I have discussed these lines in “The Book of Life,” and suggested how much cheaper it would have been to pay the owners than to fight the Civil War. I overlooked the fact that this “Boston Hymn” was written after the Civil War was on. Emerson, combining Yankee economy with wise humanity, had all along been advocating the sensible course of freeing the slaves by purchase. We think of this Concord sage as a philosopher, and less often as a poet. But he was a great poet; at his best he is among the immortals. Not only is there wisdom and moral beauty in his verse; there is love of nature, and there is passion. People sometimes died young in Concord, just as they did in old England and in Greece, and poets poured their sorrow into song. Emerson’s “Threnody,” written upon the death of his five-year-old son, is lacking in all the classical paraphernalia of Milton’s “Lycidas,” but it is full of such beauty and fervor as are native to our country, and I see no reason why we Americans should devote all our time to the worship of foreign gods. If our colleges must teach the classics, to the exclusion of modern work, let them at least teach our native classics, which are easier for us to understand. I propose a motto for our youth: See Emerson first! CHAPTER LXXVI THE AGE OF INNOCENCE America at this time was an overgrown youthful body, ill-supplied with mind; and a few ardent believers in culture set out to fill this need. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a student at Bowdoin College, and the faculty decided that Cervantes and Dante and Goethe and Moliere and Hugo ought to be more than names to the American people; somebody ought to study these languages and literatures, and pass them on. They gave Longfellow a traveling scholarship for three years, and he went abroad and collected things romantic and beautiful and innocent in Spain and Italy and Germany and France, and came home and spent the next twenty or thirty years in teaching them, first at Bowdoin and then at Harvard. He translated poetry, and also wrote poetry of his own, very much resembling the translations. At the age of forty-seven he became a poet exclusively, and lived to be a seventy-five-year-old boy, just as romantic and beautiful and innocent as when he had first gone out to gather nourishment for the hungry young soul of America. Longfellow was a moralist, and it was his purpose to draw useful conclusions in his poetry. He would start by looking at the planet Mars, and end by proving that human beings must be brave and self-reliant: not that there is anything remotely suggesting such qualities in a “red planet,” but because this planet happens to be named after the God of war. He would look at a ship on the stocks, and draw conclusions about the government of his country. He would look at the village blacksmith, and thank him for a lesson in diligence and sobriety.