as it may, the selections given are all
worth saving, and the fragmentary resurrection is just about as much as
our age has time to attend to of the growths that were formed when New
England thought was young. That was the day when Mrs. Hominy fastened
the cameo to her frontal bone and went to the sermon of Dr. Channing,
when young Hawthorne chopped straw for the odious oxen at Brook Farm,
and when a budding Booddha, called by his neighbors Thoreau, left
mankind and proceeded to introvert himself by the borders of Walden
Pond. Mr. Alcott's little diary gives us some of the best skimmings of
that time of yeast. There is Emerson-worship, Channing-worship, Margaret
Fuller-worship and the pale cast of _The Dial_. There is, besides, in
another stratum that runs through the collection, a vein of very welcome
investigation amongst old authors--Plutarch's charming letter of
consolation to his wife on the death of their child; Crashaw's "Verses
on a Prayer-Book;" Evelyn's letter on the origin of his _Sylva_; and
many a jewel five-words-long filched from the authors whom modern taste
votes slow and insupportable. We mention these to give some idea of the
spirit in which this work of marquetry is executed--a work too
fragmentary and incoherent to be easily describable except by its
specimens. And while culling fragments, we cannot forbear mentioning the
curious records of Mr. Alcott's "Conversations," held now with Frederika
Bremer, now with a band of large-browed Concord children, held forty
years ago, and turning perpetually upon the deeper questions of
metaphysics and religion; we will even indulge ourselves with a short
extract from one of the "Conversations with Children," reported verbatim
by an apparently concealed auditress, and eliciting many a cunning bit
of infantine wisdom, besides the following finer rhapsody, which Mr.
Alcott succeeded in charming out of the lips of a boy six years of age:

"Mr. Alcott! you know Mrs. Barbauld says in her hymns, everything is
prayer; every action is prayer; all nature prays; the bird prays in
singing; the tree prays in growing; men pray--men can pray _more_; we
feel; we have more, more than Nature; we can know, and do right:
_Conscience prays_; all our powers pray; action prays. Once we said,
here, that there was a Christ in the bottom of our spirits, when we try
to be good. Then we pray in Christ; and that is the whole!"

To think that the lips of this ingenuous and golden-mouthed la