contained the words “eloquence” and “wealth” it is greatly strengthened by the change.
As to obtaining a verse from Emerson to fill the gap at the close of his paper, her appeal seems to have been successful; the five lines called “Silence” being placed there, which, although not included by him in his published volumes, are now printed as his by his editor, Mr. Cabot. At the time of its first appearance the little verse was regarded as rather grotesque; and it will never, perhaps, be placed among his happiest efforts.
The storm of criticism which opened upon the “Dial,” at the very outset, was something formidable. It was directed even at the very moderate peculiarities of Emerson; the “Knickerbocker,” a New York monthly, making great fun of his opening essay, which it derided as “literary euphuism.” But the chief assault fell upon Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings,” which provoked numerous parodies, the worst of which Mr. Alcott composedly pasted into his diary, indexing them, with his accustomed thoroughness and neatness, as “Parodies on Orphic Sayings.” Epithets, too, were showered about as freely as imitations; the Philadelphia “Gazette,” for instance, calling the editors of the new journal “zanies,” “Bedlamites,” and “considerably madder than the Mormons.”
It will convey some impression of the difficulties which Margaret Fuller, as leading editor, had to meet, when we consider that, all this time, Mr.
