machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed
more for each other than was reasonable,--so much occasionally that
their pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: "What
forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What
great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you
performed?" There was too much talk about earnestness and too little
real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock
and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled
no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist"
dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as
that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time.

In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious
persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader
must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait,--a friend and
not a scoffer:--

"They are not good citizens, not good members of society:
unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens;
they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public
religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions,
foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the
temperance society. They do not even like to vote."

After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual
beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this
is what they have to say:--

"'New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you
want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the