RALPH WALDO EMERSON 169 Boston congregation ; he returned with but one thing made clearer, namely that he had begun an ascent which each must climb alone. The Old Manse was built in 1767 for Emerson's grandfather, who had be come minister of Concord church. Emerson's father was the first child born in it, and used to claim that he was " in arms " on the field when the British were repulsed, being six years old when the fight occurred close to the windows. In this house we now find Emerson, at the age of thirty-one, studying Plato and Plotinus, and the English mystics, but also, with Sarah Ripley, studying Goethe and savants oi the new school, like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Here was conceived his first book, " Nature." This essay was published in 1836, the same year in which he wrote the Concord hymn, since annually sung, with its line about " the shot heard round the world." The little book was not at once heard so far, but it proved also the first shot of a revolution. A writer in the Saturday Review speaks of "the great men whom America and England have jointly lost" Emerson and Darwin and remarks that " some of those who have been forward in taking up and advancing the impulse given by Darwin, not only on the gen- eral ground where it started, but as a source of energy in the wider application of scientific thought, have once and again openly declared that they owe not a little to Emerson." This just remark may be illustrated by Dr. Tyndall's words, in 1873 : "The first time I ever knew Waldo Emerson was when, years ago, I picked up at a stall a 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 im- pulse 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 re- turned 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 Con- cord 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 pil- grims 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 deli- cate 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
