Mrs. Sanborn is to come next week to board with us, Ellen Emerson wrote in June, 1889. She will take charge of her own room, and Mr. Sanborn will make us his headquarters. His desk is to arrive Saturday, Mrs. Sanborn sometime next week, and he later. The arrangement to continue while their house is let, till September 15th. We are very much pleased.

By August, the Sanborns had become an integral presence in the Emerson home, Louisa shedding her mourning clothes, dressing again in her trademark white dresses, Frank coming and going in his long black coat at all hours, even in warm weather, occasionally stopping long enough through an evening to regale the household with stories of the diversity of the people, some sane and some not, that he was still prone to meet in his journey on life’s way.

Mrs. Sanborn and I do our errands and housekeeping in the morning, till eleven, Ellen reported to her sister on August 5th. Then we repair to Mother's room to stay till dinner-time. We read chapters from the Prophet Ezekiel first, and then the day's letters or a book. After dinner we go out to Brown's Carryall store, or go in search of roadside blackberries. The law appropriates to a householder all berries which grow along the road close to him. The house is always there, as sure as fate. We may not have seen a house for half a mile, but where the berries hang thick and black, always there appears a house. Mrs. Sanborn is convinced that farmers always build where they see a blackberry bush.

The Sanborns returned to their own home in the fall, piecing their life back together as best they could. Frank made arrangements in the spring for them to travel overseas, ostensibly for him to tour poorhouses, asylums, and prisons, and to collect information for his Life of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Philanthropist, which would be published in New York in 1891. Upon Howe’s death in 1876, Dr. Michael Anagnos had been appointed to head up the Perkins Institution for the Blind, which post he would retain until his own death in 1906. Born in Epirus, Greece, and graduated from the University of Athens, Anagnos had been regaling Sanborn for years with his captivating tales of Greece, insisting the ancient hub of the universe, Delphi by Mount Parnassus, home to the world’s most important oracle, was the first city-state ever to make a serious attempt at abolishing slavery. Anagnos convinced Sanborn he must make the journey overseas.

The Arabs have a proverb, Sanborn noted, which says that though a hundred deserts separate the heart of the Faithful from the Kaaba of Mecca, yet there opens a window from its sanctuary into the soul. For those who have the true inward illumination, a pilgrimage is not needful. Yet to all it is agreeable, and it has been the practice of mankind for ages, and will be, so long as we remain ourselves but pilgrims and wayfarers on this earth.

Aboard the ship, Sanborn searched the Atlantic's depths, and darkness. Approaching Europe, he felt the nearness of eternity, and destiny, and folly. He reflected on the countless medieval ships traveling these same waters, filled with village fools, outcasts, petty criminals, beggars, the debauched, the deformed, the delirious, and the deranged, their every embarkation a potential final exile. Everywhere were laws, police, institutions, trustees, misunderstandings, walls, asylums, prisons, convicts, madness. At every port could come a cure, release, a further curse, confinement, or death. There was lunacy, mania, furor, melancholia all the world over, through all time.

Sanborn toured assorted institutions, studying the circumstances of patients, inmates, guardians. He stayed five weeks in Greece where S.G. Howe had, beyond engaging in glorious battle in his youth, obtained a gold-inlaid plumed helmet Lord Byron had reputedly worn when he'd fought in the war for Greek independence.

Sanborn would again travel to Europe in 1893, this time alone, staying five months. As he had in 1890, Sanborn would travel to Greece and to Belgium. The town of Gheel had been an important landmark in Howe's world, because home care for the chronic insane had long been practiced there, providing Howe with a tried-and-true prototype for his recommending to the Board of State Charities, in 1866, a comparable program for Massachusetts.

Family Care for the chronic insane has been successful, Sanborn could declare in 1916. Three Boards in succession have taken the place of those men and women who, in 1888, demeaned themselves to carry out the grudge of a Governor, and have been in favor of what Dr. Howe and I took the responsibility to test and implement.

Upon returning to Concord after his 1890 European sojourn, new trouble came to Sanborn in the form of one Dr. S. A. Jones, a combative Michigan professor and homoeopathist who had set himself up, at least in his own mind, as Henry David Thoreau's only rightful interpreter and defender, beyond his being the sole rightful interpreter and defender of homoeopathy.

Samuel Arthur Jones knew Franklin Benjamin Sanborn couldn't hold a candle to his own understanding of Thoreau. Such a man as Sanborn could never know the great naturalist-scientist so well as he did, said S.A. Jones, though he hadn't actually ever met Thoreau. He nevertheless knew himself to be the only man alive who really had the character, the insight, and the intuition needed to illuminate Thoreau's life and work, to protect his reputation, and to keep his memory alive.

In August 1890, Dr. Jones showed up in Concord, going first to the Concord Free Library to copy out longhand Thoreau's manuscript, Walking. He then went out in search of Thoreau's contemporaries. Concordians seemed interested in speaking only of Emerson. I don't care a damn about Emerson, Jones told them. What I came here for was to do honor to Thoreau. Emerson is a tallow dip compared with that man.

Jones found Sam Staples, who was only too happy to regale him with his jailer's tales. Then Jones showed up at Franklin Sanborn's door, kindly asking if he might see the distinguished biographer's collection of Thoreauviana. Sanborn welcomed him, showing Jones unpublished manuscripts and the several reminiscences he'd contributed to assorted journals through the years. Though much preoccupied with his usual slate of simultaneous project, still Sanborn gave of his time and treasures to Dr. Jones. Having laid his bounty before his guest, the gaunt, tall master of the manse stalked to and fro in silence, staring at the book-lined walls and curtained windows. In responding to Dr. Jones' inquiries, Sanborn would answer deliberately, his brows furrowed, carefully composing each sentence. Now and again he would extend his long arms, in enigmatic and emphatic silence, reaching for a particular book or manuscript, finding at once what he sought, or something very like it, pointing with his index finger to the private scribblings or printed page. Much of what Sanborn showed the doctor that day would find its way into a Thoreau bibliography prepared by none other than one Dr. S.A. Jones.

I have no personal feeling in regard to Mr. Sanborn, the severe Dr. Jones wrote amicable Daniel Ricketson. I cannot say I like him, as you do. I met him in Concord with eager anticipation. On first seeing him, at his house, I told him that, for my father's sake, I was glad to meet him and to pay my respects to him as an abolitionist. A peculiar expression in his face told me that I had put my foot in it. Yet never in my life had I ever spoken more sincerely.

In 1895 one of Dr. Jones' Concord correspondents, Fred Hosmer, would curse Sanborn soundly in a letter to Henry S. Salt, noting that Sanborn had no authentic love for Thoreau, caring only about money jingling in his pockets. He feared Sanborn would get his hands on the Thoreau manuscripts held in Worcester by H.G.O. Blake. When that same year Dr. Jones would learn that Salt hadn't received any particular help from Sanborn in preparing the text for a posthumous collection of Thoreau's verse, Poems of Nature, he would write Hosmer, Drat Franklin Benjamin Sanborn! I'd like to pull his nose.

Having departed the home of his generous and gracious host, Sanborn, the brazen homeopathist bragged to Thoreau's old friend Ricketson in 1889: I remembered to Sanborn Emerson's having asked him why he did not participate in the war he had done so so much to precipitate. I tell you, God's sunlight shone through all the man's disguises. I saw he was a sham. He may pose in whatsoever attitude he can devise, but he can be only and always an Insincerity, Jones trumpeted. Such an one is not fit to deal with Henry Thoreau.

For Sanborn, Samuel Arthur Jones was not even a scoundrel. When he got word of what mischief Jones had been up to, Sanborn had a place for him. The doctor was consigned to a hell just under the floorboards of the insane asylum Sanborn carried with him in his head. There the belligerent homeopathist would find no peace, have no satisfaction, enjoy no happiness. He'd contend only with his own malevolence and emptiness, that much Sanborn knew.

It was not widely known that Franklin B. Sanborn had only lately lost a son to suicide. People close to him could see it had changed him. The tall, gaunt, proud Sanborn now ventured forth from his house slightly stooped, burdened, vulnerable.

He came under fire not only from nose-pulling quacks, but from literary critics as well, some saying publicly they disliked or distrusted Sanborn, or both. Credited by many for his vivid chronicles of Concord, he'd be condemned by others for over-inventiveness, and carelessness. Sanborn's insertions and stretches were denounced by assorted historians, scholars, and pedants. He was charged with having no qualms at all about altering punctuation, grammar, spelling. But Sanborn knew where he'd come from; he knew what tradition he was in; and he knew what the rules were.

It was widely understood that an editor might leave out words, or lines, or entire stanzas or paragraphs. One might rewrite entire passages, deleting personal names while altering dates, occasionally disregarding chronological time altogether. Sanborn knew that the works of Thoreau, for example, were riddled with alterations, omissions, and adaptions. The familiar territory of the the biographer included occasional misquoting, corrections, deletions, false attributions. Even Emerson had felt entirely free to transpose, change tenses, paraphrase, purloin, simplify. In Sanborn's time the author had the freedom to use any device or convention that came to mind, so long as it made the writing more striking.

I have had my share of controversy, Sanborn would write, but seldom in personal quarrels; usually in behalf of others, for whom I sought to present the case as they could not, or would not; and I am never so well pleased as when truthfully corrected, as I often have been and expect to be.

Sanborn was dropped from Concord's Social Circle, a club he had helped form. He is a stubborn man who will not hear any opinion not his own, people said. The man listens only to dead or dying people, to put them in his books.

When Ellery Channing had fallen ill in the summer of 1889, Sanborn had gone to him straightaway to ask if Channing would come and stay with his wife and himself in their home. They'd take good care of him. Channing agreed to it, not as a guest but as a paying boarder.

My talks with Channing took place in his room in my house, warmed through winters by an open fire burning in my grandfather Leavitt's Franklin stove, Sanborn said. Channing related numerous anecdotes and stories about assorted Concordians, these mingled with other revelations on a variety of topics, all told me in evening conversations through the ten years he lived in my house, from 1891 to his death in 1901.

Keeping warm by the fire that winter, cantankerous old Channing, then seventy-four, sat in his chair, waving his hands at the ceiling or at the stove as he spoke, stern Sanborn, then sixty, standing over him through the interviews, or leaning against one of the walls, always careful no to bang his head on the attic's low woodbeam. Pacing back and forth through the tiny room, listening intently to the old poet's tales, like clockwork, Sanborn's left hand would reach to his furrowed brow, as if to wipe away sweat. This, the loquacious Channing knew, meant Sanborn was concentrating, and daydreaming. He knew that every word he said was being registered and saved by the younger man for God only knew what future use.

In Mother's room last night, Ellen Emerson wrote her sister Edith on November 20, 1890, she spoke of her will, and of leaving something for the boy. I asked, Which one? She said, The youngest, I suppose. Then, after a while, she said, Do you think that beautiful boy that I fell so much in love with would like his share? Just before she fell asleep she said, Do you think Mr. and Mrs. Sanborn will be pleased that the wonderful child has his rights?

I have invited Mr. Sanborn to come read to Mother, Ellen Emerson wrote her sister Edith on January 11, 1892. He has chosen to come this evening, to share with us his lecture about Father, which he has read throughout the West this winter. We are all, of course, electrified by news of your West India plans. Mother has been well. I feel thankful for every day, for she is so old, and every week someone dies in Concord.

I have seen Sanborn this summer, Horace Hosmer wrote in the fall from Acton, Massachusetts to Dr. S. A. Jones. He looks old and careworn. He is writing for a Boston paper, and his short papers are well received, but they will be soon forgotten, and he will drop out of sight unless some one kicks him to keep him alive.

In mid-October Ellen Emerson wrote of a family Columbus festival, which was followed by Mrs. Emerson's birthday, Ellen inviting Mrs. Sanborn and others to tea. To my joy every soul came. The Town's Columbus Celebration is coming this week. The children have been learning songs at school and are to march with banners behind the Company to the music of a brass band from the schoolhouse to the square.

In mid-November Ellen reported her mother's lately breathing as if she had merely a heavy cold. Before we went to bed Miss Leavitt was seriously alarmed. I asked Mother if I should read to her. She asked what. I said father's letters to Mr. Carlyle, and she said, By all means. I read and she slept. At about seven I tried to give her some hot milk from the sprout-cup. She said, I can't. The rattling in her throat stopped, she opened her eyes, I saw she was dying for they were dead. At 7:35 I think she breathed her last. I sent for Miss Leavitt, who smoothed her hair. Edward was a wise and skillful hand, and a great comfort.

In December, 1892, Sanborn again journeyed to Europe, visiting a dozen different countries, perusing their prisons and asylums. He stayed five months in Greece, well-stocked with pencils and writing paper, mid-December to early May.

In April, while Sanborn was still in Greece, Ellen Emerson rented out her family home and went abroad with Edith Forbes and her youngest sons, visiting England and Scotland in the summer. In the winter Ellen and Edith were joined in Antibes, France by their brother Edward and his children. The next summer would bring further Forbes children. All would be back home again by October, 1894.

In the fall of 1893, the ten-volume collection of Thoreau's works was published, edited by Horace E. Scudder of Houghton, Mifflin & Company, printed by the Riverside Press. Sanborn had collaborated with the man Bronson Alcott had called his Western Friend, William Torrey Harris, in writing A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy, which was published that year.

In the first week of January, 1894, ninety year-old Elizabeth Peabody died. Beyond her decades of advocating for the abolition of slavery, improved education for children, increased rights for orphans, and the emancipation of women, she was a passionate advocate for international peace. The previous year, though she couldn't be present at the Universal Peace Congress which had met at the Chicago World's Fair, Elizabeth had proposed the convention seize the opportunity and organize an International Board of Arbitration for World Peace.

The funeral service was held in the Church of the Disciples, the church that had come of James Freeman Clarke's having set his mind to it, having envisioned it, so many years before his death, and before Elizabeth's, back in the days of her busy Boston bookshop on West Street.

The liberal church let a woman speak an eulogy for Miss Peabody, the biographer, novelist, and educator, Ednah Cheney. All of the the other eulogies came from men, and among these men was Franklin Sanborn.

Late that summer the long dead John Brown again was big news in Virginia. Over an article by one D. H. Panhill, which appeared in the August 7, 1894 edition of The Richmond Dispatch, ran the headline, John Brown's Raid: The Atrocious Proposition to Erect a Monument to the Outlaw. The outrage was not only over the monument's design, a proposed $12,000 dollar granite shaft soaring skyward, but also the proposed site: Harper's Ferry. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company had donated the land expressly for the purpose. This we can only regard as an atrocious proposition, Panhill wrote, against which we owe it to ourselves, to the memory of our fathers, to the gallant Confederate soldiers, living and dead, to protest in a manner that cannot be mistaken.

A friend of mine has sent me your interesting article, Sanborn wrote Panhill directly after reading it. It contains a long and angry protest, mingled with many historical errors, against the proposed monument to my noble old friend, John Brown, the fearless emancipator of negro slaves, of whom several millions for whom he died were set free within four years of his martyrdom. Another correspondent of yours, in the same issue, proposes a monument at Harpers Ferry to Governor Wise, a brave and passionate Virginian whose name will be preserved from oblivion chiefly by his connection with the legal murder of John Brown.

Sanborn proposed that a monument be built at Harper's Ferry that honored neither Wise nor Brown, but Thomas Jefferson instead. This ought to be welcomed by every Virginian, whether living in the old eastern portion or in the new State of West Virginia. Jefferson would be holding a scroll, and the scroll would be inscribed his words: I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice can not sleep forever. The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. The way, I hope, is preparing for the total emancipation; and this is disposed to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.

The prophecy of your far-seeing Virginian has been accomplished, Sanborn told Panhill. John Brown was a Jeffersonian, willing to give his life for its fulfillment, as he did. A monument to Jefferson, bearing this inscription, and nothing more, will be a better recognition of Brown's services than any that may recall his name; and I can hardly suppose that any Virginian will oppose such a tribute to your greatest political philosopher.

Sanborn suggested Panhill read his Life and Letters of John Brown, or his 1891 biography of Dr. S. G. Howe, the Philanthropist: -- There you'll find the truth about Brown and his friends, accurately stated, and without fear, favor, or hope of reward.

Sanborn grew irritated in September when, with each passing day, there came back no response from Panhill. I have heard nothing from The Richmond Dispatch, Sanborn wrote to Samuel May, Jr. on September 21st. I infer from this that my letter was not published. I will write to the editor and inquire. I should have supposed that a Virginian, in whose newspaper a gentleman and a stranger has been attacked, would allow him to say a word moderately on the issues raised; and perhaps it is merely inadvertence on the part of the editor, in not sending me the paper, as I requested, and as is customary. I kept no copy of my letter, but sent several to friends, among others to John Brown, Jr., at Put-in-Bay, Ohio, so that it may see the light in some Western newspaper. If you still have the copy I sent you, and will send it to me, I will perhaps publish it in the N.Y. Sun, which has a considerable Southern circulation, and the editor of which has lately asked me to write something for him.

Sanborn, in rebounding from his losses and grieving, did so with characteristic enthusiasm. But with the re-emergence of this familiar trait came a short-fused, infuriated cantankerousness, the likes of which, he noticed, had apparently done his eccentric, short-tempered, ornery curmudgeon friend Channing no harm.

Having shed what seemed like hundreds of affiliations as either a contributing member or the chairman of a panoply of associations, Sanborn only reluctantly succeded Frank Bird, in 1894, as the President of The Bird Club, which he had joined in 1854.

Dissatisfied with Emerson's selections for his book, Thoreau's Letters to Various Persons, Sanborn brought out his own edition, The Familiar Letters, published as the 11th volume in what had been the 10-volume Riverside edition of Thoreau's works. Sanborn's critics would have a hey-dey with this one, declaring Sanborn had edited the letters with a reckless abandon tantamount to penning the letters himself.

Meanwhile, in New York City, a far more voluble writer-reformer had emerged onto the national scene, one of three new commissioners elected to the New York City Board of Police Commissioners, Theodore Roosevelt. Within a month he would be Board President. The man began almost immediately to alienate New Yorkers, campaigning to enforce a law against drinking in saloons on Sundays. Though he had nothing against drinking, he insisted any laws on the books ought to be enforced. Non-enforcement of laws led only to increased police corruption. He was not going to look the other way. This sounded good, but still it did not sit well with the working class, who experienced Roosevelt's campaign as a direct assault on one of their most cherished traditions. In the coming years the outspoken and occasionally antagonistic Roosevelt would become one of the nation's foremost reform proponents.

In these years Americans would be outraged by a flood of news reports regarding rising violence, malevolence, corruption, destruction. The journalists Lincoln Steffens and Jacob Riis stood in the forefront of a crusade, tearing away every veil that might be keeping from the public eye any of the nation's multitude of ills and disgraces, to which the poor and disenfranchised were daily subjected. Like Bronson Alcott and Sanborn before him, Roosevelt would dip into Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in search of the just right phrase or word. Roosevelt would come away with a pejorative that would do nicely, labelling the whole vile, slough-loving, scandal-mongering bunch of reporters muck-rakers.

In 1895, the year Frederick Douglass died at seventy-eight, Houghton Mifflin published, in collaboration with the London firm of John Lane, Henry David Thoreau: Poems of Nature, edited by Sanborn in collaboration with Henry S. Salt.

H.G.O. Blake of Worcester helped Sanborn supply original poems in manuscript, which would be edited primarily by Salt, who had no patience for Sanborn's exuberant, errant alterations of original texts. Blake urged Sanborn not to print Thoreau's poems in their entirety, suspecting Sanborn would probably have a go at them, altering the poems beyond recognition. He felt Sanborn's creative urges could best be restrained through printing straight, unedited excerpts from the poems. In the end he would defer to Sanborn.

In the summer of 1895, Sanborn traveled north from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, first to his birthplace, Hampton Falls, then to Portsmouth, and then over the border into Kittery, Maine, to visit nearby Green Acre in Eliot, on the banks of the Piscataqua. The wealthy but pretenseless founder of Green Acre, Sarah Jane Farmer, had made extensive arrangements for what she envisioned as being the second of annual gatherings, or conferences, at her expansive home and grounds. This year there was to be a reunion, perhaps a revival, of the Concord School of Philosophy and Literature, right there along the calm Piscataqua river, on Green Acre's broad lawns.

Stately, long-legged, high-rising Sanborn arrived in a long black frock coat and a beige velvet hat with a brown satin band. He looked every bit the proud man who had gone among gods atop Mount Olympus, but who was not so vain he could not occasionally stroll among mere mortal women and men. As a co-founder of the legendary Concord School and an intimate of the vegetarian founder of Fruitlands, Bronson Alcott, Sanborn was welcomed as a venerated and estimable dignitary. This was a role he played well, and he noticed that he, like his mentors Alcott and Channing before him, liked it better and better the older he got. Sarah Farmer, who would come to be known by her many admirers as Mother Heart, rolled out the red carpet for him. He had agreed to come peruse the campus, review the curriculum, and to lead his hostess and her students, admirers, or guests, in lofty conversations on Transcendentalism, with lectures and conversations on Alcott, Emerson, Channing, Thoreau, and Sanborn.

He had a fine time. The providential, which happens in Greenacre oftener than anywhere else, Sanborn elegantly deigned, fills up all vacancies here with singular fitness, and so introduces that delightful element of the unexpected which is a part of the celebrated Greenacre spirit.

The ideal which I have for Green Acre is to free it from obligation of all kinds, Sarah Farmer would write of her vision for Green Acre. I would put its cottages, tents, and all else at the service of men and women who are searching after righteousness, relying upon their voluntary co-operation to meet the needful expense. We need an experienced and scientific farmer to cultivate the land, to raise fruits and vegetables, and milk and eggs. When this is attained and in working order, when roads have been built to Monsalvat, the hill crowned with cottages for the homes of the teachers, we shall be ready to build the Monsalvat School for the Comparative Study of Religion. I would have in this school the most consecrated Christians I could find; the most devout Catholic; the most simple, learned Jew; the most devoted Swami. I would build schools for boys and girls. From alleys and basements I would bring here poor mothers, burdened with cares, their thoughts full of murder. I would open to them a school for Motherhood. I would build cottages in the orchard, each housing at least one aged person to teach children reverance for age. And I would bring music into the lives of all of these.

On September 2, 1895, in Saratoga, New York, the General Secretary of the American Social Science Association gave his Annual Report at the opening evening session of the annual meeting, which was reported in the Boston Evening Transcript on September 3rd: It is in the great cities, Sanborn told the assembled, that the fallacy of intrusting all property to the control of the public as landlord becomes most apparent. The hypothesis of the Socialists is that governments will deal more equitably by the citizen than private landlords do. Probably nothing has given so severe a blow to the Nationalist cause in America as the exposure and displacement of Tammany officials in New York, a squad of thieves. As Emerson once remarked to me, Immoral conclusions spare us much trouble in examining the argument.

In 1897, after editing The Journal of Social Science for thirty years, Sanborn resigned. He went at his own paper piles, discarding some, re-writing others. He concocted an essay ostensibly comparing two highly unlikely soulmates, Henry Heine and Henry Thoreau: Notwithstanding his long voluntary exile in Paris, and his Hebrew ancestry, Heine was a true German, who found his only fit estimation among Germans, Sanborn wrote. Frenzel has said that Goethe was the first, Heine the second lyric poet of Germany. Without the lyrical gift, but with an equal amount of paradox and a greater fund of humor and moral earnestness, Henry Thoreau may be set off against Henry Heine, the German Aristophanes, as Heine liked to call himself, against the Walden Zeno or Diogenes.

In Boston, Sanborn spoke at a Reunion of Anti-Slavery Men and Women, making it as clear as he could to his audience that John Brown had been nothing if not perfectly clear as to stating his aims. He came to me with a note of introduction from my Springfield kinsman, George Walker. Being Kansas committeemen, we both were working to maintain the cause of freedom in that territory. Brown's errand was straightforward: to levy war on Kansas, occasionally to carry the war into Missouri, and to make similar incursions into Virginia and other Southern States.

Brown knew the inward cancer that was feeding on this republic, Sanborn declared. He pointed to the knife and the cautery that must extirpate it; and he had the force and nerve to make the first incision.

In the summer of 1897 Ellen Emerson, having trouble with a trick knee, spent a month at Hot Springs, Virginia with her sister and brother-in-law, Edith and William Forbes. Will was burdened with a persistent cough which, when he went on to Dublin, New Hampshire for the summer, only got worse. He died there of tuberculosis of the throat in October.

In Maine that year, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the mother of the California newspaper publisher William randolph Hearst, visited Sarah farmer at Green Acre. The two got along very well, Phoebe agreeing to provide Sarah with urgently needed funding for her school and related projects through coming years.

From the 1890s on, my father devoted himself entirely to literary and philanthropic work, Victor Sanborn would remember. He was often in demand for lectures, and he delivered addresses in many parts of the country. Brown University appointed him one of its examiners, and for several years he attended the meetings with regularity and with distinction. After a day spent in his official duties, he would write until past midnight.

Under the beautiful leafy aisle of Concord's Main Street, wrote a literary pilgrim in 1897, there moves no more remarkable a figure than that of F.B. Sanborn. As you meet him on the diurnal walk from the little post-office (where everybody meets everybody, and everybody bows to everybody, and perhaps, as in Gavarni's French vilage, 'everybody backbites everybody'), book-laden, reading as he walks, he will cast a quick, searching glance at you from under his broad-rimmed hat. What a pungent look! What an Emersonian face! A typical New England face: kind, so sympathetic and sympathy-craving, yet so keen. Mr. Sanborn's smile is a benediction, yet there is a rapier thrust latent in it. His eye twinkles and gleans at once. His lips are wreathed with lines of gentleness, yet have adaptability for a sardonic twist.

Lucky are you, continued the pilgrim, if you are received in his hospitable home down in the bend of the Sudbury, vine-clad and umbrageous, with a most peaceful outlook on the curves of the river and low embracing hills. Within are books, and books, and books. Books and talk, and that mobile, quaint, bitter-sweet flashing face, the well-considered, finished speech, full of wisdom and wit.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through a United States battleship, The Maine, anchored just outside Havana, killing 262 men. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, pushed for a declaration of war. When, on April 25th, the U.S. went to war with Spain, Roosevelt resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to accept a commission as Lieutenant Colonel in the First Volunteer Cavalry regiment. In August, the thirty-nine year-old Roosevelt returned to Long Island a hero of the Spanish-American War.

In 1899, New York Republicans were on the lookout for a strong candidate to run for Governor. The biggest obstacle in the way of putting forward Theodore Roosevelt was the Republican Boss, Thomas Platt, who wanted a governor he could control. Platt knew Roosevelt was not his man, but he backed him, as he was at least a Republican. Once elected, Roosevelt saw to it that, over time, reliable and trustworthy people were appointed to important posts, replacing Platt's stooges. Infuriated, Platt saw to it that incumbent President McKinley would get the maverick New York Governor for his running mate.

In 1898, the Boston firm of Damrell & Upham published The Memoirs of Pliny Earle, M.D., Sanborn's biography of his friend and professional associate, the psychiatrist and former director of the State Lunatic Asylum in Northampton, who'd died in 1892 at the age of eighty-three.

Sanborn's son Victor, thirty-two in 1899, published his Genealogy of the Family of Samborne or Sanborn in England and America, printed at the Rumford Press in Concord, New Hampshire. His father's genealogy, The Smiths and Walkers of Peterborough, Exeter, and Springfield, was likewise issued from Concord, New Hampshire that year.

In 1900 Sanborn's close friend Edwin Morton -- Gerrit Smith's longstanding houseguest, the tutor of his children -- died in Morges, Switzerland. Sanborn’s world seemed to be shrinking.

Ten years after moving in, Ellery Channing still lived with the Sanborns. At the top of the house, in his tiny attic study, he paced back and forth, stumbling into furniture, attempting to effectively contemplate ideas and words that sprang to mind and then were lost again. When one day Channing's grandson Chilton Cabot came to call, bringing his five-year-old son Richard with him, the old poet smiled benignly at the little boy. Reluctantly, the child smiled back, unsure what to make of his great-grandfather's strange, clouded gaze, grizzled beard, and rumpled black skullcap atop a shiny dome sprouting luminous, silk-like, floating white hair.

Evenings, Sanborn would go up. The two would again and again go over the well-worn, familiar terrain, Channing recollecting his having lived in a cabin on a vast, open stretch of Illinois prairie, his hikes and coach rides through New Hampshire's White Mountains, and his walks in the woods around Walden Pond.

Occasionally Channing would rearrange his few possessions in the room, now and again jotting down a note on a paperscrap, perhaps a verse, the start of yet another poem he had no intention whatsoever of finishing.