May those who stand here one hundred years hence say,—­the twentieth century supplied more of kindly soil for Channing seed than the nineteenth.

EMERSON

Emerson was not a logician or reasoner, and not a rhetorician, in the common sense.  He was a poet, who wrote chiefly in prose, but also in verse.  His verse was usually rough, but sometimes finished and melodious; it was always extraordinarily concise and expressive.  During his engagement to the lady who became his second wife, he wrote thus to her:  “I am born a poet,—­of a low class without doubt, yet a poet; that is my nature and vocation.  My singing, be sure, is very husky, and is, for the most part, in prose.  Still, I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those.”

This husky poet had his living to get.  His occupations in life were those of the teacher, minister, lecturer, and author.  He was a teacher at various times between 1818 and 1826; but he never liked teaching.  He was a preacher at intervals from 1826 to 1847, but a settled minister only from 1829 to 1832.  His career as a lecturer began in the autumn of 1833; and his first book, “Nature,” was published in 1836, when he was thirty-three years old.  His lectures for money were given as a rule during the winter and early spring; and for thirty years the travelling he was obliged to do in search of audiences was often extremely fatiguing, and not without serious hardships and exposures.  These occupations usually gave him an income sufficient for his simple wants; but there were times when outgo exceeded income.  The little property his first wife left him ($1200 a year) relieved him from serious pecuniary anxiety by 1834; although it did not relieve him from earning by his own labor the livelihood of his family.

In 1834 he went to live in Concord, where his grandfather had been the minister at the time of the Revolution, and in 1835 he bought the house and grounds there which were his home for the rest of his days.  Before settling in Concord, he had spent one winter and spring (1826-27) in the Southern states, and seven months of 1833 in Europe.  Both of these absences were necessitated by the state of his health, which was precarious during his young manhood.  With these exceptions, he had lived in Boston or its immediate neighborhood, until he settled in Concord.  His progenitors on both sides were chiefly New England ministers.  His formal education was received in the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, and was therefore purely local.  How narrow and provincial seems his experience of life!  A little city, an isolated society, a country village!  Yet through books, and through intercourse with intelligent persons, he was really “set in a large place.”  The proof of this largeness, and of the keenness of his mental and moral vision, is that, in regard to some of the chief concerns of mankind, he was a seer and a fore-seer.  This prophetic quality of his I hope to demonstrate to-night in three great fields of thought—­education, social organization, and religion.