32.   Photograph of Ellery Channing, in Alfred Winslow Hosmer’s extra-illustrated copy of the second edition of Salt’s Life of Henry David Thoreau (1896).  A.W. Hosmer’s Thoreau library, including the extra-illustrated Salt, presented by Herbert Buttrick Hosmer, 1949. 
 

Poet William Ellery Channing (1817-1901)—nephew of minister William Ellery Channing, the “father of Unitarianism”—was one of those bright young men in whom Emerson found genius and whose writing he published in The Dial in the 1840s.  The two became friends in 1842, when Channing stayed with the Emersons while looking for a home in Concord for himself and his wife Ellen (Margaret Fuller’s sister).  After the Channings moved to Concord and became Emerson’s neighbors in 1843, Ellery and Waldo grew close.  Channing also became a particular friend of Thoreau, the first biography of whom he would later write (Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, published in 1873) and a friend of Bronson Alcott and Hawthorne.

   Emerson was an early champion of Channing’s poetry.  He wrote on June 21, 1840, to Margaret Fuller, “Ellery Channing has granted the verses [for The Dial], which fills me with joy.  They are what I wanted the Journal for.”  He soon saw Channing’s inconsistency and weaknesses as a poet, but continued to admire his talent.  He wrote to Margaret Fuller on December 12, 1842, “A true poet that child is, and nothing proves it so much as his worst verses: sink or swim,—hit or miss, he writes on, & is never responsible.”  To Caroline Sturgis, he wrote in August of 1842, “He (Ellery) has great selfpossession, great simplicity & mastery of manner, very good sense, & seems to me to be very good company to live with … If he could only master his negligent impatient way of writing—this impatience of finishing, his sweet wise vein of thought & music would have no rival.”

   Others were not so generous in their estimation of Channing’s work.  Edgar Allan Poe cuttingly reviewed his first published volume of poetry (Poems, 1843): “His book contains about sixty-three things, which he calls poems, and which he no doubt seriously supposes them to be.  They are full of all kinds of mistakes, of which the most important is that of their having been printed at all.”  Even Channing’s good friend and traveling companion Thoreau characterized his work as “sublimo-slipshod.”

   Son of physician and Harvard Medical School professor Walter Channing, Ellery lost his mother when he was five.  He was raised by an aunt in Milton, sent to the Round Hill School in Northampton, and later to the Boston Latin School.  He entered Harvard in 1834 but, unable to submit himself to college regulations, left after a few months.

   His father’s continuing financial support made it unnecessary for Channing actively to pursue a career.  He wrote poetry, homesteaded for a while in Illinois, and moved to Cincinnati, where he met and married Ellen Fuller.  The Channings settled in Concord in 1843 specifically to be near Emerson, who had already seen some of Ellery’s work into print in The Dial.

   Channing was as unwilling to accept the financial and emotional responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood as he had earlier been to fit into life at Harvard.  Although he and Ellen had five children, he was absent from the family for long periods of time.  In 1844 and 1845, he lived in New York and worked at the Tribune.  In 1845, he traveled to Europe through the largesse of friends. 

   In Concord, the Channings lived first on the Cambridge Turnpike, then moved to Lexington Road, later to Punkatasset Hill, and after that to Main Street.  From 1855, while Channing edited the New Bedford Mercury, they lived away from Concord.  Ellen died in 1856, not long after the birth of their fifth child.

   Channing returned to Concord after his connection with the Mercury ended in 1858.  He lived here for the rest of his life, spending his final years in Frank Sanborn’s home.  He remained intimate with Emerson, who never ceased to value his friend’s judgment of literature and character.  On April 11, 1850, Emerson expressed his feelings for Channing in a letter to Margaret Fuller: “I go home tomorrow & the next day … I shall find, I trust, Ellery full of thoughts, if fitful & moody as ever.  I could only wish he were born as much for his own happiness, & for yours, as he is for mine.  To me, he is from month to month, from year to year, an incomparable companion, inexhaustible even if it be, & more’s the pity, the finest luxury, rather than a necessity of life.”

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