Accompanied by his daughter Ellen, Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled through France, Italy, Switzerland, Egypt, and England before sailing home again.

Emerson's house is to be finished, Bronson Alcott told a friend late in February,1873, in time for his reception when he returns home this spring. His son Edward is to be married (they say) on his father's and sister's return.

To one Mrs. Perry, in Keokuk, Iowa, Alcott wrote apologetically in March, I was summoned home from St. Louis suddenly by the illness of my eldest daughter, Mrs. Pratt, leaving many promised engagements unfulfilled. She is now out of danger. I have submitted to Mr. Sanborn your letters from your daughter. He says that as they have been published, and are rather dated, he would prefer receiving fresher letters, and if her sketches prove lively and good he will publish them in the Republican. The weather here is fearfully uncomfortable, the snow deeper than for many winters past.

It was during that cold and snowy winter that Henry Thoreau's mother died, his sister Sophia vacating the Thoreau house to move from Concord to Bangor, Maine. Though she had formerly intended to leave Henry's manuscripts with the Concord Free Public Library, or had at least intimated that she would do so, Sophia handed them over to Alcott, who had long and eagerly anticipated getting them. She'd then succumb to the pleas of a zealous Thoreau enthusiast in Worcester, ordering Alcott to give up her brother's journals to Harrison Gray Otis Blake, lest Sanborn get his hands on them.

In 1873-74, Sanborn wrote, when I was living in Sophia Thoreau's house, she desired that the Journals, which she had left in the house, be removed to the Town Library, fearing, as Mr. Emerson told me, that Ellery Channing would have access to them. For a similar reason, apparently, she did not take Emerson's advice to leave the Journals to me.

Thoreau's journals, manuscripts and such books as his sister wishes to have in my care have come to hand, Bronson Alcott wrote in his diary. They are sent in three trunks, the manuscripts and the books, with a bookcase made by Thoreau himself. I am to hold them sacred from all but Thoreau's friends, allow none to take them away for perusal, subject to his sister's pleasure during her lifetime, and if I survive her, then they become mine for quotation or publishing. Many volumes may be compiled from them, and will be when his editor appears. I house them under lock and key safely in my attic.

To Mrs. Perry in Keokuk, Iowa, Alcott wrote, in April: Mr. Sanborn has made acquaintance with your daughter's Genius. Mr. Sanborn would gladly print letters of hers, should she choose to send him one from Germany, or wherever she may sojourn. My daughter May left this morning for London, where she purposes to pursue her art studies in the Art Galleries and probably visit the continent before she returns. I send you a notice regarding my Western Tour, printed in The Literary World, and also Mr. Sanborn's account of it in The Springfield Republican.

In mid-May, Alcott received an inquiry regarding progressive New England schools for boys, to which Louisa responded, As Father is deep in garden ploughing and orchard pruning just now, he desires me to answer for him. The original model for my fictional Plumfield Academy for Boys was quenched forty years ago in Boston, and has never sprung up again except on paper. P.S. When father gets his Socratic Seminary started here we shall be at no loss where to direct anxious parents. I know he will have it in time because he has waited so patiently forty years. And when it is underway the whole West is cordially invited to come and discuss Chaos, Cosmos, and the Oversoul.

When Emerson and Ellen returned home at the end of May, they were greeted at the train depot by firends and family, including Judge Hoar, the Alcotts, and the Sanborns, all waiting in carriages, along with an open barouche for the Emersons.

I enclose Sanborn's notice in the Republican of Mr. Emerson's reception by his friends and townspeople on his return from Europe, Alcott wrote a Boston friend. Nothing could be more charming, and all the more that the whole was a surprise to him. It was beautiful to see with what modesty and sweetness he met and spoke to his admiring neighbors at his gate. Our little village became suddenly exalted and glorified thereby. Ellen's face beamed upon them, the type of bliss personified. Both appeared in excellent health only borrowed by travel.

In July, Ellen wrote her mother from Naushon, the Forbes' retreat, reminding her that Edith's first born son, John, was then twenty-three months old, and Edward Waldo, her second son, was just eleven days old. Ellen mentioned her joining Alice Leavitt, Mrs. Sanborn's sister, on a long ride round Clarke's Island.

Back in Concord, Sanborn put the finishing touches on Channing's biography of Thoreau. After the 1863 fiasco of Channing's having pulled the work from serial publication in The Boston Commonwealth, then edited by Sanborn, after only two chapters, Sanborn had coaxed and flattered the miffed, temperamental Channing, through a decade, into preparing the book for publication as a book. In 1873, the firm of Roberts Brothers finally agreed to the publication of an edition of 1,500 copies.

In 1872, Sanborn wrote, after my return to Concord from residing in Springfield, Channing gave me what he called his completed manuscript, the Thoreau biography, which was ready, he said, for Roberts Brothers to print.

Channing had poured over his first draft at assorted intervals through a decade, here cutting, and there adding, making some parts enigmatic, even obscure, sprinkling the manuscript with allusions, mottoes, decorative frills, and new excerpts from old scribblings, mixing selections from his journal of 1867 with passages from Thoreau's journals, which he had been copying out longhand through the years.

Thomas Niles at Roberts Brothers thought there was not matter enough to make so large a volume as he wished, Sanborn noted, and desired more. Instead of again weaving in material here and there, Channing opened his manuscript in the middle, inserting the chapter or two needed, using for his insertion, in part, a manuscript of Walks and Talks which he had written twenty years before as a record of conversations with Thoreau and Emerson, including bits from their manuscripts or journals, to which they had given him access.

The work was a pastiche, a scrapbook of scattered memories of walks, events, sayings, and opinions that did not even proceeed chronologically. The story of Thoreau's life was told through biographical essays and imaginary dialogues, Channing's characters taking turns talking, each in a fine, highminded, unlikely style, replete throughout with supercillious and frivolous embellishments and flourishes.

None, including even Channing, thought the book would ever see the light of publication, except for his friend, Sanborn. But to everyone's surprise, including Sanborn, the first edition, once printed, sold out quickly. For all its obvious weaknesses, still people welcomed the book, Thoreau, the Poet- Naturalist: With Memorial Verses. Though it was clear this was no scholarly work, in the absence of any other book about Thoreau, whose legend was growing, Channing's book was informative, and not without a certain charm. Readers seemed comfortable with the book's friendly assessibility, however convoluted in parts, which came of Channing's authentic friendship, and intimacy, with Thoreau through twenty years.

Channing walked through the town now, head high, hands clasped at his back, his coat tails trailing behind him, letting his townspeople see and know that here was someone to reckon with, substantial, not just a dreamy, dismissable nobody, after all.

Channing's book on Thoreau is just out, Alcott wrote Harris in September. Read it. See if it is not full of Genius! Beware: method is not to be looked for.

On September 18th, Alcott wrote to Samuel Orcutt, in Wolcott, I shall gladly receive the Circulars for the Wolcott Centenary Library. If my name will serve you in the least, let me share the honor of having it added to the Library Committee. I think I can get the works of our Concord Authors, already promised. Their works alone will make a considerable library of 40 Volumes or more. Allow me some little time to collect them. I have mailed to your address a copy of the Poem by Channing, which I'll be reading at the Centennial Celebration, corrected by himself and as he wishes it to stand in your History of Wolcott. It will afterwards be published in Franklin Sanborn's Report of the Proceedings, to be compiled by him from various sources. I hope it will appear in this week's Springfield Republican.

In the meantime, Concordians prepared for their own special ceremony, the dedication of the new Concord Free Public Library. Here in Concord on the 29th, Alcott wrote to J.H. Temple in Nantucket, our Town Library is to be dedicated with an address by Emerson.

Emerson had served on the Library Committee some forty years. While elsewhere in the land the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie was giving out large sums of money for the building of libraries, proud Concord had raised the needed building funds from the pockets of its own citizens. On a Monday, a crisp, bright, splendid autumn day, the library was dedicated. The people turned out to hear Emerson speak, and to admire the splendid new structure, and to take pride in their shared free, democratic heritage, looking to the promise held out for them, a bright and prosperous future for this town of towns, and its people.

Meanwile, Alcott had been away in Wolcott, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Connecticut town. I enclose Sanborn's account, Alcott wrote a Boston friend early in October, published in last week's Springfield Republican. I call your attention specifically to Channing's Poem, which was read by me for the occasion.

For Alcott, Sanborn had taken on still another added responsibilty, the writing all the material about the Alcott family which would appear in Orcutt's History of the Town of Wolcott, 1731 to 1874.

Grateful are we, Alcott wrote from Boston to Sanborn in Concord, for the graceful manner in which you have sketced the family of Alcott. Lifelong good will and good wishes would be insufficient to repay our obligation for this, and for numerous other acts of kindness and affection which we have received from your constant friendship. A Happy New Year to you and your family, The Alcotts.

Sanborn, recently promoted from Secretary to Chairman of the Massachusetts State Board of Charities, had meanwhile been appointed Permanent Secretary of the American Social Science Association, which offered him a salary of $1,200 a year, contingent upon the understanding that he would devote one-third of his time to the work of the Association while keeping his other jobs with the state of Massachusetts and as a columnist for the Springfield Republican.

Through the winter he focused on the completion of a reformatory essay, The Prison Question in America, meanwhile scribbling away on The Work of Social Science in the United States. As Secretary of the ASSA he faced the challenge of not only rescuing the failing association, editing and publishing its Journal of Social Science, but of establishing a further new association still, the National Conference of Charities and Correction, intended to be the comprehensive umbrella organization for the ASSA, for all existing state charity boards, and for the general nationwide charities organization movement.

At times he was heartily amused, laughing right out loud at a phrase or line of his own construction, plucked right out of the air, a simple or a long and convoluted sentence that just sang to him. He found himself, at intervals, to be as happy as the maddest lunatic, a distracted whirling dervish in a prison of his own making, him bound by the shackles of his devotional inclinations and brooding tendency of mind, chained to his pens and paper and his writing desk. Occasionally he would take a break from his Promethean labors as America's preeminent social scientist -- and from the deafening silence that greeted him, as such, in lieu of fanfare, applause, or encouragement -- to hack away at a yet more satisfying work-in-progress, an article about his martyred convict mentor John Brown which, in 1874, would appear in the Atlantic Monthly.

At the outset of the year, early in January, Sanborn had arranged to meet with Octavius Brooks Frothingham, then at work on a biography of Gerrit Smith, hopefully to put to rest some issues still haunting him and others of the so-called Secret Six. He wanted Frothingham to ascertain the authenticity of a note sent to him by Ann Smith of Peterboro, New York, who had written down a statement which had then been signed by her husband, Gerrit Smith. The statement read:

Mr. Edwin Morton of Boston was for several years a member of my family. During that time Mr. Frank B. Sanborn, of Concord, Massachusetts, repeatedly visited him. They were classmates in Harvard University. On his visit in February, 1858, he met John Brown, who often took my home in his way between Kansas and his residence in Essex County, New York. He and Mr. Sanborn were much in Mr. Morton's room. I was in it a part or all of the time whilst Brown was reading his plan for entering the South and summoning the slaves to the mountains, where they could defend themselves and thence escape to Canada. This plan, I have been informed, was drawn up by himself not long before, under the roof of Mr. Frederick Douglass in Rochester. My heart responded to his merciful interest in the victims of opression, and he had my warmest wishes for his success. I had but little conversation with Brown respecting his enterprise. He told me he was not decided in what State to begin it. As the execution of it was long delayed, I thought it was abandoned. His invasion of Harper's Ferry in the fall of 1859 grew, as I supposed, out of an entirely new and suddenly adopted plan. I was astonished to hear of it, so unlike was it to that of going to the mountains. I came afterwards to believe that this invasion was in pursuance of the revival of his old plan. He addressed a large anti-slavery meeting in our village in April, 1859. I never saw him after that time, and I kept up no communication with him.

Having sent the above document to Sanborn, Smith had contacted Morton, directing him to change certain parts of it, in particular his statement that he never saw John Brown after April, 1859, the very time during which Smith had most actively helped fund John Brown's projects.

The above statement, Sanborn jotted on Smith's January 25, 1874 directive to Morton, is incomplete, and fails to give the more important facts of the case. We can therefore make no public use of it.

In June, Sophia Thoreau traveled from Bangor, Maine to Concord for a short visit. She met with Alcott to discuss the disposition of certain of her brother's manuscripts, including his Indian Notebooks, which she intended for the Concord Free Public Library, but which would end up in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. When Sophia learned from Alcott that her brother's Journals were just then on loan to Sanborn, she was outraged, directing Alcott to convey them to H.G.O. Blake in Worcester post haste.

To Harris he wrote that summer, Thank you for your most recent School Report. I esteem your Reports as models for all School Superintendents. Philosophy has not been hitherto a perceptible element in School Reports, nor in education itself, and we are far from appreciating its importance, outside of Germany. P.S. I have heard your name mentioned as a candidate for the Superintendent of the Boston Schools.

That summer, travelling with his son Tommy, 11 years old in 1874, Sanborn took in Peterboro, New York in returning to Concord. They were there for two days. Tommy was happy to make such investigations of the Smith's marvellous mansion as he could get away with, while in the dark, luxurious, and solemn study his father interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Smith regarding the martyr, John Brown.

This would be Sanborn's last meeting with Gerrit Smith, who died later that year, not long after their common colleague, the energetic and zealous reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, had a stroke. He had let his hair and beard grow long, so that late in life he looked like an Old Testament prophet. The stroke left him slightly disabled, but he did not die. He survived this first stroke only to be struck the following summer by a second, which would leave him blind and dumb.

Howe, having fought in the Greek war for independence as a young man, returned to New England and, as a radical reformer, supported abolitionism, and John Brown, later becoming the head of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, which he remained, if in name only, until his death in 1876.

His colleague Sanborn was widely known in Massachusetts, even nationwide, as a founding officer of the American Social Science Association, and variously as a member, secretary, or president of the Massachusetts Infant Asylum, the National Conference of Charities, the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, the National Prison Association, and also as a trustee of the reknowned Clarke School for the Deaf. He traveled the university lecture circuit, speaking at Wellesley College, Smith College, Cornell University, and elsewhere. Now the venerable Samuel Gridley Howe handpicked Sanborn to succeed him as Chairman of the State Board of Charities.

In 1874 his friend, Governor Talbot, appointed him Chairman of the Board of Charities, Sanborn's son Victor later would write He again returned to Concord, which was his home ever after.

That fall, Bronson Alcott wrote from Concord to Samuel Orcutt, in the town where John Brown was born, Torrington, Connecticut, where Orcutt was at work on his next town history, Thanks for the photographs of John Brown's Birth place. Channing and Sanborn tell me they have also received copies of the picture. Sanborn informs me Channing has written new verses on Brown for your History. He himself has not spoken about them, though he takes tea regularly with us every Wednesday. On looking over my papers, I find matter that may serve you concerning Brown, particularly some notes of a Conversation of mine printed at the time in The Commonwealth, then edited by Sanborn.

Louisa Alcott shot off a letter to Edwin Munroe Bacon, editor of the Boston Globe, The Springfield Republican is a great gossip, and as one of the editors lives in Concord, it is vain to try and keep anything private. He does not know everything, however, or he would have said that Miss Alcott had declined to write a serial for more than one Boston paper, if that is any comfort.

Edith Emerson worked closely with her distracted philosopher father in compiling a poetry anthology with the title, Parnassus. The book did not gather together popular or well-known contemporary American poems, but was a collection that represented simply the favorites of Ralph Waldo Emerson's family. Jones Very, Harriet Spofford, Sara Palfrey, and Henry Thoreau were in it. Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe were not.

Through portions of that winter of1875-76, Bronson Alcott, Annie Pratt's family, and the Sanborns all lived together in the Thoreau-Alcott house. There Alcott and Sanborn completed an essay about the Alcott family that would be included in Orcutt's History of Wolcott, and undertook to write an essay about John Brown, which would appear in Orcutt's History of Torrington, Connecticut, Brown's birthplace.

Upon his return to Concord, Sanborn was first informally rejected by, then formally re-elected to, membership in the Concord Social Circle. He was not in the committe appointed for the purpose of organizing and orchestrating a Centennial jubilee, a springtime celebration of the town's first 100 years.

I think the labours of every inhabitant for months beforehand were Herculean, wrote Ellen Emerson, then thirty-six. My brother Edward was on the decoration committee. No doubt he did the whole, as head, though some of his committee helped well. He found mottoes for the dinner tent, the houses, the roads, the the Ballroom, and they had to dress everything in flags besides. Enormous! The result was perfectly satisfactory. Every house, tree, and corner was labeled with its history. The Ballroom was described by everyone as the handsomest ever seen. The coming of the guests on Saturday, the sound of bands in the street, the decorations going up, the continual progression of carriages coming into town, the crowds getting out of every train, made everyone excited and happy. The joy of the occasion began to dawn upon us. When Monday came, it was first bright, and we had great hopes of the weather, but then came a strong, freezing wind under a black sky most of the day, perfectly horrible. Yet the crowd was as great as could be dealt with, and a lovely day might have brought one three times as great, which would have involved us in endless confusion. So the weather was probably the best we could have had, as it interfered with nothing. Guests in the tents huddled together, only somewhat defended by the canvass from the wind, and were not quite frozen. They heard and enjoyed so much that they forgot their discomfort, pitying those who had stayed home. The coming home and comparing notes was delightful all round, and the Ball was a great success. The next day everyone went. We hated to lose them but had the satisfaction of a brilliant festivity to look back on.

Late in 1875 Alcott wrote his friend Harris, The city of Boston is reorganizing its system of Public Schools and a Superintendent is to be elected. I enclose the list of the new School Committee. Perceiving your name mentioned as a Candidate, I write to inquire whether you will serve, if elected, and if you will allow me to further your election by naming your extraordinary claims to that office to the proper electors. And this office might presently open the way to Harvard College, if you wished a professorship there.

Harris wrote back, saying no. He said he felt that under the circumstances of Boston schools at that time, as he understood it, he would not be able to bring change. He did not want the post, he said, if he would not have the power to reform the Boston School System.

I am pleased to learn of your purposed trip to the Far West, Alcott wrote H.G.O. Blake in Worcester in the spring. Every New Englander should see that portion of our Globe, as an important part of his culture. I am sure you will enjoy your sally. I am sorry that I have acquaintances to name in but three or four of the cities which you purpose visiting. I know of no one in Louisville, Omaha, or San Francisco. Nor do I recall the names of persons whom I met at the West specially interested in Thoreau. Mr. Harris I wish you to see. Through him you will find those whom you will care to meet in St. Louis. Mr. Wiley, a banker, will introduce you to the like in Chicago. I'll hope to see you in a day or two, to learn more of your California expedition, and other interesting matters.

A New York City printer, a Mr. Worthington, had that spring begun printing pirated copies of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass from the plates of the Thayer and Eldridge edition, which he'd bought from the bankrupt publishing firm. Whitman's resulting despondency was well publicized, and probably overstated, by his growing circle of disciples, and his friends. Sanborn visited him early in April and dashed off at once a special dispatch to the Springfield Republican from Philadelphia:

Though graver than formerly, he is none the less cheerful, Sanborn reported. He has no special complaints or reproaches against the muse or against the power that rules the world. Certain statements made in his name about the neglect of critics and publishers, and the hardships of poverty, have come from him only as a mention of the simple fact, and not as reproaches or entreaties. Whitman lives as comfortably and pleasantly as an invalid can, with his brother Colonel George W. Whitman, who is inspector of gas-pipes in the city of Camden.

Sanborn seems to have been particularly impressed by, and to have taken particular solace from, Walt Whitman's being tended to by an inspector. God knew how dangerous and lethal gas-pipes could be.

Yesterday evening Mr. Sanborn took tea with us, Alcott wrote from Concord to Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey on April 19th. He told us many interesting things about his recent call upon you. He brought me your handsome books. It was with pleasure that I learned of the of the interest taken in this, the sixth edition of your Leaves of Grass. I promise myself much satisfaction in renewing my acquaintance with your thoughts when I shall have more leisure for reading. I hear that your health is somewhat broken. I am sorry for this, yet am sure your spirit which has borne and braved your time so nobly and well, is superior to Fate. I shall cherish the hope of interchanging words with you before we both must leave the scene of Things. My daughters wish to have me express to you their interest in your thoughts and welfare.

In May, Sanborn was on the road again. I took tea with Governor Tilden of New York in the State Mansion at Albany, Sanborn recalled. He confided to me the pleasure he took in having just nominated Effie Lowell, the widow of my College friend Charles Russell Lowell, killed in the Civil War, as the first woman on the New York State Board of Charities.

The following spring, 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes having snatched from Samuel J. Tilden the Presidency of the United States after a rancourous three-month re-count of electoral votes, and after Sophia Thoreau's death, Anna and Louisa May Alcott set their sights on purchasing the Thoreau house. The Sanborns were then living in it, with a lease on the property through to June of that year. In March, Louisa negotiated the purchase price with Sophia's cousin, George Thatcher of Bangor, Maine, who the dying Sophia had appointed executor of the Thoreau family's Concord estate.

I find on consulting various Concord men who know the worth of the Thoreau place that $5,000 is considered a high price, the now wealthy authoress of Little Women wrote Thatcher. Our lawyer, Mr. Sewall, also thinks it too much, as the taxes upon it seem to show that it is not so valuable a property as we thought it. Real estate is so low just now that prices are expected to fall also, and we will offer $4,500 for the place. On examining the house we find it needs considerable repairing, as several ceilings must be done over and some painting is necessary as we do not want to buy a shabby house. I do not know whether the current occupant, Mr. Sanborn, is expected to do this, or the owners, before selling it.

On March 10th Thatcher accepted Louisa's $4,500 offer, selling the house just as it was, shabby or otherwise. The busy authoress went back to work on her story, Under the Lilacs, telling the editor of St. Nicholas magazine, Mary Maples Dodge, of including a poem by her new tenant Sanborn's five-year-old son Francis, which she felt would provide the book illustrator with a good scene: the boy reciting his verses, under lilacs of course. In the meantime his brother Victor had got to work too, setting the poem to music.

On May 4th, two days prior to Chief Crazy Horse's surrender to Army officials in Nebraska, Alcott wrote H.G.O. Blake in Worcester, An English correspondent of mine, Dr. Kenningale Robert Cook, who has connections with the Dublin University Magazine, and who is an admirer of Thoreau, has written to inquire if something of Thoreau's is not available for publishing in that Journal. I have consulted Emerson and Sanborn, and they agree that a contribution to an English Journal would help publish Thoreau's merits abroad and, perhaps, further the publication of his manuscripts here at home. Mr. Niles of Roberts Brothers in Boston has offered to publish a selection, and Emerson says he will help to bring it, by any short introduction, to the public. Now, if you will not prepare such, then let Sanborn.

Within two weeks Alcott again was writing Blake, We shall expect you to dine or, if you come in the afternoon to tea, to pass the night here with us. Sanborn and Emerson, probably, will join us for the evening, and we can consult about Thoreau's manuscripts. I wish you may consent to compile a volume for the press forthwith. And we may arrange for the publication, from time to time, of the papers left by our gifted friend.

You wrote of visiting New England early in July, Alcott reminded his friend Harris in June.I wish it might be convenient for you to come to us in Concord during the second week, when William Henry Channing is to be with us. He wishes much to meet you. We hope he will stay three or four days. He is the guest of Emerson while here, and we shall claim you as ours for as long as you can stay in Concord. Mrs. Emerson will open her parlors for an evening, at least, for a Conversation.

My good friend William Henry Channing has passed a fortnight in Concord, Alcott wrote to his daughter May, in Paris. I saw him almost daily. He comes again in August to preach for us. Then we shall probably have another Conversation at Emerson's. We had a memorable evening, when Mr. Harris was here. Mr. Channing spoke beautifully, and Mr. Harris won the admiration of every one present. James Freeman Clarke will preach here next Sunday, and I am invited to another Conversation at Emerson's that evening. So Concord gets a share of the fresh ideas now current.

In mid-October, Nez Perce Chief Joseph, after surrendering to U.S. troops after a five-day standoff in blizzard conditions in the Bear Paw mountains of Montana, is reported to have said, I will fight no more, forever.

In November, Bronson Alcott wrote his daughter May, in Paris, It cannot be long before your Mother sleeps the sleep from which she will not awaken. This letter will prepare you for the next, which will doubtless apprize you of your dear Mother's decease. For though she is semi-conscious at moments, and in a state of quiet rapture whispering to herself the happiness she enjoys she cannot survive many hours at most, and may have passed from us even before tomorrow morning's mail by which this goes to you.

This letter was followed with a note from Anna telling May of their mother's death at 7:30 that evening, November 25th. As she had wished to have a private funeral, Alcott wrote, her remains were laid in Sleepy Hollow, attended only by ourselves, Anna, Louisa, my grandchildren and myself.

Upon the death of Abby Alcott, her husband and daughters closed the Orchard House and moved into the Thoreau House, now owned by Anna and Louisa May Alcott. The Sanborns moved from the house to the vacant Chamberlain house on the Subury River. The Thoreau-Alcott house would be inherited, along with Louisa's entire estate, by Anna Pratt's son Frederick, who she would formally adopt just prior to her death ten years later. In 1909, in his Recollections of Seventy Years, Sanborn would write of the Thoreau family's house having become the home of Mr. A. Bronson Alcott's grandson.

The late Octavius Frothingham's first edition of Gerrit Smith's biography in 1878, Sanborn wrote, led to a sharp controversy in the New York journals concerning the statements made therein about Mr. Smith's connection with the plans of John Brown for attacking negro slavery by force. At that time, anticipating that I might be called to declare in public the facts within my knowledge, but very unwilling to appear in the controversy, I wrote a letter to the New York Evening Post, which was to be my statement for those who wished to learn the truth.

In the course of the year 1878, Sanborn was in and out of the controversy. One of Gerrit Smith's nephews, General John Cochrane, charged Sanborn with distortions regarding his claims as to his uncle's complicity in Brown's raid, but withdrew his charges upon seeing the revelatory letters to sanborn and Morton written by his Aunt, and signed by his uncle, Gerrit Smith. The letter Sanborn wrote to the New York Evening Post was never sent, but was saved by Sanborn, and was included in his 1909 Recollections:

My own first knowledge of the plans of John Brown for invading the South and forcibly emancipating slaves, the same plans he afterwards attempted to execute in Virginia, was obtained from Brown in Gerrit Smith's house at Peterboro, New York, February 22, 1858, and in the presence of Mr. Smith himself, with whom I discussed them fully on that day, the following day, and again on the 24th of May, 1858, at the Revere House in Boston. We two, Mr. Smith, then 61 years old, and myself, 26, on the 23rd of February, 1858, at about the hour of sunset, did deliberately and earnestly engage with each other that we would stand by and support John Brown in his undertaking. How could Mr. Smith, G.L. Stearns, and Dr. Howe deny, as they all did, that they knew nothing of the Harper's Ferry attack? Simply because they did not know, or perhaps guess, that Brown meant to begin there. We expected he would go farther west, into a region less accessible. Probably Gerrit Smith felt justified in making public statements which told a part of the truth, but not the whole. He was not a witness at the Senate Committee Hearings, being an asylum patient at Utica in that agitated winter of 1859-60.

Now, in the winter of 1879-80, Ellen Emerson announced the arrival of a glorious February snowstorm: I am almost satisfied with its depth. Either this is a much greater storm than it looks or Concord people are growing effeminate. Not a sleigh has come past the house today, two sleds and one or two foot passengers are all. Mr. Cabot and I have been hard at work all day on three of Father's lectures, each which I flatter myself will be very good. Mrs. Cabot's eyes seem to have exercised a blessed magic upon Father's essay, The Sovereignty of Ethics. Father practiced giving his lecture at Edward's. It took just an hour, which pleased him. He said he understood it better now himself. Father can't possibly remember for a minute the subject of the lecture, and so asks what is it, every minute. This amuses him very much. He also thinks it rather high-soaring for a Concord audience, and laughed today, saying, A funny occasion it will be, a lecturer who has no idea what he's lecturing about, and an audience who don't know what he means!

Westward the Empire of Ideas makes its way, Alcott wrote to Mary Adams on August 21, 1878, and finds there its freshest interpreter in William Torey Harris, a new star in our Ideal firmament. You will like to know, he added, that Thoreau's Cairn has grown a good deal this summer, every visitor at Walden adding a stone. When will you come and see what you started so happily for his memory.

All of us are in good health, save Louisa who is resting from her labors, Alcott wrote that spring. My daughter May has married a Swiss gentleman, Ernest Nieriker. They met in London and were married in Paris on March 22nd, where they are now. She writes happily of herself and of him. Yesterday evening Emerson's Essay on Ethics was read before our Fortnightly Club. Here we have his religious creed at last!

Since November I have been living with my daughters in the Thoreau House on Main Street, Alcott informed Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford. Sometime I hope to return to my old Home under the Elms. Mr. Emerson is less abroad than formerly and pleads his old age when I meet him. Thoreau's fame is on the ascendant. A braver person has hardly trodden our Globe in our day. Channing I never see anymore. I am blessed with perfect health, youthfulness of spirit, and will not disdain to round off my century, God willing.

We expect, Alcott wrote Harris in St. Louis, you will join us next summer, for our Concord Symposium.