There is a little nook by Gore Hall in Cambridge with which I have a queer medley of associations. One night I was tossed in a blanket there during my initiation into the Hasty Pudding Club. Precisely there I met Emerson rather memorably on the Commemoration Day in 1865 when he said to me, glancing at my soldier's uniform, in very simple words but with an intonation that betrayed deep feeling, "This day belongs to you." Immediately after, hard by I shook hands with Meade, the towering stately victor of Gettysburg in the full uniform of a corps commander, in contrast indeed to the slight, plainly-dressed philosopher. And only the other day I helped my little granddaughter to feed the grey squirrels in the same green nook from which the rollicking boys, the sage, and the warrior have so long since vanished. I have heard it remarked by a man of much literary discrimination that Emerson's poetic gift was pre-eminent and that he should have made verse and not prose his principal medium for expression. As it is his poems are few, his habitual medium being prose. The critic attributed this to a distrust which Emerson felt of his power of dealing with poetic form, the harmonious arrangement of lines. He felt that Emerson was right in his judgment of himself, that there was a defect here, and that it was well for him to choose as he did. All this I hesitate to accept. As regards form, while the verse of Emerson certainly is sometimes rough, few things in poetry are more exquisite than many verses which all will recall. What stanzas ever flowed more sweetly than these written for the dedication of the Concord monument? "By the rude bridge that arched the flood," or the little poem on the snow-storm, "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky arrives the snow." _The Boston Hymn_, too, though in parts informal to the point of carelessness, has passages of the finest music, "The rocky nook with hill-tops three, Looked eastward from the farms And twice each day the flowing sea Took Boston in its arms." Emerson when he gave his mind to it could sing as harmoniously as the best. Possibly we ought to regret that he did not write for the most part in verse. It is verse which comes and clings most closely to our souls and which memory holds most permanently. Prose is the inferior medium when a great utterance is addressed to men, it is the singer pre-eminently who holds our hearts and lives forever. But Emerson chose to be what he was and we are thankful for him. Many were vexed with Matthew Arnold whom we thought depreciatory, but I find no fault with his summing up of Emerson, "as the friend of all those who seek to live in the spirit." His prose and poetry are a precious possession and we should be grateful for both, and for him. But my purpose here as always is not to criticise but only to touch the light outside things, pausing at the edge of profundities.