7 - The Hope of Reform

Summary

Religious controversy and the publishing of periodicals absorbed much of the Transcendentalists' energy during the early 1840s. But larger movements caught their attention as well. The various reform movements sweeping the country seemed to offer support to the theory that a new age was indeed at hand, an age when the mountainous obstructions of inherited evil would be forced to yield to the pure force of spirit. Life would learn to conform itself to the idea in the mind; a new church and state would flow outward from the wellsprings of regenerate souls. In an 1839 lecture, “Literature” (from a series entitled “The Present Age”), Emerson had predicted that the genius of the time would soon “write the annals of a changed world and record the descent of principles into practice, of love into Government, of love into Trade. It will describe the new heroic life of man, the now unbelieved possibility of simple living, and of clean and noble relations with men.”

The sense that great things were taking place or were about to take place in the world often made Emerson at once hopeful and chagrined. He wrote to his young friend Caroline Sturgis in October 1840 that he felt that he and his friends were “the pets & cossets of the gracious Heaven, have never known a rough duty, have never wrestled with a rude doubt, never once been called to anything that deserved the name of an action. … I am daily getting ashamed of my life.”