and in such particulars the scheme was thoroughly conservative and
irreproachable. Its main characteristic was that each individual
concerned in it should do a part of the work necessary for keeping the
whole machine going. He could choose his work and he could live as he
liked; it was hoped, but it was by no means demanded, that he would
make himself agreeable, like a gentleman invited to a dinner-party.
Allowing, however, for everything that was a concession to worldly
traditions and to the laxity of man's nature, there must have been in
the enterprise a good deal of a certain freshness and purity of
spirit, of a certain noble credulity and faith in the perfectibility
of man, which it would have been easier to find in Boston in the year
1840, than in London five-and-thirty years later. If that was the era
of Transcendentalism, Transcendentalism could only have sprouted in
the soil peculiar to the general locality of which I speak--the soil
of the old New England morality, gently raked and refreshed by an
imported culture. The Transcendentalists read a great deal of French
and German, made themselves intimate with George Sand and Goethe, and
many other writers; but the strong and deep New England conscience
accompanied them on all their intellectual excursions, and there never
was a so-called "movement" that embodied itself, on the whole, in
fewer eccentricities of conduct, or that borrowed a smaller licence in
private deportment. Henry Thoreau, a delightful writer, went to live
in the woods; but Henry Thoreau was essentially a sylvan personage and
would not have been, however the fashion of his time might have
turned, a man about town. The brothers and sisters at Brook Farm
ploughed the fields and milked the cows; but I think that an observer
from another clime and society would have been much more struck with
their spirit of conformity than with their _déréglements_. Their
ardour was a moral ardour, and the lightest breath of scandal never
rested upon them, or upon any phase of Transcendentalism.