for completeness of theory. There
were no formulas, doctrines, dogmas; there was no interference
whatever with private life or individual habits, and not the faintest
adumbration of a rearrangement of that difficult business known as
the relations of the sexes. The relations of the sexes were neither
more nor less than what they usually are in American life, excellent;
and in such particulars the scheme was thoroughly conservative and
irreproachable. Its main characteristic was that each individual
concerned in it should do a part of the work necessary for keeping the
whole machine going. He could choose his work and he could live as he
liked; it was hoped, but it was by no means demanded, that he would
make himself agreeable, like a gentleman invited to a dinner-party.
Allowing, however, for everything that was a concession to worldly
traditions and to the laxity of man's nature, there must have been in
the enterprise a good deal of a certain freshness and purity of
spirit, of a certain noble credulity and faith in the perfectibility
of man, which it would have been easier to find in Boston in the year
1840, than in London five-and-thirty years later. If that was the era
of Transcendentalism, Transcendentalism could only have sprouted in
the soil peculiar to the general locality of which I speak--the soil
of the old New England morality, gently raked and refreshed by an
imported culture. The Transcendentalists read a great deal of French
and German, made themselves intimate with George Sand and Goethe, and
many other writers; but the strong and deep New England conscience
accompanied them on all their intellectual excursions, and there never
was a so-called "movement" that embodied itself, on the whole, in
fewer eccentricities of conduct, or that borrowed a smaller licence in
private deportment. Henry Thoreau, a delightful writer, went to live
in the woods; but Henry Thoreau was essentially a sylvan personage and
would not have been, however the fashion of his time might have
turned, a man about town. The brothers and sisters at Brook Farm
ploughed the fields and milked the cows; but I think that an observer
from another clime and society would have been much more struck with
their spirit of conformity than with their _dereglements_. Their
ardour was a moral ardour, and the lightest breath of scandal never
rested upon them, or upon any phase of Transcendentalism.

A biographer of Hawthorne might well regret that his h