“On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns Festival, held at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial Anniversary of the poet’s birth. He spoke, after the dinner, to the great audience with such beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. Among his hearers was Mr. Lowell, who says of it that ‘every word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds.’ Judge Hoar, who was another of his hearers, says that, though he has heard many of the chief orators of his time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with, but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel.” The strange part of all the accounts given by the hearers is that Mr. Emerson seemed to speak _extempore_, which can hardly have been so. No account of the Festival, or Mr. Emerson’s part therein, appears in the journals, except a short page of praise of the felicitous anecdotes introduced by other after-dinner speakers. [210] _Page 440, note 1._ Here comes out that respect for labor which affected all Mr. Emerson’s relations to the humblest people he met. In the Appendix to the _Poems_ it appears in the verses beginning,— Said Saadi, When I stood before Hassan the camel-driver’s door. [211] _Page 441, note 1._ Thomas Carlyle. [212] _Page 441, note 2._ Mr. Emerson here recalls his childhood and that of his brothers, as in the passage in “Domestic Life,” in _Society and Solitude_, that has been often referred to in these notes. [213] _Page 443, note 1._ Among some stray lecture-sheets was the following on the scholar or poet:— “Given the insight, and he will find as many beauties and heroes and strokes of genius close by him as Dante or Shakspeare beheld. It was in a cold moor farm, in a dingy country inn, that Burns found his fancy so sprightly. You find the times and places mean. Stretch a few threads over an Æolian harp, and put it in the window and listen to what it says of the times and of the heart of Nature. You shall not believe the miracle of Nature is less, the chemical power worn out. Watch the breaking morning, or the enchantments of the sunset.” SHAKSPEARE The following notes on Shakspeare were written by Mr. Emerson for the celebration in Boston by the Saturday Club of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the poet’s birth. In Mr. Cabot’s _Memoir of Emerson_, vol. ii., page 621, apropos of Mr. Emerson’s avoidance of impromptu speech on public occasions, is this statement:—