democrat must not be a "high priest of the kid-glove persuasion." Writing in his Journal at the age of thirty-two, he says: "I would not have a man dainty in his conduct. Let him not be afraid of being besmirched by being advertised in the newspapers, or by going into Athenaeums or town-meetings or by making speeches in public. Let his chapel of private thoughts be so holy that it shall perfume and separate him unto the Lord, though he lay in a kennel."
It ought to be possible to feel "inwardly perfumed and separated unto the Lord" without either showing or feeling that Brahminical spirit of exclusiveness which men like Holmes and Lowell exhibited, and of which they were obviously proud. Emerson was quite earnestly opposed to the celebrated Brahminism of Boston and Cambridge. As Mr. Brownell has finely said: "A constituent of his refinement was an instinctive antipathy to ideas of dominance, dictation, patronage, caste, and material superiority whose essential grossness repelled him and whose ultimate origin in contemptuousness—probably the one moral state except cravenness that chiefly he deemed contemptible—was plain enough to his penetration." Henry Adams suggests, indeed with a touch of characteristic humor, that Emerson, from the spiritual altitude of Concord, probably looked down on the Brahmins themselves, looked down, for instance, on the Adamses, as worldlings.
Now there is interesting evidence in the Journals
