If the Transcendental movement was ever or ganized, this did not take place until 1836 (Sep tember 19th), when Emerson, Hedge, Alcott, and others formed the so-called Hedge or Transcenden tal Club. Little came of this organization until The Dial was started in 1840, and Brook Farm (q.v.) founded in 1841. Neither enterprise was fully successful, but both were very influential upon literature and thought, though not greatly upon action. Under Margaret Fuller (q.v.) and Emerson 7'he Dial was a hospitable receptacle for the verses of the Transcendentalist poets— C. P. Craneh (q.v.), the younger IV. E. Chan ping (q.v.), and others, whose merits are slowly being recognized—and for many of the best papers of the two editors, and of Thoreau (q.v.). It did not create or recreate American literature, but it undoubtedly stimulated important writers. Brook Farm was laughed at by the hard-headed, and not effectively supported by many of the leading Transcendentalists themselves, but it set up a beneficial ideal of "plain living and high thinking," it furnished Hawthorne material for his Blith-edale Romance, and it doubtless leavened the utilitarian spirit of the country and the age.
No writer upon New England Transcenden talism has failed to remark upon the exceedingly elusive character of the movement. It is difli cult to its elements, to delimit it in point of time, to say what it really accomplished, to determine what it became. If it had been fully organized the case would have been dif ferent for the student, yet the results would probably have been less fortunate, both to the Transcendentalists themselves and to the Ameri can people at large. Not being hampered by or ganization, by formulas, by the apparatus of propagandism, the Transcendentalists were better able to serve a more specific cause of greater moment—that of Abolition. They were also en abled to follow the bent of individual genius after having experienced, as Wordsworth had before them, the stimulating effects of having lived in a visionary period, when it was bliss merely to be alive, and when to be young was very heaven.
Emerson became the favorite moralist of his countrymen, and an important poet; Alcott gave full vent to his eccentricity, and ended as the patron saint of the Concord Philosophers; Margaret Fuller had a brilliant and only too short career as a critic and woman of letters; Ripley by his reviews in The Tribune and his services with C. A. Dana (q.v.) as an eneyelo predist showed that a Brook Farmer was capable of valuable, if homely, work in the cause of letters and science; Thoreau revealed nature to his countrymen. and became a high priest of individualism, as well as a writer of truly classic prose; Theodore Parker died just before the be ginning of the crusade of which he was perhaps the greatest preacher. Last, but not least, thou sands of men and women throughout New Eng land were inspired by Transcendentalism to de vote themselves to every form of philanthropy, including educational and temperance reform, to acquire a varied and genuine culture, and to become public-spirited citizens. The era of the Transcendentalists was in many respects an American Renaissance, the effects of which were not confined to this country, but were spread, chiefly through the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Charming, to England and to some extent to the Continent of Europe. That their ideas were vague and often transcended reason, not to say common sense, that their literary' work was largely amateurish, that their extravagances gave much occasion to legitimate ridicule, that their so-called movement was the forerunner of religious and social manias of all sorts, can scarcely be gainsaid; but it is equally idle to deny the loftiness of their aims and the impor tance of their works.
Consult the various lives of Emerson, Ripley, Channing, J. F. Clarke, Parker, Margaret Fuller, Alcott, Thoreau, etc. Also Cooke, Unitarianism in America (Boston, 1903) ; id., The Poets of Transcendentalism (ib., 1903) ; Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England (New York, 1S76) ; Swift., Brook Farm (ib., 1900) ; T. W. Higginson, Old Cambridge (ib., 1900).