thought. Unlike all the world before us, our own age and land shall be classic to ourselves.”[1]
This oration, be it remembered, was delivered and printed while the “Dial” was yet unborn; and before Emerson had published anything but “Nature” and a few addresses. These words which I have quoted were like a trumpet-call to myself and others, half a dozen years later; and nothing of Emerson’s ever touched us more deeply. They make it very clear, at any rate, that the intellectual excitement of that day, whatever may be thought of it as philosophy, produced in literature the effect of emancipation. The “Dial” was the embodiment of this movement; and without Margaret Fuller it is doubtful whether the “Dial” would ever have been born.
In conducting it, she had to attempt that hardest thing in life, to bring reformers into systematic coöperation. Reformers are like Esquimaux dogs, which must be hitched to the sledge, each by a separate thong; if put in one common harness, they turn and eat each other up. Under the common phrase, “Transcendentalists,” were comprised, at that day, people of the most antagonistic temperaments. Nobody could dwell higher among the clouds than Alcott; no one could keep his feet more firmly on the earth than Parker; yet they must be harnessed to the same conveyance. Those who have had to do similar charioteering amid the milder divergences and
- ↑ Heraud’s New Monthly Magazine, iii. 448.
