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Descendants of John Howland

88. Lemuel¹¹ Sawyer (Nathan¹⁰, Ebenezer⁹, Joanna⁸ Cobb, Ebenezer⁷, Hope⁶ Chipman, Hope⁵ Howland, John⁴, Henry³, John², John¹)⁴⁸⁶ was born May 08, 1801 in Cape Elizabeth, ME⁴⁸⁶. He married Love M Patten⁴⁸⁶ November 15, 1842 in Cherryfield, ME⁴⁸⁶, daughter of John Patten and Pamelia Leighton. She was born November 25, 1815 in Cherryfield, ME⁴⁸⁶, and died July 30, 1893⁴⁸⁶.

More About Lemuel Sawyer and Love Patten:
Marriage: November 15, 1842, Cherryfield, ME⁴⁸⁶

Child of Lemuel Sawyer and Love Patten is:

122

Sarah Waite¹² Sawyer⁴⁸⁶, born November 29, 1845⁴⁸⁶; died December 16, 1870⁴⁸⁶. She married W. T. Hill⁴⁸⁶.

98. Ralph Waldo¹¹ Emerson (Ruth¹⁰ Haskins, Hannah⁹ Upham, Hannah⁸ Waite, Lydia⁷ Sargent, Lydia⁶ Chipman, Hope⁵ Howland, John⁴, Henry³, John², John¹)^487,^488,⁴⁸⁹ was born May 25, 1803 in Boston, Mass ^490,⁴⁹¹, and died April 27, 1882 ^492,⁴⁹³. He married (1) Lydia Jackson^494,⁴⁹⁵. He married (2) Ellen Louise Tucker⁴⁹⁵.

Notes for Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), American essayist and poet, a leader of the philosophical movement of transcendentalism.

Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Seven of his ancestors were ministers, and in 1829 Emerson became minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) of Boston. In 1832 Emerson resigned from his pastoral appointment because of personal doubts about administering the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. He toured England, where he met several British writers, including Walter Savage Landor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth.

When he returned to the United States in 1833, Emerson settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and lectured in Boston. His most detailed statement of belief was presented in his first published book, Nature (1836), which was published anonymously. The volume has come to be regarded as Emerson's most original and significant work, offering the essence of his philosophy of transcendentalism.

The first volume of Emerson's Essays (1841) includes some of his most popular works, including "History," "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Love," "Friendship," "Prudence," "Heroism," "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect," and "Art." The second series of Essays (1844) includes "The Poet," "Manners," and "Character." In 1846 his first volume of Poems was published. Several of Emerson's lectures were collected in the volume Representative Men (1850). The Conduct of Life (1860) was the first of his books to enjoy immediate popularity. Included in this volume of essays are "Power," "Wealth," "Fate," and "Culture." This was followed by a collection of poems entitled May Day and Other Pieces (1867).

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A CHRONOLOGY OF
RALPH WALDO
EMERSON'S LIFE

1803 - born May 25 in Boston to William Emerson and Ruth Haskins Emerson

1807 - (April 26), death of brother John Clarke

1811 - (May 12) father, William Emerson, dies

1812-17 - attends Boston Latin School

1820 - begins keeping journals which he would continue throughout virtually all his life. The first series are called "Wide World", expressing his current thoughts on any and all topics.

1821-25 - attends Harvard College, in a rather undistinguished manner
- also teaches "school for young ladies"

1822 - publishes first article, in The Christian Disciple

1825 - admitted to middle class of Harvard Divinity School

1826 - preaches first sermon in Samuel Ripley's pulpit

1827 - sails to South Carolina and St. Augustine, Florida seeking better health

1827-29 - serves as "supply" preacher

1828 - engaged to Ellen Tucker, age 17
- mental breakdown of brother Edward

1829 - ordained as junior minister of Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston
- (September 10) - marries Ellen Tucker

1831 - (February 8) - Ellen dies of tuberculosis

1832 - preaches "Last Supper" sermon, (October 28) resigns from Second Church
- (December 25) first trip to Italy, France, England and Scotland
- formulates many of his self-reliance, "Nature" ideas on trip

1833 - meets Coleridge, Wordsworth, has inspiring meeting with Carlyle
- interest in science rises, sees connections with spirituality and the unity of all
- returns (October 9), enthusiastic about his new embracement of Transcendentalism
- gives first lecture "The Uses of Natural History" at the Masonic Temple, Boston (November 5)

1833 - Frederic Hedge publishes article on Coleridge in The Christian Examiner which provides the first American recognition of the claims of Transcendentalism

1834 - settles in Concord. Boards with Ezra Ripley, his stepgrandfather. "Nature" and next set of lectures written there.
- (October 1) - brother Edward dies unexpectedly, age 29. Edward once said, "the arrow of the angel had gone too deep".
- Aunt Mary came to live with them for a year.
- Coming together of influences encourage Emerson's conviction that what is beyond nature is revealed to us through nature, that the miraculous is revealed through the scientific and the natural, and that the inner life is revealed through the life of the senses. - Bronson Alcott establishes Temple School in Boston, a "remarkable" experiment in Transcendental education

1835 - lectures on "Biography" from January - March
- meets Bronson Alcott
- (September 14) - marries Lydia (Lydian) Jackson
- Margaret Fuller gives her "Conversations" to "interested persons"

1835-36 - Lecture Series on "English Literature" - November-January

1836 - (May 9) - brother Charles dies
- (September 9) "Nature" published
- meets Margaret Fuller
- helps form Transcendental Club in September
- (October 30) - son Waldo born
- Carlyle publishes "Sartor Resartus"

1837 - RWE gives "The American Scholar" address at Harvard to seniors, one of whom is Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, responding to a suggestion of Emerson's, begins to keep a journal. Leads to an extraordinary lifetime of journal-keeping.
- writes "The Concord Hymn" and delivers "The American Scholar," the Phi Beta Kappa Society oration, at Harvard

1838 - (July 15) gives "Divinity School Address" at Harvard. Later the prominent Andrews Norton attacks Emerson's views as "the latest form of infidelity"
- delivers "Literary Ethics" lecture at Dartmouth
- Jones Very makes first visit to Concord

1839 - (February 24) - daughter Ellen born
- Lecture series "The Present Age" from December to February, 1840
- Elizabeth Peabody opens a bookshop that becomes the gathering place for Transcendentalists.
- Jones Very publishes Essays and Poems

1840-44 - writes for The Dial with Margaret Fuller as editor First issue comes out July 1, 1840.

1841 - (March 20) "Essays" (First Series) - published
- includes "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul" among others
- Thoreau moves into Emerson home (April 26) for two-year stay, becomes household handyman, and father figure when Emerson is on lecture tour
- (November 22) - daughter Edith born
- Brook Farm, an experiment in communal living, established by George Ripley and colleagues. Emerson does not join.
- Theodore Parker attacks historical Christianity in his sermon "A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity"

1842 - (January 27) - son Waldo dies
lectures in New York, meets Henry James
- assumes editorship of The Dial (July)
- visits Shaker community with Nathanial Hawthrone (September)
- William Ellery Channing dies

1843 - delivers lecture series "New England" in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Newark
- Bronson Alcott and friends establish Fruitlands
- Nathaniel Hawthorne reveals attitude toward Transcendentalism in his allegory "The Celestial Railroad"

1844 - Emerson's "Essays: Second Series" published (October 19) . Sells well.
- (July 10) - son Edward born
- delivers address "Emancipation in the British West Indies", first public statement against slavery

1845 - Close friend Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
- Henry David Thoreau moves into self-built cabin on Walden Pond (on Emerson's property) for 2 years and 2 months, in order to "live deliberately."

1845-46 - Lecture series "Representative Men" (December - January)

1846 - Poems published (December 25)

1847-48 - second trip to England and France, British lecture tour. Visits Carlyle, Martineau, Wordsworth

1849 - "Nature; Addresses and Lectures published again (September)

1850 - "Representative Men" published
- first western (Cleveland & Cincinati) lecture tour (May - June)
- (July 19) - Margaret Fuller Ossoli drowns at sea off Long Island, New York on her return from Italy

1851 - speaks on the Fugitive Slave Law (May)
- Melville publishes Moby Dick

1852 - speaks on the Fugitive Slave Law (May)
- edits memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli
- western lecture tour (December - January 1853)
- Hawthorne publishes The Blithedale Romance based in part on Brook Farm

1853 - (November 16) - mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson, dies at 85, at Emerson's home

1854 - lectures on poetry at Harvard Divinity School (April)
- meets Walt Whitman in New York City (December)
- Walden by Thoreau is published. He also publishes Life Without Principle, a definition of his transcendental criticism of materialism.

1855 - Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass Emerson believes Whitman to be a true American genius yet suggests to Whitman that some overtly sexual passages be omitted. Whitman declines.

1856 - "English Traits" published

1859 - (May 27) - brother Bulkeley dies

1860 - "The Conduct of Life" published

1861 - mobbed at Tremont Temple by pro-slavery agitators

1862 - meets Abraham Lincoln (February)
- (May 6) - Henry David Thoreau dies. Emerson gives funeral oration.

1863 - hails Lincoln's "Emancipation Proclamation" with "Boston Hymn" (January)
- (October 3) - aunt Mary Moody Emerson dies

1865 - daughter Edith marries William Hathaway Forbes

1866 - given honorary doctorate at Harvard College

1867 - "May-Day and Other Pieces" published
- elected Harvard "Overseer"

1868 - (September 13) - brother William dies

1870 - "Society and Solitude" published (March)
- launches lecture series "The Natural History of the Intellect"
- Emerson's memory noticeably begins to fail

1871 - trip to California, meets with famed naturalist John Muir who is enchanted with RWE. (April - May)
- gives second Harvard lecture series

1872 - (July 24) Emerson's house (Bush) burns

1872-73 - third trip to Europe (October - May), including England (farewell visit to Carlyle) and Egypt...while house is repaired
- the town celebrates his return much to Emerson's surprise

1874 - "Parnassus" published
- son Edward marries Annie Keyes

1875 - "Letters and Social Aims" published
- discontinues regular journal entries

1876 - lectures at University of Viirginia

1881 - reads paper at Massachusetts Historical Society on the death of Carlyle (February)

1882 - Emerson dies in Concord on April 27, at age 78 and is buried in Sleepy Hollow.

1883-86 - Emerson-Carlyle correspondence published

1884 - "Lectures and Biographical Sketches" published. "Miscellanies" published.

1892 - (November 13) Lidian Emerson dies at age 90

1893 - "Natural History of the Intellect" and "Other Papers" published

1909-1910 - "Journals' edited by son Edward Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, published in ten volumes.

(Chronology taken from "Emerson: The Mind on Fire" by Richardson, "Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter" by McAleer, and others volumes.)

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Emerson's eulogy of Thoreau

Ecology Hall of Fame
Henry David Thoreau
An Essay
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson's essay on Thoreau is a mix of biography, eulogy, and personal criticism. It shows that Emerson believed Thoreau capable of far greater accomplishments than he achieved in his life. When Thoreau died in 1862, Emerson was a national figure, the Great American Philosopher. Thoreau was a minor, local personality. These excerpts from Emerson's funeral oration (expanded and printed later in The Atlantic Monthly) give his views, positive and negative, of this one-time disciple who has now eclipsed him in stature.
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He graduated at Harvard College in 1837, but without any literary distinction. An iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges for their service to him, holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his debt to them was important. [After a brief stint manufacturing pencils and inventing a better pencil, he decided] that he should never make another pencil. "Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once." He resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous studies, making every day some new acquaintance with Nature, though as yet never speaking of zoology or botany, since, though very studious of natural facts, he was incurious of techinical and textual science.

He was a born protestant. He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well.

He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself.

There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise.

He was a speaker and actor of the truth, born such, and was ever running into dramatic situations from this cause. ... In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him.

In 1847, not approving some uses to which the public expenditure was applied, he refused to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. A friend paid the tax for him, and he was released. The like annoyance was threatened the next year. But as his friends paid the tax, notwithstanding his protest, I believe he ceased to resist.

No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversion from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt. He listened impatiently to news or bonmotsgleaned from London circles; and though he tried to be civil, these anecdotes fatigued him. The men were all imitating each other, and on a small mould. Why can they not live as far apart as possible and each be a man by himself?

His robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions and strong will, cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his simple and hidden life. I must add the cardinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men, which showed him the material world as a means and symbol. This discovery, which sometimes yields to poets a certain casual and interrupted light, serving for the ornament of their writing, was in him an unsleeping insight; and whatever faults or obstructions of temperament might cloud it, he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.

He understood the matter in hand at a glance, and saw the limitations and poverty of those he talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed from such terrible eyes. I have repeatedly known young men of sensibility converted in a moment to the belief that this man was the man they were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they should do.

Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea.

It was a pleasure and a priviledge to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him.

His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with Nature, -- and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined by him. ... His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with a microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.

His poetry might be good or bad; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill, but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. ... His own verses are often rude and defective. The gold does not yet run pure, is drossy and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric fineness and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperatment, he never lacks the causal thought, showing that his genius was better than his talent.

Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party. Pounding beans is good to the end of empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans?

The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."
----- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

More About Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Burial: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery⁴⁹⁵
Mayflower: Descendant
Occupation: Author, Poet

Child of Ralph Emerson and Lydia Jackson is:

123

Edith¹² Emerson ⁴⁹⁶, born 1841⁴⁹⁶. She married William Hardaway Forbes⁴⁹⁶; born 1840⁴⁹⁶; died 1897⁴⁹⁶.

More About Edith Emerson:
Mayflower: Descendant

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