Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Alger, William Rounceville
ALGER, William Rounceville, born at Freetown, Massachusetts, Dec. 11, 1823. He graduated at Harvard College and at the Cambridge Divinity School, 1847, and became pastor of a Unitarian Church at Roxbury, near Boston. In 1855 he succeeded Theodore Parker as minister of the Society of "Liberal Christians" in Boston; and in 1876 became minister of the Unitarian Church of the Messiah in New York, where he remained until 1879. He then preached for a year at Denver, and after a few weeks' stay in Chicago went to Portland, Maine. He is now (Nov. 1882), about to return to Boston to devote himself to literature. He has published "A Symbolic History of the Cross of Christ," 1851; "The Poetry of the Orient," 1856; "A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life," 1861; "The Genius of Solitude," 1866; "Friendships of Women," 1867; "Prayers offered in the Massachusetts House of Representatives," 1868; "Life of Edwin Forrest," 1877; and "The School of Life," 1881.