America [hoping for copyright, and promising half profits]. … The request was so timely, since I was not only printing a book, but also a pamphlet, that I came to town yesterday and hastened the printers, and have now sent him proofs of all the Address, and of more than half of the book." He requests Carlyle to have an eye to its correct reproduction, to which his friend faithfully attended.
Page 100, note 1. It was characteristic of Mr. Emerson that, as a corrective to the flush of righteous wrath that man should be capable of
laying hands on anotherTo coin his labor and sweat,came his sense of justice, and the power of seeing the planter's side, born into such a social and political condition, by breeding and climatic conditions unable to toil, and with his whole inheritance vested in slaves. In a speech in New York in 1855, Mr. Emerson urged emancipation with compensation to the owners, by general sacrifices to this great end by old and young throughout the North, not as the planters' due, but as recognizing their need and losses. Yet with all due consideration for the planters' misfortune of condition, he said, on the main question, "It is impossible to be a gentleman and not be an abolitionist."
Page 103, note 1.
Sole estate his sire bequeathed,—Hapless sire to hapless son,—Was the wailing song he breathed,And his chain when life was done.These lines from "Voluntaries" in the Poems, and the stanza which there follows them, are recalled by this passage.
