the most representative of the group, the student of the
Transcendental period will be equally interested in watching its
influence upon many other types of young men: upon future
journalists and publicists like George William Curtis, Charles A.
Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists like Orestes Brownson,
Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon poets like
Jones Very, Christopher. P. Cranch, and Ellery Channing. There
was a sunny side of the whole movement, as T. W. Higginson and F.
B. Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, loved to
emphasize in their talk and in their books; and it was shadowed
also by tragedy and the pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one
looks back at it, in the perspective of three-quarters of a
century, it seems chiefly something touchingly fine. For all
these men and women tried to hitch their wagon to a star.

CHAPTER VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY

Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that great
generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other
men--romancers, poets, essayists, historians--who shared in the
intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely
artists in prose and verse than they were seekers after the
unattainable. Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at
Brook Farm with some of the most extreme types of transcendental
extravagance. The movement interested him artistically and he
utilized it in his romances, but personally he maintained an
attitude of cool detachment from it. Longfellow was too much of
an artist to lose his head over philosophical abstractions;
Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct for the
concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor.