ll sheltered by the pines which Thoreau
helped him to plant in 1838. Within the house everything is unchanged:
here are the worn books, pen and inkstand, the favorite pictures upon
the wall. Over the ridge to the north lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery
where the poet 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." And
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 his inner life, at this and later periods,
reveal the rigid self-scrutiny, the tender idealism, with which he began
his ministerial career.

But as a scheme of life for Ralph Waldo Emerson this vocation would not
satisfy. The sexton of the Second Church thought that the young man was
not at his best at funerals. Father Taylor, the eccentric Methodist,
whom Emerson assisted at a sa