Mr. Emerson brought nothing of this Concord atmosphere into society, but a great deal of good Yankee curiosity. "When I asked for a Massachusetts lady whom he knew he looked at me with those penetrating eyes that seemed too far off to have recognized anything lower than the rings of Saturn.
"Well, marm, how did you happen to have known her?" said he. I had to give him my whole lineage before he was satisfied. I remember that he quoted Alcott. We were speaking of a certain President, whom we did not love, and his large majority.
"Oh!" said he, "Beelzebub marshals majorities, and multitudes ever lie." A famous Orphic utterance.
Mr. Emerson was very learned. He could have been the "instructor of academies." Agassiz preferred his conversation on natural science to that of any other man in America, and the young poets went to him to hear about Beaumont and Fletcher, Plato and Bœhme, Bhavagadgita, Hafiz and Goethe; he could talk of them all. He said on one occasion, "When nature wants an artist she makes Tennyson or Robert Browning." And again, "Paracelsus" is the wail of the nineteenth century."
When I saw Emerson again the mighty intellect was in ruins. The memory so deeply stored was wiped out. The inductive philosopher was no more; but "that mystic past, that miracle sense," which had been present in his essays and poems will last forever. He is to many people the seer and the prophet still.
After seeing Ralph Waldo Emerson I spent one glorious day at Nahant with Agassiz. He took us to his laboratory, where we saw jelly-fishes galore and heard his wise, witty talk, which instructed the American people — North, South, East, and West. If ever a man made nature give up her secrets, that man was Agassiz. He was
