circumstances around me which made it difficult to view the world
precisely as it exists; for, severe and sober as was the Old Manse, it
was necessary to go but a little way beyond its threshold before
meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might have been
encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles.

These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the
widespreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his
earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind
acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful
magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him
face to face. Young visionaries--to whom just so much of insight had
been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them--came to
seek the clew that should guide them out of their self-involved
bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists--whose systems, at first air, had
finally imprisoned them in an iron framework--travelled painfully to
his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into
their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought or a
thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a
glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and
value. Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of
the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a
hill-top, and, climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the
surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto. The light
revealed objects unseen before,--mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses
of a creation among the chaos; but also, as was unavoidable, it
attracted bats and owls and the whole host of night birds, which
flapped their dusky wings against the gazer's eyes, and sometimes were
mistaken for fowls of angelic feather. Such delusions always hover
nigh whenever a beacon-fire of truth is kindled.