As long as man labors for a physical existence, though an act of necessity almost, he is yet natural; it is life, though that of this world, for which he instinctively works.

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity is it not?

The last decades of Very's life were spent in Salem as a recluse under the care of his sister. The first signs of a breakdown came shortly after meeting Emerson as Very was completing an essay on William Shakespeare.

Born in Salem Massachusetts to two unwed first cousins Jones Very became associated with Harvard University first as an undergraduate then as a student in the Harvard Divinity School and as a tutor of Greek. Soon after Very asserted that he was the Second Coming of Christ which resulted in his dismissal from Harvard and his eventual institutionalization in an insane asylum. Jones Very (August 28 1813 – May 8 1880) was an American poet essayist clergymen and mystic associated with the American Transcendentalism movement.