very useful, very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative Massachusetts Historical Society.  It looks unlike anything else Emerson ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix.  One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged with annotations, and trailing a supplement after it.  Oracles are brief and final in their utterances.  Delphi and Cumae are not expected to explain what they say.

It is the habit of our New England towns to celebrate their own worthies and their own deeds on occasions like this, with more or less of rhetorical gratitude and self-felicitation.  The discourses delivered on these occasions are commonly worth reading, for there was never a clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and heroines.  Concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland towns of New England.  Emerson has told its story in as painstaking, faithful a way as if he had been by nature an annalist.  But with this fidelity, we find also those bold generalizations and sharp picturesque touches which reveal the poetic philosopher.

“I have read with care,” he says, “the town records themselves.  They exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of a manifest love of justice.  I find our annals marked with a uniform good sense.—­The tone of the record rises with the dignity of the event.  These soiled and musty books are luminous and electric within.  The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they contrive to make intelligible the will of a free and just community.” ...  “The matters there debated (in town meetings) are such as to invite very small consideration.  The ill-spelled pages of the town records contain the result.  I shall be excused for confessing that I have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and private pique which I have met with in these antique books, as proof that justice was done; that if the results of our history are approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife; if the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a fair field.  And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so much ground of assurance of man’s capacity for self-government.”

There was nothing in this Address which the plainest of Concord’s citizens could not read understandingly and with pleasure.  In fact Mr. Emerson himself, besides being a poet and a philosopher, was also a plain Concord citizen.  His son tells me that he was a faithful attendant upon town meetings, and, though he never spoke, was an interested and careful listener to the debates on town matters.  That respect for “mother-wit” and for all the