The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson

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2 The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson

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4 The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson Edited by Joel Myerson Columbia University Press new york

5 The Press acknowledges with thanks a Centennial gift from Betsy Carter and Paul Carter, Emeritus Trustee of the Press, toward the costs of publishing this book. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright 1997 Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emerson, Ralph Waldo, [Correspondence. Selections] The selected letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson / edited by Joel Myerson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN (acid-free paper) 1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Correspondence. 2. Authors, American 19th century Correspondence. I. Myerson, Joel. II. Title. PS1631.A dc21 [B] CIP Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c

6 For Greta

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8 Contents Introduction 1 Chronology 17 Biographies 27 The Letters 39 Index 461

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10 Introduction Ah you always ask me for that unwritten letter always due, it seems, always unwritten, from year to year, by me to you, dear Lidian, I fear too more widely true than you mean, always due & unwritten by me to every sister & brother of the human race. I have only to say that I also bemoan myself daily for the same cause that I cannot write this letter, that I have not stamina & constitution enough to mind the two functions of seraph & cherub, oh no, let me not use such great words, rather say that a photometer cannot be a stove.... Besides am I not, O best Lidian, a most foolish affectionate goodman & papa, with a weak side toward apples & sugar and all domesticities, when I am once in Concord? 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson did not feel comfortable writing letters. The excerpt above from a letter to his wife addresses the problems he had in fully expressing his feelings to her as well as to every sister & brother of the human race. As a well-known author and lecturer, who was often referred to as the Sage of Concord, Emerson had a firmly established public persona behind which he could take refuge. Whether he faced the public in print or on the lecture platform, he was able to be separated from them and their questions; but the medium of correspondence did not offer the same type of defensive barrier. Emerson was able to stave off those who wished access to the private man until 1939, when Ralph L. Rusk published his magisterial sixvolume edition of The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Earlier editions of Emerson s letters had been controlled by his family, friends, or literary executors. Besides a few scattered letters published in the typical nineteenth-century life and letters biographies of his friends and acquaintances or in newspaper and magazine articles (the most extensive being his correspondence with Henry David Thoreau), the only significant collections of Emerson s letters published before Rusk s edition were the ones that appeared in James Elliot Cabot s two-volume Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887) and in the book-length collections of his correspondence with Thomas Carlyle (3 vols.; 1883, 1886), the German writer Herman Grimm (1903), and his childhood friend William Henry Furness (1917), as well as his letters to the British poet John Sterling (1897) and his long-time friend Samuel Gray Ward (1899). 2 In each case, the published letters presented a sanitized Emerson, a public portrait suitable for veneration. To accomplish

11 Introduction 2 this, the editorial policies were appropriately lax; just as the makeup artist covers or eliminates the physical blemishes of the subject, these editors covered Emerson s spelling and grammatical lapses, and eliminated references they considered too personally revealing according to the standards of the time or the picture of him that they were trying to present. Accordingly, the man who defined evil as merely privative, not absolute in his Divinity School Address, stood before the admiring pubiic as a smiling and beneficent Boston Brahmin incarnation of his own essay on Self-Reliance. This filiopietistic editing may have satisfied the concerns of the family, but it did not present an Emerson in touch with the global wars and other concerns of the early twentieth century. Rusk s edition changed forever the way in which we view Emerson. In nearly 2,800 pages, Rusk presents 2,313 letters never before published and 271 hitherto published only in part, as well as references to 509 letters already printed 3 and another 1,281 that were probably written. Rusk s editorial policy is straightforward: he prints the letters as they were written with only a few, minor editorial interventions. 4 Finally, the private Emerson is allowed to speak for himself directly to his public, and the results are impressive. Odell Shepard heralds the publication of the Letters with a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review, announcing that [n]ot many events in the history of American literature have been more important than the publication of these long-awaited volumes, for here is a performance boldly planned and triumphantly achieved, of which America has every reason to be proud. 5 Reviewers praise Rusk for his editorial work and for giving us the unvarnished Emerson, one whom we could now reassess in light of this important new addition to his canon. Shepard feels that those who know how he suffered throughout life with an almost total inability to heave his thought and feeling into spontaneously spoken words will be glad to know that he often made himself amends with a racing, garrulous, and somewhat slovenly pen. Thus, the effect of the many letters in which he thus lets himself go, oblivious of the points of punctuation and scornful of capital letters, is like that of a logjam suddenly broken. In addition to this new vitality, Van Wyck Brooks notices an impression of Emerson that is new and unexpected in its concreteness...it is the social and mundane Emerson who chiefly appears in these letters, and it will surprise many readers to find out how much of his life was social and mundane ; or, as Townsend Scudder III phrases it, the casual explorer may get something of a shock to learn how much the brain of a great intellectual can be stuffed with the customary events of existence. 6

12 Introduction But on the other side of the Atlantic, the man who embodied so many aspects of American intellectual and literary history was not receiving such a positive reception. The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement dismisses the letters because as a whole they do little to illuminate that deeper side of him, and the reviewer in the Manchester Guardian, after describing the six volumes as having a massive dignity befitting the last rites of an inevitable canonisation, goes on to complain that Emerson was more concerned with what he said than with his way of saying it; and if, in fact, he had not much to say he had an irresistible impulse to go on saying it. 7 These and many other reviews show that while everyone agrees that Rusk s editorial work is superb, there is much less consensus about what the letters themselves demonstrate. Typical of this lack of agreement is the reviewer in Time, who, while positively commenting on Emerson s letters, raises questions about letter writing in general: The best letters are brief, direct, factual. The best letter writers are usually women and soldiers, who observe closely, state simply. Worst letter writers are usually writers who philosophize. 8 Part of the reason for this simultaneous praise of and resistance to Emerson s letters may have been the fact that they were the first private documents of his to be released without serious editorial intervention and thus were a univocal presentation of a man whose private writings are truly multivocal. The only other edition of Emerson s private writings published before Rusk s Letters was The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Emerson s son, Edward Waldo Emerson, and grandson, Waldo Emerson Forbes, in ten volumes between 1909 and Just as in the various editions of letters edited by family members, the Journals, too, presented the Sage of Concord to the public. As the editors of the modern edition of Emerson s journals characterize their predecessor, the editors of that earlier edition believed [e]ssential privacy was not to be invaded, no one was to be embarrassed, texts were to be made grammatical and correct, trivia were to be eliminated, resulting in a portrait of what his chief editor felt impelled to make him, still more the mystic than the Yankee, and always, from beginning to end of the five thousand well-printed pages, Mr. Emerson. 9 Rusk s edition literally breaks this mold by allowing readers to form their own versions of Emerson through enabling them to read his texts without mediation. Twenty years later, this task of reading the private Emerson was made considerably easier as four decades of intense (and highly professional) editorial work began. The mere six volumes of Emerson s letters were soon joined by three volumes of his early lectures ( ), sixteen volumes of journals 3

13 Introduction 4 and miscellaneous notebooks ( ), a new edition of the correspondence with Carlyle (1964), one volume of poetry notebooks (1986), four volumes of his complete sermons ( ), three volumes of topical notebooks ( ), and four additional volumes of letters ( ). 10 Both Joseph Slater, editor of the Carlyle correspondence, and Eleanor M. Tilton, editor of the supplement to Rusk (which printed another 2,000 letters), maintained the high editorial standards of the earlier edition, as did the editors of the other editions. The result, though, is a decidedly mixed blessing: scholars have thirty-eight volumes of Emerson s lectures, letters, journals, and notebooks to mine for their studies of Emerson, but the general reader has few collections that, like anthologies of the published writings, enable them to peruse a representative Emerson in one volume. 11 The present volume will, I hope, offer a good, representative selection of Emerson s letters for the modern reader. Emerson was born in 1803, and much of his early literary training was in the works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One might also assume that his letter-writing skills were honed by the practitioners of these earlier ages, about whom one recent critic has written: The universal dictum, which pervades all levels of discourse about letter writing, is that letters should sound like conversation; that they are in fact simply substitutes for conversation with an absent person. 12 As Barbara Packer characterizes Transcendentalist letter writing, In these intimate reflections and exchanges the Transcendentalists could write with an exuberance their sense of decorum kept out of their published works; in letters particularly they could be witty, malicious, and seductive as well as high-minded and devoted to truth. 13 We can see all of these characteristics in Emerson s letters, but we must also remember that Emerson, like all people, spoke in different voices to different people (and, as I will discuss below, he disliked conversation). The Emerson who asks Carlyle about the mysteries of the universe must have used a different vocabulary and tone than the Emerson who asks a fellow townsman to buy a cow for him; similarly, the Emerson who corresponds with Carlyle does not write in the same fashion as the Emerson who buys a cow. And not only did Emerson assume different postures with different people, he assumed various personae at different stages of his career: the Emerson who writes a tortured letter to George Ripley declining to join the Brook Farm community is simply not the same man who jots perfunctory epistles to Nathaniel Hawthorne or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or James Russell Lowell a decade and a half later inviting them to a dinner at the Saturday Club.

14 Introduction Another problem in reading someone s published letters is the feeling that we are violating their privacy, for, in the words of a recent critic of the genre, the published letter carries with it the cachet of violated boundaries and revealed secrets simply by virtue of circulating in print what was once (or is alleged to have been) written for an audience of one. 14 But Emerson s circle of friends regularly circulated their journals and letters among themselves. Bronson Alcott, for example, consistently gave his journal to Margaret Fuller to read during the late 1830s. In 1837 he copies into his journal a note from Fuller, who is returning his journal, beginning I thank you for the look you have esteemed me worthy to take into your views and feelings, and trust you will never have reason to repent your confidence, as I shall always rejoice in the intercourse which has been permitted me with so fair a soul. 15 Alcott also recognizes the ways in which nominally private documents have a public purpose when he enters in his journal that it more than any other means, shall best apprize her [Fuller] of the intents of her friend. It is the best substitute for epistolary correspondence. 16 Likewise, Fuller and Emerson read each other s journals. Emerson knew that many of his letters would be read by people other than their recipient. For example, during his long career as a lecturer in America and Britain, he sent home long, detailed letters of his travels (usually to his wife), fully expecting them to be shared with his extended family and circle of friends; after all, the alternative was to write the same letter to each of them. Or, as he wrote Lidian in 1847 from England, [f]or letters, do as you will with them, only not print them (L, 3:461). So, in reading these letters, we must be aware that Emerson often envisioned a wider audience for them than one person. 5 Emerson himself recognized at a young age the multivocal requirement that his correspondence placed upon him. Writing to his brother Edward in 1818, he begins: now to tell you the truth there are three or four different moods in which I write to three or four different persons; & in the following order. When I think I should like to write a letter & yet feel sufficiently sober to keep all my nonsense down, then I begin my letter with My dear Mother but when I think I can write a grammatically correct epistle or any thing that I am sure can raise the risible muscles of gravity itself, then I address my fastidious brother Bachelor When in a very compositorial rhetorical

15 Introduction 6 mood, I send to an uncle in the Alibama and last of all when I want to scribble I know not why, & care not what, & moreover have leisure & rhyme at command, and peradventure want to amuse myself, then as now the pen flies over the lines to my semi-andover semi-boston brother Ned. In short I write to you when I am in a serio-ludrico tragico-comico miscellany of feelings. (L, 1:70) Likewise, he early on showed his recognition and understanding of the nonprivate nature of his letters, as he writes Edward in the same letter that I must sober & season my letters with moral scientifick economical &c sentiments; especially when I am as sure that they will be shown to all my friends as that you will get them (L, 1:71). Still, while accepting the rules of letter writing ( Mother says that our letters should be improving to both, that we ought to write what strikes us in our reading particularly thereby improving each with the reading of the other ), Emerson felt uncomfortable in the medium ( [t]his letter as almost all mine contains little else than nonsense [1816; L, 1:21]). He complains that My letters in general you see are a strange medley of every thing and any thing (1816; L, 1:27). Very often he feels about himself the way he describes his friend Sarah Clarke as a very true person but with the right New England frost in her nature forbidding the streams to flow (1840; L, 2:330). As late as 1841 he complains to Fuller But how to reply to your fine eastern pearls with chuckstones of granite and slate (L, 2:384). Moreover, his natural disposition not to enter into arguments curtailed his use of the letter as a vehicle for such discussions; as he writes Henry Ware, Jr., who had inquired about what Emerson had really meant in the Divinity School Address, I thought I would not pay the nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress any opposition to their supposed views out of fear of offence. I would rather say to them These things look so to me; to you otherwise: let us say out our uttermost word, & let the all prevailing Truth, as it surely will, judge between us (1838; L, 2:150). Emerson partially overcame his reluctance to write by adopting different voices at various stages of his life and career, as well as with various correspondents. Although many of his roles in life overlapped, we can discern in his letters Emerson the youth and Harvard student (through 1821), teacher ( ), divinity student and minister ( ), resident of Concord (from 1834 on), lecturer (from 1835 on), Transcendentalist (primarily from 1836 to 1844), professional author (from 1836 on), traveler (from the late 1830s on in America and in , , and in Britain and Europe),

16 Introduction supporter and editor of the Dial ( ), and, above all, family man: from 1829 to 1831 with Ellen, from 1835 to his death with Lidian (and their children), and with his mother (d. 1853) and brothers Edward (d. 1834), Charles (d. 1836), Bulkeley (d. 1859), William (d. 1868). Each persona wrote a different type of letter; each correspondent who penetrated to Emerson s inner circle of friends drew forth a different voice. The early deaths of Emerson s brothers Edward and Charles deprived him of correspondents with whom he felt completely at ease. As their older brother, Waldo could act freely with his younger siblings in ways that he could not with his own elder brother, William. Indeed, the tone of his correspondence with William, while always warm, turns somehow less personal after the latter leaves the ministry and takes up law in New York; most of their correspondence deals with business matters, of which Waldo, as the family banker, was in charge. One assumes that his youthful and romantic letters to Ellen Tucker Emerson were also unguarded, but we cannot know because none of them have come down to us. In the 1830s and 1840s he again breaks down his customary reserve in writing about the topic of friendship with Fuller, Caroline Sturgis (Tappan), and Anna Barker (Ward); these letters show an emotionalness rare in the other letters as he grapples with his feelings, as when he writes Barker if you grow so fast on my love & reverence that I can dare believe that this dear style we are learning to use to each other is to become very fact then we can drop our words-of-course & can afford the luxury of sincerity (1840; L, 2:339). The correspondence with Fuller is also revealing, with Emerson endorsing one of her first letters to him with what shocking familiarity! but concluding, in a memoir of her, that it was impossible long to hold out against such urgent assault. 17 But most correspondents received letters tailored to their own needs: his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson was part of an ongoing discussion of theology; Carlyle was approached with carefully written letters about business matters (Emerson helped publish the latter s books in America) and philosophical areas in which they could agree; Abel Adams, Emerson s Concord banker, received business letters; and, as Emerson s public career continued, there were many, many business letters to publishers about his books and to lyceums about his lectures. As the man of Concord becomes a man of the world, his correspondence increases accordingly, if grudgingly, for, as he tells Lidian, it begins to interfere with his writing: I have got into a pretty good way of reading & writing at last, and so rather grudge to write letters (1841; L, 2:427). When Emerson finds someone he likes, or a topic he wants to expound 7

17 Introduction 8 upon, his letters rise to greatness. He always preferred letters to conversation; as he writes his brother William, their brother Charles was born with a tongue[,] you & I with a pen (1831; L, 1:333). When he hears people say they had rather have ten words vide voce from a man than volumes of letters for getting at his opinion, Emerson thinks I had rather converse with them by the interpreter. To him, [p]oliteness ruins conversation because we get nothing but the scum & surface of opinions when men are afraid of being unintelligible in their metaphysical distinctions (1827; L, 1:191). To Fuller he suggests I think you should read the letters & diaries of people[:] you would infer a better conversation than we ever find (1841; L, 2:441). Emerson was always uneasy in conversational groups and much preferred the written to the spoken word for the communicative act (lectures being an uneasy compromise between the two mediums). As he describes his situation to Sturgis, I am so born & qualified for solitude that as a spoonful of wine makes some people drunk so a little society, one person whom I cherish turns my head with too much excitement, and no doubt I make compliments and fatuities not a few (1843; L, 7:570). And in writing to a former student of his in 1835 about why he has not answered a letter, Emerson makes this summary statement about conversation in contrast to correspondence: It was not because it [the student s letter] was neglected for to my habits of intercourse a written page always comes more welcome than much conversation: the pen is a more faithful index than the tongue of those qualities in my fellow man that most excite my curiosity & whatever the proverbs may say of the untrustworthiness of words I know more of all my friends by them than by their acts (L, 1:431). 18 One thought in the last letter that runs throughout Emerson s correspondence is what he calls my chronic & constitutional reluctance to write a letter (1869; L, 9:338). Again, he formed his judgment on this subject very early, as we see in this letter from 1823 to a former classmate: I dislike cordially an exact correspondence which makes it binding on the conscience of the receiver of a letter to write his answer by the next post. I rather choose to claim the liberty of writing when I am in the humour, and in what dialect of the nations I will. If to write twice without waiting for an answer, please my despotic whims, I shall write twice; or if I should let my pen rot a whole year, unwet, I should feel no qualms. Claiming so large a charter for myself, I must needs allow the same to those who honour me with their epistles, and if my lord would not always wait for

18 Introduction my tardy letter, but would sometimes vouchsafe a gratuitous sheet I should be exceedingly grateful. (L, 7:120) 9 Or, as he writes his brother Charles, A few sincere & entire communications are all we can expect in a lifetime. They are they which make the earth memorable to the speakers and perhaps measure the spiritual years. For the rest we dodge one another on our diverse pursuits[,] waste time in the ado of meeting & parting or usurp it with our pompous business (1834; L, 1:427). But as the years went on, Emerson found it harder and harder to write these kinds of communications; by 1853 he informs Caroline Sturgis Tappan I believe, my slowness to write letters has grown from the experience, that some of my friends have been very impatient of my generalizings, as we weary of any trick, whilst theirs are still sweet to me. So I hesitate to write, except to the assessors, or to the man that is to slate my house (L, 8:374). 19 Emerson s complaint to Tappan that he is reduced to writing run-of-themill letters is echoed elsewhere in his correspondence. As he complains to Carlyle in 1856, we do not write letters to the gods or to our friends, but only to attorneys landlords & tenants, 20 or to Aunt Mary in 1857, the oppressive miscellany of my business-letter, so to call them, has long ago destroyed almost any inclination to write (L, 5:91). By the 1860s he explains to a correspondent inquiring about an unanswered letter that my correspondence is large, larger than I can meet as it requires, & I at almost all times indisposed to write any letter that is not indispensable. Tis only at intervals that I dare take up my sheaves of letters to see what has been neglected (1868; L, 6:22). 21 Also, by the late 1860s Emerson s mental powers are beginning to decline, a situation exacerbated by a fire that severely damaged his Concord house in While it was being repaired Emerson and his daughter Ellen went abroad, during which time she wrote most of the couple s letters home while he suffered from a long idleness say incapacity to write anything... not a line in my diary, not any syllable that I remember unless a word or two to the bankers, or unavoidable billets in reply to notes of invitation here or there has been written (1873; L, 6:234). As his mental decline continues into the 1870s, he is reduced to confessing to Emma Lazarus that he rarely goes abroad to see his friends because he is not willing to distress [them] with his perpetual forgetfulness of the right word for the name of the book or fact or person he is eager to recall, but which refuses to come. I have grown silent to my own household under this vexation, he adds, & cannot afflict dear

19 Introduction 10 friends with my tied tongue (1876; L, 6:296). Letter writing, too, is painful: his mental ability is diminished, what energies he has left are spent on business correspondence, and he has outlived most of his friends. Lacking vitality, and thus reflective of his own diminished physical and mental abilities, the letters from the last decade of Emerson s life are pale reflections of his earlier letters. The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson prints 350 letters written between 1813 and 1880, and includes some to all of his major correspondents. I have tried, as much as possible, to present a representative Emerson, one who corresponded with the famous and the unknown, who wrote on interesting and also mundane subjects, who soared in philosophical speculation but also came down to earth to discuss financial matters, whose letters provide the germs for some of his publications (most notably Friendship ) yet deal with the nitty-gritty of the profession of authorship, who can write eloquent letters of condolence to others yet strip his soul bare in grief himself, and who, above all, refashioned himself according to the needs of the moment and the correspondent. We see Emerson writing about family and other matters to his brothers Bulkeley, Charles, Edward, and William; his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson; his step-grandfather Ezra Ripley; his adopted sister, Elizabeth Hoar, who had been engaged to Charles Emerson and was called Aunt Lizzie by the family; and his wife Lidian and their children. Here, too, are the major participants in the Transcendentalist movement: Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, John Sullivan Dwight, Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, George Ripley, and Thoreau, as well as such second-generation converts as Moncure Daniel Conway and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. I have tried to be especially generous in selecting from the revealing correspondence with Fuller, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, Anna Barker Ward, and Samuel Gray Ward. The letters to Carlyle provide interesting glimpses into their book dealings, as well as discussions of theological and philosophical issues. Other famous literary and historical figures are also represented, including George Bancroft, Horatio Greenough, William Dean Howells, Emma Lazarus, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Muir, Wendell Phillips, Charles Summer, and Walt Whitman. While Emerson s letters to his family and to his better-known contemporaries are usually the most revealing, many other letters help us to see the multifaceted personality of their writer. There are, for example, his evaluations of the prose and poetry of his friends and of strangers, which present in

20 Introduction miniature Emerson s theories of writing and literature. There is his lifelong correspondence with such people as his childhood friend William Henry Furness or Benjamin Peter Hunt, a former student of his, that gives us in passing Emerson s views on friendship. The 1850s witness a number of strong letters speaking out against slavery. His letters of condolence provide fascinating character sketches that help to define what Emerson looked for in his own representative men and women. Some of these letters stand out vividly on their own as gems of the art of letter writing (such as those to Carlyle or Fuller) or as signposts in Emerson s life. Printed here are letters accepting and then resigning his post with Boston s Second Church and Society; announcing with joy his marriage to Ellen Tucker, and then with grief her death; giving vivid descriptions of his travels across America and in Britain, France, and Egypt; supporting Alcott in the Boston newspapers against his critics (and then telling him how to write plainly); recommending both Thoreau and Whitman for positions (and saluting the latter upon the publication of Leaves of Grass); greeting the birth of his children and revealing his anguish and his inability to grieve at the death of his young son Waldo; rejecting an offer to join the Brook Farm community; trying to get his nephew an army post (here published for the first time); and engaging in the business of writing, both for himself and for others, with numerous publishers. Emerson s sermons and lectures, while unpublished until recently, nevertheless represent a public face that he wore when dealing with an audience, just as the works he published himself were to stand alone without reference to the personality behind them. His journals and notebooks provide many personal revelations, but they served primarily as the raw material out of which he formed his writings, what he called his savings bank. 22 It is in his letters that Emerson shares with us his likes and dislikes, praises and blames, highs and lows, griefs and joys, loves and deaths, empyrean heights and down-to-earth matters, and it is through the letters that we gain a unique insight into the mind of this seminal figure in American literary and intellectual history. 11 Editorial Policy This selected edition of Emerson s letters reprints the texts from the earlier editions by Rusk, Slater, and Tilton with few changes. Because matters of styling differ among these three editors, I have imposed uniformity in such

21 Introduction 12 matters by placing all date and place lines, and closing salutations and signatures flush right; placing all opening salutations flush left; indenting all paragraphs the same distance; setting words underlined by Emerson in italics; and lowering all superscript letters to the line. I have also not reported any of Emerson s revisions, such as insertions and cancellations, choosing instead to present the final layer of text. Nor have I reported ellipses used to indicate missing material from printed texts for which no manuscript source exists. Like the earlier editors, I have not modernized or regularized Emerson s spelling, punctuation, or capitalization practices, except in a few cases. 23 Square brackets in the texts of letters indicate my interpolations. The wax seal used on many of Emerson s letters often tore the manuscript when removed. When words are missing because of such damage, I have indicated this by [manuscript mutilated] ; Rusk and Tilton often supplied missing words in brackets for these cases, and I have printed their surmises here without brackets. Emerson s signature has been cut away from some letters (probably for autograph collectors), a fact I do not report. Because the annotations in the earlier editions are models of thoroughness, I have kept annotations here to a minimum, knowing that readers may return to the originals for more information. I have provided a chronology to present the outline of Emerson s life for reference, and biographies to help introduce his major correspondents. Further information may be easily obtained from Albert J. Von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), and Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism and Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, both edited by Wesley T. Mott (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996). I have, in general, attempted to create readable texts for this edition, while retaining as much of Emerson s original style as possible; full textual information is, of course, available in the Rusk, Slater, and Tilton editions. Ralph L. Rusk, Joseph Slater, and Eleanor M. Tilton all produced editions of Emerson s letters that will stand the tests of time and scholarly usage. Without their work, this edition and much of the scholarship on Emerson over the past fifty-plus years would not have been possible. In preparing this edition I am grateful to the University of South Carolina, and especially Robert Newman, chair of the English department, for support. Michael McLoughlin assisted in seeing the work through press. Scott Gwara graciously provided translations. Ronald A. Bosco, Lawrence Buell, and Rob-

22 Introduction ert D. Richardson Jr. all made valuable suggestions about the introduction. Jerome Loving helped with information on Whitman. Jennifer Crewe supported this book from the start and made it possible for me to enjoy putting it together. All manuscripts are quoted by permission of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association. The RWEMA has, ever since it was formed in the 1930s, supported scholarly work on Emerson, and the public is much in its debt for both preserving and making available the great treasure trove of papers in its collection, now at the Houghton Library of Harvard University. Greta has put up with Emersoniana spreading throughout our house and lives for more than twenty years, and has brought me, as Emerson says (1866; L, 5:451) of one of Ellen s letters, an otto of roses. This book is important; so naturally it is for her. Joel Myerson Edisto Beach, South Carolina 13 Notes 1. Letter to Lidian Jackson Emerson, 8 10 March 1848, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939; ), 4:33. Further references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text by year of the letter and volume and page number. 2. Full citations for these and other works by Emerson may be found in my Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982). Rusk s edition of Emerson s correspondence with Arthur Hugh Clough (1934) is the exception to my general statements about editorial policy in this paragraph. 3. Because of limited space, Rusk did not print any letter that had been previously published (but he did list the place of publication in his edition). This resulted in a skewed picture of Emerson in his edition, for such correspondences as those with Carlyle, Furness, Thoreau, and Ward were omitted. Tilton printed all these in her edition, plus the letters to Tappan and Anna Ward, which had not been available to Rusk. 4. Rusk did not report cancellations or insertions in the manuscripts. He also left out a few personal references at the request of the Emerson family; these were later restored by Tilton (and can be identified through using the Calendar at the end of the tenth volume). Tilton reports insertions and cancellations in the manuscripts. 5. Emerson s Collected Letters, New York Times Book Review, 28 May 1939, pp. 1, 15.

23 Introduction Brooks, Emerson in His Time, New Republic 90 (23 August 1939): 78 80; Scudder, The Human Emerson, Saturday Review of Literature 20 (10 June 1939): 3, 4, Anon., The Essential Democrat, Times Literary Supplement, 1 July 1939, pp. 388, 390; H. B. Charlton, Emerson s Letters, Manchester Guardian, 27 June 1939, p Anon., Waldo, Time, 29 May 1939, p The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), 1:xiii xiv. 10. An edition of Emerson s later lectures is underway by Ronald A. Bosco and me for publication by the University of Georgia Press. Bosco and I are also editing the correspondence of the Emerson brothers. 11. SeeYoung Emerson Speaks: Unpublished Discourses on Many Subjects, ed. Arthur Cushman McGiffert Jr. (1938); The Heart of Emerson s Journals, ed. Bliss Perry (1926); The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert N. Linscott (1960); and Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 12. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p Barbara L. Packer, The Transcendentalists, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 2 (Prose Writing ), ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, p Larry A. Carlson, Bronson Alcott s Journal for 1837 (Part Two), in Studies in the American Renaissance 1982, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1982), p Larry A. Carlson, Bronson Alcott s Journal for 1838 (Part One), in Studies in the American Renaissance 1993, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p Emerson s endorsement on Fuller s letter to him of 30 May 1837, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth, 6 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), 1:277; [William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and Ralph Waldo Emerson], Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1852), 1: Despite Emerson s strictures on conversation, the paucity of letters to his Concord family and friends suggests that he did indeed talk freely with the people whom he liked. Most of his surviving letters to Lidian and to Henry David Thoreau are written during his travels. Elizabeth Hoar, whom he treated like a sister after the death of her fiancé Charles Emerson, barely figures in his correspondence, partly because she lived nearby in Concord, and partly because his public letters to Lidian during his travels were also meant for her to read. 19. In a similar fashion, he writes Carlyle about his slowness to write and that I

24 Introduction believe the reason for this recusancy is, the fear of disgusting my friends, as with a book open always at the same page (1853, in The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater [New York: Columbia University Press, 1964], p. 491). 20. Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, p Emerson gives an unusual reason why he has let drop one segment of his letter-writing audience in replying to a friend wishing a letter of introduction to someone in England: I have let fall all my English correspondence... This state of things is not owing solely to my indolence, but partly to the fact that my friends abroad very seldom sent friends to me, so that I could not well request kind offices of them (1862; L, 5:277). 22. He also copied letters most notably those written to Aunt Mary in his journal. One brief letter to Thoreau in his journal ( My dear Henry, / A frog was made to live in a swamp, but a man was not made to live in a swamp. Yours ever. R. ) is included by Tilton, even though she confesses it is probably not to be taken as a genuine letter (1858; L, 8:562). 23. I have silently emended punctuation that is confusing, such as redundant periods; changed Emerson s elongated equal signs into one-em dashes; and emended Emerson s brackets to parentheses in his letters of 25 June 1840 and 30 December I have also silently corrected Tilton s erroneous transcription of the fourth sentence in Emerson s letter to Whitman of 21 July

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26 Chronology October Reverend William Emerson marries Ruth Haskins February Phebe Ripley Emerson born November John Clarke Emerson born September Phebe Ripley Emerson dies July William Emerson born September Lydia Jackson born May Ralph Waldo Emerson born April Edward Bliss Emerson born April Robert Bulkeley Emerson born 26 April John Clarke Emerson dies November Charles Chauncy Emerson born February Mary Caroline Emerson born 12 May Reverend William Emerson dies 1812 Spring? Enters Boston Latin School

27 Chronology April Mary Caroline Emerson dies 1817 October 1818 January Enters Harvard College Begins occasional school-teaching at Waltham August Graduates from Harvard College October Assists William in a school for young ladies 1822 November Thoughts on the Religion of the Middle Ages, RWE s first publication, appears in the Christian Disciple and Theological Review December Takes over William s school when he leaves for Germany 1824 April Begins formally studying religion 31 December Closes school February Registers as a student of divinity at Harvard 12 September Opens school at Chelmsford (closes it at end of year) January Takes over Edward s school in Roxbury when he leaves for Europe (closes it on 28 March) 1 April Opens school in Cambridge (closes it on 23 October) 10 October Approbated by American Unitarian Association to preach 25 November Sails to Charleston, S.C., and St. Augustine, Fla., to improve health June Returns to Boston

28 Chronology 25 December Meets Ellen Louisa Tucker in Concord, N.H July Edward is committed to McLean Asylum (released in the fall) 17 December Engaged to Ellen Tucker January Becomes colleague pastor at Second Church, Boston 11 March Ordained at Second Church 1 July Promoted to pastor 30 September Marries Ellen Tucker December Edward goes to Puerto Rico for his health (returns August 1832) February Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson dies of tuberculosis 7 December Charles goes to Puerto Rico for his health (returns 1 May 1832) October Edward returns to Puerto Rico for his health 22 December Sends farewell letter to Second Church resigning his position 25 December Sails for Europe August Meets Jane and Thomas Carlyle 7 October Returns to America 5 November Delivers his first public lecture, The Uses of Natural History, in Boston 3 December William Emerson marries Susan Woodward Haven 1834 March Meets Lydia Jackson of Plymouth 13 May Receives partial inheritance of $11,600 from Ellen Emerson s estate 1 October Edward dies of tuberculosis in Puerto Rico 9 October Moves to Concord, Mass.

29 Chronology January Proposes to Lydia Jackson (engagement announcement at end of month) 29 January Begins first lecture series, Biography, in Boston 12 September Delivers discourse on Concord s history (published in November) 14 September Marries Lydia Jackson (whom he calls Lidian ) May Charles dies suddenly in New York 9 September Nature published 19 September First meeting of the Transcendental Club 30 October Waldo Emerson born 8 December Begins Philosophy of History lecture series in Boston 1837 late July Receives remainder of inheritance (another $11,675) from Ellen Emerson s estate 31 August Delivers address on the American Scholar at Harvard (published 23 September) 6 December Begins Human Culture lecture series in Boston July Carlyle s Critical and Miscellaneous Essays published, edited by RWE 15 July Delivers address at the Harvard Divinity School (published 21 August) 24 July Delivers address on Literary Ethics at Dartmouth College (published 8 September) February Ellen Tucker Emerson born 7 September Jones Very s Essays and Poems published, edited by RWE 4 December Begins Present Age lecture series in Boston July First issue of Dial appears 20 March Begins Human Life lecture series in Providence 2 September Attends the last meeting of the Transcendental Club

30 Chronology March Essays [First Series] published (and in England on 21 August) 11 August Delivers The Method of Nature at Waterville College, Maine (published 21 October) 22 November Edith Emerson born January Waldo Emerson dies of scarlatina March Margaret Fuller resigns as editor of Dial; Emerson becomes editor January Begins New England lecture series in Baltimore May Carlyle s Past and Present published, edited by RWE April Last issue of Dial appears 10 July Edward Waldo Emerson born 1 August Delivers address on Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies at Concord Court House (published 9 September and in England in October) 19 October Essays: Second Series published (and in England on 9 November) December Purchases forty-one acres at Walden Pond 31 December Begins Representative Men lecture series in Concord December Poems published in England (and in America on 25 December) October Sails for England May Arrives in Paris 2 June Returns to England 6 June Begins Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth- Century lecture series in London

31 Chronology July Returns to America February Begins English Traits lecture series in Chelmsford, Mass. 20 March First meeting of Town and Country Club 11 September Nature: Addresses, and Lectures published January Representative Men published (and in England on 5 January) 13 May Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 28 June) 19 July Margaret Fuller dies December Begins The Conduct of Life lecture series in Boston February Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli published, co-edited by RWE April Lectures in Montreal 24 November Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns mid-february 1853) November Ruth Haskins Emerson dies January Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 20 February) 3 January Begins Topics of Modern Times lecture series in Philadelphia 16 December First meeting of the Saturday Club 1855 ca. 27 December Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns late January 1856) August English Traits published (and in England on 6 September) January Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 10 February)

32 Chronology May Robert Bulkeley Emerson dies January Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 25 February) 8 December The Conduct of Life published (and in England on 8 December) April Begins Life and Literature lecture series in Boston 16 July Edward Waldo Emerson admitted to Harvard May August Henry David Thoreau dies Thoreau appears in Atlantic Monthly January Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 7 February) 1May Mary Moody Emerson dies 10 October Thoreau s Excursions published, edited by RWE 27 November Begins American Life lecture series in Boston January Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 10 February) 22 July Thoreau s Letters to Various Persons published, edited by RWE 3 October Edith Emerson marries William Hathaway Forbes January Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 20 February) 23 June Complete Works published in two volumes in England 10 July Ralph Emerson Forbes, RWE s first grandchild, born 18 July Awarded LL.D. degree by Harvard January Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 22 or 23 March) 29 April May-Day and Other Pieces published (and in England on 8 June) 17 July Appointed Overseer of Harvard University 2 December Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 2 January)

33 Chronology September William Emerson dies October Prose Works published in two volumes in America March Society and Solitude published (and in England on 5 March) 26 April Begins Natural History of Intellect series at Harvard April Begins trip to California (returns 30 May) 25 November Begins midwestern lecture tour (returns 14 December) July RWE s house severely damaged by fire 23 October Goes to Europe with Ellen 25 December Arrives in Egypt February Returns to Europe 27 April Sees Carlyle for the last time 26 May Returns to America 1 October Delivers address at the opening of the Concord Free Public Library September Edward Waldo Emerson marries Annie Shepard Keyes 19 December Parnassus published, a poetry collection edited by RWE December Letters and Social Aims published (and in England on 8 January 1876) June The Little Classic Edition of RWE s works is published in nine volumes February Delivers address on Fortune of the Republic in Boston (published 10 August)

34 Chronology 7 April Elizabeth Hoar dies February Delivers one hundredth lecture before the Concord Lyceum April Catches cold 27 April Ralph Waldo Emerson dies in Concord, Mass. 30 April Buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord

35

36 Biographies Adams, Abel ( ). A lifelong friend of Emerson and neighbor of his in Concord, who advised the family on financial matters. Agassiz, Jean Louis ( ). A Swiss-born natural scientist, who founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He was a friend of Thoreau s and often visited Concord. He was also a member of the Saturday Club. Alcott, Amos Bronson ( ). A teacher at the Temple School in Boston ( ), whose progressive educational views brought him to Emerson s attention. Emerson defended Alcott against his critics when the Temple School was in trouble, read his manuscript on the development of his daughters ( Psyche ) many times without being able to get Alcott to revise it successfully, helped him to attend Transcendental Club meetings, and published his writings in the Dial. Alcott moved to Concord in 1840, visited a group in England interested in his ideas in 1842, and (with one of the Englishmen, Charles Lane) worked at the Fruitlands community in Harvard, Massachusetts, during the last half of After the failure of Fruitlands, the Alcotts moved about a good deal before permanently settling in Concord in Bancroft, George ( ). An historian and member of the Saturday Club, Bancroft had earlier trained for the ministry, studying theology in Germany and teaching at Harvard College. Blake, Harrison Gray Otis ( ). One of the students who had invited Emerson to deliver his Divinity School Address, Blake was a lifelong admirer of Emerson and a disciple of Thoreau. He later edited four volumes of selections from Thoreau s journal. After the death of Thoreau s sister Sophia, he was left all Thoreau s manuscripts. Bradford, George Partridge ( ). A Harvard Divinity School graduate, who was the brother of Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, a member of the Brook Farm community, and a good friend of Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau.