Page:Americans (1922).djvu/85

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ternal career when we say that he was a New Englander of Boston, where he was born in 1803, and of Concord, where he died in 1882, after a studious life of irreproachable purity, dignity, and simplicity becoming the descendant of several generations of New England gentlemen and scholars. His formal education he received at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1821, with a well-formed bias towards an intellectual life. The son of a Unitarian minister, he inherited an ethical impulse which directed him to the Harvard Divinity School in 1825–6. In 1829 he was appointed pastor of the Second Unitarian Church of Boston. He was married in the same year to Ellen Tucker, who died two years later, leaving him a sweet and unfading memory of her fragile loveliness. After he had served his parish acceptably for three years, he felt obliged to announce, in 1832, that he was no longer able to administer the sacrament of communion in the general sense of his congregation, and resigned his charge. In December of that year he visited Europe and made acquaintance with three or four men whose residence in Europe constituted for him the chief reason for going abroad: Landor in Italy, Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and Coleridge and Wordsworth in England. He returned to America in October, 1833, and in the following year settled permanently in Concord. In 1835 he married his second wife, Lidian Jackson. For three or four