CHAPTER IV.

THE CONCORD WRITERS.

1837-1861.

There has been but one movement in the history of the American mind
which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence
enough to merit the name of a school. This was the great humanitarian
movement, or series of movements, in New England, which, beginning in
the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in
transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the antislavery
agitation and the enthusiasms of the civil war. The second stage of
this intellectual and social revolt was transcendentalism, of which
Emerson wrote, in 1842: "The history of genius and of religion in these
times will be the history of this tendency." It culminated about
1840-41 in the establishment of the _Dial_ and the Brook Farm
Community, although Emerson had given the signal a few years before in
his little volume entitled _Nature_, 1836, his Phi Beta Kappa address
at Harvard on the _American Scholar_, 1837, and his address in 1838
before the Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)
was the prophet of the sect, and Concord was its Mecca; but the
influence of the new ideas was not confined to the little group of
professed transcendentalists; it extended to all the young writers
within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil that it had
loosened and freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not merely