Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel
Adams supported the affirmative of the question, "Whether it be lawful
to resist the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be
preserved." It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there.
The dignity, not to say the formality of an Academic assembly was
startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in "the meal in the
firkin; the milk in the pan." They could understand the deep thoughts
suggested by "the meanest flower that blows," but these domestic
illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the
grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so
stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet
had been proclaiming to them "Thus saith the Lord." No listener ever
forgot that Address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker
it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more
like that of immediate inspiration.




CHAPTER V.

1838-1843. AET. 35-40.

Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human
Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:
Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of
Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The
Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The
Dial."--Brook Farm.