"
To her, as to Emerson, Nature brought an inspiring message. On an early May
day she wrote:--
"The trees were still bare, but the little birds care not for that; they
revel and carol and wildly tell their hopes, while the gentle voluble
south wind plays with the dry leaves, and the pine trees sigh with their
soul-like sounds for June. It was beauteous; and care and routine fled
away, and I was as if they had never been."
[Illustration: MARGARET FULLER]
The transcendentalist, while voicing his ecstasy over life, has put himself
on record as not wishing to do anything more than once. For him God has
enough new experiences, so that repetition is unnecessary. He dislikes
routine. "Everything," Emerson says, "admonishes us how needlessly long
life is," that is, if we walk with heroes and do not repeat. Let a machine
add figures while the soul moves on. He dislikes seeing any part of a
universe that he does not use. Shakespeare seemed to him to have lived a
thousand years as the guest of a great universe in which most of us never
pass beyond the antechamber.
[Illustration: AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT]
Critics were not wanting to point out the absurdity of many transcendental
ecstasies.
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