In this country Ralph Waldo Emerson was the great teacher. He gave an atmosphere rather than a dogma. He was air and light. He is best described, not as a philosopher, a man of letters, a poet, but as a seer. His gift was that of insight. This he tried to render comprehensive, searching, intelligent, accurate, by reading, study, meditation, the acquaintance of distinguished men; but he was never beguiled into thinking that learning, eloquence, wit, constituted his peculiarity. He had a penetrating, eager, questioning look. His head was thrust out as if in quest of knowledge. His gaze was steady and intense. His speech was laconic and to the purpose. His direct manner suggested a wish for closer acquaintance with the mind. His very courtesy, which was invariable and exquisite in its way, had an air of inquiry about it. There was no varnish, no studied grace of motion or demeanor, no manifest desire to please, but a kind of wistfulness as of one who took you at your best and wanted to draw it out. He accosted the soul, and with the winning persuasiveness which befits friendliness on human terms. There was a certain shyness which indicated the modesty which is born of the spirit. But a commanding doer he certainly was not; that is, he was no man of expedients, of practical resources, of merely executive will. He appreciated this kind of ability, as his lecture on Napoleon shows, but he possessed little of it, his Yankee ingenuity being more confined in its range. The moral courage belonged to him, the earnestness, the faith, but his ethereal qualities lacked driving force. His principles made him interested in every movement of reform, for he had a boundless hope which led him sometimes into extravagant anticipations of truth and benefit. Every sign of life, intellectual, moral, spiritual, caught his eye, and so long as it promised new developments of power his eager sympathy went with it, but when the creative period ceased he turned away. He early enlisted in the anti-slavery cause, not because he had entire confidence in the negro, or specially liked the abolitionists, but because he demanded the utmost liberty for all men in order that substantial advantages might be widely shared; but he was not prominent among the workers of that reform. His name stood foremost in the list of those who claimed the emancipation of woman from social or political disability, not that he was a worker in the woman's-rights phalanx, not that he looked for any immediate benefit from that agitation, or felt any particular interest in the leaders or in the success of that individual crusade, but that he was in favor of the largest opportunity for all human beings, and wished every particle of power to be used. From the first he welcomed the Free Religious Association as giving promise of original light, greater breadth, fresh vigor, new revelations of knowledge in that most ideal, but most deplorably limited, of all