He was a Lexington
farmer's son, with the temperament of a blacksmith, with
enormous, restless energy, a good hater, a passionate lover of
all excellent things save meekness. He died at fifty, worn out,
in Italy.
But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau,
the most representative of the group, the student of the
Transcendental period will be equally interested in watching its
influence upon many other types of young men: upon future
journalists and publicists like George William Curtis, Charles A.
Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists like Orestes Brownson,
Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon poets like
Jones Very, Christopher. P. Cranch, and Ellery Channing. There
was a sunny side of the whole movement, as T. W. Higginson and F.
B. Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, loved to
emphasize in their talk and in their books; and it was shadowed
also by tragedy and the pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one
looks back at it, in the perspective of three-quarters of a
century, it seems chiefly something touchingly fine.
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