Like rain upon the herbless sea,
Poured down by too benignant heaven—
We see not stars unfixed by winds,
Or lost in aimless thunder-peals,
But man’s large soul, the star supreme,
In guideless whirl how oft it reels!”
But this is not to be wondered at; for although these men had arrived at the perception of certain great truths, they held them by no strong intellectual grasp, and finally they escaped them, and their intellectual fabric, like the house built upon sand, when the storm came and the winds blew, great was the fall thereof. This was the history of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, communities in which the two wings of transcendentalism attempted to reduce their
ideas into practice. Here let us remark it would have increased the interest of the volume if its author had given to his readers the programme of Brook Farm, “The Idea of Jesus of Society,” together with its constitutions. It is short, interesting, and burning with earnestness. There is scarcely any account of the singular enterprise of the group of idealists at Fruitlands, and the name of Henry Thoreau, one of the notables among transcendentalists, is barely mentioned, while to his life at Walden Pond there is not even an allusion. True, these experiments were, like Brook Farm, unsuccessful, but they were not without interest and significance, and worthy of a place in what claims to be a history of the movement that gave rise to them; at least space enough might have been afforded them for a suitable epitaph.
We will now redeem our promise of showing how the influence of our political institutions aided in producing what goes by the name of transcendentalism. But before doing this, we must settle what transcendentalism is; for our author appears to make a distinction between idealism and transcendentalism in New England. Here is what he says:
“There was idealism in New England prior to the introduction of transcendentalism. Idealism is of no clime or age. It has its proportion of disciples in every period and in the apparently most uncongenial countries; a full proportion might have been looked for in New England. But when Emerson appeared, the name of idealism was legion. He alone was competent to form a school, and as soon as he rose, the scholars trooped about him. By sheer force of genius Emerson anticipated the results of the transcendental philosophy, defined its axioms, and ran out their inferences to the end. Without help from abroad, or with such help only as none but he