Part 32

“One hears everywhere anecdotes of late, very late, remorse overtaking the hardened sinners and just saving them from final reprobation.”

Journal, 1864-65. “Why talk of President Lincoln’s equality of manners to the elegant or titled men with whom Everett or others saw him? A sincerely upright and intelligent man as he was, placed in the chair, has no need to think of his manners or appearance. His work day by day educates him rapidly and to the best. He exerts the enormous power of this continent in every hour, in every conversation, in every act;—thinks and decides under this pressure, forced to see the vast and various bearings of the measures he adopts: _he_ cannot palter, he cannot but carry a grace beyond his own, a dignity, by means of what he drops, e. g., all pretension and trick, and arrives, of course, at a simplicity, which is the perfection of manners.”

HARVARD COMMEMORATION SPEECH

It was a proud and sad, and yet a joyful day, when Harvard welcomed back those of her sons who had survived the war. All who could come were there, from boys to middle-aged men, from private soldier to general, some strong and brown, and others worn and sick and maimed, but all on that day proud and happy. The names of the ninety-three of Harvard’s sons who had fallen in the war were inscribed on six tablets and placed where all could see.

In the church, where then the college exercises were held, the venerable ex-president, Dr. Walker, read the Scriptures, Rev. Phillips Brooks offered prayer, a hymn by Robert Lowell was sung, and the address was made by the Rev. George Putnam. In the afternoon the alumni, civic and military, with their guests, were marshalled by Colonel Henry Lee into a great pavilion behind Harvard Hall, where they dined. Hon. Charles G. Loring presided; Governor Andrew, General Meade, General Devens and other distinguished soldiers spoke, and poems by Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe were read. The president of the day called on Mr. Emerson as representative of the poets and scholars whose thoughts had been an inspiration to Harvard’s sons in the field.

[179] _Page 344, note 1._ This was the mother of Robert Gould Shaw, who lost his life a few months later, leading his dusky soldiers up the slopes of Fort Wagner. It was in his honor that Mr. Emerson wrote in the “Voluntaries,”—

Stainless soldier on the walls. Knowing this,—and knows no more,— Whoever fights, whoever falls, Justice conquers evermore, Justice after as before,— And he who battles on her side, God, though he were ten times slain, Crowns him victor glorified, Victor over death and pain.

[180] _Page 345, note 1._

“O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more! ... What words divine of lover or of poet Could tell our love and make thee know it, Among the Nations bright beyond compare? What were our lives without thee? What all our lives to save thee? We reck not what we gave thee; We will not dare to doubt thee, But ask whatever else, and we will dare!”

Lowell, “Commemoration Ode.”

ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT IN CONCORD

In 1836, the “Battle Monument” to commemorate “the First organized Resistance to British Aggression” had been erected “in Gratitude to God and Love of Freedom” on “the spot where the first of the Enemy fell in the War which gave Independence to the United States.” Thirty-three years later, on the Nineteenth day of April, with its threefold patriotic memories for Concord,[K] the people gathered on the village common to see their new memorial to valor. The inscription on one of its bronze tablets declared that

THE TOWN OF CONCORD BUILDS THIS MONUMENT IN HONOR OF THE BRAVE MEN WHOSE NAMES IT BEARS: AND RECORDS WITH GRATEFUL PRIDE THAT THEY FOUND HERE A BIRTHPLACE, HOME OR GRAVE.

The inscription on the other tablet is the single sentence,—

THEY DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE WAR OF THE REBELLION

with the forty-four names.

Hon. John S. Keyes as President of the Day opened the ceremonies with a short address. The Rev. Grindall Reynolds made the prayer. An Ode written by Mr. George B. Bartlett was sung to the tune of _Auld Lang Syne_. Hon. Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, the Chairman of the Monument Committee, read the Report, in itself an eloquent and moving speech. This was followed by Mr. Emerson’s Address. Mr. F. B. Sanborn contributed a Poem, and afterwards short speeches were made by Senator George S. Boutwell, William Schouler, the efficient Adjutant-General of the State, and by Colonels Parker and Marsh respectively of the Thirty-second and Forty-seventh regiments of Massachusetts Volunteers, in which the Concord companies had served. The exercises were concluded by the reading of a poem by Mr. Sampson Mason, an aged citizen of the town.

It was a beautiful spring day. The throng was too large for the town hall, so, partly sheltered from the afternoon sun by the town elm, thickening with its brown buds, they gathered around the town-house steps, which served as platform for the speakers.

[181] _Page 351, note 1._ Compare, in the _Poems_, the lines in “The Problem” on the adoption by Nature of man’s devotional structures.

[182] _Page 352, note 1._

Great men in the Senate sate, Sage and hero, side by side, Building for their sons the State, Which they shall rule with pride. They forbore to break the chain Which bound the dusky tribe, Checked by the owners’ fierce disdain, Lured by “Union” as the bribe. Destiny sat by, and said, ‘Pang for pang your seed shall pay, Hide in false peace your coward head, I bring round the harvest day.’

[183] _Page 353, note 1._ Wordsworth’s Sonnet, No. xiv., in “Poems dedicated to National Independence,” part ii.

[184] _Page 355, note 1._ Mr. Emerson had in mind the astonishing fertility of resource in difficulties shown by the Eighth Massachusetts Regiment in the march from Annapolis to Washington, as told by Major Theodore Winthrop in “New York Seventh Regiment. Our march to Washington” (_Atlantic Monthly_ June, 1861). See “Resources,” _Letters and Social Aims_, p. 143.

Judge Hoar in his report on this occasion said, “Two names [on the tablet] recall the unutterable horrors of Andersonville, and will never suffer us to forget that our armies conquered barbarism as well as treason.”

[185] _Page 356, note 1._ Between 1856 and 1859 John Brown and other Free-State men, Mr. Whitman, Mr. Nute and Preacher Stewart, had told the sad story of Kansas to the Concord people and received important aid.

[186] _Page 358, note 1._ This was Captain Charles E. Bowers, a shoemaker, and Mr. Emerson’s next neighbor, much respected by him, whose forcible speaking at anti-slavery and Kansas aid meetings he often praised. When the war came, Mr. Bowers, though father of a large family, and near the age-limit of service, volunteered as a private in the first company, went again as an officer in the Thirty-second Massachusetts Regiment, and served with credit in the Army of the Potomac until discharged for disability.

[187] _Page 358, note 2._ George L. Prescott, a lumber dealer and farmer, later Colonel of the Thirty-second Regiment, U. S. V. He was of the same stock as Colonel William Prescott, the hero of Bunker Hill.

Judge Hoar said of him, “An only son, an only brother, a husband and a father, with no sufficient provision made for his wife and children, he had everything to make life dear and desirable, and to require others to hesitate for him, but he did not hesitate himself.”

[188] _Page 361, note 1._ Blaise de Montluc, a Gascon officer of remarkable valor, skill and fidelity, under Francis I. and several succeeding kings of France.

[189] _Page 365, note 1._ It was well said by Judge Hoar: “His instinctive sympathies taught him from the outset, what many higher in command were so slow and so late to learn, that it is the first duty of an officer to take care of his men as much as to lead them. His character developed new and larger proportions, with new duties and larger responsibilities.”

[190] _Page 366, note 1._ The Buttricks were among the original settlers of Concord, and the family has given good account of itself for nearly two hundred and seventy years, and still owns the farm on the hill whence Major John led the yeomen of Middlesex down to force the passage of the North Bridge. Seven representatives of that family of sturdy democrats volunteered at the beginning of the War of the Rebellion. Two were discharged as physically unfit, but the others served in army or navy with credit, and two of them lost their lives in the service. Alden Buttrick had fought the Border Ruffians in Kansas. Humphrey, a mason by trade, but a mighty hunter, left his wife and little children at the first call, and was first sergeant of Prescott’s company. Mr. Emerson omits to state that he was commissioned lieutenant in the Forty-seventh Regiment the following year. His service, especially as captain in the Fifty-ninth Regiment, was arduous and highly creditable.

[191] _Page 368, note 1._ Edward O. Shepard, who had been master of the Concord High School, afterwards a successful lawyer, had an excellent war record, and rose to be lieutenant-colonel of the Thirty-second Regiment.

George Lauriat left the gold-beater’s shop of Ephraim W. Bull (the producer of the Concord Grape) to go to the war in Concord’s first company. Modest and brave, he became an excellent officer and returned captain and brevet-major of the Thirty-second Regiment.

[192] _Page 368, note 2._ Francis Buttrick, younger brother of Humphrey, a handsome and attractive youth, had lived at Mr. Emerson’s home to carry on the farm for him.

[193] _Page 375, note 1._ These three were Asa, John and Samuel Melvin. Asa died of wounds received before Petersburg; both his brothers of sickness, Samuel after long suffering in the prison-pen at Andersonville. They came of an old family of hunter-farmers in Concord. Close by the wall next the street of the Old Hill Burying Ground is the stone in memory of one of their race, whose “Martial Genius early engaged him in his Country’s cause under command of the valiant Captain Lovel in that hazardous Enterprise where our hero, his Commander, with many brave and valiant Men bled and died.”

[194] _Page 379, note 1._ The writer of this letter, a quiet, handsome school-boy the year before the war broke out, lived just across the brook behind Mr. Emerson’s house. He was an excellent soldier in the Thirty-second Regiment, and reënlisted as a veteran in 1864.

EDITORS’ ADDRESS, MASSACHUSETTS QUARTERLY REVIEW

Mr. Cabot, in his Memoir, says that just before Mr. Emerson sailed for Europe in 1847, Theodore Parker, Dr. S. G. Howe and others (Mr. Cabot was one of these) met to consider whether there could not be “a new quarterly review which should be more alive than was the _North American_ to the questions of the day.” Charles Sumner and Thoreau are mentioned as having been present. Colonel Higginson says that Mr. Parker wished it to be “the _Dial_ with a beard.” It was decided that the undertaking should be made. Mr. Parker wished Mr. Emerson to be editor, but he declined. A committee was chosen—Emerson, Parker and Howe—to draft a manifesto to the public. Mr. Emerson wrote the paper here printed, but when the first number of the Review came to him in England, was annoyed at finding his name set down as one of the editors. I think that the only paper he ever wrote for it, beyond the “Address to the Public,” was a notice of “Some Oxford Poetry,”—the recently published poems of John Sterling and Arthur Hugh Clough.

Theodore Parker was the real editor. During its three years of life the _Massachusetts Quarterly_—now hard to obtain—was a brave, independent and patriotic magazine, and, like the _Dial_, gives the advancing thought of the time in literary and social matters, and also in religion and politics.

[195] _Page 384, note 1._ Plutarch tells that Cineas, the wise counsellor of Pyrrhus, king of the Epirots, asked his monarch when he set forth to conquer Rome what he should do afterwards. Pyrrhus said he could then become master of Sicily. “And then?” asked Cineas. The king told of further dreams of conquest of Carthage and Libya. “But when we have conquered all that, what are we to do then?” “Why then, my friend,” said Pyrrhus, laughing, “we will take our ease, and drink and be merry.” Cineas, having brought him thus far, replied, “And what hinders us from drinking and taking our ease now, when we have already those things in our hands at which we propose to arrive through seas of blood, through infinite toils and dangers, innumerable calamities which we must both cause and suffer?”

[196] _Page 386, note 1._ “To live without duties is obscene.”—“Aristocracy,” _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_.

[197] _Page 389, note 1._ This was shortly after the annexation of Texas, and during the successful progress of the Mexican War. The slave power, although awakening opposition by its insatiable demands, was still on the increase. Charles Sumner, though a rising statesman, had not yet entered Congress.

[198] _Page 389, note 2._

For Destiny never swerves, Nor yields to men the helm.

“The World-Soul,” _Poems_.

ADDRESS TO KOSSUTH

On a beautiful day in May, 1852, Louis Kossuth, the exiled governor of Hungary, who had come to this country to solicit her to interfere in European politics on behalf of his oppressed people, visited the towns of Lexington and Concord, and spoke to a large assemblage in each place.

Kossuth was met at the Lexington line by a cavalcade from Concord, who escorted him to the village, where he received a cordial welcome. The town hall was crowded with people. The Hon. John S. Keyes presided, and Mr. Emerson made the address of welcome.

Kossuth, in his earnest appeal for American help, addressed Mr. Emerson personally in the following passages, after alluding to Concord’s part in the struggle for Freedom in 1775:—

“It is strange, indeed, how every incident of the present bears the mark of a deeper meaning around me. There is meaning in the very fact that it is you, sir, by whom the representative of Hungary’s ill-fated struggle is so generously welcomed ... to the shrine of martyrs illumined by victory. You are wont to dive into the mysteries of truth and disclose mysteries of right to the eyes of men. Your honored name is Emerson; and Emerson was the name of a man who, a minister of the gospel, turned out with his people, on the 19th of April of eternal memory, when the alarm-bell first was rung.... I take hold of that augury, sir. Religion and Philosophy, you blessed twins,—upon you I rely with my hopes to America. Religion, the philosophy of the heart, will make the Americans generous; and philosophy, the religion of the mind, will make the Americans wise; and all that I claim is a generous wisdom and a wise generosity.”

[199] _Page 398, note 1._ I am unable to find the source of these lines.

[200] _Page 399, note 1._ For the power of minorities, see “Progress of Culture,” _Letters and Social Aims_, pp. 216-219, and “Considerations by the Way,” _Conduct of Life_, pp. 248, 249.

WOMAN

Perhaps the pleasantest word Mr. Emerson ever spoke about women was what he said at the end of the war: “Everybody has been wrong in his guess except good women, who never despair of an ideal right.”

Mr. Emerson’s habitual treatment of women showed his real feeling towards them. He held them to their ideal selves by his courtesy and honor. When they called him to come to their aid, he came. Men must not deny them any right that they desired; though he never felt that the finest women would care to assume political functions in the same way that men did.

Mr. Cabot gives in his Memoir (p. 455) a letter which Mr. Emerson wrote, five years before this speech was made, to a lady who asked him to join in a call for a Woman’s Suffrage Convention. His distaste for the scheme clearly appears, and though perhaps felt in a less degree as time went on, never quite disappeared. At the end of the notes on this address is given the greater part of a short speech which he wrote many years later, but which he seems never to have delivered. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson is reported in the _Woman’s Journal_ as having said at the New England Women’s Club, May 16, 1903, that Mr. Cabot put into his Memoir what Mr. Emerson said in his early days, when he was opposed to woman’s suffrage (the letter above alluded to), and “left out all those warm and cordial sentences that he wrote later in regard to it, culminating in his assertion that, whatever might be said of it as an abstract question, all his measures would be carried sooner if women could vote.” This last assertion, though not in the Memoir, Mr. Cabot printed in its place in the present address, and the only other address on the subject which is known to exist, Mr. Cabot did not print probably because Mr. Emerson never delivered it.

[201] _Page 406, note 1._ This passage from the original is omitted:—

“A woman of genius said, ‘I will forgive you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.’”

[202] _Page 411, note 1._ This sentence originally ended, “And their convention should be holden in a sculpture-gallery.”

[203] _Page 412, note 1._ From _The Angel in the House_, by Coventry Patmore.

[204] _Page 413, note 1._ Milton, _Paradise Lost_.

Because of the high triumph of Humility, his favorite virtue, Mr. Emerson, though commonly impatient of sad stories, had always a love for the story of Griselda, as told by Chaucer, alluded to below. In spite of its great length, he would not deny it a place in his collection _Parnassus_.

[205] _Page 413, note 2._ From “Love and Humility,” by Henry More (1614-87).

[206] _Page 414, note 1._ These anecdotes followed in the original speech:—

“‘I use the Lord of the Kaaba; what is the Kaaba to me?’ said Rabia. ‘I am so near to God that his word, “Whoso nears me by a span, to him come I a mile,” is true for me.’ A famed Mahometan theologian asked her, ‘How she had lifted herself to this degree of the love of God?’ She replied, ‘Hereby, that all things which I had found, I have lost in him.’ The other said, ‘In what way or method hast thou known him?’ She replied, ‘O Hassan! thou knowest him after a certain art and way, but I without art and way.’ When once she was sick, three famed theologians came to her, Hassan Vasri, Malek and Balchi. Hassan said, ‘He is not upright in his prayer who does not endure the blows of his Lord.’ Balchi said, ‘He is not upright in his prayer who does not rejoice in the blows of his Lord.’ But Rabia, who in these words detected some trace of egoism, said, ‘He is not upright in his prayer, who, when he beholds his Lord, forgets not that he is stricken.’”

[207] _Page 415, note 1._ See “Clubs,” in _Society and Solitude_, p. 243.

[208] _Page 417, note 1._ “The Princess” is the poem alluded to. Mr. Emerson liked it, but used to say it was sad to hear it end with, _Go home and mind your mending_.

[209] _Page 426, note 1._ The internal evidence shows that the short speech given below was written after the war. All that is important is here given. There were one or two paragraphs that essentially were the same as those of the 1855 address.

On the manuscript is written, apparently in Mr. Emerson’s hand, in pencil, “Never read,” and evidently in his hand, the title, thus:—

_Discours Manqué_

WOMAN

I consider that the movement which unites us to-day is no whim, but an organic impulse,—a right and proper inquiry,—honoring to the age. And among the good signs of the times, this is of the best.

The distinctions of the mind of Woman we all recognize; their affectionate, sympathetic, religious, oracular nature; their swifter and finer perception; their taste, or love of order and beauty, influencing or creating manners. We commonly say, Man represents Intellect; and Woman, Love. Man looks for hard truth. Woman, with her affection for goodness, benefit. Hence they are religious. In all countries and creeds the temples are filled by women, and they hold men to religious rites and moral duties. And in all countries the man—no matter how hardened a reprobate he is—likes well to have his wife a saint. It was no historic chance, but an instinct, which softened in the Middle Ages the terror of the superstitious, by gradually lifting their prayers to the Virgin Mary and so adopting the Mother of God as the efficient Intercessor. And now, when our religious traditions are so far outgrown as to require correction and reform, ’tis certain that nothing can be fixed and accepted which does not commend itself to Woman.

I suppose women feel in relation to men as ’tis said geniuses feel among energetic workers, that, though overlooked and thrust aside in the press, they outsee all these noisy masters: and we, in the presence of sensible women, feel overlooked, judged,—and sentenced.

They are better scholars than we at school, and the reason why they are not better than we twenty years later may be because men can turn their reading to account in the professions, and women are excluded from the professions.

These traits have always characterized women. We are a little vain of our women, as if we had invented them. I think we exaggerate the effect of Greek, Roman and even Oriental institutions on the character of woman. Superior women are rare anywhere, as superior men are. But the anecdotes of every country give like portraits of womanhood, and every country in its Roll of Honor has as many women as men. The high sentiment of women appears in the Hebrew, the Hindoo; in Greek women in Homer, in the tragedies, and Roman women in the histories. Their distinctive traits, grace, vivacity, and surer moral sentiment, their self-sacrifice, their courage and endurance, have in every nation found respect and admiration.

Her gifts make woman the refiner and civilizer of her mate. Civilization is her work. Man is rude and bearish in colleges, in mines, in ships, because there is no woman. Let good women go passengers in the ship, and the manners at once are mended; in schools, in hospitals, in the prairie, in California, she brings the same reform....

Her activity in putting an end to Slavery; and in serving the hospitals of the Sanitary Commission in the war, and in the labors of the Freedman’s Bureau, have opened her eyes to larger rights and duties. She claims now her full rights of all kinds,—to education, to employment, to equal laws of property. Well, now in this country we are suffering much and fearing more from the abuse of the ballot and from fraudulent and purchased votes. And now, at the moment when committees are investigating and reporting the election frauds, woman asks for her vote. It is the remedy at the hour of need. She is to purify and civilize the voting, as she has the schools, the hospitals and the drawing-rooms. For, to grant her request, you must remove the polls from the tavern and rum-shop, and build noble edifices worthy of the State, whose halls shall afford her every security for deliberate and sovereign action.