Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-277) and index.

A tea rose -- The prodigal -- Beecher's pockets -- Tristes tropiques -- At the Hotel Byron -- The prisoner of Chillon -- Birds of passage -- Covert flowers, hidden nests -- Transits of Venus -- Foggy bottom -- A route of evanescence -- Florida.

A surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within a group of exceptional and uniquely talented characters shaped and changed American thought at the close of the Civil War. Benfey takes the seemingly arbitrary image of the hummingbird and traces its "route of evanescence" as it travels in circles to and from the creative wellsprings of the age: from the naturalist writings of abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson to the poems of his wayward pupil Emily Dickinson; into the mind of Henry Ward Beecher and within the writings and paintings of his famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. A Summer of Hummingbirds unveils how, through the art of these great thinkers, the hummingbird became the symbol of an era, an image through which they could explore their controversial (and often contradictory) ideas of nature, religion, sexuality, family, time, exoticism, and beauty.--From amazon.com.