How different was his daughter, Louisa,--the keen observer of life and manners; the witty story-teller with the pictorial mind; always sympathetic, practical, helpful--the mainstay of her family, a pillar of support to her friends; forgetting the care of her own soul in her interest for the general welfare; heedless of her own advantage, and thereby obtaining for herself as a gift from heaven, the highest of all advantages, and the greatest of all rewards! And yet, with so wide a difference in the practical application of their lives, the well-spring of Louisa's thought and the main-spring of her action were identical with those of her father, and may be considered an inheritance from him. For the well-spring of her thought was _truth_, and the main-spring of her action was _love_. There can be no fine art, no great art, no art which is of service to mankind, which does not originate on this twofold basis. We are told that when she was a young girl, on a voyage from Philadelphia to Boston, her face suddenly lighted up with the true brightness of genius, as she said, "I love everybody in this whole world!" If, afterwards, a vein of satire came to be mingled with this genial flow of human kindness, it was not Louisa's fault. In like manner, Bronson Alcott rested his argument for immortality on the ground of the family affections. "Such strong ties," he reasoned, "could not have been made merely to be broken." Let us share his faith, and believe that they have not been broken. THE EMERSON CENTENNIAL EMERSON AND THE GREAT POETS _Read in the Town Hall, Concord, Mass., July_ 23, 1903 On his first visit to England, Emerson was so continually besieged with invitations that, as he wrote to Carlyle, answering the notes he received "ate up his day like a cherry;" and yet I have never met but one Englishman, Dr. John Tyndall, the chemist, who seemed to appreciate Emerson's poetry, and few others who might be said to appreciate the man himself. Tyndall may have recognized Emerson's keen insight for the poetry of science in such verses as: "What time the gods kept carnival; Tricked out in gem and flower; And in cramp elf and saurian form They swathed their too much power." A person who lacks some knowledge of geology would not be likely to understand this. Matthew Arnold and Edwin Arnold had no very high opinion of Emerson's poetry; and even Carlyle, who was Emerson's best friend in Europe, spoke of it in rather a disparaging manner. The "Mountain and the Squirrel" and several others have been translated into German, but not those which we here consider the best of them. On the other hand, Dr. William H. Furness considered Emerson "heaven-high above our other poets;" C. P. Cranch preferred him to Longfellow; Dr. F. H. Hedge looked upon him as the first poet of his time; Rev. Samuel Longfellow and Rev. Samuel Johnson held a very similar opinion, and David A. Wasson considered Emerson's "Problem" one of the great poems of the century.