148 THOREAU. 



that make no fine show of fruit, but without whose pollen, quin 

 tessence of fructifying gold, the garden had been barren. 

 Emerson s mind is emphatically one of these, and there is no 

 man to whom our aesthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan 

 revolt had made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politi 

 cally independent, but we were still socially and intellectually 

 moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave 

 us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water. No 

 man young enough to have felt it can forget, or cease to be 

 grateful for, the mental and moral nudge which he received 

 from the writings of his high-minded and brave-spirited country 

 man. That we agree with him, or that he always agrees with 

 himself, is aside from the question ; but that he arouses in us 

 something that we are the better for having awakened, whether 

 that something be of opposition or assent, that he speaks always 

 to what is highest and least selfish in us, few Americans of the 

 generation younger than his own would be disposed to deny. 

 His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, 

 some thirty years ago, was an event without any former parallel 

 in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the 

 memory for its.picturej^ueness and its inspiration. What 

 crowded and breathless aisles,&quot; what windows clustering with 

 eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of 

 foregone dissent ! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by 

 Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearances of 

 Schelling. 



We said that the. Transcendental Movement was the Protes 

 tant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an escape 

 from forms and creeds which compressed rather than expressed 

 it. In its motives, its preaching, and its results, it differed radi 

 cally from the doctrine of Carlyle. The Scotchman, with all 

 his genius, and his humour gigantesque as that of Rabelais, has 

 grown shriller and shriller with years, degenerating sometimes 

 into a common scold, and emptying very unsavoury vials of 

 wrath on the head of the sturdy British Socrates of worldly 

 common-sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much more 

 exclusively to self-culture and the independent development of 

 the individual man. It seemed to many almost Pythagorean in 

 its voluntary seclusion from commonwealth affairs. Both Car 

 lyle and Emerson were disciples of Goethe, but Emerson in a 

 far truer sense ; and while the one, from his bias toward the 

 eccentric, has degenerated more and more into mannerism, the 

 other has clarified steadily toward perfection of style exquisite 



