where to stop, and what would be bare truth to me would sound on paper like the fondest exaggeration. "I mourn for the Commonwealth, which has lost before it yet had learned his name the promise of his eloquence and rare public gifts. He blessed himself that he had been bred from infancy as it were in the public eye, and he looked forward to the debates in the Senate on great political questions as to his fit and native element. And with reason, for in extempore debate his speech was music, and the precision, the flow and the elegance of his discourse equally excellent. Familiar as I was with his powers, when a year ago I first heard him take part in a debate, he surprised me with his success. He spoke so well that he was impatient of writing as not being a fit medium for him. I never shall hear such speaking as his, for his memory was a garden of immortal flowers, and all his reading came up to him as he talked, to clear, elevate and decorate the subject of his present thought. But I shall never have done describing, as I see well I shall never cease grieving as long as I am on the earth that he has left it. It seems no longer worth living in, if whatever delights us in it departs. He has quitted forever the apparent, the partial. He has gone to make acquaintance with the real, the good, the divine, and to find mates and co-operators such as we could not offer him." Charles Emerson entered with zeal and sympathy into the daily life of the people of Concord. He delivered a few lectures, which were quite celebrated. Some of his manuscripts are in existence, and there is a boyish essay or two in the _Harvard Magazine,_ one on Conversation and one on Friendship, which show a singular charm and simplicity of style. He wrote the epitaph on the tomb of Professor Ashmun at Mount Auburn, and a tribute to his friend, James Jackson, Jr., which is preserved in Jackson's memoir by his father. Miss Martineau, in a chapter of her autobiography written in 1836, describes the feeling in Boston in regard to the opposition to slavery, which seems now incredible even to those who remember it. She says: "The Emersons, for the adored Charles Emerson was living then, were not men to join an association for any object . . . . But at the time of the hubbub against me in Boston, Charles Emerson stood alone of a large company in defence of free thought and speech, and declared that he had rather see Boston in ashes than that I or anybody should be debarred in any way from perfectly free speech."