cant, if you please, of the “Transcendentalists,” lay the fact that they looked immediately around them for their stimulus, their scenery, their illustrations, and their properties. After fifty years of national life, the skylark and nightingale were at last dethroned from our literature, and in the very first volume of the “Dial” the blue-bird and the wood-thrush took their place. Since then, they have held their own; birds and flowers are recognized as a part of the local coloring, not as mere transportable property, to be brought over by emigrants in their boxes, and good only as having crossed the ocean. Americans still go to England to hear the skylark, but Englishmen also come to America to hear the bobolink.
This effect of the new movement was doubtless partly unconscious; for the impulse included some who were illiterate, but thoughtful, and distrusted all literature. In the minds of the leaders, however, the attitude was conscious and deliberate.
“He who doubts whether this age or this country can yield any contribution to the literature of the world only betrays his own blindness to the necessities of the human soul. Has the power of poetry ceased, or the need? Have the eyes ceased to see that which they would have, and which they have not? … The heart beats in this age as of old, and the passions are busy as ever.”[1]
It was this strong conviction in their own
- ↑ Emerson in Dial, i. 157, 158 (October, 1840).
