than continuous discourses. His
printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, were first written and
delivered as lectures. In 1836 he published his first book, _Nature_,
which remains the most systematic statement of his philosophy. It
opened a fresh spring-head in American thought, and the words of its
introduction announced that its author had broken with the past. "Why
should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why
should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of
tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of
theirs?"

It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies of this little book.
But the year following its publication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa
address at Cambridge, on the _American Scholar_, electrified the little
public of the university. This is described by Lowell as "an event
without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be
always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its
inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows
clustering with eager heads, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" To
Concord come many kindred spirits, drawn by Emerson's magnetic
attraction. Thither came, from Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born
a few years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint and benignant
figure, a visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists
themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the
soul. Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, Conn., and afterward at
Boston on an original plan--compelling his scholars, for example, to
flog _him_, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging
themselves. The experiment was successful until his _Conversations on
the Gospels_, in Boston, and his insistence upon admitting colored
children to his benches, offended conservative opinion and broke up his
school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He
believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and supported
himself for some years by the work of his hands, gardening, cutting
wood, etc. He traveled into the West and elsewhere, holding
conversations on philosophy, education, and religion. He set up a
little community at the village of Harvard, Massachusetts, which was
rather less successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed _Orphic
Sayings_ to the _Dial_, which were harder for the exoteric to
understand than even Emerson's _Brahma_ or the _Over-