on, moved to Concord, and dwelt apart
from men, but "as he mused, the fire burned." Easily our first man of
American letters, he is among the first essayists of all ages and
climes. Essentially, however, he was a man of intellect, an American
Plato, "a Greek head screwed upon Yankee shoulders," to use Holmes'
expression. His essay upon "The American Scholar," and his book on
"Nature," brought him fame in England, and invitations to lecture before
their colleges. Early in his career he won the friendship of Arnold of
Rugby, of Matthew Arnold the son, of Arthur Hugh Clough, and of Thomas
Carlyle. He returned from his honours in England to find himself the
centre of the intellectual movement of New England. A number of younger
men gathered around him, until Emerson's group at Concord became like
unto Goethe's group at Weimar, and Coleridge's in London. During the
late forties American educators, orators and statesmen began to quote
the striking sentences from Emerson. Little by little it came about that
the fighters went to Emerson as to an arsenal for their intellectual
weapons. His first notable contribution to abolitionism was his "Story
of the West India Emancipation." Then came his "Essay on the Fugitive
Slave Law," his speech on the Assault on Mr. Sumner, his writings on
Kansas, and on John Brown. Few men have had such power to condense a
statement of philosophy into a single epigram. Grant once said of his
soldiers that while each man took aim for himself, Winchester slew all
the thousands. Not otherwise, hundreds of orators and reformers went up
and down the land attacking slavery, but while the voices were many,
the argument was one, and Emerson for a time did the speaking for the
abolitionists.

What Emerson stated in pure white light, Whittier made popular through
his poems of Slavery and Freedom. By way of preeminence he was the poet
of the abolition movement, and the Sir Galahad among our singers. Reared
among the Friends, he had the simplicity of the Quaker, but the solidity
and massiveness of the fighting Puritan. Strange as it may seem, he was
at once the poet of peace, insisting upon the crime of war, and the poet
of freedom, insisting upon the destruction of slavery. The fire and
glow, the moral earnestness, the spiritual passion of Whittier, are best
illustrated in his "Lost Occasion," and "Ichabod." At length the
newspapers of the North took up his work. For some years before the war
broke out, scarcely