Boston, in Summer Street, May 25, 1803. He was the third son of William
Emerson, the minister of the First Church in Boston, whose father,
William Emerson, had been the patriotic minister of Concord at the
outbreak of the Revolution, and died a chaplain in the army. Ruth
Haskins, the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was left a widow in 1811,
with a family of five little boys. The taste of these boys was
scholarly, and four of them went through the Latin School to Harvard
College, and graduated there. Their mother was a person of great
sweetness, dignity, and piety, bringing up her sons wisely and well in
very straitened circumstances, and loved by them. Her husband's
stepfather, Rev. Dr. Ripley of Concord, helped her, and constantly
invited the boys to the Old Manse, so that the woods and fields along
the Concord River were first a playground and then the background of the
dreams of their awakening imaginations.

Born in the city, Emerson's young mind first found delight in poems and
classic prose, to which his instincts led him as naturally as another
boy's would to go fishing, but his vacations in the country supplemented
these by giving him great and increasing love of nature. In his early
poems classic imagery is woven into pictures of New England woodlands.
Even as a little boy he had the habit of attempting flights of verse,
stimulated by Milton, Pope, or Scott, and he and his mates took pleasure
in declaiming to each other in barns and attics. He was so full of
thoughts and fancies that he sought the pen instinctively, to jot them
down.

At college Emerson did not shine as a scholar, though he won prizes for
essays and declamations, being especially unfitted for mathematical
studies, and enjoying the classics rather in a literary than grammatical
way. And yet it is doubtful whether any man in his class used his time