EMERSON. » 35 EM'ERSON. A frontier town of Proveneher County, Manitoba, Canada, on the right bank of the Red River, 00 miles south of Winnipeg ( Map: Manitoba, K. 5). It is the terminus of branch lines of the Canadian Pacific and the lireat Northern railways. The United Stales is repre sented by a consular agent. Population, in 1891, (iOO; in 1901, 840. EMERSON, Alfred (1859—). An Ameri- can arclucologist, appointed associate professor of classical archaeology at Cornell University in 1891. lie was lioni at I Iicencastle. Pa., and was educated in Germany and at the Johns Hopkins University. Professor Emerson's publications include Disscrtatio de Hercule Ifomerico ( 1881). In 1891 he became a contributing editor of the American Journal of Archaeology. EMERSON, Benjamin Kjendaix (1843—). An American geologist, born at Nashua, N. H., and educated at Amherst College and the universities of GBttingen and Berlin. He be- came professor of geology at Amherst College in lST'J. and was professor of geology and miner- alogy at Smith College from 1883 to 1885. He is president of the (ieologieal Society of America. United States assistant geologist, and a fellow and vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of many other learned bodies. For the United States (ieologieal Survey he prepared a number of valu- able geological maps, of Massachusetts. His publications include geological papers and mono- graphs. EMERSON, George Barreix (1797-1881). An American educator, born at Kennebunk, Maine. He graduated at Harvard, where he was afterwards tutor in mathematics and natural philosophy. He was a popular teacher in Boston for many years, and served as president of the Boston Society of Natural History, and as chair- man of the commission for the zoological and botanical survey of the State. He wrote a Re- port on the Trees and rthrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of ^fassachusetts (1846); .1 Manual of Agriculture (1861); and Reminis- cences of an Old Teacher (1878). EMERSON, Ralph Waldo (1803-82). A- famous American poet and essayist, born in Boston, Mass., May 25, 1803. ' His parents were the Rev. William Emerson and Ruth Haskins, and from them he received the train- ing that the better class of New England parents bestowed upon their children. His boy- hood was passed mainly in Boston. At the age of twenty be was graduated from Harvard Col- lege, and taught school for a time; then, like a large number of the educated youth of New Eng- land at that time, he studied for the ministry. He was ordained March 11. 1829, and became the col- league of Rev. Henry Ware, pastor of the Second Church (Unitarian) of Boston. In September of the same year he married Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker, who died in February, 1832. Shortly after his association with Ware the latter re- tired from active service and Emerson became pastor of the church, one of the foremost in New England. On September 9. 1832, however, he resigned his office, saying, in his farewell sermon. that he had ceased to regard the Lord's Supper as a necessary rite, and that he was unwilling longer to administer it. Up to that time he had been known as a rather able, earnest, and pleas- EMERSON. ing preacher; he now entered upon his lifelong career as lecturer and essayist. In the tall of L833 he took his lirst trip to Europe, where he visited Sicily, Italy, France, an. I England, and met several well-known Eng- lishmen, among them Landor and Carlyle. in September, L 835, he married Miss l.idian Jackson. The winters of 1835, ls:iti, and ls:!7 were marked by aeries of lectures, delivered in Boston, on •'English Literature," "The Philosophy of His- tory," and "Human Culture." His more elabo- rated statement of belief, however, was to be found in his first published book, Nature (1836), given out. anonymously, but soon attributed to him. The volume had a small sale and received almost no popular notice, but it was important as an exposition of the basis of Emerson's phi- losophy, and was accepted by such men as Carlyle as worthy doctrine. Briefly, it was a phrasing of the idealist view of human life, as opposed to the materialist, then common in England and America, and the Calvinist dogma, then still per- vasive in New England, and he made the essay a plea for individual freedom. The following year, on August 31st, Emerson delivered the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College on "The American Scholar." This was called by Holmes the 'intellectual declaration of independence' for America. Containing, in general, the lofty ethical principles of the author, it is. in par- ticular, a sober and earnest exhortation of his hearers to lead their lives with thoughtfulness, austerity, and self-trust, not leaning for support on the traditions and precepts of the past, but cleaving a way independently in the present. The following year was also notable for proclama- tions of emancipation. July 15th he delivered an address before the students of the Divinity School at Cambridge expressing his belief in the validity of individual thinking in religious af- fairs, and on the 24th of the same month he set forth the same general point of view at Dart- mouth College. New Hampshire, in a lecture called "Literary Ethics." The first of these in- cited a warm and widespread controversy, in which Emerson, as usual, took no active part. Throughout his life he never did more than state his views in his own vigorous and winning lan- guage, content to let others carry on the dis- cussion which he might have aroused, or body forth in some practical form the impulse which he had given them. In 1841 the first series of his Essays appeared. The volume contained several of the papers which have remained of all bis work the most popular. It comprised "History." "Self-Reliance," "Com- pensation." "Spiritual Laws." "Love." "Friend- ship." "Prudence." "Heroism." "The Over-Soul." "Circles." "Intellect," and "Art." The second series of Essays appeared in 1844. containing such titles as "The Poet," "Manners." "Char- acter." In the interval between these two vol- umes Emerson had done much writing for the Dial, the organ of Xew England idealism, or Transcendentalism as it was called. The paper was started in 1840 with Margaret Fuller as editor. Emerson himself succeeded her and re- mained editor till the collapse of the enterprise in 1814. With the other and better-known ex- periment of the Transcendentalists. the Brook Farm Community (q.V.), Emerson had little to do. In 1847 appeared the first volume of Emer- son's poems, many of which had been published
