Charles Stearns Wheeler was a respected young scholar of Greek, an editor who helped introduce Thomas Carlyle and Alfred Tennyson to American readers, and the author of articles on German culture in The Dial. His untimely death in Germany at the age of twenty-six devastated his family; the academic community in Cambridge; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists. All lamented the loss of a friend of sterling character as well as a scholarly and literary career of great promise.

Born in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the fourth of five children of Julia (Stearns) and Charles Wheeler, a farmer and town official, Wheeler helped with farming chores even as he read avidly. He was sent to his uncle in Stoughton in 1829 to study Latin and Greek, then attended the District School in Lincoln and Concord Academy, where he met young Henry Thoreau. The two were admitted to...