Then came that great event in the history of men and institutions, the Civil War. We look with anxiety for the part played by the serene thinker when the hour had struck for violent and heroic action. Emerson had hitherto been a Free Soiler; he had opposed the extension of slavery; and he favoured its compulsory extinction, with compensation on the plan of our own policy in the West Indies. He had never joined the active Abolitionists, nor did he see 'that there was any particular thing for him to do in it then.' 'Though I sometimes accept a popular call, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, I am sure to feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own' (_To Carlyle_, 1844). But he missed no occasion of showing that in conviction and aim he was with good men. The infirmities of fanatics never hid from him either the transcendent purity of their motives or the grandeur of their cause. This is ever the test of the scholar: whether he allows intellectual fastidiousness to stand between him and the great issues of his time. 'Cannot the English,' he cried out to Carlyle, 'leave cavilling at petty failures and bad manners and at the dunce part, and leap to the suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men?' These finger-pointings Emerson did not mistake. He spoke up for Garrison. John Brown was several times in Concord, and found a hearty welcome in Emerson's house. When Brown made his raid at Harper's Ferry, and the crisis became gradually sharper, Emerson felt that the time had come, and his voice was raised in clear tones. After the sword is drawn, it is deeds not words that interest and decide; but whenever the word of the student was needed Emerson was ready to give the highest expression to all that was best in his countrymen's mood during that greatest ordeal of our time. The inward regeneration of the individual had ever been the key to his teaching, and this teaching had been one of the forces that, like central fire in men's minds, nourished the heroism of the North in its immortal battle.