Octavo, original gilt-stamped green cloth, top edge gilt. First Edition. This scarce first edition of Letters contains correspondence between Emerson and Samuel Gray Ward from August 1838 to November 1853. Their close friendship began in 1838, when Margaret Fuller introduced Emerson to her circle of three younger friends: Anna Barker, Caroline Sturgis and Ward. “If it is true, as Emerson believed, that the finding of a new friend is a great event, the years from 1838-40 must be counted among the most eventful of his life. His friendship with Thoreau began early in 1838. In June of the same year… his friendship began with Samuel Gray Ward, a traveled and cultured lover of art, the son of a Boston banking family… [To] Emerson, who regarded himself as something of a hermit, the warmth of friendship was almost a novel sensation…. He debated it with Fuller and Sturgis. Finally, in the summer of 1840, he wrote his essay Friendship” (McNulty, New England Quarterly). Ward “‘more than any other person’ was on Emerson’s mind ‘as he wrote the journal passages that became the raw material’ for Friendship” (Robinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller and Transcendentalism, 9). In addition to writing Gray herein that Friendship is “indebted to you” (21), Emerson speaks of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Fuller and much more. First edition, first issue; Myerson’s Binding “A.” Edited by Charles Eliot Norton. Without scarce dust jacket, rarely found. Myerson A47.1.a. BAL 5307.