Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/88

54 was an extremely intellectual woman at thirty, and that she had remarkable insight in affairs. They also said that her pride was as unbending as her father’s. Now Abigail, too, had made a speech, not easily forgotten or overlooked by a Baker.

Keeping in mind these political agitations which stirred the country, and further grasping the hour by remembering that it was now railroads were being built across the continent, shipping was being improved by the introduction of steam, gold had just been discovered in California, improved machinery was being placed on the farms and in the mills, it will be seen why, with rapid changes in conditions of living, it was not strange, as a recent writer has said, that there should be a corresponding change in the minds of men and that their ideas should become unsettled and that transcendentalism in religion, literature, and politics should begin to flourish. Methods of education improved, newspapers were published in every town, the lyceum system of lectures became popular. Literature in America developed a new school of which the lights were Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Hawthorne, Holmes, — all New England men.

In such an era Spiritualism had its birth, and mesmerism and animal magnetism were being widely discussed. But if a Poyen lectured through New England on these subjects, he had an Emerson on his heels with saner topics. Yet it must be taken into account that in the early fifties the conversation at social gatherings was everywhere in America charged with the subject of Spiritualism. In 1849