A Summer Philosopher.
Reading edition
Chicago, Ill.
To the Editor.—I cannot express to you how charmed I am to learn through the columns of your valued paper that the littérateurs and the thinkers of Chicago are going to have a School of Western Philosophy in this city early in July. Although I have but recently come from the East (having resided in Michigan for the last five years), I take a keen interest in the growth of Western culture; and, knowing the great good effected by these re-unions whereat sympathetic intellects may revel in mutual delights, I am exceedingly anxious that this promised School of Western Philosophy shall eventuate. I was visiting friends in Boston in 1879, and went with my Aunt Holbrook to the first Concord School of Summer Philosophy. It was then and there that I got my first taste of the joys which accrue from the scholarly discussion of such subjects as the Am, the To Be, and the Knowing. The grandest minds of the century were there,—Emerson, Harris, Sanborn, Alcott, Mrs. Cheney, H. K. Jones, Wasson, Professor Pierce, Higginson, Dr. Bartol, Harrison G. O. Blake, Aunt Holbrook, and myself. It was the first and only time I met Emerson—oh, how I revere that divine man’s memory! He read an essay on “Memory;” and we hung upon his utterances, as bees cluster at 67the swarming. When I was introduced to him, he smoothed my hair kindly, and murmured, “Sweet child; sweet child.” He was a dreamy, poetic man, and his saintly thoughts were always amid the clouds of the vast Above. While he was discoursing of metempsychosis, or carving apple-pie, there was about him a subtile prescience and an ineffable psychic consciousness that were beauteous to cognize. Frank Sanborn was another philosopher-poet who charmed me deeply. I have in my scrap-book his entire “Address to the Mutability of Things,” and his tender lines in memory of Emerson’s dead canary-bird, beginning,—
“Oh! can this mortal ken descry
The Whither thou hast went?”
I am preparing a voluminous paper on the subject of the immortal intellects I met at Concord, and criticisms upon the various philosophies of the same. If I get this work completed by that time, I would like to read it at the Western School of Summer Philosophy next July. My well-known maiden effort, “The Chautauqua Cook Book, with Hints to Young Mothers,” may be cited as an earnest of my capability; and as a further proof of my acquaintance with the notables of whom I am treating, I can produce my album in which are inscribed the autographs of the same. Yours in the Noble work,
MRS. AMIABLE J. HOLBROOK.
68