SOURCE: Norko, Julie M. “Christopher Pearse Cranch's Struggle with the Muses.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1992): 209-27.

In the following essay, Norko discusses Cranch's personal struggle in choosing between a career in the ministry, which he believed was his duty, and art and literature, which he found more appealing.

In may 1874, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a letter to Christopher Pearse Cranch containing his assessment of the younger man's talents: “I have always understood that you are the victim of your own various gifts; that all the muses, jealous of each other, haunt your brain, and I well remember your speech to the frogs, which called out all the eloquence of the inhabitants of the swamp, in what we call Sleepy Hollow in Concord, many years ago.”¹

The critical assessments of the individual who entertained children with sounds of barnyard animals at Brook Farm and adults with Emersonian caricatures...