Those who are fortunate enough to have known him--he died in 1882--all agree that the real Emerson can be known only in part through his printed pages. His life was after all his greatest work. He was serene, noble, dignified. His portraits, at whatever age, testify to his fine loftiness. Every hearer speaks of the music of his voice. Withal he was friendly, full of humor, a good neighbor, a loyal townsman, and an engaging host to those who were worthy of his hospitality. Charles Eliot Norton, returning from Europe with him in 1873, when Emerson was sixty-nine years old, wrote in his journal: "Emerson was the greatest talker in the ship's company. He talked with all men, yet was fresh and zealous for talk at night. His serene sweetness, the pure whiteness of his soul, the reflection of his soul in his face, were never more apparent to me." No single quotation nor any group of them can make real to the young student that quiet refrain of reverent affection which is sounded in the recollections of scores and hundreds who knew him. This almost unparalleled beauty of character is the final guarantee of the line upon line of his poetry and the precept upon precept of his prose. What he taught must be understood partly in the light of himself and partly in the light of the years in which he was teaching. Let us take, for example, his two chief contentions. First, his insistence that the truth can be found only by searching one's own mind and conscience. Testing this doctrine by an examination of the man who preached it, one sees that he inherited a power to think from generations of educated ancestry. He had an "inquiring mind" and an inclination to use it. Furthermore, he inherited from this same ancestry a complete balance of character. He did not tend to selfishness or self-indulgence, and was free from thinking that the "voice of God" counseled him to ignoble courses. Puritan restraint was so ingrained in him that he needed no outward discipline and did not see the need of it for others. Freedom for him was always liberty under the law of right; and this freedom he championed in a period and among a people who for two centuries had been accepting without thought what the clergy had been telling them to believe. It had been for them to do what they were told, rather than to think what they should do. Now in Emerson's day there was a general restlessness. The domination of the old church was relaxed, and all sorts of new creeds were being propounded. The theory of democratic government was on trial, and no man was quite certain of its outcome. The expansion of Western territory and the development of the factory system were making many quick fortunes and creating discontent with quiet and settled frugality. Men needed to be told to keep their heads, to combine wisely between the old and the new, and to accept no man's judgment but their own. The "standpatter" would be left hopelessly behind the current of