Читать книгу A Journey Into the Transcendentalists' New England - R. Todd Felton - Страница 26

Twenty years after he helped found the Transcendental Club, Emerson was happy to be a part of another social club, the Saturday Club, which met most often at (2) the Parker House, a hotel and restaurant at 60 School Street. It was much like the Transcendental Club in that it featured dinner and conversation among brilliant and highly educated men (although the Transcendental Club had included women too) and spawned a publication—in this case, the Atlantic Monthly.

Saturday Club members were more eclectic than the Transcendentalists, though, and by no means philosophically similar. They included the scientist Louis Agassiz, Judge Hoar of Concord, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from Harvard, James Elliot Cabot, and various Transcendentalists in addition to Emerson, Alcott, and even the ever-shy novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The best-known account of the club is Holmes’s poem “At the Saturday Club,” published in the January 1884 Atlantic Monthly. In it, Holmes memorializes his club friends, including Hawthorne, Alcott, and Emerson:

Hawthorne: The great ROMANCER, hid beneath his veil Like the stern preacher of his sombre tale; Virile in strength, yet bashful as a girl Prouder than Hester, sensitive as Pearl.

Alcott: From his mild throng of worshippers released Our Concord Delphi sends its chosen priest, Prophet or poet, mystic, sage, or seer, By every title always welcome here.

The Parker House opened in 1855; its renovated version is now part of Boston’s Freedom Trail and Literary Trail.

Emerson: Ask you what name this prisoned spirit bears While with ourselves this fleeting breath it shares? Till angels greet him with a sweeter one In Heaven, on earth we call him EMERSON.