[55] Mr. Alcott records in his memoranda that Margaret Fuller “gave her views of the proposed ‘Dial,’ which she afterwards edited.” This is the first record, so far as I know, of the precise name of the periodical, this being apparently borrowed from a manuscript bearing the same name and composed by Mr. Alcott.1 Meanwhile, to accentuate the literary tendency of the new movement in a yet more marked way, a young Harvard graduate, Robert Bartlett of Plymouth, then Latin tutor at the University, who was an occasional member or visitor of the Symposium Club, had taken for his Master of Arts oration in 1839 this daring theme, “No good possible but shall one day be real,” and had thus boldly turned his searchlight upon the position and prospects of American literature :--
When Horace was affecting to make himself a Greek poet, the genius of his country, the shade of immortal Romulus, stood over him, post mediam noctem visus quum somnia vera, and forbade the perversion. ... Is everything so sterile and pygmy here in New England, that
