hood, in manners and morals, Emerson was born a Puritan, and so he lived and died. To him the spirit was always more than the senses, conduct more than enjoyment, duty more than pleasure, and life a serious affair of which a strict account must be given.

His father was the Rev. William Emerson, minister of the First Church (Congregational) in Boston. Ralph was born in 1803, the fourth child in a family of eight, of whom at least three gave proof of more than ordinary powers of mind. He was brought up in a family circle where study was regarded as the next thing in impor-. tance to moral training; and after his father's death in 1811, he had to share with the rest of the household the wholesome privations and self-denials which make a bracing life for those who are poor in money and rich in spirit. At the public grammar school and the Latin school he did nothing specially worthy of note. He had an unmarried aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who probably played a larger part in his education than all his schoolmasters. She was a woman of keen mind and intense feelings, a brilliant old maid, an original saint, clinging with both hands to the old forms of theology from which her nephew floated away, but loving the boy with a jealous passion, believing in his powers, urging him forward in his studies, and doing more than any one else to form, by action and reaction, his youthful genius and character.

II. COLLEGE LIFE, TEACHING, AND THE PASTORATE

He graduated in 1821,

His best success
He won a prize

Emerson was fourteen years old when he entered Harvard College. He partly worked his passage by running errands as "President's freshman," and by teaching in his brother's Cambridge school. ranking about the middle of the class. was in English literature and oratory. for declamation, and two prizes for essays, one on The Character of Socrates, and the other on The Present State of Ethical Philosophy, both rather dull and formal productions. He was fond of reading and writing verse, and was chosen as the class-day poet. His cheerful, quiet manner, even-tempered and not without a tranquil kind of mirth, made him a favourite with his classmates, in spite of a certain reserve. Among the college faculty his admiration was particularly given to the stately preacher and orator, Edward Everett, professor of Greek Literature. At this time the boy's ambition was to become a teacher of rhetoric and elocution.

But destiny had other things in store for him. His older brother William had opened a school for girls in Boston; and there Ralph, after his graduation, became an assistant. He did not like the work at all. The routine of the class room was distasteful to him, and he chafed under the necessity of attending to superficial duties. The life of the city seemed conventional and insincere, and its social distinctions and rivalries stupid and tire

some.

His imagination was beginning to glow, and the bonds of custom and fashion, even the sober custom and fashion of Boston in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, weighed heavily upon his poetic nature. He wished to think for himself, to live his own life, to be a leader rather than a follower of others. In this his aunt encouraged him. She urged him to seek retirement, independence, friendship with nature; to be no longer the "nursling of surrounding circumstances"; to strike out on his own course and follow the guidings of the spirit.

At that time the ministry seemed to offer the best field to a young man who was ambitious for spiritual leadership. Emerson entered the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1825 to prepare himself for the pulpit. His course was much interrupted by ill health. In 1826 he was threatened with consumption and compelled to take a long journey in the South. Returning the following year he continued his studies and preached as a candidate in various churches. In 1829 he married Miss Ellen Tucker of Concord and was installed as associate minister of the Second Church (Unitarian), in Boston. The senior minister retired soon after, and Emerson was left as the sole pastor. His thoughtful sermons, simple, direct, and elevated, pleased his congregation; the tranquil enthusiasm of his nature and the charm of his manner made him welcome in the homes of his people. At twenty-seven years of age he seemed to be well settled for life as a parish minister of the Unitarian Church.

But in 1832 his wife died, an event which greatly de

pressed him in health and spirits. Later in the same year he came to the conviction that the Lord's Supper was not intended by Christ to be a permanent institution. Following his passion for independence and sincerity, he preached a sermon to his congregation declaring that he was not willing to celebrate the Sacrament any longer, unless they would cease to observe the outward form, dispense with the use of the elements of bread and wine, and make the rite simply an act of spiritual remembrance. Precisely what he meant by this his congregation may not have understood, but at all events they declined the proposition, and Emerson retired, not without some disappointment, from the pastoral office. He never took charge of a parish again; though he continued to preach in various pulpits, as opportunity offered, until 1847. In fact he was always a preacher, though of a singular and independent order. His chosen task in the world was to befriend and guide the inner life of

man.

III. TRAVEL, STUDY, AND SELF-DISCOVERY

The three years that followed Emerson's resignation from his church were among the most important ɔf his life, for in them he found himself and his proper work in the world. He was not, in fact, fitted for any of the regular professions, the ministry, law, medicine, teaching, or even journalism, in all of which a certain conformity to rule and system is demanded and needed. He

was an exceptional man, too independent in his thoughts and feelings, too strongly convinced that the only way to be free is to make your own rules, too much enchanted with the beauty of his own intellectual visions and the joy of expressing them in his own striking, brilliant, unsystematic way, ever to find a place with other men in one of those institutions, like churches or universities, which move slowly, along fixed lines. He must mark out his own course, and mark it from day to day. He must deliver his own message to the world, not as a member of an organized body, but as an individual, a representative "single man." He was more than a Unitarian. He was a Unit.

On Christmas Day, 1832, he took passage in a sailing vessel for the Mediterranean. He travelled through Italy, visited Paris, spent two months in Scotland and England, and saw the four men that he most desired to see - Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. "The comfort of meeting such men of genius as these," he wrote, "is that they talk sincerely." His visit to Carlyle, in the lonely farmhouse at Craigenputtock, was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Emerson secured the publication of Carlyle's first books in America. Carlyle introduced Emerson's Essays into England. The two men were bound together by a mutual respect deeper than a sympathy of tastes, and a community of spirit stronger than a similarity of opinions. Emerson was a sweet-tempered Carlyle, living in the sunshine. Carlyle was a militant Emerson, moving amid thunder-clouds.