“Ah, who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clue regain? The unfinished window in Alladin’s tower Unfinished must remain.” The noble wife, who had been the inspiration and practical stimulus of the great romancer, survived her distinguished husband nearly seven years. She died in London, aged sixty, February 26, 1871, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, near the grave of Leigh Hunt. * * * * * EMERSON AND THE EMERSONITES. (FROM “MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.”) THERE were circumstances around me which made it difficult to view the world precisely as it exists; for severe and sober as was the Old Manse, it was necessary to go but a little way beyond its threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles. These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the wide spreading influence of a great original thinker who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries, to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the clew which should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists, whose systems――at first air――had finally imprisoned them in a fiery framework, traveled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thralldom. People that had lighted upon a new thought――or thought they had fancied new――came to Emerson as a finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning upon a hill-top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects unseen before:――mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of creation among the chaos: but also, as was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls and the whole host of night-birds, which flapped their dusty wings against the gazer’s eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of angelic feather. Such delusions always hover nigh whenever a beacon-fire of truth is kindled.