We read in a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, dated March 12, 1835, that Dr. Charming “lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called ‘The Transcendentalist,’ as the organ of a spiritual philosophy.”  Again on the 30th of April of the same year, in a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of Carlyle to this country, Emerson says:—­

“It was suggested that if Mr. C. would undertake a journal of which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be made to secure him a support.  It is that project which I mentioned to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,—­a book to be called ’The Transcendentalist;’ or, ‘The Spiritual Inquirer,’ or the like....  Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured.”

The idea of the grim Scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to know as “The Dial!” A concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra!  It was much safer to be content with Carlyle’s purring from his own side of the water, as thus:—­

“‘The Boston Transcendentalist,’ whatever the fate or merit of it may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom.  There must be things not dreamt of over in that Transoceanic parish!  I shall certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better.”

There were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the Transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the close connection which Emerson had with one of them and the interest which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more deeply concerned.  These were the periodical just spoken of as a possibility realized, and the industrial community known as Brook Farm.  They were to a certain extent synchronous,—­the Magazine beginning in July, 1840, and expiring in April, 1844; Brook Farm being organized in 1841, and breaking up in 1847.

“The Dial” was edited at first by Margaret Fuller, afterwards by Emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse, among them “The Conservative,” “The Transcendentalist,” “Chardon Street and Bible Convention,” and some of his best and best known poems, “The Problem,” “Woodnotes,” “The Sphinx,” “Fate.”  The other principal writers were Margaret Fuller, A. Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, Henry Thoreau, Eliot Cabot, John S. Dwight, C.P.  Cranch, William Ellery Channing, Mrs. Ellen Hooper, and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan.  Unequal as the contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest.  It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and enthusiasm.  Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard