at the outbreak of the Revolution, and died a chaplain in the army.  Ruth Haskins, the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was left a widow in 1811, with a family of five little boys.  The taste of these boys was scholarly, and four of them went through the Latin School to Harvard College, and graduated there.  Their mother was a person of great sweetness, dignity, and piety, bringing up her sons wisely and well in very straitened circumstances, and loved by them.  Her husband’s stepfather, Rev. Dr. Ripley of Concord, helped her, and constantly invited the boys to the Old Manse, so that the woods and fields along the Concord River were first a playground and then the background of the dreams of their awakening imaginations.

Born in the city, Emerson’s young mind first found delight in poems and classic prose, to which his instincts led him as naturally as another boy’s would to go fishing, but his vacations in the country supplemented these by giving him great and increasing love of nature.  In his early poems classic imagery is woven into pictures of New England woodlands.  Even as a little boy he had the habit of attempting flights of verse, stimulated by Milton, Pope, or Scott, and he and his mates took pleasure in declaiming to each other in barns and attics.  He was so full of thoughts and fancies that he sought the pen instinctively, to jot them down.

At college Emerson did not shine as a scholar, though he won prizes for essays and declamations, being especially unfitted for mathematical studies, and enjoying the classics rather in a literary than grammatical way.  And yet it is doubtful whether any man in his class used his time to better purpose with reference to his after life, for young Emerson’s instinct led him to wide reading of works, outside the curriculum, that spoke directly to him.  He had already formed the habit of writing in a journal, not the facts but the thoughts and inspirations of the day; often, also, good stories or poetical quotations, and scraps of his own verse.

On graduation from Harvard in the class of 1821, following the traditions of his family, Emerson resolved to study to be a minister, and meantime helped his older brother William in the support of the family by teaching in a school for young ladies in Boston, that the former had successfully established.  The principal was twenty-one and the assistant nineteen years of age.  For school-teaching on the usual lines Emerson was not fitted, and his youth and shyness prevented him from imparting his best gifts to his scholars.  Years later, when, in his age, his old scholars assembled to greet him, he regretted that no hint had been brought into the school of what at that very time “I was writing every night in my chamber, my first thoughts on morals and the beautiful laws of compensation, and of individual genius, which to observe and illustrate have given sweetness to many years of my life.”  Yet many scholars remembered his presence and teaching with pleasure and gratitude, not only in Boston, but in Chelmsford and Roxbury, for while his younger brothers were in college it was necessary that he should help.  In these years, as through all his youth, he was loved, spurred on in his intellectual life, and keenly criticised by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, an eager and wide reader, inspired by religious zeal, high-minded, but eccentric.