แ His "Moral Against Calvinism." eminent disputants on both sides. So far as this controversy was concerned with the theological doctrine of the Trinity it has no place in a history of literature. But the issue went far beyond that. Channing asserted the dignity William Ellery of human nature against the Calvinistic doctrine of innate Channing. depravity, and affirmed the rights of human reason and man's capacity to judge of God. "We must start in religion from our own souls," he said. And in his "Moral ArgumentAgainst Calvinism," 1820, he wrote: "Nothing Argument is gained to piety by degrading human nature, for in the competency of this nature to know and judge of God all piety has its foundation." In opposition to Edwards's doctrine of necessity he emphasized the freedom of the will. He maintained that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, foreordination, election by grace, and eternal punishment were inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made God a monster. In Channing's view the great sanction of religious truth is the moral sanction, is its agreement with the laws of conscience. He was a passionate vindicator of the liberty of the individual, not only as against political oppression, but against the tyranny of public opinion over thought and conscience: "We were made for free action. This alone is life, and enters into all that is good and great." This jealous love of freedom inspired all that he did and wrote. It led him to join the Antislavery party. It expressed itself in his elaborate arraignment of Napoleon in the Unitarian organ, the Christian Examiner, for 1827-28; in his "Remarks on Associations," and his paper "On the Char- His "Characacter and Writings of John Milton," 1826. This was his most considerable contribution to literary criticism. It took for a text Milton's recently discovered "Treatise on Christian Doctrine”—the tendency of which was antiTrinitarian-but it began with a general defense of poetry against "those who are accustomed to speak of poetry as ter of Milton." "Liberal Christianity" favorable to belles-lettres. Channing's National light reading." This would now seem a somewhat superfluous introduction to an article in any American review. But it shows the nature of the milieu through which the liberal movement in Boston had to make its way. To reassert the dignity and usefulness of the beautiful arts, was, perhaps, the chief service which the Massachusetts Unitarians rendered to humanism. The traditional prejudice of the Puritans against the ornamental side of life had to be softened before polite literature could find a congenial atmosphere in New England. In Channing's "Remarks on National Literature," reviewing a work published in 1823, he asks the question, "Do we possess what may be called a national literature?" and answers it, by implication at least, in the negative. That we do now possess a national literature is in great part due to the influence of Channing and his associates, although his own writings, being in the main controversial, and of temporary interest, may not take rank among the permanent treasures of that literature. 1. WASHINGTON IRVING : "Knickerbocker's History of New York"; "The Sketch Book"; 'Bracebridge Hall”; “Tales of a Traveler"; "The Alhambra"; "Life of Oliver Goldsmith." 3. 66 2. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: "The Spy"; "The Pilot ; "The Red Rover" ; The Leatherstocking Tales." DANIEL WEBSTER : "Great Speeches and Orations." 4. WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING: "The Character and Writings of John Milton" "The Life and Character of Napoleon Bonaparte"; "Slavery." [Vols. I. and II. of the "Works of William E. Channing." Boston : 1841.] 5. JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE: "The Culprit Fay"; "The American Flag." ["Selected Poems." New York: 1835.] 6. FITZ-GREENE HALLECK : "Marco Bozzaris"; "Alnwick Castle"; "On the Death of Drake." ["Poems." New York: 1827.] CHAPTER IV. THE CONCORD WRITERS -1837-1861. The humani tarian move ment in New England. THERE has been but one movement in the history of the American mind which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence enough to merit the name of a school. This was the great humanitarian movement, or series of movements, in New England, which, beginning in the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the antislavery agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil War. The second stage of this intellectual and social revolt was transcendentalism, of which Emerson wrote in 1842: "The history of genius and of religion in these times will be the history of this tendency." It culminated about 1840-41 in the establishment of The Dial and the Brook Farm Community, although Emerson had given the signal a few years before in his little volume entitled "Nature," 1836, his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard on "The American Scholar," 1837, and his address in 1838 before the Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo (1803-82) was the prophet of the sect, and Concord was its Mecca; but the influence of the new ideas was not confined to the little group of professed transcendentalists; it extended to all the young writers within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil that it had loosened and freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not merely Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes. Emerson. What is transcendentalism? New spirit of inquiry and dissent. Novelties of doctrine. In its strictest sense transcendentalism was a restatement of the idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs to religion, nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as including the more outward manifestations which drew popular attention the most strongly, it was the name given to that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal inquiry and experiment, which marked the third and fourth decades of this century in America, and especially in New England. The movement was contemporary with political revolutions in Europe and with the preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science, education, medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, like the Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritualists, Millerites, Second Adventists, Shakers, Mormons, and Come-outers, some of whom believed in trances, miracles, and direct revelations from the divine Spirit; others in the quick coming of Christ, as deduced from the opening of the seals and the number of the beasts in the Apocalypse; and still others in the reorganization of society and of the family on a different basis. New systems of education were tried, suggested by the writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. The pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phrenology, as taught by Gall and Spurzheim, had numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy, hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls "kindred delusions," made many disciples. Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal food, as injurious not only to health but to a finer spirituality. Not a few refused to vote or pay taxes. The writings of Fourier and Saint-Simon were translated, and societies were established where coöperation and a community of goods should take the place of selfish competition. About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these ' phalansteries" in America, many of which had their Phalansteries communities. organs in the shape of weekly or monthly journals, which advocated the principle of association. The best known of and other these was probably The Harbinger, the mouthpiece of the famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Roxbury, Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The Brook Farm. head man of Brook Farm was George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in Boston to go into the movement, and who after its failure became and remained for many years literary editor of the New York Tribune. Among his associates were Charles A. Dananow the editor of The Sun-Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others not unknown to fame. The Harbinger, which ran from 1845 to 1849-two years after the break-up of the community, had among its contributors many who were not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with the experiment. Of the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge, who did so much to introduce American readers to German literature, J. S. Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, and younger men, like G. W. Curtis and T. W. Higginson. A reader of to-day, looking into an odd volume of The Har- The Harbinbinger, will find in it some stimulating writing, together ger. with a great deal of unintelligible talk about "harmonic unity," "love germination,” and other matters now fallen silent. The most important literary result of this experiment at "plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture and agriculture, was Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance," which has for its background an idealized picture of the community life; whose heroine, Hawthorne's Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller, and whose hero, Romance." with his hobby of prison reform, was a type of the oneidea'd philanthropist that abounded in such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was always in part one of "Blithedale |