_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 the
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,