The Reverend Convers Francis, D.D., was one of the most erudite Unitarian ministers and university professors of his time. His career was almost evenly divided by his tenure of twenty-three years as pastor of the First Parish Congregational Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, and his professorship of twenty-one years in the Divinity School at Harvard. After his death, memorialists remembered him as a pioneer in the German language and theology in America, an excellent biographer and historian, a collector of rare and esoteric books, a popular teacher, a supporter of public reforms, and a beloved pastor and pulpit minister. He was a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New England Historic and Genealogical Society. Although he was a member of the Transcendental Club, he was never a major force in the New England Transcendentalist movement, though he was a strong influence in it. His name was...