So we had a hard time of it till one day William Emerson came with Waldo, and said everything necessary to be said. After William had spoken for him, Waldo took courage, things went on easier, and I went on with my Greek." Miss Peabody and her sisters afterwards Mrs. Hawthorne and Mrs. Horace Mann Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar (who had been betrothed to his brother), and Sarah Clarke, were not only true friends, but of high- some of the highest value to him. And meanwhile amid them still sat the three fair Fates, who had helped to attune that heart and intellect of his to a harmony which drew to him the trust of woman. This he found his panoply against animadversions and misunderstandings, whose severity was, and is, underrated because so cheerily borne by Emerson. Sarah Bradford, the friend of his childhood, had married Emerson's relative, the Rev. Samuel Ripley, and was settled at Waltham, in the neighbourhood of Boston. A letter of hers to Emerson's aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, shows by its date, Sept. 4, 1883, that Emerson must have sped to that Waltham home immediately after his arrival from Europe. But it shows something more. "We have had a delightful visit of two days from Waldo. We feel about him as you no doubt do. While we regard him still more than ever as the apostle of the eternal reason, we do not like to hear the crows, as Pindar says, caw at the bird of Jove; nevertheless, he has some stern advocates. A lady was mourning the other day to Mr. Francis about Mr. Emerson's insanity. Madam, I wish I were half as sane,' he answered, and with warm indig nation." This was the Rev. Dr. Conners Francis, for a long time professor in the Divinity College at Cambridge, whose wife was a sister of Mrs. Ripley, and whose sister was Lydia Maria Child, author of various works, among others of the earliest contribution to the science of religions, "The Progress of Religious Ideas." Thus was Emerson able to spare the applause of bigots, being surrounded by good women, who never fail in their sympathy for "an ideal right." Nor did they fail of their reward. "You question me," writes Margaret Fuller to a friend, "as to the nature of the benefits conferred upon me by Mr. Emerson's preaching. I answer that his influence has been more beneficial to me than that of any American, and that from him I first learned what is meant by the inward life. Many other springs have since fed the stream of living waters, but he first opened the fountain. That the 'mind is its own place,' was a dead phrase to me till he cast light upon my mind. Several of his sermons stand apart in my memory, like landmarks in my spiritual history. It would take a volume to tell what this one influence did for me, but perhaps I shall some time see that it was best to be forced to help myself." In this Margaret Fuller has expressed the grateful experience of the women I have named, while each was a sacred person in the experience of Emerson. To her words may be added these of Goethe: "Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan." ONG X. THE WAIL OF THE CENTURY. NCE when we were conversing about Robert Browning's poetry, Emerson said, "Paracelsus is the wail of the nineteenth century." I was a new student in Divinity College, and was rejoicing so much in having reached a shore so free as Unitarianism, that I did not quite understand Emerson's remark. Afterwards, while rambling along the Plymouth shore, the gently beating waves seemed to repeat "The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung To their first fault, and withered in their pride.” Like those voyagers in Paracelsus's fable, who bore their household gods to the wrong shore, the old Plymouth Pilgrims fixed their ideals in rock-caves of dogma. "A hundred shapes of lucid stone! All day we built its shrine for each, To sing because our task was done. What laughter all the distance stirs ! 'Our isles are just at hand,' they cried, Like cloudlets faint at even sleeping; Our temple-gates are opened wide, Our olive-groves thick shade are keeping Our gifts, once given, must here abide. Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer and Roger Williams, and their bands of liberal pilgrims, seemed now the gentle islanders. From Rhode Island-where the islets in the harbour and the streets of their settlements bore the names of graces and virtues—they came to tell the Pilgrims how hard and desolate was the dogma that had received their ideals of truth, liberty, and justice, whose exile they had shared. Sternly they were bidden depart, but ever and again they returned. In the end the Pilgrims had to yield and start on a new pilgrimage, seeking new shrines for their gods. There, on the self-same island where Anne Hutchinson founded her community of free and equal men and women, one hundred and fifty years later was born Channing; and there stands the beautiful memorial church that bears his name, though less beautiful in its architecture than in the fact that Channing objected to the introduction of even a theistic expression of belief into the constitution of the earlier church he dedicated at Newport (1835). He demurred to the words "be lieving in one God, the Father," lest they should ultimately become a fetter upon some honest seeker of truth. Thus is the church a memorial also of Anne Hutchinson, in the constitution of whose State it was expressly provided that none be accounted delinquent for doctrine." 66 In the phraseology of the old Pilgrims, Anne Hutchinson and her gentle islanders had been banished because they were "unfit for the society" which had been constituted at Boston, and because it was feared that they might, upon some revelation, make a sudden insurrection." But when from Rhode Island her voice came back in the eloquence of Channing, none could be more fit for the society of the citizens, though there was a revelation, and thereon an insurrection. The young scholars followed Channing as far as he could lead, and once more fixed their ideals in the shrines to which he led them. Unitarianism seemed, indeed, an abode fair enough. when seen from the bareness of Plymouth Rock. Its rise and progress are traceable in a fine enthusiasm. It did away with all the horrors of Calvinistic theology its mercantile atonement, its doctrine of human depravity, its hell and devils. When the lucid ideals had superseded such grim gargoyles of the old churches, the children of the Pilgrims sang because their task seemed done. But, alas! once again the voice of the gentle islanders was heard, and the new coast was found bare and desolate. It was found that Unitarianism had unsettled everything, settled nothing. It was trying to hold on to the Christian fairy-tales after destroying the |