William Ellery Channing, nephew of the great Unitarian minister of the same name, was a Transcendentalist poet and member of the Transcendental Club. He contributed more writings to the
Dial than any other and published seven volumes of poetry in his lifetime:
Poems [First Series] (1843),
Poems, Second Series (1847),
The Woodman (1849),
Near Home (1858),
The Wanderer (1871),
Eliot (1885), and
John Brown (1886). He also wrote two prose works,
Conversations in Rome Between an Artist, a Catholic, and a Critic (1847) and
Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist (1873), the latter a biography of his bosom friend
Henry David Thoreau. The two were very close, spending numerous days together in the woods, fields, rivers, and ponds of
Concord, Massachusetts, and the initial “C” in many of Thoreau’s Journal entries refers to Channing.
The name of Channing is conspicuous in the history of American idealism. Another nephew of Dr. Channing, William F. Channing, was a man of original force of mind and character, a bold adventurer in literature and life, of independent ideas, principles and deeds, an abolitionist, a friend of Garrison and Parker, reformer and philosopher. W. E. was author of many volumes, wrote poetry and prose for the “Dial,” and, in 1873, a life of Henry Thoreau.