Emerson | Page 7

vivid, dashing, exuberant, ebullient page.
Her criticism of Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word,
but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose contributor, again
saving the one great name, has anything to say that is so readable.
Nearly all the rest is extinct, and the Dial now finds itself far away
from the sunshine of human interest.
In 1841 the first series of Emerson's Essays was published, and three
years later the second. The Poems were first collected in 1847, but the
final version was not made until 1876. In 1847 Emerson paid his
second visit to England, and delivered his lectures on Representative
Men, collected and published in 1850. The books are said to have had a
very slow sale, but the essays and lectures published in 1860, with the

general title of The Conduct of Life, started with a sale of 2,500 copies,
though that volume has never been considered by the Emersonian adept
to contain most of the pure milk of the Word.
Then came that great event in the history of men and institutions, the
Civil War. We look with anxiety for the part played by the serene
thinker when the hour had struck for violent and heroic action.
Emerson had hitherto been a Free Soiler; he had opposed the extension
of slavery; and he favoured its compulsory extinction, with
compensation on the plan of our own policy in the West Indies. He had
never joined the active Abolitionists, nor did he see 'that there was any
particular thing for him to do in it then.' 'Though I sometimes accept a
popular call, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, I
am sure to feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into
another sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own' (To Carlyle,
1844). But he missed no occasion of showing that in conviction and
aim he was with good men. The infirmities of fanatics never hid from
him either the transcendent purity of their motives or the grandeur of
their cause. This is ever the test of the scholar: whether he allows
intellectual fastidiousness to stand between him and the great issues of
his time. 'Cannot the English,' he cried out to Carlyle, 'leave cavilling at
petty failures and bad manners and at the dunce part, and leap to the
suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the
understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men?' These
finger-pointings Emerson did not mistake. He spoke up for Garrison.
John Brown was several times in Concord, and found a hearty welcome
in Emerson's house. When Brown made his raid at Harper's Ferry, and
the crisis became gradually sharper, Emerson felt that the time had
come, and his voice was raised in clear tones. After the sword is drawn,
it is deeds not words that interest and decide; but whenever the word of
the student was needed Emerson was ready to give the highest
expression to all that was best in his countrymen's mood during that
greatest ordeal of our time. The inward regeneration of the individual
had ever been the key to his teaching, and this teaching had been one of
the forces that, like central fire in men's minds, nourished the heroism
of the North in its immortal battle.

The exaltation of national character produced by the Civil War opened
new and wider acceptance for a great moral and spiritual teacher, and
from the close of the war until his death in 1882, Emerson's ascendency
within his own sphere of action was complete, and the public
recognition of him universal. Of story, there is no more to tell. He
pursued his old way of reading, meditating, conversing, and public
lecturing, almost to the end. The afternoon of his life was cloudless as
the earlier day, and the shades of twilight fell in unbroken serenity. In
his last years there was a partial failure of his memory, and more than
one pathetic story is told of this tranquil and gradual eclipse. But 'to the
last, even when the events of yesterday were occasionally obscured, his
memory of the remote past was unclouded; he would tell about the
friends of his early and middle life with unbroken vigour.' So, tended in
his home by warm filial devotion, and surrounded by the reverent
kindness of his village neighbours, this wise and benign man slowly
passed away (April 27, 1882).[4]
[Footnote 4: The reader who seeks full information about Emerson's
life will find it scattered in various volumes: among them are--
Ralph Waldo Emerson; by George Willis Cooke (Sampson Low & Co.,
1882)--a very diligent and instructive work.
R.W.E.; by Alexander Ireland (Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. 1882),
described by Carlyle, and known by others,