RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE, ABOUT ten the next morning I called upon Mr. Randolph, and was admitted to his bedchamber. He was sitting in flannel dressinggown and slippers, looking very thin, but with a strange fire in his swarthy face. He seemed more like a spiritual presence than a man adequately clothed in flesh and blood. Before I visited Mr. Randolph again, I had listened with admiration to his wonderful improvisations in the Senate, and had determined to get at his views about the oratory of Patrick Henry, of which I had heard John Adams speak in terms of some disparagement. I accordingly put a question which I supposed would call out a panegyric upon the orator of Virginia. I asked who was the greatest orator he had ever heard. The reply was startling, from its unexpectedness. "The greatest orator I ever heard," said Randolph, "was a woman. She was a slave. She was a mother, and her rostrum was the auctionblock." He then rose and imitated with thrilling pathos the tones with which this woman had appealed to the sympathy and justice of the bystanders, and finally the indignation with which she denounced them. "There was eloquence!" he said. "I have heard no man speak like that. It was overpowering!" He sat down and paused for some moments; then, evidently feeling that he had been imprudent in expressing himself so warmly before a visitor from the North, he entered upon a defence of the policy of Southern statesmen in regard to slavery. "We must concern ourselves with what is," he said, " and slavery exists. We must preserve the rights of the States, as guaranteed by the Constitution, or the negroes are at our throats. The question of slavery, as it is called, is to us a question of life and death. Remember, it is a necessity imposed on the South; not a Utopia of our own seeking. You will find no instance in history where two distinct races have occupied the soil except in the relation of master and slave." I brought away only these few fragments of an elaborate defence of the course which he and other Southerners felt compelled to pursue; but they give its nature with sufficient clearness. Ralph Waldo Emerson. BORN in Boston, Mass., 1803. DIED at Concord, Mass., 1882. THE PROBLEM. [Poems. Revised Edition. Edited by J. E. Cabot. 1884.] Not from a vain or shallow thought The thrilling Delphic oracle; Out from the heart of nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old; The litanies of nations came, Like the volcano's tongue of flame, Up from the burning core below,— The canticles of love and woe: The hand that rounded Peter's dome Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew. Know'st thou what wove yon wood bird's nest Or how the fish outbuilt her shell, For out of Thought's interior sphere And granted them an equal date These temples grew as grows the grass; To the vast soul that o'er him planned; And the same power that reared the shrine Ever the fiery Pentecost Girds with one flame the countless host, A NATURE. [Prose Works. 1880.] A DEFINITION. LL science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, VOL. VI.-9 |