"Nature," said Emerson in his first book, written in the old Manse at Concord, which Hawthorne afterwards inhabited, and which he has so beautifully commemorated--"Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man: only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and the earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common life whoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius will have remarked how easily he took all things along with him, the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became auxiliary to a man." So is Emerson associated with the tranquil landscape of the old Middlesex town--the gentle hills, the long sweep of meadowland, the winding river, the woodland, and the pastures under the ample sky. The broad horizon and rural repose were the fitting home of the lofty and beneficent genius whose life and word perpetually illustrated the supreme worth and beauty of truth, purity, and morality. Whoever saw him there or elsewhere, saw the "sweet and virtuous soul" which George Herbert likened to seasoned timber that never gives. The sincerity and serenity of Emerson's character were unsurpassed. The freshness and glow of his interest in life were perennial. With a sober tenderness of regret he said to a friend who congratulated him upon his seventieth birthday, "Yet it is a little sad to me, for I count to-day the end of youth." In no other sense than the lapse of years, however, was it true. That auroral freshness of soul which is the distinctive charm of youth lingered when even memory somewhat failed. "How long it is since I have seen you!" he said at Longfellow's funeral to a friend whom he had accosted just before. But he said it with all that heartiness of sympathy and expectation which, in the golden prime of his life, when he was in many ways the most striking and original figure in his country, made him greet every comer as if he expected to hear from him a wiser word than had yet been spoken. A youth, fascinated by this simple graciousness of manner, declared that Emerson greeted the most ordinary persons like a King of Spain receiving an ambassador from the Great Mogul. The expectancy of his manner implied that every man had some message to deliver, and he bent himself to hear.