THE FERMENT OF THOUGHT.
IT was a remarkable agitation of mind that went on in Massachusetts thirty years ago. All institutions and all ideas went into the furnace of reason, and were tried as by fire. Church and State were put to the proof; and the wood, hay, stubble every thing combustible -- were consumed. The process of proving was not confined to Boston: the whole State took part in it. It did not proceed from Boston as a centre: it began simultaneously in different parts of the Commonwealth. It did not seem to be communicated, to spread by contagion, but was rather an intellectual experience produced by some latent causes which were active in the air. No special class of people were responsible for it, or affected by it. While in Boston the little knot of transcendentalists -- Channing, Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Alcott, Francis, Hedge, Parker were discussing the problems of philosophy at the Tremont House and elsewhere, the farmers in the country, and plain folks of Cape Cod, were as full of the new spirit as they, and were reaching, though from the opposite region of common sense, the same intrepid conclusions. It was a time of meetings and conventions for reforms of every description. A man of the people like Theodore Parker, utterly free from conventionality, knowing no distinctions of persons, equally at home with learned and simple, interested in what Epictetus calls the