a pure idealist, with no
by-ends of his own. Many of us have seen him, and everyone who has heard
him speak has been impressed alike by his simple, artless goodness and
his sublime courage. He joins that perfect Puritan faith which brought
his ancestor to Plymouth Rock, with his grandfather's ardor in the
Revolution. He believes in two articles--two instruments, shall I
say?--the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence; and he used
this expression in a conversation here concerning them: 'Better that a
whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by a
violent death, than that one word of either should be violated in this
country.'... He grew up a religious and manly person, in severe poverty;
a fair specimen of the best stock of New England, having that force of
thought and that sense of right which are the warp and woof of
greatness.... Thus was formed a romantic character, absolutely without
any vulgar trait; living to ideal ends, without any mixture of
self-indulgence or compromise, such as lowers the value of benevolent
and thoughtful men we know; abstemious, refusing luxuries, not sourly
and reproachfully, but simply as unfit for his habit; quiet and gentle
as a child, in the house. And as happens usually to men of romantic
character, his fortunes were romantic."

But the romance in this portrait is due quite as much to the imagination
of the artist as to the character of the subject. Emerson seems to have
entirely overlooked in his estimate of Brown that he had no rational
idea of the moral obligations of the citizen to the civil government and
to the peace of society; and that his conscience in its apparent
simplicity was really in dire confusion. The sentence he quotes from
Brown's conversation has its practical commentary in Brown's acts. He
was as ready to take the sword, to redress what he considered a breach
of the Golden Rule or the Declaration of Independence, as if mankind had
not for thousands of years and with infinite cost been building up
institutions for the peaceful settlement of difficulties. In Kansas he
saw in the political struggle simply an issue to be tried out by force
between good men and bad men; and he made himself executioner of a group
of men he considered bad, thereby plunging into a series of murders
utterly repugnant to his natural humanity. He afterward justified the
deed, without avowing his own part in it, which was not fully known till
twenty years later.