Part 31

[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.

’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.