Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/162

144 nals.” He continues, recording his own remarks but not those of others: —

“I said that they were destitute of proper freshness and independence. The ‘Liberator’ was then the only journal which had root in the soul and flourished.”

The Club went on meeting, now at Mr. Emerson’s in Concord, now at Dr. Francis’s in Watertown, now at Mr. Bartol’s in Boston. It was made up of unusual materials. Hedge supplied the trained philosophic mind; Convers Francis, the omnivorous mental appetite; James Freeman Clarke, the philanthropic comprehensiveness; Theodore Parker, the robust energy; Orestes A. Brownson, the gladiatorial vigor; Caleb Stetson, the wit; William Henry Channing, the lofty enthusiasm; Ripley, the active understanding; Bartol, the flame of aspiration; Alcott, the pure idealism; Emerson, the lumen siccum, or dry light. Among members or occasional guests were Thoreau, Jones Very, George P. Bradford, Dr. Le Baron Russell, and a few young theological students from Cambridge, such as William D. Wilson, now professor at Cornell University, and Robert Bartlett, whose Harvard “Master of Arts” oration has been already quoted. Once, and once only, Dr. Channing and George Bancroft seem to have met with them at Mr. Ripley’s (December 5, 1839).

The project of a magazine, long pending, seems to have been brought to a crisis by the existence