Sanborn, one of the country’s leading authorities on the proper operation of orphanages, reformatories, prisons, and asylums, took great satisfaction in his three sons. He knew his boys Francis, thirteen, and Victor, seventeen, and Tom, twenty-one, were fine young men, known and welcome in homes throughout Concord, having through the years accompanied their mother in her many and assorted rounds and runnings of errands in the town, her husband hard at work at home amid his seas of papers.

It appeared Tom would follow in his father’s footsteps, pursuing The Literary Life. Ever keeping a certain cautious distance from his austere, preoccupied father, the awed youngster could imagine no other course of life than to be just such a man, busy at one’s Literary Labors, always building.

While his father scribbled new notes or re-copied old passages from his own and others’ notebooks for numerous forthcoming biographies and composed or edited several sundry journal articles, all the while working up news for his Springfield Republican weekly column, Tom studied his diligent, significant, beloved mentor, composing his own paragraphs and the delicate and lonely lines and lovely couplets that he planned to put into great, long poems one day.

At Harvard Tom contributed, as his father had before him, to Harvard's assorted student publications. He began to distinguish himself, Daedalus trying out his own wings, moving in a direction all his own. In the spring of 1885, he vowed he would do nothing but write poems, perfecting each, one by one, line by line, word for word.

With George Santayana, Bernard Berenson, and A.B. Houghton, he helped launch The Harvard Monthly. Occasionally Wallace Stevens would show up with Santayana at editorial meetings, joining him, Berenson, Houghton, and Sanborn for marathon all-night sessions of heated discussion and debate.

Our souls rebelled against ugly industrial prosperity, and against its gross self-complacency, Santayana remembered.

There was no alternative for such creative beings as they knew themselves to be, than that they should try out their lives in this world, such as it was, whether within the hallowed halls of Harvard, or out on the town in Cambridge or Boston. They vowed their work would not bespeak the scrupulous consciousness of John Bunyan's Puritan Pilgrim, but rather the doubting scrutiny of William Dean Howells' Silas Lapham who, in Howells’ story, prevails over the empty, hypocritical norms of proper Boston society.

We yearned to be romantic and aesthetic, Santayana reminisced in later years, and became pessimistic.

In Concord, late in 1885, an ailing Louisa Alcott was bedridden in rustic Concord for ten days. Pa is rather feeble, she wrote, but likes his new quarters and old friends and, Oh be joyful! We dont see much of Franklin Sanborn.

I suppose Miss Alcott is the most widely read of the Concord authors, Sanborn admitted reluctantly, showing just how strained had become his friendship with his sagacious, jolly mentor’s feisty, brilliant daughter. Nobody can say how long the vogue of her books will continue. Ten years before her serious illness in Washington, she had tried various things and found herself unequal to her tasks. She tried teaching and was unsuccessful. She had written tales, but without much fame. She was incapable of a successful novel. She tried twice, and the books had many readers, but they could not be regarded as successful. Only in dealing with the long story of her family life was she successful, inimitable.

Sanborn’s own domestic situation, whatever else it may have been, was built around his being, as often as possible, at his writing desk. He did not write about his family life or, if he did, there is no record of it.

In 1886, Sanborn quietly helped usher into print another of William Ellery Channing’s quixotic little books, John Brown and the Heroes of Harper's Ferry, even as Ticknor & Company added to their list another tome raising Sanborn’s viability and respectability in the world of letters a notch, a collection of essays on The Life and Genius of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe edited by Sanborn from lectures delivered at the Concord School of Philosophy.

Elliot Cabot’s Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson was nearing completion, his helper Ellen Emerson informed her sister Edith on April 2nd. We have reached the year 1872. We read the work aloud together and criticize and enjoy it at our leisure. When we have finished, Mr. Cabot means to revise it all by the light of the notes he takes on these occasions, and then it will be ready to publish. It is all bright and readable, and its absolute exactness is a great charm in my eyes, for it is my constant trouble in books and newspapers that a true account of anything is so rare that I have come to regard it as hardly possible to writers.

Tom Sanborn, upon graduating from Harvard in the spring, moved home. His friend George Santayana went overseas, undertaking graduate studies in Germany. In Concord, Tom wrote. His family hardly saw him, as if the young man were quarantined or hiding in the least corner of the family’s splendid and enormous, well-appointed house. His famous father was hardly more visible, ever preparing his lectures and reports and column notes, never losing sight of his many and assorted obligations to the several respectable associations he commandeered or in which his distinguished presence and influence were important.

On July 21st came a celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Battle of Bull Run, with the Concord Artillery accompanying a procession of every available veteran from Captain Prescott's Company. A glum and silent Tom could not reconcile himself to the obviously meaningless, however relentless, swirl of local activity. He declined to join in the fun at the Poor Children's Picnic on the banks of Walden Pond. He preferred his room and the quiet work of perfecting his poems.

In the fall, on September 23rd, Tom's parents asked him and his brothers to join them in going over to see old Mrs. Emerson, whose birthday it was. His aunt Alice Leavitt, Mrs. Emerson's personal nurse, had asked they they all come over, the more the merrier. Victor and Francis accepted cheerfully, but Tom could not be interested. They arrived to find Mrs. Emerson dressed in an exotic Imperial Mandarin outfit, cheerfully reigning over tea-time, flowers filling the room.

In the dead of winter, in January, 1886, Ellen wrote her sister of Mrs. Sanborn's arriving at the Emerson home at the request of herself and Mrs. Emerson's helper, Mrs. Sanborn's sister, Miss Leavitt. Once again she'd been invited to help with the project of interesting Mrs. Emerson in joining them in visiting Boston. I had tried by myself once before, Ellen wrote, and had failed.

Mrs. Sanborn brought with her a copy of Little Lord Fauntleroy, Ellen remembered, and she read it aloud. Miss Leavitt dressed Mother for her journey and prepared her bag. Only then did we tell her our design. Mother refused to go. I put on her gaiters and rubbers while Miss Leavitt dressed her with jacket and bonnet, and Mrs. Sanborn rushed to put on her things. At 12:27 we were merrily seated at the depot waiting for the train which was only a minute or two late. In Boston, Mother first asked Mrs. Sanborn, and then me, to choose a dress and stockings for her. After we'd gone back and forth a while, till I feared the salesman was exhausted and disgusted, Mother finally decided, I think in desperation. Flannel was the next subject, and this roused her a little more, and by half past three she began to take an interest in it. After that, we had a delightful afternoon.

A year later, in January, 1887, Ellen told her sister Edith of their brother Edward's having delivered, at Miss Alice Leavitt's Saturday Club, a paper he had written on General George McClellan. I think you know how affectionately Edward feels toward McClellan, she wrote. Mr. Sanborn, on the other hand, looks on him as a very poor sort of general and patriot, and at every pause made his criticism, which drew Bob James out to defend McClellan, and Edward had plenty of answers ready. This made Edward's paper last till quarter of ten, so there was little time for any other general discussion.

In June she wrote her her sister of her having had a blissful time with Mrs. Sanborn and her son Francis. They’d been out rose-gathering, after which they’d arranged the roses for placement in the ailing Mrs. Emerson's room.

On July 27th Ellen wrote about the Concord School, again in full swing. Mother goes to the School both mornings and evenings, she noted, and enjoys it, even thrives upon it.

In the fall she wrote her sister to tell of Mrs. Sanborn’s having brought flowers from her garden to Mrs. Emerson. Mrs. Sanborn was lovely, Ellen wrote. Her sister Caroline also sent a great bunch of nasturtiums. The house was as well lighted up with flowers as with lamps.

In the spring of 1888, on March 4th, Bronson Alcott died in his daughter Louisa's house in Louisburg Square in Boston.

Sanborn found this hit him harder than even he would ever have guessed. This he truly had to wrestle with, him finding a huge, gaping hole in his world which wise old Alcott for so long, and so lovingly, had kept so filled up. The tears came fast and hard, not only for his losing his dearest mentor, but also for his losing his closest, most trusted friend.

Words did not come to him until he learned of the death of Alcott's daughter, Louisa, only two days after the death of her father. Pondering this, he slowly reached over the blank piece of paper before him on his desk, to take a pen in hand:

Bronson Alcott was one of the last living monuments of that great epoch of thought and will in New England which, in its various manifestations of religion, philosophy, politics, literature and art, gave birth to our present national condition, just as the Revolutionary epoch fifty or sixty years earlier gave birth to our national existence. In the first period, Virginia took the lead, and provided America with great men fitted for any exigency of war and peace. In the second period New England took the lead and provided America with great ideas, presented by great men which Virginia and the South could not control, nor scarcely moderate, the onward movement of New England thought. The new West came in as the hand of this movement, of which Massachusetts was the head. From Emerson, Garrison, Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, and other Massachusetts minds proceeded the impulse toward the new order of things. In their company, from first to last, stood Alcott, older than any yet surviving them all, having helped Garrison form the first the first anti-slavery society in Massachusetts, and joined with Emerson, a few years later, in that Transcendental crusade, which had such feeble immediate, but unmeasured ultimate, results.

In this changed new world in which Sanborn now found himself, he knew he was no more what he had long been: indefatigable. His clothes seemed now to hang from him like some old coat on a hook on the wall. He marvelled at the lines he only lately had come to see, etched deep into his long, drawn face. His Buffalo Bill style Vandyke beard now looked to him more like old Don Quixote's, him tilting at windmills.

Gazing at his worn and weathered face in the mirror, pulling his fingers through the valleys gouged into his cheeks, Sanborn felt weary. He had worked tirelessly through nearly three decades for prison reform and improved care for the insane and the abandoned; he felt he had witnessed, among the dozens of thousands of men, women, and children placed in his care, the deepest bottom of mankind's anguish, affliction, malady, misery, poverty, oppression; he had campaigned ceaselessly for social improvements, drafting and shepherding into law an abundance of previously unheard-of, progressive welfare measures; he had served on the Massachusetts Board of State Charities through twenty-five consecutive years; and he had been the sole, and only, lonely Inspector of State Charities through nineteen years. He decided it was time to let these go. There were others waiting, he knew, wanting to take the reigns from him.

This sadness would pass, he knew. Bracing himself over the paper piles strewn across his broad and strong oak desk, he took a freshly sharpened pencil in hand, and jotted on a loose paperscrap a long sentence that had just come, fully formed, into his mind: Insanity, so little understood by most of us, has certain features by which it is differentiated from those passing moods of enthusiasm, grief, ambition, or desire, with which the shallow confound it.

Who could know this better than me? Sanborn queried the silent air.

To get herself through this long and somber spring, after what was called the Great Blizzard of 1888, snowdrifts having risen to as high as fifteen feet, Louisa Sanborn gave her husband ample room for grieving. She had already adjusted herself to the general cheerlessness of her most serious, mysterious son, Tom. She got on with her business, doing chores and running errands, taking tea with Concord's poor and rich alike, learning all the latest news and never stopping, not for a moment, except for a nap in the afternoon or a deserved night of deep sleep.

In July 1888, the Concord School of Philosophy came quietly to a close, with as little fanfare as when it had opened. William T. Harris moved with his wife to Washington D.C., the professor having in the meantime been appointed U.S. Commissioner of Education. As the school's treasurer, Sanborn reported closing the operating books with a balance of .31¢, which he said he put in his pocket as payment for his services:

Our school had opened July 15, 1879, without funds. Its first year's expenses were $739, its receipts $733. I paid the small deficit. Early in 1880 Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson of New York gave us $1000, on condition that Professor W.T. Harris should emigrate from St. Louis to Concord, which he gladly did. I then, for the first and last time, speculated in railway securities, and increased this thousand to $1185 in three months. Out of this was paid the cost of the Hillside Chapel, just built upon land and by plans of Mr. Alcott (Now removed to the Wayside Estate, near by), for a cost of $512. The Thompson fund-balance of $673 served, from 1880-1888, to keep the Chapel in repair and furniture, pay a small ground-rent to Mr. Alcott, and meet any deficit that might occur. The receipts of the second year were $680, the expenses $650; but in the following years the rate of payment for each lecture (originally $10, with an occasional addition for travel) was raised to $15, which gradually consumed both the annual receipts and the fund-balance. But this would not have happened if we had not given away many admission and course tickets each year, to the value of one or two hundred dollars. It was not our purpose to make money from the enterprise, and we closed in July, 1888, with a balance of 31 cents. This I pocketed as my treasurer's salary for ten years.

1888 saw the publication of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Bellamy, born and raised at Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, educated in Schenectady, New York and Europe, had been admitted to the bar in 1871, the year he’d abandoned his law practice in order to become an associate editor at the Springfield Union. His book was not only a sensational best-seller, it also inspired a political mass movement. Bellamy's ideas eventually made their way from radical Bellimism into a more moderate Populist Party platform.

In 1888 Franklin Sanborn reached out to his Springfield connections, pulled a few strings, and the next thing the twenty-five year-old poet Tom Sanborn knew, he was on his way to Springfield to be an assistant editor of The Springfield Republican.

Late in the fall of 1888, Ellen Emerson informed a family friend of the death, in August, of Edith and Will Forbes' 4th son, John Murray Forbes, called Don. It seemed beyond belief, too sudden a breaking of the family circle for us even to contemplate, much less accept as fact. I went to Naushon that afternoon. Our dear Sunday-child died on a Sunday, just one day before his seventeenth birthday. On Tuesday morning the brothers helped to carry him out to the wagon, the Forbes plaid was wrapped round the box, they went down to the boat, we followed on foot. Don was placed forward, we sat aft, the flag was at half-mast in the stern, and so we came to the mainland. Mother, Annie, Cousin Sarah, Aunt Susan, Lidian, Lizzy Bartlettt, Mrs. Sanborn, Miss Leavitt, and Charley Emerson all went from Concord to the funeral.

Upon his return from the Dakota Badlands in 1886, Theodore Roosevelt had run as a Republican for mayor of New York City. Upon losing, he had sailed for England, had married for a second time, and had returned to the U.S. to live with his bride in a 22-room house he'd had built on Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, Long Island. When the Republican Benjamin Harrison would take office as President in 1889, Roosevelt would be made U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, an excellent post for a fast-rising social reformer.

In November, 1888, Frank Sanborn relinquished his post as Massachusetts' General Inspector of Charities. When I took office at the State House in Boston in early October 1863, Sanborn remembered, I was approaching thirty-two in age. When I finally left State service and returned to private life, I was nearly fifty-seven.

As Chairman of the Massachusetts State Board of Charities, my father conducted in 1888 a legislative inquiry into the mismanagement of the almshouse at Tewksbury, Sanborn's son Victor wrote years afterward. Another inquiry investigated the lunatic asylum at Danvers. Both resulted in a better system of caring for the insane and pauper classes.

A person cannot spend so many years of his life as I have, devoted to an observation and study of the insane, the epileptic and imbecile of mankind, in so many countries, without learning much of this painful but deeply interesting subject, Sanborn wrote in summing up his years of public service. I doubtless conversed, sometimes for years together, with two thousand patients in my visits of inspection to some fifty first-class hospitals for the insane, and as many or more asylums, large and small, for those esteemed incurable.

I was removed from my last office, Sanborn wrote, Inspector of Charities, at the suggestion of the then Governor, Oliver Ames, who did not wish the responsibility of removing me directly, but appointed members of the Board (from whom I held my appointment), with the understanding that they should find some pretext for the removal. It was a year or two before the pretext was found.

I had been in some State office most of the time for twenty-five years, Sanborn wrote, when I was causelessly (except for personal animosity) removed. The pretext for my removal came, at last, by the Board's reversing its own fixed and successful policy regarding the Family Care of the harmless and chronic insane. This was a policy long practiced in Europe, notably in Belgium and Scotland, and had been early recommended by the Chairman of the old Board of State Charities, Dr. Howe, in 1866. During his last visit to Europe in 1867, he had visited the ancient example of this practice at Gheel in Belgium, and, after inspecting it in its reformed condition, Howe had definitely commended it as an example for us to follow. I shared his views on that point, as did the most enlightened and progressive managers of the insane in Europe and the United States.

Our State Board had not been quite ready to try the experiment until after Dr. Howe's death, Sanborn recalled. In 1885 the new consolidated Board of Health, Lunacy and Charity, created at the suggestion of Governor Talbot, and of which he had been chairman for some years, obtained the needful legislation. The Governor instructed me, Deputy Commissioner in Lunacy, to find families suitable to receive such boarders and to obtain, from the hospitals and asylums, patients suitable for such families. This was done in 1886-7, until the number placed out in this way was about 180. The nine members of the Board either approved or ratified this action, and no serious fault was found with it, although occasionally a patient was found on trial to be unsuitable.

The harmless and chronic patients were found most numerous at the asylums, to which they had been removed from the hospitals at Worcester and Danvers, to make room for the recent and curable patients, Sanborn wrote. Many had been taken from the Tewksbury Asylum, which was then a separate department of the State Almshouse, now called the State Infirmary. Three women selected by the Tewksbury Superintendent, were placed with a trained nurse, Miss Alice Cooke, in her mother's house at Sandwich, where for $3.50 a week they received the best possible care and board, living on the same good country fare which the family used, and which I often shared with them.

Nevertheless, Sanborn remembered bitterly, the Board came to the inhuman, and in their case unlawful, conclusion that these three poor women, who owed their poverty solely to their insanity, had no claim on the State as patients, but only as paupers, and must go back to the almshouse wards as paupers, and be treated as such. The Board therefore directed me as their officer to return them as paupers to Tewksbury, to be shut up there, without occupation, and on the footing of sane or imbecile paupers. This would have been to violate the State's contract with their nurses.

I next pointed out to the Board, Sanborn wrote, that by their own action they had placed these women in the class of legally insane persons, removing them from the mere status of paupers, and so long as their insanity manifestly continued the Board could not themselves release the three from that condition of patients and wards of the State. I declined to be an accomplice in this unlawful and inhuman act.

It was clear, Sanborn recalled, that the only way the Board could get these women, and two others who were boarding with Miss Cooke, back into the poorhouse, was to get the Overseers of the poor of Sandwich to ask to have them admitted at Tewksbury. The Board was mean enough to attempt this evasion of the law.

Hearing of this purpose, I requested a citizen of Sandwich to go to an Overseer of the Poor, Sanborn confided, and to inform him, requesting him as a citizen not to comply with this fraud upon the town, since the women were there without expense to the town. This he did, and the Overseers, very properly, refused to act in the matter.

I then made application to the probate court in Barnstable County, Sanborn reported, to have the women committed to Miss Cooke as their guardian. At the same time I raised money among her friends and mine, with which I paid the board of the women when the State sneaked out of its bargain, which I had been authorized to make, and in which Miss Cooke had committed no fault. About the same time (the affair becoming public), I received from a hand then to me unknown, the sum of $500, to meet such expenses in future, should it be needed. The Board then removed me from office, and attempted to break up the advanced, economical and humane system of Family Care, which Mrs. Leonard of Springfield and I had put in practice under State authority. All this was in the year 1888.

Here's the Moral, Sanborn wrote: Do your duty in the interest of honesty and humanity, and you may safely leave the God of the widows and the fatherless, to do justice and grant mercy.

In the March, 1889 issue of the Harvard Monthly, Volume eight, Number One, appeared George Santayana's obituary notice for his good friend Thomas Parker Sanborn, in which Santayana reported the poet's having cut his throat in his bath with a razor.

Thomas Sanborn was a poet of lyric and modest flights, Santayana would recall in his 1943 memoirs. His poems showed genuine feeling, not naturally in harmony with the over-intellectualized transcendentalism of Concord, Massachusetts, where his father was a conspicuous member of the Emersonian circle. There was more of Chaucer in him than of Emerson or Wordsworth. He was not in the least conceited. On the contrary, he felt he was a misfit, shy and ungainly in appearance, and at a disadvantage in the give and take of conversation or action. These maladjustments, a few years later, led to a tragic end. His father had found him a place in the office of The Springfield Republican. That town offered little to keep up his spirits. He fell into rather undesirable company, as at College he had sometimes succumbed to drink, though not often, yet ungracefully. I think I understand the secret of these failings, gross as they may seem for a man of such delicate sensibility. He was unhappy, he was poor, he was helpless. The sparkle of a glass, the glitter of a smile, the magic of a touch could suddenly transport him out of this world, with all its stubborn hindrances and dreary conventions, into the Auberge Verte, the green paradise, of his dreams. Yet this escape from reality was necessarily shortlived, and the awakening bitter and remorseful. The strain was too much for Sanborn. His discouragement became melancholia and began to breed hallucinations. He knew only too much about madness, as everybody did in old New England, and he feared it. He cut his throat in his bath with a razor, and we buried him in Concord, in sight of the optimistic Emerson's grave, after a parlor funeral, with the corpse visible, at which his father read a few not very pertinent passages from the Upanishads and the Psalms.

In 1943, in editing Santayana's autobiography Persons and Places, John Hall Wheelock of Scribner's would admit to having his hands full. A Sanborn family friend would hire an attorney to intercede, holding up publication of the book until Santayana agreed to modify his account of the life and death of Tom Sanborn, who Santayana had come to regard as a doomed flower among only too efficient cabbages.

I refer particularly to the reference to Loose Women and Disgraceful Drinking, the lawyer would write. Santayana would be instructed to water down the overzealous passage to read thus: He fell into rather undesirable company, as at College he had sometimes succumbed to drink, not often, yet ungracefully.

Mother and I visited Mrs. Sanborn yesterday, Ellen Emerson wrote her sister Edith on March 12, 1889. She said you had written her a lovely letter, and that many such had been received, and that this was very sweet and helpful, showing still much kindness is in the world.

Miss Helen Sanborn has come to stay with Mrs. Sanborn, Ellen wrote her sister on the 15th. Yesterday a great many people called, and she saw them. Today she is not well. They are looking over and putting away Tom's clothes.