present at the unveiling to do honor to the poet whose work was
such a noble contribution to the art of his native land.

CHAPTER XI

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1803-1882

Walking the streets of Boston, in the days when old-fashioned
gambrel-roofed houses and gardens filled the space now occupied by
dingy warehouses, might be seen a serious-eyed boy who, whether at
work or at play, seemed always to his companions to live in a world
a little different from their own. This was not the dream-world so
familiar to childhood, but another which few children enter, and those
only who seem destined to be teachers of their race. One enters this
world just as the world of day-dreams is entered, by forgetting the
real world for a time and letting the mind think what thoughts it
will. In this world Milton spent many long hours when a child, and
Bunyan made immortal in literature the memory of these dreams of
youth. Never any thought of the real world enters this place, whose
visitors see but one thing, a vision of the soul as it journeys
through life. To Bunyan this seemed but a journey over dangerous
roads, through lonely valleys, and over steep mountain sides;
to Milton it seemed a war between good and evil; to this little
New-England boy it seemed but a vision of duty bravely accomplished,
and in this he was true to the instincts of that Puritan race to which
he belonged. The boy's father was the Rev. William Emerson, pastor of
the First Church in Boston, who had died when this son, Ralph Waldo,
was in his ninth year; but for three years longer the family continued
to reside in the quaint old parsonage, in which Emerson had been born.
The father had left his family so poor that the congregation of the
First Church voted an annuity of five hundred dollars to the widow for
seven years, and many were the straits the little family was put to
in order to eke out a comfortable living. The one ambition was to have
the three boys educated. An aunt who lived in the family declared
that they were born to be educated, and that it must be brought about
somehow. The mother took boarders, and the two eldest boys, Ralph and
Edward, helped do the housework. In a little letter written to his
aunt, in his tenth year, Ralph mentions that he rose before six in the
morning in order to help his brother make the fire and set the table
for prayers before calling his mother--so early did the child realize
that he must be the burden-sharer of the f