Among his circle of contemporaries were poets and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller who were deeply disappointed when Ward gave up a career in writing for business just before he married.

He was the son of Lydia Gray (1789–1874)[1] and Thomas Wren Ward (1786–1858), who served as treasurer of Harvard from 1830 to 1842[2] and was the American agent for London-based Baring Brothers & Co., merchant bank.

[5] He joined the Farrars on a trip to Europe in the summer of 1836, though he broke from them for private travels to England, Paris, and Rome, before rejoining them in the Swiss Alps by August 1837.

[11] Emerson edited the project but told Ward that Channing "goes to the very end of the poetic license, and defies a little too disdainfully his dictionary and logic".

[12] Critic Edgar Allan Poe agreed and noted in his review of Channing's book that it was "full of all kinds of mistakes, of which the most important is that of their having been written at all".

[13] Thanks to an inheritance from his father as well as his own business dealings, Ward became the wealthiest person among the Transcendentalist circle, though he did not pursue literature for long.

"[14] Emerson was equally disappointed and wrote to fellow Transcendentalist Caroline Sturgis Tappan that the news affected him "with a certain terror" and he concluded that "happiness is so vulgar".