Part 33

’Tis certainly no new thing to see women interest themselves in politics. In England, in France, in Germany, Italy, we find women of influence and administrative capacity,—some Duchess of Marlborough, some Madame de Longueville, Madame Roland,—centres of political power and intrigue.... But we have ourselves seen the great political enterprise of our times, the abolition of Slavery in America, undertaken by a society whose executive committee was composed of men and women, and which held together until this object was attained. And she may well exhibit the history of that as her voucher that she is entitled to demand power which she has shown she can use so well.

’Tis idle to refuse them a vote on the ground of incompetency. I wish our masculine voting were so good that we had any right to doubt their equal discretion. They could not easily give worse votes, I think, than we do.

CONSECRATION OF SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY

Within a quarter of a mile of Concord Common was a natural amphitheatre, carpeted in late summer with a purple bloom of wild grass, and girt by a horseshoe-shaped glacial moraine clothed with noble pines and oaks. It was part of Deacon Brown’s farm, and reached by a lane, with a few houses on it, cut through a low part of the ridge of hills which sheltered the old town. When the Deacon died, the town laid out a new road to Bedford, cutting off this “Sleepy Hollow” (as the townspeople who enjoyed strolling there had named it) from the rest of the farm. Mr. John S. Keyes saw the fitness of the ground for a beautiful cemetery, and induced the town to buy it for that purpose; and as chairman of the committee, laid out the land. The people of the village—for Concord had nothing suburban about it then—gathered there one beautiful September afternoon to choose their resting-places and consecrate the ground. Mr. Emerson made the address on the slope just below the place where, beneath a great pine, the tree he loved best, he had chosen the spot for his own grave.

Much of his essay on Immortality was originally a part of this discourse, and therefore that portion is omitted here, its place in the essay being indicated.

ROBERT BURNS

It is pleasant to be able to let Dr. Holmes, who was present at the Burns Festival, speak for himself and Lowell and Judge Hoar of Mr. Emerson’s speech on that day. I have heard the Judge tell the story of his friend’s success with the same delight.

“On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns Festival, held at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial Anniversary of the poet’s birth. He spoke, after the dinner, to the great audience with such beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. Among his hearers was Mr. Lowell, who says of it that ‘every word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds.’ Judge Hoar, who was another of his hearers, says that, though he has heard many of the chief orators of his time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with, but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel.”

The strange part of all the accounts given by the hearers is that Mr. Emerson seemed to speak _extempore_, which can hardly have been so.

No account of the Festival, or Mr. Emerson’s part therein, appears in the journals, except a short page of praise of the felicitous anecdotes introduced by other after-dinner speakers.

[210] _Page 440, note 1._ Here comes out that respect for labor which affected all Mr. Emerson’s relations to the humblest people he met. In the Appendix to the _Poems_ it appears in the verses beginning,—

Said Saadi, When I stood before Hassan the camel-driver’s door.

[211] _Page 441, note 1._ Thomas Carlyle.

[212] _Page 441, note 2._ Mr. Emerson here recalls his childhood and that of his brothers, as in the passage in “Domestic Life,” in _Society and Solitude_, that has been often referred to in these notes.

[213] _Page 443, note 1._ Among some stray lecture-sheets was the following on the scholar or poet:—

“Given the insight, and he will find as many beauties and heroes and strokes of genius close by him as Dante or Shakspeare beheld. It was in a cold moor farm, in a dingy country inn, that Burns found his fancy so sprightly. You find the times and places mean. Stretch a few threads over an Æolian harp, and put it in the window and listen to what it says of the times and of the heart of Nature. You shall not believe the miracle of Nature is less, the chemical power worn out. Watch the breaking morning, or the enchantments of the sunset.”

SHAKSPEARE

The following notes on Shakspeare were written by Mr. Emerson for the celebration in Boston by the Saturday Club of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the poet’s birth.

In Mr. Cabot’s _Memoir of Emerson_, vol. ii., page 621, apropos of Mr. Emerson’s avoidance of impromptu speech on public occasions, is this statement:—

“I remember his getting up at a dinner of the Saturday Club on the Shakspeare anniversary in 1864, to which some guests had been invited, looking about him tranquilly for a minute or two, and then sitting down; serene and unabashed, but unable to say a word upon a subject so familiar to his thoughts from boyhood.”

Yet on the manuscript of this address Mr. Emerson noted that it was read at the Club’s celebration on that occasion, and at the Revere House. (“Parker’s” was the usual gathering-place of the Club.) The handwriting of this note shows that Mr. Emerson wrote it in his later years, so it is very possible that Mr. Cabot was right. Mr. Emerson perhaps forgot to bring his notes with him to the dinner, and so did not venture to speak. And the dinner may have been at “Parker’s.”

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

The Boston Society of Natural History celebrated the One Hundredth Anniversary of the birth of Humboldt. Dr. Robert C. Waterston presided at the Music Hall, where Agassiz made the address. In the evening there was a reception in Horticultural Hall. The occasion was made memorable by the Society by the founding of a Humboldt and Agassiz scholarship in the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy in Cambridge.

Poems by Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Howe were read. Professor E. J. Young and Dr. Charles T. Jackson gave reminiscences of Humboldt; Colonel Higginson, the Rev. Dr. Hedge and others spoke. Mr. Emerson’s remarks are taken from an abstract given in the account of the celebration published by the Society.

WALTER SCOTT

Although Mr. Emerson, in the period between 1838 and 1848 especially, when considering the higher powers of poetry, spoke slightingly of Scott,—in the _Dial_ papers as “objective” and “the poet of society, of patrician and conventional Europe,” or in _English Traits_ as a writer of “a rhymed travellers’ guide to Scotland,”—he had always honor for the noble man, and affectionate remembrance for the poems as well as the novels. In the poem “The Harp,” when enumerating poets, he calls Scott “the delight of generous boys,” but the _generosus puer_ was his own delight; the hope of the generation lay in him, and his own best audience was made up of such. In the essay “Illusions,” he says that the boy “has no better friend than Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch and Homer. The man lives to other objects, but who dare affirm that they are more real?” In the essay “Aristocracy,” he names among the claims of a superior class, “Genius, the power to affect the Imagination,” and presently speaks of “those who think and paint and laugh and weep in their eloquent closets, and then convert the world into a huge whispering-gallery, to report the tale to all men and win smiles and tears from many generations,” and gives Scott and Burns among the high company whom he instances.

Mr. Emerson’s children can testify how with regard to Scott he always was ready to become a boy again. As we walked in the woods, he would show us the cellar-holes of the Irish colony that came to Concord to build the railroad, and he named these deserted villages Derncleugh and Ellangowan. The sight recalled Meg Merrilies’ pathetic lament to the laird at the eviction of the gypsies, which he would then recite. “Alice Brand,” the “Sair Field o’ Harlaw,” which old Elspeth sings to the children in _The Antiquary_, and “Helvellyn” were again and again repeated to us with pleasure on both sides. With special affection in later years when we walked in Walden woods he would croon the lines from “The Dying Bard,”—

“Dinas Emlinn, lament, for the moment is nigh, When mute in the woodlands thine echoes shall die.”

Perhaps he had foreboding for his loved woods, beginning to be desecrated with rude city picnics, and since burned over repeatedly by the fires from the railroad,—

“When half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die.”

Of this poem he wrote in the journal of 1845:—

“‘Dinas Emlinn’ of Scott, like his ‘Helvellyn,’ shows how near to a poet he was. All the Birmingham part he had, and what taste and sense! Yet never rose into the creative region. As a practitioner or professional poet he is unrivalled in modern times.” Yet he immediately adds, “In lectures on Poetry almost all Scott would be to be produced.”

[214] _Page 463, note 1._ Mr. Emerson took especial pleasure in the passage in the _Lord of the Isles_ where the old abbot, rising to denounce excommunicated Bruce to his foes, is inspired against his will to bless him and prophesy his triumph as Scotland’s deliverer.

Mr. Emerson, writing in his journal in 1842 of his impatience of superficial city life, during a visit to New York, alludes to the renewed comfort he had in the _Lord of the Isles_:

“Life goes headlong. Each of us is always to be found hurrying headlong in the chase of some fact, hunted by some fear or command behind us. Suddenly we meet a friend. We pause. Our hurry and _empressement_ look ridiculous.... When I read the _Lord of the Isles_ last week at Staten Island, and when I meet my friend, I have the same feeling of shame at having allowed myself to be a mere huntsman and follower.”

His boyish love for the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ remained through life. As we walked on Sunday afternoons he recited to his children the stanzas about “the custom of Branksome Hall,” and the passage where the Ladye of Branksome defies the spirits of the flood and fell; and the bleak mile of road between Walden woods and home would often call out from him

“The way was long, the wind was cold, The Minstrel was infirm and old,” etc.

[215] _Page 465, note 1._ The _Bride of Lammermoor_ was the only dreary tale that Mr. Emerson could abide, except _Griselda_.

Journal, 1856. “Eugène Sue, Dumas, etc., when they begin a story, do not know how it will end, but Walter Scott, when he began the _Bride of Lammermoor_, had no choice; nor Shakspeare, nor Macbeth.”

[216] _Page 467, note 1._ Journal. “We talked of Scott. There is some greatness in defying posterity and writing for the hour.”

SPEECH AT THE BANQUET IN HONOR OF THE CHINESE EMBASSY

When the Chinese Embassy visited Boston in the summer of 1868 a banquet was given them at the St. James Hotel, on August 21. The young Emerson, sounding an early note of independence of the past, had written in 1824:—

I laugh at those who, while they gape and gaze, The bald antiquity of China praise;—

but later he learned to revere the wisdom of Asia. About the time when the _Dial_ appeared, many sentences of Chinese wisdom are found in his journal, and also in the magazine among the “Ethnical Scriptures.”

REMARKS AT THE ORGANIZATION OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION

In the spring of 1867, a call for a public meeting was issued by Octavius B. Frothingham, William J. Potter and Rowland Connor “to consider the conditions, wants and progress of Free Religion in America.” The response was so large as to surprise the committee, and Horticultural Hall was completely filled on May 30. Rev. Octavius B. Frothingham presided. The committee had invited as speakers the Rev. H. Blanchard of Brooklyn from the Universalists, Lucretia Mott from the Society of Friends, Robert Dale Owen from the Spiritualists, the Rev. John Weiss from the Left Wing of the Unitarians, Oliver Johnson from the Progressive Friends, Francis E. Abbot, editor of the _Index_; and also David A. Wasson, Colonel T. W. Higginson and Mr. Emerson. The meeting was very successful and the Free Religious Association was founded.

Mr. Emerson’s genial and affirmative attitude at this meeting was helpful and important. He wished the new movement to be neither aggressive towards the beliefs of others, nor merely a religion of works, purely beneficently utilitarian. Doubtless there were many young and active radicals strong for destructive criticism. Mr. Emerson wished to see that in their zeal to destroy the dry husk of religion they should not bruise the white flower within. His counsel to young men was, “Omit all negative propositions. It will save ninety-nine one hundredths of your labor, and increase the value of your work in the same measure.”

[217] _Page 479, note 1._ In the journal of 1837 he said, “Why rake up old manuscripts to find therein a man’s soul? You do not look for conversation in a corpse.” And elsewhere, “In religion the sentiment is all, the ritual or ceremony indifferent.”

SPEECH AT THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION

[218] _Page 486, note 1._ Mrs. Julia Ward Howe writes of Mr. Emerson,—

“He knew from the first the victory of good over evil; and when he told me, to my childish amazement, that the angel must always be stronger than the demon, he gave utterance to a thought most familiar to him, though at the time new to me.”[L]

[219] _Page 488, note 1._ In the essay on Character (_Lectures and Biographical Sketches_), he says, “The establishment of Christianity in the world does not rest on any miracle but the miracle of being the broadest and most humane doctrine.”

“The word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”—“Address in Divinity College,” _Nature, Addresses and Lectures_.

[220] _Page 490, note 1._ Mr. Emerson’s doctrine was not to attack beliefs, but give better: “True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate.” In a letter to one of his best friends who had joined the Church of Rome he said, perhaps in 1858: “To old eyes how supremely unimportant the form under which we celebrate the justice, love and truth, the attributes of the deity and the soul!”

[221] _Page 491, note 1._ Dr. Holmes, in his tribute to his friend, after his death, read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, said:—

“What could we do with this unexpected, unprovided for, unclassified, half unwelcome newcomer, who had been for a while potted, as it were, in our Unitarian cold greenhouse, but had taken to growing so fast that he was lifting off its glass roof and letting in the hail-storms? Here was a protest that outflanked the extreme left of liberalism, yet so calm and serene that its radicalism had the accents of the gospel of peace. Here was an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship.”

ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF THE CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY

The Town of Concord, in the year 1782, chose a committee of ten leading citizens to give instructions to its selectmen. The third of the seventeen articles proposed by them read thus: “That care be taken of the Books of Marters and other bookes, and that they be kept from abusive usage, and not lent to persons more than one month at one time.” This indicates the root of a town library. A constitution of a Library Company, dated 1784, is extant. In 1806 a Social Library was incorporated, which was merged in the Town Library in 1851. The books were kept in a room in the Town House which was open for borrowers on Saturdays.

William Munroe, son of a Concord tradesman who vied with the Thoreaus in the manufacture of lead pencils, after leaving the Concord schools went into business, and later into the manufacture of silk. His intelligence and force of character secured prosperity. He loved Concord, and, to use his own words, “desired to testify my regard to my native town by doing something to promote the education and intelligence, and thus the welfare and prosperity of its people.” He gave to Concord a lot of land in the heart of the town and a building for a Free Public Library, which, with great care and thoroughness, he had built thereon and duly furnished; and made handsome provision for care of the land and the extension of the building later. He added a generous gift for books of reference and standard works. The town thankfully accepted the gift, placed their books in it, and chose their library committee. On a fine autumn day in 1873, the library was opened with public ceremonies. Mr. Munroe in a short and modest speech explained his purpose; Mr. H. F. Smith, on behalf of the new library committee, reported its action and the gifts which had poured in; Judge Hoar received the property on behalf of the Board of Corporation, and Mr. Emerson, but lately returned with improved health from his journey to the Nile, made the short address. Writing was now very difficult for him, but the occasion pleased and moved him, and his notes on books and on Concord, and the remembrance of his friends the Concord authors but lately gone, served him, and the day passed off well.

[222] _Page 498, note 1._ _The Gospel Covenant_, printed in London in 1646, and quoted by Mr. Emerson in the “Historical Discourse.”

[223] _Page 499, note 1._ Major Simon Willard, a Kentish merchant was Peter Bulkeley’s strong coadjutor in the founding of Concord. He also is alluded to in the “Historical Discourse.”

[224] _Page 500, note 1._ These extracts are from the diary of Miss Mary Moody Emerson.

[225] _Page 500, note 2._ This letter was written not long after the death of John Thoreau, Henry’s dearly loved brother, and also of little Waldo Emerson, to whom he became greatly attached while he was a member of Mr. Emerson’s household.

[226] _Page 501, note 1._ Mr. Emerson here speaks for others. He could not read Hawthorne because of the gloom of his magic mirror, but the man interested and attracted him, though even as neighbors they seldom met.

[227] _Page 506, note 1._ Mr. Emerson notes that this is an allusion to the “Harmonies of Ptolemy.”

THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC

In 1863, during the dark days of the Civil War, before the tide had fully turned in the field, while disaffection showed itself in the North, and England and France threatened intervention, Mr. Emerson gave a hopeful lecture, the basis of the present discourse, on the Fortune of the Republic. After the war it was adapted to the new and happier conditions. On the 30th of March, 1878, six years after Mr. Emerson had withdrawn from literary work, and but four years before his death, he was induced to read the lecture in the Old South Church, in a course planned by the committee, to save the venerable building. The church was filled, Mr. Emerson’s delivery was good, and he seemed to enjoy the occasion. It was probably his last speech in public, and so fitly closes the volume.

[228] _Page 513, note 1._ This passage occurred in the early lecture:—

“It is the distinction of man to think, and all the few men who, since the beginning of the world, have done anything for us were men who did not follow the river, or ship the cotton, or pack the pork, but who thought for themselves. What the country wants is personalities,—grand persons,—to counteract its materialities, for it is the rule of the universe that corn shall serve man, and not man, corn.”

[229] _Page 519, note 1._ Here followed: “What we call ‘Kentucky,’ or ‘Vallandigham,’ or ‘Fernando Wood’ is really the ignorance and nonsense in us, stolid stupidity which gives the strength to those names.... It is our own vice which takes form, or gives terror with which these persons affect us.”

[230] _Page 520, note 1._ This refers to a young Massachusetts scholar, of promise and beauty, whom Mr. Emerson had been pleased with, as a fellow voyager. He soon was corrupted by politics. Coming up, at a reception, to shake hands with Mr. Emerson he was thus greeted: “If what I hear of your recent action be true, I must shake hands with you under protest.” Soon after, this aspirant for power attended the dinner given to Brooks after his cowardly assault on Sumner; but the moment the Emancipation Proclamation had been approved by the people, he became an ornamental figurehead at Republican and reform gatherings.

[231] _Page 520, note 2._ From the last scene of _Cynthia’s Revels_, by Ben Jonson.

[232] _Page 521, note 1._ “The one serious and formidable thing in Nature is a will.”—“Fate,” _Conduct of Life_, p. 30.

See also “Aristocracy,” in _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_, p. 50.

[233] _Page 524, note 1._ Ben Jonson, _The Golden Age Restored_.

[234] _Page 526, note 1._

She spawneth men as mallows fresh.

“Nature,” II., _Poems_.

See also the “Song of Nature,” in the _Poems_.

[235] _Page 526, note 2._ In the earlier lecture was this passage:—

“The roots of our success are in our poverty, our Calvinism, our thrifty habitual industry,—in our snow and east wind, and farm-life and sea-life....

“There is in this country this immense difference from Europe, that, whereas all their systems of government and society are historical, our politics are almost ideal. We wish to treat man as man, without regard to rank, wealth, race, color, or caste,—simply as human souls. We lie near to Nature, we are pensioners on Nature, draw on inexhaustible resources, and we interfere the least possible with individual freedom.”

[236] _Page 527, note 1._ In the “Historical Discourse” in this volume, Mr. Emerson tells of the evolution of the town-meeting of New England and its working excellence, and of the latter also in “Social Aims” and “Eloquence,” in _Letters and Social Aims_.

[237] _Page 540, note 1._

For you can teach the lightning speech, And round the globe your voices reach.

“Boston,” _Poems_.

[238] _Page 541, note 1._

I will divide my goods; Call in the wretch and slave: None shall rule but the humble, And none but Toil shall have.

“Boston Hymn,” _Poems_.

[239] _Page 544, note 1._ The following passages came from the earlier lecture:—

“I must be permitted to read a quotation from De Tocqueville, whose censure is more valuable, as it comes from one obviously very partial to the American character and institutions:—