54 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to Caroline Healey Dall, January 4, 1860, ibid., 298. This was the New England Women’s Rights Convention of 1859, held in Boston.
55 Ibid., 313–14.
56 Samuel Johnson, Lectures, Essays, and Sermons, with a Memoir by Samuel Longfellow (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883), quoting D. H. Jaques. The best account of Johnson is Roger C. Mueller, “Samuel Johnson, American Transcendentalist: A Short Biography,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 115 (January 1979), 9–67, to which I am indebted throughout; but see also Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism & Asian Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter 8.
57 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Elizabeth Hoar, September 12, 1840, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–95), 2:331.
58 For James Walker, for example, he read Cousin’s “Lectures on Psychology” (Elements of Psychology [1834]) in Caleb Sprague Henry’s translation, and Jouffroy’s “Ethics” (Introduction to Ethics) as William Henry Channing had rendered them for Ripley’s Specimens of Standard Foreign Literature. Later Johnson recalled this as “the most delightful textbook” he had ever studied and as well lavished praise on Ripley’s whole series. See Longfellow, “Memoir,” in Johnson, Lectures, Essays, and Sermons, 4–5.
59 Ibid., 14–15.
60 Ibid., 27.
61 Ibid., 33–34, 39–40.
62 Ibid., 41–42; Persons, Free Religion, 79–80.
63 Samuel Johnson, A Ministry in Free Religion (Boston: Rand, Avery, & Frye, 1870), 24.
64 Longfellow, “Memoir,” in Johnson, Lectures, Essays, and Sermons, 47; Samuel Johnson, Oriental Religions and Their Relation to Universal Religion: India (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1872), 1.
65 Longfellow, “Memoir,” in Johnson, Lectures, Essays, and Sermons, 106–07, letter to Lucy Osgood; and 97.
66 Ibid., 97.
67 Johnson, India, 1.
68 Ibid., 3.
69 Ibid., 13–14.
70 Ibid., 2, 30.
71 Roberts Brothers to Samuel Johnson, September 19, 1870, cited in Mueller, “Samuel Johnson,” 47.
72 James Freeman Clarke, “Comparative Theology of Heathen Religions,” Christian Examiner 62 (March 1857), 183–99.
73 Atlantic Monthly 23 (May 1869), 548–62; 23 (June 1869), 713–28; and 24 (September 1869), 336–51.
74 Johnson, Ministry in Free Religion, 15.
75 Atlantic Monthly 51 (June 1883), 852.
76 Johnson, Lectures, Essays, and Sermons, 420, 423–24.
77 Ibid., 431.
78 Ibid., 447, 450.
11: TOWARD THE GENTEEL TRADITION
1 Stedman, Edmund C., Octavius Brooks Frothingham and the New Faith (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), 3–4.
2 Ibid., 7–8.
3 See Moncure Daniel Conway, ed., The Sacred Anthology: A Book of Ethnical Scriptures (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1874).
4 Stedman, Frothingham, 10–18.
5 Ibid., 8–9, 15–16.
6 Ibid., 15–18.
7 Octavius Brooks Frothingham provided reminiscences of his father in Boston Unitarianism, 1820–1850: A Study of the Life and Work of Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890).
8 One of the few modern considerations of Frothingham is J. Wade Caruthers, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gentle Radical (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1977).
9 See ibid., chapter 3.
10 Free Religious Association, Proceedings (1892), 12. Also see Stow Persons, Free Religion, An American Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), passim.
11 Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Recollections and Impressions, 1822–1890 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891), 120–21.
12 Octavius Brooks Frothingham, The Religion of Humanity (New York: D. G. Francis, 1873), 12–15.
13 Ibid., 15–17.
14 See, for example, ibid., 59, where Frothingham quotes the famous “transparent eye-ball” passage from Emerson’s Nature.
15 Ibid., 22–23.
16 Ibid., 32–34.
17 Ibid., 90, 108.
18 Ibid., 108–09.
19 Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England: A History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), vii–viii.
20 Ibid., 353, 355.
21 Samuel Osgood, “Transcendentalists in New England,” International Review 3 (1876), 761. Hedge was more acerbic. In the early 1880s, when he told a correspondent that he had provided Frothingham with his own, corrective reminiscences of the movement when Frothingham talked of preparing a new edition (never completed), Hedge added tartly, “between ourselves [Transcendentalism in New England] is a very poor book & one which [Frothingham] had no vocation to write.” Frederic Henry Hedge to James Elliot Cabot, November 20, 1883, in Mathew Fisher, “Emerson Remembered: Nine Letters of Frederic Henry Hedge,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1989 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 325–26.
22 The best account of this venture is in F. B. Sanborn and William T. Harris, Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy, 2 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893).
23 Caroline Healey Dall, Transcendentalism in New England: A Lecture (Boston: Sold by Roberts Brothers, 1897), 22.
24 Santayana, in Norman Henfrey, ed., Selected Critical Writings of George Santayana, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 2:88–89.
25 Ibid., 2:90–91.
26 Ibid., 2:91–92.
27 Ibid., 2:93.
28 George Santayana, “Emerson” (1900) ibid., 1:119.
29 George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” ibid., 2: 98–100.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been reading and thinking about Transcendentalism for forty-odd years and can date the beginning of my interest. I was barely a teenager in a November that stands out from all other damp, drizzly New England Novembers by the horror of the gunshots in Dallas: 1963. One afternoon near a field of uncut hay I saw a chokecherry tree full of chattering yellow birds. Only as large as robins, in their aura they seemed immense and surreal, with black wings and oversize finch bills, working their way through fermenting fruit with such dispatch that I watched the ground chalk beneath. Twice as big and amazingly bright, these were not goldfinches, at this season also attired in duller garb. Against a crystalline late-autumn sky these birds were startlingly garish, so noisy as to be brash, and unforgettable when, five minutes later, as oblivious to me as I was entranced by them, they flew when the last cherry was gone.
This visitation transformed my life. What were they? When I discovered that Roger Tory Peterson’s bird guide was checked out of our small public library and no other book pictured them, I convinced the librarian to help me locate the addresses of natural history museums whose scientists, I was convinced, would be excited about my discovery. I sent off several handwritten letters, addressed to the “Curator of Birds,” at the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and other such august institutions.
Months passed without any answer, but one day there appeared in the mailbox a handwritten envelope from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, with a few lines hastily written on the stationery of the Curator of Ornithology. “Undoubtedly Evening Grosbeaks, a large cousin of the Goldfinch. [signed] Dean Amadon.” My next trip to the library yielded Peterson’s field guide, returned by whoever had checked it out prior to my first foray, and there were my birds, evening grosbeaks! Their visit was not so remarkable, as it turned out, for in severe winters they often wander from northern forests to regions like New England, where food is more readily available. Rather, as I subsequently learned, the extraordinary thing was that one of the world’s foremost ornithologists, Dean Amadon, had taken the time to answer a schoolboy’s scrawl! That note was the beginning of my serious interest in nature study. Through the enthusiasm of an eighth-grade teacher I soon found t
he works of Thoreau and, eventually, through him, the Transcendentalists and their world.
I date the genesis of this particular book to April 20, 1971, when, after spending two semesters with Warner Berthoff reading nineteenth-century American literature, he inscribed to me his copies of the first two volumes of George Ripley’s Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, “to commemorate a fine tutorial year.” I have treasured these books and have eventually acquired and read Ripley’s remarkable series in its totality. More than anything, these works pushed me to consider the transatlantic dimensions of the Transcendentalist movement.
I owe much to other teachers, too. The late Joel Porte, who directed my doctoral dissertation, early on offered guidance in studies of Emerson and Thoreau. Shortly before he died, I was able to tell him of this project as well as share our mutual love of Thoreau a last time. Two other scholars whom I miss, Alan Heimert and his colleague William Hutchison, alerted me to the significance of the religious dimensions of the Transcendentalist movement. The remarkable nonagenarian Daniel Aaron insisted that I consider the political activities of Theodore Parker, Orestes Brownson, and others. His Men of Good Hope remains an inspiration. Elsewhere I have indicated my indebtedness to Richard Rabinowitz, but I want to note here that, among other things, he encouraged my work on James Marsh by sharing his own unpublished essays on this fascinating thinker. I mention, too, one memorable erratum from my student years, my not having taken Richard Niebuhr’s legendary course, “Kant, Coleridge, and Schleiermacher.” Now I know what the topic meant and why it matters, and had I enrolled in it, this no doubt would have been a better book.
For a decade I was privileged to contribute the evaluative essay on “Emerson, Thoreau, and Transcendentalism” to the annual volume American Literary Scholarship, a task that kept me abreast of the scholars who make possible the study of Transcendentalism. Foremost among these are Lawrence Buell, Joel Myerson, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., and David M. Robinson, who comprise what we jokingly call our modern Transcendental Club, meeting together or in rump session at the Modern Language Association conventions and occasionally at other venues for good talk and much cheer. For years we toyed with the idea of writing a collaborative history of the movement, but other projects took us elsewhere. These individuals know how much I am indebted to their scholarship and support. I also wish to acknowledge David D. Hall and Daniel Walker Howe, whose work in cognate fields has much helped me to write about my subject. These two are models of professionalism.
I thank Ellen S. Dunlap, the president of the American Antiquarian Society, for appointing me Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence for 2006–07 and thus allowing me to reacquaint myself, after thirty years, with New England’s four seasons. Those who have had the privilege of working at this national library of American history know its incomparable resources and its infallibly helpful and courteous staff. I single out Joanne Chaison, John B. Hench, and Caroline Sloat for years of support there.
Finally, I thank my loving children, David, Daniel, and Katherine, and my wife, Leslie, all of whom have been ever tolerant of my habits and eccentricities, and who survived an academic year when all five of us lived in different locations.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages of your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
abolitionist movement; Emerson in; Garrison in; Parker in; Thoreau and
Abram, Wood
Adams, Henry
Address before the Senior Class, An (Emerson); see also “Divinity School Address” (Emerson)
Aesthetic Papers
Agassiz, Louis
Age of Reason
Aids to Reflection (Coleridge)
Alcott, Abigail May
Alcott, Amos Bronson; Association movement and; Brook Farm and; Channing and; in Concord; “consociate family” theory of; educational philosophy of; Elizabeth Peabody and; Emerson and; Fruitlands experiment of; as lecturer; Norton’s attack on; press attacks on; Temple School of; Transcendental Club and
Alcott, Louisa May
Alcott House
Alexander, J. W.
Alger, Horatio
Allston, Washington
American Anti-Slavery Society
“American Civilization” (Emerson)
American Journal of Education
American Men of Letters series
American Religion (Weiss)
American Scholar (Emerson)
“American Transcendentalism” (Murdock)
American Union of Associationists
American Unitarian Association; Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” and
Ammons, C. F.
amours au phalanstère, Les (Love in the Phalanstery) (Hennequin)
Andover Theological Seminary
Anthony, Susan B.
Ariosto, Ludovico
Arnim, Bettina von
Associationist movement
Association of the Alumni of the Cambridge Theological School
“Asylum for Discharged Female Converts,”
atheism
Atlantic Monthly
“Aulus Persius Flaccus” (Thoreau)
Austria
Babylon Is Falling (Brownson)
“Bhagvat Geeta, and the Doctrine of Immortality, The” (Greene)
Ballou, Adin
Bancroft, George; Round Hill School of
Bangor Theological Seminary
Bartlett, Robert
Bartol, Cyrus
Batchelder, James
Baur, Ferdinand Christian
Beat generation
Beck, Karl
Beecher, Henry Ward
Bellamy, Joseph
Bellows, Henry W.
Bem, Josef
Bentley, William
Bible; authority of language of; confounding of Christianity with entirety of; Higher vs. Lower Critics of; as sacred poetry; see also New Testament; Old Testament
Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review
Blackwood’s Magazine
blasphemy
Blazing Star, The (Greene)
Boston: Athenaeum in; Fugitive Slave Law resistance in; Masonic Temple in
Boston Daily Advertiser
Boston Daily Courier
“Boston Kidnapping, The” (Parker)
Boston Post
Boston Quarterly Review
Boston Unitarianism (Frothingham)
Bowen, Francis
Bower, Samuel
Bradford, George P.
Brattle Book Shop
Brattle Street Church
Breckinridge, John C.
Brisbane, Albert
Brockmeyer, Henry C.
Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education; “articles of agreement” for; Ballou as inspiration for; Emerson and; failure of; financial problems of; Fourierist reorganization of; Fruitlands compared with; goals of; industry at; labor and activities at; lectures held at; organizational structure of; Phalanstery fire at; population of; purchase price of; religious activities at; renamings of; school at; setting and structures of
Brooks, Charles Timothy
Brooks, Preston
Brown, Frank
Brown, John
Brown, Thomas
Brownson, Orestes; Brook Farm and; Civil War and; Constant’s influence on; Cousin’s influence on; Dial and; election of 1840 and; Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” and; Emerson’s Nature reviewed by; Emerson’s popularity explained by; Fourier and; Greene and; Jouffroy and; Norton evaluated by; as reformer; Ripley and; as Roman Catholic convert; Schleiermacher’s influence on; Thoreau and; Transcendental Club and; Unitarian ministry of; as Universalist minister; see also Boston Quarterly Review; Brownson’s Quarterly Review
Brownson, Orestes, Jr.
Brownson, Sally Healy
Brownson’s Quarte
rly Review
Bruce, Georgianna
Buchez, Philippe
Buckingham, Joseph T.
Buckminster, Joseph Stevens
Bulfinch, Charles
Bunyan, John
Burns, Anthony
Bushnell, Horace
Cabot, James Elliot
Calvinism; Unitarianism’s break with
Carlyle, Thomas; Emerson and
Cass, Lewis
Channing, William Ellery (clergyman); Alcott and; Brook Farm and; as Dexter Lecturer; Dial and; Elizabeth Peabody and; journals published by; as leading Unitarian; Leroux and; Ripley and; “self-culture” and; Stuart and; Transcendental Club and
Channing, William Ellery (poet)
Channing, William Henry; Association movement and; Brook Farm and; “Christian Union” of; Clapp and; Fuller and; Jouffroy and
Chartism (Carlyle)
Chauncy, Charles
Cheerful Yesterdays (Higginson)
Cheney, Ednah
“Chief Sins of the People, The” (Parker)
Chopin, Frédéric
Christian Disciple
Christian Examiner; Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” and; as focus for Unitarian thought; Idealist philosophy and; miracles issue and; Ripley and
Christian Faith, The (Schleiermacher)
Christian Register
Church of England
Church of the New Jerusalem
American Transcendentalism Page 42
