little house upon the Boston road; the enthusiastic agriculturist and
Brook-Farmer already mentioned, then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house,
who added the genial cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of the
natural gentleman; a sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought
his weary way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of
a New England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times
merited well of her country; two city youths, ready for the fragments
from the feast of wit and wisdom; and the host himself, composed this
club. Ellery Channing, who had that winter harnessed his Pegasus to
the New York _Tribune_, was a kind of corresponding member. The news
of this world was to be transmitted through his eminently practical
genius, as the club deemed itself competent to take charge of tidings
from all other spheres.

I went, the first Monday evening, very much as Ixion may have gone to
his banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a
constrained but very amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a
tacit inquiry, seeming to ask, "Who will now proceed to say the finest
thing that has ever been said?" It was quite involuntary and
unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without
which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one
hand, and of curious listeners upon the other. I vaguely remember that
the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn "saying",
to which, after due pause, the honorable member for blackberry pastures
responded by some keen and graphic observation; while the Olympian host,
anxious that so much good material should be spun into something, beamed
smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the conversation became more
and more staccato. Miles Coverdale, a statue of night and silence, sat,
a little removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing imperturbably upon
the group; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit