greatly enjoying the society of Mr. Lowell; then went to Italy and joined a party who went up the Nile as far as Philae. He was far from well and cared little for travel, yet he mildly enjoyed the Biblical scene. "Egypt has been good and gentle to us, if a little soporific," he wrote; and again, "The people, whether in the boat or out of it, are a perpetual study for the excellence and grace of their forms and motions." He saw with pleasure in Florence, on his return, Herman Grimm and his wife, the daughter of Goethe's young friend Bettina; in Paris, Renan, Taine, Tourgueneff; then passing to England in better health gladly met again his old friend Carlyle, and also Max Müller, Ruskin, Browning, Gladstone and many others, though he was rather passive and not very strong. He joyfully sailed for home, arriving there in May, 1873, and welcomed by his townsfolk, was conducted to his restored house.
In October he made the address at the opening of the Concord Free Public Library, and in December read his poem "Boston" at the celebration in Faneuil Hall of the Boston Tea-Party His health was now restored, but his power of work was gone and his memory failing, and thereafter, with the exception of the little work which he accomplished on the papers in the present volume, he wrote nothing (hardly even letters) except with some difficulty the short address that he made at the unveiling of French's statue of the Minute-Man at the old North Bridge, on the one hundredth anniversary of Concord Fight.
POETRY AND IMAGINATION
In 1841 Mr. Emerson gave a lecture called "The Poet" in the course on The Times, in Boston, some passages of which occur in this essay. It probably also contains some leaves from
