Frederic Henry Hedge

Frederic Henry Hedge 1805-90, American Unitarian clergyman and author, b. Cambridge, Mass., educated in Germany and at Harvard. He held several New England pastorates. In 1836 he joined Emerson and others in forming the Transcendental Club. His edition of Prose Writers of Germany (1848) established him as a German scholar. Hedge also wrote for periodicals, edited (1857-61) the Christian Examiner, and wrote Reason in Religion (1865) and many other books. He was professor of ecclesiastical history in the Harvard Divinity School (1857-76) and professor of German at Harvard (1872-81).

Hedge, Frederic Henry (1805–90), Unitarian clergyman in Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island, professor in Harvard Divinity School, is noted for helping to bring Emerson and other Transcendentalists the knowledge of German idealistic philosophy that he had acquired abroad. The Transcendental Club was sometimes called the Hedge Club. His many books include Prose Writers of Germany (1848), Hymns for the Church of Christ (1853), Ways of the Spirit and Other Essays (1877), Atheism in Philosophy (1884), Hours with German Classics (1886), Martin Luther and Other Essays (1888), and many sermons, orations, and translations, some of the latter included in Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (14 vols., 1838–42), edited with George Ripley.