emerson's essay society and solitude

Society and Solitude (1870)

Society and solitude.

SEYD melted the days like cups of pearl, Served high and low, the lord and churl, Loved harebells nodding on a rock, A cabin hung with curling smoke, Ring of axe or hum of wheel Or gleam which use can paint on steel, And huts and tents; nor loved he less Stately lords in palaces, Princely women hard to please, Fenced by form and ceremony, Decked by courtly rites and dress And etiquette of gentilesse. But when the mate of the snow and wind, He left each civil scale behind: Him wood-gods fed with honey wild And of his memory beguiled. In caves and hollow trees he crept And near the wolf and panther slept. He stood before the tumbling main With joy too tense for sober brain; He shared the life of the element, The tie of blood and home was rent: As if in him the welkin walked, The winds took flesh, the mountains talked, And he the bard, a crystal soul, Sphered and concentric with the whole.

That each should in his house abide, Therefore was the world so wide. SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE

I FELL in with a humorist on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses.’ In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. ” Do you not see,” he said, ” the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S-, though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood’s poem, guillotine the last but one?” He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and in the weeks that followed we became better acquainted. He had good abilities, a genial temper and no vices ; but he had one defect, – he could not speak in the tone of the people. There was some paralysis on his will, such that when he met men on common terms he spoke weakly and from the point, like a flighty girl. His consciousness of the fault made it worse. He envied every drover and lumberman in the tavern their manly speech. He coveted Mirabeau’s don terrible de la familiarite, believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the man from whom kings have the most to fear. For himself he declared that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. He left the city; he hid himself in pastures. The solitary river was not solitary enough ; the sun and moon put him out. When he bought a house, the first thing he did was to plant trees. He could not enough conceal himself. Set a hedge here ; set oaks there, – trees behind trees ; above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round. The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him. Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not. All he wished of his tailor was to provide that sober mean of color and cut which would never detain the eye for a moment. He went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to London. In all the variety of costumes, a carnival, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he could never discover a man in the street who wore anything like his own dress. He would have given his soul for the ring of Gyges. His dismay at his visibility had blunted the fears of mortality. “Do you think,”he said, “I am in such great terror of being shot, – I, who am only waiting to shuffle off my corporeal jacket to slip away into the back stars, and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits between me and all souls, – there to wear out ages in solitude, and forget memory itself, if it be possible?” He had a remorse running to despair of his social gaucheries, and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders. God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth. He admired in Newton not so much his theory of the moon as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to insert his name with the solution of the problem in the Philosophical Transactions : “It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.”

These conversations led me somewhat later to the knowledge of similar cases, and to the discovery that they are not of very infrequent occurrence. Few substances are found pure in nature. Those constitutions which can bear in open day the rough dealing of the world must be of that mean and average structure such as iron and salt, atmospheric air and water. But there are metals, like potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under naphtha. Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in royal chambers. Nature protects her own work. To the culture of the world an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable ; so she guards them by a certain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing, port and clubs, we should have had no Theory of the Sphere and no Principia. They had that necessity of isolation which genius feels. Each must stand on his glass tripod if he would keep his electricity. Even Swedenborg , whose theory of the universe is based on affection, and who reprobates to weariness the danger and vice of pure intellect, is constrained to make an extraordinary exception: “There are also angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and house ; these dwell in the midst of heaven, because they are the best of angels.”

We have known many fine geniuses with that imperfection that they cannot do anything useful, not so much as write one clean sentence. ‘T is worse, and tragic, that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. At a distance he is admired, but bring him hand to hand, he is a cripple.’ One protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner, – each concealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict association. But there is no remedy that can reach the heart of the disease but either habits of self-reliance that should go in practice to making the man independent of the human race, or else a religion of love. Now he hardly seems entitled to marry; for how can he protect a woman, who cannot protect himself?

We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner. Michel Angelo had a sad, sour time of it. The ministers of beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and saloons. Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself. Yet each of these potentates saw well the reason of his exclusion. Solitary was he? Why, yes ; but his society was limited only by the amount of brain nature appropriated in that age to carry on the government of the world. “If I stay,” said Dante, when there was question of going to Rome, “who will go? and if I go, who will stay?”

But the necessity of solitude is deeper than we have said, and is organic.’ I have seen many a philosopher whose world is large enough for only one person. He affects to be a good companion ; but we are still surprising his secret, that he means and needs to impose his system on all the rest. The determination of each is from all the others, like that of each tree up into free space. ‘T is no wonder, when each has his whole head, our societies should be so small. Like President Tyler, our party falls from us every day, and we must ride in a sulky at last. Dear heart ! take it sadly home to thee, – there is no cooperation. We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitring and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for the salvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve ; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs. The cooperation is involuntary, and is put upon us by the Genius of Life, who reserves this as a part of his prerogative. ‘T is fine for us to talk ; we sit and muse and are serene and complete; but the moment we meet with any-body, each becomes a fraction.’

Though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a moral union of two superior persons whose confidence in each other for long years, out of sight and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious proof of probity to gods and men, causing joyful emotions, tears and glory, – though there be for heroes this moral union, yet they too are as far off as ever from an intellectual union, and the moral union is for comparatively low and external purposes, like the cooperation of a ship’s company or of a fire-club. But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the people we know ! Nor dare they tell what they think of each other when they meet in the street. We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt men of the world with superficial and treacherous courtesies !

Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath our domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult soul as with whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants sentimental and momentary. We must infer that the ends of thought were peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost. They are deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities. They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and disappears; where the question is, Which is first, man or men? where the individual is lost in his source.

But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make right or tolerable. This result is so against nature, such a half-view, that it must be corrected by a common sense and experience. “A man is born by the side of his father, and there he remains.” A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments.’ Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them. “The king lived and ate in his hall with men, and understood men,” said Selden. When a young barrister said to the late Mr. Mason, “I keep my chamber to read law,” -” Read law! ” replied the veteran,” ‘t is in the court-room you must read law.” Nor is the rule otherwise for literature. If you would learn to write, ‘t is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. Never his lands or his rents, but the power to charm the disguised soul that sits veiled under this bearded and that rosy visage is his rent and ration. His products are as needful as those of the baker or the weaver. Society cannot do without cultivated men. As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher wants become imperative.’

‘T is hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone. Here is the use of society: it is so easy with the great to be great; so easy to come up to an existing standard; – as easy as it is to the lover to swim to his maiden through waves so grim before. The benefits of affection are immense; and the one event which never loses its romance is the encounter with superior persons on terms allowing the happiest intercourse.

It by no means follows that we are not fit for society, because soirees are tedious and because the soiree finds us tedious. A backwoodsman, who had been sent to the university, told me that when he heard the best-bred young men at the law-school talk together, he reckoned him-self a boor; but whenever he caught them apart, and had one to himself alone, then they were the boors and he the better man. And if we recall the rare hours when we encountered the best persons, we then found ourselves, and then first society seemed to exist. That was society, though in the transom of a brig or on the Florida Keys.’

A cold sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose, and must decline its turn in the conversation. But they who speak have no more,- have less. ‘T is not new facts that avail, but the heat to dissolve everybody’s facts. Heat puts you in right relation with magazines of facts. The capital defect of cold, arid natures is the want of animal spirits. They seem a power incredible, as if God should raise the dead. The recluse witnesses what others perform by their aid, with a kind of fear. It is as much out of his possibility as the prowess of Coeur-de-Lion, or an Irishman’s day’s work on the railroad. ‘T is said the present and the future are always rivals. Animal spirits constitute the power of the present, and their feats are like the structure of a pyramid. Their result is a lord, a general, or a boon companion. Before these what a base mendicant is Memory with his leathern badge ! But this genial heat is latent in all constitutions, and is disengaged only by the friction of society. As Bacon said of manners, ” To obtain them, it only needs not to despise them,” so we say of animal spirits that they are the spontaneous product of health and of a social habit. “For behavior, men learn it, as they take diseases, one of another.”

But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar. In society, high advantages are set down to the individual as disqualifications. We sink as easily as we rise, through sympathy. So many men whom I know are degraded by their sympathies ; their native aims being high enough, but their relation all too tender to the gross people about them. Men cannot afford to live together on their merits, and they adjust themselves by their demerits, – by their love of gossip, or by sheer tolerance and animal good nature. They untune and dissipate the brave aspirant.’

The remedy is to reinforce each of these moods from the other. Conversation will not corrupt us if we come to the assembly in our own garb and speech and with the energy of health to select what is ours and reject what is not. Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news or eating from the same dish. Is it society to sit in one of your chairs ? I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not other-wise.

Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a rapid self-distribution takes place into sets and pairs. The best are accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to say they separate as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred in the matter, each seeking his like ; and any interference with the affinities would produce constraint and suffocation. All conversation is a magnetic experiment. I know that my friend can talk eloquently ; you know that he cannot articulate a sentence : we have seen him in different company. Assort your party, or invite none. Put Stubbs and Coleridge, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you make them all wretched. ‘T is an extempore Sing-Sing built in a parlor. Leave them to seek their own mates, and they will be as merry as sparrows.

A higher civility will reestablish in our customs a certain reverence which we have lost. What to do with these brisk young men who break through all fences, and make themselves at home in every house? I find out in an instant if my companion does not want me, and ropes cannot hold me when my welcome is gone. One would think that the affinities would pronounce themselves with a surer reciprocity.’

Here again, as so often, nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These wonderful horses need to be driven by fine hands. We require such a solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the street and in palaces; for most men are cowed in society, and say good things to you in private, but will not stand to them in public. But let us not be the victims of words. Society and solitude are deceptive names. It is not the circumstance of seeing more or fewer people, but the readiness of sympathy, that imports ; and a sound mind will derive its principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to the sufficient and absolute right, and will accept society as the natural element in which they are to be applied.’

Category VII – Society and Solitude

Society and Solitude , not published until 1870, is comprised of lectures turned into essays that Emerson gave over many years as he toured the country. "Eloquence" and "Domestic Life," for example, were early lectures. Those interested in ethical principles will appreciate "Courage" and "Success," whereas those more interested in daily life will appreciate the remaining essays in this volume.  

• Complete Works of RWE , VII - Society and Solitude

Chapter I Society and Solitude

SEYD melted the days like cups of pearl, Served high and low, the lord and churl, Loved harebells nodding on a rock, A cabin hung with curling smoke, Ring of axe or hum of wheel Or gleam which use can…

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• December 1, 2015
• VII - Society and Solitude

Vol VII – Society and Solitude (1870)

I Society and Solitude II Civilization III Art IV Eloquence  V Domestic Life  VI Farming  VII Works and Days  VIII Books  IX Clubs  X Courage  XI Success  XII Old Age

• Administrator
• December 17, 2004

Chapter XII Old Age

ONCE more,' the old man cried, ye clouds, Airy turrets purple-piled, Which once my infancy beguiled, Beguile me with the wonted spell. I know ye skilful to convoy The total freight of hope and joy Into rude and homely nooks,…

• December 16, 2004

Chapter XI Success

OUR American people cannot be taxed with slowness in performance or in praising their performance. The earth is shaken by our engineries. We are feeling our youth and nerve and bone. We have the power of territory and of seacoast,…

Chapter X Courage

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can. PERIL around, all else appalling, Cannon in front and leaden rain, Him duty, through the clarion…

Chapter IX Clubs

YET Saadi loved the race of men, – No churl, immured in cave or den; In bower and hall He wants them all; But he has no companion; Come ten, or come a million, Good Saadi dwells alone. Too long…

Chapter VIII Books

O DAY of days when we can read! The reader and the book, – either without the other is naught. THAT book is good Which puts me in a working mood. Unless to Thought be added Will Apollo is an…

Chapter VII Works and Days

DAUGHTERS of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdoms, stars and sky that…

Chapter VI Farming

To these men The landscape is an armory of powers, Which, one by one, they know to draw and use. They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work; They prove the virtues of each bed of rock, And, like the…

Chapter V Domestic Life

I REACHED the middle of the mount Up which the incarnate soul must climb, And paused for them, and looked around, With me who walked through space and time. Five rosy boys with morning light Had leaped from one fair…

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• 29 by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society and solitude: Twelve chapters by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solitude and Society

I fell in with a humorist, on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses. In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. "Do you not see," he said, "the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S., though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?" He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and, in the weeks that followed, we became better acquainted. He had great abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; but he had one defect,—he could not speak in the tone of the people. There was some paralysis on his will, that, when he met men on common terms, he spoke weakly, and from the point, like a flighty girl. His consciousness of the fault made it worse. He envied every daysman and drover in the tavern their manly speech. He coveted Mirabeau's don terrible de la familiarité , believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the man from whom kings have the most to fear. For himself, he declared that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. He left the city; he hid himself in pastures. The solitary river was not solitary enough; the sun and moon put him out. When he bought a house, the first thing he did was to plant trees. He could not enough conceal himself. Set a hedge here; set oaks there,—trees behind trees; above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round. The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was, to say that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him. Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not. All he wished of his tailor was, to provide that sober mean of color and cut which would never detain the eye for a moment. He went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to London. In all the variety of costumes, a carnival, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he could never discover a man in the street who wore anything like his own dress. He would have given his soul for the ring of Gyges. His dismay at his visibility had blunted the fears of mortality. "Do you think," he said, "I am in such great terror of being shot,—I, who am only waiting to shuffle off my corporeal jacket, to slip away into the back stars, and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits between me and all souls,—there to wear out ages in solitude, and forget memory itself, if it be possible?" He had a remorse running to despair of his social gaucheries , and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders. " God may forgive sins," he said, "but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth." He admired in Newton, not so much his theory of the moon, as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to insert his name with the solution of the problem in the "Philosophical Transactions": "It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline." These conversations led me somewhat later to the knowledge of similar cases, existing elsewhere, and to the discovery that they are not of very infrequent occurrence. Few substances are found pure in nature. Those constitutions which can bear in open day the rough dealing of the world must be of that mean and average structure,—such as iron and salt, atmospheric air, and water. But there are metals, like potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under naphtha. Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in royal chambers. Nature protects her own work. To the culture of the world, an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards them by a certain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing, Port, and clubs, we should have had no "Theory of the Sphere," and no "Principia." They had that necessity of isolation which genius feels. Each must stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity. Even Swedenborg, whose theory of the universe is based on affection, and who reprobates to weariness the danger and vice of pure intellect, is constrained to make an extraordinary exception: "There are also angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and house; these dwell in the midst of heaven, because they are the best of angels." We have known many fine geniuses have that imperfection that they cannot do anything useful, not so much as write one clean sentence. 'Tis worse, and tragic, that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. At a distance, he is admired; but bring him hand to hand, he is a cripple. One protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner,—each concealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict association. But there is no remedy that can reach the heart of the disease, but either habits of self-reliance that should go in practice to making the man independent of the human race, or else a religion of love. Now he hardly seems entitled to marry; for how can he protect a woman, who cannot protect himself? We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner. Michel Angelo had a sad, sour time of it. The ministers of beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and saloons. Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself. Yet each of these potentates saw well the reason of his exclusion. Solitary was he? Why, yes; but his society was limited only by the amount of brain Nature appropriated in that age to carry on the government of the world. "If I stay," said Dante, when there was question of going to Rome, "who will go? and if I go, who will stay?" But the necessity of solitude is deeper than we have said, and is organic. I have seen many a philosopher whose world is large enough for only one person. He affects to be a good companion; but we are still surprising his secret, that he means and needs to impose his system on all the rest. The determination of each is from all the others, like that of each tree up into free space. 'Tis no wonder, when each has his whole head, our societies should be so small. Like President Tyler, our party falls from us every day, and we must ride in a sulky at last. Dear heart! take it sadly home to thee, there is no coöperation. We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitring and recruiting of the holy fraternity that shall combine for the salvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve, and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs. The cooperation is involuntary, and is put upon us by the Genius of Life, who reserves this as a part of his prerogative. 'Tis fine for us to talk: we sit and muse, and are serene, and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction. Though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a moral union of two superior persons, whose confidence in each other for long years, out of sight, and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious proof of probity to gods and men, causing joyful emotions, tears, and glory,—though there be for heroes this moral union, yet they, too, are as far off as ever from an intellectual union, and the moral union is for comparatively low and external purposes, like the coöperation of a ship's company, or of a fire-club. But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the people we know! Nor dare they tell what they think of each other, when they meet in the street. We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt men of the world with superficial and treacherous courtesies! Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath our domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult soul as with whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants sentimental and momentary. We must infer that the ends of thought were peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost. They are deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities. They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and disappears,—where the question is, Which is first, man or men?—where the individual is lost in his source. But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make right or tolerable. This result is so against nature, such a half-view, that it must be corrected by a common sense and experience. "A man is born by the side of his father, and there he remains." A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as bodygarments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must but coop up most men, and you undo them. "The king lived and ate in his hall with men, and understood men," said Selden. When a young barrister said to the late Mr. Mason, "I keep my chamber to read law,"—"Read law!" replied the veteran, " 'tis in the courtroom you must read law." Nor is the rule otherwise for literature. If you would learn to write, 'tis in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer's home. A scholar is a candle, which the love and desire of all men will light. Never his lands or his rents, but the power to charm the disguised soul that sits veiled under this bearded and that rosy visage is his rent and ration. His products are as needful as those of the baker or the weaver. Society cannot do without cultivated men. As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher wants become imperative. 'Tis hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert exasperates people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone. Here is the use of society: it is so easy with the great to be great! so easy to come up to an existing standard ! — as easy as it is to the lover to swim to his maiden, through waves so grim before. The benefits of affection are immense; and the one event which never loses its romance is the alighting of superior persons at our gate. It by no means follows that we are not fit for society, because soirées are tedious, and because the soirée finds us tedious. A backwoodsman, who had been sent to the university, told me, that when he heard the best-bred young men at the law-school talk together, he reckoned himself a boor; but whenever he caught them apart, and had one to himself alone, then they were the boors, and he the better man. And if we recall the rare hours when we encountered the best persons, we then found ourselves, and then first society seemed to exist. That was society, though in the transom of a brig, or on the Florida Keys. A cold, sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose, and must decline its turn in the conversation. But they who speak have no more—have less. 'Tis not new facts that avail, but the heat to dissolve everybody's facts. Heat puts you in right relation with magazines of facts. The capital defect of cold, arid natures is the want of animal spirits. They seem a power incredible, as if God should raise the dead. The recluse witnesses what others perform by their aid with a kind of fear. It is as much out of his possibility, as the prowess of Coeur-de-Lion, or an Irishman's day's work on the railroad. 'Tis said, the present and the future are always rivals. Animal spirits constitute the power of the present, and their feats are like the structure of a pyramid. Their result is a lord, a general, or a boon-companion. Before these, what a base mendicant is Memory with his leathern badge! But this genial heat is latent in all constitutions, and is disengaged only by the friction of society. As Bacon said of manners, "To obtain them, it only needs not to despise them," so we say of animal spirits, that they are the spontaneous product of health and of a social habit. "For behavior, men learn it, as they take diseases, one of another." But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar. In society, high advantages are set down to the individual as disadvantages. We sink as easily as we rise, through sympathy. So many men whom I know are degraded by their sympathies, their native aims being high enough, but their relation all too tender to the gross people about them. Men cannot afford to live together on their merits, and they adjust themselves by their demerits,—by their love of gossip, or sheer tolerance and animal good-nature. They untune and dissipate the brave aspirant. The remedy is to reinforce each of these moods from the other. Conversation will not corrupt us, if we come to the assembly in our own garb and speech, and with the energy of health to select what is ours and reject what is not. Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish. Is it society to sit in one of your chairs? I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise. Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a rapid self-distribution takes place into sets and pairs. The best are accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to say, they separate as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference with the affinities would produce constraint and suffocation. All conversation is a magnetic experiment. I know that my friend can talk eloquently; you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in different company. Assort your party, or invite none. Put Stubbs and Byron, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you make them all wretched. 'Tis an extempore Sing-Sing built in a parlor. Leave them to seek their own mates, and they will be as merry as sparrows. A higher civility will reestablish in our customs a certain reverence which we have lost. What to do with these brisk young men who break through all fences, and make themselves at home in every house? I find out in an instant if my companion does not want me, and ropes cannot hold me when my welcome is gone. One would think that the affinities would pronounce themselves with a surer reciprocity. Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one, and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These wonderful horses need to be driven by fine hands. We require such a solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the street and in palaces; for most men are cowed in society, and say good things to you in private, but will not stand to them in public. But let us not be the victims of words. Society and solitude are deceptive names. It is not the circumstance of seeing more or fewer people, but the readiness of sympathy, that imports; and a sound mind will derive its principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to the sufficient and absolute right, and will accept society as the natural element in which they are to be applied.

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The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]

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SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE

IT may be well to recall some of the outward events which occurred and conditions which existed during the decade intervening between the publication of The Conduct of Life and of Mr. Emerson's next volume of essays, Society and Solitude, which did not appear until 1870. In those years a crisis in which the life or death of the United States hung long in what seemed a doubtful issue had been safely passed. Statesmen, "practical" politicians who ridiculed the higher law which the scholars and simple folk believed in, and merchants who strove to silence them for the sake of trade, were suddenly overwhelmed by the logic of events.

Redress the eternal scales

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was forced by the slaveholding interest, Mr. Emerson could not bear arms, but did better service to his country after his kind. Through the long, cruel conflict he strove, not only in special patriotic meetings, but in his lectures on the great and permanent themes, to keep the hearts of his hearers up and lift their standard higher. Many of these essays, as lectures, had exordiums fit for the day. "Civilization" is but a part of a lecture given at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in January, 1862, called "Civilization at a Pinch," in which the duty of the hour, Emancipation, was urged. The "Boston Hymn" a year later celebrated its proclamation, and "Voluntaries" was a proud dirge for Colonel Robert Shaw and his officers and soldiers killed on the slopes of Fort Wagner.

But the war made great demands on the resources of those who stayed at home, as taxes and prices rose, and the "hard times" outlasted the four years of actual hostilities. Strictest economies and increased work were required to meet them. Mr. Emerson derived little income from his books, and lecturing was his main resource. Fortunately the awakened heart and mind of the people demanded encouragement and instruction. Not only the lyceums of the older States, where his voice had long been heard, wished to hear his word of hope, but calls came from the new country beyond the Mississippi.

Mr. Emerson's name was now widely known. Many guests from both sides of the ocean came to his door. His children had grown up, and in 1865 his younger daughter was happily married to a brave soldier whose release from a Southern prison came just in time to enable him to be present at the closing scene of the war. Mr. Emerson's delight in children appears in the lecture on Domestic Life and, though it was written in 1859, it very possibly was improved before printing because of the birth of his grandchildren.

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In 1866 Harvard College invited him, after twenty-nine years, again to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa Oration. Next year he was chosen an Overseer, and in 1870 was asked to deliver a course on Philosophy there.

In this decade two near friends were taken from him by death, Henry Thoreau and Mrs. Sarah Ripley. In 1860 Theodore Parker, respected and valued by Mr. Emerson, died, and for several years thereafter he was frequently called by Mr. Parker's Society to speak to them on Sundays at the Music Hall and on week-days at their "Fraternity Lectures."

To one who heard Emerson lecture, the printed essays recall the spoken word and the speaker's presence. They were all thus first tested on the average American audience in town and country. The earlier addresses show more of the priest, the later of the lecturer who was also a poet, though the characteristics only vary in proportion.

The testimony of two of the hearers may be adduced. Mr. John Albee in his "Emerson as an Essayist" 1 says:—

"Most of them were prepared for public delivery. Some profess to detect this in their style. I should never discover it, had I not heard some of them and since been unable to forget the tones of voice, the manner and the total effect of the delivery. For it certainly cannot be discovered by any resemblances to writing that we do know was prepared for public delivery, which has for its prevailing qualities nothing in the least like the qualities of Emerson's page.

"The old lecture platform witnessed every sort of performance with an impartial eye. It listened to eloquence, to nonsense and to thought; it was not greatly moved by any; it was, perhaps, made a little more eager for the next lecture, which might demolish the ideas of the last. The audiences had their

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favorites, usually the more eloquent speakers. But it is painful to recall and still more so to read what went under the name of eloquence in Emerson's day; that which was selected for school-readers, spouted by collegians and admired by everybody."

Lowell said in an article in the Nation: —

"I have heard some great speakers, and some accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with a drift we cannot and would not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long-studied artist in these things) does the deliberate utterance, that seems waiting for the first word, seem to admit us partners in the labor of thought, and make us feel as if the glance of humor were a sudden suggestion; as if the perfect phrase lying written there on the desk were as unexpected to him as to us!"

Two extracts from Mr. Emerson's letters to Carlyle may be here introduced to bring up the picture of the raw young country in those days, as seen through the hopeful eyes of the New England idealist.

28 July, 1851: "'The Far West' is the right name for these verdant deserts. On all the shores interminable silent forest. If you land, there is prairie beyond prairie, forest behind forest, sites of nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call 'moral' value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the immense material values will show twenty or fifty Californias; that a good ciphering head will make one where he is. Thus at Pittsburg, on the Ohio, the Iron City, whither, from want of railroads, few Yankees have penetrated, every acre of land has three or four bottoms: first of rich soil; then nine feet of bituminous coal; a little lower

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fourteen feet of coal; then iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called petroleum floating on their surface. Yet this acre sells for the price of any tillage acre in Massachusetts; and, in a year, the railroads will reach it, east and west. I came home by the great Northern Lakes and Niagara."

19 April, 1853: "I went lately to St. Louis and saw the Mississippi again. The powers of the River, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes,—for it yields to no engineering,—are interesting enough. The Prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. For corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat four-legs. Workingmen, ability to do the work of the River, abounded. Nothing higher was to be thought of. America is incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. 'T is a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish Italies and Englands, when an age sublimates into a genius."

In a letter written to Carlyle in the end of January, 1870, Mr. Emerson gives the following account of the making of this volume: "I received your first letter with pure joy, but in the midst of extreme inefficiency. I had suddenly yielded to a proposition of Fields & Co. to manufacture a book for a given day. The book was planned and going on passably, when it was found better to divide the matter, and separate and postpone the purely literary portion (criticism chiefly), and therefore to modify and swell the elected part. The attempt proved more difficult than I had believed. Meantime the publication day was announced and the printer at the door. Then came your letter in the shortening days. When I drudged to keep my word, invita Minerva, I could not write in my book and I

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could not write a letter. To-morrow and many morrows made things worse, for we have indifferent health in the house, and, as it chanced, unusual strain of affairs—which always come when they should not. … But I will leave the bad month, which I hope will not match itself in my lifetime. Only 't is pathetic and remorseful to me that any purpose of yours, especially a purpose so inspired, should find me imbecile."

The "purely literary portion" mentioned as omitted from the book probably refers to the "Poetry and Criticism" and "Persian Poetry," which were included in the next volume, Letters and Social Aims.

When the volume reached England it brought back this response from his old friend:—

APRIL 6TH, 1870. The "little Book" I read here, … with great attention, clear assent for most part, and admiring recognition. It seems to me you are all your old self here, and something more. A calm insight, piercing to the very centre; a beautiful sympathy, a beautiful epic humor; a soul peaceably irrefragable in this loud-jangling world, of which it sees the ugliness, but notices only the huge new opulences (still so anarchic); knows the electric telegraph, with all its vulgar botherations and impertinences, accurately for what it is, and ditto ditto the oldest eternal Theologies of men. All this belongs to the Highest Class of thought (you may depend upon it); and again seemed to me as, in several respects, the one perfectly Human Voice I had heard among my fellow creatures for a long time. And then the "style," the treatment and expression,— yes, it is inimitable, best,—Emersonian throughout. Such brevity, simplicity, softness, homely grace; with such a penetrating meaning, soft enough, but irresistible, going down to the depths and up to the heights, as silent electricity goes. You have done very well;

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and many will know it ever better by degrees. Only one thing farther I will note: How you go as if altogether on the "Over-Soul," the Ideal, the Perfect or Universal and Eternal in this life of ours; and take so little heed of the frightful quantities of friction and perverse impediment there everywhere are; the reflections upon which in my own poor life made me now and then very sad, as I read you. Ah me, ah me; what a vista it is, mournful, beautiful, unfathomable as Eternity itself, these last fifty years of Time to me. All or nearly all the essays included in this book existed in some form as lectures in 1858 or 1859. What is known of their first delivery will be told in the notes to each essay. Yet they underwent much change during the long period of rehearsal, and sheets from them often did duty in other lectures, before the final crystallization.

Page 3, note 1. One may guess that this humorist interpreted the Medusa as a Memory because, though her face was calm, it was ever encircled by snakes. This passage may be a parable in which are figured "those infinite compunctions which embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience." 1

Mr. Emerson believed himself so unfitted for society, in his younger years, that his memories were mortifications, and he turned his face resolutely away from them. He felt the want of animal spirits. He early wrote: "There is no more indifferent companion, Heaven knows, in ordinary society than myself. I profoundly pity my right and left hand men. But

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do not blame my dulness. As soon as I have done my studies I collapse. 'T is my hygeia and natural restorative."

In those days he was not strong, and perhaps memories of his awkwardness in his parochial duties distressed him.

Journal, 1835. "Is it because I am such a bigot to my own whims, that I distrust the ability of a man who insists much on the advantage to be derived from literary conversazioni . Above is wisdom, above is happiness. Society nowadays makes us low-spirited, hopeless; above is heaven."

In Concord woods he found healing for body, and oracles for the soul. The following is an extract from a lecture called "Country Life," given in 1857:—

"The place where a thoughtful man in the country feels the joy of eminent domain is his wood-lot. If he suffer from accident or low spirits, his spirits rise when he enters it. I could not find it in my heart to chide the citizen who should ruin himself to buy a patch of heavy oak-timber. A walk in the woods is the consolation of mortal men. I think no pursuit has more breath of immortality in it."

Page 5, note 1. But the wood-life had no exemption from the law of Compensation. The virtue that there came in to him must go out from him, the messages be delivered. In family, village and public life he did his part and reaped his reward.

Journal, 1840. "Would it not be a good cipher for the seal of the Lonely Society which forms so fast in these days,—Two porcupines meeting, with all their spines erect, and the motto, 'We converse at the quills' end'?"

Page 7, note 1. During Mr. Emerson's ministry in Boston in 1828 he wrote in his journal, "A wise man in certain society is a magnet among shavings."

Of the Poet he later wrote,—

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In cities he was low and mean; The mountain waters washed him clean And by the sea-waves he was strong. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 8, note 1. Of himself Mr. Emerson would say, "My doom and my strength is to be solitary."

Page 9, note 1. In a lecture on Society, in the course in Boston, 1836-37, he said: "A man should live among those with whom he can act naturally, who permit and provoke the expression of all his thoughts and emotions. Yet the course of events does steadily thwart any attempt at very dainty and select fellowship, and he who would live as a man in the world must not wait too proudly for the presence of the gifted and the good. The unlike mind can teach him much."

Atom from atom yawns as far As moon from earth or star from star.

Journal, 1835. "'T is very strange how much we owe the perception of the absolute solitude of the spirit to the affections. I sit alone, and cannot arouse myself to thoughts. I go and sit with my friend and in the endeavour to explain my thought to him or her, I lay bare the awful mystery to myself as never before, and start at the total loneliness and infinity of one man."

In the lecture on Society above mentioned he wrote with regard to the societies which claimed his aid:—

"Philanthropic association aims to increase the efficiency of individuals by organization. But the gain of power is much less than it seems, since each brings only a mechanical aid; does not apply to the enterprise the infinite force of one man; and

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in some proportion to the material growth is the spiritual decay."

Page 10, note 1. Now comes the counter-statement. In a lecture on Private Life, in the course of 1839-40 on the Present Age, Mr. Emerson said, "Nothing but God is self-dependent. Man is powerful only by the multitude of his affinities."

Mr. Emerson writes in his journal of 1852:—

"Of Francis Potter Aubrey says, ''T was pity that such a delicate inventive wit should be staked in an obscure corner from whence men rarely emerge to higher preferment, but contract a moss on them, like an old pale in an orchard, for want of ingenious conversations, which is a great want even to the deepest thinking men; as Mr. Hobbes hath often said to me.'"

The new home in Concord after Mr. Emerson's marriage, its hospitalities and the new friends who visited him there, altered his half-resolves to be a hermit, "since it was from eternity a settled thing that he and society were to be nothing to each other."

Page 11, note 1. The rapidly increasing demand through the country for instruction by the serious lyceum-lecture justified this statement. Mr. Emerson, remembering that "the light of the public square tests the statue," saw the value of testing his lectures on self-made men and brave women and earnest youths struggling for an education.

Page 12, note 1. The allusion here is to a happy experience, always remembered with pleasure. On his journey to Florida for health, when a student, Mr. Emerson fell in with Achille Murat, the son of Napoleon's great leader of cavalry, afterwards king of Naples. The son was a man of thought and of great charm, then a planter at Tallahassee.

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He and Mr. Emerson exchanged some thoughtful letters, but never met again. Apropos of the first part of the paragraph is the following extract:—

Journal, 1862. "In manners, how impossible to overcome an unlucky temperament, unless by living with the well-bred from the start!

"Intellectual men pass for vulgar, and are timid and heavy with the elegant; but exhibit the best style if the elegant are intellectual. But the dancers' violin, or Beethoven's music even, degrades them instantly in manners, if they are not also musical.

"Laws of society, a forever engaging topic. At Sir Wm. Molesworth's house, I asked Milnes to get me safely out: he behaved very well. An impassive temperament is a great fortune. Que de choses dont je peux me passer! even dancing and music, if I had that."

Page 13, note 1. The heights of an austere nobility in friendship and love are pictured in the end of the poems "Rhea" and "The Celestial Love." The poem "Friendship" is more human and no less noble.

Page 14, note 1. Mr. Emerson used to say, "Whom God hath put asunder let not man join together."

If Love his moment overstay, Hatred's swift repulsions play. "The Visit," Poems.

Page 16, note 1. The balancing necessity of these complementary conditions is set forth in a stray sheet, perhaps from the course on the Present Age, in 1839-40:—

"We have a double consciousness. We go to school, we

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learn to read, write, cipher and trade. We have talents, arts, success; we buy and sell, have wives, children, possessions, humours; we unfold and earn and prosper and possess.

"But there is another element in us which does not learn or study or make gain, or value these things at all. It broods on all that is done, but does not; it makes no progress; is as wise at our earliest remembrance, as it is now. Others may come and go, fetch and carry, travel and govern. It lies in the sun and broods on the world."

Yet in turn Thought must become Action to justify itself. The following is from the lecture "Morals," given in 1859:

"Meantime let no man imagine that the ends of the soul can be attained by intellectual exercises. Contemplation is an office of man, but contemplation is not man. Let him obey the melodious voice of Duty, which vibrates through the universe, calling him always to act. The moral sentiment so profound, and which seems the nearest vision we have of the face of the Creator, reveals itself still in actions. The heart in us is orphan and forlorn until it finds virtue. Beside a duty, beside humility, beside courage, self-denial, and laborious love, how cold and dreary seem to us the gifts of mere genius. Go and deal with persons who are just and benevolent, not in the vulgar and moderate sense, but religiously so, and you feel at home, though in another land or another world."

"Like vaulters in a circus round

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CIVILIZATION

In April, 1861, Mr. Emerson began a course of lectures on Life and Literature at the Meionaon in Boston. He had probably prepared the lecture on Civilization in much the same form that it is printed here. But the outbreak of the Rebellion turned all thought on the crisis in the life of the Nation. Four days before this lecture was delivered he had seen the young men of Concord mustered in arms on the village green and, with the prayers of their townsfolk, march to the defence of constitutional liberty.

It seemed a fated day for Concord, the Nineteenth of April, for this was the third time in her history that her sons had been summoned for that duty on that day. The news of the attack of the Baltimore mob on the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment on that same day had also come, and again, as at Concord Bridge, a soldier from Acton was the first victim of the war. With a lapse towards barbarism threatening the country, and yet a new hope springing up with the awakening of the North, the lecture written in less stirring days had to be remodelled for the hour. Mr. Emerson named it "Civilization at a Pinch." This was, without doubt, the basis for the lecture which, with the addition of an earnest appeal to the Administration for emancipation of the slaves, was read by him before the Smithsonian Institution at Washington in January, 1862. Under the title there used, "American Civilization," it was printed in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1862. It was afterwards separated into the essay here printed, treating of the general theme, only referring to the times in the last paragraph, and the appeal for the political exigency of

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the hour, "American Civilization," included in the Miscellanies.

Can rules or tutors educate The semigod whom we await?

Page 20, note 1. Less well known than that of Cadmus in the mythology, the inventor of the alphabet, is the name of Pytheas, the Massilian Greek who, in the fourth century B. C., first explored the shores of Northern Europe and described them and the midnight sun. He discovered the inclination of the ecliptic, the circuit of the Pole-star and the relation of the tides to the moon. Manco Capac, according to tradition, was the first of the Incas, the son of the sun, and gave to the savage Peruvians the arts of life.

Rich are the sea-gods:—who gives gifts but they? They grope the sea for pearls, but more than pearls; They pluck Force thence and give it to the wise. For every wave is wealth to Daedalus, Wealth to the cunning artist who can work This matchless strength. "Sea-Shore," Poems.

Page 22, note 1. By comparing this paragraph with the ending of "The Adirondacs" in the Poems, when, after the celebration of the wild forest life, and the men it breeds, Civilization yet receives its dues, the date of the composition can be fixed. For in the summer of 1858 Mr. Emerson enjoyed with his friends, yet, as ever, much alone, two weeks in the

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primaeval woods around Follansbee Pond. William J. Stillman, the all-accomplished captain of the party, has told its story in his Autobiography. 1 His excellent painting of the forest camp and the company is in the Concord Public Library.

Page 23, note 1. Journal, 1854. "Roads, the wafer on letters, and the position of woman are good tests of civilization." Until the second half of the century envelopes were little used, and the letter-sheet was folded and sealed with one wafer.

Page 23, note 2. Dr. Thomas Brown, physician and philosopher, wrote An Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, supporting Hume's Theory of Causation.

"'The beating of her restless heart Still sounding through the storm.'

"''T is better to be quoted wrong Than to be quoted not at all.'"

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Page 26, note 1. In the poem "Voluntaries," the second stanza, the greater favor of Freedom for the Northman is told.

He planted where the Deluge ploughed, His hired hands were wind and cloud. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 28, note 2. Again Dr. Holmes's charming book must be quoted with regard to this passage: "This Essay of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals." And he did so.

Page 30, note 1. From the poem of Samuel Daniel "To the Countess of Cumberland." There is a passage to this purpose on page 307 of "Circles," in the first series of Essays.

Page 30, note 2. The wife of Colonel John Hutchinson.

But he, the man-child glorious,— Where tarries he the while? "Song of Nature," Poems.

Page 33, note 1. Journal, 1847. "Civilization is symbolized (how wittily) by a cake, in the hierological cipher of the Egyptians."

Page 33, note 2. A proper perspective of the important

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and the unimportant in life was early taught to her sons by Madam Emerson. To her oldest son William, who wrote to her at the age of thirteen about his college room, his mother answered:—

MY DEAR SON,— You did right to give me so early a proof of your affection as to write to me the first week of your college life. Everything respecting you is doubtless interesting to me, but your domestic arrangements the least of anything, as these make no part of the man or the character any further than he learns humility from his dependence on such trifles as convenient accommodations for his happiness. You, I trust, will rise superior to these little things, for, though small indeed, they consume much time that might be appropriated to better purpose and far nobler pursuits. What most excites my solicitude is your moral improvement and your progress in virtue. … Let your whole life reflect honor on the name you bear. … Should Paul plant and Apollos water, it is God alone who can give the increase.

Page 34, note 1. This concluding passage alone in the essay retains the impress of the feeling, due to the long reign of bad politics, of a doubtful issue to the great struggle just begun. Hence Emerson's word of warning to his countrymen was plain and strong.

Page 34, note 2. The journal for 1864 has the following memorandum:—

"In my paper on Civilization I omitted an important trait, namely, the increased respect for human life. The difference between the oriental nations, on one side, and Europe and America, on the other, lies mainly herein. The Japanese

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in France are astonished, 't is said, at the vast apparatus and extent of a capital trial:… Remember General Scott's maxim, too, about the sacrifice of one life more than necessity requires."

And in the first months of the war, relieved by the clearing of the moral atmosphere of the country, Mr. Emerson gladly noted:—

"War civilizes; for it forces individuals and tribes to combine, and act with larger views, and under the best heads, and keeps the population together, producing the effect of cities; for camps are wandering cities."

Mr. Emerson's first lecture on Art seems to have been that given in Boston in December, 1836, in the course on the Philosophy of History. In that and the succeeding lecture Art and Literature were compared.

"Art delights in carrying thought into action. Literature is the conversion of action into thought. The architect executes his dream in stone. The poet enchants you by idealizing your life and fortunes. In both the highest charm comes from that which is inevitable in the work, a divine necessity overpowering individual effort, and expressing the thought of mankind in the time and place." The chapter on Art in the first series of Essays contains part of that lecture.

The present essay is, with a few slight changes, mostly verbal, the paper called "Thoughts on Art," printed in the Dial by Mr. Emerson in January, 1841. It is probable that it was essentially the second lecture in the course on Life

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and Literature given in Boston in April, 1861. It possibly contained some passages from a lecture on Art and Criticism, given in a course at Freeman Place Chapel in Boston in the spring of 1859.

Ever the spell of beauty came And turned the drowsy world to flame. By lake and stream and gleaming hall And modest copse and forest tall, Where'er he went, the magic guide Kept its place by the poet's side.

But he could express beauty only in life and words.

Journal, 1841. "I frequently find the best part of my ride in the Concord coach from my house to Winthrop Place to be in Prince Street, Charter Street, Ann Street and the like places at the North End of Boston. The deshabille of both men and women, their unrestrained attitudes and manners make pictures greatly more interesting than the clean-shaved and silk-robed procession in Washington and Tremont streets. I often see that the attitudes of both men and women engaged in hard work are more picturesque than any which art and study could contrive, for the Heart is in these first. I say picturesque, because when I pass these groups I instantly know whence all the fine pictures I have seen had their origin; I feel the painter in me; these are the traits which make us feel the force and eloquence of form and the sting of color. But the painter is only in me, and does not come to the fingers' ends."

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In Greek sculpture he delighted, for its calm and temperate beauty. After this he cared most for the work of Michel Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, and Raphael's works, especially his Transfiguration.

He read what Goethe had to say on Art, and took pleasure in Vasari's Lives and Winckelmann's writings on Ancient Art, and read Ruskin and Haydon. Fergusson's and Garbett's works on Architecture were studied by him.

He wrote to a friend in 1839: "There are fewer painters than poets. Ten men can awaken me by words to new hope and fruitful musing for one that can achieve the miracle of forms. Besides, I think the pleasure of the poem lasts me longer."

It is hard to realize that Art, except for portrait painting, was little more than a name in America in the first half of the nineteenth century. What opportunities Boston offered may be learned from Mr. Emerson's own account in the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli: —

"There are persons to whom a gallery is everywhere a home. In this country the antique is known only by plaster casts and by drawings. The Boston Athenaeum,—on whose sunny roof and beautiful chambers may the benedictions of centuries of students rest with mine!—added to its library in 1823 a small but excellent museum of the antique sculpture in plaster;—the selection being dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova. The Apollo, Laocoön, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinoüs, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino,—all these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike. It is much that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw him, a benefit so pure and enduring.

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"To these were soon added a heroic line of antique busts, and at last, by Horatio Greenough, the Night and Day of Michel Angelo. Here was old Greece and old Italy brought bodily to New England, and a verification given to all our dreams and readings. It was easy to collect from the drawing-rooms of the city a respectable picture-gallery for a summer exhibition. This was also done, and a new pleasure was invented for the studious, and a new home for the solitary. The Brimmer Donation, in 1838, added a costly series of engravings, chiefly of the French and Italian museums, and the drawings of Guercino, Salvator Rosa and other masters."

Page 37, note 1. Through this chapter and that on the same theme in the first book of Essays, what is best in the useful and the fine arts is shown to be that part which is inevitable, the working through the artist of the Universal Soul. In connection with this opening paragraph may be read the last page in the essay on Fate in Conduct of Life, where comes in the consoling doctrine of "the Beautiful Necessity" offsetting the drag of temperament and race.

Page 38, note 1. Two other of his definitions may here be given:—

1851. "To describe adequately is the high power and one of the highest enjoyments of man. This is Art."

1863. "My definition of Art is the inspiration of a just design working through all the details. Art is the path of the Creator to his work."

Page 40, note 1. Mr. Emerson expounds, better than in either of the essays on Art, the divine necessity of the best art in his early poem "The Problem."

Page 41, note 1. Mr. Emerson might have mentioned in connection with Smeaton's (the third) Eddystone Lighthouse,

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that the first, built by Winstanley on that terrible reef, was, at the top, a whimsical and almost pagoda-like structure, unable long to resist the upward dash of the seas.

He lives not who can refuse me; All my force saith, Come and use me.

And what they call their city way Is not their way, but hers, And what they say they made to-day, They learned of the oaks and firs.

What's most theirs is not their own, But borrowed in atoms from iron and stone, And in their vaunted works of Art The master-stroke is still her part.

Page 46, note 1. This consideration is the theme of the poem "Each and All."

"Thus the gods fated and such ruin wove That song might flourish for posterity."

Page 48, note 1. "Thus to him, to this schoolboy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein.… He shall see that Nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty

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of his own mind."—"The American Scholar," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 48, note 2. "The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work, and gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period overpowers the artist and finds expression in his work, so far will it retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine."—"Art," Essays, First Series.

Page 49, note 1. Journal, 1835. "The Arts languish now because all their scope is exhibition; when they originated it was to serve the Gods. The Catholic Religion has turned them to continual account in its service. Now they are mere flourishes. Is it strange they perish?

"Poetry to be sterling must be more than a show, must have or be an earnest meaning. Chaucer, Wordsworth,—per contra, Moore and Byron."

Page 50, note 1. The following is from some loose sheets on Beauty (1866?):—

"Beauty was never locked up in Vaticans. It is there, but it is not less here. The seat of beauty is in the truth and health of the Soul. It is the incessant creation of the spirit of man, whenever bad affections and falsehoods do not paralyze his plastic power; places and materials are indifferent to it, and subject to it; a beautiful soul dwells always in a beautiful world."

Page 52, note 1. The following extract is from Mr. Emerson's journal in Florence, in April, 1834:—

"I revisited the Tribune this morning to see the Venus and the Fornarina and the rest of that attractive company. I reserve my admiration as much as I can: I make a continual effort not to be pleased except by that which ought to please

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me, and I walked coolly round and round the marble lady, but, when I planted myself at the iron gate which leads into the chamber of Dutch paintings, and looked at the statue, I saw and felt that mankind had had good reason for their preference."

"There is anything but time in my idea of the antique." From a lecture on Art and Criticism, 1839.

If eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being;—

The hand that rounded Peter's dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free;

For out of Thought's interior sphere These wonders rose to upper air.

Page 53, note 2. Also compare, in Essays, First Series, page 17 in "History," and several passages in "Art."

Mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

The frolic architecture of the snow,—

Page 54, note 1. Here followed in the original lecture as printed in the Dial the paragraphs on the Gothic churches in "History," pp. 20, 21, in the Essays, First Series.

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Whilst love and terror laid the tiles. "The Problem," Poems.

Journal, 1848. "I believe in the admirableness of art. I expect it to be miraculous, and find it so. The combinations of the Gothic building are not now attainable, and the Phidian friezes with reason affect us as the forest does."

I copy from a later journal, as appropriate here, the definition of Beauty by Mr. Emerson's friend, Mr. James Elliot Cabot: "The complete incarnation of spirit, which is the definition of Beauty, demands equally that there be no point it does not inhabit, and none in which it abides."

Page 56, note 2. Journal, 1863. "The measure in art and in intellect is one: To what end? Is it yours to do? Are you bound by character and conviction to that part you take?… But the forsaking the design to produce effects by showy details is the ruin of any work. Then begins shallowness of effect; intellectual bankruptcy of the artist. All goes wrong. Artist and public corrupt each other."

Page 57, note 1. Here Mr. Emerson states again the doctrine of the Trinity, older than the Christian Church. It appears in many places in his writings, especially in "The Transcendentalist," page 354, in Nature, Addresses and Lectures, and in "The Poet," page 6, in the second series of Essays.

"Ever thy phantoms arise before us, Our loftier brothers, but one in blood; By bed and table they lord it o'er us, With looks of beauty and words of good.

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Calmly they show us mankind victorious O'er all that's aimless, blind and base; Their presence has made our nature glorious, Unveiling our night's illumined face."

In February, 1847, Mr. Emerson gave a lecture on Eloquence before the Boston Mercantile Library Association. It seems to have been much the same as the present essay. Just three years earlier, after reading his lecture on The Young American before the same body, he wrote in his journal as follows:—

FEBRUARY, 1844. When I address a large assembly, as last Wednesday, I am always apprised that an opportunity is there; not for reading to them, as I do, lively miscellanies, but for painting in fire my thought, and being agitated to agitate. One must dedicate himself to it and think with his audience in his mind, so as to keep the perspective and symmetry of the oration, and enter into all the easily forgotten secrets of a great nocturnal assembly and their relation to the speaker. But it would be fine music and in the present well rewarded; that is, he should have his audience at his devotion, and all other fames would hush before his. Now, eloquence is merely fabulous. When we talk of it we draw on our fancy. It is one of many things which I should like to do, but it requires a seven years' wooing.

Eloquence, in boyhood and youth, had been his idol. He

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had used every opportunity to hear the finished speakers of that day, when rhetoric and oratory were more prized than now. In those days apparently the great body of the students at Cambridge voluntarily went to hear the Seniors declaim. The florid and fervid oratory of the young Southerners had a great charm for the Northern boys. The young Emerson himself took the Boylston prize for speaking. Writing to his Aunt Mary, at the age of twenty, concerning his choice of the ministry as a profession, he said: "I inherit from my sire a formality of manners and speech, but I derive from him or his patriotic parent a passionate love for the strains of eloquence. I burn after the aliquid immensum infinitumque which Cicero desired. What we ardently love, we burn to imitate. But the most prodigious genius, a seraph's eloquence, will shamefully defeat its own end, if it has not first won the heart of the defender to the cause he defends." In those days he expressed the hope that he might "put on eloquence like a robe."

After leaving the ministry, on his return from Europe to the new life, he resolved to "say, at public lectures and the like, those things which I have meditated for their own sake, and not for the first time with a view to that occasion." He charged himself to make his writings "as pure of all dross as if thou wert to speak to sages and demigods." Before he learned from his experience in country lyceums how to interest and quicken uncultivated hearers without lowering the thought, an acquaintance prescribed for him "a course of mobs to correct my quaintness and transcendentalism. And I might have found it as good for me as a water-cure for paralyzed stomachs." In the lyceum he drew a lesson from this story of antiquity: "When Anaximander sang, the boys derided him, whereupon he said, 'We must learn to sing better for the boys.'"

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In the years between 1840 and 1850 Mr. Emerson's growing desire to express himself in poetry began to be fulfilled. He gave a lecture in London in 1848 before the Portman Square Literary and Scientific Institution, in the exordium of which he said, "I have ventured to name my topic 'Poetry and Eloquence,' though what I have to say is chiefly on the last. There is much that is common to the two." The best prose should be poetic, but the highest eloquence should be a poem.

The present lecture naturally follows that on Art, Eloquence, including Poetry, being the art that the author most loved.

The subject was not easily exhausted, and Mr. Emerson wrote another lecture, which was read in Chicago in 1867. This last is included in the volume Letters and Social Aims.

Page 62, note 1. Plato, Republic, Book 1. At town-meetings and other public gatherings Mr. Emerson seldom spoke unless the call was urgent. He felt his unfitness for debate or extempore speech; but he listened and watched the disputants with great interest and often admiration.

Page 63, note 1. Among Mr. Emerson's notes on Eloquence he wrote as a sort of motto some lines from the ancient version of "Thomas the Rhymer," called "Thomas of Ersseldoune," a legend that was a favorite with him.

"'Fare wele, Thomas, I wend my waye, I may no lengere stande with the:' 'Gyff me a tokynynge, lady gaye, That I may saye I spake with the.'

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"'To harpe or carpe whereso thou gose, Thomas, thou sall hafe the chose sothely:' And he saide, 'Harpynge kepe I none, For tonge is chefe of minstrelsye.'"

Page 63, note 2. See Plutarch's "Lives of the Ten Orators" in the Morals. Antiphon of Rhamnus in Attica (480-411 B. C.), was the first of the Ten Attic Orators to introduce the new rhetoric into politics. He was a leader in the Revolution of the Four Hundred, and when they fell was put to death.

"But now the blood of twenty thousand men Did triumph in my face." Shakspeare, Richard II., Act III., Scene 2.

"Un jour, sous sa fenêtre Passe un entreterrement: Le cortège et le prêtre Entendent I' instrument. Ils sautent; la prière Cede aux joyeux accords; Et, jusqu'à cimetière On danse autour du corps." Béranger, "Ménétrier de Meudon."

Page 67, note 1. In writing in his journal the resolve to give his best thoughts to all classes of hearers he said, "And be no whit ashamed if not one, yea, not one in the assembly, should give sign of intelligence. Is it not pleasant to you—unexpected wisdom? depth of sentiment in middle life? persons that in the thick of the crowd are true kings and gentlemen without the harness and envy of the throne?"

Page 68, note 1. Yet with all the pleasure he took in the

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torrent of Celtic eloquence when Kate, the housemaid, described accidents that befel her, he praises in the essay on The Superlative the cautious understatement of the Yankee.

Page 69, note 1. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson relates that he heard Mr. Emerson speak thus in praise of Southern eloquence, to the content of students from that section, in the audience; a content that was lessened when he went on, "The negro too is eloquent."

Page 70, note 1. Knowing how children learn through stories, Mr. Emerson when a teacher wrote out many good anecdotes from Plutarch and other sources for his scholars, which are still preserved.

Page 71, note 1. The ballad of Glenkindie, the minstrel, is in Professor Child's collection of English and Scottish Ballads.

Page 72, note 1. Mr. Emerson had this description of Ulysses from the Iliad (Book III. 191) written out for declamation, perhaps for his own speaking when in college. He gave it to his son for this purpose, but he was much disturbed when some one corrected the last sentence to the form here given. His own mistranslation or "acting version" was far more effective and majestic in his delivery: "But when he sent his great voice forth from his breast, and words fell like to the winter snows, not then would any mortal have wished to contend with Ulysses, and we rejoice not, beholding the son of Laertes here."

Page 74, note 1. Journal, 1856. "I last night remembered what fools a few sounding sentences made of me and my mates at Cambridge, as in Lee's and John Everett's orations.… I still remember a sentence in Carter Lee's oration: 'And there was a band of heroes, and round their mountains was a wreath of light, and, in the midst, on the mountain-top, stood Liberty feeding her eagle.'"

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Page 75, note 1. Daniel Webster.

Page 79, note 1. "My hand of iron," said Napoleon, "was not at the extremity of my arm, it was immediately connected with my head."

Page 80, note 1. In "Natural Aristocracy" (in Lectures and Biographical Sketches ) the power of a commanding personality is set forth at length.

Page 83, note 1. All this paragraph, as far as the quotation from Pepys's Diary, Mr. Emerson took from his note-book of 1830.

Page 83, note 2. The Rev. Joseph Stevens Buckminster, born in 1784, ordained pastor of Brattle Street Church in Boston before he was twenty-one years old, who died at the age of twenty-eight. He was a cultivated, thoughtful and eloquent man. He preached the funeral sermon of Mr. Emerson's father, the Rev. William Emerson.

Page 85, note 1. From his youth upward Mr. Emerson lost no opportunity of hearing Daniel Webster speak. In his Phi Beta Kappa Poem in 1834 he introduced a description of Webster's commanding personality and in praise of his gifts and services. This passage may be found in the Appendix to the Poems. In 1843, when Mr. Webster was retained in an important case in Concord, Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal:—

"Mr. Webster loses nothing by comparison with brilliant men in the legal profession; he is as much before them as before the ordinary lawyer. At least, I thought he appeared, among these best lawyers of the Suffolk Bar, like a schoolmaster among his boys. His wonderful organization, the perfection of his elocution, and all that thereto belongs, voice, accent, intonation, attitude, manner, are such as one cannot hope to see again in a century: then he is so thoroughly

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simple and wise in his rhetoric. Understanding language and the use of the positive degree, all his words tell, and his rhetoric is perfect, so homely, so fit, so strong. Then he manages his matter so well, he hugs his fact so close, and will not let it go, and never indulges in a weak flourish, though he knows perfectly well how to make such exordiums and episodes and perorations as may give perspective to his harangue without in the least embarrassing his plan or confounding his transitions. What is small he shows as small, and makes the great great. In speech he sometimes roars and his words are like blows of an axe."

Page 86, note 1. In his poem "The Adirondacs" Mr. Emerson celebrates the skill and powers of the guides, to the disadvantage of the gentlemen.

Page 88, note 1. Mr. Emerson honored Lord Mansfield for his decision in the case of Somerset the slave, and contrasted him in his journals with the Boston judges who gave the decision under the Fugitive Slave Law returning Sims and Burns to bondage. Mr. Emerson here and elsewhere shows his liking for the word "common-sense," in its larger sense, being almost an equivalent for the "universal mind" found everywhere in his writings. In the journal of 1836-37, after speaking of the mob, he says:—

"A contrast is seen in the effect of eloquence, the power which one man in an age possesses of uniting men by addressing the common soul of them all: if, ignorantly or wilfully, he seeks to uphold a falsehood, his inspiration and, ere long, his weight with men is lost; instead of leading the whole man, he leads only appetites and passions."

Page 91, note 1. This definition of the eloquent man suggests the definition of eloquence in the essay of that name in the next volume: "Eloquence is the power to translate a

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truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak."

Page 91, note 2. This passage refers to the Rev. Edward Taylor, the pastor of the Seamen's Bethel at the North End in Boston, whose rugged and searching eloquence Mr. Emerson greatly admired.

Journal, 1845. "What an eloquence Taylor suggests! Ah, could he guide those grand sea-horses of his with which he caracoles on the waves of the sunny ocean. But no, he is drawn up and down the ocean currents by the strong sea-monsters only on that condition, that he shall not guide."

Page 92, note 1. See the last part of stanza i. of the "Voluntaries" in the Poems.

One who having nectar drank Into blissful orgies sank; He takes no mark of night or day, He cannot go, he cannot stay, He would, yet would not, counsel keep, But, like a walker in his sleep With staring eye that seeth none, Ridiculously up and down Seeks how he may fitly tell The heart-o' erlading miracle. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

"As in a theatre, the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his prattle to be tedious." Shakspeare, Richard II., Act V., Scene 2.

Page 94, note 1. When Mr. Emerson, a young divinity

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student, was writing his first sermon, he thus cautioned himself: "Take care, take care that your sermon is not a recitation; that it is a sermon to Mr. A and Mr. B and Mr. C."

A few years after leaving the ministry he came home distressed at the preaching he heard on Sunday morning:—

"At church to-day I felt how unequal is this match of words against things. Cease, O thou unauthorized talker, to prate of consolation, and resignation, and spiritual joys in neat and balanced sentences. For I know these men who sit below and on hearing of these words look up. Hush quickly! for care and calamity are things to them.… O speak things then, or hold thy tongue."

Page 95, note 1. Mr. Emerson used to say laughingly, "Eloquence is dog-cheap at an Anti-Slavery meeting."

Page 96, note 1. Evidently Theodore Parker was in Mr. Emerson's mind here. Mr. Lowell's remarkable description of Mr. Parker's omniscient pugnacity in his Fable for Critics might be read in this connection.

Page 98, note 1. Mr. Emerson, in writing to his revered friend the Rev. Henry Ware, after the Divinity School Address, had said as to arguments by which he might justify his position, "I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought." On another occasion he said, "Truth ceases to be such when polemically stated." He ignored attacks and left the thought to make its way. This is the counsel given in his poem "Saadi."

The rules to men made evident By Him who built the day, The columns of the firmament Not firmer based than they. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

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The speech of John Brown before receiving his death-sentence is an example of eloquence based on the great principles. In the essay on this subject in Letters and Social Aims, Mr. Emerson speaks of it, classing it as one of "the two best specimens of eloquence we have had in this country."

Page 98, note 3. Mr. Emerson acted on the counsel he gave to the American Scholar in the Phi Beta Kappa Address, in 1837: "Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom."— Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 102.

Page 99, note 1. Arnold Ludwig Heeren was a writer whose works on ancient history and civilization, particularly of Greece, translated by George Bancroft, interested Mr. Emerson.

Page 99, note 2. The reference here is to Kurroglou the Kurd, a robber-minstrel. Mr. Emerson was greatly interested in the romantic story of him and his horse Kyrat, told in Specimens of Ancient Persian Poetry by Chodzko. Kurroglou is the hero of Longfellow's poem "The Leap of Roushan Beg."

Page 100, note 1. The following note from the journal of 1850 is appropriate:—

"And let it be well considered in eloquence, that what we praise and allow is only relatively good, and that perhaps a person is there present who, if he would, could unsettle all that we have just now agreed on. We have fallen into a poor, beggarly way of living, and our orators are of the same poverty, and deal in rags and cold. The imagination, the great awakening power, the morals, the great creator of genius and men, are not addressed. But though the orators and poets are

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of this jejune rule of three faction, the capacities remain. The child asks you for a story and is thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but a symbol all radiant with meaning. The man asks you for leave to be a poet and to paint things as they ought to be for a few hours. The youth asks for a poem. The stupidest wish to go to the theatre. We must have idolatries, mythologies, some swing and verge for the eternal and creative power lying coiled and cramped here, driving us to insanity and crime if it do not find vent."

DOMESTIC LIFE

Mr. Emerson seems to have first treated this subject in a lecture called "Home" in the course on Human Life given in Boston in the winter of 1838-39. A passage from this lecture survives in the present essay and another in that on Education, in Lectures and Biographical Sketches. Probably the same, with suitable changes for an English audience, was the lecture called "Domestic Life," one of the three given in Exeter Hall.

The lecture in its present form was read to Mr. Parker's Society in the Music Hall in Boston, November 13, 1859.

Mr. Emerson was an eminently domestic man, more so than might be inferred from his writings, unless perhaps where in them he speaks of little children. In his home he was loved and loving, a good householder, if a poor farmer. His housekeeping was simple but hospitable. He was esteemed by his neighbors, and, though he served himself by preference, was cared for by servants with affectionate respect.

But by force of character and will he succeeded in keeping

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to his task and avoiding domestic entanglement, although his study was close by the front door and separated but by thin doors from the parlor.

To show the good school of domesticity in which Mr. Emerson was reared, this picture of the home after his father's death may be given. The letter was written to his Aunt Mary when Ralph was not quite ten years old.

BOSTON, APRIL 16, 1813. DEAR AUNT, —… I mean now to give you an account of what I do commonly in one day, if that is what you mean by giving an account of one single day in my life. Friday, 9th, I choose for the day of telling what I did. In the Morning I rose, as I commonly do, about five minutes before six. I then help Wm. in making the fire, after which I set the table for Prayers. I then call Mamma about quarter after six. We spell as we did before you went away. I confess I often feel an angry passion start in one corner of my heart when one of my Brothers gets above me, which I think sometimes they do by unfair means, after which we eat our breakfast; then I have from about quarter after seven to play or read. I think I am rather inclined to the former. I then go to school where I hope I can say I study more than I did a little while ago. I am in another book called Virgil, and our class are even with another which came to the Latin School one year before us. After attending this school I go to Mr. Webb's private school where I write and cipher. I go to this place at eleven and stay till one o'clock. 1 After I come home I eat my dinner and at two o'clock I resume my studies at the Latin School

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where I do the same except in studying grammar. After I come home I do Mamma her little errands if she has any; then I bring in my wood to supply the breakfast-room. I then have some time to play and eat my supper. After that we say our hymns or chapters, and then take our turns in reading Rollin, as we did before you went. 1 We retire to bed at different times. I go at a little after eight, and retire to my private devotions, and then close my eyes in sleep, and there end the toils of the day.

From Mr. Emerson's note-book:—

"On the back of Alexander's portrait of my mother, taken in 1825, at the age of 57, Edward B. E., who ordered the picture, wrote,—

"Feminae, uxoris, viduae, matris optimae, laudatae, benedictae vita pulchra, similitudo tam similis pretiosa. Ipsa mulier ad coelum ibit: umbra picta inter amicos, Deo volente, numquam inter inimicos, quia tales non sunt, vivis descriptionem sine errore mortalis quondam, tunc angeli dabit.

"Charles C. E. proposes an improved reading of the second sentence:—

"Ipsa mulier in coelum ibit: umbra picta inter amicos, Deo volente, non unquam, cum tales nulli sint, inter inimicos, errore purae mortalis quondam, tunc animae beatae imaginem servabit."

Page 103, note 1. "The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love and reason visibly stream."—"Considerations by the Way," Conduct of Life.

Pliny's charming and condensed description of a baby was

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noted by Mr. Emerson before he had children of his own: Flens animal, caeteris imperaturum, a crying creature which will give the law to others.

Page 104, note 1. The last three sentences were written soon after the birth of Mr. Emerson's first child, Waldo, who died when five years old.

Page 105, note 1. Mr. Thoreau served as horse and in every other way as delightful friend and companion to the children of his friend.

Page 105, note 2. The following is from an early journal:—

"Blessed is the child: the unconscious is ever the act of God himself. Nobody can reflect upon his unconscious period, or any particular word or act in it, with regret or contempt. Bard or hero cannot look down upon the word or gesture of a child: it is as great as they."

Page 105, note 3. Dr. Holmes wrote: "'Domestic Life' begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of the goblet which holds some tonic draught."

Page 106, note 1. In the early poem "Peter's Field," only published after Mr. Emerson's death, in the Appendix to the Poems, he told of the enchanted wood which the oaks and hemlocks behind the Ripley Hill in Concord seemed to him and his brothers.

Page 107, note 1. "We rightly speak of the guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them, they soon come not to mind it, and get a self-reliance; and if we

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indulge them to folly, they learn the limitation elsewhere."—"Uses of Great Men," Representative Men.

Page 107, note 2. Journal, 1842. "I was a little chubby boy trundling a hoop in Chauncy Place and spouting poetry from Scott and Campbell at the Latin School. But Time, the little gray man, has taken out of his vest pocket a great awkward house (in a corner of which I sit and write of him), some acres of land, several full grown and several very young persons, and seated them close beside me; then he has taken that chubbiness and that hoop quite away (to be sure he has left the declamation and the poetry) and here left a long lean person threatening soon to be a little gray man like himself."

Page 108, note 1. A similar amusing passage is in the essay on Beauty ( Conduct of Life, p. 298): "But our bodies do not fit us, but caricature and satirize us," etc.

Page 110, note 1. "There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato,—never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them in his hand."—"Spiritual Laws," Essays, First Series, p. 154.

"None is so wasteful as the scraping dame; She loseth three for one, her soul, rest, fame." Herbert, "The Church Porch."

'T is the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. "Ode," inscribed to W. H. Channing, Poems.

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Page 113, note 1. Journal, 1850. "Hear what the morning says and believe that. The house is full of noise and contradicts all that the morning hints."

Also a passage on the unworthiness of much of our daily employment is called to mind in "Lecture on the Times," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 115, note 1. In the concluding verses of "The Celestial Love" in the Poems this aspect of our debt to our kind is treated. In the journal of 1842, speaking of the self-denying ordinances of the reformers in abjuring flesh and wine and civic responsibilities, he concludes, "By none of these ways can he free himself, no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius, only by the fresh activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise and lead him by the hand out of all wards of the prison."

Page 117, note 1. His house gave hospitality, simple but comfortable, to the bodies of the many who came, but even more to the ideas. Sometimes the person did not come, only the earnest question or thought, and an answer giving light or refreshment returned. Mr. Emerson said, "I will assume that a stranger is judicious and benevolent. If he is, I will thereby keep him so. If he is not, it will tend to instruct him."

Thou shalt make thy house The temple of a nation's vows. Spirits of a higher strain Who sought thee once shall seek again. I detected many a god Forth already on the road, Ancestors of beauty come In thy breast to make a home. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

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Page 119, note 2. On his return to his own country in 1848, from the conventional life and fixed standards of England, he felt the relief and the opportunity, and wrote:—

"The dinner, the wine, the homes of England look attractive to the traveller, but they are the poor utmost that liberal wealth can perform. Alas! the halls of England are musty, the land is full of coal-smoke and carpet-smell: not a breath of mountain air dilates the languishing lungs."

Page 121, note 1. "The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life. Here is the sincere thing, the wondrous composition for which day and night go round. In that routine are the sacred relations, the passions that bind and sever. Here is poverty and all the wisdom its hated necessities can teach, here labor drudges, here affections glow, here the secrets of character are told, the guards of man, the guards of woman, the compensations which, like angels of justice, pay every debt: the opium of custom, whereof all drink and many go mad. Here is Economy, and Glee, and Hospitality, and Ceremony, and Frankness, and Calamity, and Death, and Hope."—"Education," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 121, note 2. This picture of the home of Mr. Emerson's childhood is well supplemented by those in Mr. Cabot's Memoir, vol. i. chapter i., and in the pleasant little book written by his cousin, the Rev. David Greene Haskins. 1 The book of another kinsman, George Barrell Emerson, the distinguished teacher and a much valued friend, contains this account of the Emerson household:—

"The longing for a home led me to apply to a very noble lady whom I had long known, and to beg her to let me

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become one of her family. She granted my request in the kindest manner possible. She was the widow of Rev. William Emerson, and among her sons I found William, whom I had long known and loved, the best reader, and with the sweetest voice I ever heard, and a pleasant talker; Ralph Waldo, whom I had known and admired, and whom all the world now knows almost as well as I do; Edward Bliss, the most modest and genial, the most beautiful and the most graceful speaker, a universal favorite; and Charles Chauncy, bright and ready, full of sense, ambitious of distinction, and capable of it." 1

Of the religious atmosphere in that home Mr. Emerson thus speaks in his journal of 1837: "I cannot hear the young men whose theological instruction is exclusively owed to Cambridge and to public institutions without feeling how much happier was my star, which rained on me influences of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly lives and godly deaths of sainted kindred, at Concord, at Malden, York, was itself a culture, an education. I heard with awe her tales."

Page 123, note 1. In former editions this name has been printed Genelas, but I can learn of no authority for any other spelling than Venelas. The name does not appear in the common English ballad on the same theme, "The Boy and the Mantle." Venelas appears in the "Fabliau du Mantel mantaillé" in the Collection by Montaiglon and Raynaud, and the Archaeologia Cambrensis, 3d series, vol. ix.

Page 126, note 1. "We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. We grant that human life is mean, but how

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did we find out that it was mean?"—"The Over-Soul," Essays, First Series, p. 267.

And thou shalt say to the Most High, "Godhead! all this astronomy," etc.

O friend, my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched, Through thee the rose is red; All things through thee take nobler form And look beyond the earth, The mill-round of our fate appears A sun-path in thy worth.

Page 128, note 1. Quoted by Plutarch in the essay "Of Brotherly Love" in the Morals.

If Thought unlock her mysteries, If Friendship on me smile, I walk in marble galleries, I talk with kings the while. "Walden," Poems, Appendix.

Let statue, picture, park and hall, Ballad, flag and festival, The past restore, the day adorn, And make to-morrow a new morn.

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So shall the drudge in dusty frock Spy behind the city clock Retinues of airy kings, Skirts of angels, starry wings, His fathers shining in bright fables, His children fed at heavenly tables. "Art," Poems.

Page 132, note 2. Mr. Emerson once said of Gibbon, after praising his power of labor and his stately writing, that the trouble with the man was "that he had no shrine," a man's most needful possession.

God only knew how Saadi dined; Roses he ate, and drank the wind. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

This essay, originally called "The Man with the Hoe," was the oration delivered by Mr. Emerson at the annual exhibition of the Middlesex Agricultural Society—"Cattle-show" in the vernacular—September 29, 1858. His townsman, John S. Keyes, Esquire, the sheriff of Middlesex and the president of the Society, invited him to give the address, knowing well that Mr. Emerson would present the larger and nobler view of their occupation to the farmers and gardeners of the county. For Concord, then a shire-town, was mainly agricultural, its lands still in the hands of the descendants of the early settlers. The two ministers, three doctors, six lawyers, two manufacturers, and the shop-keepers were all gardeners

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also, as were even the few residents who did business in Boston. So was Mr. Emerson, though in his essay on Prudence he admitted that "whoever sees my garden discovers that I must have some other garden." His poem "My Garden" tells of the latter, which yielded abundantly, but, that he had a right to talk to farmers as one of them, witness the printed Report of the Agricultural Society of 1858, which contains not only the Address in its first form, but the recommendation that R. W. Emerson and O. Farnsworth each receive $1.00 as a gratuity for single dishes of pears; better yet, R. W. Emerson is awarded third premium of $3.00 for Sage grapes. His neighbors, the Concord farmers, returned his salute with courtesy and respect when they met him on the roads or in their wood-lots, and most of them liked to hear him read one or more lectures in the Lyceum each winter, as did the people of the villages around. Mr. Emerson once said that his farming, "like the annual ploughing of the Emperor of China, had a certain emblematic air," but he knew how to find emblems and parables in the field, and proved in his lecturing that common people loved symbols. His neighbors gathered in their crops, but he, unknown to them, had reaped a harvest in their fields of which he tells in his poem "The Apology." This was his best crop, for he was unhandy with the spade. While his garden was small, he worked it with advice and help of his good friends George Bradford and Henry Thoreau, but as his farm increased, it was managed for a time by Mr. Edmund Hosmer. Of this neighbor Mr. Emerson gave a pleasant account in the Dial paper "Agriculture of Massachusetts," included in the volume Natural History of Intellect. After 1850 the ten-acre farm was managed and worked for him in succession by two excellent and devoted Irishmen, who left him free from its care to mind his own affairs as the interpreter.

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In the journal of 1838 he wrote:—

"If my garden had only made me acquainted with the muck-worm, the bugs, the grasses and the swamp of plenty in August, I should willingly pay a free tuition. But every process is lucrative to me far beyond its economy."

In the essay on Wealth in Conduct of Life is the amusing account of how the weeds insidiously betrayed Mr. Emerson into the loss of his morning, and in Nature, Addresses and Lectures the advantages and to some extent the drawbacks of farming are set forth in the early pages of "The American Scholar," and "Man the Reformer," pp. 237-242.

The exordium of the Cattle-show Address was as follows:—

"Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:—I suppose there is no anniversary that meets from all parties a more entire good will than this rural festival. Town and country, trader and manufacturer, clerk and layman, sailor and soldier, men and women, all have an equal stake in the prosperity of the farmer. It is well with all when it is well with him. He has no enemy, and all are loud in his praise. Every wise State has favored him, and the best men have held him highest. Cato said, when it was said that such or such a man was a good husbandman, it was looked upon as the very highest compliment. Of all the rewards given by the Romans to great public benefactors, the most valued and the rarest bestowed was the crown of grass, given only by the acclamation of the army for the preservation of the army by the valor of one man. Since the dependence, not of the whole army, but of the whole state, rests on the tiller of the ground, the arval crown, the crown of grass, should be more rightfully awarded to the farmer. Let us then look at the condition of the farmer, or the Man with the Hoe, at his strength and weakness, at his aids and servants,

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at his greater and lesser means, and his share in the great future which opens before the people of this country."

Page 137, note 1. In the autumn following his Address to the Divinity Students in 1838, Mr. Emerson had been so much denounced for his dangerous heresies that it almost seemed to him that his lecture courses, on which he largely depended for support, might not be attended. He evidently began to consider man's primitive means of support, for he wrote in the journal of September 30, immediately in connection with some entries, suggested by the attacks made upon him:—

"It seems as if a man should learn to fish, to plant or to hunt that he might be secure if he were cast out from society and not be painful to his friends and fellow men."

While planting his potatoes this comforting thought occurred: "A great fact of much import to the new philosophical opinions is the garden discovery that a potato put into a hole, in six weeks becomes ten. This is the miracle of the multiplication of loaves."

And again, May, 1839: "I think we ought to have manual labor, each man. Why else this rapid impoverishing which brings every man continually to the presence of the fact that bread is by the sweat of the face."

Page 139, note 1. It should be remembered that this address was written at the period when the old New England farming had not yet quite passed into the new. The farmer and his boys were still working together on many farms, and the mother and daughters doing dairy and household work. The farmer was less of a trader than he must be now to succeed, for he and his family mainly lived off the farm. The machine-farming was but beginning, and most farm-work, and even marketing, was done at the pace of the ox, and the

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horse was only beginning to supersede him. To offset this, the working-day was often sixteen hours long. The bread was still often made of rye and Indian meal, and vegetables, fruit, pork and beef raised on the farm, with cider for drink, made the principal diet. Grocery bills were partly paid in produce, and there was little cash for clothing, household adornment and amusement. The Irishman, whose industry and frugal living has since made him master of half of our farms, was a hired laborer newly come, and the Scandinavian had not arrived.

Page 140, note 1. The unfitness of the amateur farmers of Brook Farm and Fruitlands was in Mr. Emerson's mind.

What prizes the town and the tower? Only what the pine-tree yields; Sinew that subdued the fields; The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods Chants his hymn to hills and floods, Whom the city's poisoning spleen Made not pale, or fat, or lean. "Woodnotes," II., Poems.

Page 142, note 1. Thoreau's plan, by which he became a truly rich man, was to diminish his wants instead of increasing his income.

Time and Thought were my surveyors,—

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No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, My oldest force is good as new, And the fresh rose on yonder thorn Gives back the bending heavens in dew. "Song of Nature."

Page 145, note 1. "They do not believe, what is true, that one half of the weight of the rocks which compose the crust of the globe, … of the houses, of the stones of the pavement, of the soils we cultivate, and much more than half by weight of all living animals and plants, consists of oxygen."—Cattle-show Address.

Ever the Rock of Ages melts Into the mineral air, To be the quarry whence to build Thought and its mansions fair. "Fragments on Life," Poems.

Onward and on, the eternal Pan.

This whole theme of the farmer's servants is treated in a few lines in the poem "Guy."

Put in, drive home the sightless wedges And split to flakes the crystal ledges. "Fragments on Nature," Poems.

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In the Address the paragraph is concluded as follows:—

"Water, the daily miracle—a substance as explosive as gunpowder—the electric force contained in a drop of water being equal in amount to that which is discharged from a thunder-cloud. I quote from the exact Faraday."

Then follows a passage about the farmer's doubtful competence to control these majestic forces:—

"His servants are sometimes too strong for him. His tools are too sharp. But this inequality finds its remedy in practice. Experience gradually teaches him, and he is thoughtful. The farmer hates innovation; he hates the hoe till he tries it, preferring to scratch with a stick; he will walk till he has tried the railway car; but the oldest fogy among us, now that the Atlantic Cable is laid to London, will not send a man to swim across with his letter in his mouth."

Page 147, note 1. It may be interesting to see this passage in the garb in which it was presented to the Middlesex farmers.

"Plant a fruit-tree by the roadside and it will not produce, although it receives many hints, from projected stones and sticks, that fruit is desired to come down, and though it has been swallowed crude into the robust bowels of small boys. But draw a low fence about it to keep out the cow and pig, and for thirty, forty, perhaps a hundred years, it ripens peacefully its delicate fruit,—every pear, every nectarine, every cluster of grapes inviting you to have its picture taken, before being sent to the Horticultural Fair."

Apropos of orchards, I will give here two allusions to apples from the journals:—

1848. "I have planted a Pumpkin-sweeting near my summer house,—I believe out of agreeable recollections of that fruit in my childhood at Newton. It grew in Mr. Greenough's pasture, and I thought it solid sunshine.

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1853. "The Newtown Pippins, Gentlemen, are they not the Newton Pippins? or, is not this the very pippin that demonstrated to Sir Isaac Newton the fall of the world, not the fall of Adam, but of the moon to the earth, and universal gravity. Well, here they are, a barrel of them; every one of them good to show gravitation, and good to eat; every one as sound as the moon. What will you give me for a barrel of moons?"

Page 148, note 1. From "The Mower against Gardens" by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678).

Page 151, note 1. Henry Charles Carey, a remarkable student and writer on Political Economy. In 1836 he published The Harmony of the World, as exhibited in the Laws which regulate the Increase of Population and of the Means of Sustenance, and in the Identity of the Interests of the Sovereign and the Subject, the Landlord and the Tenant, the Capitalist and the Workman, the Master and the Slave.

In support of Mr. Carey's theory it may be said that the Great Meadows of Concord, Bedford, Sudbury and Wayland, bare of trees and waving with coarse grass, are said to have been the bait which lured the first settlers here. They hoped thus to have fertile fields without the long and arduous work of clearing primaeval forest. But neither they nor their descendants have ever been able to get anything better than meadow-hay of poor quality from them.

Page 152, note 1. Mr. Emerson, in the Historical Discourse which he gave in Concord in 1835, at the celebration of the two hundredth year of the settlement of the town, gave an amusing if piteous account of the sufferings of the first settlers. See Miscellanies.

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Page 153, note 1. This sentence recalls Mr. Emerson's wise treatment of his children if they cried at table. He always quietly sent the unhappy one to see whether the front gate were latched, or whether there were perhaps a rain-cloud coming. He knew that the change of scene and the quiet face of Nature would calm the child, who returned and duly reported, wondering why the fear of cows getting in, or a storm coming, had so suddenly come over his father.

Page 153, note 2. The following picture of the Nine-Acre Corner farms along the river, and of the old-time Concord farmers, is from the journal of 1848:—

"The cranberry meadow yonder is that where Darius Hubbard picked one hundred bushels in one season worth 200 dollars, and no labor whatever is bestowed on the crop, not so much as to mow the grass or cut down the bushes. Much more interesting is the wood-lot, which yields its gentle rent of six per cent. without any care or thought when the owner sleeps or travels, and fears no enemy but fire. But E. declares that the railroad has proved too strong for all our farmers and has corrupted them like a war, or the incursion of another race;—has made them all amateurs, given the young men an air their fathers never had; they look as if they might be railroad agents any day. We shall never see Cyrus Hubbard or Ephraim Wheeler or Grass-and-oats or Oats-and-grass, old Barrett or Hosmer, in the next generation. These old Saxons have the look of pine-trees and apple-trees, and might be the sons got between the two; conscientious labourers with a science born with them from out the sap-vessels of these savage sires. This savagery is natural to man, and polished England cannot do without it."

The Cattle-show Address concluded thus:—

"I congratulate the farmer of Massachusetts on his advantages.

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I congratulate him that he is set down in a good place, where the soil and climate yield a larger Flora than any other. A greater variety of important plants grow here than in any southern or northern latitude. We are on the northern boundary of many tropical trees, and on the southern boundary of the arctic plants. We can raise almost all crops, and if we lack the orange and palm, we have the apple and peach and pear. In Illinois, it is often said, although it is more the voice of their scorn than of their pity, that they reckon it a singular leading of Divine Providence that Massachusetts was settled before the prairie was known, else it would never have been settled. But the Massachusetts farmer may console himself that if he has not as rich a soil, he has the advantage of a market at his own door, the manufactory in the same town. I congratulate you, then, on the advantage of your position. Next, I congratulate you on the new territory which you have discovered, and not annexed but subnexed to Middlesex and to Massachusetts. I congratulate you at being born at a happy time, when the old slow ways of culture must go out with the sharp stick and the bow and arrow, when the steam-engine is in full use, and new plants and new culture are daily brought forward. I congratulate you on the fact that the year that has just witnessed the successful employment of new machines, of the mower and reaper, on the plains and prairies, has also witnessed the laying of the Atlantic Cable. The Cable is laid, and the courage of man is confirmed. All that used to look like vagary and castle-building is to be solid sense henceforth. Who shall ever dare to say impossible again? Henceforth, if a thing is really desirable, it is in that degree really practicable, and the farm you have dreamed of—go instantly and begin to make it. I congratulate you, lastly, on the new political economy which takes off the crape from farms and

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towns and nations, and lets in the light on all we do and all we gain, and teaches that whatever is really good and useful for one man to do, is good and useful for all."

WORKS AND DAYS

The lecture "Works and Days" appears to have been first given in Cincinnati and probably other cities and towns in 1857. It followed "Country Life" as the second lecture in the course called the Natural Method of Mental Philosophy in the spring of the following year. It opened then with the following passage:—

"One of the oldest remains of literature is the poem of Hesiod, called Works and Days. It is not much read in these times crowded with books and manifold spiritual influences; but it has had its day, and has furnished its share of the general culture; in as much as passages from it have passed into the public mind, and make part of the proverbs of mankind. I borrow from it only its title, to offer from this text a lesson to this day and hour."

Page 157, note 1. Sir Charles Bell quotes Galen as saying, "Did man possess the natural armor of the brutes, he would no longer work as an artificer, nor protect himself with a breastplate, nor fashion a sword or spear, nor invent a bridle to mount the horse and hunt the lion. Neither would he follow the arts of peace, construct the pipe and lyre, erect houses, place altars, inscribe laws and through letters commune with the wisdom of antiquity."

Page 157, note 2. This was Thoreau's experience with

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some of those who helped him in his land-surveying. He could verify their work by pacing.

Page 161, note 1. At the time when this lecture was written the vast undertaking of connecting by submarine cable the Old World with the New excited the hopes of civilized mankind. The apparent triumph of human wit and hands over stupendous difficulties was celebrated by Mr. Emerson in his poem "The Adirondacs," for it was there that the good news reached him, but that was in August, 1858, more than a year after this lecture was written. It was, of course, adapted to the times when later delivered, and, when the essay was published as part of this volume, the Atlantic Cable had been in successful operation nearly five years.

My paths lead out The exodus of nations: I disperse Men to all shores that front the hoary main. "Sea-Shore," Poems.

Page 162, note 2. This paragraph from the lecture here followed in the essay:—

"Vulgar progress is in extending yourself, claiming and fencing a great deal of land; conquering and counting by continents and by millions. True progress is in making the most of that you have; in disclosing the arsenal of powers that belong to an acre of ground; in unlocking the irresistible faculties that belong to a cultivated man; that control over mankind which belongs to him who controls himself; the knowledge of all men which belongs to self-knowledge; the inevitable radiation of centrality."

Mr. Emerson was speaking in high and general themes, but their special application to the hour was the moral he would point. He was impatient of the leading orators who in those

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dark days before the war were praising the patriots of "seventy-six;" yet showing themselves apostates to their great principles, applicable as ever to the problems of 1858. An omitted sheet, from the lecture, runs as follows: "Greatness is to live in the present, to magnify the present, to know its duties and carry up the present knot of affairs over Greece, or Rome, or Palestine. But we live as these paltry politicians live; we are absurdly historical: we neglect the plain duty of the moment, to honor the memory of some dead duty,—of some dead body in some dead moment. We praise Washington, but perform Lord North. We keep the fourth of July, and our eyes always nailed on mouldering escutcheons. I dreamed I stood in a city of beheaded men, where the decapitated trunks continued to walk."

It cannot conquer folly,— Time-and-space-conquering steam,— And the light-outspeeding telegraph Bears nothing on its beam. "The World-Soul," Poems.

"Wealth is the conjurer's devil, Whom when he thinks he hath, the devil hath him." George Herbert, "The Church Porch."

Page 165, note 1. Mr. Emerson, like others, was feeling the "hard times" of the great financial panic of 1857.

Page 167, note 1. His poem "Days" Mr. Emerson once spoke of as the one which he thought the best. It is not unlikely that he meant it for the purpose for which it is used in this edition, as motto to this essay, but, as he was hurried in preparing the book, could not write mottoes for all

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and so omitted any. The editor has, however, ventured to supply them from the poems or fragments of verse.

Page 168, note 1. Dr. Holmes, in his interesting chapter on Emerson's poems, quotes this prose sentence from the "Works and Days," and then says, "Now see the thought in full dress," and gives the poem "Days," adding the comment, "Cinderella at the fireside, and Cinderella at the prince's ball!"

This image of the masquerading days appears also in "May-Day," and in a youthful poem, never printed, and also in several essays or lectures; for instance: "The Times are the Masquerade of the Eternities, trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; … the quarry out of which the genius of to-day is building up the Future."

Page 170, note 1. In the original form this sentence ran: "One must look long before he finds the Timaeus weather; but at last the high, cold, silent morning arrives, the early dawn," etc.

Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more, And mix the bowl again; Seethe, Fate! the ancient elements, Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace and pain.

Let war and trade and creeds and song Blend, ripen race on race, The sunburnt world a man shall breed Of all the zones and countless days. "Song of Nature," Poems.

Page 171, note 2. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV. 477.

Page 172, note 1. "The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament. … On the instant, and incessantly, fall

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snowstorms of illusions," etc.—"Illusions," Conduct of Life.

Page 173, note 1. Compare the poem "Xenophanes."

Who bides at home, nor looks abroad, Carries the eagles and masters the sword. "Destiny," Poems.

Page 175, note 1. This sentence suggests the ending of the second "Woodnotes."

Shines the last age, the next with hope is seen, To-day slinks poorly off unmarked between: Future or Past no richer secret folds, O friendless Present, than thy bosom holds. "Heri, Cras, Hodie," Poems, Quatrains.

Page 176, note 1. Letter to Marshal Saint Cyr.

Page 177, note 1. In the lecture this sentence follows: "Beware of affronting the Genius who has covered up under these low haunts your private passage to the council-chamber of the great Gods."

Page 177, note 2. Compare the opening passage of the first essay in this volume.

Page 178, note 1. In the lecture, here follows, "Some mellow, satisfying seasons we have in the woods in cool summer days."

〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉 〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉 〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉 〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉 Odyssey, XVIII. 136, 137.

This passage has been much discussed by scholars, but the

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view as held at present gives it a different signification from that given in the essay, viz.: The mind of men on earth is like the day which the Father of gods and men brings to them.

Page 179, note 1. The elder Pliny's dedication of his Natural History to Titus Vespasian: "I have included in thirty-six books 20,000 topics, all worthy of attention, … and to these I have made considerable additions of things which were either not known to my predecessors or which have been lately discovered. Nor can I doubt but that there still remain many things which I have omitted; for I am a mere mortal, and one that has many occupations. I have, therefore, been obliged to compose this work at interrupted intervals, indeed during the night, so that you will find that I have not been idle even during this period. The day I devote to you, exactly portioning out my sleep to the necessity of my health, and contenting myself with this reward, that while we are musing on these subjects (according to the remark of Varro) we are adding to the length of our lives; for life properly consists in being awake."

Page 180, note 1. Here follow, in the original, the words "Beauty is at home."

Blessed is he, who, playing deep, yet haply asks not why, Too busied in the crowded hour to fear to live or die. Quatrain, "Nature," Poems.

Page 182, note 1. A part of the song of the White Lady of Avenel in Sir Walter Scott's novel, The Abbot.

Page 184, note 1. In the essay "Aristocracy" (Lectures and Biographical Sketches), such is said to have been the practice of the Caliph Ali.

Page 185, note 1. When the lecture was first given, this

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was Mr. Emerson's word for the hour to his countrymen: "This country has its proper glory, though now shrouded and unknown. We will let it shine. Let us set American free will against Asiatic fate; the American wilderness of capabilities and idealistic tendency, against the adamantine grooves of law and custom in which European thought travels.

"In my judgment the best use of Europe to our people is, its warnings to us, or we go to Europe to be Americanized."

That the value which Mr. Emerson set on books was a trait that had long characterized the family, the following extract from the will of his ancestor, the founder of Concord, will show:—

"I, Peter Bulkeley, … give to my son Edward certain books in my library; 1. Tarnovius on the Minor Prophets. 2. Piscator's Commentary. 3. Dr. Owen against the Arminians. 4. Dr. Willet on Exodus & Leviticus. 5. English Annotations. 6. Mr. Ainsworth's notes on 5 Books of Moses.

"To my son Eliazur, a hundred acres of land lying at the near end of the great meadow & 20 acres at the far end."

When shall I be tired of reading? When the moon is tired of waxing and waning, When the cloud is tired of raining, When the sea of ebbing and flowing,

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When the grass is weary of growing, When the planets tire of going, And when Death is sick of feeding, Then shall I be tired of reading.

It may be interesting to young people living in the twentieth century to see a letter advising a course of reading which Mr. Emerson wrote when he was twenty-eight years old to Miss Elizabeth Tucker of Derry, New Hampshire, a young girl "in her teens," who was a cousin of his first wife.

BOSTON, 1 FEB., 1832. MY DEAR COUSIN,—If it were not true that it is never too late to do right, I should be quite ashamed to send my list of books at such a long distance behind my promise. When I spent so pleasant a day at your house, I thought it would be very easy, and I knew it would be very pleasant, for me to make out a scheme of study for your vacation as soon as I got home. But what to select out of so great a company of leather-jackets and so deserving—and then a crowd of things to be done—and withal a Quaker habit of never doing things till their necessary time, in the hope of doing them better, has postponed my letter from day to day and week to week. But so you must never do, my dear Cousin. But for fear you should quite forget your wise adviser, and should be a grown lady and so I should lose the honor of having had any part in your education, I hasten to send you my poor thoughts upon what is good to be read. I make no pretensions to give you a complete course, but only select a few good books of my acquaintance—such as I think you will like, and such as will serve you. One more preliminary word. Never mind any silly people that try to sneer you out of the love of reading. People are

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fast outgrowing the old prejudice that a lady ought not to be acquainted with books. It is the display that disgusts; the knowledge that you get from them never disgusts anybody, but is all useful, and has comforted how many hours that would otherwise have been long, dull and lonely. First then you must keep one or two books for the soul always by you, for monitors and angels, lest this world of trifles should run away with you. Such a book is Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, written by a German monk near four hundred years ago, and needs only a little allowance for a Roman Catholic's opinions, to make it express the religious sentiments of every good mind. Then there is a little book I value very much, Scougal's Life of God in the Soul of Man. Taylor's Holy Dying is a good book. Its author was called the "Shakspeare of divines." Selections from Fénelon, by Mrs. Follen. Ware on the Formation of the Christian Character. Sir Thomas Browne's Religion of a Physician. This is a beautiful work lately republished in this town. Young's Night Thoughts. A friend whom I value very much told Ellen always to keep Young upon her table. But I suppose you will think here are Sunday books enough. Now for History. The American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge are publishing Müller's Universal History in four duodecimo volumes. It is very much the best of all the General histories and is very easily read. They have yet only printed the first volume. The sketches of Rome and of Greece in it are excellent. Then the most important modern history to be read perhaps is Robertson's Charles V., which is an account of Europe in the most interesting period. I would skip the first volume, which is a general view of Europe, and read the two last. Then you might take up Hume, say at the reign of Elizabeth, which would continue pretty

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well the line of events. The best history of Europe during the French Revolution is Scott's Life of Napoleon. For the American history, as you happen to live at Derry, N. H., I would read Dr. Belknap's History of the State. It is not only a very good book itself, but will give you a pretty good idea of all the States, their story is so much alike. Morton's New England Memorial is a little book and a pleasing account of the Forefathers. Milman's History of the Jews in the Family Library is a very good book. But what is far more soothing, and never painful, like the history of man, is Natural History in its various parts. The first volume of the American Library of Useful Knowledge (and you must make the Social Library in Derry subscribe for that book) contains Mr. Brougham's Discourse upon the advantage and prospects of Science, which is excellent, and Mr. Herschel's, which is better. The same Mr. Herschel, son of the famous astronomer, is about to publish a discourse on astronomy which is expected with great interest. Then there is a beautiful book on American birds by Mr. Nuttall (N.'s Ornithology) that every one who lives in the country ought to read. I suppose you have read at school Conversations on Chemistry. The Conversations on Vegetable Physiology are just as good. With this class of books I will put the Account of Polar Expeditions, a volume of the Family Library. I suppose to such a formidable list I must add a novel or two, or you would think me very unkind. So I really hope you will read De Vere by the author of Tremaine, and as much Walter Scott and Miss Edgeworth as you please. For Poetry read Milton; if the Paradise Lost tires you, it is so stately, try the minor Poems. Comus, if the Mythology does not make it sound strange, is a beautiful poem and makes one holy to read it. Read Bryant's poems. I know you will love

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them, and Cowper and Thomson, and perhaps (a very large perhaps) Wordsworth. If you do not like poetry, which I suppose you do, the best way to learn is to write some. Now I do not suppose that you will read all these books in a short time, or perhaps at any time, and some of them very probably you have read. I only wanted to fulfil your command, and speak a good word for some valued acquaintance of mine. The best of all ways to make one's reading valuable is to write about it, and so I hope my Cousin Elizabeth has a blank-book where she keeps some record of her thoughts. And if you think my letter very long, why you must bear in mind that once I was a schoolmaster, and I am so proud of my new scholar as to keep her long at my lecture. Make my respectful remembrances to your mother and father and my compliments to your sister. Your affectionate cousin, R. W. EMERSON.

Of himself he wrote in 1859: "I am a natural reader and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have written."

In his Phi Beta Kappa Address (in Nature, Addresses and Lectures ) Mr. Emerson pointed out to the American Scholar the right and the wrong use of books and said, "Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times." Only in the intervals of direct illumination he may resort to their reflected light. And in "Nominalist and Realist" (Essays, Second Series) he admits that sometimes he reads even Plato "for the lustres," "for a mechanical help to the fancy and the imagination." He told a youthful writer "only to read to start his team." But in his

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journal of 1867, after saying that in proportion to your reality of life and perception will be your difficulty of finding yourself expressed in others' words or deeds, he interrupts himself,—"and yet—and yet—when the visions of my books come over me as I sit writing, when the remembrance of some poet comes, I accept it with pure joy, and quit my thinking as sad lumbering work; and hasten to my little heaven, if it is then accessible, as angels might."

Page 189, note 1. Mr. Emerson begins this estimate of books in the "low tone" which he often commends, avoiding superstition concerning them, and this gives opportunity for ascension in the treatment of the theme. In a note-book called Literature, under the heading "Skeptical," he wrote: "We must not inquire too curiously into the absolute value of literature. Enough that it amuses and exercises us. At least it leaves us where we were. It names things, but does not add things." But in a lecture "Some Good Books" he decides the matter more cheerfully, and after "value of literature" the passage goes on thus,—"yet books are to us angels of entertainment, sympathy and provocation. These silent wise, these tractable prophets and singers, who now and then cast their moonlight illumination over solitude, weariness and fallen fortunes."

Page 190, note 1. Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), a German scholar, alchemist and reputed magician, who wrote on The Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences, and on Occult Philosophy. His magic mirror, in which he showed to the Earl of Surrey his lady-love beyond the seas, is told of in song in Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. In the same poem the "book of spells," borrowed from the grave at Melrose Abbey of the wizard Michael Scott, plays an important part. Michael

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Scott lived in the thirteenth century, and had great fame on the Continent as well as in Scotland. He is mentioned by Dante.

Page 190, note 2. The following account of the effect of a sentence from one of Emerson's books on a Virginian youth is best given in his own language: "Fresh from college, now from every career planned by parent or friend I had recoiled: some indefinable impediment barred each usual path. … Utterly miserable, self-accused amid sorrowful faces, with no outlook but to be the fettered master of slaves, I was wont to shun the world, with a gun for an apology. … So came I on a day [to the banks of the Rappahannock] and reclined on the grass reading in a magazine [ Blackwood's ] casually brought. … The church-bells across the river smote upon a heart discordant with them, at discord with itself. Nature had no meaning, life no promise and no aim. Listlessly turning to the printed page, one sentence caught my eye and held it; one sentence quoted from Emerson, which changed my world and me. A sentence only! I do not repeat it: it might not bear to others what it bore to me: its searching, subtle revelation defies any analysis I can make of its words. All I know is that it was the touch of flame I needed. That day my gun was laid aside to resume no more." 1

The author, who under the new influence sacrificed his inheritance of slaves, and even his father's blessing, and later, place and influence as a clergyman because of his advocacy of human liberty, said to the editor, "But for the reading of that extract from Emerson in a critique in Blackwood on 'Six American Books,' I should be lying in a rebel's grave to-day."

An Austrian writer on Reading and Culture 2 in his preface

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says, "It will be noticed how strongly Ralph Waldo Emerson has influenced my entire conception of the matters treated."

Page 191, note 1. The following sentence seems to have been in this lecture as first delivered: "And Plutarch: if the world's library were burning, I should fly to save that, with our Bible and Shakspeare and Plato."

Page 192, note 1. When in Mr. Emerson's later years a book-agent was impertinently recommending to him some new work, he was moved to say, "Young man, it is not for you to tell me what to read. I read for other people." He wrote in his journal, "In college days Warren Burton used to come to my room, and said he did not like to read and did not remember what he read, but what I read or quoted to him he remembered, and never forgot."

Page 192, note 2. Johann Albert Fabricius, the German scholar (1668-1736), author of the Bibliotheca Latina, Graeca, and Ecclesiastica, and Bibliographia Antiquaria. John Selden (1584-1654), called "the great dictator of learning of the English nation," though the author of many learned books, is best known by his Table-Talk. Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola (1463-1494), an Italian of very extraordinary acquirements in languages and philosophy. Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), son of a remarkable scholar, though Italian by birth, was educated in France. He became professor of Belles-lettres at Leyden, and surpassed his father in erudition. Antonio Magliabechi (1633-1714), a Florentine who, though a goldsmith's apprentice, became so eager a scholar that he was appointed by Cosmo III. his librarian. In this capacity he brought to notice many valuable but neglected manuscripts, and he bequeathed to Florence the important library which he had collected. Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), a French scholar remarkable for his courage and liberality,

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which virtues cost him in succession his professorships at Sedan and Rotterdam. His noted work is the Dictionnaire historique et critique.

Page 195, note 1. Professor Herman Grimm in his first letter to Mr. Emerson, whose writings, then newly read, had greatly stirred him, said, "Everywhere I seem to find my own thoughts,—even the words in which I would prefer to have expressed them;" and later, "You write so that every one reading your words must think you had thought of him alone."

Page 196, note 1. Journal, 1851. "One should dignify and entertain and signalize each journey or adventure by carrying to it a literary masterpiece, and making thorough acquaintance with that, on the way, as, the Figaro of Beaumarchais; the Nuova Vita of Dante; the Bride of Corinth of Goethe; the 47th Proposition of Euclid; ode of Horace or of Hafiz, and so on; Clouds of Aristophanes, a Trilogy of AEschylus."

Page 196, note 2. This suggests the advice to the Artist in the quatrain of that name.

Page 196, note 3. Shakspeare, Taming of the Shrew, Act I., Sc. I.

Page 197, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote thus of his pleasure in Greek mythology and poetry, in the journal of 1855:—

"A convertible proverb, It is Greek to him. These Eastern story-tellers whose oily tongues turn day into night and night into day, who lap their hearers in a sweet drunkenness of fancy, so that they forget the taste of meat!"

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Page 198, note 1. Mr. Emerson said to a young scholar, "I am glad you have so many of the Greek Tragedies. Read them largely and swiftly in translation to get their movement and flow; and then a little in the original every day. For the Greek is the fountain of language. The Latin has a definite shore-line, but the Greek is without bounds."

Page 199, note 1. "Read in Plato and you shall find Christian dogmas, and not only so, but stumble on our evangelical phrases."—"Quotation and Originality," Letters and Social Aims.

Page 199, note 2. Mr. Emerson's estimate of Plato may be read in full in Representative Men and of Plutarch in the essay of that name in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 201, note 1. Mr. Emerson himself never enjoyed Aristophanes, but read the comedies for such light as they gave on the age and country. Journal, 1865. "I am delighted to-day, in reading Schwegler's account of Socrates, to have justice done to Aristophanes. The rogue gets his dues."

Page 202, note 1. In a lecture given in Boston in 1861, called "Some Good Books," Mr. Emerson said:—

"What vitality has the Platonic Philosophy! I remember I expected a revival in the churches to be caused by reading Jamblichus. …

"When I read Proclus, I am astonished with the vigor and breadth of his performance. Here is an Atlantic strength which is everywhere equal to itself, and dares great attempts, because of the life with which it feels itself filled. Such a sense as dwells in these purple deeps of Proclus transforms every page into a slab of marble, and the book seems monumental. They suggest what magnificent dreams and projects! They show what literature should be. Rarely, rarely does the Imagination awake."

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But in these authors, especially Proclus, he read rather for stimulation than continuously. "I think the Platonists may be read for sentences, though the reader fails to grasp the argument of the paragraph or chapter. He may yet obtain gleams and glimpses of a more excellent illumination from their genius, outvaluing the most distinct information he owes to other books. For I hold that the grandeur of the impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on us, is surely more valuable than our exact perception of a tub or a table on the ground."

Page 203, note 1. Thomas Taylor, the enthusiastic translator of the Neo-Platonists, was a remarkable character, a high-minded Greek Pagan in London. Mr. Emerson spoke of him as "a Greek born out of time and dropped on the ridicule of a blind and frivolous age." When he was in England in 1848 he was surprised to find how little was known of Taylor and his works by the cultivated men whom he met.

Mr. Charles J. Woodbury, 1 in his faithful and remarkable report of various conversations with Mr. Emerson at about the time this lecture was given, quotes him as saying of Plato, "He lifts man toward the divine, and I like it when I hear that a man reads Plato. I want to meet that man. For no man of self-conceit can go through Plato."

Page 203, note 2. Jamblichus of Chalcis, the pupil of Porphyry, succeeded him as the head of the Neo-Platonic school of Syria in the fourth century B. C. His writings combine the religious philosophies of the Greeks and Orientals.

Page 205, note 1. Journal, 1845. "Gibbon has a strength rare with such finish. He built a pyramid, and then enamelled it."

Mr. Emerson wrote in 1839 to his young cousin, David Greene Haskins (later an Episcopal clergyman and Doctor of

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Divinity), a letter about Gibbon in which, after praising his devotion to his work, he expresses disgust at his "worst fault! the dirt he has defiled his notes with," but adds, "You must give this evil man his due and make it felt what condemnation his noble labor and perseverance cast upon scholars who have libraries which they never read, upon scholars who chide Gibbon, but are unable even to name his dignified studies, his original authorities, his great plan, and great execution of it." 1

Page 205, note 2. Note-book on Literature: "Dante's Vita Nuova reads like the book of Genesis, as if written before literature, whilst truth yet existed. A few incidents are sufficient, and are displayed with Oriental amplitude and leisure. It is the Bible of love." And again of Dante: "He was free imagination, all wings, yet wrote like Euclid."

Page 206, note 1. In acknowledging Herman Grimm's gift of his Life of Michelangelo Mr. Emerson wrote in 1861: 2

"MY DEAR FRIEND,—… The book is a treasure,—in the hero, the treatment, the frank criticism, the judicial opinions, and—what I value most—the interior convictions of the writer bravely imparted. … The book has research, method and daylight. … You step from stone to stone and advance ever. … Goethe and Michel Angelo deserve your fine speeches, and are not perilous for a long time. One may absorb great amounts of these with impunity; but we must watch the face of our proper Guardian, and if his eye dims a little, drop our trusted companions as profane."

Page 206, note 2. A passage in the oration delivered at Dartmouth College in 1838 seems to show that Mr. Emerson

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in his youth had been much moved by Robertson's account of Charles V. ( Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 162.)

"'Bathing his tender feet in the dew which yet on them does lie.'

"'That dust and feathers do not stir, All was so quiet.'

Page 207, note 3. Journal. "Lord Bacon's method in his books is of the understanding, but his sentences are lighted by ideas."

In English Traits Mr. Emerson has much to say of Bacon (p. 238 ff.).

Page 208, note 1. Mr. Emerson was asked to write the Preface to the American edition of the Gulistan (Rose-garden) of Saadi, the translation of Francis Gladwin, with a preface by James Ross (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865). In it he said: "Saadi, though he has not the lyric flights of Hafiz, has wit, practical sense, and just moral sentiment. … He is

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the poet of friendship, love, self-devotion and serenity. There is a uniform force in his page, and conspicuously a tone of cheerfulness which has almost made his name a synonyme for grace. … He inspires in the reader a good hope. What a contrast between the cynical tone of Byron and the benevolent wisdom of Saadi!"

Page 212, note 1. See the essay on Poetry and Imagination in Letters and Social Aims.

Page 213, note 1. For Mr. Emerson novels had little attraction. Mythology and epics, and heroic tradition and biography, took their place for him. He found no pleasure in Dickens or Thackeray. The Waverley Novels delighted him as a youth, and of "Scott, the delight of generous boys," he had grateful remembrance. He read Disraeli's novels with some interest, but little real liking. George Sand's Consuelo gave him much pleasure, and he alludes to it several times in his writings, especially in the chapter on Goethe in Representative Men. He read little of Balzac or Dumas. Charles Reade's Christie Johnstone and Peg Woffington he read and praised. The Jane Eyre of Miss Brontë, mentioned farther on, he read with some interest.

Page 216, note 1. The poem "The Park" seems to be the expression of this mood.

Page 217, note 1. Firdusi, "The Gardener" (940-1020), under the encouragement and patronage of the Sultan Mahmoud, composed an epic poem of great length, but renowned for its beauty, the Shah Nameh, the mythology and history of Persia from the earliest times.

Page 218, note 1. The Dial magazine did much to introduce American readers to the ethical and religious writings of China, India, Persia and Arabia, in its selections called "Ethnical Scriptures"; also to the writings of the Neo-Platonists.

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Page 221, note 1. These notes on "Books" may properly end with two rules for reading given to scholars: I. Read Proudly; II. As long as you feel the voracity of reading, read in God's name!

"Kindly man moving among his kind"

He was always more than willing to join in the formation of a club of men of varied gifts and powers. It is interesting to remember that his father had been one of the founders of a literary club in Boston, whose members were the contributors and supporters of the Anthology magazine, of which Rev. William Emerson was editor. The magazine did not survive him.

In 1836, Rev. William Ellery Channing, D.D., seems to have suggested to Mr. George Ripley the desirability of bringing together for help and counsel the persons of serious and advancing minds in Boston and its neighborhood in those days. Mr. Alcott, who was greatly interested, kept record in his journals of the meetings of this company, at first called the Symposium, later the Transcendental Club. Among the members were George Ripley, Convers Francis, Frederic H. Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, Cyrus A. Bartol, William Henry Channing, John S. Dwight, Theodore Parker,—all ministers,—Orestes A. Brownson, A. Bronson Alcott and

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R. W. Emerson. Two ladies, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth P. Peabody, and possibly others, were admitted.

Mr. Emerson in his chapter called "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, speaks of the Dial magazine as perhaps the most important result of these very informal meetings, which continued until about 1840. Perhaps eight years later a new attempt was made to supply the want of a literary club. Mrs. Ednah Cheney says, 1 "A certain almost forgotten institution, the Town and Country Club, where Concord and Boston were expected to meet and exchange the wisdom of the world and Nature, was established by Mr. Alcott about 1848, and Mr. Emerson and others heartily joined in the scheme." Mrs. Cheney tells elsewhere of the grievance that the club decided against the admission of women, influenced by Mr. Emerson's urgency on this subject, though it appears that they were admitted to its open meetings. Mr. George W. Cooke says in his book on Emerson: "The Town and Country Club was mainly organized by the efforts of Alcott. Emerson gave it its name, and he read before it the first essay to which it listened, on Books and Reading. This was May 2, 1849. Among its members were Garrison, Parker, W. H. Channing, W. E. Channing [of Concord], Alcott, Phillips, Hedge, Howe, King, Lowell, Weiss, Whipple, Higginson, Very, Pillsbury and Thoreau." It may well be doubted whether Thoreau joined, though Mr. Emerson would have been sure to have urged his doing so.

In his own village Mr. Emerson belonged to a club of a very different kind, the Social Circle, lineal descendant of the Committee of Safety during the Revolution, its avowed purposes

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being, "to cultivate the social affections" and "for the diffusion of useful communications among its members." He was chosen a member in 1840 and continued one until his death. Of his appreciation of this club he wrote, in 1844, to a friend in Boston, a man of culture and of affairs: "Much the best society I have ever known is a club in Concord called the Social Circle, consisting always of twenty-five of our citizens, doctor, lawyer, farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, etc., solidest of men, who yield the solidest of gossip. Harvard University is a wafer compared to the solid land which my friends represent. I do not like to be absent from home on Tuesday evenings in winter." This club still exists, and organized the celebration of the Centenary of his birth.

As different from the Social Circle as well might be in membership and method, and in conversation, was the Saturday Club, from which he derived great pleasure for eighteen years, but his infirmity of memory prevented his attendance during the last years of his life.

I copy from his note book the membership before 1858: "Saturday Club, 1856-7. L. Agassiz, R. H. Dana, Jr., J. L. Motley, H. W. Longfellow, J. S. Dwight, E. R. Hoar, S. G. Ward, J. R. Lowell, B. Peirce, E. P. Whipple, H. Woodman, R. W. Emerson. 1857. O. W. Holmes, C. C. Felton, J. E. Cabot." 1

To these were added during the first ten years of the Club's existence the names of Prescott, Whittier, Hawthorne, Thomas G. Appleton, John M. Forbes, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. Howe, Rev. Frederic H. Hedge, Estes Howe, Charles Sumner, Henry James, Sr., Martin Brimmer, James T. Fields, S. W. Rowse, Governor Andrew and Dr. Jeffries Wyman.

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Dr. Holmes's account of this monthly gathering of friends, eminent in so many walks of life, is as follows:—

"At about the same time there grew up in Boston a literary association, which became at last well known as the 'Saturday Club,' the members dining together on the last Saturday of every month.

"The Magazine and the Club have existed and flourished to the present day. They have often been erroneously thought to have some organic connection, and the 'Atlantic Club' has been spoken of as if there, was, or had been, such an institution, but it never existed.

"Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a platonic idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the habit of meeting him at dinner at 'Parker's,' the 'Will's Coffee-House' of Boston. This little group gathered others to itself and grew into a club, as Rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. During its first decade the Saturday Club brought together, as members or as visitors, many distinguished persons. At one end of the table sat Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always pleasant to look,—whose silence was better than many another man's conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust, sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana, Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar, eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner,

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the academic champion of freedom, Andrew, 'the great War Governor' of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe, the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy of such company. And with these, generally near the Longfellow end of the table, sat Emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording any stray word worth remembering on his mental phonograph. Emerson was a very regular attendant at the meetings of the Saturday Club, and continued to dine at its table, until within a year or two of his death.

"Unfortunately the Club had no Boswell, and its golden hours passed unrecorded."

Although there is no question of the profit in health and pleasure that Mr. Emerson found in the Club, proved by his regular attendance, and the happy report which he made of the meetings to his family, sometimes his belief of his unfitness for social gatherings weighed on him:—

Journal. "Most of my values are widely variable: My estimate of America, etc.; estimate of my mental means and resources is all or nothing,—in happy hours, life looking infinitely rich; and sterile at others. My value of my Club is as elastic as steam or gunpowder,—so great now, so little anon;" and it must have been when the pressure was low that he wrote in the journal of 1861: "I know the hollowness and superstition of a dinner, yet a certain health and good repair of social status comes of the habitude and well-informed chat there, which have great market value, though none to my solitude."

The quality of mind and the manners, friendly, simple yet reserved, of his friend James Elliot Cabot—I think Mr. Emerson said of him "Cabot is a Greek"—were very attractive to him. It is probably of Mr. Cabot that he wrote in the journal of 1869:—

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"'I could be happy with either, Were the other dear charmer away.'"

The mortification that Mr. Emerson felt, and the annoyance which he believed his increasing loss of memory for words occasioned his friends, led to infrequent attendance as he grew older. But the club celebrated his return from Europe and Egypt, to which countries his friends had sent him for his health after the burning of his house. Mr. Richard H. Dana wrote of this occasion: 1 —

"1873 [May 31, Saturday]. Our club dined to-day,—the largest number we ever sat down, partly as the last of the season to which many come, but chiefly to welcome Emerson, on his return from Europe and Egypt. … It was really rather a brilliant gathering. … Emerson looks years younger for his European tour, and is in good spirits. Even his hair has come back, which had nearly left his head last summer."

This lecture "Clubs" seems to have first been delivered in Boston as the third in a course at Freeman Place Chapel in the spring of 1859, but before its publication, like most of the later lectures, it underwent great modifications. A portion of the essay occurred in the lecture "Table-Talk," given in December, 1864, as one of the Parker Fraternity week-day course.

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It is interesting to see how the last paragraph in the preceding essay leads to the subject of the present one. The mottoes are from the poems "Mithridates" and "Saadi," and, like the others in this volume, have been supplied by the editor.

Page 225, note 1. Mr. Emerson used to recommend as good treatment for a confirmed dvspeptic an occasional feast in good company, with wine.

Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, And we are never old. "The World-Soul," Poems.

Page 227, note 1. In "The Mind-Curer," in his charming little book Prose Idylls, Mr. John Albee gives, without naming him, an account of Mr. Emerson's healing and preventive counsels for the perplexities and troubles of youth.

Page 227, note 2. This, "the natural method" of acquiring knowledge, Mr. Emerson dwells upon very pleasantly in the essay on Education in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 228, note 1. It seems well to introduce here some passages from the lecture in early form:—

"There are two benefits, I said, in conversation; one, to detach our own thought, or find out what we know; the other, to find out what our companions know. There are great difficulties in both attempts.

"We have found insuperable obstacles in the attempt to obtain the knowledge which others possess, and were willing enough to impart. Barriers of society, barriers of language, inadequacy of the channels of communication, all choked up and disused.

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"Each man has facts I am looking for, and, though I talk with him, I cannot get at them, for want of the clew. I do not know enough to ask the right question. It seems to me he does not know what to do with his facts. It seems to me that I know, if I could only have them. But I cannot have society on my own terms. If I want his facts, I must use his keys,—his keys, that is, his arrangements and ends. I want his facts for quite another use than he does. He uses them in his affairs, for profit, for power; I want them only to see how they fortify views and plans of mine. I have thoughts, which, wanting these examples, have no body. As the Indian said, 'I have no land to put my words on. Yet my words are true.' Here is all Boston, all railroads, all manufactures and commerce, in the head of this merchant. What would I not give for a peep at his rows and files and systems of facts? Here is a philologist who knows all languages. Here is the king of chemists. Here is all anatomy, fossil and contemporary, in the mind of this zoölogist. All electro-magnetism in the next man; all geology in the third; all mechanism in the fourth; all American history in a fifth; and I cannot, with all my avarice of these facts, come at any fragment of all their experience. I would fain see their picture-books, as they see them.—This was the very promise which mesmerism made to the imagination of mankind. Now, said the adept, if I could cast a spell on this man, and see his pictures, by myself, without his intervention,—I see them, and not he report them;—and having learned that lesson, turn the spell on another, lift the cover of another hive, see the cells, and suck the honey;—then another; and so without limit;—they were not the poorer, and I were rich indeed. This was the expedient of mesmerism, by way of suction-pump, to draw the most unwilling and valuable mass of experience from

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every extraordinary individual at pleasure. With what joy we began to put the experiment in practice. The eyes of the man who saw through the earth the ingots of gold that were lying a rod or two under the surface, or of the diver who comes suddenly down full on a bed of pearl-oysters, all pearl, were not to be compared to his, which put him in possession of men. Here was a diving-bell, but it dived into men. (He was the thought-vampire.) He became at once ten, twenty, a hundred men, as he stood gorged with knowledges, and turning his fierce eyes on the multitude of masters, in all departments of human skill, and hesitating on which mass of action and adventure to turn his all-commanding introspection.

"There lies the gold, and there it has slept, and will sleep, unless you can manage the collisions of discourse, or the fires of love, or the rasping of ambition, to overcome the strong cohesion and detach the sparkling atom to the day."

Page 228, note 2. In writing these sentences Mr. Emerson was recalling the memory of his relation to his brother Charles. At the time of his death, in 1836, he wrote: "My brother, my friend, my ornament, my joy and pride, has fallen by the wayside,—or rather has risen out of this dust. … I have felt in him the inestimable advantage, when God allows it, of finding a brother and a friend in one." In writing of the "valuable companion in a ship's cabin" he had in mind his happy but short companionship with Achille Murat on his Southern journey in 1827.

Page 230, note 1. In his second poem "Merlin" the harmonious rhyme of things in Nature or the mind is celebrated, and in the chapter "Language" in the essay "Nature" in the first volume of the works, Mr. Emerson teaches that Natural History, to be truly valuable, must be married to

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human history, of which it is but a symbol. The relation seen, it becomes poetry.

"Mark what another sayes; for many are Full of themselves, and answer their own notion." George Herbert, "The Church Porch."

Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, Amid the gladiators, halt and numb. "Terminus," Poems.

Page 233, note 2. This picture is perhaps a "composite" including Lowell, but an extract from the manuscript book called Gulistan, in which Mr. Emerson wrote about his friends, makes it probable that Dr. Holmes was in his mind.

"By his perfect finish, cabinet finish, gem finish, gem carved with a microscope on the carver's eye, and which perfection appears in every conversation, and in his part in a business debate, or at a college dinner-table as well as in his songs,—he resembles Fontenelle and Galiani, and Moore, though richer than either of them. Wonderful fertility and aptness of illustration. He is an illustrated magazine with twenty thousand accurate engravings. … His undersize might perhaps be suggested by his writings to one who had never seen him. It is compensated by the consummateness, as of a hummingbird, or of a flower, which defies the microscope to find a defect in Nature's favorite."

The tribute to another member may well be here given: "I call Longfellow the Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of American Poets,—remembering what Napoleon said of Cuvier: 'The Perpetual Secretary must be enabled to receive

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at dinner all the learned foreigners who visit the Capital.' Fate gave him the 6000 francs which Napoleon assigned to the office of Cuvier. … March 29, 1869. Longfellow said at the Saturday Club yesterday on the question of admitting a new member not agreeable to some existing member,—'I am sure there is no man living who could be admitted who would drive me away.'"

Page 235, note 1. The following is from stray sheets of the lecture "Clubs": "Masters in any art like to meet masters. Mutual respect is a joyful tribute, honored and honoring; conversation,—I have no book or pleasure in life comparable to it. When that result is happily found, we can spare all omens, prophecies, legends, for we see and know that which these obscurely announce."

Page 235, note 2. "The Banquet of The Seven Wise Men," Plutarch's Morals.

Page 236, note 1. Zertusht is another name for Zoroaster, used in the Desatir or Sacred Writings of the Persian Prophets.

Page 238, note 1. Mr. Emerson's reading of this death-word of the Jotun was startling to his hearers.

Page 239, note 1. This story was told of Dr. Samuel L. Dana, the chemist noted for his studies and improvements in chemistry as applied in the factories at Waltham and Lowell.

Page 240, note 1. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), whose address and ambition and eloquence succeeded in advancing him from a watchmaker's apprentice to the nobility. His dramatic successes were Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro. It was the latter that was frowned on by the Court. His eloquence in persuading the King of France to send us aid during the Revolution should be gratefully remembered by Americans.

Page 241, note 1. Mr. Emerson rejoiced in his friends,—

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Carlyle, Sterling, Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller,—and found them all better than their writings.

Worship toil's wisdom that abides.

One of these helpful and kindly men—the same for whose marriage Mr. Emerson had performed the ceremony on first coming to Concord, Mr. Alcott being the witness, and who, as deputy-sheriff, had arrested and imprisoned Alcott and Thoreau for refusal to pay taxes, yet cared for them kindly, and had in vain offered to pay Thoreau's tax before seizing him—said of Mr. Emerson to a mutual friend: "Now it's remarkable how many persons go to see Mr. Emerson. Some of 'em come from Europe, I hear. Well, I suppose there's a good many things that he knows that I don't know anything about, and I know there's a lot o' things that I know a damn' sight more about than he does."

Page 246, note 1. Mr. Emerson himself always preferred the independence of a hotel or country tavern on his lecturing journeys to taxing private hospitality or taking its chances. He gave letters of introduction sparingly, but did not use them himself, writing his own from the inn, when in England, to the person he desired to meet, thus allowing him to judge from the letter whether he was willing to receive the visitor.

Page 247, note 1. From the lecture "Clubs":—

"What is material, is, to secure men of culture whose experience has large range, and who have seen low extremes in life, such as the ordinary routine of respectable society excludes from the knowledge of gentlemen, for there are heroes among beggars and jockeys."

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Page 247, note 2. Mr. John T. Morse, Jr., gives an account of the Saturday Club, and quotes Dr. Holmes on this point:—

"Some outsiders furnished still another name for this much-entitled Club. They called it 'The Mutual Admiration Society,' and sometimes laughed a little, as though the designation were a trifle derogatory. Yet the brethren within the pale were nowise disturbed by this witticism. 'If there was not,' says Holmes, 'a certain amount of "mutual admiration" among some of those I have mentioned, it was a great pity, and implied a defect in the nature of men who were otherwise largely endowed.' Possibly one or two of these gentlemen might have been criticised for admiring themselves, but it did seem hard to blame them for being sufficiently intelligent and generous to admire each other. Would the scoffers have been better pleased to see them openly abusing or slyly depreciating each other? There are enough such spectacles elsewhere in literature." 1

Page 248, note 1. Robert Herrick's "Ode to Ben Jonson."

Page 250, note 1. Lecture sheets: "Homer said, 'When two men meet, one apprehends sooner than the other.' But it is because one man thinks well, that the other thinks better, for they mutually excite each other, each attempting to cap the other's thought."

Page 250, note 2. Mr. Emerson said that Nature's rule in conversing with man was "One to one, my dear."

Two sheets, the "salvage" of the lecture "Clubs," may be added in conclusion:—

"When I was in London, I fell in with the literary executor

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of Jeremy Bentham, who carried me to Bentham's house, and showed me, with much veneration, the apartments in which the philosopher lived. Especially his library, and the closet adjoining, in which Bentham was wont to receive his guests. He made me remark that there were but two chairs in the apartment, as it was his invariable rule to receive but one person at a time. Every distinguished person in Europe, he said, had been here at some time, including Talleyrand. …

"But at all events it [conversation] must be sought and conducted as a religious rite. I think we all have owed some of the best hours and some of the grandest promises of our being to conversation, when all frivolous and disturbing accidents were removed, and the imagination was free to play, and, in happy hour, men emulated each other and provoked each other to read the deep secrets of Nature."

The lecture "Courage" was given in Boston at the Music Hall to Mr. Parker's Society in November, 1859. These were days of great excitement both in the North and South, for the brave but desperate attempt of John Brown to seize the United States Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, arm the slaves, who, he supposed, would flock to him, and lead them quickly along the Appalachian chain to Canada, had failed, and its leader, wounded, was on trial for his life in Virginia. This event had precipitated the issue between slavery and freedom, and begun to open the eyes of Northern people to the uselessness and unworthiness of their long submission to Southern dictation in hope of preserving the Union, and with it a

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Southern market. However little the method of action of Brown in this raid commended itself to the best people of the North, their cheeks burned that such a condition of affairs existed as should drive men to treason simply for humanity's sake. John Brown's simple courage entrenched on the teaching of Jesus to "remember them that are in bonds as bound with them," contrasted with the shameful attitude of Government in half supporting Border Ruffianism in Kansas, stung tender consciences, and was working a sudden reaction in public opinion. Yet conservatism of what was then called the "Old Hunker" type was so strong among the aristocracy of Beacon Street, the business men of State Street, and the negro-hating and ruffianly element of the Democracy, that open speaking on behalf of Brown had its dangers. Mr. Cabot in his Memoir says: "It does not appear that Emerson was acquainted in advance with Brown's Virginia plot, but in this lecture, which was delivered while Brown was under sentence of death, he spoke of him as 'that new saint than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.'" It is certain that Mr. Emerson did not know of the project. But the motive and the heroism made him think better of his countrymen in that sad time. John Brown had been his guest in the days of the Kansas struggle, and he knew the quality and the quiet force of the man.

In the eleven years between the delivery of the lecture and its publication as an essay it underwent many changes, passages written during the shame and anger of the dark days before the war disappearing when the essay took on its more classic form, and some proud memories of that great struggle taking their place.

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"'Whose armor is his honest thought, And simple truth his utmost skill.'"

Margaret Fuller quoted Mr. Emerson as saying, "Careful of health, Careless of life, should be our motto."

Page 253, note 1. Journal, 1850. "The secret of Culture is to interest a man more in his public than in his private capacity."

Page 253, note 2. Speaking of the Persians, in his preface to Gladioni's translation of the Gulistan of Saadi, Mr. Emerson said, "Hatem Tai is their type of hospitality, who, when the Greek Emperor sent to pray him to bestow on him his incomparable horse, received the messenger with honor, and, having no meat in his tent, killed the horse for his banquet, before yet he knew the object of the visit."

Page 253, note 3. Another version of the paragraph was as follows:—

"Disinterestedness on the score of pelf, a purpose so sincere and generous that it cannot be tempted aside by any prospects of private advantage; like Aristides in the public treasury, poor when he entered it, poorer when he left it, like Chatham, to whom his scornful magnanimity," etc.

Page 255, note 1. "It is delightful to see that the one serious and formidable thing in nature is Will."—Miscellaneous shoets of "Courage."

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It was this power in Wendell Phillips that Mr. Emerson chiefly admired,—"the steel hid under gauze and spangles;" that, with all the elegance and perfect finish of his speech and manner, he was not seen at his best until hostile dissent broke forth among his audience.

Page 259, note 1. These manly words for the hour in 1859 were omitted from the essay when the cloud was lifted:—

"The politics of Massachusetts are cowardly. We have a snappish criticism which watches and contradicts the opposite party, but we want will that advances and dictates. When we get an advantage, as in Congress the other day, it is because our adversary has made a fault, and not that we have made a thrust. Why do we not say, We are abolitionists of the most absolute abolition, as every man must be? Only the Hottentots, only the barbarous or semi-barbarous societies, are not. We do not try to alter your laws in Alabama, nor yours in Japan, or the Fee-jee Islands; but we do not admit them, or permit a trace of them here, nor shall we suffer you to carry your thuggism north, south, east or west, into a single rod of territory which we control. We intend to set and keep a cordon sanitaire, all around the infected district, and by no means suffer the pestilence to spread."

Page 260, note 1. This was the question asked in the Concord Town Hall by John Brown on one of his visits, seeking aid for the Free-State cause in Kansas.

Page 260, note 2. This was the good old George Minot, a man of the hoe and the shot-gun. It was he who, seeing Mr. Emerson pause, in thought, in the road before his house, said to his nephew, "Charley, that man ain't like other men. He's like Enoch; he walks with God and talks with his angels."

The end of the paragraph suggests the passage in "Heroism"

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( Essays, First Series, p. 249), in which is said, "Our culture must not omit the arming of the man."

Page 261, note 1. I give here more recent striking testimony which would have delighted Mr. Emerson.

An officer of the Army of the Potomac, after speaking of the ordinary duties of a campaign, for which "the merely staple quality of courage will usually suffice," said, "But when the exigencies of the service require a call for volunteers to attempt some desperate deed whose failure would smell like murder, and whose success would seem nearly as fatal, then comes an opportunity for the 'born' soldier. At this time there will arise, … even from the purlieus of the non-combatants,—the meek-eyed denizens of the commissariat, from hospital or wagon-trains,—men who will offer their lives so freely and so inexplicably that one is led to suspect they have waited for the occasion." He quotes also the words of one who had cared for the wounded, about "the woman's mouth so often found upon the face of the youth whose courage made sure martyrdom." 1

Page 262, note 1. A similar story is told of Mr. Emerson's grandfather William Emerson, the patriotic young minister of Concord, who afterwards, a chaplain in the American army, died of fever near Ticonderoga.

A citizen of Rutland, Vermont, told the father of Professor Butler of Madison, Wisconsin (who told the editor), that, when a young man, he worked in Concord, and in the spring of 1775 enlisted in the Minute-Men. When on the morning of the 19th of April he stood in line among the village soliders on the Common, and saw the British column advancing glittering in arms, he felt that if he did not run he should

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die of fear. But at that moment the minister laid his hand on his shoulder and said, "Don't be afraid, Harry; God is on our side," and after that his mortal fear passed away.

Page 264, note 1. Mr. Emerson hurried with his neighbors to save the sacred woods, when afire, wielding his appropriate weapon, a pine bough.

Page 266, note 1. The following passage to the purpose is from a stray sheet of "Courage."

"People wrap themselves up in disguises, and the sincere man is hard to reach. A man is concealed in his nation, concealed in his party, concealed in his fortune, and estate, concealed in his office, in his profession, concealed in his body at last, and it is hard to find out his pure nature and will.

"They speak and act in each of these relations after the use and wont of those conditions. They talk as Americans, as Republicans, as men of position, men of business, and at last, as men of such appetite, decorum and habit are expected to talk,—each cunningly hiding under these wearisome common-places the character and flavor which is his peculiar gift from the author of his being, and which is all that can really make him interesting and valuable to us. Of course, he only half acts,—talks with his lips and not from his heart,—touches with fingers, and not with his strength. Bishop Latimer tells us, that his father taught him, when a boy, not to shoot with his arms but to lay his body to the bow."

Page 268, note 1. In the early years of his Concord life, Mr. Emerson made in his journal, on returning from church, the entry on which the sentence in the essay is founded:—

"I delight in our pretty church music and to hear that poor slip of a girl, without education, without thought, yet show this fine instinct in her singing, so that every note of her song sounds to me like an adventure and a victory in the 'ton-welt';

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and whilst all the choir beside stay fast by their leader and the bass-viol, this angel voice goes choosing, choosing on, and with the precision of genius keeps its faithful road and floods the house with melody."

Page 270, note 1. This was Professor Andrews Norton of Harvard University.

Page 271, note 1. From Robert Herrick's poem "Hesperides."

Page 271, note 2. This passage from the original lecture has been omitted:—

"A curious example is the recent history of the Southern States. The Southerners reckon the Yankees to be less brave than they. Yet the reign of terror is in the South. It is not to be believed that there was no minority in the South during the year 1856. Yet not a mutter or peep was heard with the exception of the explicit demonstration of Mr. Botts of Virginia and Mr. Davis of Maryland. Every gentleman in Carolina was mute as a fish. Is it to be believed that Cassius Clay is the only man in Kentucky of his opinion?

"But I do not wish to make odious, least of all, unfounded distinctions. There are reigns of terror as well in the North as in the South, and we have no right to boast so long as our love of trade, or preference of peace to justice, or the frivolity which loves comfort at any cost withholds our vote and voice. It is perfectly certain that when a million or half a million of citizens in good earnest wish a thing done, they will fast enough find governors and judges and members of Congress to put it through all the forms; and if the laws of Massachusetts are not just and heroic, it is not the fault of the United States, but of ourselves."

Page 271, note 3. Among the scattered sheets that remain of "Courage" as delivered at various times, is one headed

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"The Aristocracy," in which this echo of 1859 remains: "Governor Wise and Mr. Mason no doubt have some right to their places. It is some superiority of working brain that put them there, and the aristocrats in every society. But when they come to deal with Brown they find that he speaks their own speech,—has whatever courage and directness they have and a great deal more of the same, so that they feel themselves timorous little fellows in his hand; he out-sees, out-thinks, out-acts them, and they are forced to shuffle and stammer in their turn. They painfully feel this, that he is their governor and superior, and the only alternative is to kneel to him, if they are truly noble, or else (if they wish to keep their places) to put this fact, which they know, out of sight of other people as fast as they can. Quick, drums and trumpets, strike up! Quick, judges and juries, silence him, by sentence and execution of sentence, and hide in the ground this alarming fact. For, if everything comes to its right place, he goes up and we down."

"And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls." Longfellow, "Santa Filomena."

After the quotation of Napoleon's words, the text runs as follows in one of the manuscript sheets: "So is it with the hero. No misgivings, no hesitations, but perfect continuity of nerve, so that what he thinks he enacts.

"The vulgar mind is embarrassed by petty considerations; does not penetrate to the end of the action, but stops short at an obstacle; sees the enmities it provokes; the loss of day-wages."

Page 274, note 1. Here followed in the lecture the allusion

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to John Brown, whose execution took place on the second day of December, a little more than three weeks later:—

"Look nearer at the ungathered relics of those who have gone to languish in prison or to die in rescuing others or rescuing themselves from chains in Slave States, or look at that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave ever was led by love of men into conflict and death, the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross."

Page 275, note 1. Sheet from lecture: "It is very certain that, of two men of whom each follows his own thought, he whose thought is deepest will be the strongest character. Always one man more than another represents the will of Divine Providence to the period, and the more serious the occasion, the more it tests and searches men. A holiday general may lead a holiday procession, but vanishes unaccountably into obscurity in the heroic times."

This tribute to the moral courage of the people of England may be here given:—

"The English nation have the common credit of being more individual, more outspoken, and downright, than we are. Each man of them is, very likely, narrow and committed to opinions of no great liberality or dignity, but, such as they are, he heartily stands for them; silent or loud, he is content to be known to all the world as their champion; they grow to him; he is enraged, he curses and swears for them. In the house of lords, the patrician states his opinion, very clumsily and drearily perhaps, but at least not looking for your ballot and approbation, rather with an air that says, Such is my opinion, and who the devil are you?"

Page 277, note 1. These passages from the lecture should be given in conclusion:—

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"Whence does all power come? We are embosomed in the spiritual world. Yet none ever saw angel or spirit. Whence does our knowledge of it come? Only from men; the only Revealer of the divine mind is through the thoughts of a man.

"The statistics show you the whole world under the dominion of fate or circumstance or brute laws of chemistry. Life instantly contravenes or supervenes the low chemistry by higher. Thought resists and commands Nature by higher truth, and gives Nature a master. …

"Life is a medley, but the centre is great and eternal, and we must be real. We must know that it is as we are, and therefore the absurd accuses us. We must go for character, personal relations, poverty and honor.

"And wisdom is justified of her children. Valor pays rents as well as land. A little measure is always a great error. The noble course begets love and confidence, and has a late and sure reward. It suggests counsels proportionate to the end, broad measures, humane conduct."

Page 277, note 2. The lady was Miss Elizabeth Hoar, who should have been, but for his untimely death, the wife of Charles Emerson. To Mr. Emerson she was a sister indeed, and her frequent presence illuminated the house for all of his family. The story of George Nidiver was told by her brother Edward, who had lived for several years in California. Mr. Emerson was so pleased with it that he obtained leave to print it with the essay in 1870. Before his death he learned that some one in California, reading the essay, found the poem, and knowing George Nidiver, took it to the old hunter, who was astonished and pleased to find that his act of generous impulse, when a youth, was known and celebrated on the other side of the continent a quarter of a century after its occurrence.

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In the autumn of 1833, when he had laid aside, with his gown, the profession for which he was bred, and at the age of thirty was facing an unknown future as a scholar and public speaker, Mr. Emerson wrote in his diary:—

"Were it not heroic venture in me to insist on being a popular speaker and run full tilt against the Fortune who, with such beautiful consistency, shows evermore her back?

"'And the more falls I get, move faster on.'"

In one of the earlier journals Mr. Emerson wrote of Osman, by which name he there called his ideal man:—

"I will add to the portrait of Osman that he was never interrupted by success. He had never to look after his fame and his compliments, his claps and editions."

In the middle of December, 1858, Mr. Emerson lectured on Success at Hartford, and in March, 1859, opened his course at the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston with "The Law of Success." These lectures were, without doubt, essentially the same as the present essay.

Page 284, note 1. It was known that Giotto had visited

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a fellow artist by the circle that he drew, as a visiting-card. Strassburg Cathedral bears witness to the mastery of Erwin of Steinbach. The feat of Olaf Trygvesson is told by Longfellow in his version of the Saga of King Olaf, in the "Tales of a Wayside Inn." Ojeda was a Spanish cavalier who sailed with Columbus, and later with Vespucci. To Bernini St. Peter's church in Rome owes its colonnade and the bronze canopy over the tomb of the Saint.

Page 285, note 1. With Mr. Emerson's love for the heavenly bodies, in their splendor, their majestic courses, and more for what these signified, it is safe to believe that he attributes to the words of Columbus a higher and oracular sense.

Page 286, note 1. It is obvious that the writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mrs. Stowe, is referred to in this passage, and Jenny Lind, whose beautiful singing had a few years earlier delighted the people of two continents. Margaret Fuller had, for her sympathy and zeal in the cause of the Italian patriots, been put in charge of a hospital at Rome a few years before this essay was written, and before its publication the Civil War had called many devoted women to the military hospitals and to the schools for the newly freed negroes.

Page 287, note 1. This verse, which Mr. Emerson liked to repeat to his children, and which serves for the motto of one of his journals, came from the rude but interesting Danish ballad translated by George Borrow. It describes the Berserker madness of the hero from whom it takes its name.

Page 289, note 1. This passage from the journal of 1859 gives the offset to the lower view:—

"Power even is not known to the pure. Power indicates weakness and opposition. Health exists and unfolds in the rose, in the sea, in the circular and endless astronomy. The electricity is not less present in my body and my joy, for

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twenty years, that I never saw or suspected it, than in the twenty-first, when I drew by art a spark from my knuckle."

Page 289, note 2. Of the monotones, both of the aggressive reform and mystic type, Mr. Emerson had all too much experience, yet was always good-natured to them. The remark of his friend. Mr. Channing on the conversation of one of the latter type amused him,—"Biographie universelle de moi-même."

Page 292, note 1. Mr. Emerson had the strength and the skill to save himself for his own large mission in spite of the importunities that beset him to engage in causes, and yet kept the respect and good will of their advocates, and often helped bravely, but as a volunteer.

Page 292, note 2. Henry James, Jr., in one of his novels speaks of "the over-modelled American face."

For thought, and not praise,— Thought is the wages For which I sell days. "Fragments on The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 293, note 2. "Commerce… is an apt illustration of the intellectual quality of the process of creating values, as much as is inventing, planting or manufacturing."—From a sheet of the lecture.

Page 295, note 1. The sentence about Alfred is followed in the lecture by this comment: "Good fortune is another name for perception and good will."

Page 296, note 1. Many an author, especially among Mr. Emerson's friends, was a gainer by "imputed righteousness," to borrow the phrase from the Church. His good will and his teeming mind sometimes read values into their work.

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Lecture sheets: "Then for sensibility, I must add, that the great happiness of some of the best moments of life has been the enjoyment of books and works of art and science. And as Marcus Antoninus said, 'What matters it who found the truth, whether thyself or another, and where had been thy own intellect, if greater had not lived?' And, though I hate to be in any manner wanting to the claims of stern and manly Intellect, I must say, that the delight in the superior powers of others is one of the best gifts of God."

Page 296, note 2. Journal. "What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it is all. What is the heaven's majestical roof fretted with golden fire to one man, but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors? Well, a book is to a paddy a fair page smutted over with black marks; to a boy, a goodly collection of words he can read; to a half-wise man, it is a lesson which he wholly accepts or wholly rejects; but a sage shall see in it secrets yet unrevealed; shall weigh, as he reads, the author's mind; shall see the predominance of ideas which the writer could not extricate himself from, and oversee. The Belfast Town and County Almanack may be read by a sage; and wasteful as it would be in me to read Anti-Masonic or Jackson papers, yet whoso pierces through them to the deep Idea they embody, may well read them."

Page 297, note 1. The motto of "Culture," printed in the Poems, is on this theme.

Page 297, note 2. This sentence is a bit of autobiography.

Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know What rainbows teach, and sunsets show? "Threnody," Poems.

Still, still the secret presses; The nearing clouds draw down;

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The crimson morning flames into The fopperies of the town. "The World-Soui."

October woods wherein The boy's dream comes to pass, And Nature squanders on the boy her pomp, And crowns him with a more than royal crown, And unimagined splendor waits his steps. The gazing urchin walks through tents of gold, Through crimson chambers, porphyry and pearl, Pavilion on pavilion garlanded, Incensed, and starred with light and airs and shapes Beyond the best conceit of pomp or power.

"Though nothing can bring back the hour."

Page 299, note 2. "Concord, 11 October, 1839. At Waltham, last Sunday, on the hill near the old meeting-house, I heard music so soft that I fancied it was a piano-forte in some neighboring farm-house; but on listening more attentively I found it was the church-bells in Boston, nine miles distant, which were playing for me this soft tune."

Page 300, note 1. This passage suggests his poem "Each and All."

She paints with white and red the moors To draw the nations out of doors.

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Page 300, note 3. In the autumn of 1834, immediately after his return from Europe, Mr. Emerson began his new life as a lecturer by giving two lectures before the Society of Natural History in Boston. In the Introductory Lecture he urged the fitness for men of the study of Nature, and the second lecture was "On the Relation of Man to the Globe," calling attention to the relation of use, but also to the relation of beauty.

Tell men what they knew before; Paint the prospect from their door. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Page 302, note 1. Here followed in the lecture the words,—

"The deeper you bore, the farther you get away from the cause."

Page 303, note 1. Compare the quatrain called "Casella" in the Poems.

Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind, A poet or a friend to find: Behold, he watches at the door! Behold his shadow on the floor!

Love asks nought his brother cannot give.

Page 305, note 1. Mr. Sanborn engaged a learned German, Dr. Solger, to give a course of lectures on History at his private school, and Mr. Emerson, with other residents of

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Concord, attended them. This incident appears to have been the fruit that he carried away from the course.

Page 305, note 2. Mr. Charles Lane is here spoken of, one of the English gentlemen who returned with Mr. Alcott from England in 1844, bent upon trying in New England the experiment of a loftier and simpler method of living. The short-lived Fruitlands Community was the result.

Page 306, note 1. This paragraph in the lecture began, "The only Muse I know of is health, which is the timing, symmetry and coördination of all the faculties so that the nimble senses catch reports from things which in ordinary hours they do not render."

Page 306, note 2. Pons Capdueil, a Provençal gentleman in the twelfth century, skilled in all the accomplishments of a knight and minstrel.

Page 306, note 3. Couture, the eminent French painter, of the last generation, wrote, "You, painter, you are born to make men love and understand Earth's beauties, and not to startle us.… Dare to be yourself—there is light.… Soften your heart. Before all things be humble."

Page 307, note 1. This page on what is positive and abiding, from an old lecture, seems here appropriate:—

"We find stability central amidst all this dismaying whirl. Life looks so petty and frivolous around us, men so rude and incapable, victims of vanity, victims of appetite, scorners and corrupters of each other, and nothing so high and sacred but you shall find mobs of ferocious and ignorant men ready to tear and trample it down for some paltry bribe, were it only a bottle of brandy; and their leaders, for a bribe only a little less paltry, hounding them on. We see the historic culture of the most enlightened populations threatened by barbaric masses. We see empires subverted and the historic progress of civilization

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threatened. We see religious systems on which nations have been reared, pass away. The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. Judaism, Stoicisim, Mahometism, Buddhism, all discredited and ending. Nay, the venerable and beautiful traditions of Christianity, in which we were educated, losing their hold on human belief, day by day; but central in the whirl a faith abides, which does not pass, a central doctrine which Judaism, Stoicism, Mahometism, Buddhism, Christianity, all teach."

Page 308, note 1. The test here mentioned, namely, the state of mind in which the new prophet or revelation leaves you, Mr. Emerson mentions in connection with so-called "Spiritualism" in the essay on Demonology in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

In the lecture "Success" the following anecdote was at this point introduced: "When Campbell heard Joseph Gerald defend himself in the court in Edinburgh, he said to the stranger next him, 'By Heaven, sir, that is a great man!' 'Yes, sir,' he answered, 'he is not only a great man himself, but he makes every other man feel great who listens to him.'"

Page 308, note 2. Mr. Emerson notes, in his journal, of Socrates, that he was more afraid of himself than of the people of Athens. At the end of this paragraph in the lecture "Success" followed this sentence: "I value a man's trust in his fortune, when it is a hearing of voices that call him to his task. When he is conscious of a work laid on him to do, and that Nature cannot afford to lose him until it is done."

Page 308, note 3. In the lecture Mr. Emerson wrote "the picture of the crucifixion" instead of "some sacred subjects," and at the end of the sentence he added: "and so

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dead Romeos, and smothered princes; Nature does not so. Nature lays the ground-plan," etc.

Page 309, note 1. "Like Byron," which stood in the lecture, is here omitted.

Page 309, note 2. Wordsworth, "Poems dedicated to National Independence."

Page 311, note 1. From the Manuscripts: "Be an opener of doors to those who come after you, and don't try to make the Universe a blind alley."

Page 312, note 1. This passage is a fragment from the lost tragedy Philoctetes of Euripides.

I bear in youth the sad infirmities That use to undo the limb and strength of Age.

And with courage and work, his eyes open to beauty, manifest

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or hidden, his ears open for the words of the Spirit, he did not seem to grow old, except in increasing mellowness of the affections and an afternoon serenity. The accidents of age befel him, but such mild complaint as he made of them was always humorous. Care and anxiety on pecuniary matters were there, but he kept them under. About the year 1870 his power of work, his memory and bodily strength began to fail, yet this was noticed by few until after the exposure and shock occasioned by the burning of his house two years later. The general muster of loving friends, near or far, to his aid, and their gift of restored house and freedom from anxiety, prolonged his life several years. His working power was gone, but he was happy. As he hints in the essay, the affections had their turn when the intellectual forces ebbed. He wrote his serene recognition of Age in his poem "Terminus," a portion of which serves for a motto of this chapter. In 1864, about the time that the poem was written, he wrote in his diary, "Within I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth."

He wrote in his journal, of the increasing difficulty of composition and arrangement,—

1864. "I have heard that the engineers in the locomotives grow nervously vigilant with every year on the road until the employment is intolerable to them: and I think writing is more and more a terror to old scribes."

And again:—

1864. "The grief of old age is, that now, only in rare moments and by happiest combinations or consent of the elements, do I attain those enlargements which once were a daily gift."

Yet serene enjoyment of Nature, his friends and family remained:—

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"That which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends."

It does not appear exactly when and where the lecture on Old Age was first read, but the reference to the Phi Beta Kappa speech of the venerable ex-President of Harvard University, Josiah Quincy, in June, 1861, and the publication of "Old Age" in the January number of the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, fix the date sufficiently closely. The exordium of the lecture, evidently written during the anxious pause, after the defeat of Bull Run, of the war in Virginia, is as follows:—

"I hope I shall not shock the sentiment of the assembly when I say, that I have nothing to offer you this evening relating to war and its works; that, while I sympathize, as every good-hearted man must, with this concentrated curiosity on the public affairs, which listening with over-strained ear to every click of the telegraph, and hearing a cannon in every out-door sound, makes every liberal study impertinent, I feel that our sanity requires some balance to this fever-heat; some diversion back to old studies and traditions which respect our permanent social welfare. The country which reads nothing but newspapers all day, can surely afford to leave the army bulletins out of its church and lyceum for an evening hour. I shall therefore risk to offer you a topic, the coldest and most remote from these heats, nay, perhaps more repulsive to the American than to any other national temperament."

Page 317, note 1. "The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love and reason visibly stream."—"Considerations by the Way," Conduct of Life.

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On the day of the birth of his second daughter, Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal:—

Nov. 22, 1841. "There came into the house a young maiden, but she seemed to be more than a thousand years old. She came into the house naked and helpless, but she had for her defence more than the strength of millions. She brought into the day the manners of the Night."

"Can crowd eternity into an hour Or stretch an hour into eternity."

Page 318, note 1. In his notes upon himself Mr. Emerson wrote, "My only secret was that all men were my masters. I thought each who talked with me older than I."

Page 319, note 1. "I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth."—Manuscript of "Old Age."

"I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.' Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills, And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me, And tho' they could not end me, left me maimed To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes."

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Page 321, note 1. "Presque tous les bons ouvriers vivent longtemps: c'est qu'ils accomplissent une loi de la Providence."—Béranger.

Page 323, note 1. In connection with the mention of this great man, this quotation from a letter written in his old age is copied from Mr. Emerson's journal:—

"Humboldt in 1843 congratulates his friend Karl Ritter, on the appearance of Zimmermann's map of the Upper Nile. 'If,' he says, 'a life prolonged to an advanced period, brings with it several inconveniences to the individual, there is a compensation in the delight of being able to compare older states of knowledge with that which now exists, and to see great advances in knowledge develop themselves under our eyes in departments which had long slept in inactivity, with the exception perhaps of attempts by hypercriticism to render previous acquisitions doubtful. This enjoyment has fallen to our share in our geographical studies.'"

Page 324, note 1. In the journals written near Mr. Emerson's sixtieth year he good-naturedly treats the semi-comic aspects and compensations, as thus:—

"My humorous friend told me that old age was cheap: Time drew out his teeth gratis, and a suction-plate would last him as long as he lived; he does not go to the hair-dresser, for Time cut off his hair; and he had lived so long, and bought so many clothes, that he should not need to buy any more.

"N. said in the car to a chance companion—'Yes, but I am an old man and can't do so or so.' Instead of the indignant denial he expected, the stranger replied, 'Yes, you are an old man and that makes a difference.' Vain was his use of the dodge of old men, giving themselves for ten years older than they are; the companion quietly accepted it as true."

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In the journal of 1864 I find this entry:—

"The following page should have been printed in Society and Solitude, in the chapter called 'Old Age.'

"Old age brings along with its uglinesses the comfort that you will soon be out of it,—which ought to be a substantial relief to such discontented pendulums as we are. To be out of the war, out of debt, out of the drouth, out of the blues, out of the dentist's hands, out of the second thoughts, mortifications and remorses that inflict such twinges and shooting pains,—out of the next winter, and the high prices, and company below your ambition,—surely these are soothing hints. And harbinger of this, what an alleviator is sleep, which muzzles all these dogs for me every day? Old age—'T is proposed to call an indignation-meeting."

Page 324, note 2. A similar passage is in the first pages of the essay on Culture in Conduct of Life.

Page 325, note 1. "In his consciousness of deserving success, the caliph Ali constantly neglected the ordinary means of attaining it; and to the grand interests, a superficial success is of no account."—"Aristocracy," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

And,—fault of novel germs,— Mature the unfallen fruit. "Terminus," Poems.

Page 329, note 1. The little white star-flower of our May woods, resembling an anemone.

Page 330, note 1. This must have been Dr. John Snelling Popkin, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard College, a graduate of 1792.

Page 331, note 1. Virgil, AEneid, Book IV. 654.

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Page 331, note 2. Another view is taken in the Earth-Song in his poem "Hamatreya."

Page 334, note 1. George Whitefield (1714-1770), the English clergyman of humble origin, but devoted to religion from early youth. He studied at Oxford and formed a friendship with Wesley, and became, after his ordination, a preacher of extraordinary eloquence and power, addressing gatherings of thousands of people in the open air. He visited New England seven times, and preached with great effect, both in the North and the Southern States.

Page 336, note 1. Quisque amat, nulla est conditione senex.

Page 336, note 2. The following extracts show Mr. Emerson's calm philosophy.

Journal, 1864. "Let us not parade our rags; let us not, moved by vanity, tear our hair at the corners of streets, or in the sitting-room, but, as age and infirmity steal on us, contentedly resign the front seat and the games to these bright children, our better representatives; nor expect compliments or inquiries, much less gifts or love, any longer (which to expect is ridiculous), and not at all wondering why our friends do not come to us, much more wondering when they do, decently withdraw ourselves into modest and solitary resignation and rest."

Mr. Emerson's thought concerning old age in 1840 was borne out by his life to the end:—

"Old age… I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing in from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, throw up their hope, renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary, and talk down to

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the young.… Is it possible a man should not grow old? I will not answer for this crazy body. It seems a ship which carries him through the waves of this world and whose timbers contract barnacles and dry-rot, and will not serve for a second course. But I refuse to admit this appeal to the old people we know as valid against a good hope. For do we know one who is an organ of the Holy Ghost?"

Remembrances of Emerson, by John Albee.

"Love," Essays, First Series, p. 171.

The Autobiography of a Journalist. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901.

He did not think it worth while to mention to his aunt that he found it pleasanter to spend these two hours on the Common until Discovery and Retribution overtook him.

An abridged translation in five volumes of the Histoire Ancienne by Charles Rollin (1661-1741).

Ralph Waldo Emerson; his Maternal Ancestors, with some Reminiscences of him. Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co., 1887.

Reminiscences of an Old Teacher. Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1878.

Emerson at Home and Abroad, by Moncure Daniel Conway. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1882.

Ueber Lesen and Bildung, von Anton E. Schönbach. Gratz, 1882.

Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Baker and Taylor Co., 1890.

Ralph Waldo Emerson; his Maternal Ancestors; with some Reminiscences of him. By David Greene Haskins, D. D. Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co., 1887.

Correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Grimm. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903.

"Emerson and Boston" in The Genius and Character of Emerson. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1885.

There appears to be a mistake here, for on the printed list of members the name of Mr. Cabot does not appear until 1861.

Richard Henry Dana, a Biography. By Charles Francis Adams. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890.

Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by John T. Morse, Jr. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1896.

Colonel S. R. Elliott in "The Courage of a Soldier." Atlantic Monthly, February, 1893, p. 239.

At My Window by Terry M. Pace, PhD.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and Solitude (Essay from Works and Days)

Post #18 (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Thanks for reading At My Window by Terry M. Pace, PhD.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This essay is yet another type that I hope to write from time to time, where I write about one of my favorite authors, books, stories or essays. Sharing a brief review of the authors, comments about my own experiences in reading them, a short example of their work and it’s meaning for me. Perhaps these articles will be of interest in encouraging others to read these authors and works.

Emerson wrote during the middle of the 19 th century mainly in New England in America. He is considered one of America’s earliest and greatest world class writers and philosophers. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston Massachusetts in 1803 and   died in Concord Massachusetts in 1882, age 78. He attended Harvard and was a voracious reader and keen observer of nature and society. Emerson was influenced by many other writers and philosophers including his good friend Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Fredrick Nietzsche, John Stewart Mill, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle among many others of his time. He also read most of the earlier classical European philosophers as well as Eastern Theological Philosophies, especially Hinduism. He attended Harvard Divinity school and for a time became a Unitarian minister and viewed himself as a Christian.

Most of Emerson’s writings were actually written and first delivered as oral lectures, where he held discussions on his ideas with audience members all over New England and eventually all across America. He had an appreciation for the common people and for diverse points of view. He valued dialog and the exploration of ideas as much as the ideas themselves. In this he reflected the democratic hopes of 19 th century American society. Also, in line with the movement in American society in the 19 th century, Emerson became an abolitionist and spoke and wrote about the critical justice as well as democratic necessity of the end of slavery. Emerson’s thoughts on social justice and the interconnection with true democracy are as relevant today as they were 200 years ago! His lectures later were all collected and published in his complete works, which I have referenced below.

The great concerns and themes of Emerson’s thoughts involve the envelopment and grounding of all life and society in nature and thus the brokenness and distortions of life when removed from or neglectful of nature.  He taught about the spiritual and health value of man in solitude in nature as a passage toward self- awareness, self- reliance and authenticity as opposed to becoming the person of mass society and organization. He spoke often of how humanity as a part of nature should seek and accept balance and interdependency in life, thus balance in work and other life roles, balance in solitude and social connection, and ultimately spiritual transcendence through all the dimensions and connections of one’s life. As a Unitarian he understood God as being in and of all of nature and humanity and saw God as greater than any single view, tradition or experience, thus ultimately always with us, yet never fully definable.

I first read some of Emerson’s essays during the mad reading years of my 20’s and reflected on him ever since. Several years ago, a friend gave me a set of essays to read, and though some I had read, all of them felt new to me. I since have read most of his works, though not all. He was prolific. He also wrote in a very thick manner, clearly reflecting the oral lectures his essays came from. Every sentence in Emerson is a commentary or drop of keen observation or insight, thus, to read his work, one must just allow time and not rush the reading as if reaching the end is the goal. Very much like his deepest messages, in every word and sentence God is there and so is Emerson with his wit and self-awareness. I learned in my own reading of Emerson to be patient with the necessary solitude and the equally necessary society or collaboration his thoughts call for. One must go inward and be alone in such reading, but then surface and connect with the life and ideas of others to fully appreciate the meaning of his writing. In this complete natural circle of being oneself but in association and love with others and the world itself, there the presence of God can be at least glimpsed from moment to moment, though never simplified or captured in any dogma. God, therefore, can be known in particular moments of attention and this may happen to anyone, anywhere, in spite of any mediating tradition. So, his Unitarian, Transcendent and integrated views of life have shaped my own cosmology, theology and psychology for the past 40 years of my life.

Here is just one small passage from Emerson, probably first presented as a lecture in the winter of 1837-38 in Boston and later published in 1857. This is from the essay Society and Solitude which was published in a collection called Works and Days, on the ordinary life of human beings and especially reflecting on the lives he observed in Americans.

“ One more view remains. But life is good only when it is magical and musical, a perfect timing and consent, and when we do not anatomize it. You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself, and not interrogate it like a college professor. The world is enigmatical, – everything said, and everything known or done, – and must not be taken literally, but genially. We must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly. You must hear the bird’s song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs. Cannot we be a little abstemious and obedient? Cannot we let the morning be?

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines. I remember well the foreign scholar who made a week of my youth happy by his visit. “The PEOPLE (sic) in the islands,” he said, “delight to play with the surf, coming in on the top of the rollers, then swimming out again, and repeat the delicious manoeuvre (sic) for hours. Well, human life is made up of such transits. There can be no greatness without abandonment.

But here your very astronomy is an espionage. I dare not go out of doors and see the moon and stars, but they seem to measure my tasks, to ask how many lines or pages are finished since I saw them last. Not so, as I told you, was it in Belleisle. The days at Belleisle were all different, and only joined by a perfect love of the same object. Just to fill the hour, – that is happiness. Fill my hour, ye gods, so that I shall not say, whilst I have done this,‘Behold, also, an hour of my life is gone,’ – but rather, ‘I have lived an hour.’”

Even in this one passage, I find myself unsure how to begin my comments, there is just so much that is fleeting, indirect and momentary in what Emerson seems to be saying. I suppose that maybe that is the bigger picture, that life is not something we can ever have a finality about, that each moment matters totally as it moves on to the next and is never to be known in the same way again. Thus, paying attention, being present, both inwardly in solitude and outwardly in connection with others and the world is paramount to a good and happy life; when we “do not anatomize it.” When we are not so driven by counting success or failure, moments or years is when we may experience real joy.

I laugh each time I read this passage and Emerson admonishes us from being “to much like a college professor”; as I have been a college professor for 30 years and so know instinctually the debating, questioning, measuring, pruning, searching, reflecting, sometimes irritatingly detailed and intricate ways that professorial life can be. I recall once I led an effort to come up with a way for our faculty to evaluate our own work and the project took two years of excruciating research, discussion and debate and how every single word was laid out on the floor to be observed, considered, refined, rejected or tentatively accepted depending on the words that surrounded and framed it. It was one of the least known but most impactful of the projects I ever worked on and no one, especially myself was ever happy with it. This effort to never assume anything without extraordinary scrutiny is how the professor-hood works, it’s in the wine we drink and the blood we bleed to become professors and also why many times, we are so exhausted, inattentive to ordinary life and so unhappy. Emerson understood, and his comment here gives validation to my experiences. But this is also why I never fully felt a part of the academic life, as while I followed my calling and was sometimes good at it and enjoyed it, I also needed escape and to find wholeness and momentary transcendence. Thus, almost everyday, I escaped a little, worked hard physical labor in my garden and took long walks. Those habits, which were really needs, kept me usually sane. In those times and times of playfulness with my family, gifted me with being allowed to “just fill the hour” and “be happy.”

For anyone seeking to consider or live life from another point of view or way, apart from the common American striving for success and for more and more of everything, be it stuff or experience, Emerson offers an indirect guide or at least an inspiration if one will read him at leisure and without too much reference to clocks, calendars or pages, but just moments of full experience. The change of pace is well worth the slowing down and letting things come to you as they may.

As I prepared to post this essay to my substack page, I paused to reflect on it being Easter weekend, a time of great joy for traditionally minded Christians. Emerson, who was a Unitarian minister and considered himself a Christian, believed in a God outside of time and space as a God being in all time and all space; one known everywhere in every moment that we attend to. A God not born, unable to die, thus unable to be resurrected, a non dualistic God, but always unitary and for all. In this transcendental conception, Emerson, who loved the story of Jesus, seemed to believe the unbounded, unearned, ever-present, universal love of God that Jesus spoke of could be better shared and known.  I share Emerson’s beliefs and find great joy in this way of knowing, so I am hoping through any means possible the love and presence of God is experienced by everyone this Easter holiday. 3/30/24

"The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]." In the digital collection The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. P 180-181. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/e/emerson/4957107.0007.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 27, 2024.

Note: The Belleisle referred to by Emerson is unknown to me but could have been a number of resorts perhaps now call Belle Isle, possibly a place in Polynesia or the South Pacific. The notion of riding the waves in and out in appreciation of the gifted experience is one of Emerson’s most memorable examples of his idea of the best of human existence.

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Moscow metro to be more tourist-friendly

A new floor sign system at the Moscow metro's Pushkinskaya station. Source: Vladimir Pesnya / RIA Novosti

For many years now, Moscow has lagged behind St. Petersburg when it comes to making life easy for tourists, especially where getting around the city is concerned. Whereas the northern capital installed English-language maps, signs and information points throughout its subway system in the late 2000s, the Russian capital’s metro remained a serious challenge for foreign visitors to navigate.

Recent visitors to Moscow may have noticed some signs that change is afoot, however. In many stations of the Moscow subway, signs have appeared on the floor – with large lettering in Russian and English – indicating the direction to follow in order to change lines. Previously, foreign visitors using the Moscow metro had to rely solely upon deciphering the Russian-language signs hanging from the ceilings.

Student volunteers help tourists find their way in Moscow

However, this new solution has a significant drawback. “The floor navigation is visible only to a small stream of people – fewer than three people per meter. During peak hours, this navigation will simply not be noticed,” said Konstantin Trofimenko, Director of the Center for Urban Transportation Studies.

One of the biggest problems for tourists in the Russian capital remains the absence of English translations of the names of subway stations in the station vestibules and on platforms. The Department of Transportation in Moscow has not commented yet as to when this problem will be solved. However, Latin transliterations of station names can already be found in the subway cars themselves.

Finding the right exit

At four of the central stations – Okhotny Ryad, Teatralnaya, Ploshchad Revolyutsii, Lubyanka and Kuznetsky Most – the city authorities have now installed colorful stands at the exits with schematic diagrams of the station’s concourse and surrounding area, which provide information about the main attractions and infrastructural facilities.

The schematic diagrams are the work of British specialists from the City ID and Billings Jackson Design firms, who have already implemented successful projects in New York and London.

According to Alexei Novichkov, expert at the Design Laboratory at the Higher School of Economics, the design of these information booths raises no objections: The color solutions, font, layout and icons are consistent with international standards.

However, the stands do have some shortcomings. “Many questions are raised about the fact that the developers of these maps did not apply orientation to the north, and have provided layouts of the surrounding areas with respect to the exits,” says Novichkov. “A system like that is used for road navigators, but most of the ‘paper’ guides and maps are oriented strictly to north. The subway map is also oriented to north, so people may become confused.”

Muscovites and foreign visitors are generally positive about these navigation elements, with most of them citing the numbered exits from the subway as the most useful feature.

The fact is that many Moscow subway stations have several exits. One of the busiest central stations of the Moscow subway in particular, Kitay-Gorod, has more than a dozen exits. Previously, these exits were differentiated from each other only with signs in Russian referring to the names of streets and places of interest to which they led – making it easy for tourists and those with poor navigation skills to get confused.

Now, when making an appointment to meet a friend, instead of struggling to find the right spot when they tell you: “I'll meet you at the exit to Solyanka Street,” you can just propose to meet under a specific exit number.

“I’ve lived in Moscow for seven years,” says Angelika, a designer from Voronezh, “but I still don’t always know where to go to find the place I need, so the new schematic diagrams will be very useful. Previously, some subway stations had maps, but not with so much detail.”

Teething problems

Foreigners, meanwhile, focus their attention on other elements. “It is good that the new information boards have QR-codes, which can be ‘read’ by smartphones,” says Florentina, a writer from Vienna. But there are also shortcomings. “The English font of the information on posters and in the captions to theaters and museums is too small – you have to come very close to see it well,” she says.

Pleasant encounters on the streets of Moscow

Florentina was also dissatisfied with the fact that such posters are not provided at all subway stations: “When I was trying to find Tsaritsyno Park (a museum and reserve in the south of Moscow) at a subway station with the same name, it turned out to be quite difficult,” she says.

“There are no maps with landmarks for other areas, such as those already in the city center. There were no clear pointers in the English language, and the passers-by I met did not speak in English, so they could not help me,” she adds.

Officials say that the navigation system is gradually being redeveloped and improved. According to Darya Chuvasheva, a press representative for the Department of Transport of Moscow, the introduction of a unified navigation system will take place in stages.

“By the end of 2014, the system will first appear on the first subway stations on the Circle Line. By the end of 2015, we plan to install the system at all major stopping points, subway stations and transport interchange hubs,” says Chuvasheva.

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