bird which is to be bred
in it and to fly from it. The intellectual atmosphere into which a
scholar is born, and from which he draws the breath of his early mental
life, must be studied if we would hope to understand him thoroughly.

When the present century began, the elements, thrown into confusion
by the long struggle for Independence, had not had time to arrange
themselves in new combinations. The active intellects of the country had
found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of
political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed was
as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and
there, waiting to form centres of condensation.

Such a nebular spot had been brightening in and about Boston for a
number of years, when, in the year 1804, a small cluster of names became
visible as representing a modest constellation of literary luminaries:
John Thornton Kirkland, afterwards President of Harvard University;
Joseph Stevens Buckminster; John Sylvester John Gardiner; William Tudor;
Samuel Cooper Thacher; William Emerson. These were the chief stars of
the new cluster, and their light reached the world, or a small part of
it, as reflected from the pages of "The Monthly Anthology," which very
soon came under the editorship of the Reverend William Emerson.

The father of Ralph Waldo Emerson may be judged of in good measure by
the associates with whom he was thus connected. A brief sketch of these
friends and fellow-workers of his may not be out of place, for these
men made the local sphere of thought into which Ralph Waldo Emerson was
born.

John Thornton Kirkland should have been seen and heard as he is
remembered by old graduates of Harvard, sitting in the ancient
Presidential Chair, on Commencement Day, and calling in his penetrating
but musical accents: "_Expectatur Oratio in Lingua Latina_" or
"_Vernacula_," if the "First Scholar" was about to deliver the English
oration. It was a presence not to be forgotten. His "shining morning
face" was round as a baby's, and talked as pleasantly as his voice did,
with smiles for accents and dimples for punctuation. Mr. Ticknor speaks
of his sermons as "full of intellectual wealth and practical wisdom,
with sometimes a quaintness that bordered on humor." It was of him
that the story was always told,--it may be as old as the invention of
printing,--that he threw his sermons into a barrel, where they went to
pieces and got