the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work
of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him;
but when I have seen it near!--I do not like it better. It is done
in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management,
by tactics and clamor."

All this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by
the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson
had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser
and better one. He attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in
view of some larger and loftier principle. The charm of his imagination
and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts
that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes
it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the
dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who
sat before him. He knew the force of _felix audacia_ as well as any
rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of
those daring images which defy the critics.

"As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain,
the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall
eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we
shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds."

He said hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in
his "Lecture on the Times." It would have taken a long while to get
rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings in this lecture had been
accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence
covers with its soothing tribute!