"The beauty of Israel has fallen in its high place," said the voice of Emerson's friend and neighbor, Judge Hoar, trembling and almost hushed in emotion, and everybody who heard felt the singular felicity of the words. The plain little country church was crowded, and a vast throng stood outside in the peaceful April sunshine. Before the pulpit--the eyes forever closed, the voice forever silent--lay the man whose aspect of sweet and majestic serenity Death had not touched, and which recalled his own words: "Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house." It was the man who was beloved of his neighbors and honored by the world, whose modest counsel in grave affairs guided the village, and whose thought led the thought of Christendom. "He belonged to all men, but he is peculiarly ours," said Judge Hoar truly, speaking for the quiet historic town of which Emerson's grandfather had been the minister, and in which he lived during the larger part of his life, and to which his memory will lend an imperishable charm. Concord when he first knew it was already famous. A hundred years ago, at the bridge over the placid river, the Middlesex farmers, hastening as minute men from all the neighboring country, had obeyed the first military summons to fire upon the king's regulars; and the red-coated regulars, turning, had begun, amid the blazing patriot volley of twenty miles, their long retreat to Yorktown and over the sea. At the point where the highway by which the soldiers marched enters the village, under the hill along whose ridge the hurrying countrymen pressed to cut off the soldiers' retreat, lived for more than forty years the scholar who belongs to Concord as Shakespeare belongs to Stratford.