James Marsh (19 July 1794-3 July 1842) is best remembered as editor of the first American edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids to Reflection. This is as it should be, for in the 1830s Aids had a momentous impact on that circle of thinkers who were known as Transcendentalists, many of them recording their debt to Marsh (and Coleridge) in their journals and correspondence.

Born in the rugged farmland of eastern Vermont, at Hartford, James was the second son of a large family and was slated to take over his father's farm. But when his older brother, Roswell, refused to carry a leg of mutton to nearby Dartmouth College to help defray his academic expenses, James Marsh went in his place. At Dartmouth, where he distinguished himself as a scholar, Marsh underwent a religious crisis in the spring of his sophomore year which resulted in his earnest conversion to Christianity...