"I will show you (as in this country we can anywhere) an America in miniature in the April or November town meeting. Therein should you conveniently study and master the whole of our hemispherical politics, reduced to a nutshell, and have a new version of Oxenstiern's little wit, and yet be consoled by seeing that here the farmers, patient as their bulls of head-boards (provided for them in relation to distant national objects by kind editors of newspapers), do yet their will, and a good will, in their own parish."

"1

Nothing of the spirit of the cockney ever came of his city birth and training. The city was a centring of forces which could accomplish great results, but the simple working life of the country supplied the life-blood which gave it strength and power of action. He recognized the function of great centres of population, but also their dangers. France has held herself compact and firm in her intellectual life, amid countless revolutions, greatly through the centralizing influence of her metropolis, to which the eye of every boy of talent and ambition turns as to his polar star. Emerson said of England: "The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, a London extended into every man's mind, though he live in Van Diemen's Land or Cape Town;" and he recognized Carlyle as a "product of London." Germany must yet find or make a central city (perhaps the Berlin

1 This passage was equally descriptive of Concord, however, where it was written, and where Emerson made his home constantly from 1834 to his death in April, 1882.

of Frederick the Great) before she can become a truly united nation. How wisely have Florence, Turin, Milan, and Naples yielded local prejudices and made Rome, with its far-reaching historic memories, the centre of the new Italian government and life!

More than any city on this continent Boston has been a real uniting centre for a large and intelligent population. All over New England, men have said as Emerson wrote to Carlyle, "I am spending the summer in the country, but my address is Boston;' and as the iron links have been more closely woven around the hills and through the valleys, the interchange has become so constant (as the citizen seeks health and refreshment in every quiet village by the mountain or seaside, and the dweller in the country comes to the city for lessons and lectures, opera and concert) that dress and manners are hardly distinguishable, and each part can "call the farthest brother."

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How truly Emerson felt that the city did not shut men out from the sublimity of the universe is shown in that glorious passage on the stars with which he opens the great prose poem of "Nature," "Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are!" We please ourselves with thinking that he had never lost the feeling with which he first looked up through the vista of the narrow streets of Boston, and caught the shining of the Eternal in the stars; and that ever after they had a glory for him there which he did not find on the mountain-top, or the broad ocean, or as

they bent nearer and more lovingly to him on the plains of Concord.

When he entered Harvard College in 1817, the life at Cambridge, in College and Divinity School, did not break his relation to Boston; for the two were then closely united, and Commencement Day was a general holiday. The mild Kirkland was President; Channing, Everett, and Ticknor were among his professors; Josiah Quincy, son and grandson of Josiah, the most Bostonian of Bostonians, who might live at Quincy but prayed to be buried in Boston, was a classmate. More important than college and divinity lectures, however, was the influence of Everett's and Channing's eloquence. The indifference shown by Everett to the great moral conflict of the age destroyed so much of his personal influence in his later years, that it is difficult for us to realize that his eloquence aroused the enthusiasm of Emerson and Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller; but he had not then lost the faith and love of youth, and he may have helped the young man to that temperance of thought and sobriety of manner which never failed him, but blended happily with his never-ceasing earnestness and enthusiasm. Dr. Channing was then preaching in his Federal Street Church, and Edward Everett, leaving his pulpit in Boston, had become a professor at Cambridge, from which position he entered Congress in 1825, and in due time became Governor of Massachusetts. Emerson says of him. in 1820:

"There was an influence on the young people from the genius of Everett which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens. He had an inspiration which did not go beyond his head, but which made him the master of elegance. If any of my readers were at that period in Boston or Cambridge, they will easily remember his radiant beauty of person, of a classic style; his heavy large eye, marble lids which gave the impression of mass that the slightness of his form needed; sculptured lips; a voice of such rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance, that, although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beautiful and correct of all the instruments of the time. The word that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, became current and classical in New England. . . . He had nothing in common with vulgarity or infirmity; but, speaking, walking, sitting, was as much aloof and uncommon as a star. The smallest anecdote of his conversation or behavior was eagerly caught and repeated; and every young scholar could recite brilliant sentences from his sermons, with mimicry, good or bad, of his voice. Every youth was his defender, and boys filled their mouths with arguments to prove that the orator had a heart."

Although Emerson preached for a short time at New Bedford and other places, he accepted a call to settle in Boston as his rightful place, and was installed as colleague with Henry Ware in 1829 over the Second Church, in Hanover Street. Welcomed by the pastor and congregation, and "charming them by the beauty of his elocution and the direct and sincere manner in which he addressed them," all seemed to promise a long and happy relation.

Although in style his discourses were not unlike those of his predecessors and contemporaries, Channing, Buckminster, etc., yet the great spirit within them was felt by those in harmony with him; while it was clear that "God had let loose a thinker upon the planet," 1 and that men must beware for their frail shells of conventionalism, which he would inevitably break down. When the expanding life made it necessary for him to give up some of the customary observances, especially the form of public prayer and the celebration of the Lord's Supper, a general discussion was aroused throughout the city. I remember as a school-girl listening to the comments of my dressmaker on this minister who did not go into the pulpit in the spirit of prayer."

The impersonality of his action in thus leaving the established church of his ancestors is shown by the tender affection which he ever cherished for it. As he truly wrote,

"We love the venerable house

Our fathers built to God.

In heaven are kept their grateful vows,

Their dust endears the sod."

1 Nothing could more fitly describe the coming of Emerson to the world of Boston and the influence of his transcendental thought than his own words: "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet; then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe or where it will end. There is not a piece of science that its flank may not be turned to-morrow; there is not a literary reputation but the so-called eternal names of fame that may not be revised and condemned."