ntments."

These are enough to show the rarified atmosphere of his thought world.
He lived upon the hilltops, so to speak. And it is curious to note that
in spite of its derision, the world has come to value many of his ideas
which at first were deemed but foolishness. The importance of taste and
beauty in the schoolroom, for instance, is now accepted throughout the
world. Yet when he first preached this, what was then a new idea, and
had the walls of his Temple School in Boston tinted in restful colors,
and placed the busts of Socrates and Plato and other learned
philosophers where they could be looked upon with reverence by his
pupils, it was thought to be absurd and even dangerous, for the old
regime of ill-lighted, ill-ventilated schoolrooms, with bare, forbidding
walls, was at its height.

So also with one of his much-laughed-at theories of farming. He
advocated growing buckwheat and turning the crop back into the soil in
order to enrich the land, and all the farmers threw their hands up as
though he had lost his reason. Yet only a year ago, when the nations
were at war, the Agricultural Department in Washington sent out
bulletins urging farmers to do this very thing as an admirable and
inexpensive method to pursue.

[Illustration: _Picture of Bronson Alcott's famous Temple School,
Boston, Mass., where he taught his philosophy to young boys and girls.
It was the first school to be decorated and furnished with artistic
taste, and he believed it developed a sense of beauty and refinement.
1830-1834. The school was in the Masonic Temple._]

The fundamental principle of his dietary system was the exclusive use of
fruits, vegetables, and all kinds of grain, eliminating all animal food.
While this was carried to excess, the idea of it does not sound so very
strange to modern ears, there being plenty of vegetarians now to
commend the theory. These things are mentioned in order to show that in
spite of much that was wholly unpractical, he advocated many theories
that have not died, but have taken root.

It was the intuitive consciousness of the sincerity of his appeal to the
world that drew his daughter Louisa so closely to him and led her to
express herself so touchingly in the following poems:

A. B. A.

_Lines Written by Louisa M. Alcott to Her Father_

Like Bunyan's pilgrim with his pack,
Forth went the dreaming youth
To seek, to find, and make his own
Wisdom, virtue, and truth.
Life wa