dominant religion. Statesmanship and scholarship, too, were equally fixed and rigid; and so, to a degree hardly conceivable to-day, was the structure of society. Even to-day untrammelled freedom of thought, unrestrained assertion of individual belief, sometimes demands grave self-sacrifice. In Emerson's day it demanded heroic spirit.

To say that Emerson's lifelong heroism won us what moral and intellectual freedom we now possess would be to confuse the man with the movement in which he is the greatest figure. As the years pass, however, we begin to understand that no other American writings record that movement half so vitally as his. We may not care for some of the things he said; we may not find sympathetic the temper in which he uttered them; but we cannot deny that when, for two hundred years, intellectual tyranny had kept the native American mind cramped within the limits of tradition, Emerson fearlessly stood forth as the chief His representative of that movement which asserted the right Courage. of every individual to think, to feel, to speak, to act for himself, confident that so far as each acts in sincerity good shall ensue.

To many he still remains preeminently "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." And indeed, whoever believes in individualism must always respect in Emerson a living prophet. Just as surely, those who believe in obedience to authority must always lament the defection from their ranks of a spirit which, whatever its errors, even they must admit to have been brave, honest, serene, and essentially pure with all that purity which is the deepest grace of ancestral New England.

VII

THE LESSER MEN OF CONCORD

REFERENCES

BRONSON ALCOTT

WORKS: There is no collected edition of Alcott's works. wilen were published by Roberts Brothers, Boston. For a list of them, see Forey. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris, Memoir, 2 vols., Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foley, 3.

SELECTIONS: Stedman, 77-79; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VT, 17–22.

THOREAU

WORKS: Works, Riverside Edition, II vols., Boston: Houghton, 1899

1900.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: F. B. Sanborn, Henry David Thoreau, Boston: Houghton, 1882 (AML); H. S. Salt, Life of Henry David Thoreau, London: Scott, 1896 (Gw); Lowell, "Thoreau, " in Lowell's Works, Riverside Edition, I, 361 ff; Emerson, "Thoreau," in Emerson's Works, Riverside Edition, X, 421 ff; Stevenson, "Thoreau," in Stevenson's Works, Thistle Edition, XIV, 116 ff.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foley, 291-292; Salt, Thoreau, pp. i-x (at the end); S. A. Jones, Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau, New York: Privately printed, 1894.

SELECTIONS: *Carpenter, 343-357; Duyckinck, II, 655-656; Stedman, 182-183; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VII, 323–336.

CONCORD, Massachusetts, until Emerson's time celebrated as the place where the embattled farmers made their stand against the British regulars in 1775, is now even better known as the Yankee village where for half a century Emerson lived, and gathered about him a little group of the intellectually and spiritually enlightened. Of the

men who flourished in Emerson's Concord, the most eminent was Hawthorne, whose work belongs not to philosophy, but to pure letters, and whom we shall consider later. He would hardly have expected a place among the prophets of the eternities. At least two other Concord men, though, would have been disposed to call themselves philosophers, and, with artless lack of humor, to expect immortality in company with Emerson and Plato

and the rest. These were AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT (1799-1888) and HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862).

Alcott was four years older than Emerson. The son of a Connecticut farmer, he began life as a peddler, in which character he sometimes strayed a good way southward. A thoroughly honest

man of unusually active mind, his son blen

chief emotional trait appears to

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have been a self-esteem which he never found reason to Alcott. abate. In the midst of peddling, he felt himself divinely commissioned to reform mankind. He soon decided that his reform ought to begin with education. As early as 1823, having succeeded in educating himself in a manner which he found satisfactory, he opened a school at his native town, Wolcott, Connecticut. Five years later he removed to Boston, where he announced that if people would send him their children, he would educate them as children had never been educated before. That he kept this promise no one will doubt after reading the two volumes of Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836-1837), which show Al

cott's strange method of teaching the poor little Boston children by asking them questions about the soul and the eternities, and by punishing the good children when the bad children misbehaved.*

Before many years his school came to an end. Mr. Alcott then became a professional philosopher, lecturing, writing, and failing to support his family in decent comfort. When the Dial was started, he contributed to it his "Orphic Sayings." The fountain of these was inexhaustible; and even Margaret Fuller had practical sense enough to inform him with regret that she could not afford to fill the Dial with matter, however valuable, from a single contributor. His reply was characteristic; he loftily regretted that the Dial was no longer an organ of free speech. In 1842 he visited England, where certain people of a radical turn received him with a seriousness which he found gratifying. Returning to America, he endeavored to establish at Harvard, Massachusetts, a comFruitlands. munity called Fruitlands, something like the contemporary Brook Farm. Before long Fruitlands naturally collapsed. For most of his ensuing life, he lived in Concord.

There is an aspect, no doubt, in which such a life seems the acme of perverse selfishness; but this is far from the whole story. The man's weakness, as well as his strength, lay in a self-esteem so inordinate that it crowded out of his possibilities any approach either to good sense or to the saving grace of humor. On the other hand, he was honest, he was sincere, he was devoted to idealism, and he attached to his perceptions, opinions, and utterances an importance which those who found him sympathetic were occasionally

* See also Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's Record of a School: Exempli fying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture (1835).

inclined to share. Of his published writings none was
remembered, unless by his immediate friends, a year after
he died. In life the man was a friend of Emerson's,
holding in the town of Concord a position which he prob-
ably believed as eminent as Emerson's own. Now he
seems the extreme type of what Yankee idealism could
come to when unchecked by humor or common-sense.
If Alcott is rapidly being forgotten, the case is different
with Thoreau. For whatever the
quality of Thoreau's philosophy,
the man was in his own way a
literary artist of unusual merit.
He was born of a Connecticut
family not long emigrated from
France. On his mother's side he
had Yankee blood. What little
record remains of his kin would
seem to show that, like many New
England folks of the farming class,
they had a kind of doggedly self-
assertive temper which inclined
them to habits of personal isola-
tion.

D. Thorcow.

Thoreau graduated at Harvard College in 1837. While a student he gained some little distinction as a writer of English; his compositions, though commonplace in substance, are sensitive in form. After graduation, he lived mostly at Concord. Though not of pure Yankee descent, he had true Yankee versatility; he was a tolerable farmer, a good surveyor, and a skilful maker of leadpencils. In one way or another he was thus able by the work of comparatively few weeks in the year to provide the simple necessities of his vegetarian life. So he early

Thoreau.