to say anything. The deepest agreement of Transcendentalism was in the conviction that the individual has a natural right to believe for himself and freely to express his belief. In a community so dominated by tradition as New England, meanwhile, a community of which the most characteristic periodical up to this time had been the "North American Review," freedom of speech in print, though not theoretically denied, was hardly practicable. With a mission little more limited than this ideal of freedom, the "Dial" started.

The cover of the first number was distinguished by a single advertisement, - that of Mr. Jacob Abbott's Rollo books, then publishing by the same printer. This happy accident can hardly fail to suggest the reflection that Rollo was the body of which Transcendentalism was the soul. Whoever wishes to know the external aspect of the period now in question will waste none of the moments which he may devote to Mr. Abbott's luminous pages. Nor will time be wasted which those whose curiosity is less centred on phenomena may find themselves able to give to the "Dial" itself. For though the "Dial" was impractical, never circulated much, and within four years came to a hopeless financial end, its pages are at once more interesting and more sensible than tradition has represented them. Of the writers, to be sure, few have proved immortal. Bronson Alcott and Theodore Parker seem fading with Margaret Fuller into mere memories; and George Ripley has become more nebulous still. But Thoreau was of the company; and so was Emerson, who bids fair to survive the rest much as Shakspere has survived the other Elizabethan dramatists.

This is perhaps what now makes the "Dial" most significant. No eminent literary figure can grow into existence. without a remarkable environment; and as the pages of the "Dial" gradually reveal what the environment of Emerson's most active years was, it proves on the whole more vigorous than you would have been apt to expect. Its vigour, however,

appears more plainly in the earlier volumes of the "Dial" than in the later. Up to the time when the periodical was founded, the general temper for which it stands had been gathering force. Merely as literature, then, the first two or three numbers are surprisingly good. As you turn the pages of the later numbers you are sensible of disintegration. The thought tends to grow more vague; the kinds of reform which interest people grow more various and wilder; and, above all, the tendency, so fatal to periodical literature, of running to inordinate length, becomes more and more evident. You begin to feel as if each writer would have liked to write the whole thing himself. The "Dial" begins with an auroral glow, which soon fades into a rather bewildering mist. From beginning to end, however, it is fresh in feeling, wide in scope, earnest in its search for truth, and less eccentric than you would have thought possible. For all its ultimate failure, it leaves a final impression not only of auroral hopefulness, but of moral sanity.

Tradition has remembered about it chiefly such oddities as the "Orphic Sayings" of Bronson Alcott,- "awful sayings," they have since been called, in days when the adjective “awful” had attained its cant meaning. There is room for grave doubt whether Alcott ever knew what some of them meant; certainly no one else ever knew, and for many years no one has wanted to know. Tradition has remembered, too, Emerson's tendency in the later numbers to lay before the world the inspired truths of other scriptures than the Christian, Chinese, Indian, whatever else. At the same time tradition has forgotten the more solid and contemporary stuff that appeared there. In the second number, for example, among other things, Mr. George Ripley has much to say about that Unitarian orthodoxy against which Channing himself was protesting; and in the course of his article Ripley uses concerning his awakened New England the words "new life," in just the sense in which we have found the word "Renaissance" so truly

to express the spirit of the moment. A little later a writer believed to be Margaret Fuller expounds that Christianity is a prison; not long afterwards Theodore Parker, remembered as the most radical of the divines who still called themselves Unitarian, stoutly insists on the inexpressible merit of Christ as an example. In subsequent numbers of the first year there are articles on abolition, -a movement which logically enlisted the sympathies of almost all who were affected by the Transcendental movement; and Theodore Parker, radical from beginning to end, has some thoughts on labour by no means welcome to his conservative contemporaries. In the later volumes theoretical socialism comes more and more to the front, and there is a good deal about the community at Brook Farm in which a considerable number of Transcendentalists found material expression for their enthusiasm. Along with such articles as these there is much poetry, on the whole worth reading. Little of it is excellent; the best of course is Emerson's, mostly reprinted again and again. If not great, however, the poetry of the "Dial" is genuine, a sincere effort on the part of increasingly cultivated people earnestly and beautifully to phrase emotions which in their freshly enfranchised New England they truly felt.

Though the "Dial" had little positive cohesion, its writers and all the Transcendentalists, of whom we may take them as representative, were almost at one as ardent opponents of lifeless traditions. Generally idealists, and believers in innate ideas, they were stirred to emotional fervour by their detestation of any stiffening orthodoxy, even though that orthodoxy were so far from dogmatic as Yankee Unitarianism. And naturally passing from things of the mind and the soul to things of that very palpable part of human nature, the body, they found themselves generally eager to alter the affairs of this world for the better. If any one word could certainly arouse their sympathetic enthusiasm, it was the word "reform."

Whoever at any moment contemplates life is bound to find many displeasing things. He is bound to find at the same time a perceptible infusion of merit and virtue. Thus contemplating the mazed and confusing panorama of existence, some people shrink from any effort radically to alter the condition of human affairs; for bad as things are, alteration may by chance involve more destruction of good than suppression of evil. To reformers, on the other hand, the darker aspect of actual affairs seems the more conspicuous They are always for putting down the evil, trusting that the good shall survive by its inherent strength; and when reform takes up arms, we have revolutions. Transcendentalists never thought of resorting to arms; but they did eagerly inspect life, and finding there many unsatisfactory things, they eagerly welcomed any effort to make things better, without much question as to how practicable that effort was, or as to what it might incidentally destroy. A glance at the contents of the "Dial" will accordingly show that the periodical fervently advocated two distinct reforms. The more specific, which reached its highest development later, was the abolition of slavery, a measure important enough in the intellectual history of New England to deserve separate discussion. The more

general, which developed, flourished, and failed decidedly before the antislavery movement became a political force, was that effort to reform the structure of society which found expression in the community of Brook Farm near Boston.

In 1841, a number of people, —all in sympathy with the Transcendentalists, and most of them writers for the " Dial," among the more conspicuous of whom were Mr. George Ripley, Mr. Charles Anderson Dana, and Mr. John Sullivan Dwight, bought a farm ten or twelve miles from Boston. Here they proposed to found an ideal community, where everybody should work to support the establishment and where there should be plenty of leisure for scholarly and edifying pleasure. Incidentally there was to be a school,

where children from their earliest years were to give their infantile help in the work of the community. The experiment began. At least during its earlier years, Brook Farm attracted considerable notice, and the sympathetic attention of many people afterward more eminent than its actual members. Hawthorne came thither for a while, and his "Blithedale Romance" is an idealised picture of the establishment. Emerson, though never an actual member, was there off and on, always with shrewd, kindly interest. Thither, too, occasionally came Margaret Fuller, in whom some have discovered the original of Hawthorne's Zenobia. But if Margaret Fuller really suggested Zenobia, Zenobia is probably Hawthorne's most wonderful creation. For Zenobia is profoundly feminine; and whatever else poor Margaret Fuller seems, at least until after her passionate marriage, she seems so lost in Transcendental abstraction that nothing short of genius could connect with her the idea of sex.

Brook Farm, of course, was only a Yankee expression of the world-old impulse to get rid of evil by establishing life on principles different from those of economic law. From earliest times, theoretical writers have proposed various forms of communistic existence as a solution of the problems presented by the sin and suffering of human beings in any dense population. The writer whose principles most definitely affected Brook Farm in its later development was Fourier, a French philosopher, who sketched out a rather elaborate ideal society. The basis of his system was that people should separate themselves into phalanxes of no considerable numbers, and that cach phalanx should be mutually helpful and self-supporting. This conception so commended itself to the Brook Farmers that, at an expense decidedly beyond their means, they actually built a phalanstery, or communal residence, as nearly as might be on the lines which Fourier suggested.

What marked the peculiarly Yankee character of the Brook Farmers, was their calm disregard of a vital point in