The attraction of Emerson and the rest of the Concord authors, whose homes or tombs so many pilgrims visit, comes chiefly from the recognition by them of this search by mankind after the Infinite,--their insight into the nature and worth of this pilgrimage of life which all are making. Man loves and seeks amusement to beguile his toilsome or monotonous journey,--and hence the pleasure so many take in the lighter and more graceful or laughable forms of literature. But sooner or later, and in many persons at all times, what Tennyson calls “the riddle of the painful earth” is before us all for consideration, if not for solution. We see that the universe is moral,--even if we cannot read the moral aright,--and we seek those who can give us “the word of the enigma,” as the French say. Emerson gave it in his manner, Hawthorne in his, Thoreau in still another way; and these three Concord authors not only had much vogue in their lifetime, but are yet more widely read since their death. Others, like Ellery Channing, found little audience in youth, and time has not yet essentially enlarged the circle of their readers. With the same moral view of life which his more successful friends took, Channing, the poet (who must always be distinguished from Dr. Channing, the divine, his uncle), had in his style something of that distraction which Montaigne declares is needful to poets. [Illustration: GRAVES OF THE EMERSON FAMILY.] “The precepts of the masters,” says this eccentric Gascon, “and still more their example, tell us that we must have a little insanity, if we would avoid even more stupidity. A thousand poets drawl and languish in prose; but the best ancient prose (and ’tis the same with verse) glows throughout with the vigor and daring of poesy, and takes on an air of inspiration. The poet, says Plato” (and here Montaigne gives his own quaint form to the familiar passage in Plato’s Laws), “sitting on the Muses’ tripod, pours out like mad all that comes into his mouth, as if it were the spout of a fountain; without digesting or weighing it. So things escape him of various colors, of opposite natures, and with intermittent flow. Plato himself is wholly poetic; the old theology, say the scholars, is all poetry; and the First Philosophy is the original language of the gods.”