Transcendentalism in New England: A HistoryFrothingham, Octavius Brooks
Philosophy
Transcendentalism in New England: A History
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks
Transcendentalism (New England)
The men who sympathized with the same movement in America felt the same
gratitude to their leader. Already in 1829 "The Aids to Reflection" were
republished by Dr. James Marsh. Caleb Sprague Henry, professor of
philosophy and history in the University of New York in 1839, and before
that a resident of Cambridge, an enthusiastic thinker and eloquent
talker, loved to dilate on the genius of the English philosopher, and
was better than a book in conveying information about him, better than
many books in awakening interest in his thought. The name of Coleridge
was spoken with profound reverence, his books were studied
industriously, and the terminology of transcendentalism was as familiar
as commonplace in the circles of divines and men of letters. At present
Hegel is the prophet of these believers, Schelling is obsolete, and
Coleridge, the English Schelling, has had his day. The change is marked
by an all but entire absence of the passionate enthusiasm, the
imaginative glow and fervor, that characterized the transcendental
phase of the movement. Coleridge was a vital thinker; his mind was a
flame; his thoughts burned within him, and issued from him in language
that trembled and throbbed with the force of the ideas committed to it.
He was a divine, a preacher of most wonderful eloquence. At the age of
three or four and forty Serjeant Talfourd heard him talk.
"At first his tones were conversational: he seemed to dally with
the shallows of the subject and with fantastic images which
bordered it; but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice
deepened with the thought; the stream gathering strength seemed to
bear along with it all things which opposed its progress, and
blended them with its current; and stretching away among regions
tinted with ethereal colors, was lost at airy distance in the
horizon of fancy." At five-and-twenty William Hazlitt heard him
preach.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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