al forces; but even if Emerson had never
lived, the Transcendentalists would have appeared. He was their victim
rather than their cause. He was always tolerant of them and sometimes
amused at them, and disposed to treat them lightly. It is impossible to
analyze their case with more astuteness than he did in an editorial
letter in The Dial. The letter is cold, but is a masterpiece of good
sense. He had, he says, received fifteen letters on the Prospects of
Culture. "Excellent reasons have been shown us why the writers,
obviously persons of sincerity and elegance, should be dissatisfied with
the life they lead, and with their company.... They want a friend to
whom they can speak and from whom they may hear now and then a
reasonable word." After discussing one or two of their proposals,--one
of which was that the tiresome "uncles and aunts" of the enthusiasts
should be placed by themselves in one delightful village, the dough, as
Emerson says, be placed in one pan and the leaven in another,--he
continues: "But it would be unjust not to remind our younger friends
that whilst this aspiration has always made its mark in the lives of men
of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not remain a detached
object, but is satisfied along with the satisfaction of other aims."
Young Americans "are educated above the work of their times and country,
and disdain it. Many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty
criticism ... which only embitters their sensibility to the evil, and
widens the feeling of hostility between them and the citizens at
large.... We should not know where to find in literature any record of
so much unbalanced intellectuality, such undeniable apprehension without
talent, so much power without equal applicability, as our young men
pretend to.... The balance of mind and body will redress itself fast
enough. Superficialness is the real distemper.... It is certain that
speculation is no succedaneum for life." He then turns to find the cure
for these distempers in the farm lands of Illinois, at that time already
being fenced in "almost like New England itself," and closes with a
suggestion that so long as there is a woodpile in the yard, and the
"wrongs of the Indian, of the Negro, of the emigrant, remain
unmitigated," relief might be found even nearer home.

In his lecture on the Transcendentalists he says: "... But their
solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the
conversation, but from the labor