The Strong Women in Emerson’s Life

This month we begin a Series profiling some of the strong women who were very much a part of Emerson’s life, starting in his childhood. We start with his Aunt Mary Moody, who was instrumental in shaping Emerson’s ideas, writing and actions, starting after his father died when Emerson was just eight-years-old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Aunt Mary Moody Emerson delivered “the most important part of Emerson’s education,” ultimately influencing his views, reading habits, and his writing. [1] Waldo [2] wrote “A good aunt is more to the young poet than a patron.” [3]

Her involvement in Waldo’s life commenced after his father William Emerson died in 1811 and Mary stepped in to help his widow Ruth raise her five sons. While Mary changed her living situation frequently, her influence was provided through thousands of letters and copies of her journal Almanack, started when she was 20 years old. Waldo began his own journal, The Wide World when he was 17 years old and a student at Harvard. She counseled all the Emerson boys to do what they were afraid to do.

Mary’s Almanacks and letters became a rich source of material for Waldo in his own writing, his poems, essays, and lectures. He kept four MME workbooks and often pleaded with Mary to send him sections of her Almanack, which he routinely copied and referred to as his career progressed from minister to author and speaker. After rereading Mary’s letters in 1841, he wrote, “Aunt Mary…is a genius always new, subtle, frolicsome, judicial, unpredictable.” [4]

Mary Moody Emerson was born in 1774 to William and Phebe Bliss Emerson; one of their five children, who also included Waldo’s father. Shortly after the American Revolution commenced beside the family home – Concord’s Old Manse – and with her father going to war as a military chaplain, two-year old Mary was sent to her grandmother in Malden, Massachusetts. (This was not an uncommon practice to share responsibility for children among family members).

Mary’s father, William, died in 1776 and even after her mother, Phebe, remarried Mary was not called back home. She often referred to this period as her “infant exile.” [5] Her grandmother also died when Mary was four years old and she was adopted by her Aunt Ruth Emerson. Mary’s childhood was characterized by drudgery and a lack of money and food.

Despite humble beginnings and very little access to formal education, Mary became a prolific (but largely unpublished) writer and a voracious reader of works by such authors as Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Plato, and Boston minister William Ellery Channing. She directed her nephew Waldo to read and appreciate these writers.

Mary decided at an early age not to marry (although she was asked). Fiercely independent, by the 1830s Mary championed causes of those oppressed, including antislavery movements and women’s rights to better education. She supported her nephew Charles as he gave an antislavery address in Concord in 1835, and attended several abolitionist gatherings. She counted intellectual and free-thinking women as her friends and confidantes, including educator Elizabeth Peabody, scholar Elizabeth Hoar, abolitionist Mary Merrick Brooks, scientist and educator Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Waldo’s wife Lidian Emerson. Mary introduced Lidian to Mary Merrick Brooks, prompting Lidian to join Concord’s Female Antislavery Society. 

Mary’s appreciation for nature and its impact on thought occurred much earlier than the mid-nineteenth century reflections that permeated essays, books, and talks written by Waldo, Thoreau and others. In the early 1800s, in the words of her biographer, “she lived and wrote a celebration of the solitary imagination and of nature as analogous to God, valuing both explicitly as a woman’s resources.” [6] In 1831, Mary purchased a farm in Waterford, Maine, which she named Elm Vale. She often wrote to her nephews to share her appreciation for the landscape surrounding Elm Vale, including the mountains, the trees and Bear Pond. Waldo, Ruth (Waldo’s mother), Charles and Lidian Emerson, Elizabeth Hoar, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Elizabeth Peabody, all visited Mary at “Elm Vale”. Mary sold Elm Vale in 1851, which was necessary but also very difficult for her. Before she left she wrote in her Almanack, “What a bird dancing on that graceful limb. Had I but his iron pen how could I give praise for every bird & tree w’h have met my responding senses in this tranquil and beautiful vale.” [7]

Energetic and very outspoken, Mary was often considered difficult and challenging. But those challenges were more than compensated with her commitment and support to the contemporaries and young people she valued. After meeting with Mary when she was 77 years old, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “it is perhaps her greatest praise and peculiarity that she, more surely than any other woman, gives her companion occasion to utter his best thought. In spite of her own biases, she can entertain a large thought with hospitality…In short, she is a genius…” [8]

Robert Richardson, Jr., author of the Emerson biography The Mind on Fire, wrote in praise of Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism, “Mary Moody Emerson was a founder of Transcendentalism, the earliest and best teacher of R. W. Emerson and a spirited and original genius in her own right.” [9]

Mary Moody Emerson died on May 1, 1863, at the age of 88. Six years later, on March 1, 1869 Waldo delivered an address entitled Amita (Latin for Aunt) to the New England Women’s Club in Boston. More than 100 people attended – including Lidian and Ellen Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, Julia Ward Howe and Louisa May Alcott. In his talk he said that Mary “gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.” The minutes recorded from the event pointed out that the presentation enabled attendees to consider “a New England woman of rare gifts and originality of character.” [10]

[1] Robert D. Richardson Jr., Mind on Fire. (Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1995). 23.

[2] While at Harvard, Emerson decided that he wanted to be addressed as “Waldo” not “Ralph.”

[3] Qtd in Evelyn Barish, Emerson. The Roots of Prophecy. )Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989). 53.

[4] Qtd in Richardson, 25.

[5] Qtd in Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 71.

[6] Qtd in Cole, 8

[7] Qtd in Cole, 279.

[8] Qtd in Cole, 283.

[9] Robert D. Richardson Jr., Book jacket blurb, back cover of Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. Paperback and hardcover editions.

B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Diamond

In the nursery on the second floor of the Ralph Waldo Emerson House in Concord is a substantially-sized antique wooden rocking horse -- with a rounded base, leather saddle and ears, and a horse-hair mane and tail. It stands about three feet tall and four feet long. By Emerson family tradition, the horse's name is "Diamond." On the base, a carved inscription reads: 

Built about 1750
Bought of Mrs. Sophia Parker
At Woods Hole 1825
By Lydia Jackson of Plymouth

Given to children of N. & C. Russell
And by them returned to her son
E. W. E. Concord 1849
Repaired 1885

For as long as I have been a regular visitor to the Emerson House, the rocking horse has always stood out as a fascinating object: full of character, a bit strange, nostalgic, suggestive of idyllic Victorian childhoods and lost Yankee-pastoral ways.

I've always been curious, too, about its history and provenance. The brief version of this history on the base answers some questions, but raises others. Lydia Jackson was Ralph Waldo Emerson's second wife, who hailed from Plymouth on the Massachusetts coast. "E.W.E." was Emerson's youngest son, Edward Waldo Emerson. But other details and persons are not as well known. I decided to try to chase down some of the history of the rocking horse. What I found was an entertaining and adorable story -- one that follows Diamond all over New England; touches on themes of childhood, illness, family, and domesticity; and involves two dramatic incidents at sea -- one of them a shipwreck.

In 1825, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, Massachusetts went to stay with her maternal aunt, Sophia Cotton Parker, in Woods Hole, near Falmouth, on the southwestern coast of Cape Cod. It was a three-week trip, one that Lydia, later called Lidian, would for the rest of her life remember fondly -- and to which she would even attach great, if somewhat obscure, significance. Lydia was twenty-three years old at the time, an orphan from the age of sixteen: intellectual, eccentric, sickly, deeply interested in matters of religion and the spirit, and, although not widely considered a great beauty, striking in appearance, with dark brown hair and a complexion of "Cherries in milk," as one admiring female friend had it. She had not yet met Ralph Waldo Emerson, the minister-turned-lecturer-and-essayist who would later become her husband and companion of forty-seven years. 

Ever since the nearly simultaneous death of both her parents in 1818, Lydia had boarded with various relatives in Plymouth, including, since 1821, her uncle Rossiter Cotton and aunt Priscilla Jackson Cotton. Her mother's sister Sofia Parker -- "Aunt Parker" as she was known -- lived 40 miles to the south in the seaside village of Woods Hole, where for years Sofia and her husband Seth Parker kept a local tavern. Seth Parker had died in 1814, and at the time of Lydia's visit to Woods Hole the widow Parker was seventy years old. Lydia counted her stay with Aunt Parker to be "one of the most important and interesting occasions of her life," as she later told her daughter Ellen, although she could never quite pinpoint why. She spent much of her time alone, on the hill behind the house, thinking to herself and reading Walter Scott's novel The Betrothed. "I don't know how it was, it was different from any other experience," she told Ellen. "I felt all the time as if my Mother's spirit was very near me."

The death of her parents was only one of the two major hardships that had afflicted Lydia in recent years. The other was a bout of scarlet fever she contracted in 1821 at age nineteen, which nearly killed her and left her permanently riddled with digestive problems and other mysterious ailments, whether organic or psychosomatic. In the aftermath of her illness, Lydia had developed a strict, ascetic diet; slept four hours per night (in emulation of Napoleon, an improbable hero for a twenty-three-year old woman with reclusive tendencies); experimented with a variety of medical therapies, from hydrotherapy to mesmerism to homeopathy; and observed an exercise routine that included her dancing steps, jumping rope, and leaping over a wooden footstool. The solace she found at her aunt's home in Woods Hole was welcome respite from the privation and anxiety of Lydia's life since the death of her parents.

Still, she needed to keep up her exercises, and it was in this context that Lydia first encountered the rocking horse, already an antique in 1825. Its early history is obscure. The toy had once belonged to Aunt Parker's son John Parker, Lydia's older cousin, who had received it as a gift from family friends in Roxbury around 1800 when he was a boy. Nothing else is known of the rocking horse's earlier history, except for what we are told by the inscription on its base: that it was made around 1750. And so about fifty years of the horse's history are essentially a blank. Given that it came to Woods Hole from Roxbury, it seems reasonable to assume it was fashioned somewhere in Boston or its environs — although who knows? After the Parker children grew up, the horse seems to have stayed in the immediate family. When Lydia saw the rocking horse, according to Ellen's later account, she "took a notion that it would be good exercise for her to ride it every day--almost as good as riding a real horse." Lydia offered to trade a mahogany table she owned back in Plymouth for the horse. Aunt Parker agreed, and, according to Ellen, "the exchange was effected by sea."

If a grown woman buying a child's toy for her own use seems a little strange, Lydia probably had more than just her exercise regimen in mind. Lydia was at that time just warming up to what was evidently her new familial role, that of a spinster-aunt. John Parker remembered that she had bought the horse not for herself, but rather for her niece, Sophia Brown -- the eight-year-old daughter of Lydia's older sister, Lucy Jackson Brown. Lydia was a doting aunt to Sophia and her younger brother Frank, and would become even more involved in their care after Lucy's miscreant husband Charles Brown abandoned the family, running off to Istanbul, in 1834. Regardless of who was its intended recipient, though, the horse was soon bound by ship for Plymouth, and Lydia's cousin John, a sailor and a veteran of the naval war of 1812, agreed to accompany what had once been his own childhood toy on its journey thence.

At this point, the story of the rocking horse takes a picaresque turn. According to a later account by Ellen Emerson, John Parker reported that "some drunken sailors” aboard the ship “pushed it overboard." And what do you do with a drunken sailor? Ellen’s account goes on: "The Captain he scolded them & made 'em look for it, & they found it, only its head was broken off in the fall." After cousin John delivered the broken pieces of the rocking horse in Plymouth, presumably retrieving the mahogany table in the process, Lydia herself returned to Plymouth at the end of her three weeks in Woods Hole. Once home with her aunt and uncle Cotton, she was able to get the toy mended. And indeed if you examine the artifact closely today you can see a fracture line where the head was clearly broken off and reattached.

The details of the next twenty-five years or so of the rocking horse's history are somewhat sketchy, although the object seems to have remained in Plymouth. Sophia Brown presumably played with it as a toy in her childhood. Ultimately it was given -- or possibly sold -- to family friends. The inscription informs us that the horse was "given to children of N. & C. Russell," without specifying exactly when. "N. & C. Russell" were Nathaniel Russell, Jr. (1801-1875) -- the older brother of Lydia's best friend Mary Russell -- and Nathaniel's wife, Catherine Elliott Russell (1807-1884). Nathaniel and Catherine Russell's four children were Elliott (b. 1828), Martha (b. 1830), Francis (b. 1832), Anna (b. 1835), Nathaniel (b. 1837), and Kate (b. 1840). Some or all of these Russell children likely played with the rocking horse.

The larger Russell clan were among Lydia's closest connections in Plymouth. Mary Russell was her friend and confidante. Mary and Nathaniel's father, also named Nathaniel, was an iron manufacturer, local notable, and former ship's captain who in 1827 had purchased a fine Federal-style mansion in downtown Plymouth. "Captain Russell," as he was known, was an ebullient personality and a friend of Lydia's parents before their deaths. It was natural that the rocking horse should be left in the orbit of this prominent local family when, in 1834, Lydia departed Plymouth to begin her new married life with Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord. In fact, it was inside the Russell home on Court Street that Lydia, by then aged 32, first met Emerson, at a social gathering after a lecture he had given in Plymouth in February 1834. A brief courtship and proposal followed. Depending on when the rocking horse was given to the Russell children, it may have been on the premises for Lydia and Waldo's first meeting. Alternatively, if the horse was still in Lydia's possession, it may have looked on during their wedding at Winslow House in Plymouth on September 14, 1835.

In any case, the toy did not follow the newlyweds when they moved to Concord into the house they would call "Bush" (now the Ralph Waldo Emerson House). Waldo and Lydia -- who was now renamed "Lidian" at her husband's prompting -- lived in Concord for the next forty-seven years, as the couple hosted a constant stream of visitors in their home, Waldo became one of the preeminent figures in American literature, and Lidian gave birth to four children: Waldo (b. 1837), Ellen (b. 1839), Edith (b. 1841), and Edward (b. 1844). The rocking horse did not figure into the childhoods of the older Emerson children, although there are glimpses to suggest that other toy horses were present in the home. In July 1839, Emerson writes of Waldo in his journal: "I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies & iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, & writing & come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when he threatens his whole threat 'I will not love you.'" Waldo died of scarlet fever in 1842, at age five -- an event that devastated both parents and inspired Emerson's poem "Threnody." Lidian's old rocking horse, meanwhile, gathered dust in the garret of the Russell house on Court Street.

Rocking horses do not appear again in the historical record of the Emerson household until early 1848 -- a time of great activity for Emerson and the world at large. Democratic revolutions against monarchical rule were exploding across Europe; the potato crop failed in Ireland, leading to the Great Famine and mass Irish emigration to America; Italian unification was heating up; and a women's right's convention formed at Seneca Falls, New York. Emerson was in the midst of an eight-month journey abroad to Great Britain and France, from November 1847 until June 1848. In the course of his trip, his second to Europe, Emerson lectured all over England and Scotland, renewed his friendship with Thomas Carlyle, observed a mass Chartist convention in London, and visited Paris in the recent aftermath of the February Revolution. It was an eventful and formative experience for him, which he wrote about extensively in his book English Traits (1856).

But a more domestic duty also weighed on Emerson as he toured Europe. Before he had left Concord for Europe, the family's youngest son Edward, then aged three, had asked his father to bring him back a "red London orange" (a blood orange? a child's fancy?) and a rocking horse. In January 1848, Emerson was lecturing his way through Yorkshire when he received a letter from his eight-year-old daughter Ellen encouraging his speedy return home and reminding him of his promises to "Eddy." The plea came in the form of a rhyming poem:

Father is absent, at England is he,
He went in a ship a few weeks ago.
His form we do not any one of us see
Except in our dreams, -- when we wake we say, No.
O father, come quickly, bring Edward the red
His red London orange, & rockinghorse too.
For he would not like to know that tis said.
That oranges are no more red than they're blue.

Emerson shared Ellen's poem with Elizabeth Ashurst Biggs, the daughter of a radical lawyer and abolitionist hosted him in Manchester (and later a novelist in her own right). He commented that Ellen's verses were "pretty good for a girl who is not yet nine."

Emerson followed through on his promise, although he did not buy the rocking horse until the summer. His miscellaneous notebook of expenses from July 1848 records transactions with three London merchants -- John Davison of Hatton Garden, Robert Henderson of Snow Hill, and Paul Leach of Holborn -- with the word "rockinghorse" written next to them; it is unclear what part each of these men had in the fashioning of the toy. Although Emerson's notes are fragmentary and ambiguous, the purchase was apparently made for 50 shillings. Nothing is known of this other, English rocking horse that was intended for Edward -- not even its name. (Nothing more at all is said of the red London orange.) Emerson arranged to have the horse -- along with two busts of the Egyptian goddess Isis that he had also purchased on his European travels -- sail back to America aboard the Ocean Monarch, an emigration barque bound for Boston, which departed Liverpool on the morning of August 24, 1848.

But Eddy's London rocking horse never made it. The Ocean Monarch's August voyage, as it happened, turned into one of the most notorious shipwrecks of the mid-nineteenth century. The ship, launched the previous year and built by the Canadian-American designer Donald McKay, of clipper ship fame, was the largest in the American merchant fleet at the time, measuring 177 feet. Eight hours into her journey out of Liverpool, a fire broke out in the stern of the ship, probably caused by steerage passengers who had been smoking and from whom the captain had earlier confiscated smoking pipes. Passengers panicked and began jumping overboard. The ship dropped anchor, and after an extensive rescue effort conducted by nearby ships who had spotted the blaze, the Ocean Monarch sank 14 fathoms to the bottom of the sea, taking 179 souls with her -- as well as Emerson's furniture bound for Concord: the two busts of Isis and Eddy's rocking horse.

We know about the demise of the London rocking horse from a letter by Waldo to his older brother William on October 19, 1848, near the end of his European sojourn, which explains what happened and also efficiently recounts what happened next. "Did I tell you that Eddy's rocking horse & my casts of Isis were lost in the Ocean Monarch?" he asks. "The bill of landing was bro't me by Joseph Lyman. Lidian & the boy received the news at Plymouth, & Nathaniel Russell, to whom Lidian had once sold an old family rocking horse, only junior to the Trojan Horse, magnificently explored his garret, & made it a present to Eddie. The horse arrived in Concord amidst uproarious acclamations of our youngest people." And so there you have the story of how Diamond came back into the family: upon receiving the disappointing news that her son's toy was at the bottom of the ocean, Lidian had gone to her old friends the Russells. Captain Russell had dug out the old antique -- "only junior to the Trojan horse" -- of her young adulthood, told Eddy it was now his, and had the horse shipped to Concord, where it arrived to shouts of joy from the other Emerson children, Ellen and Edith.

It was at this point, according to Ellen Emerson, that the horse was given the name Diamond. The horse remained a beloved object among the Emerson children; this much is evident from the attention Ellen and Edward devoted to gathering and preserving its history when they were both adults. In 1870, after relaying an aging John Parker's memories of the rocking horse's misadventures at sea with the drunken sailors, and its subsequent repair, Ellen wrote to Edward: "Preserve this archive of the horse, I'll have it mended again." And she did, in 1885, if the inscription on the base is to be believed.

A later chapter of Diamond's history is known to me only because of family lore. For I have a more than scholarly connection to this object and its previous owners. Ralph Waldo Emerson was my great-great-great grandfather. Lidian was my great-great-great grandmother. Edward Emerson, "Eddy," their youngest son -- later a doctor and writer in his own right -- was my great-great grandfather. Edward's only surviving son, Raymond Emerson, to whom the rocking horse was passed on after Edward, was my great-grandfather. Raymond and his wife Amelia kept the rocking horse in the front hall of their home in Concord; upon their deaths, the horse was given back to the Emerson House, where it remains today.

I remember the first time I saw Diamond, it was during a tour of the Emerson House sometime around 2013, when I was reading quite a bit of Emerson's writing, becoming acquainted with his life and legacy as I studied American cultural and intellectual history in graduate school, and attempting to reconnect with the Emerson branch of my family history. I brought two nephews of mine -- my sister's sons -- on a tour of the Emerson House, where I had never been before, and where we were greeted graciously at the door by a guide. The guide walked us through the house without realizing that we were all of us descendants. When we reached the nursery, she pointed out the rocking horse and claimed that descendants of Ralph Waldo Emerson were still permitted, to this day, to ride Diamond. I leaned over to my nephews and whispered, "want to hop on, boys?" They smiled and said nothing; the guide looked confused.

After my visit to the house, I asked my Dad if he remembered anything about Diamond. And indeed he had fond memories of "Dinah," as he misremembered the horse's name: romping over it with his siblings and older cousins, essentially manhandling the poor thing in the foyer of his grandparents home during the 1950s. It's lucky, in all that horseplay, that they didn't break off the head again!

Charlie Riggs, PhD,
Great-Great-Great Grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Frequently Asked Questions

We receive many questions from visitors to the Ralph Waldo Emerson house. Following is a sample of some of the frequently asked questions with our answers. Enjoy!

Why did Emerson choose to make his home in Concord after his marriage to Lydia Jackson?

His ancestral connection to Concord went all the way back to its beginning in 1635, as he was descended from one of the founders, Reverend Peter Bulkeley. His Grandfather William Emerson was at the North Bridge when “the shot heard round the world” was fired and eventually joined the Continental army as a chaplain. As a child, Emerson spent some time in Concord when life in Boston was too dangerous during the War of 1812. He moved to Concord and the Old Manse after his first wife died and he had traveled to Europe to figure out his life’s direction. His connections to the town were extensive.

He wanted to get away from the “compliances and imitations of city society.” Concord, with a population of around 2,000 – as compared to close to 100,000 in Boston – was very progressive with a lyceum by 1828, a library started in 1794, a strong antislavery society and a Mozart Society. By 1835, Concord had 66 college graduates and 6 school districts. And of course, Concord provided plenty of natural surroundings.

What were some of the topics of Emerson’s lectures?

Emerson’s range of content broadened as his career developed. He lectured on historical figures; aesthetics and the arts; the great causes of his day; important characteristics of humanity, such as duty, ethics, and self-reliance; and the connection between the mind and nature. His lectures were very well attended. For example, often his lectures in Boston had 300-400 attendees.

What did the Transcendental Club members talk about?

The Club was a forum for new ideas, frequented by Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, William Ellery Channing Elizabeth Hoar, a young Theodore Parker and other ministers including Frederick Henry Hedge, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, Convers Francis and Chandler Robbins, who succeeded Emerson at the Second Church in Boston.

Typically, each meeting would center on a single topic such as “American Genius;” “Education of Humanity;” and “On the Character and Genius of Goethe.” Meetings were held in members’ homes, including Emerson’s. They produced a quarterly magazine entitled “The Dial.”

What languages did Emerson know?

Emerson studied Latin and Greek from an early age. Well versed in the classics, he also knew Italian, German, and French.

In 1843, Emerson completed a translation of Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova, The New Life, from Italian. In addition, Emerson translated hundreds of lines of Persian poetry—from German sources—to his native English.

What is the significance of the painting of three women over the mantle in Emerson's study?

Known as “The Three Fates,” the work is drawn from Greek myth and is usually considered an allegory of the human condition in which the Fates are personified by three sisters, the Moirae, who govern our destinies. The youngest, Clotho, spins the thread of life, the second, Lachesis, determines the length, and the oldest, named Atropo cuts it.

Emerson would have first encountered the original of Francesco Salviati’s 16th-century work at the Pitti Palace in Florence in 1833. Still grieving the untimely death of his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, the image may have helped Emerson come to terms with the abiding loss. From another perspective, the painting may recall three women who nurtured and influenced him in youth: his mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson; his father’s sister, Mary Moody Emerson; and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, an aunt by marriage.

An early Hudson River School artist named William Wall, whom Emerson had met on that first trip abroad, knew he admired the Renaissance painting and had a copy made for him.

R. Davis, B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Whatever I May Call You

Visiting historic places can evoke a sense of history that we can not otherwise know. When we can occupy personal spaces, and experience how historical people inhabited these same rooms and landscapes, we can see aspects that inspired them, gain fresh perspectives, and make new connections. When a historic home, such as the Emerson House, retains the personal objects used by the people who lived there hundreds of years ago, a further contextualized layer is added to our experiences of the past anchored in place. The Emerson House collections bear many testaments to Henry David Thoreau’s close friendship with the family, and the times he resided together with them in their home. Other than his birthplace, where the Thoreau family resided briefly in his infancy, the Emerson House is currently the only home that Thoreau lived in that is open to the public as a museum. It was a place that he frequently visited, where he joined in conversation, made things with his hands, presented lectures, and partook in every day life. 

Recently a visitor to the Emerson House was inspired to ask if Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau called one another “Waldo” and “Henry” when they were in a room together. To have been a fly on the wall! This is one thing that the house itself can’t tell us. Without time travel, we can never know the actual words spoken between the two men in a period on the cusp of sound recording, but personal documents – letters and journals – can offer us insight.

We found a somewhat surprising answer. In his book Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jeffery S. Cramer points to the first letter in which Thoreau addressed Emerson by his diminutive name, “Waldo.” Thoreau began, “For I think I have heard that that is your name” (qtd in Cramer 70). This letter was written in 1848, when Emerson was lecturing in Europe and Thoreau was in residence at the Emerson home, staying with Emerson’s wife, Lidian, and their children at Emerson’s request. This was nearly eleven years after the two men met in 1837; seven years after Thoreau had first come to live with the Emersons in 1841; six years after the friends had mourned together the double loss of Thoreau’s brother John and the Emersons’ eldest son Waldo in January 1842; and three years after Thoreau had moved into his house on Emerson’s Walden Pond wood lot. Letters were a more formal mode of communication, but, for many years, Thoreau had been fondly called “Henry” by Ralph Waldo and Lidian Emerson, and was known as “Uncle Henry” to their young children (38). 

Previously, Thoreau had addressed his letters to Emerson, “My Dear Friend” (42, 69). This was perhaps owing to his deference to his elder and esteemed friend, who was fourteen years older than Thoreau. It was a term that carried deep affection, reflecting their familial relations and intimate kinship, for Thoreau continued, “Whatever I may call you, I know you better than I know your name” (70). Thoreau would often times, thereafter, refer to Waldo as “my friend,” (rather than by name) in his journal. 

 More than fifteen years after his friend’s death, Emerson, then seventy-five-years-old and suffering from aphasia, could no longer recall Henry Thoreau’s name. Although he had to call into the next room to ask Lidian to supply the words ‘Henry Thoreau,’ Emerson remembered his “best friend” no matter what he was called (102).

Works Cited: 

Cramer, Jeffery S. Solid Season: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2019.

K.L. Martin, PHD, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Christopher Cranch, Transcendentalist, Artist and Follower of Emerson

The following article, written by Sasha Archibald, is reprinted from The Public Domain Review and captures the essence of Christopher Cranch, who turned some of Emerson’s essay phrases into illustrations, and became a devoted friend. We have one of Cranch’s paintings in the Ralph Waldo Emerson house, given to Emerson as a thank you “for a lifetime of solace.”

Public Domain Review Article

Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892) is remembered for bringing levity to Transcendentalism. At the various gatherings that soldered the movement, the good-looking Cranch played the flute and guitar, loved to sing loudly, and pretended to talk to animals. “We have transcendental and aesthetic gatherings at a great rate”, he reported to his sister, “and they make me sing at them all. I have worn my Tyrolese yodlers almost to the bones . . . I am quite a singing lion.” Cranch was also quick with the pen, making witty sketches on the spot. His best party trick was to sketch satirical illustrations of sentences plucked from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836) — a book that Cranch and his friends admiringly devoured. Emerson’s earthy, concrete analogies invited image-making.

It started one evening, when Cranch and a friend, the minister and publisher James Freeman Clarke, began illustrating various Emerson quotes by literalizing the author’s figurative language. The two men doodled and giggled, so much so that when the visit ended, they continued to exchange drawings in the mail. Cranch was the more skilled artist, and Clarke egged him on. Clarke collected some of the drawings into a scrapbook, titled Illustrations of the New Philosophy, and sent others round to friends — all people who revered Emerson and received the satire with its intended geniality. The sketches were passed among Transcendentalist-leaning social circles in New York and Boston to the point that Cranch bragged, “My drawings . . . permeate all houses, as water doth a sponge. Wherever I go I hear of them.” Clarke also sent a selection directly to Emerson, who received the caricatures not as an insult, but an overture of friendship. Emerson and Cranch soon became lifelong friends.

The sketches were cheeky, teasing, and toothless. They deflated Emersonian pretention, but were clearly the product of genuine delight — Cranch found Emerson’s language lively and fresh, and the drawings were his simpatico reply. One of the most popular depicted Emerson’s head perched atop a giant ridged melon, captioned with the Nature quotation, “I expand and live in the warm day, like corn and melons.” Others were similarly straightforward. When Emerson said in an address at Harvard, “Men in the world today are bugs”, Cranch drew a horde of upright insects, and when Emerson exclaimed “How they lash us with those tongues of theirs!” Cranch drew eight rope-like tongues and a cowering victim. Cranch’s illustration of “Few grown-up persons see the sun” is precisely what it says: a cluster of learned adults clueless to the radiance above. Even when the satire was more acerbic, it was a joke among friends. One such doodle, now lost, depicted Margaret Fuller driving the Transcendentalist carriage, reins in hand, with Emerson lounging in the back seat.

The best known of Cranch’s sketches is the “transparent eyeball” drawing. The version featured below shows an eyeball in a dinner jacket and top hat, his optic nerves forming a low ponytail. It was shrewd of Cranch to home in on this baffling phrase. Eyeballs perceive transparency, but aren’t themselves transparent, so what did Emerson mean? Context helps, a bit. “Transparent eyeball” appears near the end of Nature’s first chapter, when Emerson is trying to describe precisely why walking in the woods has a curative effect.

Standing on the bare ground,— my head bathed by the blithe air,— and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Bodily dissolution is key to these enchanted moments, except the body can’t entirely dissolve, because one part of the body — the eyes — induces the dissolution. “I am nothing; I see all” is the operational tangle that leads Emerson to the paradoxical “transparent eyeball”. Cranch’s illustrative figure is appropriately at odds with itself. Its posture is debonair, and its hands seem to have melted away, but its large eyeball-head, with barely the suggestion of a lid, stares upward, rapt and transfixed, as if communing directly with the sun.

Some scholars have described these jottings as the pinnacle of Cranch’s life achievement. That’s a little harsh, but it’s true that Cranch’s cleverness never begat an illustrious career. He came from a prestigious, accomplished family that was deeply intertwined over three generations with that of President John Adams and his son, President John Quincy Adams. (John Adams and Cranch’s grandfather married two remarkable sisters, Mary and Abigail Adams; Christopher Pearse Cranch married John Quincy Adam’s sister.)

Cranch was less conventional than his father, grandfather, and brother, and less impelled to do things he didn’t like doing. The poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell described his friend thus: blessed with “gifts enough for three—only his foolish fairy left the brass out when she brought her gifts to his cradle.” As a young man, Cranch entered the ministry, but spoke with too much diffidence to be a charismatic preacher. He was never ordained, and instead traveled, taking the pulpit for short stints in different cities. His burgeoning interest in Transcendentalism threatened what thin career prospects he had, and after his dear friend and fellow Transcendentalist John Sullivan Dwight was forced to resign the ministry, Cranch quit in solidarity, and burned his sermons.

With no training of any sort, he announced at age thirty that he would become a landscape painter. Unfortunately, his talent was middling. A “major mediocrity” is how he’s described by his biographer. Cranch’s unorthodox career left his wife and family of three children perpetually short on funds. They couldn’t afford to live in New York — where “greenbacks melt like snowflakes on hot griddles”, Cranch complained in 1863 — and so they settled for a decade in Paris. Cranch painted a great deal, but he also translated Virgil, published poems and reviews in The Dial and other magazines, and wrote two novels for children. He corresponded with many distinguished friends, and penned opera star Jenny Lind’s adieu to her American audiences. But nothing stuck. Few of his paintings sold, and his four books of poetry landed too quietly. One of them, ill-advisedly titled Satan, reportedly sold not a single copy.

Like many humorists, Cranch was privately melancholic, and his depressive stints deepened as he aged. A posthumous tribute in Harper’s Magazine bluntly noted that Cranch was often silent and withdrawn. Certainly he had cause: the strain of his financial struggles, his artistic mediocrity, the fact that his father was mortified by his association with the Transcendentalists; the premature death of two sons.

Cranch himself, however, said the “blues” were simply part of his character, and always had been. For relief, he looked to music, and also to Emerson. Cranch could recite pages of Nature aloud; the book reliably lifted his spirits for four decades. Thirty-five years after the satirist and his subject went huckleberry picking together on Walden Pond, Cranch sent Emerson a new landscape painting to thank him for a lifetime of solace. “I owe you for all that your works have been to me.”

Emerson’s Mountain Interval

It is well known that the untimely death of Emerson’s young first wife in 1831 from tuberculosis, and his own unease with church ritual led to his separation from the traditional ministry. But what do we make of the 1832 midsummer trip he took to the high mountains of New England between deep personal loss and the new calling he would soon pursue?

Twenty-nine-year-old Emerson’s career as a minister was already in decline. In late spring he had explained to his colleagues at Second Church of his terms for continuing as Associate Minister, terms they would eventually reject. He confided to his journal: “I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry” (Selected Journals, 193).

But first Emerson found it necessary to simply leave town, and retreated to his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson’s home in South Waterford, Maine. As Mary’s biographer Phyllis Cole noted, “He sought distance from the city—and also a kindred, if critical listener.” Then Emerson pressed west to Conway, New Hampshire, and up the Mount Washington Valley for a stay at Ethan Allen Crawford’s hostelry, at what was then called “the Gate of the White Mountains,” the spectacular pass known today as Crawford Notch.[1]

Mountains in myth are associated with divinity and the arts. In the classic tradition, Mount Olympus was the sacred dwelling of the gods, Mount Parnassus the home of the Muses, closely associated with poetry and the oracular. Emerson was also intrigued by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who often invoked mountains in his nature-worshiping lyric poetry.[2] Philosophical, Wordsworth engaged in issues relating to individual spiritual experience within nature, as well as in organized religious community, as Emerson would—and before another year passed the two men would meet.

In his nature poetry, Wordsworth explored the heights and long views of mountain experience—the vast and infinite spaces in which humans may sense the divine, a presence engendering at once bliss and fear. The type of landscape that evokes this emotional response has long been called “sublime.” Decades later, Emerson would invoke this concept in the phrase “on the mountain-crest sublime” in his 1867 poem “Waldeinsamkeit” (Collected Poems, 189-91). 

However familiar Emerson already was with hilltops in myth and poetry, it was likely his own Aunt Mary who planted the seed of her nephew’s first-hand mountain musings, the direct experience that is to nature writing what field notes are to a scientist. A pioneer in the Transcendentalist movement and an early influence on her brilliant nephew, she enjoyed breathtaking views of the northern Appalachians from her home in South Waterford, Maine. As early as 1823, Emerson wrote to a friend: “My aunt…has spent a great part of her life in the country, is an idolater of nature, and counts but a small number who merit the privilege of dwelling among the mountains…as the temple where God and the mind are to be studied and adored, and where the fiery soul can begin a premature communication with the other world” (qtd. in Cabot, v. 1, 96-97).

Three years later, Emerson was considering mountains as a place to reflect and a timeless source of wisdom, as he wrote to Aunt Mary: “I behold along the line men of reverend pretension, who have waited on mountains or slept in caverns to receive from unseen intelligence a chart of the unexplored country, a register of what is to come” (qtd. in Cabot, v. 1, 113).[3]

Most of all, perhaps, Emerson’s scenic retreat in 1832 ultimately provided solitude, and the calm, remote atmosphere he needed to make a pivotal decision. From Conway on July 6, he wrote: “Here, among the mountains, the pinions of thought should be strong, and one should see the errors of men from a calmer height of love & wisdom. … Religion in the mind is not credulity, & in the practice is not form. It is a life” (Selected Journals, 193-94).

Ensconced at the top of Crawford Notch on July 14, he wrote: “The good of going into the mountains is that life is reconsidered…and you have opportunity of viewing the town at such a distance as may afford you a just view nor can you have any such mistaken apprehension as might be expected from the place you occupy & the round of customs you run at home (Selected Journals, 194).

Still agonizing on the 15th, he wrote: “A few low mountains, a great many clouds always cover-ing the great peaks, a circle of woods to the horizon, a peacock on the fence or in the yard, & two travel-ers no better contented than myself in the plain parlor of this house make up the whole picture of this unsabbatized Sunday” (Selected Journals,195).

But later that same day, he seems to reach the decision he will live with—he concludes he cannot continue with “indifference & dislike” to a church practice others consider “the most sacred” (Selected Journals, 195). Back in Boston in September Emerson delivered his last sermon to his pastorate, ex-plaining his resignation. After touring Europe, he returned home in 1833 to begin his major career as a public lecturer and writer.

Mountains continued to occupy a place in Emerson’s imagination, itineraries, and poetry. In an unguarded 1841 journal entry, he recalled Aunt Mary, his brothers, and the mountains when he wrote: “…I would fain quit my present companions…& betake myself to some Thebais, some Mount Athos in the depths of New Hampshire or Maine, to bewail my innocency & to recover it, & with it the power to commune again with these sharers of a more sacred idea” (Selected Journals, 778).

He enjoyed a long stay in the Adirondacks with like-minded friends in the summer of 1858. With daughter Ellen, he climbed Vermont’s Mt. Mansfield in 1868 and returned to Crawford Notch in 1875, going further north to Bretton Woods. He visited Yosemite in 1871, at John Muir’s invitation. And of course, he had rambled in the Berkshires and knew Mount Monadnoc from family excursions.

Mountains are the subject of, or appear in many of Emerson’s poems including “Waldeinsam-keit,” “The Adirondacs,” “The World Soul,” and “May Day.” His 1847 poem “Monadnoc” is among those that express the intuitive communion he felt when alone in the presence of limitless nature to be found in the high hills. Consider this passage:

(Collected Poems, 159-62)

After Emerson, many came to the White Mountains. The area also inspired his peers James El-liott Cabot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Thomas Starr King, Henry David Thoreau, and James Greenleaf Whittier. Much has changed since their time, but on a clear day Crawford Notch still affords spectacular views—and an otherworldly mood in autumn color, mist, twilight, or the fierce beauty of a storm in any season.

Today, the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Highland Center stands near the site of Ethan Craw-ford’s long-gone wayside inn. Last year some 14,000 guests stayed there, and countless others passed through as visitors seeking recreation, reflection, or renewal in the mountains.

1. We are indebted to Phyllis Cole’s excellent 1998 study, Mary Moody Emerson & The Origins of Transcendentalism, which gives a detailed record of Mary’s views of her nephew’s decision, his 1832 mountain interval, and cites his 1841 comparison of the White Mountains to the sacred hills of Greece.

2. As Marjorie Marjorie Nicolson noted in her landmark study of mountains in the history of Western thought, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, “There is no mountain mood or attitude we have found…that is not reflected in Wordsworth” (388). The epigraph is from Wordsworth’s 1814 poem “The Excursion.”

3. Emerson’s 1832 trip was not his first visit to the New Hampshire uplands. In August of 1829, he and his then fiancée Ellen Louisa Tucker visited Crawford Notch on a country vacation with hopes of improving her health. See “Meredith Village,” in Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Volume III, for his account of this tour.

Works Cited or Consulted

Cabot, James Elliot. A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 1. Boston/NY: Houghton/Riverside. 1895. Facsimile edition, nd.

Cole, Phyllis. Chapter 8, “God Within Us.” Mary Moody Emerson & The Origins of Transcendentalism. Oxford/NY: Oxford UP, 1998. 214-19.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Collected Poems & Translations. Harold Bloom and Paul Kane, eds. NY: Literary Classics of the United States. Library of America #70. 1994. 189-91. 49-60.

—-Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Volume 3: 1826-1832. “Meredith Village.” William H. Gil-man, Alfred R. Ferguson, eds. Cambridge/London: Harvard-Belknap/Oxford. 1963. 159-62.

—-Selected Journals, 1820-1842. Lawrence Rosenwald, ed. NY: Literary Classics of the United States. Library of America, #201. 2010.

Emerson, Ellen Tucker. Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson. Edith E.W. Gregg, ed. Volume 2. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1982. 176-79.

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: the Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. NY: Norton, 1963.

Wordsworth, William. “The Excursion.” The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Student’s Cambridge Edition. Boston/NY: Houghton/Riverside, 1903. 403-524, lines 223-226.

— R. Davis, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Emerson and Thoreau
Companions on a Journey of Self Discovery

In the early autumn of 1833, thirty-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson was in Liverpool, England, about to return home to Massachusetts. He traveled to Europe, in part, to assuage the pain from the death of his first wife, Ellen. Her death prompted him to resign the ministry, and reconsider the whole of his life.

In the next two years (by 1835), Emerson successfully launched a second career as an essayist and public speaker, published his seminal work titled Nature, married his second wife, Lidian, and purchased the home on Cambridge Turnpike in Concord. He was on his way to becoming one of this country’s most notable, quotable and important thinkers. The literary movement in Concord at the time predominately centered around Emerson. He was at the epicenter of American thought.

Emerson’s choice to settle in Concord in the mid-1830s changed the life of a young student Henry David Thoreau, who was fourteen years younger than Emerson.

There were many similarities between Emerson and Thoreau. Starting with a strong affinity for the town of Concord. Emerson’s connections to Concord went all the way back to the town’s founding in 1635, when his ancestor Peter Bulkeley was among the early English settlers. Emerson’s grandparents lived in “The Old Manse” when the Revolutionary War began at the Old North Bridge. After he bought his house in 1835, Emerson lived in Concord for the rest of his life.

Thoreau was born in Concord and lived in the town for most of his life with his parents, brother and two sisters. He described Concord as “his Rome” and although he traveled widely in the northeast, he had no desire to live elsewhere.

The two men were bound by a strong belief in the importance of nature in developing creative and independent thinking. To share this message with others, they both chose writing and lecturing for their careers.

A Lifelong Friendship

Emerson and Thoreau met in the spring of 1837. Most likely Lucy Jackson Brown (Emerson’s sister-in-law) brought Thoreau to Emerson’s home and shared snippets of Thoreau’s poems. The year before they met, Emerson had published his essay Nature and Thoreau had borrowed it from the library and read it twice.

Emerson started keeping a journal while at Harvard and in October of 1837 Thoreau started his own after Emerson asked him “do you keep a journal?” Their journals became an integral part of their writings.

Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side
Withstand the winter’s storm,
And, spite of wind and tide,
Grow up the meadow’s pride,
For both are strong.
Above they barely touch, but, undermined
Down to their deepest source,
Admiring you shall find
Their roots are interwined
Insep’arble (qtd in Cramer, 121)

In April 1841, Emerson invited Thoreau to “live with me & work with me in the garden & teach me to graft apples.” (Walls, 120). Thoreau had free run of Emerson’s library, time to study, roam and write as he pleased.

In May 1841, Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle that in his dwelling lived “a poet you may one day be proud of: – a noble manly youth, full of melodies and inventions. We work together by day in my garden and I grow well and strong.” (120)

Both men found walking calming and introspective, whether alone or in company. While walking, Thoreau’s eyes would be focused on the ground looking for twigs, arrowheads, and flowers. Emerson would often face skyward as noted in his lecture series, The Conduct of Life, Behavior, “Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.”

Thoreau lived with the Emersons until March 1843, when he left to go to Staten Island to tutor William Emerson’s children. Missing Concord, he returned in December.

In April 1847, Thoreau moved back and stayed with the family until Emerson returned from a European lecture tour in July 1848. Thoreau acted as head of a household that included, eight-year-old Ellen, six-year-old Edith, three-year-old Edward, Lidian, Lucy Jackson Brown and Emerson’s mother Ruth Haskins. Thoreau took care of the grounds, the kitchen garden and helped with financial decisions.

“The Country Knows Not Yet, or in the Least Part, How Great a Son it Has Lost”

Thoreau died on May 6, 1862 in Concord at only forty-four-years old. Bronson Alcott planned his funeral to be held at First Parish Church. The service was modeled after the memorial Thoreau had designed for abolitionist John Brown. It was a public event, a town ceremony.

Emerson wrote and delivered the eulogy at Thoreau’s funeral on May 9, 1862. Emerson’s closing remarks reflected his great respect for his friend and companion on the journey of self-discovery.

Works Cited:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Thoreau.” The Atlantic Monthly, August 1862.

Cramer, Jeffrey S. Solid Seasons, Counterpoint Press, 2019.

Walls, Laura Dassow Henry David Thoreau A Life, The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

— R. Davis, B. Ewen, M. Purrington, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

The American Scholar
Emerson’s Call to Awaken American Thought

In late June 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson was asked by the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society to address their annual meeting in August at the Battle Street Church in Cambridge. Emerson agreed and on August 31, 1837, he delivered “The American Scholar” to an impressive audience of theologians, writers, a Supreme Court Justice, and the president of Harvard. Emerson graduated from Harvard University in 1821.

Emerson utilized this opportunity to rail against the approaches to higher education, which were still focused on repetitive teachings of the past, reliant on European writers and artists, and increasingly leaning towards the importance of financial gain and material goods. Emerson declared, “The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind…they look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates” (Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems, 88). He encouraged Americans to recognize the new intellectual opportunities and to end reliance on other cultures. He prophesied, “Perhaps the time is already come…when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close” (83).

Emerson wrote “The American Scholar” at a time when America was becoming industrialized, causing the importance of the individual to be lost over the focus on the institution. Education was viewed as the path to wealth and position and not creative thinking and self-trust. He commented, “Colleges…can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their young on flame” (90).

Emerson stressed the importance of nature in developing creative and independent thinking. Original thought was natural and self-knowledge vital. He wrote, “The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature…every day, the sun; and after sunset, Night and her stars. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages” (85). He continued, “Its [nature’s] beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments…And, in fine, the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim (86).

He concluded his address by urging his audience to consider thought revolution as naturally American, “…this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar…thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him” (101).

Emerson was experiencing significant change and taking on daring new opportunities in his own life, including challenging the American educational system and creation of ideas in “The American Scholar.” He had recently published his first important essay, Nature, in 1836, which was also the year his beloved brother Charles died and his son Waldo was born. Emerson had delivered “The American Scholar” at Henry David Thoreau’s graduation from Harvard (it is unclear if Thoreau was present) and subsequently they met.

On September 8, 1836, less than a month after the “American Scholar,” and the day before Nature was published, the Transcendental Club was formed by ministers, writers and educators who agreed with Emerson’s thoughts expressed in “The American Scholar.” The founding members (including Emerson) “found the present state of thought in America ‘very unsatisfactory’’ (Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 245). Emerson was an active member of the Transcendental Club until it disbanded in 1844.

Amidst all of the life and cultural changes, Emerson was embarking on his remarkable 40 year career as an essayist, poet and speaker. Driven to share his thoughts publicly, his mind was racing with new ideas designed to increase individual expression and promote the importance of nature to thought and literature. As biographer Robert Richardson so aptly wrote, his was a Mind on Fire.

Although the reaction to “American Scholar” was somewhat mixed, Emerson published the talk at his own expense and all 500 copies were sold out within a month. Poet James Russell Lowell later reflected, “We were socially and intellectually moored to English thought till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue water” (266). Oliver Wendell Holmes called The American Scholar, “our Intellectual Declaration of Independence” (263).

Works Cited:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems. Bantam Books, 1990, pp. 83-102.

Richardson, Robert D. Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire, University of California Press, 1995.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

A Momentous Day: April 19, 1775

That day, full of fear and anticipation, hope and dread, leaving the past, with hearts, minds, bodies and a vision for a free future, is remembered with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem, “The Concord Hymn.”

Alerted by a single lit lantern at the Old North Church, riders including Paul Revere, Samuel Prescott, and William Dawes rode to warn the militia and Minutemen from local towns that the British army was on the move to Lexington and Concord seeking stores of arms.

Skirmishes along the way and the Battle at Lexington Green culminated in the Battle of the “Old North Bridge” in Concord, sending the British into retreat.

Emerson’s grandparents, the Reverend William Emerson and Phebe Bliss Emerson witnessed the struggle from their home, “The Old Manse,” located adjacent to the Old North Bridge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was asked to compose a poem for the dedication of a commemorative monument on July 4, 1837. The white granite obelisk was erected on the east bank of the Concord River. The bridge had since fallen into disrepair and was no longer there.

The poem called “The Concord Hymn” was sung at the dedication to the tune of the “Old Hundred”. (Attributed to Louis Bourgeois,1551)

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory May their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Listen to the Concord Hymn performed by the Choir of the First Parish Church, Concord, Ma.

Emerson’s words resonate today as we remember, reflect, honor and express gratitude in this April, 248 years hence.

— I. Bornstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

MARY MOODY EMERSON

A Powerful Influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Aunt Mary Moody Emerson delivered “the most important part of Emerson’s education,” ultimately influencing his views, reading habits, and his writing. [1] Waldo [2] wrote “A good aunt is more to the young poet than a patron.” [3]

Her involvement in Waldo’s life commenced after his father William Emerson died in 1811 and Mary stepped in to help his widow Ruth raise her five sons. While Mary changed her living situation frequently, her influence was provided through thousands of letters and copies of her journal Almanack, started when she was 20 years old. Waldo began his own journal, The Wide World when he was 17 years old and a student at Harvard. She counseled all the Emerson boys to do what they were afraid to do.

Mary’s Almanacks and letters became a rich source of material for Waldo in his own writing, his poems, essays, and lectures. He kept four MME workbooks and often pleaded with Mary to send him sections of her Almanack, which he routinely copied and referred to as his career progressed from minister to author and speaker. After rereading Mary’s letters in 1841, he wrote, “Aunt Mary…is a genius always new, subtle, frolicsome, judicial, unpredictable.” [4]

Mary Moody Emerson was born in 1774 to William and Phebe Bliss Emerson; one of their five children, who also included Waldo’s father. Shortly after the American Revolution commenced beside the family home – Concord’s Old Manse – and with her father going to war as a military chaplain, two-year old Mary was sent to her grandmother in Malden, Massachusetts. (This was not an uncommon practice to share responsibility for children among family members).

Mary’s father, William, died in 1776 and even after her mother, Phebe, remarried Mary was not called back home. She often referred to this period as her “infant exile.” [5] Her grandmother also died when Mary was four years old and she was adopted by her Aunt Ruth Emerson. Mary’s childhood was characterized by drudgery and a lack of money and food.

Despite humble beginnings and very little access to formal education, Mary became a prolific (but largely unpublished) writer and a voracious reader of works by such authors as Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Plato, and Boston minister William Ellery Channing. She directed her nephew Waldo to read and appreciate these writers.

Mary decided at an early age not to marry (although she was asked). Fiercely independent, by the 1830s Mary championed causes of those oppressed, including antislavery movements and women’s rights to better education. She supported her nephew Charles as he gave an antislavery address in Concord in 1835, and attended several abolitionist gatherings. She counted intellectual and free-thinking women as her friends and confidantes, including educator Elizabeth Peabody, scholar Elizabeth Hoar, abolitionist Mary Merrick Brooks, scientist and educator Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Waldo’s wife Lidian Emerson. Mary introduced Lidian to Mary Merrick Brooks, prompting Lidian to join Concord’s Female Antislavery Society. 

Mary’s appreciation for nature and its impact on thought occurred much earlier than the mid-nineteenth century reflections that permeated essays, books, and talks written by Waldo, Thoreau and others. In the early 1800s, in the words of her biographer, “she lived and wrote a celebration of the solitary imagination and of nature as analogous to God, valuing both explicitly as a woman’s resources.” [6] In 1831, Mary purchased a farm in Waterford, Maine, which she named Elm Vale. She often wrote to her nephews to share her appreciation for the landscape surrounding Elm Vale, including the mountains, the trees and Bear Pond. Waldo, Ruth (Waldo’s mother), Charles and Lidian Emerson, Elizabeth Hoar, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Elizabeth Peabody, all visited Mary at “Elm Vale”. Mary sold Elm Vale in 1851, which was necessary but also very difficult for her. Before she left she wrote in her Almanack, “What a bird dancing on that graceful limb. Had I but his iron pen how could I give praise for every bird & tree w’h have met my responding senses in this tranquil and beautiful vale.” [7]

Energetic and very outspoken, Mary was often considered difficult and challenging. But those challenges were more than compensated with her commitment and support to the contemporaries and young people she valued. After meeting with Mary when she was 77 years old, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “it is perhaps her greatest praise and peculiarity that she, more surely than any other woman, gives her companion occasion to utter his best thought. In spite of her own biases, she can entertain a large thought with hospitality…In short, she is a genius…” [8]

Robert Richardson, Jr., author of the Emerson biography The Mind on Fire, wrote in praise of Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism, “Mary Moody Emerson was a founder of Transcendentalism, the earliest and best teacher of R. W. Emerson and a spirited and original genius in her own right.” [9]

Mary Moody Emerson died on May 1, 1863, at the age of 88. Six years later, on March 1, 1869 Waldo delivered an address entitled Amita (Latin for Aunt) to the New England Women’s Club in Boston. More than 100 people attended – including Lidian and Ellen Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, Julia Ward Howe and Louisa May Alcott. In his talk he said that Mary “gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.” The minutes recorded from the event pointed out that the presentation enabled attendees to consider “a New England woman of rare gifts and originality of character.” [10]

[1] Robert D. Richardson Jr., Mind on Fire. (Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1995). 23.

[2] While at Harvard, Emerson decided that he wanted to be addressed as “Waldo” not “Ralph.”

[3] Qtd in Evelyn Barish, Emerson. The Roots of Prophecy. )Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989). 53.

[4] Qtd in Richardson, 25.

[5] Qtd in Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 71.

[6] Qtd in Cole, 8

[7] Qtd in Cole, 279.

[8] Qtd in Cole, 283.

[9] Robert D. Richardson Jr., Book jacket blurb, back cover of Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. Paperback and hardcover editions.

Winter Reflections

No matter your thoughts on Winter, it never fails to bring a sense of wonder. Let Mr. Emerson share it with you.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills
and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the
farmhouse at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm. [1]

In January the new snow has changed the woods
So that [a man] does not know them; - has built
Sudden cathedrals in a night. [2]

Pleasant walk yesterday, the most pleasant of days. At Walden Pond, I found a new musical instrument which I call the ice-harp. A thin coat of ice covered a part of the pond, but melted around the edge of the shore. I threw a stone, upon the ice which rebounded with a shrill sound, and falling again and again, repeated the note with pleasing modulation. I thought at first it was the “peep, peep” of a bird I had scared. I was so taken with the music that I threw down my stick and spent twenty minutes in throwing stones single or in handfuls on the crystal drum. [3]

Tonight, I walked under the stars through the snow & stopped & looked at my far sparklers and heard the voice of the wind so slight & pure & deep as if it were the sound of the stars themselves. [4]

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts and occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. [5]

In the woods on a Winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window … in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. [6]

The fall of snowflakes in a still air…the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting room; - these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. [7]

See how Nature keeps the lakes warm by tucking them up under a blanket of ice, and the ground under a cloak of snow. [8]

The hearth blazes in the middle and a grateful heat is spread around, while storms of rain and snow are raging without. [9]

Among our many prognostics of the weather, the only trustworthy that I know is that, when it is warm, it is a sign that it is going to be cold. [10]

— Compiled by I. Bornstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

[1] Excerpted from Emerson’s poem The Snow-Storm.

[2] From Emerson’s Country Life lecture at the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston, March, 1858.

[3] Emerson’s journal The Wide World, December 10, 1836.

[4] Emerson’s journal, February 17, 1838.

[5] Emerson’s essay Nature, published in 1836, published by James Munroe and Company, 1836.

[6] Emerson’s essay History, part of a volume of twelve First Series essays published in 1841.

[7] Emerson’s essay Nature, published in 1836, published by James Munroe and Company, 1836.

[8] The essay Resources is from Emerson’s last book, Letters and Social Aims, published December, 1875

[9] The essay Immortality is from Emerson’s last book, Letters and Social Aims, published December, 1875

[10] From Emerson’s Country Life lecture at the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston, March, 1858.

Mr. Emerson’s Journals

Emerson started his journal in 1820 while a student at Harvard University. Naming it “The Wide World,” he continued to write entries until 1875. The journal served as the vital source of his many essays, lectures and poems and he referred to them as his “Savings Bank.” In his entries, he coalesced his ideas, thoughts, and insights prior to sharing them with his wider audiences.

The journals were a platform for Emerson to evaluate and make decisions; to react to news, good or bad; and to form a record of the people he met and the places he visited.

Examples of journal entries reflecting different periods of Emerson’s life follow:

While at Harvard he wrote in his Journal about his decision to become a Minister.

April 18, 1824, “…in Divinity I hope to thrive. I inherit from my sire a formality of manner and speech, but I derive from him, or his patriotic parent, a passionate love for the strains of eloquence.”

After his first wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, succumbs to tuberculosis Emerson went to Europe, returning nine months later. In November of 1834 he moved to the Manse in Concord and declared his intentions for his future.

November 15, 1834, “Henceforth I design not to utter any speech, poem or book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work. I will say at public lectures, and the like, those things which I have meditated for their own sake, and not for the first time with a view to that occasion.”

During the 1840’s Emerson bought plots of land at Walden Pond to protect his favorite place to walk and to be part of nature.

April 9, 1840, “We {poet Jones Very and Emerson} walked this afternoon to…Walden Pond. …the water seemed made for the wind, and the wind for the water…I said to my companion, I declare this world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists.”

When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in late 1850 as a compromise between the South and North, Emerson was incensed.

May 1851, “We shall never feel well again until that detestable law is nullified in Massachusetts and until the Government is assured that once for all it cannot and shall not be executed here. All I have and all I can do shall be given and done in opposition to the execution of the law…”

Emerson met President Lincoln on a lecture tour to Washington, DC in 1862, it was their second meeting.

February 2, 1862, “The President…[is] a frank, sincere, well-meaning man with a lawyer’s habit of mind, good clear statement of his fact, correct enough, not vulgar, as described; but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness…”.

As Emerson entered his 68th year, he reflected on what he has witnessed over his lifetime:

June, 1871, “In my lifetime have been wrought five miracles, -- namely, 1, the Steamboat; 2, the Railroad; 3, the Electric Telegraph; 4, the application of the Spectroscope to astronomy; 5, the Photograph; -- five miracles which have altered the relations of nations to each other.”

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

On the Grapevine

One of the delights of autumn at the Emerson House is the fragrance of ripening ‘Concord’ grapes drifting from the arbor just west of the barn. A living legacy, the rustic vine foliage provides welcome shade in the heat of summer, and by September its picturesque clusters of fruit are becoming more purple and sweeter by the day. Remarkably, a ’Concord’ grapevine has grown here ever since Henry David Thoreau first set out a scion of the original stock in the 1850s.

In the decades leading to the Civil War, pomology (fruit growing) was a major trend in horticulture, centered in Eastern Massachusetts and the Hudson River Valley. Gentlemen landowners like Emerson, small farmers, and commercial growers alike were obsessed with cultivating superior strawberries and orchard fruits, such as apples, pears, and table grapes. The landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and the Cambridge nurseryman Charles M. Hovey were among the leaders of the mid-century fruit-growing mania.

Small wonder that America’s most renown cultivated grape would emerge from Ephraim Wales Bull’s home vineyard on the Lexington Road in the town for which it is named. The Boston-born metalsmith had moved to Concord for his health in 1836, and as an amateur took up the cause of improving the native fox grape in the 1840s. According to the late botanist and Thoreau scholar Edmund Schofield, “during these years of struggle” Bull was “assisted and encouraged” by Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and other townsmen (Schofield, 8).

Concord’s best known naturalist Henry David Thoreau, of course frequented the Emerson House and would have had ample opportunity to plant Bull’s exciting new ‘Concord’ grape here. Evidence of Thoreau’s keen interest in wild grapes and other native fruits abounds in his journal entries, his late unfinished work Wild Fruits, and notably at Harvard University’s Gray Herbarium, to which he often contributed botanical specimens; among these are many of Vitis labrusca, the wild fox grape.

Although experts still debate its exact parentage, the ‘Concord’ grape is probably related at least indirectly to the European wine grape, Vitis vinifera (through an early American grape cultivar named ‘Catawba’). In any case, ‘Concord’ and kindred cultivars such as purple ‘Isabella’ and white ‘Niagara’ are often listed under the botanical name Vitis labruscana. Thus, as a metaphor the ‘Concord’ is more an example of strength through diversity than native purity.

In his well received 2007 history of fruit growing and its importance to American culture, Philip Pauly traced Thoreau’s acquaintance with the legendary grape variety to an August 28, 1853 journal entry which appears to refer to Bull’s vineyard near his house, “Grapevine Cottage.” Thoreau wrote: “Walking down the street in the evening I detect my neighbor’s ripening grapes by the scent…though they are concealed behind his house” (Pauly, 75, note 59; Thoreau, 152).

Native to the Caucasus region, the incomparable Old World wine grape is honored by history along with such ancient crops as wheat and olive. However, North America boasts many more species of wild grape, a few of which are edible, and others which are used by wildlife for food, nesting, or cover. Despite our native abundance, however, until the ‘Concord’ burst on the scene horticulturists had made little progress in developing premium hardy grape varieties from the many New World species.

After laboring to develop a grape that could weather bitter winter temperatures and produce ripe fruit in a relatively short growing season, Bull brought ‘Concord’ to the attention of nurserymen in 1852; thereafter it was enthusiastically distributed.

As a vine the ‘Concord’ would prove vigorous, more cold hardy, more adaptable to various climates and soils, and easy to propagate. Its sweeter fruits ripened earlier than its predecessors. The robust flavor of the lustrous slip-skin grapes could withstand heat, making them excellent for preserves. Pasteurization opened the way for the bottled juice industry, a boon to 19th-century temperance advocates. In the 20th-century, ‘Concord’ became the standard source of kosher wine (Birnbaum). And it has been used extensively in breeding; besides ‘Niagara,’ its improved progeny include ‘Dutchess,’ ‘Diamond,’ ‘Jefferson,’ and hundreds of others (Casscles, 72).

An extraordinary grape, ‘Concord’ remains justly popular for its adaptability, disease-resistance, yield, and flavor. Robust and versatile, it lives on in Emerson’s neighborhood—and many others—as one devoted gardener’s lasting contribution to his nation’s larder.

— R. Davis, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Works Cited

Birnbaum, Ben. “Strange Fruit, The Nativist Roots of America’s Quintessential Jewish Wine.” The Boston Globe. April 24, 2005. http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/04/24/strange_fruit/ Accessed August 2022. Web.

Casscles, J. Stephen. Grapes of the Hudson Valley and Other Cool Climate Regions of the United States and Canada. Coxsackie, NY: Flint Mine Press. 2015. 72-74. Print.

Pauly, Philip J. “The Development of American Culture with Special Reference To Fruit.” Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP. 2007. 51-79. See Note 59, page 284. Print.

Schofield, Edmund A. “‘He Sowed; Others Reaped’: Ephraim Wales Bull and the Origins of the ‘Concord’ Grape.” Arnoldia 48 (4): 1988. 4-15. Accessed August 2022. Web.

Thoreau, Henry David. Circa 1859. “Wild Grape.” Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript. Edited and introduced by Bradley P. Dean. NY: W.W.Norton, 2000. 150-157. Print.

“Green Emerson” [1]

Inspired by nature, Emerson was able to bring it even closer in the surroundings he chose for his newly purchased home in Concord in 1835. In July 1835, he wrote to his brother William, “…it is a mean place & cannot be fine until trees & flowers give it a character of its own.”

Emerson recorded in his journal on November 5, 1836, “This day I have been scrambling in the woods, and with the help of Peter Howe I have got six hemlock trees to plant in my yard, which may grow whilst my boy is sleeping.” The Emerson’s first child Waldo had been born in October 1836.

In May 1837, Dr. Hobbs, Dr. Adams and Mr. Ripley sent Emerson 31 trees, consisting mostly of white pine, chestnut, hemlock and catalpa. This was the origin of the nine chestnut trees [2] fronting the house. In subsequent years, children were drawn to Emerson’s yard, asking to gather the fallen chestnuts. His last chestnut tree came down in a windstorm in 2012. Two new chestnut trees were planted from the castings and thrive today in the front of his house.

The following year, Emerson wrote to his literary friend the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, “…a week ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees.”

In a subsequent letter, Emerson expressed his enjoyment in the results, “To the balsam fir tree by my study window come the ground squirrel, oriole, cedar-bird, goldfinch, cat bird, parti-colored warbler and robin.” [3]

By the Spring of 1847 Emerson had planted 128 fruit trees, consisting of apple, pear and plum. On Sunday morning walks with his children through the orchard, he would point out and identify the trees. They would pick and eat any ripe fruit.

As the years passed, Emerson, his family and his trees shared many seasons and life cycles.

Looking to Autumn, Emerson wrote, “The world has nothing to offer more rich or entertaining than the days which October always brings us, when, after first frosts, a steady shower of gold falls in the strong wind from the chestnuts, maples and hickories; …” [4]

— I. Bornstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

[1] The Best Read Naturalist: Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Michael P. Branch, Clinton Mohs. U. of Virginia Press, 2017.

[2] The actual plants under discussion are horsechestnuts, Aesculus spp., and not true chestnuts, Castanea spp.

[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson. John McAleer. Little Brown & Company, 1984.

[4] From The Country Life lecture given by Emerson in March 1858. The Atlantic Monthly, November 1904.

The Fire at Emerson House

In the early morning of July 24, 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson awoke to the sound of an unidentified crackling noise. Through a crack in the wall, he saw that it was a fire, which quickly spread when a closet door was opened. Going to the smoke-filled attic, Emerson and his wife Lidian tried unsuccessfully to put the fire out and it quickly became clear that they needed help. Emerson ran to his front gate and yelled “Fire! Whitcomb! Staples! Fire!” Staples and Whitcomb were neighbors and the first to arrive on the scene.

Emerson’s only entry in his journal on July 24:, “House burned.”

Unfortunately, the Emerson’s grown children were not there to assist their frightened and worried parents. Ellen was visiting in Beverly, (she returned quickly), Edward was in Europe and Edith was living with her husband and children in Milton, MA.

Before the fire was able to reach the lower floors, in addition to extinguishing the fire, the priorities were to remove Emerson’s papers, his books, artwork, and the family’s furniture and clothes. Staples started the removals, quickly joined by other neighbors. Whitcomb stayed at the gate directing the first responders and continuing to send out the alarm.

Word quickly spread. Ellen Emerson wrote, “there were ten men there in five or ten minutes.” She described (from neighbor reports) the clearing of her room, “…Arthur [Gray] ran straight to my room, even then the smoke was so bad he had to hold his breath, saw my pictures, thought how I must value them and took down all but Fisher boy…” Further she wrote, “Louisa Alcott & May attended to letters…there were any quantity of them lying around and they collected them...”

Ellen’s feelings on seeing the house still standing after the fire were mixed. “…our house is associated to me with dirt, waste, bottomless abysses of expense to no profit…” On the other hand, she continued “I love the house…So when I saw the house I had supposed forever lost, standing safely in its old shape among the healthy untouched trees, I was very thankful.”

One hundred and fifty years later, Emerson’s home – called either Bush or Coolidge Castle by the family (Emerson bought the house from the Coolidges) – still stands with the structure intact and filled with the original furnishings. The last Emerson to occupy the house was Ellen, who died in 1909. Since then, direct descendants own and manage the property for visitors to enjoy.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Emerson’s Impact on Concord

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s personal association with Concord began in his childhood through visits to his Grandparents at their home now known as the Old Manse. In October, 1834 when he was thirty-one-years-old, he moved into the Old Manse with his mother and one of his brothers.

Following his marriage to Lydia Jackson in 1835, Emerson and his wife settled permanently in Concord. They moved into the home he purchased on the Cambridge Turnpike, where he lived for the rest of his life. Emerson significantly impacted the life of the town, through his engagement with its intellectual life and its social institutions, and his involvement with social reform movements.

Concord’s fields, farms and woods influenced Emerson’s decision to move to the town. Over time he purchased more than 40 acres of land around his home and at Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau built his cabin. Walden Pond is less than two miles from Emerson’s home and often the destination of his daily walks.

In 1835 Concord was a small but active community of 2,021 citizens. Agriculture was the leading industry but manufacturing was also robust with a cotton mill, two sawmills, two gristmills, a pencil factory and a book bindery. Concord’s Lyceum was one of the first in New England, established in 1828. Lyceums were a form of adult education and entertainment, which provided lectures, debates, and discussions, supported by volunteers within the community. During his residency, Emerson was the Concord Lyceum’s most frequent speaker.

For Concord’s 1837 Fourth of July celebration Emerson contributed a hymn for the day’s exercises. The first stanza celebrated the national significance of the 1775 battle at the town’s North Bridge:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here, once, the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The verse is now known as the Concord Hymn.

The citizens of Concord welcomed Emerson’s involvement in various activities. In 1837 he joined the Social Circle, a group of 25 farmers and townsmen. Meetings of the Social Circle were designed to share conversations in the members’ homes during the winter months. It enabled Emerson to get to know his neighbors (and they him), which otherwise would have been difficult with his demanding schedule. He also served on Concord’s School Committee; the Cemetery Committee (he delivered the keynote address at the dedication of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery); as a director of the Concord Atheneum (Concord’s library until 1851); and on the Library Committee.

Even with his extensive involvement in community activities, the greatest impact Emerson had on the town was his ability to draw some of the leading writers, educators and reformers to his home.

Emerson’s poems, essays and lectures significantly interested America’s literary elite. Writers that visited or moved to Concord included Louisa May Alcott (with her family), James Elliot Cabot, Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. Thoreau was born in Concord but was so drawn to Emerson that he lived with the family for more than two years.

As a strong proponent of education for all, Emerson had extensive meetings in his home with progressive educators Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, Elizabeth Peabody and Sarah Alden Ripley.

The nineteenth century was a period of upheaval and agitation for reform on many fronts, including the abolition of slavery. Emerson actively spoke against slavery, including addressing the citizens of Concord on May 3, 1851 on the Fugitive Slave Law. He and his wife’s active participation attempting to drive change in the treatment of blacks and native Americans brought John Brown, Mary Merrick Brooks, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Frederick Hedge Theodore Parker and Daniel Webster to Emerson’s Concord home.

To learn more about this remarkable man, his ideas, and his impact on nineteenth century arts and social reforms you can take a guided tour of the Emerson House. Walking through the rooms his family used every day enables visitors to see the many books, art and family items that characterized their daily lives. We hope you will visit soon!

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Consider the Sibyls

“Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it…. Painting was called ‘silent poetry,’ and poetry ‘speaking painting.’ The laws of each art are controvertible into the laws of every other.

Herein we have an explanation of the necessity that reigns in all the kingdom of Art. Arising out of eternal Reason, one and perfect, whatever is beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary.”

—-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Art,” in Society and Solitude

Ralph Waldo Emerson was well versed in classic poetry and philosophy, a literature rich with heroic, mythic, and sacred figures. And he admired Renaissance art, particularly works by Michelangelo and Raphael inspired by the vast iconography of the ancient world. Among the images of heroes, angels, and gods at the Emerson House are prints of five famous portraits of sibyls by Italian painters.

Wise, clairvoyant, and powerful, the sibyls were legendary female prophets named after places in the Old World, for example the renowned “Oracle of Delphi.” Sibyls are typically pictured with an open book, in the act of reading or writing, and thus associated with both received wisdom as well as intuitive, even divine knowledge. In art and literature, sibyls are often physically powerful as well—muscular, Amazonian, colossal. (In a modern context, the Statue of Liberty may be aptly described as a sibyl.)

Michelangelo’s epic fresco on the ceiling of Rome’s Sistine Chapel is the original source of three prints of sibyls at the Emerson House today: The Libyan sibyl is prominently displayed in the Study; the Cumaean and Eritrean are placed one above the other in a corner of the Parlor. Students of the classics may recognize the fearsome Cumaean sibyl, made famous in the Aeneid when she encourages the young hero to persevere in the face of enormous difficulties. Each of these sibyls appear among Old Testament prophets in the early 16th-century masterpiece.

A later work, Raphael’s famous group portrait of “Four Sibyls,” arranges the Cumaean, Persian, Phrygian, and Tibertine sibyls within a graceful half-moon arch, or “lunette.” This print is also in the Parlor, over the mantle. Originally commissioned for the Chapel of Santa Maria Della Pace in Rome, it is also known as “Sibyls Receiving Instructions From Angels.”

Like Michelangelo’s program of sibyls and biblical prophets, Raphael’s tableau of earthbound sibyls alongside ethereal angels conflates older, pagan myths with Christian Rome.

Sibyls occasionally appear in Emerson’s writing, notably in his important poem, The Problem, where their words persist in Nature itself:

"The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold
Still floats upon the morning wind
Still whispers to the willing mind.”

In The Mind on Fire, the Emerson biographer Robert Richardson traced Emerson’s interest in the sibyls to his immersion in Persian poetry and Eastern texts, around the time he purchased these prints in 1846 from the Boston publisher Little, Brown. Richardson concluded that “Emerson hung the pictures partly out of interest in the Old Masters and partly from interest in the sibyls themselves, corresponding as they did, perhaps, with some of the strongest influences in his own life.” This suggests the sibyls may have reminded Emerson of the strong, intelligent women who contributed to his own intellectual development; these include his widowed mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson, his father’s sister, Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, his aunt by marriage, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley—and of course his wife Lidian Jackson Emerson.

The placement of the sibyls prints seems to confirm a connection between education and female influence. For example, consider the fifth sibyl, a print of the Persian sibyl (from a painting by Guercino, a third Renaissance painter). Hung over the mantle in daughter Edith’s bedroom, this classically beautiful, turbaned sibyl leans gently on her hand at a writing desk—and appears more of a thoughtful matriarch than a high priestess. She looks directly across the room to Raphael’s Madonna of the Book (“La Vierge au Livre”); this maternal image subtly echoes the theme of female wisdom, depicting as it does a young mother holding in her arms a child, and an open book.

— R. Davis, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

The Man at the Top of the Stairs

At the top of the stairs in the Emerson house hangs a photograph of a distinguished gentleman. This picture is displayed among portraits of cherished family members and United States Presidents Lincoln and Grant. Who was this individual, and how did his image come to occupy such an honored place in the Emersons’ home?

The portrait depicts Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. Sumner served in the United States Senate from 1851-1874. He was a vocal and fervent abolitionist, advocating antislavery agendas in Congress. Emerson’s connection with Sumner strengthened around their mutual antipathy toward the Fugitive Slave Act (September 1850). The law required citizens of free states to comply with the seizure and return of self-emancipated individuals to enslavement. “This is a filthy enactment,” Emerson wrote in his journal. Addressing the citizens of Concord on May 3, 1851, he declared, “Here is a statute which enacts the crime of kidnapping — a crime on one footing with arson and murder. A man’s right to liberty is as inalienable as his right to life.” He continued, “This law must be made inoperable. It must be abrogated and wiped out of the statute book. But whilst it stands, it must be disobeyed.”

On August 26, 1852, Senator Sumner spoke on his motion to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act. His speech established him as the voice of anti-slavery in the Senate. The galvanizing moment of Sumner’s senatorial career came during the Kansas -Nebraska debates, (May 19-20, 1856), when he delivered a five-hour speech (32 double columned pages) entitled The Crime against Kansas. He railed against slavery and hurled invective and insult against the South, and South Carolina in particular, personally naming some congressional members and their families.

This dishonor to the South would not go unanswered. On May 22, 1856, fury became violence on the Senate floor, as South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, beat Sumner with a gold-headed walking cane, nearly killing him. Sumner’s lengthy, painful recovery lasted almost three years, ending in his return to the Senate in 1859.

On May 26, 1856, Emerson spoke to the citizens of Concord about The Assault Upon Mr. Sumner. He said, “I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state. I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.” As the Civil War approached, Emerson continued to press for peace, realizing that this option was fast disappearing.

In January 1862, Emerson’s lectures brought him to the Smithsonian Institute in the war-torn nation’s capital. With introductions from Sumner, Mr. Emerson met President Lincoln and the members of his cabinet.

Following the terrible Civil War, Sumner was active in Reconstruction, and from 1861-1871 he served as the influential Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During his last years in Congress, he introduced the Civil Rights Act in 1870. It was not passed until 1875, after his death the previous year.

Sumner had remained engaged in the work of the Senate until his death from a massive heart attack on March 11, 1874; he was sixty-three years old. On his death bed, Sumner asked Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, former Attorney General, to deliver a message back to Concord. He said, “Judge, tell Emerson how much I love and revere him.”

Sumner lay in state at the US Capitol and in the Massachusetts State House. His coffin was guarded by Civil War veterans from the famed African-American Fifty Fourth Massachusetts regiment. With Emerson among the pallbearers, Sumner was interred in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sumner is remembered today with an imposing statue in the Boston Public Garden, and another in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

— I. Bornstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

The Spring 2022 Opening of the Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Ralph Waldo Emerson purchased his home on the Cambridge Turnpike in 1835 and lived there until his passing in 1882. His wife Lidian – they were married in 1835 – remained until her death in 1892 and their daughter Ellen until 1909. Since then, ownership of the house and property continues to be held by Emerson direct descendants – through the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association.

Reopening April 28, 2022
Visitors have a unique opportunity to experience Emerson’s home much as he left it with his original furnishings, art, books and household items. The tour starts in the barn, renovated in 2020, and then moves into the house. This year we will be walking through rooms on the first and second floors.

Tour highlights include Emerson’s study where he wrote, read extensively and met with writers and artists including Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Margaret Fuller and sculptor Daniel Chester French. The parlor, where the Transcendental Club met, features paintings of his two daughters Ellen and Edith. Visitors will hear and see additional remembrances while touring through the dining room, and rooms on the second floor.

A Museum for 92 Years
The Emerson house first opened for visitors in 1930. Since then, the tours have evolved to embrace more about his life and legacy, his impact on a young country (the U.S.) establishing its literary place in history, and his belief in the individual. His poems and essays still resonate with readers because of their continued relevancy.

Memorable events over the years include:
The Bicentennial of Emerson’s birth in May 2003, included the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society’s sponsorship of exhibits, a conference at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a gala reception at the Concord Museum and the creation of the book Emerson Bicentennial Essays. Additionally, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association hosted the Society and other groups and published a brochure, created by Bay Bancroft (great-great Emerson granddaughter) and Eliza Castaneda.

Concord’s 375th birthday (founded in 1635) featured a major parade including an Emerson House float.

The Emerson barn renovation in 2020 was designed to preserve the structure for future generations. In Emerson’s lifetime the barn was used alternatively as a school, a place for boarders, and the coverage for animals and carriages. The barn was expanded twice by 1882. Recently the Concord Museum featured the barn in the 2021 Holiday House tour.

We look forward to welcoming new and repeat visitors this year!

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Emerson’s First Journey to Europe

In October 1832, Emerson resigned as pastor of the Second Church in Boston and sailed for Europe on Christmas Day. Ellen Tucker Emerson, his wife of less than two years, had passed away in 1831 and Emerson was in deep mourning.

Emerson suddenly decided to go to Europe to receive relief from an illness and to hopefully meet with writers he viewed as kindred spirits. It was his first trip to Europe, but not his last – he subsequently made two additional visits.

His ship landed in February on the island of Malta and he stayed in Italy until June. In March he climbed Mt. Vesuvius, writing in his journal, “We got to the top & looked down into the red & yellow pits the navel of this volcano.”

He met with the writer Walter Savage Landor and explored Florence, Rome, Venice and Milan. In Paris he visited the Jardin des Plantes. The massive botanical garden had a powerful effect on Emerson. He wrote, “I feel the centipede in me – cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually ‘I will be a naturalist.’”

When he arrived in England, he sought out the writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle (in Scotland). Coleridge he found “old and preoccupied” and was frustrated that it was very much a one-sided conversation.

Eager to meet Carlyle and Wordsworth, he wrote, “Am I, who have hung over their works in my chamber at home, not to see these men in the flesh, and thank them, and interchange some thoughts with them, when I am passing their very doors?” Emerson made the long trek to visit Carlyle at his farm, which was south of Glasgow. The meeting was the start of a lifelong and cherished friendship between the two great writers. Emerson wrote, “The comfort of meeting a man of genius is that he speaks sincerely…”

His final visit was to the acclaimed poet William Wordsworth. While enjoying his visits with Wordsworth and Coleridge, he was less impressed than he expected. Leading him to understand that ‘ordinary’ people could succeed with trust in themselves. A few years later Emerson wrote, “Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.”

Emerson wrote as he waited for his return voyage to America, “I thank the Great God who has led me through this European scene, this last schoolroom in which he as pleased to instruct me…” He continued, “The comfort of meeting men of genius such as these is that they talk sincerely, they feel themselves to be so rich that they are above the meanness of pretending to knowledge which they have not, and they frankly tell you what puzzles them. But Carlyle – Carlyle is so amiable that I love him.”

All quotations are from Emerson’s journals.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

The Very Quotable Emerson

Mr. Emerson conducted many lectures over 40 years, sharing his thoughts with audiences in the hope that they might reflect and learn. As we enter a new year, hopeful of positive changes, it seems to be a good time to look back on some of his most notable quotations.

Emerson proposed that one could live best by trusting and acting in accord with one’s own “intuition”. He inspired his listeners to think freshly about the paradoxes and problems of life and society, as well as the pressing issues of their own day. His was an American voice: inclusive, outspoken, curious, democratic, tolerant, optimistic, original, and pragmatic.

The following quotations are taken from some of his many lectures and essays.

Quotation from Nature:
”The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”

Quotations from Self Reliance:
“Insist on yourself; never imitate.”
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

Quotations from Essays, First Series:
“What is the hardest task in the world? To think.”
“Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.”
”Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
”Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.”
”Tis the good reader that makes the good book.”

Quotations from The Conduct of Life:
“Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.”
“A little integrity is better than any career.”
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
“… the secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.”

Quotations from The American Scholar:
“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
“Fear always springs from ignorance.”

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

December was an Eventful Month for Mr. Emerson

In the nineteenth century as it is today, December was a time of celebrations and gatherings. For Emerson it was also a month when he experienced many life changes.

On Christmas day in 1827, 25-year-old Emerson met 17-year-old Ellen Louisa Tucker in Concord NH and promptly fell in love. He found “nothing but light & oxygen” in New Hampshire and returned several times to see her. The following December they became engaged, Emerson declaring, “now as happy as it is safe in life to be.” They married on September 30, 1829 but sadly she succumbed to tuberculosis in early 1832.

By then Emerson was serving as minister of the Second Church in Boston. After Ellen’s death he continued his duties, but was grieving. In December of 1832 he resigned his position at the Second Church and on Christmas day sailed for Europe. He embarked in Malta, traveled through Italy, Switzerland and France. In July he arrived in England and met with writers Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle, who became a lifelong friend. These meetings had a profound effect on Emerson.

December was often the month when Emerson started his lecture series and as his speaking tours were a major source of income, it was often a very busy month.

In December 1845, Emerson purchased forty-one acres of land at Walden Pond. He let Henry David Thoreau build his cabin on land that Emerson owned. That stay resulted in Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854.

Emerson’s Poems was published in December, 1846. A young Emily Dickinson received a copy of Poems when she was 20 and wrote, “Ralph Waldo Emerson has touched the secret spring.” After hearing Emerson’s lecture, The Poet, a young Walt Whitman wrote, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.” Whitman was so inspired by Emerson’s words that he went on to later write Leaves of Grass. In December 1862 Whitman wrote to Emerson requesting a letter of reference as Whitman sought employment working within President Lincoln’s cabinet.

The first meeting of The Saturday Club, cofounded by Emerson, was on December 16, 1854. Early members included scientist and educator Louis Agassiz; Judge Rockwood Hoar; author Nathaniel Hawthorne; poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; poet James Russell Lowell; and others. The group met monthly and a form of The Saturday Club still exists today in Boston.

Emerson certainly also partook of the season to be with friends and family. In December 1846, for example, the Emersons’ rode to the Alcotts’ via horse-drawn sleigh to enjoy a festive Christmas dinner that included individual notes enclosed in pieces of pie. One can imagine that the Alcott and Emerson children provided joyous entertainment.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Emerson and The Atlantic Monthly

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was always open to creating platforms to generate and share new ideas, met with like-minded men in April 1857, the result of which was the creation of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and others joined Emerson as co-founders and by November 1857 the first issue of the magazine was issued. A magazine that is still published and enjoyed 164 years later.

One can imagine these great minds sitting at the Parker House exchanging ideas for the creative side of the magazine as well as the practical side. One participant wrote “The time occupied was longer by about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually that I ever had.”

The timing was fortuitous to take on crucial issues of the day, including the abolishment of slavery. The mission statement was signed by Emerson, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and many others. The goal was to publish literature from American and foreign writers, and to rank itself politically with “the body of men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private.”

The first issues featured Walt Whitman’s poetry, Thoreau’s essays, short stories from Louisa May Alcott and contributions by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. While the Table of Contents in the early issues have the titles of the pieces within the magazine, the names of the authors are not listed. Emerson wrote “The names of contributors will be given out when the names are worth more than the articles.”

In 2004 the name of the publication was changed from The Atlantic Monthly to The Atlantic. In the December 2021 issue, Mark Greif reviewed The Transcendentalists and Their World. Written by Concord historian and writer Robert Gross, the book explores the nineteenth century relationships between Concord’s elite writers (including Ralph Waldo Emerson), their shared philosophies and the impact on America’s literary culture.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

The Divinity School Address

In 1838 Emerson was asked by the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School to deliver their graduation address. In the letter requesting his presence they asked for “the customary discourse on occasion of their entering upon the active Christian ministry.” Wanting to have a better understanding of the students’ desires and thoughts, Emerson met with them at least once prior to his speaking at their graduation.

On July 15, Emerson gave what became known as “The Divinity School Address” to the graduates, their families, and educators. “In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, a balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily.”

Emerson went on to argue that every person could have a relationship with the divine without the mediation of the church or clergy. His speech was so controversial that he was not invited back to his alma mater for 30 years.

Emerson was surprised by the negative reactions to his address in the press and from the pulpit. However not everyone disagreed with his ideas for change. Theodore Parker, a popular Unitarian minister and also an advocate for reform wrote, Emerson “…surpassed himself as much as he surpasses others in the general way…so beautiful & just, so true…”

Emerson’s Uncle Samuel Ripley – a minister in Waltham MA – was supportive of Emerson and remarked he was proud that his nephew stood “firm and unmoved” and did not allow the negative response bother him anymore than “the whistling of the wind.” In fact, Emerson never joined the controversy or responded, declaring he was “merely and observer, a dispassionate reporter.”

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Happy Father’s Day

“O dearest, dearest boy! My heart
For better lore would seldom yearn,
Could I but teach the hundredth part
Of what from thee I learn”

From Anecdote for Fathers by William Wordsworth (whom Emerson met visiting Europe in 1833).

While Father’s Day did not officially commence until 1910, fathers have always been an important part of the family unit.

Mr. Emerson was descended from strong and committed men. Emerson’s grandfather William was a minister who was involved in the battle at the North Bridge in Concord in 1775 and became chaplain to the colonial army. His father was also a minister, at the First Church in Boston from 1799 to 1811. His step-grandfather, Ezra Ripley, was the minister in Concord and, as a boy, Emerson often stayed with Ezra and his grandmother.

Emerson’s father died when Emerson was only eight years old. The family’s long history influenced Emerson’s decision to join the ministry himself in 1828. His father’s preaching and literary efforts certainly also had an effect on his son.

Emerson was the father of four children, Waldo, Ellen, Edith and Edward. He was a devoted father who always had time for his offspring. Waldo, the first born, unfortunately succumbed to scarlet fever at the age of five. As a little boy he often would follow his father into the garden and watch his father struggle to work with tools effectively. On one occasion Waldo told his father, “Papa, I am afraid you will dig your leg.”

Ellen recalled “By the time I was eleven I began to ask questions…I remember not only the immense pleasure I was having…and how good it was of Father to go into the business so minutely and faithfully, and evidently to have as good a time as I did over.”

“I have always thought my Father was very wise in his dealing with children,“ Edith wrote. “…if at table we were disputing, not quite pleasant, silly or giggling, my Father used to say ‘Edith, run out to the front gate and look at the clouds.’ It was a charming diversion.” On Sundays, Emerson took his children on long walks in the woods, pointing out flowers, tree types and sharing the names of the birds and their songs.

Edward remarked that his father, “…had the grace to leave to his children, after they began to grow up, the responsibility of deciding in more important questions concerning themselves, for which they cannot be too grateful to him; he did not command or forbid, but laid the principles and the facts before us and left the case in our hands.”

“His written and spoken words reached young people...and often brought them to him for counsel, and it was this: ‘Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.’”

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Mr. Emerson's Garden

Nature was a very large part of Emerson's philosophy, his approach to life and his motivation. When he purchased his home on Cambridge Turnpike in Concord in 1835, he immediately started planting trees. In his poem "Hamatreya" is the thought that the "Earth laughs in flowers."

These photos are of the garden in June 2021 and include the beautiful tulip tree, which we believe may have already been on the property when Emerson arrived.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Happy Birthday Mr. Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803. He was one of eight children born to William Emerson and Ruth Haskins. His father William was a Unitarian Minister in Boston at the First Church.

Unfortunately, Emerson’s father passed away when Emerson was only eight years old and there after he moved many times with his Mother and siblings between Boston and Concord. A very good listener even as a young boy, Emerson absorbed teachings by ministers who visited the Emerson home, his aunts Mary Moody Emerson, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley and others.

Emerson entered Harvard in 1817 at the age of fourteen – the common age for entering freshmen back then. He was described by professors as “calm and quiet in his manners; and no matter how much he felt externally he was never moved or excited.” Commencing on a lifetime of writing, he started his journal while at Harvard and continued it for the rest of his life. In his senior year he decided he wanted to be called Waldo (an Emerson family name) not Ralph and he was Waldo Emerson from then on.

After a brief career teaching, Emerson entered the ministry, being ordained in 1829. That same year he married Ellen Tucker and accepted a position as leader of the Second Church in Boston. Sadly Ellen succumbed to tuberculosis in 1831 after only a year and a half of marriage. By 1832 Emerson decided to leave the ministry and sailed for Europe to try to recover from his grief.

While in Europe he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Walter Landor and Thomas Carlyle, who became an influence on Emerson and lifelong friend. Carlyle described Emerson as “a beautiful transparent soul.”

Returning to America Emerson embarked on his new career as a lecturer that would become his major source of income for the next forty plus years. His brother Charles, hearing Emerson’s first lecture on “The Uses of Natural History,” remarked he “was glad to have some of the stump lecturers see what was what & bow to the rising sun.”

Emerson married Lydia Jackson in 1835 and they had four children. He purchased a home on Cambridge Turnpike before the wedding and they lived for the rest of their married life; he for 47 years, she for 57.

After the publication of his essay “Nature,” Emerson became a prolific writer of essays and poems, as well as a strenuous schedule of lecturing across America and in Europe.

Emerson made enormous contributions to America’s place in intellectual literature – his “American Scholar” address was described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.” He had an innate ability to reach people with his words and turned Concord, MA into the literary capital of America. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Franklin Sanborn, the Alcotts, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller and others either moved to Concord or ensured they spent as much time as possible to be near this kind, generous and brilliant man.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

The Trip to California

In 1871, Mr. Emerson was invited to join John M. Forbes (Emerson’s daughter Edith’s father-in-law) and family on a train trip to California. Encouraged by his wife Lidian, daughter Ellen and son Edward to make the journey, Emerson left Boston on April 11, 1871. His plan was to combine the trip with some lectures.

The first stop of significance was Salt Lake City, where Emerson met Brigham Young, the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The meeting was brief but Young’s secretary recognized Emerson and remarked, “is this the justly celebrated Ralph Waldo Emerson?” From there the journey continued. They arrived on April 21 in San Francisco. He gave four lectures in San Francisco. Subsequently the party moved on to Yosemite Valley.

He was enthusiastic about California’s beauty, writing home, “if we were all young, -- as some of us are not – we might each of us claim his quarter-section of the Government, & plant grapes & oranges, & and never come back to your east winds & cold summers.” He spent ten days in the Yosemite and Mariposa regions and was filled with admiration of the beautiful mountains and trees.

A young – and as yet relatively unknown – John Muir heard that Emerson was in Yosemite. John Muir was a naturalist, champion of the creation of national parks and a co-founder of the Sierra Club. Muir had read Emerson extensively and was greatly influenced by his writing and requested a meeting, which was held on May 9. Muir then traveled with the Emerson party through Yosemite, giving him more time with the man he so admired.

Muir later wrote of Emerson, “Emerson was the most serene, majestic, sequoia-like soul I ever met. His smile was as sweet and calm as morning light on Mountains. There was a wonderful charm in his presence; his smile, serene eye, his voice, his manner, were all sensed at once by everybody. I felt here was a man I had been seeking. There Sierra, I was sure, wanted to see him, and he must not go before gathering them an interview! A tremendous sincerity was his. He was as sincere as the trees, his eye sincere as the sun.”

On returning to San Francisco, Emerson gave two more lectures before heading home. He arrived back in Concord on May 30. Emerson started a list of “My Men” starting with Thomas Carlyle and ending with John Muir.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Mr. Emerson Speaks

Starting in 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson earned his living by lecturing across the country and eventually in Europe as well. He was able to leverage the rising enthusiasm for the lyceum movement, which began in England and made its way to America. Lyceums offered speakers a platform to provide education, discussion and entertainment to audiences hungry to hear about a broad range of topics including history, science, nature and agriculture.

Emerson began his career as a Unitarian minister. By 1833, he took his considerable skills in speaking from the pulpit to join the lyceum movement and deliver lectures. His reputation as an author and lecturer grew thanks to the publication of his first book, Nature in 1836. Acknowledging that he would be supporting his growing family through speaking, Emerson made the decision in 1836 to manage his own engagements, rather than relying on the Lyceum Association. A decision he never regretted. As an example, when speaking at the Masonic Temple in Boston, attendance at one Emerson event was 439 people. Ticket sales amounted to $796 and after expenses he cleared $571. Five hundred dollars in 1800 was worth more than $10,000 today.

Creating his lectures between the spring and fall seasons, he would go on the road to lecture in the winter. In many ways, this represented early “social media” because he was connecting in person with his audiences who might then purchase and read his poetry and essays. He started giving lectures at the Concord Lyceum but quickly expanded to all of New England, south to Washington, D.C. across the mid-west and north into Canada. From 1847 to 1848 he lectured in England as well. To understand how rigorous a schedule he kept, between January and March of 1846 he gave 37 lectures, most at different locations.

While many other people of various disciplines were also on the lecture circuit, Emerson had a vital advantage – he was able to connect with his audience. He made people “feel taller.” One laborer in Boston who attended all his lectures was asked if she understood what he was conveying. Her response was “Not a word, but I love to see him standing up there thinking everyone else is just as good as he is.”

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody – a transcendentalist, publisher and creator of the kindergarten in America – wrote, “Mr. Emerson was always preeminently the preacher to his own generation and future ones, but as much – if not more – out of the pulpit as in it; faithful unto the end of his early chosen profession and the vows of his youth.”

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Ellen Tucker Emerson

Ellen Tucker Emerson was born on February 24, 1839. She was the Emersons’ second child. Ellen was named after Emerson’s first wife (who died of TB). In 1853, Ellen was sent to Mrs. Sedgwick’s School for Young Ladies in Lenox MA, and subsequently attended the Agassiz School in Cambridge, MA and Frank Sanborn’s school in Concord.

Starting in her early teens, Ellen was an enthusiastic letter writer and told her father that her letters were her journal. Emerson encouraged his family and acquaintances to keep journals, as he did for most of his life. Fortunately, many of Ellen’s letters have been saved, providing insight into family life. She understood as the oldest daughter her role in helping her parents. On leaving the Sedgwick School she wrote, “I am going home to keep house and give Mother rest, I think it is just like going different roads.”

Living her entire life in the Emerson home on Cambridge Turnpike, Ellen was very active in Concord’s community. She taught Sunday School at First Parish Church for more than 40 years; was the first woman elected to Concord’s School Committee; and organized many of the town’s social events. Always close to her sister Edith and brother Edward, Ellen provided Edith with welcome support at each of her eight births.

Ellen traveled the world with her father on his lecture tours and as he aged helped him to ensure he didn’t lose his place while speaking. She also assisted author and philosopher James Elliot Cabot (who was Emerson’s literary executor) with his biography of her father, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Additionally, she wrote a biography of her mother, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson. Her mother was often unwell and Ellen by necessity managed the household herself.

In 1868 Ellen was sent to the Azores for a rest, staying with John Bass Dabney and his family. He was the US Consul General in the Azores at Fayal. She enjoyed the Azores and the Portuguese people immensely and her health returned. To great pleasure, Ellen took many donkey rides, a common mode of transportation. Subsequently she was sent a donkey of her own to Concord from the Azores as a gift. The donkey was named Gloriosa and Ellen would occasionally ride her to town for errands.

Ellen was surrounded in Concord with the nineteenth-century literary elite, including Henry David Thoreau and the Alcotts. In a letter home from the Azores in 1869, she writes, “Little Women has been sent out to me and I am about to read it…I just lent it to the Dabney children and they enjoy it. Louisa has always been the most lively and original girl, and her three sisters were all bright and able to help in all her scheme, and their childhood and youth were full of the most amazing and interesting works and plays.”

Ellen passed away at the age of 69 in 1909. She was the last Emerson family member to live in the home on Cambridge Turnpike. The house is owned by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association, a non-profit organization founded and maintained by Emerson descendants.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Emerson Meets Lincoln

Ralph Waldo Emerson met Abraham Lincoln on two occasions. Emerson was lecturing in Springfield, Illinois on January 10, 1853 and a then unknown Lincoln was in the audience. It was Lincoln who reminded Emerson of that prior meeting when they met again at the White House.

Emerson was in Washington on January 31, 1862 to deliver a lecture titled, “American Civilization” at the Smithsonian Institution. Through his colleague, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, Emerson was introduced to most of Lincoln’s cabinet and on February 1 and 2, to President Lincoln himself. Upon meeting, Lincoln mentioned, “I once heard you say in a lecture, that a Kentuckian seems to say by his air and manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you.’ ”

Emerson wrote of their meeting, “The President…[is] a frank, sincere, well-meaning man with a lawyer’s habit of mind, good clear statement of his fact, correct enough, not vulgar, as described; but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness…”. He later wrote about Lincoln, “A great style of hero draws equally all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him.”

A bit unsure of his feelings for the President at first, Emerson was completely won over by Abraham Lincoln’s motives and methods when Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. Emerson lectured on the Emancipation Proclamation on October 12, 1862 in Boston and that address was published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1862.

Two days after President Lincoln was assassinated, Emerson delivered his eulogy in Concord, MA on April 19, 1865. The moving remembrance captured the country’s shock and mourning, “I doubt if any death has caused so much pain to mankind as this has caused, or will cause, on its announcement…”

Emerson addressed Lincoln’s many attributes, “A plain man of the people, an extraordinary fortune attended him. He offered no shining qualities at the first encounter; he did not offend by superiority. He had a face and manner which disarmed suspicion, which inspired confidence, which confirmed good will. He was a man without vices. He had a strong sense of duty, which it was very easy for him to obey.”

“He was the most active and hopeful of men; and his work had not perished: but acclamations of praise for the task he had accomplished burst out into a song of triumph, which even tears for his death cannot keep down.”

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Edward Waldo Emerson

Edward Waldo Emerson was the last of Ralph Waldo and Lidian’s four children. He was born on July 10, 1844 and died on January 27, 1930.

The Emerson’s first son, Waldo, sadly died of Scarlet Fever at the age of five before Edward was born. The two daughters, Ellen and Edith were born between Waldo and Edward.

Edward attended Harvard University but due to health issues left for a period and then graduated in 1866 as Class Poet. He received his medical degree from Harvard in 1874 and set up his practice in Concord, where he lived for virtually his entire life.

Edward left the medical profession in 1882, the year his father died. Like his father, Edward was a writer and a lecturer. Written works included Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (written in 1917), and Emerson in Concord (1888). He was largely responsible for editing his father’s many manuscripts and some of his correspondence after Emerson’s death.

Providing wonderful insights about his father, Edward wrote, “He had the grace to leave to his children, after they began to grow up, the responsibility of deciding in more important questions concerning themselves, for which they cannot be too grateful to him; he did not command or forbid, but laid the principles and the facts before us and left the case in our hands.” Additionally, Edward shared his father’s advice to many young people, “Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”

An accomplished painter, Edward also taught art anatomy at the Museum of Fine Arts school. He served as Superintendent of Schools in Concord, on the Board of Health and the Cemetery Committee. He was also a founding member of the Concord Antiquarian Society (now the Concord Museum) and a member of Concord’s Social Circle.

He married Annie Keyes (also a lifelong Concord resident) in 1874 and they had seven children.

Edward Waldo Emerson and his brother Waldo died 88 years apart but on the same day, January 27.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Gift Giving

Following a long tradition, December was a time of giving and receiving in the Nineteenth Century. Gifts among the Emerson’s might range from fruit (pears in particular), to poems. Fifteen-year-old Ellen Emerson received an unexpected gift on December 21, 1854, Louisa May Alcott’s first published book, “Flower Fables.” The Emersons and the Alcotts were neighbors at various times and the families close. Louisa had created stories for Ellen to keep her amused, while the Alcotts were living at Hillside (now called Wayside).

Ellen wrote of her present, “So this morning I saw a bundle on the entry directed to me. I opened it and found the “Flower Fables” all bound and printed very nicely with pictures, but on turning it over I saw my name in large letters and discovered that ‘twas dedicated to me! Of course, I fell down in a swoon since I could not express my emotion, there being nobody in the house….”

The Emerson family typically exchanged gifts at New Year’s. Emerson favored giving books as a gift. He wrote on December 22, 1840, “Some books leave us free and some books make us free.” In 1844 Emerson struggled with what would be the right gift (as we all do). He wrote, “Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.” He continues, “The only gift is a portion of thyself…the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn;…this is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to the primary basis, when a man’s biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man’s wealth is an index of his merit.”

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Edith Emerson

The Emerson’s third child Edith was born on November, 22, 1841. The younger, sociable daughter married William Hathaway Forbes at the age of twenty-three, with her sister Ellen recording, “…down the walk went little Edith Emerson in her brown hat and dress, away from her father’s house for evermore…” Edith left a felt absence in the household. Birthday wishes were sent with invitations to come home a few days later for Thanksgiving, with her growing family, which eventually included eight children.

By the mid-19th century, Thanksgiving was a well-established and principal New England holiday, rooted in the combined tradition of Puritan thanks-giving fast days and harvest festival feasts. The date of annual celebrations was not fixed until 1863, and was celebrated irregularly from September through December. It was traditionally a day of charity and giving to the less fortunate. It was an important celebration in Emerson’s family, often held over two days into what he called, “Good Friday” and his daughter Ellen referred to as “Second Thanksgiving.

The first Thanksgiving celebrated at the Emerson House on Cambridge Turnpike, was likely in November 1836, about a month after Ralph Waldo and Lidian’s first child, Waldo, was born. Emerson delivered a sermon in Lexington, and hosted his step-grandfather, Concord’s Reverend Ezra Ripley, and his aunt Sarah Ripley for dinner. Starting in 1849, the Emerson’s regularly filled their home with extended relations. Twenty to thirty members of the Jackson and Emerson-Ripley families gathered in the Emerson dining room for a meal that lasted nearly three hours.

Preparations began weeks beforehand. The rooms were cleaned, the furniture rearranged, the silver polished, as many as fifty pies baked, and the raisins were de-stoned for hours the night before. Minced turnovers were served for breakfast, with a special duck-turn-over for Emerson (a favorite from his childhood). A typical Emerson family Thanksgiving dinner included: vermicelli soup, roasted turkeys and chickens, escalloped oysters, squash, cranberry sauce, sweet and white potatoes, and macaroni. Port, sherry, claret, and ale were served, while Edith’s small children drank their milk from wine glasses. For dessert plum pudding, mince, apple, squash, and pumpkin pies, followed by coffee, fruits and nuts. A “flaming pudding” was a highlight and a tradition since 1846. The men then retired to the study for after-dinner cigars, and games such as blind-man’s bluff and rhyming charades ensued in the parlor and study. There were also annual poetry recitals, singing, and music at the piano (which was moved into Emerson’s study).

As for so many of us this year, it was not every year that the family could all be together. Emerson’s lecture tours kept him from home several years. In 1866, Lidian wrote her son Edward, “Says Ellen, ‘What is Thanksgiving without Lizzie Simmons and Edward!’” Ellen wrote, “If other Thanksgivings are to be like this what shall we do? Well, I will stop lamenting…” (Letters). In 1871, Lidian and Ellen were unexpectedly the only members of the family at home --- with fifty pies!

Whether together or far-apart, the Emerson’s were grateful for the well-being of their loved ones, sharing love and memories across the miles. As Emerson wrote in his essay “Friendship,” “I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.” We sent grateful wishes to you and yours for a Happy Thanksgiving!

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Thomas Carlyle

On October 22, 1847 Emerson arrived in Liverpool, England to conduct a lecture tour. His decision to go was in reaction to increased pleas from his connections in Europe and confidence that financially he could create a lengthy tour. He sailed from Boston on October 5 (his wife Lidian, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson and Abigail Alcott saw him off). Shortly after arrival he writes, “I found…a letter which had been seeking me, from Carlyle (author Thomas Carlyle), addressed to ‘R.W.E. the instant when he lands in England’ conveying the heartiest welcome and urgent invitation to house and hearth.” He stayed with the Carlyle’s for several days. Carlyle and Emerson had met 14 years prior on Emerson’s first trip to Europe and on this second meeting spent much more time together, including a trip to Stonehenge. While they did not always agree, they were lifelong friends.

Emerson lectured in England, Paris and Scotland. While in England, Emerson met with many of the elite literary and artistic talents of the day, including Charles Dickens, William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray and Frederic Chopin. Hearing Chopin play Emerson writes, “…and heard him play; could the denying heaven have also given me ears for the occasion.”

Some comments he wrote in his Journal while on his tour:

“It is certain that more people speak English correctly in the United States than in Britain.”

“People eat the same dinner at every house in England. 1, soup; 2, fish; 3, beef, mutton or hare; 4 birds; 5 pudding and pastry and jellies; 6, cheese; 7, grapes, nuts and wine. During dinner, hock and champagne are offered you by the servant, and sherry stands at the corners of the table….What rivers of wine are drunk in England daily! One would say, every guest drinks six glasses.”

While his eight month tour included more than 70 lectures as well as sightseeing, he was ready to go home. “Never was a well-appointed dinner with all scientific belongings so philosophic a thing as at sea. Even the restless American finds himself, at last, at leisure.” He arrived back in Boston on July 27, 1848.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Ellen Louisa Tucker

On September 30, 1829, Emerson married Ellen Louisa Tucker. They had met when he was preaching in Concord, New Hampshire and fell deeply in love. Ellen was 16 when they met (Emerson 24), beautiful, wrote poetry and had a strong appreciation for nature. Unfortunately, she also had tuberculosis. Emerson wrote shortly after they were engaged in December 1828, “I have now been four days engaged to Ellen Louisa Tucker. Will my Father in Heaven regard us with kindness, and as he hath, as we trust, made us for each other, will he be pleased to strengthen and purify and prosper and eternize our affection!” The year they were married Emerson also accepted the offer from the Second Church in Boston to be their Minister, and Ellen and Emerson moved to Boston after their wedding. Sadly Ellen’s health declined rapidly and she died in Boston on February 8, 1831. Ellen is buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA, with the Tuckers.

Emerson wrote after her death, “Will the eye that was closed on Tuesday ever beam again in the fullness of love on me? Shall I ever be able to connect the face of outward nature, the mists of the morn, the star of eve, the flowers and all poetry with the heart and life of an enchanting friend? No. There is one birth and baptism and one first love and the affections cannot keep their youth any more than men.”

In 1835, Emerson married Lydia Jackson (first name changed to Lidian after marriage), his wife for 47 years and the mother of his four children.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Lidian Jackson Emerson

Emerson’s wife, Lydia Jackson, was born on September 20, 1802 in Plymouth, MA to Charles Jackson and Lucy Cotton. Lydia was one of seven children, only three surviving to adulthood, Lucy, Lydia and Charles. Lydia’s parents died when she was sixteen, occurring within two months of each other. She and her siblings, when not at school, boarded with aunts and uncles. Lydia was very fond of poetry, an avid reader and very concerned about the welfare of others. She also cared deeply about animals and was an early Vice President of the Dumb Animals Society (later the MSPCA).

She married Ralph Waldo Emerson on September 14, 1835 (the 200th anniversary of the founding of Concord) and was the mother of his four children; Waldo, Ellen, Edith and Edward. At Emerson’s suggestion she became Lidian, rather than Lydia. Over their 47 years of marriage she supported her husband’s work and helped to entertain the constant stream of guests, who came to see Emerson for discussions, advice and plans. Guests included the literary and artistic elite of the day, William Ellery Channing, Daniel Chester French, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman and Emerson’s dear friend Henry David Thoreau.

Lidian was not afraid to be involved with causes she felt important. Outraged by the injustice shown to slaves, in 1837 Lidian, Abigail Alcott, Mary Merrick Brooks, Mrs. John Thoreau (Henry’s mother) and others formed Concord’s Female Anti-Slavery Society, a very active group that influenced those with strong voices (Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott) to support their efforts and become more vocal. She also worked for women’s rights and the rights of Native Americans.

Lidian outlived her husband by ten years and passed away in 1892, still living at the their home on Cambridge Turnpike with her daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Emerson Marries Lydia Jackson

On September 14, 1835, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lydia Jackson were married in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Emerson’s first wife Ellen Louisa Tucker passed away of tuberculosis in 1831. Emerson (living in Concord at the Old Manse) proposed to Lydia via letter, beseeching her to love him. She wrote a response but then asked him to come to Plymouth so she could read it to him in person. After their discussion – she had concerns about her worthiness and the enormous changes it would bring – she accepted.

Lydia wrote and read poetry and was in one mind with Emerson’s thoughts. Emerson wrote “I am persuaded that I address one so in love with what I love…that an affection founded on such a basis cannot alter.” They were married for 47 years until his death and had four children together.

Fearing that New Englanders might refer to her as “Lydiar Emerson” based on pronunciations of the day, Emerson started to call her Lidian, which was her name for the rest of her life. They married in Plymouth at Winslow House, the Jackson family home. Lydian preferred that they settle in Plymouth but Emerson disagreed. “Wherever I go therefore I guard & study my rambling propensities with a care that is ridiculous to people, but to me is the care of my high calling. Now Concord is only one of a hundred towns in which I could find these necessary objects but Plymouth I fear is not one. Plymouth is streets; I live in the wide champaign.”

They moved in the home he purchased on Cambridge Turnpike on September 15, 1835 and lived there for the rest of their lives. It quickly became the center of literary and Transcendental thinking, discussions and writing.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Nature

On September 9, 1836, Emerson’s first significant work, Nature, was printed and offered for sale. Interestingly, he originally did not take credit for it but published it anonymously. Subsequent printings carried his name.

Nature was the culmination of several years of Emerson’s work and thought – starting on his voyage from Europe to America in 1833. In Nature he explores for the first time the connections between God, the soul and nature. “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.” Reflecting on his own experiences in nature, “In the woods we return to reason and faith…I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” The transparent eye-ball analogy suggested that to appreciate nature, one must absorb all that nature has to offer.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

The American Scholar

On August 31, 1837 Emerson delivered An Oration later entitled The American Scholar, to an audience at Harvard that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, Wendell Phillips and Edward Everett. The occasion was the annual meeting of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society. Five hundred copies of the talk were printed and sold out within weeks. Fifty years later Oliver Wendell Holmes (speaking of America) declared The American Scholar “our Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson wrote The American Scholar to liberate the individual, not a group or in this case his audience. He directly addressed the issues of individual Americans becoming self-reliant, “the single man plant himself indomitable on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” From then on his writing was directed at the individual, not any institution. He wanted to inspire original thought, to encourage people not to be bound by past traditions or the thoughts of others. Regardless of how education strived to influence and control the thoughts of its students. “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books.”

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Tumbledown Hall

173 years ago, on August 12, 1847, Bronson Alcott, assisted by Henry David Thoreau, began work building an "arbour" for Emerson. The ambitious two-storied gothic structure was intended to be a summer study for Emerson. It was constructed in a fanciful style, preserving the natural curvatures in the building materials he gathered from the woods. Alcott pride himself that this characteristic was "original" to himself as an amateur architect. Thoreau, who worked as a surveyor, found opportunity for merriment in Alcott's disregard for the mathematics of engineering in preference to his aesthetic sensibilities and philosophical ideals. Alcott noted in his journals that his project had become a subject of curiosity in the neighborhood. The Emersons called the summerhouse "Tumbledown Hall" and "The Ruin." Despite the humor, the structure stood for at least fifteen years, although it unfortunately was not well used due to heat and bugs.

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Walden Published

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden was published on August 9, 1854. Emerson had a significant impact on Thoreau’s life. When Walden was published, Emerson wrote “…it is cheerful, sparkling, readable, with all kinds of merits & rising sometimes to very great heights. We account Henry the undoubted King of all American lions.”

— B. Ewen, Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Fire at Emerson’s House

On July 24, 1872, the home of the Emersons caught fire, starting in the garret (attic). With the immediate help of neighbors, most of the family’s possessions were removed and the house – with considerable damage – was saved. Among the neighbors were Louisa May Alcott and sister May, who gathered up Emerson’s letters and manuscripts, which were thrown all over the lawn. Emerson wrote in his Journal of the event: Wednesday, July 24, “House burned.”

Daughter Ellen, who was not there, wrote on seeing the damage, “I love this house…so when I saw this house I had supposed forever lost, standing safely in its old shape among healthy untouched trees, I was very thankful.”

Barbara Ewen, Guide