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Artemas Bowers Muzzey, a prolific author of religious and inspirational tracts and a Unitarian minister and pastor of churches in Framingham, Cambridge, and Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Concord, New Hampshire, first met Emerson at Harvard in 1820, was married by him at the Second Church, and attended his funeral. Muzzey explains in his opening paragraph that he included a chapter on Emerson in his Reminiscences and Memorials of the Men of the Revolution and Their Families because of the Emerson family’s association with the Revolution; however, it is apparent in the body of the essay that his real reason for including Emerson was to pay homage to the character of a valued, lifelong friend. The essay is significant for its range of reference across a broad span of time and for its wealth of anecdotes, including this remark by “Father” Edward Thompson Taylor, preacher at the Seamen’s Methodist Bethel in Boston and the original for Melville’s character Father Mapple in Moby-Dick: “You Unitarians are awfully honest. . . . What is to become of your heretic Emerson? I don’t know where he will go when he dies. He is hardly good enough to be accepted in Heaven, and yet . . . Satan wouldn’t know what to do with him.” In the essay, Muzzey also provides a rare description of his Harvard classmate Edward Bliss Emerson, remembering him as “gifted with rare personal beauty, an eye large and beaming with genius, and a face radiant but not more with surpassing intellect than a fascinating sweetness” (p. 347). [ ] A. B. Muzzey Ralph Waldo Emerson . . . demands a prominent notice in these pages, partly for his Revolutionary family. Within a half-century the most varying epithets have been applied to him. In his early life admired as a preacher, denounced ere long as a heretic, to-day his numerous eulogists give him diverse designations. Men of all denominations unite in calling him a prophet, and—if not altogether yet almost—a Christian. Thinker, genius, philosopher , poet, essayist, leader, and king in how many realms, there is one more name which I think he richly deserves. He was, by eminence, a Patriot. . . . From Reminiscences and Memorials of the Men of the Revolution and Their Families () My recollection of Emerson extends back to his seventeenth year, when I entered Harvard College, he being then in the senior class. His fine face and figure attracted the attention of us Freshmen; his poem on Class Day gave indication of his future success in verse, no less than prose; and his eloquent words in his “conference part” at commencement, on the “Character of John Knox” indicated in simple, terse, and forcible periods the claims of the great Scottish reformer. In  Mr. Emerson began to preach; and it was while he occupied a room in Divinity Hall, that, as his neighbor in the same building, I became personally acquainted with him. He had then, as ever, great faith in the promptings of nature, which gave him a strong individuality . I saw clearly, from that time, that Mr. Emerson was to be a marked man, in private as in public. His language was keen and piquant in conversation , no less than in his writings. Speaking of one in the building, he said, “S—— is queer: he talks in scraps.” He was sought as a candidate for many pulpits. A new society had been formed in Boston, and four preachers were asked to fill the desk for successive Sundays, that one of them might be selected as a candidate for settlement . Mr. Emerson was invited to preach on one of these Sundays. Referring to this circumstance, I asked him which day he should accept: “I shall decline to go at all,” was his prompt reply; “this competition is rather too close.” His conceptions of personal dignity and self-respect were here, as everywhere, very delicate; and his manner, though modest, could be pronounced and decided. He was sometimes thought by strangers to be proud. Nothing was more unjust. I have heard him speak to a domestic in his house with as much kindness and consideration as he would manifest to a near member of his own family. He was settled as colleague pastor with Rev. Henry Ware, in the Second Church of Boston. . . . [After] Mr. Ware had resigned and become a professor in the Cambridge Divinity School, Mr. Emerson married me to a member of his society. I can never forget the impressive manner in which that service was performed...

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