The scope and spirit of your paper on Democracy2 delight
and satisfy me beyond all expectation, and I write without compliment or reserve to
The Man, The American Columbus, whose
loc_tb.00394.jpg
sagacity has thus sounded
adventurously the sea of our Social Chaos and anchored his thought securely in soil
of the newly discovered Atlantides about which Grecian Plato
died Dreaming. Especially have I to thank you for dialing such doughty thrusts into
the sides of the British Behemoth3 sending him bottomwards. All
you say of the Imperial West is strong and is.
I loc_tb.00395.jpg talked last evening with
Emerson4 about your strong strokes at the thoughtless
literature and Godless faith of this East—nothing as yet to show of original
type—wholly null and empty of ideas—only Thoreau5 to
redeem it from idiocy and fatuity.
That dutiful drill of yours, too, in Humanity during the dread struggle of these
loc_tb.00396.jpg last years gives to your
thought a sanction and potency which Universities cannot claim nor confer
Correspondent:
Amos Bronson Alcott
(1799–1888) was an American educator, abolitionist, and father of Louisa
May Alcott (1832–1888), whose 1868 novel Little
Women (loosely based on the Alcott home) secured the financial
stability her father had been unable to achieve through his own work as a
teacher and transcendentalist. See also The Journals of
Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938),
286–290.