rests, with the gravestones of Hawthorne and the Alcotts, Thoreau
and William James close by.

But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, he was born in
Boston, in 1803. His father, named William like the grandfather,
was also, like the Emerson ancestors for many generations, a
clergyman--eloquent, liberal, fond of books and music, highly
honored by his alma mater Harvard and by the town of Boston,
where he ministered to the First Church. His premature death in
1811 left his widow with five sons--one of them feebleminded--and
a daughter to struggle hard with poverty. With her husband's
sister, the Calvinistic "Aunt Mary Moody" Emerson, she held,
however, that these orphaned boys had been "born to be educated."
Arid educated the "eager blushing boys" were, at the Boston Latin
School and at Harvard College, on a regimen of "toil and want and
truth and mutual faith." There are many worse systems of pedagogy
than this. Ralph was thought less persistent than his steady
older brother William, and far less brilliant than his gifted,
short-lived younger brothers, Edward and Charles. He had an
undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was graduated in
1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of irony
like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates
for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching to
help his brothers, he passed irregularly through the Divinity
School, his studies often interrupted by serious ill-health. "If
they had examined me," he said afterward of the kindly professors
in the Divinity School, "they never would have passed me." But
approve him they did, in 1826, and he entered decorously upon the
profession of his ancestors, as associate minister of the Second
Church in Boston. His "Journals," which are a priceless record of