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[171] hesitation in'the selection of a word,--felicitously preparing the way, like Charles Lamb's stammer, for some stroke of mother-wit,these were a part of the man. It sometimes occurred that his auditors helped him, unconsciously, in the effect of his oratory. Thus I can recall the occasion when he exclaimed, in the middle of a lecture, “Beware how you unmuzzle the valetudinarian!” when a slight bustle was noticed among the seats, and one of the best known men in Boston, a man of striking appearance, was seen bearing out in his arms his wife, one of the best known women in Boston and a good deal of an invalid, who had apparently been unmuzzled by that particular sentence. Emerson always shrank from extemporaneous speech, though he was sometimes most effective in its use. He wrote of himself once as “the worst known public speaker and growing continually worse;” but his most studied remarks had the effect of offhand conviction from the weight and beauty of his elocution. It was in the year 1834 that Emerson retired to his father's birthplace, Concord, and became a dweller for the rest of his life in what was at first a small rural village. If
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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