"I shall always love you for loving Alcott," writes Emerson to his schoolmate and lifelong friend, the Reverend W. H. Furness. "He is a great man, the god with the herdsman of Admetus. His conversation is sublime; yet when I see how he is underestimated by cultivated people, I fancy none but I have heard him talk."
In the midst of slander and petty persecutions, Alcott writes in his diary for April, 1837:
I have been striving to apprehend the real in the seeming, to strip ideas of their adventitious phrases and behold them in their order and powers. I have sought to penetrate the showy terrestrial to find the heavenly things. I have tried to translate into ideas the language and images of spirit, and thus to read God in his works. The outward I have seen as the visage and type of the inward. Ever doth this same nature double its design and stand forth—now before the inner, now before the outer sense of man, at once substance and form, image and idea, so that God shall never slip wholly from the consciousness of the soul.
Emerson, weary of seeing his friend misunderstood, urges him to give up teaching and become an author, picturing as his golden view for Alcott that one day he will leave the impracticable world to wag its own way, sit apart, and write his oracles for its behoof.
"Write! let them hear or let them forbear," he thunders. "The written word abides until, slowly and unexpectedly, and in widely sundered places, it has created its own church."
The unreality of evil, as taught and believed by Alcott nearly a century ago, laughed and scoffed at then, was twenty-five years later practically the foundation of a belief which gained its first foothold in New England, and, with headquarters in Boston, has spread, until to-day its followers and churches circle the civilized globe—a new-old religion, based on the literal acceptance of the teachings of Christ. What to-day is called metaphysical teaching was in the Alcott period scoffed at as Transcendentalism.
Mr. Alcott's strict adherence to a vegetarian diet was also the topic of ridicule from public and press, although the Alcott children seemed to thrive on it, and certainly, as four-year-old Louisa once remarked, "Did pitty well for a wegetable diet."
Louisa, in her journal, gives this sample of the vegetarian wafers they had at Fruitlands:
| Vegetable diet and sweet repose Animal food and nightmare. | Pluck your body from the orchard; do not snatch it from the shamble. | Without flesh diet there could be no blood-shedding war. |
| Appollo eats no flesh and has no beard; his voice is melody itself. | Snuff is no less snuff though accepted from a gold box. |
Bronson Alcott constantly sought self-improvement, and the shortcomings of his early education were more than offset by his untiring study. Realizing at one time his lack of a vocabulary, he comments in his journal, that to rectify this he has just bought two books, "A Symposium of Melancholy," and "Hunter on the Blood."