Ralph Waldo Emerson | Page 4

where he died in the
year 1680. This is the first connection of the name of Emerson with
Concord, with which it has since been so long associated.
Edward Emerson, son of the first and father of the second Reverend
Joseph Emerson, though not a minister, was the next thing to being one,
for on his gravestone he is thus recorded: "Mr. Edward Emerson,
sometime Deacon of the first church in Newbury." He was noted for
the virtue of patience, and it is a family tradition that he never
complained but once, when he said mildly to his daughter that her
dumplings were somewhat harder than needful,--"but not often." This
same Edward was the only break in the line of ministers who
descended from Thomas of Ipswich. He is remembered in the family as
having been "a merchant in Charlestown."
Their son, the second Reverend Joseph Emerson, Minister of Malden
for nearly half a century, married Mary, the daughter of the Reverend
Samuel Moody,--Father Moody,--of York, Maine. Three of his sons
were ministers, and one of these, William, was pastor of the church at
Concord at the period of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.
As the successive generations narrow down towards the individual
whose life we are recalling, the character of his progenitors becomes

more and more important and interesting to the biographer. The
Reverend William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo, was an
excellent and popular preacher and an ardent and devoted patriot. He
preached resistance to tyrants from the pulpit, he encouraged his
townsmen and their allies to make a stand against the soldiers who had
marched upon their peaceful village, and would have taken a part in the
Fight at the Bridge, which he saw from his own house, had not the
friends around him prevented his quitting his doorstep. He left Concord
in 1776 to join the army at Ticonderoga, was taken with fever, was
advised to return to Concord and set out on the journey, but died on his
way. His wife was the daughter of the Reverend Daniel Bliss, his
predecessor in the pulpit at Concord. This was another very noticeable
personage in the line of Emerson's ancestors. His merits and abilities
are described at great length on his tombstone in the Concord
burial-ground. There is no reason to doubt that his epitaph was
composed by one who knew him well. But the slabs which record the
excellences of our New England clergymen of the past generations are
so crowded with virtues that the reader can hardly help inquiring
whether a sharp bargain was not driven with the stonecutter, like that
which the good Vicar of Wakefield arranged with the portrait-painter.
He was to represent Sophia as a shepherdess, it will be remembered,
with as many sheep as he could afford to put in for nothing.
William Emerson left four children, a son bearing the same name, and
three daughters, one of whom, Mary Moody Emerson, is well
remembered as pictured for us by her nephew, Ralph Waldo. His
widow became the wife of the Reverend Ezra Ripley, Doctor of
Divinity, and his successor as Minister at Concord.
The Reverend William Emerson, the second of that name and
profession, and the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in the
year 1769, and graduated at Harvard College in 1789. He was settled as
Minister in the town of Harvard in the year 1792, and in 1799 became
Minister of the First Church in Boston. In 1796 he married Ruth
Haskins of Boston. He died in 1811, leaving five sons, of whom Ralph
Waldo was the second.
The interest which attaches itself to the immediate parentage of a man
like Emerson leads us to inquire particularly about the characteristics of
the Reverend William Emerson so far as we can learn them from his

own writings and from the record of his contemporaries.
The Reverend Dr. Sprague's valuable and well-known work, "Annals of
the American Pulpit," contains three letters from which we learn some
of his leading characteristics. Dr. Pierce of Brookline, the faithful
chronicler of his time, speaks of his pulpit talents as extraordinary, but
thinks there was not a perfect sympathy between him and the people of
the quiet little town of Harvard, while he was highly acceptable in the
pulpits of the metropolis. In personal appearance he was attractive; his
voice was melodious, his utterance distinct, his manner agreeable. "He
was a faithful and generous friend and knew how to forgive an
enemy.--In his theological views perhaps he went farther on the liberal
side than most of his brethren with whom he was associated.--He was,
however, perfectly tolerant towards those who differed from him most
widely."
Dr. Charles Lowell, another brother minister, says of him, "Mr.
Emerson was a handsome man, rather tall, with a