Modern Eloquence: Vol II | Page 8

sweetness to be the
issue of strength, and beauty to be the halo of power. They have seen
the vision of the rainbow round the throne. They have touched with
divine light the prosaic story of New England, and found the
picturesque in what seemed commonplace. They have seen the great in
the little, and ennobled the humbler ways of existence with spiritual
insight. They have set to music the homely service and simple

enjoyments of common life. They have touched the chords that speak
to the universal heart. The very provincialism of our poets endears
them to us. Their work, as some foreign critic said, has been done in a
corner. We do not deny it. But, verily we believe, that New England is
the corner lot of our national estate. Our poets have preserved for us in
ballads our homespun legends. They have imaged in verse the beauty
of New England's hills and waters. As we read there comes the whiff of
fragrance which transports us to the hillside pasture where the sweet
fern and sorrel grow, or the salt breeze of the sea blows again on our
cheeks, or the rippling Merrimac sings in our ears, or the heights of
Katahdin or Wachusett, lift our eyes upward. Finally, our poets, in their
characters, disprove the reproach that a democracy can produce only
average men. As they wrote, they were.
The harp of New England is silent. The master hands sweep the chords
no more. But shall we dare to think that the coming generation will
have no songs and no singers? Shall we build the sepulchre of poetry?
Shall we express ourselves only in histories and criticisms? Shall man
no longer behold God and nature face to face? "Things are in the saddle
to-day," said Emerson; and indeed it may well depress us to see our
greatness as a nation measured by the number of bushels of wheat
raised, or the number of hogs packed. "The value of a country," said
Lowell, "is weighed in scales more delicate than the balance of trade.
On a map of the world you may cover Judea with your thumb, Athens
with a finger tip, and neither of them figures in the prices current, yet
they still live in the thought and action of every civilized man. Material
success is good, but only as the necessary preliminary of better things.
The measure of a nation's true success is the amount it has contributed
to the thought, the moral energy, the intellectual happiness, the spiritual
hope and consolation of mankind." Before we can have a rebirth of
poetry, we must have a fresh infusion of the Puritan devotion to ideal
ends. We must be baptized again into the spirit of non-conformity, of
intellectual and moral honesty, the spirit which does not suffer men to
go with the crowd, when reason and conscience and a living God bid
them go alone. There never was a time when we needed more the
background of Puritanism. We need in our business and our politics a
sterner sense of the fear of God, and in our home life a renewed

simplicity. If we are to build up to the level of our best opportunities,
we must build down to solid foundation on the sense of obligation. We
have new times, new land and new men. Shall we not have new
thought, new work and new worship? [Applause.]

RALPH WALDO EMERSON
ENGLAND, MOTHER OF NATIONS
[Speech of Ralph Waldo Emerson at the annual banquet of the
Manchester Athenæum, Manchester, England, November, 1847. Sir
Archibald Alison, the historian, presided]
MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--It is pleasant to me to meet
this great and brilliant company, and doubly pleasant to see the faces of
so many distinguished persons on this platform. But I have known all
these persons already. When I was at home, they were as near to me as
they are to you. The arguments of the League and its leader are known
to all the friends of free trade. The gaieties and genius, the political, the
social, the parietal wit of "Punch" go duly every fortnight to every boy
and girl in Boston and New York. Sir, when I came to sea, I found the
"History of Europe"[2] on the ship's cabin table, the property of the
captain;--a sort of programme or play-bill to tell the seafaring New
Englander what he shall find on landing here. And as for Dombey, sir,
there is no land where paper exists to print on, where it is not found; no
man who can read, that does not read it, and, if he cannot, he finds
some charitable pair of eyes that can, and hears it.
But these things are not for me to say; these compliments, though true,
would better come