realize it. Few men among us take nobler views of the mission, powers, and destinies of man than Mr. Emerson. I hope the people of this city will go and learn of him the conditions of virtue and wisdom, by what self-denial, what exertions, these are to be sought and won. The lives of the great and good are examples of this strife of the soul."

Again, Feb. 12, 1835, he says:

"I heard Mr. Emerson's lecture on 'Martin Luther,' at the Temple. There was much in it bespeaking a high philosophy of life as conceived in the mind of the speaker; and the application of the analysis of Luther's character was beautiful and profound. He deemed Luther

not less a poet than a practical man; and if not a philosopher in the common sense of the term, he was a prophet, speaking and acting from an imperative above reason."

The Diary contains no more notices of this course of lectures, in which was that remarkable one on Milton," afterwards printed in the "North American Review; nor do we find records of interview and conversation between the two friends. But that they were already becoming intimate is seen by this entry of July 12, 1835:

"A few days since, Mrs. Morrison, of Philadelphia, came in town, bringing me letters from Mr. Russell. Last evening she saw several of our friends, persons with whom we wished her to be made acquainted. Among these were the following: Mr. Waldo Emerson, Charles Emerson, Mr. and Mrs. D. L. Child, Mr. S. J. May, Miss

Elizabeth and Miss Mary Peabody [now Mrs. Horace Mann], Mrs. Bliss [now Mrs. George Bancroft], Miss Mary Emerson, Miss Elizabeth Hoar, and others."

Here we see the names of several persons of that Concord circle into which Mr. Alcott afterwards came; but as yet he had never visited the town. Later in the summer, August 23, he writes:

"I have been in attendance at the American Institute of Instruction, at the State House in the daytime, at Chauncy Hall in the evening. On Thursday, at eleven o'clock, Rev. Mr. Furness, of Philadelphia, gave an introductory address on the 'Spirit of the True Teacher,' an eloquent performance. At 4 P. M. Rev. Mr. Emerson, of Concord, gave a lecture on the 'Means of Inspiring a Taste for English Literature.'

"These two lectures were of a more spiritual character than have been presented to the Institute on former occasions. They inspire hope. They are proofs that sometimes more is felt in the community than the material. The members of the Institute. - many of them teachers from the country, persons of narrow views and superficial attainments were unprepared to follow the lecturers; yet they seemed to listen with interest, and to feel, if they did not appreciate, the truths announced."

Through this year (1835) Mr. Alcott was deep in the study of Plato and the Bible, which he found in accord with each other and with his own thoughts; and he was also in close communication with those readers of Carlyle who were inviting him to New

England, and were proposing a new magazine, to be called "The Transcendentalist," of which mention is made in Emerson's letters to Carlyle of March 12, and April 30, 1835. Of this project Emerson wrote:

"Dr. Channing lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called 'The Transcendentalist,' as the organ of a spiritual philosophy. . . . If Mr. Carlyle would undertake a journal of which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be made to secure him a support. It is to be called 'The Transcendentalist,' or 'The Spiritual Inquirer,' or the like, and F. H. Hedge was to be the editor. Hedge is just leaving our neighborhood, to be settled as a minister two hundred and fifty miles off in Maine, and entreats that you will edit the journal. He will write, and I please myself with thinking I shall be able to write under such auspices."

To this invitation Carlyle listened and responded (May 13, 1835):

"The Boston Transcendentalist,' whatever the fate or merit of it prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be things not dreamt of over in that Transoceanic Parish, and I shall cordially wish well to this thing, and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better. Innumerable tumults of Metaphysic must be struggled through, and at last Transcendentalism evolve itself as the Euthanasia of Metaphysic altogether. May it be sure! may it be speedy!"

Mr. Alcott's record of this premature movement, which found expression in "The Dial" five years later, is in a letter to his friend Russell at Philadelphia, of which we only find the heads given in his Diary of March, 1835. These are the following:

"SPIRIT OF LIFE IN BOSTON. Persons: Dr. Channing, Mr. Allston, Dr. Follen, Mr. [James] Walker, Mr. Hedge, Mr. Emerson, Mr. H. Ware, Jr., Mr. Waterston, [Father] Taylor, Mr. [C.] Francis, Mr. [G.] Ripley, Mr. May, Miss Peabody, Mrs. Follen, Mrs. Child.

666

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST.'-Hedge, Emerson, Peabody, Clarke, Ripley [no doubt as contributors].

"Republication of Coleridge, Abbott's Works [Rev. Jacob Abbott], North American,'' Examiner,' 'Observer.' "READINGS. Plato, Coleridge, Hesiod, Boëthius, Bockshirmer [a forgotten German writer on the Will], Sartor Resartus,' T. C. Upham."

เ

What effect all this spiritual movement had on the thought of Mr. Alcott may be seen in his Diary. His mind was moving on the same lines with the mind of Emerson, and they read in part the same books. Mr. Alcott writes, from March to August, 1835:

"My own conceptions of life are confirmed in the happiest manner in the Platonic theory. In Plato, as in Jesus, do I find the Light of the World, even the supersensual light, that lighteth every one who cometh into the world of sense, and essayeth to regain that spirit it seemeth to have lost by the incarnation of itself. The true study of

man is man.

When this is felt as it ought to be, natural

science will receive an impulse that we cannot at present conceive of. Then we shall begin at the beginning, and not, as now, at the end; we shall trace things in the order of their production, see them in the process of formation, growth, consummation, the only true way of apprehending them, the method of philosophy. Without this method all our boasted acquisitions are fragments, unintelligible parts, broken members of a whole, whose outline we have not pictured in our ideal, and therefore want the standard by which to resolve these parts to their true place in the great Whole. The unity of truth is wanting; glimpses only are given of this Whole, and we content ourselves with the dim survey of parts, becoming parts ourselves. . . . As Man is my study, universal as well as individual man, man in his elements, embracing views of him in all stages of his career, in his pre-existent life, his infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, decline, resumption in God, - so doth all Nature, in its manifold relations, present innumerable topics for consideration, as the framework and emblem of this same Being. Man, the Incarnate Spirit; God, the Absolute Spirit; Creation, the emblem of these two, such are my topics of speculation and inquiry. As in the morning twilight the sun paints in the horizon the radiant glories of his own visage upon the clear and serene azure, announcing to the risen world the coming day; even so doth the Divinity, in this terrestrial life, shed forth on the dim forms of mind and matter some intimation of his own celestial visage; prophesying, in these visible and invisible things, the coming of his own Day, which is Eternity; of his own life, which is Immortality, and Light without obstruction."