high character, who under great difficulties reared and educated her family. When they were without food for a day she sustained them by stories of heroic endurance. His grandfather, William Emerson, minister of this town, builder of the Old Manse, in which his children were born, addressed and encouraged the minutemen on the Common in the early morning of the nineteenth of April, 1775, was witness and recorder of the fight at the bridge, joined the army at Ticonderoga as chaplain, and died of camp-fever in 1776.

The only grandfather Mr. Emerson ever knew was Dr. Ezra Ripley, minister in this town for nearly sixty-three years, who married the widow of his predecessor and lived in the Old Manse, where Mr. Emerson came as a boy on frequent visits, attending school, and forming the acquaintance of the families of the town, and the fields, trees, and meadows which were his intimate friends during his long life. His biographical sketch of Dr. Ripley, published among the memoirs of the Social Circle, shows a deep appreciation of the life and character and manners of a sturdy New England minister of the old school, and does not fail to note the humorous side of its subject.

Mr. Emerson entered Harvard College in 1817, was President's Freshman under President Kirkland, which office entitled him to a room rent free, earned needed money as a waiter in Commons, held several scholarships, withdrew with his class from college

in his sophomore year because some of its members were expelled for a fight with freshmen, returned and graduated about midway in his class in 1821, and was its class poet. He taught school, studied for the ministry, was ordained in 1826 and preached, was threatened by serious sickness, became associate pastor with the Rev. Henry Ware in the Second Church in Boston (the old church of Cotton Mather), separated himself therefrom in 1832, refused offers of settlement from other societies, and came to Concord with his mother to board at the Old Manse in the fall of 1834, when he was thirtyone years of age.

He came to be the seer and prophet and poet, the teacher and the spokesman of this town. On its great occasions he appeared for it, and not only illumined the events of which he spoke but made those events vocal and perpetuated them in human memory. His address on the two hundredth anniversary of the settlement of the town is easily the first of its kind. It should be read here to each successive generation on the twelfth of September, even as the Deelaration of Independence is read in our towns on the Fourth of July. It was delivered on Saturday, September 12, 1835, when he was thirty-two years old. He drove to Plymouth on the fourteenth, was there married to Miss Lydia Jackson, and drove back on the fifteenth with his wife, to the house which he had bought on the Cambridge turnpike, to live there the rest of his life.

Of the farm, as he called it, on which he lived, he subsequently wrote thus:

and

"When I bought my farm I did not know what a bargain I had in the blue-birds, bobolinks, and thrushes, which were not charged in the bill. As little did I guess what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying, what reaches of landscape, and what fields and lanes for a tramp. Neither did I fully consider what an indescribable luxury is our Indian River, which runs parallel with the village street and to which every house on that long street has a back door which leads down through the garden to the river bank; where a skiff or dory gives you all summer access to enchantments new every day, all winter to miles of ice for the skater. Still less did I know what good and true neighbors I was buying: men of thought and virtue, some of them known the country through for their learning, or subtlety, or action, or patriotic power, but whom I had the pleasure of knowing long before the country did; and other men, not known widely, but known at home, farmers, not doctors of laws, but doctors of land, skilled in turning a swamp or a sandbank into a fruitful field, and where witch-grass and nettles grew causing a forest of apple-trees or miles of corn and rye to thrive. I did not know what groups of interesting school-boys and fair school-girls were to greet me in the highway, and to take hold of one's heart at the school exhibitions."

In 1837 he wrote the famous hymn for the dedi

cation of the Battle Monument, and compressed the story of the fight into the lines which are now inscribed on the base of the statue of the Minuteman.

And we take pride in the knowledge that the sublime record of his mighty thoughts has been heard round the world, with a potency for good at least as effective as the shot of the embattled farmers.

In his old age, upon the one hundredth anniversary of the fight, he spoke at our great celebration, saying at the close," It is a proud and tender story. I challenge any lover of Massachusetts to read the fiftyninth chapter of Bancroft's History without tears of joy."

And what great benefactions he showered upon this people all his life. He gratuitously gave one hundred lectures before our Lyceum, or an average of two a year. It was sometimes irreverently said that he tried them on in Concord. If this were true, it is comforting to us to admit that they proved a good fit. They are themselves the record of a noble life. They constitute the greatest service rendered to this community by any single life in its history. They were eagerly attended by old and young. They were filled with lofty and inspiring thoughts, and every now and then came flashes of unexpected humor.

I remember hearing as a boy a lecture of his; the subject I have forgotten, its doctrines probably I did not appreciate; I was no doubt charmed as always by the music of his voice and the felicity of his diction. Perhaps he was arguing for concentration of

effort. He turned from the pages of his manuscript, which, like a handful of pearls, he would seem to take one by one at random and discourse upon, and, hesitating a moment as he looked out upon his audience, smiled, and said, "No man, says the Italian proverb, can carry more than three watermelons under one arm." The memory of this anecdote served a good end thirty years afterward, and furnished an apt illustration of the helpless condition of a witness who had unsuccessfully ventured on a number of falsehoods in testifying to an important transaction.

He was for many years on our School Committee. He regularly attended the town meetings and occa sionally took active part in the discussions. We re member his speaking words of high encouragement and patriotic fervor to a company of young men of this town who were starting for the front in the Civil War. These words were spoken on the Common to the descendants of the men for whom his grandfather had done a similar service on the same spot nearly ninety years before.

And when the town dedicated its monument to those who went and did not return, we spontaneously turned again to the kindness which never failed us.

He had long service on the Library Committee of the town. He delivered also the address at the opening of our new Public Library in 1873.

He was a member of this Parish, had during all his life here a pew, in which he sat with his family whenever he went to church.