Chapter 23.  Theodore Parker and Emerson

[001] [PAGE 539] FIFTY years ago the name of Theodore Parker was more widely known in America than that of Emerson, especially among the classes that busied themselves more with theology and politics than with literature and philosophy. He died forty-nine years ago, and the great upheaval immediately following his death in May, 1860, gradually weakened, and almost effaced that strong impression his masculine character and serviceable learning had made on the generation just before the Civil War. During twenty years of his life he was closely associated with Emerson in thoughts and social movements, without being intimately connected with the Emersonian circle. Parker had his own circle, a wide and varied collection of men and women in all parts of the world, but particularly in Boston, where his pastorate was for some fifteen years. To that city his friends or their letters came, from all directions, to sympathize in his preaching and the numerous agitations in which he joined, while retaining, like Emerson, his special function in each movement where he took part. He was seven years younger than Emerson, and was born at Lexing- [PAGE 540] ton, on his father’s farm, along a by-road, five or six miles only from the corner in Concord where Emerson set up his household gods in 1835. Parker, at that date, was twenty-five, and was studying at Cambridge in the Unitarian Divinity School where, three years later, Emerson uttered those thrilling words which disturbed the religious peace of Cambridge and Boston for years,—the Divinity School discourse of 1838. But six years earlier, Parker had sojourned in Concord, before Emerson was much heard of except as an eloquent preacher at the North End of Boston. At the age of nineteen, young Parker, who was fitting him­self for Harvard College, where he never gradu­ated, taught for a winter one of the half-dozen district schools in Concord’s broad township of meadow, woodland, and sandy plain. This was in 1829. Nearly eight years later he aspired to the vacant place of assistant-pastor in Concord, where the aged Dr. Ripley still held the pulpit, but was aided by a young colleague. Rev. Hersey Good­win, the father of the eminent Greek professor, William Watson Goodwin (who was born at Con­cord), had held the place for some years, but had died, and Parker preached a few sermons as candi­date. The choice of the parish fell to another clergyman, Mr. Frost, and Parker, after preach­ing in Barnstable, Greenfield, and several other parishes, was ordained at West Roxbury in June, 1837,—John Quincy Adams, ex-President and then Congressman, being a delegate from Quincy to the ordaining Council. Parker had already be-

            [INSETS: ORCHARD HOUSE The Summer Residence of Professor Desor, GRAVE OF PARKER, AT FLORENCE]

[PAGE 541] come acquainted with Emerson, who still preached occasionally, and he heard Emerson’s lectures in Boston when he could. He joined Dr. Chan­ning’s circle of “Friends of Progress,” and not long after, the so-called “Transcendental Club,” of which the beginnings are a little in doubt, but which seems to have originated about the time of college Commencement, when certain Harvard graduates came together for a few days, and de­cided to meet oftener and discuss serious topics. Alcott, Emerson, Mr. Hedge, Parker, Dr. Francis, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, his kinsman, Samuel Ripley of Waltham, with his accomplished wife, W. H. Channing, and others met at this club, and Parker in his Journals of 1837-38 and 1840-­42 mentions its meetings. The Dial was one of its outgrowths, and Brook Farm was another. Parker at West Roxbury was within a mile or two of that Arcadia.
            [002] He had been preaching at West Roxbury a year, and more, when Emerson gave his Divinity School Address on a Sunday evening, July 15, 1838. In his Journal for that day, now in my possession, he wrote:

            After (as usual) preaching, Sunday-schooling, teachers’-meeting, etc., wife and I went over to Brookline, took M. A. and proceeded to Cambridge to hear the valedictory sermon by Mr. Emerson. In this he surpassed himself as much as he surpasses others in a general way. I shall give no abstract,—so beautiful, so just, so true, and terribly sublime was his picture of the faults of the Church in its present position. My soul is roused; and [PAGE 542] this week I shall write the long-meditated sermon on the state of the Church and the duties of these times.

            [003] In the controversy that followed Parker ranked himself on Emerson’s side, though not at first very prominent, nor perhaps entirely settled in his own mind on some of the profound questions raised by Emerson. Meanwhile the backward and the bigoted among the Unitarian clergy were in a state of agitation, alarm and anger. Soon they began to make use of the Boston Advertiser, a daily newspaper of high pretensions to learning, prudence, and respectability, as a vehicle of attack on the Concord mystic. Parker began to take notice of these attacks in his journal, and inserted there from the Advertiser what he terms “a strange article.” It contained this passage, which it soon appeared was written by Prof. Andrews Norton, who had for some years taught theology in the Divinity School:

            There is a strange state of things existing about us in the literary and religious world, of which none of the larger periodicals has yet taken notice. It is the result of that restless craving for notoriety and excitement, which, in one way or another, is keeping our community in a perpetual stir. It has shown itself particularly since that foolish woman, Miss Martineau, was among us, and stimulated the vanity of her flatterers by loading them in return with the copper coin of her praise,—which they easily believed was as good as gold. She was accustomed to talk about her “mission,” as if she were a special dis­pensation of Providence; and they, too, thought they

[INSETS: THE MEETING HOUSE AT WEST ROXBURY, HOUSE OF GEO. R. RUSSELL, WEST ROXBURY]

[PAGE 543] must all have their missions, and began to “vaticinate,” as one of their number has expressed it.
            But though her genial warmth may have caused the new school to bud and bloom, it was not planted by her. It owes its origin in part to ill-understood notions, obtained by blundering through the crabbed and disgusting obscurity of some of the worst German speculatists, which notions, however, have been received by most of its disciples at second hand, through an interpreter. The atheist Shelley has been quoted and commended in a professedly religious work called the Western Messenger; but he is not, we conceive, to be reckoned among the patriarchs of the sect. This honor is due to that hasher-up of German metaphysics, the Frenchman Cousin; and of late that hyper-Germanized Englishman, Carlyle, has been the great object of admiration and model of style. Cousin and Carlyle, indeed, seem to have been transformed into idols to be publicly worshiped, the former for his philosophy, and the latter both for his philosophy and his fine writing; while the veiled image of the German pantheist, Schleiermacher, is kept in the sanctuary.
            To produce a more striking effect, our common language is abused, antic tricks are played with it; inversions, exclamations, anomalous combinations of words, unmeaning but coarse and violent metaphors abound,—and withal a strong infusion of German barbarisms. Such is the style of Carlyle, a writer of some talent; for his great deficiency is not in this respect, but in good sense, good taste, and soundness of principle.... Carlyle as an original might be tolerated, if one could forget his admirers and imitators.
            The state of things described might seem a matter of no great concern, a mere insurrection of folly,—a sort of Jack Cade rebellion, which, in the nature of things, must [PAGE 544] soon be put down,—were it not gathering confidence from neglect, and had not proceeded to attack principles which are the foundation of human society and human happiness. “Silly women” it has been said, and silly young men it is to be feared, have been drawn away from their Christian faith, if not divorced from all that can properly be called religion.
            [004] Professor Norton then proceeded to attack Emerson’s Address as the great example of all this mischief, and to reprove all and sundry whom he thought responsible for it. He returned to the charge, with a long article denouncing the “atheist Shelley,” and ascribing to James Freeman Clarke the publication of an apology for him in the Western Messenger which Clarke was known to edit, and in which he had printed one or two of Emerson’s poems. It is now hard to believe that a good and learned, though rather narrowly learned man, could have made such an exhibition of himself. A wiser conservative (said to be Theophilus Parsons) took exceptions to Norton’s blast of a trumpet, saying, among other things:

            The tone of this article is so harsh that in many passages it seems but the outbreak of indignant contempt. It charges the objects of its rebuke with arrogance, and makes the charge with very little manifestation of humility. And while it accuses them of ignorance, it speaks of distinguished Europeans in a way which makes us ask with wonder how the writer could have formed such opinions?… If he wished to arrest the evil he deplores, to help the “silly women” and “silly young men” about [PAGE 545] whom the fascinations of the charmer are gathering, ­if he wrote in kindness and not in anger,—then he has not written wisely.... He seems to identify the school which he attacks with all inquiry,—all progress; when he objects that it is rhapsodical, incoherent, igno­rant, and presuming, he seems to feel that all this is expressed by calling it new. This is to be regretted, not merely because it is a mistake, but because it is precisely the mistake which the favorers of Mr. Emerson beg their opponents to make.
            [005] Professor Norton again turned his attention to James Freeman Clarke and “the atheist Shelley.” What he wrote in the Advertiser years ago sounds odd enough now:

            Of Shelley perhaps many readers have heard but little, for his works are not popular, and never can become so till religion and morality are empty names. He was an atheist and a bitter infidel, and his conduct answered to his principles.

            [006] During the year following this address and its ensuing controversy, Parker’s Journal has fre­quent entries concerning Emerson and his circle. Thus the new Club met, May 8, 1839, at Doctor Bartol’s in Boston, and Parker says:

            We had a very pleasant meeting, C. Stetson, F. H. Hedge, Alcott, Emerson, J. L. Russell, George Ripley, Bartol, and myself. The subject discussed was Property. It was doubted whether Property would always continue to be. Mr. Alcott thought it was not based on an instinct of the soul. Hedge seemed of the same opinion, but was [PAGE 546] rather guarded in his expressions. His views, however, differed much, I thought, from those he expressed in that grand discourse delivered last Fourth of July. Upon the whole, very little was to-day elicited upon this subject. The old foundation of Property stands secure. There will always be Property, doubtless; but it may be distributed in a wiser way, I fancy. Now it is a sharpener of the intellect; then it may be also of the moral powers. Alcott said a good deal, but invita Minerva, I thought.
            [007] The following Sunday Parker exchanged pulpits with Dr. N. L. Frothingham, brother-in-law of Edward Everett, then Governor of Massachusetts, who had a pew in Dr. Frothingham’s church in Chauncey Place. The Governor was present, and Parker was rather discomposed by him, saying in his Journal: “I don’t like to preach before this Governor. There he sat looking cold and statuesque, as if hewn of marble. I could not bear to look at him, it quite discomposed me.” A few weeks later he meets a very different person, not for the first time. June 17th he writes: “Saw Miss Fuller also; pleasantly disappointed in her, no scoffing to-day. Her sister [Ellen] is truly lovely,—apparently a lover of the flowers.” This was the sister who married Ellery Channing. By the middle of July, 1839, the anniversary of the Divinity School had come round, and Professor Norton tried to counteract the Emersonian heresy by a discourse of his own before a similar audience. The graduating class was small—only six; the Dean was Dr. Palfrey. Parker writes:

            [PAGE 547] The Dean appeared with his six,—like the scriptural “Captain of Six” with his six. As a hen clucks equally with one chick or a dozen “pledges,” so there was no less ado about this little class than at Andover, when fourscore are made ministers by a speech. The exercises I thought decidedly inferior. Moore’s part was good,—nothing more. Eustis’s remarkably fine,—full of spirit, life, and independence,—his subject “Independence in the Ministry.” It contained some Emersonianisms, which were obvious. Their style of thought and expression was decidedly unlike the rest of his fabric. Expressions like this occurred: “To kick out behind is not a good way of getting forward, for man or horse.” He thinks the minister ought to support himself by his trade, not by preaching. This piece produced a curious effect upon the Rabbis. The Dean covered his face with his hand and never looked up; his fine, large forehead becoming blacker and blacker till the very end. President Quincy was awake during the whole of the performance. Mr. Henry Ware had, we are told, tried to persuade F. L. Eustis to read some other piece. E. insisted on this or none; but had no special desire to read any piece. McKown, whom I count the best scholar, has relinquished the profession (I think Kant has unsettled him); so he did not perform his part.
            [008] This George Moore was a Concord youth, the son of Emerson’s next neighbor, Abel Moore, whom Emerson in a fine passage called “Captain Hardy,” and on whose land stood the cottage in which Channing and Ellen Fuller began their housekeeping, near Emerson’s garden, in 1843. Mr. Eustis became a son-in-law of Dr. Channing, but did not long preach. Neither did his college [PAGE 548] classmate, Harrison Blake, who was at the Divinity School when Emerson spoke, and was long the devoted friend, correspondent, and editor of Thoreau.
            [009] A few days later came a call from Margaret Fuller, who had taken up her residence at Jamaica Plain, near Parker. He says of her: “She has outgrown Carlyle; thinks him inferior to Coleridge. I doubt this much. She says Coleridge will live and Carlyle be forgot. I am glad she has outgrown him,—I wish the world had. Miss Fuller is a critic, not a creator,—not a vates, I fear. Certainly she is a prodigious woman, though she puts herself upon her genius a little too much. She is not a good analyst, not a philosopher.” He contrasted her with Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who called some days after. Of her he said:

            She is a woman of most astonishing powers; has a manysidedness and a largeness of soul quite unusual; rare qualities of head and heart. I never before knew just with what class to place her; now I see she is a Boswell. Her office is to inquire and answer, “What did they say?” “What are the facts?” A good analyst of character, a free spirit, kind, generous, noble. She has an artistic gift also. She may well be called the “narrative Miss Peabody.”

            [010] In August, 1839, Bronson Alcott, then hesitating between Boston and Concord, came out to see Parker, who says of him: “He came before noon and stayed till night, full of talk. He does not like the name ‘Christian’ because it represents the false no less than the true; not that the Christianity [PAGE 549] of Christ has anything false in it,—but as it is understood.”

            I think that he desires to make a new advance; that he will eventually give up Christianity altogether, as Christ did Mosaism, and take some new measures. But they will not succeed, for Christianity has not yet lived its life, as Mosaism then had done; nor has Mr. Alcott the proper skill needed for the work. He cannot translate his thought into the language of the people,—at least, not without offending them. He says Dr. Channing is a politician, and Garrison also. This is true of both, though in a different sense. Garrison has one idea; he, as a politician, wishes to see it actualized. But Dr. Channing wishes legislation made humane and even divine; then will all partial evil be ended.
            [011] And now among these New Lights came one of another school, who afterwards made himself conspicuous as the encomiast of two French emperors, —John S. C. Abbott. He called one August day, with his wife, on Parker, who says: “I am always glad to see them. He seems a man truly devout; says he finds few who live a divine life. He thinks the greater part of the Christian community are utterly dead to religion. He doubts Waldo Emerson is a Christian, or a man who can be saved; distrusts all forms of piety except one technical form.”

            [012] The famous Dial appeared the next summer (July, 1840), edited by Margaret Fuller and George Ripley,—Emerson at first declining the task, but writing the preface, and contributing [PAGE 550] largely from first to last. So did Parker until he went abroad in 1843; when he returned, The Dial had died of starvation. The numbers that sold best and were soonest out of print were two containing popular sermons of Parker’s. He proved to have what he denied to Alcott, the power to translate his thought into the language of the people without offending them. Before going to Germany he had read Goethe thoroughly, and among the other books, Goethe’s alleged “Correspondence with a Child,” published by the famous Bettina von Arnim. In the summer of 1839, he thus commented on it in his Journal:

            Read Goethe’s “Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde,”—an astounding book,—beginning middling, and ending a mystery. What did the creature wish of Goethe? Not to be his wife,—for he had one, at least, at the time. His wife writes one letter to Bettina, such as you might fancy, still and precise, without feeling. Bettina is one of the queerest of girls, as well as one of the wisest and deepest and highest. She was superior to Goethe, that is quite plain; so the old fox, aware of that fact, desires to get out of her all that he could be wrung from her in the shape of letters,—he in the meantime giving nothing by way of return. His selfishness was never more apparent, I fancy, than in this. Goethe used her, as he used all that came in his way.
            [013] Five years after this (May 23, 1844) Parker, being in Berlin, delivered his letters of introduction for Savigny, Baur, and Von Humboldt, and called on Bettina. He thus describes the interview:

[PAGE 551] A little woman, about sixty. She must once have been handsome; her face is full of expression, her smile beautiful. Hand quite long, only the nails were long and dirty; her attire shabby, the room a little disarranged. I gave the letter to the porter. Presently she came; said she did not speak English. I went in. Saw a gentleman there rather vulgar-looking, from forty-five to fifty (his name I did not catch in the introduction), with a blue coat and metal buttons, a great patch of court-plaster on his forehead. They were sitting, or had been, on a little sofa, at a table, taking coffee; I also took a cup. Soon we talked about Mrs. Edward Robinson and Dr. R., who, she said, looked like a Menschenfresser (ogre). Mrs. R. was very geistreick; she wondered at the union; asked if Mrs. Robinson was happy in America,—if Robinson had a great renown? still insisting that he was a Menschenfresser. I told her in explanation of the marriage that all of that class loved women, and so must have a wife. She said, “He is tyrannisch”; asked if the men did not tyrannize over the women in America? I told her no, but the tyranny was on the other side. She showed me a letter from Mrs. L. M. Child, and her “Letters from New York,” which she said she should not read; she could not read English with pleasure, and now reads almost nothing.
            She has many letters from all parts; was pleased when I told her that her books were much read in America. I told her also of Gunderode. She showed me a great mass of criticisms in a scrap-book, of which she complained that they did not understand her,—though they all were favorable notices. She had forgotten Miss Fuller (though she remembered her at length), and the books, but had never read them. She showed me a volume of her letters, just printed but not published; her earliest letters, when she was but fifteen. The volume (Clemens Brentano’s [PAGE 552]
            Lauberkranze, etc., Charlottenburg bei Egbert Baier, 1844) contains letters that passed between her and her brother. She dedicates it to Prince Waldemar, sends a copy to the King, of course to the Censure,—for it may be prohibited! Another volume is to follow. She said she once printed a book that was forbidden,—suppressed! and another book has met with much hostility from the ministers, who have tried to pass a law that shall yet crush it; but this the King refuses to sanction.
            She spoke with great freedom about the King; told me that at Aachen in a certain company some one proposed the King’s health,—the company hissed down the proposal, and threw the man out of the window! She thinks him a tyrant; spoke of the affairs of Silesia; said that 70,000 men were there suffering for want, almost in a state of famishing. Still there was bread enough in the land, but the rich landholders crushed the people, and the King did them no good. He was religious; built a cathedral that cost a million thalers, and served God in that way. She read me four or five pages of a book that she is publishing about Silesia, in which she says that the Bible speaks of two Paradises; one is Yenseits, the other is certainly not the Province of Silesia. (Frederick II. called Silesia his Paradise.) Then she tells how the serpent has come in; the Schlangenmutter (namely, the Government), and the Schlangenbrud (namely, the officials); that the Menschenmutter has eaten the apple, and hence the Menschenbrud are in a sad condition. The serpent has deceived them there; they eat neither of the Tree of Life nor the Tree of Knowledge; the rich keep them from one, the Government from the other. They are like to be obliged to come upon the Schlangenbrud for their diet! How the Government will welcome such a book it is not difficult to see. [PAGE 553]
            She had complained there is no courage in Deutschland. I told her if the men lacked it she had enough; that she had the courage of a Jewish prophet, and the inspiration of a Christian apostle. She said she was not Christian, but heathen; she prayed to Jupiter. I told her that was nothing; there was but one God, whose name was neither Jupiter nor Jehovah; and He took each true prayer. Then she said she was no Christian. I asked, “Have you no respect for Christ?” “None for his person, for he had done more harm to the world than any other man.” But that was not his fault; for many years his name has been a Beil (axe) with which the bigots have beheaded the liberals; a name in virtue of which the worst tyranny has been carried on. I found, however, that for the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and for all the great doctrines of religion she had the greatest respect. I told her there was, to my thinking, but one religion; that was being good and doing good. She said Yes; but doing good was not vulgar charity, but lifting up the fallen, and helping forward the Entwickelung der Menscheit (Development of Man).
            I stayed an hour and a half, and a most animated time we had. Her English is about as bad as my German. Yet she had the exceeding generosity to try to talk English.
            [014] As the “new Journal” goes on towards its birth in July, 1840, Parker hints some of the encouragements and difficulties, and copies some of the verses of his friends, Christopher Cranch and John Dwight, which were to appear in the first number. He also copies some “Lines” ascribed to Emerson, which were never acknowledged by him. They are plain and homely, with nothing of the oracular tone, which soon began to characterize every poem [PAGE 554] of the Concord sage; but for the chance that they may have been one of his earlier pieces, before the philosophic maturity of his mind, they may be quoted:

Summer Scenes in New England
“I love the woodlands dark and deep;
 An herd of cows; a flock of sheep;
 I love the grass; I love the sky;
 I love the waving field of rye.
             But most of all I love the swain
 Who drives the herd and sows the grain.
             I love to hear his manly feet
 Salute the ground with wholesome beat;
 I love to hear his evening song,
 As tired of toil he strolls along:
 I sit with reapers ’neath the tree,
 And many a joyful talk have we.

“When the late sun comes up the sky,
And fresh with dew the meadows lie,
How sweetly sings the Bob-o-link
His cheerful note with chink, chink, chink;
And every wren from out the bush,
Red Robin, Blackbird, and Brown Thrush,
Welcome the rising of the sun
In notes that sparkle as they run.
How gladly then for comely girls
In honey hoods and fairy curls,
I tread the forest and the fields
To cull the flowers that Nature yields.”

The Dial disappeared in 1844; in December, [PAGE 555] 1847, appeared its successor, the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, which was the special organ of Parker, as the earlier quarterly had been of Emerson and his Concord friends. These hardly contributed to the new venture, except that Emerson wrote its prefatory note of seven pages, just as he was getting ready for his European tour of 1847-48. Its first three numbers came out in Boston, while he was in England and France, lecturing, dining, and watching the new French Revolution in Paris, with Lamartine in a position of power. But Parker printed in this quarterly his papers on Dr. Channing, John Quincy Adams, Prescott the historian, and Emerson himself; and Lowell here first reviewed Thoreau in his Week, and with more geniality than he ever displayed on that sore subject afterward. Parker’s review of Emerson has noticeable merits, and utters his constant admiration; yet is faulty in its appreciation of Emerson’s verse. But of the man and the thinker Parker gave a just account; even as Emerson did of Parker in his funeral eulogy of May, 1860. Parker said, ten years before:

            Emerson leaves you tranquil, resolved on noble manhood, fearless of the consequences. His position is a striking one. Eminently a child of Christianity and of the American idea, he is out of the Church and out of the State. Reproached as an idler, he is active as the sun, and pours out his radiant truth on lyceums at Chelmsford, at Lowell, and all over the land. Such is the beauty of his speech, such the majesty of his ideas, and such the im-
[PAGE 556] pression which his whole character makes on men, that they lend him everywhere their ears, and thousands bless his manly thoughts.
            [015] My own acquaintance with Parker began in 1852, eight years after his interview with Bettina. Our relation soon became very intimate; I heard him on all convenient occasions, and was very much at his house in Exeter Place, to which I carried John Brown in 1857, as already mentioned. He made me one of his executors, along with John Manly and Fred May, one of the sons of Deacon May, the uncle of Mrs. Alcott, and of Parker’s dear friend, Rev. S. J. May of Syracuse, N. Y. He informed me privately that I was to take charge as literary executor, of the publication of his MSS. after his death; and so I was ready to do in 1860. But the will left that matter formally to Mrs. Parker, who soon intimated that she would choose Joseph Lyman, who had become intimate with Parker in his last years, and who desired to undertake the work. A controversy had sprung up in the last year of his invalid life between the Apthorps and some other friends of Parker, who objected to Mr. Lyman’s choice of John Weiss as his biographer, and refused to allow him the use of their letters from Parker, very numerous and intimate. These friends were earnest that I should assert my claim as executor, against the choice of Mrs. Parker, who had broken with Miss F. P. Cobbe, Parker’s best friend and editor among the English, and a dear friend also of the Ap- [PAGE 557] thorps. I could not endure the thought of a public quarrel over the fresh grave of Parker, and de­clined to be any party to it,—hoping better from the work of Lyman and Weiss than others did.
            [016] Mr. Lyman, though a good friend to the Parkers, proved to have no talent for editing, and, after many delays brought little to pass. Mrs. Parker worked industriously and spent thousands of dol­lars in having Parker’s large correspondence copied, but, with a singular lack of foresight, she destroyed most of the originals in Parker’s diffi­cult handwriting. Consequently, Weiss’s “Life and Letters,” printed in England, had countless errors of the press, which could not all be corrected, because the text had been lost. Mrs. Parker, with all her amiability, quarreled with Weiss as well as with Miss Cobbe and others, and was so dissatisfied with the big biography, which had been very costly, and sold but little, that she engaged Octavius Frothingham to write a new one. This is free from the objections against Weiss’s two volumes, which blazed with indiscretions and were not without mistakes of fact; and the second biography will be the standard for Parker’s life and opinions. Finally, after thwarting most of the hopes of her husband’s best friends by the delays and mistakes in a task for which she was not fitted, Mrs. Parker, with no previous notice to me, bequeathed by her will the whole mass of extant copyrights, manu­scripts, printed papers, etc., to me, when it was too late to bring the matter before the world, and with no fund to meet the cost of so doing. I am [PAGE 558] still the owner of this material, have granted the use of it freely to editors and biographers of Parker, and finally, to a committee acting for the American Unitarian Association, which is now bringing out a uniform edition of such of Parker’s works, published or unpublished, as this committee, of which I am a member, shall choose to give the world. The first volume which appeared in this series was so disfigured with errors of typography and editing, that it had to be in part reprinted; the later volumes are now in more careful editorial hands.
            [017] The Journals, from which I have quoted above, are to go ultimately to the Boston Public Library. They came into my hands from Mrs. Parker’s executors with many erasures, by whom made I cannot say; but they still contain passages that can­not be discreetly submitted to general inspection in a great library.
            [018] Of Parker’s talents and character I have often written in prefaces and elsewhere. He was a sin­cere and gifted reformer, more learned than Luther or Calvin or Knox, and more technically a logician and philosopher than Emerson or Alcott. His warm feelings made him less impartial as biog­rapher and historian than several of his contempo­raries; but his wide reading and his capacious memory gave him the advantage over all of them. In the pulpit, on the lecture platform, and at po­litical meetings, his eloquence was masterly, and he convinced his hearers more permanently than the graceful Phillips or the humorous, but less sincere

[INSET: STORY’S PARKER MONUMENT, FLORENCE: “THEODORE PARKER / THE GREAT AMERICAN PREACHER / BORN AT LEXINGTON MASSACHUSETTS / UNITED STATES OF AMERICA / AUGUST 24 1810 / DIED AT FLORENCE ITALY / MAY 10 1860 / ---- / HIS NAME IS ENGRAVED IN MARBLE / HIS VIRTUES IN THE HEARTS OF THOSE HE / HELPED TO FREE FROM SLAVERY / AND SUPERSTITION”]

[PAGE 559] Beecher. In private he was the most friendly and sympathetic of men, and had myriads of friends who seldom or never saw his Socratic face.
            [019] I have quoted what Parker, early in his career, said of Miss Peabody. She was an early votary of Transcendentalism, to which she came naturally through her intimacy with Dr. Channing, of whom she was for a time an amanuensis. I knew her well for years, and in my house on the Sudbury Road, which I sold in 1868, on my removal to Springfield for four years, I was a next-door neigh­bor while she lived with her sister, Mrs. Horace Mann. She formed ties with all the Concord authors, and was not only a reporter of Dr. Chan­ning’s thoughts, but also made the first record of Alcott’s noteworthy Temple School in Boston. She did not wholly approve of his theory of educa­tion, having one or more of her own; and there were points of difference between her and Mrs. Alcott, which sometimes marred their friendship. She had great mental activity, many friends in all the circles of New England, and among the exiles whom European revolutions and conspiracies cast on our shores at intervals for fifty years. At one time she was the publisher of the Dial; it was issued from her circulating library in West street, Bos­ton, which was also her brother, Dr. Peabody’s, homeopathic apothecary shop. As years went on, the limits of fact and imagining in her active brain became confused,—this gave a certain tinge to the portrait of her which Alcott drew in his book of Sonnets, here quoted:

[PAGE 560] “Daughter of Memory! who her watch doth keep
O’er dark Oblivion’s land of shade and dream,
Peers down into the realm of ancient Sleep,
Where Thought uprises with a sudden gleam
And lights the devious path ’twixt Be and Seem; Mythologist! that dost thy legend steep
Plenteously with opiate and anodyne,
Inweaving fact with fable, line with line,
Entangling anecdote and episode,
Mindful of all that all men meant or said,
We follow pleased thy labyrinthine road,
By Ariadne’s skein and lesson led:
For thou hast wrought so excellently well,
Thou drop’st more casual truth than sages tell.”

            [020] In the year 1843, while Thoreau was editing the Dial for Emerson, as already stated, and before the Fruitlands experiment of Alcott and Lane was begun near Still River, Miss Peabody thus wrote to the pencil-making Thoreau:

            Boston, Feb. 26, 1843.
My Dear Sir:
I understand you have begun to print the Dial, and I am very glad of it on one account, viz., that if it gets out early enough to go to England by the steamer of the first of the month (April) it does not have to wait another month, as was the case with the last number. But I meant to have had as a first article a letter to the “Friends of the Dial,” somewhat like the rough draft I enclose, and was waiting Mr. Emerson’s arrival to consult him about the name of it. I have now written to him at New York on the subject and told him my whys and wherefores. [PAGE 561]
            The regular income of the Dial does not pay the cost of its printing and paper; there are readers enough to support it if they would only subscribe; and they will subscribe if they are convinced that only by doing so can they secure its continuance. He will probably write you on the subject.
            I want to ask a favor of you. It is to forward me a small phial of that black-lead dust which is to be found, as Dr. C. T. Jackson tells me, at a certain lead-pencil manufactory in Concord; and to send it to me by the first opportunity. I want lead in this fine dust to use in a chemical experiment.
            Respectfully yours,
E. P. Peabody.
            P. S. I hope you have got your money from Bradbury & Soden. I have done all I could about it. Will you drop the enclosed letter for Mrs. Hawthorne into the Post Office?
Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, Concord.

            [021] Mrs. Hawthorne was passing her first winter at the Old Manse, and watching her husband skate with Emerson on the winding river near by. The “certain lead-pencil manufactory” was that of John Thoreau & Sons in Concord and Acton, where Henry made thousands of good pencils after 1850 to pay for the printing of his first book, the “Week.”
            [022] Like her sister, Mrs Mann, Miss Peabody was a true lover of the poor, and seldom have I known persons to whom, as by instinct, there gravitated whatever was defeated or unfortunate, more certainly than to these sisters. The same might be [PAGE 562] said of Mrs. Alcott, who contracted the fever which, when transmitted to her daughter Beth, caused that child’s death by a lingering illness, by attendance on the fever of a poor, neglected woman at Walpole, N. H., where the Alcotts were living in 1856-57.
            [023] Like Mr. Alcott’s, Miss Peabody’s life-work was originally education,—now in this form, now in that, but always with the noblest ideal of what education is. She had derived this ideal from the spiritual surroundings of her youth in Boston, at that fortunate period when Dr. Channing, Alcott, the Emersons, Dr. Howe, Horace Mann, the Everetts, Eliots, Quincys, Charles Sumner, and so many more, citizens or public teachers, were all in their own way seeking to promote a broader, more profound culture. She joined with enthusiasm in Alcott’s school at the Masonic Temple, and wrote its first record for publication. That school failed, but it pointed the way to nearly all the improvement since made in the discipline of young children. Even the Kindergarten, which Miss Peabody did much to introduce in America, is little more than a systematic rendering of Alcott’s principles in the Temple School. And Miss Alcott in her years of trial, before she found her place in literature, was a “kindergartener” in one of Miss Peabody’s Boston ventures.

            [024] Parker had a fancy for prediction, and in a letter to Dr. Füster, a worthy Viennese professor, exiled for republicanism, June 17, 1856, he wrote:

[PAGE 563] To-day is the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Things look much like a civil war again. You may hear the Kanonen a second time, and again be Feld-Kaptan, with your sword by your side. I wish there might be a different solution of our troubles; but I often fear we must wipe out this spot in blood. Both of the old political parties are grown quite useless. Is there virtue enough in the people to correct the vices of the government? I never doubted it, nor do not now. Frémont will be nominated to-morrow. I think he will be elected; then the trouble is settled peacefully. If he is not elected, then the Union goes to pieces in five years,—not without blood. It is strange that men are not yet wise enough to settle difficulties without fighting.
            [025] Here was a mixture of wisdom and error in Parker’s mind; the future does not let itself be mapped out so precisely. But in the general prediction Parker was thoroughly sagacious. In the same letter he sends to Foster news of Desor, the Swiss naturalist, of whom some account is given in the volume of Parker’s Centenary edition lately issued by G. W. Cooke for the Unitarian Association, closing with that final satire of Parker’s, printed first by Desor at Combe Varin in Switzerland, in the summer of 1859,—the last that Parker lived to see.
            [026] He died in Florence, May 10, 1860, and his grave monument is from a design by the sculptor Story. I contributed the $50 which paid for its carriage from Rome, and its setting up.
            [027] Long before I ever heard of Parker, indeed, while I was in my cradle at Hampton Falls, he, at [PAGE 564] the age of 22, was writing these two letters to former friends at Lexington, two brothers named Huntington, and describing incidents in that rural township
1. To the Fellow-Pupil.          (1832)
Watertown, 24 August,
Dear Friend:
I received your letter of the 14th inst. in due season, and am rejoiced to find that you have not forgotten Lexington, and that your Brother is still alive and well; for reports have formerly circulated among us that he had fallen a victim to the Yellow Fever at Natchez. I have frequently heard my acquaintance in this place speak of your brother whose decease you mention in your last; he taught a school last winter in a neighboring town, and was much esteemed as a good instructor and an excellent man. But he is gone. I too, dear friend, have felt, and keenly, the afflictive rod. Since our attendance at school, a brother, a brother-in-law, and lastly a sister, have gone the way of all the earth. The latter was but a few years above my own age, and had been married but one year, one week and one day. You have five brothers and three sisters; I have but two brothers and as many sisters, who, with myself, alone remain of a family of eleven children. The Lord giveth and taketh away, but we can answer, “Blessed be his name!”
You say you are engaged in farming. After leaving your brother’s school at Lexington, I re-engaged in the same honorable occupation, and taught a common school for four successive winters, during which time I studied laboriously. In 1830 I entered the Freshman class at Cambridge, without having devoted any other time to study than hours stolen from slumber, after having per-

[INSET: PARKER’S LETTER TO HUNTINGTON]

[PAGE 565] formed a day’s labor at farming. I did not join the class, but continued to work, and in the ensuing winter completed my fourth period of teaching a district school. Then I engaged as an assistant in a private academy in Boston, where I remained upwards of a year; and as a further re­move I came to Watertown, where I at present remain.
2. To W. P. Huntington, a Former Teacher.*

            Dear Friend and Instructor:
It is long since we have met, but the recollection of the days spent under your instruction still lives in revered remembrance. I am rejoiced to hear of your welfare, since we have felt much anxiety on your account.
            You enquire of Lexington Academy. You probably know that it did not flourish under Mr. Russell. Mr. Hagar succeeded him, with similar success. The building stood unoccupied nearly a year. Mr. Houghton, a grad­uate (as he says) of the Vermont colleges, next occupied it, and with tolerable success. He had at one time about 50 scholars, but they were principally little boys,—­scholars well suited to his capacity for instruction. He, too, has gone, and a Mr. Whitney, a graduate of Cam­bridge, has taken his place and meets with scanty encour­agement. The good character of the school has been declining ever since your departure, and now we may ex­press its condition by the Roman Fuit.
            We have a Lyceum in Lexington, but it totters on the brink of ruin and will probably soon hasten to that maga­zine of “things exploded”—the Moon. Lyceums are es­tablished in almost all the neighboring towns, and in most Debates are conducted on the same evenings with the *W. P. Huntington graduated at Harvard, 1824, and died 1885.
            [PAGE 566] Lectures. In Watertown we have both a Lyceum and a debating society; but the standard of education is not very elevated among us.
            My School has now been in existence but 18 weeks, yet I have 24 scholars, which seems to bid fair as to future prospects. I instruct in the Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish Languages, Algebra, and such other sciences as are usually taught in country academies. I have four scholars preparing for the University, and others just commencing the Languages.
            My own education since attendance at your school [in 1827] has been pursued in private and alone. I have read all the Greek and Roman authors used at Cambridge, and many more; in Geometry and Algebra I have used the Cambridge course. This has been effected without the assistance of any Teacher. I have likewise obtained considerable knowledge of the Spanish and French Languages, and a smattering of the German, which I intend to pursue still farther.
            I shall mention with great pleasure to our friends at Lexington that I have heard from you, as when I last saw some of them they requested me to make inquiry. I remain your friend and former pupil.
            Theo. Parker.
            P. S. I this day complete my 22nd year.
            ——
The name of the brother of the teacher does not appear in this sheet, but Parker inquires for his cousins, Eleazar and Lynde Huntington. His brother William had been at the South, and in after life was a physician. Of his other pupils at Lexington Academy, Parker adds in the letter 1: “Your old schoolmate Glover (Dr. L. J. Glover, died in 1856), will graduate the ensuing Commencement. Casey entered Brown University, but quitted after the second term, and is now studying medicine. Asa Adams has become an actor…. The Misses Phinney still remain at Lexington, having plenty of Beaux, but no Fellows. Miss Mullikin has married a young man who lives near.”

[INSETS: MRS. BROAD’S HOUSE AND SCHOOLHOUSE, THE WEST ROXBURY PARSONAGE]

            [028] [PAGE 567] This letter has not been printed elsewhere, I believe; and it gives a glimpse at the progress of those studies that were never intermitted, so long as Parker could hold a book, or hear reading. His learning was vast and methodical; not so exact as that of narrower scholars, nor so enlivened by elegance as was the discriminate reading in fewer languages of Emerson and Thoreau. He had a turn for verse translation, and often composed original verse, highly expressive of feeling, some­times of thought, but not entitling him, save in a few examples, to the name of poet. His Sonnets are often fine. I found two such in a pencil note-book written before 1850, and I sent one of them, in 1889, for publication by C. H. Crandall in his “Representative Sonnets by American Poets.” The other, never yet printed, is this: