If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward, look, the land is bright. I A NEW ENGLAND MYSTIC N this age of tumult, when so many old ideals are shattered and so many new ones proved false or futile, it is probable that there may be but little interest in the work of an obscure New England thinker of the nineteenth century. Yet the impartial critic will sometimes look backward with a certain regret to that older day, between 1830 and 1880, and admit that he finds then more original thinking and more good writing than in any other similar period in our literary history. Among the group of thinkers who made those years memorable a distinctive position must be accorded to Bronson Alcott; he was preeminently our New England mystic. Mysticism is foreign to our practical American temper. We demand that our knowledge shall be clear and definite. Some profound and familiar truths, indeed, we accept on their own evidence, confessing that they are not susceptible of clear statement before the understanding. We know that we only disguise our own ignorance in such words as "force," "being," "spirit." But we are content to use them without clear definition and are impatient of any attempt to fathom their meaning by any process of introspection. The mystic, on the contrary, cannot rest satisfied with the admission that such transcendental truths are beyond the grasp of our intellect; to him they seem precisely the kind of truths best worth knowing. He is constantly striving after some higher mode of knowledge, some spiritual apprehension, something which he may experience though he cannot express. He often finds his highest satisfaction in a mental state that transcends pure intellectual apprehension, and delights, like old Sir Thomas Browne, to lose himself in mystery and pursue his reason to an O Altitudo! This was certainly true of Alcott. He was obsessed by one or two great truths and spent his life trying to utter them. He talked like an oracle, talked endlessly, and his listeners felt for the hour as if in the power of some strange inspiration. And the better the listener, the more potent this influence upon him. Yet he never was able to reduce this high Delphic talk to plain statement in print. "Alcott has, said Emerson, "the greatest passion both of mind and temper in his discourse; but when the conversation is ended, all is over." Other thinkers, like Coleridge, have influenced their contemporaries, as Alcott did, mostly by personal interviews and conversation; but Coleridge, though he never elaborated any philosophical system, did leave a body of writings from which set consistent opinions, philosophical, religious, and critical, may readily be educed. When you look to-day for Alcott's works, however, you find only three or four thin volumes, like the Tablets and Table Talk, made up of gnomic sentences and paragraphs without much system or connection. It is perhaps less surprising that he should have found difficulty in the attempt to apply his ideas in practice; yet it was the dream of some of his best years to do just that. It is the purpose of this paper to give a brief account of his two principal attempts, with some indication of the philosophic principles that prompted them and the results he hoped to attain by them. Although he was to be the most transcendental of New English transcendentalists, Alcott was not one of the New England Brahmin type. His birthplace was the rural Connecticut town of Wolcott; his father was a small farmer; his mental training, for several years after graduating from the cross-roads country schoolhouse, was mostly gained while working in Mr. Hoadley's clock factory or peddling tinware in Virginia. But he managed to read a good deal and to think more, and he early began to show his remarkable power of conversation. Several hospitable Virginia gentlemen found him no ordinary peddler, and welcomed him to homes of culture where he found good books and good talk. During the last of five annual visits to the South he passed some months among people of a yet different type, the Quakers of North Carolina. Here he read, during a long illness, the writings of Penn and George Fox, Barclay's Apology, Law's Serious Call, all of which strengthened and fixed the mystical tendency in his thinking. It was two years later that he found his career. He taught for a little time in the public schools of Bristol and Wolcott, and in the fall of 1825 he opened in the adjoining town of Cheshire a school of his own. The most characteristic work of his life had begun; he was really a teacher the rest of his days. At first this Cheshire School differed little from the ordinary Connecticut common school of the period, but Alcott's ideals of the purpose and methods of education were already taking shape, and he at once began to embody them in his school. Two great principles decided all his teaching: first, that the moral culture of the pupil ought always to accompany his intellectual training; second, that all education should mean the bringing out of the native capacity of the child, or, to use Alcott's own phrase, "the production and exercise of original thought." The child is educated not by what is imparted from without to his merely receptive mind, rather by what he learns for himself and from himself. In accordance with these principles the teaching in the Cheshire School took the form of suggestive and interesting conversation; the curiosity of the pupil was constantly stimulated; he was taught to define for himself the meaning of all words he used or found in his reading, and to find out facts and truths—especially truths— for himself. A small well-chosen library was placed at his disposal. Some of the books were beyond the full appreciation of children, but it was a part of Alcott's plan always to make the child's mind look up. In the government of the school special effort was made to develop the child's sense of personal responsibility and the power of moral judgment. Two superintendents were appointed, at intervals, from the pupils themselves, whose duty it was to oversee the schoolroom, record all misdemeanors, and sometimes to take charge of the room in the absence of the teacher. The Cheshire School soon attracted the favorable attention of educators not only in Connecticut but in adjoining states. The Boston Recorder, at that time the most influential paper in Boston, in the summer of 1827 quoted a Connecticut writer as saying that Mr. Alcott's school in Cheshire was "the best common school in this State, perhaps in the United States." A Society for the Improvement of Common Schools at its annual meeting, in Hartford, in 1827, elected Alcott to membership, and appointed a committee to examine the principles and methods of the new school. But while there were flattering notices from educational experts there was growing dissatisfaction at home. It is not easy to introduce new ideas into an old community. Plain Cheshire folk probably looked with some suspicion upon such a departure from their traditional conception of what a schoolmaster ought to do and thought the new sort of education their children were getting a doubtful substitute for practical drill in the three R's, enforced upon stupidity or laziness by the occasional use of the birch. Whatever the causes, confidence in the school declined. The number of pupils fell from eighty to thirty, and after about two years of trial, Alcott gave it up. Several But he had by no means abandoned his educational ideals. His story for the next half dozen years is the record of various not very successful attempts to put them into practice, and in 1834 he opened the famous Temple School, which must always be associated with his name. years earlier he had made his first extended stay in Boston and gained the friendship of Emerson and Channing. One day in the summer of 1828 he writes in his journal, with fine enthusiasm, after listening to a sermon by Channing: "There is a city in our world upon which the light of the sun of righteousness has risen-a sun which beams in its full meridian splendor there. . . . It is the city that is set on high; it cannot be hid. It is Boston, whose morality is of a purer and more elevated kind than that of any city in America. Channing is its moral teacher." It was to Boston, then, that Alcott, after two rather discouraging |