Lot 40: Ralph Waldo Emerson handwritten letter to Transcendentalist about Harvard

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO. (1803-1882). American essayist and poet; the leading figure in the Transcendentalist movement. ALS. (“R.W. Emerson”). 3pp. Small 8vo. Concord, August 3, 1875. To American transcendentalist writer and artist CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH (1813-1892). ********** “I hope you have some notes to send me of your visits to the H. College classes of Rhetoric & English Literature. Mr. Dana who is Chairman of the Over Seers Committee of H. College has called upon the Chairman of each Sub-Committee for a report of the findings of his Committee in their visits to the College during the year. I hope you have some good facts, criticisms and advice to send me on this department. My own opportunities have in this year been less than usual and I have yet no communications from the Committee except from Mr. Chase alone, who has sent me a valuable sheet. Do me the favor to send me any results you have on this subject at your earliest leisure, & oblige your friend….” ********** The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson entered Harvard College at age 14 and served as class poet. After his graduation, he traveled to the South, where he was deeply affected by the institution of slavery. Returning to Massachusetts, he worked as a teacher and in the law offices of Daniel Webster, before distinguishing himself as a student at Harvard Divinity School. Eventually, he grew disillusioned by the church’s teachings and set off for England where he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. ********** Upon his return to the United States, he settled in Concord and joined the booming lecture circuit, delivering his first public talk in 1833 and, over the next five decades, continuing to speak on topics as diverse as science, religion, history, and philosophy. He became known in Europe and America as “the bringer of a new religion which somehow squared with the times even while it supplied a method for criticizing them,” (DAB). Emerson’s home in Concord became the epicenter of Transcendentalism as Emerson found himself increasingly, if reluctantly, drawn into movements for social reform. Despite his involvement, “his attitude... was the attitude of a poet and philosopher; his game was the intellect, and his goal the triumph of invisible - though none the less potent - ideas,” (ibid.). ********** In 1875, Emerson published his Letters and Social Aims, and throughout 1874 and 1875, he maintained a correspondence with fellow members of the Harvard Overseers Committee on Rhetoric, many of which are included in Emerson’s published letters. ********** Cranch, the son of a prominent judge in the District of Columbia, attended Harvard Divinity School and undertook a career as a traveling Unitarian minister. Much impressed by Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature,” he was soon counted among the members of the Cambridge Transcendental Club. He devoted himself more to writing and became editor of the Western Messenger where he reviewed Emerson’s 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address, “The American Scholar,” calling Emerson a “man of genius, the bold deep thinker, and the concise original writer,” (“Emerson and Christopher Pearse Cranch,” Carpenter, The New England Quarterly). His own poetry was published in the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial and The Harbinger. In addition to writing, Cranch painted landscapes, but his best-known work is a sketch of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” a concept Emerson described in “Nature” as necessary to fully experience nature. Cranch was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1850. ********** Our letter mentions Emerson’s fellow committee member Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1787-1882), who, as a child, had been a student at Emerson’s private school. He was the son of notable Boston poet and literary critic Richard Henry Dana, Sr., who had written unfavorably about the work of Emerson and Transcendentalism. Both father and son attended Harvard College, and the younger Dana went on to achieve renown as a writer, lawyer and politician. He is the author of the classic 19th-century memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, which chronicles his unconventional stint as a merchant seaman during a hiatus from his education at Harvard. After completing his undergraduate studies and studying law at Harvard where he specialized in maritime law, Dana published the legal reference book The Seaman’s Friend. An abolitionist, he defended fugitive slaves and helped form the Free Soil Party. In 1853, he represented William Morton in his legal claim that he had discovered the medical uses of ether before his rival claimants. Abraham Lincoln appointed Dana Unites States Attorney for Massachusetts and he argued cases before the Supreme Court and participated in the trial of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Also mentioned is committee member and author George B. Chase (1835-1902) who graduated Harvard in 1856. ********** Folded and accompanied by a contemporary sepia carte-de-visite photograph of the seated poet, holding a book. Our letter is published in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 10, wherein it is noted that our letter was once in the inventory of Boston’s Goodspeed’s Book Shop.