After Reverend William Emerson’s death Mrs. Emerson removed to a house in Beacon Street, where the Athenaeum Building now stands.  She kept some boarders,—­among them Lemuel Shaw, afterwards Chief Justice of the State of Massachusetts.  It was but a short distance to the Common, and Waldo and Charles used to drive their mother’s cow there to pasture.

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The Reverend Doctor Rufus Ellis, the much respected living successor of William Emerson as Minister of the First Church, says that R.W.  Emerson must have been born in the old parsonage, as his father (who died when he was eight years old) lived but a very short time in “the new parsonage,” which was, doubtless, the “brick house” above referred to.

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We get a few glimpses of the boy from other sources.  Mr. Cooke tells us that he entered the public grammar school at the age of eight years, and soon afterwards the Latin School.  At the age of eleven he was turning Virgil into very readable English heroics.  He loved the study of Greek; was fond of reading history and given to the frequent writing of verses.  But he thinks “the idle books under the bench at the Latin School” were as profitable to him as his regular studies.

Another glimpse of him is that given us by Mr. Ireland from the “Boyhood Memories” of Rufus Dawes.  His old schoolmate speaks of him as “a spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be about ten years old,—­whose image more than any other is still deeply stamped upon my mind, as I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why, and thought him so angelic and remarkable.”  That “blue nankeen” sounds strangely, it may be, to the readers of this later generation, but in the first quarter of the century blue and yellow or buff-colored cotton from China were a common summer clothing of children.  The places where the factories and streets of the cities of Lowell and Lawrence were to rise were then open fields and farms.  My recollection is that we did not think very highly of ourselves when we were in blue nankeen,—­a dull-colored fabric, too nearly of the complexion of the slates on which we did our ciphering.

Emerson was not particularly distinguished in College.  Having a near connection in the same class as he, and being, as a Cambridge boy, generally familiar with the names of the more noted young men in College from the year when George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, and Francis William Winthrop graduated until after I myself left College, I might have expected to hear something of a young man who afterwards became one of the great writers of his time.  I do not recollect hearing of him except as keeping school for a short time in Cambridge, before he settled as a minister.  His classmate, Mr. Josiah Quincy, writes thus of his college days:—­