All those sects known as Primitive Christians represent variations of the idea—Quakers, Mennonites, Communists, Shakers and Dunkards!
A Transcendentalist is a Dukhobortsi with a college education. A Quaker with an artistic bias becomes a Preraphaelite, and lo! we have News from Nowhere, a Dream of John Ball, Merton Abbey, Kelmscott, and half a world is touched and tinted by the simplicity, sterling honesty and genuineness of one man.
George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson evolved New England Transcendentalism, and very early Henry Thoreau added a few bars of harmonious discords to the symphony. Horace Greeley once contended in a "Tribune" editorial that Sam Staples, the bum bailiff who locked Thoreau behind the bars, was an important factor in the New England renaissance, and as such should be immortalized by a statue made of punk, set up on Boston Common for the delectation of bean-eaters. I fear me Horace was a joker.
California quail are quite different from the quail of New York State, and naturalists tell us that this is caused by a difference in environment—quail being a product of soil and climate.
And man is a product of soil and climate—for only in a certain soil can you produce a certain type of man. As a whole, this world is better adapted for the production of fish than genius—most of the really good climate falls on the sea. Christian Scientists are Transcendentalists whose distinguishing point is that they secrete millinery—California quail with rainbow tints and topknots, Balboaic instincts well defined.
Let this fact stand: it was Emerson who made Concord. He saw it first—he was on the ground, and the place was his by right of discovery, the title strengthened by the fact that four of his ancestors had been Concord clergymen, and the most excellent and venerable Doctor Ripley, a near kinsman.
Concord and Emerson, as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty, when Emerson was thirty-seven years old, were synonymous. He had defied the traditions of Harvard, been excommunicated by his Alma Mater, published his pantheistic Essay on Nature, and his thin little books and sermons had been placed on the Boston Theological Index Expurgatorius.
Through it all he had remained gentle, smiling, sympathetic, unresentful.
The world can never spare the man who does his work and holds his peace. Emerson was being lifted up, and souls were being drawn unto him.