ug at the ropes." When the Southern
States began to secede, some frightened compromisers in the North
hoped to soothe them by silencing the abolitionists; roughs were
employed to fill the anti-slavery halls and drown every voice.
Sometimes there was personal violence. During the war, in which many
of his friends were slain, and his only son wounded, no man did better
service than Emerson, with voice, pen, and means; and when it ended
his counsels were of the utmost importance.

Emerson had a happy old age, and lived to see his golden sheaves
around him. In the "Address" (1837), now historical, which brought the
fulminations of the Unitarian pulpit and university upon him, in his
thirty-fourth year, he admonished the American scholar that, "if the
single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there
abide, the huge world will come round to him." And now America has, in
his own history, the impressive confirmation of his faith. In just
twenty-nine years from the time that sentence was uttered, the
university which repudiated him made him an overseer and a doctor of
laws, and a lecturer to the students, and he was the most universally
beloved and honored man in America. Where he singly opened his church
to abolitionists, he lived to see all churches anti-slavery and the
slave set free. The white-robed sage lay in the church founded by his
Puritan ancestors, enlarged by his own thought, above whose pulpit was
a harp made of golden flowers, and on it an open book made of pinks,
pansies, roses, with the word "Finis." Flowers were never more truly
symbolical. His effective weapons against error and wrong were like
those roses with which the angels, in Goethe's "Faust," drove away the
demons, and his sceptre was made known by blossoming in his hand.

* * * * *

The following extract from a letter written by Emerson to one of his
children, is reprinted from Cabot's "A Memoir of R. W. Emerson," by
permission of the publisher, G. W. Dillingham.

"You are bound to be healthy and happy. I expect so much of you,
of course, and neither allow for nor believe any rumors to the
contrary. Please not to give the least countenance to any
hobgoblin of the sick sort, but live out-of-doors and in the
sea-bath and the sail-boat, and the saddle, and the wagon, and,
best of all, in your shoes, so soon as they will obey you for a
mile. For the great mother Nature wil