Four Americans

ndental haze which filled the mental atmosphere thereabout. Of those who had made Concord one of the homes of the soul, Hawthorne and Thoreau had been dead many years?I saw their graves in Sleepy Hollow;?and Margaret Fuller had perished long ago by shipwreck on Fire Island Beach. But Alcott was still alive and garrulous; and Ellery Channing?Thorea'u's biographer? was alive. Above all, the sage of Concord, "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit," still walked his ancient haunts; his mind in many ways yet unimpaired, though sadly troubled by aphasia, or the failure of verbal memory. It was an instance of pathetic irony that in his lecture on "Memory," delivered in the Town Hall, he was prompted constantly by his daughter. It seemed an inappropriate manner of arrival?the Fitchburg Railroad. One should have dropped down upon the sacred spot by parachute; or, at worst, have come on foot, with staff and scrip, along the Lexington pike, reversing the fleeing steps of the British regulars on that April day, when the embattled farmers made their famous stand. But I remembered that Thoreau, whose Walden solitude was disturbed by gangs of Irish laborers laying the tracks of this same Fitchburg Railroad, consoled himself with the reflection that hospitable nature made the intruder a part of herself. The embankment runs along one end of the pond, and the hermit only said: It fills a few hollows And makes banks for the swallows, And sets the sand ...