Ralph Waldo Emerson is not exactly my favorite guy. He will figure prominently in the book I've been (endlessly) researching as perhaps the person most responsible for much of today's New Age hairbrainism (I was going to claim first use of that last term, but google shows one other hit; damn). Looking for an image of the old... fellow, I found this 1950 archive photo. Of course, that's not when it was taken, as RWE himself was "archived" in 1882 in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass.

The foremost figure of the American Transcendentalist Movement, the poet, writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson began during the 1830's to lecture and promote his views, emphasizing man's unique spiritual place in nature. Condemned by the church for his liberal philosophy (especially in his 1840's journal "The Dial"), he helped signal the independence of American thought from European influence in his famous 1837 Harvard lecture.

from: Ralph Waldo Emerson
source: Archive Photos, January 1, 1950.
via: HighBeam Research

btw, the aforementioned famous lecture was on "The American Scholar," in which Emerson spoke of divers matters, including, and I quote "the sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude." Would that our Waldo had but lived to see the Internet!