e eighteen-forties, the moral fervor knew no
restraint. Garrison, although in many respects a most unromantic
personality, was engaged in a task which gave him all the inspiration
of romance. A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of
the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed to mark in literature,
surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New England
transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of himself, were soldiers.
They felt themselves enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious
campaign. They were willing to pardon, in their comrades and in
themselves, those imaginative excesses which resemble the physical
excesses of a soldier's camp. Transcendentalism was thus a militant
philosophy and religion, with both a destructively critical and a
positively constructive creed. Channing, Parker, Alcott, Margaret
Fuller, were warrior-priests, poets and prophets of a gallant campaign
against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for the light.

The atmosphere of that score of years in New England was now
superheated, now rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never quite the
normal atmosphere of every day. On the purely literary side, it is
needless to say, these men and women sought inspiration in Coleridge
and Carlyle and other English and German romanticists. In fact, the
most enduring literature of New England between 1830 and 1865 was
distinctly a romantic literature. It was rooted, however, not so much
in those swift changes of historic condition, those startling
liberations of the human spirit which gave inspiration to the
romanticism of the Continent, as it was in the deep and vital fervor
with which these New Englanders envisaged the problems of the moral
life.

Other illustrations of the American capacity for romance lie equally
close at hand. Take, for instance, the stout volume in which Mr. Burton
Stevenson has collected the _Poems of American History_. Here are
nearly seven hundred pages of closely printed patriotic verse. While
Stedman's _Anthology_ reveals no doubt national aspirations and
national sentiment, as well as the emotional fervor of individuals, Mr.
Stevenson's collection has the advantage of focussing this national
feeling upon specific events. Stedman's _Anthology_ is an enduring
document of American idealism, touching in the sincerity of its poetic
moods, pathetic in its long lists of men and women who are known by one
poem only, or who have never, for one reaso