Some sixty years after this entry was made, I undertook a literary pilgrimage to Wolcott in company with a friend. We crossed the mountain from Plantsville and, on the outskirts of the village, took dinner at a farmhouse, one wing of which was the little Episcopal chapel in which the Alcott family had worshipped about 1815. It had been moved over, I believe, from the centre. The centre itself was a small green, bordered by some dozen houses, with the meeting-house and horse sheds, on an airy summit overlooking a vast open prospect of farms and woods, falling away to the Naugatuck. We inquired at several of the houses, and of the few human beings met on the road, where was the birthplace of A. Bronson Alcott? In vain: none had ever heard of him, nor of an Alcott family once resident in the town: not even of Louisa Alcott, whose “Little Women” still sells its annual thousands, and a dramatized version of which was even then playing in New York to crowded houses. The prophet and his country! We finally heard rumors of a certain Spindle Hill, which was vaguely connected with traditions of the Alcott name. But it was getting late, and we availed ourselves of a passing motor car which set us some miles on our way towards the Waterbury trolley line. This baffled act of homage has seemed to me, in a way, symbolical, and I have never renewed it. It was Emerson’s belief that the faintest promptings of the spirit are also, in the end, the practical rules of conduct. A paragraph written in 1837 has a startling application to the present state of affairs in Europe: “I think the principles of the Peace party sublime. . . . If a nation of men is exalted to that height of morals as to refuse to fight and choose rather to suffer loss of goods and loss of life than to use violence, they must be not helpless, but most effective and great men: they would overawe their invader and make him ridiculous: they would communicate the contagion of their virtue and inoculate all mankind.” Is this transcendental politics? Does it belong to what Mr. Roosevelt calls, with apt alliteration, the “realm of shams and shadows”? It is, at all events, applied Christianity. It is the principle of the Society of Friends; and of Count Tolstoy, who of all recent great writers is the most consistent preacher of Christ’s gospel. ----- [1] _Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820–76._ Edited by E. W. Emerson and Waldo E. Forbes. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1909–14. [2] _Ralph Waldo Emerson._ By O. W. Firkins. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915. THE ART OF LETTER WRITING