[57] cliff and plain, we will make something infinitely nobler than Salamis or Marathon. This pale Massachusetts sky, this sandy soil and raw wind, all shall nurture us:--This was the attitude of mind which the new periodical was to represent; but Alcott writes of its prospects in his diary (November I, 1839): “Half a dozen men exhaust our list of contributors; Emerson, Hedge, Miss Fuller, Ripley, [W. H.] Channing, Dwight, [J. F.] Clarke, are our dependence.” It is to be noticed that, of this club of seven, Hedge and Miss Fuller were Cambridge born; Emerson and Channing had resided in Cambridge with their parents; while all but Miss Fuller were Harvard graduates. This certainly established at the outset a very close connection between the new literary movement and Old Cambridge; and among its later writersO Nature, less is all of thine,
Than are thy borrowings from our human breast.Rich skies, fair fields, shall come to us, suffused with the immortal hues of spirit, of beauteous act and thought. Unlike all the world before us, our own age and land shall be classic to ourselves.
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