names of Jouffroy and Cousin were as familiar to Yankee ears as were those of Locke or Descartes or Kant. Perhaps more heartily still this whole school of enthusiastic seekers for truth welcomed that wide range of modern literature, English and foreign alike, which was at last thrown open by such scholars as Ticknor, Longfellow, and Lowell. For this almost riotous delight in pure literature there was a reason now long past. The Puritans generally had such conscientious objections to fine art that only at the moment to which we are now come could the instinct of native New England for culture conscientiously be satisfied. The Renaissance of New England, therefore, was in no aspect more truly renascent than in the unfeigned eagerness with which it welcomed the newly discovered fine arts. The Transcendental youth of New England delighted in excellent modern literature and music as unaffectedly as fifteenth-century Italians delighted in the freshly discovered manuscripts of classic Greek. In one way or another this Transcendental movement The Dial. affected almost all the ardent natures of New England from 1825 to 1840. In that year it found final expression in the Dial, a quarterly periodical which flourished until 1844. Its first editor was among the most characteristic figures of Transcendentalism. This was a woman, regarded in her own time as the prophetess of the new movement, and prevented by a comparatively early death from struggling through days when the movement had spent its force. Fuller. SARAH MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850) was the Margaret daughter of an eccentric but very assertive citizen of Cambridge. Educated by her father according to his Purpose of the Dial. own ideas, she was much overstimulated in youth. She became editor of the Dial in 1840. In 1842 she relinquished the editorship to Emerson, and removed to New York. Horace Greeley, whose sympathy with New England reformers was always encouraging, had invited her to become the literary critic of the New York Tribune. A little later she strayed to Italy, where, in the revolutionary times of 1847, she married a gentleman named Ossoli, an Italian patriot some years younger than herself. She was in Rome during the siege of 1848, and two years later started for America with her husband, virtually an exile, and her child. The ship on which they were journeying was wrecked off Fire Island; all three were lost. In 1839 Margaret Fuller had translated Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; later she published Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) and Papers on Literature and Art (1846). And, as we have seen, she was the first editor of the Dial. The precise purpose of the Dial is hard to state; it belongs with that little company of short-lived periodicals which now and then endeavor to afford everybody a full opportunity to say anything. The deepest agreement of Transcendentalism was in the conviction that the individual has a natural right to believe for himself and freely to express his belief. In a community so dominated by tradition as New England, meanwhile, a community of which the most characteristic periodical up to this time had been the North American Review, freedom of speech in print, though not theoretically denied, was hardly practicable. With a mission little more limited than this ideal of freedom, the Dial started. "I would not have it too purely literary," Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller. "I wish that we might make a journal so broad and great Though the Dial was impractical, never circulated much, and within four years came to a hopeless financial end, its pages are at once more interesting and more sensible than tradition has repre 1. Mary. sented them. Of the writers, to be sure, few have proved immortal. Bronson Alcott and Theodore Parker seem fading with Margaret Fuller into mere memories; and George Ripley has become more nebulous still. But Thoreau was of the company; and. so was Emerson, who bids fair to survive the rest much as Shakspere has survived the other Elizabethan dramatists. Emerson, Thoreau, and some others of the Transcen- Minor dental group we shall consider in later chapters; but at this point we must very briefly glance at some of their minor literary contemporaries. One was the eccentric JONES VERY (1813-1880), licensed to preach, but never ordained, a few of whose poems show something near genius. Another was CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH (1813-1892), painter and poet, whose Last of the Huggermuggers (1856) used to be a favorite book with children. Larger figures in the group were WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING (1810-1884) and WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, the younger (1818 Transcendentalists. Significance of the Dial. 1891); yet neither is generally remembered very distinctly. They were nephews of the Unitarian apostle; and one of them was the author of the familiar line, "If my bark sinks, 'tis to another sea. Far more noteworthy is the Reverend JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE (1810-1888), pastor from 1841 until 1888 of the Church of the Disciples, in Boston, a potent advocate of antislavery, a stout supporter of all rational measures of reform, a fearless theologian, and author, among other writings, of Ten Great Religions (1871). His contributions to the Dial are chiefly in verse, a fact which is deeply characteristic of the period. People who were later apt to express themselves in prose were then moved to write in verse, usually ephemeral. Among them were Miss Elizabeth Peabody, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Orestes Brownson. For our purpose we need mention no more names. These people lived and helped to make the Transcendental movement possible; what they wrote did not much affect the history of pure letters. Above these rises Emerson, a Transcendentalist with a lasting message. But to him we shall turn in our next chapter. That the Dial shows Emerson's relation to his fellow Transcendentalists is perhaps what now makes it most significant. No eminent literary figure can grow into existence without a remarkable environment, and the pages of the Dial gradually reveal the rather vigorous environment of Emerson's most active years. This vigor, however, appears more plainly in the earlier numbers, which, merely as literature, are often unexpectedly good. As you turn the pages of the later numbers you feel that the thought tends to grow more vague; the kinds of reform grow more various and wilder; and, above all, the tendency, so fatal to periodical literature, of running to inordinate length, becomes more and more evident. From beginning to end, however, the Dial is fresh in feeling, wide in scope, earnest in its search for truth, and less eccentric than you would have thought possible. For all its ultimate failure, it leaves a final impression not only of hopefulness, but of sanity. Though the Dial had little positive cohesion, its writers Its Spirit. and all the Transcendentalists, of whom we may take them as representative, were almost at one as ardent opponents of lifeless traditions. Generally idealists, they were stirred to emotional fervor by their detestation of any stiffening orthodoxy, even though that orthodoxy were so far from dogmatic as Unitarianism. And naturally passing from things of the mind and the soul to things of that palpable part of human nature, the body, they found themselves generally eager to alter the affairs of this world for the |