Emerson’s Mountain Interval
It is well known that the untimely death of Emerson’s young first wife in 1831 from tuberculosis, and his own unease with church ritual, led to his separation from the traditional ministry. But what do we make of the 1832 midsummer trip he took to the high mountains of New England, between deep personal loss and the new calling he would soon pursue?
Ethan Allen Crawford’s rustic inn, looking south to the “Gate” of the Notch. Lithograph by A.L. Dick after William Henry Bartlett, The Notch House, White Mountains, 1835-1850. Courtesy of the Museum of the White Mountains.
29-year-old Emerson’s career as a minister was already in decline. In late spring he had explained to his colleagues at the Second Church of his terms for continuing as Associate Minister, terms they would eventually reject. He confided to his journal: “I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry.” (Selected Journals, 193)
But first Emerson found it necessary to simply leave town, and retreated to his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson’s home in South Waterford, Maine. As Mary’s biographer Phyllis Cole noted, “He sought distance from the city—and also a kindred, if critical listener.” Then Emerson pressed west to Conway, New Hampshire, and up the Mount Washington Valley for a stay at Ethan Allen Crawford’s hostelry, at what was then called “the Gate of the White Mountains,” the spectacular pass known today as Crawford Notch. [1]
Mountains in myth are associated with divinity and the arts. In the classic tradition, Mount Olympus was the sacred dwelling of the gods, Mount Parnassus the home of the Muses, closely associated with poetry and the oracular. Emerson was also intrigued by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who often invoked mountains in his nature-worshiping lyric poetry. [2] Philosophical, Wordsworth engaged in issues relating to individual spiritual experience within nature, as well as in organized religious community, as Emerson would—and before another year passed the two men would meet.
In his nature poetry, Wordsworth explored the heights and long views of mountain experience—the vast and infinite spaces in which humans may sense the divine, a presence engendering at once bliss and fear. The type of landscape that evokes this emotional response has long been called “sublime.” Decades later, Emerson would invoke this concept in the phrase “on the mountain-crest sublime” in his 1867 poem “Waldeinsamkeit” (Collected Poems, 189-91).
However familiar Emerson already was with hilltops in myth and poetry, it was likely his own Aunt Mary who planted the seed of her nephew’s first-hand mountain musings, the direct experience that is to nature writing what field notes are to a scientist. A pioneer in the Transcendentalist movement and an early influence on her brilliant nephew, she enjoyed breathtaking views of the northern Appalachians from her home in South Waterford, Maine. As early as 1823, Emerson wrote to a friend: “My aunt…has spent a great part of her life in the country, is an idolater of nature, and counts but a small number who merit the privilege of dwelling among the mountains…as the temple where God and the mind are to be studied and adored, and where the fiery soul can begin a premature communication with the other world” (qtd. in Cabot, v. 1, 96-97).
Looking east to Mount Washington in the distance.
Three years later, Emerson was considering mountains as a place to reflect and a timeless source of wisdom, as he wrote to Aunt Mary: “I behold along the line men of reverend pretension, who have waited on mountains or slept in caverns to receive from unseen intelligence a chart of the unexplored country, a register of what is to come” (qtd. in Cabot, v. 1, 113). [3]
Most of all, perhaps, Emerson’s scenic retreat in 1832 ultimately provided solitude, and the calm, remote atmosphere he needed to make a pivotal decision. From Conway on July 6, he wrote: “Here, among the mountains, the pinions of thought should be strong, and one should see the errors of men from a calmer height of love & wisdom. … Religion in the mind is not credulity, & in the practice is not form. It is a life” (Selected Journals, 193-94).
Ensconced at the top of Crawford Notch on July 14, he wrote: “The good of going into the mountains is that life is reconsidered…and you have opportunity of viewing the town at such a distance as may afford you a just view nor can you have any such mistaken apprehension as might be expected from the place you occupy & the round of customs you run at home (Selected Journals, 194).
Still agonizing on the 15th, he wrote: “A few low mountains, a great many clouds always cover-ing the great peaks, a circle of woods to the horizon, a peacock on the fence or in the yard, & two travel-ers no better contented than myself in the plain parlor of this house make up the whole picture of this unsabbatized Sunday” (Selected Journals, 195).
But later that same day, he seems to reach the decision he will live with—he concludes he cannot continue with “indifference & dislike” to a church practice others consider “the most sacred” (Selected Journals, 195). Back in Boston in September, Emerson delivered his last sermon to his pastorate, explaining his resignation. After touring Europe, he returned home in 1833 to begin his major career as a public lecturer and writer.
Mountains continued to occupy a place in Emerson’s imagination, itineraries, and poetry. In an unguarded 1841 journal entry, he recalled Aunt Mary, his brothers, and the mountains when he wrote: “…I would fain quit my present companions…& betake myself to some Thebais, some Mount Athos in the depths of New Hampshire or Maine, to bewail my innocency & to recover it, & with it the power to commune again with these sharers of a more sacred idea” (Selected Journals, 778).
He enjoyed a long stay in the Adirondacks with like-minded friends in the summer of 1858. With daughter Ellen, he climbed Vermont’s Mt. Mansfield in 1868 and returned to Crawford Notch in 1875, going further north to Bretton Woods. He visited Yosemite in 1871, at John Muir’s invitation. And of course, he had rambled in the Berkshires and knew Mount Monadnoc from family excursions.
Mountains are the subject of, or appear in many of Emerson’s poems including “Waldeinsamkeit,” “The Adirondacs,” “The World-Soul,” and “May- Day.” His 1847 poem “Monadnoc” is among those that express the intuitive communion he felt when alone in the presence of limitless nature to be found in the high hills. Consider this passage:
On the summit as I stood,
O’er the floor of plain and flood
Seemed to me, the towering hill
Was not altogether still,
But a quiet sense conveyed;
If I err not, thus it said:—
‘Many feet in summer seek,
Betimes, my far-appearing peak;
In the dreaded winter time,
None save dappling shadows climb,
Under clouds, my lonely head,
Old as the sun, old almost as the shade.
And comest thou
To see strange forests and new snow,
And tread uplifted land?
And leavest thou thy lowland race,
Here amid clouds to stand?
And wouldst be my companion,
Where I gaze,
And shall gaze,
When forests fall, and man is gone,
Over tribes and over times,
At the burning Lyre,
Nearing me,
With its stars of northern fire,
In many a thousand years?’(Collected Poems, 159-62)
After Emerson, many came to the White Mountains. The area also inspired his peers James Elliott Cabot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Thomas Starr King, Henry David Thoreau, and James Greenleaf Whittier. Much has changed since their time, but on a clear day Crawford Notch still affords spectacular views—and an otherworldly mood in autumn color, mist, twilight, or the fierce beauty of a storm in any season.
Today, the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Highland Center stands near the site of Ethan Crawford’s long-gone wayside inn. Last year some 14,000 guests stayed there, and countless others passed through as visitors seeking recreation, reflection, or renewal in the mountains.
— R. Davis, Emerson House guide
WORKS CITED:
We are indebted to Phyllis Cole’s excellent 1998 study, Mary Moody Emerson & The Origins of Transcendentalism, which gives a detailed record of Mary’s views of her nephew’s decision, his 1832 mountain interval, and cites his 1841 comparison of the White Mountains to the sacred hills of Greece.
As Marjorie Marjorie Nicolson noted in her landmark study of mountains in the history of Western thought, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, “There is no mountain mood or attitude we have found…that is not reflected in Wordsworth” (388). The epigraph is from Wordsworth’s 1814 poem “The Excursion.”
Emerson’s 1832 trip was not his first visit to the New Hampshire uplands. In August of 1829, he and his then fiancée Ellen Louisa Tucker visited Crawford Notch on a country vacation with hopes of improving her health. See “Meredith Village,” in Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Volume III, for his account of this tour.
WORKS CONSULTED:
Cabot, James Elliot. A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 1. Boston/NY: Houghton/Riverside. 1895. Facsimile edition, nd.
Cole, Phyllis. Chapter 8, “God Within Us.” Mary Moody Emerson & The Origins of Transcendentalism. Oxford/NY: Oxford UP, 1998. 214-19.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Collected Poems & Translations. Harold Bloom and Paul Kane, eds. NY: Literary Classics of the United States. Library of America #70. 1994. 189-91. 49-60.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Volume 3: 1826-1832. “Meredith Village.” William H. Gil-man, Alfred R. Ferguson, eds. Cambridge/London: Harvard-Belknap/Oxford. 1963. 159-62.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Journals, 1820-1842. Lawrence Rosenwald, ed. NY: Literary Classics of the United States. Library of America, #201. 2010.
Emerson, Ellen Tucker. Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson. Edith E.W. Gregg, ed. Volume 2. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1982. 176-79.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: the Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. NY: Norton, 1963.
Wordsworth, William. “The Excursion.” The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Student’s Cambridge Edition. Boston/NY: Houghton/Riverside, 1903. 403-524, lines 223-226.
