Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/228

 166 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS RALPH WALDO EMERSON BV MONCURE D. CONWAV O' (1803- 1 882) k N the 30th day of April, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emer- son was "gathered to his fathers," at Concord, Mass. The simple Hebrew phrase was never more ap- propriate, for his ancestors had founded the town and been foremost at every period of its remarkable history. More than two hundred and fifty years ago John Eliot, who had gone from the University of Cambridge, Eng- land, to be the " Apostle of the Indians," found on the banks of the Musketaquid a settlement of natives, into whose language he translated the New Testament. In 1634, the Rev. Peter Bulkeley, of Bedfordshire, whose Puritan proclivities brought him under the ban of Laud, migrated with a number of his parishioners to New England ; these settled themselves at Musketaquid, which they named Concord. In the next year went from County Durham probably, Thomas Emerson, whose son married a Bulke- ley, and his grandson Rebecca Waldo, descendant of a family of the Waldenses. It was at Concord that the soldiers of George III. first met with resistance. Along the road where many Englishmen have walked with Emerson and Haw- thorne, the retreat took place, and wounded soldiers were taken into homes they had invaded to learn the meaning of love to enemies. Some of these brave men never again left the village where they were so kindly nursed. Concord, with its thirteen hundred inhabitants, supplied Washington's army with wood and hay, and suffering Boston with grain and money, with a generosity that shines in American annals. Washington's headquarters were at Craigie House, so long the home of Longfellow, and the Harvard buildings being used as barracks, the university was transferred to Concord. No mere literary estimate of Emerson's writings can adequately report the man or his work. The value placed upon him by Americans appears strangely exaggerated beside the contemporary English criticism. It were, indeed, easy to cite from European thinkers Carlyle, Quinet, John Sterling, Arthur Clough, Tyndall, Herman Grimm words concerning Emerson glowing as those of Mar- garet Fuller, Hawthorne, Curtis, Lowell, and other American authors ; but if such tributes from individual minds are universally felt in America alone, to be simplest truth and soberness, it is because Emerson cannot be seen detached from the cumulative tendencies .summed up in him, and from the indefinable revolu- tion in which they found, and still find, expression. The father of Emerson was a Unitarian preacher of fine culture, melodious