ally driven by dire necessity to teaching
school. But there could be no success at school-teaching for a man the
most eccentric of his day--a mystic, a follower of Oriental philosophy,
a non-resistant, an advocate of woman suffrage, an abolitionist, a
vegetarian, and heaven knows what besides. So in the end, he was sold
out, and removed with his family to Concord, where he developed into a
sort of impractical idealist, holding Orphic conversations and writing
scraps of speculation and criticism, and living in the clouds generally.

Life would have been far less easy for him but for the development of an
unexpected talent in one of his daughters, Louisa May Alcott. From her
sixteenth year, Louisa Alcott had been writing for publication, but with
little success, although every dollar she earned was welcome to a family
so poor that the girls sometimes thought of selling their hair to get a
little money. She also tried to teach, and finally, in 1862, went to
Washington as a volunteer nurse and labored for many months in the
military hospitals. The letters she wrote to her mother and sisters were
afterwards collected in a book called "Hospital Sketches." At last, at
the suggestion of her publishers, she undertook to write a girls' story.
The result was "Little Women," which sprang almost instantly into a
tremendous popularity, and which at once put its author out of reach of
want.

Other children's stories, scarcely less famous, followed in quick
succession, forming a series which has never been equalled for
long-continued vogue. Few children who read at all have failed to read
"Little Men," "Little Women," "An Old-Fashioned Girl," "Eight Cousins,"
and "Rose in Bloom," to mention only five of them, and edition after
edition has been necessary to supply a demand which shows no sign of
lessening. The stories are, one and all, sweet and sincere and helpful,
and while they are not in any sense literature, they are, at least, an
interesting contribution to American letters.

But to return to the Transcendentalists.

The most picturesque figure of the group was Margaret Fuller. Starting
as a morbid and sentimental girl, her father's death seems suddenly to
have changed her, at the age of twenty-five, into a talented and
thoughtful woman. Her career need not be considered in detail here,
since it was significant more from the inspiration she gave others than
from any achievement of her own. She proved herself a sympathetic
crit