our Society may appropriately record concerning him, one of them likely to be lost sight of in the lustre of his later and more famous achievements, and the other of a quality so evanescent as to be preserved only by contemporary evidence and

tradition.

The first relates to his address in September, 1835, at the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Concord; which seems to me to contain the most complete and exquisite picture of the origin, history, and peculiar characteristics of a New England town that has ever been produced.

The second is his power as an orator, rare and peculiar, and in its way unequalled among our cotemporaries. Many of us can recall instances of it, and there are several prominent in my recollection ; but perhaps the most striking was his address at the Burns centennial, in Boston, on the 25th of January, 1859.*

The company that he addressed was a queer mixture. First, there were the Burns club,-grave, critical, and long-headed Scotchmen, jealous of the fame of their countryman, and doubtful of the capacity to appreciate him in men of other blood. There were the scholars and poets of Boston and its

*This speech is given near the end of the volume.

neighbourhood, and professors and undergraduates from Harvard College. Then there were state and city officials, aldermen and common councilmen, brokers and bank directors, ministers and deacons, doctors, lawyers, and "carnal self-seekers" of every grade.

I have had the good fortune to hear many of the chief orators of our time, among them Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Ogden Hoffman, S. S. Prentiss, William H. Seward, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, some of the great preachers, and Webster, Everett, Choate, and Winthrop at their best. But I never witnessed such an effort of speech upon men as Mr. Emerson apparently then attained. It reached at once to his own definition of eloquence,—“a taking sovereign possession of the audience." He had uttered but a few sentences before he seemed to have welded together the whole mass of discordant material and lifted them to the same height of sympathy and passion. He excited them to smiles, to tears, to the wildest enthusiasm. His tribute to Burns is beautiful to read, perhaps the best which the occasion produced on either side of the ocean. But the clear articulation, the ringing emphasis, the musical modulation of tone and voice, the loftiness of bearing, and the radiance of his face, all made a

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part of the consummate charm. When he closed, the company could hardly tolerate any other speaker, though good ones were to follow.

I am confident that every one who was present on that evening would agree with me as to the splendour of that eloquence.

Very truly yours,

Rev. GEORGE D. ELLIS, D.D.,

E. R. HOAR.

Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

ADDRESS OF DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes then arose and addressed the Society as follows:

It is a privilege which any of us may claim, as we pass each of these last and newly raised mounds, to throw our pebble upon the cairn. For our own sakes we must be indulged in the gratification of paying our slender tribute. So soon, alas, after bidding farewell to our cherished poet to lose the earthly presence of the loftiest, the divinest of our thinkers! The language of eulogy seemed to have exhausted itself in celebrating him who was the darling of two English worlds, the singer of Acadian and Pilgrim and Indian story, of human affections and aspirations, of sweet, wholesome life from its

lullaby to its requiem. And now we hardly know what measure to observe in our praises of him who was singularly averse to over-statement, who never listened approvingly to flattery when living, and whose memory asks only the white roses of truth. for its funeral garlands.

The work of his life is before us all, and will have full justice done it by those who are worthy of the task and equal to its demands. But, as out of a score of photographs each gives us something of a friend's familiar face, though all taken together do not give us the whole of it, so each glimpse of reminiscence, each hint of momentary impression, may help to make a portrait which shall remind us of the original, though it is, at best, but an imperfect resemblance.

When a life so exceptional as that which has just left our earthly companionship appears in any group of our fellow-creatures, we naturally ask how such a well-recognised superiority came into being. We look for the reason of such an existence among its antecedents, some of which we can reach, as, for instance, the characteristics of the race, the tribe, the family. The forces of innumerable generations are represented in the individual, more especially those of the last century or two. Involved with these, inextricable, insoluble, is the mystery of mysteries,

the mechanism of personality. No such personality as this which was lately present with us is the outcome of cheap paternity and shallow motherhood.

I may seem to utter an Hibernian absurdity; I may recall a lively couplet which has often brought a smile at the expense of our good city; I may—I hope I shall not-offend the guardians of ancient formulæ, vigilant still as watch-dogs over the bones of their fleshless symbols, but I must be permitted to say that I believe the second birth may precede that which we consider as the first. The divine renovation which changes the half-human animal, the cave-dweller, the cannibal, into the servant of God, the friend, the benefactor, the lawgiver of his kind, may, I believe, be wrought in the race before it is incarnated in the individual. It may take many generations of chosen births to work the transformation, but what the old chemists called cohobation is not without its meaning for vital chemistry; life must pass through an alembic of gold or of silver many times before its current can possibly run quite clear.

A New Englander has a right to feel happy, if not proud, if he can quarter his coat-of-arms with the bands of an ancestry of clergymen. Eight generations of ministers preceded the advent of this prophet of our time. There is no better flint to