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Updated: June 26, 2025
Paul completely refuted his charge of ignorance of the Irish, by contrasting their religious knowledge with that of the English and Americans; in the former one of which countries there are seven or eight millions of pagans, and in the later so many thousands who follow such impostors as Miller, Smith, spiritual rappers, Transcendentalists, Fourierites, and other impostors notorious for their crimes.
The era of the Greek rhapsodists, when a body of matchless epical literature was handed down by memory from generation to generation, and a recitation of the whole "Odyssey" was not too much for a dinner-party, the era of Periclean culture, when the Athenian populace was wont to pass whole days in the theatre, attending with unfaltering intellectual keenness and æsthetic delight to three or four long dramas, either of which would exhaust a modern audience, the wild and vast systems of imaginary abstractions, which the Neo-Platonists, as also the German transcendentalists, so strangely devised and became enamored of, the grotesque views of men and things, the funny universe altogether, which made up both the popular and the learned thought of the Middle Ages, the Buddhistic Orient, with its subtile metaphysical illusions, its unreal astronomical heavens, its habits of repose and its tornadoes of passion, such are instances of great diversities of character, which would be hardly accountable to each other on the supposition of mutual sanity.
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.
So, the transcendentalists affirm, the complete absolute thought is the pre-condition of our thoughts, and we finite creatures are only in so far as it owns us as its verbal fragments. The metaphor is so beautiful, and applies, moreover, so literally to such a multitude of the minor wholes of experience, that by merely hearing it most of us are convinced that it must apply universally.
He had a feminine temperament, was full of sensibility, and of an indolent turn of mind. Emerson was attracted to him, and at one time had great expectations concerning his genius. His paper, published in The Dial, under the title of "The Two Dolons," was much admired by some of the Transcendentalists when it was printed there; and it is referred to by Hawthorne in his "Hall of Phantasy."
The English doctor mentioned is well known to transcendentalists, and he is actually a high-grade Mason; he is also personally well-known to myself. To the best of his recollection he has never at any time met any person terming herself Diana Vaughan. More especially, no such individual has ever called at his house, much less copied any rituals of which he may be in possession.
Not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist." In December, 1841, Emerson delivered a Lecture entitled "The Conservative."
I thought that I detected an idealistic implication in the lines which accounted for their presence in "Parnassus." That shy recluse, Ellery Channing, most eccentric of the transcendentalists, was not to be found at the School or the evening symposia.
The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of "Transcendentalists" was applied, and which made itself an organ in the periodical known as "The Dial," has been written about by many who were in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of it at second hand.
And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the 'transcendentalists, and a man of middle age when the South seceded, and though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and the burlesque, of the war, clear upon the other side, yet he was virtually the child of national leisure, of moderation and education, an American of the seventies and onwards.
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