were Unitarians, Unitarian conservatism was peremptory and austere. The
entire circle of which Mr. Ticknor was the centre or representative, the
world of Everett and Prescott and their friends, regarded Transcendentalism
and Brook Farm, its fruit, with good-humored wonder as with Prescott, or
with severe reprobation as with Mr. Ticknor. The general feeling in regard
to Mr. Emerson, who was accounted the head of the school, is well expressed
by John Quincy Adams in 1840. The old gentleman, whose glory is that he was
a moral and political gladiator and controversialist, deplores the doom of
the Christian Church to be always racked with differences and debates, and
after speaking of 'other wanderings of mind' that 'let the wolf into the
fold,' proceeds to say: 'A young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of my
once-loved friend William Emerson, and a classmate of my lamented son
George, after failing in the every-day avocations of a Unitarian preacher
and school-master, starts a new doctrine of Transcendentalism, declares all
the old revelations superannuated and worn out, and announces the approach
of new revelations.' Mr. Adams was just on the eve of his antislavery
career, but he continues: 'Garrison and the non-resistant Abolitionists,
Brownson and the Marat Democrats, phrenology and animal magnetism, all come
in, furnished each with some plausible rascality as an ingredient for the
bubbling caldron of religion and politics.' C.P. Cranch, the poet and
painter, was a relative of Mr. Adams, and then a clergyman; and the
astonished ex-President says: 'Pearse Cranch, _ex ephebis_, preached here
last week, and gave out quite a stream of Transcendentalism most
unexpectedly.'

"This was the general view of Transcendentalism and its teachers and
disciples held by the social, political, and religious establishment. The
separation and specialty of the 'movement' soon passed. The leaders and
followers were absorbed in the great world of America; but that world has
been deeply affected and moulded by this seemingly slight and transitory