a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond the reach of the receding waves.  Thoreau wrote for nearly every number.  Margaret Fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her part as a contributor as well as editor.  Theodore Parker came down with his “trip-hammer” in its pages.  Mrs. Ellen Hooper published a few poems in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories.  Others, whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent contributions.  It is a pleasure to turn back to “The Dial,” with all its crudities.  It should be looked through by the side of the “Anthology.”  Both were April buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the pledge of a better season.

We get various hints touching the new Magazine in the correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle.  Emerson tells Carlyle, a few months before the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge of our young people than any he has had.  It is true that unfledged writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more interesting.  This was the time above all others when out of the mouth of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength.  The feeling that intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the inspiration of these “young people” to whom Emerson refers.  He has to apologize for the first number.  “It is not yet much,” he says; “indeed, though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had.—­The Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know.”  They did print “The Problem.”  There were also some fragments of criticism from the writings of his brother Charles, and the poem called “The Last Farewell,” by his brother Edward, which is to be found in Emerson’s “May-day and other Pieces.”

On the 30th of August, after the periodical had been published a couple of months, Emerson writes:—­

“Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism; and the Dial, poor little thing, whose first number contains scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public.”

Carlyle finds the second number of “The Dial” better than the first, and tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with his usual air of superiority.  He distinguishes what is Emerson’s readily,—­the rest he speaks of as the work of [Greek:  oi polloi] for the most part.  “But it is all good and very good as a soul; wants only a body, which want means a great deal.”  And again, “‘The Dial,’ too, it is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like.  Will no Angel body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee man, with color in the cheeks of him and a coat on his back?”