Rightly considered, these thirty-one years are a piece not only of Emerson's life; they are a piece of American history. They exhibit the life in Boston of a boy and young man with a fine Puritan inheritance. Among all the traits which came down to him from the past, none were more dominant than his rectitude and his independence. Like the boys of earliest Pilgrim families, he was trained at home in "the uses of adversity," given a careful schooling, and sent to college to be prepared for the ministry. His mind, like that of his ancestors, "derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests"; but like some of the strongest of these--like Roger Williams, for example (p. 11), he was bent on arriving at his own conclusions. Fortunately men were no longer persecuted for their religious beliefs in the old savage ways. Emerson's withdrawal from the pulpit did not forfeit him the love of the people whom he had been serving. Though men could still feel bitterly on the subject of religious differences, the new century was more generous than the old had been. Travel along the Atlantic seaboard and in Europe enriched his knowledge of the world, but only deepened his love of the home region; and here as a full-grown man he settled down with his books and among an increasing circle of congenial friends to think about life and to record what he had thought. It was therefore no accident that in three successive years--1836, 1837, and 1838--Emerson made three statements in summary of his chief ideas on men and things. In all of them there was a central thought--that life had become too much a matter of unconsidered routine and that people must stop long enough to make up their minds what it was all about. He offered no "system." He pleaded only that people begin to think again, so that if they followed in the footsteps of their fathers they should do so with their eyes open, or if they decided to strike off into new paths they should not be blind men led by the blind.