he frost imagery on the enchanted hall window" or something to do
with "Feathertop," the "Scarecrow," and his "Looking Glass" and the
little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do with the
old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to those in the
churchyard, to protect them from secular noises, as when the circus
parade comes down Main Street; or something to do with the concert at
the Stamford camp meeting, or the "Slave's Shuffle"; or something to do
with the Concord he-nymph, or the "Seven Vagabonds," or "Circe's
Palace," or something else in the wonderbook--not something that
happens, but the way something happens; or something to do with the
"Celestial Railroad," or "Phoebe's Garden," or something personal,
which tries to be "national" suddenly at twilight, and universal
suddenly at midnight; or something about the ghost of a man who never
lived, or about something that never will happen, or something else
that is not.

IV--"The Alcotts"

If the dictagraph had been perfected in Bronson Alcott's time, he might
now be a great writer. As it is, he goes down as Concord's greatest
talker. "Great expecter," says Thoreau; "great feller," says Sam
Staples, "for talkin' big ... but his daughters is the gals
though--always DOIN' somethin'." Old Man Alcott, however, was usually
"doin' somethin'" within. An internal grandiloquence made him melodious
without; an exuberant, irrepressible, visionary absorbed with
philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind of transcendental business,
the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family.
Apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than
metaphysics, gave a kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice
when he sang his oracles; a manner something of a cross between an
inside pompous self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. But
he was sincere and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what
he could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw it.
In fact, there is a strong didactic streak in both father and daughter.
Louisa May seldom misses a chance to bring out the moral of a homely
virtue. The power of repetition was to them a natural means of
illustration. It is said that the elder Alcott, while teaching school,
would frequently whip himself when the scholars misbehaved, to show
that the Divine Teacher-God-was pained when his children of the earth
were bad. Quite often the boy next to