emembered conversations; Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was then
breaking ground in the field of his subsequent great reputation; and
many another who has since been widely heard of. I count it as one of my
privileges to have listened to a single sermon from Dr. Channing, with
whom I had some personal acquaintance. I can remember only a few
passages. Its theme must have been the divine love; for Dr. Channing
said that God loved black men as well as white men, poor men as well as
rich men, and bad men as well as good men. This doctrine was quite new
to me, but I received it gladly.

The time was one in which the Boston community, small as it then was,
exhibited great differences of opinion, especially regarding the new
transcendentalism and the anti-slavery agitation, which were both held
much in question by the public at large. While George Ripley, moved by a
fresh interpretation of religious duty, was endeavoring to institute a
phalanstery at Brook Farm, the caricatures of Christopher Cranch gave
great amusement to those who were privileged to see them. One of these
represented Margaret Fuller driving a winged team attached to a chariot
on which was inscribed the name of her new periodical, "The Dial," while
the Rev. Andrews Norton regarded her with holy horror. Another
illustrated a passage from Mr. Emerson's essay on Nature--"I play upon
myself. I am my own music"--by depicting an individual with a nose of
preternatural length, pierced with holes like a flageolet, upon which
his fingers sought the intervals. Yet Mr. Cranch belonged by taste and
persuasion among the transcendentalists.

As my earliest relations in Boston were with its recognized society, I
naturally gave some heed to the views therein held regarding the
transcendental people. What I liked least in these last, when I met
them, was a sort of jargon which characterized their speech. I had been
taught to speak plain and careful English, and though always a student
of foreign languages, I had never thought fit to mix their idioms with
those of my native tongue. Apropos of this, I remember that the poet
Fitz-Greene Halleck once said to me of Margaret Fuller, "That young lady
does not speak the same language that I do,--I cannot understand her."
Mr. Emerson's English was as new to me as that of any of his
contemporaries; but in his case I soon felt that the thought was as
novel as the language, and that both marked an epoch in literary
history. The grandiloquence