Many with an income barely sufficient for
comfortable living set aside a fund for purchasing books before anything
else. Emerson could even write to Carlyle that all the bright girls in New
England wanted something better than morning calls and evening parties, and
that a life of mere trade did not promise satisfaction to the boys.
In 1800 there were few foreign books in Boston, but the interest in them
developed to such an extent that Hawthorne's father-in-law and
sister-in-law, Dr. and Miss Peabody, started a foreign bookstore and
reading room. Longfellow made many beautiful translations from foreign
poetry. In 1840 Emerson said that he had read in the original fifty-five
volumes of Goethe. Emerson superintended the publication in America of
Carlyle's early writings, which together with some of Coleridge's works
introduced many to German philosophy and idealism.
In this era, New England's recovery from emotional and aesthetic starvation
was rapid. Her poets and prose writers produced a literature in which
beauty, power, and knowledge were often combined, and they found a
cultivated audience to furnish a welcome.
THE TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.
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