"Do you plan to donate your Filet de Bouef to the alms house?" Mary Moody asked, long finished with her portion. "Or is something else on your mind?"

"Some of the Cambridge poets are making progress on finishing a Dante translation of Longfellow's. Wendell Holmes called on me to ask for my company."

"Did Dr. Holmes advise you to turn vegetarian, Ralph Waldo?"

"You do remember I've asked my friends to call me simply Waldo for some time now, Aunty?"

"Yes. And I'm not your friend. Your mother entrusted your welfare to me."

"And how is it that my welfare, at sixty-two years of age, includes the use of my Christian name?"

"You'll live with it until I'm gone, which will be soon, do not fool yourself," she added. "This next Christmas."

Emerson showed no reaction to the gloomy prophecy. Moody's nephew, like all her family and her friends, long ago had grown to accept her preoccupation with death. Saladin, it is said, had his funeral shroud made to carry to battle with him as his standard. Aunt Moody had done the like all her life, making up her shroud, then, thinking it a pity to let it lie idle, wearing it as a night-gown or even a day-gown until it would be worn out, at which point she would order another. Lately, she had taken to sleeping in a coffin-shaped bed commissioned from a carpenter friend of hers, her tender 4'3" frame fitting rather comfortably.

"You're thinking of giving them some lessons on Dante, are you?"

"They are the experts, Aunty."

"Oh, and what of your translation?"

Emerson put down his fork and looked his Aunt in the eyes, waiting for an explanation.

"Margaret told me. She said it was, well, excuse my inability to resist, divine. The Nuova Vita, wasn't it?"

"La Vita Nuova. The New Life. Yes. It's something of a preface to the rest of Dante's work, a little book Dante wrote to prepare himself for The Divine Comedy, prepare himself to find his lost Beatrice. It is here, not in the infernal abyss, that we learn the real force driving all of Dante's work - it is not politics or religion or revenge, but the closed chambers of the heart. Well, I see Madame Fuller never did learn to keep things to herself in a sitting room."

"From an old woman with a needle eye nobody can. So why is it you never published it?"

"Margaret pushed me to do it. I undertook the project so that I could make Dante's acquaintance, not for others to do so. Margaret used to say that the value of a translation is greatest for the translator. Dante lacks the superficial charm to cheat a reader into knowing him without yourself entering his sphere."

"And you're too good to enter that sphere with the Cambridge professors, is that the case, Ralph Waldo?"

"If Socrates lived today, we could go talk with him out in the open streets, Aunty. But Longfellow and his type, we cannot do so. There is a palace, and servants, and wine glasses, and fine coats to get through. I am not fond of professors and would rather have living learning around me. The only one of their kind I shall tolerate is the 'Professor' of Concord, my neighbor Channing's dog."

"And yet you complain of late you are never given the company of magnetic minds!" she persisted.

"Yes, but as I say to Dr. Holmes, I shall not seek them in large assemblies. Bring the best minds together and they are so impatient of each other, so worldly, so babyish, so much age and sleep and care, that you have no academy at all. I heard of one story of a recent meeting of the Atlantic Club, Aunty. When a pile of the new number of the Atlantic was brought in, every one rose eagerly to get a copy, as if inside were contained all answers. And then each sat down and read his own article. The Saturday Club, the Atlantic Club, the Union Club, all boast one ego too many when I'm present."

Aunt Moody looked at Emerson sharply, extending her deceptively long neck toward her nephew. With her cropped blond hair pushed under her mobcap, Emerson thought she looked very much like a nun ready to punish her ward for talking out of turn.

"You, my dear Ralph Waldo, have been alone in your intellectual pursuits and despise the fact. You want for peers and are afraid of that."

"Aunty, when I did not make Phi Beta Kappa in college, when I wasn't valedictorian of my Harvard class like William and Charles, you were the only one who wasn't disappointed."

"Yes."

"And now that some have insisted on cataloguing my writings among the greatest thinkers of our age, you're the only one around me who hasn't been impressed. I do not need followers around me to boost my confidence. My writing comes from a wish not to bring men to me, but to bring them to themselves. I do not have but one disciple, and, yes, I take pleasure in driving them from me. It is my boast that I have no school and no followers."

Aunt Moody pushed her tiny frame away from the table. She knew that Emerson had once had disciples. Thoureau, Margaret Fuller, Jones Very, George Ripley, Alvah Page, Ellery Channing. But they grew to love him too much, or hate him too much, or both at different times. Without the patience or drive to mend broken bridges, Emerson had watched his Concord circle splinter and dissolve.

"Like Cicero," she said pointedly, "your poetry will not be valued for many years, because your prose is so much better."

"I thank you, as always Aunty, for your complete lack of relevance. It is refreshing. You are indeed one of America's great men."

Aunt Moody nodded defiantly and excused herself. Emerson picked up a nearby Boston Evening Telegraph. For whatever reason, the Telegraph was the only newspaper Mary Moody would suffer in her little cottage. On the front page, the Telegraph reported Johnson's latest push against inflation. Emerson tried to ignore a flashy article announcing a "Foul Deed," giving readers the latest scoop on the grizzly death of an unidentified man whose body was found naked, infested with worms and insects. Such grotesque detailing was the price paid for reading the Telegraph, Emerson thought as he turned to the profiles of the municipal election candidates.

"You are behind the times, dear Ralph Waldo," Aunt Moody said, bringing in a large bowl of strawberries and cream. "That is yesterday's newspaper. You will be quite handicapped in all those drawing room conversations you wish so dearly to avoid."

Moody produced the latest edition and offered it to Emerson alongside a serving of the berries.

"I'm sorry if my presence alone is not enough to sustain interest," she sighed. "If I repel people of intelligence greater than mine, it is because I know them too well."

Emerson thought to put aside the paper and assure Aunt Moody of the value of her company, but was drawn to a new article on the murder victim. Emerson found himself almost reading aloud as he greedily harvested the article for its content. This Telegraph reported that the murder victim was Chief Justice Artemus Shaw Healey of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and that the family had held a small, private funeral while the police continued their investigation. Emerson knitted his fine brows in incredulity. He had little respect for Justice Healey, and long ago had publicly pronounced the man an occupational coward after the horrendous Sims case. But to have been brought down to such a degrading demise - to be reduced to a grotesque blurb in the Boston Evening Telegraph! There were few leads as to possible suspects, and the police were currently investigating two men who owed Justice Healey substantial amounts of money he had lent them to start a business. Emerson found this proposition startling. What sort of nervous debtor would dream up such a ferocious manner for a murder?

Emerson was quite glad at the moment he had been sequestered in Concord, and more so that he shortly would be departing New England again for several weeks. The vision of Chief Justice Healey's fate would keep Emerson awake much of that night. With all the reformers, the abolitionists, with the long war, the emancipation of an enslaved race, the victory, still there was barbarity and loss. Emerson found himself thinking, as he shuddered at the newspaper, that his life had been one of reading and writing. How rarely it had allowed him to live! He had known those who tried, like Thoreau, yet perhaps Thoreau had in the end found it wasteful to spend a tenth or twentieth of his active life at Walden with a muskrat and fried fishes. Emerson had not come to know virtue and evil. Only its literature. How different he found reading the newspaper from reading a book. When learning the latest news of the world, he wished to give up all hope for Boston and for the future. When reading a good book, Emerson wished nothing else but that life was 3,000 years long.

He tried to ignore the news he had read, but the questions in his mind had already begun to be spun. They had entered the teetering line between past and present. What would become of the "Hub of the Universe?"