system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old
stand-point.' Yet good men rightly hoped that 'out of the very thoughts
that were wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm,
and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble
and happy life.' Now that we are able to look back on the crisis of the
times that Hawthorne describes, we perceive that it was as he expected,
and that in the person of Emerson the ferment and dissolvency of thought
worked itself out in a strain of wisdom of the highest and purest.

In 1842 Emerson told Carlyle, in vindication of the _Dial_ and its
transcendentalisms, that if the direction of their speculations was as
deplorable as Carlyle declared, it was yet a remarkable fact for history
that all the bright young men and young women in New England, 'quite
ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession
to fathers and mothers--the boys, that they do not wish to go into
trade; the girls, that they do not like morning calls and evening
parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all
the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead.'

It is worth while to transcribe from the _Dial_ itself the scene at one
of the many Bostonian Conventions of that date--the Friends of Universal
Progress, in 1840:--'The composition of the Assembly was rich and
various. The singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from
all parts of New England, and also from the Middle States, men of every
shade of opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy,
and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great
variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of
confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and
enthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen,
madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers,
Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists,
Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers, all came successively to the
top, and seized their moment, if not their _hour_, wherein to chide or
pray or preach or protest. The faces were a study. The most daring
innovators, and the champions-until-death of the old cause, sat side by
side. The still living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing
yet after several generations, encountered the founders of families,
f