Birth of Cranch: Nature is but a scroll

Christopher Pearse Cranch was born on March 8, 1813, in what is now Alexandria, Virginia, the youngest son of 13 children. As he recalled many years later, "My first recollections date from the house in Washington Street, when I was about four or five years old." Not all of those recollections were positive. He remembered one of his teachers as "a great tyrant" known for "devising all sorts of strange, an sometimes cruel, punishments for the boys. Two of his sisters died when Christopher was young. "The death of these two elder sisters were my first great griefs, and made a deep impression on me."

Cranch's father, William Cranch, was appointed by President John Adams to the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia as an assistant judge (later to promoted as chief judge by Thomas Jefferson) before the boy's birth. Like Adams, the Cranch family also owned and operated a farm. After graduating from a college in D.C., Christopher Pearse Cranch made his way to Harvard Divinity School, after which he became influenced by the new liberal theology known as Transcendentalism.

Cranch's career was divided as a preacher, an artist, and as an author, editor, and poet. He lived for 78 years, almost to the very end of the century, outliving many of his fellow Transcendentalists. Perhaps his greatest poem is also one of his earliest — and his most Transcendental. "Correspondences" was originally published in The Dial in January 1841. In it, Cranch shows a "correspondence" with a Nature that represents the deity. That deity creates a world in much the same way as an author or poet creates his writing. In turn, then the deity and the speaker are able to communicate directly, if only one can discern the writing:

All things in Nature are beautiful types to the soul that will read them;
Nothing exists upon earth, but for unspeakable ends.
Every object that speaks to the senses was meant for the spirit:
Nature is but a scroll—God's hand-writing thereon.
Ages ago, when man was pure, ere the flood overwhelmed him,
While in the image of God every soul yet lived,
Everything stood as a letter or word of a language familiar,
Telling of truths which now only the angels can read.
Lost to man was the key of those sacred hieroglyphics—
Stolen away by sin—till with Jesus restored.
Now with infinite pains we here and there spell out a letter;
Now and then will the sense feebly shine through the dark.
When we perceive the light which breaks through the visible symbol,
What exultation is ours! we the discovery have made!
Yet is the meaning the same as when Adam lived sinless in Eden,
Only long-hidden it slept and now again is restored.
Man unconsciously uses figures of speech every moment,
Little dreaming the cause why to such terms he is prone—
Little dreaming that everything has its own correspondence
Folded within it of old, as in the body the soul.
Gleams of the mystery fall on us still, though much is forgotten,
And through our commonest speech illumines the path of our thoughts.
Thus does the lordly sun shine out a type of the Godhead;
Wisdom and Love the beams that stream on a darkened world.
Thus do the sparkling waters flow, giving joy to the desert,
And the great Fountain of Life opens itself to the thirst.
Thus does the word of God distil like the rain and the dew-drops,
Thus does the warm wind breathe like to the Spirit of God,
And the green grass and the flowers are signs of the regeneration.

O thou Spirit of Truth; visit our minds once more!
Give us to read, in letters of light, the language celestial,
Written all over the earth—written all over the sky:
Thus may we bring our hearts at length to know our Creator,
Seeing in all things around types of the Infinite Mind.

Cranch and Story: poesy and art and mirth

Both Christopher Pearse Cranch and William Wetmore Story dabbled in art and poetry — and were successful in each field. They became particularly close in the 1850s. The two men went to Europe at the same time and spent time together in Rome, Paris, and London. In 1855, Cranch described Story as "a good, constant and warm-hearted friend, and congenial to all my tastes."

Story was particularly known as a sculptor, and Cranch praised his work and particularly the statue of Cleopatra, which he concluded was "great. I have seen no modern statue, American or European, that impressed me so much." Story, in turn, convinced Cranch to continue his series of writings for children (the "Huggermugger" series) and even secured his publisher.

Cranch reportedly had a portrait of Story in the study at his home on Ellery Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Story, in turn, sketched Cranch at least twice (one is pictured above, the other is here). Story made Europe his permanent home, however, and Cranch seldom saw him. Expressing his lament over the distance, Cranch wrote a poem (or, more accurately, a sonnet) to his artist friend, dated April 9, 1870, and titled "To W. W. S.":

So many years have passed, so far away
You seem, since arm in arm and eye to eye
We talked together, while the great blue sky
Of Rome smiled over us day after day,
Or on the flower-starred villa grounds we lay
Beneath the pines, while poesy and art
And mirth lent us one common mind and heart.
So long ago! while we are growing gray,
And neither knows the life the other leads,
Shut in our separate spheres of thought and change.
Friend of my youth, how oft my spirit needs
The old, responsive voice! Silence is strange,
That so conspires with Time. O, let us break
The spell, and speak, at least for old love's sake!

Cranch: the sky is a vault of stone

Christopher Pearse Cranch recognized spring as a sort of battle ground between winter and spring. Though born near Washington, D.C., he spent most of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On April 21, 1874, the poet, painter, and Transcendentalist wrote "A Battle of the Elements":

The warring hosts of Winter and of Spring
    Are hurtling o'er the plains.
All night I heard their battle-clarions ring,
    And jar the window-panes.

The arrowy sleet is rattling on the glass;
    The sky a vault of stone;
The untimely snows besiege the sprouting grass;
    The elm-trees toss and moan.

Their swelling buds curl backward as they swing;
    The crocus in its sheath
Listens, a watchful sentinel, till Spring
    Shall melt the snow's last wreath.

The saddened robins flit through leafless trees,
    And chirp with tuneless voice,
And wait the conquering sun, the unbinding breeze;
    They cannot yet rejoice.

Slowly the victor Spring her foe outflanks,
    And countermines his snows;
Then, unawares, along the grassy banks
    Her ambushed violets throws.

Soon she will mask with buds of fragrant white
    Her arsenals of thorns,
And lift her rose-bush banners to the light
    Of soul-entrancing morns.

Along the fields her fairy troops shall hide,
    And conquer by their grace,
And shake their flowery crests, and far and wide
    The surly frosts displace;

Till all the woods are ringing with the glee
    And prophecy of change
That melts the past and sets the present free
    Through Summer's perfect range.

O flagging spring of Honor and of Truth,
    Shalt thou not victor be,
And bring again the faith the nation's youth
    Made one with Liberty?

Shall the new birth America has known
    Amid her battle-throes
Prove a nipped blossom, blighted ere 't is blown,
    Or a perennial rose?

The final stanzas of the poem shift the theme, as so often happens with poetry. Here, Cranch applies his metaphor for Spring to the whole of the United States, still reeling after the Civil War amid the Reconstruction era. Cranch's acquaintance, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner, had died only the month prior to this poem,  and the politician had spent his final years pushing for civil rights reforms.

Cranch: This is Spring

Though born in Virginia, and having spent the majority of his life in Massachusetts, Christopher Pearse Cranch had been living on Staten Island in New York for about ten years when he wrote "A Spring-Growl" on March 26, 1873:

Would you think it? Spring is come.
Winter's paid his passage home;
Packed his ice-box, — gone — half-way
To the Arctic Pole, they say.
But I know the old ruffian still
Skulks about from hill to hill,
Where his freezing footprints cling,
      Though 'tis Spring?

II.
Heed not what the poets sing
In their rhymes about the Spring.
Spring was once a potent queen,
Robed in blossoms and in green.
That, I think, was long ago.
Is she buried in the snow,
Deaf to all our carolling, —
      Poor old Spring?

III.
Windows rattling in the night;
Shutters that you thought were tight
Slamming back against the wall;
Ghosts of burglars in the hall;
Soaring winds and groaning trees;
Chimneys shuddering in the breeze;
Doleful dumps in everything,—
      Such is Spring.

IV.
Sunshine trying hard awhile
On the bare brown fields to smile;
Frozen ruts and slippery walks;
Gray old crops of last year's stalks;
Shivering hens and moping cows;
Curdled sap in leafless boughs
Nipped by Winter's icy sting, —
      Such is Spring.

V.
Yet the other day I heard
Something that I thought a bird.
He was brave to come so soon;
But his pipes were out of tune,
And he chirped as if each note
Came from flannels round his throat,
And he had no heart to sing, —
      Ah, poor thing!

VI.
If there comes a little thaw,
Still the air is chill and raw.
Here and there a patch of snow,
Dirtier than the ground below,
Dribbles down a marshy flood;
Ankle-deep you stick in mud
In the meadows, — while you sing,
      "This is Spring."

VII.
Are there violets in the sod,
Crocuses beneath the clod?
When will Boreas give us peace?
Or has Winter signed a lease
For another month of frost,
Leaving Spring to pay the cost?
For it seems he still is king,
      Though 'tis Spring.

Music did not sing as poets say she sung

The Harvard Musical Association was founded in Boston in 1837 by John Sullivan Dwight, a minister, former Brook Farmer, editor, and musical critic. On January 28, 1874, the annual dinner of the Association was held at the historic Parker House in Boston. The evening included a poem by Christopher Pearse Cranch (pictured). A friend of Dwight's, Cranch was an artist and musician as well as a poet. Years earlier, both were also in the same circle of Transcendentalists. Cranch's poetic contribution to the dinner was the simply titled "Music":

When "Music, Heavenly Maid," was very young,
She did not sing as poets say she sung.
Unlike the mermaids of the fairy tales,
She paid but slight attention to her scales.
Besides, poor thing! she had no instruments
But such as rude barbaric art invents.

In those early days, Cranch writes, there were no well-known instrument makers like Steinway or Chickerings — in fact, many instruments did not yet exist. After all, "Music was then an infant." Other arts developed more quickly, including painting and architecture.

But she, the Muse who in these latter days
Lifts us and floats us in the golden haze
Of melodies and harmonies divine,
And steeps our souls and senses in such wine
As never Ganymede nor Hebe poured
For gods, when quaffing at the Olympian board, —
She, Heavenly Maid, must ply her music thin,
And sit and thrum her tinkling mandolin,
Chant her rude staves, and only prophesy
Her far-off days of immortality.

Like Cinderella waiting for her prince, Music sits idly somewhat impatiently. As "the years and centuries rolled on," slowly the world of music grew and new instruments evolved:

But every rare and costly instrument
That skill can fabricate or art invent, —
Pianos, organs, viols, horns, trombones,
Hautboys, and clarinets with reedy tones,
Boehm-flutes and cornets, bugles, harps, bassoons,
Huge double-basses, kettle-drum half-moons,
And every queer contrivance made for tunes.

Through these the master-spirits round her throng,
And Europe rings with instruments and song.
Through these she breathes her wondrous symphonies,
Enchanting airs, and choral litanies.
Through these she speaks the word that never dies,
The universal language of the skies.
Around her gather those who held their art
To be of life the clearest, noblest part.

The great composers, like Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (chief of all) swarm to her in long processions of, as Cranch writes, "the lords of Tone," who come to attend her "like a queen enthroned."

Ah! greater than all words of mine can say,
The heights, the depths, the glories, of that sway.
No mortal tongue can bring authentic speech
Of that enchanted world beyond its reach;
No tongue but hers, when, lifted on the waves
Of Tone and Harmony, beyond the graves
Of all we lose, we drift entranced away
Out of the discords of the common day;
And she, the immortal goddess, on her breast
Lulls us to visions of a sweet unrest,
Smiles at the tyrannies of time and space,
And folds us in a mother's fond embrace,
Till, sailing on upon that mystic sea,
We feel that Life is Immortality.

Cranch: My mind did swoon

Chrisopher Pearse Cranch — Transcendentalist, painter, and poet — did not publish his first book of poems until 1844. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, he frequently attended public speeches by major politicians of the day (and even claimed to witness the inauguration of John Quincy Adams). He went to Harvard Divinity School and started a long series of travels. It was in Cincinnati, Ohio, that he and James Freeman Clarke founded the Western Messenger as an outlet of Transcendentalism. Cranch's earliest poems were published in that journal as well as The Dial, and usually signed "C.P.C." One of those early poems, "Night and the Soul," was written on January 2, 1839:

I went to bed with Shakespeare's flowing numbers
      Within me chiming,
As I sank slowly to my pleasant slumbers,
      My thoughts with his were rhyming.

Out of the window I saw the moonlight shadows
      Go creeping slow;
The sheeted roofs of snow — the broad white meadows
      Lay silently below.

A few keen stars were kindly winking through
      The frost-dimmed panes,
And dreaming Chanticleer woke up and crew
      Far o'er the desolate plains.

But soon into the void abyss of sleep
      My mind did swoon;
I saw no more the broad house-shadows creep
      Beneath the silent moon.

I woke; the morning sun was mounting slowly
      O'er the live earth: —
Say, fancy, why the shade of melancholy
      Which then in me took birth?

Why does the night give to the spirit wings,
      Which day denies?
Ah, why this tyranny of outward things
      When brightest shine the skies?

My soul is like the flower that blooms by night,
      And droops by day;
Yet may its fruit expand, though in the light
      Night-blossoms drop away.

The visions thus in dreamy stillness cherished,
      Like dreams may fly;
But day's great acts, o'er thoughts that nightly perished,
      may ripen, not to die!

Cranch: one in the Land of Sleep

The November 7, 1885 issue of the New York-based weekly The Critic included a poem by Christopher Pearse Cranch. Cranch was a minister-turned-Transcendentalist who alternated his career as a writer and artist. His poem "The Two Dreams" was later referred to by one critic as "one of his more subtle and imaginative bits of verse."  When published in The Critic, it coincidentally followed an article on American Art galleries.

The poem is unusual for Cranch in many ways. For one, it is written in the voice of a woman and it also expresses an atypical sentimentalism for Cranch. Many of his other works are humorous or philosophical, often employing nature and scenery for metaphorical purposes. "The Two Dreams":

I met one in the Land of Sleep
   Who seemed a friend long known and true.
I woke. That friend I could not keep —
   For him I never knew.

Yet there was one in life's young morn
   Loved me, I thought, as I loved him.
Slow from that trance I waked forlorn,
   To find his love grown dim.

He by whose side in dreams I ranged,
   Unknown by name, my friend still seems;
While he I knew so well has changed.
   So both were only dreams.

Cranch: one living spirit blending all

"The Evening Primrose," a poem by writer/artist Christopher Pearse Cranch, is dated October 10, 1872. The poem refers to the oenothera, a yellow flowering plant which opens nearly instantaneously in the evening. Certainly, the poem is influenced by the poet's Transcendentalist leanings but, further, it reminds the reader to find beauty where he/she can:

"What are you looking at?" the farmer said;
   "That's nothing but a yellow flowering weed."
We turned, and saw our neighbor's grizzled head
   Above the fence, but took of him no heed.

There stood the simple man, and wondered much
   At us, who wondered at the twilight flowers
Bursting to life, as if a spirit's touch
   Awoke their slumbering souls to answer ours.

"It grows all o'er the island, wild," said he;
   "There are plenty in my field: I root 'em out.
But, for my life, it puzzles me to see
   What you make such a wonderment about."

The good man turned and to his supper went;
   While, kneeling on the grass with mute delight
Or whispered words, around the plant we bent,
   To watch the opening buds that love the night.

Slowly the rosy dusk of eve departed,
   And one by one the pale stars bloomed on high;
And one by one each folded calyx started,
   And bared its golden petals to the sky.

One throb from star to flower seemed pulsing through
   The night, — one living spirit blending all
In beauty and in mystery ever new, —
   One harmony divine through great and small.

E'en our plain neighbor, as he sips his tea,
   I doubt not, through his window feels the sky
Of evening bring a sweet and tender plea
   That links him even to dreamers such as I.

So through the symbol-alphabet that glows
   Through all creation, higher still and higher
The spirit builds its faith, and ever grows
   Beyond the rude form of its first desire.

O boundless Beauty and Beneficence!
   O deathless Soul that breathest in the weeds
And in a starlit sky! — e'en through the rents
   Of accident thou serv'st all human needs;

Nor stoopest idly to our petty cares;
   Nor knowest great or small, since folded in
By universal Love, all being shares
   The life that ever shall be or hath been.

Cranch and Fuller: the noblest woman of her time

On May 23, 1870, the New England Women's Club held an event in honor of Margaret Fuller. Fuller would have been 60 years old that day, if she hadn't died tragically two decades earlier. The featured speaker was fellow Transcendentalist and poet Christopher Pearse Cranch, who read his original poem "To the Memory of Margaret Fuller Ossoli." The massive poem was over 1,400 words long; here are a few snippets.

...One record rises from our past,
That shall forever last;
A name our age can never
From its remembrance sever.
We bear it in our hearts to-day,
Fresh as the perfume of the May.
It vibrates in the air, a rich, full-chorded strain
Touched with weird minor moods of pain,
The music of a life revealed to few,
Till to the age Death gave the fame long due,
And made the unfinished symphony a part
Of the great growing century's mind and heart.

But when I strive the music to rehearse,
How feebly rings my verse!
And why intone this melody of rhyme
For one, the noblest woman of her time,
Whose soul, a pure and radiant chrysolite,
Dims the superfluous arts our social forms invite?

Cranch notes that in her time, she was met with scorn by some. But Fuller, he writes, used her "wise intuition" to raise an "image of ideal womanhood." He references poetically her "Conversations" as well as who she was as a person:

...Her sweet persuasive voice we still can hear
Ruling her charmed circle like a queen;
While wit and fancy sparkled ever clear
Her graver moods between.
The pure perennial heat
Of youth's ideal love forever glowed
Through all her thoughts and words, and overflowed
The listeners round her seat.
So, like some fine-strung golden harp,
Tuned by many a twist and warp
Of discipline and patient toil,
And oft disheartening recoil, —-
Attuned to highest and to humblest use,—
All her large heroic nature
Grew to its harmonious stature.
Nor any allotted service did refuse,
While those around her but half understood
How wise she was, how good,
How nobly self-denying, as she tasked
Heart, mind, and strength for truth, nor nobler office asked.

Cranch: If death be final

On the morning of January 20, 1892, Christopher Pearse Cranch died peacefully at his home in Massachusetts. In his 78 years, he had been a minister, a painter and artist, a poet and author of children's books, a Transcendentalist, a translator, and he maintained his sense of humor throughout. One of his last sketches, "The Grasshopper Burden," reportedly got many laughs from his friends, according to his daughter.

Cranch's contemporaries noted that his poems were sometimes too philosophical, coming from the mind rather than the heart. His skill as a writer of sonnets, however, was universally acknowledged. Some of the more celebrated poems of his lifetime were in a series titled "Life and Death," including:

If death be final, what is life, with all
  Its lavish promises, its thwarted aims,
  Its lost ideals, its dishonored claims,
Its uncompleted growth? A prison wall,
Whose heartless stones but echo back our call;
  An epitaph recording but our names;
  A puppet-stage where joys and griefs and shames
Furnish a demon jesters' carnival;
  A plan without a purpose or a form;
A roofless temple; an unfinished tale,
  And men like madrepores through calm and storm
Toil, die to build a branch of fossil frail,
  And add from all their dreams, thoughts, acts, belief,
  A few more inches to a coral-reef.

Cranch was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, relatively close to Nathaniel Parker Willis, who died the same day 25 years earlier.

Taylor: one so strong in hope, so rich in bloom

The poet Bayard Taylor died on December 19, 1878. Perhaps the worst part of his death was that he could no longer defend himself from being called "James Bayard Taylor" — never his legal name, though his parents did name him after politician James A. Bayard. The error comes from anthologist Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who encouraged the younger man to publish his poems. Taylor, certainly unable to predict the confusion over his name, dedicated that 1844 volume of poems to Griswold, "as an expression of kind gratitude for the kind encouragement he has shown the author." Griswold, who assisted in the publication of that book, also had "James Bayard Taylor" put on the title page, an error which continues to this day.

Perhaps on a happier note, Taylor's friend Christopher Pearse Cranch paid a posthumous tribute through a sonnet:

Can one so strong in hope, so rich in bloom
   That promised fruit of nobler worth than all
   He yet had given, drop thus with sudden fall?
   The busy brain no more its worth resume?
Can Death for life so versatile find room?
   Still must we fancy thou mayst hear our call
   Across the sea, with no dividing wall
   More dense than space to interpose its doom.
Ah then—farewell, young-hearted, genial friend!
   Farewell, true poet, who didst grow and build
   From thought to thought still upward and still new.
Farewell, unsullied toiler in a guild
   Where some defile their hands, and where so few
   With aims as pure strive faithful to the end.

Another poetic tribute came from Southern writer Paul Hamilton Hayne (appropriate, considering Taylor's attempts to reunite North and South through poetry). Hayne said this poem was inspired in part by a letter Taylor wrote to him only weeks before his death:

"Oft have I fronted Death, nor feared his might!—
To me immortal, this dim Finite seems
Like some waste low-land, crossed by wandering streams
Whose clouded waves scarce catch our yearning sight:
Clearer by far, the imperial Infinite!—
Though its ethereal radiance only gleams
In exaltations of majestic dreams,
Such dreams portray God's heaven of heavens aright!"

Thou blissful Faith! that on death's imminent brink
Thus much of heaven's mysterious truth hast told!
Soul-life aspires, though all the stars should sink;—
Not vain our loftiest Instinct's upward stress,—
Nor hath the immortal Hope shone clear and bold,
To quench at death, his torch in Nothingness!

More from another of Taylor's Southern admirers will be posted in a couple days.

Lowell and Cranch: with this abominable pen

In a letter dated December 18, 1868, James Russell Lowell wrote to Christopher Pearse Cranch, "I... would rather have (if I can say so with this abominable pen) one old friend with a silver-mine in his hair, than all the new ones that were ever turned out." Lowell notes that he intends to send "C.P.C." a copy of his new book once it is printed but admits he doesn't care if he likes it, "provided you will continue to like J.R.L." In fact, Lowell says, he almost hopes Cranch will dislike it, saying he'd rather have "a pennyweight of honest friendship than a pound of fame, or — what is about as solid — flattery."

Lowell was approaching 50 years old, as he notes in the letter, and demands a "test of friendship" from Cranch: for his birthday, he wants him to pay a visit at the Lowell home, Elmwood. Though living in New York at the time, Cranch came through, and even wrote a birthday poem for Lowell. Perhaps as a response to Lowell's value of fame mentioned above, the poem concludes that "our love" makes "his fame."

The letter is sincere and warm, reflecting a friendship not generally recognized by history. Cranch, a minister, was also a poet and artist — and deserves the title of best sense of humor among the Transcendentalists. Lowell, for all his varied efforts, was also a humor poet, publishing his A Fable for Critics in 1848 at the age of 29.

As Lowell concludes his letter to Cranch:

My old clock in the entry has just given that hiccup with which tall fellows of their hands like him are wont to prelude the hours — and the hour is midnight. My fire and my pipe are both low. I must say good-night. I have had great difficulty in saying what I wished with this pen, which has served me I know not how long. But I have stood by it, and that should convince you (if you needed convincing, as I am sure you didn't) that I don't give up an old friend even when he has lost his point. But that is something you can never do for me, and I shall expect you on [my birthday]... You shall... have a warm welcome from Mrs. Lowell (who thinks you handsome — that way madness lies!).

Bicentennial of William Henry Channing

William Henry Channing is probably not as well-known as his uncle, one of the foremost Unitarian preachers, or even as famous as his brother, the much-maligned poet Ellery Channing. W. H. Channing was born 200 years ago today on May 25, 1810.

After graduating from Harvard Divinity School, Channing was ordained at a church in Cincinnati. While there, he succeeded his colleague James Freeman Clarke as editor of the Western Messenger. Already floating in the circle of Transcendentalists, Channing had previously been asked by Orestes Brownson to review an essay called "The American Scholar" by one Ralph Waldo Emerson (who shares his birthday). Channing concluded that Emerson's points were "hinted, without the progressive reasonings through which he was led to them." (He later was more openly laudatory; in a private letter in 1842, he writes of Emerson's "fineness of touch about all he does, and such a genuine appreciation of everything! ...I thank Heaven I was born in the same day with him.")

Later, while in New York, Channing became interested in the Associationist movement, the same reform ideas that inspired Brook Farm, and issued a journal, The Present, to promote it. His theories eventually evolved into, what he called, "Christian Union," the idea that a fervent faith among the masses could fix society's problems and lead to greater equality. More than just a theory, Channing put his beliefs into practice, emphasizing that Christians were obligated to work for the good of neglected or abused segments of the population. By 1847, he termed it "Church of Humanity."

One of those inspired by Channing was fellow obscure Transcendentalist Christopher Pearse Cranch. As Cranch later recalled, "He always took an intense interest in the spiritual elevation of the people, but no less in establishing a high standard of morality for the cultured classes." Cranch noted Channing's opposition to slavery, the Mexican War, the annexation of Texas. "It is difficult to describe a man so perfect... He held an ideal standard in everything," he wrote.

Channing was also a lifelong friend of Margaret Fuller. "She was peerless," he wrote of her. After Fuller's death in 1850, he visited the wreck at Fire Island where she died, spending two days there talking to survivors. Channing, Clarke, and Emerson collaborated on her biography. Channing sought out a man named James Nathan (with whom Fuller may have had a romantic relationship) for his relevant letters. He refused (and friend told Emerson that a biography could not be written without them; his letters were later edited and published, in small part, by Julia Ward Howe).

Emerson in particular rushed the project and controlled its direction. Channing wanted to take his time, particularly in the section about Fuller's marriage and pregnancy (still somewhat confusing today). Channing believed that Fuller, on principle, would never legally marry and privately told Emerson as much. Emerson was unconcerned and made up a wedding date, apparently out of thin air. The book, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, remains controversial and has been blamed for much of the 19th century's judgment of Fuller as an abrasive, arrogant, "unwomanly" figure.