Chapter CLXXV: Section 1: On Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, Emerson delivered an

Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a controversy, in which Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body. In its simplest and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters.

He begins with a beautiful picture which must be transferred without the change of an expression:--

"In this refulgent Summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath
of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with
fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and
sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new
hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade.
Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost
spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge
globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and
prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn."

How softly the phrases of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear, and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased attention! The "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," could not have wooed the listener more sweetly. "Thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon." And this was the prelude of a discourse which, when it came to be printed, fared at the hands of many a theologian, who did not think himself a bigot, as the roll which Baruch wrote with ink from the words of Jeremiah fared at the hands of Jehoiakim, the King of Judah. He listened while Jehudi read the opening passages. But "when Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth." Such was probably the fate of many a copy of this famous discourse.

It is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. The file-leaders of Unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had often been applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this alarming manifesto. And yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the theological world since the time when that discourse was delivered that it is read as calmly to-day as a common "Election Sermon," if such are ever read at all. A few extracts, abstracts, and comments may give the reader who has not the Address before him some idea of its contents and its tendencies.

The material universe, which he has just pictured in its summer beauty, deserves our admiration. But when the mind opens and reveals the laws which govern the world of phenomena, it shrinks into a mere fable and illustration of this mind. What am I? What is?--are questions always asked, never fully answered. We would study and admire forever.

But above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. Man is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. "The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws.--These laws refuse to be adequately stated.--They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.--The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.--As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell."

These facts, Emerson says, have always suggested to man that the world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind,--that one mind is everywhere active.--"All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death."--"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom."

"This sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively
creates all forms of worship.--This thought dwelled always deepest
in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in
Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt,
in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental
genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men
found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon
mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the
history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this
infusion."

But this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition. What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject it. If the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,--"the doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul."

The following extract will show the view that he takes of Christianity and its Founder, and sufficiently explain the antagonism called forth by the discourse:--

"Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with
open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony,
ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.
Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was
true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in
man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World.
He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am Divine. Through
me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion
did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the
following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear
to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this
high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This
was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say
he was a man.' The idioms of his language and the figures of his
rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not
built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a
Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He
spoke of Miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and
all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the
character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian
churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one
with the blowing clover and the falling rain."

He proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of historical Christianity. It has exaggerated the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the Christian name. It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us. "To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." The preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies; they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and peculiarity.

Another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of Christ is that the Moral Nature--the Law of Laws--is not explored as the fountain of the established teaching in society. "Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead."--"The soul is not preached. The church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct.--The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of Man--is lost."

When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the "practical application," some of his young hearers must have been startled at the style of his address.

"Yourself a new--born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all
conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it
first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and
money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that
you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the
immeasurable mind."

Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of Christianity; first the Sabbath,--hardly a Christian institution,--and secondly the institution of preaching. He spoke not only eloquently, but with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. He had sacrificed an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. But he was assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity, rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with whatever truth was in their messages. He might be wrong, but his words carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the spirit of all truth was with him. Some of his audience, at least, must have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, "he speaks 'as one having authority, and not as the Scribes.'"

Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. Its doctrines were repudiated in the "Christian Examiner," the leading organ of the Unitarian denomination. The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly esteemed and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of Emerson's discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of Christianity. To this note Emerson returned the following answer:--

"What you say about the discourse at Divinity College is just what I
might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known
opinions. I am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time,
and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and
presence which I supposed would meet with dissent, I may say, of
dear friends and benefactors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is
perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse,
and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very
important that it be spoken; and I thought I could not pay the
nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my
opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. I would
rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise.
Let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as
it surely will, judge between us. Either of us would, I doubt not,
be willingly apprised of his error. Meantime, I shall be admonished
by this expression of your thought, to revise with greater care the
'address,' before it is printed (for the use of the class): and I
heartily thank you for this expression of your tried toleration and
love."

Dr. Ware followed up his note with a sermon, preached on the 23d of September, in which he dwells especially on the necessity of adding the idea of personality to the abstractions of Emerson's philosophy, and sent it to him with a letter, the kindness and true Christian spirit of which were only what were inseparable from all the thoughts and feelings of that most excellent and truly apostolic man.

To this letter Emerson sent the following reply:--

CONCORD, October 8, 1838.

"MY DEAR SIR,--I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter
of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. The letter was right
manly and noble. The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it
assails any doctrine of mine,--perhaps I am not so quick to see it
as writers generally,--certainly I did not feel any disposition
to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your
thought, whilst I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think
of my new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men
at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of
criticism. I have always been--from my very incapacity of methodical
writing--a 'chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to
rail,--lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed
near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the
notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated
fully the advantages of my position, for I well know there is no
scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a polemic. I
could not give an account of myself, if challenged. I could not
possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on
which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments
are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in
telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it
is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see
that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the
present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly
raised to the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I
advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make
good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such
thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have
always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the
page that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before, seeing
whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the
same fortune that has hitherto attended me,--the joy of finding that
my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society,
loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my
conceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in
motley,--and so I am your affectionate servant," etc.

The controversy which followed is a thing of the past; Emerson took no part in it, and we need not return to the discussion. He knew his office and has defined it in the clearest manner in the letter just given,--"Seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see." But among his listeners and readers was a man of very different mental constitution, not more independent or fearless, but louder and more combative, whose voice soon became heard and whose strength soon began to be felt in the long battle between the traditional and immanent inspiration,--Theodore Parker. If Emerson was the moving spirit, he was the right arm in the conflict, which in one form or another has been waged up to the present day.

In the winter of 1838-39 Emerson delivered his usual winter course of Lectures. He names them in a letter to Carlyle as follows: "Ten Lectures: I. The Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV. Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty; X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on Human Life." Two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published Lectures or Essays; Love, in the first volume of Essays; Demonology in "Lectures and Biographical Sketches;" and "The Comic" in "Letters and Social Aims."

* * * * *

I owe the privilege of making use of the two following letters to my kind and honored friend, James Freeman Clarke.

The first letter was accompanied by the Poem "The Humble-bee," which was first published by Mr. Clarke in the "Western Messenger," from the autograph copy, which begins "Fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee!" and has a number of other variations from the poem as printed in his collected works.

CONCORD, December 7, 1838.

MY DEAR SIR,--Here are the verses. They have pleased some of my
friends, and so may please some of your readers, and you asked me
in the spring if I hadn't somewhat to contribute to your journal. I
remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of
yours that the verses, "Take, O take those lips away," were not
Shakspeare's; I think they are. Beaumont, nor Fletcher, nor both
together were ever, I think, visited by such a starry gleam as that
stanza. I know it is in "Rollo," but it is in "Measure for Measure"
also; and I remember noticing that the Malones, and Stevens, and
critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for Shakspeare, and
those for Beaumont and Fletcher. But the internal evidence is all
for one, none for the other. If he did not write it, they did not,
and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. What care we _who_
sung this or that. It is we at last who sing. Your friend and
servant, R.W. EMERSON.

TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

CONCORD, February 27, 1839.

MY DEAR SIR,--I am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an
answer to your flattering request for two such little poems. You are
quite welcome to the lines "To the Rhodora;" but I think they need
the superscription ["Lines on being asked 'Whence is the Flower?'"].
Of the other verses ["Good-by proud world," etc] I send you a
corrected copy, but I wonder so much at your wishing to print them
that I think you must read them once again with your critical
spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years
ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury
called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper
than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and
am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic
date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry,
and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any
verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these
juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses,
that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up
old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely
as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to
music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe
I have in April or May an annual poetic _conatus_ rather than
_afflatus_, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I
may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my
MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of
a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily
treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a
year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. In regard
to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I
remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it;
but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall
have it if it will pass muster. I shall certainly avail myself
of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the "Carlyle
Miscellanies," so soon as they appear. He, T.C., writes in excellent
spirits of his American friends and readers.... A new book, he
writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring
lectures are over (which begin in May). Your sister Sarah was kind
enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done
by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital. They seemed to me to
betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any
line since you can draw all? Genius has given you the freedom of the
universe, why then come within any walls? And this seems to be the
old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you
will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every
possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous. I
heartily thank you for the good wishes you send me to open the year,
and I say them back again to you. Your field is a world, and all men
are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted
service you render. And yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that
concerns either you or me. The whole world is sick of that very ail,
of being seen, and of seemliness. It belongs to the brave now to
trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone. I am glad
to see William Channing is one of your coadjutors. Mrs. Jameson's
new book, I should think, would bring a caravan of travellers,
aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along
the lakes to Mackinaw. As I read I almost vowed an exploration, but
I doubt if I ever get beyond the Hudson.

Your affectionate servant, R.W. EMERSON.

On the 24th of July, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery of the Address before the Divinity School, Mr. Emerson delivered an Oration before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College. If any rumor of the former discourse had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to which they listened. The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy old dogmatists as dry as ever.

Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his audience. President Lord was well known as the scriptural defender of the institution of slavery. Not long before a controversy had arisen, provoked by the setting up of the Episcopal form of worship by one of the Professors, the most estimable and scholarly Dr. Daniel Oliver. Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. There is a kind of harmony between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary colors. It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side that comparison makes them odious to each other. Mr. Emerson could go anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner, such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to quarrel with the gentle image-breaker.

The subject of Mr. Emerson's Address is _Literary Ethics._ It is on the same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence as the Phi Beta Kappa Address. The word impassioned would seem misplaced, if applied to any of Mr. Emerson's orations. But these discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his complete manhood. They were produced at a time when his mind had learned its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and all peremptory external authority. It is not strange, therefore, to find some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative illustration.

"Neither years nor books," he says, "have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." And yet, he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled the reasonable expectation of mankind. "Men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought." For all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie all his teachings. "The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the Intellect." New lessons of spiritual independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history and biography. There is a passage here so true to nature that it permits a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment:--

"An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of
injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their
possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything
that lies In our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that
he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a
grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny
to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is
piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of stoical _plenum_
annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him
talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved."

But it ought to be added that if the pleasure of denying the genius of their betters were denied to the mediocrities, their happiness would be forever blighted.

From the resources of the American Scholar Mr. Emerson passes to his tasks. Nature, as it seems to him, has never yet been truly studied. "Poetry has scarcely chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of Nature to us is, 'The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I give you the universe a virgin to-day.'" And in the same way he would have the scholar look at history, at philosophy. The world belongs to the student, but he must put himself into harmony with the constitution of things. "He must embrace solitude as a bride." Not superstitiously, but after having found out, as a little experience will teach him, all that society can do for him with its foolish routine. I have spoken of the exalted strain into which Mr. Emerson sometimes rises in the midst of his general serenity. Here is an instance of it:--

"You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear
that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What
is this truth you seek? What is this beauty?' men will ask, with
derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore
truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say,
'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early
visions: I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and
romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;'--then
dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and
poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand
thousand men.--Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from
every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to
show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom. Why should you
renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for
the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has
its roof and house and board. Make yourself necessary to the world,
and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as
shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all
men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope."

The next Address Emerson delivered was "The Method of Nature," before the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841.

In writing to Carlyle on the 31st of July, he says: "As usual at this season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges nine days hence.... My whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue." It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced in a public lecture than as read in a private letter.

The Oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter. Its title is "The Method of Nature." He begins with congratulations on the enjoyments and promises of this literary Anniversary.

"The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the
foundations of the castle."--"We hear too much of the results of
machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle
folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid
wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the
incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes
of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the
bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the
farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and
feature of man."--"While the multitude of men degrade each other,
and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a
bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself."

I think we may detect more of the manner of Carlyle in this Address than in any of those which preceded it.

"Why then goest thou as some Boswell or literary worshipper to this
saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with
whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think
meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his
ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?"

That there is an "intimate divinity" which is the source of all true wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it, that "the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force," that the rule is "Do what you know, and perception is converted into character,"--all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in this Oration. Just how easily it was followed by the audience, just how far they were satisfied with its large principles wrought into a few broad precepts, it would be easier at this time to ask than to learn. We notice not so much the novelty of the ideas to be found in this discourse on "The Method of Nature," as the pictorial beauty of their expression. The deep reverence which underlies all Emerson's speculations is well shown in this paragraph:--

"We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not
thanks nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for
our communication with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring
reception,--reception that becomes giving in its turn as the
receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy."--"It is God
in us which checks the language of petition by grander thought. In
the bottom of the heart it is said: 'I am, and by me, O child! this
fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am, all things are
mine; and all mine are thine.'"

We must not quarrel with his peculiar expressions. He says, in this same paragraph, "I cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of things so sublime; but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond explanation."

"We can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency
appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is
growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else;
is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be
man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring,
a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit
and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that
it does not exist to any one, or to any number of particular ends,
but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no
private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by
one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life
which in conscious beings we call ecstasy."

Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme.

"The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify
the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of
stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man!
thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning
and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry
of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of
right and wrong."

His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:--

"We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know
that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which
house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal
activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a
natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this
one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist,
cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that
they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they
were."

It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the "pantheism" which is the object of dread to many of the faithful. But there are many expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and vaguely to his Christian audience. "Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold benefit?" It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would feel that they lost by his counsels.

"The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,
Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and
generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for
themselves as an end."--"I say to you plainly there is no end to
which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if
pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence
to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible
to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,--never
touched; always giving health."

Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson's calling to supply impulses and not methods. He was not an organizer, but a power behind many organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their special objects. The Oration we have been examining was delivered in the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called "Man the Reformer," and another called "Lecture on the Times." In the first he preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that "a man should have a farm, or a mechanical craft for his culture."--That he cannot give up labor without suffering some loss of power. "How can the man who has learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall we say all we think?--Perhaps with his own hands.--Let us learn the meaning of economy.--Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is frugality for gods and heroes."

This was what Emerson wrote in January, 1841. This "house with one apartment" was what Thoreau built with his own hands in 1845. In April of the former year, he went to live with Mr. Emerson, but had been on intimate terms with him previously to that time. Whether it was from him that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or whether this idea was working in Thoreau's mind and was suggested to Emerson by him, is of no great consequence. Emerson, to whom he owed so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which Thoreau entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice. He was at the philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common sense for a moment. It would never have occurred to him to leave all the conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends "Teague and his jade," as he called the man and brother and sister, more commonly known nowadays as Pat, or Patrick, and his old woman.

"The Americans have many virtues," he says in this Address, "but they have not Faith and Hope." Faith and Hope, Enthusiasm and Love, are the burden of this Address. But he would regulate these qualities by "a great prospective prudence," which shall mediate between the spiritual and the actual world.

In the "Lecture on the Times" he shows very clearly the effect which a nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves Reformers had upon him.

"The Reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice,
but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are
quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no
more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they
reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal
and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness
that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who
are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of
mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as
the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work
of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him;
but when I have seen it near!--I do not like it better. It is done
in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management,
by tactics and clamor."

All this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser and better one. He attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in view of some larger and loftier principle. The charm of his imagination and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who sat before him. He knew the force of _felix audacia_ as well as any rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of those daring images which defy the critics.

"As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain,
the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall
eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we
shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds."

He said hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in his "Lecture on the Times." It would have taken a long while to get rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings in this lecture had been accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence covers with its soothing tribute!

"All the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course defame
what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but
of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment
man ever receives from Heaven is the sending to him its disguised
and discredited angels."

The Lecture called "The Transcendentalist" will naturally be looked at with peculiar interest, inasmuch as this term has been very commonly applied to Emerson, and to many who were considered his disciples. It has a proper philosophical meaning, and it has also a local and accidental application to the individuals of a group which came together very much as any literary club might collect about a teacher. All this comes out clearly enough in the Lecture. In the first place, Emerson explains that the "_new views_," as they are called, are the oldest of thoughts cast in a new mould.

"What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism:
Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever
divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class
founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class
beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class
perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us
representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they
cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the
force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on
the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on
individual culture."

"The materialist takes his departure from the external world,
and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his
departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an
appearance.--His thought, that is the Universe."

The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of "Transcendentalists" was applied, and which made itself an organ in the periodical known as "The Dial," has been written about by many who were in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of it at second hand. Emerson was closely associated with these "same Transcendentalists," and a leading contributor to "The Dial," which was their organ. The movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any other writer. So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best witness.

In his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," he sketches in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the development of the "new views" above mentioned. "There are always two parties," he says, "the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement."

About 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in literature. In our own community the influence of Swedenborg and of the genius and character of Dr. Channing were among the more immediate early causes of the mental agitation. Emerson attributes a great importance to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of Edward Everett, who returned to Boston in 1820, after five years of study in Europe. Edward Everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as Rufus Choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great orator. These wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life in a few old men's memories. It is therefore with delight that one who remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant, grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the harmonies of utterance,--it is with delight that such a one reads the glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great master of academic oratory.

Emerson follows out the train of influences which added themselves to the impulse given by Mr. Everett. German scholarship, the growth of science, the generalizations of Goethe, the idealism of Schelling, the influence of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Carlyle, and in our immediate community, the writings of Channing,--he left it to others to say of Emerson,--all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins Warren's,--Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among the rest, full of the great thoughts he wished to impart. The preliminaries went on smoothly enough with the usual small talk,--

"When a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster
supper, crowned by excellent wines [this must have been before
Dr. Warren's temperance epoch], and so ended the first attempt to
establish aesthetic society in Boston.

"Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs.
Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies
and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present.--Margaret Fuller,
George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr.
Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, and many others
gradually drew together, and from time to time spent an afternoon at
each other's houses in a serious conversation."

With them was another, "a pure Idealist,--who read Plato as an equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were intellectual." He refers, of course to Mr. Alcott. Emerson goes on to say:--

"I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston
that there was some concert of _doctrinaires_ to establish certain
opinions, and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy,
and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite
innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or
three men and women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual
vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge
and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and
sympathy. Otherwise their education and reading were not marked, but
had the American superficialness, and their studies were solitary.
I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or
sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given, nobody
knows by whom, or when it was applied."

Emerson's picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments.

"In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human
thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any
presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the Spiritualist adopts
it as most in nature. The Oriental mind has always tended to this
largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist, who thanks
no man, who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors,' but who in his
conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its
reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has
done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.

"These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no
compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one
compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely
exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist
in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible
friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and
what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without
service to the race of man."

The person who adopts "any presentiment, any extravagance as most in nature," is not commonly called a Transcendentalist, but is known colloquially as a "crank." The person who does not thank, by word or look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a churl.

Nothing was farther from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed more for each other than was reasonable,--so much occasionally that their pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: "What forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you performed?" There was too much talk about earnestness and too little real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist" dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time.

In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait,--a friend and not a scoffer:--

"They are not good citizens, not good members of society:
unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens;
they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public
religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions,
foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the
temperance society. They do not even like to vote."

After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this is what they have to say:--

"'New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you
want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the
labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust:
but we do not like your work.'

'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.'

'We have none.'

'What will you do, then?' cries the world.

'We will wait.'

'How long?'

'Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.'

'But whilst you wait you grow old and useless.'

'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_ (as you call it), but
I will not move until I have the highest command.'"

And so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his reasons for doing nothing.

It is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings. It is easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the subscription paper go by us to the next door. The common duties of life and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of themselves while we contemplate the infinite. There is no safer fortress for indolence than "the Everlasting No." The chimney-corner is the true arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their all-sufficient panoply. Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among his disciples. His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a fitting condition to receive it. He was a sower who went forth to sow. Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism. Some fell on the rocks of hardened conservatism. Some fell by the wayside and was picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of themselves. But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives.

Emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them. But he makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go.

"Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must
behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet
accrue from them to the state. Besides our coarse implements, there
must be some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and
telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers,
there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges
and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct,
who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the
by-stander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and
monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the
electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks
the frigate or "line-packet" to learn its longitude, so it may not
be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare
and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and
verify our bearings from superior chronometers."

It must be confessed that it is not a very captivating picture which Emerson draws of some of his transcendental friends. Their faults were naturally still more obvious to those outside of their charmed circle, and some prejudice, very possibly, mingled with their critical judgments. On the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him:--

"There has sprung up in Boston," says Dickens, in his "American
Notes," "a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On
inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I
was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be
certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this
elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the
Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I
should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much
that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying
so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold.
Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has
not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not
least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to
detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe.
And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a
Transcendentalist."

In December, 1841, Emerson delivered a Lecture entitled "The Conservative." It was a time of great excitement among the members of that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. Never did Emerson show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more beautifully than in this Lecture and in his whole course with reference to the intellectual agitation of the period. He is as fair to the conservative as to the reformer. He sees the fanaticism of the one as well as that of the other. "Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery; believes in a negative fate; believes that men's tempers govern them; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they will fail me, I must bend a little; it distrusts Nature; it thinks there is a general law without a particular application,--law for all that does not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction. And so, whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists that each is a good half, but an impossible whole."

He has his beliefs, and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair play, and though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be unjust to the present or the past.

We read in a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, dated March 12, 1835, that Dr. Charming "lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called 'The Transcendentalist,' as the organ of a spiritual philosophy." Again on the 30th of April of the same year, in a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of Carlyle to this country, Emerson says:--

"It was suggested that if Mr. C. would undertake a journal of which
we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would
do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be
made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned
to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be called 'The
Transcendentalist;' or, 'The Spiritual Inquirer,' or the like....
Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous
contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured."

The idea of the grim Scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to know as "The Dial!" A concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra! It was much safer to be content with Carlyle's purring from his own side of the water, as thus:--

"'The Boston Transcendentalist,' whatever the fate or merit of it
may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be
things not dreamt of over in that _Transoceanic_ parish! I shall
certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure
forerunner of things better."

There were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the Transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the close connection which Emerson had with one of them and the interest which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more deeply concerned. These were the periodical just spoken of as a possibility realized, and the industrial community known as Brook Farm. They were to a certain extent synchronous,--the Magazine beginning in July, 1840, and expiring in April, 1844; Brook Farm being organized in 1841, and breaking up in 1847.

"The Dial" was edited at first by Margaret Fuller, afterwards by Emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse, among them "The Conservative," "The Transcendentalist," "Chardon Street and Bible Convention," and some of his best and best known poems, "The Problem," "Woodnotes," "The Sphinx," "Fate." The other principal writers were Margaret Fuller, A. Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, Henry Thoreau, Eliot Cabot, John S. Dwight, C.P. Cranch, William Ellery Channing, Mrs. Ellen Hooper, and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Unequal as the contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest. It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and enthusiasm. Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond the reach of the receding waves. Thoreau wrote for nearly every number. Margaret Fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her part as a contributor as well as editor. Theodore Parker came down with his "trip-hammer" in its pages. Mrs. Ellen Hooper published a few poems in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories. Others, whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent contributions. It is a pleasure to turn back to "The Dial," with all its crudities. It should be looked through by the side of the "Anthology." Both were April buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the pledge of a better season.

We get various hints touching the new Magazine in the correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle. Emerson tells Carlyle, a few months before the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge of our _young people_ than any he has had. It is true that unfledged writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more interesting. This was the time above all others when out of the mouth of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength. The feeling that intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the inspiration of these "young people" to whom Emerson refers. He has to apologize for the first number. "It is not yet much," he says; "indeed, though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had.--The Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know." They did print "The Problem." There were also some fragments of criticism from the writings of his brother Charles, and the poem called "The Last Farewell," by his brother Edward, which is to be found in Emerson's "May-day and other Pieces."

On the 30th of August, after the periodical had been published a couple of months, Emerson writes:--

"Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism;
and the _Dial_, poor little thing, whose first number contains
scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored
by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least
betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public."

Carlyle finds the second number of "The Dial" better than the first, and tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with his usual air of superiority. He distinguishes what is Emerson's readily,--the rest he speaks of as the work of [Greek: oi polloi] for the most part. "But it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only a body, which want means a great deal." And again, "'The Dial,' too, it is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like. Will no _Angel_ body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee _man_, with color in the cheeks of him and a coat on his back?"

Emerson, writing to Carlyle in March, 1842, speaks of the "dubious approbation on the part of you and other men," notwithstanding which he found it with "a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion." So, when Margaret Fuller gave it up, at the end of the second volume, Emerson consented to become its editor. "I cannot bid you quit 'The Dial,'" says Carlyle, "though it, too, alas, is Antinomian somewhat! _Perge, perge_, nevertheless."

In the next letter he says:--

"I love your 'Dial,' and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem
to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present
Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage,
and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations and such
like,--into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of
perpetual frost, for one thing. I know not how to utter what
impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the
fore-hoof."

A curious way of characterizing himself as a critic,--but he was not always as well-mannered as the Houyhnhnms.

To all Carlyle's complaints of "The Dial's" short-comings Emerson did not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty, with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite.

"For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write
as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of
these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary
history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite
ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make
confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys, that they do not wish
to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and
evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they
reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer
in their stead. Perhaps one of these days a great Yankee shall come,
who will easily do the unknown deed."

"All the bright boys and girls in New England," and "'The Dial' dying of inanition!" In October, 1840, Emerson writes to Carlyle:--

"We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social
reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his
waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live
cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and
scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.
One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and
another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on
the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope."

Mr. Ripley's project took shape in the West Roxbury Association, better known under the name of Brook Farm. Emerson was not involved in this undertaking. He looked upon it with curiosity and interest, as he would have looked at a chemical experiment, but he seems to have had only a moderate degree of faith in its practical working. "It was a noble and generous movement in the projectors to try an experiment of better living. One would say that impulse was the rule in the society, without centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal routinary character of our educational, religious, social, and economical life in Massachusetts." The reader will find a full detailed account of the Brook Farm experiment in Mr. Frothingham's "Life of George Ripley," its founder, and the first President of the Association. Emerson had only tangential relations with the experiment, and tells its story in his "Historic Notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen without her chickens was but half a hen." Is not the inaudible, inward laughter of Emerson more refreshing than the explosions of our noisiest humorists?

This is his benevolent summing up:--

"The founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made
what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All
comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of
residences. It is certain, that freedom from household routine,
variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means
of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade,
did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine.
There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the
associates, education; to many, the most important period of their
life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with
the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of
letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were
always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room.
It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of
Reason in a patty-pan."

The public edifice called the "Phalanstery" was destroyed by fire in 1846. The Association never recovered from this blow, and soon afterwards it was dissolved.