My Friends at Brook Farm | Page 5

campaign, Elder Evans, inviting him to make an
address before the Shaker community at Harvard, Mass., asked him to
please bring "the old white coat, that our folk may know it is you, for
sure."
It is possible there may have been some little feeling of resentment
against this sort of patronage expressed in the dragging on of the old
white coat with the sleeves awry and the collar turned under, but I am
sure that as a rule Mr. Greeley gave very little thought as to
wherewithal he would be clothed.
Horace Greeley never had half a chance to develop the finer qualities of
his nature--and he knew it. He was a tremendous worker and as an
aggressive editor, an ambitious politician and an ardent reformer,
driven like a steam engine, he could give little heed to the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune, but he was sensitive as a girl to rebuffs
bringing to mind what might have been. Among friends with whom he
felt at home and in really congenial company, he was a different being
from the hard hitting fighter and eccentric philosopher known to the
public. At our home he was with the children like a child, genial and
companionable as an elder brother. In the house of the Carey sisters,
where I saw him years later, he was happy and care-free. Phoebe and
Alice Carey, poets and essayists, had Sunday evening gatherings at
their home in New York, where the choice spirits of the literary world

held converse after the manner of their kind, as at the assemblies in the
Paris salons of the 18th century. In this company Mr. Greeley was at
his best, animated, witty and charmingly affable. He realized, only too
well, that his best was wasted in the strife which was his daily portion
and which ended in the disastrous defeat that cost him his life. The
flashes of aroused egotism that sometimes blazed out in red-hot words,
were only signs of impatience and regret that he had been deprived of
opportunity to cultivate the amenities and graces of life and to gain
control of the higher powers he consciously possessed. Any one who
will take the trouble to-day to read his later writings, his tribute to old
friends and his essays like that on "Growing Old Gracefully," will be
led to know that Horace Greeley had the soul of a poet.
Through acquaintance with Thurlow Weed my father came to know Mr.
Greeley and through Mr. Greeley he came to know Dr. George Ripley
and the circle of literary folk in Boston of which he was the center.
Boston was not at that time a literary city. If there was a seat of
literature in America, then, it was to be found in Philadelphia, there
being very little visible evidence of literary activity, in the three-hilled
town; no Old Corner Book Store, no publishing house like Ticknor and
Fields, no Scarlet Letter, no Atlantic Monthly and no Evening
Transcript, subsequently one of the best newspapers from a literary
point of view this country ever had. There was, however, at the period
referred to, about 1840, a coterie of brilliant intellectual people in
Boston and Cambridge many of whom attained, later, some degree of
eminence in the literary world.
These were young men and women of fine culture, liberal in opinion
and animated by a new spirit of the times which was in this country
first manifested in their midst. At that period a wave of interest in what
was then known as social reform swept over France and Germany and
reached our shores in Massachusetts Bay, eventually extending all
through the north and northwest, conveying new social and political
ideas to thousands of intelligent Americans. These new ideas were
discussed at the meetings of the thinking young folk above referred to,
at which meetings they also held other high debates on matters
philosophic, poetic, educational, etc. They eventually established a

periodical as their organ called The Dial, a publication which
immediately attracted wide attention by the admirable literary style of
its articles as well as by their originality and commanding interest. The
Dial had the effect of imparting greater cohesion to the company of
editors, contributors and others interested in its publication, and these
presently became known to the world as the Transcendentalists; a word
borrowed from Germany and rather too formidable for general use in
our busy country.
Whether they were overweighted by their ponderous title or whether
they created an artificial atmosphere too etherial for common mortals,
the first generation of Transcendentalists was also the last. They had no
successors and The Dial, as their organ, was short lived. It undoubtedly
exercised a considerable influence in its day; and individual members
of the long-named fraternity did much to mould