awning. It was the era of Martin Chuzzlewit,
a malicious caricature,--founded on fact. This time of humiliation, when
there was no free speech, no literature, little manliness, no reality,
no simplicity, no accomplishment, was the era of American brag. We
flattered the foreigner and we boasted of ourselves. We were
over-sensitive, insolent, and cringing. As late as 1845, G.P. Putnam, a
most sensible and modest man, published a book to show what the country
had done in the field of culture. The book is a monument of the age.
With all its good sense and good humor, it justifies foreign contempt
because it is explanatory. Underneath everything lay a feeling of
unrest, an instinct,--"this country cannot permanently endure half slave
and half free,"--which was the truth, but which could not be uttered.

So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they
are timid upon all subjects. They wear an iron crown and talk in
whispers. Such social conditions crush and maim the individual, and
throughout New England, as throughout the whole North, the individual
was crushed and maimed.

The generous youths who came to manhood between 1820 and 1830, while
this deadly era was maturing, seem to have undergone a revulsion against
the world almost before touching it; at least two of them suffered,
revolted, and condemned, while still boys sitting on benches in school,
and came forth advancing upon this old society like gladiators. The
activity of William Lloyd Garrison, the man of action, preceded by
several years that of Emerson, who is his prophet. Both of them were
parts of one revolution. One of Emerson's articles of faith was that a
man's thoughts spring from his actions rather than his actions from his
thoughts, and possibly the same thing holds good for society at large.
Perhaps all truths, whether moral or economic, must be worked out in
real life before they are discovered by the student, and it was
therefore necessary that Garrison should be evolved earlier than
Emerson.

The silent years of early manhood, during which Emerson passed through
the Divinity School and to his ministry, known by few, understood by
none, least of all by himself, were years in which the revolting spirit
of an archangel thought out his creed. He came forth perfect, with that
serenity of which we have scarce another example in history,--that union
of the man himself, his beliefs, and his vehicle of expression that
makes men great be