erary point of view only are we here concerned.

It

is the only distinct "movement" in American literature. The organ of the group was the Dial, a quarterly magazine which was begun the year before Brook Farm was organized, and which "expired after four years of precarious life." The following sentence from the prospectus of the Dial will show the intimate connection of the literary aspect of the movement with the social and religious aspects: "The pages of this journal will be filled by contributors who possess little in common but the love of individual freedom and the hope of social progress; who are united by sympathy of spirit, not by agreement in speculation; whose faith is in Divine Providence, rather than in human prescription, whose hearts are more in the future than in the past, and who trust the living soul more than the dead letter." Thus the emancipation of literature is seen to have been one of the chief aims of these innovators. Margaret Fuller, the brilliant woman popularly identified with Hawthorne's Zenobia,' edited the Dial for two years, and Emerson was a regular contributor. A. B. Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, childhood's favorite writer, contributed Orphic Sayings, of which Professor Goddard says: "It will surely be no exaggeration to say that these, more than all 1 See page 125.

THE "ORCHARD" HOUSE, CONCORD. Home for many years of Amos Bronson Alcott, one of the leading Brook Farmers.

the other contributions to the Dial combined, served to bring down the ridicule of the community without discrim ination on its pages."

In an essay on Thoreau, Lowell remarks that besides the comic aspect, which he sets forth at considerable length, Transcendentalism had "a very solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly explosiveness." This aspect of it is best known to us in the pages of Emerson, philosopher, moralist, and poet; and Thoreau, the revealer of nature and first practitioner of the simple life. We are now to study the lives and works of these two as the expression of the best that this unorganized movement gave to our national life and letters.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882

One of the longest, happiest, and most even-tempered of the world's literary lives, and one in which the same sort of unity appears as we have noted in Bryant's life, is that of the great New England philosopher and poet, - Emerson. Like Bryant, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, he came of a long line of New England Puritans, with eight generations of preachers behind him, and twelve other preachers and fifty graduates of Harvard in the family connection.

A Bostonian. Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803; he died in Concord, "an ideal New England town," twenty miles distant, April 27, 1882; and he spent nearly the whole of the intervening seventy-nine years within the limits of what is now called "Greater Boston." His education was carried on in the grammar schools and the famous Latin School of his native city, continued, as a matter of course, in Harvard, from which he was graduated in 1821. Many of Emerson's school and college friends who became famous have been forced, on being pressed for reminiscences

of their more famous associate, reluctantly to admit that he did not especially distinguish himself, that he made friends slowly, and that he attracted little attention from teachers or students. At his graduation from Harvard, however, he took second prize in English composition, and was chosen

class poet; but the honor of this appointment is somewhat lessened by the fact that seven others had declined it.

Career in the Ministry. - During the years immediately following, Emerson was occupied with teaching and with the study of theology, until, in March, 1829, he was ordained assistant pastor of the Second Church, Boston, of which, on the resignation of the pastor, Emerson assumed sole charge. Some months later he married the daughter of a Boston merchant, Miss Ellen Tucker, an invalid who died in less

than three years. Finding some of the duties of his ministerial position distasteful, and feeling a want of sympathy with the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, he set forth his views in a sermon in September, 1832, and resigned the pastorate. Though Emerson was a preacher to the end of his days, it will be seen that his tenure of a church pulpit was limited to a little over three years.

Friendship with Carlyle. - In 1833 Emerson made his first trip to Europe, of which the most notable experiences were his preaching in Edinburgh, and his meeting with Thomas Carlyle. Upon returning to America he took up his residence in the "Old Manse" of Concord, a house built for Emerson's grandfather, and occupied at the time by Dr. Ezra Ripley, a connection of the family. During the winter of 1833-1834, having determined on a platform career, he began lecturing; but a far more important event of the year was a letter to Carlyle, May 14, 1834. Then was begun one of the most remarkable correspondences of the world, which lasted thirty-eight years. In temperament and attitude toward life, the two philosophers were directly opposed; but each had an admiration and a strong sympathy for the other, and the friendship lasted till death. Emerson rendered a real service to Carlyle in introducing his works to American readers, beginning in 1836 with a preface to Sartor Resartus, which was published in this country before appearing as an independent work in England. (It had been printed in an English magazine the preceding year.) Emerson married in September, 1835, Miss Lydia Jackson, whom he described to Carlyle as "an incarnation of Christianity."

First Writings. The year 1836 marks the entrance of Emerson into literature as poet, with the Concord Hymn, and as philosopher-essayist, with Nature, "a reflective prosepoem." Two lines of the former are familiar to all: