The guides—­rude men of the woods, rough and illiterate, but with all their physical faculties at a maximum acuteness, senses on the alert and keen as no townsman could comprehend them—­were Emerson’s avid study.  This he had never seen,—­the man at his simplest terms, unsophisticated, and, to him, the nearest approach to the primitive savage he would ever be able to examine; and he studied every action.  When the dinner was over, and the twilight coming on, he sometimes asked me to row him out on the lake to see the nightfall and watch the “procession of the pines,” that weird and ghostly phenomenon I have before alluded to.

More than a generation has passed since then.  Twenty-five years afterward I went back to the scene of the meeting.  Except myself, the whole company are dead, and the very scene of our acting and thinking has disappeared down to its geological basis, pillaged, burnt, and become a horror to see; but, among the memories which are the only realities left to it, this image of Emerson claiming kinship with the forest stands out alone, and I feel as if I had stood for a moment on a mount of transfiguration, and seen, as if in a vision, the typical American, the noblest in the idealization of the American, of all the race.  Lowell was of a more cosmopolitan type, of a wider range of sympathies and affections, accepted and bestowed, and to me a friend, loved as Jonathan loved David; but, as a unique, idealized individuality, Emerson looms up in that Arcadian dream more and more the dominant personality.  It is as character, and not as accomplishment or education, that he holds his own in all comparisons with his contemporaries, the fine, crystallized mind, the keen, clear-faceted thinker and seer.  I loved more Agassiz and Lowell, but we shall have many a Lowell and Agassiz before we see Emerson’s like again.  Attainments will be greater, and discovery and accomplishments will surpass themselves as we go on, but to be, as Emerson was, is absolute and complete existence.

Agassiz was, of all our company, the acknowledged master; loved by all, even to the unlettered woodsmen, who ran to meet his service as to no other of the company; by all the members of it reverenced as not even Emerson was; the largest in personality and in universality of knowledge of all the men I have ever known.  No one who did not know him personally can conceive the hold he had on everybody who came into relations with him.  His vast command of scientific facts, and his ready command of them for all educational purposes, his enthusiasm for science and the diffusion of it, even his fascinating way of imparting it to others, had even less to do with his popularity than the magnetism of his presence and the sympathetic faculty which enabled him to find at once the plane on which he should meet whomever he had to deal with.  Of his scientific position I cannot speak, though I can see that his was the most powerful of the scientific influences of that