made a new advance, reiterated the idea of a transcendent faculty, intuitive religion, and perception of God, and embodied in an original form the spiritual interpretation of nature. The Symposium, or Transcendental Club, began to meet in 1836, first at the house of Dr. George Ripley. Among the members were Emerson, Frederic H. Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Rev. Cyrus A. Bartol, Orestes A. Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody. Dr. Channing once attended, and was in sympathy with the club, which discussed religion, impersonality, justice, truth, mysticism, pantheism, and the development of American genius. In this last theme perhaps lay the germ of Emerson's oration, “The American Scholar,” delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa society at Cambridge in August, 1837. This has been well called “our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” an event without any former parallel in our literary annals. After eloquently describing the education and duties of the scholar, it protested against the prevailing subserviency to European taste, suspected the American freeman of being “timid, imitative, tame,” and demanded that the individual man “plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide. . . . We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. . . . A nation of freemen will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which inspires all men.” His friend, Bronson Alcott, having set up a school in Boston for teaching young children by methods based on a new theory of education, published in 1837 a book reporting his own conversations with the children on the gospels, which excited severe criticism, and Emerson defended him in the Boston “Courier.” He was destined to rouse a much greater hostility himself by his address to the senior class in the Divinity college, Cambridge, 15 July, 1838. With great force and beauty of language he attacked the formalism of contemporary religion, and the traditional limited way of using the mind of Christ. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. . . . The soul is not preached. . . . It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity — a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man — is lost.” To each of the graduates he said: “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hands with the Deity.” The address, pronounced with strong conviction, led to lively controversy, in which Emerson took no part. Ten lectures were given by him, in the winter of 1838-'9, on “The Doctrine of the Soul,” “Home,” “The School,” “Love,” etc., followed later by “Man the Reformer,” “The Method of Nature,” and a “Lecture on the Times.” In these he treated some of the reforms then agitated — temperance, anti-slavery, non-resistance, no government, and equal labor. Having come to hold the position of a religious reformer, he was looked to for sympathy with other reforms; but he dealt with them in the same spirit as with religion, and proceeded to reform the reformers. He pointed out that “reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea.” Their work “is done profanely, not piously; by management, by tactics, and by clamor.” Any end pursued for itself, by the practical faculty, must become an offence. The end should be “inapprehensible to the senses”; then it would always be a good, always giving health. Briefly, it was Emerson's mission not to do practical work for reforms, but to supply impulses and a high inspiration to the workers. In 1841 he lectured on “The Conservative,” and the next year on " The Transcendentalist," saying that “transcendentalism ” was simply modern idealism, and that the “new views” were the oldest of thoughts cast in a new mould. Yet, seven years before, he had consulted with others about establishing a journal to be known as “The Transcendentalist,” and in July. 1840, it was begun, under the name of “The Dial.” Emerson succeeded Margaret Fuller as the editor, and during its continuance, until April, 1844, published more than forty of his own pieces, prose and verse, in its columns. The poems included such famous ones as “The Problem,” “Wood-notes,” “The Sphinx,” and “Fate.” This periodical contained much delicate and valuable writing, but failed of pecuniary support. Associated as he was with the idealists, in the capacity of chief intellectual leader, he took a cordial interest in the semi-socialistic experiment at Brook Farm (1840 to 1847), with which some of the brightest New England men and women of that day were connected; but he did not join the community. Hawthorne, who was actually a member and lost money in the undertaking, has been much criticised for having viewed it independently; but Emerson, outside, held a similar neutral attitude, and wrote an account of the affair, in which, touching it humorously at points, he called it “a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a patty-pan.” In 1841 appeared the first volume of his essays, made up from lectures. It embraced “History,” “Compensation,” “Self-Reliance,” “Heroism,” “The Over-Soul,” “Spiritual Laws,” “Love,” “Friendship,” “Prudence,” “Intellect,” “Circles,” and “Art.” A second series was published in 1844, containing “Character,” “Gifts,” “Manners,” “The Poet,” “Politics,” “New England Reformers,” and a new one on “Nature.” These made a favorable impression in France and England, and laid the basis of his lofty reputation in this country as a prose-writer. Two years later he collected in a volume of “Poems” his scattered metrical pieces, many of which had been printed in periodicals. He did not escape sharp criticism, but the circle of his admirers rapidly widened. A new periodical, “The Massachusetts Quarterly Review,” began its career at Boston in 1847, edited by Theodore Parker, a disciple of Emerson, who expounded the “new views” in a more combative way; and Emerson wrote for it an “Editor's Address,” inculcating a wise and sincere spirit in meeting the problems of the state, of slavery, and socialism. In October of that year he sailed to England on a lecturing tour, repeated a course on “Representative Men” in various places, read a special series in London on “The Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century,” and lectured frequently in Scotland. He was enthusiastically received by large audiences, met a great number of the foremost men and women of the time, and was a guest in many private houses. In 1849 he returned home and published “Representative Men” (1850). Here he contributed to the “Memoirs” of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852) an account of her conversations in Boston and her Concord life. He also, having visited Paris while abroad, gave a lecture on “France,” which has never been printed; and at the Woman's Rights convention in 1856 delivered an address that took advanced ground, for that date, in favor of larger liberty for women. In
