'Mild orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine,' does not sound very appetising, though we are assured by Dr. Holmes that it is 'a very agreeable aspect of Christianity.' Emerson himself does not seem to have found it very lively, for in 1832, after three years' experience of the ministry of the 'Second Church' of Boston, he retires from it, not tumultuously or with any deep feeling, but with something very like a yawn. He concludes his farewell sermon to his people as follows: 'Having said this I have said all. I have no hostility to this institution. {221} I am only stating my want of sympathy with it.' Dr. Holmes makes short work of Emerson's childhood. He was born in Boston on the 25th May, 1803, and used to sit upon a wall and drive his mother's cow to pasture. In fact, Dr. Holmes adds nothing to what we already knew of the quiet and blameless life that came to its appointed end on the 27th April, 1882. On the completion of his college education, Emerson became a student of theology, and after a turn at teaching, was ordained, in March, 1829, minister of the 'Second Church' in Boston. In September of the same year he married; and the death of his young wife, in February, 1832, perhaps quickened the doubts and disinclinations which severed his connection with his 'Church' on the 9th September, 1832. The following year he visited Europe for the first time, and made his celebrated call upon Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and laid the keel of a famous friendship. In the summer of 1834 he settled at Concord. He married again, visited England again, wrote essays, delivered lectures, made orations, published poems, carried on a long and most remarkable correspondence with Carlyle, enjoyed after the most temperate and serene of fashions many things and much happiness. And then he died. 'Can you emit sparks?' said the cat to the ugly duckling in the fairy tale, and the poor abashed creature had to admit that it could not. Emerson could emit sparks with the most electrical of cats. He is all sparks and shocks. If one were required to name the most non-sequacious author one had ever read, I do not see how one could help nominating Emerson. But, say some of his warmest admirers, 'What then? It does not matter!' It appears to me to matter a great deal.