Emerson was not, of course, simply the mediator of a Puritan worldview; he was a man of his own time, whose intellectual heritage was mediated for him by the late-Augustan culture of his youth and by the heady Anglo-Germanic Romanticism of his adult years. Born 25 May 1803, he grew up in Federalist Boston, the son of William Emerson (1769-1811), a socially prominent Unitarian minister, and Ruth Haskins (1768-1853), whose background was Anglican. The Puritan tradition held little attraction for either of his parents, and in the civic-minded culture of flourishing, fashionable Boston (incorporated as a city in 1822), Calvinist views, when noticed at all, were apt to be scorned as narrow, superstitious, provincial, and vulgar. If not for his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, to whom the mystical depths of the old religion irresistibly appealed, young Waldo might have adapted more comfortably than he did to the Scottish "Common Sense" philosophy of Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1821, or to the empiricism (based on the philosophy of John Locke) of Harvard's Unitarian Divinity School, which he briefly attended a few years later. Aunt Mary, a lively, sharp-tongued personality who had special charge of Emerson's childhood religious education, was a source of more modern influences as well: suspicious of city life, she talked endlessly to her nephew about the charms of solitary communion with nature and the pastoral delights of the poetry of William Wordsworth.
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