George Henry Calvert (2 June 1803-24 May 1889), editor, essayist, dramatist, poet, and biographer, grew up on his family's estate in Riverdale, Maryland. Upon graduation from Harvard College in 1823, he travelled to Europe, where he studied in German universities and met Goethe. He returned to Baltimore, married, and edited the Baltimore American . In 1840 he returned to Europe, visiting William Wordsworth before his return to Newport, Rhode Island, where he settled permanently in 1843. Calvert wrote nearly forty books in over fifty years, well-read in their time but too dated to have merit today. His most famous work, Scenes and Thoughts in Europe (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846), describes continental life in the mid-century. A proponent of phrenology and the water cure, Calvert also supported German and English literature, and wrote biographies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Goethe, Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Wordsworth.