for the good wishes you send me to open the year, and I say them back again to you.  Your field is a world, and all men are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted service you render.  And yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that concerns either you or me.  The whole world is sick of that very ail, of being seen, and of seemliness.  It belongs to the brave now to trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone.  I am glad to see William Channing is one of your coadjutors.  Mrs. Jameson’s new book, I should think, would bring a caravan of travellers, aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along the lakes to Mackinaw.  As I read I almost vowed an exploration, but I doubt if I ever get beyond the Hudson.

    Your affectionate servant, R.W.  EMERSON.

On the 24th of July, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery of the Address before the Divinity School, Mr. Emerson delivered an Oration before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College.  If any rumor of the former discourse had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to which they listened.  The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious old tenants of the Hanover aviary.  If there were any drops of false or questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy old dogmatists as dry as ever.

Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his audience.  President Lord was well known as the scriptural defender of the institution of slavery.  Not long before a controversy had arisen, provoked by the setting up of the Episcopal form of worship by one of the Professors, the most estimable and scholarly Dr. Daniel Oliver.  Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker.  There is a kind of harmony between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary colors.  It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side that comparison makes them odious to each other.  Mr. Emerson could go anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief from the views he held.  Such was his simplicity of speech and manner, such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to quarrel with the gentle image-breaker.