382 . EMERSON THE LECTURER. 



into a prominence of obscurity, and seem to masthead 

 them there. Everybody was asking his neighbor who 

 this or that recondite great man was, in the faint hope 

 that somebody might once have heard of him. There 

 are those who call Mr. Emerson cold. Let them revise 

 their judgment in presence of this loyalty of his that 

 can keep warm for half a century, that never forgets a 

 friendship, or fails to pay even a fancied obligation to 

 the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of shadows 

 was but incidental, and pleasantly characteristic of the 

 man to those who know and love him. The greater part 

 of the lecture was devoted to reminiscences of things 

 substantial in themselves. He spoke of Everett, fresh 

 from Greece and Germany; of Channing ; of the trans- 

 lations of Margaret Fuller, Ripley, and Dwight ; of the 

 Dial and Brook Farm. To what he said of the latter 

 an undertone of good-humored irony gave special zest. 

 But what every one of his hearers felt was that the pro- 

 tagonist in the drama was left out. The lecturer was 

 no ^Eneas to babble the quorum magna pars fid, and, as 

 one of his listeners, I cannot help wishing to say how 

 each of them was commenting the story as it went along, 

 and filling up the necessary gaps in it from his own pri- 

 vate store of memories. His younger hearers could not 

 know how much they owed to the benign impersonality, 

 the quiet scorn of everything ignoble, the never-sated 

 hunger of self-culture, that were personified in the man 

 before them. But the older knew how much the coun- 

 try's intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus 

 of his teaching and example, how constantly he had kept 

 burning the beacon of an ideal life above our lower 

 region of turmoil. To him more than to all other causea 

 together did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the 

 sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so 

 touching in every record of their lives. Those who are 



