little digestible material, nor were they naturally voracious.
They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were starved.
Emerson, to be sure, fed on books. There was a great catholicity in
his reading; and he showed a fine tact in his comments, and in his way
of appropriating what he read. But he read transcendentally, not
historically, to learn what he himself felt, not what others might
have felt before him. And to feed on books, for a philosopher or a
poet, is still to starve. Books can help him to acquire form, or to
avoid pitfalls; they cannot supply him with substance, if he is to
have any. Therefore the genius of Poe and Hawthorne, and even of
Emerson, was employed on a sort of inner play, or digestion of
vacancy. It was a refined labour, but it was in danger of being
morbid, or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental
rhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender echoes
and quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal genius
sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies in
comparison with what a real observer would have said in the premises.
Their manner, in a word, was subjective. In their own persons they
escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but they supplied
nothing to supplant it in other minds.

The churches, likewise, although they modified their spirit, had no
philosophy to offer save a new emphasis on parts of what Calvinism
contained. The theology of Calvin, we must remember, had much in it
besides philosophical Calvinism. A Christian tenderness, and a hope of
grace for the individual, came to mitigate its sardonic optimism; and
it was these evangelical elements that the Calvinistic churches now
emphasised, seldom and with blushes referring to hell-fire or infant
damnation. Yet philosophic Calvinism, with a theory of life that would
perfectly justify hell-fire and infant damnation if they happened to
exist, still dominates the traditional metaphysics. It is an
ingredient, and the decisive ingredient, in what calls itself
idealism. But in order to see just what part Calvinism plays in
current idealism, it will be necessary to distinguish the other chief
element in that complex system, namely, transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism is the philosophy which the romantic era produced in
Germany, and independently, I believe, in America also.
Transcendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set
of dogmas about what