The
faculty of turning away one's eyes as one approaches a chasm is
not unusual, and Boston showed, under the lead of Mr. Webster,
how successfully it could be done in politics; but in politics a
certain number of men did at least protest. In religion and
philosophy no one protested. Such protest as was made took forms
more simple than the silence, like the deism of Theodore Parker,
and of the boy's own cousin Octavius Frothingham, who distressed
his father and scandalized Beacon Street by avowing scepticism
that seemed to solve no old problems, and to raise many new ones.
The less aggressive protest of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from an
old-world point of view, less serious. It was naif.
The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with
the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy
were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been
possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of
necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew
up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests.
They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from childhood
the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day, table-talk as
good as they were ever likely to hear again. The eldest child,
Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her brother met
in a long and varied experience of bright women.
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