Emerson worked his way through college. He was fortunate to be appointed “the President’s freshman” in his first year by the college president, John Thornton Kirk-land, a friend and classmate of his father, and that January, during the semester break, he began teaching at his uncle Samuel Ripley’s grammar school, a job he would work at during summers as well. He also tutored his classmates and entered most of the academic prize competitions, which usually carried a cash award. He earned distinction in philosophy, oratory, and poetry, and in his senior year he was elected class poet, but only after seven other students declined the honor.

Emerson received a broad education at Harvard. He studied Latin and Greek, English rhetoric and oratory, mathematics, logic, and history both ancient and modern. He was fluent in French when he entered, and he would later learn German. By his senior year he was spending more and more time studying British empiricism and Scottish common sense philosophy, especially the work of John Locke and Dugald Stewart. Much of this reading went into his “Dissertation on the Present State of Ethical Philosophy,” which placed second in the annual Bowdoin Prize competition. This course of reading was excellent preparation for the ministry, but when he graduated in 1821 he was ambivalent about a career at the pulpit. He moved in with his mother in Boston and began teaching in the school for young ladies that his brother William had established. William was planning to travel to Germany to study theology at Göttingen. For a time, Emerson entertained the idea of joining him, but he had assumed responsibility for the school (the tuition fees were helping to fund William’s studies), and his interest in a career in divinity continued to fluctuate. In January 1823 he wrote to a friend, “My sole answer and apology to those who inquire about my studies is—I keep school—I study neither law, medicine, or divinity, and write neither poetry nor prose” ( The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, p. 127). A little over a year later, though, he declared in his journal, “I am beginning my professional studies. In a month I shall be legally a man. And I deliberately dedicate my time, my talents, & my hopes to the Church” (Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 237). Soon thereafter, Emerson requested a reading list from William Ellery Channing, a prominent Unitarian preacher and theologian who had been one of his professors at Harvard, and began studying on his own in preparation to enter the Divinity School at Harvard. He met with Channing weekly, and by the end of the year, had closed his school and enrolled for the spring term. His independent study under Channing’s direction made it possible for him to complete his training in two years (rather than the usual three), but economic considerations forced him back to teaching in the summer. He also began to experience severe health problems. He contracted an eye infection that drastically limited his ability to read and caused him constant headaches. He also experienced inflammation in one of his hips that was diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis; Emerson believed these symptoms were related to tuberculosis, the disease that plagued his younger brothers Edward and Charles. Although he was officially approbated to preach in October 1826, Emerson suspended his studies and traveled south for the winter, first to Charleston, South Carolina, and then to St. Augustine, Florida, in the hope that a change in climate would improve his health.

It was perhaps fortunate that Emerson’s poor health disrupted his studies. He had found the readings in Unitarian theology somewhat stifling, and during his illness he decided to pursue his own interests, reading the Essais of Michel de Montaigne for the first time, and returning to Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius, as well as Madame de Staël’s Germany and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. This return to stoic philosophy and literary romanticism was perhaps the antidote Emerson needed to the rationalist theology he was hearing from Channing and the other faculty of the Harvard Divinity School. Emerson’s education coincided with Harvard’s institutionalization of Unitarianism, a liberal approach to theology that challenged the Calvinistic traditions of the New England churches.