It was soon after this that the _Dial_ was projected. It had its origin in the Transcendental Club, a little knot of speculative students at Boston, who met four or five times a year at one another's houses to discuss questions mainly theological, from more liberal points of view than was at that time common, 'the air then in America getting a little too close and stagnant.' The Club was first formed in 1836. The _Dial_ appeared in 1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals. Emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last half of its existence he acted as editor. 'I submitted,' he told Carlyle, 'to what seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism--I know not what else to call it--and took charge of our thankless little _Dial_ here, without subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any labourer; it has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be transcribed or circulated, and we always are waiting until somebody shall come and make it good. But I took it, and it took me and a great deal of good time to a small purpose' (July 1, 1842). On the whole one must agree that it was to small purpose. Emerson's name has reflected lustre on the _Dial_, but when his contributions are taken out, and, say, half a dozen besides, the residuum is in the main very poor stuff, and some of it has a droll resemblance to the talk between Mrs. Hominy and the Literary Ladies and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. Margaret Fuller--the Miranda, Zenobia, Hypatia, Minerva of her time, and a truly remarkable figure in the gallery of wonderful women--edited it for two years, and contributed many a vivid, dashing, exuberant, ebullient page. Her criticism of Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word, but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose contributor, again saving the one great name, has anything to say that is so readable. Nearly all the rest is extinct, and the _Dial_ now finds itself far away from the sunshine of human interest. In 1841 the first series of Emerson's Essays was published, and three years later the second. The Poems were first collected in 1847, but the final version was not made until 1876. In 1847 Emerson paid his second visit to England, and delivered his lectures on Representative Men, collected and published in 1850. The books are said to have had a very slow sale, but the essays and lectures published in 1860, with the general title of _The Conduct of Life_, started with a sale of 2,500 copies, though that volume has never been considered by the Emersonian adept to contain most of the pure milk of the Word.