The Ralph Waldo Emerson House

08/31/2026

189 years ago, on August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered an address, later known as “The American Scholar,” to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of his Alma-mater Harvard.

Emerson spoke to an audience of more than 200 people, including prominent Boston intellectual elites, his wife, Lidian, and friends and associates. Transcendentalist teachers Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott, whose controversial Temple School was in decline, were among those who gathered at the First Parish of Cambridge to hear Emerson speak on the scholar's nature and duties.

Emerson made a case for a fresh approach to literature, intellectualism, and education. He proclaimed that society had cut man off from his whole nature, and that in his true nature a scholar was more than an intellect.
Emerson argued that the scholar should be “Man Thinking”—this indicated an active state of being, not an attribute. The implication of Emerson’s provocative drift was that to be a scholar one did not have to be a Phi Beta Kappa member, or a student of Harvard, or, indeed, of any college. Instead he declared, “every man a student.” The most important teachers were not professors or the curriculum's rote book education, but nature and self-knowledge. As it was, Emerson complained, “instead of man thinking we have the bookworm,” who passively absorbed knowledge rather than creating it anew. “The book, the college, the school of art, the intuition of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. … But,” he declared, “genius looks forward…” with a progressive impetus. He said, “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”

Books and vestiges of the past were useful, but only as sources of inspiration in a process of continuing creation, which according to Emerson, was the primary duty of the scholar. By actively engaging with life and moral principles, the province of knowledge was as much that of the farm laborer as the college student or professor.

Emerson’s address carried forth the themes introduced in "Nature" (1836), with germs of his future essays, such as “Self-Reliance” and “The Poet.” In its tone of liberation from institutional conventions, it also foreshadowed his more controversial “Divinity School Address,” delivered the following summer.

While the address alienated portions of his audience, it was a success. 500 copies of Emerson’s oration were printed and sold out within a month. Fifty years later, poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had been in attendance, called Emerson’s address America’s “Declaration of Independence.”

Image: Drawing by Eliza Susan Quincy of Harvard alumni exiting the First Parish meetinghouse (1836), Wikimedia Commons.

08/30/2026

From Emerson’s study to the Robbins family’s legacy to centuries of Concord treasures, our town’s museums bring history to life- plan your visit today!
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08/28/2026

Join scholar Russell C. Powell on September 8th for a public research talk at the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard Divinity School: [HDS Talk] Emancipating Ecology: The Emerson-Thoreau Fault Line and Why It Matters for the Climate Crisis

Why is Thoreau a hero of environmental politics—but not Emerson? Join scholar Russell C. Powell for a public research talk revisiting Emerson’s universalism alongside Thoreau’s attention to place, asking how environmental politics can address climate injustice while remaining grounded in parti...

08/27/2026

Join author Bruce Nichols in conversation with Thoreau scholar Richard Smith about Nichols’s acclaimed new book on September 24th at First Parish in Concord : The Emerson Circle: A Conversation with Bruce Nichols

Join author Bruce Nichols in conversation with local historian and Thoreau expert Richard Smith about Nichols’s acclaimed new book, The Emerson Circle —an engaging look back at the Transcendentalists of 1840s Concord, MA and their enduring influence on the way we think about what it means to be ...

08/26/2026

The latest from the Lyceum, our blog: Emma Lazarus’s Visit to the Emerson House

Emma Lazarus is best known for the lines from her sonnet “The New Colossus” (1883) —“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—immortalized on the Statue of Liberty. In 1876, when she was invited to the Emersons’ Concord home, she was an emerging poet...

08/25/2026

Emma Lazarus is best known for the lines from her poem “The New Colossus” (1883) —“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—immortalized on the Statue of Liberty. In 1876, when she visited the Emerson House, she was an emerging poet, whom Ralph Waldo Emerson had taken an interest in. Lazarus came to stay with the Emerson family in Concord for a week, arriving on August 25th— one hundred and fifty years ago today.

Her visit will be recounted in a new installment of our blog, “The Lyceum,” coming soon!

Image: Emma Lazarus (1872), engraving by T. Johnson, The New York Historical Society, Wikimedia Commons.

08/23/2026

Today we celebrate the life of Mary Moody Emerson, born at Concord's "Old Manse," 252 years ago, on August 23, 1774.

Mary Moody Emerson had a tremendous influence on her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson. She encouraged young Waldo to enjoy nature and to keep a daily journal, as she did. Her nephew would borrow largely from her journals when writing his essays and lectures. Aunt Mary instructed him to, "do what you are afraid to do," a quotation for which he is now well known.

Mary Emerson led a spiritual and intellectual life of independence. She poetically described it as dancing "to the music of my own imajanation [sic]." She was a strong minded and opinionated woman, who could be difficult to get along with.

Despite their disagreements, Emerson greatly admired his aunt, and he called her "my heroine." The epitaph on her headstone in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, is his tribute to her, and is a testament to the care she gave to Emerson and his brothers. He described her influence as "a blessing which nothing else in education could supply."

If you wish to learn more about Mary Moody Emerson, we highly recommend Phyllis Cole's biography, *Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of the Transcendentalist Movement.* You can also check out the project to digitize her "Almanacs" (journals) online at https://marymoodyemerson.net/

08/22/2026

Did you know that before Concord’s Sleepy Hollow was a cemetery it was a wooded retreat enjoyed by the town’s authors?

On the afternoon of Sunday August 21, 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne returned a book to the Emerson House, which Margaret Fuller had left behind at The Old Manse, but neither she or Emerson were in. On his walk home, Hawthorne happened upon Fuller in the Sleepy Hollow woods, where she reposed with a book along a curving pathway.

Hawthorne recorded, "She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows, whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high and low philosophy.”

Their conversation was interrupted by footsteps on the upper hillside. A person hidden by the trees called to Fuller, by her first name. When Ralph Waldo Emerson emerged from the greenery, “he said there were muses in the woods today and whispers to be hear in the breezes.” As it neared 6 in the evening, the friends parted company; Emerson with Fuller, and Hawthorne—with an open invitation to dine at the Emerson house— to the Old Manse.

Sleepy Hollow was consecrated as a cemetery in 1855. Emerson delivered the dedicatory address. Today, you can visit the graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and their families on (or near) “Author’s Ridge.”

The Hawthorne quotations are from his journal and were published in his “American Notebooks.”
Images:
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1840), by Charles Osgood, Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, Wikimedia Commons.
Margaret Fuller (1840), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Wikimedia Commons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson(1846), photographed by Southworth, Wikimedia Commons.