emptiness, devoid of feeling, poetry or imagination; little
higher than the common scourings of State Street; politicians of
doubtful honesty; natures of narrow scope; and already, at
eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feel uncertainty about so
many matters more important than Adamses that his mind rebelled
against no discipline merely personal, and he was ready to admit
his unworthiness if only he might penetrate the shrine. The
influence of Harvard College was beginning to have its effect. He
was slipping away from fixed principles; from Mount Vernon
Street; from Quincy; from the eighteenth century; and his first
steps led toward Concord.

He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the
rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always
an insect, or something much lower -- a man. It was surely no
fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps -- as
Mr. Emerson justly said -- it was so; in spite of the
long-continued effort of a lifetime, he perpetually fell back
into the heresy that if anything universal was unreal, it was
himself and not the appearances; it was the poet and not the
banker; it was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He
did not lack the wish to be transcendental. Concord seemed to
him, at one time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth Russell
Lowell was as little transcendental as Beacon Street. From him
the boy got no revolutionary thought whatever -- objective or
subjective as they used to call it -- but he got good-humored
encouragement to do what amused him, which consisted in passing
two years in Europe after finishing the four years of Cambridge

The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was