EMERSON was “the eighth in succession of a line of Puritan ministers.” He was born May 25th, 1803, in Boston, where his father, Rev. William Emerson, was pastor of the “First Church.” Emerson himself was educated at Harvard for the ministry, and from 1829 to 1832 he filled a Unitarian pulpit in Boston; but he found the pulpit uncongenial because of its restrictions, and gave it up to preach in a field where his intellect could create for itself the largest possible liberty of expression. In 1833 he began the work as a lecturer and platform-teacher, which lasted until his death, April 27th, 1882. It was work for which he was in every way fitted; and as an incident of it, he became one of the greatest essayists of the nineteenth century. Primarily and fundamentally he is a poet, who failed to become the greatest American poet of the century because no one can be at once a great poet and a great preacher. The poet is a picture maker. He must give his thoughts harmonious images, and make them move before us to concordant music. He must make us forget that they are the thoughts of his mind and convince us that they are living things, or he fails as a poet. But the preacher must compel us to recognize his thought as valid; to think it ourselves and to enter with it into his own relations with the great universe of thought to which it belongs. This faculty Emerson has above any other American essayist. It is part of his nature and his creed that he should have it. He felt that the supreme necessity of his existence was intellectual activity, that he might enter into closer relations with the ceaseless intellectual activity of which all nature is a result. “Behold there in the wood the fine madman. He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily in his veins;… He does not longer appertain to his family and society. He is somewhat. He is a person. He is a soul.”—This is his own account of himself and of how he grew into possession of the high courage necessary to give expression to such an individuality as his, in spite of scoffs, which were hard to bear, and of neglect, which was harder still. It is said that it took twelve years to sell five hundred copies of the first edition of “Nature”—the volume in which he first defined his purposes. But he had something higher than self-confidence to sustain him. He had faith. He believed that all truth is a direct inspiration from God, and that this inspiration will go on increasing as long as love and faith are left on earth. This was his creed. He did not hesitate to believe himself inspired by God with all the truth his mind was capable of receiving; and in his lectures, his poems, and his essays, he attempted to so express truth as to make it appear to all others as beautiful and desirable as it did to him. It was a high and noble ambition, and it has given his work an immortality of high and noble usefulness.