Emerson's
library, a large square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant by
pictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that line the walls are well
filled with books. There is a lack of showy covers or rich bindings, and
each volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant service. Mr.
Emerson's study is a quiet room upstairs.'
[Footnote 3: Clough's _Life and Letters_, i. 185.]
Fate did not spare him the strokes of the common lot. His first wife
died after three short years of wedded happiness. He lost a little son,
who was the light of his eyes. But others were born to him, and in all
the relations and circumstances of domestic life he was one of the best
and most beloved of men. He long carried in his mind the picture of
Carlyle's life at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his own
choice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly in the busy world, nor
quite beyond it.'
'Besides my house,' he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I have, I believe, 22,000
dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other
tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last
winter 800 dollars. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich
man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance, I have food,
warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer.
I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose,
ever was rich in the sense of _freedom to spend_, because of the
inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise.
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