When he was temporarily preaching in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1827, he
met Miss Ellen Tucker, then sixteen years old. This meeting was for two
reasons a noteworthy event in his life. In the first place, her inspiration
aided in the development of his poetical powers. He seemed to hear the
children of Nature say to her:--
"Thou shalt command us all,--
April's cowslip, summer's clover,
To the gentian in the fall,
Blue-eyed pet of blue-eyed lover."
[Illustration: ELLEN TUCKER]
His verses tell how the flower and leaf and berry and rosebud ripening into
rose had seemed to copy her. He married her in 1829 and wrote the
magnificent prophecy of their future happiness in the poem beginning:--
"And Ellen, when the graybeard years,"
a poem which he could not bear to have published in his lifetime, for Mrs.
Emerson lived but a few years after their marriage. In the second place, in
addition to stimulating his poetical activity, his wife's help did not end
with her death; for she left him a yearly income of twelve hundred dollars,
without which he might never have secured the leisure necessary to enable
him "to live in all the faculties of his soul" and to become famous in
American literature.
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