J. 1560, 1631 H.W.F.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, LL.D., Boston, Massachusetts, May 25, 1803—April 27, 1882, Concord, Massachusetts. He was the son of [Rev. William Emerson], q.v., minister of the First Church of Boston (Unitarian) who, though not himself a hymn writer, published in 1808 the excellent small collection entitled A Collection of Psalms and Hymns [(5)].
R. W. Emerson graduated from Harvard College in 1821 and after further study in the Harvard Divinity School took his A.M. in 1827. He was ordained in 1829 as minister of the Second Church of Boston (Unitarian). He served the church for three years but resigned in 1832, feeling that his pastoral work was inadequate and that he was not in accord with his parishioners’ views about the Communion Service. A volume of his sermons, selected and edited by A. C. McGiffert, Jr., was published in 1938 under the title The Young Emerson Speaks. Although he preached occasionally for several years thereafter he never held another pastorate, but retired to Concord and devoted himself to lecturing and authorship. As an essayist and poet he rose to great and lasting distinction. He published Orations, Lectures, and Addresses, 1844; Poems, 1846; Representative Men, 1850; English Traits, 1856; and a succession of later volumes. His Collected Works were published after his death, in 12 volumes. Perhaps his most famous essay was his epoch-making Divinity School Address, delivered in 1838. In 1833 he wrote his hymn
We love the venerable house (The house of God)
for the ordination of his successor, [Rev. Chandler Robbins], q.v., in the Second Church, though it is more a commemorative poem than an ordination hymn. It was included in Longfellow and Johnson’s Hymns of the Spirit, 1864; in Martineau’s Hymns of Praise and Prayer, printed in England in 1873; and in later Unitarian and other hymn books down to the present day. Four stanzas selected from this poem, beginning with the second,
Here holy thoughts a light have shed,
were included in Hedge and Huntington’s Hymns for the Church of Christ, 1853, though without the author’s name, and the same collection erroneously attributed to Emerson a hymn beginning,
All before us is the way,
the author of which was [Eliza T. Clapp], q.v., an error which was repeated in various other collections.
Part of Emerson’s poem entitled The Problem, beginning