the fraternity that adventured upon the Brook Farm endeavor. We know how Hawthorne in his diary threw over it the play of his delicate humor; and although he disavows the application of the "Blithedale Romance" to what he observed at Brook Farm, we cannot doubt that his last words upon such attempted ameliorations of social conditions are to be found in that book. We can see that such efforts are dependent for what success they secure on the very conditions which they impugn; the society from which they flee is the constant source of the blessing which they most prize and enjoy. Thoreau at Walden communes with the great writers of the Orient and wanders with delight through translations of Hindoo books which were made by help of that wicked wealth he would have no lot or share in. We are all at last obliged to confess our allegiance to that universal spirit of history which has through the ages built the institutions through which we attain the best that has been attained, and which are in truth the beneficent supporters of all we do; yet we cannot on that account withhold our sympathy from undertakings whose inspiration was to hasten the time when that which is now the appanage of the few shall be the daily bread and drink of all.

But the intellectual tendencies and developments of the movement are the most interesting and permanent. The influences emanating from the ardor of speculation and the resolute pursuit of ideas to their ultimate consequences, which were part and parcel of the transcendentalist's equipment, spread far beyond the confines of New England; and club after club, coterie after coterie, in larger cities, in villages and hamlets all over the land, owe their inspiration and continuity to Emerson and his compeers, so that his tours, and those of Alcott, seemed like the progress of some person possessed of reverence that belongs to power exercised for what is noblest and most elevating. Many a man, no matter

how far his present opinions may diverge, looks back to his first acquaintance with these names as the first splendor which arose on the night of his intellectual wanderings.

The life and spirit of the intellectual ferment of the time was liberty. Nothing accepted or generally believed was too sacred for demonstration of the grounds on which it rested; religion, art, philosophy, science, were passed in review, and each must listen to a verdict upon its claims. Boundless freedom and horizon,-that was the demand of the scholar, and every outward authority seemed almost an impertinence. This freedom was accompanied by boldness in the pursuit of ideas. There were no doubts expressed as to the power of the human soul; discussions of the limitations belonging to man's faculties were little to the taste of the fearless navigator to marvelous and novel spiritual realms; there were no problems placed beyond the pale of human investigation; indeed it was impossible that there should be, for with the postulate of absolute freedom comes another: this freedom is itself the deepest essence of the universe, and its own creations are the only realities. This freedom is no personal possession; it is the being and life of all men. To allow its unimpeded action, controlled only by the laws it frames for itself, is to conduct into all that is permanent and eternal. This has been the claim of idealism in all ages, and the New England idealists were not slow in making it. God, immortality, life, fate, substance, reality, were the themes most interesting and most discussed.

This method when applied to the study of nature was as fruitful and significant in its results. Nature was all alive; she was a symbol of the eternal mind that was mirrored in her. Every new fact, every new theory, every discovery-the more marvelous the better-was precisely what the transcendentalist wanted. To him nature was throughout her expanse the manifestation of spiritual poten

cies, mind infinitely divided, as Schiller says in his Philosophical Letters; every new law, every systematic procedure therein discovered, makes all the movements and periodicities of nature the more consonant to the movements and periodicities of mind.

The atmosphere in which the transcendentalists lived was tonic and inspiring. To them it would have seemed vain and impertinent to engage in speculations on the most profound subjects, if they had no relation to practice. The conduct of life was the subject above all other subjects. The Puritan remained in them in the steadfast regard to noble living and right doing. Morality has never had loftier teachers or more inspired prophets; but morality was not isolated from the beliefs which underprop it and alone make it possible. The universal and eternal law of right, as Kant had demonstrated, presupposes freedom as the basis of all responsibility, immortality as a field for its ultimate and perfect exercise, and a Lawgiver to afford it sanction and invest it with authority. Emerson in the wide range of his thought endeavors to do justice to its varied demands. In the Essays, the "Over-Soul" and "Circles" stand side by side with "Self-Reliance" and "Love"; the latter are based upon the former; action requires nothing less than the universal to give it spring and impetus; the merely expedient, the trivial, the transitory, cannot hold the fixed regard of mankind.

The charge of mysticism made against these writings is largely due to the expression. Yet we have no reason to quarrel with this expression. Every new literature is strange to the generation which bears it. If we take up the Dial now, we wonder that any one found difficulty with what seems so natural to us. Yet the delving in literary quarries disused for many years, the working in mines which had been long abandoned, gave to the diggers a somewhat uncanny aspect. A man who gave his days and nights to enthusiasm and the gorgeous Neo

Platonism of Thomas Taylor might be expected to have something unusual about his modes of talking and thinking; devotion to Cudworth and Henry More might give the devotee a physiognomy somewhat unlike the ordinary. Still the strangeness is no greater than one will find in the most flourishing poetry of to-day. The writers were averse to systematic exposition; the logical method appeared to them not a means for attaining truth, but an attempt to put it into a straightjacket and divest it of life and health. Philosophy when it drops out system and travels away from dogmatism cannot be otherwise than mysticism: it is the having of insights, glimpses of verity all the more dazzling for their isolation. Such writings have inconsecutiveness, but are like a succession of gems strung upon a golden thread. The objection has often been made against Emerson that you can read him backwards as well as forwards; but if we reach his plane of thought, we shall not find ourselves disturbed by the mysticism.

Thus the great men and women struggled and toiled. They attempted to fathom those problems of life and destiny whose depths no plummet has ever sounded, and which will forever remain abysses into which speculation will plunge and bring thence newer and nobler treasures. The fine enthusiasm which pervaded their circle may have led them into strange and difficult thickets of thought. They expected too much, perhaps, and hoped to ameliorate the world more rapidly than can be done with the good dame, used to the slow process of the centuries. But the spectacle of such single devotion to truth, of such inspiring hopefulness, of such vigorous thinking, stands supreme in the history of the land. When making up the record of what we have done in our brief experiment of establishing free institutions, we must not fail to award the proper place to what was done by these pioneers in the continent of free thought.

HE mind of the Rev. John Fairfield was a blank. He was conscious of no sensation but that of extreme exhaustion and of a dull feeling of the necessity of producing from a vacuum, for the coming Sunday, two sermons which would satisfy the requirements of a critical and. fastidious audience. The sheets of sermon paper lay before him on his desk, smooth, white and unspotted. There was a massive cut glass ink bottle set in a richly carved silver standard, his initials in cipher on the silver top, and a silver penholder lying by it, both gifts from an admiring parishioner. But the Rev. John Fairfield felt no movings of mind or body to induce him to touch either one. He lay back in his chair, his eyes half closed, filled with a morbid consciousness of defeat and a paralyzing certainty that he had mistaken his calling, that what he had imagined was the voice of the Lord was a delusion born of his own conceit. The sweet stillness of the summer air filled the room. The odors from a field of clover, over which myriads of white butterflies fluttered away their brief day, made the air sweet and languorous. The fragrant spiciness of nasturtiums tempered by the passion of mignonette stole over his senses. There was a gentle twittering of the newly wedded lovers in the nest by his lattice window. But all the sweet blandishments of Nature, instead of inspiring him, depressed him and dragged him farther down in the dull slough of despair.

He had come into his parish fresh from the Seminary, radiant with first

honors in Greek and Hebrew, the glory of valedictorian in his college days still hovering over him, a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging on the silk cord which also held a golden cross, the sign and symbol of his religion; up in all the traditions and transcendentalisms of the day; ready to buckle. on his sword and fight for the honor of the Church and the glory of God; to lift up the weary hands and the heavy heads; to comfort the widows and the orphans, and, above all, to write, twice a week, the brilliant essays which had delighted his professors rather more than his classmates.

And now-before the fifth year of his rectorship was ended-he had come to a dead pause, and he felt that he was through. It was not so easy nor so delightful a task to visit the poor and the afflicted; there was nothing very inspiring in hearing over and over again the tales of woe and suffering which he could do little to alleviate; the repulsion of physical suffering and uncleanliness overcame him, and he began to feel that, in addition to the discovery of a weak stomach, he must add that of a weak mind. It was rather hard for a young man who had held the most delicate ideas of the sanctity of love and matrimony to be consulted by a mother, in the privacy of his study, on the best method of bringing a dilatory lover "to time"; it was a revelation to have wives coming to complain, with bitter weepings, of delinquent husbands, and to have husbands exhibit the festering wounds of their domestic lives-lives which looked so smooth upon the surface and ask his advice as to separation and the opinion of the Church on divorce. To a man of his

sensitive organization all this was slow torture; the wear and tear of these daily thorns and brambles had been too much for him and had gradually undermined his constitution, so that the tired body reacting on the tired mind had produced a form of mental coma, and the Rev. John Fairfield was physically unequal to the task which lay before him.

Up in the room above him he heard the low voice of his wife, singing over her needlework, and the patter of little feet and the laughter of a baby voice mingled with the sweet sounds of the summer air. These two were his own to care for and to nourish. If he broke down now in the beginning of his career there was no one for them to turn to,- for he had not married an heiress. His wife's pride in him and belief in his powers were unbounded. How could he disappoint and surprise her so unpleasantly? It was not possible, and it should not be.

He envied the clergymen who dared trust to the inspiration of the moment and go into their pulpits with only a text of Scripture and a vague outline in their minds, to pour forth floods of eloquence upon their congregations. He could never do that. His own sermons had been so far carefully written, models of diction and argument, and so far more than satisfactory; but he had exhausted thought and resources thus early in his career, and was too young to venture to repeat his sermons or to have the proverbial barrel to fall back upon. This must not-could not-be. He would not acknowledge himself beaten and drop out of the ranks so early in the battle. He roused himself and drew the fair blank sheets to him and hastily wrote down a text-the first which entered his mind: "Enter ye in at the straight gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat."

He waited a moment for the ideas

to come, but they were slow in coming. The clear black lines stood out upon the whiteness and dazzled his eyes. He read them over and over mechanically until they seemed burned upon his brain. A sudden little wind stirred the honeysuckle at his window, and the fragrant perfume and the written words brought back to his memory the old parsonage where he used to visit his grandfather, and a Saturday morning when he stood at the study table, with a boyish petition, and heard his grandfather read to his wife this very text, from a sermon just finished. Strange that it should come back to him now! But there was no accounting for these brain waves. He wondered where that sermon was. It might be that he could get an idea or two from re-reading it. Of course he would never for a moment think of anything more, for of all contemptible things in this world stealing another man's brains was the most contemptible—even if it were all in the family. But in this crisis, when he was so exhausted, even the slightest idea might start him afresh, and it really seemed like a leading of Providence that this same text should occur to him. His grandfather had been a man of marked ability and eloquence in his day. It would be quite as suitable to draw inspiration. from his sermons as from Jeremy Taylor's or any of the old divines'. He believed he had the box of sermons in the attic, where some old books and a few heirlooms too dilapidated to refurbish for the parlor had been placed. He would go and look them over. He rose from his chair and went slowly up the stairs, past the nursery door, a half guilty feeling in his heart that he was taking one of those steps to dangerous avenues which are so easy to take and so im

the lid gently and took out a pile of yellowed manuscripts in cramped, prim handwriting-the ink faded by years, but every word as legible as print. He turned the pages slowly, reading here and there a sentence, then, growing more absorbed, a page or two. Strange how up to date these words of half a century before were, and how eloquent, and really in his own style! They would need very little alteration to sound exactly like his own. Certainly, manner of writing was as distinctly hereditary as other traits.

He laid down one sermon and took up another. From its yellow pages a spray of honeysuckle, still fragrant with the odor of past ages, fluttered and fell in ashes at his feet. He opened the cover, and on the title-page the selfsame text which he had just written on his own blank pages stood before him. His heart gave a great leap; a strong temptation beset his soul,-and, closing the book, he threw it from him onto the garret floor. Then he sat for a moment, looking out from the attic. window at the light, soft clouds on the dull blue of the summer sky and the purple mists of the distant hills, torn with temptation, weary and exhausted. He could see the tower of the church from the window-the church in which he must appear to-morrow, empty handed, empty minded, before a congregation that would not put up long with platitudes or repetition, and tacitly acknowledge his mental weakness and incapacity.

Could he bear this? Could he so shame Ruth and so mar his own career? It must not be! He set his lips firmly, the lips pronounced so ecclesiastical and eloquent,and, picking up the folio from the floor, put it into the breast of his frock and, hastily replacing the others, went down to his study and locked himself in. Then for hours he wrote rapidly, and when the sun went down in a cloud of glory and the sleepy

birds twittered good night to the world, he came out of his room with a flush on his pale cheek and a glow in his eyes, leaving a beautifully written manuscript in his sermon. cover and a little heap of fluttering gray ashes in his grate.

The congregation of St. Mary's-bythe-Sea listened with breathless interest to the sermon, next morning. Never before had the Rev. John Fairfield been so fluent or so impressive. There were the dignity and thoughtfulness of maturity and the fire and enthusiasm of youth combined. Every sentence was carefully rounded, every gesture in the right place; and after it was ended a flutter of satisfaction, like a tiny wave, swept over the congregation.

Then came a long time of rest and increased usefulness for the rector of St. Mary's. There was no falling off in his manner of preaching. Indeed, as time went on, each sermon seemed ever better than the last. His fame spread far and wide, and he was asked to accept larger parishes and increased salary; but he preferred to stay where he had earned his first laurels. Relieved from extreme tension of mind, he grew stronger bodily and the pleasures of merely physical life were more alluring than in his ascetic youth.

The pile of yellow sermons grew gradually less, and the first pangs of conscience grew less also, until they finally vanished entirely. There was no possibility of discovery, and he began to feel that he was giving to the world the emanations of his own brain. Even his wife-his own Ruth-never suspected his honesty, but rejoiced in his success and sunned herself in the reflection of his glory. There was no intangible barrier between them, no shadow of doubt to mar their happy life.

The years went on and the drain upon the resources of the hidden treasure increased, and the Rev. John Fairfield began to discover that he was near the end of his rope; but it