Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/86

Rh garet's new friend could not but bow in reverence before her; and from that time the two always met as intimates.

Mr. Channing's reminiscences preserve for us a valuable aperçu of the Transcendental, movement in new England, and of Margaret's relation to it.

The circle of the Transcendentalists was, for the moment, a new church, with the joy and pain of a new evangel in its midst. In the very heart of New England Pupitanism, at that day hard, dry, and thorny, had sprung up a new growth, like the blossoming of a century-plant, beautiful and inconvenient. Boundaries had to be enlarged for it; for if society would not give it room, it was determined to go outside of society, and to assert, at all hazards, the freedom of inspiration.

While this movement was in a good degree one of simple protest and reaction, it yet drew much of its inspiration from foreign countries and periods of time remote from our own. From the standpoint of the present it looked deeply into the past and into the future. Its leaders studied Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch, among the classic authors, and De Wette, Hegel, Kant, and Fichte, among the prophets of modern thought. The Welt-geist of the Germans was its ideal. Method, it could not boast. Free discussion, abstinence from participation in ordinary social life and religious Worship, a restless seeking for sympathy, and a constant formulation of sentiments which, exalted in themselves, seemed to lose something of their character by the frequency with which they were presented,—those are some of the traits which Transcendentalism showed to the uninitiated.

To its Greek and Germanic elements was presently