The Periodicals Of American Transcendentalism

The Periodicals of American Transcendentalism BY CLARENCE L. F. GOHDES DURHAM NORTH CAROLINA DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1931 PREFACE . he present volume undertakes a study of the period icals which were conducted or controlled by people who were known in their day as transcendentalists. An ex ception is the last chapter, dealing with The Index, a journal which throws so much light upon the later his tory of transcendentalism that the writer felt that it should not be omitted from his study. This book does not presume to be a general treatise on transcendentalism, and it takes for granted a knowledge of such investigations as have been made by O. B. Froth ingham and H. C. Goddard. In making the present study the writer has profited by the assistance and suggestions of a number of gentle men to whom he would express his gratitude Professors K. B. Murdock and Bliss Perry, of Harvard University 5 J. B. Hubbell, of Duke University 5 and A. H. Thorn dike, H. Schneider, E. E. Neff, and R. L. Rusk, of Colum bia University. For his generous aid and kindly direction the author owes an especial debt to Professor Rusk, under whose supervision this work was written as a Columbia doctoral dissertation. The chapter dealing with The Western Messenger and The Dial is reprinted with few changes from Studies in Philology for January, 1929. CLARENCE GOHDES Duke University April, 1931 v CONTENTS PAGE Chapter I Introduction 3 Chapter II The Western Messenger and The Dial 17 Chapter III Orestes A. Brownson and The Boston Quarterly Review 38 Chapter IV The Present 83 Chapter V The Harbinger 101 Chapter VI The Sfirit of the Age 132 Chapter VII Elizabeth Peabody and Her JEsthetic Papers 143 Chapter VIII TheMassachusetts Quarterly Review 152 Chapter IX The Dial Cincinnati 194 Chapter X The Radical 2IO Chapter XI The Index 229 Appendix Two Uncollected Emerson Items 255 Index 257 vii THE PERIODICALS OF AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION oTLmerican transcendentalism, an eddy in the current of Romanticism, has never been satisfactorily defined. It has been variously regarded as a distinct philosophical system, a mere faith, a recrudescence of the Puritan spirit in an age of developing national consciousness, a reaction against the dominion of Locke and the Scotch theologians, pan theism with a peculiar admixture of skepticism, and so on. Most of the important students of the transcendental movement have commented upon the various foreign in fluences which have shaped its course. The writings of Plato, Kant, Schelling, Coleridge, Carlyle, Cousin, Con stant, and even the Orientals have been mentioned as possible sources. There has also been suggested the im portance of the spirit of individualism fostered by the Congregational churches in New England since the days of the Mathers, or the survival of an intellectual restless ness which was the aftermath of the war with England. The failure of later treatments of transcendentalism to be explicit and definite is, of course, inherent in the very nature of the subject. Religion, philosophy, and, to a less extent, sociology and literature are all involved. Moreover, like every phase of idealistic philosophy in the nineteenth century, it was eclectic. Indeed, should a new variety of idealism be discovered among the tribes of Africa, it would probably bear some of the earmarks of transcendentalism, for the characteristics of a high Platonic mysticism, so much in evidence in the writings of Emerson and his friends, are practically the same wher ever manifested. Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint Francis of Assisi, the youthful Jonathan Edwards, Alcott all have much in common with the Hindu seer con 4 Periodicals of American Transcendentalism templating the word Om. East and West will always meet when mysticism is involved...