For nearly three-quarters of a century this mysterious essence of greatness that one feels must always be present in places where great deeds have taken place seems to have flashed no spark to the outer world. Grass waved on Concord farms and fell before the scythe, and new generations of farmers grew up to take the places of those which passed unmarked outside their community. For that space of time Concord was, very much as Troy was, the scene of a memorable fight. Then came Emerson to bring back to the place something of the nobility of spirit and independence of thought and action that must have come to it with his ancestor the Rev. Peter Bulkeley. Here was the scholar and the preacher instead of the farmer, but born of the same old sturdy stock and come back to set roots in Concord soil. Here he walked daily in the fields and woods with his veins open to that same ichor of the gods which had not made patriots and heroes indeed, but had given them tongues, which seems to have given power of expression to him who was already poet and seer. Here with him, grown up out of the same town, was Thoreau. Hither came Alcott to paint the bubbles of his inchoate dreams in rainbow conversation. Hither too came Hawthorne, to tramp the woods as did the others and feel as did they the divine afflatus drumming in their veins and the impulse to sturdy independence coming up to them out of the Concord soil as it thrilled up to the Minute Man through his plow handle. It was not so much that these men had within them the poetic fire, but that it burned there on the hearth of freedom, independence, and intense individuality. [Illustration: “Hither too came Hawthorne, to tramp the woods as did the others and feel as did they the divine afflatus.”] With them Concord came again into the eye of the world, and because they preached as well as wrought, the world’s eye is still upon it. And, as after the Minute Man and his times passed the little village slumbered, seeming to wait placidly for the next troubling of the waters, so now Sleepy Hollow, where these four dreamers lie, seems to be the real center of the town. The mystic dreams of Hawthorne, the golden serenity of Emerson, the primal wisdom of Thoreau, and the roseate fog of Alcott’s transcendentalism all flow serenely forth over its rim and flood the green hills and shadowy valleys of the region with peace and sweet content. Here, almost side by side, rest the four, and such blood of the gods as flowed in them is piped to all the world by way of what each wrote. No wonder Concord is a place of pilgrimage and people come by thousands to these graves as devout Mohammedans go to that of the prophet. Red oaks set their roots deep in the knoll where these lie, and white pines tower above them as if forming the first and most fitting round in their ladder to the stars. Out of the tops of these pines the harper wind should pluck harmonies beyond those common to groves.