In his lecture on the Transcendentalists he says: "... But their
solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the
conversation, but from the labors of the world: 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 enterprises 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." A less sympathetic observer, Harriet Martineau, wrote of them:
"While Margaret Fuller and her adult pupils sat 'gorgeously dressed,'
talking about Mars and Venus, Plato and Goethe, and fancying themselves
the elect of the earth in intellect and refinement, the liberties of the
republic were running out as fast as they could go at a breach which
another sort of elect persons were devoting themselves to repair; and my
complaint against the 'gorgeous' pedants was that they regarded their
preservers as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and their work as a
less vital one than the pedantic orations which were spoiling a set of
well-meaning women in a pitiable way.
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