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[170] with Longfellow, described his visit as being like the visit of an angel. This was the beginning of that lifelong friendship the terms of which are recorded in their published correspondence. “The dear Emerson,” said Carlyle to an American forty years later, “he thinks that the whole world is as good as himself.” After his return to Boston, Emerson entered that secular pulpit called in those days the Lyceum, or lecture platform. For half a century he was one of the leading lecturers of the country. He spoke in forty successive seasons before the Salem Lyceum. Much of the success of these addresses came from the unique simplicity and dignity of his manner. There was a legend of a woman in a town near Concord, who once avowed frankly that she could not understand a word he said, but she loved to watch him lecturing, because he looked so good. His calm and sonorous oratory, once heard, seemed to roll through every sentence of his that the student afterwards read, and his very peculiarities, the occasional pause, accompanied by a deep gaze of the eyes into the distance, “looking in the corner for rats,” as an irreverent Boston young lady once described it, or an apparent
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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