throughout by the French Revolutionary theories, by the Romantic
spirit, by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by
the unrest of a fermenting age.

Our present concern is with the impact of this cosmopolitan
current upon the mind and character of a few New England writers.
Channing and Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau
and Emerson, are all representative of the best thought and the
noblest ethical impulses of their generation. Let us choose first
the greatest name: a sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one
of the very Sun-Gods.

The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village
library to study French's statue of Emerson will notice the
asymmetrical face. On one side it is the face of a keen Yankee
farmer, but seen from the other side it is the countenance of a
seer, a world's man. This contrast between the parochial Emerson
and the greater Emerson interprets many a puzzle in his career.
Half a mile beyond the village green to the north, close to the
"rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the Old
Manse, once tenanted and described by Hawthorne. It was built by
Emerson's grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, who
died of camp-fever at Ticonderoga. His widow married Dr. Ezra
Ripley, and here Ralph Waldo Emerson and his brothers passed many
a summer in their childhood. Half a mile east of the village, on
the Cambridge turnpike, is Emerson's own house, still sheltered
by the pines which Thoreau helped him to plant in 1838. Within
the house everything is unchanged: here are the worn books, pen
and inkstand, the favorite pictures upon the wall. Over the ridge
to the north lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery where the poet