change to myself. I am no longer your minister, but am not the less engaged, I trust, to the love and service of the same eternal causee—the advancement, namely, of the kingdom of God in the hearts of men. The tie which binds each of us to that cause is not created by our connection, and cannot be hurt by our separation. To me, as one disciple, is the ministry of truth, as far as I can discern or declare it, committed; and I desire to live nowhere and no longer than that grace of God is imparted to me the liberty to seek, and the liberty to utter it.

"I rejoice to believe that my ceasing to exercise the pastoral office among you does not make any real change in our spiritual relations to each other. Whatever is most desirable and excellent in it remains to us. If we have conspired from week to week in the sympathy and expression of devout sentiments; if we have received together the unspeakable gift of God's truth; if we have studied together any sense of the Divine Word, or striven together in any charity; above all, if we have shared in any habitual acknowledgment of that benignant God whose omnipotence raises and glorifies the meanest offices and the lowest ability, and opens heaven in every heart that worships him-then, indeed, are we united; we are mutually debtors to each other of faith and hope, engaged to confirm each other's hearts in obedience to the gospel. We shall not feel that the nominal changes and little separations of this world can release us from the strong courage of this spiritual bond. And I entreat you to consider how truly blessed will have been our connection if in this manner the memory of it shall serve to bind each one of us more strictly to the practice of our several duties.

...

"I pray God that whatever seed of truth and virtue

we have sown and watered together may bear fruit unto eternal life. I commend you to the Divine Providence. May he grant you in your ancient sanctuary the services of able and faithful teachers; and, whatever of discipline may be appointed to you in this world, may the blessed hope of the resurrection he has implanted in the constitution of the human soul, and confirmed and manifested by Jesus Christ, be made good to you beyond the grave. In this hope and faith I bid you farewell."

Immediately after sending this letter, Mr. Emerson set out upon his first visit to Europe, where he spent nearly a year, mainly in Italy and Great Britain.

IV.

VISITS TO EUROPE.

Of his first visit Mr. Emerson has given only a very brief account, extracted many years afterward from his note-books. Of the places which he visited, and the incidents of travel, he says nothing, confining himself wholly to reports of his interviews with a few notable men. "As they respect," he says, "parties quite too good and too transparent to the whole world, there is no need to affect any prudery of expression about a few hints of these bright personalities." These personal sketches evince a phase of Emerson's ca

pabilities of which there is elsewhere little trace except in what he has to say of Margaret Fuller, to whose biography by her brother and James Freeman Clarke he contributed some interesting chapters.

He went first to Italy. At Florence, where he made the longest stay, he was intimate with Horatio Greenough, the American sculptor, "whose face was so handsome, and his person so well formed, that he might be pardoned if, as was alleged, the face of his Medora and the figure of a colossal Achilles in clay were idealizations of his own."

HORATIO GREENOUGH.

"He was," says Emerson, “ a superior man, ardent and eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation and magnanimity. He believed that the Greeks had wrought in schools or fraternities, the genius of the master imparting his design to his friends, and inflaming them with it; and, when his strength was spent, a new hand, with equal heat, continued the work, and so, by short relays, until it was finished in every part with equal fire. This was necessary in so refractory a material as stone; and he thought Art would never prosper until we left our shy, jealous ways, and worked in society as they. All his thoughts breathed the same noble generosity. He was an accurate, and a deep man; a votary of the Greeks, and impatient of Gothic Art."

Through Greenough Mr. Emerson was introduced to Walter Savage Landor, then residing

near Florence, to all appearance in the most happy manner. Landor was about sixty years old, and his character had not yet assumed those darker shades which it bore in his extreme old age. Emerson saw Landor only twice; but his representation of the man at his best is worthy of reproduction. We give his account of these two interviews:

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

"On the 15th of May I dined with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful landscape. I had inferred from his book, or magnified from some anecdote, an impression of Achillean wrath, an untamable petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were just or not, but certainly on this May day his courtesy vailed that haughty mind, and he was the most patient and gentle of hosts. He admired Washington; talked of Wordsworth, Byron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, he is decided in his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well content to impress, if possible, his English whim upon the immutable past. No great man, he said, ever had a great son, if Philip and Alexander be not an exception; and Philip he calls the greater man. In Art he loves the Greeks, and in sculpture them only. He prefers the Venus to everything else, and, after that, the head of Alexander, in the gallery here. He prefers John of Bologna to Michel Angelo; in painting, Raffaelle; and shares the growing taste for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek historians he thought the only good,

and, after them, Voltaire. He pestered me with Southey, but who is Southey?

"He invited me to breakfast on Friday, and I did not fail to go this time with Greenough. He entertained us at once with reciting half a dozen hexameter lines of Julius Cæsar's. He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was necessary; undervalued Burke, and undervalued Socrates; designated as the three greatest of men, Washington, Phocion, and Timoleon, and did not even omit to remark the similar termination of their names. 'A great man,' he said, 'should make great sacrifices, and kill his hundred oxen without knowing whether they would be consumed by gods and heroes, or whether the flies would eat them.' He despised entomology, yet in the same breath said, 'The sublime is in a grain of dust.' I suppose I teased him about recent writers; but he professed never to have heard of Herschel, not even by name. One room was full of pictures, which he likes to show, especially one piece, standing before which he said, 'I would give fifty guineas to the man who would swear that it was a Domenichino.' I was more curious to see his library, but was told by one of the guests that he gives away his books, and has never more than a dozen at a time in his house.

"Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak, which the British like to indulge, as if to signalize their commanding freedom. He has a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible; meant for a soldier, by some chance converted to letters, in which there is not a style nor a tint not known to him; yet with an English appetite for action and heroes. 'The thing done avails, and not what is said about it; an original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.' Lan