Emerson was as loyal an American, as thorough a New Englander, as home-loving a citizen, as ever lived.  He arraigned his countrymen sharply for their faults.  Mr. Arnold made one string of his epithets familiar to all of us,—­“This great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America.”  This was from a private letter to Carlyle.  In his Essay, “Works and Days,” he is quite as outspoken:  “This mendicant America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America.”  “I see plainly,” he says, “that our society is as bigoted to the respectabilities of religion and education as yours.”  “The war,” he says, “gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation.”  All his life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization.  All his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them.  To the dark prophecies of Carlyle, which came wailing to him across the ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations.  “Here,” he said, in words I have already borrowed, “is the home of man—­here is the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.”

Such a man as Emerson belongs to no one town or province or continent; he is the common property of mankind; and yet we love to think of him as breathing the same air and treading the same soil that we and our fathers and our children have breathed and trodden.  So it pleases us to think how fondly he remembered his birthplace; and by the side of Franklin’s bequest to his native city we treasure that golden verse of Emerson’s:—­

  “A blessing through the ages thus
  Shield all thy roofs and towers,
  GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,
  Thou darling town of ours!”

Emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend their meetings as a listener and looker-on.  His study was his workshop, and he preferred to labor in solitude.  When he became famous he paid the penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those “devastators of the day” who sought him in his quiet retreat.  His courtesy and kindness to his visitors were uniform and remarkable.  Poets who come to recite their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are among the most formidable of earthly visitations.  Emerson accepted his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy.  Except in that one phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far as I remember, in his writings.  His perfect amiability was one of his most striking characteristics, and in a nature fastidious as was his in its whole organization, it implied a self-command worthy of admiration.

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The natural purity and elevation of Emerson’s character show themselves in all that he writes.  His life corresponded to the ideal we form of him from his writings.  This it was which made him invulnerable amidst all the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited.  His white shield was so spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave their defacing marks upon it.  One would think he was protected by some superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as existing about Boileau,—­