The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Lectures and biographical sketches [Vol. 10]

NOTES

NOTES

DEMONOLOGY

MR. EMERSON gave a course of ten lectures on Human Life, in Boston in the winter of 1838-39, of which "Demonology" was the last. In 1877 it was published in the North American Review. Much of the matter was drawn from his journals of 1837 and 1838. At that time Mesmerism, Animal Magnetism and Clairvoyance were attracting much attention, and wizards, male and female, found Boston a good field for their arts, and excited the curiosity and obtained the credence even of some persons of culture and religious character.

When the lecture was revised for publication as an essay, so-called "Spiritualism"—Mr. Emerson always spoke of it as "Spiritism"—had, from its humble beginnings in the "Rochester Knockings," spread far and wide in the United States, and invaded England also; so passages from journals between the years 1850 and 1860 referring to it were introduced. It appears also that one or two pages in "Spiritual Laws," in the first series of Essays, were transferred thither from "Demonology," the lecture which followed it in the course.

Page 3, note 1. Taylor's Philip van Artevelde, Act IV., Scene 1.

Page 4, note 1. Scott, Lady of the Lake, canto 1.

Page 5, note 1. Journal, September, 1866. "Struggled hard last night in a dream to repeat and save a thought or sentence spoken in the dream; but it eluded me at last: only came out of the pulling with this rag,—

"'his the deeper problem, But mine the better ciphered.'"

Mr. Emerson was a good sleeper, yet had, at least at certain periods, frequent and vivid dreams. These were due to the activity of his imagination, for his fare was simple, and he was remarkably temperate in his eating and drinking. He often wrote, however, until late in the evening. His journals show that he was greatly interested in the psychology of his dreams;—how it was that he, a minor actor, and the guest, or often the victim, in the pleasing or startling drama, should have created the characters, painted the scene and furnished the dialogue.

In the journal for 1851 he wrote:—

"My dreams are somewhat arch and satirical, if I dare give them all the meaning they will bear. If they mean anything, they are surprising bits, yet by no means from a divine plane, but from a great sagacity on the Franklin level. This confusion in counting New Hampshire bills was an example—they had a varying value, twenty different figures on the corners."

Two years earlier, he copied these pleasing lines from Ford's play The Sun's Darling:—

"I have found More sweets in one unprofitable dream Than in my life's whole pilgrimage."

Page 6, note 1. This thought came to him early, for in 1833, after seeing the ascending steps of animal forms in the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, he wrote in his journal: "We feel that there is an occult relation between the very worm, the crawling scorpion and man. I am moved to strange sympathies." These extended far, for in the "Bacchus" he wrote:—

And the poor grass shall plot and plan What it will do when it is man;

and in a lecture, in 1836, on the Humanity of Science, speaking of Lamarck's theories: "He says to the caterpillar, 'How dost thou, brother? Please God you shall yet be a philosopher.'"

Page 7, note 1. Calidasa or Kâlidasa, an East Indian poet whose writings have great beauty and charm. His principal work is the Sakuntala.

In the little poem on Birds ("Fragments on Nature," Poems, Appendix) they are called—

Gems in Nature's cabinet; These the fables she esteems Reality most like to dreams.

Page 8, note 1. This is Mr. Emerson's favorite doctrine of Compensation, and he was greatly interested in the symbolism of the phenomenon of Polarity (see Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 98).

In his speech on the Fugitive Slave Law, he quotes from AEschylus these lines:—

"For evil word shall evil word be said, For murder-stroke a murder-stroke be paid, Who smites must smart."

Page 10, note 1. The thought of this paragraph is contained in the poem "Fate," especially in its conclusion:—

For the prevision is allied Unto the thing so signified; Or say, the foresight that awaits Is the same Genius that creates.

Page 10, note 2.

You doubt we read the stars on high, Nathless we read your fortunes true; The stars may hide in the upper sky, But without glass we fathom you. "The Romany Girl," Poems.

Page 11, note 1. The office of the poet is to read the

Delicate omens traced in air.

See the motto to "Fate" in Conduct of Life.

Page 11, note 2. From George Herbert's poem "Man," several verses of which are given in Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 68.

Page 12, note 1. Mr. Emerson says this again in a fragment of verse:—

This passing moment is an edifice Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild.

Page 13, note 1. The pine-tree in "Woodnotes" sings, not of a fiat Creation, but

Of tendency through endless ages.

Page 13, note 2. See in the Poems (Appendix, "Fragments on the Poet") the verses beginning

For what need I of book or priest, Or sibyl from the mummied East?

Page 13, note 3.

〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉 Iliad, XIII., 243.

Page 14, note 1. Mr. Emerson quotes this story from Montaigne.

Page 15, note 1. Hecateus, a philosopher and disciple of the skeptic Pyrrho, accompanied Alexander the Great on his Asiatic conquest. He wrote on the Hyperboreans and also on Egypt.

Page 18, note 1. Goethe, Wahrheit and Dichtung, bk. xx.

Page 19, note 1. In his journal, Mr. Emerson makes magnetism a gift of the Prince of the Power of the Air; the purest men have it not. He cites Andrew Jackson as an instance of the magnetic man.

Page 20, note 1. Something like this is said in the poem on Nature, who,—

by marvel of her own, Strikes the loud pretender down. For Nature listens in the rose And hearkens in the berry's bell To help her friends, to plague her foes, And like wise God she judges well. "Nature," I., Poems.

Page 20, note 2. Quoted from Heracleitus.

Page 20, note 3. Gyges is told of by Herodotus. Plato tells of his obtaining the ring, and with it invisibility, the criminal use of which obtained a queen and kingdom. Peter Schlemihl, the man without a shadow, is the hero of a tale by Chemisso.

Page 22, note 1. In the essay in the first series on Spiritual Laws is a similar passage, where it is said that every man has his proper call, but "the pretence that he has another call, a summons by name and personal election and outward 'signs that mark him extraordinary and not in the roll of common men,' is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that

there is one mind in all the individuals, and no respect of persons therein." The quotation in both passages is from the braggart speeches of Glendower in Shakspeare, Henry IV., Part I., Act III., Scene 1. A similar passage, probably once part of "Demonology," and having also a reference to dreams, is on page 148 of "Spiritual Laws."

Page 23, note 1. Mr. Emerson elsewhere quotes a saying attributed to Pindar, that "Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much." Unhappily modern scholars think that Pindar's fragmentary line probably had no such charming significance.

The last two lines of this paragraph suggest what Mr. Emerson says of "The Poet" (Poems, Appendix),—his submissive willingness

to adjourn To infinite time his eager turn, His lot of action from the urn.

Page 24, note 1. The Latin quotation from Cicero, criticising Epicurus, might be rendered, Unconsciousness is an element of what is great and generous.

Ralph Cudworth, an English clergyman (1617-88), wrote The True Intellectual System of the Universe and A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. It was not Cudworth, however, but his quotations, especially from Plato, that delighted Emerson in his college days. In the journal of 1845 he wrote: "I know no book so difficult to read as Cudworth proper. For as it is a magazine of quotations, of extraordinary ethical sentences, the shining summits of ancient philosophy, and as Cudworth himself is a dull writer, the eye of the reader rests habitually on these wonderful revelations and refuses to be withdrawn."

Patrick Colquhoun of Dumbarton, Scotland (1745-1820),

was a police magistrate and wrote on economic subjects, criminals and pauperism in Great Britain. He lived for a time in Virginia in his youth.

Page 24, note 2. Journal, 1866. "Incredulity of truth is apt to be accompanied by credulity of much nonsense, as in our skeptics in religion who go blind into Mr. Lister's astrology, and Mr. Hume's mesmerism."

Page 25, note 1. When, in 1852, the "rat and mouse revelation" reached Concord, its disciples were, for the most part, of a kind that justified Mr. Emerson's remarks, and Judge Hoar's observation that, "if this were a treasure, it came to us in earthen vessels."

Of these manifestations Thoreau wrote to his sister,—

"Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings. Most people here believe in a spiritual world which no respectable junk-bottle which had not met with a slip would condescend to for a moment—whose atmosphere would extinguish a candle let down into it like a well that wants airing; in spirits which the very bull-frogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison. If I could be brought to believe in the things which they believe, I should make haste to sell out my stock in this and the next world's enterprises and buy a share in the first Immediate Annihilation Company that offered. I would exchange my immortality for a glass of small beer this hot weather. Where are the heathen? Was there ever superstition before? And yet I suppose there may be a vessel this very moment setting sail from the coast of North America to that of Africa with a missionary on board. Consider the dawn and the sunrise—the rainbow and the evening—the words of Christ and the aspirations of all the saints!

Hear music! see, smell, taste, feel, hear—anything—and then hear these idiots, inspired by the cracking of a restless board, humbly asking, 'Please, Spirit, if you cannot answer by knocks, answer by tips of the table'!!!!!!"—Thoreau's Letters.

Page 26, note 1. Hotspur's answer to his anxious wife, begging him to confide in her the cause of his restlessness while he was planning revolt against the king.—Henry IV., Part I., Act II., Scene 3.

Page 27, note 1. "These revelations … do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after. Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. … We must check this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask."

This passage is from "The Over-Soul," Essays, First Series, where on pages 269 and 270 is much matter skin to this essay.

Page 28, note 1. Mr. Emerson had a great liking for the epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's play, The Honest Man's Fortune, especially the lines:—

"Man is his own star, and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man Commands all light, all influence, all fate: Nothing to him falls early, or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

Page 28, note 2. Impatient as he was of quackery in things spiritual, and unattractive as semi-physiological matters were to him naturally, he knew that unexplained phenomena

would yet receive their solution in accordance with beautiful and universal law. An extract from his journal of 1842 is here given:—

"How slowly, how slowly we learn that witchcraft and ghostcraft, palmistry and magic and all the other scattered superstitions, which, with so much police, boastful skepticism and scientific committees, we had finally dismissed to the moon as nonsense, are really no nonsense at all, but subtle and valid influences, always starting up, mowing, muttering in our path and shading our day. The things are real, only they have shed their skin, which with much insult we have gibbeted and buried. One person fastens an eye on us and the very graves of the memory render up their dead, the secrets that make us wretched either to keep or to betray must be betrayed; and another person fastens an eye on us, and we cannot speak a syllable, and the very bones of the body seem to lose their cartilages."

See also "Nominalist and Realist" in Essays, Second Series, pp. 234, 235.

ARISTOCRACY

On his second visit to England, whither he had been invited by his friends, Alexander Ireland of Manchester and Thomas Carlyle, to give some lectures, Mr. Emerson wrote to his wife on February 10, 1848: "I have written a lecture on Natural Aristocracy, which I am to read at Edinburgh to-morrow, and interpolated beside some old webs with patches of new tapestry, contrary to old law."

The title "Natural Aristocracy" was given to make it the more intelligible to the English hearers; "The New Aristocracy"

was at first contemplated. The lecture was the sixth and last of the course given in June, in London, before a somewhat select audience, including many titled persons, at the Portman Square Literary and Scientific Institution.

Of this essay, Dr. Holmes said, "Let him who wishes to know what the word means to an American whose life has come from New England soil, whose ancestors have breathed New England air for many generations, read it, and he will find a new interpretation of a very old and often greatly wronged appellation."

With regard to the Portman Square audience, Mr. Cabot says in his Memoir:—

"'The English aristocracy,' Emerson remarks in English Traits, 'have never been addicted to contemplation;' and Emerson's idealism, thus abruptly presented, was not calculated to win them to it. … Emerson's London audience, to be sure, would probably in any case have given themselves but little concern with his ideas; it was not the ideas, but the man, that attracted them, so far as they were attracted."

The essay as here presented by no means represents the lecture read in England. The subject, under whatever name,—Being versus Seeming, Heroism, Self-Reliance, Character, Greatness,—was one that he continually wrote upon from the days when, a student at Harvard, he stood at his tall desk in Hollis Hall (number 15), writing his thoughts by the dawn of a winter's morning. Much matter accumulated, and selections from many sheets were variously grouped, to be read in different years to differing companies under the title "Aristocracy." Mr. Cabot skilfully incorporated the best later fragments with the substance of the English lecture.

Page 34, note 1. Professor N. S. Shaler, in his Interpretation

of Nature, well illustrates the point that the facts of Evolution and Heredity make morals more essential than does the Biblical account of Creation.

Page 36, note 1. Mr. Emerson said of Sir Walter Scott:

"His power on the public mind rests on the singular union of two influences. By nature, by his reading and taste an aristocrat, in a time and country which easily gave him that bias, he had the virtues and graces of that class, and by his eminent humanity and his love of labor escaped its harm."—"Walter Scott," Miscellanies.

Page 37, note 1. This paragraph suggests Guy, the "mortal mixed of middle clay," in the Poems.

Page 38, note 1.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can. "Voluntaries," Poems.

Page 39, note 1.

And through man and woman and sea and star Saw the dance of Nature forward and far. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 41, note 1. Eight years after leaving England, when English Traits was published, Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal concerning our own country:—

"The detachment of the Puritans without aristocracy must be as great a gain to mankind as the opening of that continent, and though tender people may object to us an aristocracy of wealth,—if you think what that means,—opportunity, free trade and bringing all the powers to the surface,—it is what all aim at."

It is needless to say that, writing in the simpler days of the Republic, he had not in mind the overgrown fortunes of the present era of materialism. The "wealth" he had in mind was of the moderate sort that helps to well-being.

Page 42, note 1. Southey's Chronicle of the Cid was a favorite book; Mr. Emerson liked to read fine passages from it to his children, and also from the old French Chanson de Roland the account of the hero, overwhelmed in the pass of Roncesvalles by the Moors through Ganelon's treachery, though wounded to death, standing by his dying friend Oliver and blowing on "the oliphant" the

"blast of that dread horn, On Fontarabian echoes borne, That to King Charles did come." "Marmion."

Page 43, note 1. There is much about Temperament in the essays, especially in "Fate" (Conduct of Life). See also in the Poems, in the "Fragments on Life," the lines beginning,—

From the stores of eldest matter, The deep-eyed flame, obedient water.

Page 44, note 1. Shakspeare, Coriolanus, Act IV., Scene 7.

Page 44, note 2. In the journal of 1852 there is a passage on "Fate which appears in statistics; exalts races by a cellule in their brain; that makes certain families miners, and others hunters, and levies her own tariffs by making dreadful boundaries of her own," etc.

Page 45, note 1.

"Nothing to him falls early or too late."

Beaumont and Fletcher, The Honest Man's Fortune, Epilogue.

Page 45, note 2. This phrase is quoted from the speech

on the scaffold by Richard Rumbold, one of Cromwell's soldiers of extreme Republican views. He served at Dunbar and Worcester, and was one of the guard around the scaffold of Charles I. After the Restoration he was engaged in a conspiracy to assassinate Charles II. and the Duke of York. When the plot was discovered he escaped to Holland, but later, while serving in the army of the Duke of Argyll, was captured, tried and executed. On the scaffold he scoffed at the divine right of kings, and said, "I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another."

Page 46, note 1. In a stray fragment of the beginning of "Natural Aristocracy," as given in the United States, is the following sentence which also evidently appeared in the lecture as given in Boston: "I am well aware that, in almost every town in the world but our towns, there would be a sort of insult and cruelty in speaking to a great mixed audience on the opportunities and duties of the favored classes."

Page 47, note 1. This was Thoreau's saying.

Page 49, note 1. A good story relating to the price of men is given in Representative Men, p. 152.

Page 50, note 1. "The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will." See Conduct of Life, p. 30.

Page 52, note 1. Journal, 1831. "He that does nothing is poorer than he that has nothing." See also p. 232 in "Worship" (Conduct of Life).

Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal for 1866:—

"Aristocracy is always timid. After I had read my lecture on Natural Aristocracy in London and had said, after describing the 'man without duties,' 'Who can blame the peasant if he fires his barns?' etc., Lord Morpeth came to see me at Chapman's, and hoped I would leave out that passage if I repeated the lecture."

The aristocracy were much alarmed at this time. Across the Channel, in France, a revolution was going on, and in England the Chartist demonstrations caused grave anxiety.

In a letter which Mr. Emerson wrote to his wife from London, March 23, 1848, he tells of this state of affairs, and adds:—

"One thing is certain; that, if the peace of England should be broken up, the aristocracy here—or, I should say, the rich—are stout-hearted, and as ready to fight for their own as the poor; are not likely to run away."

Page 54, note 1. This was Professor Louis Agassiz, who at that time was delighting the audiences of country lyceums, familiar enough with woodchucks, robins, pickerel and river-turtles, with his classifications and descriptions of radiates, mollusks and articulates. His charming presence, his interesting foreign accent, his enthusiasm and his ready drawing swept all before him.

Page 55, note 1. "It will not be doubted, that, if a beautiful person is born into a family, a new career is opened for that person,—an influence which no reasoning and no legislating could hinder, and which must remain a differencing, that is, an aristocratic quality."—Stray sheet from "Beauty."

Page 55, note 2. I find this passage on a stray sheet, followed, however, by the sentence beginning the next paragraph here:—

"Will any one question the uses of an aristocracy? Not while there is any remainder of the substance in the form. For the name is a verdict. The noble ennobles. That is his use. Can there be any greater?"

Page 57, note 1. After a parlor-lecture in a Western city, some metaphysicians with taste for dialectics undertook to make Mr. Emerson defend his thesis and prove his utterances.

He said, with amused good nature, when he came home, "Their logicians rolled me in the dust."

Page 57, note 2. This was a counsel in accordance with his own practice, steadily urged upon all who sought his advice,—Do not make the mistake of assuming chivalries not proper to you.

Page 57, note 3.

Who bides at home, nor looks abroad, Carries the eagles and masters the sword. "Destiny," Poems.

Page 58, note 1. This was Mrs. Barbauld's line, in her poem "The Brook":—

"And the more falls I get move faster on."

Mr. Emerson made it one of his mottoes in life.

Page 58, note 2. Ali ben Abu Taleb, son-in-law of Mahomet, and fourth Caliph, called for his courage "The Lion of God." Mahomet said of him, "I am the city of knowledge, but Ali is the gate." He is often mentioned in Mr. Emerson's writings.

Journal, 1845. "The Caliph Ali is a fine example of character. 'He possessed a vein of poignant humour which led Soliman Farsy to say of a jest he one day indulged in, "This it is which has kept you back to the fourth" (Abu Beker Oman and Othman having been successively elected before him), for a reliance on his rights of sovereignty was the ruling feeling of that sacred person, and it is one which gives ascendance to the inner and individual nature in opposition to the suggestions of appearance and the observance of our relations with the many.'

"Mahomet said, 'Various are the Virtues, O Ali, by which men are brought near to their Creator, but thou by thy intellect

art created near, and standest before them by many degrees of approach.'"

The quotations come from the Akhlak-i-Jalaly, translated by W. F. Thomson (London, 1839). It is a Persian work of the fifteenth century, tracing its origin to an Arabic work five centuries older, which was an "effort to reconcile Greek Philosophy with the social and religious systems of the Mohammedans." Mr. Emerson alludes to this in "Plato," Representative Men, p. 40.

Page 62, note 1. The sneer was an impossibility to Mr. Emerson. In a note-book of 1827 he says of a man of the world: "If his opinions shall turn out right, he betrays his imperfections of mind by a sneer."

Page 63, note 1. He always guarded his independence on every question. He said, "The relation of men of thought to society is always the same; they refuse that necessity of mediocre men, to take sides."

PERPETUAL FORCES

President Lincoln appointed the thirteenth day of April, 1862, as a Day of Fasting and Prayer, recommending to the Country to take thankful remembrance of the better aspect of our affairs at that early stage of the War of the Rebellion.

On that day Mr. Emerson read before the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society (Theodore Parker's), at the Music Hall in Boston, an address called "Moral Forces." It was a subject on which his mind dwelt especially then, for in the war he saw the revulsion due to these forces heralding better days, and in his lectures during the darker days which followed, he dwelt on their sure action, to encourage the people.

In the late autumn of the same year, he gave the lecture "Perpetual Forces," in the Fraternity Course in Boston. His note-book, begun the following year, 1863, is called "Forces and Forms." Its mottoes are "An arch never sleeps," and "Every man requires, or lives from, the whole world." It is full of interesting passages on the greater forces, and the essay as it stands, made no doubt from the two lectures, was reinforced from these notes for publication in the North American Review in 1877.

Page 69, note 1. The advantage and blessing of poverty are emphasized by Mr. Emerson in the essay on Domestic Life. Also in "Worship," in the same volume (Conduct of Life), he says: "Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of his early instinct under the guidance of a deeper instinct. He learns to welcome misfortune, learns that adversity is the prosperity of the great."

Page 70, note 1.

Ever the Rock of Ages melts Into the mineral air, To be the quarry whence to build Thought and its mansions fair. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Page 71, note 1. Compare in the essay on Farming, in Society and Solitude, the passage, "Who are the farmer's servants?" etc.

Page 72, note 1.

Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy, He hides in pure transparency; Thou askest in fountains and in fires, He is the essence that inquires. "Woodnotes," II., Poems.

Page 74, note 1. Mr. Emerson loved to see that it was alike true of farmer, engineer or poet, that

He planted where the Deluge ploughed, His hired hands were wind and cloud; His eyes detect the Gods concealed In the hummock of the field. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 79, note 1.

The archangel Hope Looks to the azure cope, Waits through dark ages for the morn, Defeated day by day, but unto victory born. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Page 80, note 1.

For the world was built in order, And the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, The sun obeys them and the moon. "Monadnoc," Poems.

Page 82, note 1. This passage in the manuscript is followed by, "To prize sensibility, see the subjects of the poet; they were insignificant until he raised them."

Page 83, note 1. "'You tell me a great deal of what the devil does, and what power he has: When did you hear from Christ last?' asked Father Taylor of some Calvinistic friends."—Notes on Forces.

Page 84, note 1. Mr. Emerson elsewhere quotes Bacon to the effect that Nature is to be commanded by obeying her. In the essay on Worship, in Conduct of Life, he says that "the last lesson in life, the Choral Song which rises from all the elements and all the angels, is a voluntary obedience, a necessitated

freedom. Man is made of the same atoms as the world is; he shares the same impressions, predispositions and destiny."

Page 86, note 1. In the lecture on the National Fast Day alluded to in the note at the opening of this essay, was the following kindred passage on the urgent conditions of the day:—

"Let us rejoice in every success and in every overthrow, which a wise and good soul, whether among our enemies or in other nations, would see to be for the right, for ideas, for the good of humanity. We are rightly glad only in as far as we believe that the victories of our cause are real grounds of joy for all mankind. … Things point the right way. A position is taken by the American Executive,—that is much; and it has been supported by the legislature. What an amount of power released from doing harm and now ready to do good! The world is nothing but a bundle of forces, and all the rest is a clod which it uses. In all works of man there is a constant resistance to be overcome and constant loss by friction. But the tree rises into the air without any violence, by its own unfolding, which is as easy as shining is to the sun, or warming to fire. It is the same with the moral forces. People, in proportion to their intelligence and virtue, are friends to a good measure, whilst any wrong measure will find a hitch somewhere. Inspiration and sympathy—these are the cords that draw power to the front, and not the harness of the cannon. …

"We are listless and apologizing and imitating; we are straws and nobodies,—and then the mighty thought comes sailing on a silent wind and fills us with its virtue."

Page 86, note 2. Another note on Forces from those made in 1863:—

"My point is, that the movement of the whole machine,

the motive force of life, and of every particular life, is moral. The world stands on our thoughts, and not on iron or cotton; and the iron of iron, the fire of fire, the ether and source of all the elements is moral forces."

Page 88, note 1. In allusion to Rufus Choate's flippant allusion to the declaration of the rights of man in the Preamble to the Constitution, Mr. Emerson said, "Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever."1 1.1

The passage in "Voluntaries" is here suggested, beginning,—

Great men in the Senate sate.

Page 88, note 2. Thoreau said, "If you have built castles in the air, that is where they should be; now put the foundations under them."

This note from the manuscript "Forces" may be added here:—

"Family likeness in the Greek gods. Socrates says, 'the laws below are sisters of the laws above.' So really are the material elements of close affinity to the moral elements. But they are not their copies, but they are themselves. They are the same laws acting on superior and inferior planes. On the lower plane, it is called Heat; on the higher, Love. Whenever you enunciate a physical law, I hear in it a moral rule."

CHARACTER

This essay was the concluding lecture of a course given before the Parker Fraternity in Boston by Mr. Emerson, in the winter of 1864-65. It was printed in the North American Review in April, 1866. It might have been as fitly called "The Sovereignty of Ethics" as the essay which bears that name.

The reader is referred to the chapter on the same subject, printed in the second series of Essays in 1844.

Page 92, note 1. The Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-1747) was a Proven&c;cedil;al writer on Morals, and the correspondent of Voltaire and Mirabeau.

Page 95, note 1. Wordsworth's "Ode to Immortality."

Page 96, note 1. This convertibility of Truth, Goodness and Beauty, making a trinity of Moral Force, appears in the chapter on Spirit, in "Nature," in the first pages of "The Poet" in the second series of Essays, and elsewhere in Mr. Emerson's writings.

Page 96, note 2. This is the quatrain "Sacrifice," in the Poems.

Page 97, note 1. In the Address to the Divinity Students (Nature, Addresses and Lectures, pp. 128, 129), Mr. Emerson set forth this thought more fully.

Page 98, note 1. The charges of blasphemy against Empedocles and Socrates, and even against Jesus, were on the same ground. In a sermon note-book and journal, kept by Mr. Emerson in 1828, he wrote:—

"I find a kindling excitement in the thought that the feeling which prompts a child to an act of generosity is the same which guides an archangel to his awful duties: that in the humblest transaction in which we can engage we can introduce these stupendous laws which make the sovereignty of the creation the character of God. It seems to me, in obeying them, in squaring my conduct by them, I part with the weakness of humanity. I exchange the rags of Nature for a portion of the majesty of my Maker. I am backed by the Universe. I lean on omnipotence."

Page 99, note 1. In the journal for 1856 he wrote cheerfully: "I have been writing or speaking what were once called novelties for twenty-five or thirty years, and I have not now one disciple." He only wished people to go to the fountain-head themselves: that practice was all he wished to convert others to.

Page 100, note 1. Mr. Emerson liked to recognize what was best in his friends, the great and universal part, and ignore their weakness. The following is from a sheet marked "Character:"—

"I see only two or three persons and allow them all their room: they spread themselves at large to the horizon. If I looked at many, as you do, or compared these habitually with others, these would look less. Yet are they not entitled to this munificence? Is it not their own? Is not munificence the only insight?

"Our exaggeration of all fine characters arises from this, that we identify each in turn with the Soul. Presently the individual warps and shrinks away, and we accuse him. Hard to find an ideal in history. By courtesy we call saints and heroes such, but they are very defective characters; I cannot easily find a man I would be."

Page 101, note 1. It is difficult to say whether these lines are a free translation, or only inspired by Mr. Emerson's Oriental readings. They appear in the verse-book, as if meant to show the joy that came from converse with God in Nature, as a concluding verse of an early form of "My Garden," printed now in the Appendix to the Poems under the name of "Walden."

Page 101, note 2. This was his own method. He read in Plato, Proclus, AEschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, Swedenborg "for lustres," or, as he put it to a young friend, "Only read to start your own team."

Page 102, note 1.

Yon water-flags, yon sighing osier, A drop can shake, a breath can fan; Maidens sigh and weep: Composure Is the pudency of man." "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 104, note 1. Mr. Emerson used to laugh over Béranger's "Le bon Dieu," and Swift's irreverent picturing of the last judgment, which he printed in Parnassus under the title "Jove and the Souls."

Page 106, note 1. His Aunt Mary Emerson's journals were rich with the imagery of the old religion, drawn from the Old and New Testaments and from Milton.

Page 107, note 1. In the diary of Rev. William Emerson of Concord, Mr. Emerson's grandfather, it appears that during the excited month preceding the outbreak of the Revolution at the Old North Bridge, his first sermon, with the purpose of arousing the freemen to take up arms, met with only moderate success, but in the course of a week he joined forces with a neighboring minister and they had an all-day preaching;

result, "Minute men enlisted to the number of one hundred or more."

Page 110, note 1. Compare the passage about "mere morality," in "Worship," Conduct of Life, p. 215.

Page 111, note 1. This paragraph comes from the journal of 1845. At the time that it was written, with the apt quotation from Von Ense, Theodore Parker was one of the most active and earnest preachers of the Gospel in Massachusetts, though called an infidel.

Page 111, note 2. In Representative Men Mr. Emerson expressed his impatience of Swedenborg's exclusive Hebraism in his writings.

Page 113, note 1.

The rules to men made evident By Him who built the day, The columns of the firmament Not firmer based than they.

Page 115, note 1. In his Divinity School Address Mr. Emerson called Jesus the friend of man. When it was printed, Miss Elizabeth Peabody begged him to write "Friend" instead of "friend." "No," he answered; "if I did, they would all go to sleep."

Page 116, note 1. Dr. Charles T. Jackson, Mrs. Emerson's brother, when a boy, was, with several others, the pupil of the excellent but eccentric Dr. Alleyne of Duxbury. One Sunday the boys, accompanying their reverend friend to afternoon service in a time of drouth, each carried a large umbrella under his arm. "Boys!" said the Doctor, "what nonsense is this?" "Why, Doctor, you prayed for rain this morning." "Pshaw! pshaw! boys; it's customary!"

Page 117, note 1. Journal, 1839. "The Sabbath is my

best debt to the Past, and binds me to some gratitude still. It brings me that frankincense out of a sacred antiquity."

Page 119, note 1. Milton, "Vacation Exercises," not quite correctly quoted.

Page 122, note 1. These lines from Keats's poem "Hyperion" were favorites with Mr. Emerson:—

"One avenue was shaded from thine eyes, Through which I wandered to eternal truth."

EDUCATION

An invitation to attend and speak words of counsel at the summer festivals attendant upon the graduating exercises of colleges throughout the country always had great attraction for Mr. Emerson. To Carlyle, always praising his friend's words, and as constantly recommending silence and inveighing against speech, Mr. Emerson wrote in 1841: "As usual at this season of the year I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges nine days hence. You will say I do not deserve the aid of any Muse. O but if you knew how natural it is to me to run to these places! Besides, I am always lured on by the hope of saying something which shall stick by the good boys."

Of course the privilege of the scholar and his corresponding duties, the objects of study and thought, and advice on the choice, use and limitations of books, were the subjects treated. The essays in this volume on the Scholar and the Man of Letters were college addresses, and the present essay was made up from material used in several given on such occasions, especially those at Waterville College in Maine, and at Dartmouth

College at Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1863, and at Middlebury, Vermont, in 1864.

It should be remembered that Mr. Emerson had experiences as a teacher in both city and country schools for four years, in which pursuit he had little satisfaction, because, being shy and young, he did not follow his instincts and break loose as much as he would have liked to do from routine methods. In his village life he served for many years on the School Committee, but with great modesty, and in his later life he served on the Board of Overseers of Harvard College, admiring rather the administrative ability of others than taking an active part. He was also on visiting committees. Of his service on these Mr. Cabot says: "He was chairman, from time to time, of committees, of whose reports I find fragmentary drafts among his papers, mostly of a general character; insisting that the aim of the college being to make scholars, the degrees, honors and stipends should be awarded for scholarship, and not for deportment; and that scholarship is to be created, not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. 'The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. He is there to show them what delights and instructs himself in Homer, or Horace, or Dante, and not to weigh the young man's rendering, whether it entitles to four or five or six marks. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.'"

Page 126, note 1. In his lecture "Boston," Mr. Emerson says, "I trace to this deep religious sentiment and to its culture great and salutary results to the people of New England; first, namely, the culture of the intellect, which has always been found in the Calvinistic church." He then

quotes with pride the order of the General Court of Massachusetts in 1637, with regard to the establishment of schools in all towns "after the Lord has increased them to more than fifty householders," beginning, "to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of the forefathers, ordered," etc.

Page 127, note 1. Some paragraphs in this portion of the Essay come from lectures on Home, and probably from "School," in the course on Human Life given in Boston in 1838-39.

Page 128, note 1. The passage on the blessings of the home life among the comparatively poor, in the essay on Domestic Life (Society and Solitude, pp. 119-121), shows Poverty as a teacher. The following passage is from the lecture on Home given in 1839:—

"The instinct of the mind, its sense of stability, demands some outward type, a home, and as fast as one and another are seen to be impermanent, transfers its regard. To the infant, the mother, the bed, the house and furniture supply the object. Presently these pass away; the boy finds that he and they can part and he remain whole. The old ties fade and are succeeded by new, which prove equally fleeting. He is not yet a man if he have not learned the household laws, the precepts of economy and how to reconcile them with the promptings of love, of humanity. A wise man can better afford to spare all the marts and temples and galleries and state-houses and libraries than this key that deciphers them all."

Page 130, note 1.

For the Muse gave special charge His learning should be deep and large, And his training should not scant The deepest lore of wealth or want:

His flesh should feel, his eyes should read Every maxim of dreadful Need; In its fulness he should taste Life's honeycomb, but not too fast. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 130, note 2. "Kepler and Newton are born with a taste for the manners of Nature, and catch the whole tune from a few bars, usually from one; for they know that the single fact indicates the universal law."—Lecture on Seven Metres of Intellect, 1866.

Page 131, note 1. Compare the chapter on Language, in "Nature," in the first volume.

Page 131, note 2. See in "The Poet" the lines beginning,—

Divine Inviters! I accept The courtesy ye have shown and kept From ancient ages for the bard, etc.

Page 132, note 1.

Being's tide Swells hitherward, and myriads of forms Live; robed with beauty, painted by the sun, Their dust, pervaded by the nerves of God, Throbs with an overmastering energy Knowing and doing. "Pan," Poems, Appendix.

Page 132, note 2. The value of a day is told in "Works and Days," in Society and Solitude.

Page 133, note 1. Mr. Emerson's young friends John and Henry Thoreau, in their private school in Concord, and especially Mr. Alcott in his schools in Connecticut and Boston, had practised some of the methods, then ridiculed, now held in the very highest esteem. Horace Mann had made wonderful

improvements in the Massachusetts public schools, but in very practical ways. George Barrell Emerson,1 1.2 a distant cousin and highly valued friend of Mr. Emerson, had done much towards raising the quality of public instruction and had kept a school for young ladies in Boston, noted for its excellence.

Page 134, note 1. The compensatory swing of the pendulum of public opinion towards athletics and manual training for boys and girls has surely come.

Page 135, note 1. In his address to the Adelphic Union at Williams College, in 1854, Mr. Emerson said:—

"Trade is not to know friends, or wife, or child, or country. But this walking-ledger knows that though he, poor fellow, has put off his royal robes, somewhere the noble humanity survives, and this consoles him for the brevity and meanness of his street-life. He has not been able to hide from himself that this devotion to means is an absurdity; is, for a livelihood, to defeat the ends of living.…He has said, Let there be schools, a clergy, art, music, poetry, the college. But if the youth, looking over the college wall at the houses and the lives of the founders, make the mistake of imitating them, they may well say, 'We paid you that you might not be a merchant. We bought and sold that you might not buy and sell, but reveal the reason of trade. We did not want apes of us, but guides and commanders.'"

Page 138, note 1. "We rightly speak of the guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them, they

soon come not to mind it and get a self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the limitation elsewhere."—"Uses of Great Men," Representative Men.

Page 138, note 2. In some notes written by Mr. Emerson in 1846, for a little speech at the reunion of his class, twenty-five years after graduating, after telling of all the various works they have in those years been called upon to do, he adds: "But, if we have done these things well, as I doubt not, it was because we could carry ourselves good-humouredly as boys."

Page 142, note 1. Compare, in the "Fragments on the Poet," in the Appendix to the Poems, the lines beginning,—

For thought, and not praise; Thought is the wages For which I sell days, etc.

Page 143, note 1. Mr. Emerson had been greatly pleased with Thomas Hughes's books, and also with the life of Hodson, his schoolmate at Rugby, Twelve Years of a Soldier's Life in India, to which he wrote the introduction. During one of Mr. Emerson's winter lecturing-trips, perhaps in 1860, he was invited to visit a school and say something to the children. In his speech he advised them to read some books that he thought well of, among them Tom Brown. Next day he was denounced in the local paper for spreading incendiary abolitionist doctrines in the schools and holding up the traitor John Brown as an exemplar.

Page 144, note 1. His practice was exactly in accordance with his word. With all his sweetness and serenity and the respect with which he treated his own and others' children, he had the quality of inspiring awe at any moment, and resistance to him by word or act was impossible.

Page 146, note 1. Sir Charles Fellow's discovery of Xanthus, the capital of old Lycia, was in 1838. He took Mr. Emerson to the British Museum to show him the results of his ten years' labor. The finest part were the statues in honor of the twelve cities which sent aid to Harpagus, the general who reduced the Ionian cities.

Page 147, note 1. Mr. Emerson elsewhere tells that Dr. Johnson is reported to have said: "If the child says he looked out of this window, when he looked out of that—whip him!"

Page 153, note 1. In spite of Mr. Emerson's humble opinion of his success in his schools, he was remembered with respect and regard by his pupils. Mr. Benjamin Peter Hunt, of Philadelphia, was his pupil in the school at Chelmsford, a boy of whom Mr. Emerson said later, "He was a philosopher whose conversation made all the social comfort I had." Mr. Hunt wrote to him in 1860:—

"It is now thirty-five years since you began your teachings to me, and, with the exception of the great rough impartial world, I think they are the best which I ever received from any man I have personally known. I hope I shall continue to receive similar teachings thankfully, as at present, for many years to come."

In 1865 the ladies whom he had taught as girls in Boston invited him to meet them, and among his words to them on that occasion were the following:—

"I still recall my terrors at entering the school; my timidities at French, the infirmities of my cheek, and my occasional admiration of some of my pupils,—absit invidia verbo,—and the vexation of spirit when the will of the pupils was a little too strong for the will of the teacher.…I am afraid none but I remembers the merit of the 'compositions' which I carefully

read, and with the wish to fix their comparative rank.…Now I have two regrets in regard to the school. The first is that my teaching was partial and external. I was at the very time already writing every night, in my chamber, my first thoughts on morals and the beautiful laws of compensation and of individual genius, which to observe and illustrate have given sweetness to many years of my life. I am afraid no hint of this ever came into the school, where we clung to the safe and cold details of languages, geography, arithmetic and chemistry. Now I believe that each should serve the other by his or her strength, not by their weakness; and that, if I could have had one hour of deep thought at that time, I could have engaged you in thoughts that would have given reality and depth and joy to the school, and raised all the details to the highest pleasure and nobleness. Then I should have shown you (as I did afterwards to later friends) the poems and works of imagination I delighted in; the single passages which have made some men immortal. The sharing a joy of this kind makes teaching a liberal and delicious art. What I wonder at is that I did not read to you, and attempt to teach you to read, certain selections of Shakspeare and the poets, in which in late years I have had a certain degree of success." Yet the "fair-haired daughters of this raw city" against whom he had "lifted the truncheon," as he wrote forty-two years earlier, brought no complaint against him.

Page 158, note 1. Mr. Emerson often spoke of the good he had received then and later from works of poetry or imagination smuggled under the bench in school and college.

All through college, he was diligently working along the lines that his genius pointed out, to the neglect, however, of the required mathematics, a hopeless task always to him. His rank was about halfway down his class list, but he won prizes for speaking and composition.

He used to express to his friends his pleasure that "children nowadays are encouraged to do things and taught to do them," as contrasted with the times when childish virtue was summed up in the familiar lines of negative virtue,—

"Speak when you're spoken to, Do what you're bid, Shut the doors after you, And you 'll never be chid."

THE SUPERLATIVE

In November, 1847, shortly after his arrival in England, Mr. Emerson gave a lecture on the Superlative, in his course of four before the Manchester Athenaeum. Mr. Ireland says that it was also read in London. It underwent modification and received additions later. As it stands now, it was printed in the Century Magazine in February, 1882.

In connection with this essay, it is pleasant to give this tribute to Mr. Emerson's power of winning his way with hearers, taken from a newspaper article in the year 1879, apropos of his reading "The Superlative" at that time to the students at Amherst College:—

"In truth there was something wonderful in the way his unaggressive mind has melted away all opposition. It was my privilege to hear him read.…'The Superlative, or Mental Temperance,' to an audience certainly as orthodox as can be had in Massachusetts. Years ago, when Mr. Emerson was announced to lecture in that place, only one room in the town was at his disposal, and a union prayer-meeting was appointed in the same building and at the same hour as the lecture, in

order to keep the people away. At his last visit he occupied the platform of the College Hall, and President Julius H. Seelye introduced him, using very aptly and tenderly Emerson's own words, 'The hand that rounded Peter's dome,'" etc.

Page 167, note 1. This was Jonathan Phillips, an esteemed Bostonian whose words Mr. Emerson on several occasions noted in the journals.

Page 168, note 1. The following is from one of the note-books:—

"The excellence of what I call the Low Superlative is shown in Newton's praise of Cotes, 'If he had lived, we should have known something,' or in the mot which I found in D'Herbelot, 'If the poems of Dhoair Fariabi fall into thy hands, steal them, though it were in the temple of Mecca;' or in Tom Appleton's speech about Shakspeare, 'He'll do.'

"'The whistling of cannon-balls affected him so unpleasantly that he withdrew' from the army.—Herr Von P. in Life of Carl Loewe, Dwight."

Page 169, note 1. The portion of the lecture about the temperance of the Greek mind is omitted from the essay. I give the following:—

"To Beauty the positive degree is essential. Accuracy is essential to beauty; and the old Latin verse declares that 'the Graces are slow to unbind their zone.' Temperance seems the genius of the Greeks, who were the nation of beauty,—Temperance in rhetoric, painting, sculpture and architecture.

"Temperance too in our partial sense; for Simonides said: 'Bacchus rejoices in being mixed, himself the fourth, with three nymphs;' i. e., wine with three parts water.

"Observe the studied moderation of their phrases. In Athens the Pelasgicon was a strip of land under the western wall of the citadel. A curse had been pronounced on any who should tenant it, and the oracle declared it, 'Better untrodden.' Especially users of the positive degree were the Spartans, who wrote to be read, and spoke to be understood; whose laws were not written. The first Greek Olympiad is the boundary of fable and credible history. Nothing is more remarkable than the severe simplicity of their building, held aloft by just enough support, and all superfluity removed; translating the prose of a wall into the poetry of a colonnade.

"They called Intellect the science of metes and bounds. Greek architecture is geometry. Its temples are diagrams in marble, and not appeals to the imagination, like the Gothic—they are powers of the square and cube. They are productions of the same mind that led Thales to show the Egyptians how to measure the height of their pyramid, by sticking his staff into the ground at the extremity of the shadow of the pyramid and computing it by the Rule of Three, or the famous 47th proposition by Pythagoras,—

"'When the famed lines Pythagoras devised For which a hecatomb he sacrificed,'—

and the beautiful command of the Delphian Apollo to the Athenians, that they should double his altar, which was a cube (and the doubling the cube being a test of mathematical skill)."

Page 171, note 1. Hamlet, Act iv., Scene 4.

Page 172, note 1. Antonio Magliabecchi (1633-1714), the son of a Florentine goldsmith, was a remarkable collector of books, and scholar, and became librarian to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to whom he left his great library, which the Duke gave to the city.

Giovanni Pico, son of the prince of Mirandola (1463-94), a very remarkable and brilliant scholar. He was versed in Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldee, and devoted himself to sacred letters. He came under the influence of Savonarola, and in the later years of his short life showed great piety and beauty of character.

Page 175, note 1. This was a saying of Linnaeus, the great botanist.

Page 175, note 2. In one of the manuscript sheets this sentence ends thus: "The most powerful means are the cheapest; fire, water, fresh air, bodily activity, the stroke of the hand, a kind eye, a serene face,—these are the drugs of AEsculapius and Galen, and these leave the apothecary's shop to inferior and busier doctors. Peu de moyens, beaucoup d'effet."

Page 176, note 1. Two scraps from the lecture might here be given: "The legs of a throne are the plough, the oar, the anvil and the sewing-machine." "I am sorry to find that among the Norse deities was the god Brage, celebrated for his eloquence and majestic mien."

Page 176, note 2. See in "Aristocracy," "The terrible aristocracy that is in Nature. Real people dwelling with the real face to face undaunted," etc.

Page 176, note 3. The following is from the lecture-sheets on the subject of the Superlative:—

"In India, it is colossal, and though occasionally confounding us from our want of all key to the apologue, often beautiful. The picture which the Mahabarat gives of the wars of the Suras and Asuras, of the churning the Ocean with the Meron mountain to obtain the drops of the Amreeta, or liquor of immortality, is in the gigantic taste, but is pleasing, and the terrible earnestness of the belief in Fate lends an energy to the

picture of all conflicts, such as those of the enemies of Hari. What can be more tender than the assertion that 'the flame of the funeral pile is cool to the widow,' what more daring than the picture the Brahmins give of the beatitude of contemplative absorption when they declare, that 'Heavenly fruition is an impediment to felicity'?

"In the infancy of society, in barbarous nations, it is as pleasing as berries and game: in the Arabian Nights, we have the living Superlative; the fragments of Persian border poetry are gay, light and exhilarating.

"Better yet when we come full on (that desirable person) Hafiz, the model of lyric grace and felicity, the AEolian harp hung in grapevines and harem windows,—Hafiz, the foam of the cup, the sheen of the waterfall,—all whose poetry is a superlative, yet in whom it is native."

Page 177, note 1. "It was quite coincident with this habit of thought, the alternative which the Arabians carried with them in their triumphant march, the Koran or the Sword. With the like extreme, the Prophet encouraged his followers: 'By the God of Abu Taleb's son I swear that a thousand beheadings were easier than one death-bed.' 'The saint's best blush in Heaven is his heart's blood red.'"

Page 178, note 1. In the essay on Plato (Representative Men, pp. 52-54) the Oriental and Occidental habits of mind are contrasted, the East loving infinity, the West delighting in boundaries.

Page 179, note 1. This passage followed in the lecture:—

"Perhaps this dominion of the positive degree is to proceed much farther; that our life has at present far too much inflation. European history is the age of wine, age of miscellany, of appetite, of ponderous expense. I call it the age of wine. The age of water, the simpler and sublimer condition, when

the wine is gone inward, or the constitution has powers of original chemistry and can draw the wine of wine from water, as the earth out of loam and silex educes the orange, the pomegranate, plum, peach, pineapple and grape, the Rus Ruris, the age of gardens, the age of Temperance, of bread-eaters and water-drinkers; of simple and sincere speech and dealing; the age of the users of the positive degree;—is yet in its coming."

Here is a fragment that did duty probably in "The Superlative," though parts of it are now elsewhere printed:—

"The rule of positive and superlative is this. As long as you deal with things from your common sense, or as other people in the street, call things by their right names. But every man may be (as some men are) raised to a platform whence he sees beyond sense to moral and spiritual truth; when he no longer sees snow as snow, or horses as horses, but only sees or names them representatively, for those interior facts which they signify. This is the way prophets, this is the way poets use them. And in that exaltation small and great are as one, the mind strings worlds like beads upon its thought. The success with which this is done can alone determine how genuine is the inspiration."

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ETHICS

"Some minds are incapable of skepticism.…They may well give themselves leave to speculate, for they are sure of a return. Once admitted to the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night but infinite invitation on the other side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky over sky, and they are encompassed with divinities." Thus wrote Mr. Emerson in his chapter on Montaigne, in Representative Men. In every new

discovery which he eagerly heard from his friends, scholars or workers in science, he saw the Law working surely and beautifully. In his first book on Nature he said that she echoes the Ten Commandments. His later essays testify the same, and he said: "For other things, I make poetry of them, but the moral sentiment makes poetry of me."

Hence it was a theme to which he constantly recurred. The material for this essay, which was printed in the North American Review of May, 1878, was drawn from several lectures, especially "Morals," given at Freeman Place Chapel, in 1859, "The Essential Principles of Religion," before Theodore Parker's Society at the Music Hall in 1862, "The Rule of Life" and "Natural Religion" at Horticultural Hall respectively in 1867 and 1869, and possibly from others. Mr. Cabot made the best mosaic that he could, and it received Mr. Emerson's approval, but, as he said in his prefatory note to Letters and Social Aims, with regard to "Immortality," it contains passages written at periods far apart from one another.

Page 183, note 1. The charm which Oersted's discovery of Polarity had for Mr. Emerson appears in all his writings:—

The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly drive By their animate poles. "The Sphinx."

The lecture on the Essential Principles of Religion has a similar beginning:—

"The great physicists have signified their belief that our analysis will reach at last a sublime simplicity, and find two elements, or one element with two polarities, at the base of

things; and in morals we are struck with the steady return of a few principles: we are always finding new applications of the maxims and proverbs of the nursery."

Page 185, note 1. There is a little fable, in Scottish dress, on the grub and butterfly, in the Appendix to the Poems, beginning,—

Have ye seen the caterpillar Foully warking in his nest?

Page 185, note 2. This suggests Thoreau's remarks,—that there is no greater blunderer than the man who consumes the best part of his life getting a living, and that you must get your living by loving.

Page 185, note 3. From Keats's Hyperion.

Page 186, note 1. Quoted from Goethe.

Page 190, note 1. This, in the journal, is quoted from Pellet's account of Napoleon's speeches in council.

Page 191, note 1. This paragraph in its first part recalls those in the essay on Fate (Conduct of Life, pp. 48, 49), and in its ending suggests the image in "The World-Soul":—

The patient Daemon sits, With roses and a shroud; He has his way, and deals his gifts,— But ours is not allowed.

Page 193, note 1. In "Voluntaries," as first published. at the end of the fourth stanza, were lines omitted in the later version, telling how

The erring foe, Self-assured that he prevails, Looks from his victim lying low, And sees aloft the red right arm Redress the eternal scales.

Page 194, note 1. The following is from a sheet that perhaps was in the lecture "Worship":—

"But what is it? What is pure spirit? Here we feel that we have no language, that words are only auxiliary and not adequate: are suggestions, and not copies of our cogitation. We worship it; we beseech it to inhabit us, not with words, but, as one said, 'with groanings that cannot be uttered.' We call it not a person. That would cripple and profane our thought. We deny to it personality because that is too little, not too much. It is within all persons. It is the Reason of Reason, the Love of Love, the Life of Life."

"When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence."—"The Over-Soul."

Page 195, note 1. From the diary of Miss Mary Moody Emerson. This sentence is poetically rendered in "The Nun's Aspiration," the poem which is used for the motto to the sketch of her life in this volume.

Page 195, note 2.

If the Law should thee forget, More enamoured, serve it yet. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 196, note 1. This passage about floating with the stream of power and wisdom, and that which follows it about the abdication of choice, are very like those in "Spiritual Laws," Essays, First Series, pp. 138, 139.

Page 200, note 1. In his Address to the Divinity Students, speaking of Jesus, Mr. Emerson said: "He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by

Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain."

In the verses on the Poet, he is spoken of as

Born and nourished in miracles.

Page 201, note 1. Ygdrasil in the Norse mythology.

Page 203, note 1. "'Mere morality'—which is much as if one should say, 'Poor God, with nobody to help him.'" See "Worship," Conduct of Life, p. 215.

Page 204, note 1. Contrasting the decorously negative position of Boston Unitarianism with the rude and searching, yet human, eloquence of Father Taylor the Methodist, and the fervid Calvinism of his Aunt Mary, Mr. Emerson once used the expression "the corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street." In his journal of 1837, he said: "When the conversation soars to principles, Unitarianism is boyish."

Page 206, note 1. This expression of a certain sympathy with a religious attitude which he could no longer hold recalls the opening and closing lines of "The Problem."

Page 213, note 1. Compare in the Poems the lines in the second "Woodnotes,"—

Him Nature giveth for defence His formidable innocence,—

and those in one of the "Fragments on the Poet,"—

But over all his crowning grace, Wherefor thanks God his daily praise, Is the purging of his eye To see the people of the sky: From blue mount and headland dim Friendly hands stretch forth to him, etc.

Page 213, note 2. Ormuzd and Ahriman, in the Dualism of the Persian religious philosophy, represented the principles of Good and Evil; Mr. Emerson's poem "Uriel" describes, in celestial imagery, the shock that the heresy of the possibility of Good coming out of Evil produces in the minds of some churchmen.

THE PREACHER

In May, 1867, Mr. Emerson read a discourse called "The Rule of Life" before the Radical Association in Boston. It contained matter which was later used in "Sovereignty of Ethics" and in a lecture called "The Preacher" which he gave at the house of Rev. J. T. Sargent in Boston, in the following September. In May, 1879, he read at Divinity Hall Chapel, in Cambridge, a lecture called "The Preacher," which, beside what had been read at Mr. Sargent's, contained some passages from the lectures "Cause and Effect," given in 1861, and "Health," in 1862, both in Boston. "The Preacher" was first published in The Unitarian Review for January, 1880.

Mr. Emerson recognized fully the difficulties that beset the Preacher—the same which took him out of the pulpit for the greater freedom of the lecturer's desk—but he made it easier for the next generation. He did as he counselled others: "Be an opener of doors to those who come after you, and don't try to make the Universe a blind alley."

"In Religion the sentiment is all, the ritual or ceremony indifferent."

In the journal of 1838 he wrote: "A sermon, my own,

I read never with joy, though sincerely written; an oration, a poem, another's or my own, I read with joy. Is it that from the first species of writing we cannot banish tradition, convention, and the last is more easily genuine? Or is it that the last being dedicated to Beauty, and the first to Goodness, to Duty,—the spirit flies with hilarity and delight to the last; with domestic obligation and observance only to the first? Or is it that the sentiment of Duty and the Divinity shun demonstration and do retreat into silence; they would pervade all, but they will not be unfolded, exhibited apart, and as matter of science?"

Page 222, note 1. In writing of Gibbon, Mr. Emerson lamented that, with his extraordinary gifts and accomplishment, "the man had no shrine,"—a man's most important possession, he held.

Page 223, note 1. This passage was written in 1837.

Page 223, note 2. Mr. Emerson used to tell that some eminent Frenchman, when asked what his religion was, answered, "Oh, I am of the religion of all sensible men." "And what is that?" said his questioner. "Sensible men never tell," was the answer.

Page 226, note 1. Wordsworth's sonnet "Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways."

Page 227, note 1. In one of the lectures this paragraph was followed by—

"The old psalms and gospels are mighty, as ever showing that what people call religion is literature; that is to say, that here was one who knew how to put his statement, and it stands forever, and people feel its truth, and say, Thus saith the Lord; whilst it is only that he had the true literary genius which they fancy they despise.…

"Bibles. A bible is a collection of formulas to express the inevitable moral facts. It is the record of the experience and aspiration of the wisest and most religious minds,—of the saints of each nation. Of course it will not be ended until the Creation is. Each nation has its own, and of course it is dear to every tender soul, and preferred to every foreign bible, because it is identified with the aspirations and affections of the people and gathers with time a miraculous repute. But with advance of civilization liberal minds discover there are as good or better bibles in other nations, that affirm in other languages the selfsame aspirations, and they gradually enrich their national bible with the best texts from these.

"What happens to nations, happens in each nation earlier to sects. Sects are stoves of a hundred different patterns; but fire keeps its old properties indifferently in them all.

"I think the weapons we oftenest use are artificial, and that our strongest weapons are natural. Thus our talent and our worldly breeding or manners are the arms on which we rely. 'T is a kind of war-paint with which we hope to impress each other and which everybody must put on. And the established religion of our age and country, which by that very fact admits that it is not an enthusiasm, not an intuition, but a doctrine or tradition, of course is a part of this armor; and men are clothed and shod and gloved with these customs, these externalities, and slide along on these arts from year to year, accepting all they find, originating nothing, until at last they depart out of life without using their original force."

Page 229, note 1. "The difference between religion and ethics. There is but one divine element feeding, vivifying all minds. Men, in the moment of its inspirations, are sensible of this unity. But in the off-hours, in this kingdom of custom in which they live, they distinguish between religion and ethics,

as if ethics meant my own perception of right and wrong,—but religion always some other man's. My belief in eternal justice and the rule of right is ethics or morals; but Jesus' or Moses' belief is religion."

Among the stray sheets is this on Religion, which may here be inserted:—

"In children the instinct is specially strong. That lawyer, Talent, requires age, experience, ingenuity; but children rest in this native oracle which makes them so much wiser than their sires, who have lost it. What eye-waters all the virtues are! humility, love, courage, and what a blind-man's-buff is conceit!"

Page 230, note 1. Ποῦ στῶ—"Somewhere to stand," a condition which Archimedes required of King Hiero before undertaking to move the world with his mechanical contrivances.

Page 232, note 1. "All of us can understand justice, but few have a taste for theology. Theology is the rhetoric or the technical distribution of conscience."—Lecture-sheets.

Page 233, note 1. This passage, omitted in the essay, was in the lecture:—

"Meditate; let the thought have free course; and delight yourself in each new result and intimation. … But the strict condition of success is,—not to build too much on what is already built. Let that alone, and it will let you alone. All your inspirations will come only for what is native to you. You have been struck, in your casual intercourse with obscure people, by some trait of charity, or self-command, of persistency, which was new as the last sunbeam, not taught him or her who showed it, not quoted, not imitated. You dwell upon it, magnify it, as if there were nothing else: as if it contained all virtue. Well, you are right: domesticate that; bear down

upon it; it will bear up thee, me and all nature, as easily as a scrap of down. For all the virtues are sisters, and that which comes to you in this native way is representative of all,—is the door which God opens for you to all the heaven.

"Couture's rules of drawing are swiftly translatable into rules of writing. 'Draw directly or actually a perpendicular and a horizontal line through the centre of the object.' Now suppose the theme was Cambridge, or Andover; actually to draw the lines would be to name them: ideally, to hint them by suggestive description. The perpendicular line would be their relation to truth; the horizontal, their relation to the world around them. Couture proceeds,—'Half close the eyes and look at the object long: find where is the strongest light, and the degrees of light, and thus see only the masses, without the details. Then do the like to see where is the strongest shadow, and the less strong. Draw these with vigor. Keep three quarters of your eye on Nature, and only one quarter on your work.'1 1.3 Now apply these rules to your writing. 'Half close the eyes and look at the object long and find the strongest light.' That is—Don't think of your chamber, or boarding-house, or the daily routine of life or instruction, but search your memory for the happiest passages, the best thought, the best intercourse, some crowning result that has characterized the curriculum or the society, the height of hope, the fruitfullest truth—then you have the strongest light, and minor lights, and will see masses and not details."

Page 235, note 1. He here mentions a main secret of his own success.

Page 235, note 2. Here followed in the lecture this sentence:—

"And I should think it praise enough of the friends I speak to, if they now again, as the Quakers of old, brought back their age to see the simplicity of Divine Action, that Heaven does not come with libraries in his hand, but repeats the whole commandment to each mind."

Page 236, note 1. The following sentence here came in:—

"But let passing events suggest the theme which we will carry out of its trivial limits by lifting it to the measure of duty and of our destiny."

Page 237, note 1. This is a part of the counsel given to Osiris by his father, as told in A Treatise on Providence by Synesius. It is included in the same volume with Thomas Taylor's translation of Plotinus.

Page 238, note I. Mr. Emerson's exhortation to the young divines, in his Address in 1838, may fitly end the notes on "The Preacher." "Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure and money are nothing to you,—are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see,—but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connection,—when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts; that

all men value the few real hours of life. … Discharge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by an angel."

THE MAN OF LETTERS

On July 22, 1863, Mr. Emerson, by the invitation of the literary societies of Dartmouth College, read an address on a theme always dear and fresh to him, the happiness and privilege of the Scholar, who, he said there, "has drawn the white lot in life." On August 11, he repeated the address at Waterville College in Maine.

The essay here published is that address, with a new title to distinguish it from the next, which is of the same character. Its length shows that it is only a portion of the address as delivered, having been plundered of its sheets for the benefit of other essays. Probably "The Scholar" contains some of them.

Page 242, note 1. In his Williams College address in 1854, speaking of the "practical" man of trade, "the walking ledger," Mr. Emerson said:—

"He knows the conditions of vulgar success,—that a devotion to means without reference to any end is the sole safe method. But he has not been able to hide from himself that this is an absurdity,—he is prescribing amputation for headache,—is, for a livelihood, to defeat the ends of living; and it is out of the wish to preserve sanity in time to come; to find out how the minor propositions may be established without throwing overboard the major proposition; … that he has said, 'Let there be schools, a clergy, art, music and poetry.'"

Page 244, note 1.

Earth smiled with flowers, and man was born.

On the wind-blown sea-marge bleak, Forward stepped the perfect Greek. "Solution," Poems.

Page 244, note 2. Of the Puritan fathers Mr. Emerson says, in his lecture "Boston," Natural History of Intellect, "They were precisely the idealists of England; the most religious in a religious era. An old lady who remembered these pious people said of them that 'they had to hold on hard to the huckleberry bushes to hinder themselves from being translated.'"

Page 245, note 1. Compare what is said of Faust in the chapter on Goethe, in Representative Men.

Page 245, note 2. "Life should not be prosaic. The reason why it is, is because it is false and violates the laws of the mind. Life tends ever to be picturesque, and, on the entrance of a genial and superior friend, becomes so."—Stray sheet on Beauty.

Page 247, note 1. Journal, 1856. "What's the use of this prostitution of literature? Art lies not in trying to make an obscure thing prominent, but in choosing what is really eminent, and showing its eminence. You can't write up what gravitates down."

Page 248, note 1. Journal, 1832. "'I teach by degrees,' says Landor's Epicurus. 'It is not the will, but the necessity of the wise. None are wise enow to teach otherwise. All this pedantry about the people's not bearing the whole truth,—what else does it mean, than that the teacher has not yet arrived at the safe, that is, the true statement of the particular doctrine which he would oppose to the ruling

error.' He knows in general there is an error; he has not yet found its boundary lines."

Page 249, note 1. From Wordsworth's "Laodamia."

Page 250, note 1. Compare in the "Boston Hymn" the lines beginning—

Lo! I uncover the land.

Page 251, note 1. In the year 1863 Mr. Emerson was appointed a member of the committee to visit and report on the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was greatly pleased with all he saw there, especially the manly and honorable tone of the cadets, and the simple life and self-help required by the discipline of the Academy.

Page 252, note 1. Journal, 1837. "I thought, as I rode through the sloughs yesterday, that nothing is more untrue, as well as unfavorable to power, than that the thinker should open his mind to fear of the people among whom he works. Rather let him exult in his force. Whichever way he turns, he sees the pleasure and deference which these faculties of writing and speaking excite."

Page 254, note 1. In the decadence of public morality during the period between the Mexican and Civil wars, Mr. Emerson's note-books had many entries tracing the lapses in literature, art, the learned professions, especially among the clergy, and in citizenship and statesmanship all to one root—skepticism, abandonment of the ideal.

Page 256, note 1. "The man of genius is he who has received a larger portion of the common nature. He apprises us not so much of his wealth as of the common wealth. Are his thoughts profound? So much the less are they his, so much the more the property of all."—Lecture on Society, course of 1836-37.

Page 257, note 1. "To stand for the private verdict against popular clamor is the office of the noble. If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or of the Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of the poor; that sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the hero. That is his nobility, his oath of knighthood, to succor the helpless and oppressed; always to throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope; on the liberal, on the expansive side, never on the defensive, the conserving, the timorous, the lock-and-bolt system. More than our good will we may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, our own genius, which chains each to his proper work. We cannot give our life to the cause of the debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is doing; but to one thing we are bound, not to blaspheme the sentiment and the work of that man, not to throw stumbling-blocks in the way of the abolitionist, the philanthropist; as the organs of influence and opinion are swift to do."—"The Young American," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 257, note 2. Yet with all his interest, as citizen and patriot, in the political struggles of his day, and the War for Freedom and Union that resulted, he never let the dust of party strife obscure the sidereal heavens, and he feared lest the youth, in the strife over transient issues in their day, lose a true sense of perspective for the great laws. The following is from a sheet which has done duty in lectures like the present:—

"The true question is, how to reach and detain truth,—and the quite secondary question is the position of affairs to-day. I say, Beware of the last question. Give it no thought; leave it to the journals and the gossips. The only firm ground is, What truth interests you, attracts you, how far have you penetrated it. Happy is he whose thought interests him,—

whose book is sweet to him, and makes him forget the time,—forget or despise the cold, the smoke, or whatever inconvenience. Our real benefactors are not those who gave us money or hospitality, but those who brought us acquainted with Plato, with Milton, with Herbert, Antoninus, Taylor, with the great lords of the spiritual world, whether intellectual or ethical; who spoke to the conscience and to the reason, imagination; who made our ears and memories rich with imperishable thoughts."

THE SCHOLAR

At the time when the invitation came to Mr. Emerson from the Senior Class at the University of Virginia to address them on the occasion of their graduation,—the first invitation which had come to him from any Southern college,—he was no longer able to write an oration. But this call from the young men of the South was one of peculiar interest, one which it might seem ungracious to refuse, and all through life he had been writing to and for scholars. By Mr. Cabot's kind and ready help a suitable arrangement was made of sheets on the subject, many of which had, of course, done duty in earlier college addresses.

Page 262, note 1. In the journal of 1851, Mr. Emerson wrote of Beauty: "It is a privilege. … Indeed all privilege is that of Beauty, for there are many Beauties: 1, of face; 2, of form; 3, of manner, not less prevailing; 4, of brain or method—the sphere changes with the mode, and the sphere of brain or method is elemental, and lasts long,—Shakspeare's,

Raphael's, Michel Angelo's is the Beauty of Brain or Method."

Page 263, note 1. Mr. Charles J. Woodbury relates that Mr. Emerson, talking with him in his student days of the American historians, commended their mastery of their subjects, but lamented their mechanical quality and lack of style. He said, "They have no lilt in them. You noticed the marble we have just seen. You remember that marble is nothing but crystallized limestone? Well, some writers never get out of the limestone condition. Be airy. Let your characters breathe from you. Walk upon the ground, but not to sink. It is a fine power this. Some men have it, prominently the French. How it manifests itself in Montaigne … and in Urquhart's Rabelais! Grimm almost alone of the Germans has it; Borrow had it; Thoreau had it; and James Wilson—sometimes."1 1.4

Page 263, note 2. It is a pleasure to give here Mr. Emerson's words about another scholar of a far different type, yet who has written so well of him—Dr. Holmes:—

"What shall I say of his delight in manners, in society, in elegance, in short, of his delight in Culture, which makes him a civilizer whom every man and woman secretly thanks for valuable hints?

"What then of his correction of popular errors in taste, in behaviour, in the uncertain sciences, and in theology, attested by the alarm of the synods, and this is only possible to the man who has the capital merit of healthy perception, who can draw all men to read him; whose thoughts leave such cheerful and perfumed memories, that when the newsboy enters the car, all over the wide wildernesses of America the tired traveller says, 'Here comes the Autocrat to bring me one

half hour's absolute relief from the vacant mind.'"—Notes in Journal for speech at the dinner to Dr. Holmes on his Fiftieth Birthday, August 29, 1859.

Page 264, note 1. This address cannot but recall others on the same theme. The following passage is from the Address "Literary Ethics," given at Dartmouth College in 1838:—

"Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground where other men's aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind; feet is he to the lame. His failures, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages. … The public can get public experience, but they wish the scholar to replace to them those private, sincere, divine experiences of which they have been defrauded by dwelling in the street."

And the following sentence from Mr. Emerson's Address to the Divinity Students, in the same month, may be added:—

"What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation?"

Page 266, note 1. For Nature's method of teaching by allurements and surprises, see the two "Nature" poems and the quatrain thus called.

Page 267, note 1. "The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank

confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers;—that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself. In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be,—free and brave."—"The American Scholar," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 268, note 1. Mr. Emerson copied as a motto this line of Ossian: "Cathmore dwelt in the wood to avoid the voice of praise." He wrote in his journal, of his ideal man, "I will add to the portrait of Osman that he had never to look after his fame and his compliments, his claps and his editions."

Page 270, note 1. In the "Fragments on the Poet," stanza IV., is told the far-reaching power of the random word which the listener hears from the Muse, feigning to speak to another.

Page 271, note 1. "Almack's" was a suite of assembly-rooms in King Street, St. James's, London, built in 1765 by MacCaul, the valet of a Scottish nobleman, who reversed his name when he came to London and became a tavern-keeper. From 1765 to 1840 balls were held at Almack's under the management of a committee of ladies of rank. "The circle having admission to balls at Almack's was, at the beginning of the century, regarded as the seventh heaven of the fashionable world." The rooms were not closed until 1890.

Page 274, note 1. Compare what is said of the labor due from the Scholar in the essay on Greatness, Letters and Social Aims, p. 311.

Page 277, note 1. Usually in his writings, as in this essay, two pages later, Mr. Emerson warns against talent, meaning thereby self-exhibition, but here the word seems used in the sense of successful expression.

Page 279, note 1. "Men of talent sometimes seem to me sepulchres in which vices are entombed with architecture and praise,"—Lecture-sheet.

Page 282, note 1. "The man whose part is taken and who does not wait for society in anything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel. The familiar experiment called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary column of water balances the ocean, is a symbol of the relation of one man to the whole family of men."—"New England Reformers," Essays, Second Series.

Page 284, note 1. Journal, 1841. "No man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world, or do anything well who does not suppose his work to be of greatest importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with impunity. Whoso does what he thinks mean is mean."

Page 287, note 1. "The scholar will feel that the richest romance, the noblest fiction that was ever woven, the heart and soul of beauty, lies enclosed in human life. Itself of surpassing value, it is also the richest material for his creations. How shall he know its secrets of tenderness, of terror, of will, and of fate? How can he catch and keep the strain of upper music that peals from it? Its laws are concealed under the details of daily action. … He must bear his share of the common load. … Out of love and hatred, out of earnings, and borrowings, and lendings, and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of travelling, and voting, and watching, and caring; out of disgrace and contempt,

comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws. Let him not slur his lesson; let him learn it by heart. Let him endeavor exactly, bravely, and cheerfully, to solve the problem of that life which is set before him. And this by punctual action, and not by promises or dreams."—"Literary Ethics," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 288, note 1.

The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails. "Heroism," Poems.

Page 288, note 2. Mr. Emerson, in a letter to a friend, said:—

"It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other: and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterward in the hope of being in Paradise again. But what better sign can the genius of our times show that the old creative force is ready to work again, than the universal indisposition of the best heads to touch the books even of name and fame?"

Page 289, note 1. "Strength and spirits are wasted in rejection. But the strong spirits overpower those around them without effort. Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood, quite withdraws them from all notice of these carping critics; they surrender themselves with glad heart to the heavenly guide, and only by implication reject the clamorous nonsense of the hour. Grave seniors talk to the deaf,—church and old book mumble and ritualize to an unheeding, preoccupied and advancing mind, and thus they, by happiness of greater

momentum, lose no time, but take the right road at first."—"The Transcendentalist," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

PLUTARCH

Dr. Holmes said, in his Memoir of Mr. Emerson, that "the Essay on Plutarch has a peculiar value from the fact that Emerson owes more to him than to any other author except Plato, who is one of the only two writers quoted oftener than Plutarch. Mutato nomine, the portrait which Emerson draws of the Greek moralist might stand for his own." There is much truth in this remark. Throughout Plutarch's writings the gracious and humane personality is singularly apparent, and the reasons of this sympathy across the centuries are plain.

Mr. Emerson as a boy read Plutarch, and never tired of this early friend. When I was fourteen years old, he put Plutarch's Lives into my hand and bade me read two pages every week-day and ten every holiday. It seemed at first an irksome task, but my mother asked me to read them aloud to her, and this made it easier. Lycurgus's training of the Spartan boys, Archimedes's amazing military engineering in the defence of Syracuse, Hannibal's passage of the Alps, Scipio's magnanimity and Caesar's courage and genius won their own way, as my father knew they would with a boy, and, what is by no means common with authors, the personality of the writer also, as, for instance, where he drops the narrative to hotly censure the meanness of Cato the Elder in selling his slaves when they were past service. The style of Plutarch could commend itself even to a boy. Mr. Emerson loved the racy English of Morgan's edition of the Morals of 1718, and while sure of the

accurate scholarship of Professor Goodwin in his revision of the work, I think interceded with him in advance to save the old English phraseology where possible, which was done. The correction of the inaccuracies, often gross, and the clearing up of obscurities by Professor Goodwin gave him, as he says in the essay, great pleasure.

He was sure that Plutarch was as good reading for to-day as for men or boys nineteen centuries ago. He wrote, "When I read Plutarch, or look at a Greek vase, I am inclined to accept the common opinion of the learned, that the Greeks had cleaner wits than any other people. But there is anything but time in my idea of the Antique. A clear and natural expression by word or deed is that which we mean, when we love and praise the Antique. In society, I do not find it; in modern books, seldom; but when I come into the pastures, I find antiquity again. Once in the fields with the lowing cattle, the birds, trees, waters, and satisfying curves of the landscape, and I cannot tell whether this is Thessaly and Enna, or whether Concord and Acton."

Page 295, note 1. Jacques Amyot (1513-1593), a youth of humble parentage, went to the College of France, and there underwent great privations in his zeal for learning. He soon after was made Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Bourges. He there translated some of Plutarch's Lives, which he dedicated to Francis I., who was so much pleased that he gave him the revenues of the Abbey of Bellezane. Amyot's dream was to translate Plutarch, and he went to Italy in the train of certain prelates to see the best texts. Henry II. made him tutor to his two sons, later Charles IX. and Henry III., and for his success and his translations of Plutarch's Lives and Morals made him grand almoner and

Bishop of Auxerre. This necessitated his temporarily leaving the study of the Pagan writers to learn a little divinity. His royal pupils befriended him, but in the time of the League sad reverses befell him.

Page 295, note 2. Jeanne D'Albret, queen of Navarre, of whom it was said that she was "a princess with nothing of the woman but the sex, with a soul full of everything manly, a mind fit to cope with affairs of moment and a heart invincible in adversity."

Page 297, note 1. La Cité Antique, by Coulanges, is the work here alluded to.

Page 299, note 1. Probably the chapter which Mr. Emerson had to skip because of its technicality was the one "Concerning Music."

Page 302, note 1. This is a favorite doctrine of Mr. Emerson's, appearing in many places, especially in "Quotation and Originality" (Letters and Social Aims), that a good quoter acquires some rights in the original. Speaking of Shakspeare's borrowings, in Representative Men, he said, "A great poet who appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating."

Page 303, note 1. This recalls the paper by Oscar Wilde "On the Decay of Lying," a suggestive article on Art, in spite of the whimsical form in which it is clothed.

Page 306, note 1. Mr. Emerson spoke in "The Over-Soul" of "that flowing river which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me." See also the poem, "The Two Rivers."

Page 310, note 1. This passage is one of those in which the likeness spoken of by Dr. Holmes between Plutarch and Emerson is conspicuous, the latter eager for all facts the naturalist could give, but using them as keys to higher laws.

Page 318, note 1. In the journal, Mr. Emerson quotes Clough's choice,—"Plutarch's best life is Antony, I think."

Page 320, note 1. This is characteristic of Mr. Emerson. He willingly gave to proper persons letters of introduction, but he almost never used them. He said, "My practice is to go to the inn in the town where the person I wish to see lives and send a note to him thence. He can judge by the note whether I am a person he cares to see, or no."

Page 322, note 1. This phrase pleased Mr. Emerson; he used it, slightly modified, in the first stanza of "The Poet," where the verse

Fell unregarded to the ground, Unseen by such as stood around. The pious wind took it away, The reverent darkness hid the lay.

Page 322, note 2. Journal, 1860. "Plutarch, the elixir of Greece and Rome,—that is the book which nations want to compose. If the world's library were burning, I should as soon fly to rescue that as Shakspeare and Plato, or next afterwards."

HISTORIC NOTES OF LIFE AND LETTERS IN NEW ENGLAND

It is remembered in the family that this paper was not a mosaic of many notes taken at different times, but that most of it was continuously written, and with enjoyment, by Mr. Emerson, probably about the year 1867, for one or more lectures. His daughter remembers her father's saying, with a smile of amusement, "I believe I must put in Brook Farm."

He was afraid that it might be a little early to do so, and this portion must have been read as a parlor lecture. "Historic Notes" was published in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1883.

Page 327, note 1. The tendencies of that epoch are also described in the essays on the Transcendentalist and on New England Reformers.

Page 328, note 1. Mr. Emerson could not like Faust, could never feel that the poet was justified in meddling with "the Negative." He expresses himself further upon the poem in the chapter on Goethe in Representative Men, and in the division "Morals" in "Poetry and Imagination," in Letters and Social Aims, and in the "Man of Letters" in this volume.

He valued much the work by Professor James Hutchison Stirling, of Edinburgh, The Secret of Hegel.

Page 329, note 1. Dr. Jacob Bigelow, eminent both as physician and botanist, had at this time introduced a healthy skepticism among the physicians of Massachusetts as to the power of drugs over disease, much to the advantage of the practice of that day of heroic treatment in which mediaeval methods and prescriptions lingered; and soon after, the young Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes became a formidable and useful critic as to the ways and beliefs of the profession; both of these writers clearing the ground for a more rational and scientific practice.

Page 330, note 1. As is shown in his chapter on Swedenborg, in Representative Men, Mr. Emerson's value for the high symbolism of the seer did not blind him to his sombre and tedious monotony. In an early poem he laments that a friend should cower before

The phantoms One self-deceiving mystic drew in swarms Wherever rolled his visionary eye, The Swedish Pluto of a world of ghosts,— Eyes without light, men without character, Nature a cave of theologians.

Page 333, note 1. Mr. Cabot says in the Memoir that the enthusiasm of admiration felt by the young Emerson for Everett subjected him to the ridicule of his more prosy classmates, and adds: "The admiration had begun earlier, when Everett was preaching in Boston, and Emerson (as he told me) and his brother Edward used to go on Sunday and peep into the church where their favorite was expected to preach, to make sure that he was in the pulpit."

In a letter to his classmate, John B. Hill, he wrote, the year after their graduation: "I have been attending Professor Everett's lectures, which he has begun to deliver in this city, upon Antiquities. I am as much enamoured as ever with the incomparable manner of my old idol, though much of his matter is easily acquired from common books. We think strong sense to be his distinguishing feature; he never commits himself, never makes a mistake."

Page 335, note 1. From this paragraph it appears that very possibly the Lyceum system, which, starting from the Northern seaboard, spread speedily throughout the Middle and Western States, though it seemed unable to pass Mason and Dixon's line, owed much of its initial success to Everett. To the Lyceum the wide spreading of Mr. Emerson's influence was largely due, for all of his essays were originally spoken face to face to the men and women of his country.

Page 335, note 2. Rev. Nathaniel L. Frothingham, pastor

of the First Church in Boston and, earlier, instructor in Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard College, was friendly to Mr. Emerson and seems to have been one among the older clergy who was not wholly shocked by the Divinity School Address. He was a member of the Transcendental Club in 1836.

Professor Andrews Norton held the chair of Biblical Literature in the Divinity School of Harvard College. Mr. Cabot spoke of him as "a man of acute intellect and a commanding personality, and, I suppose, the foremost theologian of the Liberal Christians."

Page 336, note 1. Of discoveries in astronomy and its great laws Mr. Emerson only knew from his reading, but he was fortunate in having for his brother-in-law Dr. Charles Thomas Jackson, educated in Paris, and an accomplished chemist and geologist in the modern advance of these sciences. He made the first geological surveys of many of the States, and was the first to examine and make scientific report on the great mineral resources of the Lake Superior region. Mr. Emerson frequently enjoyed his brilliant conversation in his laboratory in Boston and during Dr. Jackson's visits to his sister, Mrs. Emerson, in Concord.

Page 340, note 1. With Dr. Channing, who was installed as pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston the year that Emerson was born, he always had the kindest relations, felt in youth his influence, and later preached in his pulpit by invitation. Rev. John W. Chadwick in his life of Channing1 1.5 says, "We do not wonder at Emerson's delight in Channing when we read this superb anticipation of his own 'Self-Reliance' [Dr. Channing's address on Spiritual Freedom]."

Mr. Emerson wrote, "In our wantonness we often flout Dr. Channing and say he is getting old. But as soon as he is ill, we remember he is our bishop, and that we have not done with him yet."

Page 341, note 1. Dr. Francis was a Unitarian clergyman of wide sympathies and genial character, brother of the charming and typical New England woman, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, the authoress and reformer of the best type.

Dr. Frederic H. Hedge, a clergyman first in Bangor, Maine, then in Brookline, Massachusetts, studied in Germany and was a student of German literature, but especially of philosophy.

Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, born the same year with Mr. Emerson, was a marked reformer in his day. Beginning life as a Universalist preacher, he became strongly interested in the schemes for social reform of the Englishman, Robert Owen, and in 1828 organized the Working Men's Party in New York. After coming under Dr. Channing's influence he became a Unitarian clergyman, and soon after formed the Society for Christian Union and Progress, and preached for them for several years. He supported, and for the most part wrote, certain magazines to propagate his beliefs. In 1844 he became a Catholic, and not long after was offered a chair in the University of Dublin by Dr. John Henry Newman, but declined it.

Rev. William Henry Channing, near in kindred to Dr. Channing, was a man high-minded, enthusiastic, and beautiful in character. He was the contemporary and friend of James Freeman Clarke, with whom he was associated in the publication of the Western Messenger in Cincinnati, and with him and Mr. Emerson in writing the life of Margaret Fuller. He was, during the Civil War, pastor of a Unitarian church

in Washington, and later lived in England, where he preached to a society in London.

The pure idealist mentioned in the end of the paragraph is, of course, Mr. Alcott.

Page 342, note 1. The following stray sheets from a lecture on this subject are here introduced because of the allusion to Mr. Alcott in the latter part:—

"Every man, in the degree in which he has positive convictions, is continually disappointed in his acquaintance with men. He is searching in the crowd for types of these convictions. Of course he does not find them easily. He goes to England: but where are the extraordinary individuals? He meets a great many trifling persons with foolish sounding voices, but not easily those mighty men, unrivalable by Americans, he looked for among the Milmans, Macaulays, Milnes, Disraelis, Wilsons. Yes. What then of Wordsworth? Landor? Carlyle? Tennyson? Well, these are as exceptional there and admired as here, and perhaps disdainful of the mediocrity of their several circles. And the young traveller is struck even more than at home—(perhaps it is his fault of false expectation and his own unfitness)—at the poverty and limitation.

"Not the less is it true, that each man comes into the world timed and accompanied by just conditions and associates,—no matter how self-sufficing or how exigeant he is. 'T is certain that to each of us the loss of a few persons would be most impoverishing,—a few persons who give flesh to what were else mere thoughts and which now he is not at liberty to slight, or in any manner treat as fictions. He cannot treat Platonism as cloud-land, if he knows a Platonist who makes the theory as solid to him as Massachusetts. He cannot hold Stoicism impossible if he has before him a Stoic in flesh and

blood with pertinacious Saxon belief, and Saxon performance. Nor hold Pythagoras to be mythical, if he finds at his door the like urgent organizer of association."

In the passage following the above, Mr. Emerson seems to be speaking of the inability which he always felt to satisfy the hope and desire of friends of warmer temperament:—

"But when one of the Dorians conversed with one of the Persians, it was a great disadvantage to the last. For the native coldness of the Dorian so contrasted with the heat of the other, that it seemed rigor and austerity. 'I ought never to converse with you,' said the Dorian, 'since to love and to hate, to live and to die, seem to me no more than to walk out into the road and return hither, whilst to you they are passionate occasions, and the bare mention of these words excite you to joy and despondency.'"

Page 342, note 2. Journal (about 1840). "The view taken in State Street of Transcendentalism is that it threatens to invalidate contracts."

Page 343, note 1. For further information concerning the Transcendental epoch, see Mr. Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, Transcendentalism in New England, by the Rev. Octavius B. Frothingham, and in Mr. George W. Cooke's life of Mr. Emerson the chapter "The Era of Transcendentalism."

Page 344, note 1. In the Familiar Letters of Thoreau, edited by Mr. F. B. Sanborn, are several interesting references to the Dial at a time when Thoreau was helping Mr. Emerson in the editing.

Page 344, note 2. In spite of their difference in temperament and method, Emerson and Parker had great esteem and honor one for another. Mr. Emerson said, "Parker is a soldier whom God gave strength and will to fight for him the battle

of the day." In the volume Miscellanies will be found his address at the memorial meeting in the Music Hall after Mr. Parker's death. Mr. Edwin D. Mead has written an interesting chapter on Emerson and Parker.1 1.6 Lowell, in his Fable for Critics, gives a spirited and amusing description in verse of Parker's forceful and omniscient preaching.

Page 346, note 1. Journal, 1847. "Here was _____ _____ , with somewhat ridiculous, yet much nobility, always combined in his person and conversation truth, honesty, love, independence,—yet this listening to men and this credulity in days and conventions and Brisbane projects. His look has somewhat too priestly and ecclesiastic in its cut. He looks like a Universalist minister. But though his intellect is something low and limitary, prosaic and a good roadster, yet he has great depth of character, and grows on your eye. Pathetic it was to hear of his little circle of six young men who met one evening long ago in a little chamber in Boston, and talked over his project of No Money until all saw that it was true, and had new faith in the omnipotence of love. In Alabama and Georgia he seems to have stopped in every printing-house, and the only signs of hope and comfort he found were newspapers like Brisbane's 'Future,' which he found in these dusky universities. When shall we see a man whose image blends with nature, so that when he is gone, he shall not seem a little ridiculous, that same small man!"

Page 347, note 1. Robert Owen, a Welshman, as his name indicates, and with the sanguine zeal of the race, perserved in benevolent socialistic schemes, which came to nothing, all through his life. Among others was that of New Harmony, Indians, where with his own means he bought 20,000 acres

of land and dwellings for 1000 people. He was a constant writer on his favorite theories, his principal work being The Book of the New Moral World.

Page 348, note 1. The five following pages are from a paper entitled "Fourierism and the Socialists," written by Mr. Emerson in the Dial for July, 1842, as an introduction to an article by Mr. Albert Brisbane, called "Means of effecting a Final Reconciliation between Religion and Science." The opening paragraph of Mr. Emerson's introduction, omitted from this essay, was as follows:—

"The increasing zeal and numbers of the disciples of Fourier, in America and in Europe, entitle them to an attention which their theory and practical projects will justify and reward. In London, a good weekly newspaper (lately changed into a monthly journal) called the Phalanx, devoted to the social doctrines of Charles Fourier, and bearing for its motto, 'Association and Colonization,' is edited by Hugh Doherty. Mr. Etzler's inventions, as described in the Phalanx, promise to cultivate twenty thousand acres with the aid of four men only and cheap machinery. Thus the laborers are threatened with starvation, if they do not organize themselves into corporations, so that machinery may labor for, instead of working against them. It appears that Mr. Young, an Englishman of large property, has purchased the Bénédictine Abbey of Citeaux, in the Mont d'Or, in France, with its ample domains, for the purpose of establishing a colony there. We also learn that some members of the sect have bought an estate at Santa Catharina, fifty miles from Rio Janeiro, in a good situation for an agricultural experiment, and one hundred laborers have sailed from Havre to that port, and nineteen hundred more are to follow. On the anniversary of the birthday of Fourier, which occurred in April, public festivals were kept

by the Socialists in London, in Paris and in New York. In the city of New York, the disciples of Fourier have bought a column in the Daily Tribune, Horace Greeley's excellent newspaper, whose daily and weekly circulation exceeds twenty thousand copies, and through that organ are now diffusing their opinions."

Page 354, note 1. Fourier and his doctrines and followers are alluded to by Mr. Emerson in "The Young American," Nature, Addresses and Lectures, pp. 382 ff., and in Representative Men, in the last paragraph of "Napoleon."

Page 357, note 1. The sturdy, simple monk, Samson, is the hero of Carlyle's Past and Present.

Page 360, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote at the beginning of the Brook Farm experiment in 1840:—

"What a brave thing Mr. Ripley has done! He stands now at the head of the Church Militant, and his step cannot be without an important sequel. For the 'community,' I have given it some earnest attention and much talk, and have not quite decided not to go. But I hate that the least weight should hang on my decision,—of me who am so unpromising a candidate for any society. At the name of a society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen. I shall very shortly go or send to George Ripley my thoughts on the subject."

But it was foreordained that Mr. Emerson should not become a worker in a hive, and his true instinct saved him from obeying the urgency of his friends, yet he refused, as he said, "very slowly and almost with penitence."

Page 362, note 1. The letters of George W. Curtis to his friend, Mr. John S. Dwight, give an interesting picture of his manly and yet partly idyllic youth.1 1.7

Several members of the community have written of it, and it is pleasant to find the happy memories it left with them, in spite of its failure. It is also interesting that no one connected with that community wished any one but him or herself to make fun of it. Among the articles on Brook Farm are the following: "Reminiscences of Brook Farm," by George P. Bradford, Century Magazine, vol. xxiii., p. 141; "A Girl of Sixteen at Brook Farm," by Mrs. Sedgwick, Atlantic Monthly, vol. ixxxv., p. 394; and "A Visit to Brook Farm," by Mrs. Kirby, Overland Monthly, vol. v., p. 9. Lindsay Swift's Brook Farm is a good sketch of the community.

Page 363, note 1. The person here alluded to is Mr. Charles K. Newcomb, a youth of great virtue and charm, towards whom Mr. Emerson felt an unusual attraction all through his life. Mr. Newcomb's Hamlet-like temperament hindered him from obvious achievement in life, though he did service to his country as a private soldier during the Civil War. When he visited Concord he brought what he had lately written, and usually it gave Mr. Emerson pleasure, but his only published work that I know of is the paper in the Dial called "The Two Dolons."

Page 363, note 2. The "accomplished Doctor of Music" was Mr. John S. Dwight, the well-known musical critic. He is the person alluded to a little later, who would hoe corn on Sunday only.

Page 370, note 1. Mr. Emerson's attitude towards the reformers of the day was respectful. He honored their earnest seeking, and showed hospitality to their thoughts; but was not their dupe. His mind did not trouble itself with details, and he lived on a larger pattern, but honored them, as far as they went. He wrote in the journal: "In reference to the philanthropies of the day, it seems better to use than to flout them.

Shall it be said of the hero that he opposed all the contemporary good because it was not grand? I think it better to get their humble good and to catch the golden boon of purity and temperance and mercy from these poor [preachers and reformers]."

He wrote in his journal that one of his friends, a refined lady, asked him, Whether Reformers were not always in bad taste? "Oh no," he answered; "the poet, the saint, are not only elegant, but elegance. It is only the half-poet, the half-saint who disgust. Thus now the saint in us proposes, but the sinner in us executes so lamely. But who can be misled who trusts to a thought? That profound deep where-unto it leads is the Heaven of Heavens. On that pillow, softer than darkness, he that falls can never be bruised."

"The soul of a better quality thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will provide. … The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.

"The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine,—'It is a noble, generous liquor and we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before it.'"—"Heroism," Essays, First Series.

THE CHARDON STREET CONVENTION

The story of these remarkable meetings, under the name of the "Chardon Street and Bible Conventions," was written by Mr. Emerson for the Dial for July, 1842. The Chardon Street Convention, before breaking up, had appointed a "Committee to summon a new Convention to be styled 'the Bible Convention,' for the discussion of the credibility and authority of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments." By invitation of this Committee, the new Association met at the Masonic Temple in Boston, March 29, 1842. Of this thinly attended convention Mr. Emerson wrote: "Possibly from the greater unpopularity of its object, out of doors, some faintness or coldness surprised the members. At all events, it was hurried to a conclusion on the first day, to the great disappointment of many. Mr. Brownson, Mr. Alcott, Mr. West, and, among others, a Mormon preacher took part in the conversation. But according to the general testimony of those present, as far as we can collect it, the best speech made on that occasion was that of Mr. Nathaniel H. Whiting, of South Marshfield." Mr. Emerson says of him: "A plain, unlettered man, leaving for the day a mechanical employment to address his fellows, he possesses eminent gifts for success in an assembly so constituted." He obtained from Mr. Whiting the substance of his address, occupying eight pages of the magazine, to which his own Dial paper, here given, was the introduction.

Page 376, note 1. In the "Lecture on the Times,"

given the year after this convention, the following is the concluding passage:—

"Reality is all we prize, and … we are bound on our entrance into nature to speak for that. Let it not be recorded in our own memories that in this moment of the Eternity, when we who were named by our names flitted across the light, we were afraid of any fact, or disgraced the fair Day by a pusillanimous preference of our bread to our freedom. What is the scholar, what is the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time? Have you leisure, power, property, friends? You shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every untried project which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest compliment man ever receives from heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels."—Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 376, note 2. This very convention was probably in Mr. Emerson's mind when he wrote in the first chapter of Representative Men these words:—

"I go to a convention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human body,—that man liberates me; I forget the clock. I pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am made

immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods."

Page 377, note 1. Journal, 1841. "We concede, O Miss P. [Peabody?], there is a difference between the spirit in which these poor men struggling to emancipate themselves from the yoke of a traditional worship, and crying out in their sorrow and hope, speak at the Chardon Street Convention, and the spirit in which he who is long already free from these fears turns back and knowingly shoots sarcasms at the old and venerated names."

EZRA RIPLEY, D. D.

This sketch was written for the Social Circle, a club in Concord dating from the close of the Revolution. During that struggle the notables of the town, formed into a Committee of Safety, had come together from their farms, shops or offices to raise men for the army and provide for them in the field. After the war was over they missed these friendly gatherings for the common good, and so in 1782 organized the Circle, "to strengthen the social affections, and disseminate useful communications among its members." The minister of the town was not, however, chosen a member until 1785. Mr. Emerson was a member from 1839 for the rest of his life. After the death of Dr. Ripley, who was his step-grandfather, he was asked to prepare the customary Memoir for the Club-Book. It was enlarged from a notice printed by him in the Middlesex Yeoman at the time of Dr. Ripley's death.

Mr. Emerson himself enjoyed the club, which met at the house of each of the twenty-five members in turn from October

to April. The hours were from seven to nine in the evening, for, when he joined, a large part of the members were farmers. The Circle held strictly to its formation, the company, sitting upright in their chairs around the small parlor of the entertainer, strove to keep the conversation general. Just before they went home they partook of simple refreshment,—apples, nuts and raisins, sometimes cake, and cider or chocolate for drink. Mr. Emerson wrote to a city friend in 1844:—

"Much the best society I have ever known is a club in Concord called the Social Circle, consisting always of twenty-five of our citizens, doctor, lawyer, farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, etc., solidest of men, who yield the solidest of gossip. Harvard University is a wafer compared to the solid land which my friends represent. I do not like to be absent from home on Tuesday evenings in winter."

The celebration of the birthday of Emerson held in Concord, May 25, 1903, was under the suspices of the Social Circle.

Page 382, note 1. The following information regarding this subject is gathered from Shattuck's History of Concord:—

"The buildings of Harvard College were occupied as barracks for the American army, while stationed at Cambridge, and the students were dispersed. The college was removed to Concord and commenced its operations on the first of October, 1775. President Langdon lived at Dr. Minot's [on the Common, where until a few years since the Middlesex Hotel stood]; Professor Sewall lived at James Jones's; Professor Wigglesworth at the Bates place on the Bedford Road; and Professor Winthrop at Darius Merriam's, near which was the library and philosophical apparatus. … The students boarded

… in many different places. The recitations were at the court-house and meeting-house. Prayers were attended at the latter place.

"The following proceedings of the government of the college were communicated to the town when it was about to be removed to Cambridge:—

"'CONCORD, June 12, 1776.

"'At a meeting of the President, Professors, and Tutors of Harvard College, voted, that the following address of thanks be presented by the president to the selectmen, the gentlemen of the committee, and other gentlemen and inhabitants of the town of Concord, who have favored the college with their encouragement and assistance, in its removal to this town, by providing accommodations.

"'Gentlemen,—The assistance you have afforded us in obtaining accommodations for this society here, when Cambridge was filled with the glorious army of freemen, which was assembled to hazard their lives in their country's cause, and our removal from thence became necessary, demands our grateful acknowledgments.

"'We have observed with pleasure the many tokens of your friendship to the college; and particularly thank you for the use of your public buildings. We hope the scholars while here have not dishonored themselves and the society by any incivilities or indecencies of behaviour, or that you will readily forgive any errors which may be attributed to the inadvertencies of youth.

"'May God reward you with all his blessings, grant us a quiet re-settlement in our ancient seat to which we are now returning, preserve America from slavery, and establish and continue religion, learning, liberty, peace, and the happiest

government in these American Colonies to the end of the world.

"'SAMUEL LANGDON, President. "'Per order.'"

Page 383, note 1. Phebe was the eldest daughter of Rev. Daniel Bliss, the zealous pastor of the Concord Church from 1738 until his death in 1764. Then the young William Emerson was summoned from his teacher's desk at Reading to supply the pulpit for a few weeks. His preaching pleased the people, and in the end of 1765 he was chosen pastor by the church, and their action confirmed by the town at the "March meeting." He boarded with the widow of his predecessor, and fell in love with Phebe, whom he married, and in 1769 built the Manse by the Old North Bridge, "a nest for his phebe-bird." He was an eager Son of Liberty, and fanned the flame of patriotism of his parishioners at the outbreak of the Revolution. In August, 1776, having obtained from the church leave of absence for the purpose, he joined the Northern army at Ticonderoga as chaplain, but in October sickened and died of fever. Four years after his death his widow married the young successor, the subject of this Memoir.

Dr. Ripley was always kind and hospitable to the Emerson children and grandchildren of his wife. He especially befriended the widow of William the younger, with her five boys, who thus learned to regard Concord as a home. This determined Waldo's settling there, and on his return from Europe in 1834, while looking for a house in Concord, he stayed with Dr. Ripley, and much of "Nature" was written at the Manse.

Page 384, note 1. Rev. Joseph Emerson, the minister of Malden for years. He married Mary, the daughter of Rev.

Samuel Moody of York, Maine, a good but eccentric man, and a rugged and powerful preacher. Joseph Emerson was a devoted scholar. Mr. Emerson recorded with pleasure this anecdote of him,—that he said after he had read the Iliad that he should be sorry to think that the men and cities he read of never existed.

Three of his sons were ministers, Joseph of Pepperell, William of Concord and John of Conway, Massachusetts.

Page 385, note 1. In previous editions this has been printed "repent this Providence," but I am quite sure that this was an error arising from Mr. Emerson's habitual use of the old-fashioned long s. "Resent" was then used in a good as well as a bad sense to signify the reaction of the mind on any event. Rev. William Emerson, the son of Joseph, in writing to his wife of the narrow escape from death of her two brothers who were in the crowd at the Boston Massacre, so-called, said: "However afflicting such a Scene as y^e Murder of y^e 4 above mentioned, yet to you and I it is more sensibly felt, & ought to be gratefully resented, the very wonderful Preservation of our dear Brothers, Theo^r and Sam^l."

Page 386, note 1. In his journal for 1834 Mr. Emerson notes: "Dr. Ripley prays for rain with great explicitness on Sunday, and on Monday the showers fell. When I spoke of the speed with which his prayers were answered, the good man looked modest." When Dr. Ripley was old and feeble and also deaf, Rev. Hersey B. Goodwin was associated with him as pastor, and their relations were pleasant. One Sunday Mr. Goodwin exchanged with Rev. Octavius B. Frothingham, then a young minister and unacquainted with the old-time formalities connected with the church and the aged pastor. Arriving early, the clergyman from Boston took his

place in the pulpit and soon heard the Doctor's voice at the entrance inquiring for him, and tones of disapproval when it appeared that he had not waited for the senior pastor. On ascending the pulpit, Dr. Ripley read and handed over to Mr. Frothingham the customary notes sent up by families or individuals, in affliction or in joy, desiring by name the prayers of the congregation. When the prayer was over, Dr. Ripley, who had leaned forward to hear with his hand to his ear, was heard by the congregation to say, "But you have n't prayed for our afflicted members." Mr. Frothingham had to explain, in voice loud enough to make the Doctor hear, that it was his custom not to read notes aloud nor to pray for individuals, but to frame a general petition including all, to which the Doctor severely answered in a voice sudible to the congregation, "Well, it is a very bad custom, and the sooner you change it the better!"

Page 387, note 1. The Manse stood close by the Old North Bridge, and Mr. Emerson, while a guest there in 1864, writes: "Francis comes to Dr. Ripley at breakfast to know whether he shall drive the cow into the battle-field."

Page 391, note 1. He was a member of the old Fire Association of Concord, founded in 1794. Mr. Emerson was also a member, and over the stairway in his house always hung the two leathern fire-buckets and green baize bag for saving property.

Page 392, note 1. This was the remark of Mr. Emerson's brother Edward.

Page 394, note 1. Journal, 1834, "I listened yesterday as always to Dr. Ripley's prayer in the mourning house with tenfold the hope and tenfold chance of some touch of nature that should melt us, that I should have felt in the rising of one

of the Boston preachers of proprieties—the fair house of Seem. These old semi-savages do from the solitude in which they live and their remoteness from artificial society and their inevitable daily comparing man with beast, village with wilderness, their inevitable acquaintance with the outward nature of man, and with his strict dependence on sun and rain and wind and frost, wood, worm, cow and bird, get an education to the Homeric simplicity, which all the libraries of the Reviews and the Commentators in Boston do not countervail."

Journal, 1840. "Dr. Ripley is no dandy, but speaks with the greatest simplicity and gravity. He preaches, however, to a congregation of Dr. Ripleys; Daniel Webster to an assembly of Websters. Could this belief of theirs be verified in the audience, each would be esteemed the best of all speakers."

Page 395, note 1. Journal, 1841. "Sept. 21. Dr. Ripley died this morning. The fall of this oak of ninety years makes some sensation in the forest, old and doomed as it was. … His body is a handsome and noble spectacle. My mother was moved just now to call it 'the beauty of the dead.' … I carried Waldo to see him and he testified neither repulsion nor surprise, but only the quietest curiosity. He was ninety years old, yet this face has the tension and resolution of vigorous manhood. … A man is but a little thing in the midst of these great objects of Nature, yet a man by his moral quality may abolish all thoughts of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world."

MARY MOODY EMERSON

Mary Moody Emerson, the daughter of Rev. William Emerson of Concord and Phebe Bliss, his wife, was born in 1775, and lived until 1863. She was the younger sister of Mr. Emerson's father. When Madam Emerson was left a widow in straitened circumstances with five little boys, their aunt used often to visit them, awakened their interest in literature and in character, and by constant correspondence with her favorites, Waldo and Charles, spurred their ambition, led them on to discussion of authors and principles, criticised their thought and expression, and elevated their standards. Although the words seem grotesque when applied to this ascetic enthusiast and devotee, she had many of the characteristics and faults now commonly associated with the "artistic temperament." She was a born painter in words, was odd in speech and dress, impulsive and abrupt, and so whimsical and exacting as to have to constantly seek, up and down New England, for a new boarding-place. Once when she wrote a prayer for "peace in our borders," some one pointed out that she had written boarders, but Miss Emerson said, "Let it stand."

With all her oddities, she was always welcome to her nephew. Writing to her in 1839 he urged her to come again to Concord, "this old, dear, odious haunt of the race," the "odious" referring to her unpleasant remembrance of having her youthful waywardness checked by her good stepfather, Dr. Ripley, on her early visits at the Manse. To her remarkable degree of literary culture, though almost unschooled and brought up by relatives who had hardly more than the reading

of the Bible gave, her nephew owed much; but more to her native gifts, the fire of her piety, her zeal for learning, her brilliant expression and the unsparing criticism, which yet could but thinly mask her affection.

Her humor tempered her oddities to those who had the wit to detect it. The few persons who did not always give way to her whims, but dared meet steel with steel, and not allow themselves to be browbeaten, fared best with her. Soon after the Rev. Grindall Reynolds began his long and useful ministry in the church of her ancestors, Miss Emerson, then eighty years old, waited on the porch until he came out, genially talking with his parishioners, and in their presence rebuked him for laughing in the sacred precincts. "Miss Emerson," said the minister pleasantly, "my father, years ago, tried to break me of the habit, but failed, and I'm afraid you will: but, Madam, I perceive that you are smiling." "Ah, but it is a sardonic smile," she answered.

A few years later Mr. Emerson gathered a company of friends and neighbors at his house to hear Mr. Alcott converse. Anxious that some of his friends from the city should find the pleasure and profit that he himself did in Mr. Alcott's thought, he invited, among others, Mr. Henry James, senior. Mr. James, supposing that in a "Conversation" more than one could take part, and being a born dialectician, presently took issue with Mr. Alcott and harassed him with questions, to his great discomfiture, and, with characteristic originality in use of terms, began a witty diatribe upon Morals, meaning thereby self-conscious moral action. Mr. Alcott, who had much less skill in fence even than Mr. Emerson, was driven from the field. Then from her chair arose Miss Emerson, eighty-four years old, to her full height of some four and a half feet, crossed the parlor to where Mr. James, looking like a kindly

Socrates, sat, took him by the shoulders and roundly rebuked his levity, shaking him the while. Mr. James was delighted, and treated her with most chivalrous respect, and, slighting Mr. Alcott, gave her the honors of the tournament. An account of this conversation is given in the Familiar Letters of Thoreau. Miss Emerson liked Thoreau and they always had pleasant relations.

In 1855 he wrote:—

Miss Mary Emerson is here,—the youngest person in Concord, though about eighty,—and the most apprehensive of a genuine thought; earnest to know of your inner life; most stimulating society; and exceedingly witty withal.

She says they called her old when she was young, and she has never grown any older. I wish you could see her.

Mr. Emerson so valued his aunt's writings, especially her journals, which, like his own, were occupied with thoughts,—events being only alluded to,—that he frequently read in them, and copied into four books of the size of his journals long passages from them and from her letters. At the beginning of the first of these he wrote:—

"E. T. E.'s notice of M. M. E. in her Journal. 'Morning dawns; and Hartford, though Pleasantly its pictures glow, We must leave; and one who seems Like a vision in our dreams. She will dwell upon our mind, Flesh and blood so well refined That one questions whether death, Wasted form, or loss of breath Will be in her path to heaven,— All her body seems to glow With her spirit's action so.'"

This account of his aunt's life was read by Mr. Emerson before the Woman's Club in Boston, in 1869, under the title "Amita." "The Nun's Aspiration," in the Poems, which was a rendering into verse of a passage in his aunt's diary, at first bore the same name. Part of this poem serves as the motto to this sketch.

Page 402, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote, about the year 1837: "I doubt if the interior and spiritual history of New England could be truelier told than through the exhibition of family history such as this, the picture of this group of M. M. E. and the boys, mainly Charles. The genius of that woman, the key to her life is in the conflict of the new and the old ideas in New England. The heir of whatever was rich and profound and efficient in thought and emotion in the old religion which planted and peopled this land, she strangely united to this passionate piety the fatal gift of penetration, a love of philosophy, an impatience of words, and was thus a religious skeptic. She held on with both hands to the faith of the past generation as to the Palladium of all that was good and hopeful in the physical and metaphysical worlds, and in all companies and on all occasions and especially with these darling nephews of her hope and pride, extolled and poetised this beloved Calvinism. Yet all the time she doubted and denied it, and could not tell whether to be more glad or sorry to find that these boys were irremediably born to the adoption and furtherance of the new ideas. She reminds me of Margaret Graeme, the enthusiast in Scott's Abbot, who lives to infuse into the young Roland her enthusiasm for the Roman church, only that our Margaret doubted while she loved. Milton and Young were the poets endeared to the generation she represented. Of Milton they were proud, but I fancy

their religion has never found so faithful a picture as in the Night Thoughts. These combined traits in M. M. E.'s character gave the new direction to her hope, that these boys should be richly and holily qualified and bred to purify the old faith of what narrowness and error adhered to it, and import all its fire into the new age—such a gift should her Prometheus bring to men. She hated the poor, low, thin, unprofitable, unpoetical Humanitarians as the devastators of the Church and robbers of the Soul, and never wearies with piling on them new terms of slight and weariness. 'Ah!' she said, 'what a poet would Byron have been, if he had been born and bred a Calvinist!'"

Page 403, note 1. Reading over her letters to him and his brothers, Mr. Emerson wrote in 1864:—

"Aunt Mary, whose letters I read all yesterday afternoon, is a genius always new, subtle, frolicsome, musical, unpredictable. All your learning of all literatures and states of society, Platonistic, Calvinistic, English or Chinese, would never enable you to anticipate one thought or expression. She is embarrassed by no Moses or Paul, no Angelo or Shakspeare after whose type she is to fashion her speech; her wit is the wild horse of the desert, who snuffs the sirocco and scours the palm-grove without having learned his paces in the Stadium or at Tattersall's. What liberal joyful architecture, liberal and manifold as the vegetation from the earth's bosom, or the creations of frostwork on the window! Nothing can excel the freedom and felicity of her letters—such nobility is in this self-rule, this absence of all reference to style or standard; it is the march of the mountain winds, the waving of flowers, or the flight of birds. But a man can hardly be a reader of books without acquiring their average tone, as one who walks with a military procession involuntarily falls into step."

Yet, in spite of her oddities and of her piety of old New England, because of her quality and the directness and grandeur of her thought and expression her nephew wrote:—

"I believe that this Greek genius is ever reappearing, and that each of us knows one or more of the class. Aunt Mary is a Greek, and I have more in memory. Every child is a Greek."

Page 409, note 1. Her joy that her beloved nephews should drink freely at the fountains of knowledge, for which every day of her life she had so eagerly thirsted, is touching. It is shown in this letter written to William Emerson just before he sailed for Germany to pursue his studies at Göttingen in 1823:—

"I have thought of you often in the past week, in which I have gone through the 1st volume of Michaelis's Introduction to the New Testament. I beg when you come to antient MSS, to Latin versions and above all to the history of the Syrian antient version, you will write to me. What fields of knowledge as well as of labour lie before you! This author, so learned, so famous, says no clergyman ought to be ignorant of the Hebrew, Syriac and rabbinical language. Then remember me. And I do believe, take all our intercourse from the first promise of your childhood to the present, that you are in debt to me for affection. After you have spent long years in sacrificing case and fine things, then repay me by one single learned letter."

Page 412, note 1. Dr. Holmes in reference to this and some other passages quoted by Mr. Emerson in this sketch says: "There are many sentences cited by Mr. Emerson from the journal of his Aunt Mary which remind us very strongly of his own writings. Such a passage as the following might have come from his essay 'Nature,' but it was written when her nephew was only four years old."

Page 415, note 1. The memory of the devout attitude of the guides of his youth towards Nature remained with Mr. Emerson in his days of emancipation:—

"Life is ecstatical, and we radiate joy and honor and gloom in the days and landscapes we converse with. But I must remember a real or imagined period in my youth when they who spoke to me of Nature were religious, and made it so, and made it deep: now it is to the young sentimentalists frippery, and a milliner's shop has as much reason and worth."

In his journal of 1837, he wrote blessing his star, "which rained on me influences of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius, and derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly lives and godly deaths of sainted kindred, at Concord, at Malden and York, was itself a culture, an education. I heard with awe her tales, etc.

"In my childhood Aunt Mary herself wrote the prayers which first my brother William and, when he went to college, I read aloud morning and evening at the family devotions, and they still sound in my ear with their prophetic and apocalyptic ejaculations. Religion was her occupation, and when, years after, I came to write sermons for my own church, I could not find any examples or treasures of piety so high-toned, so profound or promising such rich influence, as my remembrance of her conversation and letters."

Page 426, note 1. Commenting upon this passage, Dr. Holmes said, "Miss Mary Emerson showed something of the same feeling towards natural science which may be noted in her nephews Waldo and Charles."

Page 428, note 1. Mr. Cabot in his Memoir gives extracts

from letters passing between Miss Emerson and her nephew when he was studying divinity in Cambridge. The disbelief that he rashly ventures to express in the orthodox scheme of salvation draws upon his head and upon the college a torrent of scornful eloquence from the zealous aunt, who, Mr. Emerson said, "wished every one to be a Calvinist but herself." The nephew seems to have seen no need for the Mediation, for the aunt bursts forth,—

"He talks of the Holy Ghost: God of mercy, what a subject! Holy Ghost given to every man in Eden; it was lost in the great contest going on in the vast universe,—it was lost, stifled; it was re-given embodied in the assumed humanity of the Son of God. And since,—the reward of prayer, agony, self-immolation! Dost not like the faith and the means? Take thy own or rather the dictates of fashion. … Would to God thou wert more ambitious,—respected thyself more and the world less. Thou wouldst not to Cambridge. True, they use the name Christo, but that venerable institution, it is thought, has become but a feeble, ornamental arch in the great temple which the Christian world maintains to the honor of his name. …

"The nature and limits of human virtue, its dangers, its origin, 'questions answered at Cambridge, easily,'—God, forgive thy child his levity,—subjects veiled in something of Thine own awful incomprehensibility, soothed only by the faith which reason leaves, but can never describe." …

Page 433, note 1. The abiding influence which this spurring, guiding, rebuking and loving enthusiast in her lonely life had on her nephew, whose taste, whose motives, character and style she helped to form, may be judged by these extracts from his journal:—

1866. "Read M. M. E.'s MSS. yesterday many pages.

They keep for me the old attraction, though when I sometimes have tried passages on a stranger, I find something of fairy gold:—they need too much commentary, and are not as incisive as on me. They make the best example I have known of the power of the religion of the Puritans in full energy, until fifty years ago, in New England. The central theme of these endless diaries is, her relation to the Divine Being; the absolute submission of her will, with the sole proviso that she may know it is the direct agency of God (and not of cold laws of contingency, etc.) which bereaves and humiliates her. But the religion of the diary, as of the class it represented, is biographical; it is the culture, the poetry, the mythology, in which they personally believed themselves dignified, inspired, judged and dealt with, in the present and in the future; and certainly gives to life an earnestness and to nature a sentiment, which lacking, our later generation appears frivolous."

And again:—

"Yesterday I read an old file of Aunt Mary's letters, and felt how she still gains by all comparison with later friends. Never any gave higher counsels, as E. H. Most truly said, nor played with all the household incidents with more wit and humor. My life and its early events never look trivial in her letters, but full of eyes, and acquire deepest expression."

SAMUEL HOAR

Page 437, note 1. This paper reflects the gloom which settled on the friends of Freedom in the North on the fourth of November, 1856, when James Buchanan was chosen President of the United States. On that day this sketch was written. It was first printed in Putnam's Magazine.

Page 437, note 2. The State of South Carolina having, between the years 1820 and 1835, passed several Acts with purpose "to restrain the emancipation of slaves and to prevent free persons of color from entering" the State, resulting in the imprisonment of many citizens of Massachusetts (seamen on coasting vessels) during the stay of the vessels at Charleston, and the whipping or selling them as slaves should they return, various resolves of protest against this outrage were passed by the General Court of Massachusetts. To these the offending State turned a deaf ear. The Acts of South Carolina being obviously unconstitutional, it was desired to bring some cases before the Supreme Court, but it proved impossible to do so without collecting evidence in Charleston. After all other means had failed, the General Court passed in 1844 the following resolve concerning the imprisonment of citizens in other States:—

"Resolved, That His Excellency the Governor, with the advice and consent of the Council, be hereby authorized to employ an agent for the port of Charleston, South Carolina, and an agent for the port of New Orleans, whose duty it shall be to reside in said port, for a term not exceeding one year, for the purposes specified in the resolves relating to this subject, passed on the twenty-fourth of March, in the year one thousand eight hundred and forty-three. And that His Excellency the Governor be hereby authorized to draw his warrant to cover any necessary expenses incurred in carrying into effect this or the aforementioned resolves, after the same shall have been audited and allowed by the Council, to be paid out of the public treasury."

I copy from the Report of the Joint Special Committee of the Senate of Massachusetts their statement as to the treatment of the Agent of Massachusetts by the people of Charleston,

and the subsequent Acts of the Legislature of South Carolina. This report was made February 3, 1845 (Senate Document, No. 31), and is signed by Charles Francis Adams:—

"Under the authority conferred by this resolve the Governor of the Commonwealth appointed Samuel Hoar, a respected citizen of Massachusetts, the agent for the port of Charleston, to perform the duty specifically assigned him and no more. That gentleman repaired to Charleston, endeavored to commence upon his task, and, simply because he attempted so to do, was driven by threats of personal violence of a mob from the territory of South Carolina. And the Legislature of that State subsequently sanctioned the act of the people, by recording on her statute-book an order for the expulsion, as a dangerous emissary of sedition, of this single, inoffensive, unarmed man. And the same Legislature has passed a law making it a highly penal offence in any person, whether citizen or stranger, ever to attempt the like again."

This Committee made a Protest and a Declaration of the history of maltreatment of our citizens and the measures taken in the case by Massachusetts and South Carolina, which they recommended should be sent to the President and to the Governors of all the States.

Page 439, note 1. Mr. Hoar was born in May, 1778, in Lincoln, the portion that belonged to Concord until the incorporation of Lincoln in 1754. He graduated at Harvard College in 1802, was admitted to the bar and moved to Concord in 1805. He was a member of the Convention for revising the Constitution of Massachusetts in 1821, and was in the State Senate in 1825.

Two of his sons attained eminence in public life, Ebenezer Rockwood at the bar and on the bench, and as Attorney-General of the United States during Grant's administration,

and George Frisbie as Representative and Senator through many Congresses.

Page 441, note 1. Journal. "The beauty of character takes long time to discover. Who that should come into Concord but would laugh if you told him that Samuel Hoar was beautiful, yet I thought one day when he passed, the rainbow, geometry itself is not handsomer than that walking sincerity, straitly bounded as it is."

Journal, 1838. "I know a man who tries time. The expression of his face is that of a patient judge who has nowise made up his opinion, who fears nothing, and even hopes nothing, but puts nature on its merits. He will hear the case out and then decide."

Page 441, note 2. Sir Henry Wotton's "The Happy Life."

Page 442, note 1. A client met his counsel at the court-room door in Concord, and said, "How is our case getting on?" "We are nowhere!" snapped the disgusted lawyer; "there's only one man of any sense on the jury, and he thinks that Sam Hoar was the making of him."

Journal, 1849. "It is not any new light he sheds on the case, but his election of a side and the giving his statuesque dignity to that side, that weighs with juries or with conventions. For he does this naturally."

Journal, 1864. "I should say of Samuel Hoar what Clarendon writes of Sir Thomas Coventry, that 'he had a strange power of making himself believed, the only justifiable design of eloquence.'"

Page 444, note 1. The following passage from the journal of 1844 occurs with slight changes, and the omission of the name, in the chapter on Montaigne, in Representative Men:

"Men are edificant or otherwise. Samuel Hoar is to all

men's eyes conservative and constructive: his presence supposes a well-ordered society, agriculture, trade, large institutions and empire; if these things did not exist, they would begin to exist through his steady will and endeavors. Therefore he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very readily. The reformer, the rebel, who comes by, says all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discovers to my groping Daemon no plan of house or empire of his own. Therefore, though Samuel Hoar's town and State are a very cheap and modest commonwealth, men very rightly go for him and flout the reformer."

Page 446, note 1. From Cowper's Task.

Page 446, note 2. The father of "Squire Hoar," as he was called in Concord, was also Samuel Hoar, who represented Lincoln in the General Court almost continuously from 1794 to 1808, and was Senator from 1813 to 1817. John Hoar, an ancestor, was the first representative of the law in Concord, during the seventeenth century. He was independent and eccentric, and incurred censure and fine for speaking with disrespect of the minister. During King Philip's War he displayed great courage and humanity on behalf of the Praying Indians.

THOREAU

In May, 1862, Thoreau died, at the age of forty-four, in Concord, where he was born. Consumption had been in his family, and attacked even his rugged frame after an unusual exposure, the sitting long in the snow counting the growth-rings on some stumps. His illness was long and progressive,

but his courage and good cheer, and his affection towards his family, showed throughout. He worked on his manuscripts until within a few weeks of his death. In a remarkable letter written about six weeks before it occurred, he said, "I suppose I have not many months to live; but of course I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever and regret nothing."1 2.1 His funeral services were held in the meeting-house of the First Church. His neighbor the Rev. Mr. Reynolds made the prayer, a poem by his friend William Ellery Channing was sung, and Mr. Emerson made the address. In the following August his remarks, with some additions, were printed in the present form in the Atlantic Monthly.

In 1837 Mrs. Emerson's elder sister, Mrs. Lucy C. Brown, who boarded in the Thoreau family, and to whom many of Thoreau's published letters were written, called Mr. Emerson's attention to the independence of the thoughts, and the similarity to his own, of some writings of the young Henry, who had just graduated from Harvard College. Mr. Emerson was interested, and asked her to bring her young friend to see him. Thus began a friendship which, in spite of the difference of fourteen years in their ages, and of temperamental impediments to its fullest enjoyment, was deep and lasting. In the spring of 1841 Thoreau, by Mr. Emerson's invitation, came to live in his family like a younger brother, giving help in the care of the garden and poultry, and applying his Yankee "faculty" to any household exigency, yet having much of his time for his own pursuits. He bore the severe test of close association well, and won increasing respect and regard from his host and hostess. With such a master of arts in the house, Mr. Emerson

was relieved of many questions, cares and tasks that he had no fitness to deal with, though he often worked in the garden with his friend. Thoreau showed a chivalric devotion to Mrs. Emerson, or more properly, regarded her as a priestess, as his fine letters to her show. His treatment of children, who always delighted in him, was perfect,—a delightful playfellow, yet always with reverence for childhood. In the note to the poem "Threnody" is an extract from Mr. Emerson's journal telling of his friend's devotion to little Waldo.

When Thoreau's years of teaching and pencil-making and the Walden episode were over, he came once more into his friend's home, this time to be man-of-the-house during Mr. Emerson's absence in England in 1847-48, and again his conduct of his trust was perfect. To know Thoreau as he was, the reading of his Familiar Letters, above alluded to, and the extracts from his journal, must supplement the reading of the books published by him. In them, as in conversation with men who were his friends, there was a tendency to startle, to controvert and to provoke argument. This was inherited from the Scotch Dunbar blood on his mother's side, and was a distinct misfortune, standing in the way of perfect relations. In his letters the true, pure man and loyal friend appears. Living so long, at the most impressionable age, in close relation with an older friend and scholar, whom he honored, and with whose views, then considered heretical, he sympathized, it was not unnatural that his manner of thought and his style should have been legitimately influenced, and even some superficial trick of manner or speech unconsciously acquired. Hence the charge of imitation has been brought against Thoreau. Doubtless his growth was stimulated by kindred ideas. This is all that can be granted. Utter independence, strong individuality distinguished him. His one

foible was, not subserviency, but combativeness, mainly from mere love of fence when he found a worthy adversary, as his best friends knew almost too well.

Although their personal relations could not be close, each held the other in highest honor. In 1852 Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal:—

"I am my own man more than most men, yet the loss of a few persons would be most impoverishing, a few persons who give flesh to what were else mere thoughts, and which now I am not at liberty to slight or in any manner treat as fictions. [He speaks of Alcott, and then goes on.] And Thoreau gives me in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief my own ethics. He is far more real, and daily practically obeying them than I, and fortifies my memory at all times with an affirmative experience which refuses to be set aside."

This sketch of Thoreau by a friend who had known him for twenty-five years with increasing respect for the genuineness of his knowledge, the truth of his mind and the nobility of his character, is important as a corrective to the essay on Thoreau by Lowell, who knew little of him directly. Yet Lowell, after some nine pages of ridicule, which is what catches the eye and leaves the impression on the casual reader, says in a page or two what, if true, should make all that precedes as dust in the balance.

Page 451, note 1. Thoreau records that he did not cry when, at the age of three months, he was baptized by the venerable Puritan Dr. Ripley. In college both he and Emerson won disapproval from the authorities, and great and permanent advantage for themselves, by introducing the elective system in their own cases. It escaped Mr. Emerson's

notice that Thoreau had a "Part" at his Commencement: with a classmate he had a Conference on "The Commercial Spirit," which, it is unnecessary to say, he attacked. This paper, written at the age of twenty, has the originality and beauty which characterized his later writing. Mr. Sanborn gives extracts from it in the Familiar Letters.

With regard to the French, or more properly Breton, element in Thoreau, Mr. Emerson quotes a friend as saying: "Here is the precise voyageur of Canada sublimed or carried up to the seventh power. In the family, the brother and one sister preserved the French character of face."

With regard to the private school of John and Henry Thoreau, I collected the testimony, some twenty years since, of such of the scholars as I could find, and all but one (who was not very bright and had been among the younger pupils) had remembered it as a privilege of their lives; they loved John and respected Henry.

Page 452, note 1. It is a fact not generally known, for Thoreau did not deign to notice the gossip of his neighbors, that when he left his father's occupation of the lead-pencil manufacture because he wished to do business with the Celestial City, his family, largely through his means, had a lucrative business. His reading in college gave him the knowledge of the best ingredient to mix with the plumbago, for which purpose bay-berry wax had hitherto been used here. His own ingenuity probably had a large part in the invention of a simple but perfect way of grinding the lead to an impalpable powder. Thus the greasiness and grit of American lead-pencils were got rid of. The new art of electrotyping demanded the best plumbago, and the Thoreaus had practically the monopoly by the excellence of their lead. After the death of his father, even up to the time of his own illness, Henry gave

necessary oversight to the mill in Acton, and helped in the heavier part of packing the product, when necessary.

Page 453, note 1. The first mention of Thoreau in Mr. Emerson's journal is on February 11, 1838:—

"At the 'teachers' meeting' last night my good—, after disclaiming any wish to difference Jesus from a human mind, suddenly seemed to alter his tone and said that Jesus made the world and was the Eternal God. Henry Thoreau merely remarked that 'Mr.—had kicked the pail over.' I delight much in my young friend, who seems to have as free and erect a mind as any I have ever met."

His friend copied with pleasure from Thoreau's journal of 1855 and 1856 the following notes of heroic satisfaction in asceticism:—

"What you call bareness and poverty is to me simplicity."

And again:—

"Ah! how I have thriven on solitude and poverty. I cannot overstate this advantage."

Page 454, note 1. The statements here made, though true in spirit, need a little qualification. As a boy and youth he was expert as a hunter, and notably so as a fisherman. The gun and rod are almost invariably the first guides of a lover of Nature to wood and stream. He soon passed through this novitiate. His last use of the gun was probably when he confesses to have "effected the transmigration of a wood-chuck" which was destroying his bean-crop at Walden, but the pond fed him occasionally with her fishes, and he caught and procured many specimens of all the Concord fishes for Agassiz's collection. While never man cared less what he ate, and he could have lived simply as an Esquimau without complaint, he was a man of too large pattern to live by any rule of thumb. Much foolish outcry was raised because he was

too kindly a son to thrust back the little gifts which his loving mother, when he went to see her, sometimes begged him to take back with him to his cabin. At the table of friends he ate what was set before him, instead of making the self-conscious protests of contemporary reformers. Many persons now gone have testified to the writer, what he also remembers well, the charm and the helpfulness of Thoreau's society. He was the best of sons and brothers, and lived at home all but the two years of his life spent at Walden, the years when he was at college, and the short period when he taught in Staten Island. While always helpful, he kept his mind, his hands and feet free from all bondage.

Page 455, note 1. "We dine," he said, "at the sign of the scrub-oak."

Page 456, note 1. This was Mr. Emerson's own remark.

Page 457, note 1. Some lines of William Morris, from the Proem to the Earthly Paradise, exactly describe Thoreau's gift to his townspeople in the old Lyceum, on those dreary winter nights when he read us his "Wild Apples" or "Autumnal Tints":1 2.2—

"Folk say, a wizard to a Northern king At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show, That through one window men beheld the Spring, And through another saw the Summer glow, And through a third the fruited vines a-row, While still, unheard, yet in its wonted way, Piped the drear wind of that December day."

Page 458, note 1. Thoreau had become disgusted with the Government at the time of the Mexican War. He said

that only once a year did he come in contact with it in the person of the tax-collector, and refusal to pay his tax seemed his obvious way of protest against the evil measures of the day. He thus washed his hands of any share, possibly not knowing that his town and county tax went entirely for innocent and useful purposes. Samuel Staples, at once the tax-gatherer, constable and jailer, a downright friendly man, offered to pay the small tax for him, but Thoreau would not allow this, so Staples said, "Henry, if you don't pay, I shall have to lock you up pretty soon." "As well now as any time, Sam," was the answer. "Well, come along then," said Staples, and put him in jail. The tax was left at the jailer's house next day when he was away from home. He told me that he never knew who paid it, but, if I recollect rightly, said that he supposed that it was Miss Elizabeth Hoar, or her father, through his hands. Of course then he released his prisoner, and, as he said earlier concerning Mr. Alcott's refusal to pay taxes, "I vum, I believe it was nothing but principle," held the same opinion of Thoreau's action. They were always good friends. Mr. Staples, coming out from visiting Thoreau during his sickness, met Mr. Emerson coming in, and said to him, "I never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace."

Page 461, note 1. The vestry of the Unitarian church was filled. There stood this man, ordinarily keeping quite clear of political matters, except in occasional protest against slavery and its aggressions, now stirred to the core, and in praise of a hero after his own heart speaking to his rather cool audience, made up in great part of timid people, with the eloquence of passion. The effect, as I recall it, was wonderful. Many of "those who came to scoff remained to pray."

Page 462, note 1. His manly sincerity in speaking the

true and elevating word, as shown in his letters, is unsurpassed. His counsel had weight because in requiring life on a high plane he was even more severe with himself than with others.

Page 466, note 1. An over-familiar, officious clergyman, or a gentleman with the conceit of society, or a patronizing editor, found Thoreau, as his friend said of him, "a gendarme good to knock down Cockneys with." Not so the simple, direct people who minded their business, whether scholars, mechanics or laborers. With them he had good relations. He took an active and humane interest in his poor Irish neighbors, lately arrived, and took their part when cheated by mean employers.

Page 467, note 1. "Even the facts of science," he said, "may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced by the dews of fresh and living truth."

Page 468, note 1. In a letter to Mr. Emerson from Staten Island, Thoreau, probably thinking that the weeds would cheer up in his friend's garden now that he was gone, wrote, "I like to think of your living on the banks of the Mill-brook, in the midst of the garden with all its weeds; for what are botanical distinctions at this distance?"

Page 469, note 1. How Thoreau rejoiced in his lot, as he found it, appears in his journal for 1856: "God could not be unkind to me if he should try. I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time too."

Page 470, note 1. This passage brings up the lines in "May-Day" beginning—

Ah! well I mind the calendar, Faithful through a thousand years, Of the painted race of flowers.

The quotation in the following sentence is from a verse in George Herbert's poem "Vertue," beginning—

"Sweet rose, whose hue, angrie and brave, Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye."

Mr. Emerson had such delight in his occasional walks with Thoreau as guide to the penetralia of Concord woods, and had such respect for his mind, that he wished that he and his literary and cosmopolitan friends in Boston should know one another, but Thoreau could not be lured to the city. In a lecture on Clubs this wish found voice:—

"Here is a man who has seen Balaclava, the clubs of Paris, was presented at St. James's, has seen the wreckers at Florida, knows the wrath of Kansas and Montana. And here, on the other side, is my friend who knows nothing and nobody out of his parish. He is the pride of his maiden aunt, and knows muskrats and willows; never went to New York but once in his life. But if the other was a cosmorama, and had seen more than his share, my friend's eyes are microscopes, have seen down into that infinite world which stretches away into the invisible; and he had the advantage that the spot of ground on which he stood was sweeter to him than the whole world beside. Now we cannot spare either, but must have both."

Page 473, note 1. A field will yield several crops at once and divide them among owners and trespassers. Emerson, in his "Apology," tells of the crop which he took off his neighbor's field without his missing it, and Thoreau strolling over a Staten Islander's field said, "I took my toll out of the soil in the way of arrow-heads, which may, after all, be the surest crop."

Page 474, note 1. The charity with which Thoreau regarded

the railroad and the telegraph when they invaded his shrines in the woods is remarkable. More than that, one of his most remarkable poems, though in prose, is the passage about the telegraph and its wild harping, given by Mr. Channing in his Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist.1 2.3

Page 475, note 1. This reference to Thoreau is from Mr. Emerson's journal, about 1850:—

"Nothing so marks a man as bold imaginative expressions. A complete statement in the imaginative form of an important truth arrests attention, and is repeated and remembered. A phrase or two of that kind will make the reputation of a man. Pythagoras's golden sayings were such, and Socrates's and Mirabeau's and Bonaparte's; and I shall not make a sudden descent if I say that Henry Thoreau promised to make as good sentences in that kind as any American."

Mr. Charles J. Woodbury tells, in his Talks with Emerson, of this word which he had from him upon style. After speaking of some of the American historians, he said, "Their style slays. Neither of them lifts himself off his feet. They have no lilt in them. You noticed the marble we have just seen? You remember that marble is nothing but crystallized limestone? Well, some writers never get out of the limestone condition. Be airy. … Walk upon the ground, but not to sink. It is a fine power, this. Some men have it, prominently the French. How it manifests itself in Montaigne … and in Urquhart's Rabelais! Grimm almost alone of the Germans has it; Borrow had it; Thoreau had it."

Page 477, note 1. The lines quoted here are all from the poem "Inspiration."

Journal, 1839. "August 1. Last night came to me a beautiful poem from Henry Thoreau, 'Sympathy,'—the purest strain and the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest. I hear his verses with as much triumph as I point to my Guido when they praise half poets and half painters."

Page 479, note 1. In his journal Thoreau wrote:—

"It steads us to be as true to children and boors as God himself. It is the only attitude which will suit all occasions; it only will make the earth yield her increase, and by it do we effectually expostulate with the wind." He speaks of "the charm of Nature's demeanor toward us,—strict conscientiousness and disregard of us when we have ceased to regard ourselves. So she can never offend us. How true she is, and never swerves."

The "terrible Thoreau" appears in his essay called "Life without Principle," in the collection entitled Miscellanies.

Page 480, note 1. It seems to the editor that this was but the expression of a mood. Thoreau's skill, exactness and remarkable powers, all backed by character, made his friend long to watch him with pride achieve something in those fields for which he recognized his own unfitness. This passage was written before Thoreau's death. His life had not yet the benefit of perspective, nor had his influence on thought and life and taste of multitudes here and abroad appeared. As has been already said, and this sketch shows, the friends could not always thrive in conversation, and Mr. Emerson had not then had opportunity to read much in the journals. Later he read in them with increasing delight and surprise, and approached his friend through them as never before. He would not then have written, as he did in his journal of 1848:—

"Henry Thoreau is like the wood-god who solicits the

wandering poet and draws him into 'antres vast and desarts idle,' and bereaves him of his memory, and leaves him naked, plaiting vines and with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the end is want and madness."

But the dose of Nature that sufficed for Emerson was not enough for Thoreau.

Page 482, note 1. Readers of Thoreau will not forget the passage in which he tells of his visits in the Walden cabin in the long winter evenings, from "the original proprietor who is reported to have dug Walden Pond," and his neighbor there, the "elderly dame, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb-garden I love to stroll."

Page 485, note 1. I find this undated sentence among notes relative to Thoreau and so marked:—

"The man of men, the only man you have seen (if you have seen one) is he who is immovably centred."

This scrap also from the journal of 1852:—

"Henry T. rightly said the other evening, talking of lightning-rods, that the only rod of safety was in the vertebrae of his own spine."

CARLYLE

Shortly after the death of Carlyle, the Massachusetts Historical Society invited Mr. Emerson to speak of his friend at their meeting, held in February, 1881. He was no longer able to write an address, but, unwilling to be silent at the meeting held in the great writer's honor, or to disappoint expectation entirely, read this short paper. Most of it is taken from a letter written by him soon after his visit to Carlyle, in 1848,

and to this a few passages from the journals were added. Hence this account of Carlyle has the characteristics of a letter written to near friends who well knew the honor and affection in which the writer held its subject. Secure in this knowledge, he could show them the man at close range—even his less lovely traits. Emerson's tastes and methods were foreign to Carlyle, and above all his good hope; yet Carlyle could not but love and praise him, and never forgot the help that Emerson's grateful recognition in person of his early work, before its acceptance at home, had been to him. In these particulars there is a striking similarity to Carlyle's relations with his other friend, John Sterling. Emerson knew the brave purpose and utter loyalty to truth of Carlyle, and delighted in his gigantic power of expression. Knowing and loving his virtues, he persistently ignored his prejudices and faults.

These men, born with the ocean between them, had each in early manhood done the other great service. Each saw that the other's metal rang true, though of different temper. One worshipped earnest strength, the other beauty in its largest sense. One worked with the heat of the blast-furnace, the other with sun-heat. With temperaments so different, it was well that the sea remained between them, but their friendship endured as long as life.

This paper was printed by the Historical Society among their Proceedings; also in Scribner's Magazine for May, 1881. In connection with it, the passages relating to Carlyle, in English Traits, chapters I. and XIV., may be referred to, and the review of Past and Present, among the papers from the Dial, printed in the volume Natural History of Intellect; also the Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, and the frequent mention of Carlyle in the Correspondence of Emerson and Sterling.

Page 490, note 1. In a letter written to Carlyle in 1837, hence long before Webster's defection from the cause of Freedom, Mr. Emerson, with prophetic humor, called him "a good man, and as strong as if he were a sinner." Carlyle recognized in him "a sufficient, effectual man, whom one must wish well to and prophesy well of," and saw in his face "that 'indignation' which, if it do not make 'verses,' makes useful way in the world." The next year Carlyle was struck with his imposing appearance, of which he gave a wonderful description,1 2.4 and said, "As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world."

Page 491, note 1. In a letter from London in March, 1848, when the French Revolution and the Chartist demonstrations at home alarmed the English, Mr. Emerson, telling of the conversation at a dinner-party at Mr. Baring's, said, "Carlyle declaimed a little in the style of that raven prophet who cried 'Woe to Jerusalem' just before its fall. … All his methods included a good deal of killing."

In a letter written to a friend, on his voyage home, Mr. Emerson tells how, when challenged by Carlyle and Arthur Helps as to men "who had the American idea," he assured them "There were such monsters hard-by the setting sun, who believed in a future such as was never a past. … I sketched the Boston fanaticism of right and might without bayonets or bishops, every man his own king, and all coöperation necessary and extemporaneous. Of course my men went wild at the denying to society the beautiful right to kill and imprison. But we stood fast for milk and acorns, told them that musket-worship was perfectly well known to us, that it was an old bankrupt, but that we had never seen a man of sufficient valor

and substance quite to carry out the other, which was nevertheless as sure as Copernican astronomy," etc.1 2.5

Page 492, note 1. Immediately after Mr. Emerson's return in 1848 from England, where was great suffering among the poor, he and his wife tried to introduce the use of Indian meal into England through Carlyle and his philanthropic friends. They sent out first meal, and then corn on the ear, with directions as to the various ways it might be cooked, which recipes were in some sort tried by Mrs. Carlyle and Lady Ashburton, but British conservatism could not be overcome. Carlyle tried to take an interest and make civil speeches, but, in the end, human nature burst out, "The Johnny-cake is good, the twopence-worth of currants in it too are good; but if you offer it as a bit of baked ambrosia, Ach Gott!"

Page 494, note 1. John Sterling, in a letter to Emerson, in 1844, said: "Carlyle, our far greater Tacitus, in truth hates all poetry except for that element in it which is not poetic at all, and aims at giving a poetic completeness to historic fact. He is the greatest of moralists and politicians, a gigantic anti-poet."

Page 495, note 1. Mr. Emerson, however, shows another view of Carlyle's attitude in the journal of 1834: "Goethe and Carlyle and perhaps Novalis have an undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing on common principles. Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfast maintainers of the pure ideal morality. But they worship it as the highest beauty; their love is artistic. Praise Socrates to them, or Fénelon, much more any inferior contemporary good man, and they freeze at once into silence. It is to them sheer prose."

Page 497, note 1. In spite of Carlyle's strictures on

poetry, Mr. Emerson, when he read Sartor Resartus, felt that there was a poetic element in him, and wrote in his journal in 1833: "As to Carlyle, he is an exemplification of Novalis's maxim concerning the union of Poetry and Philosophy. He has married them, and both are the gainers. Who has done so before as truly and as well? Sartor Resartus is a philosophical poem."

Page 498, note 1. In the essay on "Aristocracy," in this volume (page 63), is a passage on the test that times of riot or revolution put on the scholar's manhood, and Mr. Emerson took pride in his friend's steadfast courage on behalf of the common weal.

Throughout the journals are expressions of the comfort he took in his brother across the sea, and the pleasure and pride with which he read each new work sent by him. Many of these will appear in the volumes made up of passages selected from the journals, which the editor hopes ere long to prepare.

GEORGE L. STEARNS

Mr. Stearns was born in Medford and made his home there throughout his life. He early went into business in Boston and was associated in the business of ship-chandlery with Albert Fearing. Later he was engaged in the manufacture of sheet and pipe lead. His great energy, clear head and integrity made him respected and highly successful in whatever business he undertook. He was an excellent citizen. A "Conscience Whig" in 1846, he of course became a "Freesoiler" in 1848, and thereafter in the midst of his busy life gave time and thought and money lavishly to the

anti-slavery cause, and especially to aid Kansas in her struggle. At that time he became acquainted with John Brown. Not only did Mr. Stearns, in his capacity as an officer of the Kansas Aid Society, furnish him with rifles, ammunition and supplies, but he personally contributed Colt's revolvers to the value of thirteen hundred dollars. He did not know of Brown's design to make the Harper's Ferry raid, but as an officer of the Kansas Aid Society, fearing that Brown might make some aggressive move into a slave state, wrote to remind him that he held his rifles in trust, only to be used in Kansas. While John Brown was undergoing his trial, Mrs. Stearns sent Brackett, the sculptor, to take the measurements and make the necessary sketches for a bust of the old warrior in the prison at Charlestown, Virginia. The bust still adorns the Stearns house in Medford.

During the War of the Rebellion Mr. Stearns was a tireless and effective worker on the side of freedom, but, like his friend John M. Forbes, kept his name out of the papers. Yet he was the founder of the Commonwealth and The Right Way newspapers, and active in the Loyal Publication Society. He had urged the arming of negroes at a time when it was exceedingly difficult to recruit more white troops. When it was decided to raise colored regiments, Governor Andrew made Mr. Stearns chairman of a committee to do so. He assumed the most difficult and delicate part of the work, the recruiting negroes from Canada, and in the Southwest. In this he was wonderfully successful, and public opinion, at first hostile, rapidly changed. This committee raised the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments of infantry, and the 5th Massachusetts cavalry. Secretary Stanton commissioned Mr. Stearns a major, and he recruited for the regiments of United States colored troops.

Major Stearns died in middle life in April, 1867. In a notice of his life in the Commonwealth it was truly said of him: "Major Stearns saw the working out and full consummation of the great principles to which his life was devoted; freedom everywhere, the slave free, and a citizen, and a soldier, and a voter—all this he saw before he passed on."

Page 504, note 1. In the Senate Document of the 36th Congress, No. 278, is the report of this committee. At the end of his long examination, fearlessly met, a senator asked Mr. Stearns, "Do you disapprove of such an action as that at Harper's Ferry?" He answered: "I should have disapproved it if I had known of it in advance. Since then I have changed my opinion. I believe John Brown to be the Representative Man of this century, as Washington of the last. The Harper's Ferry affair, and the capacity shown by the Italians for self-government, are the great events of the age; one will free Europe and the other America."

Notes

• 1 1.1

  This was in a lecture on Books given in the Fraternity Course in Boston in 1864. See Mr. Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, vol. ii., p. 790, but it is probable that this sentence had been uttered in more direct retort to Mr. Choate's words years before, and was only used again in the lecture.
• 1 1.2

  Author of the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts and of Recollections of an Old Teacher.
• 1 1.3

  These are quoted from Méthode et Entretien d' Atelier, by Thomas Couture.
• 1 1.4

  Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Baker & Taylor, 1890.
• 1 1.5

  William Ellery Channing, Minister of Religion. By John W. Chadwick. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903.
• 1 1.6

  The Influence of Emerson, published by the American Unitarian Association, Boston, 1903.
• 1 1.7

  Early Letters of George William Curtis to John S. Dwight. Edited by George Willis Cooke. Harper & Bros., 1898.
• 1 2.1

  Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1895.
• 1 2.2

  These lectures are printed in Thoreau's Excursions.
• 1 2.3

  Pages 188, 189. Published by Roberts Brothers, Boston, 1893.

  In the extracts from Thoreau's diary, in the volume Winter, are many passages on the "Telegraph Harp," but none so fine as the one referred to.
• 1 2.4

  Correspondence, vol. i., p. 260.
• 1 2.5

  Letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson to a Friend. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899.