virtues. It often appears that a contemplative mind is more
capable of action than an actively objective one. Dr. Emerson
says: "It is good to know that it has been recorded of Alcott,
the benign idealist, that when the Rev. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, heading the rush on the U.S. Court House in Boston, to
rescue a fugitive slave, looked back for his following at the
court-room door, only the apostolic philosopher was there cane in
hand." So it seems that his idealism had some substantial
virtues, even if he couldn't make a living.

The daughter does not accept the father as a prototype--she seems
to have but few of her father's qualities "in female." She
supported the family and at the same time enriched the lives of a
large part of young America, starting off many little minds with
wholesome thoughts and many little hearts with wholesome
emotions. She leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England
childhood days,--pictures which are turned to with affection by
middle-aged children,--pictures, that bear a sentiment, a leaven,
that middle-aged America needs nowadays more than we care to
admit.

Concord village, itself, reminds one of that common virtue lying
at the height and root of all the Concord divinities. As one
walks down the broad-arched street, passing the white house of
Emerson--ascetic guard of a former prophetic beauty--he comes
presently beneath the old elms overspreading the Alcott house. It
seems to stand as a kind of homely but beautiful witness of
Concord's common virtue--it seems to bear a consciousness that
its past is LIVING, that the "mosses of the Old Manse" and the
hickories of Walden are not far away. Here is the home of the