August 23, 1774

Ralph Waldo Emerson edited the essays of Thomas Carlyle and arranged for their American publication. Carlyle is best known for his theory of history as powered by certain heroic individuals. Emerson sent his aunt a copy.

Mary Moody Emerson (August 23, 1774 to May 1, 1863) helped raise Ralph and his siblings. Though self-educated she pursued a life of ideas and was a creative influence on her nephews. Of Carlyle she said, "I don't know what he does believe about the interior world and it's divine source....What would be his theory of a single human being alone with the Infinite? "

Her letters have been collected and published: The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson (1993), and there we find a very charming passage. She complains that her nephew, sent her books without adding an inscription, without writing her name on the first page.

We quote:

I write I believe (if I have a distinct purpose at this sleepy hour) to thank you for the last two volumes of the "Misselanies"...Looked in vain for a line--a word of a name. Why I said to myself when I give a bone to the dog if I pat or speake him how much more he relishes his bit. And the very cat sits more gracefully at her meal when called poor puss.

But I shall value the books and often bless you--hope not to find what seems to me an affectation of thunder & lightning in the parts w'h belong to Carlyle's style. ..But I am too bad to prose over you at such a time. Well take the blessing of the aged and long may your virtue & happiness continue to irradiate the old earth ...your aff't Aunt 

The influence of Mary Moody Emerson on the thinker some call America's greatest, has been flagged in a recent book. One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History, by Peter Manseau (2015) is described in one reviewer's note:

The image of a city upon a hill evokes a founding idea of America: an exceptional nation of pilgrims, contending with the wilderness, united in their faith. “One Nation, Under Gods” dispels that tidy image and replaces it with a picture of early colonial life that is riddled with indifference, paranoia and ­crypto-faiths. Manseau, the author of the memoir “Vows,” explores this fractured bedrock by teasing out less frequently told stories, like those of a Muslim religious teacher who arrived by way of a slave ship; the Jews who helped win the American Revolution by circumventing the British blockade; and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aunt, whose encounter with a Hindu would inform her nephew’s work and Transcendentalist thought.