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 mixed up, and that when he was going to preach he fished out what he thought would be about enough for a sermon, and patched the leaves together as he best might.  The Reverend Dr. Lowell says:  “He always found the right piece, and that was better than almost any of his brethren could have found in what they had written with twice the labor.”  Mr. Cabot, who knew all Emerson’s literary habits, says he used to fish out the number of leaves he wanted for a lecture in somewhat the same way.  Emerson’s father, however, was very methodical, according to Dr. Lowell, and had “a place for everything, and everything in its place.”  Dr. Kirkland left little to be remembered by, and like many of the most interesting personalities we have met with, has become a very thin ghost to the grandchildren of his contemporaries.

Joseph Stevens Buckminster was the pulpit darling of his day, in Boston.  The beauty of his person, the perfection of his oratory, the finish of his style, added to the sweetness of his character, made him one of those living idols which seem to be as necessary to Protestantism as images and pictures are to Romanism.