On this Father’s Day, a look back at the father figures in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life and his own role as a devoted father to the four children he shared with Lidian: Waldo, Ellen, Edith, and Edward.

A virtual peek at early-summer blooms in the garden of the Emerson House in Concord, Massachusetts.

In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson joined John Murray Forbes—his daughter Edith’s father-in-law—and family on a train trip to California. After Emerson gave a series of lectures in San Francisco, the party moved on to Yosemite Valley, where a young John Muir arranged to meet the man he so admired.

Ralph Waldo Emerson met Abraham Lincoln on two occasions. First in January 1853, when Emerson was lecturing in Springfield, Illinois and a then-unknown Lincoln was in the audience—and again in February 1862, when Emerson was invited to the White House to meet with President Lincoln. Initially unsure of his feelings about the President, Emerson was soon won over. He conveyed his admiration in a moving eulogy delivered after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.

A biographical profile of Ralph Waldo & Lidian’s youngest child, Edward Waldo Emerson. Trained as a doctor, Edward practiced medicine until his father’s death, after which he left the profession and spent his time writing, painting, and editing his father’s manuscripts.

In October 1847, Emerson embarked on an eight-month European lecture tour. While in England, he reconnected with his friend Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer and philosopher whom he’d first met 14 years earlier. While the two men didn’t always agree, they maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence.

On September 30, 1829, Ralph Waldo Emerson married his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker. Already ill with tuberculosis when they met, she succumbed to the disease in 1831. Emerson mourned her death deeply and left the ministry soon thereafter.

On this day in 1835, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lydia “Lidian”Jackson were married in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The following day, they moved into the house in Concord that they would call home for the rest of their lives.

On this day in 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s groundbreaking essay “Nature” was published, establishing the foundation of Transcendentalism.

On this day in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famed address, “"An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge," later retitled “The American Scholar.” Oliver Wendell Holmes called Emerson’s speech America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”