Dr. Convers Francis, who contrived upon the salary of a poor country clergyman to subscribe to everything and buy everything, of course took Heraud’s periodical; and his copy, apparently the only one to be found in these parts, now lies before me. In this magazine it was proposed to publish some other things from American sources besides Bartlett’s oration; as, for instance, a review of Jones Very’s poems, by Miss Fuller; and one of Tennyson’s, by John S. Dwight; but these seem never to have appeared. Besides this monthly, Heraud or his friends planned and announced a still more esoteric periodical, to be called “Aurora;” and his ally, Dr. J. Westland Marston, actually published some numbers of one called “Psyche.” All these productions were read with great eagerness by the Boston circle, Mr. Alcott’s diary recording from month to month the satisfaction taken by himself, Miss Fuller, and others in Heraud’s undertakings, and his own fear that Americans could not support such an enterprise. “It will be some time,” he writes in his diary (November 1, 1839), “before our contemplated journal will be commenced, and I question whether we shall find talent or spirit to equal that of our English brethren. We have writers enough, but they are neither accomplished nor free. Half a dozen men exhaust our list of contributors; Emerson, Hedge, Miss Fuller, Ripley, Channing, Dwight, and Clarke are our dependence.”[1] But
- ↑ Alcott’s MS. Diary, xiii. 375.
