It claimed the lives of two of his brothers, Edward at the age of twenty-nine and Charles at thirty-two. They were his closest confidants. Following Charles’s funeral, Emerson is reported to have said, “When one has never had but little society—and all that society is taken away—what is there worth living for?” Finally, in 1842, when Emerson was thirty-eight and happily married to his second wife, Lydia Jackson, their eldest son, Waldo, died of scarlet fever. He was five. Emerson’s optimistic affirmations of the individual take on new urgency when read in light of this litany of loss.

When he writes in Nature that our “relation to the world... is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility” (p. 44), the “self-recovery” he speaks of is not simply a return to one’s sense of self. It is a recovery from our failures, and especially from the failure of what we thought we knew, in the face of experiences that indicate otherwise. At times in his essays, Emerson will entertain the deepest skepticism. “No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts” (p. 375), he wrote in “Fate.” Among these facts is the awful truth that not just our knowledge, but our loves and friendships are partial and temporary. “Souls never touch their objects,” he wrote in “Experience.” “An unnavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with” (p. 236). And yet, in the face of these facts, Emerson still affirms the beauty and value of human life. Confronting the mixed bag of human experience—what he jokingly calls “the pot-luck of the day”—he insists that “if we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures” (pp. 242-243). These are not the words of an idealistic dreamer, as Emerson has sometimes been portrayed. They are an expression of his confidence in man’s ability to meet and master his circumstances; they are a call for a pragmatic engagement of the world in which we find ourselves.

The world in which Emerson found himself was decidedly mixed. He was born May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts, the fourth of eight children. His father, William Emerson, was the minister of First Church, Boston, one of the leading congregations in the city. His mother, Ruth Haskins, was the daughter of a wealthy merchant family. However, his father’s untimely death left his mother responsible for raising six children (Emerson’s oldest sister, Phebe Ripley, died before he was born; his oldest brother, John Clarke, when he was three). She was able to do so with the help of family and friends, but she was no longer a member of Boston’s social elite. The congregation of the First Church allowed her to continue living in the parsonage for the next year, and she then managed a series of boardinghouses in Boston and the vicinity. While Emerson and his brothers never suffered the deprivations of poverty, neither did they lead a life of wealth and privilege. Above all, Ruth Emerson made sure that her children were educated. Before he was three, Emerson attended a dame school (an early form of nursery school) and by the age of nine he was enrolled in Boston Latin, the preparatory school that sent many of its students on to Harvard. During the break between morning and afternoon classes, Emerson attended a second school, the South Writing School, with his close friend William Henry Furness. At Boston Latin, Emerson first began writing poetry, and in his final year, at the age of thirteen, he delivered his “Poem on Eloquence” as part of the school’s annual exhibition.

The next year he attended Harvard, where his older brother William was beginning his senior year. Emerson was one of the youngest in his class, but it was common practice at that time for students to enter college at fourteen and to graduate at eighteen.