the bad boy was punished, to show
how sin involved the guiltless. And Miss Alcott is fond of working her
story around, so that she can better rub in a moral precept--and the
moral sometimes browbeats the story. But with all the elder Alcott's
vehement, impracticable, visionary qualities, there was a sturdiness
and a courage--at least, we like to think so. A Yankee boy who would
cheerfully travel in those days, when distances were long and
unmotored, as far from Connecticut as the Carolinas, earning his way by
peddling, laying down his pack to teach school when opportunity
offered, must possess a basic sturdiness. This was apparently not very
evident when he got to preaching his idealism. An incident in Alcott's
life helps confirm a theory--not a popular one--that men accustomed to
wander around in the visionary unknown are the quickest and strongest
when occasion requires ready action of the lower virtues. It often
appears that a contemplative mind is more capable of action than an
actively objective one. Dr. Emerson says: "It is good to know that it
has been recorded of Alcott, the benign idealist, that when the Rev.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, heading the rush on the U.S. Court House in
Boston, to rescue a fugitive slave, looked back for his following at
the court-room door, only the apostolic philosopher was there cane in
hand." So it seems that his idealism had some substantial virtues, even
if he couldn't make a living.

The daughter does not accept the father as a prototype--she seems to
have but few of her father's qualities "in female." She supported the
family and at the same time enriched the lives of a large part of young
America, starting off many little minds with wholesome thoughts and
many little hearts with wholesome emotions. She leaves
memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England childhood days,--pictures
which are turned to with affection by middle-aged children,--pictures,
that bear a sentiment, a leaven, that middle-aged America needs
nowadays more than we care to admit.

Concord village, itself, reminds one of that common virtue lying at the
height and root of all the Concord divinities. As one walks down the
broad-arched street, passing the white house of Emerson--ascetic guard
of a former prophetic beauty--he comes presently beneath the old elms
overspreading the Alcott house. It seems to stand as a kind of homely
but beautiful witness of Concord's common virtue--it seems to bear a
consciousne