American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  5 Furness, Remarks on the Four Gospels, 146.

  6 Martin Luther Hurlburt, “Remarks on the Four Gospels,” Christian Examiner 22 (March 1837), 103–104.

  7 Ibid., 107.

  8 Ibid., 111–12.

  9 William Henry Furness, “The Miracles of Jesus,” Christian Examiner 22 (July 1837), 283–321.

  10 Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (hereafter LRWE), eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–95), 2:147.

  11 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885), 115.

  12 Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 263–64.

  13 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” in Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures; Historical Introduction and Notes by Robert E. Spiller; Text Established by Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 76.

  14 Ibid., 76, 80.

  15 Ibid., 81.

  16 Ibid., 81, 84.

  17 Ibid., 85–86.

  18 Ibid., 89, 90, 91, 93.

  19 Convers Francis to Frederic Henry Hedge, August 10, 1838, in Guy R. Woodall, “The Record of a Friendship: The Letters of Convers Francis to Frederic Henry Hedge in Bangor and Providence, 1835–1850,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 34.

  20 Cyrus Bartol, Radical Problems (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), 68.

  21 Theodore Parker to George E. Ellis, August 7, 1838, in Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Theodore Parker: A Biography (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1874), 106.

  22 Sampson Reed, Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1826; Boston: O. Clapp, 1838), vii.

  23 Woodall, “Letters of Francis to Hedge,” 34.

  24 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry Ware, Jr., July 26, 1838, LRWE, 2:146–50.

  25 For Andrews Norton’s diatribe, see Boston Daily Advertiser, August 27, 1838.

  26 Theophilus Parsons, Boston Daily Advertiser, August 30, 1838.

  27 Patrick W. Carey, ed., The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 5 vols. to date (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2000–), 4:47–52.

  28 Orestes Brownson, “Mr. Emerson’s Address,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (1838), 504–12; “Norton on The Evidences of Christianity,” ibid. 2 (1839), 87, 112.

  29 Reprinted in Joel Myerson, Transcendentalism: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 250–60.

  30 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (hereafter JMN), eds. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 5:471, 467.

  31 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry Ware, Jr., October 8, 1838, LRWE, 2: 166–67.

  32 Andrews Norton, A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity (Cambridge: John Owen, 1839), 4–5.

  33 Ibid., 9, 11.

  34 Ibid., 11.

  35 Ibid., 40–41.

  36 Ibid., 44.

  37 Ibid., 61.

  38 Emerson, JMN, 7:110–11.

  39 George Ripley, “The Latest Form of Infidelity” Examined: A Letter to Mr. Andrews Norton (Boston: J. Munroe and Company, 1839), 3, 5, 12–13.

  40 Ibid., 132.

  41 Ibid., 142.

  42 Ibid., 150.

  43 George Ripley, Defence of “The Latest Form of Infidelity” Examined: A Second Letter to Mr. Andrews Norton (Boston: J. Munroe and Company, 1840), 84.

  44 Richard Hildreth, Letter to Andrews Norton on Miracles as the Foundation of Religious Faith (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Company, 1840), 3–4.

  45 Ibid., 8–9.

  46 J. W. Alexander, Albert B. Dod, and Charles Hodge, Two Articles from the Princeton Review (Cambridge: John Owen, 1840), 10–11.

  47 Ibid., 63.

  48 Ibid., 67–68, 69.

  49 Woodall, “Letters of Francis to Hedge,” 37.

  50 It is conveniently reprinted in Joel Myerson, Transcendentalism: A Reader, 261–80.

  51 Frothingham, Theodore Parker, 581–82.

  52 John Weiss, Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Convers Francis, D.D. (Cambridge: privately printed, 1863), 67.

  53 Levi Blodgett (Theodore Parker), The Previous Question between Mr. Andrews Norton and His Alumni Moved and Handled, in a Letter to All Those Gentlemen (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Company, 1840), 4, 15, 18.

  54 Theodore Parker, Journal, ca. May 27, 1840, quoted in Dean Grodzins, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 199.

  55 Wilhelm M. L. de Wette, A Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament / from the German of Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette; translated and enlarged by Theodore Parker, 2 vols. (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1843).

  56 Gary A. Collison, “A Critical Edition of the Correspondence of Theodore Parker and Convers Francis, 1836–1859,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1979), 2:302–303.

  57 Two of Lamennais’s books were particularly important to Brownson, his Paroles d’un croyant (1834) and Le Livre du people (1837), both of which were translated and published in Boston, as, respectively, The Words of a Believer (1834) and The People’s Own Book (1839).

  58 Carey, ed., Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 4:425–26.

  59 Ibid., 4:123–25.

  60 “Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New School,” Western Messenger 6, no. 1 (November 1838), 46.

  61 Carey, ed., Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 5:253–54.

  62 Ibid., 5:297.

  5: CENTRIPETAL FORCES AND CENTRIFUGAL MOTION

  1 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to William Ellery Channing, July 10, 1840, cited in Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 393. On Peabody’s library specifically see Leslie Perrin Wilson, “‘No Worthless Books’: Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library, 1840–1852,” Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 99, no. 1 (2005), 113–52.

  2 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, quoted in George Willis Cooke, A Historical and Biographical Introduction to the “Dial,” 2 vols. (1902; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 1:148. For the catalog see Madeleine Stern, “Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Foreign Library,” American Transcendental Quarterly 20, supplement (1973), 5–12.

  3 George P. Bradford in George Ripley and George P. Bradford, “Philosophic Thought in Boston,” in Justin Winsor, ed., The Memorial History of Boston, 4 vols. (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1881), 4:329, n. 1.

  4 Edward Everett Hale, A New England Boyhood (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1900), 248.

  5 Theodore Parker to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, July 1, 1840, cited in Marshall, Peabody Sisters, 393.

  6 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898), 86.

  7 Helen R. Deese, ed., Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 19.

  8 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to Samuel Gray Ward, September 13, 1841, cited in Bruce A. Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 186; and Helen R. Deese, ed., Selected Journals of Caroline Healey Dall, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections 90 (2006), 69.

  9 Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 86.

  10 Joel Myerson, “A Calendar of Transcendental Club Meetings,” American Literature 44, no. 2 (May 1972), 32.

  11 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, March 12, 1835, in Joseph Slater, ed., The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 119.

  12 [Orestes Brownson,] “Introductory Remarks,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (January 1838), 6.

  13 Emerson to Carlyle, March 18, 1840, in Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, 261; and April 21, 1840, ibid., 269.

  14 [Ralph Waldo Emerson,] “The Editors to th
e Reader,” Dial 1 (July 1840): 1–4.

  15 See Joel Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), passim.

  16 Ibid., 98.

  17 Theodore Parker to Convers Francis, December 18, 1840, in Gary L. Collison, “A Critical Edition of the Correspondence of Theodore Parker and Convers Francis, 1836–1859,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1979), 1:203.

  18 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), 161.

  19 George Ripley in Winsor, The Memorial History of Boston, 4:304.

  20 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (hereafter JMN), eds. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 5:272.

  21 See Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 77—101.

  22 Margaret Fuller to James Freeman Clarke, ca. May 20, 1833, in Robert N. Hudspeth, ed., The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 6 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983–94), 1:182.

  23 Margaret Fuller to (Sophia Ripley?), August 27, 1839, ibid. 2:86–89.

  24 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, eds. R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852), 1:330.

  25 Elizabeth Hoar to Ralph Waldo Emerson, March 27 [1841] in Myerson, “Mrs. Dall Edits Miss Fuller: The Story of Margaret and Her Friends,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 72 (1978), 191.

  26 Deese, Daughter of Boston, 20.

  27 Memoirs of Ossoli, 1:347–48.

  28 Odell Shepard, Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1937), 423.

  29 Deese, Daughter of Boston, 137–42.

  30 [George Ripley,] Philosophical Miscellanies, translated from the French of Cousin, Jouffroy, and B. Constant, 2 vols. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1838), 1:vii.

  31 Samuel K. Lothrop, “Existing Commercial Establishments,” Christian Examiner 22 (July 1837), 398.

  32 “The Laboring Classes” is found in its entirety in Patrick W. Carey, ed., The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 5 vols. to date (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2000—), 5:298–327.

  33 Ibid., 5:306–08.

  34 Ibid., 5:310–12.

  35 Ibid., 5:321–23.

  36 See Octavius Brooks Frothingham, George Ripley (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 38, a letter from Ripley to his mother.

  37 George Ripley, The Temptations of the Times (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1837), 12, 9.

  38 [George Ripley,] A Letter to the Congregational Church in Purchase Street by Its Pastor (Boston: Printed, Not Published, by Request, for the Purchase Street Church, 1840), 5. Also available in Frothingham, Ripley, 63–91.

  39 Ripley, A Letter, 7, 24.

  40 Ibid., 25–26, 28.

  41 George Ripley, A Farewell Discourse, Delivered to the Congregational Church in Purchase Street, March 28, 1841 (Boston: Freeman and Bolles, 1841), 18–19.

  42 Frothingham, Ripley, 92–93.

  43 Theodore Parker, A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity; Preached at the Ordination of Mr. Charles C. Shackford, in the Hawes Place Church in Boston, May 19, 1841 (Boston: Printed for the author, 1841). The sermon is available in Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 259–84. Parker’s journals and letters for the few months preceding the sermon’s composition point to deep reading in German theologians like Strauss, in whose work he found the very title of the sermon. See Strauss, “Über Vergängliches und Bleibendes im Christenthum” (“On Transience and Permanence in Christianity”), which Parker knew by 1839; and Dean Grodzins, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 242.

  44 Theodore Parker, A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity; Preached at the Ordination of Mr. Charles C. Shackford, in the Hawes Place Church in Boston, May 19, 1841, 2nd ed. (Boston: Printed for the author, 1841), 8–9, 12.

  45 Ibid., 15–16, 21.

  46 The South-Boston Unitarian Ordination (Boston: Saxton and Pierce, 1841), 3–6.

  47 Parker, Transient and Permanent, 2nd ed., 4. Theodore Parker to Charles Miller, July 12, 1841, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  48 South-Boston Ordination, 2.

  49 John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1864), 1:155.

  50 Theodore Parker, A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1842), 5, 7.

  51 Samuel Osgood, review of Parker’s Discourse, Monthly Miscellany 7 (August 1842), 145–50.

  52 Convers Francis to Frederic Henry Hedge, January 24, 1843, in Guy R. Woodall, “The Record of a Friendship: The Letters of Convers Francis to Frederic Henry Hedge in Bangor and Providence, 1835–1850,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 44–45.

  6: HEAVEN ON EARTH

  1 Dean Grodzins, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 225–28, gives the best account of this, citing from Parker’s manuscript diary.

  2 The Liberator, October 30, 1840.

  3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Chardon Street Convention,” in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, in Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903–04), 10:351–54.

  4 Ibid., 10:352.

  5 See Edward K. Spann, Hopedale: From Commune to Company Town, 1840–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992).

  6 This meeting between Ripley and Ballou is detailed by Butler Wilmarth, one of Ballou’s supporters; see William H. Fish, Memoir of Butler Wilmarth, M.D. (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1854), 88–89.

  7 Frederick C. Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott, an Intellectual Biography (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 184–85.

  8 Margaret Fuller to William Henry Channing, March 29, 1841, in Robert N. Hudspeth, ed., The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 6 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983–94), 2:205.

  9 Printed in Octavius Brooks Frothingham, George Ripley (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 307–308.

  10 Sophia Ripley, “Letter,” Dial 2 (July 1841), 122–29.

  11 Joel Myerson, New England Transcendentalists and the “Dial”: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 200.

  12 Albert Brisbane, Social Destiny of Man; or, Association and Reorganization of Industry (Philadelphia: C. F. Stollmeyer, 1840); Grodzins, American Heretic, 218.

  13 See Charles Pellarin, Life of Charles Fourier (New York: W. H. Graham, 1848); and Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

  14 Ralph Waldo Emerson to George Ripley, December 15, 1840, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (hereafter LRWE), eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–95), 2: 368–71.

  15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (hereafter JMN), eds. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 7:407–408; and Emerson to Ripley, December 15, 1840, LRWE, 2:370. Regarding Emerson’s servants’ resistance to his plans for them see Emerson to William Emerson, March 30, 1841, LRWE 2:389.

  16 The best descriptions of Brook Farm are in Sterling Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  17 See ibid., particularly chapter 1.

  18 Peabody’s descriptions are “The Community at West Roxbury,” in the Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters 5 (August 1841), 113–18; “A Glimpse of Christ’s
Idea of Society,” Dial 2 (October 1841), 214–28; and “Plan of the West Roxbury Community,” ibid. 2 (January 1842), 361–72.

  19 Delano, Brook Farm, 64–65.

  20 John Sullivan Dwight, A Lecture on Association, in Its Connection with Education (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, for the [New England Fourier] Society, 1844), 3, 5.