wrote. It is a hymn to force, honesty, and physical well-being, and ends
with the dominant note of his belief: "By this general activity and by
this sacredness of individuals, they [the English] have in seven hundred
years evolved the principles of freedom. It is the land of patriots,
martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged
should wash it away, it will be remembered as an island famous for
immortal laws, for the announcements of original right which make the
stone tables of liberty." He had found in England free speech, personal
courage, and reverence for the individual.

No convulsion could shake Emerson or make his view unsteady even for an
instant. What no one else saw, he saw, and he saw nothing else. Not a
boy in the land welcomed the outbreak of the war so fiercely as did this
shy village philosopher, then at the age of fifty-eight. He saw that war
was the cure for cowardice, moral as well as physical. It was not the
cause of the slave that moved him; it was not the cause of the Union for
which he cared a farthing. It was something deeper than either of these
things for which he had been battling all his life. It was the cause of
character against convention. Whatever else the war might bring, it was
sure to bring in character, to leave behind it a file of heroes; if not
heroes, then villains, but in any case strong men. On the 9th of April,
1861, three days before Fort Sumter was bombarded, he had spoken with
equanimity of "the downfall of our character-destroying civilization....
We find that civilization crowed too soon, that our triumphs were
treacheries; we had opened the wrong door and let the enemy into the
castle."

"Ah," he said, when the firing began, "sometimes gunpowder smells good."
Soon after the attack on Sumter he said in a public address, "We have
been very homeless for some years past, say since 1850; but now we have