For all
these men and women tried to hitch their wagon to a star.
CHAPTER VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY
Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that great
generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other
men--romancers, poets, essayists, historians--who shared in the
intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely
artists in prose and verse than they were seekers after the
unattainable. Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at
Brook Farm with some of the most extreme types of transcendental
extravagance. The movement interested him artistically and he
utilized it in his romances, but personally he maintained an
attitude of cool detachment from it. Longfellow was too much of
an artist to lose his head over philosophical abstractions;
Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct for the
concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor.
Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman
preferred to keep their feet on the solid earth and write
admirable histories.
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