en of Channing's
once famous article on "A National Literature" in 1823: it was a plea
for an independent American school of writers, but these writers should
know the best that Europe had to teach.

The purely literary movement was connected, as the great name of
Channing suggests, with a new sense of freedom in philosophy and
religion. Calvinism had mainly done its work in New England. It had bred
an extraordinary type of men and women, it had, helped to lay some of
the permanent foundations of our democracy, and it was still destined
to have a long life in the new West and in the South. But in that stern
section of the country where its influence had been most marked there
was now an increasingly sharp reaction against its determinism and
its pessimism. Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and
influential churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had
accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as Unitarianism.
The movement spread throughout Eastern Massachusetts and made its way to
other States. Orthodox and liberal Congregational churches split apart,
and when Channing preached the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in
Baltimore in 1819, the word Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with
some misgiving, became the recognized motto of the new creed. It is
only with its literary influence that we are here concerned, yet that
literary influence became so potent that there is scarcely a New England
writer of the first rank, from Bryant onward, who remained untouched by
it.

The most interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has little
directly to do with the specific tenets of theological Unitarianism,
and in fact marked a revolt against the more prosaic and conventional
pattern of English and American Unitarian thought. But this movement,
known as Transcendentalism, would have been impossible without a
preliminary and liberalizing stirring of the soil. It was a fascinating
moment of release for some of the most brilliant and radical minds of
New England. Its foremost representative in our literature was Ralph
Waldo Emerson, as its chief exponents in England were Coleridge and
Carlyle. We must understand its meaning if we would perceive the quality
of much of the most noble and beautiful writing produced in New England
during the Golden Age.

What then is the significance of the word Transcendental? Disregarding
for the moment the technical development of this term as used