Emerson's personal appearance was that of a scholar and the descendant of scholars,--tall, slender, and with the complexion which is bred in the alcove and not in the open air. His hair was brown, fine, and thick. His eyes were of the deepest blue. His mode of living was very simple, but he was constitutionally fastidious, and very much averse to vulgar or commonplace companionship. He loved all children and simple-minded people, and the very babies in Concord knew and loved him. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee" he called himself; but he was rather a silent man in reality, and did not care to talk excepting when he had somewhat to say. He did not prate eternally of silence, as Carlyle did, while wreaking himself upon speech in the most frantically vehement manner all his days, but he knew when and how to be silent. The glimpses he gives of Mrs. Emerson, in the long correspondence with Carlyle, are all of the most pleasing nature, and his home life was apparently as perfect as music all his life long. Of the boy Waldo, who died, he was fond of speaking, and he evidently mourned him very deeply for a long time. Of his other children he never boasted, but always spoke most kindly. The most entire revelation that Emerson ever made of himself was doubtless in the letters to Carlyle; and it must be said that nowhere else has Carlyle appeared to so good advantage as in this correspondence with Emerson. One loves the grim, sardonic old man better after seeing that he could love his friend faithfully and loyally for so many years, and after reading all the tender and touching things he puts into his letters to him. Especially is this the case in the later days, when both had grown to be old men, and had been saddened by their life experience. Carlyle's letters after his wife's death are very touching. In the first after the sad event he says:-- "By the calamity of last April I lost my little all in this world, and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a _home_ for me any more. Bright, heroic, tender, true, and noble was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings; I am forever poor without her. She was snatched from me in a moment as by a death from the gods. Very beautiful her death was; radiantly to those who understood it, had all her life been: _quid plura?_" This which follows in the same letter, written while Carlyle was still in the unbroken possession of his faculties, makes us not only sad but indignant that his determination had not been allowed to be carried out; and that the poor old man, when broken down by age, should have been permitted to expose to view all those sacred things which, when sane and sound, he would so carefully have covered from the prying eyes of the world. He says:--