Seven years later, aproachingt the same topic from another point of view, and with more experience of his countrymen, Emerson said in the first number of the Massachusetts Quar terly: The aspect this country presents is a certain maniacal i activity, an immense apparatus of cunning machinery, which turns out at last some Nuremberg toys. Has it gen erated, as great interests do, any intellectual power? One would say there is nothing colossal in the country but its geography and its material activities; that the moral and the intellectual effects are not on the same scale with the trade and production. . . . It is a poor consideration that the country wit is precocious, and, as we say, practical; that political interests on so broad a scale as ours are administered by little men with some saucy village talent; by deft partisans, good cipherers, strict economists, quite empty of any superstition. . . . The state, like the individual, should rest on an ideal basis. As soon as men have tasted the enjoyments of learning, friendship, and virtue — for which the state exists -- the prizes of office appear polluted, and their followers outcasts.
The profound discontent so manifested, yet lightened by an ideal hope of better things, was working in the mass of the Northern people, as well as in this small nucleus of Platonists and agitators of New England, New York and Ohio. While The Dial had to perish for want of subscribers, the Tribune of New York rose up to more than fill its place; and Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, George Ripley and George William Curtis found Greeley ready to give them a hearing in his daily and weekly newspaper, which had readers everywhere. It reported Emerson's lectures, the sermons of Parker and printed the higher criticism of Rip ley, Dana and Margaret Fuller. Political parties began to be formed on ideal issues and courageous minorities began to grow into tri umphant majorities here and there.
In this escape out of the ideal into the prac tical Emerson rather unwillingly found himself involved. He began to be popular, and his books, which up to 1850 had scarcely paid for the cost of publishing them, became a source of moderate income. He had followed up the publication of essays in The Dial by the issue in 1841 of a volume selected from his earlier lectures and essays, a second series iri 1843, a collection of his orations annexed to a reprint of 'Nature' in 1849, and in 1850 his most effective book for European recognition of his high quality, the
way had been prepared for his extended reputa tion in England and on the continent by his visit there in 1847-48, when he lectured exten sively in England and SCotland under arrange ments made for him by Alexander Ireland of the Manchester Guardian and by his friend Carlyle and others in London. He had even aroused the envy of Mrs. Carlyle by his wel come in England among the aristocratic circle to which he had access through his friends George Bancroft and Charles Sumner, as well as by the simple dignity of his own manners, which admitted him everywhere in the exclusive society of great cities. On this visit he saw something of the French Revolution of 1848, and made acquaintance in England with Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, Fronde and others of the rising young men in literature, as well as the older men of letters whom he met at the breakfasts of Rogers and in the circle to which Carlyle, long resident at Chelsea, be longed.
Emerson had ever been more forward to publish his friends' books than to hasten to the press with his own. The first edition of 'Sartor Resartus' in America was introduced by him in a preface, and he took charge later of American editions of the 'French Revolution' and the earlier essays of Carlyle, by all which the author received from sales in America before 1842 about $1,000, which he assured Emerson was more than he had then got from his books (not his review articles) in Great Britain. Emer son also edited the first edition of Jones Very in 1839, and promoted the earlier volumes of Ellery Channing and Thoreau from 1840 to 1854, when Thoreau issued the second of the only two volumes published in his lifetime. Altogether, for Carlyle, Margaret Fuller and his other friends, he had caused to be printed three times as many volumes as appeared of his own writing during the 20 years after his second marriage in 1835. In 1852, while in the midst of his lecturing popularity, he paused at Buffalo, N. Y., from one of his extended tours to urge on his friends at Plymouth to gratify the ambition of Ellery Channing, who would figure as a lecturer as well as a poet. Emerson wrote then to Marston Watson, the Evelyn,'" as Alcott styled him, thus (4 Jan. 1852) : Mr. Scherb is a very proper person to take w part in your series of Sunday lectures, and will gladly do so. One other person I should like well to have engaged, my friend Ellery Charming. But I dare not quite say he has any lecture for your purposeuntil I hear his lecture on the ' Future: Both the others of his three I have heard; and though they are full of wit and criticism or sarcasm all round the compass, he needs practice and pruning. I am sorry on his very account to leave home just now; for I wish more that he should lecture than that should.