But no man more charitably and diligently sought to understand others, and to be just to what was obscure and foreign to him. He listened patiently to music. But it did not charm him. He was punctual in the duties of a citizen. But he had no proper political tastes. Yet for the true politics, the application of the moral law to the control of public affairs, no man was more perceptive or uncompromising. He was always on the right side of great public questions. His hospitable sympathy entertained every good cause, and in all our antislavery literature there is no nobler or more permanent work than his address upon the anniversary of West India emancipation in 1844. The only cloud that ever arose upon his regard for Carlyle was his displeasure with Carlyle's contemptuous and cynical sneers at our civil war. He was deeply impatient of doubtful and half-hearted Americans during the war. "They call themselves gentlemen, I believe," he said of certain persons, and in a tone which showed that his lofty and patriotic honor instinctively and utterly repudiated the pinchbeck claims of educated feebleness to bear "the grand old name of gentleman." Those who recall Emerson when he was a clergyman in Boston remember a singular spiritual beauty in the man, and an indescribable charm of manner in his public speech. But apparently he impressed his earlier associates with the purity and refinement of his mind and life, his lofty intellectual tastes and sympathy, and his literary accomplishment, rather than by the peculiar force of a genius which was to give the most powerful spiritual impulse of the generation to American thought. This is the more singular because there was always something breezy and heroic in his tone, which might have led to the suspicion of the fact that he was from the first a fond reader of Plutarch, from whose "Lives" he draws so many illustrations. As in a mountain walk the traveller is suddenly aware of wafts of perfumed air, now of the wild-grape blossom, now of the azalea or sweet-brier, so the strain of Emerson suggests his sympathy with Plutarch and Montaigne, the Oriental poets and the Platonists.