Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/196

 have they produced results which are so. The aim—the intention, is the best part of them.

Emerson says in his characteristics of transcendentalism:

“If there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment—an extravagance of faith—the spiritualist adopts it as highest in nature.



“These youths bring us a rough but effectual aid. By their unconcealed dissatisfaction, they expose our poverty and the insignificance of man to man.



“These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact; and if they stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist in demanding to the end, and without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.



“When every voice is raised for a new road, or another statute; or a subscription of stock; for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry; for a new house or a large business; for a political party, or a division of an estate—will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon these improvements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war,—by new inventions—by new seats of trade, or the geologic changes;—all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the sea-beach with a white colony to-day—for ever renewed, to be for ever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well