d upon Concord,
flitted to the queer community of Fruitlands, was starved back to
Concord, inspired and bored the patient Emerson, talked endlessly, wrote
ineffective books, and had at last his apotheosis in the Concord School
of Philosophy, but was chiefly known for the twenty years before his
death in 1888 as the father of the Louisa Alcott who wrote "Little
Women." "A tedious archangel," was Emerson's verdict, and it is likely
to stand.

Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, analyzed by Emerson, and
painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is now a fading
figure--a remarkable woman, no doubt, one of the first of American
feminists, suggesting George Eliot in her physical unattractiveness,
her clear brain, her touch of sensuousness. She was an early-ripe,
over-crammed scholar in the classics and in modern European languages.
She did loyal, unpaid work as the editor of the "Dial," which from 1840
to 1844 was the organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at
Brook Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For
a while she served as literary editor of the "New York Tribune" under
Horace Greeley. Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's manuscripts at
Paris with trembling, adoring fingers, made a secret marriage in Italy
with the young Marquis Ossoli, and perished by shipwreck, with her
husband and child, off Fire Island in 1850.

Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," an admirable Greek scholar,
an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in
Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the memories of a few
liberal Bostonians who remember his tremendous sermons on the platform
of the old Music Hall. He was a Lexington farmer's son, with the
temperament of a blacksmith, with enormous, restless energy, a good
hater, a passionate lover of all excellent things save meekness. He died
at fifty, worn out, in Italy.

But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau, the most
representative of the group, the student of the Transcendental period
will be equally interested in watching its influence upon many other
types of young men: upon future journalists and publicists like George
William Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists
like Orestes Brownson, Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and
upon poets like Jones Very, Christopher. P. Cranch, and Ellery Channing.
There was a sunny side of the whole movement, as T. W.