r be sunk in sensuality. It is on this
ground that I sympathize with what is called the 'Transcendental party,'
and that I feel their aim to be the true one."

The grievance maintained against society by the new school of thought
was of a nature to make the respondent say: "We have piped unto you, and
ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not wept." The
status of New England, social and political, was founded upon liberal
traditions. Yet these friends placed themselves in opposition to the
whole existing order of things. The Unitarian discipline had delivered
them from the yoke of doctrines impossible to an age of critical
culture. They reproached it with having taken away the mystical ideas
which, in imaginative minds, had made the poetry of the old faith.
Margaret, writing of these things in 1840, well says: "Since the
Revolution there has been little in the circumstances of this country to
call out the higher sentiments. The effect of continued prosperity is
the same on nations as on individuals; it leaves the nobler faculties
undeveloped. The superficial diffusion of knowledge, unless attended by
a deepening of its sources, is likely to vulgarize rather than to raise
the thought of a nation.... The tendency of circumstances has been to
make our people superficial, irreverent, and more anxious to get a
living than to live mentally and morally." So much for the careless
crowd. In another sentence, Margaret gives us the clew to much of the
"divine discontent" felt by deeper thinkers. She says: "How much those
of us who have been formed by the European mind have to unlearn and lay
aside, if we would act here!"

The scholars of New England had indeed so devoted themselves to the
study of foreign literatures as to be little familiar with the spirit
and the needs of their own country. The England of the English classics,
the Germany of the German poets and philosophers, the Italy of the
Renaissance writers and artists, combined to make the continent in which
their thoughts were at home. The England of the commonalty, the Germany
and Italy of the peasant and artisan, were little known to them, and as
little the characteristic qualities and defects of their own
country-people. Hence their comparison of the old society with the new
was in great part founded upon what we may call "literary illusions."
Moreover, the German and English methods of thought were only partially
applicable to a mode of life whose