“The Creator moves the creature, and the creature moves the created.

“We know God by looking towards Him with the single eye.

“To-morrow I go with R. W. Emerson to Harvard to see Lane and Alcott, and shall stay until Sunday.  We shall not meet each other, for I can meet him on no other grounds than those of love.  We may talk intellectually together, and remark, and reply, and remark again.”

We give the reader from the diary the following estimate of a transcendentalist, mainly to serve as a background for the picture which Isaac Hecker drew of his own mind in the succeeding pages: 

“June 14.—­A transcendentalist is one who has keen sight but little warmth of heart; who has fine conceits but is destitute of the rich glow of love.  He is en rapport with the spiritual world, unconscious of the celestial one.  He is all nerve and no blood—­colorless.  He talks of self-reliance, but fears to trust himself to love.  He never abandons himself to love, but is always on the lookout for some new fact.  His nerves are always tight-stretched, like the string of a bow; his life is all effort.  In a short period he loses his tone.  Behold him sitting on a chair; he is not sitting, but braced upon its angles, as if his bones were of iron and his nerves steel; every nerve is drawn, his hands are closed like a miser’s—­it is his lips and head that speak, not his tongue and heart.  He prefers talking about love to possessing it, as he prefers Socrates to Jesus.  Nature is his church, and he is his own god.  He is a dissecting critic—­heartless, cold.  What would excite love and sympathy in another, excites in him curiosity and interest.  He would have written an essay on the power of the soul at the foot of the Cross. . . .

“That the shaping of events is not wholly in our own hands my present unanticipated movement has clearly demonstrated to me. . .  I know of no act that I could make which would have more influence to shape my destiny than my union with the Catholic Church. . . .  It is very certain to me that my life is now as it never has been.  It seems that I live, feel, and act from my heart.  That reads, talks, hears, sees, smells, and all.  All is unity with me, all love.  Instead of exciting thoughts and ideas, as all things have done heretofore, they now excite love, cheerful emotion, and gladness of heart.

“To the Spirit within I address myself:  So long as I struggled against Thee I had pain, sorrow, anguish, doubt, weeping, and distress of soul.  Again and again have I submitted to Thee, though ever reluctantly; yet was it always in the end for my good.  Oh! how full of love and goodness art Thou to suffer in us and for us, that we may be benefited and made happy.  It is from Thy own pure love for us, for Thy happiness cannot be increased or diminished, that Thou takest upon Thee all the suffering of the children.

“Lord, if I would or could give myself wholly up to Thee, nothing but pure joy, complete happiness, and exquisite pleasure would fill all my spirit, soul, and body.  The Lord desires our whole happiness; it is we who hinder Him from causing it by our struggles against His love-working Spirit.