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A MEMOIR OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON BY JAMES ELLIOT CABOT
IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II.
A MEMOIR
OF
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
BY
JAMES ELLIOT CABOT
IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II.
CAMBRIDGE
primes at tty fttoersfoe press
1887
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
789195 A
ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS
B. 1935 L
Copyright, 1887, By JAMES ELLIOT CABOT.
All rights reserved.
No.
Edition fimiteb to #itoe $untiK& Copied. 3 k U-
* * * « . . i • ,
i /:/•• ''
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.
CHAPTER XI.
PAGE
Lectures. — The Dial. — Emerson's Transcendenta- lism 383
CHAPTER XII.
Reform. — First Speech on Slavery. — Address on West Indian Emancipation. — Letter to Presi- dent Van Buren on the Cherokee Outrage. — Brook Farm and Fruitlands. — Emerson's own Experiments : Domestic Service, Manual Labor, Vegetarianism. — His Position with Regard to Reform. — Women's Rights 421
CHAPTER XIII.
The Business of Lecturing. — Pecuniary Circum- stances. — Poems. — Death of his First Child. — His Ways with his Children 457
CHAPTER XIV.
Second Visit to England. — Paris 501
CHAPTER XV.
Lecturing at the West. — Death of Margaret Ful- ler. — Death of Emerson's Mother. — The Anti- Slavery Conflict 563
IV CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XVI.
Views of College Education. — Agassiz and the Sat- urday Club. — Recognition by his Contempora- kies. — Emekson Overseer op Harvard College.
— UNrvERSTY Lectures. — Trip to California. — The Burning of his House 614
CHAPTER XVII.
Third Visit to Europe. — Egypt. — Paris. — London. — Oxford. — Return Home. — Candedate for Rector- shd? of Glasgow. — Anniversary of Concord Fight.
— Compilation of a New Volume of Essays. — The Virginia Address. — Visit to Concord, N. H. — Mr. French' s Bust. — Last Readings. — Declining Years.
— Illness and Death 657
Appended A 685
Appendix B 689
Appendlx C 695
Appended D 697
Appendix E 703
Appendix F 710
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
CHAPTER XI.
LECTURES. — THE DIAL. EMERSON'S TRANSCEN- DENTALISM.
At the time of the Divinity Hall address, Em- erson, as I said, was intending to lecture, the next winter, in Boston ; and he persevered, though he expected that his audience would be small. When the lectures began, however, in December, there was no appearance of any deterrent effect from the address.
" The lecturing [he writes to his brother William] thrives. The good city is more placable than it was represented, and forgives, like Burke, much to the spirit of liberty."
The attendance was large, and of the same class of persons as before, most of them, no doubt, Liberal Christians, but of a liberality that was not disturbed by his departure from the Cambridge platform. They came, as Mr. Lowell says, to hear Emerson, not to hear his opinions. They would have admitted, most of them, that his opinions
384 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
were rather visionary ; that his eyes were fixed so steadily on " the fine horizon line of truth " as to overlook ordinary mortals and dwell on angelic forms, too airy and indistinct to be identified with any of the solid inhabitants of earth. But they liked to put themselves under the influence of one who obviously had lived the heavenly life from his youth up, and who made them feel for the time as if that were the normal mode of existence.
The subject was " Human Life ; " the soul, the universal principle in man, unfolding itself in the individual. The course might have been called Lectures on Transcendentalism ; a summing-up of what was to be said for and against the new views. The indications of development, he says, are not always agreeable facts. It begins with protest and rejection, with turbulence and revolution, and thoughtful persons are apt to overlook, in the rude and partial expressions, the truth they prefigure. It is like the rubbish and confusion that go before the building of a new city ; they are not agreeable, but they may be welcomed for the sake of what they announce, — at least for the symptoms of life and progress.
*' Undoubtedly the movement has its foolish and canting side. New thoughts will always introduce a new crop of words, and these are all that the foolish will get. And yet always there is in man
LECTURES. 385
somewhat incalculable and unexhausted. Men are not made like boxes, a hundred, a thousand, to order, and all alike. Out of the darkness and the awful Cause they come, to be caught up into this vision of a seeing, partaking, acting and suffering life ; not foreknown or foremeasurable. Therefore we welcome the unexact extravagant spirits who set routine at defiance, and, drawing their impulse from some profound thought, appear in society as its accusers and its prophets. What if they be, as often such are, monotones, men of one idea? How noble in secret are the men who have never stooped nor betrayed their faith ! The two or three rusty, perchance wearisome souls who could never bring themselves to the smallest composition with society, rise with grandeur in the background, like the statues of the gods, whilst we listen to those who stoop a little."
We rest in what we have done, in what we have said, or in what others have done or said, and if we attempt to move, society is against us. " This deliquium, this ossification of the soul, is the Fall of Man. The redemption is lodged in the heart of youth. To every young man and young woman the world puts the same question, Wilt thou become one of us? And to this question the soul in each of them says heartily, No. The world has no interest so deep as to cherish that resistance. No matter though the young heart do not yet understand it-
386 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
self, do not know well what it wants, and so con- tents itself with saying No, No, to unamiable tedi- ousness, or breaks out into sallies of extravagance. There is hope in extravagance ; there is none in routine.
" The hostile attitude of young persons toward society makes them very undesirable companions to their friends, querulous, opinionative, impractica- ble ; and it makes them unhappy in their own soli- tude. If it continue too long it makes shiftless and morose men. Yet, on the whole, this crisis which comes in so forbidding and painful shape in the life of each earnest man has nothing in it that need alarm or confound us. In some form the question comes to each : Will you fulfil the de- mands of the soul, or will you yield yourself to the conventions of the world ? None can escape the challenge. But why need you sit there, pale and pouting, or why with such a mock-tragic air affect discontent and superiority? The bugbear of so- ciety is such only until you have accepted your own law. Then all omens are good, all stars auspicious, all men your allies, all parts of life take order and beauty."
In vain shall we expect to redeem society in any way but through the integrity of the individuals who compose it : —
" I am afraid that in the formal arrangements of the socialists the spontaneous sentiment of any
LECTURES. 387
thoughtful man will find that poetry and sublimity still cleave to the solitary house. The members will be the same men we know. To put them in a phalanx will not much mend matters, for as long as all people want the things we now have, and not better things, it is very certain that they will, under whatever change of forms, keep the old system."
Two of the lectures (" Tragedy " and " Comedy") were printed a year or two afterwards in the Dial ; " Demonology," which was the last of the course, nearly forty years later, in the North American Review.1 The others were used in the first series of Essays ; one of them (" Love ") is given there almost entire.
In closing the course, Emerson said that it was with regret that he found himself compelled, by the state of his health, to bring it to a somewhat abrupt termination. He had intended to give some completeness to the series by two additional dis- courses, one on the limitations of human activity by the laws of the world, and one on the intrinsic powers and resources of our nature ; but the exe- cution of these plans he was constrained to post- pone.
" My lungs [he writes to Carlyle] played me false with unseasonable inflammation ; ' and in letters to his brother William after this time he speaks of troubled health, not amounting to posi- tive illness, but to an indisposition for work : —
1 Collected Writings, viii. 149. " Comedy," x. 7. " Demonology."
388 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
" I have not been very strong this summer, con- trariwise, very puny, and hoped I should gain vigor by a journey to the mountains. But I gained lit- tle. I am, as usual, neither sick nor well, but, for aught I see, as capable of work as ever, let once my subject stand, like a good ghost, palpable be- fore me. But since I came home I do not write much, and writing is always my meter of health, — writing, which a sane philosopher would probably say was the surest symptom of a diseased mind."
" This ill-health of yours and mine and every- body's [he writes to Miss Fuller] is a sore blemish on the prospects, because on the powers of society. If you wish to protest (as most ingenious persons do for some years) against foibles, traditions, and conventions, — the thing has one face if you live only long or strong enough to rail, and quite an- other if you can serenely and in due time broach your new law, and show the upholsterers the granite under their whitewash and gingerbread. When it gets no farther than superciliousness and indigna- tion, the Beckendorf s [Metternich, in " Vivian Grey " ] have every right to ask us what time we go to bed. Therefore I hate sickness, in common with all men this side of forty, and am sour and savage when I anticipate the triumphs of the Philis- tines. For really, in my best health and hope, it 's always mean to scold, and when I am lean I am ten times sorry."
LECTURES. 389
Up to the age of forty or thereabouts Emerson was subject from time to time to a tenderness of the lungs and to fits of languor which sometimes alarmed his wife, though he always treated them lightly, as only a symptom of the want of sufficient preoccupation of mind, which he looked upon as the disease of the times.
" Power and aim, the two halves of felicity [he says in one of his letters to Miss Fuller] seldomest meet. A strong mind with a great object finds good times, good friends, good weather, and fair lodging ; but wit without object, and not quite sufficient to make its own, turns all nature upside down, and Rousseau-, Carlyle-, or Byronizes ever. The middle name does not belong in such ill com- pany; but my friend, I think, wants nothing but work commensurate with his faculty. It must be more the malady, one sometimes thinks, of our day than of others ; for you cannot talk with any intelligent company without presently hearing ex- pressions of regret and impatience whose scope af- fects the whole order of good institutions. Certainly we expect that time will yield some adequate revo- lution, regeneration, and, under better hours, will fetch us somewhat to do ; but whilst the grass grows, the noble steed starves, — forgive the pro- verb, — we shall die of the numb-palsy. Ethics, however, remain, when experience and prudence have nothing to show."
390 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
The want of definiteness in his subject, where he wished to protest against the foibles of society, was due in part to a characteristic slowness to take sides. We have a vicious way, he says in one of these lectures, of esteeming the defects of men organic. We identify the man with his faults, judging them from our point of view. We should rather ask how they appear from his point of view. Pride, for example, may be an impure form of self- reliance ; the willingness to accept obligations would only show that he has suffered a fatal slack- ness in his springs. The love of fighting, beastly as it may look to us, is the first appearance of the manly spirit, the willingness to venture all for a principle. At a certain stage of progress the man fights, if he be of a sound body and mind. So again we accuse the people of incapacity for self- direction ; they can only follow their leaders, who flatter them. But the flattery consists in telling them that they are capable of governing them- selves, and would lose its attraction were they en- tirely devoid of this capacity. It is possible to be below these vices as well as to be above them.
In principle, Emerson stood, of course, with the idealists, the reformers, the party of progress, or at least of aspiration and hope. But he could not help seeing that the existing order, since it is here, has the right to be here, and the right to all the force it can exert. It is not disposed of (he says)
LECTURES. 391
because we see or think we see something better ; still less by merely rejecting it ; but only by its developing in us the force that is needed for put- ting the better in its place. Nothing is gained by insisting on the omnipotence of limitations, but neither is anything gained by ignoring them ; they are like the iron walls of the gun, that concentrate the force and make it irresistible.
This was very well for a " chimney-corner phi- losophy," but it did not lend itself readily to the ex- igencies of the lecturer's desk. The audience must have a definite statement ; but Emerson did not see his way to a comprehensive theory. The reconcile- ment of fate and freedom — the might of estab- lished facts and the rights of the soul — must be made by each man for himself, as the occasion arises for deciding between conformity and follow- ing his own bent ; it must be realized in a life ; it cannot be stated in propositions.
" We wish [he says in his journal] to sum the conflicting impressions by saying that all point at last to a unity which inspires all, but disdains words and passes understanding. Our poetry, our religions, are its skirts and penumbrae. Yet the charm of life is the hints we derive from this. They overcome us like perfumes from a far-off shore of sweetness, and their meaning is that no tongue shall syllable it without leave ; that only it- self can name it ; that by casting ourselves on it
392 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
and being its voice, it rushes each moment to pos- itive commands, creating men and methods. If we attempt to define it we say nothing.
" We must affirm the endless possibilities in every man that is born, but if we affirm nothing else, we are checked in our speech by the need of recognizing that every fact contains the same, — until speech presently becomes rambling, general, indefinite, and mere tautology. The only speech will at last be action."
He would have preferred, he says in a letter to Carlyle,1 to retire to his study, hoping to give some form to his " formless scripture." But he had no choice ; money must be had, among other things for advances on Carlyle' s account. He had re- printed the " French Revolution," and was now re- printing the " Miscellanies ; " there were bills to be paid, — one bill of five hundred dollars for pa- per ; and he had already exhausted his credit in borrowing for his friend. Of all which, of course, Carlyle remained blissfully ignorant.
He writes to his brother William : —
Concord, September 26, 1839. I have just decided, somewhat unwillingly, to read one more course of lectures in Boston next winter, but their tenor and topics float yet far off and undefined before me.
1 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i. 259.
LECTURES. 393
The topic he fixed upon was the " Present Age." The characteristic trait of the period, he says, is the growing consciousness in the individual man of his access to the Universal Mind. This tends to degrade and weaken all other relations. Super- ficially it shows itself in a spirit of analysis and de- tachment. Ours is the age of the first person sin- gular, of freedom and the casting-off of all ties. In the infancy of society, Reason has a kind of passive presence in Dread; a salutary dread de- fends man in his nonage from crime and degrada- tion. Analysis destroys this check ; the world is stripped of love and terror, and is looked upon merely for its economic uses. At bottom, analysis takes place in obedience to the higher instincts: we do not wish to be mastered by things ; we wish things to obey us. But it first runs to excess, sep- arates utilities from the labor they should repre- sent, appropriates and monopolizes them. The end to be rich infects the whole world, and shoves by the State and the Church. Government and Edu- cation are only for the protection of property, and Religion even is a lever out of the spiritual world to work for this. The decay of piety begets the decay of learning ; the fine geniuses of the day de- cry books, and ostentatiously disdain the knowl- edge of languages, antiquity, and art. The " self- made'* men, of whom we have so large a crop, like to explain how little they owe to colleges and
394 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
schools. Of course this is most evident and most deplorable in the highest sentiment, that is, the religious : —
" Who can read the fiery ejaculations of St. Augustine, a man of as clear a sight as almost any- other, of Thomas a Kempis, of Milton, of Jeremy Taylor, without feeling how rich and expansive a culture — not so much a culture as a higher life — they owed to the ceaseless and grand promptings of this sentiment ; or without contrasting their im- mortal heat with the cold complexion of our recent wits ? Side by side with this analysis remains the surviving tradition, the old state of things in Church, State, College, and social forms ; number- ing in its train a multitude composed of those in whom affection predominates over intellect, and talent over character ; of those who are indisposed to the exertion which novelty of position demands ; and, lastly, of those who have found good eating under the shadow of the old institutions, and there- fore hate any change."
Having lost touch of the sentiment which in- spired the tradition, this party has nothing to at- tract the young mind eager for truth, and nothing to oppose to the disintegrating activity of the un- derstanding. On the other hand, the Movement Party, though resting on ideas, are infected with the vice of the age, — the propensity to exaggerate the importance of visible and tangible facts. They
LECTURES. 395
magnify particular acts and avoidances ; they en- deavor to vamp and abut principles, and to give a mechanical strength to the laws of the soul. They rely on new circumstances ; on votes, statutes, as- sociations. They promise the establishment of the kingdom of heaven, and end with champing un- leavened bread or dedicating themselves to the nourishment of a beard. But let us not distrust our age. Man once for all is an exaggerator ; but let us look at the tendencies. Analysis is the road to power, and the understanding, with its busy ex- perimenting, steadily tends to place power in the right hands. The ray of light passes invisible through space ; only when it falls on an object is it seen. So is spiritual activity barren until it is directed to something outward. It was Com- merce as well as Religion that settled this country, and it is constantly at work to correct its own abuses. It matters not with what counters the game is played, so it be played well. Men rely upon contrivances and institutions, yet the heat of the reformers and the resistance to reform make the discipline and education of the public con- science. On neither side is the cause defended on its merits. Yet, on the whole, the Movement Party gains steadily, and as by the movement of the world itself. The great idea that gave hope to men's hearts creeps on the world like the advance of morning twilight, and they have no more part
396 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
in it than the watchman who announced the day- break.
Our part in relation to the projects of reform is to accept and use them, but not be used by them. Keep yourself sacred and aloof from the vices of the partisan, but do not hold yourself excused from any sacrifice when you find a clear case on which you are called to stand trial. And be in no haste to decide. Patience and truth, patience with our frosts and negations, and few words, must serve. We find ourselves not expressed in the literature, the science, the religion of our fathers, and cannot be trained on their catechism. What has the ge- neric life of Paris or New York to do with Judaea, with Moses, or with Paul ? The real religion of the day is reverence for character. This may seem an abstraction, but there is no thought so delicate and interior but it can and will get a realization. One would have said the same of the lowliness of the blessed soul that walked in Judaea and hal- lowed that land forever. So will this new percep- tion— which came by no man, but into which all souls at this era are born — endue its own body and form, and shine in institutions. See the fruit- ful crop of social reforms, — Peace, Liberty, La- bor, Wealth, Love, Churches of the Poor, Rights of Women. The reformers, it may be, see not what they point at. They go forward to ends whereof they yet dream not, and which the zealots
LECTURES. 397
who work in these reforms would defy. But the heart and the hand go forward to a better heaven than they know.
Not always shall this hope be disappointed. The life of man shall yet be clean and honest, his aims unperplexed. Faith shall be possible and society possible when once there shall be shown to him the infinitude of himself.
Emerson had left the pulpit for the lecturer's desk, because he wished to be entirely free to de- clare the faith that was in him, without being ex- pected to make it square with any presuppositions. But this freedom had its drawback, since it was no longer sufficient for him to suggest the truth he wished to enforce, trusting that his suggestions would be filled out from the common stock of be- lief ; they were subversive of the common beliefs ; and yet, since Emerson could never take the po- lemical tone, and was not ready with a scheme for reconstruction, he found himself condemned to a way of speaking that seemed vague and ineffective, and he felt for a time a disgust at lecturing. He writes in his diary : —
" October 18, 1839. Lectures. For the last five years I have read, each winter, a new course of lec- tures in Boston, and each was my creed and confes- sion of faith. Each told all I thought of the past, the present, and the future. Once more I must
398 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
renew my work, and, I think, only once in the same form ; though I see that he who thinks he does something for the last time ought not to do it at all. Yet my objection is not to the thing, but to the form ; and the concatenation of errors called Society, to which I still consent until my plumes be grown, makes even a duty of this concession also. So I submit to sell tickets again. But the form is neither here nor there. What shall be the substance of my shrift? Adam in the garden, I am to new-name all the beasts in the field and all the gods in the sky ; I am to invite men drenched in Time to recover themselves and come out of Time and taste their native immortal air. I am to fire, with what skill I can, the artillery of sympathy and emotion. I am to indicate constantly, though all unworthy, the ideal and holy life, the life within life, the forgotten Good, the unknown Cause in which we sprawl and sin. I am to try the magic of sincerity, that luxury permitted only to kings and poets. I am to celebrate the spiritual powers, in their infinite contrast to the mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time. I am to console the brave sufferers under evils whose end they cannot see, by appeals to the great Optimism self-affirmed in all bosoms."
When the lectures were over he felt that he had come short of his mark.
LECTURES. 399
TO WILLIAM EMERSON.
Concord, February 25, 1840.
... I closed my lectures duly a week ago last Wednesday. I cannot say much for them in any respect. I pleased myself, before I began, with saying I will try this thing once more, because I have not yet done what I would with it. I will agitate men, being agitated myself. I, who rail at the decorum and the harness of society, why should I not speak very truth, unlimited, overpowering ? But now unhappily the lectures are ended. Ten decorous speeches and not one ecstasy, not one rapture, not one thunderbolt. Eloquence, there- fore, there was none. As the audience, however, were not parties to my intention and hope, they did not complain at my failure. Still, my company was less than the last two years.
(Journal.) " I seem to lack constitutional vigor to attempt each topic as I ought. I ought to seek to lay myself out utterly, large, enormous, prodi- gal, upon the subject of the week. But a hateful experience has taught me that I can only expend, say twenty-one hours, on each lecture, if I would also be ready and able for the next. Of course I spend myself prudently ; I economize ; I cheapen ; whereof nothing grand ever grew. Could I spend sixty hours on each, or, what is better, had I such
789195 A
400 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
energy that I could rally the lights and mights of sixty hours into twenty, I should hate myself less ; I should help my friend."
But if the lectures seemed to Emerson tame and decorous, literary essays rather than effective lay- sermons, the following letter from Theodore Parker to Dr. Con vers Francis (obligingly communicated to me by Mr. F. B. Sanborn) shows that such was not the impression they produced on his au- dience : —
West Koxbury, December 6, 1839. . . . Are you not to attend Emerson's lectures this winter ? The first was splendid, — better meditated and more coherent than anything I have ever heard from him. Your eyes were not dazzled by a stream of golden atoms of thought, such as he sometimes shoots forth, — though there was no lack of these sparklers. It was Democratic - locofoco throughout, and very much in the spirit of Brown- son's article on Democracy and Reform in the last Quarterly [Brownson's Review]. . . . Bancroft was in ecstasies, — he was rapt beyond vision at the locqfocoism of the lecture, and said to me the next evening, "It is a great thing to say such things before any audience, however small, much more to plant these doctrines in such minds : but let him come with ws, before the ' Bay State,' and we will give him three thousand listeners." . . . One grave,
LECTURES. 401
Whig-looking gentleman heard Emerson the other night, and said he could only account for his de- livering such a lecture on the supposition that he wished to get a place in the Custom-House under George Bancroft.1 . . . Ever yours, Theodore Parker.
" I take it [adds Mr. Sanborn] that the ' Bay State ' was a Democratic club. This was the year (1839), when Marcus Morton was elected governor over Edward Everett by one vote."
The next winter (1840-41) he seems to have given no lectures except that on " Man the Re- former." 2 He was busy with his book (the first series of Essays), and the project of a periodical as the organ of the new views was taking definite shape. He writes to his brother William : —
Concord, September 26, 1839. . . . George Ripley and others revive at this time the old project of a new journal for the expo- sition of absolute truth ; but I doubt a little if it reach the day. I will never be editor, though I am counted on as a contributor. My Henry Tho- reau will be a great poet for such a company ; and, one of these days, for all companies.
1 Mr. Bancroft was then Collector of the port of Boston.
2 Collected Writings, i. 215.
402 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
TO MARGARET FULLER.
Concord, December 12, 1839. ... I believe we all feel much alike in regard to this journal. We all wish it to be, but do not wish to be in any way personally responsible for it. For the sake of the brilliant possibility I would promise honest labor of some sort to each number for a year, but I should wish to leave myself the latitude of supreme indifference, nay abhorrence of such modes of working forever after. But if your labors shall introduce a new age, they will also mould our opinions, and we shall think what you think. But to-day is no writing day with me, so farewell. R. W. Emerson.
The plan of the journal had somewhat changed its shape since 1836. It was to have the character of a magazine as well as of a review, and, first of all, it was to furnish means of utterance to the boundless aspirations of the time. Emerson's chief interest in it perhaps lay in the prospect of intro- ducing to the public his friends, Mr. Alcott, Mr. Thoreau, Mr. William Ellery Channing, the un- named author of " Dolon," and one or two others. " Were I responsible [he writes to Miss Fuller March 30, 1840], I would rather trust for its wit and its verses to the eight or nine persons in whose affections I have a sure place than to eighty or ninety celebrated contributors."
THE DIAL. 403
After many conferences and much correspon- dence, the first number of the Dial appeared in July. Mr. George Ripley and Miss Margaret Ful- ler were the most active promoters ; Mr. Ripley undertaking the business management, and Miss Fuller the literary editorship. It was a rash and generous enterprise, for the subscribers were few and the promised contributors for the most part unpractised writers ; and it was sure to have the dead weight of the reading community against it. Miss Fuller herself was under no illusions as to their prospects. " We cannot show high culture [she writes], and I doubt about vigorous thought." Her object, however, was not to make a successful journal, but " to afford an avenue for what of lib- eral and calm thought might be originated among us by the wants of individual minds." 1
It was an experiment worth trying, and even if it succeeded only in bringing these wants into clearer consciousness, this of itself ought to give to the Dial a place of honor in our literary annals. It is much to have uniformly taken the high- est tone upon all subjects ; and whatever may be said of the Dial, this praise abundantly belongs to it.
Success, in the ordinary sense of the word, was out of the question, — if from no other reason, from
1 In a letter quoted by Mr. Cooke, in his Life of Emerson, p. 78.
404 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
the lack of complete unity of purpose in the pro- jectors. No two of them precisely agreed as to what they would have. Some of its oldest friends had been alienated by the want, or rather the avoid- ance, of any definite aim. Others soon began to complain that it still savored of the old order of things. The practical reformers sniffed at the superfine idealism of many of its pages. Emer- son, for his part, was in favor of the largest liberty and the most extravagant aspirations, but he winced in spite of himself at the violations of literary form, and he confessed, in strict confidence, that he found some of the numbers unreadable. Miss Ful- ler, writing to him two years afterwards, when he relieved her of her charge, says that the change of editors cannot but change the aim as well as the character of the journal : —
" You will sometimes reject pieces that I should not. For you have always had in view to make a good periodical and represent your own tastes ; while I have had in view to let all kinds of people have freedom to say their say, for better, for worse."
Emerson cared only for the poetry, or for the poetical point of view ; that everything should be looked upon, as he said, " at large angles ; " and to this he was extremely tolerant. His criticism on the first number (in a letter to Miss Fuller) was that the verse was not sufficiently conspicuous ;
THE DIAL. 405
were he the compositor, he would set it in larger type than the prose. But he did not find that the public shared his tastes.
" Nowhere [he complains in a letter to Miss Fuller, July 8, 1840] do I find readers of the Dial poetry, which is my one thing needful in the en- terprise. I ask in vain after Z., or H. T., or ' new contributor,' — of many a one. They wait till I have done, and then inquire concerning Mr. Parker. I think Alcott's paper of great importance to the journal, inasmuch as otherwise, as far as I have read, there is little that might not appear in any other journal."
Afterwards, he writes to Miss Fuller, August 4, 1840, he began " to wish to see a different Dial from that which I first imagined. I would not have it too purely literary. I wish we might make a jour- nal so broad and great in the survey that it should lead the opinion of this generation on every great interest, and read the law on property, government, education, as well as on art, letters, and religion. ... It does not seem worth our while to work with any other than sovereign aims. So I wish we might court some of the good fanatics, and publish chapters on every head in the whole art of living. I am just now turning my pen to scribble and copy on the subjects of Labor, Farm, Reform, Do- mestic life, etc., and I asked myself, Why should not the Dial present this homely and grave sub-
406 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
ject to the men and women of the land ? . . . I know the dangers of such latitude of plan in any but the best conducted journal. It becomes friendly to special modes of reform ; partisan, bigoted, per- haps whimsical ; not universal and poetic. But our round-table is not, I fancy, in imminent peril of party and bigotry, and we shall not bruise each the others' whims by the collision." And in his diary of the same date : — " I think our Dial ought not to be a mere lit- erary journal, but that the times demand of us all a more earnest aim. It ought to contain the best advice on the topics of Government, Temperance, Abolition, Trade, and Domestic Life. It might well add such poetry and sentiment as will now constitute its best merit. Yet it ought to go straight into life, with the devoted wisdom of the best men and women in the land. It should — should it not ? — be a degree nearer to the hodi- ernal facts than my writings are. I wish to write pure mathematics, and not a culinary almanac or application of science to the arts."
But he was not easy to suit with any applica- tions that offered themselves, — for instance, Theo- dore Parker's, though he acknowledged Parker's earnestness and his power of reaching the ear of the public with his vigorous rhetoric. Afterwards, when Emerson had assumed the editorship and the Dial was in pecuniary straits, Mr. Parker sent a
THE DIAL. 407
long article concerning the Reverend John Pier- pont's differences with his parish on the subject of Temperance ; which Emerson wished to reject, but admitted at last, as he said, pro honoris causa. When that number of the journal appeared, Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who was then the publisher, wrote to Emerson that Parker's article had sold the whole of the issue, and that more copies were wanted.
Miss Fuller struggled bravely on, with much labor and no pay, for about two years, and then Emerson felt obliged to take it up, though very unwilling.
" The Dial [he writes in his diary] is to be sus- tained or ended ; and I must settle the question, it seems, of its life or death. I wish it to live, but I do not wish to be its life. Neither do I like to put it into the hands of the Humanity and Reform men, because they trample on letters and poetry ; nor in the hands of the scholars, for they are dead and dry. I do not like the Plain Speaker so well as the Edinburgh Review. The spirit of the last may be conventional and artificial, but that of the first is coarse, sour, indigent ; dwells in a cellar- kitchen and goes to make suicides."
" Poor Dial! [he writes Dr. Hedge] — it has not pleased any mortal. No man cried, God save it ! And yet, though it contains a deal of matter I could gladly spare, I yet value it as a portfolio
408 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
which preserves and conveys to distant persons precisely what I should borrow and transcribe to send them if I could. It wants mainly and only some devotion on the part of its conductor to it, that it may not be the herbarium that it is of dried flowers, but the vehicle of some living and advanc- ing mind. But nobody has yet conceived himself born for this end only."
The Dial " enjoyed its obscurity," as Emerson says, two years longer under his charge, and then expired, in April, 1844,1 to his great relief ; hav- ing cost him, I conjecture, some money as well as perpetual worry.
Emerson had done what he could to forward the birth of a new spirit in our literature, and Miss Fuller had done her part ; but the child refused to be born. The genius of the new era had not as yet got on speaking terms with its day and genera- tion.
About the same time with the Dial, another scheme, foreshadowing the later Concord School of Philosophy, appears in a letter from Emerson to Miss Fuller : —
1 Rev. George William Cooke has given, in the Journal of Spec- ulative Philosophy (July, 1885), a careful account of the Dial and its writers. For a list of Emerson's contributions see Appen- dix C.
THE DIAL. 409
Concord, August 16, 1840. . . . Alcott and I projected the other day a whole university out of our straws. Do you not wish that I should advertise it in the Dial ? Mr. Ripley, Mr. Hedge, Mr. Parker, Mr. Alcott and I shall, in some country town, — say Concord or Hyannis, — an- nounce that we will hold a semester for the instruc- tion of young men, say from October to April. Each shall announce his own subject and topics, with what detail he pleases, and shall hold, say two lectures or conversations thereon each week; the hours being so arranged that any pupil may attend all, if he please. We may, on certain evenings, combine our total force for conversations, and on Sunday we may meet for worship, and make the Sabbath beautiful to ourselves. The terms shall be left to the settlement of the scholar himself. He shall understand that the teachers will accept a fee, and he shall proportion it to his sense of ben- efit received and his means. Suppose, then, that Mr. Ripley should teach the History of Opinion, Theology, Modern Literature, or what else; Hedge, Poetry, Metaphysics, Philosophy of His- tory ; Parker, History of Paganism, of the Catho- lic Church, the Modern Crisis, — in short, Ecclesias- tical History ; Alcott, Psychology, Ethics, the Ideal life; and I, Beaumont and Fletcher, Percy's Re- liques, Rhetoric, Belles-Lettres. Do you not see that
410 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
by addition of one or two chosen persons we might make a puissant faculty, and front the world with- out charter, diploma, corporation, or steward ? Do you not see that if such a thing were well and hap- pily done for twenty or thirty students only at first, it would anticipate by years the education of New England ? Now do you not wish to come here and join in such a work? What society shall we not have ! What Sundays shall we not have ! We shall sleep no more, and we shall concert better houses, economics, and social modes than any we have seen.
What the New England leaders of opinion, even such as were the least averse to thinking for them- selves, thought of their would-be teachers was ex- pressed, though in rather shrill tones, by John Quincy Adams in his diary at this time : —
" The sentiment of religion is at this time, per- haps, more potent and prevailing in New England than in any other portion of the Christian world. For many years since the establishment of the the- ological school at Andover, the Calvinists and Uni- tarians have been battling with each other upon the Atonement, the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and the Trinity. This has very much subsided, but this wandering of minds takes the place of that, and equally lets the wolf into the fold. A young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of my once-
EMERSON'S TRANSCENDENTALISM. 411
loved friend William Emerson, and a classmate of my lamented George, after failing in the every-day avocations of a Unitarian preacher and schoolmas- ter, starts a new doctrine of Transcendentalism, declares all the old revelations superannuated and worn out, and announces the approach of new rev- elations and prophecies. Garrison and the non- resistant abolitionists, Brownson and the Marat democrats, phrenology and animal magnetism, — all come in, furnishing each some plausible rascal- ity as an ingredient for the bubbling caldron of religion and politics. Pearse Cranch, ex ephebis, preached here last week, and gave out quite a stream of Transcendentalism, most unexpectedly." *
Emerson for his part did not feel that there had been any essential change in his position of mind towards religion since the days when he was a Uni- tarian preacher. In an address to his old friends of the Second Church (Sunday, March 10, 1844), when they were rebuilding their meeting-house in Hanover Street, he says : —
" I do not think that violent changes of opinion very often occur in men. As far as I know they do not see new lights and turn sharp corners, but commonly, after twenty or after fifty years you shall find the individual true to his early tenden- cies. The change is commonly in this, that each
1 Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, x. 345.
412 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
becomes a more pronounced character ; that he has thrown off those timidities and excessive regard to the minds of others which masked his own. I have not the least disposition to prove any consistency in myself ; a great enlargement, a discovery of gross errors corrected, would please me much more ; but as a matter of fact I do not find in the years that have elapsed since I stood here to teach any new varieties of thought, but rather an accumulation of particular experiences to establish, or, I should rather say, illustrate, the leading belief of my youth."
He was looked upon, by John Quincy Adams and by everybody, as the representative Transcenden- talist ; yet, in a lecture in 1841, when he was at his farthest in this direction, he defines Transcen- dentalism as " the Saturnalia or excess of faith." 1 Not as if faith, the vision of the absolute, the look to the ideal as our reinforcement against the ty- ranny of mere use and wont tending to shut us up in petty cares and enjoyments, — not as if this could ever too much abound ; but that it may want "the restraining grace of common sense, . . . which does not meddle with the absolute, but takes things at their word, things as they appear." 2 This restraint was never wanting to Emerson ; he felt safe against the dangers of " divine discontent," and this feeling made him the more charitable towards
i Collected Writings, i. 320. 2 Ibid., viii. 9.
EMERSON'S TRANSCENDENTALISM. 413
its extreme manifestations. He was as much alive to the extravagances as anybody, having frequent occasion to observe them ; but our danger he thought did not He on that side.
"Buddhism, Transcendentalism [he writes in his journal], life delights in reducing ad absurdum. The child, the infant, is a transcendentalist, and charms us all ; we try to be, and instantly run in debt, lie, steal, commit adultery, go mad, and die."
" The trick of every man's conversation we soon learn. In one this remorseless Buddhism lies all around, threatening with death and night. We make a little fire in our cabin, but we dare not go abroad one furlong into the murderous cold. Every thought, every enterprise, every sentiment, has its ruin in this horrid Infinite which encircles us and awaits our dropping into it. If killing all Bud- dhists would do the least good, we would have a slaughter of the innocents directly."
" It must be admitted that civilization is onerous and expensive, — hideous expense to keep it up : let it go, and be Indians again. But why Indians ? That is costly, too. The mudturtle-and-trout life is easier and cheaper, and oyster cheaper still. ' Play out the game ; act well your part ; if the gods have blundered, we will not.' "
" 'T is necessary that you honor the people's facts. If you have no place for them, the people
414 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
absolutely have no place for you. A person, what- ever he may have to say or do, to whom politics is nothing, navigation nothing, railroads nothing, money nothing, books nothing, men and women nothing, may have his seat or sphere in another planet, but once for all has nothing to do here. The earth and sea and air, the constitution of things, and all that we call Fate, is on the people's side ; and that is a reasoner not liable to a fal- lacy."
" does not do justice to the merits of la- bor. The whole human race spend their lives in hard work, for simple and necessary motives, and feel the approbation of their conscience ; and they meet this talker at the gate, who, as far as they see, does not labor himself, and takes up this grat- ing tone of authority and accusation against them. His unpopularity is not all wonderful. There must be, not a few fine words, but very many hard strokes, every day, to get what even an ascetic wants."
" Let a man hate eddies, hate the sides of the river, and keep the middle of the stream. The hero did nothing apart and odd, but travelled on the highway and went to the same tavern with the whole people, and was very heartily and naturally there ; no dainty, protected person."
" I speak [he says] as an idealist," — but his idealism never made him blind to facts, nor did it
EMERSON'S TRANSCENDENTALISM. 415
make him wish to ignore them. Money, for in- stance, might be, as was then much urged, a very- rude certificate of a man's worth and of his claims upon his fellow-men; in a better state of society the " cash-nexus " would be superseded by the bonds of justice and love. Meantime let us not pretend to be better than we are : —
" The cant about money and the railing at mean- souled people who have a little yellow dirt only to recommend them, accuses the railer. Money is a truly admirable invention, and the delicacy and perfection with which this mercury measures our good sense in every transaction in a shop or in a farm ; the Egyptian verdict which it gives : thou hast done well : thou hast overdone : thou hast un- done, — I cannot have a better voice of nature.
" Do not gloze and prate and mystify. Here is
our dear, grand says, You shall dig in my
field for a day, and I will give you a dollar when it is done, and it shall not be a business transaction. It makes me sick. Whilst money is the measure really adopted by us all as the most convenient measure of all material values, let us not affectedly disuse the name and mystify ourselves and others ; let us not ' say no and take it.' We may very well and honestly have theoretical and practical objections to it ; if they are fatal to the use of money and barter, let us disuse them ; if they are less grave than the inconvenience of abolishing
416 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
traffic, let us not pretend to have done with it whilst we eat and drink and wear and breathe it.
" However, I incline to think that among angels the money or certificate system might have some important convenience, — not for thy satisfaction of whom I borrow, but for my satisfaction that I have not exceeded carelessly my proper wants, have not overdrawn."
A sound, sincere, and catholic man, he says, is one who is able to honor at the same time the ideal, or laws of the mind, and Fate, or the order of Na- ture. " For wisdom does not seek a literal recti- tude, but a useful, that is a conditional one, — such a one as the faculties of man and the constitution of things will warrant." l With all his idealism Emerson is free from the pedantry of ignoring the actual conditions, or the existing motives by which the ideal must be realized. It is one thing to do what we can to elevate these motives ; it is quite another to call upon men to act as if they were different from what they really are. Thus, for in- stance, in speaking of Education as it ought to be, he describes the prevailing system of emulation and display as " the calomel of culture ; " easy to use and prompt in its effect, but a " quack prac- tice." 2 But once when he found this view too rashly acted on by one of the smaller New Eng- land colleges, he calls it an " old granny system, l Collected Writings, iv. 47 j i. 286. 2 Ibid., x. 151.
EMERSON'S TRANSCENDENTALISM. 417
President has an aversion to emulation, as in- jurious to the character of the pupils. He there- fore forbids the election of members into the two literary societies by merit, but arranges that the first scholar alphabetically on the list shall be as- signed to the X and the second to the Y, the third to the X and the fourth to the Y, and so on. ' Well, but there is a first scholar in the class, is there not, and he has the first oration at Com- mencement ? ' ' Oh no, the parts are assigned by lot.' The amiable student who explained it added that it tended to remove disagreeable excitement from the societies. I answered, Certainly, and it would remove more if there were no colleges at all. I recommended morphine in liberal doses at the college Commons. I learn, since my return, that the President has resigned ; the first good trait I have heard of in the man."
And when a youthful admirer of his, having in mind the description * of the spiritual life as that of a man who eats angels' food ; " who, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles ; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how ; clothed, sheltered, and weap- oned, he knew not how," etc., — sent him the auto- biography of George Muller, an Englishman, who found himself and a large number of persons under his charge supported entirely by miraculous meth-
1 Collected Writings, i. 319.
418 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
ods, Emerson expressed surprise that the book should be sent to him, and, when he returned it, says : —
" I send back the book with thanks, and, as I said, with some wonder at your interest in it. I sometimes think that you and your coevals missed much that I and mine found ; for Calvinism was still robust and effective on life and character in all the people who surrounded my childhood, and gave a deep religious tinge to manners and con- versation. I doubt the race is now extinct, and certainly no sentiment has taken its place on the new generation, — none as pervasive and control- ling. But they were a high tragic school, and found much of their own belief in the grander traits of the Greek mythology, Nemesis, the Fates, and the Eumenides ; and, I am sure, would have raised an eyebrow at this pistareen Providence of Robert Huntington and now of George Muller. There is piety here, but 't is pulled down steadily into the pantry and the shoe-closet, till we are distressed for a breath of fresh air. Who would dare to be shut up with such as these from year to year? Cer- tainly there is a philosophic interest and question here that well deserves attention, — the success, namely, to which he challenges scrutiny, through all these years ; God coming precisely in the mode he is called for, and to the hour and minute. But this narrative would not quite stand cross-exam- ination."
EMERSON'S TRANSCENDENTALISM. 419
" There is illusion that shall deceive even the elect ; " and idealism may be one form of it. Yet the desire for perfection, the discontent with present attainment, is the spring of all human pro- gress ; there cannot be too much of it, there may easily be too little. Indeed, what seems excess is rather defect ; an infirm faith that cannot recog- nize its ideals in the masquerade of every-day life. Care will be taken that the trees do not grow up into the sky ; if only sap and vigor be not wanting, the checks will supply themselves when they are needed.
" It is a sort of maxim with me never to harp on the omnipotence of limitations. Least of all do we need any suggestion of checks and measures ; as if New England were anything else."
The one thing he feared was an insufficient sup-
pJy: —
" Of so many fine people it is true that, being so much, they ought to be a little more, and, missing that, are naught. It is a sort of King Rene period ; there is no doing, but rare thrilling prophecy from bands of competing minstrels.
" We are wasted with our versatility ; with the eagerness to grasp on every possible side. The American genius runs to leaves, to suckers, to ten- drils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, with sloth.
"Allston's pictures are Elysian, fair, serene, but
420 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
unreal. I extend the remark to all the American geniuses : Irving, Bryant, Greenough, Everett, Channing, — even Webster, in his recorded elo- quence, — all lack nerve and dagger.
"Our virtue runs in a narrow rill : we have never a freshet. One would like to see Boston and Massachusetts agitated like a wave with some gen- erosity ; mad for learning, for music, for philan- thropy, for association, for freedom, for art. We have sensibility and insight enough, if only we had constitution enough. But, as the doctor said in my boyhood, ' You have no stamina.' What a company of brilliant young persons I have seen, with so much expectation ! The sort is very good, but none is good enough of his sort.
" Yet the poorness or recentness of our experi- ence must not deter us from affirming the law of the soul. Nay, although there never was any life which in any just manner represented it, yet we are bound to say what would be if man kept the divine law, — nay, what already is, and is explained and demonstrated by every right and wrong of ours ; though we are far enough from that inward health which would make this true order appear to be the order of our lives." (Journal, 1839-43.)
CHAPTER XII.
reform. first speech on slavery. — ad- dress on west indian emancipation. let- ter to president van buren on the chero- kee outrage. brook farm and fruitlands.
— emerson's own experiments : domestic service, manual labor, vegetarianism. — his position with regard to reform. wo- men's rights.
When Emerson said in his letter to Margaret Fuller that he wished the Dial might lead the opin- ion of the day and declare the law on every great interest, he was unconsciously borrowing a tone that did not belong to him. He had no disposition to play the oracle, or to declare the law upon any subject. Transcendentalism was to him not a par- ticular set of doctrines, but a state of mind; the healthy and normal state, in which we resist the sleep of routine, and think and act for ourselves in- stead of allowing circumstances to decide for us.
" I told Mr. [Emerson writes in his jour- nal] that he need not consult the Germans, but, if he wished at any time to know what the Transcen- dentalists believe, he might simply omit what in
422 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
his own mind he added from the tradition, and the rest would be Transcendentalism."
Emerson's sympathies, in that age of renovation, of confident outlook to the speedy removal of the ills that beset man's condition, were of course with the renovators, the temperance men, the abolition- ists, the seekers after improved forms of society. But " abolition, or abstinence from rum, or any other far-off external virtue should not divert at- tention from the all-containing virtue which we vainly dodge and postpone, but which must be met and obeyed at last, if we wish to be substance, and not accidents." The stress that was laid on the importance of improved conditions, of associations to help men to escape from bodily or mental bon- dage, made him think the more strongly of the prime necessity that the man himself should be re- newed, before any alterations of his condition can be of much help to him.
" If [he writes to a friend] the man were de- mocratized and made kind and faithful in his heart, the whole sequel would flow easily out and instruct us in what should be the new world ; nor should we need to be always laying the axe at the root of this or that vicious institution."
In Emerson's philosophy " all that we call Fate," or external condition, has to be reckoned with, since it is the counterpart of our internal condition, and holds its own so long as that remains unchanged. Here are some extracts from his journal in 1840 : —
REFORM. 423
" I told that I thought he must be a very
young man, or his time hang very heavy on his hands, who can afford to think much and talk much about the foibles of his neighbor, or ' denounce,' and play the ' son of thunder,' as he called it. I am one who believe all times pretty much alike, and yet I sympathize so keenly with this. We want to be expressed ; yet you take from us War, that great opportunity which allowed the accumu- lations of electricity to stream off from both poles, the positive and the negative. Well, now you take from us our cup of alcohol, as before you took our cup of wrath. We had become canting moths of peace, our helmet was a skillet, and now we must become temperance milksops. You take away, but what do you give ? Mr. Jefts has been preached into tipping up his barrel of rum into the brook ; but day after to-morrow, when he wakes up cold and poor, will he feel that he has somewhat for somewhat ? If I could lift him up by happy violence into a religious beatitude, or imparadise him in ideas, then should I have greatly more than indemnified him for what I have taken. I should not take away ; he would put away, — or rather, ascend out of this litter and sty in which he had rotted, to go up clothed and in his right mind into the assembly and conversation of men.
" We frigidly talk of Reform until the walls mock us. It is that of which a man should never
424 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
speak, but, if he have cherished it in his bosom, he should steal to it in darkness, as an Indian to his bride, or as a monk should go privily to another monk and say, Lo, we two are of one opinion ; a new light has shined in our hearts ; let us dare to obey it.
" I have not yet conquered my own house ; it irks and repents me. Shall I raise the siege of this hen-coop, and march baffled away to a pretended siege of Babylon ? It seems to me that so to do were to dodge the problem I am set to solve, and to hide my impotency in the thick of a crowd.
" Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day steadily in his own garden than he who goes to the abolition-meeting and makes a speech ? He who does his own work frees a slave. He who does not his own work is a slave-holder. Whilst we sit here talking and smiling, some per- son is out there in field and shop and kitchen, do- ing what we need, without talk or smiles. The world asks, Do the abolitionists eat sugar? Do they wear cotton ? Do they smoke tobacco ? Are they their own servants ? Have they managed to put that dubious institution of servile labor on an agreeable and thoroughly intelligible and trans- parent foundation ? Two tables in every house ! Abolitionists at one and servants at the other ! It is a calumny you utter. There never was, I am persuaded, an asceticism so austere as theirs, from
FIRST SPEECH ON SLAVERY. 425
the peculiar emphasis of their testimony. The planter does not want slaves ; no, he wants his lux- ury, and he will pay even this price for it. It is not possible, then, that the abolitionist will begin the assault on his luxury by any other means than the abating of his own."
In November, 1837, Emerson was requested to deliver an address at Concord on the subject of Slavery. There was some difficulty in getting a room for the purpose, all agitation of the question of Slavery being at that time generally deprecated ; at length the Second Church agreed to allow the use of their vestry. In his speech he dwelt espe- cially on the duty of resisting all attempts to stifle discussion. It is, he says, the eminent prerogative of New England, and her sacred duty, to open her churches and halls to the free discussion of every question involving the rights of man.
" If the motto on all palace-gates is ' Hush,' the honorable ensign to our town-halls should be ' Pro- claim.' I account this a matter of grave impor- tance, because symptoms of an overprudence are showing themselves around us. I regret to hear that all the churches but one, and almost all the public halls in Boston, are closed against the dis- cussion of this question. Even the platform of the lyceum, hitherto the freest of all organs, is so ban- daged and muffled that it threatens to be silent.
426 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
But, when we have distinctly settled for ourselves the right and wrong of this question, and have cov- enanted with ourselves to keep the channels of opinion open, each man for himself, I think we have done all that is incumbent on most of us to do. Sorely as we may feel the wrongs of the poor slave in Carolina or in Cuba, we have each of us our hands full of much nearer duties. . . . Let him not exaggerate by his pity and his blame the outrage of the Georgian or Virginian, forgetful of the vices of his own town and neighborhood, of himself. Let our own evils check the bitterness of our condemnation of our brother, and, whilst we insist on calling things by their right names, let us not reproach the planter, but own that his misfor- tune is at least as great as his sin."
To the abolitionists this tone appeared rather cool and philosophical, and some of his friends tried to rouse him to a fuller sense of the occasion. He was insufficiently alive, they told him, to the inter- ests of humanity, and apt to allow his disgust at the methods or the manDers of the philanthropists to blind him to the substantial importance of their work. He was ready to admit that there might be some foundation for the charge : —
" I had occasion to say the other day to Eliza- beth Hoar that I like best the strong and worthy persons, like her father, who support the social or- der without hesitation or misgiving. I like these ;
FIRST SPEECH ON SLAVERY. 427
they never incommode us by exciting grief, pity, or perturbation of any sort. But the professed philanthropists, it is strange and horrible to say, are an altogether odious set of people, whom one would shun as the worst of bores and canters. I have the same objection to dogmatism in Reform as to dogmatism in Conservatism. The impatience of discipline, the haste to rule before we have served, to prescribe laws for nations and humanity before we have said our own prayers or yet heard the benediction which love and peace sing in our own bosom, — these all dwarf and degrade ; the great names are profaned ; our virtue is a fuss and sometimes a fit. But my conscience, my unhappy conscience, respects that hapless class who see the faults and stains of our social order, and who pray and strive incessantly to right the wrong; this annoying class of men and women, though they commonly find the work altogether beyond their faculty, and their results are, for the present, dis- tressing. They are partial, and apt to magnify their own. Yes, and the prostrate penitent also, — he is not comprehensive, he is not philosophical in those tears and groans. Yet I feel that under him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth and the sea and all that in them is, and the axis around which the universe revolves passes through his body there where he stands."
It was not fastidiousness nor inertia that made
428 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
Emerson averse to active participation in the phi- lanthropic schemes, so much as a necessity of his nature, which inclined him always to look for a relative justification of the offending party or in- stitution ; at any rate, disinclined him, as he said, from coveting the office of constable. In judging ourselves we rightly apply an absolute standard ; but in judging others we ought to consider the circumstances, and take care not to attribute to the individual what belongs to his position : —
" Hostility, bitterness to persons or to the age, indicate infirm sense, unacquaintance with men; who are really at top selfish, and really at bottom fraternal, alike, identical."
For us to keep slaves would be the sum of wick- edness, but in the planter it may indicate only a degree of self-indulgence which we may parallel readily enough nearer home ; in attacking him we are demanding of him a superiority to his condi- tions which we do not demand of ourselves. He is to blame, of course, but in the same sense the slave is to blame for allowing himself to be held as a slave : —
" The degradation of that black race, though now lost in the starless spaces of the past, did not come without sin. The condition is inevitable to the men they are, and nobody can redeem them but themselves. The exertions of all the aboli- tionists are nugatory except for themselves. As
FIRST SPEECH ON SLAVERY. 429
far as they can emancipate the North from slavery, well.
" The secret, the esoteric of abolition — a secret too from the abolitionists — is that the negro and the negro-holders are really of one party, and that when the apostle of freedom has gained his first point, of repealing the negro laws, he will find the free negro is the type and exponent of that very animal law ; standing as he does in nature below the series of thought, and in the plane of vegetable and animal existence, whose law is to prey on one another, and the strongest has it.
" The abolitionist (theoretical) wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man. He considers that it is violence, brute force, which, counter to intellectual rule, holds property in man; but he thinks the negro himself the very representative and exponent of that brute, base force ; that it is the negro in the white man which holds slaves. He attacks Legree, Mac Duffie, and slave-holders, North and South, generally, but be- cause they are the foremost negroes of the world, and fight the negro fight. When they are ex- tinguished, and law, intellectual law, prevails, it will then appear quickly enough that the brute in- stinct rallies and centres in the black man. He is created on a lower plane than the white, and eats men, and kidnaps and tortures if he can. The negro is imitative, secondary ; in short, reactionary merely
430 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
in his successes ; and there is no organization with him in mental and moral spheres.
" It is becoming in the scholar to insist on cen- tral soundness rather than on superficial applica- tions. I am to demand the absolute right, affirm that, do that ; but not to push Boston into a false, showy, theatrical attitude, endeavoring to persuade her she is more virtuous than she is."
Meantime he was heartily glad that men were found willing and able to throw themselves un- hesitatingly into the contest. They might be wrong-headed, he said, but they were wrong-headed in the right direction : —
" The haters of Garrison have lived to rejoice in that grand world-movement which, every age or two, casts out so masterly an agent for good. I cannot speak of that gentleman without respect. I found him the other day in his dingy office." (Journal, 1844.)
He went to Garrison's office, perhaps, to concert for a meeting which the abolitionists held in the Concord Court - House * on the 1st of August in this year (1844), to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of the slaves in the British West Indies. Emerson delivered the address, which is
1 None of the churches would open their doors to the conven- tion. At length Thoreau got leave to use the old court-house, and himself rang the bell.
WEST INDIAN EMANCIPATION. 431
printed in the last edition of his works ; 1 a most satisfactory performance (the Liberator says) to the abolitionists who were present. In this speech and in one a year later, Emerson went farther than ever before in maintaining the negro's capability of civilization. He esteemed the occasion of the ju- bilee, he said, to be " the proud discovery that the black race can contend with the white ; that in the great anthem which we call History, — a piece of many parts and vast compass, — after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect and take a master's part in the music. The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becom- ing indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself."
And in a speech which I know only from the report in the New York Tribune2 (for he never printed it, and seems not even to have preserved the manuscript), on the same anniversary in the next year, at Waltham, he says the defence of slavery in the popular mind is not a doubt of the equity of the negro's cause, nor a stringent self- interest, but the objection of an inferiority of race; a fate, pronouncing against the abolitionist and the philanthropist ; so that the good-will of amiable en- thusiasts in the negro's behalf will avail him no
1 Collected Writings, xi. 129. 2 August 7, 1845.
432 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
more than a pair of oars against the falling ocean at Niagara.
" And what is the amount of the conclusion in which the men of New England acquiesce ? It is that the Creator of the negro has given him up to stand as a victim, a caricature of the white man beside him ; to stoop under his pack, to bleed under his whip. If that be the doctrine, then I say, if He has given up his cause, He has also given up mine, who feel his wrong. But it is not so ; the universe is not bankrupt ; still stands the old heart firm in its seat, and knows that, come what will, the right is and shall be ; justice is forever and ever. And what is the reply to this fatal allegation ? I believe there is a sound argument derived from facts collected in the United States and in the West Indies in reply to this alleged hopeless infe- riority of the colored race. But I shall not touch it. I concern myself now with the morals of the system, which seem to scorn a tedious catalogue of particulars on a question so simple as this. The sentiment of right, which is the principle of civili- zation and the reason of reason, fights against this damnable atheism. The Persians have a proverb: Beware of the orphan ; for, when the orphan is set a-crying, the throne of the Almighty is shaken from side to side. Whatever may appear at the moment, however contrasted the fortunes of the black and the white, yet is the planter's an unsafe
WEST INDIAN EMANCIPATION 433
and an unblest condition. Nature fights on the other side, and as power is ever stealing from the idle to the busy hand, it seems inevitable that a revolution is preparing, at no distant day, to set these disjointed matters right."
He liked the sun's way of making civilization cast off its disguises better than the storm's. It was always a painful struggle with him when he felt himself constrained to undertake the office of cen- sor : as when, some years earlier than this, another national crime, the violent removal of the Chero- kee Indians by the State of Georgia, backed by the army of the United States, forced from him a cry of indignation in a letter to President Van Buren,1 which that sleek patriot probably never read.
" April 19, 1838. This disaster of the Chero- kees, brought to me by a sad friend to blacken my days and nights : I can do nothing why shriek ? Why strike ineffectual blows ? I stir in it for the sad reason that no other mortal will move, and if I do not, why it is left undone. The amount of it, to be sure, is merely a scream ; but sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."
" Yesterday went the letter to Van Buren, — a letter hated of me ; a deliverance that does not de- liver the soid. I write my journal, I read my lec- ture with joy ; but this stirring in the philanthropic
1 Appendix D.
434 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
mud gives me no peace. I will let the republic alone until the republic comes to me. I fully sym- pathize, be sure, with the sentiment I write ; but I accept it rather from my friends than dictate it. It is not my impulse to say it, and therefore my ge- nius deserts me ; no muse befriends ; no music of thought or word accompanies."
The same feeling, that sympathy with the aims of the reformers must not tempt him beyond his proper bounds, made him, after some hesitation, draw back when he was urged to join in the Brook Farm experiment in 1840.
" What a brave thing Mr. Ripley has done ! [he writes to Miss Fuller ;] he stands now at the head of the Church Militant, and his step cannot be without an important sequel. For the ' commu- nity,' 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 soci- ety 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."
(Journal.) " October 17, 1840. Yesterday George and Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and Alcott discussed here the new social plans. I wished to be convinced, to be thawed, to be made nobly mad
BROOK FARM. 435
by the kindlings before my eye of a new dawn of human piety. But this scheme was arithmetic and comfort ; a hint borrowed from the Tremont House and United States Hotel ; a rage in our poverty and politics to live rich and gentlemanlike ; an an- chor to leeward against a change of weather. And not once could I be inflamed, but sat aloof and thoughtless ; my voice faltered and fell. It was not the cave of persecution, which is the palace of spiritual power, but only a room in the Astor House hired for the Transcendentalists. I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons."
He wrote to Mr. Ripley, towards the end of the year, that he had decided, " yet very slowly and, I may almost say, with penitence," not to join them ; giving his reasons for thinking himself unfit, and adding some advice from Mr. Edmund Hosmer, "a very intelligent farmer and a very upright man in my neighborhood," concerning the details of the farming.
" I approve every wild action of the experiment- ers [he writes in his journal] ; I say what they say, and my only apology for not doing their work is preoccupation of mind. I have a work of my own, which I know I can do with some success. It would leave that undone if I should undertake with them, and I do not see in myself any vigor equal
436 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
to such an enterprise. So I stay where I am, even with the degradation of owning bank-stock and seeing poor men suffer whilst the universal genius apprises me of this disgrace, and beckons me to the martyr's and redeemer's office. This debility of practice, this staying by our work, is belief too ; for obedience to a man's genius is the particular of faith; by and by shall come the universal of faith."
The following passage, endorsed " December 12, 1840," was sent to me by the late Reverend William Henry Channing, as copied by Miss Fuller from some letter or journal of Emerson's : —
" I have the habitual feeling that the whole of our social structure — State, School, Religion, Mar- riage, Trade, Science — has been cut off from its root in the soul, and has only a superficial life, a ' name to live.' It would please me then to restore for myself these fruits to their stock, or to accept no church, school, state, or society which did not found itself in my own nature. I should like, if I cannot at once abolish, at least to tend to abolish for myself all goods which are not a part of this good ; to stand in the world the fool of ideas ; to demonstrate all the parts of faith ; to renounce a property which is an accident to me, has no rela- tion to my character or culture, is holden and ex- pended by no sweet and sublime laws, and my dependence on which is an infirmity and a hurt to
BROOK FARM. 437
me. I should like to make my estate a document of my faith, and not an anomalous fact which was common to me, a believer, with a thousand unbe- lievers. I know there must be a possible property which flows directly from the nature of man, and which may be earned and expended in perfect con- sent with the growth of plants, the ebb and flow of tides, and the orbit of planets. But now, as you see, instead of being the hero of ideas and explor- ing by a great act of trust those diviner modes which the spirit will not fail to show to those who dare to ask, I allow the old circumstance of mother, wife, children, and brother to overpower my wish to right myself with absolute Nature ; and I also consent to hang, a parasite, with all the parasites on this rotten system of property. This is but one example. Diet, medicine, traffic, books, social in- tercourse, and all the rest of our practices and usages are equally divorced from ideas, are empir- ical and false. I should like to put all my prac- tices back on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which I had not the whole world for my reason. If there are inconveniences and what is called ruin in the way, because we have so enervated and maimed ourselves, yet it would be like dying of perfumes to sink in the effort to reattach the deeds of every day to the holy and mysterious recesses of life.
" But how will Mr. R.'s project help me in all
438 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
this ? It is a pretty circuitous route, is it not, to the few, simple conditions which I require ? I want my own labor, instead of that which is hired, — or, at least, that the hired shall be honorable and honored. Mr. R.'s plan offers me this, and with another great good for me, namely, direction of my labor. But so would a farm which I should buy, associating to me two or three friends and a hired farmer, secure the same advantages. To Mr. R.'s proposed school I attach no special inter- est. I am sure that I should contribute my aid as effectually to the education of the country on my own lonely acres as I can in this formal institution. Where a few conditions suffice, is it wise to enter into a complex system ? I only wish to make my house as simple as my vocation. I have not the least faith in the enlargement of influence through an external largeness of your plan. Merely the thought in which you work makes the impression, and never the circumstance. I have the dream that a small family of ascetics, working together on a secluded spot, would keep each other's benevolence and invention awake, so that we should every day fall on good hints and more beautiful methods. Then there is no secluding of influences. It is the nature of light to shine."
Nor did he see his way to joining the little com- munity of Fruitlands, established a year or so later than Brook Farm, by Mr. Alcott and some English
FRUITLANDS. 439
friends, Messrs. Lane and Wright, in the town of Harvard, not far from Concord : —
" I begged A. to paint out his project, and he proceeded to say that there should be found a farm of a hundred acres, in excellent condition, with good buildings, a good orchard, and grounds which admitted of being laid out with great beauty ; and this should be purchased and given to them in the first place. I replied, You ask too much. This is not solving the problem ; there are hundreds of innocent young persons who, if you will thus estab- lish and endow and protect them, will find it no hard matter to keep their innocency. And to see their tranquil household after all this has been done for them will in no wise instruct or strengthen me. But he will instruct and strengthen me who, there where he is, unaided, in the midst of poverty, toil, and traffic, extricates himself from the corruptions of the same, and builds on his land a house of peace and benefit, good customs and free thoughts. But, replies A., how is this to be done ? How can I do it, who have wife and family to maintain ? I answered that he was not the person to do it, or he would not ask the question. When he that shall come is born, he will not only see the thing to be done, but invent the life ; invent the ways and means of doing it. The way you would show me does not commend itself to me as the way of great- ness. The spirit does not stipulate for land and
440 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
exemption from taxes, but in great straits and want, or even on no land, with nowhere to lay its head, it manages, without asking for land, to oc- cupy and enjoy all land ; for it is the law by which land exists ; it classifies and distributes the whole creation anew. If you ask for application to par- ticulars of this way of the spirit, I shall say that the cooperation you look for is such cooperation as colleges and all secular institutions look for, — money. True cooperation comes in another man- ner. A man quite unexpectedly shows me that which I and all souls looked for ; and I cry, ' That is it. Take me and mine. I count it my chief good to do in my way that very thing.' That is real cooperation, unlimited, uncalculating, infinite cooperation. The spirit is not half so slow, or mediate, or needful of conditions or organs as you suppose. A few persons in the course of my life have at certain moments appeared to me not meas- ured men of five feet five or ten inches, but large, enormous, indefinite ; but these were not great pro- prietors nor heads of communities, but, on the con- trary, nothing could be more private. They were in some want or affliction or other relation which called out the emanation of the spirit, which digni- fied and transfigured them to my eyes. And the good spirit will burn and blaze in the cinders of our condition, in the drudgeries of our endeavors, in the very process of extricating us from the evils
FRUITLANDS. 441
of a bad society. But this fatal fault in the logic of your friends still appears ; their whole doctrine is spiritual, but they always end with saying, Give us much land and money. If I should give them anything, it would be from facility and not from beneficence. Unless one should say, after the max- ims of the world, Let them drink their own error to saturation, and this will be the best hellebore.
" Not this, but something like this I said ; and then, as the discourse, as so often, touched char- acter, I added that they were both intellectual: they assumed to be substantial and central, to be the very thing they said, but were not, but only intellectual; or the scholars, the learned of the spirit or central life. If they were that, — if the centres of their life were coincident with the centre of life, — I should bow the knee ; I should accept without gainsaying all that they said, as if I had said it, — just as our saint (though morbid) Jones Very had affected us with what was best in him, — but that I felt in them the slight dislocation of these centres, which allowed them to stand aside and speak of these facts knowingly. Therefore I was at liberty to look at them, not as the commanding fact, but as one of the whole circle of facts. They did not like pictures, marbles, wood- lands, and poetry ; I liked all these, and Lane and Alcott too, as one figure more in the various land- scape.
442 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
" And now, I said, will you not please to pound me a little before I go, just by way of squaring the account, that I may not remember that I alone was saucy ? Alcott contented himself with quarrelling with the injury done to greater qualities in my company by the tyranny of my taste, which cer- tainly was very soft pounding. And so I parted from the divine lotos-eaters." (Journal, Novem- ber 19, 1842.)
Yet Emerson had so much at heart the results aimed at by these communistic schemes that he had already proposed to Mr. Alcott to join him in the attempt to secure them in a simpler fashion. The inequalities of condition which he saw about him, even in New England, were painful to him, — as indeed they never ceased to be. Later in life he consoled himself, at the sight of great posses- sions in the hands of men whom he loved and re- spected, with the thought that these men stood in a just relation to their wealth, having the faculty to use it for the best advantage. None should be rich, he says, but those who understand it ; but there may be such. For himself, he felt at this time a strong desire to clear himself of superfluities and unnatural relations. In a paper on Labor, after- wards rewritten for the lecture on " Man the Re- former," 1 in 1841, he says : —
1 Collected Writings, i. 27.
EMERSON'S OWN EXPERIMENTS. 443
" Living has got to be too ponderous than that the poor spirit can drag any longer this baggage- train. Let us cut the traces. The bird and the fox can get their food and house without degrada- tion, without domestic servants, and without ties, and why cannot we ? I much prefer going with- out these things to the annoyance of having them at too great cost. I am very uneasy when one waits on me at table. I had rather stretch my arm or rise from my chair than be served by one who does it not from love. Why should not the phi- losopher realize in his daily labor his high doctrine of self -trust ? Let him till the fruitful earth under the glad sun, and write his thought on the face of the ground with hoe and spade. Let him put him- self face to face with the facts of dire need, and know how to triumph by his own warlike hands and head over the grim spectres. Let him thus be- come the fellow of the poor, and show them by experiment that poverty need not be. Let him show that labor need not enslave a man more than luxury ; that labor may dwell with thought. This is the heroic life possible in this age of Lon- don, Paris, and New York. It is not easy ; if it were it would not be heroic. But he who can solve the problem for himself has solved the problem not of a clique or corporation, but of entire human- ity. He has shown every young man for a thou- sand years to come how life may be led indepen-
444 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
dently, gracefully, justly. Religion does not seem to me to tend now to a cidtus, as heretofore, but to a heroic life. We find extreme difficulty in conceiv- ing any church, any liturgy, any rite, that would be quite genuine. But all things point at the house and the hearth. Let us learn to lead a man's life. I have no hope of any good in this piece of reform from such as only wish to reform one thing ; which is the misfortune of almost all projectors. A par- tial reform in diet, or property, or war, or the praise of the country-life, is always an extrava- gance. A farm is a poor place to get a living by, in the common expectation. But he who goes thither in a generous spirit, with the intent to lead a man's life, will find the farm a proper place. He must join with it simple diet and the annihilation by one stroke of his will of the whole nonsense of living for show. He must take ideas instead of customs. He must make the life more than meat, and see, as has been greatly said, that the intel- lectual world meets man everywhere ; in his dwell- ing, in his mode of living. What a mountain of chagrins, inconveniences, diseases, and sins would sink into the sea with the uprise of this doctrine ! Domestic hired service would go over the dam. Slavery would fall into the pit. Shoals of maladies would be exterminated, and the Saturnian Age re- vive.
He writes to his brother William : —
EMERSON'S OWN EXPERIMENTS. 445
Concord, December 2, 1840. ... I am quite intent on trying the experiment of manual labor to some considerable extent, and of abolishing or ameliorating the domestic service in my household. Then I am grown a little im- patient of seeing the inequalities all around me; am a little of an agrarian at heart, and wish some- times that I had a smaller house, or else that it sheltered more persons. So I think that next April we shall make an attempt to find house-room for Mr. Alcott and his family under our roof ; for the wants of the man are extreme as his merits are extraordinary. But these last very few persons perceive ; and it becomes the more imperative on those few, of whom I am in some respects nearest, to relieve them. He is a man who should be main- tained at the public cost in the Prytaneum ; per- haps one of these days he will be. ... At all events, Lidian and I have given him an invitation to establish his household with us for one year, and have explained to him and Mrs. Alcott our views or dreams respecting labor and plain living ; and they have our proposal under consideration.
Mrs. Emerson loyally consented, though the scheme appeared to her a wild one ; fortunately Mrs. Alcott declined to come into it.
Meantime an experiment towards putting the do- mestic service upon a more ideal footing was tried.
446 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
TO WILLIAM EMERSON".
Concokd, March 30, 1841. . . . You know Lidian and I had dreamed that we would adopt the country practice of having but one table in the house. Well, Lidian went out the other evening and had an explanation on the sub- ject with the two girls. Louisa accepted the plan with great kindness and readiness ; but Lydia, the cook, firmly refused. A cook was never fit to come to table, etc. The next morning, Waldo was sent to announce to Louisa that breakfast was ready ; but she had eaten already with Lydia, and refused to leave her alone. With our other project we are like to have the same fortune, as Mrs. Alcott is as much decided not to come as her husband is ready to come.
Napoleon's saying, " Respect the burden," was a favorite maxim of Emerson's, and often incul- cated upon his children. He was very considerate in his treatment of servants ; winced visibly when they were reproved, and was relieved when they left the room, from fear lest something might chance in conversation to make them feel dispar- agement. He always respected their holidays, even to the inconvenience of their employers, and scrupulously avoided all occasions of unnecessary increase of their work. At a birthday party at his
EMERSON'S OWN EXPERIMENTS. 447
house, the little guests in their play tumbled over the hay-cocks, to the vexation of the hired man, at whose complaint Emerson came out with long strides : " Lads and lasses ! You must n't undo hard work. The man has worked in the heat all day ; now all go to work and put up the cocks : " and stayed and saw it done, working himself.
Another part of the scheme, manual labor, was no novelty to Emerson : he had been in the habit of working in his garden, and speaks in his letters to Miss Fuller of hoeing his corn and tomatoes ; though he confesses that " this day-labor of mine has hitherto a certain emblematic air, like the ploughing of the Emperor of China," and that his son Waldo begs him not to hoe his leg. But now he wished that he " might make it an honest sweat, and that these ornamental austerities might become natural and dear." Accordingly, in the spring (1841) he invited Thoreau to come and live with him a year and teach him. " He is to have his board, etc., for what labor he chooses to do [Emerson writes to his brother William], and he is thus far a great benefactor and physician to me, for he is an indefatigable and a very skilful la- borer, and I work with him as I should not with- out him, and expect to be suddenly well and strong ; though I have been a skeleton all the spring, until I am ashamed. Thoreau is a scholar and a poet, and as full of buds of promise as a young apple-tree."
448 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
Concord, April 22, 1841. Dear Margaret, — Thanks for your kind so- licitude, but though feeble, and of late feebler than ever, I have no dangerous complaints, — nothing but ridiculously narrow limits, which if I overpass I must pay for it. As soon as my old friend the south wind returns, the woods and fields and my garden will heal me. Henry Thoreau is coming to live with me, and work with me in the garden, and teach me to graft apples. Do you know the issue of my earlier plans, — of Mr. Alcott, liberty, equal- ity, and a common table, etc. ? I will not write out that pastoral here, but save it for the bucolical chapter in my Memoirs. ... I am sorry we come so quickly to the kernel and through the kernel of Cambridge society ; but I think I do not know any part of our American life which is so superficial. The Hoosiers, the speculators, the custom-house officers, — to say nothing of the fanatics, — interest us much more. If I had a pocketful of money, I think I should go down the Ohio and up and down the Mississippi by way of antidote to what small remains of the Orientalism (so endemic in these parts) there may still be in me, — to cast out, I mean, the passion for Europe by the passion for America ; and our reverence for Cambridge, which is only a part of our reverence for London, must be transferred across the Alleghany ridge. Yet I, perverse, take an extreme pleasure in reading Au-
EMERSON'S OWN EXPERIMENTS. 449
brey's Anecdotes, letters, etc., of English scholars, Oxonian and other ; for, next to the culture of man, the demonstration of a talent is the most at- tractive thing, and English literary life has been, if it is no longer, a most agreeable and complete circle of means and ends. . . . We ought to have good verses in the next number [of the Dial], for we must have levity sufficient to compensate the morgue of Unitarianism and Shelley and Ideal Life and Reform in the last number. Lidian sends her love to you. She is not well, but thinks you shall make her well when you come. We read Porphyry and Due de St. Simon and Napier's Pe- ninsular War and Carlyle's lectures, to pass away the cold and rainy season, and wish for letters every day from Margaret Fuller. Do you know that in August I am to go to Waterville, a Baptist college, and deliver a literary oration to some young men ? For which of my sins ? Why should we read many books, when the best books do not now avail us to yield that excitement and solid joy which fifteen years ago an article in the Edinburgh, or almost a college poem or oration, would give ? . . . And yet — and yet — towards evening and on rainy days I wish to go to Berlin and to Dres- den before I quite amputate that nonsense called Europe.
Yours affectionately, Waldo E.
450 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
As to the garden, it did not take him long to find out that he had another garden where he could labor to more advantage. In his journal, before the end of the year, he says : —
" If I judge from my own experience, I should unsay all my fine things, I fear, concerning the manual labor of literary men. If you would be a scholar you must come into the conditions of the scholar. Tell children what you say about writing and laboring with the hands ! Can the glass-worker make glass by minding it at odd times ? Or the chemist analyze soils? Or the pilot sail a ship through the Narrows ? And the greatest of arts, the subtilest and of most miraculous effect, you fancy is to be practised with a pen in one hand and a crow-bar in the other ? The writer shall not dig. To be sure, he may work in the garden, but his stay there must be measured, not by the needs of the garden, but of the study." " When the terres- trial corn, beets, onions, and tomatoes flourish [he writes to Miss Fuller] the celestial archetypes do not."
Another small reform he tried about this time, — partly induced, perhaps, by the example of Mr. Al- cott, — namely, vegetarianism ; but soon gave it up, finding it of no particular advantage.
In any effort he might feel called upon to make towards better modes of living, Emerson was with-
EMERSON'S OWN EXPERIMENTS. 451
out help from the love of innovation. There was, to be sure, a certain presumption in his mind in favor of opinions which he had not been accustomed to hold, but, when it came to practice, he was slow to quit the accustomed ways and glad to return to them. Of the tendency to variation, which plays so important a part in civil as in natural history, he had a very small share. He liked to hear of new projects, because they showed activity of mind ; adoption of them was another matter ; it must come from a distinct call in the individual, and not from a persuasion that such and such a course is advi- sable for people in general. Still less sympathy had he with chiding, or with the people (though some of them were his friends) who made a duty of refusing to vote or to pay taxes.
" Don't run amuck against the world. Have a good case to try the question on. As long as the State means you well, do not refuse your pistareen. You have a tottering cause ; ninety parts of the pistareen it will spend for what you also think good, ten parts for mischief : you cannot fight heartily for a fraction. Wait till you have a good difference to join issue upon."
" The non-resistants go about and persuade good men not to vote, and so paralyze the virtue that is in the conservative party, and thus the patriotic vote in the country is swamped. But, though the non-voting is right in the non-resistants, it is a
452 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
patch and pedantry in their converts ; not in their system, not a just expression of their state of mind."
" A thought he could find as good a ground
for quarrel in the State tax as Socrates did in the edict of the Judges. Then, I say, be consistent, and never more put an apple or a kernel of corn into your mouth. Would you feed the devil? Say boldly, There is a sword sharp enough to cut sheer between flesh and spirit, and I will use it, and not any longer belong to this double-faced, equivocating, mixed Jesuitical universe. The abo- litionists should resist, because they are literalists ; they know exactly what they object to, and there is a government possible which will content them. Remove a few specified grievances, and this present commonwealth will suit them. They are the new Puritans, and as easily satisfied. But you nothing will content. No government short of a monarchy consisting of one king and one subject will appease you. Your objection, then, to the State of Massa- chusetts is deceptive. Your true quarrel is with the state of Man."
(Journal.) " Jock could not eat rice, because it came west ; nor molasses, because it came north ; nor put on leathern shoes, because of the methods by which leather was procured ; nor indeed wear a woolen coat. But Dick gave him a gold eagle, that he might buy wheat and rye, maple sugar and
POSITION WITH REGARD TO REFORM. 453
an oaken chest, and said : This gold piece, unhappy Jock, is molasses, and rice, and horse-hide, and sheep-skin."
" The philosophers of Fruitlands have such an image of virtue before their eyes that the poetry of man and nature they never see ; the poetry that is in a man's life, the poorest pastoral, clownish life, the light that shines on a man's hat, in a child's spoon, the sparkle on every wave and on every mote of dust, they see not."
His position with regard to reform is summed up in the following fragment of a letter, without address or date, but written, I conjecture, about 1840 : —
My dear Friend, — My silence is a very poor account of the pleasure your letter and your book gave me, and I feel that it is very likely to be mis- interpreted. . . . Your letter was very grateful to me, and spoke the language of a pure region. That language let us always speak. I would willingly never hear any other. It blended in my ear with whatever of best and highest I have heard among my companions, and fortifies my good hope of what society may yet realize for us. A few persons with whom I am acquainted do indeed stand in strong contrast with the general tone of social life. They think society faithless and base : society in its turn reckons them dreamers and fanatics. And they
454 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
must pass for such until they can make their fine words good, by adding to their criticism on the pretension and sensuality of men a brave dem- onstration to the senses of their own problems. Certainly virtue has its arithmetic, as well as vice, and the pure must not eat the bread of the im- pure, but must live by the sweat of their own face, and in all points make their philosophy affirmative. Otherwise it tends so fast downward to mere rail- ing and a greater falseness than that which it rep- robates. The first impulse of the newly stricken mind, stricken by light from heaven, is to lament the death with which it is surrounded. As far as the horizon it can scarcely see anything else than tombs and ghosts and a sort of dead-alive popula- tion. War, war without end seems then to be its lot ; how can it testify to the truth, to life, but by affirming in all places that death is here and death is there, and all which has a name to live is dead ? Yet God has higher and better methods. Come out, he saith, from this death, once and forever. Not by hate of death, but by new and larger life is death to be vanquished. In thy heart is life. Obey that ; it is inventive, creative, prodigal of life and beauty. Thence heroism, virtue, redemp- tion, succor, opportunity, come to thee and to all. ... If thou wouldst have the sense of poverty, squalid poverty, bestir thyself in endless procla- mation of war against the sins of society, thyself
WOMAN'S RIGHTS. 455
appearing to thyself the only exception. If thou wouldst inherit boundless joyful wealth, leave the war to such as like it.
His opinion of the later agitation for according political functions to women is indicated in the following letter to a lady who had asked him to take part in calling a convention for that pur- pose : —
Concord, September 18, 1850.
Dear Madam, — I have waited a very long time since I had your letter, because I had no clear answer to give. . . . The fact of the political and civil wrongs of woman I deny not. If women feel wronged, then they are wronged. But the mode of obtaining a redress, namely, a public con- vention called by women, is not very agreeable to me, and the things to be agitated for do not seem to me the best. Perhaps I am superstitious and traditional, but, whilst I should vote for every franchise for women, ... if women asked or if men denied it, I should not wish women to wish political functions, nor, if granted, assume them. I imaarine that a woman whom all men would feel to be the best would decline such privileges if offered, and feel them to be rather obstacles to her legitimate influence. Yet I confess I lay no great stress on my opinion; ... at all events, that I may not stand in the way of any right, you are at
456 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
liberty, if you wish it, to use my name as one of the inviters of the convention, though I shall not attend it, and shall regret that it is not rather a private meeting of thoughtful persons sincerely in- terested, instead of what a public meeting is pretty sure to be, — a heartless noise, which we are all ashamed of when it is over.
Yours respectfully, R. W. Emerson.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE BUSINESS OP LECTURING. PECUNIARY CIR- CUMSTANCES. POEMS. DEATH OP HIS FIRST
CHILD. HIS WAYS WITH HIS CHILDREN.
The period from 1835 to 1845, — the thirty- second to the forty-second year of Emerson's life, — the heyday of the Boston Transcendentalism, was also the period of his greatest productivity. That it took the shape of lectures was due very much to circumstances, and not to his will. There was something questionable, if not repugnant, to him in thus bringing his thoughts to market. " I feel [he writes in his journal] that my life is friv- olous and public ; I am as one turned out-of-doors ; I live in a balcony or on the street ; " and he is constantly resolving to withdraw. But there was really no help ; his family expenses were increas- ing ; other children, two daughters and another son, were born to him ; other persons besides those of his household were partly dependent on him ; he kept open house ; and, with the strictest economy, his outlay outran his income. He published dur- ing this period two books (the first and second series of Essays), which afterwards sold well, but
458 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
they brought him at first very little money. Em- erson was always careful about his expenditures, and he had nothing of the contempt for money which many persons at that time thought becom- ing, but he had no skill to earn it. " It is an essen- tial element to our knowledge of the man [he says in his lecture on Wealth] what, was his opinion, practice, and success in regard to the institution of property ; " and in this regard Emerson's position has not always been understood. The pains he gave himself with bargaining and with bookseller's accounts for Carlyle, and the common sense he al- ways showed in practical affairs, have sometimes given the impression that he was a shrewd man of business. But in bargaining for himself he was easily led to undervalue his own claims and to take an exaggerated view of those of the other party, and so usually bought dear and sold cheap. Amus- ing instances could be given, were it on the whole worth while. He had, it is true, from the first, the help of his friend Mr. Abel Adams in his money matters, and afterwards that of other efficient helpers ; but he thought it the duty of every man to attend to these things for himself : —
" The gods deal very strictly with us, make out quarter-bills and exact specie payment, allow no partnerships, no stock companies, no arrangements, but hold us personally liable to the last cent and mill. The youth, charmed with his intellectual
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 459
dream, can neither do this nor that : ' My father lived in the care of land and improvements, valued his meadow, his mill-dam ; why must I be worried with hay and grass, my cranberry-field, my burned wood-lot, my broken mill, the rubbish lumber, my crop, my trees ? Can I not have a partner ? Why not organize our new society of poets and lovers, and have somebody with talent for business to look after these things, — some deacons of trees and grass and buckwheat and cranberries, — and leave me to letters and philosophy ? ' But the nettled gods say, Go to ruin with your arrangements ; you alone are to answer for your things. Leases and covenants shall be punctually signed and sealed. Arithmetic and the practical study of cause and effect in the laws of Indian corn and rye-meal are as useful as betting is in second-class society to teach accuracy of statement, or duelling, in coun- tries where the perceptions are obtuse, to hold men to courteous behavior. To a certain extent every individual is holden to the study and management of his domestic affairs. It is a peremptory point of virtue that his independence be secured, and there is no more decisive training for all manly habits than the household. Take from me the feel- ing that I must depend on myself, give me the least hint that I have good friends and backers there in reserve who will gladly help me, and in- stantly I relax my diligence. I obey the first im-
460 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
pulse of generosity that is to cost me nothing, and a certain slackness will creep over all my conduct of my affairs."
Emerson's management, however, did not tend to the positive increase of his worldly goods. " My prudence [he says] consists in avoiding and go- ing without ; not in the inventing of means and methods ; not in adroit steering ; not in gentle re- pairing." For the filling of his purse the only means he could invent was lecturing. As his name grew more widely known to the managers of the country lyceums in New England and then at the West, he could, with much travelling, collect fees enough to fill the ever-yawning gap betwixt income and outgo, though never much more than fill it. His fees in those days were small; not so large, perhaps, as more skilful management might have made them. He writes to Mr. Alexander Ireland in 1847 that the most he ever received was $570 for ten lectures ; in Boston, fifty dollars ; in the country lyceums, ten dollars and travelling ex- penses. Then, from the liberal style of his house and his housekeeping, he passed with his neighbors for a well-to-do man, and paid, his friends thought, more than a fair proportion of the town taxes. So it came about that all these years in the forties were years of unremitted watchfulness and some- times anxiety to keep out of debt. This appears from time to time in his letters to his brother Wil- liam in New York : —
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 461
" August 3, 1839. Carlyle's accounts have re- quired what were for me very considerable ad- vances, and so have impoverished me in the cur- rent months very much. I shall learn one day, if I live much longer, to keep square with the world, which is essential to my freedom of mind.
" August 17. I see plainly I shall have no choice about lecturing again next winter. I must do it. Here in Concord they send me my tax-bill for the current year, $161.73.
" April 4, 1840. I got home yesterday morning. I crowed unto myself on the way home on the strength of my three hundred dollars earned in New York and Providence. So should I pay my debts. But pride must have a fall : the Atlas Bank declared no dividend ; so I find myself pretty nearly where I was before. At Providence I might have enlarged my receipts by undertaking a course of lectures on my own account, after my six were ended ; but I preferred not.
"April 20, 1840. I suppose that I am now at the bottom of my wheel of debt and, shall not hastily venture lower. But how could I help printing ' Chartism,' 103 pages, sent to me for that express purpose, and with the encouragement of the book- sellers? They will give T. C. fifteen cents per copy.
" May 11, 1840. J. Munroe & Co., in making out the account of T. C. [find] he was in my debt
462 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
between six and seven hundred dollars, although some important amounts paid by me were not entered in the account.
" October 7, 1841. This winter I must hang out my bush again, and try to sell good wine of Castaly at the Masonic Temple. Failing there, I will try the west end of New York, or of Philadel- phia, or, as I have lately been challenged to do, of Baltimore.
" October 16, 1843. I think not to lecture by courses this winter ; only by scattering guerillas, and see if I can make a new book [the second series of Essays], of which the materials collect themselves day by day. Yet I am poor enough to need to lecture."
And lecture he did, every winter but one, from the time he came to Concord, so long as he was able ; gradually extending his field from year to year towards the West.
Some of the lectures of the course on the " Pres- ent Age," in 1839-40, were repeated in Provi- dence, R. I., and in New York, as well as near Boston. The next winter, 1840-41, he seems to have turned away from lecturing to the preparation of a volume of essays, which came out in the spring of 1841. In the summer, being asked to deliver an address at Waterville College, Maine, he went down to Nantasket for a breath of sea-air. Emerson,
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 463
though he was born on the edge of the salt water, was a stranger to the sea, and this visit made a strong impression on him.
Worrick's Hotel, Nantasket Beach, July 13, 1841.
Dear Lidian : . . . I find this place very good for me on many accounts, perhaps as good as any public place or house full of strangers could be. I read and write, and have a scheme of my speech in my head. I read Plato, I swim, and be it known unto you I did verily catch with hook and line yes- terday morning two haddocks, a cod, a flounder, and a pollock, and a perch. . . . The sea is great, but reminds me all the time of Malta, Sicily, and my Mediterranean experiences, which are the most that I know of the ocean ; for the sea is the same in summer all the world over. Nothing can be so bland and delicious as it is. I had fancied some- thing austere and savage, a touch of iron in it, which it hardly makes good. I love the dear chil- dren, and miss their prattle. . . . Take great care of yourself, and send me immediate word that you are well and hope everything good. That hope shall the Infinite Benevolence always justify. Your affectionate husband,
Waldo E.
464 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
TO MISS FULLER.
My dear Margaret : . . . I am here making a sort of peace-offering to the god of waters, against whom, ever since my childhood, imprisoned in streets and hindered from fields and woods, I have kept a sort of grudge. Until lately every landscape that had in it the smallest piece of the sea seemed to me a little vulgarized (shall I say?) and not quite festal. Now a surfeit of acorns and whortleberry-pastures has restored the equilibrium of my eyes and ears, and this beach and grand sea- line receive me with a sort of paternal love. . . . I gaze and listen by day, I gaze and listen by night, and the sea and I shall be good friends all the rest of my life. I quite comprehend how Greece should be Greece, lying in the arms of that sunny sea. Cut off its backwoods from New Eng- land, and it would be more likely to repeat that history of happy genius. Is it these few foolish degrees of the thermometer that make England (Old and New) so tough and mighty instead of so graceful and keen ? Really this summer bay glistens before my eyes so azure and spiritual that I won- der to think that the only question it suggests to the tall and tanned denizens along these sounding shores is, "How's fish?" And inland, the same question, a little magnified and superficially varied, makes Wall Street and State Street. But Attica
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 465
and Peloponnesus were not so easily pleased. I have come down here with by-ends, else I should not be of the true New England blood I celebrate. I hope to find an oration under some of the boulders, or, more probably, within some of the spouting- horns of this shore.
To another friend : —
" I like the sea. What an ancient, pleasant sound is this of the rubbing of the sea against the land : this satiating expanse, too, — the only thing on earth that compares with the sky in contenting the eye, which it more contents beheld from the shore than on the ocean. And then these pretty gliding columnar sail which so enliven and adorn the field."
July 21.
Dear Lidian : . . . I am very glad you get on so happily and hopefully at home, though I do not like what you say of mother's fasting and languor in the heats. It is time her son should come home. I wish he was a better son ; but Elizabeth will come back again soon, whose refreshing influences none of us can quite resist. I have read Henry's verses thrice over, with increasing pleasure ; they are very good. I wish I had any to return, but the beach has not yielded me any. If I did not remember that all my life long I had thought To- day always unprofitable and the muses of the Pres-
466 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
ent Hour always unkind, I should think myself on this present 21st of July under some ban, that nothing tuneful and nothing wise should visit my heart or be spoken by my lips. But the saying of the stream is the motto also of men : " And, the more falls I get, move faster on." We fat on our failures and by our dumbness we speak. . . . Thanks again for the news from the nursery. All angels dwell with the boy and the girl, and with all who speak and behave to them worthily ! In the pocket of the coat I will put a pebble from the beach for Waldo. . . .
To his brother William, after his return home : —
Concord, July 27, 1841.
At Nantasket I found delicious and bracing airs and sunniest waters, which reminded me of nothing but my Mediterranean experiences ; for I have never seen so much of the sea before at home. I hoped there to write an oration, but only my out- line grew larger and larger, until it seemed to defy all possibility of completion. Desperate of success abroad, I rushed home again ; having before found that I could write out of no inkstand but my own. Perhaps not out of that.
Yet, in the Waterville address, delivered on the 11th of August, we seem to find a touch of the sea, " inexact and boundless," yet distinct in its tone
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 467
of suggestion ; and Emerson himself, when Mr. Whipple long afterwards praised it to him, con- fessed that it was " the heat and happiness of what I thought a real inspiration " that was extinguished by the cold reception which the discourse met, and the warning of the presiding minister in his clos- ing prayer against its heresies and wild notions.1
TO MISS FULLER.
Concord, September 8, 1841. Dear Margaret : ... At Waltham I promised to consider and ascertain whether I could supply you with some prose pages in a fortnight from Phi Beta Kappa night. After turning over many top- ics, I fancied that I might possibly furnish you with a short article on Landor, and I am now try- ing to dissolve that pearl or opal in a crucible that is perhaps too small ; the fire may be too low, or the menstruum too weak. But something I will send you on Friday or Saturday at farthest. . . . I have nothing to say ; not a mouse stirring in all the horizon. Not a letter comes to me from any
1 Recollections of Eminent Men, etc. By Edwin Percy Whip- ple. Boston, 1887 : p. 145. The same story is told of the Middle- bury (Vt. ) address, four years later. Possibly, in his account to Mr. Whipple, Emerson confounded them together. The minis- ter's prayer was that they might be delivered from ever again hearing such transcendental nonsense from the sacred desk. Em- erson, the story goes, asked the name of the clergyman, and said, ' ' He seems a very conscientious, plain-spoken man. ' '
468 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
quarter ; not a new book ; not a vision out of the sky of night or noon. And yet I remember that the autumn has arrived, and already I have felt his infusions in the air, — wisest and preciousest of seasons. Presently it will be — will it not ? — the rage to die. After so much precocity, apathy, and spiritual bankruptcy, the age of suicide may be shortly expected. We shall die with all manner of enthusiasm. Nothing at the book-shops but Wer- ther, and Cato by Plutarch. Buddhism cometh in like a flood. Sleep is better than waking, death than life. The serpent of the pyramids has begun to swallow himself. The scorpion-stung scorpion is the only cipher and motto. . . .
November 9. ... I read little, I write little. I seek, but with only my usual gypsy diligence, to drive my loitering troops metaphysical into pha- lanx, into line, into section ; but the principle of infinite repulsion and every one for himself, and the hatred of society which animates their master, animates them to the most beautiful defiance. These are the asserters of immortality ; these are they who by implication prove the length of the day in which such agents as we shall work ; for in less than millenniums what towers could be built, what brick could be laid, if every straw was enemy to every straw ! Gray clouds, short days, moon- less nights, a drowsy sense of being dragged easily somewhere by that locomotive Destiny, which, never
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 469
seen, we yet know must be hitched on to the cars wherein we sit, — that is all that appears in these November weeks. Let us hope that, as often as we have defamed days which turned out to be ben- efactors, and were whispering oracles in the very droning nurses' lullabies which soothed us to sleep, so this may prove a profitable time. . . .
This was the time of Emerson's Transcendental apogee, the extreme of his impulse to withdraw from lecturing and betake himself to solitary con- templation. Henceforth he lectured diligently. In the course on " The Times," in the winter 1841- 42, his impatience of the "universal whiggery," that is, of decent, self-complacent routine, is bal- anced by a more explicit recognition of the claims of the actual order of things, not merely as inev- itable, but as the germ of a better. Three of these lectures, " The Times," " The Conservative," and "The Transcendentalist," were published in the Dial, and afterwards in the first volume of his collected writings. The course was repeated in Providence, in New York, and elsewhere. In 1843 he read five lectures on " New England " in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other places, spending the whole winter away from home.
470 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
Baltimore, January 7, 1843. Deae Margaret, — I received in Boston your packet for William Channing, and the next morn- ing I left it with my brother in New York. I spent one night at Staten Island [with William] and two nights in Philadelphia, and am here ready to attend high mass in the Cathedral to-morrow morning. In Philadelphia I had great pleasure in chatting with Furness, for we had ten or a dozen years to go over and compare notes upon. . . . And he is the happiest companion. Those are good companions to whom we have the keys. How true and touching in the romance is the saying, " But you can never be to them Vich Ian Vohr" ! and each of us is an unsuppliable Vich Ian Vohr to somebody. Furness is my dear gossip, almost a gossip for the gods, there is such a repose of worth and honor in the man. He is a hero-worshipper, and so collects the finest anecdotes, and told very good stories of Mrs. Butler, Dr. Channing, etc. I meant to add, a few lines above, that the tie of school-fellow and playmate from the nursery on- ward is the true clanship and key that cannot be given to another. At Mrs. Morrison's, last night, I heard Knoop and the Sefiora de Goni ; which was very good exercise, — " me satis exercuisti" said the honest professor to the young Sam. Clarke when he wrangled, — and we are all glad to be turned into strings and finely and thoroughly played upon.
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 471
But the guitar is a mean, small-voiced instrument, and but for the dignity that attaches to every na- tional instrument, and its fine form, would not be tolerated, would it? Very hard work and very small cry, Senora.
Sunday, p. m. This morning I went to the Cathedral to hear mass, with much content. It is so dignified to come where the priest is nothing and the people nothing, and an idea for once ex- cludes these impertinences. The chanting priest, the pictured walls, the lighted altar, the surpliced boys, the swinging censer, every whiff of which I inhaled, brought all Rome again to mind. And Rome can smell so far ! It is a dear old church, — the Roman, I mean, — and to-day I detest the Unitarians and Martin Luther and all the parlia- ment of Barebones. We understand so well the joyful adhesion of the Winckelmanns and Tiecks and Schlegels, — just as we seize with joy the fine romance and toss the learned Heeren out of the window ; unhappily with the same sigh as belongs to the romance, — " Ah, that one word of it were true ! " One small element of new views has, how- ever, got into the American cathedral, namely, pews ; and after service I detected another, a rail- road which runs from one angle of the altar down into the broad aisle, for the occasional transporta- tion of a pulpit. We are as good for that as the French, who pared apples at dinner with little guil-
472 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
lotines. ... In Baltimore, though I have enquired as diligently as Herod the king after holy chil- dren, I have not yet heard of any in whom the spirit of the great gods dwelleth. And yet, with- out doubt, such are in every street. Travelling I always find instructive, but its lessons are of no sudden application. I cannot use them all in less than seven transmigrations of Indur, hardly one of them in this present mortal and visible. . . .
Your friend, Waldo.
TO HIS WIFE.
January 8, 1843.
To-day I heard high mass in the Cathedral here, and with great pleasure. It is well for my Protestantism that we have no cathedral in Con- cord ; E. H. and I should be confirmed in a fort- night. The Unitarian church forgets that men are
poets. Even Mr. himself does not bear it in
mind.
(Journal.) "The Catholic religion respects masses of men and ages. It is in harmony with nature, which loves the race and ruins the individ- ual. The Protestant has his pew, which, of course, is the first step to a church for every individual citizen, a church apiece."
In 1844-45 he lectured in many places, and still
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 473
more widely in 1845-46, giving, this winter, the course on " Representative Men." He complains in his journal of " the long, weary absences at New York and Philadelphia. I am a bad traveller; the hotels are mortifications to all sense of well- being in me. The people who fill them oppress me with their excessive virility, and it would soon become intolerable but for a few friends, who, like women, temper the arid mass. Henry James was true comfort ; wise, gentle, polished, with heroic manners, and a serenity like the sun.
" I was born to stay at home, not to ramble. I was not made for an absentee. I have no thoughts, no aims, and seem never to have had any. I must cower down into my own fens presently, and con- sult the gods again."
He writes to a friend from one of these lectur- ing-tours : —
" It is strange how people act on me. I am not a pith-ball nor raw silk, yet to human electricity is no piece of humanity so sensible. I am forced to live in the country, if it were only that the streets make me desolate. Yet if I talk with a man of sense and kindness I am imparadised at once. Pity that the light of the heart should resemble the light of the eyes in being so external, and not to be retained when the shutters are closed. Now that I am in the mood for confession, you must even hear the whole. It is because I am so ill a.
474 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
member of society ; because men turn me, by their mere presence, to wood and to stone ; because I do not get the lesson of the world where it is set be- fore me, that I need more than others to run out into new places and multiply my chances for obser- vation and communion. Therefore, whenever I get into debt, which usually happens once a year, I must make the plunge into this great odious river of travellers, into these wild eddies of hotels and boarding-houses, — farther, into these dangerous precincts of charlatanism, namely, lectures ; that out of all the evil I may draw a little good, in the correction which every journey makes to my exag- geration, in the plain facts I get, and in the rich amends I draw for many listless days in the dear society of here and there a wise and great heart. I hate the details, but the whole foray into a city teaches me much."
Philadklphia, January 20, 1843.
Dear Lidian : . . . I find that advantage as before in wandering so far from home, that I be- come acquainted with " the Indians who have the Spirit." ... I have seen no winter since I left New York, but the finest October weather prevails. The bland speech and courtly manners of these people, too, is as kindly a contrast to our more selfish man- ners. If I ask my way in the street, there is sure to be some gracefulness in conveying the informa-
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 475
tion. And the service of the negroes in the hotels is always courteous. It looks as if it would be a long time before I get home, and I am getting tired of my picnic. I learn something all the time, but I write nothing, and, as usual, vow each week that I will not play Signor Blitz again. So you must find out, dear wife, how to starve gracefully, — you and I and all of us, another year. Very re- freshing is it to me to know that I have a good home. ... So peace be with you, and joy !
Yours, Waldo.
TO WILLIAM EMERSON.
Philadelphia, January 8, 1843. I had a very comfortable ride hither from the cabin of the Jersey ferry-boat, and soon got snugly ensconced in the warm entrails of an argument on the divine decrees with a thoroughbred Presby- terian clergyman. B was here, but I had
tasted him, and preferred the bear's meat which we can never get at home. I can very well afford to set up this lottery. I can never draw quite a blank ; for though I wish money to-day, I wish ex- perience always, and a good failure is always a good experience, which is mother of much poetry and prose for me.
476 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
TO MISS FULLER.
Poktland, December 21, 1842. . . . Many and many a mile, nothing but snow and pine-trees ; and in travelling it is possible sometimes to have a superfluity of these fine ob- jects ; the villages few and cold as the Tobolsk and Irkutsk of Siberia, and I bethought myself, as I stared into the white night, whether I had not com- mitted some misdemeanor against some Czar, and, while I dreamed of Maine, was bound a thousand versts into Arctic Asia. . . . Here have I seen, besides others, Judge , who was lately a com- missioner on the part of Maine on the Ashburton negotiations ; a very sensible person, but, what is remarkable, called a good Democrat here, whilst his discourse is full of despondency on the entire failure of republican institutions in this country : they have neither cherished talent nor virtue ; they have never had large nor even prudent aims, — none but low personal ones, and the lowest ; and the offi- cers of government are taken every year from a lower and lower class. And the root of the whole evil is universal suffrage. . . . Every man deserves an answer, but few get one. Words are a pretty game, but Experience is the only mathematician who can solve problems ; and yet I amused the man with my thrum that anarchy is the form and theocracy the fact to which we and all people are tending,
THE BUSINESS OF LECTURING. 477
which seemed to him a pretty soap-bubble. I never see people without observing that strength or weakness is a kind of atmospheric fact : if a man is so related to the topic and the by-standers that he happily expresses himself, well ; if not, he is a fool, — quite independently of the relations of both to reason and truth. Plainly we are cackling geese when we do not feel relations, let the Abso- lute be as grand as he will. Therefore let time and space stand, and man and meeting-house, and Washington and Paris, and phrenology and mes- merism, and the old Beelzebub himself ; for rela- tions shall rule, and realities shall strike sail.
It was not merely the incidental annoyances or the disturbance to his habits that made it repug- nant to Emerson " to go peddling with my literary pack of notions ; " but there was also a recoil from what seemed like a profanation of things dear and sacred. " Are not lectures a kind of Peter Parley's story of Uncle Plato, and a puppet show of the El- eusinian mysteries ? "
He felt this sometimes even in the select conver- sations : —
TO MISS FULLER.
Concord, March 14, 1841. The young people wished to know what possessed me to tease you with so much prose, and becloud the fine conversation. I could only answer that it
478 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
was not an acute fit of Monday evening, but was chronic and constitutional with me. I asked them in my turn when they had heard me talk anything else. So I silenced them. But how to reply to your fine Eastern pearls with chuckstones of gran- ite and slate ? There is nothing for it but to pay you the grand compliment, which you deserve if we can pay it, of speaking the truth. Even prose I honor in myself and others very often as an awk- ward worship of truth ; it is the plashing and strug- gling in the water of one who would learn to swim. I know but one solution to my nature and relations, which I find in remembering the joy with which in my boyhood I caught the first hint of the Berke- leyan philosophy, and which I certainly never lost sight of afterwards. There is a foolish man who goes up and down the country giving lectures on electricity : this one secret he has, to draw a spark out of every object, from desk and lamp and wooden log and the farmer's blue frock ; and by this he gets his living. Well, I was not an electrician, but an idealist. I could see that there was a Cause be- hind every stump and clod, and, by the help of some fine words, could make every old wagon and wood- pile and stone-wall oscillate a little and threaten to dance ; nay, give me fair field, and the select- men of Concord and the Reverend Pound-me-down himself began to look unstable and vaporous. You saw me do my feat, it fell in with your own studies,
poems. 479
and you would give me gold and pearls. Now there is this difference between the electrician — Mr. Quimby is his name ? I never saw him — and the idealist, namely, that the spark is to that phi- losopher a toy, but the dance is to the idealist terror and beauty, life and light. It is and it ought to be, and yet sometimes there is a sinful empiric who loves exhibition too much. This insight is so pre- cious to society that where the least glimmer of it appears, all men should befriend and protect it for its own sake. You, instead of wondering at my cloistered and unfriendly manners, should defend me. You and those others who are dear to me should be so rightly my friends as never to suffer me for a moment to attempt the game of wits and fashionists, — no, nor even that of those you call friends ; but, by expecting of me a song of laws and causes only, should make me noble and the encoiirager of your nobility. . . .
To lecturing he could reconcile himself, and even find in it a good side ; but it was after all a pis alter, an expedient, not the mode of utterance to which he aspired. That was verse ; not so much, I think, from a direct impulse towards rhythmical expression as for the sake of freer speech ; because, he says, we may speak ideal truth in verse, but we may not in prose. It was " the harmony of laws and causes," not the music of words and images,
480 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
that primarily attracted him ; the purely poetical impulse was so heavily weighted with thought that it seemed to him feeble, and he lamented his hard fate in being only "half a bard," or, as he wrote to Carlyle,1 " not a poet, but a lover of poetry and poets, and merely serving as writer, etc., in this empty America, before the arrival of the poets."
Nevertheless, poems of his had been handed about amongst intimate friends, and there were already those who found in them a supreme attrac- tion. James Freeman Clarke had got leave to publish three of them in the Western Messenger (Louisville, Kentucky), of which he was then the editor, and now applications came from the Boston publishers.
" Yesterday [Emerson writes to his brother Wil- liam, December 3, 1843], for the second time, I had an application from the bookseller to print a volume of poems ; on which proposition — which it seems he makes at the instance of others — I might sit a little, — I, uncertain always whether I have one true spark of that fire which burns in verse. When such a request comes to me I am in- clined to cut my customary cords, and run to woods and deserts, into Berkshire, into Maine, and dwell alone, to know whether I might not yield myself up to some higher, better influences than any I am 1 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, Supplementary Letters, 64.
DEATH OF HIS FIRST CHILD. 481
wont to share in this pewter world. But months and years pass, and the aspirant is found in his old place, unchanged." And two years afterwards he writes to his brother : —
" As for the poems about which you ask once more, a critical friend of mine has discovered so many corrigible and reparable places in them, re- quiring too the freest leisure and the most favor- able poetic mood, that I have laid them aside for two months." It was yet nearly two years before they were published.
One of the last pieces in the volume was the " Threnody " on his eldest child, a beautiful boy, little more than five years old, who died at the be- ginning of this period (January 27, 1842), after four days' illness of scarlet fever. " A domesti- cated sunbeam," says a friend of the house, " with his father's voice, but softened, and beautiful dark blue eyes with long lashes. He was his father's constant companion, and would stay for hours to- gether in the study, never interrupting him."
After the first outburst of passionate grief, Em- erson was as if stunned, and incapable of expres- sion until long afterwards.
" The innocent and beautiful [he writes to a friend] should not be sourly and gloomily la- mented, but with music and fragrant thoughts and sportive recollections. Alas ! I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve. Dear boy, too precious and unique
482 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
a creation to be huddled aside into the waste and prodigality of things ; yet his image, so gentle, so rich in hopes, blends easily with every happy mo- ment, every fair remembrance, every cherished friendship, of my life. Calm and wise, calmly and wisely happy, the beautiful Creative Power looked out from him, and spoke of anything but chaos and interruption. What was the moral of sun and moon, of roses and acorns, that was the moral of the sweet boy's life ; softened only and humanized by blue eyes and infant eloquence."
Some months later, in his answer to the letter of a lady who had been Waldo's teacher, he says : —
"Meantime life wears on, and ministers to you, no doubt, as to me its un delaying and grand lessons, its uncontainable endless poetry, its short dry prose of scepticism, — like veins of cold air in the evening woods, quickly swallowed by the wide warmth of June, — its steady correction of the rash- ness and short sight of youthful judgments, and its pure repairs of all the rents and seeming ruin it operates in what it gave ; although we love the first gift so well that we cling long to the ruin, and think we will be cold to the new if new shall come. But the new steals on us like a star which rises be- hind our back as we walk, and we are borrowing gladly its light before we know the benefactor. So be it with you, with me, and with all."
To Miss Fuller two years later : —
DEATH OF HIS FIRST CHILD. 483
Concord, January 30, 1844.
When, last Saturday night, Lidian said, " It is two years to-day," I only heard the bell-stroke again. I have had no experience, no progress, to put me into better intelligence with my calamity than when it was new. I read lately, in Drum- mond of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson's narrative to him of the death of his son, who died of the plague in London. Ben Jonson was at the time in the country, and saw the boy in a vision ; " of a manly shape, and of that growth, he thinks, he shall be at the resurrection." That same preternatural ma- turity did my beautiful statue assume the day after death ; and so it often comes to me, to tax the world with frivolity. But the inarticulateness of the Supreme Power how can we insatiate hearers, perceivers, and thinkers ever reconcile ourselves unto ? It deals all too lightly with us low-levelled and weaponed men. Does the Power labor as men do with the impossibility of perfect application, that always the hurt is of one kind and the com- pensation of another? My divine temple, which all angels seemed to love to build, and which was shattered in a night, I can never rebuild : and is the facility of entertainment from thought, or friendship, or affairs an amends ? Rather it seems like a cup of Somnus or of Momus. Yet the na- ture of things, against all appearances and special- ities whatever, assures us of eternal benefit. But
484 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
these affirmations are tacit and secular; if spoken, they have a hollow and canting sound. And thus all our being, dear friend, is evermore adjourned. Patience, and patience, and patience ! I will try, since you ask it, to copy my rude dirges to my dar- ling, and send them to you.
Emerson gave much more of his time and thought to his children, from their infancy, than was usual with busy fathers in New England forty years ago, or is, perhaps, now. " There is nothing [he writes in his journal] that is not of the great- est interest in the nursery. Every tear and every smile deserves a history, to say nothing of the stamping and screaming ; " and he kept a record of their childish doings and sayings, in which these " pretty oracles " are chronicled like the anecdotes of Plutarch. Their play and their work, their companions and their lessons, their out-of-door rambles and their home occupations, were objects of his constant care. The home discipline was never neglected, though it was enforced by the gentlest methods. The beginning of a childish quarrel, outbursts of petulance and silliness, were averted by requests to run into the study and see if the stove-door was shut, or to go to the front gate and look at the clouds for a minute. " His interest and sympathy about every detail of school affairs, school politics and school pleasures [says
HIS WAYS WITH HIS CHILDREN. 485
one of his children] were unbounded. We told him every word as we should have told our mates, and I think he had as much enjoyment out of it as we. He considered it as our duty to look after all the strangers that came to the school; at his desire we had large tea-parties every year, to be sure to have all the out-of-town boys and girls come to the house. He used to ask me, when I told him of a new scholar, ' Did you speak to her ? ' ' No, I had n't anything to say.' ' Speak, speak, if you haven't anything to say. Ask her, Don't you admire my shoe-strings ? ' And he was always kind and friendly to them when they came to tea ; made them talk and entered into what they said. On Sunday afternoons he came into the front entry at four o'clock, and whistled or said, ' Four o'clock,' and we all walked with him, from four to eight miles, according to the walking and the flowers we went to see ; as, when a rare flower was in bloom, we went to find it, in Becky Stow's Hole, or Ledum Swamp, or Copan, Columbine Rock or Conantum. Mr. Channing often gave the names to the spots, and showed them to father in their glory ; then he would conduct us to see the show, or take us to places he had found beautiful in the course of the week ; full of pretty speeches about what we were to see, making it a great mystery. Once I expressed my fear that he would cut down his Walden grove or sell it : he answered, ' No, it
486 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
is my camel's hump. When the camel is starving in the desert and can find nothing else, he eats his own hump. I shall keep these woods till every- thing else is gone.' One day when he saw smoke in the direction of the grove, he cried out with such love and fear in his voice, ' My woods, my beauti- ful woods ! ' and hurried off to the rescue. A baby could not be too young or small for him to hold out his hands instantly to take it into his arms. As long as he was strong enough to bear it, the [grand] children were constantly in his study."
The following extract from a letter to his wife shows that even at the time when he most jealously guarded the retirement of his study the babies were not excluded : —
" February 19, 1838. . . . Here sits Waldo be- side me on the cricket, with mamma's best crimson decanter-stand in his hand, experimenting on the powers of a cracked pitcher-handle to scratch and remove crimson pigment. News comes from the nursery that Hillman has taught him A and E on his cards, and that once he has called T. All roasted with the hot fire, he at present gives little sign of so much literature, but seems to be in good health, and has just now been singing, much in the admired style of his papa, as heard by you only on several occasions."
At New Year's time he planned with them about their little presents to the cousins in New York. He writes to his brother William : —
HIS WAYS WITH HIS CHILDREN. 487
Concord, February 3, 1845.
The precious gifts of the cousins to the cousins arrived as safely as such auspicious parcels should ; which doubtless have all angels that love children to convoy them to their destination. A happy childhood have these babes of yours and mine ; no cruel interferences, and what store of happy days ! We cannot look forward far, but these little feli- cities, so natural and suitable to them, should be introductory to better, and not leading into any dark penumbra. We must arm them with as much good sense as we can, and throw them habitually on themselves for a moral verdict.
I do not wonder that you and Susan should de- light in the boys. I spend a great deal of time on my own little trinity, — for my own pleasure, too, — if we could divide it from theirs. But these interests are luckily inseparable, and all our cordial study of the bewitching manners and character of the children is a more agreeable kind of self-knowl- edge, and a repairing of the defects of our memory of those earliest experiences.
On the birth of his first grandchild he writes : —
My dear : Happy wife and mother that
you are, and not the less, surely, that the birth of your babe touches this old house and its people and neighbors with unusual joy. I hope the best
488 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
gifts and graces of his father and mother will com- bine for this blossom, and highest influences hallow and ripen the firm and perfect fruit. There is nothing in this world so serious as the advent of a child, with all his possibilities, to parents with good minds and hearts. Fair fall the little boy ! he has come among good people. I do not grudge to and you the overflow of fondness and won- der ; and to the boy it is the soft pillow prepared for him. It is long before he will come to himself, but I please myself already that his fortunes will be worthy of these great days of his country ; that he will not be frivolous ; that he will be noble and true, and will know what is sacred.
Emerson was playful and winning in his ways with his children, but he did not often romp with them, and he discouraged their devoting the early hours, even of a holiday, to amusement. " He taught us that at breakfast all must be calm and sweet, nothing must jar ; we must not begin the day with light reading or games ; our first and best hours should be occupied in a way to match the sweet and serious morning."
From the age of thirteen or fourteen he thought they should be encouraged as much as possible to regulate their own conduct. He would put the case, and leave them to think and act for them- selves ; and he did not fear to inculcate, even at this
HIS WAYS WITH HIS CHILDREN. 489
age, the whole of his own doctrine of self-reliance. To one of his daughters who was away from home, at school, he writes : —
" Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remem- ber. You have done what you could ; some blun- ders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day ; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old non- sense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays."
Soon after his son's death Emerson went upon a lecturing-tour to Providence and New York, and paid a visit to his brother William.
Staten Island, March 1, 1842. Dear Lidian : . . . Yesterday I dined with Mr. Horace Greeley and Mr. Brisbane, the socialist, at a Graham boarding-house. Mr. Brisbane promised me a full exposition of the principles of Fourier- ism and Association as soon as I am once lodged at the Globe Hotel. One must submit, yet I foresaw, in the moment when I encountered these two new friends here, that I cannot content them. They are bent on popular actions. I am, in all my the- ory, ethics, and politics, a poet ; and of no more
490 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
use in their New York than a rainbow or a firefly. Meantime they fasten me in their thought to " Tran- scendentalism," whereof you know I am wholly guiltless, and which is spoken of as a known and fixed element, like salt or meal. So that I have to begin by endless disclaimers and explanations : " I am not the man you take me for." One of these days shall we not have new laws forbidding solitude, and severe penalties on all separatists and unsocial thinkers? . . . Those poor little girls whose crown of glory is taken from them interest me still, if it were only for pity, and I would gladly know how they fare. Tell mother that Su- san and William had greatly hoped to see her in the winter, but now that they learn how formidable the journey looked to her they are content that she did not come. They say she shall come when you and I make a summer visit here. They are the same faultless, affectionate people here that they ever were. In their temple of love and veneration Elizabeth [Hoar] holds undisputed possession of the highest niche. William is not the isolated man I used to find or fancy him, but, under the name of "the judge," seems to be an important part of the web of life here in his island. . . . Write to me all the particulars of home, including Elizabeth, you can ; that you are yourself very peaceful and still beneficent to me and to all. Give my love to Henry and a kiss to each of the babes. Yours affectionately, W.
HIS WAYS WITH HIS CHILDREN. 491
New York, March, 1842. Thanks, dear Lidian, for this morning's welcome letter, which informed me of what I most wished to know. . . . We had a pretty good company in the lecture-room, although the hall is small, and I see not how it will hold people enough to answer any of my profane and worldly purposes, which you and I at this moment have so much at heart. And for the sacred purposes of influence and pro- vocation, — why, we know that a room which will hold two persons holds audience enough; is not that thy doctrine, O unambitious wife ? . . . This p. M. Mr. Brisbane indoctrinated me in the high mysteries of Attractive Industry, in a conversa- tion which I wish you all might have heard. He wishes me, " with all my party," to come in di- rectly and join him. What palaces ! what con- certs ! what pictures, lectures, poetry, and flowers ! Constantinople, it seems, Fourier showed was the natural capital of the world, and when the earth is planted, and gardened, and templed all over with "groups" and "communities," each of 2000 men and 6000 acres, Constantinople is to be the me- tropolis ; and we poets and miscellaneous tran- scendental persons who are too great for your Con- cords and New Yorks will gravitate to that point for music and architecture and society such as wit cannot paint nowadays. Well, to-morrow p. m. I am to hear the rest of the story, so you shall have
492 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
no more of it. I doubt, I doubt if I find anything here in New York of gain, outward or inward, that it is at all worth while to break up my dull rou- tine for. I should have invented a better expedi- ent at home, and stayed there, and come hither later, in another or a following year. However, my Ides of March are not quite gone yet. Thanks for all the tidings, of Elizabeth too. Perhaps she will yet want to write to me, though I really might not care, in this empty, listless, homeless mood, to write her in reply ! Chat away, little Ellen ; might all her words countervail one the Boy should speak. . . . William and Susan are the best of husband and wife, brother and sister, host and friend, that can be to sad, estranged, misad ventured, estrayed
Waldo Emerson.
These years, as I have said, were years of strait- ened circumstances to the Concord family; strait- ened in part by extraordinary expenses, some unavoidable, others such as, on the whole, Emer- son did not choose to avoid : for instance, in the purchase of land to preserve a bit of his favorite woodlands from the otherwise inevitable axe.
TO WILLIAM EMERSON.
Concord, October 4, 1844. I have lately added an absurdity or two to my
HIS WALDEN WOOD-LOT. 493
usual ones, which I am impatient to tell you of. In one of my solitary wood-walks by Walclen Pond I met two or three men who told me they had come thither to sell and to buy a field, on which they wished me to bid as purchaser. As it was on the shore of the pond, and now for years I had a sort of daily occupancy in it, I bid on it and bought it, eleven acres, for $8.10 per acre. The next day I carried some of my well-beloved gossips to the place, and they deciding that the field was not good for anything if Heartwell Bigelow should cut down his pine-grove, I bought, for $125 more, his pretty wood-lot of three or four acres, and am now land- lord and water-lord of fourteen acres, more or less, on the shore of Walden, and can raise my own blackberries.
Emerson found great satisfaction in his wood- lot. " My spirits," he says, " rise whenever I en- ter it. I can spend the entire day there with hatchet and pruning-shears, making paths, without the remorse of wasting time. I fancy the birds know me, and even the trees make little speeches, or hint them."
He had more misgivings over the purchase of a piece of land adjoining his homestead on the east. It was needful in order to prevent a threatened in- terruption of his only free outlook ; but it was ar- able land, and had to be " improved " with orchard
494 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
and kitchen-garden. The orchard was a pure de- light to him, but the addition to his agriculture in- volved additional responsibilities and worries, and it involved expenses which had to be met by lec- turing. The passage in " Wealth " x about the scholar who pulls down his wall and adds a field to his homestead was a reflection on this piece of his own experience.
Perhaps the need of replenishing his stock of materials for lectures may have weighed with him in deciding upon an offer which came to him at this time from England.
"I had lately an irregular application from dif- ferent quarters in England [he writes to his brother William, December 29, 1846], proposing to me to come thither to lecture, and promising me engage- ments to that end in the great towns if I would. And I understand the Queenie (not Victoria, but Lidian) to say that I must go."
The invitation came at a good time, for he was in need of recreation, and this he could find only in some fresh task. Emerson's method of work left him without the momentum which in general serves the man of letters to carry him over the dead-points of life. Wanting the fly-wheel of a regular, continuous occupation, the impulse had to be supplied wholly from within.
1 Collected Writings, vi. 113.
INVITATION TO ENGLAND. 495
Now he had come to one of those dead-points, those " solstices when the stars stand still in our in- ward firmament, and when there is required some foreign force, some diversion or alterative, to pre- vent stagnation." 1 " As I manage it now [he writes to Miss Fuller] , I who have never done any- thing never shall do anything." And to another friend who was in Europe : —
" No news or word from abroad, no lion roars, no mouse cheeps ; we have discovered no new book ; but the old atrophy, inanition, and drying- up proceeds at an accelerated rate, and you must hasten hither before any high wind shall sweep us into past and pluperfect tenses."
" Here am I [he writes in his journal] with so much all ready to be revealed to me as to others, if only I could be set aglow. I have wished for a professorship ; much as I hate the Church I have wished the pulpit, that I might have the stimulus of a stated task. R. spoke more truly than he knew, perchance, when he recommended an aboli- tion-campaign to me. I doubt not a course of mobs would do me much good."
An English audience, he fancied, might furnish "that stimulation which my capricious, languid, and languescent study needs. The Americans are too easily pleased. We get our education ended a little too quick in this country. As soon as we
1 Collected Writings, vi. 142.
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have learned to read and write and cipher we are dismissed from school and set up for ourselves ; we are writers and leaders of opinion, and we write away without check of any kind, play what prank, indulge what spleen or oddity or obstinacy, comes into our dear head, and even feel our complacency therein ; and thus fine wits come to nothing. We are wits of the provinces, Caesars in Arden, who easily fill all measures, and lie on our oars with the fame of the villages. We see none who calls us to account, and so consult our ease ; no Douglas cast of the bar, no pale Cassius, reminds us of inferior- ity. In the acceptance that my papers find among my thoughtful countrymen in these days, I cannot help seeing how limited is their reading. If they read only the books that I do, they would not ex- aggerate so wildly."
He wished to find those powerful workers, those well-equipped scholars, whom he admired from a distance ; to see them close at hand and feel him- self among them. He did not mean to thrust him- self upon them ; he might accept a challenge, but he would offer none. He said nothing to Carlyle, not wishing that the smallest pains should be taken to collect an audience for him. But in the course of the winter he received, through the friendly of- fices of Mr. Alexander Ireland, regular invitations to lecture before various Mechanics' Institutes in Lancashire and Yorkshire, which he accepted for
MASSACHUSETTS QUARTERLY REVIEW. 497
the following autumn (1847). Carlyle, too, hear- ing of his intentions, wrote to promise him " an audience of British aristocracy " in London.
In the spring before he sailed there were meet- ings at his house looking to a new quarterly review which should be more alive than was the North American to the questions of the day. Theodore Parker and Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, I think, were the persons most forward in the matter. Mr. Sumner came up and spoke approvingly of the un- dertaking, but doubted whether the time was quite ripe for it. Thoreau was there, but contented him- self with asking whether any one present found difficulty in publishing in the existing journals anything that he might have occasion to say. On the whole, but little zeal was manifested, nor would anybody promise definite contributions. But it was taken for granted that the new review was to be ; the main discussion was about the editor. Mr. Parker wished to put Emerson forward, but Em- erson declined ; other persons were talked of, but nothing was distinctly agreed upon, that I remem- ber, except a committee, consisting of Emerson, Parker, and Howe, for the drafting of a manifesto to the public. This Emerson wrote, and he seems to have supposed his office thereby discharged. But when the first number of the Massachusetts Quarterly Revieio reached him in England, he found himself set down, with Mr. Parker and me,
498 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
" assisted by several other gentlemen," as the edi- tors. He did not like this, but suffered his name to stand upon the covers until, after his return home, the fourth number appeared with the an- nouncement that he would now " of course " con- tribute regularly. Then he insisted upon with- drawing, and Mr. Parker became, what in fact he had always been, sole editor. Emerson had no part in it beyond writing the Editor's Address.
This spring, also, he went to Nantucket to lec- ture, and while there, at the request of the minister of the place, he read (I suppose for the last time) a Sunday discourse from the pulpit. The sub- ject was Worship. He said he was not a clergy- man ; he had long ceased to take any active part in churches, and perhaps also had private objection that withheld him from the pulpit. But he was unwilling to refuse to speak on a topic which con- cerns not only every churchman, but every man, — the cardinal topic of the moral nature.
Somewhat earlier in the year he had lectured in New Bedford, and no doubt met there some of his Quaker friends, one of whom (probably Miss Mary Rotch) wrote him a letter, to which he made the following reply : —
Concord, March 28, 1847.
My dear Friend, — It was a great pleasure to hear from you, if only by a question in philosophy.
LETTER ON THEOLOGY. 499
And the terrors of treading that difficult and quak- ing ground shall not hinder me from writing to you. I am quite sure, however, that I never said any of those fine things which you seem to have learned about me from Mr. Griswold, and I think it would be but fair, as he deduces them, that he should explain them, and, if he can, show that they hold. No, I never say any of these scholastic things, and when I hear them I can never tell on which side I belong. I never willingly say any- thing concerning " God " in cold blood, though I think we all have very just insights when we are " in the mount," as our fathers used to say. In conversation sometimes, or to humility and temper- ance, the cloud will break away to show at least the direction of the rays of Absolute Being, and we see the truth that lies in every affirmation men have made concerning it, and, at the same time, the cramping partiality of their speech. For the science of God our language is unexpressive and merely prattle : we need simpler and universal signs, as algebra compared with arithmetic. Thus I should affirm easily hoth those propositions, which our Mr. Griswold balances against one another ; that, I mean, of Pantheism and the other ism.
Personality, too, and impersonality, might each be affirmed of Absolute Being ; and what may not be affirmed of it, in our own mind ? And when we have heaped a mountain of speeches, we have still
500 RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
to begin again, having nowise expressed the simple unalterable fact.
So I will not turn schoolman to-day, but prefer to wait a thousand years before I undertake that definition which literature has waited for so long already. Do not imagine that the old venerable thought has lost any of its awful attraction for me.
I should very heartily — shall I say, tremulously, — think and speak with you on our experiences or gleams of what is so grand and absorbing ; and I never forget the statements, so interesting to me, you gave me many years ago of your faith and that of your friends. Are we not wonderful creatures to whom such entertainments and passions and hopes are afforded ?
Yours with respect and affection,
R. W. Emerson.
CHAPTER XIV.
SECOND VISIT TO ENGLAND. — PAKIS.
1847-1848.
Emerson sailed from Boston in the packet-ship Washington Irving, on the 5th of October, reached Liverpool on the 22d, and soon afterwards pro- ceeded to London.
Chelsea, London, October 27, 1847. Dear Lidian : . . . I found at Liverpool after a couple of days a letter which had been once there seeking me (and once returned to Manchester be- fore it reached my hands) from Carlyle, addressed to " R. W. E., on the instant he lands in Eng- land," conveying so hearty a welcome and so urgent an invitation to house and hearth that I could no more resist than I could gravitation ; and finding that I should not be wanted for a week in the lec- ture-rooms, I came hither on Monday, and, at ten at night, the door was opened to me by Jane Car- lyle, and the man himself was behind her with a lamp in the entry. They were very little changed from their old selves of fourteen years ago (in August), when I left them at Craigenputtock.
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" Well," said Carlyle, " here we are, shovelled to- gether again." The floodgates of his talk are quickly opened, and the river is a great and con- stant stream. We had large communication that night until nearly one o'clock, and at breakfast next morning it began again. At noon or later we went together, Carlyle and I, to Hyde Park and the palaces (about two miles from here), to the National Gallery, and to the Strand, — Carlyle melting all Westminster and London down into his talk and laughter as he walked. We came back to dinner at five or later ; then Dr. Carlyle came in and spent the evening, which again was long by the clock, but had no other measures. Here in this house we breakfast about nine ; Car- lyle is very apt, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker he is, and altogether as extraordinary in his con- versation as in his writing, — I think even more so. You will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might do than he has ever done, without seeing him. I find my few hours' discourse with him in Scotland, long since, gave me not enough knowledge of him, and I have now at last been taken by surprise. . . . Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms. Nothing can be more engaging than their ways, and in her bookcase all his books are inscribed to her, as they came, from year to year, each with some significant lines.
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But you will wish to hear more of my adven- tures, which I must hasten to record. On Wednes- day, at the National Gallery, Mrs. Bancroft greeted me with the greatest kindness, and insisted on pre- senting me to Mr. Rogers, who chanced to come into the gallery with ladies. Mr. Rogers invited me to breakfast, with Mrs. B., at his house on Friday. . . . The smoke of London, through which the sun rarely penetrates, gives a dusky magnifi- cence to these immense piles of building in the west part of the city, which makes my walking rather dream-like. Martin's pictures of Babylon, etc., are faithful copies of the west part of Lon- don ; light, darkness, architecture, and all. Friday morning at half past nine I presented myself at Mr. Bancroft's door, 90 Eaton Square, which was opened by Mr. Bancroft himself ! in the midst of servants whom that man of eager manners thrust aside, saying that he would open his own door for me. He was full of goodness and of talk. . . . Mrs. Ban- croft appeared, and we rode in her carriage to Mr. Rogers' house. . . . Mr. Rogers received us with cold, quiet, indiscriminate politeness, and enter- tained us with abundance of anecdote, which Mrs. Bancroft very skilfully drew out of him, about peo- ple more or less interesting to me. Scott, Words- worth, Byron, Wellington, Talleyrand, Mme. de Stael, Lafayette, Fox, Burke, and crowds of high men and women had talked and feasted in these
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rooms in which we sat, and which are decorated with every precious work. ... I think it must be the chief private show of London, this man's collec- tion. But I will not bore you with any more particu- lars. From this house Mrs. Bancroft carried me to the cloister of Westminster Abbey and to the Ab- bey itself, and then insisted on completing her boun- ties by carrying me in her coach to Carlyle's door at Chelsea, a very long way. ... At five P. M. yes- terday, after spending four complete days with my friends, I took the fast train for Liverpool, and came hither, 212 miles, in six hours; which is nearly twice our railway speed. In Liverpool I drank tea last Saturday night with James Marti- neau, and heard him preach on Sunday night last. He is a sincere, sensible, good man, and though greatly valued as a preacher, yet I thought him su- perior to his books and his preaching. I have seen Mr. Ireland, also, at Manchester on my way to London, and his friends. It seems I am to read six lectures in this town in three weeks, and at the same time three lectures in each week in Manches- ter, on other evenings. When this service is ended I may have as many new engagements as I like, they tell me. I am to begin at Manchester next Tuesday evening.
November 1, Tuesday evening. I am heartily tired of Liverpool. I am oppressed by the seeing of such multitudes : there is a fierce strength here
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in all the streets ; the men are bigger and solider far than our people, more stocky, both men and women, and with a certain fixedness and determi- nation in each person's air, that discriminates them from the sauntering gait and roving eyes of Amer- icans. In America you catch the eye of every one you meet; here you catch no eye, almost. The axes of an Englishman's eyes are united to his backbone. . . . Yesterday morning I got your wel- come letter (by Mr. Ireland). I am greatly con- tented to know that all is so well with you. . . . Ever affectionately yours, Waldo E.
In a fragment, apparently a rough draft of some letter at this time, he says : —
" I had good talk with Carlyle last night. He says over and over for months, for years, the same thing. Yet his guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice, and he too says that there is properly no religion in England. He is quite contemptuous about Kunst also, in Germans, or English, or Americans. . . . His sneers and scoffs are thrown in every direction. He breaks every sentence with a scoffing laugh, — ' windbag,' ' monkey,' ' donkey,' ' bladder ; ' and let him describe whom he will, it is always ' poor fellow.' I said : « What a fine fellow are you, to bespatter the whole world with this oil of vitriol ! ' 'No man,' he replied, ' speaks truth to
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me.' I said : ' See what a crowd of friends listen to and admire you.' ' Yes, they come to hear me, and they read what I write ; but not one of them has the smallest intention of doing these things."
Manchester, December 1, 1847. Dear Lidian, — What can be the reason that I have no letter by this Caledonia which has arrived ? It is just possible that letters have gone to London and back to Liverpool, and will reach me to-night. Care of Alexander Ireland, Esq., Examiner Office, Manchester, is still for the present the best ad- dress. You cannot write too often or too largely. After January 1, I believe there is a steamer once a week, and if you will enclose anything to Abel Adams, he will find the right mail-bag. I trust you and the children are well, — that you are well, and the children are well, — two facts, and not one; two facts highly important to an exile, you will be- lieve. Ah ! perhaps you should see the tragic spec- tacles which these streets show, — these Manchester and those Liverpool streets, by day and by night, — to know how much of happiest circumstance, how much of safety, of dignity, and of opportunity, belongs to us so easily, that is ravished from this population. Woman is cheap and vile in England, it is tragical to see ; childhood, too, I see oftenest in the state of absolute beggary. My dearest little Edie, to tell you the truth, costs me many a penny,
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day by day. I cannot go up the street but I shall see some woman in rags, with a little creature just of Edie's size and age, but in coarsest ragged clothes and barefooted, stepping beside her : and I look curiously into her Edie's face, with some ter- ror lest it should resemble mine, and the far-off Edie wins from me the halfpence for this near one. Bid Ellen and Edie thank God they were born in New England, and bid them speak the truth, and do the right forever and ever, and I hope they and theirs will not stand barefooted in the mud on a bridge in the rain all day to beg of passengers. But beggary is only the beginning and the sign of sorrow and evil here.
You are to know in general that I am doing well enough in health and in my work. I have, which is a principal thing, read two new lectures in the last two weeks : one on Books, or a course of reading ; and the other on the Superlative, which was my lecture on Hafiz and my Persian readings. The next new one I get out will be the Natural Aristocracy, or some such thing.
I have had the finest visit to Mrs. Paulet, at Seaforth House, near Liverpool, where I was lodged in Canning's chamber in a grand chateau ; also a visit to be thankful for to Mr. Kathbone at Green- bank.
Birmingham, December 16, 1847.
Dear Lidian : . . . I find very kind friends
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here, and many such. I have even given up my caprice of not going to private houses, and now scarcely go to any other. At Nottingham I was the guest on four nights of four different friends. At Derby I spent two nights with Mr. Birch, Mr. Alcott's friend. Here also I am hospitably re- ceived ; and at towns which I have promised to visit 1 have accepted invitations from unknown hosts. . . . The newspapers here report my lectures (and London papers reprint) so fully that they are no longer repeatable, and I must dive deeper into the bag and bring up older ones, or write new ones, or cease to read. Yet there is great advan- tage to me in this journeying about in this fashion. I see houses, manufactories, halls, churches, land- scape, and men. There is also great vexation. At any moment I may turn my back on it and go to London ; and, if it were not winter, might embark and come home. So give my love to mother, — to whom you must send all my letters, for I do not write to her, — and say I much doubt whether I go to France. Love to all the darlings at home, whom I daily and nightly behold. I am much disap- pointed that no steamer yet arrives from you; it is overdue by a day, or two, or three. I dare not begin to name the friends near and nearest in these lines, they are so many and so loved, but I have yet no letter from Elizabeth H., and none from George Bradford. Tell George that I respect the
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English always the more, the sensible, handsome, powerful race ; they are a population of lords, and if one king should die, there are a thousand in the street quite fit to succeed him. But I shall have letters from you, I trust, to-morrow, so good-night.
W.
Alexander Ireland approves himself the king of all friends and helpful agents ; the most active, un- weariable, imperturbable. ... A wonderful place is England ; the mechanical might and organiza- tions it is oppressive to behold. I ride everywhere as on a cannon-ball (though cushioned and com- forted in every manner), high and low, over rivers and towns, through mountains in tunnels of three miles and more, at twice the speed and with half the motion of our cars, and read quietly the Times newspaper, which seems to have mechanized the world for my occasions.
Manchester, December 25, 1847. Dear Lidian, — I did not receive your letters by the last steamer until the moment when my own must be forwarded, so that I could not write the shortest note to Mrs. Ripley, nor to you. I shall write to her a letter to accompany this.1 Sudden and premature and shattering so many happy plans
1 Reverend Samuel Ripley died very suddenly soon after his re- moval to Concord.
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as his death does, yet there was so much health and sunshine and will and power to come at good ends in him that nothing painful or mournful will at- tach to his name. He will be sure to be remem- bered as living and serving, and not as suffering. I am very sorry that I should not have been at home, for he, who was so faithful to all the claims of kindred, should have had troops of blood-rela- tions to honor him around his grave. I think often how serious is his loss to mother. I remem- ber him almost as long as I can remember her, and, from my father's death in my early boyhood, he has always been an important friend to her and her children. You know how generous he was to me and to my brothers in our youth, at college and afterwards. He never ceased to be so, and he was the same friend to many others that he was to us. I am afraid we hardly thanked him ; it was so natural to him to interest himself for other people that he could not help it. And whenever or wher- ever we shall now think of him, we shall see him engaged in that way. . . . You must see Mrs. Rip- ley as much as you can. We cannot afford to live as far from her (in habits, I mean) as we have done. ... I am a wanderer on the face of this island, and am so harried by this necessity of read- ing lectures — which, if accepted, must be accepted in manner and quantity not desirable — that I shall not now for a fortnight or three weeks have time
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to write any good gossip, you may be sure. What reconciles me to the clatter and routine is the very excellent opportunity it gives me to see England. I see men and things in each town in a close and domestic way. I see the best of the people (hith- erto never the proper aristocracy, which is a stra- tum of society quite out of sight and out of mind here on all ordinary occasions) — the merchants, the manufacturers, the scholars, the thinkers, men and women — in a very sincere and satisfactory conversation. I am everywhere a guest. Never call me solitary or Ishmaelite again. I began here by refusing invitations to stay at private houses, but now I find an invitation in every town, and accept it, to be at home. I have now visited Pres- ton, Leicester, Chesterfield, Birmingham, since I returned from Nottingham and Derby, of which I wrote you, and have found the same profuse kindness in all. My admiration and my love of the English rise day by day. I receive, too, a great many private letters, offering me house and home in places yet unvisited. You must not think that any change has come over me, and that my awkward and porcupine manners are ameliorated by English air ; but these civilities are all offered to that deceiving Writer who, it seems, has really beguiled many young people here, as he did at home, into some better hope than he could realize for them. . . . To-day is Christmas, and being
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just returned yesterday p. m. from a long circuit, I am bent on spending it quite domestically, and Mr. Ireland and Mr. Cameron are coming pres- ently to dine with me. On Wednesday I go spin- ning again to Worcester, and then presently to those Yorkshire engagements which at home were first heard of. Parliament is now in holidays again until February, and of course London empty. But it looks as if I should not arrive there for any residence until March. I am often tempted to slip out of my trade here, by some shortest method, and go to London for peace. . . . At Leicester I just missed seeing Gardiner, author of the " Music of Nature." At Chesterfield I dined in company with Stephenson, the old engineer who built the first locomotive, and who is, in every way, one of the most reniai'kable men I have seen in England. I do not know but I shall accept some day his reit- erated invitations " to go to his house and stay a few days, and see Chatsworth and other things." . . . Every word you send me from the dear chil- dren is excellent. Our Spartan-Buddhist Henry is pere or bonhomme malgre lui, and it is a great comfort daily to think of him there with you. . . . You ask for newspapers, but you do not want re- ports of my lectures, which they give too abundant- ly ; nor the attacks of the clergymen upon them ; nor the pale though brave defences of my friends : there are such things, but I do not read them.
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When there is, if there should be, anything really good, I will send it. But first there must be some- thing really good of mine to build it upon. Ah me ! Elizabeth has written the best and fullest of letters, and I dare not say that I shall write to her by the going steamer. Tell Ellen that I fear I shall not see Tennyson, for, though Dr. John Car- ry le writes me yesterday that he has just met him at his brother's, he is going to Rome, and I hardly think I shall follow him there. He has not three children who say all these things which my wife records. . . . Elizabeth says that aunt Mary thinks to come to Concord ; by all means, seduce her into the house, and make her forget, if it be possible, her absurd resolutions and jealousies. . . . Here is no winter thus far, but such days as we have at the beginning of November. I am as well in body as ever, and not worse in spirit than when I am spinning to winter lectures at home. But mortal man must always spin somewhere, and I bow to my destiny.
TO MISS ELIZABETH HOAR.
Manchester, December 28, 1847.
Dear Elizabeth, — You are the best of sis- ters, and good by yourself and without provocation. . . . How generously you give me trust for indefi- nite periods ! You must believe, too, that I appre- ciate this magnanimity, though too dull and heavy
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to make a sign. The hour will come and the world, wherein we shall quite easily render that account of ourselves which now we never render, and shall be very real brothers and sisters. . . . When I see my muscular neighbors day by day I say, Had I been born in England, with but one chip of Eng- lish oak in my willowy constitution ! . . . I have seen many good, some bright, and some powerful people here, but none yet to fall in love with, nei- ther man nor woman. I have, however, some youthful correspondence — you know my failing — with some friendly young gentlemen in different parts of Britain. I keep all their letters, and you shall see. At Edinburgh I have affectionate invi- tations from Dr. Samuel Brown, of whom I believe you know something. He saw Margaret F. At Newcastle, from Mr. Crawshay, who refused the tests at Cambridge after reading my essays ! as he writes me. And so with small wisdom the world is moved, as of old. In the press of my trifles I have ceased to write to Carlyle, and I hear nothing from him. You have read his paper in Fraser ? 1 He told me the same story at his house, but it reads incredible, and everybody suspects some mystification, — some people fancying that Carlyle himself is trying his hand that way ! But Carlyle takes Cromwell sadly to heart. When I told him
1 December, 1847. Thirty-Jive Unpublished Letters of Oliver Cromwell. Communicated by Thomas Carlyle.
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that he must not expect that people as old as I could look at Cromwell as he did, he turned quite fiercely upon me. ... If I do not find time for another note, am I the less your constant brother ?
Waldo.
Manchester, January 8, 1848. Dear Lidian : . . . There is opportunity enough to read over again a hundred times yet these musty old lectures, and when I go to a new audience I say, It is a grossness to read these things which you have, fully reported, in so many newspapers. Let me read a new manuscript never yet published in England. But no, the directors invariably refuse. " We have heard of these, advertised these ; there can be no other." It really seems like China and Japan. But the great profession and mystery of Bards and Trouveurs does hereby suffer damage in my person, and I fear no decent man in London will speak to me when I come thither ; to say nothing of the absolute suspension and eclipse which all my faculties suffer in this routine, so that, at whatever perils, I must end it. I have had a letter from George Bradford, very good to read ; never one from Parker or any of the 3fassachusetts Quarterly men. Their journal is of a good spirit, and has much good of Agassiz, but no intellectual tone such as is imperatively wanted ; no literary skill, even, and, without a lof-
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tier note than any in this number, it will sink into a North American at once. In a day or two I shall have good news again from you, and news from the nursery and school, ever heartily wel- come. ... I hope you keep — you must keep — a guest-chamber with a fire this winter and every winter, as last winter we had none. I may send you a young Mr. Stansfield, a Leeds merchant, who offers to carry letters for me, and the nephew of Mr. Stansfield, of Halifax, who showed me great hospitality ; and it would chill my bones to believe that he passed a New England winter night without fire, so unprepared by the habits of Eng- lish at home. I shall perhaps say to Mr. S., if he wishes to go into the country and look, you will gladly give him a night's lodging. And if he comes, — or any Englishman, — give him bread and wine before he goes to bed, for these people universally eat supper at nine or ten P. M., and there- fore must be hungry in Concord ; which would make me hungry all my life, they have been so careful of me. Farewell. Yours, W.
Manchester, January 26, 1848. Dear Lidian : . . . I have been at York and at Flaraborough Head since I wrote you last. I have no special notes to write of these places — and persons ; persons are like stars, which always keep afar. No angel alights on my orb, — such
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presences being always reserved for angels. But I was proceeding to tell you that I am now spend- ing a few peaceful days at Manchester, after rack- eting about Yorkshire in the last weeks. I was disgusted with reading lectures, and wrote to all parties that I would read no more ; but in vain. Secretaries had misunderstood, had promised and pledged me. I myself had not forbidden it. Did not Mr. E. remember ? etc., etc. And at last I have consented to drudge on a little longer after this peaceful fortnight is ended, and shall go to Edinburgh on the 7th February, and end all my northern journeys on the 25th. Then I return hither and proceed to London to spend March and April, and (unless I go to Paris) May also. I am writing in these very days a lecture which I will try at Edinburgh, on Aristocracy. The other night at Sheffield I made shift, with some old papers and some pages suggested lately by the Agassiz reports, to muster a discourse on Science. Last night I heard a lecture from Mr. Cameron, whom I have heretofore mentioned, on some poetic and literary matters. He talked, without note or card or com- pass, for his hour, on Headers and Reading ; very manly, very gaily ; not quite deeply enough, — it did not cost him enough, — yet what would I not do or suffer to buy that ability ? " To each his own." A manly ability, a general sufficiency, is the genius of the English. They have not, I think,
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the special and acute fitness to their employment that Americans have, but a man is a man here ; a quite costly and respectable production, in his own and in all other eyes. To-morrow evening I am to attend what is called the " Free-Trade Banquet," when Cobden, Bright, Fox, and the free-traders are to speak. . . . Peace be with all your house- hold ; with the little and with the larger members ! Many kisses, many blessings, to the little and the least. I am glad the children had their good visit to Boston and Roxbury ; but I would keep them at home in winter. You speak of Ellen's letter ; surely I wrote one to Edith also, and if Eddie will wait, or will only learn to read his own name, he shall have one too, at least a picture. So with love to all, Yours, W.
Gateshead Ikon Works, February 10, 1848. ... I have written a lecture on Natural Aris- tocracy, which I am to read in Edinburgh to-mor- row, and interpolated besides some old webs with patches of new tapestry, contrary to old law. The day before leaving Manchester we had a company of friends assembled at Dr. Hodgson's house and mine : two from Nottingham, Neuberg and Sutton ; Mr. Gill from Birmingham ; one from Hudders- fielcl : and Ireland, Cameron, Espinasse, and Bal- lantyne from Manchester. I gave them all a din- ner on Sunday. These are all men of merit, and
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of various virtues and ingenuities. I have been once more at Mr. Stansfield's in Halifax ; and yes- terday, at Barnard Castle, I found myself in the scene of Scott's Rokeby. ... I find here at New- castle a most accomplished gentleman in Mr. Craw- shay, at whose counting-room in his iron works I am now sitting, after much conference on many fine and useful arts. . . . My reception here is really a premium often on authorship ; and if Henry [Thoreau] means one day to come to Eng- land, let him not delay another day to print his book. Or if he do not, let him print it.
Perth, February 21, 1848. Dear Lidian : . . . All these touching anec- dotes and now drawings and letters of my darlings duly come, and to my great joy, and ought to draw answers to every letter and almost to every piece of information. I cannot answer but with most ungrateful brevity, but you shall have a short chronicle of my late journeys. Well, then, I came from Newcastle to Edinburgh [and after some mischance, delaying him on the way, reached the lecture-room a quarter of an hour late]. It was really a brilliant assembly, and contained many re- markable men and women, as 1 afterwards found. After lecture I went home with my friend, Dr. [Samuel] Brown, to his lodgings, and have been his guest all the time I was in Edinburgh. There
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I found David Scott, the painter, a sort of Bronson Alcott with easel and brushes, a sincere great man, grave, silent, contemplative, and plain. . . . The next day I was presented to Wilson (Christopher North), to Mrs. Jeffrey, and especially to Mrs. Crowe, a very distinguished good person here. ... I looked all around this most picturesque of cities, and in the evening met Mr. Robert Cham- bers (author of the " Vestiges of Creation ") by appointment at Mr. Ireland's (father of Alexan- der), at supper. The next day at twelve, I visited by appointment Lord Jeffrey, . . . and then to Mrs. Crowe's at 5.30 to dine with De Quincey and David Scott and Dr. Brown. De Quincey is a small old man of seventy years, with a very handsome face, and a face, too, expressing the highest refine- ment ; a very gentle old man, speaking with the greatest deliberation and softness, and so refined in speech and manners as to make quite indifferent his extremely plain and poor dress. For the old man, summoned by message on Saturday by Mrs. Crowe to this dinner, had walked on this stormy, muddy Sunday ten miles, from Lass Wade, where his cottage is, and was not yet dry ; and though Mrs. Crowe's hospitality is comprehensive and mi- nute, yet she had no pantaloons in her house. Here De Quincey is very serene and happy among just these friends where I found him ; for he has suffered in all ways, and lived the life of a wretch
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for many years, but Samuel Brown and Mrs. C. and one or two more have saved him from himself, and defended him from bailiffs and a certain Fury of a Mrs. Macbold (I think it is), whom he yet shudders to remember, and from opium ; and he is now clean, clothed, and in his right mind. . . . He talked of many matters, all easily and well, but chiefly social and literary; and did not venture into any voluminous music. When they first agreed, at my request, to invite him to dine, I fan- cied some figure like the organ of York Minster would appear. In tete-a-tete, I am told, he some- times soars and indulges himself, but not often in company. He invited me to dine with him on the following Saturday at Lass Wade, where he lives with his three daughters, and I accepted. The next day I breakfasted with David Scott, who in- sists on sittings for a portrait ; and sat to him for an hour or two. . . . This man is a noble stoic, sitting apart here among his rainbow allegories, very much respected by all superior persons. Of him I shall have much more to say. At one o'clock I went to Glasgow, and read my story there to an assembly of two or three thousand people, in a vast lighted cavern called the City Hall. . . . Next day I dined at Edinburgh with Robert Chambers, and found also his brother William. . . . This day I went to the University to see Professor Wilson, and hear him lecture (on Moral Philosophy) to his
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class. We, that is always Dr. B. and I, went first into his private retiring-room and had a pretty long talk with him. He is a big man, gross almost as
S , and tall, with long hair and much beard,
dressed large and slouching. His lecture had really no merit. It was on the association of ideas, and was a very dull sermon, without a text, but pronounced with great bodily energy, sometimes his mouth all foam ; he reading, the class writing, and I at last waiting a little impatiently for it to be over. No trait was there of Christopher North ; not a ray. Afterwards we went to Sir William Ham- ilton's lecture on Logic. He is the great man of the college, master of his science, and in every way truly respected here. ... In the evening, at Mr. Stoddart's, I saw George Combe, who had called on me and had invited me to breakfast. . . . Next morning I breakfasted with Mr. Combe. Mrs. Combe is the daughter of Mrs. Siddons, whom she more and more resembles, they all say, in these days. Combe talked well and sensibly about America. But, for the most part, there is no elas- ticity about Scotch sense ; it is calculating and precise, but has no future. Then to Glasgow, and spent the night at Professor Nichol's observatory, well appointed and rarely placed, but a cloudy night and no moon or star. I saw, next day, the Saut Market and oh ! plenty of women (fishwives and others) and children, barefooted, barelegged,
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on this cold 18th of February, in the streets. . . . At Edinburgh again I dined with Mr. Nichol, brother of the Professor, and in the evening, by invitation, visited Lord Jeffrey, with Mrs. Crowe. . . . Jeffrey, as always, very talkative, very dis- putatious, very French ; every sentence interlarded with French phrases