that, in the "closely filled speech of his at the Burns centenary dinner, every word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds. He looked far away over the heads of his hearers with a vague kind of expectation, as into some private heaven of invention, and the winged period came at last to obey the spell. My dainty Ariel!' he seemed murmuring to himself as he cast down his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of applause, and caught another sentence from the sibyline leaves that lay before him ambushed behind a dish of fruit, and seen only by nearest neighbors. Every sentence brought down the house as I never saw one brought down before; and it is not so easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that has no hint of native brogue in it. I watched for it was an interesting study - how the quick sympathy ran flashing from face to face down the long tables like an electric spark, thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of plaudits. I watched till tables and faces vanished; for I, too, found myself caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my excited fancy set me under the bema listening to him who fulmined over Greece." This eloquent and magnetic speech was closed with this testimony to the power of Burns's poetry and the expansiveness of his fame:

"The memory of Burns, I am afraid heaven and earth have taken too good care of it to leave us any thing to say. The west winds are murmuring it. Open the windows behind you, and hearken for the incoming tide, what the waves say of it. The doves perching always on the eaves of the stone chapel opposite may know something about it. Every name in broad Scotland keeps his fame bright. The memory of Burns, — every man's and boy's and girl's head carry snatches of his songs, and can say them by heart; and, what is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley, and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them; nay, the music-boxes at Geneva are framed and toothed to play them, the hand-organs of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells ring them in the spires. They are the property and the solace of mankind."

In 1860 The Conduct of Life was published. Its essays, as usual, had been delivered as lectures during

the previous half-dozen years. It contains some of his most practical, as well as some of his most philosophical, essays. It is, as a whole, less mystical than his previous books, and consequently loses some of the finest flavor of his thought. The essays on Fate, Worship, Illusions, and Considerations by the Way are among his very best, however, giving important additions to his philosophic thought. As usual this book received the most unmerciful treatment from some of the critics. Noah Porter said, in The New Englander, that the writer did not know enough of religion to speak upon it with authority; and wrote of "the utter shallowness and flippancy of the judgments Emerson expresses concerning Christianity." "Of all the descriptions," this critic says, "we have ever read of the merciless and remorseless absolutism of a universe of impersonal law, this strikes us as the most horrible." The English Saturday Review was even more severe, for it said,

“He manages to write what the crowds which throng American lecture-rooms appear, for some strange reason, to relish; and he continues to put it in an unintelligible form. By these two feats he secures a popularity which there is no other way of explaining. That an American audience likes to hear the dreariest of all dreary platitudes when they are strung together in what is called an oration, is a fact attested by credible proof, and must be believed like any other strange circumstance which rests on that authority. That, being in that state of mind, mystical language should please them is what experience would suggest, if, indeed, experience applies to people who like orations. It is inconceivable that Mr. Emerson should have any claims to any higher reputation than this." He is also described as "so commonplace a writer," who “intersperses his dreary platitudes with downright nonsense."

His previous books had sold very slowly, but twentyfive hundred copies of The Conduct of Life were disposed of in two days after its publication. There were many other tokens of his growing favor. His books were received, both at home and abroad, with many new signs of approval; while the circle of his admirers constantly increased. In 1850 Parker wrote of him as "the most original thinker we have produced in America; a man of wonderful gifts." In 1857 he says in one of his

letters, "Emerson has touched the deepest strings on the human heart, and, ten centuries after he is immor tal, will wake the music which he first waked."

In a carefully discriminating article, which does not spare Emerson's faults, and yet is full of sympathetic admiration, Parker says,

"He has not uttered a word that is false to his own mind or conscience; has not suppressed a word because he thought it too high for man's comprehension, and therefore dangerous for the repose of men. He never compromises. He sees the chasm between the ideas which come of man's nature and the institutions which represent only his history; he does not seek to cover up the chasm, which daily grows wider between truth and public opinion, between justice and the state, between Christianity and the church; he does not seek to fill it up, but he asks men to step over and build institutions commensurate with their ideas. He trusts himself, trusts man, and trusts God. He has confidence in all the attributes of Infinity. Hence he is serene; nothing disturbs the even poise of his character, and he walks erect. Nothing impedes him in his search for the true, the lovely and the good; no private hope, no private fear, no love of wife or child or gold or ease or fame. He never seeks his own reputation; he takes care of his being, and leaves his seeming to take care of itself. Fame may seek him; he never goes out of his way a single inch for her.

"He has not written a line which is not conceived in the interest of mankind. He never writes in the interest of a section, of a party, of a church, of a man, always in the interest of mankind. Hence comes the ennobling influence of his works. Emerson belongs to the exceptional literature of the times; and, while his culture joins him to the history of man, his ideas and his whole life enable him to represent also the nature of man, and so to write for the future. He is one of the rare exceptions amongst our educated men, and helps redeem American literature from the charge of imitation, conformity, meanness of aim, and hostility to the powers of mankind. No faithful man is too low for his approval and encouragement; no faithless man too high and popular for his rebuke."

This is one of Parker's best critical articles,1 as well as one of the best papers ever written about Emerson. Parker is especially fascinated with the original and American cast of Emerson's mind; and calls him "the most republican of republicans, the most protestant of

1 Massachusetts Quarterly Review for 1849, reprinted in Miss Cobbe's edition of his collected works, vol. x. p. 196.

the dissenters." His culture is cosmopolitan, has no varnish about it; but it has penetrated deep into his consciousness Parker finds he belongs to a very high rank in literature. "He is a very extraordinary man. To no English writer since Milton, can be assigned so high a place; even Milton himself, great genius though he was, and great architect of beauty, has not added so many thoughts to the treasury of the race; no, nor been the author of so much loveliness. Emerson is a man of genius such as does not often appear; such as has never appeared before in America, and but seldom in the world. He learns from all sorts of men; but no English writer, we think, is so original." These opinions of Parker's have lost none of their force since they were written, and are far truer now than then; while they would be accepted by a much larger number of persons. The years since they were written have fully confirmed his high estimate of the genius of Emerson.

EMERS

X.

THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT.

MERSON early gave his sympathies to the move meat against slavery. When no other church in Boston was open to the friends of liberty, May and others spoke in his; and he was even ready to welcome Garrison there. In the Transcendental Club, when others held aloof from sympathy with this movement, he defended it, and expressed his faith in Garrison. Though not himself inclined to adopt the methods of the radical agitators, he could but feel they were in the right in their aims, and that they represented the highest moral sense of the community. His tendencies of thought led him in another direction to secure the same ends, but to this great reform he gave such help as he could; and his influence on his times, the real spirit and purpose of the man, are not likely to be understood. without a knowledge of his relations to this agitation. He had but little faith in external methods of reform, and did not tink much could be done by legislation. His faith was in the moral and spiritual influences which lead men out of passion and selfishness, but he could not feel that selfishness was to be opposed with hatred. It was because the life of the American people was low, vulgar, mean, that slavery was possible; and he thought slavery could only be gotten rid of by raising the moral standard, and by a larger appreciation of the human soul. Though little inclined to the ordinary methods of reform, Harriet Martineau testifies to his early espousal of the cause of the slave, when almost no one in Boston was ready to plead in behalf of justice and humanity. In speaking of how prone public men were to shrink from the defense of a new and hated cause,