Hugh Garland and Orestes Brownson were once friends. And that is thing that I would to discuss. Brownson was a Transcendentalist early in career — certainly in late 1830s and early 1840s. Garland’s article on Democrat Review in 1839, where his was critical on Bank of United States. And then Brownson was writing in education in the Democrat Review in 1842. Garland wrote him a 1842 letter
[F]or you are my friend–unconsciously to yourself the most intimate and precious friend I have…. You have given voice and utterance it what has been anxiously struggling in my bosom for years—cast a ray of light athwart the dark welting chaos of the Past, Present, and Future—given shape and distinctness to a wild sea of thought-furnished the lofty, heart-gladdening ideal for which my soul had been longing-in a word, you have led me through the wilderness and placed in my hand the golden bough which serves as a talisman to conduct me into Elysian Fields.
Garland was inquiring about Garland’s three daughters be eligible to Brook Farm School in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Very strange, because Brook Farm School is a Transcendentalist institution. What’s going here? Short answer, I don’t know.
(1) Professor James Marsh was teaching at Hampden-Sydney College when Garland was a student there. Marsh wrote an introduction to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. Garland read it and praised Marsh. Marsh and Ralph Waldo Emerson was fans of Coleridge — and, I guess, Garland also.
(2) University of Virginia are in early of 1830s were pre-Transcendentalist. They have news ideas, rather the old ideas, for instance.
(3) Democrat public education were to central to Garland’s and Brownson’s attitudes. Or something else!