There is another matter to be noted as of some significance namely that
leading Transcendentalists were, and leading Pragmatists now are,
scholars and university men. It is true America was not turning out
university men in the '40's and it might perhaps better be said that the
Transcendentalists were college men, but as several of them were
educated in Germany the connotation may be allowed to stand. It was said
of these learned students that at their meetings they read Dante in the
original Italian, Hegel in the original German, Swedenborg in the
original Latin, which language the Swedish seer always used, Charles
Fourier in the original French, and perhaps the hardest task of all,
Margaret Fuller in the original English. Margaret was an honored member
of the illustrious company and was held in high esteem; but her writings
are mighty hard reading. I can quite understand James Russell Lowell's
judgment in his "Fable For Critics" where he condemns a certain literary
offender to severe punishment, sentencing him to 30 days at hard labor,
reading the works of Margaret Fuller.

It was, as above said, after one of his visits to Boston that my father
came home with the suggestion of sending Althea and myself to school at
Brook Farm. The idea met with a good deal of opposition from the Dutch
side of the house, which was my side for all I was worth, but I suppose
father opined that it was time some of the provincialism of the Old
Colonie should be rubbed off. Through his acquaintance with Thurlow Weed
he came to know Mr. Greeley and through Mr. Greeley was introduced to
Dr. Ripley and the Transcendentalists, gaining, by the way, broader
views and a wider range of ideas than those which had prevailed in
Beaver Street for two hundred years. Such, I take it was the sequence of
events, not as noted by a little boy but as partly imagined and partly
reasoned out at a later time. Partly imagined, too, is the presumption