A heavy and
vase-like blossom of a magnolia, with fragrance enough to perfume a
whole wilderness, which should be lifted by a whirlwind and dropped into
a branch of aspen, would not seem more as if it could never have grown
there than Emerson's voice seems inspired and foreign to his visible and
natural body." Emerson's ever exquisite and wonderful good taste seems
closely connected with this asceticism, and it is probable that his
taste influenced his views and conduct to some small extent.
The anti-slavery people were not always refined. They were constantly
doing things which were tactically very effective, but were not
calculated to attract the over-sensitive. Garrison's rampant and
impersonal egotism was good politics, but bad taste. Wendell Phillips
did not hesitate upon occasion to deal in personalities of an
exasperating kind. One sees a certain shrinking in Emerson from the
taste of the Abolitionists. It was not merely their doctrines or their
methods which offended him. He at one time refused to give Wendell
Phillips his hand because of Phillips's treatment of his friend, Judge
Hoar.
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