[168] curious journal of the Transcendentalists, the Dial, lived only four years; the Brook Farm community held together for seven years. The whole movement had about it much that was visionary and merely odd as well as much that was true and noble; but it had, on the whole, great power for good in that day, as, through the expression of its spirit by Emerson, it has even now. In coming to Emerson we arrive at the controlling influence, if not the creator, of modern American thought. Emerson never could have said what Lady Diana Beauclerc wrote from Bath, one foggy day: “A thousand children are running by the window. I should like to whip every one of them for not being mine.” In Emerson's case the spiritual children are all his; they are still running by, and perhaps we must admit that the day sometimes looks foggy, and the children sometimes deserve whipping.
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[168] curious journal of the Transcendentalists, the Dial, lived only four years; the Brook Farm community held together for seven years. The whole movement had about it much that was visionary and merely odd as well as much that was true and noble; but it had, on the whole, great power for good in that day, as, through the expression of its spirit by Emerson, it has even now. In coming to Emerson we arrive at the controlling influence, if not the creator, of modern American thought. Emerson never could have said what Lady Diana Beauclerc wrote from Bath, one foggy day: “A thousand children are running by the window. I should like to whip every one of them for not being mine.” In Emerson's case the spiritual children are all his; they are still running by, and perhaps we must admit that the day sometimes looks foggy, and the children sometimes deserve whipping.
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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