They walked in dry places, seeking rest and
finding none. The Transcendentalists are not collectively important
because their _Sturm und Drang_ was intellectual and bloodless. Though
Emerson admonish and Harriet Martineau condemn, yet from the memorials
that survive, one is more impressed with the sufferings than with the
ludicrousness of these persons. There is something distressing about
their letters, their talk, their memoirs, their interminable diaries.
They worry and contort and introspect. They rave and dream. They peep
and theorize. They cut open the bellows of life to see where the wind
comes from. Margaret Fuller analyzes Emerson, and Emerson Margaret
Fuller. It is not a wholesome ebullition of vitality. It is a nightmare,
in which the emotions, the terror, the agony, the rapture, are all
unreal, and have no vital content, no consequence in the world outside.
It is positively wonderful that so much excitement and so much suffering
should have left behind nothing in the field of art which is valuable.
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