materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.”

“The materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that.  The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance.—­His thought, that is the Universe.”

The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of “Transcendentalists” was applied, and which made itself an organ in the periodical known as “The Dial,” has been written about by many who were in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of it at second hand.  Emerson was closely associated with these “same Transcendentalists,” and a leading contributor to “The Dial,” which was their organ.  The movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any other writer.  So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best witness.

In his “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” he sketches in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the development of the “new views” above mentioned.  “There are always two parties,” he says, “the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement.”

About 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in literature.  In our own community the influence of Swedenborg and of the genius and character of Dr. Channing were among the more immediate early causes of the mental agitation.  Emerson attributes a great importance to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of Edward Everett, who returned to Boston in 1820, after five years of study in Europe.  Edward Everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as Rufus Choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great orator.  These wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life in a few old men’s memories.  It is therefore with delight that one who remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant, grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the harmonies of utterance,—­it is with delight that such a one reads the glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett.  It is enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great master of academic oratory.