‘I feel that my impatient nature needs the dark days. I would learn the art of limitation, without compromise, and act out my faith with a delicate fidelity. When loneliness becomes too oppressive, I feel Him drawing me nearer, to be soothed by the smile of an All-Intelligent Love. He will not permit the freedom essential to growth to be checked. If I can give myself up to Him, I shall not be too proud, too impetuous, neither too timid, and fearful of a wound or cloud.’
III.
TRANSCENDENTALISM.
The summer of 1839 saw the full dawn of the Transcendental movement in New England. The rise of this enthusiasm was as mysterious as that of any form of revival; and only they who were of the faith could comprehend how bright was this morning-time of a new hope. Transcendentalism was an assertion of the inalienable integrity of man, of the immanence of Divinity in instinct. In part, it was a reaction against Puritan Orthodoxy; in part, an effect of renewed study of the ancients, of Oriental Pantheists, of Plato and the Alexandrians, of Plutarch’s Morals, Seneca and Epictetus; in part, the natural product of the culture of the place and time. On the somewhat stunted stock of Unitarianism, — whose characteristic dogma was trust in individual reason as correlative to Supreme Wisdom, — had been grafted German Idealism, as taught by masters of most various schools, — by Kant and Jacobi, Fichte
