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TOWN THROWING YEARLONG PARTY FOR EMERSON'S 200TH

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From: The Boston Globe
Date: 20030119
Author:Leslie Anderson, Globe correspondent

They came to his study as if to a shrine. Daniel Webster. Louis Agassiz. John Brown. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

But Ralph Waldo Emerson also welcomed the earnest young poets and starving philosophers who made a pilgrimage to Concord during the late 1800s to visit America's most celebrated man of letters.

Rich and poor, famous and obscure, visitors would take a seat on Emerson's horsehair sofa and chat with the aging guru.

Then came Emerson's favorite moment.

"They'd bow," says David Wood, curator of the Concord Museum. "And as they backed up, they'd trip over the feet of the sofa."

The leather ...

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