Sunday Firesides: Look Into the Tomb

A year and two months after his wife died, Ralph Waldo Emerson opened her tomb.

Emerson had been visiting Ellen’s grave daily since she’d succumbed to tuberculosis, just two years into what had been a happy, golden marriage.

But on a gray day in March 1832, Emerson decided to not only talk to Ellen as he typically did, but to look at her dead and decaying…