but only pallid phantoms with large, calm eyes, eating uncooked grain,
out of baskets, and discoursing in a sublime shibboleth of which
mortals have no key. But how could Plato Skimpole, who goes down to
Hingham on the sea, in a New England January, clad only in a suit of
linen, hope to build immortal summer-houses?

Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon
entering the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books
like the den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the
ornamental retreat of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain
shelves, not in architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a
few choice engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of
Michael Angelo's "Fates", which, properly enough, imparted that grave
serenity to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what
is written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's
published writings, the essays, orations, and poems, date from this
room, as much as they date from any place or moment. The villagers,
indeed, fancy their philosophical contemporary affected by the
novelist James's constancy of composition. They relate, with wide
eyes, that he has a huge manuscript book, in which he incessantly
records the ends of thoughts, bits of observation and experience, and
facts of all kinds--a kind of intellectual and scientific ragbag, into
which all shreds and remnants of conversations and reminiscences of
wayside reveries are incontinently thrust. This work goes on, they
aver, day and night, and when he travels the rag-bag travels too, and
grows more plethoric with each mile of the journey. And a story, which
will one day be a tradition, is perpetuated in the village, that one
night, before his wife had become completely accustomed to his habits,
she awoke suddenly, and hearing him groping about the room, inquired
anxiously,