Mr. William Emerson left, published, fifteen Sermons and Discourses, an Oration pronounced at Boston on the Fourth of July, 1802, a Collection of Psalms and Hymns, an Historical Sketch of the First Church in Boston, besides his contributions to the “Monthly Anthology,” of which he was the Editor.

Ruth Haskins, the wife of William and the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is spoken of by the late Dr. Frothingham, in an article in the “Christian Examiner,” as a woman “of great patience and fortitude, of the serenest trust in God, of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous bearing, one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority, and knew how to give the least trouble and the greatest happiness after that authority was resigned.  Both her mind and her character were of a superior order, and they set their stamp upon manners of peculiar softness and natural grace and quiet dignity.  Her sensible and kindly speech was always as good as the best instruction; her smile, though it was ever ready, was a reward.”

The Reverend Dr. Furness of Philadelphia, who grew up with her son, says, “Waldo bore a strong resemblance to his father; the other children resembled their mother.”

Such was the descent of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  If the ideas of parents survive as impressions or tendencies in their descendants, no man had a better right to an inheritance of theological instincts than this representative of a long line of ministers.  The same trains of thought and feeling might naturally gain in force from another association of near family relationship, though not of blood.  After the death of the first William Emerson, the Concord minister, his widow, Mr. Emerson’s grandmother, married, as has been mentioned, his successor, Dr. Ezra Ripley.  The grandson spent much time in the family of Dr. Ripley, whose character he has drawn with exquisite felicity in a sketch read before The Social Circle of Concord, and published in the “Atlantic Monthly” for November, 1883.  Mr. Emerson says of him:  “He was identified with the ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and liberated America....  The same faith made what was strong and what was weak in Dr. Ripley.”  It would be hard to find a more perfect sketch of character than Mr. Emerson’s living picture of Dr. Ripley.  I myself remember him as a comely little old gentleman, but he was not so communicative in a strange household as his clerical brethren, smiling John Foster of Brighton and chatty Jonathan Homer of Newton.  Mr. Emerson says, “He was a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable, manly, and public-spirited; his nature social, his house open to all men.—­His