espect of Miss Fuller herself.

It was the day of seers and "Orphic" utterances; the air was full of
the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philanthropic projects and
plans for the regeneration of the universe. The figure of the
wild-eyed, long-haired reformer--the man with a panacea--the "crank" of
our later terminology--became a familiar one. He abounded at
non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies
and of woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque
aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. "Bran had
its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs,
tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious
zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people),
professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . .
Communities were established where every thing was to be common but
common sense."

This ferment has long since subsided and much of what was then seething
has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some very solid
matters also have been precipitated, some crystals of poetry
translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome
was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a
record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies,
and sects founded only to dwindle away or be reabsorbed into some form
of {439} orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the
worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the
enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides
of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the
movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; its moral
earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual
conscience. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque
extremes. Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder
outcroppings of transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New Lights,
Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his time. There is in him that
mingling of idealism with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee
shrewdness, which characterizes the race. The practical, inventive,
calculating, money-getting side of the Yankee has been made
sufficiently obvious. But the deep heart of New England is full of
dreams, mysticism, romance:

"And in the day of sacrifice,
When heroes piled the pyre,
The dismal Massachusetts ice