ndemic orthodoxy of that place
and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the
sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. There is a kind of harmony
between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary
colors. It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side
that comparison makes them odious to each other. Mr. Emerson could go
anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief
from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner,
such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to
quarrel with the gentle image-breaker.

The subject of Mr. Emerson's Address is _Literary Ethics._ It is on the
same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence
as the Phi Beta Kappa Address. The word impassioned would seem
misplaced, if applied to any of Mr. Emerson's orations. But these
discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his
complete manhood. They were produced at a time when his mind had learned
its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which
freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and
all peremptory external authority. It is not strange, therefore, to find
some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative
illustration.

"Neither years nor books," he says, "have yet availed to extirpate a
prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and
earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." And yet,
he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled
the reasonable expectation of mankind. "Men here, as elsewhere, are
indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery
productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought."
For all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie
all his teachings. "The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his
confidence in the attributes of the Intellect." New lessons of spiritual
independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history
and biography. There is a passage here so true to nature that it permits
a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment:--

"An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of
injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their
possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything