[Illustration: AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT]
Critics were not wanting to point out the absurdity of many transcendental ecstasies. AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT (1799-1888), one of the leading transcendentalists, wrote a peculiar poem called The Seer's Rations, in which he speaks of
"Bowls of sunrise for breakfast,
Brimful of the East."
His neighbors said that this was the diet which he provided for his hungry family. His daughter, Louisa May, the author of that fine juvenile work, Little Women (1868), had a sad struggle with poverty while her father was living in the clouds. The extreme philosophy of the intangible was soon called "transcendental moonshine." The tenets of Bronson Alcott's transcendental philosophy required him to believe that human nature is saturated with divinity. He therefore felt that a misbehaving child in school would be most powerfully affected by seeing the suffering which his wrongdoing brought to others. He accordingly used to shake a good child for the bad deeds of others. Sometimes when the class had offended, he would inflict corporal punishment on himself. His extreme applications of the new principle show that lack of balance which many of this school displayed, and yet his reliance on sympathy instead of on the omnipresent rod marks a step forward in educational practice. Emerson was far-seeing enough to say of those who carried the new philosophy to an extreme, "What if they eat clouds and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man."
[Illustration: ORCHARD HOUSE, HOME OF THE ALCOTTS]
THE NEW VIEW OF NATURE.—To the old Puritan, nature seemed to groan under the weight of sin and to bear the primal curse. To the transcendentalist, nature was a part of divinity. The question was sometimes asked whether nature had any real existence outside of God, whether it was not God's thoughts. Emerson, being an idealist, doubted whether nature had any more material existence than a thought.
The majority of the writers did not press this idealistic conception of nature, but much of the nature literature of this group shows a belief in the soul's mystic companionship with the bird, the flower, the cloud, the ocean, and the stars. Emerson says:—
"The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them."
Hawthorne exclaims:—
"O, that I could run wild!—that is, that I could put myself into a true relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial elements."