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Over his long and varied career as a teacher, journalist, social reformer, prolific reporter of Transcendentalism in New England, and biographer of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and others, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn earned immense respect from his contemporaries. Today, however, Sanborn’s reputation is mixed at best. For although as a second-generation Transcendentalist he—probably more than anyone else—transmitted the intellectual fervor of the founders of the movement to twentieth-century readers, Sanborn, like Moncure D. Conway, had an unfortunate tendency to rewrite history, and did so always to his own advantage. Emerson acknowledged as much to his daughter Ellen when, following the burning of his house in 1872, he expressed his dread that either Sanborn or Conway should inherit his manuscripts (see Ellen Tucker Emerson to Edith Emerson Forbes, 22 August 1872, Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, 1:690). Thus, under most circumstances one has to review at least two or three reports by Sanborn of a particular event in order to construct an account of what actually occurred. In the present case, however, Sanborn’s review of Emerson as a lecturer stands on its own. His entire focus is on Emerson, whose lecture series on American Life he praises for disrupting the dull routine that lecture series had become in Boston by the mid-1860s. Like many in Emerson’s audience , Sanborn is fascinated by and genuinely admires “the quality of what he says, not its volume, or its manner of expression.” Treating Emerson as the pride of Boston, he argues that Emerson’s substance—his “moral certitude”— re-creates in New England the tradition of Socrates’s “Athenian liturgy.” [] “Mr. Emerson’s Lectures” ( ) [Franklin Benjamin Sanborn] The course of lectures on “American Life” which Mr. Emerson is now reading in this city deserves a notice more adequate than we have yet given. We have become so acclimated and inured to lectures and courses of lectures, here in Boston, that we are in some danger of losing our interest in everything called by that name.Do we read the report of a lecture in the Advertiser with any more zest than wait upon the daily doings of the “State Valuation Committee,” or the unctuous chronicle of “Whalers” on the fourth page? This indifference ought to be dispelled by the announcement of a new lecture by Mr. Emerson, and so it always is in the minds of the earnest and the thoughtful. On the evening announced, the benches are filled by an audience which in itself is a pleasure and a study. There sit the gray-haired couple, who have listened to every one of his lectures since the music of the young scholar’s voice first enchanted them thirty years ago. There, too, are their children and their grandchildren,...who can scarcely remember when they first heard what is yet constantly new to them, and nevertheless recalls to mind some gracious memory of earlier lessons from the same lips. There is the saintly woman, the adored beauty, the polished gentleman, and beside them the brown-faced farmer, the rustic maiden, and the shy stripling from the Maine woods, to whom a single evening at one of these lectures is the event of the year, perhaps impossible to be repeated. There are always just so many students from Cambridge,and so many fair-faced girls from Boston parlors. And scattered among the audience are always a few strangers, a foreigner or two, a great many clergymen, and reformers. Of this audience, so various, yet so select and so appreciative, about onethird disappears every two years, . . . and their places are filled by new hearers . And so, while they meet like old friends from one course of lectures to another, there is constantly a band of novices, in whom the elders of the company see with joy their own emotions of years ago reproduced and perpetuated . So much that is exalted in character and ardent in aspiration,—so much serene gravity and so much rosy enthusiasm,—assembles nowhere else and on no other occasion in Boston. If this were a tribute to the lecturer, . . . it could not be better deserved. This grave and melodious voice, which has now been heard in Boston for more than a generation . . . never uttered an ignoble word, or failed to appeal to high sentiments. It has advocated opinions which were for the moment unpopular,and others about which men will always contend,but all who listened to it were forced to recognize the lofty key...

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