Then there was the Concord Lyceum. People in those days believed in
obtaining nourishment for the mind as well as the body. Pretty dry
nourishment it often proved to be; but it served to bring them together
for an hour or two, and take them out of themselves and their dull
routine. Wiser remarks and more fresh information were sometimes heard
upon the stairway than in the lecture-hall.

Yet Emerson was always good, and every man and woman who came to hear
him probably felt better for it, even if they were unable to comprehend
what he said to them. In the mind's eyes one can see now his spare
figure standing at the desk between two large kerosene lamps, bending
forward slightly to catch the familiar sentence with his eye, and then
calmly surveying his audience as if to see where he could deliver it
most effectively.

Henry Ward Beecher drew the largest house, and produced great enthusiasm
by comparing the United States to an elephant,--though at that time
there can hardly be said to have been any United States; but the fine
oratory of Wendell Phillips made the strongest impression, rather too
rhetorical to be permanent--but it was intense while it lasted. A young
lady who was obliged to take laughing-gas a few days after his lecture
on Toussaint L'Ouverture repeated passages from it with appropriate
gestures, in the dentist's chair, and finally concluded, not with the
name of the negro statesman, but of the Concord high-school teacher.
Phillips was an especial favorite with the older ladies of the town, who
organized a local anti-slavery society in his honor, and held a meeting
of it whenever he came there.

But neither Phillips nor Beecher could equal a lecture by the Unitarian
clergyman on the naval policy of England, which was based on valuable