this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this,
namely--it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand.
Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can
receive from another soul." To make one's self so much more
interesting would help to make life interesting, and life was
probably, to many of this aspiring congregation, a dream of freedom
and fortitude. There were faulty parts in the Emersonian philosophy;
but the general tone was magnificent; and I can easily believe that,
coming when it did and where it did, it should have been drunk in by a
great many fine moral appetites with a sense of intoxication. One
envies, even, I will not say the illusions, of that keenly sentient
period, but the convictions and interests--the moral passion. One
certainly envies the privilege of having heard the finest of Emerson's
orations poured forth in their early newness. They were the most
poetical, the most beautiful productions of the American mind, and
they were thoroughly local and national. They had a music and a magic,
and when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, the
beautiful modulation of his utterance, one regrets in especial that
one might not have been present on a certain occasion which made a
sensation, an era--the delivery of an address to the Divinity School
of Harvard University, on a summer evening in 1838. In the light,
fresh American air, unthickened and undarkened by customs and
institutions established, these things, as the phrase is, told.

Hawthorne appears, like his own Miles Coverdale, to have arrived at
Brook Farm in the midst of one of those April snow-storms which,
during the New England spring, occasionally diversify the inaction of
the vernal process. Miles Coverdale, in _The Blithedale Romance_, is
evidently as much Hawthorne as he is any one else in particular. He is
indeed not very markedly any one, unless it be the spectator, the
observer; his chief identity lies in his success in looking at things
objectively and spinning uncommunicated fancies about them. This
indeed was the part that Hawthorne played socially in the little
community at West Roxbury. His biographer describes him as sitting
"silently, hour after hour, in the broad old-fashioned hall of the
house, where he could listen almost unseen to the chat and merriment
of the young people, himself almost always holding a book before him,
but seldom turning the leaves." He put his hand