RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 403 



promise of its final completion and of his return to this country, he 

 died suddenly of pneumonia at Rome on Jan. 6, 1882, and was buried 

 in the new Protestant cemetery outside the city's walls. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



In the death of Ralph Waldo Emerson the Academy has lost a 

 member rarely seen perhaps at its meetings, and not owing his fame to 

 any achievements in the fields in which its discussions are usually 

 engaged, yet from his youth upwards accustomed to follow with a 

 lively and sympathetic interest the triumphant progress of modern 

 science, and always glad of an opportunity to see and to converse with 

 scientific men. " I love facts," he said, " and hate lubricity and people of 

 vague perceptions." 



The earliest of his " lectures," read before the Mechanics' Institute 

 in Boston, had for its subject " Water," and it was followed by one 

 upon " The Relations of Man to the Globe." Afterwards he read an 

 essay, entitled " The Naturalist," before the Boston Society of Natural 

 History. His early note-books show many traces of his studies of 

 natural science, and in the last conversation I had with him, a short 

 time before his death, he recurred to what was always a favorite 

 theme, the astonishing advance of scientific discovery during his life- 

 time. In the series of lectures on the Natural History of the Intel- 

 lect, first given, I believe, in England in 1848, and repeated, with 

 modifications and additions, in the University Course at Harvard 

 College in 1870, the central idea was that mind is matter come to 

 self-consciousness, so that in the shapes and the laws of the physical 

 world we may trace, as in cipher, the genesis of thought. 



Ralph Waldo Emerson was the fourth child and third son of the 

 Rev. William Emerson, minister of the First Church in Boston, and 

 Ruth Haskius.* He was born in Boston, May 25, 1803, in the old 

 parsonage in Summer Street, and was the descendant of several lines 

 of faithful ministers, going back to the first settlement of the country; 

 of Peter Bulkeley, one of the first settlers of Concord, Mass., and 

 its first minister ; of Daniel Bliss, prominent in Whitfield's " revival " ; 

 of the Moodys, famous preachers of Portsmouth and York, and one 

 of them a predecessor of William Emerson in the First Cluirch in 

 Boston. His grandfather, the Rev. William Emerson, of Concord, 

 of revolutionary memory, was the builder of tlie " Old Manse," and 

 from its windows witnessed the fight at the bridge; Directly after- 

 wards he joined the army as chaplain, and died in the service. 



