There he could talk daily to celebrities like Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Louisa May Alcott relates
that when eight years old she was sent to the Emerson home to inquire about
the health of his oldest son, a boy of five. Emerson answered her knock,
and replied, "Child, he is dead!" Years later she wrote, "I never have
forgotten the anguish that made a familiar face so tragical, and gave those
few words more pathos than the sweet lamentation of the _Threnody_" Like
Milton and Tennyson, Emerson voiced his grief in an elegy, to which he gave
the title _Threnody_. In this poem the great teacher of optimism wrote:--
"For this losing is true dying;
This is lordly man's down-lying,
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning."
Aside from domestic incidents, his life at Concord was uneventful. As he
was by nature averse to contests, he never took an extreme part in the
antislavery movement, although he voiced his feelings against slavery, even
giving antislavery lectures, when he thought the occasion required such
action. His gentleness and tenderness were inborn qualities. Oliver Wendell
Holmes said that Emerson removed men's "idols from their pedestals so
tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship.
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