Part 30

Theodore Parker, worn by his great work in defence of liberal religion and in every cause of suffering humanity, had succumbed to disease and died in Florence in May, 1860, not quite fifty years of age. Born in the neighbor town of Lexington when Emerson was seven years old, they had been friends probably from the time when the latter, soon after settling in Concord, preached for the society at East Lexington, from 1836 for two years. Parker was, during this period, studying divinity, and was settled as pastor of the West Roxbury church in 1837. In that year he is mentioned by Mr. Alcott as a member of the Transcendental Club and attending its meetings in Boston. When, in June, 1838, Mr. Emerson fluttered the conservative and the timid by his Divinity School Address, the young Parker went home and wrote, “It was the most inspiring strain I ever listened to.... My soul is roused, and this week I shall write the long-meditated sermons on the state of the church and the duties of these times.”

Mr. Parker was one of those who attended the gathering in Boston which gave birth to the _Dial_, to which he was a strong contributor. Three years after its death, he, with the help of Mr. James Elliot Cabot and Mr. Emerson, founded the _Massachusetts Quarterly Review_, vigorous though short-lived, of which he was the editor. Parker frequently visited Emerson, and the two, unlike in their method, worked best apart in the same great causes. Rev. William Gannett says, “What Emerson uttered without plot or plan, Theodore Parker elaborated to a system. Parker was the Paul of transcendentalism.”

Mr. Edwin D. Mead, in his chapter on Emerson and Theodore Parker,[J] gives the following pleasant anecdote:—

“At one of Emerson’s lectures in Boston, when the storm against Parker was fiercest, a lecture at which a score of the religious and literary leaders of the city were present, Emerson, as he laid his manuscript upon the desk and looked over the audience, after his wont, observed Parker; and immediately he stepped from the platform to the seat near the front where Parker sat, grasping his hand and standing for a moment’s conversation with him. It was not ostentation, and it was not patronage: it was admiring friendship,—and that fortification and stimulus Parker in those times never failed to feel. It was Emerson who fed his lamp, he said; and Emerson said that, be the lamp fed as it might, it was Parker whom the time to come would have to thank for finding the light burning.”

Parker dedicated to Emerson his _Ten Sermons on Religion_. In acknowledging this tribute, Mr. Emerson thus paid tribute to Parker’s brave service:—

“We shall all thank the right soldier whom God gave strength to fight for him the battle of the day.”

When Mr. Parker’s failing forces made it necessary for him to drop his arduous work and go abroad for rest, Mr. Emerson was frequently called to take his place in the Music Hall on Sundays. I think that this was the only pulpit he went into to conduct Sunday services after 1838.

It is told that Parker, sitting, on Sunday morning, on the deck of the vessel that was bearing him away, never to return, smiled and said: “Emerson is preaching at Music Hall to-day.”

[158] _Page 286, note 1._ Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal:—

“The Duc de Brancas said, ‘Why need I read the Encyclopédie? Rivarol visits me.’ I may well say it of Theodore Parker.”

[159] _Page 290, note 1._ Richard H. Dana wrote in his diary, November 3, 1853:—

“It is now ten days since Webster’s death.... Strange that the best commendation that has appeared yet, the most touching, elevated, meaning eulogy, with all its censure, should have come from Theodore Parker! Were I Daniel Webster, I would not have that sermon destroyed for all that had been said in my favor as yet.”

[160] _Page 293, note 1._ I copy from Mr. Emerson’s journal at the time of Mr. Parker’s death these sentences which precede some of those included in this address:—

“Theodore Parker has filled up all his years and days and hours. A son of the energy of New England; restless, eager, manly, brave, early old, contumacious, clever. I can well praise him at a spectator’s distance, for our minds and methods were unlike,—few people more unlike. All the virtues are solitaires. Each man is related to persons who are not related to each other, and I saw with pleasure that men whom I could not approach, were drawn through him to the admiration of that which I admire.”

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

On January 31, 1862, Mr. Emerson lectured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington on American Civilization. Just after the outbreak of war in the April preceding, he had given a lecture, in a course in Boston on Life and Literature, which he called “Civilization at a Pinch,” the title suggesting how it had been modified by the crisis which had suddenly come to pass. In the course of the year the flocking of slaves to the Union camps, and the opening vista of a long and bitter struggle, with slavery now acknowledged as its root, had brought the question of Emancipation as a war-measure to the front. Of course Mr. Emerson saw hope in this situation of affairs, and when he went to Washington with the chance of being heard by men in power there, he prepared himself to urge the measure, as well on grounds of policy as of right. So the Boston lecture was much expanded to deal with the need of the hour. There is no evidence that President Lincoln heard it; it is probable that he did not; nor is it true that Mr. Emerson had a long and earnest conversation with him on the subject next day, both of which assertions have been made in print. Mr. Emerson made an unusual record in his journal of the incidents of his stay in Washington, and though he tells of his introduction to Mr. Lincoln and a short chat with him, evidently there was little opportunity for serious conversation. The President’s secretaries had, in 1886, no memory of his having attended the lecture, and the Washington papers do not mention his presence there. The following notice of the lecture, however, appeared in one of the local papers: “The audience received it, as they have the other anti-slavery lectures of the course, with unbounded enthusiasm. It was in many respects a wonderful lecture, and those who have often heard Mr. Emerson said that he seemed inspired through nearly the whole of it, especially the part referring to slavery and the war.”

A gentleman in Washington, who took the trouble to look up the question as to whether Mr. Lincoln and other high officials heard it, says that Mr. Lincoln could hardly have attended lectures then:—

“He was very busy at the time, Stanton the new war secretary having just come in, and storming like a fury at the business of his department. The great operations of the war for the time overshadowed all the other events.... It is worth remarking that Mr. Emerson in this lecture clearly foreshadowed the policy of Emancipation some six or eight months in advance of Mr. Lincoln. He saw the logic of events leading up to a crisis in our affairs, to ‘emancipation as a platform with compensation to the loyal owners’ (his words as reported in the _Star_). The notice states that the lecture was very fully attended.”

Very possibly it may be with regard to this address that we have the interesting account given of the effect of Mr. Emerson’s speaking on a well-known English author. Dr. Garnett, in his _Life of Emerson_, says:—

“A shrewd judge, Anthony Trollope, was particularly struck with the note of sincerity in Emerson when he heard him address a large meeting during the Civil War. Not only was the speaker terse, perspicuous, and practical to a degree amazing to Mr. Trollope’s preconceived notions, but he commanded his hearers’ respect by the frankness of his dealing with them. ‘You make much of the American eagle,’ he said, ‘you do well. But beware of the American peacock.’ When shortly afterwards Mr. Trollope heard the consummate rhetorician, ⸺ ⸺ he discerned at once that oratory was an end with him, instead of, as with Emerson, a means. He was neither bold nor honest, as Emerson had been, and the people knew that while pretending to lead them he was led by them.”

Mr. Emerson revised the lecture and printed it in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for April, 1862. It was afterwards separated into the essay “Civilization,” treating of the general and permanent aspects of the subject (printed in _Society and Solitude_), and this urgent appeal for the instant need.

The few lines inspired by the Flag are from one of the verse-books.

[161] _Page 298, note 1._ Mr. Emerson himself was by no means free from pecuniary anxieties and cares in those days.

Journal, 1862. “Poverty, sickness, a lawsuit, even bad, dark weather, spoil a great many days of the scholar’s year, hinder him of the frolic freedom necessary to spontaneous flow of thought.”

[162] _Page 300, note 1._ This was during the days of apparent inaction when, after the first reverses or minor successes of the raw Northern armies, the magnitude of the task before them and the energy of their opponents was realized, and recruiting, fortification, organization was going on in earnest in preparation for the spring campaign. General Scott had resigned; General McClellan was doing his admirable work of creating a fit army, and Secretary Cameron had been succeeded by the energetic and impatient Stanton. But the government was still very shy of meddling with slavery for fear of disaffecting the War Democrats and especially the Border States.

[163] _Page 307, note 1._ A short time before this address was delivered Mr. Moncure D. Conway (a young Virginian, who, for conscience’ sake, had left his charge as a Methodist preacher and had abandoned his inheritance in slaves, losing in so doing the good will of his parents, and become a Unitarian minister and an abolitionist) had read in Concord an admirable and eloquent lecture called “The Rejected Stone.” This stone, slighted by the founders, although they knew it to be a source of danger, had now “become the head of the corner,” and its continuance in the national structure threatened its stability. Mr. Emerson had been much struck with the excellence and cogency of Mr. Conway’s arguments, based on his knowledge of Southern economics and character, and in this lecture made free use of them.

[164] _Page 308, note 1._ Mason and Slidell, the emissaries sent by the Confederacy to excite sympathy in its cause in Europe, had been taken off an English vessel at the Bermudas by Commodore Wilkes, and were confined in Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. President Lincoln’s action in surrendering them at England’s demand had been a surprise to the country, but was well received.

[165] _Page 309, note 1._ From the Veeshnoo Sarma.

[166] _Page 309, note 2._ See in the address on Theodore Parker the passage commending him for insisting “that the essence of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use or nothing,” etc.

[167] _Page 311, note 1._ In the agitation concerning the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, gradual emancipation was at first planned, as more reasonable and politic, but, in the end, not only the reformers but the planters came in most cases to see that immediate emancipation was wiser.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

On the 22d of September, President Lincoln at last spoke the word so long earnestly desired by the friends of Freedom and the victims of slavery, abolishing slavery on the first day of the coming year in those states which should then be in rebellion against the United States.

At a meeting held in Boston in honor of this auspicious utterance, Mr. Emerson spoke, with others.

The address was printed in its present form in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for November, 1862.

[168] _Page 316, note 1._ It may be interesting in this connection to recall the quiet joy with which Mr. Emerson in his poem “The Adirondacs” celebrates man’s victory over matter, and its promise to human brotherhood, when the Atlantic Cable was supposed to be a success in 1858.

[169] _Page 320, note 1._ Milton, “Comus.”

[170] _Page 321, note 1._ It is pleasant to contrast this passage with the tone of sad humiliation which prevails in the address on the Fugitive Slave Law given in Concord in 1851.

[171] _Page 324, note 1._ See the insulting recognition of this disgraceful attitude of the North by John Randolph, quoted by Mr. Emerson in his speech on the Fugitive Slave Law in Concord in 1851.

[172] _Page 326, note 1._ Shakspeare, Sonnet cvii.

[173] _Page 326, note 2._ The tragedy of the negro is tenderly told in the poem “Voluntaries,” which was written just after they had gallantly stood the test of battle in the desperate attack on Fort Wagner.

On the first day of the year 1863, when Emancipation became a fact throughout the United States, a joyful meeting was held in Boston, and there Mr. Emerson read his “Boston Hymn.”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

In the year 1865, the people of Concord gathered on the Nineteenth of April, as had been their wont for ninety years, but this time not to celebrate the grasping by the town of its great opportunity for freedom and fame. The people came together in the old meeting-house to mourn for their wise and good Chief Magistrate, murdered when he had triumphantly finished the great work which fell to his lot. Mr. Emerson, with others of his townsmen, spoke.

[174] _Page 331, note 1._ On the occasion of his visit to Washington in January, 1862, Mr. Emerson had been taken to the White House by Mr. Sumner and introduced to the President. Mr. Lincoln’s first remark was, “Mr. Emerson, I once heard you say in a lecture that a Kentuckian seems to say by his air and manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you.’”

The interview with Mr. Lincoln was necessarily short, but he left an agreeable impression on Mr. Emerson’s mind. The full account of this visit is printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1904, and will be included among the selections from the journals which will be later published.

[175] _Page 332, note 1._ Mr. Emerson’s poem, “The Visit,” shows how terrible the devastation of the day of a public man would have seemed to him.

[176] _Page 336, note 1._ The brave retraction by Thomas Taylor of the hostile ridicule which _Punch_ had poured on Lincoln in earlier days contained these verses:—

“Beside this corpse, that bears for winding-sheet The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew, Between the mourners at his head and feet, Say, scurrile jester, is there room for _you_?

“Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, To lame my pencil, and confute my pen;— To make me own this kind of princes peer, This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.”

The whole poem is included in Mr. Emerson’s collection _Parnassus_.

[177] _Page 337, note 1._ This thought is rendered more fully in the poem “Spiritual Laws,” and in the lines in “Worship,”—

This is he men miscall Fate, Threading dark ways, arriving late, But ever coming in time to crown The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down.

[178] _Page 338, note 1._ The following letter was written by Mr. Emerson in November, 1863, to his friend, Mr. George P. Bradford, who, as Mr. Cabot says, came nearer to being a “crony” than any of the others:—

CONCORD.

DEAR GEORGE,—I hope you do not need to be reminded that we rely on you at 2 o’clock on Thanksgiving Day. Bring all the climate and all the memories of Newport with you. Mr. Lincoln in fixing this day has in some sort bound himself to furnish good news and victories for it. If not, we must comfort each other with the good which already is, and with that which must be.

Yours affectionately,

R. W. EMERSON.

A year later, he wrote to the same friend:—

“I give you joy of the Election. Seldom in history was so much staked on a popular vote—I suppose never in history.

“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.