Among the many popular descriptions of New England Transcendentalism which ran current in its own day, the most usual and least malicious were those which stressed its ethereality. Transcendentalism means “a little beyond,” said Emerson's friend with a wave of her hand. A meeting of the Club was like going to heaven in a swing, according to one earth-bound observer. And for many Bostonians “the model Transcendentalist,” as O. B. Frothingham pointed out, was not Emerson or Parker but Cyrus Bartol, minister of the West Church. For Bartol appeared to fit the public preconception. “He seems a man who lives above the clouds,” Frothingham remarked, “— not always above them, either.”