men who made Concord famous are asleep in
Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory prevails to draw seekers after
truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which met annually, a
few years since, to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality,"
next door to the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne
wore a path as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks.

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. _Nature_. _The American Scholar_. _Literary
Ethics_. _The Transcendentalism_. _The Over-soul_. _Address before
the Cambridge Divinity School_. _English Traits_. _Representative
Men_. _Poems_.

2. Henry David Thoreau. _Excursions_. _Walden_. _A Week on the
Concord and Merrimac Rivers_. _Cape Cod_. _The Maine Woods_.

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. _Mosses from an Old Manse_. _The Scarlet
Letter_. _The House of the Seven Gables_. _The Blithedale Romance_.
_The Marble Faun_. _Our Old Home_.

4. _Transcendentalism in New England_. By O. B. Frothingham. New
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1875.

[1]The Indian name of Concord River.

CHAPTER V.

THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS.

1837-1861.

With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it
is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly
been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small
and poor, and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their
alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even
those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters
find little to attract them at the home of their _alma mater_, and seek
by preference the larger cities, where periodicals and publishing
houses offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the
older and better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps
of working scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather
inclined to undervalue merely "literary" performance. In many cases
the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar,
the timid conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of
learning, and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses
free discussion, have exerted their benumbing influence upon the
originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens
that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact
sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy,
and the severer branc