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In October 1847 Henry Thoreau terminated his now famous sojourn at Waiden Pond in order to move into Emerson's house, to help tend to family -welfare while the Concord sage -went abroad. When Emerson toured England at the peak of his fame and influence during the winter and spring of 1847-1848, he renewed his long-standing friendship with Carlyle (with whom he went to Stonehenge), visited Wordsworth, Dickens, Tennyson. He also brought with him a letter of introduction from his American friend Henry James, Sr., to a homeopathic physician called Garth Wilkinson. They met on April 17, 1848 as they dined with Crabb Robinson, William Blake's friend. Ten years earlier Wilkinson had been lent a copy of Blake's engraving of Songs of Innocence and Experience, and the following year (1839) published, with his brother, a commercial edition of Blake's text (the first publication, as such, of anything by Blake). Wilkinson was 26 at the time (born June 3, 1813), and was shortly to make the acquaintance of Browning, Carlyle, Henry James, Sr., and of course Emerson.
One of the figures profiled in Emerson's 1845 lecture series on "Representative Men" (published in 1850) was Swedenborg, whose work he was reading in Wilkinson's translations. On the evidence of his praise, Emerson was deriving much also from Wilkinson's prefatory matter: "The admirable preliminary discourses with -which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade," he -wrote, proclaiming Wilkinson "a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigor of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's. . . " Emerson was willing to extend such praise to practical support, and while on the circuit in England lecturing to Mechanics' Institutes and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, he drew his sponsors' attention to Dr. Wilkinson.
Wilkinson's first set of public lectures, on "The Physics of Human Nature," was delivered in Liverpool during August 1848. (In June he had rushed over to Paris to witness something of the revolutionary uprising, having been preceded there as well by Emerson, who'd gone over in May, when he lunched -with Chopin and met de Tocqueville.) Wilkinson's lectures were ostensibly medical, but in fact applied the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences to the topic of the body. While...