Alcott and, perhaps, others of the stricter school of Transcendentalism, were shaking their heads over the “Dial” as being timid, compromising, and, in fact, rather a worldly and conventional affair. Even before its actual birth we find him writing in his diary, “I fear that the work will consult the temper, and be awed by the bearing of existing things.”[1] After the first number he writes to Dr. Marston in England, “It is but a twilight ‘Dial;’” and to Charles Lane, “This ‘Dial’ of ours should have been a truer. It does not content the public, nor even ourselves. Yours, the ‘Monthly Magazine’ [Heraud’s], pleases me better in several aspects.” To Heraud he writes at the same time: “The ‘Dial’ partakes of our vices, it consults the mood and is awed somewhat by the bearing of existing orders, yet is superior to our other literary organs, and satisfies in part the hunger of our youth. It satisfies me not, nor Emerson. It measures not the meridian but the morning ray; the nations wait for the gnomon that shall mark the broad noon.”[2]
These remarks are of value as illustrating the difficulty that Margaret Fuller had to encounter in endeavoring to keep her magazine somewhere midway between the demands of Theodore Parker on the one side and those of Alcott on the other. What Theodore Parker alone would have made it may be judged by his “Massachusetts
