Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American author and leader of New England transcendentalism, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, a locally distinguished Unitarian clergyman, died in 1811 leaving Emerson and five other children in the care of a pious mother and a very learned aunt on the father's side. From 1813 to 1817 Emerson attended the Boston Latin School; then, after four undistinguished years at Harvard, he became a schoolmaster while he continued to study extramurally at Harvard Divinity School. "My reasoning faculty is proportionally weak," he confessed in his Journal in 1824, on deciding to become a minister, "nor can I ever hope to write a Butler's Analogy or an Essay of Hume. … [But] the preaching most in vogue at the present day depends chiefly on imagination [italics added] for its success, and asks those accomplishments which I believe are most within my grasp." Made...