Emerson, writing to Carlyle in March, 1842, speaks of the “dubious approbation on the part of you and other men,” notwithstanding which he found it with “a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion.”  So, when Margaret Fuller gave it up, at the end of the second volume, Emerson consented to become its editor.  “I cannot bid you quit ‘The Dial,’” says Carlyle, “though it, too, alas, is Antinomian somewhat! Perge, perge, nevertheless.”

In the next letter he says:—­

“I love your ‘Dial,’ and yet it is with a kind of shudder.  You seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations and such like,—­into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing.  I know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof.”

A curious way of characterizing himself as a critic,—­but he was not always as well-mannered as the Houyhnhnms.

To all Carlyle’s complaints of “The Dial’s” short-comings Emerson did not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty, with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite.

“For the Dial and its sins, I have no defence to set up.  We write as we can, and we know very little about it.  If the direction of these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession to fathers and mothers,—­the boys, that they do not wish to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and evening parties.  They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead.  Perhaps one of these days a great Yankee shall come, who will easily do the unknown deed.”

“All the bright boys and girls in New England,” and “‘The Dial’ dying of inanition!” In October, 1840, Emerson writes to Carlyle:—­

“We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform.  Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.  I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly.  George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.  One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope.”

Mr. Ripley’s project took shape in the West Roxbury Association, better known under the name of Brook Farm.  Emerson was not involved in this undertaking.  He looked upon it with curiosity