ies. The very name, like the name Methodist, was
probably bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of
staid New England had its humorous side. Witness the career of Bronson
Alcott. It is also true that the glorious affirmations of these seers
can be neither proved nor disproved. They made no examination and they
sought no validation of consciousness. An explorer in search of
the North Pole must bring back proofs of his journey, but when a
Transcendentalist affirms that he has reached the far heights of human
experience and even caught sight of the gods sitting on their thrones,
you and I are obliged to take his word for it. Sometimes we hear such a
man gladly, but it depends upon the man, not upon the trustworthiness
of the method. Finally it should be observed that the Transcendental
movement was an exceedingly complex one, being both literary,
philosophic, and religious; related also to the subtle thought of the
Orient, to mediaeval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched
throughout by the French Revolutionary theories, by the Romantic spirit,
by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by the unrest of a
fermenting age.

Our present concern is with the impact of this cosmopolitan current
upon the mind and character of a few New England writers. Channing and
Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau and Emerson, are
all representative of the best thought and the noblest ethical
impulses of their generation. Let us choose first the greatest name: a
sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one of the very Sun-Gods.

The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village library to
study French's statue of Emerson will notice the asymmetrical face. On
one side it is the face of a keen Yankee farmer, but seen from the
other side it is the countenance of a seer, a world's man. This contrast
between the parochial Emerson and the greater Emerson interprets many a
puzzle in his career. Half a mile beyond the village green to the north,
close to the "rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the
Old Manse, once tenanted and described by Hawthorne. It was built by
Emerson's grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, who died of
camp-fever at Ticonderoga. His widow married Dr. Ezra Ripley, and here
Ralph Waldo Emerson and his brothers passed many a summer in their
childhood. Half a mile east of the village, on the Cambridge turnpike,
is Emerson's own house, sti