tic.

After Coleridge came Emerson, by a natural succession; and side by side with Emerson-not in advance of him-there stood for American readers Carlyle, who, though not a transcendentalist, was an idealist, a worker for righteousness, a poet. Carlyle thundered as a prophet of evil, a denouncer of wrong, a summoner to good; the force of man's will was the force on which he relied for reform; his very prejudices were intense and influential. Emerson thought upon, and revealed to his countrymen, the good; he was an optimist, a serene presence, unexcited because confident of the ultimate result. Carlyle made terrible mistakes, and showed the injustice of ignorance. Emerson, though bitterly attacked, seldom retorted and seldom swerved from his self-confident course. Το the essayist of Chelsea God was a mighty avenging and rewarding force; to the essayist of Concord he was a benign spirit pervading the universe. "Thou shalt," "thou shalt not," said Carlyle; "be thyself," said Emerson.

Emerson

The life of Ralph Waldo Emerson was outwardly an uneventful one. The literary man of the nineteenth century lives in no such events the man. as those which followed Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Bacon, Milton, Bunyan, or De Foe. The placid academic career of Gray was scarcely more quiet than the lives of Wordsworth in England or Emerson or Longfellow in America. The man Emerson, outside of his books and lectures, was simply a silent citizen of the country town of Concord, in which he was a successful farmer. Most

of the male ancestors of Emerson, in the direct line, were Congregational ministers in the eastern part of Massachusetts, and one of his forefathers, by an early maternal line, was Rev. Peter Bulkley, the first minister of that town of Concord with which Emerson's fame was so closely connected. This clerical ancestry, upon which Emerson somewhat prided himself, and upon which all of his biographers dwell fondly, was not a surprising thing. The Emersons were well educated, and duly sent their sons to college. The ministerial profession was the one to which college graduates naturally turned. Forty or fifty per cent. of Harvard's alumni became ministers in the old days. The clerical line preceding the essayist and poet means simply, in this instance, that he came from the best New England stock, accustomed for years to think and live in an atmosphere stimulating to thought. It would be an error to suppose that those nearest to Emerson in the line of descent were old-fashioned Puritans. The change in theological opinion which finally brought the Unitarian revival of 1800-1820 had begun in Eastern Massachusetts by the middle of the eighteenth century. Emerson's grandmother married, as her second husband, Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley, senior minister of the Concord church after the Unitarian change; and Rev. William Emerson, father of Ralph Waldo, was minister of the First Church in Boston until his death in 1811. The First Church was historically the most prominent religious organization in the town, and William Emerson seems to have had that grace of manner and

son.

quiet eloquence which afterward appeared in his In his time he was deemed a radical, but a tolerant one; a good man, but not a very able or vigorous one. His wife was Ruth Haskins, of Boston, a woman of whom many kind things are said, and who may be described as a New England mother. The "hereditary genius" of Emerson, like that of Longfellow, Holmes, or Lowell, simply promised that he would be an intelligent man, somewhat better educated and somewhat more liberal than his predecessors, and a New Englander in mental habit. That which was to come afterward must depend upon individual taste and effort.

Emerson was born almost at the beginning of the century, in Boston, May 25, 1803, during his father's pastorate over the First Church. At that time, and during the period of Emerson's school and college days, literature in Boston was springing into leaf and flower. After theological productiveness lessened in Massachusetts, miscellaneous literature, such as it was, flourished more vigorously in Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania than on Massachusetts Bay; but no long time elapsed before the Bostonians took up their pens with a new and more distinctly literary purpose. The Unitarian ministers were paying considerable attention to the art of style, and a culture which was to be described by no more complimentary epithet than "genial," was slowly developing in the society of the town, and of the neighboring Cambridge. Finally appeared The Monthly Anthology, which

was something better than a college literary magazine. Rev. William Emerson edited it for a time, and gathered into its pages whatever literary ability he could summon to his aid. The Boston Athenæum's library and art collection were also begun; Boston gentlemen were beginning to meet in societies and elsewhere, and were striving, in several ways, to promote literature and culture. In all these other movements William Emerson took an active part. By the time Ralph Waldo Emerson graduated at Harvard, he had heard Daniel Webster plead, and Channing preach, studied Greek under Edward Everett and modern languages under George Ticknor, and read The North Emerson's American Review (virtually the improved youth. successor of The Monthly Anthology) for several years. In college he was a great reader, and an occasional writer in prose and verse. Some of his college companions-William Henry Furness, George Ripley, Charles Wentworth Upham-felt the same new stimulus at Harvard, under the English instruction of Edward Tyrrel Channing, and afterward attained some note as writers. Ripley and Furness, too, were to become "reformers " in the approaching days of religio-philosophical simmer. Elsewhere, Bryant, the elder Dana, Washington Allston, Charles Sprague, Joseph Rodman Drake, Fitz-Greene Halleck, James Gates Percival, and Irving were beginning to be known; clearly the dawn had come, but there was no precursor of Emerson.

After a period of school-teaching, for William

Emerson had left his family in narrow circumstances, Ralph Waldo Emerson, following the cleriEmerson the cal bent of his inherited genius, and minister. turning to the profession which was still the most tempting field for a New England mind, studied at the Cambridge divinity school, and entered the Unitarian ministry. At that time Unitarianism, though held in abhorrence in other parts of the country, was socially and intellectually paramount in the vicinity of Boston. The theology of Channing was prevalent. Emerson, though he began to study under Channing's supervision, was even in youth somewhat inclined to radicalism; but even as a radical he was not an early force, for neither his collegiate nor his theological studies gave special promise of future distinction. His first clerical opportunity, after finishing his work as a divinity student, was a very favorable one. In 1829, when a little less than twenty-six years old, he was ordained and installed as colleague pastor of the old Second Church in Boston, of which the senior pastor was the elder Henry Ware. Before long, by Dr. Ware's resignation, young Emerson became sole minister of one of the more prominent churches of the New England metropolis. His four years' career as a Boston preacher appears to have been fairly successful, but not brilliant. He was an anti-slavery reformer, was interested in the school affairs of Boston, and served for a time as chaplain to the State Senate. During this pastorate he was married, and his wife died. In 1832 occurred that event which ended Emerson's minis