large cities; and even at the present day our Jerusalem and Samaria, though they by no means refuse dealing with each other, do not exchange so many cards as they do checks and dollars.  The exodus of those children of Israel from the house of bondage, as they chose to consider it, and their fusion with the mass of independent citizens, got rid of a class distinction which was felt even in the sanctuary.  True religious equality is harder to establish than civil liberty.  No man has done more for spiritual republicanism than Emerson, though he came from the daintiest sectarian circle of the time in the whole country.

Such were Emerson’s intellectual and moral parentage, nurture, and environment; such was the atmosphere in which he grew up from youth to manhood.

CHAPTER I.

Birthplace.—­Boyhood.—­College Life.

1803-1823.  To AET. 20.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of
May, 1803.

He was the second of five sons; William, R.W., Edward Bliss, Robert
Bulkeley, and Charles Chauncy.

His birthplace and that of our other illustrious Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, were within a kite-string’s distance of each other.  When the baby philosopher of the last century was carried from Milk Street through the narrow passage long known as Bishop’s Alley, now Hawley Street, he came out in Summer Street, very nearly opposite the spot where, at the beginning of this century, stood the parsonage of the First Church, the home of the Reverend William Emerson, its pastor, and the birthplace of his son, Ralph Waldo.  The oblong quadrangle between Newbury, now Washington Street, Pond, now Bedford Street, Summer Street, and the open space called Church Green, where the New South Church was afterwards erected, is represented on Bonner’s maps of 1722 and 1769 as an almost blank area, not crossed or penetrated by a single passageway.

Even so late as less than half a century ago this region was still a most attractive little rus in urbe.  The sunny gardens of the late Judge Charles Jackson and the late Mr. S.P.  Gardner opened their flowers and ripened their fruits in the places now occupied by great warehouses and other massive edifices.  The most aristocratic pears, the “Saint Michael,” the “Brown Bury,” found their natural homes in these sheltered enclosures.  The fine old mansion of Judge William Prescott looked out upon these gardens.  Some of us can well remember the window of his son’s, the historian’s, study, the light from which used every evening to glimmer through the leaves of the pear-trees while “The Conquest of Mexico” was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less formidable than those encountered by Cortes.  It was a charmed region in which Emerson first drew his breath, and I am fortunate in having a communication from one who knew it and him longer than almost any other living person.