Some
friend recommended an Abolition campaign to him: "I doubt not a course
in mobs would do me good."

Then he refers to his faults as a writer: "I think I have material
enough to serve my countrymen with thought and music, if only it was
not scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold dust but ingots."

Emerson felt his own bardic character, but lamented that he had so few
of the bardic gifts. At the age of fifty-nine he says: "I am a bard
least of bards. I cannot, like them, make lofty arguments in stately,
continuous verse, constraining the rocks, trees, animals, and the
periodic stars to say my thoughts,--for that is the gift of great
poets; but I am a bard because I stand near them, and apprehend all
they utter, and with pure joy hear that which I also would say, and,
moreover, I speak interruptedly words and half stanzas which have the
like scope and aim:"

"What I cannot declare, yet cannot all withhold."

There is certainly no over-valuation in this sentence, made when he
was sixty-two: "In the acceptance that my papers find among my
thoughtful countrymen, in these days, I cannot help seeing how limited
is their reading. If they read only the books that I do, they would
not exaggerate so wildly." Two years before that he had said, "I often
think I could write a criticism of Emerson that would hit the white."

Emerson was a narrow-chested, steeple-shouldered man with a tendency
to pulmonary disease, against which he made a vigorous fight all his
days. He laments his feeble physical equipment in his poem,
"Terminus":

"Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once,
The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb."

And yet, looking back near the end of his life, he says that
considering all facts and conditions he thinks he has had triumphant
health.

XIII

Emerson's wisdom and catholicity of spirit always show in his
treatment of the larger concerns of life and conduct. How remarkable
is this passage written in Puritanic New England in 1842:

I hear with pleasure that a young girl in the midst of rich,
decorous Unitarian friends in Boston is well-nigh persuaded
to join the Roman Catholic Church. Her frien