Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, F

Frederic Henry Hedge, [Reminiscences of Emerson] (1882)

[
] The son of Harvard professor Levi Hedge, Frederic Henry Hedge was the Transcendentalist most familiar with German literature, and the only one who had studied in Germany. He met Emerson in 1828, when both were in the Harvard Divinity School. One of the leading lights of what became the Transcendentalist movement, his March 1833 article on Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Unitarian journal, the Christian Examiner, is considered the first major confrontation between those who favored the intuitive philosophy of Immanuel Kant and those who believed in John Locke, who had made sensory experience the prime means by which we learn. In 1835, partially through Emerson’s assistance, Hedge became pastor to a congregation in Bangor, Maine, where he stayed until 1850. His return visits to Boston became the occasion for the social gatherings known as the Transcendental Club. But the influence of Hedge’s essentially conservative parish, his support of the American Unitarian Association, his desire to find a moderate middle ground in the current theological debates, and his own antipathy toward the more radical aspects of Transcendentalism, all soon distanced him from the movement and his friends in it. He later served as editor of the Christian Examiner, president of the American Unitarian Association , and professor of German language and literature at Harvard University. Hedge’s reminiscences of Emerson, written for James Elliot Cabot shortly after Emerson’s death, present a useful overview of Emerson and his ideas that spans half a century. Frederic Henry Hedge [Reminiscences of Emerson] () Frederic Henry Hedge to James Elliot Cabot,  September  Dear Mr. Cabot, I send you herewith, at your suggestion some reminiscences of our friend Emerson, written at the first leisure moment since the receipt of your letter. . . . I have brought them down to the time when he began to be famous & when as I suppose your acquaintance with him commenced. . . . emerson in his own time Reminiscences of Emerson My acquaintance with Emerson began in . He was then living in Divinity Hall Cambridge, & though not a member of the Divinity School was understood to be a candidate for the ministry preparing himself in his own way for the function of preacher. There was no presage then, as I remember, of his future greatness. His promise seemed faint in comparison with the wondrous brilliancy of his younger brother, Edward Bliss Emerson, whose immense expectation was doomed never to be fulfilled.A still younger brother, Charles Chauncy, had also won admiration from contemporary youth while Waldo as yet had given no proof of what was in him. He developed slowly. Yet there was notable in him then, at the age of twenty five, a refinement of thought & a selectness in the use of language which gave promise of an interesting preacher to cultivated hearers. He never jested; a certain reserve in his manner restrained the jesting propensity & any license of speech in others. He kept a diary in which he recorded whatever he had heard that seemed to him memorable during the day.I remember his coming to me one evening to learn some particulars in an anecdote with which Professor Norton had illustrated his remarks on a sermon just preached by one of the students in Divinity Hall chapel. He could not sleep until he had made a note of the whole. As I kept no diary myself I can recall but little of our talk.I tried to interest him in German literature but he laughingly said that as he was entirely ignorant of the subject he should assume that it was not worth knowing. Later he studied German mainly for the purpose of acquainting himself with Goethe to whom his attention had been directed by Carlyle. He was slow in his movements as in his speech. He never through eagerness interrupted any speaker with whom he conversed, however prepossessed with a contrary opinion. And no one, I think, ever saw him run. He told me that he never went from home on even the shortest journey without leaving his papers & other matters as he would have them found if suddenly overtaken by death. In ethics he held very positive opinions. And here his native independence of thought was manifest. “Owe no conformity to custom,” he said, “against your private judgement.” “Have no regard to the influence of your example, but act always from the simplest motive.” [ ] Once I was giving him a lift in my chaise on his...