While turning the pages of The Dial, we shall often meet with sentiments as full of meaning to us as to the people of that time. Among such we may instance:—
"Rest is not quitting
The busy career;
Rest is the fitting
Of self to its sphere."
Occasionally we shall find an expression fit to become a fireside motto:—
"I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;
I woke, and found that life was duty."
The prose in The Dial reflects the new spirit. In the first volume we may note such expressions of imaginative enthusiasm as:—
"The reason why Homer is to me like dewy morning is because I too lived while Troy was and sailed in the hollow ships of the Grecians…. And Shakespeare in King John does but recall me to myself in the dress of another age, the sport of new accidents. I, who am Charles, was sometime Romeo. In Hamlet I pondered and doubted. We forget that we have been drugged with the sleepy bowl of the Present."
In the same volume we find some of Alcott's famous Orphic Sayings, of which the following is a sample:—
"Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust. Yourself is sacred, profane it not. Forge no chains wherewith to shackle your own members. Either subordinate your vocation to your life or quit it forever."
A writer on Ideals of Every Day Life in The Dial for January, 1841, suggested a thought that is finding an echo in the twentieth century:—
"No one has a right to live merely to get a living. And this is what is
meant by drudgery."