Mr. Emerson came, with a sunbeam in his face; and we had as good a talk as I ever remember to have had with him. He spoke of Margaret Fuller, who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a higher state since their last meeting. [There rings the tea-bell.] Then we discoursed of Ellery Channing, a volume of whose poems is to be immediately published, with revisions by Mr. Emerson himself and Mr. Sam G. Ward.... He calls them "poetry for poets." Next Mr. Thoreau was discussed, and his approaching departure; in respect to which we agreed pretty well.... We talked of Brook Farm, and the singular moral aspects which it presents, and the great desirability that its progress and developments should be observed and its history written; also of C. N----, who, it appears, is passing through a new moral phasis. He is silent, inexpressive, talks little or none, and listens without response, except a sardonic laugh; and some of his friends think that he is passing into permanent eclipse. Various other matters were considered or glanced at, and finally, between five and six o'clock, Mr. Emerson took his leave. I then went out to chop wood, my allotted space for which had been very much abridged by his visit; but I was not sorry. I went on with the journal for a few minutes before tea, and have finished the present record in the setting sunshine and gathering dusk.... UNIVERSITY REFORM. AN ADDRESS TO THE ALUMNI OF HARVARD, AT THEIR TRIENNIAL FESTIVAL, JULY 19, 1866. We meet to-day under auspices how different from those which attended our last triennial assembling! We were then in the midst of a civil war, without sight of the end, though not without hope of final success to the cause of national integrity. The three days' agony at Gettysburg had issued in the triumph of the loyal arms, repelling the threatened invasion of the North. The surrender of Vicksburg had just reopened the trade of the Mississippi. The capture of Port Hudson was yet fresh in our ears, when suddenly tidings of armed resistance to conscription in the city of New York gave ominous note of danger lurking at the very heart of the Union. In the shadow of that omen, we celebrated our academic festival of 1863. The shadow passed. With varying fortunes, but unvarying purpose, the loyal States pursued the contest. And when, in the autumn of 1864, by a solemn act of self-interrogation, they had certified their will and their power to maintain that contest to the end of disunion, and when a popular election expressing that intent had overcome the land like a summer-cloud without a bolt in its bosom, the victory was sown with the ballot which Grant and Sherman reaped with the sword.