The exposure incidental to the fire seriously undermined Emerson"s already failing health; shortly after he wrote a friend in Philadelphia, "It is too ridiculous that a fire should make an old scholar sick; but the exposures of that morning and the necessities of the following days which kept me a large part of the time in the blaze of the sun have in every way demoralized me for the present,--incapable of any sane or just action. These signal proofs of my debility an decay ought to persuade you at your first northern excursion to come and reanimate and renew the failing powers of your still affectionate old friend."
The story of his last days is told by his son, who was also his physician:
"His last few years were quiet and happy. Nature gently drew the veil over his eyes; he went to his study and tried to work, accomplished less and less, but did not notice it. However, he made out to look over and index most of his journals. He enjoyed reading, but found so much difficulty in conversation in a.s.sociating the right word with his idea, that he avoided going into company, and on that account gradually ceased to attend the meetings of the Social Circle. As his critical sense became dulled, his standard of intellectual performance was less exacting, and this was most fortunate, for he gladly went to any public occasion where he could hear, and nothing would be expected of him. He attended the Lyceum and all occasions of speaking or reading in the Town Hall with unfailing pleasure.
"He read a lecture before his townpeople** each winter as late as 1880, but needed to have one of his family near by to help him out with a word and a.s.sist in keeping the place in his ma.n.u.script. In these last years he liked to go to church. The instinct had always been there, but he had felt that he could use his time to better purpose."
"In April, 1882, a raw and backward spring, he caught cold, and increased it by walking out in the rain and, through forgetfulness, omitting to put on his over-coat. He had a hoa.r.s.e cold for a few days, and on the morning of April 19 I found him a little feverish, so went to see him next day. He was asleep on his study sofa, and when he awoke he proved to be more feverish and a little bewildered, with unusual difficulty in finding the right word. He was entirely comfortable and enjoyed talking, and, as he liked to have me read to him, I read Paul Revere"s Ride, finding that he could only follow simple narrative. He expressed great pleasure, was delighted that the story was part of Concord"s story, but was sure he had never heard it before, and could hardly be made to understand who Longfellow was, though he had attended his funeral only the week before."
It was at Longfellow"s funeral that Emerson got up from his chair, went to the side of the coffin and gazed long and earnestly upon the familiar face of the dead poet; twice he did this, then said to a friend near him, "That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name."
Continuing the narrative, the son says: "Though dulled to other impressions, to one he was fresh as long as he could understand anything, and while even the familiar objects of his study began to look strange, he smiled and pointed to Carlyle"s head and said, "That is my man, my good man!" I mention this because it has been said that this friendship cooled, and that my father had for long years neglected to write to his early friend. He was loyal while life lasted, but had been unable to write a letter for years before he died. Their friendship did not need letters.
"The next day pneumonia developed itself in a portion of one lung and he seemed much sicker; evidently believed he was to die, and with difficulty made out to give a word or two of instructions to his children. He did not know how to be sick, and desired to be dressed and sit up in his study, and as we had found that any attempt to regulate his actions lately was very annoying to him, and he could not be made to understand the reasons for our doing so in his condition, I determined that it would not be worth while to trouble and restrain him as it would a younger person who had more to live for. He had lived free; his life was essentially spent, and in what must almost surely be his last illness we would not embitter the occasion by any restraint that was not absolutely unavoidable.
"He suffered very little, took his nourishment well, but had great annoyance from his inability to find the words which he wished for. He knew his friends and family, but thought he was in a strange house. He sat up in a chair by the fire much of the time, and only on the last day stayed entirely in bed.
"During the sickness he always showed pleasure when his wife sat by his side, and on one of the last days he managed to express, in spite of his difficulty with words, how long and happy they had lived together. The sight of his grandchildren always brought the brightest smile to his face. On the last day he saw several of his friends and took leave of them.
"Only at the last came pain, and this was at once relieved by ether, and in the quiet sleep this produced he gradually faded away in the evening of Thursday, April 27, 1882.
"Thirty-five years earlier he wrote one morning in his journal: "I said, when I awoke, after some more sleepings and wakings I shall lie on this mattress sick; then dead; and through my gay entry they will carry these bones. Where shall I be then? I lifted my head and beheld the spotless orange light of the morning streaming up from the dark hills into the wide universe.""
After a few more sleepings and a few more wakings we shall all lie dead, every living soul on this broad earth,--all who, at this mathematical point in time called the present, breathe the breath of life will pa.s.s away; but even now the new generation is springing into life; within the next hour five thousand bodies will be born into the world to perpetuate mankind; the whole lives by the constant renewal of its parts; but the individual, what becomes of the individual?
The five thousand bodies that are born within the hour take the place of the something less than five thousand bodies that die within the hour; the succession is preserved; the life of the aggregate is a.s.sured; but the individual, what becomes of the individual? Is he immortal, and if immortal whence came he and whither does he go? if immortal, whence come these new souls which are being delivered on the face of the globe at the rate of nearly a hundred a minute? Are they from other worlds, exiled for a time to this, or are they souls revisiting their former habitation?
Hardly the latter, for more are coming than going.
One midsummer night, while leaning over the rail of an ocean steamer and watching the white foam thrown up by the prow, the expanse of dark, heaving water, the vast dome of sky studded with the brilliant jewels of s.p.a.ce, an old man stopped by my side and we talked of the grandeur of nature and the mysteries of life and death, and he said, "My wife and I once had three boys, whom we loved better than life; one by one they were taken from us,--they all died, and my wife and I were left alone in the world; but after a time a boy was born to us and we gave him the name of the oldest who died, and then another came and we gave him the name of my second boy, and then a third was born and we gave him the name of our youngest;--and so in some mysterious way our three boys have come back to us; we feel that they went away for a little while and returned. I have sometimes looked in their eyes and asked them if anything they saw or heard seemed familiar, whether there was any faint fleeting memories of other days; they say "no;" but I am sure that their souls are the souls of the boys we lost."
And why not? Is it not more than likely that there is but one soul which dwells in all things animate and inanimate, or rather, are not all things animate and inanimate but manifestations of the one soul, so that the death of an individual is, after all, but the suppression of a particular manifestation and in no sense a release of a separate soul; so that the birth of a child is but a new manifestation in physical form of the one soul, and in no sense the apparition of an additional soul? It is difficult to think otherwise. The birth and death of souls are inconceivable; the immortality of a vast and varying number of individual souls is equally inconceivable. Immortality implies unity, not number.
The mind can grasp the possibility of one soul, the manifestation of which is the universe and all it contains.
The hypothesis of individual souls first confined in and then released from individual bodies to preserve their individuality for all time is inconceivable, since it a.s.sumes--to coin a word-- an intersoulular s.p.a.ce, which must necessarily be filled with a medium that is either material or spiritual in its character; if material, then we have the inconceivable condition of spiritual ent.i.ties surrounded by a material medium; if the intersoulular s.p.a.ce be occupied by a spiritual medium, then we have simply souls surrounded by soul,--or, in the final a.n.a.lysis, one soul, of which the so-called individual souls are but so many manifestations.
To the a.s.sumption of an all-pervading ether which is the physical basis of the universe, may we not add the suprasumption** of an all-pervading soul which is the spiritual basis of not only the ether but of life itself? The seeming duality of mind and matter, of the soul and body, must terminate somewhere, must merge in ident.i.ty. Whether that ident.i.ty be the Creator of theology or the soul of speculation does not much matter, since the final result is the same, namely, the immortality of that suprasumption, the soul.
But the individual, what becomes of the individual in this a.s.sumption of an all-pervading, immortal soul, of which all things animate and inanimate are but so many activities?
The body, which for a time being is a part of the local manifestation of the pervading soul, dies and is resolved into its const.i.tuent elements; it is inconceivable that those elements should ever gather themselves together again and appear in visible, tangible form. No one could possibly desire they ever should; those who die maimed, or from sickness and disease, or in the decrepitude and senility of age, could not possibly wish that their disordered bodies should appear again; nor could any person name the exact period of his life when he was so satisfied with his physical condition that he would choose to have his body as it then was. No; the body, like the trunk of a fallen tree, decays and disappears; like ripe fruit, it drops to the earth and enriches the soil, but nevermore resumes its form and semblance.
The pervading soul, of which the body was but the physical manifestation, remains; it does not return to heaven or any hypothetical point in either s.p.a.ce or speculation. The dissolution of the body is but the dissolution of a particular manifestation of the all-pervading soul, and the immortality of the so-called individual soul is but the persistence of that, so to speak, local disturbance in the one soul after the body has disappeared. It is quite conceivable, or rather the reverse is inconceivable, that the activity of the pervading soul, which manifests itself for a time in the body, persists indefinitely after the physical manifestation has ceased; that, with the cessation of the physical manifestation, the particular activity which we recognize here as an individuality will so persist that hereafter we may recognize it as a spiritual personality. In other words, a.s.suming the existence of a soul of which the universe and all it contains are but so many manifestations, it is dimly conceivable that with the cessation, or rather the transformation, of any particular manifestation, the effects may so persist as to be forever known and recognizable,--not by parts of the one soul, which has no parts, but by the soul itself.
Therefore all things are immortal. Nothing is so lost to the infinite soul as to be wholly and totally obliterated. The withering of a flower is as much the act of the all-pervading soul as the death of a child; but the life and death of a human being involve activities of the soul so incomparably greater than the blossoming of a plant, that the immortality of the one, while not differing in kind, may be infinitely more important in degree. The manifestation of the soul in the life of the humming-bird is slight in comparison with the manifestation in the life of a man, and the traces which persist forever in the case of the former are probably insignificant compared with the traces which persist in the case of the latter; but traces must persist, else there is no immortality of the individual; at the same time there is not the slightest reason for urging that, whereas traces of the soul"s activity in the form of man will persist, traces of the soul"s activity in lower forms of life and in things inanimate will not persist. There is no reason why, when the physical barriers which exist between us and the soul that is within and without us are destroyed, we should not desire to know forever all that the universe contains. Why should not the sun and the moon and the stars be immortal,--as immortal in their way as we in ours, both immortal in the one all-pervading soul?
"The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and the magazine of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last a.n.a.lysis, a residuum it could not solve," said Emerson in the lecture he called "Over-Soul."
What a pity to use the phrase "Over-Soul," which removes the soul even farther aloof than it is in popular conception, or which fosters the belief of an inner and outer, or an inferior and a superior soul; whereas Emerson meant, as the context shows, the all-pervading soul.
But, then, who knows what any one else thinks or means? At the most we only know what others say, what words they use, but in what sense they use them and the content of thought back of them we do not know. So far as the problems of life go we are all groping in the dark, and words are like fireflies leading us. .h.i.ther and thither with glimpses of light only to go out, leaving us in darkness and despair.
It is the sounding phrase that catches the ear. "For fools admire and like all things the more which they perceive to be concealed under involved language, and determine things to be true which can prettily tickle the ears and are varnished over with finely sounding phrase," says Lucretius. We imagine we understand when we do not; we do not really, truly, and wholly understand Emerson or any other man; we do not understand ourselves.
We speak of the conceivable and of the inconceivable as if the words had any clear and tangible meaning in our minds; whereas they have not; at the best they are of but relative value. What is conceivable to one man is inconceivable to another; what is beyond the perception of one generation is matter of fact to the next.
The conceivable is and ever must be bounded by the inconceivable; the domain of the former is finite, that of the latter is infinite. It matters not how far we press our speculations, how extravagant our hypotheses, how distant our vision, we reach at length the confines of our thought and admit the inconceivable.
The inconceivable is a postulate as essential to reason as is the conceivable. That the inconceivable exists is as certain as the existence of the conceivable; it is in a sense more certain, since we constantly find ourselves in error in our conclusions concerning the existence of the things we know, while we can never be in error concerning the existence of things we can never know, being sure that beyond the confines of the finite there must necessarily be the infinite.
We may indulge in a.s.sumptions concerning the infinite based upon our knowledge of the finite, or, rather, based upon the inflexible laws of our mental processes. We may say that there must be one all-pervading soul, not because we can form any conception whatsoever of the true nature of such a soul, but because the alternative hypothesis of many individual souls is utterly obnoxious to our reason.
To those who urge that it is idle to reason about what we cannot conceive, it is sufficient answer to say that man cannot help it.
The scientist and the materialist in the ardent pursuit of knowledge soon experience the necessity of indulging in a.s.sumptions concerning force and matter, the hypothetical ether and molecules, atoms and vortices, which are as purely metaphysical as any a.s.sumptions concerning the soul. The distinction between the realist and the idealist is a matter of temperament. All that separated Huxley from Gladstone was a word; each argued from the unknowable, but disputed over the name and attributes of the inconceivable. Huxley said he did not know, which was equivalent to the dogmatic a.s.sertion that he did; Gladstone said he did know, which was a confession of ignorance denser than that of agnosticism.
Those men who try not to think or reason concerning the infinite simply imprison themselves within the four walls of the cell they construct. It is better to think and be wrong than not to think at all. Any a.s.sumption is better than no a.s.sumption, any belief better than none.
Hypotheses enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. With a.s.sumptions the intellectual prospector stakes out the infinite. In life we may not verify our premises, but death is the proof of all things.
We stopped at Wright"s tavern, where patriots used to meet before the days of the revolution, and where Major Pitcairn is said-- wrongfully in all probability--to have made his boast on the morning of the 19th, as he stirred his toddy, that they would stir the rebels" blood before night.
One realizes that "there is but one Concord" as the carriages of pilgrims are counted in the Square, and the swarm of young guides, with pamphlets and maps, importune the chance visitor.
We chose the most persistent little urchin, not that we could not find our way about so small a village, but because he wanted to ride, and it is always interesting to draw out a child; his story of the town and its famous places was, of course, the one he had learned from the others, but his comments were his own, and the incongruity of going over the sacred ground in an automobile had its effect.
It was a short run down Monument Street to the turn just beyond the "Old Manse." Here the British turned to cross the North Bridge on their way to Colonel Barrett"s house, where the ammunition was stored. Just across the narrow bridge the "embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world." A monument marks the spot where the British received the fire of the farmers, and a stone at the side recites "Graves of two British soldiers,"-- unknown wanderers from home they surrendered their lives in a quarrel, the merits of which they did not know. "Soon was their warfare ended; a weary night march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry across the river, and then these many years of rest.
In the long procession of slain invaders who pa.s.sed into eternity from the battle-field of the revolution, these two nameless soldiers led the way." While standing by the grave, Hawthorne was told a story, a tradition of how a youth, hurrying to the battle-field axe in hand, came upon these two soldiers, one not yet dead raised himself up painfully on his hands and knees, and how the youth on the impulse of the moment cleft the wounded man"s head with the axe. The tradition is probably false, but it made its impression on Hawthorne, who continues, "I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his skull. The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood-stain, contracted as it had been before the long custom of war had robbed human life of its sanct.i.ty, and while it still seemed murderous to slay a brother man. This one circ.u.mstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight."
There are souls so callous that the taking of a human life is no more than the killing of a beast; there are souls so sensitive that they will not kill a living thing. The man who can relate without regret so profound it is close akin to remorse the killing of another--no matter what the provocation, no matter what the circ.u.mstances--is next kin to the common hangman.
From the windows of the "Old Manse," the Rev. William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson, looked out upon the battle, and he would have taken part in the fight had not his neighbors held him back; as it was, he sacrificed his life the following year in attempting to join the army at Ticonderoga, contracting a fever which proved fatal.
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery lies on Bedford Street not far from the Town Hall. We followed the winding road to the hill where Hawthorne, Th.o.r.eau, the Alcotts, and Emerson lie buried within a half-dozen paces of one another.
Th.o.r.eau came first in May, 1862. Emerson delivered the funeral address. Mrs. Hawthorne writes in her diary, "Mr. Th.o.r.eau died this morning. The funeral services were in the church. Mr. Emerson spoke. Mr. Alcott read from Mr. Th.o.r.eau"s writings. The body was in the vestibule covered with wild flowers. We went to the grave."
Hawthorne came next, just two years later. "On the 24th of May, 1864 we carried Hawthorne through the blossoming orchards of Concord," says James T. Fields, "and laid him down under a group of pines, on a hillside, overlooking historic fields. All the way from the village church to the grave the birds kept up a perpetual melody. The sun shone brightly, and the air was sweet and pleasant, as if death had never entered the world. Longfellow and Emerson, Channing and h.o.a.r, Aga.s.siz and Lowell, Greene and Whipple, Alcott and Clarke, Holmes and Hillard, and other friends whom he loved, walked slowly by his side that beautiful spring morning. The companion of his youth and his manhood, for whom he would willingly, at any time, have given up his own life, Franklin Pierce, was there among the rest, and scattered flowers into the grave. The unfinished "Romance," which had cost him so much anxiety, the last literary work on which he had ever been engaged, was laid in his coffin."
Eighteen years later, on April 30, 1882, Emerson was laid at rest a little beyond Hawthorne and Th.o.r.eau in a spot chosen by himself.
A special train came from Boston, but many could not get inside the church. The town was draped; "even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief." At the house, Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, conducted the services. "The body lay in the front northeast room, in which were gathered the family and close friends." The only flowers were lilies of the valley, roses, and arbutus.
At the church, Judge h.o.a.r, standing by the coffin, spoke briefly; Dr. Furness read selections from the Scriptures; James Freeman Clarke delivered the funeral address, and Alcott read a sonnet.
"Over an hour was occupied by the pa.s.sing files of neighbors, friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the dead poet. The body was robed completely in white, and the face bore a natural and peaceful expression. From the church the procession took its way to the cemetery. The grave was made beneath a tall pine-tree upon the hill-top of Sleepy Hollow, where lie the bodies of his friends Th.o.r.eau and Hawthorne, the upturned sod being concealed by strewings of pine boughs. A border of hemlock spray surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides.
The services were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final resting-place. The grandchildren pa.s.sed the open grave and threw flowers into it."
In her "Journal," Louisa Alcott wrote, "Thursday, 27th. Mr.
Emerson died at nine P.M. suddenly. Our best and greatest American gone. The nearest and dearest friend father ever had, and the man who has helped me most by his life, his books, his society. I can never tell all he has been to me,--from the time I sang Mignon"s song under his window (a little girl) and wrote letters _? la_ Bettine to him, my Goethe, at fifteen, up through my hard years, when his essays on Self-Reliance, Character, Compensation, Love, and Friendship helped me to understand myself and life, and G.o.d and Nature. Ill.u.s.trious and beloved friend, good-by!
"Sunday, 30th.--Emerson"s funeral. I made a yellow lyre of jonquils for the church, and helped trim it up. Private service at the house, and a great crowd at the church. Father read his sonnet, and Judge h.o.a.r and others spoke. Now he lies in Sleepy Hollow among his brothers under the pines he loved."