Channing and Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau
and Emerson, are all representative of the best thought and the
noblest ethical impulses of their generation. Let us choose first
the greatest name: a sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one
of the very Sun-Gods.
The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village
library to study French's statue of Emerson will notice the
asymmetrical face. On one side it is the face of a keen Yankee
farmer, but seen from the other side it is the countenance of a
seer, a world's man. This contrast between the parochial Emerson
and the greater Emerson interprets many a puzzle in his career.
Half a mile beyond the village green to the north, close to the
"rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the Old
Manse, once tenanted and described by Hawthorne. It was built by
Emerson's grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, who
died of camp-fever at Ticonderoga. His widow married Dr. Ezra
Ripley, and here Ralph Waldo Emerson and his brothers passed many
a summer in their childhood.
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