… Yet is his [Emerson’s] a noble speech! I love to reprove myself by it.”[1]
As I read her letters and diaries, it seems plain that her yearning desire, during her whole life, was not merely to know but to do. She was urged on by an intense longing, not for a selfish self-culture, nor even for self-culture in its very widest sense, but for usefulness in her day and generation.
“He who alone knoweth,” she writes in August, 1843, “will affirm that I have tried to work wholehearted, from an earnest faith, yet my hand is often languid and my heart is slow; — I must be gone, I feel, but whither? I know not: if I cannot make this plot of ground yield corn and roses, famine must be my lot forever and forever, surely.”[2]
In accordance with this thought, she felt that this country must create, as it has now done, its own methods of popular education, especially for the training of girls. She wrote in her “Summer on the Lakes:” —
“Methods copied from the education of some English Lady Augusta are as ill suited to the daughter of an Illinois farmer as satin shoes to climb the Indian mounds. … Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.[3]
Had this protest come from an ignorant per-
