cord that
the soldiers of George III. first met with resistance. Along the road
where many Englishmen have walked with Emerson and Hawthorne, the
retreat took place, and wounded soldiers were taken into homes they
had invaded to learn the meaning of love to enemies. Some of these
brave men never again left the village where they were so kindly
nursed. Concord, with its thirteen hundred inhabitants, supplied
Washington's army with wood and hay, and suffering Boston with grain
and money, with a generosity that shines in American annals.
Washington's headquarters were at Craigie House, so long the home of
Longfellow, and the Harvard buildings being used as barracks, the
university was transferred to Concord.

No mere literary estimate of Emerson's writings can adequately report
the man or his work. The value placed upon him by Americans appears
strangely exaggerated beside the contemporary English criticism. It
were, indeed, easy to cite from European thinkers--Carlyle, Quinet,
John Sterling, Arthur Clough, Tyndall, Herman Grimm--words concerning
Emerson glowing as those of Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, Curtis,
Lowell, and other American authors; but if such tributes from
individual minds are universally felt in America alone, to be simplest
truth and soberness, it is because Emerson cannot be seen detached
from the cumulative tendencies summed up in him, and from the
indefinable revolution in which they found, and still find,
expression.

The father of Emerson was a Unitarian preacher of fine culture,
melodious voice, handsome person, and especially noted for his
paramount interest in the ethical and universal element of religion.
He died in 1811, at the age of forty-two, leaving his five sons, of
whom Waldo, then eight years old, was the second, to the care of his
young wife, who had been Ruth Haskins, of Boston. Emerson's early
growth was under the fostering care of good and refined women. His
mother has been described by one who knew her, the late Dr.
Frothingham, as "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. Both her mind
and character were of a superior order, and they set their stamp upon
manners of peculiar softness and natural grace and quiet dignity." She
was assisted in bringing up her family by her sister-in-law, Mary
Emerson, a scholarly woman, well read in theology and phi