The Transcendentalist keeps his essential faith. Generally the Transcendentalists have done this. It was a faith too deeply planted, too nobly illustrated, too fervent and beautiful in youth, to be laid aside in age. James Walker died in the ripeness of it; Parker died in the strength of it; others—old and grave men now—live in the joy of it. The few who have relapsed, have done so, some under pressure of worldly seduction—they having no depth of root—and some under the influence of scientific teaching, which has shaken the foundation of their psychology. The original disciples, undismayed by the signs of death, still believe in the Master, and live in the hope of his resurrection.
MINOR PROPHETS.
The so-called Minor Prophets of the Old Testament owed that designation to the brevity, rather than to the insignificance of their utterances. They were among the most glowing and exalted of the Hebrew bards, less sustained in their flight than their great fellows, but with as much of the ancient fire as any of them. It is proper to say as much as this to justify the application of the title to the men who claim mention now as prominent in the transcendental movement.
William Henry Channing is not quite fairly ranked among minor prophets, even on this explanation, for he has been copious as well as intense. A nephew of the great Doctor Channing—a favorite nephew, on account of his moral earnestness, and the close sympathy he felt with views that did honor to human nature and glorified the existence of man,—he grew up in the purest atmosphere that New England supplied—the most intellectual, the most quickening. He was born in the same year with Theodore Parker, and but three months earlier, and was native to the same spiritual climate. He was educated at Harvard, and prepared for the ministry at Cambridge Divinity School, where the new ideas were fermenting. He was graduated the year before Parker entered. His name was conspicuous among the agitators of the new faith. He was a contributor to the "Dial." In 1848 he published the Memoirs of his uncle, in three volumes, proving his fitness for the task by the sincerity in which he discharged it. In 1840 he translated Jouffroy's Ethics, in two volumes, for Ripley's "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature." In 1852 he took part in writing the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, the second volume being chiefly his work. "The Life and Writings of James H. Perkins," of Cincinnati, a pioneer of rationalism at the West, came more fitly from his pen than from any other. In the "Western Messenger," which he edited for one year; the "Present," and the "Spirit of the Age," short-lived journals, of which he was the soul; in the "Harbinger," to which he was a generous and sympathetic contributor—he exhibited a fine quality of genius. The intensity of his nature, his open-mindedness, frankness, and spiritual sensitiveness, his fervency of aspiration and his outspokenness, made the office of settled pastor and steady routine preacher distasteful to him. He was a prophet who went from place to place, with a message of joy and hope. Meadville, Cincinnati, Nashua, Rochester, Boston, and New York, were scenes of his pastoral service. His preaching was every where attended by the clearest heads and the deepest hearts. In New York his society was composed of free elements altogether, come-outers, reformers, radicals of every description. His command of language, his free delivery, his musical voice, his expressive countenance, his noble air, his extraordinary power of kindling enthusiasm, his affluence and boldness of thought, his high standard of character, made him in his prime an enchanting speaker.
Very early in his career Mr. Channing committed himself to the transcendental philosophy as interpreted by the French School, for he possessed the swiftness of perception, the felicity of exposition, the sensibility to effects, the passion for clean statement and plausible generalization that distinguish the French genius from the German and the English. The introduction to Jouffroy's Ethics contained the principles of the French school of philosophy, which, to judge from his approving tone, he had himself accepted:
That Psychology is the basis of Philosophy.
That the highest problems of Ontology may be solved by inductions from the facts which Psychology ascertains.