Society in 1862. Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.]

[Footnote 11: Anson Burlingame, famous in his time for treaties
negotiated between China and the United States, England, Denmark,
Sweden, Holland, and Prussia. His son, E. I. Burlingame, has long been
the editor of _Scribner's Magazine_.]

What could we do with this unexpected, unprovided for, unclassified,
half-unwelcome new-comer, who had been for a while potted, as it
were, in our Unitarian cold green-house, but had taken to growing so
fast that he was lifting off its glass roof and letting in the
hailstorms? Here was a protest that outflanked the extreme left of
liberalism, yet so calm and serene that its radicalism had the accents
of the gospel of peace. Here was an iconoclast without a hammer, who
took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed
like an act of worship.

The scribes and pharisees made light of his oracular sayings. The
lawyers could not find the witnesses to subpoena and the documents
to refer to when his case came before them, and turned him over to
their wives and daughters. The ministers denounced his heresies, and
handled his writings as if they were packages of dynamite, and the
grandmothers were as much afraid of his new teachings as old Mrs.
Piozzi[12] was of geology. We had had revolutionary orators,
reformers, martyrs; it was but a few years since Abner Kneeland had
been sent to jail for expressing an opinion about the great First
Cause; but we had had nothing like this man, with his seraphic voice
and countenance, his choice vocabulary, his refined utterance, his
gentle courage, which, with a different manner, might have been called
audacity, his temperate statement of opinions which threatened to
shake the existing order of thought like an earthquake.

[Footnote 12: Hester Lynch Salisbury, who married first Henry Thrale,
the English brewer, and second an Italian musician named Piozzi; but
her fame rests on her friendship of twenty years with Doctor Samuel
Johnson, of whom she wrote reminiscences, described by Carlyle as
"Piozzi's ginger beer."]

His peculiarities of style and of thinking became fertile parents of
mannerisms, which were fair game for ridicule as they appeared in his
imitators. For one who talks like Emerson or like Carlyle soon finds
himself surrounded by a crowd of walking phonographs, who mechanically
reproduce his mental and vocal accents. Emerson was before long
talking in the midst of