[7]
‘to be Anglicized in the aristocratic sense’ of the term;1 and he described the beautiful English country-seats as ‘paradises very perverting to the moral and politico-economical sense,’ and sure to ‘pass away, one of these centuries, in the general progress of humanity.’2 And he afterwards said the profoundest thing ever uttered in regard to our Civil War, when he said that it was not, in the ordinary sense, ‘a military war,’ but a contest of two principles.3 Wendell Phillips once told me that as the antislavery contest made him an American, so Europe made Motley one; and when the two young aristocrats met after years of absence, they both found that they had thus experienced religion.
When we pass to other great American authors, we see that Emerson lifted his voice and spoke even to the humblest of the people of the intrinsic dignity of man:— God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear each morning brings
The outrage of the poor.
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