One word concerning Mr. Emerson's relation to Christ and to Christianity. The distinction which he made between Jesus and other teachers was, no doubt, one of degree and not one of kind. He put no great gulf of supernatural powers, origin, or office between Christ and the ethnic prophets. But his reverence for Jesus was profound and tender. Nor did he object to the word "Christian" or to the Christian Church. In recent years, at least, he not unfrequently attended the services of the Unitarian Church in his town, and I have met him at Unitarian conventions, a benign and revered presence.
In the cemetery at Bonn, on the Rhine, is the tomb of Niebuhr, the historian, a man of somewhat like type, as I judge, to our Emerson. At least, some texts on his monument would be admirably appropriate for any stone which may be placed over the remains of the American prophet and poet in the sweet valley of tombs in Concord.
One of these texts was from Sirach xlvii. 14, 17:
"How wise wast thou in thy youth, and as a flood filled with understanding!
Thy soul covered the whole earth, and thou filledst it with dark parables.
Thy name went far unto the islands, and for thy peace thou wast beloved.
The countries marvelled at thee for thy songs and proverbs and parables and interpretations."
And equally appropriate would be this Horatian line, also on Niebuhr's monument:—
"Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tam cari capitis."
From a lifelong friend of Emerson I have just received a letter containing these words, which, better than most descriptions, give the character of his soul:—
"And so the white wings have spread, and the great soul has left us.
'’Tis death is dead; not he.'
He had no vanity, no selfishness; no greed, no hate; none of the weights that drag on common mortals. His life was an illumination; a large, fair light; the Pharos of New England, as in other days our dear brother called him. And this light shone further and wider the longer it burned."