Emerson’s puritanism was in the blood. Seven of his ancestors were ministers of New England churches of the early type. Among them was Peter Bulkley, who left his comfortable parish in Bedfordshire, England, to become the pastor of “the church in the wilderness” at Concord, Massachusetts; Father Samuel Moody of Agamenticus, Maine, who was such a zealous reformer that he pursued wayward sinners even into the alehouse to reprove them; Joseph Emerson of Malden, a “heroic scholar,” who prayed every night that no descendant of his might ever be rich; and William Emerson, the patriot preacher, who died while serving in the army of the Revolution. These were verily “soldiers of the Lord,” and from them and women of like stamina and mettle, Emerson inherited the best of puritan qualities: independence, sobriety, fearless loyalty to conscience, strenuous and militant virtue. But he had also a super-gift which was not theirs. That which made him different from them, gave him a larger and more beautiful vision of the world, led him into ways of thinking and speaking which to them would have seemed strange and perilous, (though in conduct he followed the strait and narrow path,)—in short, that which made him what he was in himself and to countless other men, a seer, an inspirer, a singer of new light and courage and joy, was the gift of poetic imagination and interpretation. He was a puritan _plus_ poetry. Graduating from Harvard he began life as a teacher in a Boston school and afterwards the minister of a Boston church. But there was something in his temperament which unfitted him for the service of institutions. He was a servant of ideas. To do his best work he needed to feel himself entirely independent of everything except allegiance to the truth as God gave him to see it from day to day. The scholastic routine of a Female Academy irked him. The social distinctions and rivalries of city life appeared to him both insincere and tiresome. Even the mild formulas and regulations of a Unitarian church seemed to hamper him. He was a come-outer; he wished to think for himself, to proclaim his own visions, to act and speak only from the inward impulse, though always with an eye to the good of others. So he left his parish in Boston and became a preacher at large to “these United States.” His pulpit was the lecture-platform; his little books of prose and verse carried his words to a still larger audience; no man in America during his life had a more extended or a deeper influence; he became famous both as an orator and as a writer; but in fact he was always preaching. As Lamb said to Coleridge, “I never heard you do anything else.”