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eclectic philosophy of the Frenchmen Cousin and Jouffroy, whose books were translated from the French and used for a time as text-books in Harvard College and elsewhere, as early as 1839. The German poets also were just being translated, though of course in a fragmentary way, in America, especially Goethe, Schiller, and even Heine; and the poetic writings of Hoffmann, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, and others lent their influence, first under the lead of Carlyle, and afterwards through direct American translators, the Rev. Charles T. Brooks and Mrs. Eliza Buckminster Lee. Many of these poetic translations appeared in The Dial, and the prose versions in the series of volumes, fourteen in all, entitled Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, planned and edited by George Ripley. To him especial attention should be given, since if the sunny atmosphere of the period was personally incarnated in any one, it was undoubtedly in him.

George Ripley was the single consummate type, during that period, of that rarest of combinations, the natural scholar and the cheery good fellow. Evidence of the former quality might be found in the catalogue, had it only been preserved, of his library sold in aid of the organization of Brook Farm, and universally recognized as the best German library then to be found in America; while the best tribute to the other trait was the universal regret said to have been felt among his clerical brethren at the loss of the gayest companion and best story-teller in their ranks. He it was who with Emerson, Hedge, and George Putnam called together the first meeting of "what was named in derision the Transcendental Club," as Hedge writes; and he it was who resigned his clerical charge in 1840, with a view to applying to some form of action the newer and ampler views of life.

Even Dr. Channing, then the intellectual leader of Boston, had some conference with Ripley as to whether it would

be possible to bring cultivated and thoughtful people together and make a society that deserved the name. Mr. Swift in his admirable book on Brook Farm reminds us that there was a consultation on this subject at the house of Dr. John C. Warren, then the leading physician of Boston, which ended "with an oyster supper, crowned by excellent wines." Undoubtedly, on that occasion, George Ripley told his best stories and laughed his heartiest laugh. But we may be sure that his jubilant cheeriness was no less when he turned his back on all this and left the flesh-pots of Egypt for a dinner of herbs at Brook Farm.

There is something very interesting and not wholly accidental in the way in which a German influence was thus early making itself felt in this country and contributing, as a matter of course, to its sunshine. This clearly came from a double influence, the appearance in America of a number of highly educated Germans, of whom Lieber, Follen, and Beck were types, who were driven from their country by political uproar about 1825; and, on the other hand, the return of a small number of highly educated Americans, at a period a little earlier, who had studied at the German universities. The most conspicuous among these men were Edward Everett, George Ticknor, George Bancroft, and Joseph Green Cogswell, the latter being the organizer of our first great American library, the Astor. Their experience and influence had a value quite inestimable, and the process of their training is shown unmistakably in a remarkable series of letters from them to my father, then steward of Harvard College, and in some respects their sponsor; letters published by myself in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine for September, 1897. In one of these letters, the cool and clear-headed Everett, going from the Continent to inspect the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, expressed the opinion that America had at that date (1819) "nothing to

learn from England [in regard to university methods], but everything to learn from Germany," and I have been more than once assured by English scholars, on quoting to them the passage, that the remark was, at the period indicated, absolutely true. It is, however, also true that Mr. Everett himself practically recognized a subsequent change in conditions, when he sent his own son, forty years later, to an English and not to a German university.

It must not be supposed that the "Disciples of the Newness," as they liked to call themselves, were allowed to go on their way unchecked. Professor Bowen of Harvard, always pungent and often tart, followed them up vigorously in the North American, as did Professor Felton more mildly. Yet there was always something behind the cloud, an influence which revived these victims like some cloud-concealed goddess in Homer, and however severe the attacks may have been they were usually the fruit of narrowness, not of mere malice. They were rarely mixed with merely personal bitterness, as were the contests of the same period, under Poe's influence, among New York men of letters; nor were they so much entangled with money-quarrels as those, since money was a thing with which New England students had little to do. No one among them, however, fared so miserably, in financial negotiations, as did poor Cornelius Mathews in New York, who, after his Big Abel and the Little Manhattan had been announced as a forthcoming volume of a series, was offered by the repentant publishers $100 to allow them to withdraw the offer and leave the book unpublished, but who refused the request. The North American Review - then a Boston periodical settled the case of this unfortunate author tersely by saying, "Mr. Mathews has shown a marvelous skill in failing, each failure being more complete than the last." Horace Greeley hit his merely political opponents as hard as this, but

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the New York Tribune under Margaret Fuller's influence kept clear of bitter personalities in literature, something which she had not always quite done in The Dial.

It must be remembered that the Transcendentalists never, in the early days, called themselves by that name. Their most ambitious title was, as has been said, that of Disciples of the Newness. It must also be remembered that this Newness itself was in some degree a reversion to the old, as in Margaret Fuller's case it came from a learned father who brought in direct inheritance of whatever

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was ancient. She was, by her own statement, early "placed in a garden with a great pile of books before her." She began to read Latin before she read English. The Greek and Roman deities were absolutely real to her, and she prayed, "O God, if thou art Jupiter;" or else to Bacchus for a bunch of grapes. When she was old enough to think about Christianity, she cried out for her dear old Greek and Roman gods. It was a long time, her friend Mrs. Dall tells us," "before she could see the deeper spirituality of the Christian tradition." Hence it is, perhaps, that we see rather less of sunshine in her than in the other Transcendentalists.

For the unbelieving world outside, it must be remembered, the Transcendental movement at least contributed some such sunshine through the very sarcasms it excited; as when Mrs. Russell, Father Taylor's brilliant daughter, did not flinch from defining the Transcendentalists as "a race who dove into the infinite, soared into the illimitable, and never paid cash;" or when Carlyle described Ripley, who had called on him in England, as 66 a Socinian minister, who had left the pulpit to reform the world by cultivating onions." Emerson compared Brook Farm to a French Revolution in small," and a certain meeting of the Transcendental Club to "going to heaven in a swing." All the peculiarities of Brook Farm, we may be sure, were reported without diminu

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tion in the gossip of Boston society, even the jokes of the young people made upon themselves being taken seriously in the world outside; as when they asked at the dinner-table, "Is the butter within the sphere of your influence?" or proposed that a pie should be cut "from the centre to the periphery." There being more young men than young women, at first, an unusual share of household duties, moreover, fell upon the stronger sex. They helped in the laundry, brought water from the pump, prepared vegetables in the barn. The graceful George William Curtis trimmed lamps, and the manly and eminently practical Charles Dana organized a band of "griddle-cake servitors," composed of "four of the most elegant youths of the community."

vague and dreamy times might have communicated to those reared in them too passive and negative a character but for the perpetual tonic of the anti-slavery movement, which was constantly entangling itself with all merely socialistic discussion. At every crisis brought on by this last problem it turned out that mere moral purpose might impart to these pacific social reformers a placid courage which rose on occasion to daring. Thus it took years to appreciate the most typical of these men, Bronson Alcott. The quality that was, at first, rather exasperating in him became ultimately his greatest charm: the manner in which this idealist threw himself on the Universal Powers and left his life to be assigned by them. That life had seemed at first as helpless and unpromising as the attitude of the little Italian child who, having stopped at a certain door near Boston and received breakfast for sweet charity's sake, was found sitting placidly on the doorstep, two hours later, and being asked why she had not gone away replied serenely, "What for go away? Plenty time go away!" The wide universe was to Alcott a similarly vast and tranquil scene. He had, as was said of his English friend Greaves, "a copious. peacefulness." It was easy enough to see this in a humorous light, but when in later years, after those who had broken down the Boston Court House door for the rescue of Anthony Burns had been driven out, and the open doorway was left bare, it was Alcott who walked unarmed up the empty steps, calmly asking, "Why are we not within?" and on finding himself unsupported turned back slowly, then walked placidly down again, he and his familiar cane, without visible disturbance of mind. It has lately come to light, since the publication of the memoirs of Daniel Ricketson, that Alcott afterwards offered to be one of a party for the rescue of Captain John Brown. It was still the same Alcott, only that he watched the slowly It is possible that those seemingly forming lines of his horoscope, and found

There was also a Brook Farm legend that one of the younger members or pupils confessed his passion while helping his sweetheart to wash dishes; and Emerson is the authority for stating that as the men danced in the evening, clothespins sometimes dropped from their pockets. Hawthorne wrote to his sister, not without sarcasm, "The whole fraternity eat together, and such a delectable way of life has never been seen on earth since the days of the early Christians. We get up at halfpast six, dine at half-past twelve, and go to bed at nine." An element of moral protest also entered into the actual work of the more serious members. Thus Mr. Ripley said to Theodore Parker of John Dwight, afterwards eminent as a musical critic, “There is your accomplished friend; he would hoe corn all Sunday if I would let him, but all Massachusetts could not make him do it on Monday." Rumor adds that Parker replied, "It is good to know that he wants to hoe corn any day in the week." The question is not how far these details were based on fact or were the fruit of fancy, but the immediate point is that they materially aided in keeping up the spirits of the unbelieving world outside.

them in Emerson's phrase, 66 come full circle." In a similar way, Thoreau, after all his seeming theories of self-absorption, ranged himself on the side of Brown as placidly as if he were going for huckleberries.

Yet the effect of Transcendentalism on certain characters, a minority of its adherents, was seemingly disastrous; though the older we grow, the harder it is to be sure that we know all the keys to individual character. The freedom that belonged to the period, the sunny atmosphere of existence, doubtless made some men indolent, like children of the tropics. Some went abroad and lived in Europe, and were rarely heard from; others dwelt at home, and achieved nothing; while others, on the contrary, had the most laborious and exacting careers. Others led lives morally wasted, whether by the mere letting loose of a surge of passion ill restrained, or by that terrible impulse of curiosity which causes more than half the sins of each growing generation, and yet is so hard to distinguish from the heroic search after knowledge. I can think of men among those bred in that period, and seemingly under its full influence, who longed to know the worst of life and knew it, and paid dearly for their knowledge; and their kindred paid more dearly still. Others might be named who, without ever yielding, so far as I know or guess, to a single sensual or worldly sin, yet developed temperaments so absolutely wayward that it became necessary, in the judgment of all who knew the facts, for their wives and children to leave them and stay apart, so that these men died in old age without seeing the faces of their own grandchildren. Others vanished, and are to this day untraced; and yet all these were but a handful compared with that majority which remained true to early dreams while the world called them erratic, and the church pronounced them unredeemed or, in Shakespeare's phrase, "unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled."

It must be remembered also that, in that period of general seething, all other reformatory movements alternated with efforts of the socialists and joined with them to keep up the spirits of the Community. The anti-slavery meetings, for instance, mingled sorrow with joy and sometimes even with levity. Nowhere in all the modern world could have been seen more strikingly grouped the various dramatis personæ of a great impending social change than on the platform of some large hall, filled with Abolitionists. There sat Garrison in the centre, his very attitude showing the serene immovableness of his mind, and around him usually two or three venerable Quaker Vice Presidents, always speechless, while in themselves constituting an inexorable though unwearied audience. Grouped among them were "devout women, not a few," as the Scripture has it, and fiery orators brought together from different fields of action, where they had been alternately starved, frozen, or mobbed, according to the various methods adopted by unbelieving rural scoffers. Mingled with these were a few city delegates, the most high-bred men and women in appearance to be found in Boston, like Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, and Mrs. Chapman. Among these, strangest of all, were the living texts for all the impending eloquence of the platform: the fugitive slaves, black or mulatto or sometimes indistinguishably white, perhaps just landed from their concealment on Southern packet ships, or in covert corners of freight cars. There might be Henry Box Brown, so named from the box in which he had been nailed up and been borne, occasionally on his head, from slavery to freedom; or Harriet Tubman, who after making her own escape from the land of slavery had made eight or ten covert visits thither, each time bringing back by the underground railroad her little band of fugitives; or William and Ellen Craft, she going from city to city northward as a white woman, and he as

her attendant slave. These, and such as these, passed across the stage in successive years. And no one who early saw Frederick Douglass just rescued from slavery could possibly have foreseen in him the princely and commanding aspect with which he was to tread in later years those same boards and prove himself, as the veteran reporter Yerrington used to say, the only orator on the platform, except Wendell Phillips, whose speeches needed absolutely no revision before printing.

These gave the tragic, the Shakespearean aspect of the anti-slavery movement, to be relieved by another side of the screen when Wendell Phillips and some other hero of the platform led beyond the door the shrieking Abby Folsom, with her unfailing cry, "It's the capitalists!" or Mellen was silenced by more subtle persuasions, and tempted away to continue his interminable harangue to some single auditor in the side scenes. Once take Garrison himself away from the convention and no man better loved his placid joke. He could go to prison without flinching, but could not forego his pun, we may be sure, after he got there, and would no more have denied himself that innocent relaxation in jail than a typical French nobleman in Revolutionary days would have laid aside his snuff-box in the presence of the guillotine. A similar cheerful and unwavering tone pervaded those leaders generally, and I remember when Mrs. Chapman established the first outdoor anti-slavery festival, on the avowed ground that there was no reason why the children of this world should enjoy themselves better than the Children of Light.

It is needless to say that the tropical race in whose interest all this anti-slavery work was carried on took their share of levity, when opportunity came, the instances of habitual gloom being usually found, not among those who had escaped from slavery, but rather in those born free, bred at the North, having some

worldly prosperity, and yet feeling that a modified subjugation still socially rested upon them. The inexhaustible sense of humor in Frederick Douglass, on the other hand, kept him clear of this, as was never better seen than on the once famous occasion when the notorious Isaiah Rynders of New York at the head of a mob had interrupted an anti-slavery meeting, captured the platform, placed himself in the chair, and bade the meeting proceed. Douglass was speaking and, nothing loath, made his speech only keener and keener for the interference, weaving around the would-be chairman's head a wreath of delicate sarcasm which carried the audience with it, while the duller wits of the burly despot could hardly follow him. Knowing only, in a general way, that he was being dissected, Rynders at last exclaimed, "What you Abolitionists want to do is to cut all our throats! "Oh, no!" replied Douglass in his most dulcet tones. "We would only cut your hair;" and bending over the shaggy and frowzy head of the Bowery tyrant he gave a suggestive motion as of scissors, to his thumb and forefinger, with a professional politeness that instantly brought down the house, friend and foe, while Rynders quitted the chair in wrath, and the meeting dissolved itself amid general laughter. It was a more cheerful conclusion, perhaps, than that stormier one

not unknown in reformatory conventions with which Shakespeare so often ends his scenes: "Exeunt fighting."

One of the most curious circumstances connected with the whole Transcendental period, and one tending, whether in seriousness or through satire, to bring out its sunny side, was its connection with Horace Greeley. He himself was a strange mixture of the dreamy and the practical, and his very appearance and costume, his walk and conversation, combined these inconsistent attributes. The one great advertising medium possessed by the whole Brook Farm movement was the New York Tribune, and it is a part

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