the Republic, his tone is that of confidence and trust, though he spares not our faults. He finds that our Republic "represents the sentiment and the future of mankind," though he is still obliged to tell us that "our political economy is low and degrading," while we "consider nothing less than the sacredness of man.' Faults enough he is yet able to find, and he tells us of them in the plainest words; but the higher ends of national existence he as sincerely declares.

As a critic faithful in pointing out the conditions and methods of social and moral progress, we owe him a debt we can never repay but by acceptance of his teachings. He has been a true critic, because recognizing the absolute foundations on which all truth of conduct must rest. He has tried to lift us to "the ways and manners of the sky," infusing into our life, our thought, and our literature a pure and a lofty sense of human responsibility.

THE

XII.

THE PROPHET RECEIVED.

HE period from 1860 to 1870 is that in which Emerson secures the widest hearing, has the strongest personal influence in molding the thought of his time, and when his character shines out in the most emphatic manner. He is less the critic, more thoroughly than at any other time in sympathy with the purpose and spirit of his country. His words had-. taken root, and began to produce their fruit. He had become a prophet to be heard gladly, while those who differed from him began to think less of his errors than of his truths. Fame had taken hold of his name; his countrymen found they could rejoice in his reputation, and, from being the admired of a party, he became an accepted power in American thought and literature. During this period he re-affirms in some of his most original essays the great ideas to which his life had been devoted, and finds for these ideas an acceptance they had not before received.

At the beginning of this period he lost two of his most valued friends; Parker dying in 1860, and Thoreau in 1862. He spoke at the meeting held by Parker's society in Music Hall, in his commemoration, and paid an admiring and noble tribute to his friend. He closed by saying that "the sudden and singular eminence of Mr. Parker, the importance of his name and influence, are the verdict of his country to his virtues. We have few such men to lose, he said; amiable and blameless at home; feared abroad as the standard-bearer of liberty; taking all the duties he could grasp; and, more, refusing to spare himself. He has gone down in early glory to his grave, to be a living and enlarging power, wherever

learning, wit, honest valor, and independence are honored." He spoke also at Thoreau's funeral, doing fine justice to the genius of that rare soul. Thoreau, he said, "was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home." This address was published in the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1862, and in 1866 was reprinted as an introduction to Thoreau's writings, appearing in the Excursions. He helped to edit Thoreau's Letters, which came out in 1865, and to prepare several other volumes from his manuscripts.

After Parker's death his society desired Emerson, the next autumn, to give the first sermon for them in Music Hall. The treatment Parker had received made a strong impression on his mind, had alienated him more than ever from the Unitarians, and had made him think the church cared mainly for the external things of religion. At this time he had reached the extreme of his alienation from the church, had wholly given up prayer, and discontinued nearly all outward acts of worship. He was reluctant to enter Parker's pulpit, as he could no longer give a sermon in the ordinary sense, and as he had long before abandoned all thought of ever preaching again. He was urged so strongly, however, that at last he consented; and on the first Sunday said he was glad Parker had made the place one of freedom, that he had valued religion more than its forms. During several years he frequently appeared before the society, often on Sundays, while he gave a great number of lectures for the Parker Fraternity. One of his sermons 2 in Music Hall has been reported by M. D. Conway, who says it was the most "impressive utterance" he ever heard from Emerson.

"There was not one, but many themes and texts, and all related. He began by calling attention to the tendency to simplification. The inventor knows that a machine is new and improvable when it

1 The remainder of this address is printed in Frothingham's Life of Parker.

2 Fraser's Magazine, May, 1867.

has a great many parts. The chemists already find the infinite variety of things contained in sixty-six elements; and physicists promise that this number shall be reduced to twenty, ten, five. Faraday declares his belief that all things will, in the end, be reduced to one element with two polarities. Religious progress has similarly been in the direction of simplification. Every great religion has in its ultimate development told its whole secret, concentrated its force, in some simple maxims. In our youth we talk of the various virtues, the many dangers and trials, of life; as we grow older, we find ourselves returning to the proverbs of the nursery. In religion one book serves many lands, ages, and varieties of character; nay, one or two golden rules out of the book are enough. The many teachers and scriptures are at last but various routes by which we always come to the simple law of obedience to the light in the soul. 'Seek nothing outside of thyself,' says one, 'Believe nothing against thy own spirit,' echoes another part of the word. Jesus said, 'Be lowly; hunger and thirst after justice; of your own minds judge what is right.' Swedenborg teaches that heaven and hell are the loves of the soul. George Fox removes the bushel from the light within. The substance of all morals is, that a man should adhere to the path which the inner light has marked out for him. The great waste in the world comes of the misapplication of energy. The great tragedies of the soul are strung on those threads not spun out of our own hearts. One records of Michael Angelo that he found him working on his statue with a lamp stuck in his cap, and it might almost symbolize the holier light of patient devotion to his art. No matter what your work is, let it be yours; no matter if you are tinker or preacher, blacksmith or president, let what you are doing be organic, let it be in your bones, and you open the door by which the affluence of heaven and earth shall stream into you. You shall have the hidden joy, and shall carry success with you. Look to yourself rather than to materials; nothing is unmanageable to a good hand; no place slippery to a good foot; all things are clear to a good head. The sin of dogmatism, of creeds and catechisms, is that they destroy mental character. The youth says that he believes when he is only brow-beaten; he says he thinks so and so, when that so and so are the denial of any right to think. Simplicity and grandeur are thus lost, and with them the sentiment of obligation to a principle of life and honor. In the legends of the Round Table it is told, that a witch, wishing to make her child supremely wise, prepared certain herbs, and put them in a pot to boil, intending to bathe the child's eyes with the decoction. She set a shepherd-boy to stir the pot whilst she went away. Whilst he stirred it, a raven dropped a twig into the pot, which spattered three drops of the liquid into the shepherd's eyes. Immediately all the future became as if passing before his eyes; and, seeing that when the witch returned she meant to kill him, he left the pot, and fled to the woods. Now, if three drops of that all-revealing decoction should suddenly get into the eyes of every human being crowding along Broadway some day, how many of

them would still go on with the affair they are pursuing on the street? Probably they would nearly all come to a dead stand. But there would, let us hope, be here and there a happy child of the Most High, who had taken hold of her or his life's thread by sacred appointment. These would move on without even a pause. The unveiled future would show the fatality of many schemes, the idleness of many labors; but every genial aim would only be exalted, and shown in their eternal and necessary relations. Finally, humility was, the speaker declared, the one element to which all virtues are reducible. 'It was revealed unto me,' said the old Quaker, that what other men trample on must be thy food.' It is the spirit that accepts our trust, and is thus the creator of character and the guide to power.

"In closing this discourse, the speaker read at length the story of the proposed humiliation, and the victory through humility, of Fra Christoforo, in Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. I regret that I can not give a report verbatim of this extraordinary discourse, which produced an effect on those who heard it beyond any thing that I ever witnessed, many being moved at times to tears. I went with pencil and paper, intending to take down as much as I could; but at the end of the hour occupied by it, the paper remained blank, and the pencil had been forgotten. I can therefore only produce the record of my impressions of it, as they were written down the same day."

In July, 1861, he gave an address before one of the societies of Tufts College. He said, that while the brute cannon was being heard, and though it found a poetic echo in the hearts of those who regarded it as an instrument of freedom, it should not be allowed to intrude upon the sanctity of a truly intellectual occasion. He urged the students in a time of conflict to rely upon those better weapons of the mind; for the institution of learning is in all times the ark of deliverance, and many feet should constantly turn towards it. A great national failure would be due solely to a lack of duty on the part of the college, using that word in its very broadest sense. If the college-bred man leaves his altar and his library, and plays the sycophant, then the institution is nothing more than a suicidal hospital of decayed tutors or a musty shop of old books. Here you are to become thinkers, to learn the art of command. The thought secured is higher than its instrument, as the general is greater than the park of artillery. Many have written of a new revival of religion