a few years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint and benignant
figure, a visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists
themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the
soul. Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, Conn., and afterward at
Boston on an original plan--compelling his scholars, for example, to
flog _him_, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging
themselves. The experiment was successful until his _Conversations on
the Gospels_, in Boston, and his insistence upon admitting colored
children to his benches, offended conservative opinion and broke up his
school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He
believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and supported
himself for some years by the work of his hands, gardening, cutting
wood, etc. He traveled into the West and elsewhere, holding
conversations on philosophy, education, and religion. He set up a
little community at the village of Harvard, Massachusetts, which was
rather less successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed _Orphic
Sayings_ to the _Dial_, which were harder for the exoteric to
understand than even Emerson's _Brahma_ or the _Over-soul_.

Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most intellectual woman
of her time in America, an eager student of Greek and German literature
and an ardent seeker after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. She
threw herself into many causes--such as temperance and the higher
education of women. Her brilliant conversation classes in Boston
attracted many "minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as literary
editor of the _New York Tribune_, she furnished a wider public with
reviews and book notices of great ability. She took part in the Brook
Farm experiment, and she edited the _Dial_ for a time, contributing to
it the papers afterward expanded into her most considerable book,
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_. In 1846 she went abroad, and at