It was this power in Wendell Phillips that Mr. Emerson chiefly admired,—"the steel hid under gauze and spangles;" that, with all the elegance and perfect finish of his speech and manner, he was not seen at his best until hostile dissent broke forth among his audience.
Page 259, note 1. These manly words for the hour in 1859 were omitted from the essay when the cloud was lifted:—
"The politics of Massachusetts are cowardly. We have a snappish criticism which watches and contradicts the opposite party, but we want will that advances and dictates. When we get an advantage, as in Congress the other day, it is because our adversary has made a fault, and not that we have made a thrust. Why do we not say, We are abolitionists of the most absolute abolition, as every man must be? Only the Hottentots, only the barbarous or semi-barbarous societies, are not. We do not try to alter your laws in Alabama, nor yours in Japan, or the Fee-jee Islands; but we do not admit them, or permit a trace of them here, nor shall we suffer you to carry your thuggism north, south, east or west, into a single rod of territory which we control. We intend to set and keep a cordon sanitaire, all around the infected district, and by no means suffer the pestilence to spread."
Page 260, note 1. This was the question asked in the Concord Town Hall by John Brown on one of his visits, seeking aid for the Free-State cause in Kansas.
Page 260, note 2. This was the good old George Minot, a man of the hoe and the shot-gun. It was he who, seeing Mr. Emerson pause, in thought, in the road before his house, said to his nephew, "Charley, that man ain't like other men. He's like Enoch; he walks with God and talks with his angels."
The end of the paragraph suggests the passage in "Heroism"
