“Here’s another story of Emerson,” continued my host, with a twinkle, “that reminds me of the story of the man who said he couldn’t make a speech like Henry Clay, but he had once held the statesman’s hat when Clay was speaking. When Mr. Emerson delivered his second Phi Beta address, the desk had been removed from the pulpit of the church, so that he had at the beginning to kneel uncomfortably to read his manuscript. I went back in the vestry and found the desk, and, in the first pause in Emerson’s address, placed it before him. The audience of course applauded. When the oration was over, Lowell, who presided, congratulated Mr. Emerson on his success, and Emerson’s first words were, ‘Where’s that saint, Edward Hale?’”
SITTING-ROOM.
“Have you any special reminiscence of Hawthorne?”
“Hardly any at all. Personally, Hawthorne was very reticent in society. My own recollections of him, when I first saw him, were that he hardly spoke a word to anybody. This little scrap of Hawthorne’s, which you may use, if you care to, was sent to the ‘Boston Miscellany,’ a magazine that my brother edited, and to which all Young America at that time contributed. Lowell published his first stories and articles in the ‘Miscellany,’ after those in ‘Harvardiana.’
“But with Lowell my relations were singularly intimate. He was also intimate with my brother Nathan. Our 295 room in college was convenient for him, as his was at a distance from recitations. He was a class in advance of me. Those were the days when we borrowed Emerson’s volume of Tennyson’s first poems, and copied the poems in our scrap-books. Lowell was deep in the old dramatists then, and read papers on them in the Alpha Delta, which was the literary club to which we both belonged. The intimacy which was then begun lasted through our lives. He edited ‘The Atlantic’ when I published my first stories there.
HIGHLAND STREET, WITH THE HALE PLACE ON THE RIGHT.