagger his neighbor, young lady, by bursting out with, "But madam, I do not accept your major premiss!" Poor thing, she evidently was not accustomed to such language, are wont to do, for a few lines for herand not acquainted with that terrible self. He at once resumed his pen and term. She collapsed, evidently quite at wrote:a loss as to what gift on her part Mr. Lowell declined to accept. a equally so. After he had written the above verses for my wife, my young daughter Beatrice (now Mrs. Colyer Fergusson) asked him, as young ladies Sometimes even the most harmless remark about America would call forth very sharp replies from him. Everybody knows that the salaries paid by America to her diplomatic staff are insufficient, and no one knew it better than he himself. But when the remark was made in his presence that the United States treated their diplomatic representatives stingily, he fired up, and discoursed most eloquently on the advantages of high thoughts and humble living. His cleverness and readiness in writing occasional verses have become proverbial, and I am glad to be able to add two more to the many jeux d'esprit of this brilliant and amiable guest. Had I all tongues Max Müller knows, The halls, the gardens, and the quads, There's nought can match them on this planet, Smiled on by all the partial gods Since Alfred (if 'twas he) began it: But more than all the welcomes warm, 'em, Why, they'd have wooed in winter-storm Bring me a cup of All Souls' ale, O'er the wet sands an insect crept I lost the pleasure of shaking hands with Longfellow during his stay in England. Though I have been more of a fixture at Oxford than most professors, I was away during the vacation when he paid his visit to our university, and thus lost seeing a poet to whom I felt strongly attracted, not only by the general spirit of his poetry, which was steeped in German thought, but as the translator of several of my father's poems. I was more fortunate with Dr. Wen. dell Holmes. His arrival in England had been proclaimed beforehand, and one naturally remained at home in order to be allowed to receive him. His hundred days in England were one uninterrupted triumphal progress. When he arrived at Liverpool he found about three hundred invitations waiting for him. Though he was accompanied by a most active and efficient daughter, he had at once to engage a secretary to Better than e'er was bought with siller, answer this deluge of letters. To drink (0 may the vow prevail) The health of Max' and Mrs. Müller! And though he was past eighty, he never spared himself, and was always ready to see and to be seen. He was not only an old, but a ripe and mellow man. There was no subject on which one could touch which was not familiar to the autocrat at the breakfast table. His thoughts and his words were ready, and one felt that it was not for |