Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson · License: Public domain · Source

• SELECTED AND EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES, BY EDNA H.L. TURPIN, AUTHOR OF "STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY," "CLASSIC FABLES," "FAMOUS PAINTERS," ETC. ¶6
• INTRODUCTION LIFE OF EMERSON CRITICAL OPINIONS CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PRINCIPAL WORKS ¶11
• Emerson lived a quiet life in Concord, Massachusetts. "He was a first-rate neighbor and one who always kept his fences up." He traveled extensively on his lecturing tours, even going as far as England. In _English Traits_ he has recorded his impressions of what he saw of English life and manners. ¶41
• Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great hierarchy of letters. Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to agree with his judgment of our great American. ¶45
• After a review of the poetical works of Emerson the English critic draws his conclusions as follows: ¶46
• After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to praise. Quoting passages from the Essays, he adds: ¶49
• Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in his own country, did much to obtain a hearing for Emerson's works in Germany. At first the Germans could not understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed turns of phrase which are so characteristic of Emerson's style. ¶51
• Froude in his famous "Life of Carlyle" gives an interesting description of Emerson's visit to the Carlyles in Scotland: ¶55
• Carlyle wrote to his mother after Emerson had left: ¶57
• In 1841 Carlyle wrote to John Sterling a few words apropos of the recent publication of Emerson's essays in England: ¶59
• John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an analytic study of Emerson's style, which may reconcile the reader to some of its exasperating peculiarities. ¶61
• E.P. Whipple, the well-known American critic, wrote soon after Emerson's death: ¶63
• Nature 1836 Essays (First Series) 1841 Essays (Second Series) 1844 Poems 1847 Miscellanies 1849 Representative Men 1850 English Traits 1856 Conduct of Life 1860 Society and Solitude 1870 Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and R.W. Emerson 1883 ¶68
• It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.[5] ¶74
• In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is _Man Thinking_. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. ¶77
• It is the raw material out of which the intellect molds her splendid products. A strange process too, this by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin.[45] The manufacture goes forward at all hours. ¶97
• I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties. ¶104
• But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of nearer reference to the time and to this country. ¶112
• "Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."[79] ¶115
• I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state. ¶117
• I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my expectation, if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle. ¶130

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