Half a mile east of the village, on
the Cambridge turnpike, is Emerson's own house, still sheltered
by the pines which Thoreau helped him to plant in 1838. Within
the house everything is unchanged: here are the worn books, pen
and inkstand, the favorite pictures upon the wall. Over the ridge
to the north lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery where the poet
rests, with the gravestones of Hawthorne and the Alcotts, Thoreau
and William James close by.
But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, he was born in
Boston, in 1803. His father, named William like the grandfather,
was also, like the Emerson ancestors for many generations, a
clergyman--eloquent, liberal, fond of books and music, highly
honored by his alma mater Harvard and by the town of Boston,
where he ministered to the First Church. His premature death in
1811 left his widow with five sons--one of them feebleminded--and
a daughter to struggle hard with poverty. With her husband's
sister, the Calvinistic "Aunt Mary Moody" Emerson, she held,
however, that these orphaned boys had been "born to be educated.
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