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Emerson was born in Boston on May 25, 1803-one year before Hawthorne, four years before Longfellow and Whittier, and six years before Holms and Poe. On the paternal side he came of a long line of ministers; and in that respect there is no better representative of the Brahmin caste of New England than he. His father, the minister of the First Church in Boston, died in 1811, leaving the widow with a family of boys to bring up. There was something Spartan about Emerson’s boyhood. An important influence was that of Emerson’s aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who was determined that her nephews should attain to intellectual distinction. To judge from her letters, she must have had some influence upon Emerson’s prose style. Emerson entered Harvard College at the age of fourteen and the course of study at the school was little more advanced than that of a modern preaparatory school was little more advanced than that of a modern preparatory school. Emerson was graduated in 1821 at the age of eighteen. Emerson’s Journals reveal an earnest young man doing a considerable amout of reading and thinking for himself but his theological work at the Harvard Divinity School was irregular. He began preaching in 1826. Afterwards he said that if the authorities had inquired into his thelological views, they would have refused him the license to preach. In 1829 Emerson was called as minister to the Second Church in Boston. In the same year he was married to Ellen Louisa Tucker, who died two years later. The immediate occasion of Emerson’s giving up his church was a disagreement with his congregation over the Lord’s Suppur, which the independent clergyman found himself unable to regard as a sacrament to be administered of stated occasions. In 1832, Emerson sailed for Europe and his primary object was to see British authors : Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle. The visit marks the beginning of a notable literary friendship. In November, 1834 Emerson moved to Concord, where he made his home the remainder of his life, and in September, next year, he married Lydia Jackson. He edited the DIAL for two years after Margaret Fuller gave it up. Emerson was no primarily a literary figure or a philosopher ; he was what Professor Trent has termed him, "an ethical stimulator" or in Matthew Arnold’s word, " the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." He was much more of a mystic and poet than a philosopher. Yet Emerson’s hold on the modern reader is to be explained not only by the vitality of his ideas but by his literary power. His poems are certainly a more compact expression of his ideas. New England Transcendentalism, although not primarily a literary movement, had strong an influence upon the work of Thorearu, and other writers. American transcendentalism, an eddy in the current of Romanticism, has never been satisfactorily defined. It has been variously regarded as a distinct philosophical system, a mere faith, a recrudescence of the Puritan spirit in an age of developing national consciousness, a reaction against the dominion of Locke and the Scohct thelologians, pantheism with a peculiar admixture of skepticism. In Transcendentalism, religion, philosophy, sociology, and literature are all involved. Its fundamental principle is a belief in the infallibility of intuition. The New England transcendentalism was a late and local manifestation of that great movement for the liberation of hrmanity which, invading practically every sphere of civilized activity, swept over Europe at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. According to this view of the world, the one reality is the vast spiritual background of existence, the Oversoul, God, within which all other being is unified and from which it derived its life. Because of this indwelling of divinity, every part of the world, however small, is a microcosm, comprehending within itself all the laws and meaning of the whole. The soul of each individual, therefore, is inentical with the soul of the world, and contains, latently, all that that larger soul contains. From these central conceptions all the other teachings of the transcendentalists are derived; their doctrines of self-reliance and individualism, of the identity of moral and physical laws, of the essential unity of all religions, of the negative nature of evil; their spirit of complete tolerance and of absolute optimism ; their defiance of traditio and disregard for all external authority.
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