n. On the 9th of April,
1861, three days before Fort Sumter was bombarded, he had spoken with
equanimity of "the downfall of our character-destroying civilization....
We find that civilization crowed too soon, that our triumphs were
treacheries; we had opened the wrong door and let the enemy into the
castle."

"Ah," he said, when the firing began, "sometimes gunpowder smells good."
Soon after the attack on Sumter he said in a public address, "We have
been very homeless for some years past, say since 1850; but now we have
a country again.... The war was an eye-opener, and showed men of all
parties and opinions the value of those primary forces that lie beneath
all political action." And it was almost a personal pledge when he said
at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865, "We shall not again disparage
America, now that we have seen what men it will bear."

The place which Emerson forever occupies as a great critic is defined by
the same sharp outlines that mark his work, in whatever light and from
whatever side we approach it. A critic in the modern sense he was not,
for his point of view is fixed, and he reviews the world like a
search-light placed on the top of a tall tower. He lived too early and
at too great a distance from the forum of European thought to absorb the
ideas of evolution and give place to them in his philosophy. Evolution
does not graft well upon the Platonic Idealism, nor are physiology and
the kindred sciences sympathetic. Nothing aroused Emerson's indignation
more than the attempts of the medical faculty and of phrenologists to
classify, and therefore limit individuals. "The grossest ignorance does
not disgust me like this ignorant knowingness."

We miss in Emerson the underlying conception of growth, of development,
so characteristic of the thought of our own day, and which, for
instance, is found everywhere latent in Browning's poetry. Browning
regards character as the result of experience and as an ever changing
growth. To Emerson, character is rather an entity complete and eternal
from the beginning. He is probably the last great writer to look at life
from a stationary standpoint. There is a certain lack of the historic
sense in all he has written. The ethical assumption that all men are
exactly alike permeates his work. In his mind, Socrates, Marco Polo, and
General Jackson stand surrounded by the same atmosphere, or rather stand
as mere naked characters surrounded by no atmosphere at all. He is