and heart, it is plain that many of Channing's anticipations and hopes
have already been realized, that his influence on three generations of
men has been profound and wholly beneficent, and that the world is
going his way, though with slow and halting steps.

His life brightened to its close. In its last summer but one he wrote:
"This morning I plucked a globe of the dandelion--the seed-vessel--and
was struck as never before with the silent, gentle manner in which
nature sows her seed.... I saw, too, how nature sows her seed
broadcast.... So we must send truth abroad, not forcing it on here and
there a mind, and watching its progress anxiously, but trusting that it
will light on a kindly soil, and yield its fruit. So nature teaches."

May those who stand here one hundred years hence say,--the twentieth
century supplied more of kindly soil for Channing seed than the
nineteenth.




EMERSON


Emerson was not a logician or reasoner, and not a rhetorician, in the
common sense. He was a poet, who wrote chiefly in prose, but also in
verse. His verse was usually rough, but sometimes finished and
melodious; it was always extraordinarily concise and expressive. During
his engagement to the lady who became his second wife, he wrote thus to
her: "I am born a poet,--of a low class without doubt, yet a poet; that
is my nature and vocation. My singing, be sure, is very husky, and is,