t down to
New York to make goodly successes in the great game of life.

At Brook Farm they succeeded in the high thinking all right, but the
entrepreneur is quite as necessary as the poet--and a little more so.
Brook Farm had no business head, and things unfit fall into natural
dissolution. But the enterprise did not fail, any more than a rotting
log fails when it nourishes a bank of violets. The net results of Brook
Farm's high thinking have passed into the world's treasury, smelted
largely by Emerson and Thoreau, who were not there.

* * * * *

Immanuel Kant has been called the father of modern Transcendentalists:
but Socrates and his pupil Plato, so far as we know, were the first of
the race.

Neither buzzing bluebottles nor the fall of dynasties disturbed them.
"The soul is everything," said Plato. "The soul knows all things," says
Emerson.

In every century a few men have lived who knew the value of plain living
and high thinking, and very often the men who reversed the maxim have
passed them the hemlock.

All those sects known as Primitive Christians represent variations of
the idea--Quakers, Mennonites, Communists, Shakers and Dunkards!

A Transcendentalist is a Dukhobortsi with a college education. A Quaker
with an artistic bias becomes a Preraphaelite, and lo! we have News from
Nowhere, a Dream of John Ball, Merton Abbey, Kelmscott, and half a world
is touched and tinted by the simplicity, sterling honesty and
genuineness of one man.

George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson evolved New
England Transcendentalism, and very early Henry Thoreau added a few bars
of harmonious discords to the symphony. Horace Greeley once contended in
a "Tribune" editorial that Sam Staples, the bum bailiff who locked
Thoreau behind the bars, was an important factor in the New England
renaissance, and as such should be immortalized by a statue made of
punk, set up on Boston Common for the delectation of bean-eaters. I fear
me Horace was a joker.

California quail are quite different from the quail of New York State,
and naturalists tell us that this is caused by a difference in
environment--quail being a product of soil and climate.

And man is a product of soil and climate--for only in a certain soil can
you produce a certain type of man. As a whole, this world is better
adapted for the production of fish than genius--most of the really good
climate falls on the sea. Christia