In reading him I find the same thoughts, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generalization.

'Tis as if I went into a gymnasium and saw youths leap and climb and swing with a force unapproachable, tho these feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps." One is reminded of Mrs.Hawthorne's vivid characterization of the two men as she saw them on the ice of the Musketaquid twenty years before.
In our reverence for a place where a great man for a time has had his home, we must not forget that, while death may mark a given spot, life is quite another matter.

A man may be born or may die in a country, a city, a village, a house, a room, or,--narrower still,--a bed; for birth and death are physical events, but life is something quite different.

Birth is the welding of the soul to a given body; death is the dissolution of that connection; life is the relation of the imprisoned soul to its environment, and the content of that environment depends largely upon the individual; it may be as narrow as the village in which he lives, or it may stretch beyond the uttermost stars.

A man may live on a farm, or he may visit the cities of the earth,--it does not matter much; his life is the sum total of his experiences, his sympathies, his loves, of his hopes and ambitions, his dreams and aspirations, his beliefs and convictions.
To live is to love, and to think, and to dream, and to believe, and to act as one loves and thinks and dreams and believes, that is life; and, therefore, no man's life is bounded by physical confines, no man lives in this place or that, in this house or that; but every man lives in the world he has conquered for himself, and no one knows the limits of the domains of another.
The farmer's boy who sows the seed and watches the tender blades part with volcanic force the surface of the earth, making it to heave and tremble, who sees the buds and flowers of the spring ripen into the fruit and foliage of autumn, who follows with sympathetic vision all the mysterious processes of nature, lives a broader and nobler life than the merchant who sees naught beyond the four walls of his counting-room, or the traveller whose superficial eye marks only the strange and the curious.
In the eyes of those about them Hawthorne "lived" a scant mile from Emerson; in reality they did not live in the same spheres; the boundaries of their worlds did not overlap, but, like two far-separate stars, each felt the distant attraction and admired the glow of the other, and that was all.