“In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the Spiritualist adopts it as most in nature.  The Oriental mind has always tended to this largeness.  Buddhism is an expression of it.  The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says, ‘Do not flatter your benefactors,’ but who in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.

“These exacting children advertise us of our wants.  There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.”

The person who adopts “any presentiment, any extravagance as most in nature,” is not commonly called a Transcendentalist, but is known colloquially as a “crank.”  The person who does not thank, by word or look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a churl.

Nothing was farther from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity.  But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products.  They claimed more for each other than was reasonable,—­so much occasionally that their pretensions became ridiculous.  One was tempted to ask:  “What forlorn hope have you led?  What immortal book have you written?  What great discovery have you made?  What heroic task of any kind have you performed?” There was too much talk about earnestness and too little real work done.  Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled no arduous summit.  In short, there was a kind of “Transcendentalist” dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time.

In reading the following description of the “intelligent and religious persons” who belonged to the “Transcendentalist” communion, the reader must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait,—­a friend and not a scoffer:—­

“They are not good citizens, not good members of society:  unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions, foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society.  They do not even like to vote.”

After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this is what they have to say:—­