blance to the talk between Mrs. Hominy
and the Literary Ladies and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. Margaret
Fuller--the Miranda, Zenobia, Hypatia, Minerva of her time, and a truly
remarkable figure in the gallery of wonderful women--edited it for two
years, and contributed many a 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 a