onception. If it be true, he stands alone in the history of
teachers; he has circumvented fate, he has left an unmixed blessing
behind him.

The signs of those times which brought forth Emerson are not wholly
undecipherable. They are the same times which gave rise to every
character of significance during the period before the war. Emerson is
indeed the easiest to understand of all the men of his time, because his
life is freest from the tangles and qualifications of circumstance. He
is a sheer and pure type and creature of destiny, and the
unconsciousness that marks his development allies him to the deepest
phenomena. It is convenient, in describing him, to use language which
implies consciousness on his part, but he himself had no purpose, no
theory of himself; he was a product.

The years between 1820 and 1830 were the most pitiable through which
this country has ever passed. The conscience of the North was pledged to
the Missouri Compromise, and that Compromise neither slumbered nor
slept. In New England, where the old theocratical oligarchy of the
colonies had survived the Revolution and kept under its own waterlocks
the new flood of trade, the conservatism of politics reinforced the
conservatism of religion; and as if these two inquisitions were not
enough to stifle the soul of man, the conservatism of business
self-interest was superimposed. The history of the conflicts which
followed has been written by the radicals, who negligently charge up to
self-interest all the resistance which establishments offer to change.
But it was not solely self-interest, it was conscience that backed the
Missouri Compromise, nowhere else, naturally, so strongly as in New
England. It was conscience that made cowards of us all. The white-lipped
generation of Edward Everett were victims, one might even say martyrs,
to conscience. They suffered the most terrible martyrdom that can fall
to man, a martyrdom which injured their immortal volition and dried up
the springs of life. If it were not that our poets have too seldom
deigned to dip into real life, I do not know what more awful subject for
a poem could have been found than that of the New England judge
enforcing the fugitive slave law. For lack of such a poem the heroism of
these men has been forgotten, the losing heroism of conservatism. It was
this spiritual power of a committed conscience which met the new forces
as they arose, and it deserves a better name than these new forces