Chapter V: The Transcendental Period

Although Henry Thoreau would have been, in any place or time of the world's drama, a personage of note, it has already been observed, in regard to his career and his unique literary gift, that they were affected, and in some sort fashioned by the influences of the very time and place in which he found himself at the opening of life. It was the sunrise of New England Transcendentalism in which he first looked upon the spiritual world; when Carlyle in England, Alcott, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller in Massachusetts, were preparing their contemporaries in America for that modern Renaissance which has been so fruitful, for the last forty years, in high thought, vital religion, pure literature, and great deeds. And the place of his birth and breeding, the home of his affections, as it was the Troy, the Jerusalem, and the Rome of his imagination, was determined by Providence to be that very centre and shrine of Transcendentalism, the little village of Concord, which would have been saved from oblivion by his books, had it no other title to remembrance. Let it be my next effort, then, to give some hint--not a brief chronicle--of that extraordinary age, not yet ended (often as they tell us of its death and epitaph), now known to all men as the Transcendental Period. We must wait for after-times to fix its limits and determine its dawn and setting; but of its apparent beginning and course, one cycle coincided quite closely with the life of Thoreau. He was born in July, 1817, when Emerson was entering college at Cambridge, and Carlyle was wrestling "with doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing, in agony of spirit," at Edinburgh. He died in May, 1862, when the distinctly spiritual and literary era of Transcendentalism had closed, its years of preparation were over, and it had entered upon the conflict of political regeneration, for which Thoreau was constantly sounding the trumpet. In these forty-five years,--a longer period than the age of Pericles, or of the Medici, or of Queen Elizabeth,--New England Transcendentalism rose, climbed, and culminated, leaving results that, for our America, must be compared with those famous eras of civilization. Those ages, in fact, were well-nigh lost upon us, until Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellowship, brought us into communication with the Greek, the Italian, and the noble Elizabethan revivals of genius and art. We had been living under the Puritan reaction, modified and politically fashioned by the more humane philosophy of the eighteenth century, while the freedom-breathing, but half-barbarizing influences of pioneer life in a new continent, had also turned aside the full force of English and Scotch Calvinism.

It is common to trace the so-called Transcendentalism of New England to Carlyle and Coleridge and Wordsworth in the mother-country, and to Goethe, Richter, and Kant in Germany; and there is a certain outward affiliation of this sort, which cannot be denied. But that which in our spiritual soil gave root to the foreign seeds thus wafted hitherward, was a certain inward tendency of high Calvinism and its counterpart, Quakerism, always welling forth in the American colonies. Now it inspired Cotton, Wheelwright, Sir Harry Vane, and Mistress Anne Hutchinson, in Massachusetts; now William Penn and his quaint brotherhood on the Delaware; now Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Pierpont, in Connecticut; and, again, John Woolman, the wandering Friend of God and man, in New Jersey, Nicholas Gilman, the convert of Whitefield, in New Hampshire, and Samuel Hopkins, the preacher of disinterested benevolence, in Rhode Island, held forth this noble doctrine of the Inner Light. It is a gospel peculiarly attractive to poets, so that even the loose-girt Davenant, who would fain think himself the left-hand son of Shakespeare, told gossiping old Aubrey that he believed the world, after a while, would settle into one religion, "an ingenious Quakerism,"--that is, a faith in divine communication that would yet leave some scope for men of wit like himself. How truly these American Calvinists and Quakers prefigured the mystical part of Concord philosophy, may be seen by a few of their sayings.

Jonathan Edwards, in 1723, when he was twenty years old, and the fair saint of his adoration was fifteen, thus wrote in his diary what he had seen and heard of Sarah Pierpont:--

"There is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that
Great Being who made and rules the world; and there are
certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way
or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with
exceeding sweet delight, and she hardly cares for anything
except to meditate on Him. Therefore, if you present all
the world before her, with the richest of its treasures,
she disregards it, and cares not for it, and is unmindful
of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in
her mind, and a singular purity in her affections; is most
just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could
not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you
would give her all the world, lest she should offend this
Great Being. She will sometimes go about from place to
place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy
and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be
alone walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have
some one invisible always conversing with her."

Nicholas Gilman, the parish minister of little Durham, in New Hampshire,--being under concern of mind for his friend Whitefield, and the great man of New England, at that time, Sir William Pepperell, just setting forth for the capture of Louisburg--wrote to them in March, 1745,--to Sir William thus:--

"Do you indeed love the Lord? do you make the Lord your
Guide and Counselor in ye affair? If you have a Soul,
great as that Hero David of old, you will ask of the Lord,
and not go till he bid you: David would not. If you are
sincerely desirous to know and do your duty in that and
every other respect, and seek of God in Faith, you shall
know that, and everything else needful, one thing after
another, as fast as you are prepared for it. But God will,
doubtless, humble such as leave him out of their Schemes,
as though his Providence was not at all concerned in the
matter--whereas his Blessing is all in all."

To Whitefield, Gilman wrote in the same vein, on the same day:--

"Are you sufficiently sure that his call is from above,
that he was moved by the Holy Ghost to this Expedition?
Would it be no advantage to his Estate to win the place?
May he not have a prospect of doubling his Wealth and
Honours, if crowned with Success? What Demonstration has he
given of being so entirely devoted to the Lord? He has a
vast many Talents,--is it an easy thing for so Wise a man
to become a Fool for Christ? so great a man to become a
Little Child? so rich a man to crowd in at the Strait Gate
of Conversion, and make so little noise?... If you see good
to encourage the Expedition, be fully satisfy'd the project
was formed in Heaven. Was the Lord first consulted in the
affair? Did they wait for his Counsell?"

John Woolman, the New Jersey Quaker (born in 1720, died in 1772), said,--

"There is a principle which is pure, placed in the
human mind, which, in different places and ages hath
had different names; it is, however, pure, and proceeds
from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of
religion, nor excluded from any, when the heart stands in
perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows,
they become brethren. That state in which every motion from
the selfish spirit yieldeth to pure love, I may acknowledge
with gratitude to the Father of Mercies, is often opened
before me as a pearl to seek after."[7]

That even the pious egotism and the laughable vagaries of Transcendentalism had their prototype in the private meditations of the New England Calvinists, is well known to such as have studied old diaries of the Massachusetts ministers. Thus, a minister of Malden (a successor of the awful Michael Wigglesworth, whose alleged poem, "The Day of Doom," as Cotton Mather thought, might perhaps "find our children till the Day itself arrives"), in his diary for 1735, thus enters his trying experiences with a "one-horse Shay," whose short life may claim comparison with that of the hundred-year master-piece of Dr. Holmes's deacon:--

"_January 31._ Bought a shay for £27 10_s._ The Lord grant
it may be a comfort and blessing to my family.

"_March, 1735._ Had a safe and comfortable journey to York.

"_April 24._ Shay overturned, with my wife and I in it, yet
neither of us much hurt. Blessed be our gracious Preserver!
Part of the shay, as it lay upon one side, went over my
wife, and yet she was scarcely anything hurt. How wonderful
the preservation!

"_May 5._ Went to the Beach with three of the children. The
Beast being frighted, when we were all out of the shay,
overturned and broke it. I desire (I hope I desire it) that
the Lord would teach me suitably to repent this Providence,
to make suitable remarks on it, and to be suitably affected
with it. Have I done well to get me a shay? Have I not
been proud or too fond of this convenience? Do I exercise
the faith in the divine care and protection which I ought
to do? Should I not be more in my study, and less fond of
diversion? Do I not withhold more than is meet from pious
and charitable uses?

"_May 15._ Shay brought home; mending cost 30 shillings.
Favored in this beyond expectation.

"_May 16._ My wife and I rode to Rumney Marsh. The Beast
frighted several times."

At last this divine comedy ends with the pathetic conclusive line,--

"_June 4._ Disposed of my shay to the Rev. Mr. White."

I will not pause to dwell on the laughable episodes and queer characteristic features of the Transcendental Period, though such it had in abundance. They often served to correct the soberer absurdity with which our whole country was slipping unconsciously down the easy incline of national ruin and dishonor,--from which only a bloody civil war could at last save us. Thoreau saw this clearly, and his political utterances, paradoxical as they seemed in the two decades from 1840 to 1860, now read like the words of a prophet. But there are some points in the American Renaissance which may here be touched on, so much light do they throw on the times. It was a period of strange faiths and singular apocalypses--that of Charles Fourier being one. In February, 1843, Mr. Emerson, writing to Henry Thoreau from New York, where he was then lecturing, said:--

"Mr. Brisbane has just given me a faithful hour and a half
of what he calls his principles, and he shames truer men
by his fidelity and zeal; and already begins to hear the
reverberations of his single voice from most of the States
of the Union. He thinks himself sure of W. H. Channing
here, as a good Fourierist. I laugh incredulous whilst
he recites (for it seems always as if he was repeating
paragraphs out of his master's book) descriptions of the
self-augmenting potency of the solar system, which is
destined to contain one hundred and thirty-two bodies,
I believe,--and his urgent inculcation of our _stellar
duties_. But it has its kernel of sound truth, and its
insanity is so wide of the New York insanities that it is
virtue and honor."

This was written a few months before Thoreau himself went to New York, and it was while there that he received from his friends in Concord and in Harvard, the wondrous account of Mr. Alcott's Paradise Regained at Fruitlands; where in due time Thoreau made his visit and inspected that Garden of Eden on the Coldspring Brook.

If Mr. Brisbane had his "stellar duties" and inculcated them in others, the Brook Farmers of 1842-43 had their planetary mission also; namely, to cultivate the face of the planet they inhabited, and to do it with their own hands, as Adam and Noah did. Of the Brook Farm enterprise much has been written, and much more will be; but concerning the more individual dream of Thoreau's friends at "Fruitlands," less is known; and I may quote a few pages concerning it from Thoreau's correspondence. While Thoreau was at Staten Island in 1843, Mr. Emerson wrote to him often, giving the news of Concord as a Transcendental capital. In May of that year we have this intelligence:--

"Ellery Channing is well settled in his house, and works
very steadily thus far, and our intercourse is very
agreeable to me. Young Ball (B. W.) has been to see me, and
is a prodigious reader and a youth of great promise,--born,
too, in the good town. Mr. Hawthorne is well, and Mr.
Alcott and Mr. Lane are revolving a purchase in Harvard of
ninety acres."

This was "Fruitlands," described in the "Dial" for 1843, and which Charles Lane himself describes in a letter soon to be cited. In June, 1843, Mr. Emerson again sends tidings from Concord, where the Fitchburg railroad was then building:--

"The town is full of Irish, and the woods of engineers,
with theodolite and red flag, singing out their feet and
inches to each other from station to station. Near Mr.
Alcott's (the Hosmer cottage) the road is already begun.
From Mr. A. and Mr. Lane at Harvard we have yet heard
nothing. They went away in good spirits, having sent 'Wood
Abram' and Larned, and William Lane before them with horse
and plow, a few days in advance, to begin the spring work.
Mr. Lane paid me a long visit, in which he was more than I
had ever known him gentle and open; and it was impossible
not to sympathize with and honor projects that so often
seem without feet or hands. They have near a hundred acres
of land which they do not want, and no house, which they
want first of all. But they account this an advantage,
as it gives them the occasion they so much desire,--of
building after their own idea. In the event of their
attracting to their company a carpenter or two, which is
not impossible, it would be a great pleasure to see their
building,--which could hardly fail to be new and beautiful.
They have fifteen acres of woodland, with good timber."

Then, passing in a moment from "Fruitlands" to Concord woods, Thoreau's friend writes:--

"Ellery Channing is excellent company, and we walk in all
directions. He remembers you with great faith and hope,
thinks you ought not to see Concord again these ten years;
that you ought to grind up fifty Concords in your mill;
and much other opinion and counsel he holds in store on
this topic. Hawthorne walked with me yesterday afternoon,
and not until after our return did I read his 'Celestial
Railroad,' which has a serene strength we cannot afford
not to praise, in this low life. I have letters from Miss
Fuller at Niagara. She found it sadly cold and rainy at the
Falls."

Not so with Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane in the first flush of their hopes at Fruitlands. On the 9th of June,--the date of the letter just quoted being June 7,--Mr. Lane writes to Thoreau:--

"DEAR FRIEND,--The receipt of two acceptable numbers of
the 'Pathfinder' reminds me that I am not altogether
forgotten by one who, if not in the busy world, is at
least much nearer to it externally than I am. Busy indeed
we all are, since our removal here; but so recluse is our
position, that with the world at large we have scarcely
any connection. You may possibly have heard that, after
all our efforts during the spring had failed to place us
in connection with the earth, and Mr. Alcott's journey
to Oriskany and Vermont had turned out a blank,--one
afternoon in the latter part of May, Providence sent to us
the legal owner of a slice of the planet in this township
(Harvard), with whom we have been enabled to conclude for
the concession of his rights. It is very remotely placed,
nearly three miles beyond the village, without a road,
surrounded by a beautiful green landscape of fields and
woods, with the distance filled up by some of the loftiest
mountains in the State. The views are, indeed, most poetic
and inspiring. You have no doubt seen the neighborhood;
but from these very fields, where you may at once be at
home and out, there is enough to love and revel in for
sympathetic souls like yours. On the estate are about
fourteen acres of wood, part of it extremely pleasant as
a retreat, a very sylvan realization, which only wants a
Thoreau's mind to elevate it to classic beauty.

"I have some imagination that you are not so happy and so
well housed in your present position as you would be here
amongst us; although at present there is much hard manual
labor,--so much that, as you perceive, my usual handwriting
is very greatly suspended. We have only two associates in
addition to our own families; our house accommodations are
poor and scanty; but the greatest want is of good female
aid. Far too much labor devolves on Mrs. Alcott. If you
should light on any such assistance, it would be charitable
to give it a direction this way. We may, perhaps, be rather
particular about the quality; but the conditions will
pretty well determine the acceptability of the parties
without a direct adjudication on our part. For though to me
our mode of life is luxurious in the highest degree, yet
generally it seems to be thought that the setting aside of
all impure diet, dirty habits, idle thoughts, and selfish
feelings, is a course of self-denial, scarcely to be
encountered or even thought of in such an alluring world as
this in which we dwell.

"Besides the busy occupations of each succeeding day, we
form, in this ample theatre of hope, many forthcoming
scenes. The nearer little copse is designed as the site of
the cottages. Fountains can be made to descend from their
granite sources on the hill-slope to every apartment if
required. Gardens are to displace the warm grazing glades
on the south, and numerous human beings, instead of cattle,
shall here enjoy existence. The farther wood offers to the
naturalist and the poet an exhaustless haunt; and a short
cleaning of the brook would connect our boat with the
Nashua. Such are the designs which Mr. Alcott and I have
just sketched, as, resting from planting, we walked round
this reserve.

"In your intercourse with the dwellers in the great city,
have you alighted on Mr. Edward Palmer, who studies with
Dr. Beach, the Herbalist? He will, I think, from his
previous nature-love, and his affirmations to Mr. Alcott,
be animated on learning of this actual wooing and winning
of Nature's regards. We should be most happy to see him
with us. Having become so far actual, from the real, we
might fairly enter into the typical, if he could help us in
any way to types of the true metal. We have not passed away
from home, to see or hear of the world's doings, but the
report has reached us of Mr. W. H. Channing's fellowship
with the Phalansterians, and of his eloquent speeches in
their behalf. Their progress will be much aided by his
accession. To both these worthy men be pleased to suggest
our humanest sentiments. While they stand amongst men, it
is well to find them acting out the truest possible at the
moment.

"Just before we heard of this place, Mr. Alcott had
projected a settlement at the Cliffs on the Concord River,
cutting down wood and building a cottage; but so many more
facilities were presented here that we quitted the old
classic town for one which is to be not less renowned. As
far as I could judge, our absence promised little pleasure
to our old Concord friends; but at signs of progress I
presume they rejoiced with, dear friend,

"Yours faithfully,

"CHARLES LANE."

Another Palmer than the Edward here mentioned became an inmate of "Fruitlands," and, in course of time its owner; the abandoned paradise, which was held by Mr. Lane and Mr. Alcott for less than a year, is now the property of his son. Mr. Lane, after a time, returned to England and died there; Mr. Alcott to Concord, where, in 1845, he aided Thoreau in building his hut by Walden. Mr. Channing (the nephew and biographer of Dr. Channing) continued his connection with the "Phalansterians" in New Jersey until 1849 or later, for in that year Fredrika Bremer found him dwelling and preaching among them, at the "North American Phalanstery," to which he had been invited from his Unitarian parish in Cincinnati, about the time that Brook Farm was made a community, and before Mr. Alcott's dream had taken earthly shape at "Fruitlands." The account given by Miss Bremer of the terms upon which Mr. Channing was thus invited to New Jersey, show what was the spirit of Transcendentalism then, on its social side. They said to him,--

"Come to us,--be our friend and spiritual shepherd, but
in perfect freedom. Follow your own inspiration,--preach,
talk to us, how and when it appears best to you. We
undertake to provide for your pecuniary wants; live free
from anxiety, how, and where you will; but teach us how we
should live and work; our homes and our hearts are open to
you."

It was upon such terms as this, honorable alike to those who gave and those who received, that much of the intellectual and spiritual work of the Transcendental revival was done. There was another and an unsocial side to the movement also, which Mr. Emerson early described in these words, that apply to Thoreau and to Alcott at one period:--

"It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest
observer, that many intelligent and religious persons
withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions
of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a
solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid
fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They
hold themselves aloof; they feel the disproportion between
themselves and the work offered them, and they prefer
to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the
degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the
city can propose to them. They are striking work and crying
out for somewhat worthy to do. They are lonely; the spirit
of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel
influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut
themselves in their chamber in the house; to live in the
country rather than in the town; and to find their tasks
and amusements in solitude. 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
or domestic, in the abolition of the slave trade, or in
the temperance society. They do not even like to vote. The
philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not
mean sloth; they had as lief hear that their friend is
dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he
paralyzed, and can do nothing for humanity."

It was this phase of Transcendentalism that gave most anxiety to Thoreau's good old pastor, Dr. Ripley, who early foresaw what immediate fruit might be expected from this fair tree of mysticism,--this "burning bush" which had started up, all at once, in the very garden of his parsonage. I know few epistles more pathetic in their humility and concern for the future, than one which Dr. Ripley addressed to Dr. Channing in February, 1839, after hearing and meditating on the utterances of Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, George Ripley, and the other "apostles of the newness," who disturbed with their oracles the quiet air of his parish. He wrote:--

"Denied, as I am, the privilege of going from home, of
visiting and conversing with enlightened friends, and of
reading even; broken down with the infirmities of age, and
subject to fits that deprive me of reason and the use of
my limbs, I feel it a duty to be patient and submissive
to the will of God, who is too wise to err, and too good
to injure. Some reason is left,--my mental powers, though
weak, are yet awake, and I long to be doing something for
good. The contrast between paper and ink is so strong, that
I can write better than do anything else. In this way I
take the liberty to express to you a few thoughts, which
you will receive as well-meant and sincere....

"We may certainly assume that whatever is unreasonable,
self-contradictory, and destitute of common sense, is
erroneous. Should we not be likely to find the truth,
in all moral subjects, were we to make more use of
plain reason and common sense? I know that our modern
speculators, Transcendentalists, or, as they prefer to
be called, Realists, presume to follow Reason in her
purest dictates, her sublime and unfrequented regions.
They presume, by her power, not only to discover what is
truth, but to judge of revealed truth. But is not their
whole process marred by leaving out common sense, by
which mankind are generally governed? That superiority
which places a man above the power of doing good to his
fellow-men seems to me not very desirable. I honor most
the man who transcends others in capacity and disposition
to do good, and whose daily practice corresponds with
his profession. Here I speak of professed Christians. I
would not treat with disrespect and severe censure men
who advance sentiments which I may neither approve nor
understand, provided their authors be men of learning,
piety, and holy lives. The speculations and novel opinions
of _such_ men rarely prove injurious. Nevertheless, I would
that their mental endowments might find a better method
of doing good,--a more simple and intelligible manner of
informing and reforming their fellow-men....

"The hope of the gospel is my hope, my consolation, support
and rejoicing. Such is my state of health that death is
constantly before me; no minute would it be unexpected. I
am waiting in faith and hope, but humble and penitent for
my imperfections and faults. The prayer of the publican,
'God be merciful to me a sinner!' is never forgotten. I
have hoped to see and converse with you, but now despair.
If you shall think I use too much freedom with you, charge
it to the respect and esteem which are cherished for your
character by your affectionate friend and brother,

"E. RIPLEY.

"CONCORD, _February 26, 1839_."

At this time Dr. Ripley was almost eighty-eight, and he lived two years longer, to mourn yet more pathetically over the change of times and manners. "It was fit," said Emerson, "that in the fall of laws, this loyal man should die." But the young men who succeeded him were no less loyal to the unwritten laws, and from their philosophy, which to the old theologian seemed so misty and unreal, there flowered forth, in due season, the most active and world-wide philanthropies. Twenty years after this pastoral epistle, there came to Concord another Christian of the antique type, more Puritan and Hebraic than Dr. Ripley himself, yet a Transcendentalist, too,--and JOHN BROWN found no lack of practical good-will in Thoreau, Alcott, Emerson, and the other Transcendentalists. The years had "come full circle," the Sibyl had burnt her last prophetic book, and the new æon was about to open with the downfall of slavery.