Ralph Waldo Emerson entered Harvard College in 1817 as president's freshman, or orderly, a position that helped pay his way through college and that required him to serve as messenger for Harvard's president, John Kirkland. He also tutored and later served as a waiter in the junior commons, and during college vacations taught in Waltham, Massachusetts, in the college preparatory school kept by the Reverend Samuel Ripley (son of Ezra Ripley) and his learned wife Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley.
Emerson's Harvard curriculum included Latin, Greek, English, rhetoric, history, mathematics, and modern languages. Emerson read English philosopher John Locke as part of his formal studies. A middling student, he read widely on his own. Shakespeare, Montaigne, Swift, and Byron were among the authors he selected independently of his class work. His Harvard teachers included George Ticknor in modern languages, Edward Everett in Greek, and Edward Tyrrel Channing in English composition. (In 1815, Ticknor and Everett had traveled to Europe and studied at the University of Göttingen, where they were exposed to the German literature and thought that would become so important to the New England Transcendentalists.) Emerson was a member of Harvard's Pythologian Club (a literary society). He won a prize for an essay on Socrates and graduated from Harvard in 1821.
The first surviving journal volume kept by Emerson dates from his college years. (His manuscript journals are located in the Houghton Library of Harvard University.) He kept a journal until 1875, when declining health and diminished intellect made it impossible for him to continue. As with Thoreau's journal, Emerson's journal entries became the basis for his lectures, essays, and books. They were sufficiently developed that Emerson sometimes extracted passages just as they were for use in lecture or publication. He indicated his awareness of the value of his journals to his thought and writing in the first entry he made in the volume for 1837, in which he described his journal as his "savings' bank," to be drawn upon in future endeavors. Although maintained over a longer period of time than Thoreau's journal, Emerson's is not nearly as extensive as Thoreau's. Emerson was less inclined than Thoreau to regard journalizing as an end in itself.
