it off but cast it aside when addressed by the sun's
genial warmth, had an illustration in the many who surrendered their
prejudice and selfishness, not at the bidding of the stormy reformers,
but touched by the serene light of Emerson. Emerson's specific influence
on slavery or any other social problem is hard to measure, for his power
was thrown on the illumination and inspiration of the individual man.
But in the large view his was an incomparable influence in diffusing
that temper of mingled courage and sweetness, the idealist's vision and
the soldier's valor, which is the world's best help and hope. He spoke
out against slavery whenever he saw that his word was needed; he
vindicated the right of the Abolitionists to free speech, whether they
spoke wisely or not; and in some of his poems, as the "Concord Ode," and
"Boston Hymn," he thrillingly invoked the best of the Puritan and
Revolutionary temper to right the wrongs of the present. It was said of
him that he gave to the war for the Union, "not one son, but a
thousand." But he also gave watchwords that will long outlast the issues
of the war and our issues of to-day. The homely yet soaring idealism of
the true American will always answer to the word, "Hitch your wagon to a
star."

The group of writers who gave brilliancy to this period have already
been cited as champions of freedom. Most effective in his advocacy was
Whittier, who, in early days, took active part in politics as a Free
Soiler, and afterward did greater service by the lyrics of freedom,
which like his songs of labor and poems of home life and religion, went
to the heart of the common people as no other American voice has done.
One who reads Whittier to-day may be allowed to wish that he had known
the sunny as well as the shady side of Southern life; and that, as in a
later poem he softened his fierce criticism on Webster, so he had
celebrated the virtues and graces of his white countrymen below the
Potomac and the Ohio, as well as the wrongs of his black countrymen.
Lowell, usually a scholarly poet, spoke to the common people nobly for
peace and freedom in the Biglow Papers. In 1857 the _Atlantic Monthly_
was started under his editorship, the organ at once of the highest
literary ability of New England, and of pronounced anti-slavery and
Republican sentiment. After he gave up the editorship in 1862, he wrote
at intervals of a few years the second series of Biglow Papers, and his
"Commemoration Ode"