The Sanborns, upon settling in Concord after their stint in Springfield, had lived in the Thoreau house until 1877, when they had begun to rent the Chamberlain house. Now, in 1880, they decided they'd go forward in building the house of their dreams, a gambrel-roofed house on Elm Street, just off Main Street, by a bend in the Concord River, on the banks of the Sudbury.

Mrs. Sanborn was relieved and pleased, remembering what Mrs. Alcott had told Frank, that in her first twenty-nine years of marriage to Bronson she had moved twenty-seven times. Louisa was melancholy, but unperturbed when, in the early stages of the house's construction, she learned her husband had ceremoniously sealed the collection of his and his first wife's love letters among the bricks of the splendid central fireplace.

In future years the tall and imposing house, perched high above the riverbank, embraced by a tangle of vines and close-clinging shrubbery, would gain a reputation of being nearly so withdrawn, lonesome, dark, and forbidding as the Nathaniel Hawthorne house. Pilgrims to Concord seeking the picturesque home of the estimable and distinguished Mr. Franklin B. Sanborn were given directions to travel up Main Street from Concord center to the fork in the road at which stood the Concord Free Public Library. There, the Sudbury Road branched to the left, and Main Street to the right. The visitor, travelling further along Main Street, would pass various houses connected with the Hoar family. The Thoreau-Alcott house, which Henry Thoreau had helped his father to build, and in which he had died, was the third house beyond Belknap Street, on the left. Further up on Main Street, just after Nashawtuc Road, Elm Street branched off, leading to the Sudbury River and the Sanborn house, on the right bank.

It would be prized, by assorted society-minded ladies in the town, to be invited to a tea hosted by Mrs. Louisa Augustus Leavitt Sanborn. In the spring Ellen Emerson felt great delight in her being among the first to drop in on Mrs. Sanborn in her stately new home: I forgot to say that one day recently, being hungry, I sought rest and food at Mrs. Sanborn's. Oh! what a beautiful time!

In nearby Tewksbury, in the poorhouse there, the future teacher of Helen Keller had been living in sordid, terrifying circumstances. Approaching blindness due to trachoma, Annie Sullivan boarded with grotesques, dysfunctionals, prostitutes, the wretched, the insane. An investigating committee led by the head of the Board of Charities, Sanborn, had arrived to inspect the institution. At the end of the committee’s tour, Annie threw herself in their midst, pleading -- Mr. Sanborn, Mr. Sanborn, I want to go to school!

On October 3, 1880, Annie Sullivan was admitted to the Perkins Institute for the Blind. She would later be chosen by the Director of the Institute, Michael Anagnos, to go to Alabama to be Helen Keller’s tutor. Years later Keller would be forced to renounce the authorship of a poem she’d written especially for Anagnos, as a birthday present, in 1891. Anagnos and Sanborn would denounce both Helen and Annie as plagiarizers. In a letter to the Board of Trustees of the Perkins Institute, Sanborn, taking the side of his friend Anagnos, would accuse Helen's teacher of warping her student's mind. Mark Twain would condemn both men, along with the entire Perkins Board, calling them dull and hoary pirates, solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heart with their ignorant damned rubbish, disciplining and purifying a kitten.

Eighty years later, the editor of an annotated checklist of Sanborn’s letters, John Wheeler Clarkson, would comment on how Sanborn gave Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller the silent treatment: Nowhere in his autobiography does he mention either.

Helen would never get over it. I cannot excuse his -- Sanborn’s mean-spirited behavior, she would write many years later. Little did he remember that, however impatient we may be with our fellow men, we are all bound together and live for and by one another.

In January, 1881, Louisa May Alcott, having just returned from a trip to London, renting a house at 81 Pinckney Street in Boston, wrote to her father's friend Harris, again renting the Orchard House with his wife: I hope to be in Concord next week and if I can come see you I will. As to a biography about my Father, I have little to say. I have never understood my Father's philosophy, and biography is not in my line. I shall never write it, except perhaps in a story some time. Sanborn and yourself are the persons to do that, and I can only help a little, perhaps about the domestic part. I hope a good life will some time be written, to set him right with the world. Though, after all, the living is the main point. He has seen several of his ideals become facts, and that is more than most of us ever do.

Alcott wrote Sanborn from Burlington, Iowa that spring: Having now reached the Mississippi, and soon to turn my face northward, visiting a few places in the interior of the state, I may begin to entertain the thought of returning homewards. My interest still continuing unabated in the incidents of my journeyings, and in the cordial acceptance I receive everywhere, I hope I may fulfill the promise of my tour, though it extend into the summer sunshine. I find wherever I journey much interest expressed in the School, and we may expect a larger attendance than last year. Philosophy is a favorite, and no stranger, here in these prairies. The colleges even offer criticisms on professors in the East. Everywhere I go, Professor Harris is spoken of with admiration, and with high hopes for his future career. Have you copies of our program at hand? I should like some for distribution.

Sanborn forwarded the programs, and on April 8th they reached Alcott in Dubuque: The circulars I was glad to have at hand, as I had distributed the last from a former envelope, and so had none more for eager applicants. From most of the cities and towns where I have spoken, I think we may count recruits for next summer's sessions. Philosophy is deemed a profitable possession here, something useful as well as ornamental, an occupant of the head as well as the bookshelf. I leave for Rockford, Illinois tomorrow, where I am to speak and Converse. Many cities lie along my route eastward. I find I must deny myself the pleasure, for want of time, of pausing in them all. The snow's dissolving, and the spring birds are already here.

The School opened, a beehive of comings and goings, arrangements and appointments. Sanborn took care of details, meanwhile seeing to it that the other obligations on him as a newspaper columnist, the editor of assorted journals, and as the inspector of asylums, prisons and other assorted charitable State institutions, all were being met.

On April 15th, Walt Whitman lectured on Abraham Lincoln in the Hawthorne Room of the St. Botolph Club, in Boston. He'd come down with a bad cold in January, and had been ailing all that winter. The invitation to speak in Boston had come from Nathaniel Hawthorne's son-in-law, G.P. Lathrop. Whitman's friend John Boyle O-Reilly had reserved a room for him at the Revere House. Mrs. John T. Sargent had made arrangements for a general reception. The lecture went well, and was attended by the leading literati, as the Boston Herald reported.

It was well I got away, Whitman wrote after a week of being celebrated. If I had stayed another week I should have been killed with kindness, and with eating and drinking.

That summer the Sioux Indian Chief, Sitting Bull, pursued through five years after the massacre of Custer and his troops at Little Big Horn, surrendered to U.S. troops, chanting, A Warrior I have been; now it is over; a hard time is at hand.

At the end of July, Ellen Emerson went into Boston with a family friend, Mrs. Cabot, to attend the National Conference of State Boards of Charities, assembling at the State House. We took a carriage because Mrs. Cabot's foot was lame, as her horse had fallen on it, Ellen reported. When we came to the Hall of the Representatives, I was disgusted to see a small audience. Effie Lowell and Lizzie Putnam were sitting together in the front row. Mr. Sanborn sat solemnly in a chair at the desk facing out to the audience. People began taking their seats, and Mr. Sanborn, in his capacity as Chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Charities, called the Conference to order. Effie, representing both the Massachusetts and New York State Boards of Charities, was called on, and went up to the desk. I saw for the first time how tall she was. She appeared to me then as being so beautiful in figure as in face. But she had on spectacles, to my horror and surprise. Otherwise, she was perfectly beutiful. She wore her bonnet. There was no doubt at all that she could make herself heard. We had to listen closely to be sure, but we lost nothing. Her being a member of the Board of Charities merely doing a member's duty at a meeting of Boards of Charities, I was free simply to enjoy her beauty, and the beauty of her performance. The wisdom of what she said being far greater than mine, I could only accept, without judging. The experience and the power it showed filled me with admiration, giving me a new sense of reverence for her, and for her work. Then arose the gentlemen, one by one, and discussed this point and that point, till at last Mr. Sanborn arose and said, In considering details, I fear people may lose the main drift of Mrs. Lowell's paper. He therefore wished to remind them that, she, the first attending this Conference to speak, had presented a philosophically arranged, new plan of administering public charities, whose general features seemed wise and and practical to him, though in some points he might differ from her. This speech of Mr. Sanborn's pleased Mrs. Cabot, who gratefully alluded to it as we came out.

In mid-August, the new revised, expanded Boston edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass went to press, published by James R. Osgood & Company and printed by Avery and Rand, on Franklin Street. At the end of July, Whitman had left Camden, New Jersey, to visit Long Island, Paumanok as he liked to call it, for four days. The Bard of Paumanok, as he liked to call himself, had gone on to Manhattan for two weeks before heading north along the oceanside route, by way of Providence, to Boston. He had arrived on August 19th. On the 23rd, he moved into one of the printer's offices and, reminiscent of his visit to Boston some twenty years previously, variously corrected proof and visited friends, rode the streetcars, or just strolled over the Common.

An interview appeared in The Boston Globe on August 24th, amid reports of the ailing President, James A. Garfield, who'd been stalked all summer by a man who, on July 2nd, had shot him in the back as he strolled arm in arm with his Secretary of State across the waiting room of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington. He'd intended to take the train north, to speak at his Alma mater in western Massachusetts, Williams College, but now was rushed back to Washington, where he would remain three months, before dying.

On September 4th, Thomas A. Edison pulled a switch in the offices of Drexel, Morgan, & Company in New York City's Lower East Side, introducing the Edison Company's new electric lighting system.

In mid-September, while President Garfield still lay dying, a depressed Walt Whitman made the forty minute journey by train from Boston to Concord, to visit the Sanborns in their elegant and spacious new home. His spirits were lifted upon arriving and meeting the family, Sanborn saying he'd invited Concord's numerous local luminaries to come calling, and all had given their assurances that they would, each and all being eager to meet him.

On September 17th, in the evening, Sanborn felt profound contentment in the grand turnout of guests in his parlor, this luminous collection of Concord's best eccentrics, authors, and philosophers. If, as Thoreau said, it is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain, what would he say could he but see Franklin Sanborn now! The more the merrier, he told himself. These men and women, this glorious feast of hobnobbing, right here in his own home: it was unspeakably delectable to proud Sanborn, exhillerated as he surveyed the scene before him. This is the delight, he felt, that Whitman hhimself had felt when he wrote that to be with those he liked was enough, to stop in company with the best at evening was enough, to be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh was enough!

Sanborn took a deep breath, looked around him, and knew: this was good. He'd arrived. This was the top, or very near the top. Suddenly Sanborn's eyes met Louisa Alcott's. Her disdainful gaze was chilling. She looked away and, as Sanborn steadied himself, embarking back into polite society, she resumed her former contemplation of the robust, ruddy Whitman, who'd sounded his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. He was just then sitting perfectly still in a wheelback chair, staring at the Concord Sage, Emerson, who sat in his chair in a corner of the room, saying nothing. Whitman, fascinated by Emerson's benign, imperturbable face, peered into his eyes with empathy. Louisa searched in vain to find signs of seething wildness hidden somewhere in Whitman's now so serene outer demeanor, as he studied her idol, Mr. Emerson. All this while her father, discoursing in the middle of the hubbub, held the assembled captive with his rousing yarns of Margaret Fuller and Thoreau.

At the Emerson house for dinner the next evening, Whitman continued searching the Concord Philosopher's eyes for a sign, a nod, a silent benediction, cherishing Emerson's calm, Sphynxian gaze. After the meal, Whitman was taken out for a walking tour, or pilgrimmage, through Concord, visiting the Minute Man statue, the Old Manse, Sleepy Hollow Cemetary, and Walden Pond, where Whitman placed a stone atop the memorial cairn that marked the site where Thoreau had built his cabin.

On October 1st Whitman went back to Boston, where he reviewed, and signed, a new contract with James R. Osgood. Osgood agreed to be Whitman's publisher for the coming ten years. The book would be published that November, and would sell for two dollars each, twenty-five cents of which would be Whitman's royalty. Osgood agreed to be Whitman's publisher for the next ten years. In mid-October, Osgood and Whitman held an open house for over three hundred friends and journalists. Whitman spent the following week devouring the sights of Boston, after which he visited Manhattan for two days, before returning home to Camden.

For Bronson Alcott, Whitman's visit was heady stuff, him now singing to his friend, Professor Harris, I remember my being in the West, following on the trail of a certain William. T. Harris, who left a streak of light wherever he sojourned and was still blazing in a wilderness of trash. I suppose we shall make a few clearings there, and prepare the ground for the culture of Ideas which the barrens in New England fail to produce. I have been on a six months peddling tour to the Carolinas and Virginia, have been laid low with typhus, got up from a tussle with the Goblins and Spectres horrible, and walked all the way from Norfolk to Spindle Hill, stopping in New York a day to change homespun for broadcloth, to the amazement of the rustics who had known only what their own fields and looms had bestowed. Yes, my verses number now just 60, longer than part first of Pedlar's Progress. Carpenters are at work on my Concord School Study, promising occupancy by Thanksgiving, when you shall report The Philosopher's Progress through the West and South. These are stirring times for us, with work for all the wits we have at command to animate and grow a new crop for the future. Sanborn is here every few days, and then away.

That fall, Sanborn's collection of Parker's Prayers was printed. The preface was to have been written by Louisa May Alcott but, as the preface arrived only as the book was being printed, it would not appear in the book until the second edition, printed and published the following January, 1882, even as Sanborn submitted to Houghton Mifflin and Company a draft of his biography of Henry Thoreau.

Many thanks for your sumptuous gift book of Illustrious Autographs, Alcott wrote at the end of November to Sanborn, who had passed around a guestbook in his parlor when Walt Whitman had come calling. I need not add, the giver is valued beyond his gift, and that he means more to me than ever in these days of several Septenniads.

In January, 1882, Oscar Wilde came to America, arriving in New York on January 2nd with the intent, first and foremost, of visiting Walt Whitman, whose brilliant confessions of love between and among men Wilde had cherised through fifteen years. In a brown velvet suit Wilde went to Camden to Whitman's Stevens Street home. After sipping elderberry wine made by Whitman's sister, Wilde was led up to the top of the house to a room cluttered with books, manuscripts, and loose papers, where they looked together over the Camden rooftops out to the Delaware River.

It was hard to believe that the softspoken Whitman was just then embroiled in controversy, not over his poems expressing homosexual love, but over his prosody revelling in heterosexual love. Into the 1882 debate over America's deteriorating morals there entered no renunciation of Whitman's Calamus poems, replete with same-sex declarations of devotion. Instead, his Children of Adam, trumpeting the esctacies of men and women in love, was received throughout the country with scorn and condemnation.

The publisher James Osgood received a formal letter from the Boston District Attorney, Oliver Stevens, on March 1st, ordering him to stop publication of Leaves of Grass, insisting it violated the public statutes concerning obscene literature. Osgood forwarded the letter to Whitman, along with Stevens' list of poems and individual passages to be altered, or cut out entirely, in any subsequent editions. Whitman, who had already modified his work to suit the taste of conventional, middle-class Americans, was not averse to doing what Osgood asked, if that would speed consumers in their purchasing his book. He altered the poems, deleting offending passages throughout, only to learn from Osgood, afterwards, that these modifications and expurgations just were not enough.

Well, then the list whole and entire is rejected by me, Whitman wrote back. Further changes will not be thought of under any circumstances. Osgood sent Whitman 225 unsold copies of Leaves of Grass, the book's printing plates, $400.00 in royalty checks, and $100 cash.

As for Oscar Wilde, he’d now landed in Boston bearing letters of introduction for hosts Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harvard art professor Charles Eliot Norton, and Julia Ward Howe. Wilde was welcomed not only in Howe's Beacon Street apartments, but also in her Newport, Rhode Island home, where Mrs. Howe arranged for numerous receptions and dinner parties. This prompted a wary and indignant Thomas Wentworth Higginson to write letters accusing Howe of improprieties, his dander up particularly over her apparent endorsement of so plainly immoral a man as Oscar Wilde.

Higginson had recently received, from a lady in Amherst, a strange cache of poems which he deemed unpublishable. It would not be until after Emily Dickinson's death that a repentant Higginson would aid in their publication. Now, in 1882, the prurient Higginson took the opportunity of Wilde's visit not only to castigate Britain's pornographer, but also to denounce America's own Walt Whitman. The once fiery reformer had lately set up shop as America's rightful judge of morality, of right and wrong. The former Colonel, who had led a black regiment into war, now attacked Wilde's aestheticism, railing at Whitman for his having had no authentic experience of battle, except as a hospital nurse. The two fakes were denounced, along with their conspicously immoral art, in the February issue of The Women's Journal, where Higginson appealed to Wilde that he should not be wasting his time writing such drivel as he did, when there was real work to be done in the troubled land of his birth, Ireland.

Mrs. Howe shot off a letter to the Boston Evening Transcript which appeared on February 16th, denouncing Colonel Higginson's presuming himself to be America's only authority on morals, and on who should be received socially, and who not.

To be either a Puritan, a prig or a preacher is a bad thing, Wilde told New England news reporters. To be all three at once reminds me of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. I have been treated outrageously. I will not complain. I am not the one who is injured, it is the public. By such ridiculous attacks the people are taught to mock where they should reverence.

In the meantime, Ellen Emerson celebrated her simple rites of tea time, writing bouyantly of her brother Edward's having come for tea with his wife Annie one January evening, quite unexpectedly. He had stories to tell. He'd been at a meeting of The Social Circle, where Mr. Staples had reminiscenced, prodded by Mr. Sanborn's questions. He told of his having variously had Mr. Alcott, Mr. Lane, and Mr. Thoreau all in jail, also of other prisoners, and finally of Mrs. Thoreau, and Mrs. Hoar. I tell you, he said, They could use their tongues too! Afterwards, I went up to Mrs. Sanborn's. She showed me a vase of the most beautiful roses, which her middle son, Victor, had received.

In his last days Emerson enjoyed, as ever, being present wherever an invigorating conversation was to be found, Sanborn wrote in his 1909 memoir. To the last he engaged in such conversations, for which Concord was noted, though at last his part consisted wholly in listening and smiling at what was said.

Emerson died on April 27, 1882. The streets of Concord were draped in black.

My Father has died, Ellen wrote. In this last year I could see he was declinining faster than in former years. It had even become hard for him to understand common things that were said to him, and it was very little that he could say himself. Edward told me on saturday, April 22nd, that father probably would not get well. On Wednesday morning he sent for Judge Hoar, Mr. Alcott, Mr. Channing, and Mr. Staples. To Mr. Alcott, Father spoke perfectly clear. What Father said to them indicated that he regarded it as farewell. His mind was clear enough. He tried to sum up the relation he had held with each through life. This was plain, though he couldn't say two words of a sentence right. Sometimes through the day it was evident that he did not know us. We never asked him. At noon Mr. Cabot came. Father showed the old joy when he saw him, and tried to say, This is that good man who has done so much for me, but it would not come out straight. Soon, what he said was no longer to be guessed at. At four, as Mr. Cabot drove out of the yard, Dr. Putnam and Mr. Sanborn drove in, coming from Boston. When Mr. Sanborn came in, Father smiled and said, This is a man that is a man. But he could not say anything else, and seemed to be more uncomfortable, so that Mr. Sanborn presently went out. Then he returned and shook hands and said goodbye. Father looked at me to desire me to take things in hand. It was the last time, the last real communication, for Mr. Sanborn immediately took his leave, and was hardly downstairs before father was seized with the sharp pain which brought the doctors in haste, and for which they gave him ether, telling us that he would never wake after it.

The Concord School of Philosophy held a special session on July 22nd, officially declared Emerson Day in Concord, an occasion widely reported in Boston area newspapers. The roster of distinguished speakers, reports noted, included such estimable and prominent figures as Julia Ward Howe, William Torrey Harris, Bronson Alcott, and Frank Sanborn.