In 1840 a slightly bewildered and grumpy John Quincy Adams observed in his diary that a young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson, “after failing in the every-day avocations of a Unitarian preacher and schoolmaster, starts a new doctrine of transcendentalism.” And along with this transcendentalism, Adams complained, “Garrison and the non-resistant abolitionists…, phrenology and animal […]
Source : New England Ecstasies
