This text is part of:
[183]
soon created for itself a wide public.
It was his articles, as Mr. Emerson has since told me, that sold the numbers; that is, as far as they did sell, which was not very far. The editor was to have had two hundred dollars as her annual salary, but it hardly reached that sum, and I believe that the whole edition was but five hundred copies.
I can testify to the vast influence produced by this periodical, even upon those who came to it a year or two after its first appearance, and it seems to me, even now, that in spite of its obvious defects, no later periodical has had so fresh an aroma, or smacked so of the soil of spring.
When the unwearied Theodore Parker attempted, half a dozen years after, to embody the maturer expression of the same phase of thought in the “Massachusetts quarterly review,” he predicted that the new periodical would be “The Dial, with a beard.”
But the result was disappointment.
It was all beard, and no “Dial.”
During the first year of the “Dial's” existence, it contained but little from the editor,--four short articles, the “Essay on critics,” “Dialogue between poet and critic,” “The Allston exhibition,” and “Menzel's view of Goethe,” --and two of what may be called fantasy-pieces, “Leila,” and “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain.”
The second volume was richer, containing four of her most elaborate critical articles,.-“Goethe,” “Lives of the great Composers,” “Festus,” and “Bettine Brentano.”
Few American writers have ever published in one year so much of good criticism as is to be found in these four essays.
She wrote also, during this period, the shorter critical notices, which were good, though unequal.
She was one of the first to do hearty justice to Hawthorne, of whom she wrote, in 1840, “No one of all our imaginative writers has indicated a genius at once so fine and so rich.”
Hawthorne was at that time scarcely known, and it is singular to read in her diary, four years earlier, her account
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.