[121] _Page 160, note 1._ In his description of the Tower of London in the journal of 1834, it appears that the suits of armor there set up affected Mr. Emerson unpleasantly, suggesting half-human destructive lobsters and crabs. It is, I believe, said that Benvenuto Cellini learned to make the cunning joints in armor for men from those of these marine warriors. In the opening paragraphs of the essay on Inspiration Mr. Emerson congratulates himself that the doleful experiences of the aboriginal man were got through with long ago. “They combed his mane, they pared his nails, cut off his tail, set him on end, sent him to school and made him pay taxes, before he could begin to write his sad story for the compassion or the repudiation of his descendants, who are all but unanimous to disown him. We must take him as we find him,” etc. [122] _Page 162, note 1._ In _English Traits_, at the end of the chapter on Stonehenge, Mr. Emerson gave a humorous account of his setting forth the faith or hope of the non-resistants and idealists in New England, to the amazed and shocked ears of Carlyle and Arthur Helps. [123] _Page 164, note 1._ “As the solidest rocks are made up of invisible gases, as the world is made of thickened light and arrested electricity, so men know that ideas are the parents of men and things; there was never anything that did not proceed from a thought.”—“The Scholar,” _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_. [124] _Page 164, note 2._ In “The Problem” he says of the Parthenon and England’s abbeys that out of Thought’s interior sphere These wonders rose to upper air. [125] _Page 167, note 1._ Mr. Emerson in his conversation frankly showed that he was not yet quite prepared to be a non-resistant. He would have surely followed his own counsel where he says, “Go face the burglar in your own house,” and he seemed to feel instinctive sympathy with what Mr. Dexter, the counsel, said in the speech which he used to read me from the Selfridge trial:— “And may my arm drop powerless when it fails to defend my honor!” He exactly stated his own position in a later passage, where he says that “in a given extreme event Nature and God will instruct him in that hour.” [126] _Page 172, note 1._ Thoreau lived frankly and fearlessly up to this standard. [127] _Page 173, note 1._ This same view is even more attractively set forth in “Aristocracy” (_Lectures and Biographical Sketches_, pp. 36-40). Rev. Dr. Cyrus A. Bartol, in an interesting paper on “Emerson’s Religion,”[C] gives, among other reminiscences, the following: “I asked him if he approved of war. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in one born to fight.’” THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW, CONCORD, 1851