First edition of Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836), which contained the foundation of his intellectual edifice developed over the years. From the collection of R. Eden Martin.

Portrait of Emerson reproduced from a lithograph by Forbes Lithograph Company of Boston. It was redrawn from a tintype of Emerson taken in the 1850s. From Frontispiece in Bliss Perry, Emerson Today, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1931.

Title page for Emerson’s “Divinity School Address,” an address so powerful — “dangerous,” was the word often used to describe it — that the powers-that-be refused to bring him back on the Harvard campus until near the end of his life. From the collection of R. Eden Martin.