addressed affectionately as Emma-all these and many more had joined the sleepers in Sleepy Hollow. The town itself has suffered comparatively few changes. True there is a trolley line through the main street-oddly called "The Milldam," and in Walden wood I met an automobile not far from the cairn, or stone pile, which marks the site of Thoreau's cabin. But the woods themselves were intact and the limpid waters of the pond had not been tapped to furnish power for any electric light company. The Old Manse looked much the same, and so did the Wayside and the Orchard House. Not a tree was missing from the mystic ring of tall pines in front of Emerson's house at the fork of the Cambridge and Lexington roads. On the central square the ancient tavern was gone where I had lodged on the night of my arrival and where my host, a practical philosopher-everyone in Concord had his philosophy, took a gloomy view of the local potentialities of the hotel business. He said there was nothing doing—some milk and asparagus were raised for the Boston market, but the inhabitants were mostly literary people. "I suppose," he added, "we've got the smartest literary man in the country living right here." "You mean Mr. Emerson," I suggested. "Yes, sir, and a gentleman too."

"And Alcott?" I ventured.

"Oh, Alcott! The best thing he ever did was his daughters."

This inn was gone, but the still more ancient one across the square remains, the tavern where Major Pitcairn dined on the day of the Lexington fight, and from whose windows or door steps he is alleged by the history books to have cried to a group of embattled farmers, "Disperse, ye Yankee rebels."

Concord is well preserved. Still there are subtle indications of the flight of time. For one thing, the literary pilgrimage business has increased, partly no doubt because trolleys, automobiles, and bicycles have made the town more accessible; but also because our literature is a generation older than it was in 1879. The study of American authors has been systematically introduced into the public schools. The men who made Concord famous are dead, but their habitat has become increasingly classic ground as they themselves have receded into a dignified, historic past. At any rate, the trail of the excursionist-the "cheap tripper," as he is called in England, is over it all. Basket parties had evidently eaten many a luncheon on the first battle-field of the Revolution, and notices were posted about, asking the public not to detace the trees, and instructing them

where to put their paper wrappers and fragmenta regalia. I could imagine Boston schoolma'ams pointing out to their classes, the minuteman, the monument, and other objects of interest, and calling for names and dates. The shores of Walden were trampled and worn in spots. There were springboards there for diving, and traces of the picnicker were everywhere. Trespassers were warned away from the grounds of the Old Manse and similar historic spots, by signs of "Private Property."

Concord has grown more self-conscious under the pressure of all this publicity and resort. Tablets and inscriptions have been put up at points of interest. As I was reading one of these on the square, I was approached by a man who handed me a business card with photographs of the monument, the Wayside, the four-hundred-year-old oak, with information to the effect that Mr.

would furnish guides and livery teams about the town and to places as far distant as Walden Pond and Sudbury Inn. Thus poetry becomes an asset, and transcendentalism is exploited after the poet and the philosopher are dead. It took Emerson eleven years to sell five hundred copies of "Nature," and Thoreau's books came back upon his hands as unsalable and were piled up in the attic like cord-wood. I was im

pressed anew with the tameness of the Concord landscape. There is nothing salient about it: it is the average mean of New England nature. Berkshire is incomparably more beautiful. And yet those flat meadows and low hills and slow streams are dear to the imagination, since genius has looked upon them and made them its own. "The eye," said Emerson, "is the first circle: the horizon the second."

And the Concord books-how do they bear the test of revisitation? To me, at least, they have even some of the second-rate papers in the "Dial" have-now nearly fifty years since I read them first, that freshness which is the mark of immortality.

No ray is dimmed, no atom worn:

My oldest force is good as new; And the fresh rose on yonder thorn

Gives back the bending heavens in dew.

I think I do not mistake, and confer upon them the youth which was then mine. No, the morning light had touched their foreheads: the youthfulness was in them.

Lately I saw a newspaper item about one of the thirty thousand literary pilgrims who are said to visit Concord annually. Calling upon Mr. Sanborn, he asked him which of the Concord authors he thought would last longest. The answer, somewhat to his sur

prise, was “Thoreau." I do not know whether this report is authentic; but supposing it true, it is not inexplicable. I will confess that, of recent years, I find myself reading Thoreau more and Emerson less. "Walden” seems to me more of a book than Emerson ever wrote. Emerson's was incomparably the larger nature, the more liberal and gracious soul. His, too, was the seminal mind; though Lowell was unfair to the disciple, when he described him as a pistillate blossom fertilized by the Emersonian pollen. For Thoreau had an originality of his own—a flavor as individual as the tang of the bog cranberry, or the wild apples which he loved. One secure advantage he possesses in the concreteness of his subject-matter. The master, with his abstract habit of mind and his view of the merely phenomenal character of the objects of sense, took up a somewhat incurious attitude towards details, not thinking it worth while to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." The disciple, though he professed that the other world was all his art, had a sharp eye for this. Emerson was Nature's lover, but Thoreau was her scholar. Emerson's method was intuition, while Thoreau's was observation. He worked harder than Emerson and knew more, that is, within certain defined limits. Thus he read the Greek poets in the original.