their flight back to Boston that day, pursued and ambuscaded by hundreds and thousands of the aroused militia of Middlesex and Essex counties, should themselves have committed some barbarities,--for their defeat and humiliation were great. They lost in course of the day 273 men and officers,--more than had fallen on that glorious day, sixteen years before, when Wolfe died in the arms of victory at Quebec. The loss of the yeomanry was only ninety-one--a third of the British loss,--while all the trophies and circumstances of victory were on the American side. From that day, the Revolution was begun,--to end only with the creation of a new republic. Concord, as President Dwight said, “prefaced the history of a nation, the beginning of an empire.” “Man,” he added, “from the events that have occurred here, will in some respects assume a new character; and experience a new destiny.” Hence the interest with which the world, from that day forward, began to look on this little town. Yet the prominence of Concord in the revolutionary century that followed her skirmish at the Bridge and along the Lexington road was in part accidental; for Boston and Virginia were the two _foci_ of the American revolt, and Concord became famous chiefly because it was near Boston. It was otherwise with the literary revolution that began sixty years later, with Emerson for its Washington,--and with results that seem as permanent, and in some sort as important, as those which Washington secured to his countrymen. In 1835, when Emerson’s literary career may be said to have fairly begun, America had maintained her political independence, but had lost much of her political principle: she was powerful without moral progress, and without either a profound philosophy or an original literature. The beginnings of poetry and art were visible, but they were more in promise than in performance. Our political writings, though disparaged by Jeremy Bentham, were coming to be recognized as among the foremost; but we had little else that Europe cared to read,--a few sketches by Irving, a dozen novels by Cooper, two or three sermons and as many essays by Channing. Into the stagnation of this shallow pool of American letters, Emerson, in 1836, cast the smooth stone of his philosophical first book,--_Nature_. It made little immediate stir; the denizens of the pool paid small heed to it, and few of them guessed what it meant. It was written in Concord, and chiefly at the Old Manse, where Emerson dwelt with his mother and kindred before his second marriage in 1835, and where Hawthorne afterward made the house and himself widely known. The fixing of his own residence in this town by Emerson was due in part to ancestry, and still more to a perception of the fitness of the region for the abode of a poet and sage. The same perception, by Hawthorne, Alcott, Ellery Channing and others,--together with the important fact that it [Illustration: HENRY THOREAU. (1857.)]