The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Miscellanies [Vol. 11]

Mr. F. B. Sanborn, in his Familiar Letters of Thoreau, says that he introduced John Brown to Thoreau in March, 1857, and Thoreau introduced him to Emerson. This was at the time when Brown came on to awaken the people of Massachusetts to the outrages which the settlers and their families were suffering, and procure aid for them. His clear-cut face, smooth-shaven and bronzed, his firmly shut mouth and mild but steady blue eyes, gave him the appearance of the best type of old New England farmers; indeed he might well have passed for a rustic brother of Squire Hoar. Mr. Emerson was at once interested in him and the story of the gallant fight that the Free-State men in Kansas were making, though Brown was very modest about his own part and leadership. Indeed he claimed only to be a fellow worker and adviser. I think that soon after this time, on one of his visits to Concord, he stayed at Mr. Emerson's house; certainly he spent the evening there. The last time he came to Concord he was a changed man; all the pleasant look was gone. His gray hair, longer and brushed upright, his great gray beard and the sharpening of his features by exposure and rude experiences gave him a wild, fierce expression. His speech in the Town Hall was excited, and when he drew a huge sheath-knife from under his coat and showed it as a symbol of Missouri civilization, and last drew from his bosom a horse-chain and clanked it in air, telling that his son had been bound with this and led bareheaded under a burning sun beside their horses, by United States dragoons, and in the mania brought on by this inhuman treatment had worn the rusty chain bright,—the old man