A Journey Into the Transcendentalists' New England. R. Todd Felton

Boston Vigilance Committee (which included Alcott, Parker, Channing, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson) tried to ensure the safety of Burns and other escaped slaves, such as Thomas Sims. The Alcott and Thoreau families were active participants in the Underground Railroad, which passed through Concord on its way to Canada.

       Tremont Street, looking toward Park Street Church.

      Unfortunately, the Masonic Temple did not enjoy as enduring an existence as some of its more famous occupants. It was sold in 1858 to the U.S. government, which used it as a courthouse until it was demolished to make way for a department store. The Masons now occupy a site just down the road, at 186 Tremont Street.

      Quiet Places: Boston Common and the Boston Athenaeum

      Sandwiched between Tremont Street and Beacon Hill, running from Arlington Street on the west side to Park Street on the eastern border, are the fifty acres of (7) the Boston Common. Long a major feature of the city, its walks, gardens, and ponds were a major attraction for the nature-loving Transcendentalists.

      Emerson, who had grazed his family’s herd of cows on the Common as a child (grazing was allowed until 1830, when the area became a park), particularly enjoyed strolling the paths as an adult. In fact, it was on just such a stroll in 1860 that he gave advice to a young Walt Whitman. Whitman later described the event in his journal:

       I walk’d for two hours, of a bright sharp February mid-day twenty-one years ago, with Emerson, then in his prime, keen, physically and morally magnetic, arm’d at every point, and when he chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual. During those two hours he was the talker and I the listener. It was an argument-statement, reconnoitering, review, attack, and pressing home ... of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, “Children of Adam.” ... I could never hear the points better put—and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way.... Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at the American House. And thenceforward I never waver’d or was touch’d with qualms.

      After their walk on the Common, Emerson took Whitman over to (8) the Boston Athenaeum and registered him as a guest. A private library founded in 1807 by the members of the Anthology Society, the Athenaeum began modestly but quickly became a center of Boston’s intellectual universe. By 1851, the Athenaeum had moved from Tremont Street, and its home for thirty-seven years on Pearl Street, to its current location at 10 1/2 Beacon Street. It had also become one of the five largest libraries in the country. Coincidentally, this Beacon Street location was also the former site of Emerson’s boyhood home.

      The Athenaeum provided a quiet haven for working amid the bustle of the city for Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Amy Lowell, Lydia Maria Child, and, when he was in town, Walt Whitman. Hawthorne seemed particularly at home among the dusty volumes and quiet solitude of the Pearl Street location. In fact, as he recounts in “The Ghost of Dr. Harris,” it was here that he met up with a ghost of one of the members and, for fear of disrupting the reigning silence, quietly ignored him: